Church Heritage Record 608528

Nve with south porch and north vestry, chancel.

Nave 15m (50ft) long, 5m (16ft) wide.

The church was originally built as the Capella extra portas (the chapel without the gate) of the Cistercian Abbey of St Mary. The Abbey was founded c 1153 by Maurice Fitz Geoffrey and his overlord Robert de Ferrers, Earl of Derby.

The chapel was built outside the south gate around this time, perhaps immediately afterwards, and was originally dedicated to St Thomas of Canterbury, then but recently martyred (1170). It is a rare survival, the other notable example being Coggeshall, of the same date but used until a 19th-century restoration as a barn.

The possessions of the Abbey were widely distributed throughout Essex and like other Cistercian houses it did a considerable trade in wool. This wealth allowed for the chapel to be rebuilt and extended in the early 14th century, with an added chancel larger than the original building, which became the nave.

The abbey declined during the 16th century and shortly after the dissolution, it was gradually robbed and demolished. The chapel was granted to the parish for use as a parish church. 

The church was altered in the late 17th century with a new south porch and ceiling, and in the 18th with a new bell cupola, and new furnishings.  It was restored in the late 19th century, with a new north vestry and benches.

The site of the abbey was partly excavated in 1901, which recovered the plan of the cruciform, aisled church with the claustral range to the north. Excavations by Steer in 1949 located the infirmary, a separate building to the east of the church. The churchyard borders on its north side the abbey grounds which have been designated as a Scheduled Monument, but is not part of it.

There were extensive works within the church directed by Stephen Dykes-Bower in 1959-62, to earlier plans.  He whitened the interior and built up the raised platform at the west end, and created the font out of fragments from the Abbey excavations. H T Rushton removed the ceiling in 1975. The east window was restored in 1981, these repairs are now failing.

The nave is the original church of c.1220, the ochre colour of the plastered walls distinguishing it from the taller and wider, 14th century, flint chancel.

The west wall has an original window of three deeply splayed stepped lancets, the gable surmounted by a pretty turret with plain louvred openings and an open bell cupola of c 1750. The small timber framed and plastered south porch is of the late 17th century.

The south wall has an external string course.  There are four original pointed lancets in each side wall whereby the east window in the south wall is shorter to allow for the piscina within, and a north doorway with pointed head. A small lean-to brick vestry off the west bay opening off the old doorway in the north wall was added in the late 19th century, and has a pointed lancet in the north wall and a plain stack up the west, and stepped crenellated parapets to the east and west ends, an odd feature.

 The 14th-century chancel has a 3-light pointed north window with Decorated cusped tracery, and a similar south 2-light window set high to allow for the sedilia and piscina inside. The east wall has diagonal buttresses, and a truncated gable with cross finial.

The east window is huge, of five lights with idiosyncratic tracery. The window is flanked by two cinquefoil headed niches with gabled, crocketed and finialed labels and side pinnacles with carved crockets and finials. Below the window is a band of flint and stone chequerwork.

The interior is thickly plastered and whitewashed, but with enough mature woodwork and uneven, unrestored features so as not to appear sterile or foreboding. There is a raised platform at the west end, behind blue-painted panelling, installed in the 1950s. The removal of a 17th-century plaster-and-lath ceiling in 1975 revealed a fine late 15th-century timber nave roof with side purlins, a collar (formerly arch-braced), moulded wall plates and one embattled tie beam. The east gable cuts across the view of the east window, effectively fulfilling the role of a chancel arch.

 Some decoration survives on the roof, as do some vestiges of 13th-century vine pattern wall paintings on the north and south walls; more is doubtless still behind the plaster. The windows have hoodmoulds to head-stops.  The floors are a patchwork of mostly 17th-century stone slabs with Purbeck insets but with some areas of quarry tiles.

Below the eastern window of the nave in the south wall is a 13th-century piscina and plainer integral adjacent aumbry, which would have served the high altar before the present chancel was added.

The canted roof to the chancel is 14th-century, still plastered on the soffit.  There is a moulded string, forming a label to the 14th-century 3-bay sedilia and integral double piscina in the south wall, with moulded and shaped jambs, capitals, bases and traceried heads and head stops. Fragments of Medieval grave slabs are built into the north wall.