Church Of St Peter And St Paul

Church of St. Peter and St. Paul

This church in Deddington, located on the north side of Church Street, is a substantial medieval parish church with a complex building history spanning from the early 13th century to the present day. The building comprises a chancel, vestry, nave with north and south aisles, porches, and a west tower. It is constructed of coursed squared marlstone with limestone-ashlar dressings and lead roofs.

The chancel was originally built in the early 13th century and was lengthened to four bays in the late 13th century. It features two-light windows with Y tracery separated by buttresses. One bay on the south side was altered to accommodate the organ, and a nineteenth-century vestry projects from the north. Both sides of the chancel retain restored fifteenth-century square-headed clerestory windows in contemporary walling. A large three-light east window with geometrical tracery was added by G.E. Street during the 1858-68 restoration.

The broad south aisle contains several notable windows of different periods. To the east is a Tudor-arched window with four cinquefoil-headed lights above an arched subterranean entry to the crypt. The south wall features a fine five-light early fifteenth-century window with drop tracery in a four-centre-arched casement-mould surround, which is attributed to Richard Winchcombe, the designer of the chancel at Adderbury Church. A three-light early fourteenth-century window with cusped intersecting tracery and a three-light fifteenth-century window to the left of the porch with a depressed arch and drop tracery incorporating a transom are also present. The nineteenth-century south porch is flanked by chamfered arched recesses in the aisle walls and shelters a thirteenth-century doorway with a deeply-moulded arch. Five-light west windows of the aisles with intersecting tracery and head stops date from the seventeenth century and are contemporary with the tower; a plainer three-light window in the north wall is probably also a restoration from the same period.

The north aisle features a seventeenth-century porch with a moulded Tudor-arched doorway and a quatrefoil-panelled parapet with corner pinnacles. Two three-light fourteenth-century windows to the left of the porch have geometrical tracery. An east window matching that of the south aisle is also present. The nave clerestory contains six three-light four-centre-arched windows with Perpendicular drop tracery on each side, and a four-light window over the chancel. All roofs are shallow pitched with plain limestone parapets.

The tower was rebuilt after its collapse in 1634 and was not completed until circa 1683. It consists of four stages with massive diagonal buttresses and a crenellated limestone parapet with eight large crocketed pinnacles. The moulded four-centre-arched west doorway has hood-stops carved as an eagle and a monkey, and above it is a Classical entablature carried on bulbous pilasters. A four-light west window features Gothic-Survival tracery, and above it are large re-used stone figures of Saints Peter and Paul flanking a rectangular window. The bell-chamber stage has two-light openings with Y tracery, and on the east are two moulded lead eighteenth-century rainwater heads.

The interior contains several significant medieval features. The chancel features a fine late thirteenth-century sedilia and piscina incorporated in a four-bay arcade with detached shafts and leaf capitals. A thirteenth-century chancel arch of three chamfered orders (the inner being a nineteenth-century restoration) opens to the nave. The four-bay nave arcades, of two chamfered orders with circular and octagonal columns, date from the thirteenth century but were probably partly rebuilt in the seventeenth century. A tall tower arch is seventeenth-century.

The south aisle contains a mutilated fourteenth-century piscina, a chamfered tomb recess above which steps rise, and a tall doorway formerly leading to a wall stair. The north aisle has a thirteenth-century piscina near the blocked entry to a rood stair, and the early thirteenth-century north doorway, now internal, displays a fine moulded arch and detached shafts with stiff-leaf capitals. The north aisle roof, with moulded cambered beams, is probably seventeenth-century; the nave roof may incorporate old timbers but was rebuilt in 1843; the south aisle roof is nineteenth-century and the chancel roof twentieth-century. The north porch features an unusual seventeenth-century stone saucer vault.

Fittings include a fine traceried fifteenth-century screen, a font of 1664, and eighteenth-century communion rails, though most fittings are nineteenth-century. Monuments include a fourteenth-century effigy of a judge, part of a late fourteenth-century brass, and a small panelled chest tomb with indented reredos and a fragment of the brass inscription to William Billing (died 1533). Baroque wall tablets commemorate Beta Belchier (died 1686) and Francis Wakefield (died 1730). A small painted Hanoverian Royal Arms is also present. Stained glass includes an east window of 1888 by C.E. Kempe and two windows of 1923 and 1936 by A.J. Davies of the Bromsgrove Guild.

The church was repaired in 1843 and underwent major restoration between 1858 and 1868 by the architect G.E. Street. The tower was rebuilt after its collapse in 1634 and represents the final major phase of medieval construction at the site.