
The Corpus of ROMANESQUE SCULPTURE in Britain & Ireland

St Botolph (now)
Parish church
Bradenham is a small village in the Chilterns, consisting of a few houses, a pub, the church and a manor house all on a minor road off the A4010, some 3 miles NW of High Wycombe. Church and manor stand side by side facing an enormous green in the hilly, wooded landscape. The church consists of a chancel (rebuilt 1863-65) with a 2-bay N chapel added in 1542, an aisleless 12thc nave with a 19thc S porch and a short 15thc W tower with a pyramid roof behind a plain parapet. The church was restored by G. E. Street in 1863 and 1865. Construction is of flint and the chapel is rendered. Romanesque sculpture is found on the S doorway.
Parish church
Situated in one of the most charming villages in the county, St Botolph’s consists of a 13thc W tower with a later medieval bell-stage, a three-bay nave with side aisles of the late 13th/early 14thc, and a chancel of c. 1300 with a S chapel of perhaps a slightly earlier date. Restoration work, including the chancel arch and the clerestory, was done by Kirk and Parry in 1865-66. A restoration in 1869 included a complete rebuilding of the roof and the S aisle. The tower arch has a Romanesque column, its L (S) nook facing the nave.
Parish church
This is a small flint church with a W tower, a long nave with a blocked 13thc. N arcade, and a square chancel. A Norman window survives in the S side of the nave. The chancel arch is probably late Anglo-Saxon rather than early Norman, but is included in the Corpus on account of its stylistic relationship with Sompting (qv).
Parish church
The church is substantially of the 14thc. and consists of a nave with aisles of c.1400 to which a S porch and S chapel were added in the mid-15thc.; an aisleless chancel rebuilt by Bodley in 1872; and a W tower with boldly projecting angle buttresses dating from c.1400. Construction is of pebble and stone rubble with ashlar dressings. The only 12thc. carvings are chevron voussoirs reset in the N and S walls of the tower.
Parish church
St Botolph's consisted originally of nave and chancel with a central tower, all of the early 12thc. Original
nave windows, now blocked, are visible on the N and S walls inside. To this
nave was added a 13thc. S aisle, two bays long, and
this was rebuilt by Carpenter and Ingelow in 1878 as a second nave with a
second, broad chancel to the E. The original nave
received a clerestorey of trefoil lights in spherical triangles, probably
c.1300. The central tower retains its narrow E and W arches, with
important carved capitals, but the space beneath it has been converted into a
vestry and organ loft, with the original
chancel serving as a small chapel. Inside this is
splendid wall arcading with naturalistic foliage
capitals of c.1300. When visited, the second nave and chancel to the S had been arranged for a concert, with the
stage in the chancel and auditorium occupying both the
original nave and the new one. The plain font may be 12thc. On the exterior,
some herringbone masonry is visible in the N walls of
the tower and chancel. Early 12thc. sculpture survives
on the N nave doorway, with its figural tympanum, and
the elaborate windows on the N wall of the tower, nave and chancel. The 12thc. tower itself is of three storeys,
undivided by string courses; the bell-openings are of the early 14thc., and the
parapet still later.
Parish church
St Botolph's has an aisled, clerestoreyed nave with N and S doorways, the S under a porch; aisleless chancel with a N boiler-room, and a W tower with a spire. The tower, 12thc. in its lower parts, was rebuilt in 1864-65 under the direction of Edward Browning, and at that time Anglo-Saxon foundations were discovered. The S aisle, with its two-bay arcade, was added in the early 13thc., and the N in the mid 13thc. The S doorway, under a 14thc. porch (rebuilt in 1901), belongs stylistically to c.1200, but might be contemporary with the S arcade. The N doorway has been blocked, probably in 1864-65. Around 1300 short bays on corbels were added at the E end of each arcade, and the chancel rebuilt. The chancel windows are dated 1609. At the W end, the aisles flank the tower, but the tower arches to N and S are 19thc. copies of 12thc. work. The tower's lowest storey is square; a chamfer in the 2nd storey produces an octagonal plan, which is maintained for two further storeys. On top is a short stone spire with a single row of lucarnes. Construction is of ashlar except for the chancel, of roughly coursed stone. Romanesque features are the tower arch responds and capitals (the arch is later) and the S doorway.
