The Corpus of ROMANESQUE SCULPTURE in Britain & Ireland
"stretford"
Redundant parish church
Streford is in NW Herefordshire, 4 miles SW of Leominster. Little remains of the village except for a farm with the church standing in the farmyard. The church was declared redundant in 1972, and has been in the cared of the Churches Conservation Trust since 1974. It is a small building of coursed rubble with ashlar dressings, and consists of two parallel naves with chancels sharing a gabled roof with a timber bell-turret over the W gable. The two naves and their chancels are separated by a 3-bay arcade, and timber traceried screens, perhaps 16thc, divide naves from chancels at pier 1. The N nave has 12thc features; a blocked doorway and a plain lancet, while the S belongs to the 13thc, as does the arcade. The construction of the arcade suggests that the two naves originally had separate roofs, and the present structure dates from the early 16thc. The chancels were lengthened in the 14thc. In addition to the N doorway there is a Romanesque font and the bowl of a pillar piscina is set in the S chancel. The church was restored in 1875 and again in 1922.
Parish church
Water Stratford is in the NW of the county adjacent to the Oxfordshire border, in the Domesday hundred of Stotfold, 3 miles E of Buckingham. It consists of a few houses and the church scattered along the line of the old Roman road from Bicester to Towcester and Northamptonat a crossing of the Great Ouse. The village and church are on the N bank of the river, on rising, wooded ground given over to pasture.
The church is at the S end of the village, near the river crossing. It consists of a nave and chancel with a low W tower, and the nave has been extended alongside the tower on the S to provide a staircase. All walls are of stone rubble, mortar rendered and marked with fake coursing lines in the render. The entire church is 12thc, with carved Romanesque doorways on the N side of the chancel and the S side of the nave. The chancel arch was renewed in the 13thc, and lateral lancets were added to the chancel towards the W end at the same time. Both originally had low side openings below them, and the N still survives, with its hinged shutter. The chancel was lengthened in the 14thc (see the straight joint in the S wall) and the E window is of that date with flowing tracery. Slightly earlier in the 14thc diagonal W buttresses and a reticulated W window were added to the tower. The nave windows, two on the S and one on the N, are apparently 17thc imitations of medieval traceried windows. A date stone above the S doorway suggests that this work was done in 1652. The church was rebuilt by Willmoor of Buckingham in 1828-30, and there was another restoration in 1890. The S nave doorway is one of the highlights of Romanesque sculpture in Buckinghamshire, and the N chancel doorway is unusually elaborate for a priest’s doorway.
Parish church
The earliest fabric is the chancel, which dates from the early 13th century, while the nave dates from the 15th century. The west tower was rebuilt in 1711.The only Romanesque carving is a mutilated, probably late-12th century, Purbeck marble font bowl.
Parish church
This small Victorian church, set in a pleasant estate village, was rebuilt from 1845. The builders reused many Norman stones quarried from a light yellow limestone and the light grey Hildenley limestone. These stones are now weathering, diversely but decisively. They probably came from the Norman Scampston chapel, on whose foundations the present church was erected (Stratford, 1911, 7); parts of the N and W walls were retained (Pevsner and Neave, 1995, 669).
Diagonal tooling can be seen on many of the stones, but no sculpture.
Museum
Salisbury Museum contains a significant collection of carved stone fragments from Old Sarum. Some of the stones came to the museum as a result of excavations that took place in the early 20th century while others arrived by a more circuitous route, being recovered from demolished buildings in and around Salisbury and Old Sarum. Most of the fragments originated from the former cathedral, though some items in the museum probably came from the castle and the bishop’s palace.
A smaller number of fragments from the other great lost building of South Wiltshire, Clarendon Palace, provide hints of the scale and quality of the building campaigns at this royal hunting lodge during the 12th and 13th centuries. When the finds from excavations at Clarendon were divided between the British Museum and Salisbury in 1957, all the excavated stonework was transferred to the Museum in Salisbury.
The collection also possesses carved stone fragments recovered from Ivychurch Priory.
