A. A very common practice prevailed, from about the middle of the sixteenth century, when any alteration or addition was made in or to a church, of affixing a stone in the masonry, with the date of such in figures. Thus over the east window of Hillmorton Church, Warwickshire, (which is a pointed window of four lights, formed by three plain mullions curving and intersecting each other in the head, which is filled with nearly lozenge-shaped lights, but all without foliations,) is a stone bearing the date of 1640. In the south wall of the tower of the same church (which is low, heavy, and clumsily built, without any pretension to architectural design) is a stone to denote the period of its erection, which bears the date of 1655. Pulpits, communion-tables, church chests, poor-boxes, and pewing of the latter part of the sixteenth and of the seventeenth century, also very frequently exhibit, in figures carved on them, the precise periods of their construction.
Q. What specimens are there of this style of late or debased and mixed Gothic?
A. Annexed to Sunningwell Church, Berkshire, is a singular porch or building, sexagonal in form, at the angles of which are projecting columns of the Ionic order supporting an entablature. On each side of this building, except that by which it communicates with the church, and that in which the doorway is contained, is a plain window of the Debased Gothic style, of one light, with a square head and hood moulding over. The doorway is nondescript, neither Roman or Gothic. This building is supposed to have been erected by Bishop Jewell. The chapel of St. Peter’s College, Cambridge, finished in 1632, exhibits in the east wall a large pointed window, clumsily designed, in the Debased style, and divided by mullions into five principal lights, round-headed, but trefoiled within; three series of smaller lights, rising one above the other, all of which are round-headed and trefoiled, fill the head of the window, the composition of which, though comparatively rude, is illustrative of the taste of the age. On each side of the window, on the exterior, is a kind of semi-classic niche. In Stowe Church, Northamptonshire, are a number of windows inserted at a general reparation of the church in 1639; these are square-headed, and have a label or hood moulding over, and are mostly divided into three obtusely pointed-arched lights, without foliations. Under the windows of the south aisle is a string-course, more of a semi-classic contour than Gothic. On the south side is a plain round-headed doorway, inserted at the same period. The tower and south aisle of Yarnton Church, Oxfordshire, erected by Sir Thomas Spencer, A. D. 1611, have the same kind of square-headed window, with arched lights without foliations, as those of Stow. Stanton-Harold Church, Leicestershire, erected A. D. 1653, is perhaps the latest complete specimen of the Debased Gothic style. Towards the end of this century Gothic mouldings appear not to have been understood, as in the attempt to reconstruct portions of churches in that style we find mouldings of classic art to prevail. Such is the case with respect to the tower of Eynesbury Church, St. Neot’s, Huntingdonshire, rebuilt in a kind of Debased Gothic and mixed Roman style, in 1687. Other instances of the kind might also be enumerated. At the commencement of the eighteenth century the Roman or Italian mode appears to have prevailed generally in the churches then erected, without any admixture even of the Debased Gothic style.
CONCLUDING CHAPTER.
ON THE INTERNAL ARRANGEMENT AND DECORATIONS OF A CHURCH.