Sabine Baring-Gould and Mersea

Rector of East Mersea, 1871–1881

Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924) became rector of St Edmund's church at East Mersea in March 1871, moving from Dalton in Yorkshire. By then he had already published works on religious belief, legends and travel and written the hymn Onward, Christian Soldiers.

The parish was reached over the tidal Strood, and Mersea's creeks, marshes and farming communities provided a very different setting from his earlier work in Yorkshire.

Writing during the Mersea years

He remained a prolific author while carrying out parish duties. Publications from the period include parts of his multi-volume Lives of the Saints, The Vicar of Morwenstowe (1876), Germany, Present and Past (1879), and religious and literary writing for a wide readership. Contemporary biographical listings already treated him as an unusually productive writer.

Mehalah and the Essex estuaries

Mehalah: A Story of the Salt Marshes was published in 1880, before Baring-Gould left Mersea. The novel's opening describes the country between the Blackwater and Colne and places its central characters on the Ray. The real coast influenced the story, but the lives of Mehalah Sharland and Elijah Rebow are fiction.

The move to Lew Trenchard

When his father died in 1872, Baring-Gould inherited the family property at Lew Trenchard in Devon. The rectory there remained occupied by his uncle, so he continued serving East Mersea until the living became vacant in 1881. He then returned to Devon, where he continued writing and pursued interests in antiquarian study and folk song.

A later recollection

Baring-Gould subsequently recalled his time in Essex in a chapter commonly known as 'Ten Years on the Mud'. The description is a retrospective personal account; his published novel, contemporary biographies and church chronology provide other ways to date events in his Mersea years.