Langton by Spilsby, Lincolnshire

Out of time but not out of place

Among the box pews of the perfect Georgian interior of the church at Langton by Spilsby in my previous post is a object that has existed for much longer than the church itself. It’s the font, which must have been recycled from a medieval church, presumably on the same site, when the current building was put up in the early-18th century. This sometimes happened with fonts. As vessels of the sacrament of baptism they acquire a holiness of their own, which, combined with their aura of antiquity (generations have been Christened in that font), and sometimes their sheer beauty and craftsmanship, gives them a good chance of survival.

This one is a ‘pattern book’ font on which each face illustrates a design of window tracery, and it is similar to a font in Warwickshire that I’ve posted about before. It’s late medieval and bears tracery designs that are mostly in what we now call the Decorated Gothic style of the 14th century. But there’s one face with a design of the Perpendicular style that spread across England in the late-14th and 15th centuries, indicating that the font must be late-14th century at least. My photograph shows a couple of particularly crisp Decorated tracery designs. Although out of place chronologically, the font sits beautifully among Langton’s box pews and under its curvaceous, dome-like cover, presumably a contribution of the woodworkers who fitted out the church in the Georgian period.

Langton by Spilsby, Lincolnshire

Carpenter’s Georgian

Across the lane from the picturesque cottage in my previous post is the church of St Peter and St Paul, Langton by Spilsby, a brick building in a severe classical style dating probably to the 1720s. For me, the main interest of this building is its unspoilt Georgian interior. It’s beautifully fitted out with panelled box pews, three-decker pulpit , and wooden panelling behind the altar. At the west end there’s also a wooden gallery supported on fluted columns, one of which is just visible in the left foreground of my photograph.

This is the kind of interior that church-crawlers mean when they talk about a ‘preaching box’ – a church, that is, specifically designed for Protestant worship in which the important thing is that the congregation is able to sit and listen to the sermon. So there’s nothing much in the way of statuary or painting, the pulpit dominates the space rather than the altar, and the shoe-box shape of the building makes for good acoustics. Clear glass in the windows provides light enough for reading one’s Bible or hymn book and in this particular church the natural light can be supplemented with a generous number of candles – there are candle-holders everywhere.

The pews are arranged facing inwards towards the central aisle. This is quite an unusual arrangement for a parish church (it’s more common in the chapels of Oxbridge colleges) and takes the focus away from the altar. It also makes it hard for those on the right to look at the preacher, but I suppose the important thing is to listen, not to look. Whatever the practicalities, it makes for a pleasing, symmetrical layout. Whoever the carpenter was, he must have been pleased with the job. The curving panelling around the tiny apse, mirrored by the pews at the far end, are particularly satisfying.

Perhaps one of the occupants of those commodious east-end curving-fronted pews was Bennet Langton, writer and close friend of Dr Johnson, who was born in the great house nearby. One of the hatchments (the lozenge-shaped panels bearing funerary coats of arms) on the church wall is his. But the small quiet country church of Langton by Spilsby, for all the sophistication of its furnishing, seems a world away from the busy literary world in which Johnson and his friend played a prominent part.

Langton by Spilsby, Lincolnshire

What shape is a house?

I checked the Pevsner Buildings of England volume on Lincolnshire before setting out to find the severe classical church of Langton by Spilsby, all red brick and box pews, but I didn’t notice the book’s two lines on this nearby cottage: ‘E of the church an eminently picturesque cottage orné,* circular, with a conical, thatched, overhanging roof.’ Fortunately this eye-catching product of the Picturesque movement was the first thing I did notice when I pulled up by the church.

Pevsner gets it right, more or less. He might have mentioned the mud and stud construction, the Gothic pointed windows, the elaborate pattern of the glazing bars (a mix of elongated octagons and lozenges), and the fact that the roof overhang is supported by slender columns, but we get the idea. There’s an odd thing though. Would you call this cottage circular? Its footprint seems to me octagonal, with fairly crisp corners to the wall and a column at each corner. The thatched roof smooths out the shape, as thatched roofs do, but still has more or less obvious facets. By the time your eye reaches the top of the roof, you’re gazing at an elliptical chimney pot. So: Circular? Octagonal? Metamorphic, perhaps.

There have been at least three big houses at Langton – an old hall, a rebuild of 1822 that didn’t work out because of bad foundations and was demolished, and a third, a Victorian hall, that has also been pulled down. This small but striking cottage, perhaps built in the early-19th century to please the owner of the estate and house servants or farm workers, has outlived them all, a survivor in a quiet lane by the church and the ubiquitous Lincolnshire farms.

- - -

* Cottage orné Rustic house of picturesque design, as the English Heritage definition has it. Cottages ornés were built in the 18th and 19th centuries and have features such as polygonal plans, thatched roofs, pointed or quatrefoil windows, and ornate or rustic woodwork.