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father-in-law. Tesson was visited at La Lande-Patry by
King John on April 3, 1203 on his way to Bonneville- sur-Touque.
Presumably, King John hoped, but failed, to persuade Tesson to support him
in his struggle to retain Normandy. In 1208 Tesson’s estates in England,
including Patrixbourne, were awarded to Geoffrey de Say.13 It
is clear that Joan Patrick received the church and its manor because when
she married Jean de Préaux he gave the church and its income to the
priory he founded at Beaulieu, near Préaux.14 It is not
known exactly when Jean de Préaux gave the holdings acquired as a result
of his marriage to Beaulieu, but it would seem reasonable to assume that
he did not live at Patrixbourne.
The Fabric
Both Kahn and Tatton-Brown cite as evidence of an earlier, probably
eleventh-century building, the saddle-shaped block which forms the head of
the small window on the south side of the west wall and the roughly laid
herring-bone masonry, also in the west wall.15 Among the
other churches in east Kent with surviving remnants of pre-Conquest
fabric, Whitfield provides a particularly interesting comparison because
it is relatively unaltered.16 The exterior of the west end of
the Whitfield nave is of similar proportions to that at Patrixbourne,
although like |
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Patrixbourne
it is clad in flint so that not much actual evidence is visible.
With the exception of the north aisle, the plan of
Patrixbourne church today is, at first glance, probably much as it was at
the end of the twelfth century (Fig. 1). The main changes in the
view from the south are the later spire, the existence of the Bifrons
chapel17 and the creation of a ridge roof over both the
chapel and the remains of the south aisle to the west.18 The
chapel was probably added some time after the twelfth century and is a
re-building of the south aisle between the tower and the chancel. The
overall length of the nave and the chancel and the position of the porch,
however, are unchanged. The twelfth-century church was fundamentally a
two-cell building, but with the addition of a narrow south aisle. The
latter feature is unusual and may, as Kahn surmises, have originally been
a way of incorporating — or making full use of — the floor plan of an
earlier church. The two cells consist of a nave that is longer, wider and
taller than the chancel giving the appearance of two boxes, one of which
would fit inside the other.
Many such two-cell churches were built in east Kent and in
Normandy in the twelfth century. The examples from Normandy are often
larger than those in Kent and are probably slightly older. A few, |