Astoft

 

North Stoneham, Hampshire  -  St Nicholas Church
C.1600

Click on photos to enlarge.
Notes in italics from Hampshire and the Isle of Wight by Nikolaus Pevsner and David Lloyd (1967)
Yale University Press, New Haven and London.



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An intriguing and problematical building, with a three-gabled E termination and a W tower, looking like a Devon church. Nave, chancel, and aisles continuing into chapels; a rectangle except for the tower and N porch. The church was rebuilt at some time between 1590 and about 1610 in an interesting Gothic Survival manner, but incorporating older features (not necessarily from the previous church on the site). It was restored in 1826, and again (by Bodley) in the late C19. The tower is of ashlar, in two tall stages, with plain double bell-openings in arched frames on three sides, battlements, and thin crocketed pinnacles; typical work of c.1600.


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But re-set in the W wall is a C13 window of three lancets, the centre one higher ... It was probably the E window of a church of some pretension. The aisles are also of ashlar, mainly Perp in character, but the simple round-headed N doorway (not shown) and the Elizabethan-looking porch give away their true date. The side windows are all square-headed, of three or four lights; they are all cusped now, but the cusping looks original only in (not shown); the other windows are said to have been uncusped before Bodley restored them. The E and W windows of the aisles (E in first picture, W in last two) are all three-light Perp in arched frames, but differing in details and looking, for the most part, authentically medieval; all or some of them are probably re-used. The E wall of the chancel is built of rubble, and is obviously earlier than the ashlar walls of the aisles and chapels; presumably it is part of the medieval church, and the three-light Perp E window is a feature in situ. ...


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