Description

TQ 93 SE WAREHORNE CHURCH ROAD (south side) 5/151 Church of St. Matthew 27.11.57 GV I Parish church. C13, with C14 aisles and chancel, tower of 1777 and north porch 1784. Ragstone with brick tower and porch. Plain tiled roofs. Chancel, nave with aisles, western tower and north porch. Three stage western tower with offset angle buttresses, plat bands and parapet, with north-west stair turret. Leaded cross-window and belfry lights, with simple segmentally headed western doorway. Rebuilt 1777 after lightning destroyed the old tower in 1770. Aisles with tall plinth with 2 light and 3 light C14 windows with cusped intersecting tracery. Chancel with square headed late C14 windows with cusped tracery. Perpendicular East window of 4 lights. The east window of the north aisle appears to incorporate an earlier tracery pattern built into later C14 window (due to restoration at some later date, perhaps). Red and blue chequered brick porch with segmental gable and dated keystone over door inscribed 1784. C18 panelled south door. Interior: C15 tower arch survives; tall arch with wave moulded surround on round moulded responds, with wave and hollow chamfered inner arch. Three bay arcades in nave, with round piers of Bethersden marble, with deep undercut capitals and double chamfered arches. North-western respond with fine carved head. Roof of 4 crown posts on moulded tie beams with quatrefoil pierced knee braces. Aisles with roofs of 4 short moulded crown-posts, almost as high as the nave roof. Eastern most side windows in each case with reveals brought down as seating. Depressed arched doors and passage doors to former rood stair and loft. No chancel arch, just a stepping-in, with roof of 3 spindly crown posts on 1 unmoulded and 2 moulded tie beams with blank traceried knee braces, the wall plate with stylised flower enrichment. The easternmost window reveals to north and south brought down to form seating. Fittings: window seat to chancel south wall enriched as sedilia with integral piscina in the eastern angle, a coved niche in the western angle, with deeply undercut naturalistic vine frieze, damaged. Arched aumbrey in east wall. C20 carved wooden reredos flanked by e.C18 text boards. C19 altar rail; pulpit of 1905. Ogee headed shelved piscina in south aisle with adjacent aumbrey. Simple C17 Bethersden marble font. Box pews in nave, installed 1738 (north side) (centre) and 1839 (south side). Screen to tower with simple panels and panelled door with scrolled and pedimented surround to Royal Arms, dated 1708; painted at the same time as the text boards in chancel, the Lord's prayer and Creed against the tower, and 4 sentence boards in the aisles (and by the same craftsman who painted the hall archway at Leacon Hall, Warehorne, item 5/153 also in 1708). Tower with boarded octagonal stair inserted 1820. Lugged benefaction board dated 1824 in south aisle. Fragments of C14 glass (figures) in north and south aisles, and heraldic and floral fragments in chancel. Patches of painted foliage in south aisle and by font in nave. Quarry tiles and some old encaustic tiles throughout, and medieval coffin lid in 3 sections by south door. Memorials: brass plaque in nave to Thomas Jely, d.1438; plain white bolection moulded wall tablet to John Camley, d.1681, and white marble plaque at nave east end to Joseph Hodges and family (1802 onwards), with Arms on apron, 2 ball finials and urn over. A board hung below the corbel head at the north end records that J. Woolley, Churchwarden, painted the church in 1850-1-2. (See B.O.E. Kent I, 591-2; church guide).

Listing NGR: TQ9871832459

External Links

• Wikidata Q17529269

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Recommended Books

• 
  Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990
• 
  Old House Handbook: A Practical Guide to Care and Repair
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  Oxfordshire (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)
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  For the Record
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  Dorset (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)
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  Suffolk: East (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)