Church Heritage Record 605053

The church is the nave of the original Priory church; this is five bays long with a chancel contrived in the eastern bay by means of steps and screens; the south aisle is of ample Perpendicular proportions, but the north aisle is double, with a narrow passage aisle next to the nave and then a much wider space further north again, making the outline plan of the church virtually square. To the east are small outbuildings housing church rooms. In the west bay of the south aisle is a two-storeyed porch and the tower stands forward in a complementary position from the eastern bay. The west door has no porch.

The present church is the nave of the Benedictine Priory founded in 1129 by Robert Earl of Gloucester, the natural son of Henry I who was also responsible for initiating the construction of Bristol Castle in the same year. The church was completed and dedicated before the death of the Earl in 1147. A drawing still apparently exists depicting the extensive ruins of the monastery as they were in c.1630, but nothing may now be readily seen of them. The chancel disappeared in c.1540. The nave was assigned to the use of the parishioners in the fourteenth century by the Abbot of Tewkesbury, and the parishioners were required to build a tower and re-roof the nave. The tower was finally built in 1375. The south aisle wall dates from a rebuilding in 1698, and the north aisle was rebuilt in its present form in 1864.

The west front is divided by tall buttresses into four parts which form, reading from left to right, the west end of the Victorian north aisle (showing the two aisles by differing roof structures), the main front of the nave, the west end of the south aisle and the west wall of the porch. The last two sections were until the early years of this century concealed by houses which abutted against them, and may be quickly described; the aisle has one three-light window which was re-opened and much restored after the demolition of the houses, and the west porch wall is partly of ashlar and partly (where the building formerly stood) rendered. The facade of the north aisle is in two parts, one with a three-light window with Geometrical tracery of the simplest sort (three circles in plate tracery) under a tall gable, and the other with a Neo-Norman round headed window in the lower part of the wall and a quatrefoil within a small roundel higher up; these features prepare for the uncompromisingly aggressive treatment of the interior of the north aisle.

The west wall of the nave is divided by string- courses into three horizontal sections. The lowest, which appears to have been almost entirely refaced, has a doorway of very plain appearance with a segmental arch under a tympanum and a plain round-headed outer arch carried on one order of nook-shafts. The second register has interlaced arcading with alter nately wide and narrow panels between, the three panels pierced for windows and the rest, together with an extra pair of narrow panels at each end, blind. The extra pair, being rather narrower, come under a pointed arch, a curious detail at this period. Above this is the gable, itself divided by a further string-course below which is a small wheel window of much interest. In form the window consists of a central circle surrounded by eight slightly smaller circles all within a deeply recessed roundel. The important thing about the window is the continuous band of rope, now much decayed, which encompasses each circle of the outer ring, crossing and re-crossing itself so as to form an octagonal surround to the middle circle. The Wiple design, is framed by a continuous zig-zag edging to the roundel. Higher in the gable is a tall, narrow opening, and the gable was formerly flanked by pinnacles of which no apparent trace remains.

In its present form, the south wall of the aisle dates from 1698, and consists of four bays ranged between the porch in the western bay and the tower at the east end. The bays are divided by buttresses with two off-sets which die into the walls at the level of the window heads. Each window is square-headed, of four lights, with trefoiled heads and tracery above consisting of panels like the heads of the main lights set alternately with them. The windows all have hollow-moulded labels which return and pass, as it were, through each buttresses to re-appear in the next bay. The easternmost window is shorter than the others to allow for a doorway beneath; this has a two-centred arch carried on nook-shafts with tracery in the spandrels. The parapet is embattled.

The south-west porch, of two storeys, has two windows similar to those in the aisle to light the upper chamber, one facing south and one east. Unlike the aisle, however, the porch is faced with fine ashlar masonry. The doorway is of considerable interest, and appears to be eighteenth-century Gothic, with flat pilasters each side enriched by trefoil-headed panels; these support an entablature over the doorway which has similar arcading in the frieze terminated at each end by shallow quatrefoils in square panels. The doorway itself is a two-centred arch and has a panelled door which also is eighteenth-century. 

The tower occupies the position of a south transept (considering the church as it once was completed by a chancel), and now therefore stands rather oddly projecting southward from the aisle wall and eastward beyond the body of the present church. It is of four stages, roughly equal in height, divided by simple string-courses one from another. The lower stages are blind on three sides, but the second stage has a small window in the south wall and the third stage a clock face in this position. The fourth stage, which contains the bells, has paired louvred bell openings of Perpendicular design in each face and the parapet, made classical in the eighteenth century, was replaced in Bristol Perpendicular style in 1897.

