Church Heritage Record 621192

The church is comprised of a clerestoried nave, north and south aisles with parapets; central crossing tower complete with parapet, spire; clerestoried transepts with west transepts; chancel; south porch and vestry.

There has been a settlement on the site since at least since the Roman occupation. The earliest records of the village show that residents usually held free tenant status and lived on their holdings rather than forming a residential community in the village. This may explain why there is no easily definable ‘centre’ of the village other than the church.

The settlement of Alfgare was recorded in Domesday Book (1086). It has also been known as Algarkyrek, Algerkirk, Alderkirke and even Alderton. During the reign of William I (1066-1087) the village of ‘Riche’ occupied the land where Wigtoft, Sutterton, Algarkirk and Fosdyke are now - as late as 1744 its was known that parts of the parish has formerly been ‘Reek’. The etymology of the name ‘Algarkirk’ and its antecedents is open to conjecture. Legend has it that comes from ‘brave’ Earl Algar, who rose up with the men of Kesteven and Holland to fight the Danes in 870, as set out by Ingulph’s History of Croyland (first published in Latin in Sir Henry Saville’s Scriptores post Bedam, 1596). More likely, it is a partial eponym derived from the name of a local ninth-century landowner; ‘kirk’ (Norse for church) being appended in the twelfth century.

A Saxon church of wood is the first church recorded on the site, which was succeeded by a Norman stone church of which a few fragments remain. The earliest sections of the large cruciform church still extant can be dated to c.1190, but the building largely dates to the 13th and 14th centuries, with identifiable 15th century features. A lost inscription formerly in the clerestorey recorded that the church was built and glazed in 1492 by Nicholas Robertson and his wife Isabella.

It was during the 13th and 14th centuries that the fenland region of Lincolnshire grew in wealth, largely due to wool production, which led to the building and enlargement of the area’s many churches. The church’s large size indicates the former presence of a prosperous local population.  Its construction was largely financed by the wool trade; however, there is also evidence of wealthy benefactors supporting the development of the church building in life and in death, through their estates; for example Willian Bystill ‘prest off the chanter of oure lady in Algarkyre’ d. 1510.

In 1625 Sir Thomas Middlecott built Almshouses at Fosdyke as residencies for ten poor people of good repute from Algarkirk and Fosdyke. They were considered to be too remote from the village of Algarkirk in the 1970s, so were sold as private residences; the money generated being used to build bungalows in the village. 50 council dwellings were built opposite the church, and were approved of at the time for their enlightened design and site planning.

The first Revd Basil Beridge, the 5th son of the Chanter of Lincoln and a fervent Royalist, became Rector of the parish in 1637, with the family continuing to provide Rectors and Patrons for the following 244 years. He was responsible for restoring the church tower and hung a peal of five bells during his incumbency.

Until the 18th century commercial livestock were routinely kept on the fens and many residents kept their own animals on common land. In Algarkirk, as elsewhere, this practice was more or less halted by Enclosure.

Algarkirk was a centre of crop-growing—reeds for thatching for example, but particularly woad. The village boasted a Woad Mill, the last remaining buildings of which were still standing in the 1970s. Woad was used to fix black and blue dyes. Its seed was sown in May and the leaves harvested in August when they would be ground in the mill; a second cutting was made in October. It was then fermented for 6 weeks and put into casks to be sent

The final Basil Berridge was installed as Rector of Algarkirk in 1822, by which time the family had acquired significant property in the district, including Algarkirk Hall.

R.C. Carpenter restored the church between 1851 and 1854 at the behest of the Revd Basil Beridge. The Ecclesiologist had much praise for the scheme and both the rector and architect were honoured by the Lincolnshire Architectural Society.

During the 1850s restoration the church was entirely re-roofed and the north aisle and south porch completely rebuilt; the east window tracery was re-carved to match the other windows throughout the church and the various family memorials within the chancel were moved to strategic places around the church to make way for a new carved reredos by J. G. Crace.

