1100: Richard de Bologne.  After the Norman Conquest, Eustace de Bologne was rewarded by King William with gifts of land, one of which was Chrishall.  So it looks like he installed one of his relations as the vicar. Queen Matilda, Eustace’s daughter, married King Stephen and as she was the heiress of the Bologne family she also inherited Chrishall.  That she cared for the village is evident from a letter she wrote to Alius regarding the welfare of her people in Chrystosale. Was Chrishall the home of a small order of Benedictine monks before 1100? – read the article ‘and the village was burned‘ here!

1121: Alius

1158: Theobald (the first vicar to be Canon of St. Martin le Grand in London)

1309: Roger de Nilliton

1356: William Hervey

1399: John Chittern

1401: John Clerk (source: Mapping the Medieval Countryside)

1486: Ric Gynne (see comment below)

1518: Richard Game

1534: John Harold

1538: Nicholas Masson

1540: Thomas Fletcher

1546: Leonard Taylor

1547: Richard Scarlett

1554: Richard Conway

1569: William Alexander

1580: David Lufkin

1604: William Scott

1605: Robert Baker

1609: Abraham Jenne

1609: John Griffin

1640: Thomas King

1657: John Debnam

1673: John Priest A.M.

1677: Henry Cornwallis A.M.

1682: Roger Banks A.M.

1689: John Doo.  The Doo family have many records in the church registers for children being baptised. However sadly John Doo met an early end when he died after falling from his horse on Thriplow Heath one night.

1712: Thomas Ashburner

1720: Thomas Melville – a man who believed in getting things sorted out. You can read here his solution to the ‘heart burnings and jangling’ that was being caused by grazing on Chrishall common.

1749: John Banks (Church Burial Register: The Revd Mr Bankes Vicar. Aged 84 years. Feb 19). Rev. Bankes had a curate in the 1790s who was John Buckworth (or Beckwith) Herne. We think he was probably the following:

1787: Butler Berry – “He was a typical late eighteenth-century Anglican, having plural livings from each of which he received an income; it was said of him that ‘he used to ride around on horseback, and if he found no congregation at one church he passed on to the next and so on’”. You can read the tragic tale of Butler Berry’s grandson here in the Thriplow Society Journal.

There are various references to a curate called Joseph Walter Berry. It seems likely that they were related. Joseph Walter Berry is named as a curate from 1825 onwards (he conducts most marriages until 1832 when the new vicar, Robert Lascelles takes over).

1830: Robert Lascelles

1839: Godfrey Everth (read about Rev Everth and his book of poems here)

1858: Robert Greene Hebbert Ware

1864: William Way: William Way was responsible for a huge amount of work on the fabric of the church building.

1881: Edmund Leachman – a fellow of St John’s College in Cambridge and mentioned (unfortunately only as an obituary) in their newsletter from March 1889 (p377)

1888: Charles Allen / Evans Beley

1911: Lawrence Hards – extract from The Sydney Morning Herald of 24th January 1914: “The Rev. Lawrence Hard, vicar of Chrishall (England) and the Rev. Henry J. Allen, curate of of St Cyprian’s, (Liverpool) have left England to take up appointments in the diocese of Christchurch (New Zealand). [https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/28120844?searchTerm=Chrishall]

1913: William May – Rev. May and his wife are mentioned many times in the document ‘Chrishall at War’ documenting the First World War (and downloadable here). They did a lot of work fund-raising for those who were fighting abroad and also in supporting the village. However it seems that Rev. May did suffer from ill-health and was away from the village quite a bit as he mentions in his updates in the Church newsletters.

1924: Edward Arthur Hort A.K.C.  Chrishall School is a Church of England School so the current vicar of the parish was usually closely involved with the school. Rev. Hort was no exception and would go into the school every Tuesday morning to take prayers.[1. Source: B Rogers, Nov 2016]

1942: James Cornelius Morrice M.A.

1946: Albert Anthony Bagley M.A.

1965: William Henry Taylor

1980: William Hubert Branch

1981: William Hugh Alan Cooper

1988: John Lester Brennan

1991: David Wesley Parrott

1997: John Graham Simmons (to 2005)

2007: Rod J. Doulton

2009: Andrew Colebrooke