The Corpus of ROMANESQUE SCULPTURE in Britain & Ireland
Winchester (now)
Parish church
Stoke Charity is in rolling woodland and sheep pasture in central Hampshire, 6 miles N of Winchester, and is one of a chain of villages than runs along the valley of the river Dever, many of which form the present benefice. The tiny village is on the S side of the river, with the church now standing alone in fields to the N of the centre, close to the riverbank. The manor, originally SW of the church, was demolished c1730, and the widening of the river to the NW of the church is probably connected with the provision of manor fishponds. The Iron Age hillfort of Norsebury Ring is half a mile to the N of the church, across the river.
The nave has a W bell turret carrying a short broach spire; both tower and spire clad in wooden shingles. It also has a N aisle and a 19thc timber S porch. The chancel has a N chapel linked to the nave aisle by an arch. The nave must be 12thc, although its S wall was rebuilt and it was lengthened westward in the early 14thc, and its doorway and W and S windows are of this period. The 2-bay N arcade is 12thc, however, as is the arch to the N chapel from the aisle and a small doorway, curiously set at the E end of the aisle. The aisle N windows are 19thc replacements and its W window is of c1300. The chancel arch is 12thc, but the chancel is otherwise late 13thc, with S windows and a piscina of that date. The E wall has been rebuilt in brick and a 3-light Perpendicular window of 1907, said to reproduce the design of a 15thc window and incorporating some 15thc glass, is set in it. The present N chapel is 15thc., built by Thomas Hampton (d.1483) and his wife Isabella (d.1475), whose tombs it houses. The 15thc chapel clearly replaced an earlier one on the site, as is demonstrated by the 12thc arch from the N aisle and traces of c1200 wallpainting on the S wall. It was restored in 1946. The exterior is of flint except the E chancel wall, rebuilt in brick, and the timber porch, bell-turret and spire. Romanesque features are the N arcade, the chancel arch, the arch from the aisle to the N chapel, the N aisle doorway and a pillar piscina head mortared to the N chapel window sill (described as a loose stone below).
Parish church
Hurstbourne Priors is in NW Hampshire, four miles E of Andover. It lies in the valley of a tributary of the Test. The village clusters around a crossroads S of the important Roman road known as the Portway, which runs through St Mary Bourne 2½ miles to the N. The church is N of the village centre, and E of it is the wooded expanse of Hurstbourne Park, site of the manor house. The medieval manor house was immediately E of the church, on a site known as the Cascades where 14thc masonry and Tudor bricks have been found on the river bed. By the 18thc the estates belonged to the Earls of Portsmouth. A later house on the same site was demolished in 1785, and replaced by another site on high ground further N, site of the present house, now known as Hurstbourne Park and dating partly from 1894.
St Andrew’s is substantially a rebuilding of 1870 by Clark and Holland, retaining or reusing some ancient material. It consists of a nave with a transeptal S chapel, now housing the organ, a chancel with a N chapel, now used as a vestry, and a W tower. The tower was rebuilt in 1870 by Clark and Holland in yellow brick with ashlar dressings, in a neo-Romanesque style but reusing the 12thc doorway. The arch to the N chapel is also a recycled Norman piece that might originally have been the chancel arch. The nave is of knapped flint and was rebuilt in 1870 with windows in a Perpendicular style. The 18thc transeptal S chapel is of red brick. The chancel is substantially early 13thc, with lancets and a priest’s doorway of that date on the S side. The N chapel is 16thc and is rendered in mortar outside. A view of 1835 shows much the same arrangement of elements, but with a shorter tower of indeterminate date capped by a conical roof. The church also houses a chevron-decorated font, probably 12thc rather than 19thc but grotesquely over restored. A new font carved by Marilyn Smith was installed in 2008.
