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1. St John the Baptist, Armitage, Staffordshire, England

Parish church
Armitage is in central south Staffordshire, to the E of Cannock Chase and 2 miles SE of Rugeley. The village is built along the A513 road from Rugeley to Handsacre, and the latter and Armitage now form a continuous conurbation. This road follows the line of the River Trent, and St John's is built on a sandstone outcrop overlooking the river.
2. All Saints, Chebsey, Staffordshire, England

Parish church
Chebsey is a village on the river Sow, 5 miles upstream from the centre of Stafford. All Saints has a spacious nave with no clerestory and S aisle, a chancel and W tower with a modern vestry on the S side of it. Nave and chancel are 12thc.; visible in the two 12thc. N nave doorways (one now blocked and neither with a porch), the flat buttress on the N nave wall, and the tiny round-headed lancets on the N walls of the nave and chancel. The S aisle was added in the mid-13thc., and the chancel arch remodelled at the same time. Both this and the four-bay S arcade have pointed, double chamfered arches and moulded capitals. The S doorway, under a porch, is also 13thc. The W tower is 15thc. with diagonal buttresses, a SE stair turret and a battlemented parapet with pinnacles. Construction is of reddish sandstone, much renewed especially in the S aisle wall. The 12thc. doorways and windows are very plain, but the interior niche left by the blocking of the eastern doorway now contains loose 12thc. stones carved with foliage in relief. There are two 19thc. S views in the William Salt Library, Stafford, SV III 74 and 75a, but they add little to our knowledge of the building.
3. St Lawrence, Gnosall, Staffordshire, England

Formerly Collegiate church, now parish church
St Lawrence's is a cruciform church begunc.1100 with substantial later additions. Three-bay aisles were added to the nave in the 13thc.; the arcades have pointed, double chamfered arches carried on octagonal piers with moulded capitals. The W doorway and the triple lancet above it are also 13thc., as are the small lancets in the W walls of the aisles, so it is possible that the length of the church was changed in the 13thc. too. The S doorway is 13thc. too, now under a 19thc. porch (by Lynam, 1893). The 12thc. chancel has been drastically remodelled, but the original shallow buttresses remain on the N wall. The five-light E window is a spectacular example of mid-14thc. flowing tracery. A Lady Chapel was added on the S side of the chancel c.1500. It has tall three-light windows and a parapet, and a view of the E end serves to point up both the ineptness of the addition and the contrast between the sinuous Decorated tracery of the chancel and the austere late-Perpendicular work of the chapel. Also Perpendicular is the eastern chapel added to the N transept. The most recent addition is the new N vestry, designed by Ian Henderson of Horsley, Huber and Associates of Stafford and dedicated by the Bishop of Stafford in 1994. It is linked to the N nave aisle doorway by a passage containing a lavatory and an outer door, and thus combines the functions of porch, vestry and washroom.
4. St Mary, Kingswinford, Staffordshire, England

Parish church
The village of Kingswinford has now been entirely absorbed into the Dudley conurbation. In 1851 it was described as 'a small but pleasant village, with many new houses, three miles WSW of Dudley' (White). The parish, however, was an extensive one, heavily populated even then, with 22,221 inhabitants dispersed among eight villages and twenty hamlets, largely employed by the coal, iron, glass, brick and pottery industries. Kingswinford village still exists, in name at least, as the area immediately around the church, with a green and a pond. Bradley Hall, a timber-framed house dated 1596, once stood in the village too, but when it was taken down its timbers reused by K. H. Smith for use in neo-Tudor houses at Stratford-upon-Avon in the early 20thc.
5. All Saints, Madeley, Staffordshire, England

Parish church
Madeley is in NW Staffordshire, just over a mile from the Shropshire border and four miles E of Newcastle-under-Lyme. The parish was formerly an extensive one, occupying the fertile, hilly ground as far W as the county boundary. It consisted of the three villages of Great, Middle and Little Madeley and Onneley, to the W. All of these lie along the A525 road from Whitchurch to Newcastle. Madeley was apparently always the largest settlement. The church is alongside the main road, with the Old Hall (now a 17thc. building) immediately to the N. Old Madeley manor is a mile to the S, but ruinous, and the new manor is in Little Madeley to the NE. Red and blue clay is still extracted for brick manufacture, and coal was formerly mined at Leycett colliery (closed 1957) and Silverdale (closed 1998). All Saints is a red sandstone church with a nave with aisles, a S porch and transepts, a chancel with a N chapel and a W tower. The oldest part of the church is the 12thc. N arcade. The S arcade and clerestorey are ofc.1300, and both aisles have been widened; the N in the 14thc. and the S in the 15thc., to judge from the windows. The nave aisles are of four bays and extend partway alongside the tower to the W. The S porch is 15thc. Its original entrance has been blocked, and the modern entrance to the church is through a doorway cut into the E wall of the porch, allowing the insertion of lavatories at the S end. The N transept was added in the 14thc., and a lancet at the W end of the N arcade wall (originally the outer wall) indicates that there was no transept here before that. The S transept is 15thc., as is the N chancel chapel (now a vestry). The chancel itself was completely rebuilt in 1872 as part of a restoration by Charles Lynam of Stoke-on-Trent. Views of the church before this restoration are in the William Salt library. The tower is 15thc. with a 19thc. battlemented parapet with finials. Romanesque sculpture is found in the N nave arcade.
6. Ranton Priory, Staffordshire, England

