The Hormeads

Normally I would cover St Nicholas, Great Hormead, and St Mary, Little Hormead, as separate posts but Arthur Mee covers them as one entity so who am I to diverge from the master?

When I visited St Mary in March there was a team of three CCT conservators busy at work in the church on the 12th century north door - if they weren't there I doubt I would have got access to the interior. According to the CCT website St Mary is a small, rural and homely piece of living history, with an 11th century nave and a 13th century chancel, divided by a grand Norman chancel arch. One of the two Norman doorways has its original door (now preserved inside). This is a rare and precious survival, with wonderful craftsmanship in wood and ironwork. Amongst the wealth of interest here is an exquisitely carved 14th century font and an unusual set of Charles II Royal Arms, of 1660. Ancient timbers survive in the roofs and support a later bell turret, containing two bells which may well have rung out over this beautiful area of agricultural north-east Hertfordshire for 600 years.

St Mary, in my opinion, is rather odd for a Hertfordshire church - the shingled belfry is reminiscent of a mid Essex church - but it's a step up from the humdrum Braintree architectural style perhaps because of the whitewashed wooden tower or it's situation. I'm glad that the CCT are fulfilling Arthur's wishes by remedying year's of neglect.

ST MARY. The fame of this small and lonely church is its N DOOR, with the most lavish display of C12 ironwork, two large interlaced quatrefoil patterns in the centre, and borders of scrolls and trails. The door belongs to the N doorway which has one order of colonnettes with scalloped capitals and an arch with a thick roll moulding and a thin unusual triangular moulding. The same capitals and mouldings grouped inside in the awkwardly depressed chancel arch. The S doorway is also Norman and simpler. In fact the whole nave is Norman (see also one deeply splayed small roundheaded N window), the chancel E.E. (the S lancet windows are original). - The roofs are of the late Middle Ages, with rough tie-beams in the nave, with diagonal wind-braces in the chancel. - FONT. Early C14, octagonal, with very pretty blank tracery. - ROYAL ARMS. Dated 1660, small but nicely carved; above the chancel arch.

St Nicholas has the worst extension in the history of church extensions - how it got through planning is beyond me, I suspect corruption. That aside I can see why Mee extolled St Mary over St Nicholas. Although on the face of it St Nicholas is the grander church, St Mary is more charming and intimate - St Nicholas feels Puritan but has some nice features.

ST NICHOLAS. Away from the village street, on a hill behind Great Hormead Bury. The church is much restored (1874), the chancel rebuilt, and the S porch an addition. W tower with diagonal buttresses (late C14 to late C15), nave, and two aisles. Three bays with octagonal piers, moulded capitals, and double-chamfered arches. The date may be c. 1300. The last much shorter arcade bays were added, probably later in the C14. The W tower arch still later, say c. 1400 (shafts with capitals and, in the diagonals, hollows without capitals). - FONT. Norman, undecorated, on thick circular stem and eight shafts set around. - PLATE. Two Chalices, 1740, 1748. - MONUMENT. Lt-Col. Stables, killed at Waterloo 1815, Grecian sarcophagus with the word Waterloo on it in an oval laurel Wreath. By Kendrick. 

Hormead. It is Hormead Great and Hormead Little, and they are half a mile apart, both with ancient churches, one of which we found sadly in need of restoration, hoping that the petition on its 500 year-old bell would be answered, St Margaret, pray for us.

It is Little Hormead that needs St Margaret's prayers. It has a Norman doorway in which a magnificent door has been hanging for 800 years, splendid with 12th-century ironwork, a very rare survival, and the splendid Norman chancel arch; the medieval bell with its silent prayer in Latin was on the floor. Some of the old houses here have fared better than the church, one black-and-white timbered farm making an arresting picture down the road, and the Old Glebe House having given a new lease of life to its long thatched barn by turning it into a home.

The nave and the north aisle are 13th century, the south aisle 14th, while the tower was finished in the 15th, the north chapel added in the 16th century, and the whole church was made to look new when the chancel was built in 1874. There are animal gargoyles on the outside walls showing rows of grinning teeth, and queer stone faces inside staring down from the open timbers of the roof. A rusty helmet hangs over the 17th-century memorial of William Brand, and there is a memorial to a soldier of the manor house, Colonel Stables, who served under Wellington and Sir John Moore, and sleeps near the battlefield of Waterloo, where he fell. A lovely face looks down from another stone, a relief of Betty Romer, who died in 1916. The pillared font is Norman.

