St Peter’s

Pevsner thinks St Peter’s “the most interesting Norman church in Northamptonshire”.

The Churches Conservation Trust may be biased as it is responsible for the care of the church, goes one better calling it “the most outstanding Norman church in the county”. It was my favourite when I was there last Wednesday. The exterior alone is worth seeing. It is built with reddish Northamptonshire ironstone and yellowish oolitic limestone, often in decorative bands.

The stripes are pleasing and one’s eye is drawn upwards to the blind arcading. (A blind arcade or blank arcade is an arcade (a series of arches) that has no actual openings and that is applied to the surface of a wall as a decorative element: i.e., the arches are not windows or openings but are part of the masonry face. It is designed as an ornamental architectural element and has no load-bearing function says Wikipedia). It took my breath away.

I am nuts for carved Norman arches. Inside great Norman arches of plain and banded stone are decorated with zigzag chevron waves. Elaborate carved capitals overflow with foliage, scrollwork, birds and beasts.

The carving looks pristine. This is thanks to local antiquarian, Anne Baker. All the interior carvings were plastered over in the 16th century by the Puritans and she painstakingly picked them clean using a bone knife in the 1830s. It took her eleven years. Hats off to Miss Baker. The biggest intervention to the interior was made by Sir George Gilbert Scott who restored the church in the middle of the 19th century, particularly the East end.

I have noticed so many churches that have changed over the centuries still have the original font. This is the case at St Peter’s. It is octagonal and the bowl and stem are all in one. It used to have a painted cover by Gilbert Scott but that is either in storage or has been lost.

There are plenty of other bits and bobs to see but I couldn’t take my eyes off all that lavish Norman carving and the continuous arcade of eight arches – most unusual in a parish church. It seems to echo buildings of the Cluny order and there was a Cluniac monastery in Northampton, demolished at the Dissolution. The order was Benedictine founded in Cluny, where else, in 910. It was a significant monastic reform movement in the Middle Ages.

The church was built by Simon de Senlis in the middle of the 12th century. If the name rings a bell, he is the son of Simon and Maud who built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre some fifty years earlier.