Church Of St John

Church of St John, Corby Glen

This is a parish church of considerable architectural importance, with significant elements from the 12th century onwards. The building was substantially restored in 1860.

The church is constructed of coursed limestone rubble with ashlar dressings and lead roofs. It comprises a western tower, nave with clerestory, aisles, chancel, and south porch.

The western tower is a three-stage 12th-century structure with two chamfered string courses and a single clasping buttress to the south-west angle. The belfry stage, added in the 15th century, is of ashlar with a battlemented parapet decorated with a quatrefoil frieze, gargoyles, and paired cusped louvred lights set in hollow chamfered surrounds. Two narrow stair lights illuminate the second stage on the south side.

The north aisle wall, constructed in ashlar, dates to the late 13th century and features a chamfered pointed doorway with a quatrefoil to the west and to the east a three-light window with Geometric roundels, beyond which is a further three-light window with intersecting tracery. The aisle was lengthened in the 15th century, when two three-light windows with cusped heads and four-centred chamfered surrounds were added. The four nave clerestory windows are similar in character.

The chancel's east window contains three cusped lights with 19th-century panel tracery above. The south wall displays three matching three-light windows beneath four-centred arches with brattished transomes. The 15th-century south aisle has a single three-light east window and three similar south windows, all with cusped lights and moulded four-centred arched surrounds.

The 14th-century two-storey south porch has a pointed outer arch with shafted reveals and moulded hood. The gable is parapeted and pinnacled, with a small two-light window featuring trefoil heads to the lights and a moulded hood. Similar pairs of windows appear in the side walls. Sidebenches are positioned at the porch entrance. The 14th-century inner doorway is moulded and pointed with a hood.

The interior contains a late 14th-century four-bay nave arcade with clustered annular shafts, engaged octagonal capitals, moulded arches, and hoods. The nave roof is supported on contemporary grotesque corbels. The tall 14th-century tower arch has moulded reveals and an annular moulded hood with florate stops. The 13th-century double-chamfered chancel arch dies into the reveals; beside it is the doorway to the rood loft. Above can be seen the earlier roof pitch and a blocked window.

The south aisle contains a reset 14th-century embattled statue bracket and a fine double piscina with cusped canopies and pinnacles. The north aisle holds a small ogee-headed niche and, further east, a single chamfered arched tomb recess. The north wall of the chancel features two 15th-century moulded arches to the north chapel and three 19th-century arched openings in the Sanctuary.

An extensive scheme of 14th and early 15th-century wall painting covers the walls of the nave and aisles, depicting scenes including King Herod, the Magi, the Virgin and Child, St Anne teaching the Virgin, a gigantic St Christopher, the Seven Deadly Sins, Warning to Swearers, and a Tree of Jesse. A 15th-century stained glass figure appears in the quatrefoil north aisle window, with other fragments of medieval glass in various windows.

Among the fittings near the south door is a 15th-century iron-bound oak chest. The church contains 17th-century turned baluster altar rails and a complete set of panelled box pews, those in the aisles dating to the 18th century and the remainder to the 19th century but matching in style. The 13th-century font has an octagonal bowl with stop chamfers to the square base, now supported on a free-standing marble shaft added in 1893.

The monuments include two large stone 15th-century ledger slabs for brasses in the chancel. The north chapel contains an oval monument with elaborate Rococo surround to Frances Wilcox, died 1764. Three further 18th-century wall plaques by Hawley of Colsterworth in the north aisle display fine ribbon work and classical flourishes.