Deerhurst, Gloucestershire

Ancient and modern

St Mary’s, Deerhurst, was one of the first historic churches I ever visited. I was sent there by a school teacher, who wanted me to see a Saxon building, and to go there I had to persuade my parents to take me in the car a few miles along the A38 Gloucester to Tewkesbury road, and up the lane leading towards the River Severn. We enjoyed seeking out details of almost unbelievable antiquity – Saxon carvings inside and out, the font, with its spiral decoration – and marvelling when the guidebook told us that the latter had been at one time removed from the church, lost, and found again doing outdoor duty as a planter, trough, or some such.*

I’ve been back many times since, and taken in the building’s later architecture too. I’m fascinated, for example, by the capitals of the nave arcades. They seem to date from the early-13th century, when the church’s aisles began to take their current form. They are all different. One is like capitals I’ve seen before in churches of the Early English Gothic style: this is a variation on the stylised foliage that the Victorians called ‘stiff leaf’ (Pevsner calls it ‘windswept stiff-leaf’, with the addition of small heads peeping out from the vegetation. I always find these heads charming, whether they come in large numbers, as at Much Marcle, or are thin on the ground, as they are here.

Another capital has just stylised foliage, which is given a bit more space and takes a striking form. The date must be similar, but the shapes of the leaves, with their strong lines and elegant curves, seems akin to the Art Nouveau of around 1890–1900. I’m not suggesting for one moment that some late-Victorian decorator saw this capital and based a whole artistic movement on it. Both medieval carvers and Art Nouveau designers looked at nature appreciatively and derived patterns from it. No wonder they sometimes ended up with something slightly similar; the medieval masons were no doubt also influenced by some of the foliage in earlier Romanesque ornament. Wherever the inspiration comes from, the effect made me catch my breath.

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* I’ve heard similar tales in several other churches, to the extent that I’m wondering if this is the ecclesiological equivalent of an urban myth.

Deerhurst, Gloucestershire

Saxon Severnside

This is the other Saxon church at Deerhurst, to which I referred in the previous post. It’s now the parish church of St Mary, though it began life as a Saxon minster, becoming a Benedictine priory a few years before the Norman conquest. The building has been much altered over the centuries, and architectural historians have traced many phases of construction, including several in the Saxon period as the church grew form a small, narrow building without a tower to the larger, wider structure, with its tall west tower, that we see today. The tower is a real local landmark, visible from a long way across the low-lying Severnside country.

From the outside, the building doesn’t look that much like a Saxon church, because most of the windows are late-medieval. But many of the walls they pierce are Saxon, and inside there are the outlines of numerous earlier blocked window openings that allow one to imagine what the building must once have been like.

The interior is full of fascinating details from the Saxon period and later. Here are just a couple, first a detail of the carved design on the font. This kind of spiral motif also appears on English manuscripts of the 9th century and before, and Anglo-Saxon jewellery of the same period, leading experts to date the font to before 875. I once read that it had disappeared for years before being found in a farmyard in use as a trough, but I’ve been unable to verify this story.

There are several other outstanding pieces of Saxon carving in the church, including an angel, a Madonna, and this animal head projecting from a wall at the west end. Those incised lines reveal a sure touch, as does the way the stone is slightly asymmetrical, in sensitive and lifelike counterpoint to the stylized lines. This may have been a remote, provincial church, but a thousand years or more ago it played host to some fine artists.

Deerhurst, Gloucestershire

Lost and found

Saxon churches are rare, but in the village of Deerhurst, not far from the River Severn, there are two. This is the smaller, Odda’s Chapel, a very simple stone building now attached to a timber-framed farmhouse. For years – indeed centuries – it vanished from view, incorporated into the house, the stone nave serving as a kitchen, the small chancel divided into upstairs and downstairs rooms. No one knew that it was anything other than an old part of the house.

In 1675, a stone with a Latin inscription was discovered nearby. The text says that ‘Earl Odda ordered this royal chapel to be built and dedicated in honour of the Holy Trinity, for the soul of his brother Aelfric who left his body in this place,’ and goes on to date the building’s dedication to 12 April 1056. A dated foundation stone like this for such an early building is very unusual, but back in 1675 when it was found, no one knew the whereabouts of the building to which it referred.

Then in 1885 someone doing some repair work to the farmhouse discovered an old window and the truth began to dawn. Archaeologists unpicked the two buildings in the 1960s, restoring the chapel’s separate entrance and repairing the roof. The small, bare space inside is lit by tiny, narrow windows, the chancel arch is a simple stone horseshoe design, details that would be familiar to masons and worshippers almost a thousand years ago.