A Brief History
All Saints church is mentioned in The Domesday Book and has been a site of Christian worship since the Jutes. The building contains architecture and furnishings that reflect its history. The present building, including the doorway, dates from the 12th century with a remodelled Norman chancel arch from two centuries later.
Before the pulpit lies the oldest stone in the building, the font. It is thought to be Saxon-made and was once buried safely from the Puritans’ grasp when church statuettes were smashed and wall paintings covered. In the 1800’s Henry James Abbott, the gardener, unearthed the font whilst double digging the shrub bed. It returned to the church on a new pedestal in 1893, after more than 200 years underground.
The pews are made from forest oak and date back to the 17th century. `Private’ pews built by local notable families on the north side resemble small sitting rooms with a fireplace each. The south transept was enlarged in the 19th century to accommodate all the Minstead estate workers, the patron and his family.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Arthur Conan Doyle often stayed in various houses in Lyndhurst during extended summer holidays until he bought and much-enlarged a property in the Parish. It was substantially burned in a fire but rebuilt by the Doyles.
He was fascinated by the Forest, its ways and its mythology. He based several plots of his novels and many incidents within its ambience.
He was originally buried in the garden of his home in Surrey but after the Second World War and in line with the wishes of his wife, both were exhumed and re-interred here at All Saints.
Making it clear
As part of the ‘Our Past, Our Future’ Heritage Lottery Funded (HLF) Landscape Partnership Scheme, the New Forest National Park Archaeology Team have been working with Minstead to survey the condition of, and record the monuments at All Saints in Minstead. The survey will help accurately map and identify monuments that can be conserved using HLF funds and will ultimately create a database for ongoing management of the graveyard. The other ambition is to make the list of burials and monuments within the graveyard available to the public on this site to help people who are researching their family trees.
Revealing the Secrets of All Saints’ Minstead churchyard
Minstead RTI (Reflectance Transformation Imaging )