Ecclesfield Church

The Church of St Mary, Ecclesfield, is situated on Church Street in the village of Ecclesfield, now a northern suburb of Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England. It is situated 4.3 miles (7 km) north of the city centre. It is a Grade One listed building, one of only five within the Sheffield city boundary. It was originally the parish church for Hallamshire, one of the largest parishes in England and in the 17th century was known as the “Minster of the Moors” due to its then rural situation.

The exact date for the creation of a church on the site of St Mary's is unknown. The name Ecclefield, which may mean “Church in the Field” in the Old English language, is mentioned in the Domesday Book (though the church is not), so it is possible that there might have been some sort of place of worship there before the Norman conquest of England. It has been implied by historians that the Anglo-Saxons founded a church on the site between 625 and 650.

After the conquest and the repercussions of the Harrying of the North the lands around Ecclesfield passed to William de Lovetot at the start of the 12th century. It was de Lovetot who built the first substantial church on the site, with a date of 1111 often given, however there is no written evidence to support this date. The church was given to the monks of Fontenelle Abbey, near Rouen, Normandy, becoming an “alien priory”, a small group of monks came from France to live there. In 1386 Richard II dissolved the alien priories and handed over the church to the Carthusian Monks of Coventry who held it until the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the late 1530s, when it was handed over to the Lords of Hallamshire. The parish at the time was 82 square miles, one of the largest in England and because of this size, Ecclesfield had four churchwardens instead of the usual two and this tradition has been retained

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