The South Porch
Finally, as you leave the church, please admire the 15th century South Porch. It is considered by many to be a Gothic masterpiece, and was described by John Betjeman as 'the most lovely in all England'.
The interior contains a complex lierne vault supporting the upper floor, with Christ's head in glory in the centre and other heads as bosses. There are three narrow windows on either wall with eight corbel brackets between - these probably supported statues removed during the Reformation.
The corbels are carved with grotesques, now mutilated and defaced, but a green man can be discerned, together with a cat playing a fiddle to three rats (thought to be a reference to a mid-15th century political satire).
The upper chamber or parvis (not open to the public) was originally intended as quarters for a priest. It is well fitted, with a fireplace with recess at the back that could be used as a bread oven, and a niche used to keep salt dry. On either side of the fireplace are two stone candle brackets and, on the opposite wall, a narrow bench and a cupboard recess. The flue for the fireplace was cleverly concealed in the central finial on the west face of the porch.
The graffiti of names on the walls and window jambs suggests that the chamber was used as a school room in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The south front of the porch is open, with a multi ordered archway with a crocketed ogee hoodmould swooping up to the base of the first of two canopied statue niches - the lower containing a statue of Our Lady with the Holy Child, and the upper containing God the Father from the Holy Trinity. The statues are badly eroded, but it is little less than a miracle that they survived the iconoclasm of the 15th and 16th centuries.
The string courses and facade on all three elevations contain small statuettes and grotesque heads, together with numerous repeating Tudor rose emblems. All have suffered badly from erosion; some are now almost unrecognisable whilst others, in more sheltered positions on the east face, are better preserved.
Original text by the late W C Fallows and the late Mrs Selina Balance; revised and extended by Stephen Ashby FRICS and Simon Wills