Parish church
Minstead is a village in the New Forest in SW Hampshire, 8 miles W of Southampton and 2 miles N of Lyndhurst. The village is compact, and consists of a public house and mixed housing on the edge a large area of woodland known as Manor Wood. The N side of the church faces the village, and presents a curiously residential aspect thanks to its brick and tile construction, its gabled N chapel, transept and porch, and the dormer windows in the nave. It consists of a nave and a raised chancel with a broad 13thc chancel arch. On the N side of the nave is a porch, then a gabled vestry alongside the nave, and a N chapel alongside the chancel. Thers is another vestry on the S side of the chancel, and on the S side of the nave a very long, broad and low transept. The interior presents a crowded apprearance owing to the double gallery that occupies the W end and part of the N side of the nave. This timber feature is dated by three inscriptions to 1661, 1814 and 2000. At the W end of the nave is a brick tower. The only Romanesque feature is the font.
Parish church, formerly chapel
Exbury is a village on the SE edge of the New Forest, on a peninsula formed by the Beaulieu River estuary to the W and Southampton Water to the E. The village clusters around a bend in a broad lane that runs from Dibden and Beaulieu to the coast, a mile S of the village centre. The present church of St Katherine was built by J. Oldrid Scott and Son in 1907, and consists of a nave and chancel in one with a S doorway under a stone porch and a short tower at the W end of the nave on the N side. The interior is dominated by the 2-bay Forster Chapel on the ground floor of the tower, commemorating John and Alfred Forster who were killed in the Great War. The chapel contains a bronze soldier’s effigy on a tomb chest. The chancel is flanked to the N by an organ loft and to the S by a vestry.
VCH (1908) describes a different building on the same site – a rectangular yellow brick church of no known dedication, built by William Mitford and consecrated in 1827. The medieval church, demolished in 1827, was a mile to the S at Lower Exbury, where the Beaulieu River runs into the Solent. The only Romanesque feature is the Purbeck font, transferred from the medieval church via Mitford’s church to the present one.
Parish church, formerly chapel
Brockenhurst is in the New Forest, 3½ miles S of Lyndhurst on the road to Lymington. The village is now a large one of around 4,000 people, and practically all of it is to the W of the railway line from Southampton that opened in 1848. The original village of Brockenhurst lay to the E of the line, and of the present A337 road to the coast, and was centred around the church and Brockenhurst Park. The development of the village on the opposite side of the tracks was due largely to the influence of the Morant family, owners of the manor and Brockenhurst Park and much of the land in the village, who wished to preserve the rural nature of the historic centre. There is little farming here now; the New Forest and the coastal resorts providing tourist attractions and the railway allowing easy commuter access to Southampton and Bournemouth.
St Nicholas is on high ground to the E of the village; cut off by the railway line (which still has a level crossing) and sited on the edge of Brockenhurst Park. The church has a nave with a N aisle and a S porch, a chancel with a N vestry, and a W tower with a spire and a small N vestry alongside it. The nave has a 12thc S doorway under a simple stone 13thc porch. It is lit by a two-light square headed S window, dated by heraldry to the mid-16thc, and a modern dormer at theW end of the S wall. The N aisle is of 1832, of brick and separated from the nave by well-spaced, slender shafts, presumably of iron. Inside, a wooden W gallery runs continuously across the nave and aisle. The organ stands on the nave gallery, while the section above the aisle has seating. The chancel arch is plain and round-headed, and may be 12thc too, although there is some doubt about this. The chancel is of c1300 or slightly earlier, with Y-tracery windows and a late-13thc piscina. Both nave and chancel are of rough stone blocks covered with flaking render, but it is clear from their junction on the S that they were not built together, and there is some herringbone masonry in the nave only. The N vestry is apparently contemporary with the aisle. The tower, dated to 1761, is of brick and its spire rises from a curious domed base. The spire and its base are clad in mathematical tiles. The small vestry N of the tower was added in 1908. The church also contains a Purbeck marble font.
Parish church, formerly Benedictine house
Romsey is a town on the E bank of the river Test in the SW of the county, some 7 miles NW of the centre of Southampton. The abbey is on the western edge of the town, near the river.