The entries below are organised according to the provenance of the stones as follows:
1. Stones from Old Sarum2. Stones from Toone’s Court, 14 Scot’s Lane, Salisbury
Toone’s Court was a group of 16th century houses on Scot’s Lane that were demolished in 1972. (RCHME 1980 142-3) The chimneybreast in no. 14 was found to include a large number of carved stones including three engaged columns, four engaged capitals, six sections of ‘kidney-section’, spiral shafts, nine voussoirs with chevron moulding, ten similar parallel-sided blocks, five blocks decorated with diaper pattern and one other fragment. The diversity, quality and date of the fragments suggests that they probably originated from Old Sarum. As there is considerable consistency in the type of fragments used in the chimney this suggests that they came directly from Old Sarum and specifically from one or two buildings. Therefore, although the first robbing of stone from the site took place as early as the 13th century, this suggests that significant buildings were still standing in the 16th century to be quarried. An alternative, though less likely, explanation is that the chimney breast was built from stone taken from a previous building in the town, which itself was built from stone robbed from Old Sarum.
3. Stones from the Courtyard House, Old Sarum
These form the remains of a chimney, found during excavation on the outside of the north side of the Courtyard House at Old Sarum.
4. Stones from Gibbs Mew Public House
These are a series of fragments recovered from excavations in Brown Street, Salisbury, conducted by the Trust for Wessex Archaeology. They consist of two blocks with engaged shafts at one corner, two sections of a shaft with a similar diameter and a piece of Purbeck marble. Although most fragments found in buildings in Salisbury were quarried from buildings at old Sarum, the piece of Purbeck marble is more likely to originate from the cathedral.
5. Stones from Clarendon Palace6. Stones from Ivychurch Priory, Alderbury.7. Capital from Glastonbury
The museum contains a fine capital from the cloister of Glastonbury Abbey. It was built while Henry of Blois was the abbot (1126-71). Henry, a nephew of Henry I, was the Bishop of Winchester from 1129 onwards, but he never relinquished control of the abbey. No documents record the dates of the construction of the cloister, but it is attributed to the middle of the 12th century. The cloister was destroyed by a devastating fire in 1184. The capital was presented to the museum by James Brown, a local antiquary, between 1864 and 1870, but where he found it is not recorded.
The description of the items is based on the catalogue entries for the stone sculpture in the Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum.
Parish church
The S nave arcade dates from the late 12thc., though the E bay of the arcade was altered, probably in the 15thc. The N nave arcade is Perpendicular, as is the N transept, and the nave has a Perpendicular clerestory. The chancel dates from the 13thc., and the tower from the 14thc and 15thc.
Parish church
Maiden Bradley is a village about 6 miles SW of Warminster. The name 'Maiden' derives from the 12thc leper asylum for maidens (see History). The church lies on the SE of the village and is adjacent to Maiden Bradley House. The present building was almost certainly erected on the site formerly occupied by a Saxon church or chapel. It was extensively rebuilt in 1385 and consists of a chancel, nave, aisles; the porch and W tower are largely Perpendicular in style and date from the 14th and 15thc. The three W bays of the N nave arcade date from the 12thc and a fourth E bay was added in the 14thc. The S arcade and chancel were built in the 14thc.
Parish church
Built of red sandstone ashlar, the church has a 12thc. nave and chancel, both without aisles. The timber bell-turret with spire and the W end of the nave are modern. Romanesque sculpture is found in the blocked N doorway of the nave and in the chancel arch.
Parish church
Built of sandstone rubble, the church has a 12thc. nave and chancel, and a W tower of 1817. Restorations were carried out in 1905, and the E part of the chancel was rebuilt at this time. There is Romanesque sculpture in the S doorway of the nave and on the font.
Parish church
The church comprises a medieval W tower and nave, restored and reroofed in the 1860s, and a chancel of 1895. Romanesque sculpture is found in the reset S and N doorways, the former within a later porch and the latter blocked, and on a fragment reset into the interior chancel wall.