Church Micro 2833...Greensted-Juxta-Ongar Multi-Cache

Church of St. Andrew Greensted-Juxta-Ongar

A very simple mini multi-cache, you can park by the church then round up the clues to give you the final cache location which is accessible from OUTSIDE the church boundary. Please bring a pen/pencil.

Photo (c) davemcwish 2012

Greensted is a little secluded village, about a mile from Chipping Ongar and twenty from London, consisting of a few farmhouses and cottages. It is held by many to be a genuine Anglo-Saxon wooden building; at least its nave is so held.

In one of the early incursions of the Danes into England (A.D. 869), Edmund, king of East Anglia, was taken prisoner by them, and, refusing to abjure the Christian religion, put to a cruel death. He was a favourite of the people, but especially of the priests; and came naturally therefore to be spoken of as a martyr, and his remains to be held in estimation as those of a saint. In the reign of Ethelred the Unready, the Danes, emboldened by the cowardice of the king, who only sought to buy them off from day to day, ravaged the country until in the year 1010, their triumph was completed in the surrender of sixteen counties of England, and the payment of £48,000. In this year the bones of St. Edmund were removed from Ailwin to London, to prevent their falling into the hands of the Danes. They appear to have remained in London about three years, when they were carried back to Bedriceworth (Bury St. Edmund's). A manuscript informs us that on its return to Bury, "his body was lodged (hospitabatur) at Aungree, where a wooden chapel remains as a memorial to this day". It is this same "wooden chapel" which is supposed to form the nave of Greensted Church. The inhabitants of the village have always had a tradition that the corpse of a king rested in it, and the appearance of the building vouches for its great antiquity.

In 1837 as a result of a public outcry against their harsh sentence of transportation to Australia, the famous Dorset farmers known as the ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’ were returned to England where they were given tenancies in Greensted and High Laver. In 1839 one of them James Brine married Elizabeth Standfield, the daughter of another of the martyrs at Greensted Church. The entry in the marriage register is still available for view in the church.

To this illustrious heritage we should also add davemcwish and sammyjw who were married here in 2008.

The building is as simple in construction as we might expect from the object for which it was erected – a rural chapelry in a small parish. It is formed of the trunks of oaks or chestnut, about 1½ foot in diameter, split in half and roughly hewn at each end, to let them into a sill at the bottom, and into a plank at the top, where they are fastened with wooden pegs. This is the whole of the original fabric which yet remains entire, though much corroded and worn by time and long exposure to the weather. It is 29 feet 9 inches long by 14 feet wide, and 5 feet 9 inches high on the dies which supported the primitive roof. The oak trunks are arranged as closely side by side as their irregular edges will permit. On the south side there are sixteen of them, and two doorposts, with an opening for the entrance; on the north side there are twenty-one, and two vacancies filled up with plaster. The ends were similar, but the eastern has been removed and the church enlarged by the addition of a brick chancel; the western end remains, but it is hidden by a wooden tower that has been erected against it. On the south side there is a wooden porch, and both sides have been strengthened by brick buttresses. The brick chancel which has been added to its east end appears younger than the nave; it probably, judging from the carved mouldings of the blunt-pointed arch of this doorway, belongs to the later Norman period. Altogether, though rudely venerable in appearance, has so substantial a look as almost to promise, if carefully attended, to last another eight centuries.

Additional prints of the church can be found in the Essex Archives online.

Cache Instructions
The coordinates above are for the entrance to the church where you need to commence your quest to discover the following information:-

• The amount Ethelred the Unready paid to the Danes of the surrender of 16 English Counties £AB,000
• The age Richard Green died CD years
• The date the cache owners were married here EFGH
• The date on the Crusaders Grave Century=JK
• The year Joan Price MBE was born 190L
• The number of roles Mary Hillman played at the church between 1970 and 1999 M
• The number of members of the Bass family identified on a single memorial N