The North Chapel of Appledore Church
THE NORTH CHAPEL OF APPLEDORE CHURCH
CECILY LEBON
Appledore church was granted to the Priory of St. Martin, Dover, in
the time of Archbishop Richard (1174-84) who had previously been
prior of that House.1 Dover kept the patronage until its dissolution in
1535, although it did not always keep the rectorial tithes. An early
Appledore rector (but not the first, it is hinted in the source
document, to hold from Dover) was Joseph of Exeter,2 a Latin
scholar and poet who went on a crusade in 1190 with his uncle,
Archbishop Baldwin. It would be a misconception to think of master
Joseph as the priest who ministered directly to the people of
Appledore, although the rector was normally responsible for the
maintenance of services, at least by deputy (vicar), and for the fabric
of the chancel including its sanctuary. Joseph is known to have
returned home from the Third Crusade by 1191 and may have
continued to hold Appledore rectory during the succeeding years
when it seems likely that the oldest part of the present parish church
was built. This is the north chapel which looks as if it had been
planned to serve the basic functions of a small parish church at that
time. It comprised a congregational room or nave, slightly wider
(north-south) than long (east-west), with a smaller, squarish sanctuary
projecting eastwards. Unquestionably, the two compartments
were built at the same time, the unifying factor being the distinctive,
very dark conglomerate ironstone quoins which were used at all the
external corners. 3 The same kind of ironstone was discovered in
1 The Victoria County History, ii(), 135, refers to Lambeth MS 241, the Cartulary
of Dover Priory.
2 The Dictionary of National Biography. I am indebted to Sir John Winnifrith for
drawing my attention to the entries on Joseph of Exeter and Archbishop Baldwin.
3 Mr R.W. Sanderson, of the Geological Museum, London, kindly identified a
sample as a conglomerate ironstope, composed of pebbles and lumps of limonite in a
matrix of silty sand. It was sometimes used in the Weald for iron smelting and was
known there as 'shrave'.
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CECILY LEBON
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Fig. 1. St. Peter and St. Paul, Appledore.
excavating below the pillars of the sanctuary arch where it was used in
cylindrical pedestals, 15 in. high and 13 in. in diameter, which stand
upon massive blocks of reddish sandstone. On either side of the
pedestals and built into the piers of the archway there ate similar
ironstones horizontally chamfered as offsets at the base of the walls.
The slender, round pillars above are of limestone ( the upper half of
one has been renewed in dark Bethersden marble). They have round,
roll-moulded bases and capitals. The latter are decorated with a
single tier of trefoil crockets, reminiscent of some early stiff-leaf work
in the north-east transept of Canterbury Cathedral and thereby
dating towards the end of the twelfth century. A more local example
occurs in the north arcade of Wittersham church where the east
respond is of the same style and approximate age.
Windows in the east wall of the chapel suggest a similar period.
Because they are pointed, and not round-headed like those of
neighbouring Bonnington, they must be dated some years later than
the 1170s when Canterbury Cathedral choir was rebuilt in the Gothic
style already introduced into the great abbey church of St. Denis in
Paris. However, the east windows of Appledore's north chapel have
certain characteristics of the Norman period in being rather short,
quite widely separated and only two in number. They are in these
respects Transitional, rather than fully Early English in style.
84
TIIE NORTH CHAPEL OF APPLEDORE CHURCH
Although not many churches in Kent and Sussex retain a pair of
lancets in their east walls, 4 it was probably quite a common feature in
small, late Norman churches, an arrangement which in most cases
was long ago replaced by a window of three or four lights extending
across, and obliterating, its predecessors. Here, the pair remained
unaltered because the little church became merely a side chapel a
century later when a much larger church of St. Peter and St. Paul was
built alongside it and was given an ampler east window with
reticulated tracery in contemporary style. The east lancets of the
chapel are peculiarly co-ordinated. Each has only one splay and the
other is at right angles to the wall. The splays converge, leaving an
intervening panel of wall behind the centre of the altar. Given this
valuable space of 2 ft. 9 in. (for a cross, crucifix or icon), there was
not enough remaining length in the east wall to permit splays on both
sides of the embrasures, as in the usual design of east lancets. One
may ask why the sanctuary was not made just a little wider,
particularly as the 'nave' is relatively wide. There is, however,
another aspect of the actual design here, and it may have been
purposeful. This is the way that the splays allow morning sunlight,
whether the sun rises early or late, to focus on a point just in front of
the altar where it was customary to hang the pyx containing the
consecrated bread. In the early mornings, before the sun got round to
any scratch dial there may have been on the south side, it would have
been possible to estimate the time by the incidence of the sun shining
through the splayed openings onto a fixed object within. For the
worshippers, the sun's rays highlighting the pyx must have been
symbolic of its glorification in the liturgy.
