The Corpus of ROMANESQUE SCULPTURE in Britain & Ireland
"Thurlow"
Parish church
The villages of Great and Little Thurlow are in the Stour valley N of Haverhill; their churches only half a mile apart. St Peter's has an aisled nave with four-bay arcades and clerestories with oculi. The chancel has a N chapel with a two-bay arcade to the main vessel, built in 1621 to house the spectacular wall-tomb of Sir Stephen Soame (d.1619). The W tower is of two storeys with angle buttresses and dates from the 14thc. in its lower parts. Its bell openings and embattled parapet with flint chequer-work are Perpendicular. The tower is flint faced, as is the entire church except for the mortar-rendered clerestorey, the battlemented Soame chapel (of brick with mortar rendering) and the N porch (of brick). None of the fabric postdates the later 13thc. The church boasts three 13thc. piscinae; one in the chancel and one in each nave aisle, indicating that the aisles were built as chapels. The nave arcades and chancel arch are of c.1300, the tower arch is Perpendicular, N clerestory is 17thc. and the S 19thc. The only Romanesque feature is the font, carved with stylised foliage.
Parish church
The villages of Great and Little Thurlow are in the Stour valley N of Haverhill; their churches only half a mile apart. All Saints, Great Thurlow is alongside the Hall. It has an aisled and clerestoried nave, a short chancel with a N vestry and a W tower. The 15thc. nave arcades are of four bays, carried on lozenge-shaped piers without capitals into which the arch mouldings die without any transition. The square-headed clerestory windows are Perpendicular too. The nave has north and south doorways, the north under a porch. The chancel is very short and 12thc in its fabric, with external shafts at its eastern angles, but it was heavily restored in the 19thc and given a new chancel arch, and it retains no original windows. The roofs of both nave and chancel have been raised, apparently for purely decorative purposes, since the tower shows the scar of a taller and steeper nave on its east face. Liturgically the presbytery has been given an extra bay by inserting a step opposite the first nave piers and by screening off the east aisle bays for use as an organ chamber (N) and a chapel (S). The west tower may be late 14thc, although its diagonal buttresses appear to be added. Its bell openings are no help; the north is 15thc, the south and east apparently 14thc and the west 19thc.. and an embattled parapet. On top of the tower is a neo-classical bell-cote of lead. The exterior nave and aisle walls are embattled too, and the church is faced with flint. The angle shafts of the chancel provide the only signs of Romanesque fabric, but there is a reset stone carved with a cable moulding reset in the west wall of the north aisle, and the font is 12thc too.
Parish church
Naughton is a village in the rolling arable farmland of S central Suffolk, 9 miles W of the centre of Ipswich. It consists of houses with the church and a moated site at a junction of two minor roads just off the B1078 Sudbury to Needham Market road. Naughton Hall, alongside the church, is now a 17thc. building. A second moated site is 0.3 miles SW of the church and there are farms outside the village. St Mary's has a nave, chancel and W tower. The flint W tower is two storeys high and has a blocked round-headed window on the S side in the lower storey. This may thus be 12thc, but the upper storey has Y-tracery bell-openings ofc.1300. There is an embattled parapet. The W window is a replacement in 15thc. style, and the tower arch is pointed with mouldings dying into the embrasures. Nave and chancel are mortar-rendered, and all their windows are stylistically ofc.1300 except for one late-13thc. plate-tracery window in the chancel S wall, one with a cusped head in the nave S wall, and a 15thc. window in the chancel S wall. The chancel arch is 14th-15thc. There is a 14thc. piscina with a cusped arch towards the E end of the nave on the S wall, indicating the presence of an altar. The chancel
piscina is ofc.1300. The S nave doorway is protected by a rendered porch, while the 13thc. N doorway has been blocked and fitted with a window. Set in the window splay is a 12thc. font that has been cut down, and this is the only Romanesque sculpture here.
