The Corpus of ROMANESQUE SCULPTURE in Britain & Ireland
St Mary (medieval)
Parish church
The small priory of Austin canons at Letheringham was set in low, rolling country alongside the river Deben in east central Suffolk, three miles south of Framlingham. There is no discernable village; only what remains of the church, converted to parish use, and the Abbey Farm alongside it, surrounded by an empty arable landscape.
The present church of St Mary’s incorporates the two western bays and the tower of the priory church. It is tall and boxy, its walls rendered with mortar. It has a 12thc south doorway under a brick porch of 1685, with a Dutch gable, and buttresses have been added on the side walls and at the eastern angles. The 12thc north doorway survives too, but this has been reset facing inside the church. The south windows are of c.1300 with three-light intersecting tracery. There are no windows on the north side. The east end of the church fell into disrepair and was demolished in the 18thc, but part of its north wall survives as the churchyard wall, and to the north of this are ruinous remains of the monastic buildings. The east window, rescued from the rubble and reset, is a three-light affair with cusped intersecting tracery. The 14thc tower is of flint and rubble, unrendered, with diagonal buttresses decorated with flushwork, a polygonal SE stair and an embattled parapet with flushwork panels. The tower arch is tall and incorporates some 12thc material, and the church also has a 12thc capital, loose but displayed behind bars.
Redundant parish church
This is a church in an isolated farm setting NW of Faversham. Essentially a twin-cell building comprising a Romanesque core with a 13thc chancel, it contains evidence of many later alterations, not least due to the collapse of the N tower in 1806 and its sympathetic rebuilding at the W end of the nave in brick, complete with pointed windows and crenellations. As Tim Tatton-Brown has observed, the north and south walls of the west end of the nave must incorporate 12th-c fabric (including some re-used Roman brick). The only Romanesque sculpture is in the W doorway.
Parish church
Woodleigh is a parish in Devon in the S of the county in the South Hams area. The small village of Woodleigh lies in the S of the parish, and the church is in the middle of the village.
The church features a simple 14th-c plan, rebuilt after a fire in 1649 and much restored in 1890-1 by George Fellowes Prynne. The fabric is largely slatestone with granite dressings, slate roof, and clay ridges.
The W tower is early, low, unbuttressed in two stages with slight offset and renewed battlements on corbel table. The nave is aisleless. The N and S transepts feature arches which might be contemporary with the tower. The N wall of the nave is plain, and the building is set into the slope on this side. The nave S side has a 14th-c three-light window in cusped. The S gabled porch has an apex cross and a slate sundial of 1707 over the plain and round arched doorway. In the chancel the 14th-c Easter Sepulchre serves as an enclosure to the monument of Sir Thomas Smyth, Rector of the church between 1492 and 1527.
The octagonal font, the only Romanesque sculpture here, is described as 'Norman' by Nikolaus Pevsner and 'Transitional' by the National Heritage List for England.
Parish church, formerly Benedictine house
St Mary's, Deerhurst is certainly the most imposing, enigmatic and controversial Anglo-Saxon building in the county, and perhaps the whole country. It retains features from several periods of Anglo-Saxon building, covering the period (depending on which version of its history you prefer) from the 7thc to the 11thc. Putting the standing evidence together into a believable building sequence is by no means straightforward. The general reader who has prepared for a visit to the church might well be surprised to find any post-Conquest material there at all, but the interior is dominated by the late-12thc nave arcades that will be the main subject of this report.
An oversimplified version of the story is that the earliest church, predating the first mention of a monastery here in 804 might have been a rectangular box with a W porch. This church was greatly enlarged in a second phase of building, usually assumed to correspond to the late-10thc reform movement. Porticus were added alongside the nave, and a polygonal apse was added at the E end. The nave was raised at the same time to its present height of approximately 12m, and a chancel was carved out of the rectangular nave by the insertion of a cross wall. Around this time too, the W porch was given extra stioreys to convert it into a tower porch (although this may have been done in several phases). After the Conquest - perhaps as late as 1190 - the porticus flanking the nave were replaced by aisles with 3-bay arcades. The S aisle was later (but still in the 12thc) fitted with transverse arches carried on responds abutting the nave arcade piers. The plan included here, displayed inside the church, shows one interpretation of the building phases.
What survives, therefore, is a church with a chancel, aisled nave and a W tower porch. The aisles extend W alongside the tower, and a passage linking them, W of the central vessel, forms a kind of W transept. Remains of 12thc work survive here, notably in a section of foliate stringcourse of the W wall of the passage. The W end of the N aisle now houses Deerhurst's famous font; presented as a work of 9thc art in its own right, dramatically lit from below. This report is provisional, as access to the upper levels of the tower was not available at the time of the visit.
Parish church
Broughton is a small town in North Lincolnshire, 20 miles N of Lincoln, to which it is linked by Ermine Street (now the A15) and 4 miles E of Scunthorpe. The church has a nave with 14thc aisles and a S porch, a 12th - 13thc chancel with a N chapel, and a W tower originally built as a tower nave in the 11thc, to which a W stair turret was added later in the same century. The 14thc N nave arcade has two Romanesque bases with spur ornaments, and the List Description also reports chevron moulded stones re-used in the chancel arch, but these were not seen.
Parish church
Eastling is a small village 4.5 miles SW of Faversham. The church of St Mary has an aisled nave, a chancel, and a W tower with a spire. The S door is Romanesque.
Parish church
St Mary's was rebuilt in 1876, three years after the collapse of the tower, reusing old materials but also retaining some medieval fabric, including the S doorway and S transept. The only Romanesque carving at the church is on the pillar piscina in the chancel although this, too, is at least partly modern.
Parish church, redundant
The Mendip hamlet of Emborough (‘Emborrow’ on old maps) lies about 5 miles NE of Wells, Somerset. The site is high up at about 200m OD, on a gentle slope down towards the north which pulls the prospect in that direction, the view south being obscured by the rise of the hill. It rests on Jurassic geology comprising Mudstone and Limestone with some Chert (the last specifically under the church). The hamlet lies along a secondary but busy road which runs SW-NE along the eastern plateau of the Mendip Hills. The village is only about 3 miles from the former Fosse Way, and so however sequestered Emborough might now seem, it has not been isolated from the broader world throughout its history. The church lies within an angle of the secondary road to Chewton Mendip. It shows alterations of several periods, with a Gothic revival remodelling c. 1800 (Pevsner). The church is now in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust, who call it the church of St Mary the Virgin. There is a plain font.
Parish church
Fishley lies to the east of Norwich, close to Acle. It was a substantial settlement in 1086. St Mary's is a small, largely 13thc church, with a round tower. The only Romanesque sculpture is on the (heavily restored) S doorway.
Parish church
Chislet is today a small village in NE Kent sited between Canterbury and Thanet. The church of St Mary the Virgin has an aisled nave, a blunt Norman central tower and a long aisless chancel. The church owes more to the 13thc than any other period, but there is a Romanesque tympanum to the staircase doorway, chancel arch, and some fragments of unknown date.