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Newbury, Berkshire - St Nicolas Church
16th century

Click photos to enlarge.
Notes in italics from Berkshire by Nikolaus Pevsner (1966)
Yale University Press, New Haven and London.


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From the street the churchyard is entered by two very pretty Gothic archways. It is likely that they are connected with a payment to Fuller White in 1770.


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The church is the great monument of the wealth of Newbury in the Late Middle Ages. It is a Perp church throughout, large, ashlar-faced, and the work of one generation. It was built c.1500-32, the nave at the expense of John Smallwood. The church is embattled throughout. The W tower has massive polygonal buttresses and big pinnacles with their own battlements and pinnacles. On it a date 1532. The windows are of four to six lights and of three lights in the clerestory.


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Doorways in tower, south porch and chancel. Battlement details.


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The arcades have five bays, and the piers are of a variety of the standard section of four shafts and four hollows in which the shafts towards nave and aisle are trebled. Only one pier, the second from the E on the N side, is different. It has a wave moulding instead of the plain hollow and a capital band all round instead of capitals only for the shafts. The nave roof is Perp and has the initials of John Smallwood.


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The chancel arch and the pretty chancel roof are of 1858 (Woodyer). 


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Pulpit. Unusual and quite splendid. Above the familiar blank arches square panels with thick leaf frames. The pulpit was presented in 1607.


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Font. - Monument to Griffith Cuerteys, died 1587. Kneeling figures under arches. - Charity boy painted on board and cut out. He comes from a school founded before 1713.


The church is in West Mills, Newbury
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