Parish church
Preston St Mary is in the rolling arable land between Bury St Edmunds
and Sudbury, towards the W of the county. The nearest town is Lavenham, 2 miles
to the W. Preston stands on a low hill above a stream to the E that runs S into
the river Brett. It is an attractive village; its main street occupied by
houses and a pub, with the church at its southern end, facing the street and
alongside the hall. St Mary's has an aisled nave with a N porch, chancel with N
vestry and W tower. The nave has a 15thc. clerestory
and three-bay aisles with 15thc. windows. The N
porch is 15thc. too, but very elaborate with flushwork
decoration, niches on the buttresses and a
battlemented parapet. The chancel is 14thc. in its
details, with one reticulated N window and flowing tracery in the E and S
windows. The N vestry is 19thc., with a N window with
Perpendicular-style tracery. The tower has diagonal buttresses to the E, a
polygonal SE bell-stair and a battlemented parapet with gargoyles below. The W
face has a 15thc. doorway with kings as label stops
and niches to either side and above for statuary. The
bell openings are two-light reticulated with triangular heads. The nave, aisles
and chancel are of flint, septaria and reused brick or
tile - a typical Suffolk mixture. The tower is of roughly-knapped flints. The
church contains an important early Romanesque font.
Parish church
The villages of Great and Little Bradley are in the Stour valley N of Haverhill; their churches less than a mile apart. St Mary’s has a nave with N and S doorways and a S porch, a chancel and a W tower. The nave is Romanesque; both doorways are 12thc., as are the jambs of the chancel arch, but the arch itself is later and steeply pointed. The nave windows have all been replaced; one on the N is 16thc., the rest are 19thc. The S porch is an attractive brick construction with a crow-stepped gable and niches, dating from the 16thc.. The chancel, and the upper part of the chancel arch, are early 14thc. judging from the S chancel doorway and the form of the windows. The W tower is perhaps 14thc. too, and has angle buttresses and a spiral stair turret at its SE corner. It was heavily modified in the 16thc., however, and the W doorway, the flushwork on the plinth, the bell-openings and the battlements on the main parapet and the taller stair turret parapet must date from the later period. Externally the tower is mortar rendered, as is the entire church except for the S nave wall (of flint) and the E chancel wall (of flint with brick diagonal buttresses and decorative banding) and the S porch of red brick. Of the Romanesque work, the N doorway is plain in comparison with the S, which is modelled either on the Prior’s doorway at Ely, or on the copy at nearby Kirtling (Cambs).
Parish church
The villages of Great and Little Bradley are in the Stour valley N of Haverhill; their churches less than a mile apart. All Saints has an aisleless nave, chancel and W tower. The nave is 12thc., with a plain Romanesque chancel arch and a 12thc. S doorway under a flint and timber porch. Its N doorway has been replaced by a 19thc. window. The eastern part of the chancel is early 12thc., with two plain lancets in the N wall (one blocked) and signs of two more in the E wall. The western section of the chancel has thicker walls and is presumably 11thc. The original eastern angles are visible on the present side walls, indicating that the original chancel was lower as well as shorter. Mortlock claims that there is long and short work here, but it is a later repair. At the W end of the nave, the tower arch is small enough to be called a doorway (and it was fitted with a door and a wooden tympanum to square off the opening in the 16thc.) This leads to a W tower, circular and presumably 11thc. in its lower stage, with flint course laid in herringbone patterns, and octagonal above, with a battlement with double stepped merlons. There are plain round-headed lancets in the lower walls to N, S and W, but they are all restored. Construction is of flint, with herringbone work on the lower part of the tower and the western part of the chancel. Romanesque work reported here is in the chancel arch, the tower arch and the S doorway.
Parish church
St Mary’s has an aisleless nave, chancel and W tower. The nave has a S doorway under an attractive flint and brick porch, and a blocked N doorway. Nave and chancel are 14thc., and the nave has a wooden organ gallery at the W end by Detmar Blow (1912). The tower is 14thc. too, with diagonal buttresses at the W. Construction is of flint, once rendered but much of the rendering has gone now. The font is the only Romanesque feature.