Originally house of Augustinian canons
The ruined priory of Ranton and the remains of the Georgian hall alongside it stand in landscaped parkland 1 mile W of the village of Ranton and 5 miles W of Stafford. All that survives of the abbey church is the W tower and a short section of the S nave wall rebuilt to house the S doorway. This doorway is of the late 12thc. The 15thc. tower has angle buttresses, a five-light W window and two-light bell-openings below a saltire frieze and an embattled parapet. All the main windows are now blocked with bricks. To the S of the church is the ruined shell of the house, called Ranton Abbey and dating fromc.1820 according to Pevsner. Various antiquarian drawings survive in the William Salt Library, many by Buckler and most concentrating on the W tower. SV VIII 59 (Buckler 1842) shows the S doorway looking much as it does today, but it is not clear from this whether any more of the nave wall was standing at that date.
7. St Chad, Stafford, Staffordshire, England

Parish church
St Chad's is on Greengate Street, one of Stafford's main shopping streets running S from the market square. Its W front is entirely the work of George Gilbert Scott (1873-74), but this conceals a church that is substantially 12thc. and considerably larger than expected. It is cruciform with a crossing tower and aisles to the nave. The aisles have four-bay arcades carried on heavy cylindrical piers with scallop capitals and chevron decoration on the two eastern arches of each arcade. Above the E respond capitals and pier 1 capitals on the nave faces of both arcade walls are attached half-shafts rising to clerestory sill level, with plain cuboidal blocks where capitals and bases would be expected. The W responds of the arcades are of a later date than the rest, suggesting that the nave might originally have extended further W, but the vicissitudes undergone by the façade (see below) make this by no means certain. Above the arcades are round-headed clerestory windows; originally 12thc. but entirely remade. The aisles are entirely Scott's work. The only nave doorway is at the W. The crossing tower was rebuilt in the 14thc. and restored by Robert Griffiths of Stafford in 1884, and all four crossing arch heads are 14thc., although the beautifully carved 12thc. W arch was retained, the new W crossing arch being constructed immediately to the E of it. In the detailed descriptions below, the 12thc. arch is called the chancel arch. The N arch was rebuilt in the 19thc, incorporating 12thc. carved capitals and imposts discovered in the restoration. The E arch has 12thc. embrasures, capitals and imposts supporting the 14thc. archivolts above. The S arch appears to be entirely 14thc. work, but it is largely concealed by the organ. The N transept is by Griffiths (1886) and now houses the Jevons Memorial Chapel, furnished in 1937. The S transept was not rebuilt until 1953-55 and houses the organ with a vestry behind it. The chancel is now of three bays, with 12thc. windows in the two western bays, original on the N side, and 12thc. interior wall arcading in these bays on the N and S sides. The exterior chancel stringcourse also stops at the end of bay two, indicating that the 12thc. chancel was a bay shorter than the present one. It may have ended in an apse.
8. St Mary, Swynnerton, Staffordshire, England

Parish church
Swynnerton is an attractive village on a low hill just 6 miles S of Newcastle-under-Lyme. It is centred on the church and the hall just to the S, the latter standing in Swynnerton Park. A view of the hall from the SW, published in 1821, shows the church in the background (William Salt Library SV X 59b). St Mary's has an aisled and clerestoried nave, a chancel with a S chapel (the Lady Chapel, now a vestry) and a W tower. The nave is 12thc. in origin, and of large, irregular ashlar blocks. It retains a round-headed W window and a W doorway to the tower. The tower itself is also 12thc. in its lower parts, including another W doorway (which Pevsner suggests is re-set here), but in the 14thc. diagonal buttresses were added and the upper stage rebuilt in more regular ashlar. Drawings of 1838 and 1841 (William Salt Library SV X 59a and 60) show the parapet with urns at the corners. The form of the five-bay nave arcades and a dogtooth stringcourse at the top of the nave walls indicate that the aisles were added in the 13thc. The clerestory has quatrefoil openings of the same period. The E bay of the each nave aisle has been enlarged to form a chapel; the S Perpendicular and battlemented, the N 13thc. in style but perhaps 19thc. (it does not appear in the 1838 drawing noted above). There is a 13thc. S doorway under a porch. The chancel arch is 13thc., with nailhead on moulded capitals and detached en-delit shafts, and the chancel is of the same date. The details of the S chancel chapel indicate that it was added in the early 14thc. Beneath it is the Fitzherbert family vault. Romanesque sculpture, elaborate for the county, appears on the two W doorways.