From 1848 to 1961 Algarkirk was served by a rail service; first run by the Great Northern Railway and then, from 1948, by the nationalised Eastern Region of British Railways. The Algarkirk and Sutterton Railway Station was closed on 11 September 1961.

There was very little development surrounding the church between 1900 and the 1970s, at which point modern suburban-style housing was built to the east. It also shows how the railway to the south east is converted into the A16 road between the 1950s and 1970s with the closure of the line. The parkland associated with the now-demolished Algarkirk Hall also remained largely intact by the 1970s.

Constructed from Ancaster limestone ashlar, the church has a fifteenth century clerestoried nave, north and south aisles with parapets; central crossing tower complete with parapet, thirteenth-century style platetraceried belfry lights, mid wall shafts and short nineteenth-century spire; clerestoried transepts with rare west transepts; chancel; south porch and vestry.

The north and south aisles are crenelated, as are the transepts and clerestory, with five pairs of three-light traceried windows.

The south transept has a window of seven lights with cusped flowing tracery, replete with memorable daggers, mouchettes and quatrefoils. The north transept has a tall window with six lights with curvilinear tracery. Two three light fourteenth-century aisle windows with ogee heads flank the large six-light, fourteenth-century west window with curvilinear tracery. The chancel has nineteenth-century two-light windows with cusped ogee tracery. The east window is a five light nineteenth-century window with curvilinear tracery installed during the 1850-54 restoration.

St Peter and St Paul’s has a narrow early thirteenth-century nave comprising five bay arcades with circular piers, octagonal capitals, (some hobnailed, some stiff leaf) and double chamfered pointed arches. The numerous light and graceful pillars lend the interior an aesthetically pleasing effect; and the double row of pillars in the transept, some of which support the arches of the old Norman church enhance the beauty of the interior.

Also contained within is an early fifteenth-century crossing arch with engaged triple keeled shafts, stiff leaf and waterleaf capitals, two stepped moulded orders and remarkable grotesques.

The north transept has two facetted double-chamfered round arches to the west on circular shafts with octagonal and late twelfth-century water leaf capitals.

The fourteenth-century chancel has a ballflower frieze and elaborate nineteenth-century painted scheme by Carpenter; the ornate nineteenthcentury reredos by J.G. Crace boasts many carved figures and other decorative features is both gilded and painted, and flanked by two ogeeheaded and crocketed niches. The chancel walls are painted with stencil decoration probably after designs by A.W.N. Pugin and the sanctuary floor is finished with fine encaustic tiles, by Minton.

The are many architectural features of note; a short section of late 12th century looped corbel table beneath the clerestory, a thirteenth-century font, restored by Carpenter, of octagonal Purbeck marble, on free standing circular shafts, and a fourteenth-century crocketed piscina in the south transept with notable grotesque carvings.

The church has many important monuments including a large urn of 1782 dedicated to Charles Beridge, a marble wall plaque and obelisk to the Skerritt family dated 1799, two late 18th century marble wall plaques to the Beridge family, another plaque of 1792. a brass memorial of 1678 to Basil Beridge, and another marble plaque to a Charles Beridge 1778.

The historian Gervase Holles visited in the seventeenth century and noted memorials to Nicholas Robertson (d. 1498), Thomas Roberston (d. 1531) and John Saunders (d 1507) - all merchants of wool who contributed to the' adornment’ of the church. On the floor of the north transept there are also two fourteenth-century alto-relievo effigies to a civilian and a priest under an ogee canopy, the man is said to be Earl Algar, but is more likely to be Roger Toup, John of Gaunt’s seneschal for Lincolnshire. The effigies were originally in the chancel before the nineteenth-century restoration; they were later discovered in the churchyard and moved to the north transept.

Examples of timber beams from the original bell frame now lay within the north transept and have the initials of a churchwarden carved into them. There is also a miscellany of stone fragments in this corner.

Five of the church bells were cast at the foundry of Thomas Norris of Stamford in 1662; a treble was added in 1936 when the peal was re-hung by Mears and Stainbank of Whitechapel.