Parish church
Withersdale is nearly 3 miles E of Harleston and a mile and a half from
the river Waveney, which marks the border with Norfolk. The church stands
alongside the B1123 and the moated hall site, with a medieval farmhouse, is 500
yards (457 metres) to the S. The rest of the village has migrated W along the
road towards Harleston, forming the settlement of Withersdale Street. The church is a two-cell building, largely of flint. The nave is tall
with a wooden belfry on the W gable. A blocked N doorway, converted into a window,
indicates a 12thc. date, but the S doorway, pointed and chamfered, and small pointed lancets in the lateral walls
suggest a major 13thc. remodelling. Lateral two-light windows were added at the
E end of the nave in the 15thc. Inside there is a N rood stair. There is no chancel arch
and the chancel, slightly lower than the nave, has a
13thc. S doorway and plain pointed lancets in the side walls at the W end.
Further E the lateral windows have Y-tracery, suggesting that it was lengthened
c.1300. The E wall is 18thc., of brick part-rendered with a window with
wooden glazing bars. An oblong W window, bargeboards at E and W and on the S
porch, and a mortar render on the S side combine to
give the church a domestic look. The highlight for the student of Romanesque
sculpture is a damaged but elaborately carved
font.
Parish church
This aisleless church has a thatched nave and chancel. The windows, N porch and W tower date from the 15thc, while the carved Romanesque S doorway surviving in the flint wall of the nave, together with a deeply-splayed round-arched recess low in the N wall of the chancel, indicate that the structure of the building is substantially earlier.
Castle
Windsor Castle, founded by King William I, consists of a big chalk motte on which stands a round tower, with walled enclosures to the W (the Lower Ward) and E (the Upper Ward. This is no place for a full architectural description of the castle, especially since it is by no means certain that the carved Romanesque stones described here were originally from this site (see Comments and Opinions, below), but the Bibliography will be useful as a guide to further reading about the site.
The material described here is all in the form of loose or reset stones, out of context and displayed in various locations around the castle, as follows.
The Moat Garden
This is the cultivated motte on which the Round Tower stands. The earliest account we have of a garden on the mound is in King James I of Scotland’s poem,The King’s Quair, written during his period of captivity at Windsor Castle between 1413 and 1423. This describes a small and private garden alongside the wall of the Round Tower :
Now was there maid, fast by the Touris wall,
A gardyn faire, and in the corneris set,
Ane herbere grene, with wandis long and small,
Railit about, and so with treis set
Was all the place, and hawthorn hegis knet,
That lyf was non, walkyng there forbye,
That mycht within scarce any wight aspy. (Tighe and Davies (1858), 79.)
There was little or no planting on the rest of the mound then, and none is visible in Norden’s 1607 view of the castle, but Hollar’s c.1672 engraving shows the south slopes divided into a series of geometric beds, quite unlike the present arrangement. (Roberts (1997), 161).
The area of the mound is associated with the so-called Norman Gate, built alongside it by William of Wykeham c.1359. At the time of Wyatville’s restoration of the castle, the mound had been rented out to a fruit and vegetable grower who sold the produce at market. The fruit trees planted against the curtain walls below the Round Tower were apparently undermining it, and in 1836 Wyatville sent a strongly-worded letter to the then resident of the Norman Gate, Lady Mary Fox, the State Housekeeper, warning her that if any more fruit trees were planted there was a danger of it collapsing. Indeed, some years earlier part of the wall had collapsed for this very reason, and repairs at a cost of £1500 were needed to repair the damage. (Taylor (1935)). By 1844, when the mound was photographed by Fox-Talbot, it was planted with a few shrubs and small trees, but there was no longer any evidence of systematic fruit-growing. The wall that partly encircles the mound on the inner side of the middle terrace was in place by that date (figure 1).
In 1901 the Norman Gate was given as a residence to the Right Hon. Sir Dighton Probyn, on his appointment as Keeper of the Privy Purse. Probyn had been a young officer during the Indian Mutiny, when he was awarded the VC and he rose to the rank of general before he entered the service of the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII. It was Probyn who was responsible for clearing away the remains of the Victorian design, and he transformed the mound into a richly-planted and less formal garden. He brought brown Carstone from Norfolk to build a rock garden, and introduced a water and bog garden and the present scheme of walls, terraces, borders and architectural ornaments. As we shall see, this work was in progress when Keyser photographed the Romanesque stones c.1915. The garden was neglected during the remainder of the Great War, and many plants were lost in the drought of 1921, so that Lord Wigram, Probyn’s successor as occupant of the house, had to restore the garden and added rare plants from the Far East (Taylor (1935), 326-28).
