Church Heritage Record id18501

The aisled neve has arcades of five bays; the tower stands within the south-west bay of the south aisle; there is no structural chancel; north-west porch and south-east vestry.

The church was originally the parochial nave of the Benedictine nunnery church founded by Gundreda, wife of Roger de Glanville, in about 1160; in the present building are elements of the Decorated and Perpendicular styles, and the tower was begun c.1470: it was much rebuilt in 1702 after a serious fire had swept through the town in 1688; the nave arcades are early fourteenth-century. The church was restored in 1879.

The tower rises through three storeys to an embattled parapet. At each corner is a buttress in the form of an octagonal turret eventually rising above the parapet as a stocky pinnacle. The ground stage has a plinth decorated in the lowest part with a band of flushwork trefoil-headed arches and then a carved band like cresting incorporating shields of arms and quatrefoils. The surface of the south wall, although not pierced by a window, is relieved by patterning of flint and stone in small chequers, and this appears above the west window also. The faces of the octagonal buttresses towards the west are decorated with refined panelling in flushwork. The middle stage is the least lofty of the three, and also the least decorative. The belfry stage is very tall, with attenuated three-light openings in each wall, all with transoms and identical tracery composed of mouchettes. The parapet round the top of the tower is carved with panels of arcading incorporating lozenges with shields, crowned with Ms and other devices. The octagonal buttresses rise above this to terminate in a ring of little battlements enclosing large crocketted pinnacles.

West from the tower runs the south aisle , which is pierced by three large windows of Perpendicular design with transoms and simple panel tracery. The cloisters of the nunnery would formerly have abutted against the church on this side, and the present south wall seems to date in great part from 1850, when the wall was rebuilt and faced with flint instead of plaster. The present east wall of the church was built after the Dissolution of the nunnery, and the large window set high in the wall with four transomed lights and panel tracery is taken to be an interesting example of seventeenth-century Gothic Survival. Eastwards from this wall runs a single wall, thought to have been either a part of the original choir of the the nunnery church or of the chapel of St. Mary which is mentioned, as being part of the buildings on this site in 1370.

The north aisle was built in the fifteenth-century and is a fine example of the period. It is of six bays, of which the westernmost has the further addition of a porch. The other five bays are uniform in design with Perpendicular two-centred windows with panel tracery and mouchettes. Between these are buttresses with sloping gabletted offsets below niches for statues (now empty). The east and west buttresses stand at angles to the corners but are otherwise of the same pattern.

The north porch is the principal entrance to the church and is of the same date as the aisle to which it is attached. The north corners are supported by diagonal buttresses.

The arcades, with filletted quatrefoil. piers and moulded arches appear to have been entirely recut in the nineteenth century. All the roofs and floors also are nineteenth-century incorporating some earlier woodwork. The aisle roofs are low-pitched, with the usual moulded beams and purlins, the intersections decorated with bosses some of which may be mediaeval. The nave roof, which is of uniform design except for a very slight claboration of the three eastern bays above the altar, seems to follow. the mediaeval pattern with curved braces to the principal rafters. The south aisle roof has a beam dated 1699. The south-west bay of the aisle, above which the tower stands, was walled off to form a vestry in the 1879 restoration, these walls being relieved by pairs of big lancets and roundels with tracery above.