Fig. 8. Tickhill, Yorkshire: general view from S.E., showing clerestory, western tower and projecting eastern chapel.

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§ 33. West doorways are frequently found in towers; and often, as at Grantham and Newark, they are of some importance in the design. They are a general feature of the larger towers, although sometimes, as at St Michael’s, Coventry, where the nave has a west porch north of the tower, they are insignificant, and were probably intended to be little more than a convenient entrance for building materials. In Northamptonshire, some of the towers of the churches of the Nene valley have doorways covered by shallow porches. The beautiful porch at Higham Ferrers and that at Raunds are the earliest: later porches occur at Oundle, Rushden, and Keyston, the last place being just across the border of Huntingdonshire. These western doorways were sometimes used as principal entrances to the church, and were provided with holy-water stoups. But habitually they were kept closed, and used only on special occasions for ritual purposes, as in the Palm Sunday procession, when the clergy and choir entered the church by the west door. Such entrances would be a natural feature of large churches, like Kettering, and are found in the west walls of churches like Stratford-on-Avon, St Mary Redcliffe’s at Bristol, or Ketton in Rutland, where the tower is central or in a situation not at the west end of the nave. Where the west doorway is covered by a projecting porch, as mentioned above, the design possibly recalls the western porches or Galilees, found in some of our larger churches, and on an imposing scale, in certain districts of France. The word Galilee arises from the fact that the west porch was the last stage in the Sunday procession, and the celebrant, entering it first, symbolised our Lord preceding His disciples into Galilee after the Resurrection, of which Sunday was the festival. A regular western building of the Galilee type is a somewhat rare feature in an English parish church; but there is one at Melton Mowbray, and at Snettisham in Norfolk there is an open porch, projecting beyond the west wall of the church. In both cases the church has a central tower. At King’s Sutton in Northamptonshire, there is a vaulted porch in front of the western tower.

§ 34. It has been said that there are churches of the twelfth century in which the tower was omitted, and a bell-cot above the western gable took its place. Quenington in Gloucestershire, and Barton-le-Street in the north riding of Yorkshire, are good examples. In both cases, a north as well as a south doorway were provided to the aisleless nave, although, at Barton-le-Street, this circumstance has been obscured by a modern restoration. In neither case was there a western door; and in both the north doorway, which stands on the side nearest the village, has probably been always the main entrance. The reason of the two doorways may have been the exigencies of processions, in which the litany was sung, and the altars of the church sprinkled with holy water. Such processions took place, at any rate in the greater churches, every Sunday, and in monastic churches were partly external, to include the buildings of the cloister. In smaller churches, however, external processions would be of rare occurrence, and two doorways would hardly be provided for this reason alone. As a rule, the ordinary entrance would lie on the side of the church nearest the approach from the village, which was generally on the south. But this is not invariable; and the favourite entrance, even where a village lay to the north of the church, was on the south side. There are sometimes signs that one of the doorways may have been appropriated traditionally to the use of the tenants of one of the manors in a parish, or to the parishioners of a chapelry who were bound to attend the mother church on certain feasts in the year. Thus at Barton-le-Street, the south doorway, lying on the side of the church towards the hamlet of Coneysthorpe, is called the Coneysthorpe doorway. At Easingwold, in Yorkshire, the north doorway is called the Raskelf door, and was doubtless used by the inhabitants of the chapelry of Raskelf on these special occasions. At Hungerton, near Leicester, the tenants of each of the four manors in the parish still occupy their own quarter of the nave; and at Churchdown, near Gloucester, the names of the various chapelries of the medieval parish are still applied to divisions of the churchyard. In cases like this, the doorway nearest to the part of the church appropriated to one or more of these separate bodies of parishioners would naturally be used as well as the main doorway.

§ 35. In its simplest form, the porch is simply a protection to the doorway which it covers. The timber porches, often beautiful works of art, which are common in Essex and other timber-growing parts of England and Wales, can hardly have served any very practical use, although, like stone porches, they have side-benches, on which worshippers could rest. But, from the days when the south porch of Canterbury cathedral was resorted to by litigants from every part of the kingdom, the church porch was a common place for the transaction of much secular business. Hence, no doubt, it became a permanent stone structure, usually roofed with wood, but sometimes vaulted, as at Barnack, or covered, as in some of the churches round Doncaster, by a high pitched roof of stone slabs. In many later medieval churches, the size of the porch increased, and it was vaulted with elaborate ribbed ceilings, or, as at Lavenham in Suffolk, with fan vaulting. There may sometimes have been, as there was at Canterbury and possibly at Bradford on Avon, an altar in the porch. At South Pool in Devon, the bench which runs along the east wall is raised in the middle, and forms an altar table. A broad south aisle was built in the fifteenth century, but was stopped at the east wall of the porch. A small window, now filled in, directly above the altar, commanded a view of the aisle and the south altar of the chancel from the porch, and was closed on the side of the aisle by an iron grille. Such altars, however, must have been very rare. One may suggest that the altar at South Pool contained relics, on which oaths were taken by those who came to the porch to settle business or disputes which might be terminated by mutual agreement, without being brought before the regular courts.

Fig. 9. St Mary’s, Beverley: south porch.

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