200 HIMBLETON.

Himbleton.

SEVEN miles north-east of Worcester, is an agricultural parish, of 1,894 acres, and has a population of 410. But the population ought to be reckoned at 464, as the hamlet of Shell (though strangely enough situate in the parish of Inkberrow, five and a half miles distant) is within half a mile of the village of Himbleton. The other hamlets are Earl's' Common, Saleway, Dunhampstead, and Phepson. The parish was given to the Church of Worcester in 816 by the King of the Mercians, and to the Church of Worcester it continued to belong until the Ecclesiastical Commissioners recently took it into their keeping. The crops cultivated are chiefly wheat and beans; heavy mixed land, mainly clay and gravel; and there are no traces of the coal mines said (in the Cathedral records) to have been worked here in the seventeenth century. There is little in the parish worthy of mention beyond the church, which has a chancel, nave, north aisle, clerestory, south chapel, wooden porch, and tower. There is Norman, Early English, and Perpendicular work here, with many fragments of old glass - "Ora pro Nobis" meeting the eye in all directions. A beautiful door, with the wood-work arranged in the form of four-leaved flowers, will be noticed, as likewise in the Shell Chapel (formerly belonging to that hamlet or extra-parochial place), a cast-iron slab on the floor, to the memory of some of the Pinchers, who resided there for two centuries. The date of the slab is 1690, and no other one of iron of so early a date is known in this county. The Rev. H. D. Woodhouse, M.A., Scholar of Christ's College; Cambridge, is the vicar; the Dean and Chapter of Worcester patrons. Value of living, £170, derived from 113 acres of