The Bishop's book

He does not appear to be man who in general lives by thou shalt nots. He seems more interested in the idea of inclusiveness, ready to rule things in rather than out.

Traditionally, the Bishop of Selby lived in Precentor's Court in the shadow of York Minster's west front. Now his residence and headquarters is in Barton-le-Street, looking out towards the North York Moors and 40 minutes from the coast.

"I can't believe my luck," he says. "When the time comes, we'll retire to Yorkshire, the quality of life is so much better." He tried a little hobby farming for a time and had four Black Mountain sheep (one was called Mince Sauce and another Gravy) but has since stopped.

Rural life offers a contrast to his other job in Yorkshire, as a vicar in Attercliffe in Sheffield for three years in the early Seventies. "It was all slum clearances and steel furnaces and now it's Meadowhall. I went back a couple of years ago. The whole community has gone, even the street patterns have gone. I still have a lot of affection for the place. My oldest child was born at Northern General and my wife taught at Tinsley school."

Bishop Martin's present residence is in a tiny community on a junction of the B1257 that runs east from Hovingham. You could easily drive along it to Malton without ever noticing you had passed Barton-le-Street.

It may not extend very far, but it goes down deep. The village's present field pattern lies over an Iron Age settlement or cemetery. This rich tillage prompted Bishop Martin to start digging for facts and to write a book. "I was always interested in local history. I started a file which grew like Topsy."

What makes the book intriguing is the standpoint from which it's written. There's an assumption that beneath what can be seen today and a bare list of dates, lies a wealth of human stories.

"It's not about dates and kings, it's about the people who created this landscape."

The Bishop's narrative takes in the story of an epileptic in a tower; the axe man at the church door who came to rid them of a turbulent priest; a witch who lived at the bottom of the hill.

The B1257 is either pre-Roman or a former Roman paved road. Later the Saxons built a church at this spot. Bishop Martin writes: "As history begins to be written, and people's names appear on the story of Barton, already we see power struggles, family intrigue, anger, vengeful murder and cruel ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. Beneath the apparent tranquillity of today's village lies a maelstrom of passion and violence..."

He has a sceptical take on the gallant local yeomanry, the Barton Cavalry, set up in 1803 by a knight who lived at the Manor House to combat the threat from Napoleon. This force had 52 members, almost a third of Barton's population. "It was a sort of Dad's Army. The landed gentry were terrified of Napoleon but also of his ideas. The cavalry was a means of keeping people occupied and was also a protection against revolutionary thinking."

There seems enough factual material sketched in here in this 80-page book to keep an imaginative historical novelist in story-lines for a lifetime.

In some respects, the more Barton has changed, the more it stayed the same. "It had a population of 186 in Domesday Book – exactly the same as today. It existed to provide farm labourers – 500 acres were needed to sustain one man 100 years ago."

In the last half century the pace of change has picked up, a bit too much, many may think. Barton's school closed in 1960, the railway station went four years later, and the post office shut in 1969. Around this time, two more shops, the blacksmith, the pub and the Mothers Union all vanished.

But Bishop Martin does not go along with the idea of a downward spiral of decline. Barton, he reckons, has now become a success as something else – a dormitory village with a farming backdrop. "Any community has to decide what its purpose is. In the Sixties it had a shop, but a lot of the houses were empty. The village has reinvented itself, although farming remains very important. It's more picturesque than ever and better cared for.

"It's not a cheap place to live. Country living is expensive – I've just paid 53 to fill up my car. People are no different, but they don't meet each other walking across the village green any more. Any socialising has to be organised. We have safari suppers for example." Apparently these are dining evenings when residents move from house to house for different courses.

Things are not always quite what they seem. The church looks Norman, but is an exact copy of one from a much later date. It's one of seven in a group where the regular Sunday congregation numbers about 10.

To an outsider, a slightly confusing aspect of Bishop Martin's job title is that he is actually in charge of York and an area within a 30-mile radius of it. He does 20,000 miles a year getting round it all.

Village shops struggle to match the diversity in supermarkets within easy reach of rural car owners and it seems the rural church faces a similar plight.

"In a village people feel the church belongs to them. If it's the only one in the village, you have to offer something relatively broad. In one square mile of York there are 60 different Christian organisations. It's about half an hour to drive to York, so people can go there and choose the type they want.

"That creates its own pressure. With young people especially you need a critical number to make things happen. It's a real challenge to develop anything for them."

York has big event called XLS which attracts 800 for the weekend. "It has everything from rock climbing to quiet prayer rooms. Many churches will take young people away for summer camps, some hold services in the style of the Michael Parkinson or Jonathan Ross television shows.

"There is still religious feeling. What strikes me is that when you go into a bookshop, Religion is no longer tucked away in a dark corner. People want to read about body, mind, spirit, New Age, dreams –'ologies' of all sorts.

"People are interested in spirituality rather than formal religion to make sense of their life. They can be committed to saving the whale or saving trees. They very much want a spiritual path, but don't want to join a formal religious movement.

"We have churches that can relate to the reality of modern living and they attract young adults in growing numbers. Older teenagers and those in their early twenties are hard to crack.

"My experience as a vicar is that people re-examine their values when they have children and are thinking about how they want to bring them up

"Yorkshire has its parts where life is difficult, but I see nothing like the deprivation I saw in London or Sheffield. I miss some of the grit and colour of those times when every social issue you can think of was thrown at you every day.

"Behind the front door, people's lives are complicated because they've got money.

"You have the boss with the silver BMW in the drive who is awake at four every morning asking, 'is it worth it?' I spend a lot of time with people in that situation."

Meanwhile, the bricks and mortar – 16,000 churches, 12,000 of them Grade I listed – are very expensive to keep up and attempts to re-order them inside can meet opposition from conservation societies and local feeling.

In this respect Bishop Martin takes a fairly radical line. "There's a lot of misunderstanding about church buildings. They were originally used as the village hall, market, court, hospital. Today they are fitted with pews and that alienates the larger part of the population. It was done unwittingly, but the end result was not helpful. Post-Reformation the Victorians put the pews in and when you have pews you must sit in rows and look to the front and be very sedate.

"I would personally like to see them as a natural meeting place – which they should be. Church is somewhere where you can meet with God and each other."

The Bishop of Reading has expressed his concern that the Church of England is in danger of becoming the preserve of middle-of-the road, comfortably-off people – or in his words they have become known as the Marks & Spencer option. Bishop Martin points out this is not exactly a new worry, and refers to William Temple (Archbishop of Canterbury in the mid-1940s).

"He warned that the church needed to be careful or it might die of good taste.

"There's nothing wrong with Marks & Spencer and Radio 4, but we need to acknowledge Radio 1 and 2 and commercial radio. What I personally wonder is where Jesus would buy from? I think he'd be at home in Harrods and in the pound superstore."

In Good Company: A History of the Village of Barton-le-Street by Martin Wallace. Contact 01653 627191.