The church was the site of a minor skirmish during the English Civil War and also hosts the grave of Little Nell from Charles Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop, despite the character being entirely fictitious.

Roger la Zouche, William's brother and heir, was outraged and initiated an assize of darrein presentment against the abbot at Westminster in November 1220, aiming to prove his own right to nominate Ernulf's successor.

Sir Fulk and his first wife, Margaret Trussell followed, and then Isabel's former husbands, her parents and ancestors, and finally "all the faithful departed"[28] The king's licence gave permission for Isabel, Walter Swan and William Mosse to grant the advowson of the college, once it was securely founded, to Richard Vernon – called in this instance Richard de Penbrugge,[29] presumably to emphasise his kinship to Sir Fulk.

The college statutes reiterate the orthodox faith of the Western Catholic Church in the face of incipient revolt: the mass is a sacrifice in which the priest offers up the Son to the Father, a re-enactment of the Crucifixion, and it contributes to both the well-being of the living and the freeing of the dead.

[56] Adultery, incest, perjury, false witness, sacrilege, theft and robbery would not merit expulsion, so long as due confession and penance were undertaken, and an oath sworn never to offend again.

A founder's mass was to include a special collect which began: Deus, cui proprium est misereri semper, et parcere, propitiare[note 4] – "God, whose nature and property is ever to have mercy and to forgive and be gracious."

[80] His grant of Lapley to Tong College, dated 19 June 1415 and made in response to a request from Isabel Lingen,[81] reiterates that it was in accordance with an ordinance of the Leicester parliament and mentions that he had since let the priory to the former prior, John Bally, and two others.

However, by the time of the Valor Ecclesiasticus of 1535, two small estates had been added: the college held a fifth of the nearby manor of Weston-under-Lizard, which brought in £2 a year, and some land at Wellington, Shropshire, worth 6s.

In 1451, for example, William FitzHerbert, who had already resided in the college for some years, made Richard Eyton, the warden, and Agnes Hereward his executors, with responsibility for disposing for any of his goods remaining after his bequests had been carried out.

[113] The commission was addressed to four of the Midlands upper landed gentry,[114] all men with either powerful connections or great wealth, or both: Sir George Blount of Kinlet, brother of the king's former mistress, Elizabeth Blount, a religious conservative[115] but a distinguished soldier[116] who was close to the powerful and Protestant John Dudley, Viscount Lisle; George Vernon, lord of Haddon, apparently not much in favour at Court, whose father Richard had died in 1517, only two years after acting as executor for Sir Henry Vernon;[117] Thomas Giffard, son of Sir John Giffard of Chillington, a former courtier who had played a major part in preparing Henry VIII's reception of Anne of Cleves, and a Catholic who had, nevertheless, acquired Black Ladies Priory[116] after its dissolution through the favour of Thomas Cromwell;[118] and Francis Cave of Baggrave, a property he had acquired on the dissolution of Leicester Abbey, a noted City lawyer and a Protestant.

To make sure he was aware of important outgoings, the inventory began with a detailed list of foods required by the almshouses at Tong, including coarse grain for bread, malt for brewing, fat cattle and pigs, and Lenten items, like pulses and herring.

a licence to sell the Tong College building and site, the rectory or tithes of the church and the advowson, Vernon's Chantry and its meadow, together with other small properties to James and Alice Wolryche or Woolrich.

for a licence to sell a Lapley manor and large number of properties previously belonging to the priory to Robert Broke,[131] an eminent lawyer in the service of the City of London but from Claverley in Shropshire.

[132] It is clear that Robert Forster, who had helped in the surveying of the college, acquired the lands which he had been leasing from Manners in Wellington and Horsebrook (in Brewood), as well as several estates belonging to Vernon's Chantry, as in 1557 he bought a licence to grant them to his son.

Early in the 19th century, the owner of the Tong estate, George Durant, had the remaining college structures demolished, leaving just a short section of wall to mark the position of the original almshouses.

[148] However, the attempt failed in the face of a coup carried out by Francis Ottley and the Parliamentarian gentry and clergy were forced to flee the county when the king led his main field army from Nottingham to Shrewsbury.

[154]Symonds actually witnessed the damage at Tong on 17 May 1645, on the campaign that culminated in the decisive defeat of the royalists at the Battle of Naseby, noting that the church had suffered a large amount of broken glass.

[155] While his home was ransacked, besieged and burnt, William Pierrepont was a lay member of the Westminster Assembly and seems to have been Presbyterian in his sympathies, although he was a friend of Oliver Cromwell and on good terms with the Independents.

[161] His successor, Joseph Bradley, who had no university degree and was presumably ordained by a Presbyterian classis, underwent episcopal ordination successively as a deacon and priest during 1662,[165] avoiding the Great Ejection.

[174] Jeffery suggests that it could be the bedrock underneath, but it was also thought that this was a deliberate and practical act to allow the floor to be washed as water poured in from the east would flow straight out of the west door.

[191] The first person recorded to have described St Bartholomew's as a "little Westminster" was Elihu Burritt, an American consul based in Birmingham, who was in awe of its "beautiful and costly monuments".

[194] St Bartholomew's is noted for its bourdon bell, which weighs 2 long tons 6 cwt 1 qr (5,180 lb or 2.35 t)[194][195] and was re-cast in the same year that Christian's restoration of the church was completed.

The bell is now rung only on certain days and on certain occasions[note 7][196][197] which gives the vicar of the church an equal status with the local noble families and the sitting monarch of the United Kingdom.

[note 8][214][215][216][217][218] The cross has lines from Lord Byron, Walter Scott and Sir Thomas More cut into it (though they are mostly worn away now by weathering),[219] and, like many other parts of the church area, is a Grade II listed structure.

The tomb is made from Nottingham Alabaster[note 10][202] and has sustained some damage, although some of the original black paint in Isabel de Pembrugge's widow dress is still visible today.

RW Eyton, the great Shropshire antiquarian, reported in 1855 that this tradition had at that time died out,[255] although he quoted an anonymous correspondent of The Gentleman's Magazine for 1800 to show that it had been alive, if not understood, in the late 18th century.

[256]Eyton explained that the custom was rooted in a deed sufficiently unusual to be recorded by the herald William Dugdale,[257] by which a lord of Tong, Roger la Zouche, some time between 1237 and 1247, had granted land and rights to a neighbouring landowner.

[240][259] However, the original terms indicated that the chaplet was owed by the Hugford family to Roger la Zouche and his heirs, so the logic seems to be that it is now paid or commemorated on "the earliest Monument of the Manorial Lords which the Church happened to contain.

The former's is a brass plaque in a marble surround with crossed swords above a shield at the top, dedicated in glorious and undying memory of those from this parish who gave their lives in the great struggle of right against might.

There is also an individual memorial plaque to Humphrey Herbert Orlando Bridgeman who during that same war went missing in action at Roeux in France on 11 May 1917, inscribed with the text from Ephesians: This is a great mystery.