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| A view from the north aisle |
Perhaps I was just a bit disorientated by entering the church via the priest’s door and starting in the chancel instead of the nave, as usual, but for some reason my method of systematic method of photographing churches got out of sync and the only view of the west tower is when standing in the chancel and looking west along the nave.
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| A view from the chancel to the tower arch |
The Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland (CRSBI) record the details of the construction of the tower arch much better than me, but I did manage to have a quick look at the masonry inside the tower, which has the same pattern of rubble masonry that I had seen in the nave and chancel. which is considered to be a C14 reconstruction of the original Norman arch.
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| A view of the west side of the tower arch |
When first approaching All Saints church up the steps from the B6422 road, although I wasn’t aware of this at the time, the C14 angle buttress on the south-west corner of the tower was built at the same time as a spiral staircase to the upper stages of the tower, according to Peter Ryder’s church plan in the Saxon Churches of South Yorkshire.
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| The entrance to the spiral staircase in the tower |
In the area known in the church guide as the tower room there are two medieval grave slab set against the wall, one of which has a plain Latin cross - given a late C11 or C12 date by Ryder - and the other has an elaborate floriated cross, with one side incised with a sword entwined by a serpent and on the other a book.
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| Grave slabs in the tower room |
The north arcade is dated 1175-1200 by Pevsner and described as having two bays, a big circular pier with waterleaf decoration to the capital and an octagonal abacus. CRSBI and Historic England both date it as C13, with the latter drawing attention to the shape of its arches.
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| The north arcade |
This is a feature that is usually associated from the change from Romanesque to Early English Gothic style architecture but, with the tables and chairs used for the coffee morning occupying a good proportion of the north aisle, I just took a few quick snaps of the south side of the arcade.
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| Views of the north arcade |
I managed to take a couple of photos of the crocketted capital from different angles but didn’t spend any more time looking at the north aisle and moved on to its east and the Stotfold Chapel, which the church guide says was added in the C11.
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| The crocketted capital in the north arcade |
In the Comments/Opinions section of their report on All Saints church, however, CRSBI makes reference to the following: ‘Hamilton Thompson (1909), 126-7, thinks the N chapel was added to the early C12 chancel at about the same time as the N aisle was added to the nave, that is, ‘at a not very certain date… towards the end of the twelfth century’.
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| The west side of the arch to the Stotfold Chapel |
Ryder’s church plan assigns the base of the arch to the C15, which would account for the distinctly pointed arch, but Pevsner makes no mention of this – unless it is the unspecified arch to the north chapel that he just describes as difficult to assign a date to.
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| A view west in the Stotfold Chapel |
In the walling above the pointed arch, there is a section of masonry that look like the voussoirs to an arch, for which I have not read any explanation and, once inside the Stotfold Chapel, this can still be clearly seen. Having finished my brief exploration of the interior, I stopped briefly to photograph the Norman font, which came from an unnamed church in 1900 and has been reworked, before heading off to find Hooton Pagnell’s listed buildings.
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| The font |
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