Church Heritage Record id18861

Wide nave with north and south aisles; south-west tower; chancel, with north vestry; north of the vestry the octagonal Stackhouse Library, now serving principally as the clergy vestry.

Nave and aisles together are a prodigious 91 feet in width.

The earliest reforence to the church is said to be in a document of the 13th century, but clearly the church existed before then (the first written Charter of the Borough is 1157, and Norman stones were found embeded in the walls in the 19th century wave of restoration) as a building of some significance.

Both town and church suffered severely in the Civil War. The church was at one point used as an ammunition store, and set on fire by a cannon mounted in the Castle. The resulting fire swept through and virtually destroyed the High Town in 1646.

The chancel was restored in memory of Thomas Whitmore; the south aisle was rebuilt in memory of his brother by John Pritchard, MP for the Borough; the tower followed in 1870, chiefly at the expense of W.O. Foster of Apley (Patron of the living at the time) and W.H. Foster, then MP for the Borough.

The architect for this work (i.e. the major programme of the 1860's and 1870's) was William Slater, the partner and successor of R.C. Carpenter one of the most sensitive of 19th century church restorers (the 19th century work at Sherborne Abbey, Dorset). The octagonal Stackhouse Library was added in 1878. Slater died in 1872 , so someone else was presumably responsible for the design.

What impresses one at once about this building is its sprawling scale. This can be appreciated, for instance, by standing at the south-east from where it is possible to see the tower, south chapel (which is the east end of the south aisle) and chancel in relationship to one another. As to stylistic considerations the overall impression is of the 14th century.

The east window consists of four principal lights, arranged two plus two, with quatrefoils above each pair; in the window head a large and elaborately cusped quatrefoil within a circlet. 

Steeply gabled, and on a grand scale, the south chapel is of two bays with prominent clasping buttresses at the south-east corner.

Then comes the exceedingly grand tower, a powerful mass of masonry seen from close to, no less than it is a prominent feature of the town and the surrounding landscape. It consists of three stages, with diagonal stepped buttresses extending virtually up to parapet level, and grotesque gargoyles project vigorously from the corners.

The sprawling character of the building is again especially evident as one looks at the west front. The west face of the southaisle is ingeniously set back so that it appears to be a linking passage between the tower and the main body of the church.

The nave itself is uncommonlywide, and the design solution here is also a pair of windows. These are on a big scale, with three principal lights apiece, and a pair of cinquefoils and a trefoil in each head. The doorway is richly moulded and has two orders of flanking colonettes. In the gable above the two main windows is a single-light window with one order of colonettes.

The north face of the north wall is a straight run of five bays, divided by buttresses, each with a three-light window with gently varying geometrical tracery of the kind familiar from the rest of the building.

The interior contrives to be, in spite of the far-flung spaces, both magnificently well-related in its several parts and sumptuous in its details.

details. First its astonishing width, 91 feet, must be noticed again. The north aisle itself seems wide enough for a nave, and the nave is almost twice as wide as that. The north arcade is of five bays, with circular piers and stiff-leaf capitals. The south arcade is more complex. In the first place it is of four bays, not five, because of the setting back of the west wall of the aisle to form a visual linking passage with the tower. Then the third bay from the east is divided by a trumeau, and the western half of the divided bay is completely filled by stone panelling, richly diapered, and with a memorial.

The richest part of the church architecturally is the panelled arch into the tower space, and the lierne vaulting of the tower space itself, forming an extremely good entrance-porch to the church. The tower space is divided from the western bay of the south aisle by a stone screen of some elaboration consisting of the central doorway with pierced trefoils over and flanking openings of two lights each with quatrefoils in the head.

A feature of major significance is the magnificent 17th century (1662) roof of the nave. This is of five bays. The distinguishing feature is the series of six frames, consisting of a system of tie and haimer-beams with flat voluted braces and pendants. The braces are said to represent 'tongues of fire' though they are in fact a common local motif of the period. Other old woodwork seems to survive in the roofs, for instance the carved brackets supporting the main timbers in the roof of the baptistery (west bay of south aisle) and the solid richly carved spandrel brackets in the north aisle.

The chancel fabric may well be largely mediaeval but its overall impression is High Victorian inside, with a series of steps rising to the High Altar, sumptuous tiled floors and a convincingly mediaeval-looking roof structure.