Church Heritage Record id19333

The church consists of a west tower, five-bay nave, two-bay chancel with transepts and a chapel on the south side of the chancel linked to the chancel and south transept by arches. The south porch has a parvise.

No certain date is known for any part of this church.

The west tower of the church is the first part to be seen from the street and it presents a stumpy aspect because it has been lowered at some time in the 19th century. As a result, it now has no bell-openings and has acquired four disproportionately large pinnacles. In the place of any opening is the clock face, with the date 1827 and the legend 'Forget me not'. The walls of the tower, as of the rest of the church are faced with flints. 

The porch on the south side of the church leads into the foot of the tower. The south front of the porch is an attractive composition, the centrally placed doorway having figures of St. Michael and the Dragon Satan in the spandrels. On each side of the doorway are niches for statues with attractive crocketted canopies and shields set in quatrefoils beneath.

The band of flint flushworh between the ground floor and first floor represents crowned black-letter 'M's. In the front of the parvise, three recesses are connected by a continuous square dripstone running above them. The central one, formerly containing a sundial, is now a niche with a nineteenth-century statue of St. Michael. This unnecessarily duplicates the theme of the spandrelsbelow. The other two openings here are windows for the room within. They are square-headed with ogee tracery and small mouchettes in the corners of the head of each light. Like most of the windows in the church they are olaved with quarries. The parapet above is plain except for an indistinguishable carved stone in the centre and stumps not worthy of being called pinnacles at the top of the corner buttresses. The side walls of the porch have open traceried windows. Each is of two main lights with tracery very similar to that at St. Peter, Hungate, nearby, employing an ogee pattern and mouchettes.

The nave of the church is very plain, with four windows in each wall and a simple buttress between each. The roofs are all leaded. The tracery of these windows is more Decorated than Perpendicalar although like those at St. Peter Hungate, traces of both persuasions can be discerned. These windows are of three lights, each having a cinquefoil head, and above the tracery follows a common pattern of mouchettes and daggers. The windows of the chancel and transepts although a slightly different pattern follow the same tracery design, which would seem to point to the fact that the church was all built at roughly the same time.

The north transept has a base frieze of shields as has the north aisle. Whether this indicates that the north side of the church is of a slightly different date or that the base frieze does exist on the south but is concealed by higher ground level is uncertain. The other details of the architecture seem much the same as the other darts of the church.

Facing the door in the nave of the church is the octagonal font with its notable cover. On the left, a tall arch opens into the tower. The door to the tower stair is to the right under this arch and leads to a bridge gallery at first floor level made in 1887 out of some of the old fittings of the church (the balustrade is part of the altar rails, some of which still remain in their place in the sanctuary). At the same time the room over the porch to which this gallery leads was panelled with the wood from the box pews which were removed from the nave. An interesting and attractive detail is the cendle-sconce on the gallery, consisting of a long stem of wrought iron twisted into a corkscrew for a short section halfway up and terminating in an elegant clasp for the candlellike a stylized lily flower. Beside this is a slender S shaped rod of metal forming the handrail for the three steps leading up from the gallery into the parvice.

Down the central alley of the nave are several fine lodger slabs of marble. There are more in the area of floor just in front of the chancel screen. The total number is about thirty. Near the font is a most curious monument in two sections on walls which meet at an obtuse angle. The roof of the nave is an arch-braced construction with embattled bratishing along the wall plate and curious longitudinal arch-braces on the walls between the wall-posts. At the apex of the roof are winged angels. 

The south transept has recently been used as a vestry. There are one or two monuments on the walls. The north transept formerly contained the monument of the Ferrer family, but in the 1887 rehabilitation of the church, the stonework of this was re-used to make a pulpit.

Like the nave of the church, the chancel is well lit by large windows with quarries of clear glass, the only stained glass being a few mediaeval fragments in the tracery at the hood of the east window.