England & Wales Hardwicke Marriage Index
Marriages 1754 - 1837
Hazleton St Andrew

The Parish

The parish of Hazleton lies in eastern Gloucestershire roughly 9 miles southeast of the town of Cheltenham. Hazleton sits about a half mile north of the A40 road which links Cheltenham with Oxford. Hazleton is a small and compact village largely with properties sitting around an oblong of narrow lanes on the higher ground of the Cotswold Hills. The area is underpinned by limestone, which was quarried for its honey-coloured stone much used in the field walls hereabouts, which gave sweet grazing for the thousands of sheep that were here in medieval times granting wealth to the nearby weaving towns from their wool. Today the area is largely arable and many of the field boundaries have been cleared to make way for modern machinery. The porous limestone also means there is little surface drainage with intermittent "winter-bournes" temporarily flowing and trending generally southeast, all emerges eventually as the Sherborne Brook, a feeder for the River Windrush which, in turn, feeds the Thames, after passing through Oxford the Thames makes its way to London & then the North Sea. Hazleton is sited at around 230 metres above the sea on one of the Cotswold high points, to the northwest it is slightly over-topped by the local high point st 270 metres. With the detached chapel of ease at Yanworth (which was licensed for marriages and will have its own page within this project) its acreage was roughly 2,500 acres probably at 1,300 acres excluding that chapelry, the population would have been around 200 parishioners. In Domesday times Hazleton was held by one Sigar de Chocques and was a prosperous rural settlement offering 13 ploughs as its only assets.

The Church

St Andrew's church sits at the northeastern corner of the oblong of lanes forming the village. The church dates from the earliest times being largely from the 12th century and with little changing until the intervention of the Victorian restorers. The nave is largely untouched from the earliest times an example of the Norman Romanesque style. There were a few later medieval changes but these were minor, the southern doorway is borderline 13th century whilst its porch its a 14th century completion, a few Perpendicular styled windows indicate work ongoing in the late 14th century and early 15th. The major work of the 15th century is the Perpendicular styled western tower although it had to be partially rebuilt c1670. The Victorian restorers largely rebuilt both chancel and chancel arch as well as creating the 2-bay northern arcade, a further restoration of 1886 mainly tackled the interior. The lanes surrounding the church are narrow but carry little traffic, a few spots permit on-verge parking. The main access is from the southeast corner where a sloping path rises to the churchyard which sits above road height. Once within there are no significant obstacles for the photographer.