Church Of All Saints

CHURCH OF ALL SAINTS

The Church of All Saints is a parish church built in the early 15th century on a new site, replacing an earlier church that had been granted to Fecamp Abbey in Normandy in the early 11th century. The church was referred to as "new" in a will of 1436. It was restored in 1870 by William Butterfield, one of the finest 19th-century church architects, and underwent further restoration work in the 1970s and around 2000.

The building is constructed of stone and flint rubble with cut stone dressings, including some chequerboard flint and stonework, with tiled roofs. It comprises a nave with north and south aisles, a west tower, a south porch, a chancel with a north organ chamber and vestry.

The exterior is almost entirely of early 15th-century appearance and represents a single building campaign. The substantial three-stage west tower is the architectural showpiece, featuring an embattled parapet in chequerboard flint work with a polygonal north-east stair turret rising slightly above it. The tower contains a tall pointed arch opening with continuous mouldings and a label with head stops, framing both the west door and west window together. The west window has an embattled transom with cusped lights and vertical tracery. The west door has a pointed head with deeply cut, continuous mouldings. Windows in the second stage have ogee heads that break the string course, while the bell stage contains plain rectangular openings with a mullion and transom. The nave and chancel feature chequerboard parapets without crenellations; the aisle parapets are plain. There is no clerestory. The aisles and chancel are lit by 15th-century windows with vertical tracery; the east window is of five lights and was renewed by Butterfield in 1870. A blocked north aisle door survives. The south porch, rebuilt in the 19th century, has a chequerboard gable with a small, possibly Anglo-Saxon cross reset within it. Its outer opening has multiple narrow mouldings and a hood mould, very similar in character to the 15th-century south door.

The interior is consistently of the 15th century and, like the exterior, the tower serves as the architectural focal point. The tower arch is tall and substantial, comprising three orders with the inner order on short shafts. Above it is an impressive tierceron vault with moulded ribs rising from shafts and grotesques in the corners. The central opening for bell ropes is carved with animals and foliage, and small carved fleur-de-lys are scattered across the vault web surfaces. The window recess for the west window has deeply splayed, shafted sides. The west door is covered by an internal timber porch of 19th or 20th-century date. Four-bay north and south nave arcades rest on polygonal piers with moulded capitals; the arches have multiple mouldings and stops above the capitals. A tall, wide 15th-century chancel arch with continuous mouldings carries a remarkable 15th-century doom painting. A 15th-century window in the chancel north wall now opens into the organ chamber, and another has had its sill raised to accommodate the door to the north vestry.

The church contains exceptional fixtures and fittings. The doom painting above the chancel arch, dated to the 15th century, depicts Christ seated on rainbows, flanked by the Punishment of the Damned and the Heavenly Jerusalem. A 15th-century piscina and three-seat sedilia in the chancel feature cusped arches and openwork tracery spandrels. A polygonal 15th-century font has alternating quatrefoils and blind arches on the bowl and blind arcading on the stem.

A large 19th-century reredos extends up either side of the east window, featuring figures, inscriptions and other motifs in tracery panels. A 19th-century timber and stone pulpit has open tracery sides to its upper part. Good 19th-century choir stalls feature open arcaded fronts, foliage carving and kneeling angels on the arms; these are said to have been brought from St Paul's, Bohemia Road, St Leonard's after its closure.

The church contains some good 19th and 20th-century stained glass. The east window is a fine pictorial work of 1861 by Gibbs. Two south aisle windows commemorating the Revd Webster Whistler (died 1832) are executed entirely in a Baroque mode. Another mid-20th-century window commemorates members of the Eaton family.

Monuments include a brass to Thomas Goodenough and his wife Margaret, dating to around 1520, and a large incised slab to a civilian and wife dating to around 1458, possibly not English in origin. There is a pre-Victorian style brass with an urn and drapery to John Edmonds (died 1847), and another to Revd Webster Whistler. Some 19th and 20th-century wall tablets are also present. Six hatchments are displayed in the nave, and an unusually late 20th-century hatchment of 1963 appears in the south aisle.

The Royal Arms of George II, painted in 1755 by Roger Mortimer, survive, as do panels by the same hand bearing the Lord's Prayer, Creed and Commandments, now positioned under the tower. Also under the tower is a rhyming inscription of 1756 in a frame which reads: "But if you ring in spur or hat / sixpence you pay be sure of that / and if a bell you overthrow / pray pay a groat before you go".

The churchyard contains some good monuments.

The emphasis on the elaborate tower suggests that much of the work was funded by the townspeople, for whom the tower served as a point of civic pride and display. By the early 19th century the church contained galleries, which were removed during Butterfield's restoration in 1870.