Qualla: Church of St Thomas of Canterbury, Kingswear

Church of St Thomas of Canterbury, Kingswear: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geoff Pick, CC BY-SA 2.0. On 29 December 1170, four knights of King Henry II walked into Canterbury Cathedral and hacked Archbishop Thomas Becket to death at the foot of the steps to the choir. The shock travelled across Europe and ignited an extraordinary wave of popular piety. The dead archbishop was canonised in 1173, his shrine became the most visited in England, and across the country new churches and chapels were dedicated to him. One of them was at Kingswear, on a steep hillside above the River Dart, where a chapel went up on land owned by the de Vasci family since the Norman Conquest. The tower of that chapel still stands. Some local historians think it was built to do two jobs, holding bells and stopping raiders, and looking at its narrow staircase and chimney flue you can see why.

Image: Geoff Pick | CC BY-SA 2.0

Church of St Thomas of Canterbury, Kingswear: A Becket Chapel

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geoff Pick, CC BY-SA 2.0. The earliest deeds for the church are kept in the records of Totnes Priory and date to about 1173, three years after the murder and the same year Becket was made a saint. In one of them, William de Vasci and his wife Juliana gave half the land of "Kingeswere" to a deacon named Ri...

Image: Geoff Pick | CC BY-SA 2.0

Church of St Thomas of Canterbury, Kingswear: The Murderer's Descendant

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrewrabbott, CC BY-SA 4.0. There is a coffin lid in the church with a story attached. In 1280, a Brother Philip is recorded as a witness on a local deed. He is thought to have been Philip Fitzurse, a descendant of Reginald Fitzurse, one of the four knights who had murdered Thomas Becket in 1170. That a Fit...

Image: Andrewrabbott | CC BY-SA 4.0

Church of St Thomas of Canterbury, Kingswear: Henry VIII and the Plague

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrewrabbott, CC BY-SA 4.0. When Henry VIII broke with Rome and the 1534 Act of Supremacy gave him authority to dissolve the monasteries, the Kingswear lands held by Torre Abbey became Crown property. Torre Abbey was dissolved in 1539, and Kingswear Church was placed under the parish of Brixham. A parchment...

Image: Andrewrabbott | CC BY-SA 4.0

Church of St Thomas of Canterbury, Kingswear: The Tower That Might Be a Keep

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 3.0. When the church was rebuilt in 1845-47, the old tower was kept. It dates from about 1173, the chapel's original century, and it has features that go beyond ordinary medieval bell-tower design. According to the antiquary Charles Cox, Norman church towers in counties that suffered ...

Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 3.0

Church of St Thomas of Canterbury, Kingswear: Bells, Organs, and War Dead

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrewrabbott, CC BY-SA 4.0. The church carries the small, accumulated dignity of an old parish. Three bells now ring in the tower, where four once hung; one was sold in 1767 to pay for a clock. The treble and second were cast around 1599 by Thomas Birdall of Exeter, the tenor recast in 1939 by John Taylor a...

Image: Andrewrabbott | CC BY-SA 4.0