Church Heritage Record id18979

West tower, aisleless nave with north porch; transepts; chancel with south organ chamber and north vestry.

The tower is fifteenth century, the nave of Saxon origins, but now mostly fourteenth and fifteenth-century in appearance. The transepts and chancel date from 1862, when the Revd. George Drury rebuilt the previous small chancel on a much larger scale and added transepts to it. He seems to have been his own architect.

West tower, aisleless nave with north porch; transepts; chancel with south organ chamber and north vestry.

The west tower is of three stages, of which the lower two are undivided externally. There are diagonal buttresses to the western corners but none to the eastern corners. These stand on plinths decorated with flint flushwork, and there are panels of flushwork on the outer faces of the buttresses arranged in pairs; the lowest pair has pretty cinquefoiled ogee heads, but those higher up are plainer, with simple trefoiled heads. The north and south walls are blind as far as a stringcourse which marks the top of the buttresses and also the division of the belfry from the stage below. 

The western angles of the nave show some Saxon long-and-short work to a considerable height; this seems to have been squared off and tidied up a little. The rendering on the rest of the walls makes their building history obscure, but they are apparently built of rubble. The original main entrance to the church was by the north door which faces towards the village; this was thereforen covered by a porch in the fifteenth century. The corners are rather crude and much above a stringcourse at the level of the apex of the arch has been rebuilt, as have the gabletted brick battlements.

The transopts may be taken externally as a single unit ; the most striking feature is that the ridge of the roof, being so much taller than the nave or chancol, runs right across from north to south, giving an awkward cross-emphasis. The north and south walls have big three-light windows with slightly differing cusped tracery and there are low diagonal buttresses. The gables are crowned with foliated grosses, The use of un-knapped flints enforces the contrast with the nave in comparison with the gently-coloured rendering on the walls of the latter. 

The north and south walls of the chancel are both obscured by additional chambers. On the south is an organ chamber which is gabled parallel to the chancel and has a boilor chimney at the south-east corner. The doorway in the south wall is a strange interpretation of Early English set close to the neighbouring trefoiled lancet.

On the north side of the chancel are two smaller gables, one of which is very narrow and rather low; it seems to have been built solely for the purpose of housing the sanctus boll which hengs in a small trefoil-arched cote at the apex; the other is the vestry, of nuch the same height as the last but wider, and with a two-light cusped window.

The east wall of the chanccl is surprising because it is medieval and seems to have survived the nineteenth-century rebuilding. The east window has mediaeval grotesques at the label stops; the window itself is of three equal lancet lights, all trofoiled, and has a six-pointed rose as tracery.

The small nave has a simple fifteenth-century arch-braced roof of three bays with moulded wall plates decorated with bratishing. It seems to have been panelled between the purlins. The floor is paved with bricks, both at the west end and under the pews, and with tiles and concrete in the alley.

The walls are plastered with an uneven surface, and are painted white with the exception of a small rectangle on the north wall. 

At the east end of the nave is a wide heavily moulded arch carried on half-round shafts with semi-circular moulded capitals which introduces the 1862 work. The unexpected thing is the next bay, which is arched in the four cardinal directions (to the nave, chancel and transepts) and is vaulted in wood with four quarter-fan vaults to give the impression of a crossing space. In the middle of the vault is a panel carved with a cross painted red. The piors of the nave and chancel arches rise from the floor, but those to the transept arches are triple, and are carried on big corbels with lavish carving of grapes, oak leaves and acorns, hops and ivy, all deeply undercut, naturalistic and rather elaborate. The transepts are roofed with panelled ceilings with foliated bosses at the intersections of the ribs.

The chancel was formerly divided from the nave by a minimun-Gothic screen, but this has been removed; arches on the north and south open into the flanking chambers. 

The roof of the chancel is braced with seni-circular arched braces, introducing a form which appears nowhere else in the building; it is in now three bays, decorated with stencilled embellishment in polychromy, chiefly red. The main features are loaf-trails and trefoils along the arch braces and florets on the rafters; the spandrels have quatrofoils within roundels.

The east wall is of some interest also; the window comes quite low and seems never to have been obscured by a reredos.