Our Parish Church

Pocklington’s Roman Catholic heritage traces its roots to the first chapel on the site of SS Mary & Joseph’s church in the early 1800s; but goes back centuries before that. It includes Tudor martyrs; the decline of the town’s main families for clinging on to their faith; and some leading Catholic figures, including a Pocklington-born bishop who turned down approaches to be the country’s highest prelate.

The town has been a religious centre since Saxon times, when Pocklington was a large minster parish, sending out priests to say mass in a dozen surrounding villages. Papal records contain a handful of medieval documents relating to Pocklington and the church’s manor house in New Street in the 14th and 15th centuries.

The world changed when Henry VIII broke from Rome; and Pocklington went on to play a key part in the opposition to his reformation. Henry closed the nearby priories – there were five in the villages around Pocklington – and over the next half century townsfolk played leading roles in Tudor uprisings, with a dozen locals executed by the crown.

Source:
Parish website (content is a summary of the talk given by Phil Gilbank in February 2017)