Little Maplestead

We habitual church crawlers must, of course, be prepared to pursue our passion in city, town, village or hamlet. We love the big town churches with their architectural jigsaw puzzles and their rich furnishings. We love seeking out those obscure treasures in obscure parts of the countryside, negotiating improbably narrow tortuous lanes with grass growing up the middle in order to get to them , ever fearful of Farmer Giles appearing around the next bend perched high up on a tractor the size of a small house and looking nonchalant as your nice new car flirts with a ditch, brambles scratching your paintwork, mud encrusting your tyres. And if you have never experienced that, O Best Beloved, then you are not serious about your hobby! Or you are a a rank beginner. Or even a wimp!

But you will also know that feeling of spiritual uplift when you see a six hundred year old church sitting in the middle of nowhere, glowing in the sun, surrounded by greenery, birdsong serenading you. You will know the mixture of hope and fear when you lift the latch on the door and the endorphins-soaked elation when the door swings open. How many times have you gleefully said “it’s open” to your companion?

On such a day I arrived at Little Maplestead Church in rural North Essex and life felt so good. After two years of Covid-19 the custodians of this little church were still prepared to put themselves out for the likes of you and me.

In the unlikely even that you arrived here unbriefed (and if you are reading this then that is impossible for you, isn’t it?) you would immediately be struck by its odd shape. For this is one of only four churches in the country that has a circular nave. This was not a whim on the part of its builders. Such churches were only built by the Knights Templar and the the Knights Hospitaller - now the Knights of St John - both of which orders were emulating the fourth century Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem which they saw when taking part in the Crusades. Of the four round churches in England, only the Temple Church in London and Little Maplestead are associated with the two orders. As its name implies, the Temple Church was built by the Templars, leaving Little Maplestead as the only round-naved church in England associated with the Hospitallers.

The village and manor were given to the order in 1185. They built a commandery across the road from where the church is situated and then a church for their community to use. It probably replaced an Anglo-Saxon church. The brighter of you will take one look at this church and know that it was not built in 1185 when its style would probably have been Transitional. The building we see dates from around 1335. Even then, there has been much rebuilding since.

It is possible that the round walls - although not, obviously, the windows - are from the original Norman-era church. Or the nave may have been rebuilt on precisely the same ground plan. The apse is contemporary with the rotunda which is very odd. Whoever heard of a fourteenth century apse? Was that also simply rebuilt over an existing floor plan? Logically, it seems more likely then that a good bit of the walling is original but we don’t know.

In the mid-nineteenth century the church was drastically altered. All of the windows were replaced, the exterior was resurfaced. The rather pretty hexagonal wooden belfry was added and the west porch rebuilt.

Pevsner said of all this: “Those who believe in texture and the handiwork of the mediaeval mason will not be pleased with Little Maplestead”. Well, more fool them. They should get over themselves! This little church is a visual delight. Its connections with the Hospitallers are real and it is in its own way unique. To be here on a sunny January morning in 2022 was to fall in love with my England all over again.

Left: The west entrance of the church is perhaps as pretty as any in England. Centre: The church, despite its unique nave, is remarkably simple. There is no separation of nave and chancel. The chancel itself is a simply rectangle with an apsidal east end. Around the camera is the circular nave. Why was there no screen? I presume this was because the Knights were themselves soldier-monks, not lay people. Right: Looking towards the west end you get a better impression of the hexagonal arcade within the rotunda walls. This is not the whole story, of course. Each of the columns is linked by another arch to the nave walls. You will get a better understanding of this from the plan at the bottom of this page..

Left: The pretty chancel roof. Centre: The font is Norman and the only visible evidence of the Norman era church. It was originally square in plan until some genius had the bright idea of chamfering the corners. Right: The Hospitaller connection is remembered here. The Knights of St John organisation still exists and holds a procession and service here on the first Sunday of every June.

Left: These attractive and sophisticated foliate capitals terminate all of the places where the arches join the inner arcade to the outer walls. Right: Looking west through the inner arcade.

Left: The pretty south doorway is also Victorian. For my money, is a sympathetic design paying homage to mediaeval designs without just producing an ersatz neo-Gothic pastiche, Note Hospitaller badge on the door. Centre and Right: The royal label stop could, in my view, be a recycled mediaeval one. Look at the amount of weathering. Then look at the bishop’s face that is crisp and clean as if it was carved yesterday, having been protected throughout its life by the porch.

A plan of the church from a 1919 book. It shows the interesting and unique wheel-and-spoke configuration of the nave,

Left: The apsidal east end is blank. It is a shallow apse, attributable I think to the knight-monk status of the Knights. There was less need of separation of priest from congregation and doubtless the order had liturgical quirks all of its own. There are faint signs of an original east window. Right: But for the gothic windows you might have looked at this picture and imagined a converted Kentish oast house! North Essex was short of quarrystone and this led to an unusually high incidence of the use of red brick and, as here, of red tiles. It makes for an attractive building and the round nave is very much in evidence here.


	Click Here for Great Maplestead Church - 1 Mile Distant