The Church of St Michael and All Angels : Discussion

Honeyman gives a detailed account and interpretation of the church in the Northumberland County History. He sees the east wall of the nave as of early Norman date (on the strength of an early 19th century sketch of the chancel arch by Rev Joseph Hodgson) and the chancel as having been rebuilt and extended in the later 12th century.

Around 1200 the nave received three-bay aisles and the chancel was lengthened again in the later 13th century, and a south transept, possibly with a western aisle, built. In the 14th century a crypt was formed under the chancel, raising the floor to its present level, and c 1340 the southeast window of the chancel; was inserted.

After a Post-Reformation period of decay, in 1672 the south transept was rebuilt, and at around the same time various alterations to the chancel carried out; documentary sources attest to a variety of repairs being carried out in the 1720s. In 1851-2 the Rev Aislabie Proctor ‘turned George Pickering, a Durham architect, loose on the church’ (as Honeyman puts it) with the result that the greater part of the fabric was rebuilt, and the church assumed its present character.

As usual, one has to take Honeyman’s interpretations with a pinch of salt; his overall pattern is no doubt correct, but his evidence for the dating of certain phases (e.g. the formation of the crypt, which neither he nor any other antiquarian has evidently seen) is often highly hypothetical. On the other hand, he simply dismisses the nave as ‘modern’, missing the obvious pre-Victorian fabric and the remains of the earlier west window.

It does appear that 12th century fabric survives in the western part of the chancel, but there is no clear evidence to separate this in date from the lost chancel arch. 13th century changes are evidence by the fragmentary remains of the nave arcades (parts of their eastern responds), the east end and lower courses of the north wall of the north aisle, and the low-side windows in the chancel.

The re-set head of a 14th century window may date the eastern extension of the chancel; there is no evidence for the date of the original south transept; perhaps rebuilt in 1672 (the date of is re-set finial cross), no pre-Victorian features survive. The character of the old masonry in the south aisle and at the west end suggests an 18th-century rebuilding; were the old arcades removed at this time? Total rebuilding from ground level might suggest that the nave was shortened at this time.

Honeyman’s criticisms of the 1851 - 2 remodelling are, it has to be admitted, justified. A relatively humble and much-patched multi-phase church typical of upland Northumberland was transformed into a Victorian Gothic edifice of a type that could have been built anywhere in the country, with absolutely no acknowledgement of the local vernacular.