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Titchfield,  Hampshire  -  St Peter Church

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


Dscn1475-crp-405-u80.1.1-webq50.jpg (31605 bytes) Dscn1485-540-u80.1.1-webq30.jpg (56643 bytes) An amalgam of work of many periods and many degrees of quality. Outside, especially when the church is approached from the village, it is the tower that compels attention. The lower part is Anglo-Saxon, not Anglo-Danish, i.e. of the C9 or perhaps C8. It was not a tower but a W porch,  as at Monkwearmouth in the late C7. It stood in front of an aisleless nave. Of all this the following parts survive: 

Dscn1476-405-u80.1.1-webq50.jpg (42659 bytes) The high W entry with a round arch, the quoins of the porch, ... the traces of a round-arched W window, (the heightening to a tower is C13), a bonding course of Roman tiles,  Dscn1499-crp-405-u100.1-webq40.jpg (63074 bytes) and the SW quoins of the nave.


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The tower still serves as W porch, and leading into the nave is a well preserved C12 doorway of three orders of zigzag moulding with some small-scale ball and lozenge ornament, with shafted jambs and capitals carved in strange writhing reeded leaf patterns.
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The present nave retains the proportions of the Saxon original. ... The chancel arch is low, wide, and plain, probably early C14 but re-using plain semicircular late C12 responds. Three-bay C19 S arcade in rather unhappy relationship with the splendid C15 N arcade, 

Dscn1490-crp-levmid-405-u80.1.1-webq60.jpg (40799 bytes) with lofty slender piers of the four-shafts- and-four-hollow section. The N aisle is spacious,  Dscn1478-540-u80.1.1-webq40.jpg (52147 bytes) with four side windows and the W window all all of the same three-light design, with the central light rising slightly higher than the rest. ... 

Hampshire can show few examples of Perp architecture as ambitious as this aisle, although it would not be specially notable in the West Country or East Anglia.

Dscn1481-540-u80.1-webq40.jpg (46834 bytes) The chancel was rebuilt in the 13th century and remodelled in the 15th century but now has a 19th century Perp east window. The  south chapel was added in the 14th century and has two-light south windows, each light ogee-headed. The south aisle of the nave is neo-Dec of 1867, replacing a Norman south aisle. Dscn1495-lev-540-u80.1.1-webq50.jpg (51789 bytes) The inner string course and the sedilia, the latter over-restored, are C13 survivals.

Dscn1494-satyel-levmid-540-u80.1.1-webq50.jpg (40467 bytes) The two-bay S arcade dates from c.1320, when the S chapel was built.  It stands on a stone screen wall. Dscn2241-u4-540-u0.3-q60.jpg (44830 bytes) It has curious capitals carved with engaging though grotesque winged figures and profuse foliage.

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In the S chapel the magnificent monument to the first Earl and countess of Southampton (died 1550 and 1574) and to the second Earl,  who died in 1581. ...
 

Map

Church Website, including detailed church history (external site)

Titchfield Abbey

 
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