The Church of Our Lady
and St. Kenelm
Stow-on-the-Wold
Stow means a ‘place for religious gathering’. In Norman days, in its charter of 1476, Stow on the Wold was named St Edward Stowe – Saint Edward’s Holy Place; which dedication was later given to the ancient parish church. The Victoria History of Gloucestershire reports that ‘there is no evidence of any significant group of Roman Catholics in the district before the twentieth century’. The only churches in the area before the 1914-18 War were those at Chipping Campden (founded in 1854) and Chipping Norton (founded in 1836). In 1914 small chapels were established at Carterton and Witney in Oxfordshire and regular Masses were celebrated there.
At the end of the war a young French layman, Count George de Serionne, came to live in the area and set about providing for the needs of Catholics. He obtained permission from the Bishop of Clifton, Bishop Burton, to try to establish a Catholic Mission at Stow. Single handed and with enormous difficulties to overcome, he finally succeeded in finding and renting the disused Church of England school in Back Walls, built in 1836, and closed in 1908. It was being used as a builder’s store!
At the first Mass in 1918, sixteen people were present.
Memorial in
Stow Church
Providing the building was only one of the problems. It had to be furnished, equipped and maintained. Priests had to be found to say Mass and transported to Stow and back home again. The people had to be visited in their homes and the children taught. George not only did all this, but he financed it from his own pocket! He travelled around the villages and farms, by bicycle or on horseback, meeting the children after school to instruct them in the Faith. He lived at Oxford but had a room at the Unicorn Inn in Stow which he used on a regular basis. He was often referred to as “The Bishop of Stow”. When his uncle died in Brittany in 1922, instead of returning to France to claim his inheritance, George sold the remaining three small farms in Brittany and the contents of his flat in Paris. With some of the proceeds he bought the church building at Stow, which he had been renting since 1918.
As regular Masses (monthly at first) began in 1918, the Diocesan Directory gives that year for the foundation of the Mission at Stow.