The History of All Saints' Braunston in the Community

Piscina

Braunston has had three stone churches since Norman times serving the ever changing community. All three churches have been on the same site at one end of the ridge where initially a cluster of farmsteads and dwellings grew.  The site was almost certainly an ancient tumulus (burial ground).

It is said the original Norman church was polluted by murder in 1290. The restoration of church services was supposedly denied until a new church was built (rebuilt C14). There is evidence however that there was confusion between Braunston and Bramston and even there the trouble was not murder but bloodshed that was not fatal!

Several relics of the first churches remain in All Saints, today.

  1. A sculpture, almost certainly in memory of William, Fourth Baron Ros who died on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1352. The De Ros family held the Braunston Manor from 1200 to 1508
  2. The Church Chest, which once housed the Parish Records dating from 1538 now deposited in the County Records Office in Northampton
  3. The Norman Font, the only remaining part of the first church on the site.
  4. The Piscina, a stone basin used for draining water used in the Mass pre-Reformation
  5. The Head of the Churchyard Cross, possibly fourteenth century which has on the four sides the remains of carvings of the Crucifixion, the Madonna and Child, a robed ecclesiastic and a warrior.
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