Although much restored and rebuilt, the interior of the nave a thorough gives an initial impression of a completely Norman church; Georgian refurnishing with collegiate pews, pulpit against the north arcade, baroque reredos and so forth was swept away by the Victorians, so that while the architecture is left now to speak for itself unencumbered.

The Norman work at St. James is substantial, but not without a certain elegance. This is chiefly provided by the fact that the piers, being somewhat late in date, are not the usual squat drums, but are quite slender circular columns with attached half-shafts in the cardinal directions. The second from the east on the south side takes the design one stage further by substituting our quartershafts for the curves of the central drum between the half-shafts, but this is the only pillar in the church of this pattern. The arcades are of five bays, the multi-scalloped capitals of the pillars following the cruciform outline of their plan and supporting arches of two orders, the outer outlined by a projecting label with rows of lozenge-shaped billets on the soffit and with a roll moulded edge, the inner without decoration. The wall surface in the spandrds is faced with dressed masonry, and above the arcade runs a stringcourse with billets above and lozenges on the canted soffit like those round the arches. The wall surfaces above this string are plastered and whitened, the stone rere-arches of the clerestory windows left exposed but without carved decoration. The windows are much smaller than the arches which contain them, being given steeply sloping sills on the inside, and the eastern pair are nineteenth-century copies, the originals having been replaced by Perpendiculer lights.

The west wall of the nave has three windows of Norman origin of virtually identical sizes, the outer pair slightly smaller, all with attached shafts on the inner side and zig- zag round the rere-arches. The small roundel above is placed within a round-headed arch internally, and the stringcourse above the arcades is returned across the well to form the sill of the three main lights. The east wall of the church appears to be early nineteenth- century in its present form with lumpish Neo-Norman details which accord badly with the considerable refinement of genuine Norman work in the building. There are two tiers of arcading, the lower simply formed of interesting roll-mouldings without bases or capitals and the upper of smaller round arches on dumpy colonettes with cushion capitals. In the gable above are three large round-headed windows with attached shafts and interlacing zig- zag round the arches. The whole effect is somewhat 2140 clumsy. The roof of the main body of the church has tie-beams set high up with closely spaced arch braces below there is one to each rafter; no division into bays, save that in the nave some beams come lower down the walls to corbels, a feature which does not occur above that part now screened off to form the chancel.

The south aisle is rather wide, and must have been dark also when the west window was blocked by adjacent buildings, since the east wall is blind because of the abutment of the tower at this point. It forms, however, the backcloth to a collection of varied monuments ranging from a late- sixteenth-century brass to a handsome mid-nineteenth-century bust of a notable former rector. Two of the south windows contain some of the small quantity of stained glass in the church, and besides the doorway in the western bey is a door at higher level which doubtless once gave access to a gallery. The roof, with wall-posts supported on corbels carved as human heads and grotesques, has tie-beams to each bay and intermedially, supporting king-posts and arched braces. The underside of the relatively low-pitched roof is ceiled with plaster.

The north aisle is considerably more assertive. Some accounts state that it replaces a previous north aisle, others that it stands on the site of the Abbey refectory, and it may well be that it covers both, for it consists of two parallel elements. It was added in 1864, in typical high Victorian Early English with cylindrical piers of polished red Peterhead granite ringed at the mid-point with black stone annulets and provided with elaborate carved foliage on the capitals. The section of the aisle closer to the nave is little more than a passage with half arches of stone crossing at each bay to support the north nave arcade at clerestory level. The outer aisle is very much wider, and throws the proportions of the church rather awry; it is , moreover, arranged in an unusual way which seems to have been intended to allow as much light as possible into the north side of this somewhat dark church. Thus each bay has a big three-light window with simple tracery of three quatrefoils within roundels. To gain maximum height for the windows, each is set within a cross-gable and each bay of the aisle is therefore roofed at right-angles to the nave; in addition, each bay is separated from the next by a stone diaphragm arch to support the valleys between the roofs. The arches are two-centred and rather thin, but nonetheless some continuity is achieved because they have an outer roll-moulded order and an inner plain order after the fashion of the Norman arcades. The whole effect of polished pillars and the numerous arches which spring from them has been called Byzantine. At the east end is a doorway leading to the rooms beyond the east gable, and the organ fills almost all the a eastern bay of the outer aisle.