(DEDICATION IS UNKNOWN)

The rear of the church It is impossible to photograph the front due to the giant Yew Tree and the closeness of the main road

THE HISTORY OF THE CHURCH

The church is remarkable in having no dedication. It has just been Corhampton Church as far as we know for the whole of its long life.

It has more Saxon work in it than any other in the Meon Valley, and has remained almost unaltered from the time it was built. It is a wonderful example of a small village Church of pre-Norman Conquest times, though strangely enough it is not mentioned in the Doomsday Book.

It has the look of being built on an artificial mound. This was rare for a Christian Church, and the very interesting suggestion has been made that it may stand on the site of a heathen temple of Roman or earlier times; these temples were sometimes built on man-made mounds.There is no documentary evidence of this, and if the mound had been so old we would have expected that some early objects would have been found in the digging of graves, but none ever has. So we can do no more than record the suggestion as being a possibility without proof.

The Meonwaras were among the last people in England to whom Christianity was brought. We learn from the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England that St. Wilfred, Bishop of York, spent five years among the south and west Saxons from 681 to 686 after a journey to Rome when it was not possible for him to return to Northumbria. He preached in the Isle of Wight and in the province of the Meonwara, and although Bedewas writing in Jarrow he was well informed about affairs in the south of England through his friend Nothelm, Bishop of London and afterwards Archbishop of York. Bede was interested in the career of Wilfred as a fellow Northumbrian, and there is no reason to question his statement.

The interior of the church showing the Saxon arch

Warnford claims to have been Wilfred's headquarters when he was preaching in the valley, the claim being based on a tablet in the porch at Warnford, and though there are a number of Churches which have Saxon work in them, there is little in their fabric that can be dated to Wilfred's time. Most likely he built a number of temporary mud and wattle Churches which were replaced by stone Churches later on. By about the year 1000 Christianity was established, parish boundaries had been laid out and the building of permanent Churches was possible.

The Church was served by the Canons of Titchfield up to the time of the Reformation. In 1545, the village of Lomer was deserted, the Church there fell into ruins and its parish was joined to Corhampton. From the Reformation it had its own Rector up till 1928, when it was joined with Meonstoke.

THE FABRIC OF THE CHURCH
The walls of the nave and the west part of the south wall of the chancel are all pre-Conquest work. Arthur R. and Phyllis M. Green, (Saxon Architecture and Sculpture in Hampshire 1951) date it to the first quarter of the eleventh century, and probably before 1020. The walls are of plastered whole flints and the corners are made of long and short stones, which are a mark of Saxon work, and in the wall spaces are pilasters, or straight uprights of stone put in to strengthen the flint work of the walls; these are also typical of Saxon work. The pilasters rise from a projecting base course, and at the eaves are topped by a horizontal course of wrought stone which is continued across the west gable. An unusual feature of the pilaster strips is the treatment of their bases, which spring from a stone carved as a group of three scrolled leaves or brackets on the base course. The best preserved is on the west of the south door. Some of the others are very worn. The pilasters and the long and short corners of the nave are of stone from the Isle of Wight either from Binstead or Quarr. The walls are remarkably thin, as Saxon walls often were. They are only 2ft. 6ins. thick.

The chancel originally had a large round window. This is shown in the illustration inside the front cover, which is a water-colour hanging in the Church which looks from its style to be early nineteenth century. The east end and the north wall of the chancel fell down in 1855 due to road widening work when the mound was dug into and the foundations weakened. This cannot have been the turnpike road, the present A32, which is well back from the Church with the river in between. It must have been what is now the entrance to the next door house called The Yard, but which I believe to have been in earlier days a road which came from Exton, past Exton Farm and into the A32 by The Yard gate. The water- colour mentioned before shows a clearly fenced track along here, and a pen-and-ink drawing of 1908 on the front cover, in "Highways and Byways of Hampshire" shows a wide, muddy track. Indeed it is still a footpath today. We have suffered much from traffic and road-widening in recent years, but they did not give much cause for grumbling as far back as 1855. The chancel was built up again rather poorly and clumsily in red brick, but almost certainly on the old foundations, so that from the inside the appearance was not altered except that the stonework of the east window is modern. The vestry on the north side, the porch, and a big brick buttress in the south-west corner are also modern. There is a plan hanging inside the Church drawn by the architect, S. C. Horseman, in 1917 which shows the different periods of the building very clearly.

Two things to be looked at from the outside are, first, the blocked-up north doorway, which is an interesting architectural feature. It has a semi-circular head and is cut straight through the wall without any projections, just a plain rib all round it on the outside. The point where the arch springs from the uprights is a stone carved rather unusually in horizontal rolls, and the bases of the jambs are round and bulbous. Above the arch a pilaster runs up to the eave. A lancet window of the thirteenth century has been put into the masonry, so the doorway must have been blocked then or earlier. The south doorway was once just the same, but since the building of the porch, which has a buttress as one of its walls, nothing but the rib framing the arch and the pilaster strip above it can be seen.

The other thing to notice is the Saxon sundial to the east of the south porch. It is divided, not into twelve sections as a modern clock would be, but into eight. The Saxons divided the day into eight tides and not into twelve hours. There are curious bulbous objects at the end of each mark. The hole in the centre for the projection which cast the shadow can be seen. The dial is a reddish-brown stone quite different from anything else in the Church and it may very likely be older than the Church and go back to an earlier building, perhaps even to the time of St. Wilfred himself.