The sanctuary now has a lancet in its north wall where a fireplace
was removed in the nineteenth century. There may have been a
window embrasure or niche here previously; and there may have
been other small windows in the north and south walls of the chapel,
but the evidence for them has been destroyed by removal of
surrounding masonry later in the Middle Ages.
Even in its early years the chapel was not entirely detached, for
part of its west end adjoined another building now replaced by the
nave of the subsequent parish church. Consequently, its Early
English west window could not be placed centrally. The remains of its
arch springing can be seen inside the chapel above the post-medieval
door which opens onto the churchyard path running outside the main
4 E.g. Petham and Newington in Kent; and, in West Sussex, Coates, Elstead,
Didling and Barlavington.
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CECILY LEBON
north wall. That wall was largely rebuilt after the fire and ruination
caused by a French attack in 1380,5 but its lower courses appear to be
as old as the masonry of the chapel.
The late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century tower, squat and
strengthened with clasping buttresses, and now with a Tudor
doorway forming the west entrance to the parish church, looks built
to defend the vicinity; it may indeed have done so during the Barons'
War when Simon de Montfort held the Cinque Ports and many other
places in Kent. Kilburne, Phillipott and other Kent topographers pass
on the tradition that the major part of the parish church here was
built of stones re-used from an earlier building on the same site,
known as Appledore Castle.6 Some even thought that a stronghold
had survived from the Danish fort of 982, although that would have
had little, if any, stonework in it. However, it may not be entirely
fanciful to wonder if a stone-built castle or fortified house had stood
here overlooking the strategically important junction of several
distributaries forming the delta of the Rother. Henry VIII's librarian
and topographer, John Leland,7 mentions that Appledore was by
some accounted a limb of Romney. Certainly by mid-thirteenth
century the Rhee canal8 was bringing Appledore increased commerce
with New Romney; and Appledore Water was then a wide creek to
the south, an easy sea lane to Rye, which was becoming a safer and
more frequented haven than the storm-battered island of Old Winchelsea.
Moreover, Appledore could easily get Wealden timber by
water from Reading and Smallhythe even before the main stream of
the Rother was diverted from the south to the north side of the Isle of
Oxney in the fourteenth century.9 In these circumstances, it is not
surprising that Appledore's growing prosperity was expressed by
building, under the direction of Dover Priory, a larger church with an
aisled nave joined onto the older tower and a chancel extending past
and beyond the previous little church, now known as its north chapel.
The plan in Fig. 1 shows the north chapel in relation to other parts of
the present-day parish church.
5 Sir John Winnifrith: Appledore Church Guide.
6 Sir John Winnifrith: A History of Appledore, 1973 (Phillimore, 1983) Appendix 2.
7 John Leland's Itineraries (edited by Lucy Toulmin Smith): 'Appledore (of sum is
contid as a membre of Rumeney) ys yn Kent a market town and hath a goodly chirch.'
8 Jill Eddison, 'The Reclamation of Romney Marsh: Some Aspects Reconsidered'.
Arch. Cant., xcix (1983) 57.
9 Jill Eddison, 'Developments in the Lower Rother Valley up to 1600',
Arch. Cam., cii (1985), 95 ff.
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THE NORTH CHAPEL OF APPLEDORE CHURCH
During 1985 and 1986 some excavations were carried out while the
floor of the north chapel was being taken up for renewal and when
the organ was temporarily shifted. An axial section was dug from the
east to the west wall and other excavations were made to explore the
original structure and subsequent deposits and alterations in the
chapel.
