View source for St George's Chapel

<blockquote>On the site of the present Free Library the old St. George's Chapel once stood, raised upon open-built arches, a good model of which is preserved in our museum.

It was <strong>erected in 1754</strong> on the site of some dingy-looking buildings, consecrated on June 24th, 1755, by Bishop Keene, and <strong>removed away in June, 1855</strong>, having just stood one hundred years. After the erection of the present St. George’s Church in 1841, this chapel was little used excepting for temporary purposes, but it will always be honoured as the place where the [[Rev. William Whitelock]] preached so faithfully between the years 1807 and 1822.

<blockquote>Church Missionary Society - On Sunday, the 28th inst. two Sermons will be preached at St. George’s Chapel, in this Town, by the Rev. Isaac Saunders, M.A., of St. Margaret’s, Westminster, in aid of the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East. - Service to commence at half-after Ten in the Morning, and at Six in the Evening. - Kendal, August 20th, 1814. Printed by M. Braithwaite & Co., Kendal. (COPY OF HANDBILL)
</blockquote> I have thought it interesting here to illustrate a handbill in my possession, as being the first notice we have of the Church Missionary Society in Kendal.

The executors of the will of the late Dr. Stratford, commissary of the Archdeaconry of Richmond, contributed £600 towards the building and endowment, besides £11 or so for a set of communion plate. The same Dr. Stratford also gave by his will £50 to the poor of Kendal, £20 to the poor of Killington, £3,ooo more for specific charities; and he bequeathed the residuum of his personality, £9,390, to be laid out in buying good books to be disposed of to proper persons within the Archdeaconry of Richmond, in relieving poor housekeepers, putting out poor children as apprentices, clothing poor old people and poor boys and girls, and augmenting fifty-eight small livings and curacies. Good man!

Beneath the chapel were three shops at the west end, behind which was the foul, dark, filthy <strong>“ Black Hole,”</strong> disused in the year 1836, and beneath this again was the town’s dungeon, where refractory prisoners were confined in irons. In befitting contiguity, as the cause of such suffering, were other commodious vaults for the storage and sale of wine and ardent spirits. During the evening services the outcries of the drunken prisoners, it is said, were sometimes heard giving fresh earnestness to the solemn preaching of Dr. Whitelock.

There are many towns that claim the authorship of the following lines, and notably the ancient town of Richmond, but in 1822 one of our papers pub-
lished them as a genuine inspiration:

“ There’s a spirit above, and a spirit below,

A spirit of love, and a spirit of woe

The Spirit above is the Spirit divine.

And the spirit below is the spirit of wine!”


In the rear was the market with its stalls clustered around the wooden columns supporting the chapel floor, but the accommodation being imperfect and insufficient the Corporation came forward in 1855, and, in order to provide a new [[Market House|market house]], voluntarily relinquished their holding in the two front shops, and the Rev. J. W. Barnes, with the consent of Bishop Graham, consented to the removal of the disused church.

The present building was erected by public subscription, at a cost of £700, upon a rather narrower site, in order to widen the northern lane to the market square. The mayor, John Whitwell, laid the foundation stone at the south-west corner on the 21st day of July, 1855, who, instead of building in, as of old, a townsman’s child alive to propitiate the evil spirit of the earth, and thus secure a safe foundation, paid the forfeiture by depositing a bottle beneath the stone, containing the seven silver coins then in circulation, a penny, six half-pennies, a farthing, and half farthing, together with a copy each of the two local papers, and a parchment document. It seems that the mayor was unfortunately cut short in the middle of his speech upon this occasion by the ringing of the fire-bell in consequence of the firing of a haystack at Aikrigg End, and which caused the immediate dispersal of the meeting. The building was converted into a Free Library upon the erection of the New [[Market Hall]] in the year 1891.


<strong>John F Curwen, Kirkbie Kendal (1900)</strong></blockquote>

[[Category:Chapel]] [[Category:Religion]][[Category:Market Place Walk]][[Category:Shop]][[Category:Law and Order]][[Category:Punishment]]