Church of St James the Less, Sulgrave

The Church of St James the Less is the Church of England parish church of Sulgrave, a village about five miles north of Brackley in Northamptonshire — a Grade II* listed building dating largely from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and a place of pilgrimage for Americans, for this is the church of the Washington family of Sulgrave Manor, ancestors of the first President of the United States.

Sulgrave has had a church since the Anglo-Saxon era, though not on the current site: an earlier stone church is believed to have stood about a quarter of a mile north of the present one, on higher ground near the windmill. The church on the present site was built in the thirteenth century, when the Cluniac Priory of St Andrew, Northampton held the advowson — and at least some material from the original church was carried down and reused. Most notable is a triangular-headed doorway, characteristic of Anglo-Saxon architecture and possibly dating from the tenth century, reset as the west door of the west tower; the tower's trefoiled lancet windows and bell-openings are Early English work of the thirteenth century. The tower once carried a spire, but it collapsed in the fourteenth century — a record of about 1340 reports the church as "destroyed", with twenty carts at "Helmydene" (Helmdon, two miles south-east) collecting stone for its repair. Helmdon stone, a fine freestone, was the best building stone in the district, and the work it supplied probably included the south aisle, added in the mid-fourteenth century and retaining all its original Decorated Gothic windows. The four-bay arcade between aisle and nave is later Perpendicular work; the aisle also keeps a squint to the high altar — blocked after the Reformation, reopened in 1885 — and a fourteenth- or fifteenth-century piscina, both from the days when it held a side altar. The south door is fourteenth-century, sheltered by an Elizabethan porch of the sixteenth century with a Tudor four-centred arch and a datestone carrying the initials "ER" and the year 1564 — Elizabeth I visited Northampton that year, and the initials may commemorate her. The chancel has Decorated and Perpendicular south windows, the octagonal font may date from the 1660s, and the church holds an ancient wooden chest hewn from a solid oak trunk, said to be fourteenth-century, bound with closely spaced iron bands.

The Washington story is written across the south aisle. Under the floor at its east end lies the tomb of Lawrence Washington — the wool merchant who built Sulgrave Manor, twice mayor of Northampton, and the great-great-great-great-great-grandfather of George Washington — who died in 1584, with his wife Amee, who died in 1564. Their tomb is covered by a six-foot slab of Hornton ironstone set with monumental brasses: originally six, comprising 21-inch figures of Lawrence and Amee, smaller brasses of their four sons and seven daughters, a family coat of arms and an inscription. The brasses of Amee, the arms and the inscription are long missing — and in 1889 the two brasses of the children and the head of Lawrence's figure were stolen, recovered only in 1923 and reinstalled in 1924, no one ever being charged with the theft. The two-light east window of the aisle contains four stained glass coats of arms of successive generations of the Washington family, each surrounded by strapwork in white and yellow glass, probably sixteenth-century. In the aisle stands the Washington Pew, a seventeenth-century pew installed while the family held Sulgrave Manor. Even the bells carry the name: in 1552, during the Edwardine Reformation, the church was listed as having four bells and a sanctus bell, one of which the churchwardens had sold for £16 to pay for road and ford repairs — the buyers being Thomas Stuttesbury and Lawrence Washington, who had so far paid £6, the bell remaining in the belfry until the balance was settled.

The Washingtons sold Sulgrave Manor in 1659, and around 1673 it passed to the Hodges family, three of whose neoclassical wall monuments hang on the south wall above the Washington Pew — the largest and most ornate, in grey and white marble with fluted pilasters, commemorating the brothers John and the Reverend Moses Hodges, who both died in 1724.

The Victorians reshaped and then repented. In 1840 the nave walls were raised about six feet, the ancient oak roof replaced with deal, and the windows reduced in height — all to accommodate galleries for a growing congregation. In 1885 the galleries came out, the oak roof was restored, and the north aisle was added in compensation, reusing the fourteenth-century north doorway; the chancel's three-light east window is also nineteenth-century Gothic Revival. The American connection then renewed itself in the twentieth century: in 1929 the Women's Committee of the George Washington Institute funded the wooden screen — made by craftsmen of Broadway, Worcestershire — that separates the tower's ground stage from the nave as a vestry, and in 1930 the Colonial Dames of America presented the church with a pipe organ, replaced with a new instrument in 1975.

None of the bells of 1552 survives, though their metal may live on in the present ring: the third and fourth were cast by the Newcombe family of Leicester in 1610 and 1612, the fifth by Edward Hall of Drayton Parslow in 1744, the second by Matthew Bagley of Chacombe in 1769, and the tenor by John Briant of Hertford in 1808 — Briant having also recast the medieval sanctus bell in 1806. Gillett & Johnston of Croydon recast the whole ring of five in 1928 — the year the present turret clock was installed — and John Taylor & Co of Loughborough added the treble in 1932 to make six. The parish today belongs to the benefice of Culworth with Sulgrave and Thorpe Mandeville and Chipping Warden with Edgcote and Moreton Pinkney, in the deanery of Brackley, the archdeaconry of Northampton and the Diocese of Peterborough — and the church hall is to be refurbished with a grant from HS2 Ltd, including accessible toilets: the newest chapter for the church where the first President's forebears worshipped, and where the stars and stripes of their coat of arms still glow in sixteenth-century glass.