The present church has an aisled nave and chancel and a crossing between with a crossing tower, and unaisled transepts with single eastern chapels. The eastern arm is unusual in that it is square-ended but has an ambulatory. The central vessel of the chancel is three bays long and terminates at the east with a two-bay arcade. The aisles are of four bays, the eastern bays ending in apses, and the straight ambulatory thus consists of four bays: the east bay of each aisle and between them the two bays east of the eastern arcade. There was once an axial chapel, of course, and the two deep arches leading into it from the ambulatory survive, now fitted with altars dedicated to St Mary and St Ethelfleda. It has usually been suggested that this chapel was originally an open square, two bays by two, but Fernie raises the possibility that there were two parallel chapels separated by a wall, each housing the relics of one of the founding abbesses (Elfleda and Merwinna). The 12thc chapel was replaced c.1270-80 by a Lady Chapel, itself demolished after 1544.
The original chancel elevation remains to north and south, and consists of a three-bay round-headed arcade with a tall gallery whose openings have central shafts and arches dividing them in two, but no tympana. There are no gallery windows. The clerestory has a passage and each bay has a tall central arch around the window, flanked by lower ones. Shafts run up the wall face ending at the straight horizontal wall-head, indicating that there was no stone vault. The arcade has compound piers and the arches of the arcade and gallery are decorated with chevron and other motifs. The aisles have transverse arches and quadripartite rib vaults between them. The elaborate figural and foliage capitals, including the ROBERTVS inscriptions, for which Romsey is justly celebrated are found on the aisle and ambulatory vault responds. The chapels at the ends of the aisles (St George’s on the north; St Anne’s on the south) are decorated with internal wall arcading with scallop or volute capitals and chip-carved decoration.
The crossing has round-headed arches carried on compound crossing piers. On the interior walls, above the crossing arches, a passage runs all the way around the tower, opening into the crossing space through three bays of paired round-headed arches on each face. What remains of the tower outside the church is short, plain and largely rebuilt.
The east walls of the transepts have similar elevations to the chancel; three storeys with two ground level arches framing the entrances to the chancel aisles and transept chapels (the S now the clergy vestry and the N the choir vestry), and gallery and clerestory arcades above. The west walls of the transepts, however, have significant changes in elevation. On the exterior the S transept has a triple window at the middle level of the outer bay, with simple round headed clerestorey windows above, and large areas of blank wall above and below the lower window. On the inside the S bay is articulated with blind arcading below the triple window, and the blank wall above it is largely occupied by the splays of the windows and their elaborate arches. The clerestory of the inner bay is again similar, but below it the gallery and the arch to the nave aisle have an enclosing arch, or giant order. This scheme continues in the nave arcade, and also appears on the external face of the south transept façade in a less plastic form. It is also notable that the gallery opening on the south, but not the north, has a heavy cylindrical central shaft, rather than the slender shafts used elsewhere in the transept and chancel galleries. On the N transept thel exterior W wall has a more conventional elevation with windows at 3 levels in the outer bay. The clerestorey is flanked by blind arches, reflecting the internal arrangement, the middle level has a simple wide arched window within and without, and at the lower level a triple opening similar to that at mid-level on the S transept has been blocked and a small three-light Perpendicular window inserted, although the original arrangement is clearly seen on the interior,
In the nave, the first bay is double on both north and south elevations, with compound piers framing the double bay and a heavy cylindrical central shaft, suggesting that an alternating system of giant-order supports may have been envisaged for the entire nave. Fernie (2000), 174-75 presents a good deal of convincing evidence that this was not, in fact, the original scheme, and that the cylindrical pier was intended to mark a feature such as the nave altar. Further west, the elevation reverts to single bays with compound piers; the giant order expressed by the enclosing arches of the gallery which are carried on nook-shafts descending right down to the arcade pier bases. The design of the gallery openings is similar to that found in the chancel and transepts. The nave is seven bays long (counting the double bay as two), but only bays 1-4 of the arcade and gallery are 12thc. The three western bays and the entire clerestory on either side are early 13thc work, and are not included in this report. The south nave aisle has quadripartite rib vaults with wall responds. Bay 1 contains the so-called Abbess’s doorway from the NE angle of the cloister, and bay 2 has intersecting wall arcading but the remaining 12thc bays are undecorated. The north nave aisle of the abbey church was formerly used as the parishchurchofRomsey. In a dispute in 1372, the parishioners asserted that the aisle was too narrow to accommodate them on Sundays and festivals, and a commission of inquiry was appointed by Bishop Wykeham to look into the issue. In 1403 the vicar and his parishioners were granted a faculty to pull down the north wall of the aisle and enlarge it, making it clear that the parish was responsible both for the work and for the maintenance of the enlarged aisle. After the Dissolution the parish bought the entire church, and the north aisle was returned to its original width. In the course of these changes the entire aisle wall was replaced except for the two eastern bays, which appear to have been spared, and which retain their original masonry but not their windows, which were replaced in the 19thc. The north porch is of 1908, by W. D. Caroe.
