KAS Churches Committee Competition
KAS CHURCHES COMMITTEE COMPETITION
Mr Toby Huitson's winning entry appears here.
St Peter is one of the three medieval churches of the Cinque Port town of Sandwich. In St Peter's churchyard, due west of its west door, stands a single retained window. In this short article, we will examine the window, and find out something about its history. The churchyard window is a substantial and high-quality architectural feature which might easily be taken for granted, and it deserves closer inspection.
Description of the window
The window itself, in the Decorated style, is large and freestanding (see below). It consists of masonry tracery without glass, standing on a chamfered plinth and supported by narrow modern side walls. The retained parts, about 8 feet 6 inches (2.6 m) high and 6 feet 6 inches (1.97 m) across. The moulding on the side facing the church door suggests that this is the original front face. The lower half of the tracery, which is 8.5 inches (21.6 cm) thick, consists
ABOVE: Thomas Elys' tomb
OPPOSITE: The Medieval Window.
...of two lower lights with trefoil tops. The upper part has three quatrefoils - one large one above two smaller examples. The smaller two quatrefoils are 14 inches (35.5 cm) across, while the larger one is 19 inches (48 cm) in diameter. The cusped tracery extends upwards to the sides, allowing the design to take up the full space of the rectangle. The design is beautifully proportioned, and the ratio of its height-to-width approximates to the famous Golden Section ratio (1 to 1.61).
It has been built from two main stone types. One is a pale yellow sandstone, similar to Caen stone. Other sections have been carved from a light grey stone, packed with shells. The window is, unfortunately, not in perfect condition, and it has been patched and repaired. This is particularly apparent on the inside face, where it has been repaired using several different materials - cement (mixed with sand and crushed sea-shells), together with an orange-buff coloured plastic stone, and even pieces of brick. Most of the spaces between the tracery sections have a ½ inch (1.3 cm) rebate, which suggests that it was originally glazed, although no traces of the original glass survive. These glazing slots are not present on the lower section of the window, suggesting that some of this stone may have been replaced. The central mullion is certainly quite modern.
The window is framed by a surround of knapped water-rounded flints and edged with ashlar. On the inside face of the surround, light yellow and orange bricks have been used for the fill. The mortaring of these bricks is the same cement and aggregate mix that we noted earlier reinforcing the window tracery, suggesting that these repairs were contemporary with the building of the surround. Although the surround as a whole is clearly modern, it re-uses medieval stone of the same types as the window, together with blocks of Kentish ragstone with its characteristic light green colouring. Some of this stone is carved. To the sides are pieces of a string-course with a simple chamfered top and bottom, and below are two sections of a roll-moulding. These may be older than the window itself, and could be of Romanesque or thirteenth-century date. Given that the adjacent church has vestiges of such work, and its south aisle is in ruins, it is quite possible that these roll-mouldings could have been salvaged from the vicinity.
History of the window
Did the window originate from the church? Reassembled windows in churchyards taken from an associated building are known elsewhere in Kent, such as at St Mary, Ashford, where nineteenth-century photographs show large Gothic windows in the churchyard, reputedly salvaged from the adjacent late medieval secular College. In our case-study, we know that it came instead from a rather different source, as an inscription at the base of the plinth tells us:
This window was formerly in St. Thomas’ Hospital, founded in 1392. Presented to the Corporation by E.C. Bryne, Town Clerk, and erected here in 1932.
St. Thomas’ Hospital was built by Thomas Elys or Elys, a merchant draper who was Mayor of Sandwich twice in the 1370s. The hospital, which provided accommodation for twelve poor people, was apparently named in honour of St Thomas Becket of Canterbury. Thomas was also, of course, the patron’s own Christian name.
Nothing remains to be seen of the original hospital building near New Street in Sandwich. This was demolished in the mid-nineteenth century, although an engraving, dated 1851, preserves an impression of its appearance. It shows a long building with several dormer windows and a projecting wing at one end. The window now in the churchyard appears in the sketch, located immediately to the right of the entrance porch. This shows that, at this time, it was partially blocked by several courses of bricks. This may explain why the lowest section of the window seems to have been renewed. The hospital’s foundation date of 1392 fits the Decorated style of the window very well. It could have either been an original fixture, or perhaps the result of a subsequent modification made in the early fifteenth century.
A clue to other local work of similar quality survives on Elys’ tomb, located, appropriately enough, within St Peter’s church itself. Here, in the North aisle, where he founded a chantry chapel in the same year as the Hospital, a central table-tomb recess is traditionally attributed to Elys. Interestingly, the side has five filled with four smaller quatrefoils, each with a cusped quatrefoil bearing a central shield (see above). Strongly reminiscent of window tracery, the design has been elaborated to fill the entire space of the square, just as the window fills the whole rectangle. The two designs look roughly contemporary, and it suggests that Elys was an important local patron of high-quality architectural sculpture.
The Decorated style was anticipating subsequent Perpendicular forms. The churchyard window would, therefore, serve as a fitting legacy to the man and his charitable work.
See Roy Tricker's guidebook St Peter's Church, Sandwich, Kent (Churches Conservation Trust) 2002, p. 15.