Titchfield,
Hampshire - St Peter Church
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 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: |
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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, |
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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, |
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with lofty slender piers of the
four-shafts- and-four-hollow section. The N aisle is spacious, |
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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. |
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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. |
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The inner string course and the
sedilia, the latter over-restored, are C13 survivals. |
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The two-bay S arcade
dates from c.1320, when the S chapel was built. It stands on a stone
screen wall. |
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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. ... |
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