Romsey contains two important Anglo-Saxon carved stone roods. The smaller, now set over the altar in St Anne’s Chapel shows Christ elevated high on a tall cross with angels above the arms. To either side are the figures ofSt Johnand the Virgin and Longinus and Stephaton amid a sparse tangle ofWinchesterfoliage. The surface is eroded and retains little detail, but Talbot-Rice suggests a Byzantine prototype and offers a date in the early 11thc. Stone takes a similar view. The larger rood, now set in the west wall of the south transept, is generally considered to have been set originally above a chancel arch. Stone dates this to the first half of the 11thc, and Talbot-Rice to 1000-20 and this dating is usually accepted, although Fernie (1983) associated it with the building erected in 967 (see section VII).
The Quarr stone apse of an earlier church was discovered under the floor and reported by Peers (1901). Peers’s important article suggests a building sequence in which an aisleless, cruciform pre-Conquest church received its apse after the Conquest, c.1090-1100. From c.1120 the church was rebuilt starting at the east end. The Anglo-Saxon nave and transepts remained in place initially, and the big new transepts were built immediately to the east of the old ones. When it came to rebuilding the south nave aisle, work began west of the old transept leaving its façade wall in place, and this eastern section was not replaced until the rest of the aisle was complete. This explains the odd alignment of the first two bays of the south nave aisle, and the change in masonry. It also explains why the sculpture of the Abbess’s doorway in bay 1 of this aisle is more elaborate and advanced than that elsewhere in the Romanesque work. Later workers such as the Taylors, Pevsner, Hearn and Fernie have accepted Peers with only slight modifications. Hearn (1975) goes into most detail, identifying five distinct campaigns between c.1120 and c.1230. There are no documents that allow an accurate dating of the Romanesque work at Romsey, and estimates have therefore been based on sculptural forms and mouldings. Unfortunately, the dating of the figural and foliage Romsey chancel capitals was based on their similarities to some in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral, and the comparison was made at a time when it was believed that the Canterbury capitals were carved in-situ c.1120. This view has now been discarded, and the Canterbury capitals redated to c.1100, but the old 1120 date has stuck at Romsey. McAleer was aware of the problem in 1983 but retained the later date at that time. Fernie also recognised that the redating at Canterbury constituted a challenge to the traditional dating of Romsey, but accepted an 1120 date on the basis of the chevron ornament which is more complex than that carved at Durham between c.1110 and 1120. This issue will be discussed further in section VIII, but for the present it should be stated that the present author prefers a starting date around 1110.
Romanesque sculpture is found in the chancel, the crossing and the western part of the nave at Romsey. In addition to the doorways, windows, arches, arcades, capitals and blind arcading mentioned above, there are internal carved stringcourses in the chancel main vessel, in the transepts and crossing and in the nave, and external ones on the nave aisle and transept walls, and corbel tables survive on the nave, chancel and transepts, although many corbels have been replaced. All of this work belongs to a single campaign, which must have extended over several decades, except the heavily restored Abbess’s doorway and the window above it. Both are set in a projecting frontispiece with a drip-course between them, protecting the doorway. The doorway has elaborate twisted shafts and symmetrical foliage motifs typical of the 1140s. The window, less tall than the other aisle windows, has decoration connecting it with the doorway.