Welcome to this website about the community of Chrishall in Essex.
Chrishall is a small village on a hilltop in the very north west of Essex, close to the borders of Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire, in the East of England. This website is particularly aimed at the local community and the genealogist who perhaps has never visited Chrishall and wishes to visualise the kind of community whence his or her ancestor came.
“I stumbled accidentally across some aspects of its history, and began to learn and think more about it, but then – as I studied the records – people began to rise up out of them. Where before I had seen only names on lists, individual characters began to shake their shoulders and stand up. It was as though these dead were being awakened, resurrected. They seemed close, as though they had something to say.”
(quote from In a Country Churchyard by Ronald Fletcher. Although this quote refers to Westleton in Suffolk, we hope you come to feel the same about Chrishall charcters and history.)
Christmas Event
Christmas Church Stories – an online Zoom event – Wed. 9 December, 7.30pm.
If you would like a tour through some of the Chrishall Church stories we have on the website – and probably a few more things thrown in too – I am holding a Zoom event on Wednesday 9th December. Free to attend. Please use the contact form to request a Zoom link if you would like to come along.
Recent updates to existing content:
- February 2020: found the names of the winning football team (although we still don’t know what they won!)
- April 2020: Saffron Walden Museum have started a blog. It is linked from our Links page where there are all sorts of other interesting history resources for you to check out as well. Also added is a photograph of Wire Farm showing the lamp outside – see the Wire Farm page here and scroll down for the photograph.
- May 2020: An interview with Dennis Smith about him joining the Home Guard when he lived in Chrishall has been added to our links page. And another one for our links page: the Rogers family history containing links to many Chrishall families.
Wenden Lofts Mill
Wenden Lofts’ Mill “Miss Nellie Smith who lived at Hamlet House, Pond Street, is shown on the photograph as a young girl on the steps of the Mill. Her family lived at Hope Farm and farmed the land round about. The Mill was taken down very soon after the First World...
Chrishall Windmill
For nearly two hundred years Chrishall had it’s own windmill. It stood next to Mill House on Mill Causeway and was a post mill, probably very similar to Chishill Mill. The mill was made of wood and could be turned around a main central post so that the sails were into...
Mary Tins – a request for help with research
Chrishall Archive has received the following request for help with a research project. I must admit I know very little about 'Mary Tins' so if anyone does have one, or knows any more about them, it would be lovely to know. Please reply to Martin in the first instance....
Alfred Brand and the bees
Alfred Brand lived at Peacock Cottage in Crawley End Chrishall. We don't know where the above photograph was taken - whether it was in Peacock Cottage garden or at an allotment. At the time Alfred Brand lived there, there would have been allotments just over the road...
A period of unrest leads to road improvements!
1830 Wheat 64s 3d per quarter. A changeable summer. Accounts of the harvest vary, some recording a good harvest and some estimating it as less than average. Blizzards in mid-January and severe frosts in February, March was fine, warm and excellent for sowing. July was...
Chrishall History Facebook Page
New Chrishall History Facebook page so we can continue to share the collection even when the Archive is closed. As I write this we are in the midst of a pandemic - Corvid-19 has changed our lives and is a historic event in itself. One of the impacts of the virus is...