Church Heritage Record 610238

West porch, timber bell turret, nave and chancel with south vestry.

Nave 13m (40ft) by 5m (16ft).

The church is mentioned in Domesday as an ecclesiola.  The thick walls and dimensions of the nave would seem to point to a Norman rebuilding after the Conquest, the earliest material evidence being an ex situ head from a corbel-table.  There is no evidence of a manorial link with the estate or house.  In the 13th century the estate belonged to the de Boucy family, the tithes from the church were in the possession of Sele Priory, a Benedictine house.

The parish was thereafter afflicted by financial problems and internal strife, and the church was apparently in a dilapidated condition by 1700. It was thoroughly restored in the early years of the 18th century, from which time many of the furnishings and the roof structure date. The nave was extended to the west and the porch built, with a musician’s gallery added in 1747 with external stairs.  At some point in the mid 19th century the brick south vestry was added to the chancel, brick buttresses erected at the corners of the building, and the fenestration replaced with domestic rectangular oak-framed windows.

The church was restored again in 1885, at which time the chancel seems to have been comprehensively restored with new Gothic windows, furnishings and fittings.  The windows in the eastern bays of the nave were renewed over the next 50 years with lancets, replacing the rectangular windows. The gallery was removed and replaced with an organ loft in 1927.

This is, at least at first sight, a simple and rather quaint building, with relatively sparse architectural detail and ornament.  The successive restorations have left the building with few obvious reminders of its antiquity, at least from the outside.   Nairn and Pevsner remarked that the story of the church was “difficult to sort out”; this is an understatement, as we shall see.  An attempt to sort it out will be made here, but there is indeed little to go on for the earliest years, partly because the church is rendered inside and out, and also because of the successive restorations. 

The church has little vertical emphasis, and steps down from the short west bell turret to the shallowly pitched roof of the nave and slightly lower and narrower chancel of similar pitch. Starting at the west end, the square bell turret has tongue-and-groove boarding, surmounted by a pyramid roof with lead flashings and wooden spike with weathervane. There are square louvred belfry openings in each face. 

The small west porch is of timber on stone footings with a round-headed arched frontispiece, and looks 18th-century.  Adjacent to the north of it is a stone staircase with modern metal handrail leading up to a door which gave access to the musician’s gallery, now the organ loft.  The internal doorway is square-headed, and the joinery again looks 18th century.

The nave has a noticeable kink in the south wall beyond the third bay from the east, which may suggest that the western two bays were added in the 18th century.  This supposition would appear to be supported by the existence of rectangular, rather domestic windows with oak frames in these bays and in the west wall, compared with the small pointed lancets in the eastern bays. However, faculty records show the lancets were installed in the late 19th century and early 20th century, replacing the rectangular windows.  This proves how erroneous assumptions made purely through observation can be, although in this case, even more confusingly, the conclusion thus reached would have been correct.

The squat chancel has a square-headed two-light window in the north wall with cusped heads, of 14th-century style. There are two single-light rectangular windows in the same style in the east wall, so placed to frame the wooden reredos installed in 1885. It is recorded that the chancel windows were copied from fragments found during the 1885 restoration of the church, and replaced oak framed windows. 

All the windows described have diagonal leading.  The east and west windows of the vestry have domestic wooden windows.  Photographs dated 1917 in the Council collections show a chimney rising from the vestry, now gone.

There are broad brick angle buttresses with one weathering at the north-east corner of the chancel, and buttresses at the south-east and south-west corners of the nave.  These are probably of roughly the same date as the brick vestry, mid 19th-century.  All are laid in Flemish bond. The single west buttress at the north-west corner is of ashlar, and arguably dates to the 18th-century reconstruction rather than the medieval period as previously thought, for reasons which will be explained in more detail below.

In defence of the traditional view, it has to be said that the masonry of the buttress is in parts very worn.  There is within it a chamfered slab, which one could interpret as an impost from the Norman chancel arch. If this observation is correct, this would have been removed in the early 18th century to create the present rectangular opening, the masonry from the old east and west walls then re-used in the “new” west walls and buttress, thus solving the problem.  This is however just one of several possible interpretations.

The interior of the church is a revelation, with a contrast in styles between the nave and chancel.  The nave preserves its 18th-century box pews, still inscribed with the names of the surrounding houses and farmsteads. There are boards under the pews, the aisle under red carpet.  It was not possible to check for monuments under this.

The rather odd organ loft at the west end catches the eye, suspended on a plain wooden frame, the organ seemingly crammed just under the barrel-vaulted wooden ceiling.  The ceiling leaves exposed the 18th-century tie-beams, the ends now buried in the walls.  These are moulded, and some have clearly been re-used.  The stone corbels for the musician’s gallery are still visible, adorned with a stone urn with Greek-key decoration around the rim sitting on each.

There are several other interesting details in the nave, with several post-medieval wall monuments (see below) in the side walls and three medieval corbel heads mounted in the west wall, the latter apparently set there early in the 20th century after they were discovered during repair work to the buttresses.  The earliest of these is a feline mask with characteristic bulging eyes, which would seem likely to have been part of a corbel-table to the Norman church. The other two are damaged male and female heads, the male with curling and twisted plaits of hair and moustache.  These were probably also corbels, perhaps from the medieval roof, long gone.

There are also two in situ medieval features in the south wall, a piscina and a recessed blocked arch.  The piscina is of early 13th-century type, with a plain pointed head, credence ledge and half-moon drain. The fact that this has survived in the easternmost bay of the nave south wall indicates that the extension of the nave did not occur in this direction, refuting suggestions made in the past that the west wall of the church is “ancient”, as noted above. 

The above observations are further supported by the existence of the blocked arch, presumably a doorway, which is recessed within a taller arch; both have the same broad pointed profile as the piscina, therefore late 12th or early 13th century in date.  The west side of this feature has been cut away, presumably during the 18th-century extension of the nave from this point westwards. 

Looking east, the chancel “arch” is in fact a rectangular opening, presumably dating to the 1710 reconstruction. It has been “gothicised” by the insertion of a timber screen which seeks to make an arch out of it with its tracery, the spandrels enclosed by a hammer-beam motif.  Beyond this the chancel is uncompromisingly High Victorian, the windows already described flanking an oak reredos, with panelling all around the walls. A traceried oak screen was inserted between the chancel and vestry in 1885 to replace a plaster and lath screen. The chancel has a flat inserted ceiling, painted white.  The sanctuary is reached by three steps, the floor has Minton encaustic tiles.