The Corpus of ROMANESQUE SCULPTURE in Britain & Ireland
Holy Cross and St Lawrence (now)
Parish church, formerly Augustinian house
Waltham Abbey is the name of the town in which the former Priory (later Abbey) of the Holy Cross stands. The town is outside London on the N side, immediately outside the M25, and alongside the border with Hertfordshire. The present church consists of a 12thc aisled 7-bay nave, with a 16thc W tower porch and a 14thc Lady chapel on the S side. This is a mere fragment of the original abbey church, which extended at least 300 feet further E at its greatest extent in the 13thc. In brief King Harold II's burial church was rebuilt at some unrecorded date in the early 12thc as a cruciform aisled church with a crossing tower and eastern apse ambulatory. The E arm was demolished by Henry II, who re-established the church, initially as a priory of Augustinian canons, and a few years later as a mitred abbey, in expiation for the assassination of Archbishop Becket. The former E ambulatory has been excavated and is now marked out on the ground, E of the church. What was built at the E end was a complete new church on an enormous scale: a 7-bay nave, crossing with transepts aisles on the E side, a square-ended presbytery, perhaps 6 bays long, and possibly a retrochoir and E Lady Chapel too. On the N side of the new nave, a cloister was built with the normal claustral arrangements to N and E. Meanwhile the Norman nave (the present parish church) was screened off for parish use by a 13thc wall. After the Dissolution the E parts were pulled down and shortly afterwards the crossing tower collapsed, bringing down the transepts with it. The site had passed to Sir Anthony Denny at the Dissolution. Restoration of the church began under Ambrose Poynter in 1853, but William Burgess was responsible for most of the work, and especially for the internal elevation of the E end, in a campaign that began in 1859-60 at the E end of the present church, and was completed by 1877. Thus the Romanesque work that survives, by and large, belongs to the early-12thc building and not to Henry II's grandiose enlargement. This includes the W crossing arch and that part of the N crossing arch that adjoins it; the arch linking the nave aisle to the former S transept; the nave with its N and S arcades, galleries and clerestories; the nave aisle vault responds; the aisle and clerestorey windows and S nave doorway, and various internal and external stringcourses. There are also corbel tables under the eaves of the first two bays of the nave, but these, and the nave windows, are only readily visible on the south side of the building. Further investigation might allow recording of the north side in the future.