Скачать или смотреть St Nicholas. Castle Hedingham. Halstead. Essex. CO9 3ER.

** https://greatenglishchurches.co.uk/ht... **

Its Guidebook rather loftily claims this to be “The Most Exciting Church in Essex” and that it “literally (literally?) takes the breath away, packed to the rafters with the kind of architectural treasures that most congregations can only dream of...” Can it lives up to those claims? Jenkins thinks not: he gave five other Essex churches more stars. I don’t really believe in ranking systems but it is a sure thing that any church crawler visiting this church will find a great deal of interest. With just two stars, this is one of Jenkins’s pottier ratings.

The first sight of the chancel and, especially, the east wall will tell you immediately that this is a church with Norman origins. The east end, moreover, has one of the only “wheel windows” in England. The is a Norman doorway on the north side of the chancel. The rest of the church presents a late Gothic face to the world with plenty of Essex brickwork in evidence and an obviously Tudor west tower. My immediate thought was that this had been a standalone Norman chapel that had been greatly extended to the west. That impression lasts only until one enters the church and sees that both arcades are unambiguously Norman.

The chancel arch is lofty and pointed, supporting the surmised 1180s building date. The chancel windows go a step further. They are small lancet windows, of Norman proportions but with pointed heads. The grandiose chancel interior paints a different picture. The walls are an impressive array of alternate wide and narrow rebates, the wider ones containing the deep splays of the windows.


These rebates are of a size out of all proportion to the windows themselves. The interior, however, is very definitely Norman in style albeit extraordinarily rich and sophisticated. The ambiguity of it all is completed by the Transitional style priest’s door. This is a chancel designed and built by masons with early knowledge of the Gothic revolution gathering pace across the English Channel but without yet having the confidence or the nous to go the whole hog. It is a beguiling structure.

The arcade arches are plain but sophisticated, lacking the Norman fetish for zigzag moulding. They too predict the Transitional style to come. We know then that both of the aisles are of Norman origin, Yet this is completely hidden on the outside by Tudor style windows and brick-built battlements and buttresses. The clerestory and south porch are also Tudor.

So we come to that bruiser of a west tower. It is as unambiguously Tudor as the east end is Norman. Few parish churches can show such contrast and unusually the two structures are equally fine. When the tower was built the nave was shortened by one bay to the west to accommodate it. One or two bits of the lost Norman tower are incorporated into the Tudor chancel arch. The tower is as sophisticated as it is impressive with large rectangular windows, a tower stair at the south east corner and bold rectangular windows, as well as stone inserts for contrast.. Above all, perhaps, one simply has to admire the aesthetic beauty and the sheer craftsmanship that of this huge acreage of red brick. We in the UK are all mighty familiar with brick building and it would be all too easy to pass swiftly over the gorgeous structure we see here at Castle Hedingham.

Both inside and out there is a lot to be seen here. Perhaps the real gem is the fourteenth century chancel screen. It survived mainly because its imagery is secular. There are several carved faces to be see and rather remarkably the Church Guide suggests that they are identifiable with a cast including Edward II, Piers Gaveston his supposed catamite; Edward’s wife Queen Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer who together overthrew and did away with Edward and Gaveston in 1327. Supposedly the screen was commissioned by John de Vere, 7th Earl of Oxford and one of Edward III’s trusted captains in 1357. It is an intriguing idea but I have found no collaboration of this theory and I wonder whether the Earl would have been making this Good vs Evil point thirty years after the event? Jenkins places the date the screen at 1400 and I think he is more likely to be right looking, given the highly developed Perpendicular style of it.