The Corpus of ROMANESQUE SCULPTURE in Britain & Ireland
St Andrew (now)
Parish church
Brigstock is toward the N of the county, 6 miles NE of Kettering. It is a substantial
village lying in the valley of Harper's Brook, a tributary of the river Nene. The
settlement is an ancient one, and a good deal of Roman material has been found around
the village. It is within Rockingham forest; a royal hunting ground created by
William I, but by no means entirely wooded even then. The church is in the centre of
the village, alongside the brook. St Andrew's has a tall 11thc. nave with a blocked
window remaining in the N wall. N and S aisles have been added, with three-bay
arcades; the two western bays of the N
arcade 12thc., the E bay and the
entire S arcade are 14thc. The S doorway is of c.1200, under a Perpendicular porch. The chancel arch is tall and Perpendicular, but the chancel itself has a N chapel with a two-bay 13thc.
arcade and a S chapel now housing the organ. The N chapel
contains the tomb of Robert Vernon, first Baron Lyveden (d.1873) with a marble
effigy. The nave aisles extend westward alongside the tower, and it is this for which
the church is known. The tower arch is tall and round-headed; the tower originally
short and of rubble with long-and-short quoins. There is a
rough round-headed window high on the N face. A round stair turret is attached to the W wall, entered from within by a triangular-headed
doorway. A completely plain round-headed arch, probably 12thc., links the tower and
the N aisle extension. To the 11thc. tower has been added a 14thc. storey of ashlar
and a broach spire with three rows of lucarnes. The church was restored by Carpenter
(1876-77). The tower arch is described here, although it is probably pre-Conquest.
Also recorded are the 12thc. parts of the N arcade and the S
doorway.
Parish church
St Andrew's has a clerestoreyed and aisled nave with three-bay 14thc. arcades. The chancel and its arch are 14thc. too, as are the clerestorey and the aisle windows. The chancel was in fact rebuilt in 1828. The W tower is of c.1300, and has a broach spire. What remains of the 12thc. church is the masonry at the SW angle of the nave and the S doorway, now reset and protected by a porch.
Parish church
St Andrew's has an aisled and clerestoreyed nave with four-bay arcades; the N of the late 12thc., the S 13thc. with pointed arches and moulded capitals. The N and S doorways are 12thc., the N doorway under a porch. The aisle windows are renewed in an early 14thc. style. At the E end of the nave, above the chancel arch, is a large blocked window, apparently 14thc. The chancel has 14thc. sedilia. On the N side of the chancel, and separated from it by a two-bay arcade, is a chapel added by John Chambre between 1495 and 1505, now housing the organ and a vestry. This extends the N nave aisle as far as the E end of the chancel, but is screened from it. There is a 12thc. W tower with a contemporary tower arch. It is of three storeys; the lowest containing an elaborate W doorway and a blind arcade on the W face only, the next decorated with blind arcading, and the topmost with double bell-openings flanked by blind arches and a corbel table at the top. The belfry-stage lancets are Scott's replacements of Decorated windows (see Parker). It has a later recessed spire behind a battlemented parapet. The church was restored by Scott before 1849.
Parish church
Shoeburyness is a town on the N bank of the Thames estuary, 3 miles E of the centre of Southend-on-Sea and forming the eastern end of the Southend conurbation. South Shoebury is the part of Shoeburyness nearer the coast, and borders the MOD Shoeburyness site to the E, which provides testing and evaluation of weapons systems. St Andrew's stands in an urban setting and consists of a chancel with a S vestry, nave with S porch and W tower. The nave and chancel are 12thc, the tower dates from the 14thc with later brick battlements, the timber porch is 15thc work and the plain rendered vestry was built by volunteer labour in 1902. Construction is of ragstone and flint rubble. The church was restored by W. Slater c.1857, and by Nicholson, c.1894-1902. The 12thc chancel arch is flanked by later medieval arches on the E and the N and S nave walls, perhaps indicating the presence of nave altars, and the remains of a rood stair survive on the N side. Romanesque features recorded here are the N and S nave doorways, chip-carved windows on the N and S walls of the chancel, a reset corbel on the S chancel wall and the chancel arch. The font is in a 12thc style but must date from Nicholson's restoration.