The present design is more or less Probyn’s, and consists of an outer crescent following the inside of the lower moat wall with a long bed of shrubs and herbaceous plants that runs in a three-quarter circle from the NE to the SE of the mound (figure 2). On this wall is an arched feature made of Romanesque carved stones (figure 3), and other loose stones are placed on stone shelves built onto its inner face. The bed is bounded on the inside by a low brick retaining wall, and inside this the ground is terraced to provide a flat lawn enhanced by rose beds and a small pond, with a paved terrace at the east end. From the inner edge of the lawn the mound rises steeply to the base of the Round Tower curtain wall, some 90 or 100 feet above. The lower slopes are simply grassed except towards the E, where they are planted with shrubs and trees, and at the far northern end, where the rockery descends with a series of pools and a flight of steps from the rear entrance of the Norman Gate, now the Governor’s residence, to the level of the moat wall (figure 4). At the top is the Herbere pavilion, and below it the Corinthian Fountain (figure 5), both of which include Romanesque carvings described here. Partway up the mound, and concentric with the line of the lower moat wall at the bottom and the Round Tower curtain wall at the top is a narrow terrace now known as the middle terrace (figure 6), and another arched feature made up of Romanesque carved stones is set there, with further carved stones placed on a shelf at the east end of the terrace (figures 7, 8). Above the middle terrace, up to the curtain wall of the Round Tower, the planting is denser, though still informal. At the extreme east end of the garden, at the foot of the mound, are greenhouses. The slope rising behind them has been reinforced with ashlar blocks, and among them are several stones with roll-moulded edges that show traces of possible Romanesque carving (figure 9).
The South Bowe
The South Bowe is a blocked sally port on the south side of the Upper Ward of the castle. It appears to date from the thirteenth century, although there is little in the structure that is diagnostic of date. In the passage is a rough arch constructed largely of clunch but including, in its west jamb, two moulded stones and two chevron voussoirs (figure 10).
The Carronade wall
The carronade wall is the retaining wall of the central motte on the Upper Ward side. A single stone carved with two units of diapering is set into this, described as cat. 55. It was photographed by Tsang and drawn by Brian Kerr. (figure 11).
All stones are numbered and described; the organisation of the stones being based on the type of object rather than its location. Loose stones were all photographed separately, but this was not always possible for stones built into structures, most notably the two arched structures in the Moat Garden. In these cases stones were identified by their position within the structure, and photographic references to the figures in which they appear are included in the feature descriptions.
1. The Lower Moat Wall. This structure takes the form of an arch attached to the garden side of the lower moat wall at the west (figure 12). There are two non-Romanesque stones carved with human figures in the centre, and around them is an arch made up of twelve 12th-century stones. Each jamb is made up of three stones, the arch is of five voussoirs and a niche-head in the centre forms a pseudo- tympanum. In the catalogue these stones are identified as follows:
LM1 - LM 3. Left jamb, bottom to top.
LM 4 - LM 8. Voussoirs of arch, left to right.
LM 9 - LM 11. Right jamb, top to bottom.
LM 12. Niche-head “tympanum”.
2. The Middle Terrace. The main feature is a structure in the form of an arch at the west side of this terrace, supported on a capital (R) or an impost (L) (figure 13). Five voussoirs form the arch, and five sections of label of two different designs surround the arch. Under the arch is another niche head, and below this, forming the centrepiece framed by the arch, is a post-medieval lion’s head. In the catalogue these stones are identified as follows:
MT1 - MT5. Label stones, left to right
MT6. Left hand impost
MT7 - MT11. Stones of arch, left to right
MT12. Right hand capital
MT13. Niche-head “tympanum”