At the west end of the nave above the horizontal course are two square-headed openings which once held bells.

THE INTERIOR
On. going inside, the dominant feature is the perfect and untouched Saxon chancel arch, illustrated on the back cover. It is very simple, with only the keystone projecting, and all the stones which form the arch run right through from side to side.

In the sanctuary, on the north side, is an old altar stone which is most likely Saxon. It has six consecration crosses roughly carved on it. Five on the top, one in the middle and one in each corner, is very common, but it is rare to have a sixth carved on the front edge. The Victoria County History, published in 1908, says that it stood then in the south porch having been used till a short time before as a seat under the yew tree, and that in the early part of the nineteenth century it was in the floor of the Church. Opposite to it is a stone seat which is probably thirteenth century.

The roof of the nave, which was plastered up till 1906 when the rafters were uncovered, is about 1600 or rather earlier. Some panelling on the right-hand side of the entrance as you go in, forming the back of the first pew, and the pulpit, are about the same date. The windows were enlarged in the thirteenth century. On the north wall of the nave near the gallery are a number of incised lines, done when the plaster was fresh, in the form of a cross made by intersecting arcs of similar sized circles.

The font at the west end under the gallery is very difficult to date. It has a small round bowl with a line of cable moulding running round the middle. The detail suggests the twelfth century, but many experts have said that
it is Saxon.

The west gallery is mid-Victorian and so is the little organ which is still in use. It was hand pumped until 1976, and is now electrically blown.

There are two bells, the treble inscribed "In God is my hope 1619 I.H. and the second dated 1828.

The pulpit is early Jacobean on a modern base. The pews and the wooden platform on the floor date from 1906, when a good deal of restoration work was done. They were all made by local craftsmen. Recently, with a grant from the Historic Churches Preservation Trust, all the woodwork and the roof timbers were treated against woodworm and beetle.

THE WALL PAINTINGS
Some of these paintings had been known to exist for some time but no one knew how many there were or how good was the quality. They were uncovered in 1968 by Mrs. Baker and her assistants and the cost was paid by a generous grant from the Pilgrim Trust. In the nave, they are in poor condition compared with the chancel. On the north wall of the nave an Agony in the Garden has been identified as part of a series on the Passion which once covered the whole wall. On the south side of the chancel arch is one which is probably an expulsion from the Garden of Eden. In the chancel the principal theme is the story of St. Swithun, the first Bishop of Winchester. Not all the subjects can be identified, but at the eastern end of the south wall is the story of the old woman with the basket of eggs. The saint had gone to inspect the building of the bridge over the Itchen at the bottom of the High Street; there was a big crowd and the old woman, bringing her eggs in to sell in the market, was jostled and the basket knocked out of her hand; the saint restored the eggs to her unbroken. The eggs can be seen in the picture falling to the ground. Next to this picture are two men, the head
of one of whom is cut off by new plaster, who are carrying something which looks like a stretcher. This is a more doubtful identification but there is story of a young man who was frightened by two wild women and fell into the river; taken out as dead he was placed beside the tomb of the saint where, after three days, he was restored. Round the corner, on the chancel arch wall, is a rearing horse. The paintings are bordered by bands of colour and a lozenge riband pattern. Underneath are elaborately painted representations of loose hangings and veils, very rare indeed for so early a period, some patterned with medallions representing such subjects as lions couchant, or lying down, on the north side, and two doves tail-to-tail with their heads turned round to look at each other, or adorsed in heraldic language, on the south side.

The wall paintings

It is hard to be precise over the date of the paintings. They could be of the same date as the Church, or they could be as late as 1225, but on the whole it is likely that they are twelfth century, but whether early or late in the century we do not know. Professor Wormald has said of them . The real importance of the chancel scheme is that it is the most elaborate decorative scheme that survives in English Romanesque painting." They are true fresco with a very smooth finish.

Inside the chancel on the north side is a time switch which will turn on the lights to show you the paintings more clearly.

THE CHURCHYARD

The giant Yew tree overshadows the church

Outside in the Churchyard is the gigantic yew tree, one of the finest for miles around. There is no way of dating a tree except by cutting it down and counting the rings, and it would be a pity to do that. And even if it were done it might well give a date too young, as the tree has surely ceased to grow though it is still full of life. Williams Freeman in "Field Archaeology as Illustrated by Hampshire" 1915, has an interesting passage on the age of yew trees. Two which he measured, whose age could be put from local information roughly back to 1200, each had a girth of 15ft. 9ins. Another at Merdon Castle, five miles south west of Winchester, had a girth of 22ft. 9ins., and was growing on a pre-Norman Conquest bank. The girth of the Corhampton yew is 23 feet, so we can say with some confidence that it was planted at about the time when the Church was built, and is therefore very little short of a thousand years old. Fifteen props support its outlying branches.

Near the entrance gate of the Churchyard on the left-hand side going out is a coffin-shaped flower bed with a stone surround. It is indeed a coffin dating from Roman times. It was dug up in 1917 in Little Shawford Meadow, near the Grinch. The body it contained was buried in Meonstoke Churchyard, and the coffin and inner lead lining were put in Corhampton Churchyard. Then later it was filled with earth and flowers.

There is a splendid show of daffodils in the spring on the bank over- looking the road.