Fig. 2A represents the outline and certain features discovered
which belong to the first phase of the building. It was found that the
base courses of the 2 ft. wide south wall of the sanctuary had
remained intact. On it a new and narrower wall was built in 1986,
when the little sanctuary was restored to its original dimensions and
once again furnished with an altar. In the body of the chapel a stretch
of its south wall foundations remained beneath the later arch to the
great chancel, and a long, narrow slab (surface 4 ft. x 11 in.) which
may have been a doorstep at an external entrance to the chapel. West
of the 'doorstep', mortar gave ample evidence that a wall had been
removed, just as it had also been cleared away close to the north and
south piers of the archway. No ironstone quoins had been left at these
corners. It was noticed that ironstone does occur casually in some
parts of the later church, including the chancel and the south (Horne)
chapel. In these positions it may have been in re-use after having
been discarded from the original south corners of the north chapel.
There was no material evidence to indicate that the west wall of the
chapel once extended across the recess adjacent to the north rood
screen, although the recess lies in line with the west wall and its depth
exactly corresponds with the width of the wall (2ft. 10 in.). As can be
appreciated from the plan, the chapel is a symmetrically-shaped
building, although unusually short relative to its width for a church in
England of its period, estimated to be the last decade of the twelfth
century. There were n o remains of piers or posts to support a central
tower over this little church of Byzantine proportions. One puzzling
feature at Phase I level in the recess is worth mentioning. It is a large,
rectangular block of hard sandstone, sunk to make some kind of
emplacement or threshold; possibly the substructure for a font, or
perhaps simply the threshold of a doorway leading out of the chapel
into what later became part of the nave.
In the sanctuary, some low dry-stone walling of rough stones
formed a rectangular structure against a stone sill built into the east
wall. This was most likely to be the foundation to hold the medieval
altar. It was filled with brown sand containing a number of chalk
lumps, and below it were pebbles and cobblestones. The rest of the
sanctuary contained a thick deposit of sandy silt over a thin layer of
chalk, except where the chalk had been removed to built later
structures such as a fireplace and a wall across the archway. It was
87
C
1p feet
3 m,
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CECILY LEBON
I I
I I
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-----
---- arch - - - screen
B I
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Fig. 2. A: End of twelfth century; B: Fifteenth century; C: 1699-1858; D: 1858-1986.
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THE NORTH CHAPEL OF APPLEDORE CHURCH
observed that there was no chalk between the chapel sanctuary and
the high chancel, a fact which confirms that the area had been outside
the church and open space so long as chalk was used in laying down
floors. Similar chalk layers were found on the site of the medieval
church of Ebony, which had also belonged to Dover.
In the chapel nave there was a second and higher stratum of
mortar-encrusted chalk, and bedded on it near the middle of the
room was a patch of pavement where some plain, medieval tiles in
two sizes had been left in situ. Elsewhere, tiles and their fragments
were frequently found scattered at various depths. Several periods in
their manufacture have been identified, varying between late thirteenth
and early sixteenth centuries. 10 The chapel, it seems, was first
paved with tiles soon after the larger church was built and a new floor
was laid in the fourteenth century some fifty years before the fire of
1380, and presumably patched and renovated afterwards.
Fig. 2B represents the next phase, late medieval. In or shortly
before the fifteenth century, and possibly in delayed rebuilding after
the disaster of 1380, much more light was let into the chapel by
making the great north window in Perpendicular style. This required
more height than the original alignment of the roof provided. In small
churches, a lofty window had to be accommodated in a gable.
Therefore, the ridge of the roof might have to be turned round 90° so
that the gable came where the big window was to be made, on the
north side in this case. As a result, the lower eaves above the west
wall would have cut across the old window head, which may then
have been only partly blocked and not removed until a door was
made underneath it in 1699. On the south side the original wall was
removed and the chapel thrown open to the high chancel by a wide
arch, although doubtless it was screened here, as it certainly was
where it joined the nave at its west end by the surviving fourteenth
century part of the rood screen. The upper chalk level must be
associated with this period. Known now as the chapel of Our Lady of
Pity, it contained an image of the Virgin holding in her arms the
crucified body of her Son. The cult was found in many other
churches, and attracted donations and bequests from parishioners.