Parish church
The medieval church would have dominated the view from the river, as it stands above a slope running down towards the deeply-entrenched Aire. Only the parish church and town hall remain to show that this end of town was once the centre. Redevelopment to increase the modern housing has shifted the commercial centre westwards. Both church and town hall have old quarries adjacent; the stone is a flaggy Magnesian limestone and not a freestone.
The church has a W tower, nave with porch, and chancel with vestry and organ chamber. All surfaces have been rendered and plastered inside, and on much of the exterior except for the tower.
No Romanesque sculpture, but the interior splay of a simple round-headed window is seen from inside in the W wall of the nave.
Parish church
St Botolph's has a slim W tower of flint and brick, 13thc. in its lower
parts with a later knapped flint embattled parapet. The
nave and chancel are of flint, with brick buttresses
and repairs on the S. The roof is of thatch. The only Romanesque feature is the
S nave doorway, now under a 14thc. flint and brick porch. The N doorway and one N window are 13thc. The
chancel contains 14thc. wall paintings generally
considered among the finest in the county, and showing Passion scenes and a
Doom. They were restored in the 1990s, when a good deal of 19thc. overpainting
was removed.
Parish church
The existence of a reset 12thc. doorway confirms that there was a stone
church of that date, but there appears to have been a complete rebuilding in
the 13thc. The nave with its four-bay aisles belongs to
that period, as does the chancel with its broad arch.
The E end of the S aisle was widened to form a chapel c. 1330, and in the
15thc. the clerestorey was added. The W tower dates
from c. 1500. The main doorway now is in the S aisle, facing the village, and
is 13thc. work of some pretension to grandeur. The 12thc. doorway now serving
as a priest's door is much too imposing to have fulfilled that function
originally, and although it is small for a nave doorway this is what it must
have been. The chancel and chancel arch were largely rebuilt in 1880, and the rest of the
church was restored from 1888-93, when the south chapel and the east wall of
the north aisle were largely rebuilt. In 1901, the upper part of the
clerestorey was rebuilt and re-roofed, the aisles
repaired and re-roofed, and the south door reset. The north-west corner of the
north aisle was partly rebuilt in 1906.The chancel is
of ashlar except for the N wall, rebuilt in pebble and reddish ashlar above;
the nave clerestorey is of ashlar and the aisles of
stone and pebble rubble; the three lower storeys of the tower are of ashlar,
and the 4th of stone rubble. The church contains a store of fragments in the
nave, including 15th-16thc. window heads, two reliefs with snaking tendrils, a
late-medieval base and a section of keeled
shaft, but nothing of obviously Romanesque
manufacture.
Parish church, formerly Benedictine house
What survives of the abbey church begun under Gunter, abbot from 1085, is the five W bays of the nave, with alternating round and compound piers, divided into bays by half-column responds running up from floor to ceiling, where they terminate in a cornice, presumably of 1638. The nave was originally aisled and had a gallery and clerestorey. The aisles have been demolished and the arcade walled below and glazed above. Likewise the gallery arches have been glazed and the roof lowered by the removal of the clerestorey (although the blocked windows of the W bay survive, visible on the exterior). The arcade and gallery arches are thus visible both inside and out. All this remodelling work dates from the rebuilding of 1638. At the W end the Norman buttresses have become the twin turrets of a 15thc. façade, with a Perpendicular W window and doorway. At the E a transept copying the Romanesque work, with vestries and organ in the arms and the altar in the centre, was added by Edward Blore, architect of Buckingham Palace, from 1839-41. Thorney was in Cambridgeshire until 1965, when it a boundary change moved it to Huntingdonshire. It reverted to Cambridgeshire when Huntingdonshire was abolished in the 1974 reorganisation.