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Beaulieu. They probably saw Patrixbourne merely as a
useful source of income and so took no real interest in the church as
such. Similarly Merton, although presenting the incumbent, had little
incentive to improve the building. The only record referring to the
structure of Patrixbourne church is that from 1317 stipulating that the
vicar was responsible for any necessary repairs to the chancel.
A window in the decorated style, and so possibly from the
first half of the fourteenth century, is to be found in the north wall of
the present north aisle to the west of the door. However, the aisle was
added around 1824, and so it is reasonable to assume, as Tatton-Brown
does, that like the Romanesque north door, it has been reset. However,
there is no mention in the Merton Priory records of the period that any
window was added to any part of the church or of an earlier window being
replaced. There is, then, little evidence of any building after the
completion of the first stage at the end of the twelfth century until the
fifteenth century.45
There was a considerable programme of alterations in the
fifteenth century when the Isaac family held a number of manors in
Patrixbourne and the surrounding area.46 The large,
three-light west window is perpendicular in style and there are heads at
the stops of the hood mould.47 The head on the left looks
female and the one on the right male; could these be the donors? The
western buttresses may have |
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been
added to support the wall to allow the large window to be inserted.
Tatton-Brown agrees with Livett that the south-west aisle was heightened
and the square-headed window installed or replaced there (also
perpendicular in style) in the fifteenth century. The southeast chapel,
now called Bifrons, was also added or, possibly, re-built around the same
time. The square-headed window in the south wall of the chapel matches
that in the south-west aisle.48 On the interior and
looking rather like a blocked window, there is a small round-headed niche
set in the east wall between the larger, twentieth-century window and the
south wall.49 The niche is not visible in any way from the
outside but may either have been the remains of a matching window for that
at the west end of the south aisle which was ‘saved’ when the chapel
was built.
We know that the chapel was in use in the 1440s because John
Isaac II,50 who was born around 1380 and died before
July 3, 1443, ‘was buried with his wife Cecily in a chancel of the
church of Patricksbourne, which was known as the Isaac chapel’ (Hasted).51
It would, therefore, seem that the chapel was either built for this
purpose or already existed. On the south wall there is the surround of
what appears to have been a tomb decorated in the style of the
mid-fifteenth century but the tomb itself has been removed (Plate VII)52 |