It is unfortunate that so little in the excavation shed light on the
condition of the chapel in the liturgically changeful and ecclesiastically
hazardous sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As the
churchwardens' accounts have not survived, we can only guess that,
10 Dr Mark Horton, of The Pitt-Rivers Museum, Oxford, has distinguished five
types submitted to him; see Appendix I.
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CECILY LEBON
Fig. 3. The east end of the chapel (vestry) before 1930 (Reproduced from Dr Cock's
Guide to Appledore Church).
deprived of its altar and image, the chapel ceased to be used for
worship and became a room where the parish chest was kept and
where the vestry met to administer the affairs of the parish, often in
the absence of the pluralist vicars. Meetings may have been heated on
occasions, but whether the room had any artificial means of heating is
doubtful. Several sherds of Bellarmine jugs are relics of this period.
In 1699, a new era dawned. Fig. 2C illustrates the major alterations
carried out under the direction of churchwarden William Bushell.
The recent archaeological work revealed some previously unknown
details of the new set-up and the way in which the north chapel was
then converted into two rooms: one for the vicar at the east end, and
the rest to become the village schoolroom. Remains of the division
between the two rooms were clearly seen under the sanctuary
archway {Plate I). They consisted of a double sleeper wall on which
had rested the two wooden partitions, which shut away the twin
pillars of the arch. It was probably when these partitions were taken
90
THE NORTH CHAPEL OF APPLEDORE CHURCH
down in 1858 that the pillars were damaged and the arch had to be
rebuilt.
The schoolroom, it is recorded, was also partitioned off from the
nave and chancel. It was provided with an external west door, which
was a great help in the excavation, although part of the west wall
beside the doorcase had been so weakened by makeshift rubble filling
that some of it collapsed when the wainscotting was pulled away. A
fireplace, constructed in brick, was discovered under the great north
window. That explains why this window, which might have given very
good daylight to the schoolroom, appeared to be partly blocked in an
old picture of the church. This fireplace and its chimney stood quite
apart from the position of the later vestry stove which was cleared
away from its corner site at the time of the excavation. A small patch
of paving, containing two sizes of late-medieval, undecorated tiles,
was found a little to the west and north of the room's centre. It
suggested that at the time of the school's occupation the floor of this
room was still tiled, although, according to Dr Cock's notes,11 a
parishioner recollected after many years that the schoolroom had had
a brick floor. However, many loose and fragmentary tiles were found
in the schoolroom area and scarcely any bricks other than those in
fireplaces.
The vicar's room, east of the archway partition, also had its own
fireplace which was found still filled with ash. The plastered wall at
the back of it concealed a brick chimney breast directly beneath the
north lancet window, which must have been blocked by the flue.
Post-medieval fireplaces occupying window recesses may have been
more frequently installed than is generally realised. Our excavations
in the east end also revealed the base of the little sanctuary's original
south wall which.you may now see at the foot of the newly built wall.
The 1699 alterations had removed this wall to below floor level and
had made an extension to the east wall so as to enlarge the room for
the vicar by taking in and roofing over what had been an open space.
A door was made through to the main sanctuary. Tiles were removed
and a boarded floor was put in at the same level as the sanctuary
pavement. This operation explains the absence of an upper layer of
chalk and the scarcity of discarded tiles in this part of the chapel. It is
assumed that tiles were deliberately removed to some other place and
that the underlying chalk had been taken out in an attempt to
counteract the pervasive damp by dumping the thick layer of sand
11 Many notes from Dr Cock's researches are in the Cock Collection, kept by The
National Trust.
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CECILY LEBON
PLATE l
Semi-playcd cast lancets.
PLATE II
Larly Gothic capital.
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THE NORTH CHAPEL OF APPLEDORE CHURCH
PLATE Ill
Pollur lme on pedcMal and sleeper wall for double timber partition
under the sanctuary arch.
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CECILY LEBON
found there. This deposit was made before laying the boarded floor.
Today, only the boarded extension forms the vicar's little robing
room, amounting to barely a third of the area allocated to the
eighteenth-century vicar.
