Swaffham Prior No. 2 / Suafam / Suafham / Svafam

There are nine entries for Swaffham [Bulbeck and Prior] [variant spelling] in the Domesday survey [http://opendomesday.org/place/XX0000/swaffham-bulbeck-and-prior/] [accessed 20 July 2016], none of which mentions cleric or church in it. The RCHM (1972) notes: "Font: square bowl with later splayed corners and chamfered under-edge, modern stem, 13th-century." The Victoria County History (Cambridge and the Isle of Ely, vol. 10, 2002) notes: "Of those Cambridgeshire villages that once had two churches standing within one churchyard to serve separate ecclesiastical parishes, only Swaffham Prior still retains, though mostly rebuilt, both the ancient parish churches certainly established by the early 13th century. […] Their benefices have, however, been united since 1667. The church of St. Cyriac and St. Julitta (his mother) was commonly called St. Cyri(a)c's. Its unusual dedication was established by the 1210s […] and possibly before the Conquest. […] It stands higher and more centrally in the joint churchyard than St. Mary's, which may be of slightly later origin. Both churches however, since their fabric still retained 12th-century features c. 1800, […] may well have been founded by 1100. […] The two churches of ST. CYRIAC AND ST. JULITTA and ST. MARY, the second so named by the 1250s, […] stand less than 100 ft. (30 m.) apart in a raised churchyard south-east of the south-western part of the village street. St. Cyriac's is on the crest, St. Mary's in a dip to its north, nearer that street. Until 1800 both of their fabrics were mostly late medieval. […] Separate registers for St. Cyriac's and St. Mary's are extant between 1559 and the late 1650s, […] after which combined ones, started during the Interregnum, were continued following the formal union of the benefices. […] By the 1960s the walls of St. Cyriac's, left in its turn to decay, were again ivy-grown and its ceiling collapsing. […] The medieval tower was, however, restored, 1959-60, […] and in 1974 the Redundant Churches Fund spent £10,000 on putting the 19th-century building into good repair. […] thereafter it was occasionally used for exhibitions and concerts. […] Effectively, of the two medieval churches there survived in the 1990s St. Cyriac's tower, and at St. Mary's the tower, porch, nave arcades, and some chancel walling." "