The Corpus of ROMANESQUE SCULPTURE in Britain & Ireland
Cheshire West and Chester (now)
Parish church
The church has a nave with a S aisle, and a two-bay chancel with a Decorated E window, with a Perpendicular Style full-length S chapel. Unusually the tower is built inside the S aisle. There is a small lapidarium collection at the W end of the nave, consisting of a late 9th or early 10thc cross shaft and a small decorated bowl dated 1573. The only Romanesque material is a pillar piscina.
Parish church
Bruera is in SW Cheshire, 4 miles S of the centre of Chester. It is a manor house village consisting only of the church, a moated site immediately to the NW and a few scattered houses nearby. There are traces of ridge-and-furrow cultivation in the surrounding fields.
St Mary's has a 12thc. nave with a shingled W bell-turret, added by W. M. Boden in a restoration of 1896, described by Richards as a "wanton and unnecessarily severe rebuilding of much of the church". There is a 15thc. S chapel off the nave, containing tombs of the Cunliffe family. The chancel has been largely rebuilt, but the S respond of the chancel arch is original with elaborately carved capitals and beakhead on the embrasure. There is a modern vestry on the S side of the chancel. The church contains other Romanesque or earlier material, all re-set. The S nave doorway has chevron voussoirs set above its pointed opening, and two 11thc.-12thc. carved stones on the jamb. Inside, around the rere-arch are a number of panels crudely carved with simple foliage designs, and similar panels are re-set in the interior S nave wall. They may be pre-Conquest. The church is constructed of red sandstone.
Parish church
St Michael's has a 12thc. nave with its S doorway under a very simple ashlar porch. A N aisle with a four-bay arcade was added c.1300. The chancel has no arch, but dates in its earliest parts from the 13thc. It has a two-bay N chapel - an extension eastwards of the N aisle with a two-bay arcade to the chancel. Both this and the W tower date from c.1500. The present double-span roof is 19thc., replacing a 15thc. single-span roof over nave and aisle. Construction is of red sandstone ashlar.
Parish church
St Edith's has an aisleless 12thc. nave with a 14thc. chancel, its E window with flowing tracery. There is no tower, but a 12thc. double bellcote on the W gable of the nave. A pair of buttresses on the W wall encloses a vestibule. The N doorway is a later modification; pointed and now half blocked to turn it into a window. On the S side, and unprotected by a porch, is one of the finest Romanesque doorways in Cheshire. A plain N vestry was added to the chancel in 1926, but otherwise the church has received little attention in recent years. Construction is of irregular sandstone blocks with thick mortar courses. A corbel above N doorway is not Romanesque and is illustrated for reference only.
Parish church
St Lawrence's has a W tower, an aisled and clerestoreyed nave with three-bay arcades of c.1180 and a shorter fourth bay on either side at the E end, dating from Bodley and Garner's restoration of 1880-83. The 14thc. chancel was extended eastward in the 15thc. It has a 16thc. N chapel with an organ loft and vestry and a large S chapel. The 1880s restoration is everywhere apparent, even in the arcades (see below) but the 18thc. porches were left alone. Construction is of reddish sandstone. 12thc. stones are reset in the interior S wall of the tower.
Parish church
Burton is a large village at the S end of the Wirral peninsula, 7 miles NW of Chester. It is built along minor roads to the W of the main A540 road that links Chester to Heswall and Hoylake. As a picturesque village within reach of Liverpool, Birkenhead and Chester its properties are highly sought-after, and it has been ranked eighth in a recent market-research survey of super-rich communities, with millionaires making up 16% of its population. St Nicholas’s church stands in an elevated position overlooking the village centre, and consists of a W tower with a porch, and a four-bay nave that is continuous with a two-bay chancel, with no chancel arch dividing the two. On the N is an aisle and this continues alongside the chancel as the Massey Chapel. Construction is of red sandstone with grey slate roofs. The church is largely of 1721, although there are Norman remains in the form of loose stones described below.
Parish church, formerly chapel
A spectacular and important timber church with a stone W tower, said to be of 1582 (see Pevsner) but probably earlier. The aisled nave (13th-14thc.) is of four bays, and the slightly lower chancel of two, all timber work with box pews. The nave aisles continue alongside the chancel, the N aisle dating from 1624 and the S from c.1610. They now house an organ loft and vestry to the N and the Shakerley Chapel to the S. The three vessels have separate roofs, built by Salvin in his restoration of 1852, but originally the nave and its aisles shared a single roof. The church was founded in 1269, hence none of the fabric is 12thc. What is at issue is the font, said to have been brought from Norton Priory in 1322.
Parish church, formerly collegiate church
The Romanesque church was a cruciform building with an aisled nave with triforium and clerestorey; N and S transepts and an aisled eastern arm with a gallery rather than a triforium. Of the nave, the four eastern bays and the beginning of a fifth survive. In the fifth bay was a 13thc. north doorway under a porch, and west of the sixth stood the façade. There is no evidence for the original form of this beyond the ruinous lower part of a NW tower. This tower collapsed partially in 1572 and more drastically in 1574, destroying the western bays of the nave, and was rebuilt on a magnificent scale. Until 1881 it was reportedly the glory of the exterior and a notable Chester landmark, but in that year, while long-overdue repairs were taking place, it collapsed again, destroying the Early English north porch, which was rebuilt by J. Douglas in 1881-82. The eastern arm of the church was originally aisled and of five straight bays, but now the entire north aisle has been removed (except for its eastern chapel; see below). Of the main vessel and south aisle only a single bay survives within the building, which terminates in a straight wall. The remainder of the eastern arm was abandoned in 1547, when the King's Commissioners decided that the nave alone was sufficient for the parish, and that the lead on the choir roof along with the metal of four of the church's five bells should be removed and sold. To the east, outside the building, parts of the S choir aisle wall still stand, along with what remains of the east chapels. Originally the main vessel terminated in a deep apsidal chapel, and the aisles in shallower ones. All three chapels were remodelled and enlarged in the later middle ages, but the 12thc. wall containing their entrance arches still stands. This is in a disastrously eroded condition, which should be borne in mind while reading the descriptions of its elements in this site report.
