When the wider aisles of Whaplode were erected, the builders, as at Moulton, preserved the original Transitional south doorway and re-erected it, and also the west doorway, which was erected in 1180, and is, with the two doorways at Moulton, the oldest in the district.
The north and south porches are post-Reformation.
The roof of the nave, now being repaired, is a good example of the Rectilinear Period.
The font is a creditable imitation of a Norman one, but is of post-Reformation work.
The area of this church is so great that only the eastern portions of the nave (the Norman portion) and aisles are fitted with open seats; the rest of the church is entirely open, which gives it a cathedral appearance. There is a fine seventeenth-century monument to Sir Antony Irby and his wife, ancestors of the Right Hon. Lord Boston. There were formerly three chapels in the church. Colonel Holles, when he visited the church about 1641, found memorials to the families of Fitzwalter, Littlebury, Rye, Beke, Quaplod, Venables, Kyrketon, Haultoft, Walpole, Pulvertoft, Welby, Ogle, and others.
All Saints’, Holbeach
Of this large and beautiful church little need be written. It is a fine Curvilinear building, though merging into Rectilinear in the tower and spire. It belongs to the latter part of the period, and is the only church in the neighbourhood which is built in one style of architecture. The work of erecting the edifice was practically continuous from beginning to finish. It was built in the reigns of Edward III. and Richard II., probably between 1340 and 1380.
The present church is not the first church at Holbeach—one would be inclined to believe it was the third; the first would be a small Saxon church, and the second a small Norman one, but a more substantial structure than the first.
With regard to the earlier church or churches at Holbeach, we have considerable documentary evidence, although we find few if any of their remains in the present church, unless the Norman capital which lies on the floor at the south-east corner of the nave, and some few of the very numerous corbel heads at the terminations of the hood-moulds of the clerestory windows, which are grotesque and rude enough to have been the production of Norman workmen, formed parts of the earlier Norman church.