A Church for the Strangers: The Chapel at Sandtoft

A Congregation of Refugees

The settlers who gathered at Sandtoft were not a single homogeneous group. The first wave, arriving around 1628, comprised some eighty families from Walloon Flanders — Dutch and French-speaking Protestants who had fled the religious persecution of the Spanish Netherlands. They were followed in 1635 by a further substantial influx, mostly artisans and tenant farmers from Normandy and the Walloon country, drawn by the promise of allotments on the newly-drained levels. Many came as Participants, shareholders in Vermuyden’s undertaking. or as tenants of those investors. Together they formed a close-knit Protestant community, worshipping in two languages: services in the chapel at Sandtoft were conducted alternately in Dutch and in French.

Charles I’s grant to Vermuyden explicitly authorised him:

“…to found, erect, and build one or more chapels… and to maintain ministers… according to the form of the established religion in this our kingdom of England.”

Before the chuch had been built the foreiners met for worship at Vernatti’s barn near Sandtoft. [SP 16/327 fol. 84]

The chapel was built sometime before 1639 by Isaac Bedloe, a Dutch merchant-builder, using continental techniques and proportions. Though the building is now lost, contemporary descriptions and later archaeological observations suggest:

• a simple rectangular plan
• brick construction with Dutch bond
• a steeply pitched roof
• and a modest bellcote

— a structure far more reminiscent of a Zeeland village church than an English parish chapel.

Isaac Bedloe was still owed £1,500 for his building work 20 years later.

It was, by any measure, a remarkable congregation. Huguenots who had known the violence of the Wars of Religion, Dutch Reformed settlers who had witnessed the Eighty Years’ War, now found themselves planting crops on land that had been mere fen and marsh within living memory. The names recorded in the chapel register — Dubliqu, Teurqoin, Delespiser, Dumoulin, Flahau, Amory, Vanhouge — speak of Walloon and French origins, transplanted to the flatlands of Lincolnshire. The register itself, covering baptisms and marriages from 1642 to 1685, was a vital document of this community’s life.

A Community Gathers: Worship in French and Dutch

The Participants — Vermuyden’s Dutch partners — agreed to raise £70–£80 per year to support a minister. Six of the leading proprietors even mortgaged their estates to guarantee the stipend. They insisted that no rent would be charged to new settlers until a minister was in place.

The ministers who served the Sandtoft congregation included:

• M. Berchet (d. 1655)
• M. Deckerhuel (d. 1659)
• M. Delaprix
• M. Lamber (d. 1664)
• M. De la Porte (d. 1676)
• M. Le Vanely, the last minister, was appointed in 1681

The Chapel and Its Register

Around the chapel grew a small town of 200 houses, home to French, Walloon, and Dutch Protestants. Baptisms, marriages, and burials were recorded in the Sandtoft registers from 1641/1643 to 1681. Women kept their maiden names, as in the Netherlands, and godparents were always listed.

The chapel at Sandtoft served as both place of worship and civic anchor for the settler community. It was a modest building, as befitted a new settlement on marginal land, but its significance far outweighed its size. It was the institution that gave the foreign community its legal and spiritual standing, and its minister — a French-speaking pastor — presided over rites of passage recorded in that precious register.

The register’s fate is itself a small historical tragedy. It passed, at some point, into the possession of George Stovin, the Crowle antiquary (1695/6–1780), who lived at Tetley Hall and devoted much of his long life to documenting the history of the Isle of Axholme and Hatfield Chase. Stovin transcribed extracts — the entries that survive are owed entirely to his diligence — but the register itself was not found among his papers after his death in May 1780. Those extracts, preserved at page 360 of Stovin’s manuscript now held at the University of Nottingham (HCC 9111/1), are the only direct documentary evidence of the names and families who worshipped at Sandtoft. Without Stovin’s foresight, even those fragments would be lost.

Traces in Stone

The chapel site at Sandtoft left no standing fabric above ground. The settlement was too thoroughly destroyed, and the level too thoroughly reclaimed for agriculture, for any visible trace to survive in situ. Yet physical remnants of the chapel did not entirely disappear from the local landscape — they migrated, as salvaged masonry and fittings so often do, into later buildings and private collections.

A baptismal font, believed to have come from Sandtoft chapel, survived and found its way to Tetley Hall. Its acquisition is most plausibly associated with George Stovin the antiquary — a man with an established interest in the material remains of the drainage history as well as its documentary record — though this attribution rests on tradition rather than documented provenance. That a man who transcribed the chapel register and devoted decades to the history of the Level should also have preserved a piece of its most significant building is entirely consistent with what we know of his character and methods.

https://www.heritagegateway.org.uk/Gateway/Results_Single.aspx?uid=MLS10423&resourceID=1034

When a new Mission Church was constructed at West End Road, Epworth. A stone from the Sandtoft chapel was laid bearing the inscription “To the glory of God. This stone, from Sandtoft Church, 1686, was laid as a cornerstone of this church. October 7th 1886.