Holy Trinity Church and other Chapels

The earliest reference to Rackenford’s parish church is 1239. There are no traces of this building; the arch for the south door is 14^th century but the present church is mainly 15^th century. Its original dedication was to the Holy Trinity but this was changed to All Saints before the late Victorian restoration. This took down a gallery and removed the box pews, in which it was complained that “children finished their Sunday dinners and old men slept”, and cleaned many layers of white wash off the fine oak waggon roof  with its carved bosses and angels. Other features to admire are the great west arch and the little mouldings round the capitals, looking like berries with leaves, though the one at the east end has an unusual star-shaped pattern. “Several mural monuments” mentioned in Kelly (1856) have sadly vanished.

        “ The church of All Saints is a small and ancient building of stone, in the Early English style, consisting of a chancel, nave of four bays, aisle, south porch and an embattled tower containing six bells; the font is of the reign of Henry 11.…”

  Rackenford lost its priest in the Black Death in 1348 and a later rector, Lewis Crowther, died in what was probably an outbreak of plague in the village in 1596. The rectors from about this time lived in the Old Rectory ( now a private house) across the common. Information in the church describes some of them, including the 18^thc Rev Thomas Barnes whose wife was “unable to bear ye severity of ye Winter’s cold” at Rackenford, thus obliging him to live in Tiverton.

  This was always a significantly non-conformist part of the country, and a 17^thc Kelland from Rackenford was arrested at a “conventicle” in Tiverton.  A puritan rector (James Kingwell, son of a Tiverton shoemaker) was appointed to the living without protests during the Commonwealth in 1643. A house was later licenced for non-conformist meetings and finally a Bible Christian chapel (Ebenezer) and Sunday School were built in 1848. In March 1851 a religious census showed that there were 240 church attendances in Rackenford and 175 chapel attendances. The chapel has now been converted to a house.