The most outstanding Norman church

St Peter's stands in a pretty grass churchyard in Northampton town centre, beside the buried remains of a Saxon palace. This 900-year-old Norman church is filled with glorious carved treasures. Inside, great Norman arches of plain and banded stone rise and flow with zig-zag waves.

They are supported by beautiful carved capitals, each overflowing with foliage, scrollwork, birds and beasts -- look for the man being swallowed by (or emerging from) a monster. These carvings were plastered over in the seventeenth century and were carefully unpicked with a bone knife in the early nineteenth century by local antiquarian Anne Elizabeth Baker, a labour of love lasting 11 years. Other highlights include a handsome brass lectern and carved wooden pews and monuments - including the bust of William Smith, the father of British geology.

Outside, strange half-human faces glare out from under the eaves, together with cruder, timeworn figures. There are other delights to be found include the fourteenth-century font, a twelfth-century grave slab with astonishingly clear relief carving and some fine Victorian stained glass.

Northampton Guide

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St Peter's Church features in Legacy Makers and Boundary Breakers: Extraordinary Women of Historic Churches, read more about the life and work of Anne Baker below:

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  Church of St Cyriac & St Julitta, Swaffham Prior, Cambridgeshire

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  A pair of eccentric churches

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  St Nicholas' Church, Feltwell, Norfolk

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  St Lawrence's Church, Broughton, Buckinghamshire

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  Stunningly detailed medieval wall paintings