The Corpus of ROMANESQUE SCULPTURE in Britain & Ireland
All sites
Parish church
Newnham is a village which lies about 5mi SW of Faversham in Kent. The church of Sts. Peter and Paul is in the centre of the village and dates mostly from the 12th-14thc or 15thc. It has a nave and chancel with aisles on both sides which extend to form E chapels level with the chancel, as well as a NW tower and N porch. There is probable late 12thc material in the chancel arch.
Ruined church, formerly Augustinian abbey
Keynsham commands a strategic position on the south side of the Avon, overlooking both that river and its tributary from the Mendip Hills to the south, the Chew. It controls the road between Bristol (giving access to the Bristol Channel and beyond) and Bath (giving access to London) on its side of the river. The road now running from Keynsham to Willsbridge, west of Bitton, probably represents an important ancient route.
Keynsham Abbey was founded as a house of Augustinian canons c1166. The Abbey precinct occupied c.18 acres above the left bank of the Chew, c.200m above its confluence with the Avon. After the Dissolution, the Abbey was demolished piecemeal over 400 years. The Abbey Church lay in a garden in Abbey Park, and has been the subject of several excavations which have yielded Romanesque sculpture (Brock, 1875, Lowe et al. 1987, 2004, 2005). There is a plan of the Abbey in Lowe 2004 and on the Keynsham Abbey website. Elements of sculpture from the Abbey can be seen embedded in the late 17thc archway of Park House (formerly Keynsham House). There is a lapidary collection in Keynsham Town Hall. Other elements of sculpture are located in the Crown Inn, the former Somerdale Factory site and Bristol Road arches. These sites are the subject of separate reports.
Parish church
Weston-super-mare (literally, translated from Latin, Weston-on-Sea) lies 20mi SW of Bristol in N Somerset. Geologically, the church of St John the Baptist rests on Clifton Down limestone (a quarry of which was close-by, up the hill from the church), above a thin band of Mercia Mudstone (Keuper Marl) and below Goblin Combe Oolite limestone, on the skirt of an E-W hill composed of limestone, with some basalt. The altitude of the church is about 16m. It is mostly built of limestone freestone and rubble, the latter presumably from the ground nearby and the former from the Oolite beds further up the hill. Replacing a medieval precursor, the present building in the neo-Perpendicular style dates from 1824, a response to the rapid population growth of the 19thc seaside resort. It has a W tower, nave with aisles and annexes. The only Romanesque feature is the font, recovered from an adjacent field in 1827.
Parish church
The church of St Mary Redcliffe is sited on the 'red cliff' just outside the medieval city walls of Bristol. One of the most impressive parish churches in England, it is vaulted in stone throughout and has a separate Lady chapel and unique hexagonal outer N porch. The extant work is mostly Decorated and Perpendicular, with the exception of the N inner porch which is Early English. The only remnant of the Romanesque building consists of a single block of loose sculpture.
Parish church
Almost nothing earlier than its 13thc W tower is visible at St Edmund's, a striking building constructed of a combination of dark local carstone and even darker ferrugious conglomerate. In its present state, it dates from the 13th-15thc with much 19thc restoration in places. It has a chancel, an aisled nave and a N transept but there are also signs of a former S transept, indicating that the previous building on the site was cruciform. The small colonnette reset in a puropse-built recess in the external N wall of the N transept presumably came from an earlier church and is now the only Romanesque sculpture at St Edmund's.
Chapel
All that remains of the 12thc. church is the chancel, and a few courses of the N wall of the roofless W tower. In the 13thc. the chancel was extended eastward, a chapel added on its S side and a S aisle added to the nave - all of red sandstone ashlar. The church fell into ruin and a replacement was built on a new site shortly after 1850. At this time the N doorway of the ruined nave was built into what became the W wall of the old chancel, now kept as a chapel with its 13thc. chapel adjoining to the S. In 1963 the dangerous walls of the old tower and nave were taken down, except for the old S doorway which still stands, supported by a portion of the S wall of the nave.
Parish church
Rebuilt on the site of the old church in 1881-2. Some 14thc. stone was reused in the Victorian building, but the only 12thc. work is the font.
Parish church
Abbess Roding is one of a group of eight villages called Roding in the SW of the county, 8 miles E of Harlow and 9 miles W of Chelmsford. The group is spread over a wide area, so that they lie in three separate boroughs (Chelmsford, Uttlesford and Epping Forest). Abbess Roding is in the Epping Forest district, and stands on the line of the Roman road from London to Bury St Edmund’s. The village is set in flat, mostly arable farmland, and consists of a few dwellings along a minor road, with the church and hall in the centre. The church consists of a nave and chancel with a W tower carrying a Hertfordshire spike. There are N and S doorways to the nave, the S with a timber porch, and the N used as the entrance to a vestry built around it. The nave was rebuilt in the 14thc and the chancel in the 15thc. In the 19thc the church was restored and the tower and vestry added. The only Romanesque feature is the font.
Parish church, formerly Benedictine house
The church was orginally cruciform, with aisled nave and aisleless chancel but no crossing tower. There were a pair of E chapels on each arm of the transept. This plan was changed almost as soon as it was built (perhaps even before it was built) and the inner transept chapels became the western bays of three-bay aisles alongside the central vessel of the presbytery. This terminated in a three bay E arcade, and outside it the aisles continued in a straight ambulatory, two bays wide and five bays long, The S porch is timber framed and dates from the 17thc, as does the tower that rises over the E bay of the S chancel aisle. The nave was originally nine bays long and was destroyed after the abbey was dissolved in 1536. The E respond and pier 1 of each arcade still stancds outside the W wall of the present church, and the S arcade has the arch of its first bay too. Corbel tables survive at the top of the main exterior walls. All of the main work dates from after the foundation in 1147, of course, but there is nothing dateable before c.1175, and the main structure was apparently completed by c.1200-10. It fell into disrepair after the Dissolution, and was restored in 1632-33 by John, Viscount Scudamore who reduced it to its present size, closing off the nave.