Living History
Living History
Ed: The re-ordering nearing completion at the time of writing, to adapt our Church sympathetically to modern needs, has in fact revealed an exciting glimpse back into the real history of the holy place we know and love today – so have generations of people who have worshipped here for more than 1,000 years. In cutting back the plaster work and exposing the stonework of the whole of the West Wall, fragments of earlier adaptations have been found incorporated in it. The most obvious and intriguing piece exposed, from roughly 500 years ago, is part of a window or door surround – itself taken from original construction work some 500 years before that! This forms our cover image and here David Thomas, our archivist, tells us about it and how the find causes us to rethink the development of the place from a time when our Church was simply the centre of a very small community.
The stone is Norman as it has a piece of what is known as chevron work on it. Two or three experts have all looked at it and have identified it. The date is almost certainly 12th century and the stone would have originally been part of the surround of a Norman door or window arch. There could have been a west door into the church nave before the tower was built, or a north door. There are or were similar carvings in Tintagel, Kilkhampton and Morwenstow churches.
It is built into the west wall of the north aisle just below the Oddfellows window and in the same wall are other parts of the possible doorway, 2-3 bits of side columns built end on into the wall, so all you can see are rounded ends. The date of the wall it is in would be from the early 1500s when the north aisle of the church was being rebuilt. Obviously these bits of stone from the much older church came to light at the time in the early 1500s.
The Victorians did not discover these stones as far as we know and the plaster may not have been removed right down to the stone in 1861-1862 as we have just done. However the west wall was re-plastered in the 1960s but the masons did not notice it at the time. It was a hasty job I think. The original under plastering would have been Tudor in date and possibly not very thick.
The angle the stone is built into the wall at present is on its side (as photo below) but originally the stone would have appeared as in the cover photo as the outer/upper end of the window or door arch, probably a door surround. The fragment is about a foot across.
Recent research has meant that the date of the north aisle is much later than we thought. It was not completed at the east end, where the organ is, as a new Lady Chapel, until the late 1530s. This means that even after the break with Rome in 1534 the church was still under construction. The north aisle was built, we think, in two stages: the western part, where the stone is, coming first (1520s-1530s?) and then the second part, the eastern section, later on. There are other clues within the building that support these conclusions. The discovery means that we have to completely re-write the early history of the development of the church buildings and I am proposing to re-write the Church Guide shortly over the winter to include the 2009 re-ordering and the new discoveries encountered. The rise of this building is much more complicated than we might think.
Ed: This find proves that our lovely Church has always adapted to needs. It is fascinating to think of the thousands of people over the ages, in the costumes of their changing epochs, who have entered here to worship, pray and find inspiration.