English Church Architecture.
HAMPTON LUCY, St. Peter (SP 257 570), WARWICKSHIRE. (Bedrock: Triassic Mercia Mudstone Group, Keuper Marl.)
The best and archaeologically most advanced church by Thomas Rickman (1776-1841).
Built in 1822-26 to the designs of Thomas Rickman (1776 -1841) and his partner Henry Hutchinson (1800 - 1831), Pevsner described this building (seen above, through trees from the south) as the firm's 'magnum opus' (The Buildings of England: Warwickshire, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1966, p. 305). The cost was in excess of £9,000 - a very considerable sum at the time yet modest enough for a church of such pretensions, vaulted, as it is, internally throughout. It did not at that time include the fine polygonal apse admittedly, which was a later addition by Sir George Gilbert Scott (1811-78), yet Rickman and Hutchinson's building comprised a soaring W. tower with an entrance porch beneath, a very tall aisled nave constructed in six bays, a massively built, two-storeyed N. porch with a large octagonal stair turret in the re-entrant with the aisle, and a chancel, all of which excel in one or more ways, whether through height, in the elaboration of their window traceries, or by their carved ornament or delicacy of their vaulting schemes, and all show a precocious understanding of mediaeval Gothic architecture (or, at any rate, the Decorated phase of it) following hard on the heels of the publication in 1817 of Rickman's ground-breaking study, An attempt to discriminate the styles of architecture in England (London, John Henry Parker) - an understanding, however, not always so much in evidence in some of Rickman's cheaper churches elsewhere. True, not everything here at Hampton Lucy is always what it seems - Pevsner recorded, for example, that some of the window tracery is made of cast iron - but if it is the final effect that matters most, Rickman and Hutchinson registered here a remarkable success.
The following description of the church proceeds from west to east and takes the exterior and interior of the building together:
The W. tower rises in three stages to tall, two-light bell-openings, openwork battlements, and tall, crocketed corner pinnacles. The first stage to the north and south is decorated with a three-light blank arcade of which the central bay on the S. side contains a window whose function it is to light the porch. The very wide W. doorway with its traceried crocketed gable above and two orders of side-shafts separated by a series of hollows including a wide casement moulding containing carved floral motifs at intervals, is set between subsidiary buttresses rising to crocketed pinnacles and, to the left and right of these, tall, narrow niches squeezed in between them and the principal, deeply projecting buttresses at the angles. Entering through the W. door, one notices first the tierceron vault overhead, with a central hole to allow the passage of the bell-ropes, and next, the magnificent arch between the tower and the nave, with two orders of columns at the sides, dogtooth moulding around the arch itself, and a trumeau in the centre, dividing the main arch into two and supporting a tympanum with an open, ogee-pointed cinquefoil in a circle in the centre.
The aisled nave (shown below)
is six bays long although it can be seen inside that while the
easternmost bay is positioned west of the chancel arch, as one would
expect, its
precise assignment is somewhat ambiguous as the aisle bays alongside
it are blocked of - on the S. side, to form a vestry, and on the N.
side, perhaps originally to form a chapel since stone 'parclose'
screens run round it, to the south and the west. The three-light aisle
windows take one of two forms alternately, the first with a more or
less conventional curvilinear tracery and the second with an
arrangement of four non-standard shapes arranged in a circle in
their heads, but perhaps more striking than either are the parapets above, filled with
an openwork
design of trilobes, alternately the right and wrong way up, and above and behind these, the openwork nave battlements,
with quatrefoils piercing the embrasures and trefoil-cusped
arches, the merlons. The bays are separated, in the case of
the nave, by buttresses terminating in gablets on the cardinal sides, and in the case of
the clerestory, by crocketed pinnacles. The N. porch
Finally, it remains briefly to describe the pulpit and the font. The drum of the former is constructed of wood, elaborately carved, but the stem is cut from white stone, to which groups of three small brown marble shafts have been added at the corners to give support to the little vaulted arch spaces in between. The font is entirely carved from a piece (or pieces) of brown-veined marble and is decorated round the bowl with the traditional symbols of the Evangelists (an angel for St. Matthew, a lion for St. Mark, an ox for St. Luke, and an eagle for St. John), alternating (on the cardinal sides) by four Biblical scenes, probably to be interpreted as: to the east, St. John the Baptist baptising converts; to the south, the Passion; to the west, possibly Adam and Eve; and to the north, possibly the Transfiguration.
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