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St James, Stretham, Cambridgeshire

Location
(52°20′51″N, 0°13′6″E)
Stretham
TL 512 745
pre-1974 traditional (England and Wales) Cambridgeshire
now Cambridgeshire
medieval St James
now St James
  • Ron Baxter
  • Ron Baxter
20 August 2003

Please use this link to cite this page - https://www.crsbi.ac.uk/view-item?i=13191.

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Feature Sets
Description

Aisled nave with clerestory, N and S transepts, chancel with vestry to N and organ loft to S and W tower with octagonal stone spire. Externally the rubble tower and its ashlar spire, with two tiers of dormers, are clearly 14thc. Everything else looks 19thc. In fact the N arcade and the chancel are 14thc. too, but heavily restored. Construction is of coursed ashlar, much of it irregular. The only 12thc. features are seven sections of string course neatly reset inside the S porch. In the descriptions that follow they are numbered from L to R. Measurements were only possible for the lower stones.

History

An estate in Stretham of 9 hides and 24 acres was given by Ethelwold and Brithnoth to Ely Abbey in the 10th century. In 1086 Stretham was assessed at 5 hides and held by the abbey, and in 1109 it became an episcopal manor.

Features

Interior Features

Interior Decoration

Miscellaneous
Comments/Opinions

A sawtooth string course survives at Haslingfield, and fragments of one at Great Shelford. Here at Stretham we have string courses carved with three different motifs, suggesting that the 12thc. church was a building of some pretension.

Bibliography
G. R. Bossier, Notes on the Cambridgeshire Churches. 1827, 73.

S. Bradley and N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Cambridgeshire, New Haven and London 2014, 654-55.

The Ecclesiastical and Architectural Topography of England: Cambridgeshire (Architectural Institute of Great Britain and Ireland), Oxford 1852, 106.
C. H. Evelyn-White, County Churches: Cambridgeshire and the Isle of Ely. London 1911, 166-67.

Historic England Listed Building, English Heritage Legacy ID: 49494

F. S. L. Johnson, A Catalogue of Romanesque Sculpture in Cambridgeshire and the Isle of Ely. M.Phil (London, Courtauld Institute), 1984.
D. and S. Lysons, Magna Britannia. Cambridgeshire II, pt I, London 1808, 266.
N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England. Cambridgeshire, Harmondsworth 1954 (2nd ed. 1970), 462.
The Victoria History of the County of Cambridgeshire and the Isle of Ely, IV, 1953, 155-57.