Historic Churches 2019

8 BCD SPECIAL REPORT ON HISTORIC CHURCHES 26 TH ANNUAL EDITION ignored by Davies, possibly because the hierarchical and distinctly Catholic liturgies of the Middle Ages were definitely not what he wanted to see continued. Neither does he make much of the role of guilds in creating chapels in churches, (except to comment on how benches had spread from the guilds’ chapels into the body of the church, limiting the use to which it could be put). However, from the late 12th century, family chapels, and from the next century the growth of guilds and chantries, created the demand for dedicated worship space. Regardless of the parish population, it was these needs that caused the enlargement of parish churches rather than any role as a village hall. Village meetings and certainly local courts would have been held in premises owned by the owner of the manor, perhaps in the hall of a steward, reeve or bailiff’s house if not the lord’s own hall. In the later Middle Ages, church houses, guild halls and market crosses became used for formal communal activities. HOW THE NAVE WAS REALLY USED What did happen in the nave then? The essential point of attending church was to witness the sacrament during the mass. The leading parish families stood or sat in the chancel (despite frequent episcopal orders to the contrary) and the next most influential people would congregate in front of the chancel screen under the rood, Christ’s figure on the cross in the chancel arch. The need for a separate Lady Chapel and for dedicated family burial space initially meant adding nave aisles or transverse chapels at the east end of the nave (often mistakenly called transepts). They were separated from the nave by parclose screens or by curtains within the arcades. The later guild chapels and chantries, each with an altar for a retained priest to celebrate mass, would have been behind partitions too. Different window designs, fragmentary wall paintings, bits of stained glass, corbels, empty niches and small piscina may be the only physical evidence of such chapels today. Therefore, what we now call aisles were sub-divided by screens into separate chapels accessed from the nave or even their own external doors. Each patron might commission their own window giving the aisle wall varied sizes and shapes of window. Screened chapels could well leave the nave somewhat cramped and dark, which was perhaps the inducement from the 15th century to raise the arcades, add a clerestory and insert a big west window. The growth of private devotions to favourite saints encouraged many images which have hardly survived, being targeted by Edward VI and later, the Puritans; perhaps St Christopher wall paintings, usually visible from a door, are the most common. A few paintings survive on nave arcade columns, such as Christ as the Man of Sorrows at Lydiard Tregoze (Wiltshire) or the Crucifixion at Broughton (Oxfordshire). Occasionally, small niches or just corbels can be seen (or are known to have existed); Kirkby Malham (West Yorkshire) remarkably has a niche to nearly every nave pier, each subtly different. If the nave was aisleless, then images were placed on the window splay within painted niches or on painted screens or cloths or just in the stained glass. That and any statuary have long gone and restorers have sadly stripped plaster from walls and piers. It is only documentary evidence, especially from wills, that tell us now about the existence of so many images in churches. Membership of a guild was so important to people’s social and economic life, as well as their spiritual life, that it is true to say that the average parish church really was the hub of a community in the late Middle Ages. However, the overriding activity within a medieval church was worship and religious devotion. The provision of appropriate spaces for this to take place was the prime reason to build and enlarge a church. Non-worship activities clearly did take place somewhere inside some churches on occasion, but this was the exception and not the rule. SEEKING JUSTIFICATION Heritage protection favours keeping a building in its original use wherever possible, so a greater degree of alteration may be justified where a building’s viability is at stake. However, harm to the significance of any listed building must always be weighed carefully against the benefits, avoiding spurious justifications which distort this balance. There are documented instances of a medieval church nave being used as a public space, but to suggest that all church naves were regularly used in this way over-simplifies the issue and should not be used to justify radical changes. As is normal in conservation, each case has to be considered individually and on its own merits, including defining the intrinsic benefits of contemporary uses . Further Reading Incorporated Church Building Society, Fifty Modern Churches , ICBS London, 1947 Incorporated Church Building Society, Sixty Post-War Churches: Churches, church centres, dual-purpose churches , ICBS London, 1956 P Cowley, The Church Houses: Their religious and social significance , London, 1970 P S Barnwell, T Cooper and S Brown (eds), ‘Seating in the nave of the pre-Reformation parish church’, Pews, Benches and Chairs: Church seating in English parish churches from the fourteenth century to the present , London, 2011 RICHARD HALSEY FSA , now retired, was English Heritage’s faith buildings manager. He is former president of the British Archaeological Association and maintains an active research interest in medieval architecture. Email richard@rhalsey.co.uk Other surviving indicators of how the medieval church interior was subdivided by chapels and dedications to saints include niches on the nave piers at Kirkby Malham, West Yorkshire and a painted niche in a window splay at Westhall, Suffolk. (Photos: Richard Halsey)