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The Green - All Saints Church
All Saints Church
All Saints parish church was constructed before the Victorian period between 1788 and 1790 and replaced a Fourteenth Century structure that was badly damaged in 1644, during the English Civil War. Religious worship may have taken place on this site since AngloSaxon times, possibly within a pre-Christian temple that could have been responsible for Wellington's foundation as a settlement, although no actual proof of this structure exists. In the Victorian era, the church grounds were a place of refuge and learning for the poor and vulnerable in Wellington parish and it was here that both the All Saints almshouses and the local National School were situated, standing between the church itself and the Charlton Arms Hotel.
In 1838, a year after Queen Victoria ascended to the throne, All Saints church was the scene of one of the last orders of penance to be imposed by an English ecclesiastical court. Ellen Poole, a local woman, was ordered by the Lichfield Consistory Court to walk along the aisle of the church during morning service dressed in a white sheet, whilst recanting the scandal of what she had spoken'! Quite what she is suppose to have said remains a mystery but the imagination of the local community was captured to the extent that two to three thousand people gathered at the church to witness the event, according to newspaper reports of the time. However, the proceedings were cancelled at the last minute due to what was described as an informality' in the sentence, no doubt much to Ellen Poole's very great relief.