By 1858, the village school had a schoolhouse elsewhere in the
parish. The Rev. William Kirby had the old chapel rooms thrown into
one again and the damaged arch repaired. The enlarged vestry
provided ample room for the choir of men and boys to assemble and
for witnesses to congregate when the marriage register was signed.
Either in 1858 or 1889 the two fireplaces were covered over by floor
boards, which brought the western floor level up to that of the east
end. A stove for the whole vestry was installed and a chimney for it
built in the north-east corner of the old schoolroom. The pillar bases
on either side of the archway, then exposed but a little below floor
level, were protected by ugly concrete fenders, which were removed
during the excavation in 1985. An organ was introduced into the
chapel in 1935 and has its console beneath the chancel's north arch
which, until recently, had screens on either side of the organist's seat
and a door into the chapel on the east side of the organ.
Fig. 2D shows the plan of the vestry as it was before the
excavation. Afterwards, the part of it which had been the old chapel
sanctuary was restored to its medieval dimensions and the chapel was
re-dedicated by the Bishop of Dover. All the rotten woodwork of
wainscotting, floor boards and cupboard has been removed from the
chapel, which is now paved with York stone at a lower level allowing
the pillar bases to be seen, as they were intended to be. A Charles II
altar, suitable in size, if not matching in age, furnishes the restored
sanctuary. On the wall behind the altar hangs a coloured photograph,
taken in Long Melford Church, Suffolk, of a stained glass composition
which represents Our Lady of Pity displaying the epitome of
completed sacrifice marked still by evidence of horrendous suffering,
as widely apprehended and venerated in medieval Christendom.
APPENDIX I
The Tiles
Mark Horton
(drawn by Cecily Lebon)
A substantial group of decorated and plain floor-tiles was recovered
from the north chapel excavations. Some plain tiles were found in
situ, bedded onto chalk. The majority of decorated tiles were found
94
THE NORTH CHAPEL OF APPLEDORE CHURCH
in a fill layer below this horizon, and probably derive from early
clearances of ground within the church. Other decorated tiles were
associated with the foundations of a vestry stove conjectured to be
about a hundred years old. A similar range of tiles was discovered by
Dr William Cock during his restoration of the nave and south chapel
in the 1920s; these were later relaid in the south chapel. Apparently,
some of them had been deposited in a make-up layer over a burnt
level associated with the destruction of the church by the French in
1380. The north chapel tiles could be in a similar stratigraphical
position, since there was a discontinuous layer of burnt wood below
the chalk bedding in parts of the chapel near the small remaining
pavement of plain tiles, but they are more likely to have come from a
lower chalk level traces of which were apparent. Alternatively, the
detached tiles in the north chapel could have been deposited from
elsewhere in the church during the post-medieval period.
The tiles form five groups which have been defined on the basis of
fabric, shape and size, technique of manufacture and decoration.
These groups probably represent the output of specific workshops or
kilns.
Group A
Square tiles, probably about 120 mm. in extent and 26-29 mm. thick.
The fabric is bright red-orange, hard, well-fired but reduced on the
upper surface, with a wide range of inclusions such as ill-sorted sand
and ground-up fired tile, and numerous air-holes, sometimes laminated.
The base is unsanded, the sides have a medium bevel, and
the surface decoration is applied by the slip-over-impression method
and then covered with a greenish yellow glaze. The decoration is very
worn and indistinct.
1. Fragment, vair design (one example)
2. Fragment, unclear design (1)
3. Fragment, unclear design (1)
These early two-colour tiles are similar to examples found in north
Kent at Canterbury and have been published from Ospringe Hospital
(Horton 1979) and Faversham Abbey (Rigold 1968) where they were
dated to the thirteenth century. It is interesting that these north Kent
tiles reached so far south.
Group B
Two-colour, square tiles, 114 mm. in size and 19 mm. thick. Bright
red fabric, hard with a laminated fracture and well-sorted sand
95
CECILY LEBON
GROUP A
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Fig. 4. Floor tiles: Groups A and B.
96
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15
THENORTH C HAPEL OF APPLE DORE CHURCH
GROUP C
1 1 12
13
16
Fig. S. FIo or tiles·· G roup c.
97
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17
18
20
;
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CECILY LEBON
GROUP C
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