Note 174 — ARMTHORPE BELLS.[173]

Armthorpe is a village, situated in an agricultural district, about three miles south-east of Doncaster. An account of it at length may be read in Hunter's able work, the "History of South Yorkshire." The place lay close to the confines of the ancient Chace of Hatfield, and once formed a valuable part of the possessions of the monks of the abbey of Roche. At the dissolution of the abbey the manor of Armthorpe came to the crown. In 3 James I. the king granted it to sir Robert Swyft, of Tristrop, (now Streetthorpe,) knt. The family of Cooke, of Wheatley, had a good estate here, most of which sir George Cooke, bart. sold, in 1804, to John Walbanke Childers, esq., of Cantley, in whose family it remains. The church is dedicated to St. Mary. Dr. Miller, in his "History of Doncaster," 1803, briefly remarks that it was then "a very small mean building, with one bell hanging on the outside of it, and nothing worth noticing within." Hunter, in 1828, remarks that it is a small building of one pace, with two bells hanging in a kind of pent-house on the roof, and is a fair specimen of what the original churches of the smaller country parishes must have been. "This," he says, "is the only instance of a church without a tower in the deanery." The living is a rectory in the gift of the crown, and is now held by the Rev. H. J. Branson, M.A., who was presented thereto, by Lord Chancellor Brougham, in 1834.