The central tower of the church collapsed in 1468, and again in 1572, and at some point, presumably after 1547, the transepts were removed. The only other medieval part of the church is the enigmatic two-storey structure of c.1300 built in the angle between the south transept and the choir and accessed through a doorway in the S choir aisle. Its undercroft is square and vaulted in four bays with a central pier: the upper storey has lost its roof. Locally it is known as the Chapter House, but neither its form nor its position make this very likely, and it is here suggested that it was a two-storey treasury. In the early 19thc. it was incorporated as a kitchen in a house (now demolished) which became the residence of Thomas de Quincey's mother. What remained of the treasury was renovated in 1937 and the undercroft taken over in 1939 as a public air-raid shelter. It now serves as a stone store.
There was apparently a thorough repair to the chancel in 1813, but the external appearance of the church today is of a 19thc. building in Early English style, and this is largely due to the restorations of J. C. Hussey who rebuilt the south side in 1859-60 and the north in 1886-87. Included in the latter restoration was the construction of a modest bell-tower in the angle of the north transept and the choir. No firm dates are available for the Romanesque fabric. The present church was traditionally begun by Bishop Peter de Lea, who moved the see to Chester from Lichfield in 1075, but judging from the sculpture, none of the fabric is this early.
Regimental chapel, formerly castle chapel
The present Chester Castle is largely Thomas Harrison's group of county buildings, dating from 1788-1822, and including the courts and the Shire Hall. The main medieval survival is Agricola's Tower, a three-storey tower on a rectangular plan, with a doorway to the south. The tower dates from the 12thc., but there was a fire in 1302, after which the lower room was remodelled entirely. Romanesque interest centres on the 2nd-storey chapel. This is a single space vaulted in two rectangular bays with quadripartite rib-vaults and an altar at the east. The present author was unable to gain access, and this report is based on what can be seen of the chapel through the grille that closes it off. For the guidance of future researchers, the chapel is now the Regimental Chapel of the Cheshire Regiment, and entry is controlled by the staff of the Military Museum, also on the castle site, who require at least two weeks' notice in advance of any visit.
Cathedral, formerly Benedictine monastery
The church was begun in 1092, presumably at the E. Of the 11th-12thc. work the E wall of the N transept survives, with a chapel arch and above it a triforium. Judging from the evidence of the fabric, the chapel, originally apsed, was remodelled early in the 13thc. and given a square end. Towards the end of the 14thc. a doorway was inserted from the chapel into the N choir aisle, and it may have been at that time that the arch into the transept was walled up and the chapel turned into a vestry. It remained blocked and invisible, at least from the transept side, until 1930, when it was re-opened. At that time 'traces of colour and patterns' were visible (Story of Chester 1939), but they are not now. The higher levels of the transept are Perpendicular. The only other 12thc. feature of the church is the tower at the W end of the N aisle, now a baptistery and dateable stylistically some 40-50 years after the N transept. Inside the church its E and S arches and its N window have scallop capitals, and the remains of a similar window are visible in the W bay of the N aisle wall. For the rest of the church, the five-bay choir can be dated to c.1300, the Lady Chapel slightly earlier (c.1260-80), and the crossing and S transept to the early- to mid-14thc. The nave arcades appear uniform on N and S, but in fact the S side belongs to the 1360s and the N to Abbot Ripley's time (1485-93). St Werburgh's Chapel was a late Perpendicular addition to the end of the N choir aisle.
Construction is of red sandstone, but the appearance of the exterior in particular owes much to the various campaigns of restoration carried out in the 19thc. The earliest of these was Harrison's (1818-20), followed by Hussey (from 1844), Scott (from 1868) and Blomfield (from 1882).
The cloister is to the N of the church, and here a good deal of Romanesque fabric still stands. Starting with the W or Cellarer's range, alongside the 12thc. NW tower is the rib-vaulted Abbot's Passage, entered through a 12thc. doorway, with St Anselm's Chapel above it. To the N of this is the long groin-vaulted undercroft of the range: a structure in two sections now housing an exhibition area and the cathedral shop, and originally extending beyond the square of the cloister to the N. Turning the NW corner into the N walk there is a 13thc. doorway to a passage between the Cellarer's range and the refectory. This last takes up the whole of the walk, and is of c.1300 as it stands. The Warming Room, containing the day-stair giving access to the dormitory, occupies the N end of the E range. Between this and the chapter house vestibule is the slype, and the S end of the walk is occupied by the W wall of the N transept. The S wall of the S walk, i.e. the other side of the N nave aisle wall of the church, is entirely 12thc., and contains two rows of three segmental-headed niches, very shallow for wall tombs, and at the E end of the walk an elaborate late 12thc. doorway into the N nave aisle. The cloister arcades were rebuilt c.1525-30. St Anselm's Chapel itself is built at the S end of the W cloister walk, between the Cellarer's range and the NW tower of the church, and above the Abbot's Passage. It is a mid-12thc. vaulted chapel, described more fully in section IV.4.c below.