Parish church
The church stands high on the N side of the Great Wold Valley and above the main W-E section of the course of the Gypsey Race stream before it turns at Burton Fleming and Rudston. To the immediate E of the church is the site of an early medieval manor house, which has been excavated (Brewster, 1972; Norton, 2006, fig. 11).
The church, with its W tower, nave and chancel, largely retains its Norman form (Bilson, 1922, 52), although elements were restored in 1870-72 by G. E. Street. It was faced with well-cut coursed ashlar blocks in the Norman technique (Norton, 2006, 55).
There are three doorways with tympana: one in the chancel and two opposite each other in the nave. One of the stones that forms the tympanum over the S doorway is an inscribed sun-dial with an inscription, which means that this church can be dated to c.1109-c.1118. Sculptural embellishment of the building is otherwise almost non-existent, apart from the capitals of the belfry windows and an unusual impost profile on the chancel and tower arches; there are no corbels. The cylindrical font is patterned.
Parish church
The tower of St Andrew is from the 15thc, while the remainder of the church was rebuilt in brick in 1768. The interior is Georgian Gothic and was moderately reordered by John Bilson in 1910. The tower has a gallery for the family at Boynton Hall; the altar is in front of the chancel, which is of about equal in length to the nave and contains memorials (Pevsner and Neave 1995, 333-4; Morris 1919). The building is similar to a Danish church, with its painted wooden pews, and coloured and gilded woodwork.
A reworked cylindrical font remains from the medieval church. Outside, there is a small cross of uncertain age, probably Romanesque, reset in a buttress of the tower.
Parish church
Shrivenham is a large village in the Vale of the White Horse, about 5 miles SW of Faringdon, and close to the county boundary with Wiltshire. Of the medieval church the 14thc central tower remains, and it is surrounded by a broad and long gabled church built from 1638 by Lord Craven. The W front of the nave appears to preserve sone 1thc masonry, and the rooflines of the medieval church remain on the tower walls. The only Romanesque sculpture is on the 12thc. font.
Parish church
Bredenbury is a village in the N of the county, on the E side of the A44 between Leominster and Bromyard. The church stands alongside the main road, and was built by T. H. Wyatt in 1876-77, on a new site, to replace medieval chuches both here (in the grounds of Bredenbury Court) and at Wacton, a mile to the NE. Wyatt's church consists of a chancel with a gabled S vestry, a nave with a S porch and a W tower with a pyramid roof and a SW stair turret. Construction is rusticated, or rock-faced, with ashlar dressings and a fishscale slate roof. When Wacton church was pulled down in 1881, the font bowl was brought here and is now in the churchyard W of the S porch, where it does duty as a planter. A second smaller bowl from a font or stoup stands in a matching location to the E of the porch. These are the only features described here.
Parish church
St Andrew’s has a nave with a north aisle, the plain three-bay arcade dating from c.1200. A north transept was added in 1847 to house a Robinson family pew. The chancel has chapels to north and south; the north now housing the organ, and the south monuments of the Robinsons. The west tower is late-13c in its lower parts, including an elaborate west doorway and the bell-openings. It was heightened and battlements added in the 14c. Only the N arcade is described below. The two Cranford churches were united under a single rector in 1841, and in 1954 St Andrew’s became a chapel-of-ease to St John’s. It passed into the care of the Churches Conservation Trust in 1996.
Parish church
A cruciform church of c.1200 with aisled nave, transepts and aisleless chancel. The crossing tower was removed and a W tower built to replace it, referred to in 1502 as the novum campanile and probably dating from around that time. The nave clerestorey is also late medieval, as is the chapel added to the N of the chancel. The W crossing arch provides a spectacular display of chevron ornament, and all four crossing arches have carved capitals, as do the nave arcades. It should be said that each crossing arch is supported on half columns, and between adjacent half columns within the crossing space are slender shafts with capitals. The capitals of the major supports differ from one another, and those of the secondary shafts always continue one or other of the designs alongside them, but the system is not really regular enough to say that some of the arches have two orders towards the centre and others have only one. For example, the shafts on the E side of the N and S arches clearly belong to the E crossing arch, while those on the W side belong just as unambiguously to the N and S arches rather than the W arch. In addition it should be noted that orders in the arch never correspond to what is going on in the piers below, and for that reason the arch decoration is always described separately from the piers.
Finally there are plain arches leading from the nave aisles into the transepts.