Great Hormead has still the sails of its old post-mill stretched to the wind near the stump of a small smock-mill, and two miles down a lane we come upon a queer place called Brick House, which seemed to us to have lost itself in time and place, rising from the middle of an overgrown field, with stepped gables, and forbidding air enhanced by small peepholes in the walls, which command a view of every corner of the house and every point of the compass.

Flickr set (Gt).  Flickr set (Lt).

Furneux Pelham

St Mary the Virgin's main draw is the fantastic nave roof which is oak with the beams supported by carved Angels holding coats of arms and musical instruments, one of which holds the arms of the Norman de Furneux family who gave the village its name. At some stage the original wings were sawn off, probably due to decay, and in 1964, when the roof was restored, they were replaced with wings made of Honduras mahogany. They are garishly painted which, unlike the Cutte tomb in Arkesden, lifts the Angels from the ordinary to the extraordinary - I've seen unpainted Angels in other churches and, due to the height of the roof and poor lighting, they often fade into the shadows, here in Furneux they shout out their existence!

In a recess near the chancel there is a 17th century Portuguese leather reredos and an unnamed and undated brass of a husband and wife with their two sons and three daughters. On the tower is a diamond shaped clock with the motto 'Time flies, mind your business' - until 1906, when it was repainted it read 'Time flies, mind your own business'. 

ST MARY. A big church, Perp except for the long chancel whose lancet windows (two with inner nook-shafts) and Sedilia and Piscina arrangement and details (stiff-leaf capitals) date it as middle of the C13. Tall unbuttressed W tower with Herts spike. The nave aisles frame the tower. Two-storeyed embattled S porch with two-light windows, markedly higher than the un-embattled aisle. Big S chapel coming forward as far as the S porch. The windows Late Perp. As the chapel was built (by Robert Newport) about 1518 and the N and S aisle windows are of the same shape as those of the chapel, the same late date may be assumed for the former as well. Two-light clerestory windows. The N and S aisle arcades are of a late type too, with semi-octagonal shafts and hollows (without capitals) in the diagonals. Low-pitched nave roof with tie-beams, high-pitched chancel roof with struts and collar-beams. In the nave the sub-principals are carried on angels. - FONT. Octagonal, C13, of Purbeck marble with shallow blank pointed arches. - STAINED GLASS. In the S chapel Morris and Burne-Jones windows for the Calvert family, that on the S with four figures of angels 1866, that on the E with the Virgin, Gabriel (by Morris), and Michael 1873. The quality is outstanding, especially if compared with other Victorian glass. - MONUMENTS. Tomb-chest in the S aisle at the W end with cusped quatrefoils and shields. On it the exquisite, c. 3 ft long brass figures of a man and woman of the early C15. They lie under a cusped double ogee canopy with pinnacles to the l. and r. - Brass plate to R. Newport with kneeling figures, dated 1518, on a marble slab. - Tomb-chest of Edward Cason d. 1624, with black marble pilasters and top slab. Against the back wall inscription tablet.

 

 

 

 

Furneux Pelham. "Time Flies, Mind Your Business," announces the church clock for all to see; and a swarm of bees seemed to be taking the words to heart when we called, flying in and out under the clock. For the rest, time and business seemed merely to saunter by in this pleasant village off the highway.

Yet 800 years have passed since the Norman family of de Furneux gave the village its first name, and 700 years have gone since the chancel of the church was built. It still has its three stone seats for the priests. The rest of the church is 15th century, with clerestoried nave, aisles, two-storied porch, and west tower. The finest sight here is also from the early I5th century, the altar tomb with two figures cut in brass, a man and his widow under canopies. Another brass of a very small knight kneeling with his wife and five children is thought to portray Robert Newport, whose money built the south chapel, where an Elizabethan helmet hangs over the altar tomb of a later lord of the manor, Edward Cason.

The low-pitched roof of this chapel and the angels supporting it seem to have been modelled on the finer 15th-century roof of the nave, borne up by wooden angels holding shields, two painted with coats-of-arms. The font is 700 years old. Built into a wall are two stone coffins, and in the chapel we found the lid of another. The royal arms on the screen at the west end of the south aisle have the dates 1634, 1660, and 1831. It is indeed a Royalist church, and a story told here is that the vicar Richard Hancock marched up and down the churchyard sword in hand to prevent any Puritan making away with the altar rails or with the first of these royal arms.
 
The village street sinks into a hollow and then rises to the green verge and gates of the hall, a big Elizabethan house with curving Stuart gables among the older ones. We get a glimpse of it from the road through a window cut in a thick yew hedge.

Flickr set.