Church Of All Saints

ASHBOCKING CHURCH LANE TM 15 SE 7/2 Church of All Saints 9.12.55 GV I Parish church. Medieval with major C16 alterations. Restorations of 1824 and 1870-73. Chancel, nave, west tower, south porch. Medieval walling mainly of plastered rubble with freestone dressings. Plaintiled roofs. Chancel has mid C13 work: plate-traceried windows to north and south, with matching doorway and piscina (east window a C19 restoration, with surrounding rebuilding in red brick). Nave has much mid/late C14 work: 2-light dagger-traceried windows, with restored grotesque corbels. Heavily moulded mid C14 south doorway with original grotesque corbels and adjacent stoup. A fine late C14 tomb recess in south wall, richly-carved: ogee-arched head with buttress-shafts and crocketed finials. The cusping is enriched with grotesques, and the enrichment is unusually delicate: probably for one of the de Bocking family. Mid C16 tower of red brick with a compact grid of diaper-patterning in burnt headers; the upper stage is later, perhaps c.1600, without the patterning. Moulded west doorway, labelled and with large 3-light window in ashlar above. Porch also in mid C16 brick with diaperwork: a 4-centred arched doorway with an angel in carved limestone above; crow-stepped gables (compare C16 brickwork at Ashbocking Hall). Plain and rather poor mid/late C16 hammerbeam roof to nave. Similar roofs in chancel and porch (much restored); the windbraces are a C19 embellishment. Norman font bowl of cauldron form, on C19 shafts; oak cover in the C15 manner is probably C19. A set of sixteen C17 pews in the nave, with unusual buttresses at the square ends. C19 benches have reused C15 poppyhead ends. Mounted on a panel on north wall are brasses of Edmund Bocking (1585) with his two wives and two daughters. Tn the chancel is a slab with brass bearing an acrostic epitaph to Thomas Horseman, 1619; 3 other slabs of C18.

Listing NGR: TM1695654509