Church Heritage Record 621657

Nave with south aisle and tower at the west end of the south aisle; chancel.

North Cockerington Church is said to have been founded as an extra-mural chapel of the Gilbertine Priory (of which the foundations remain under fields west of the church) which was founded in c.1154. The church is said, however, to be more ancient in foundation than the priory and to go back to the first half of the twelfth century when Hugo de Scoteni and William of Frieston his tenant gave land for a church to be built thereon. In 1155, just after the founding of the monastery, these two men resigned their rights to the income from the church in favour of the priory, and the responsibility for providing a priest devolved then upon the Prior. After the dissolution of the monasteries in 1538 this right passed to the Bishop of Lincoln and since the eighteenth century both churches have been served by one vicar although until very recently the congregations remained distinct. In 1931 the two charges were united by an Order in Council. Very little of the Norman church remains; the chancel arch is thirteenth-century and the nave arcade and south aisle fourteenth-century. The church was ruinous by 1821, there was apparently a major restoration in 1841 when the tower was rebuilt in brick covered with stucco, the porch was removed and the nave and aisle re-roofed under one roof. An attempt in 1821 to demolish both churches and build one new one to serve the two parishes was strongly resisted by the parishioners with success.

North Cockerington church is a compact little building which is rather dominated by the much more massive tower of the neighbouring church of Alvingham. The difference in their plans, however, with North Cockerington tower being placed asymmetrically at the end of the south aisle, makes them group together. 

Both are quite plain buildings, especially North Cockerington, and have almost no carved decoration externally. The rectangular nave has a large three-light window with intersecting tracery in the middle of the north wall and another of similar design in the west wall. These are of c.1300 in origin but are mostly nineteenth-century now. On the south side the low-pitched roof covers the aisle also, and this is by three-light windows of later style, the lights all of the same height and with ogee heads under a rectangular label, the stonework of these also virtually all renewed. To the west of the window in the south wall is the entrance, a plain doorway with a two-centred arch and chamfered jambs. West of this again rises the tower, a very mean design in stuccoed brick with a tall lower stage lit by a lancet in the south face and another in the west face and an upper stage with two-light belfry openings with timber Y tracery, very small, in each direction. The plain parapet has a straight moulded top and at the corners are decayed wooden pinnacles.

The chancel has a three-light window in the south wall similar to those on the south aisle and nearby quoins in the east wall of the nave show where the nave terminated before the south aisle was erected. Brickwork in the chancel wall near this point suggests that either a priest's door or a low side window has been filled in. The east window is of three cinquefoil-headed lights under a four-centred arch and the north wall which is now windowless appears to contain the head of a Norman window. On the north side the nave is almost continuous with the chancel.

The interior of the church reflects the nineteenth-century restorations, at which time it was provided with a flat plaster ceiling in the nave and also in the chancel, the second of which is in fact lower than the point of the chancel arch. The arch itself is wide and not tall, with two chamfered orders of which the outer dies into the responds and the inner is carried on moulded corbels terminating in small heads. All the windows stand within plain reveals and the memorable feature of the building is the series of Victorian texts painted on wooden boards and on metal strips affixed to the walls. The 1841 restoration also provided box pews, a remarkably late instance of these still being made in the Georgian style in the year of the publication of Pugin's True Principles. The south arcade has double-chamfered arches supported centrally on a low cylindrical pillar with buried base and crudely carved square capital and at each end on imposts, that at the east more carefully moulded than that at the west which looks like a later insertion. The roof of the aisle has a framework of thin timbers which date from 1841. The floor is unevenly paved with bricks of a weathered appearance. The chancel is floored with later nineteenth- century tiles of hard colouring and the east and south windows are within square reveals. The sloping sill of the south window has been covered with Victorian tiles.