Church of St Lawrence, Alton

The Church of St Lawrence is the Anglican parish church of Alton in Hampshire, a Grade I listed building remarkable both for the range of its architecture, from early Norman through Early English to Perpendicular and Tudor work, and for being the site of the concluding action of the Battle of Alton in the English Civil War, when Royalist soldiers made their last stand inside the church itself and bullet holes can still be seen in its doors, walls and pillars.

Anglo-Saxon settlement at Alton began around AD 500, and the township certainly had a church, of which one moving relic survives: the massive Saxon font, hewn from a single block of stone with crude axe marks still visible. Discarded in the restoration of 1868 in favour of a more fashionable design, it ended up in Cirencester, was bought back for £10 in 1934, and now stands at the west end of the south nave on a mill wheel symbolising Alton's paper industry, restored to use as a font since 1950. The present church was founded in the Norman period, conventionally in 1070, celebrating its 900th anniversary in 1970. Its four Norman tower arches, described by Pevsner as "emphatically Early Norman, say around 1100", stand midway down the southern nave, their pillar capitals carved with axes by French craftsmen into a wolf eating a bone, a pelican, winged cherubs, a demon and a pair of donkeys. The church's first mention comes in a charter of 1087, marked at its foot by William the Conqueror's own cross, by which the king exchanged the church of Alton, with five hides and tithes, with the monks of Hyde Abbey in Winchester for their burial ground, on which he wished to build his new palace: "And that this gift may be held valid and of perpetual obligation I myself make this mark with my own hand."

Alton prospered on the main route from the west country to London, and the church grew with it: the southern nave was extended westward in the twelfth century, with a west door of 1140 and an arcade of the same date whose traces remain, and the first known vicar, Richard Turstin, also sheriff of Alton, served from 1161 to 1170. The thirteenth century added the Lady Chapel east of the Norman tower, with niches that held statues of St Lawrence and the Virgin and Child, today occupied by painted wooden figures of St George and St Michael. The famous Alton Fair, begun in 1307 under a grant from Edward I, spilled into the church grounds until 19 August 1317, when the Bishop of Winchester hurried to Alton with an abbot, two priors and a deacon to forbid fairs "in the churches or cemeteries of the diocese", also commanding the parishioners to stop moving the image of St Lawrence the Martyr from the high altar — the first documentary evidence of the church's patron saint. The fifteenth century transformed the building: a new northern nave matching the southern made the church, in Pevsner's phrase, "essentially a parallelipiped", seven arcades replacing the old north wall, with three medieval paintings of saints surviving on one pillar; new roofs, Perpendicular windows, carved screens, a spire on the old tower, and the Champflour Chantry Chapel, licensed in 1463, whose founder's chantry priest was, by a report of 1548, also "to teache children grammer" — apart from Winchester College, the oldest record of any school in Hampshire.

After the Dissolution the church passed in 1541 to the Dean and Chapter of Winchester. The parish registers begin in 1615 and the churchwardens' accounts in 1625, running unbroken but for the Civil War years; the bells rang for Charles I's visit in 1625, and the outstanding mid-seventeenth-century pulpit dates from this era. Then came 13 December 1643. Alton was a Royalist town, and when Sir William Waller's Parliamentary forces marched against it, the Earl of Crawford fled to Winchester, leaving Colonel Richard Boles with a small force that was beaten back through the churchyard into the church itself, where his men built scaffolds to fire from the windows. The churchyard filled with Parliamentarians "laying about them stoutly with halberts, swords, and musket-stocks, while some threw hand-granadoes in at the church windows"; pikes snapped in the low doorway as the last defenders forced their way inside. When the west door was finally broken, Colonel Boles, who had threatened to kill any of his men who asked for quarter, died fighting, traditionally on the steps of the pulpit. Charles I, hearing the news, is said to have exclaimed: "Bring me my mourning scarf; I have lost one of my best commanders in this Kingdom." Bullets were removed from the ceiling during the Victorian restoration, fallen soldiers were found in the churchyard, and relics of the battle, a key, a uniform button, bullets and a pipe, are displayed in a cabinet, with a brass to Boles on an arcade pillar.

Drama returned on 19 December 1686, when a violent thunderstorm darkened the church during Sunday prayer and "two Balls of Fire made their entry at the Eastern Wall, pass'd through the body of the Church, leaving behind 'em so great a Smoke, and Smell of Brimstone as is scarce able to be expresst": every window broke, the roof and steeple caught fire, the weathercock was carried clean away and the clock's hand fell among the congregation, yet no one was hurt but the vicar, whose eyebrows were singed. The eighteenth century filled the church with galleries in every conceivable place, some for paying customers and some free, replaced the three-span tiled roof with the present single-span lead roof between 1724 and 1758, and recorded its housekeeping down to the price of a chamber pott (ninepence); the church also maintained the town fire engine and the Poor House of 1740. John Murray, founder of the Universalist denomination in the United States, was born in Alton in 1741 and baptised here, reportedly uttering his first word, "Amen", in the priest's arms at his sister's baptism. In 1817 Francis Austen, brother of Jane Austen of nearby Chawton, joined a committee to superintend the parish's affairs after tithe disputes had seen every window of the vicarage broken.

The great restoration came in 1862-68, launched by Canon Woodrooffe's appeal for a town of 3,769 souls whose church seated 899 with no room for the working classes. The galleries were swept away, the whole repewed, a new organ by Speechly and Ingram installed by public subscription for £850, and the church reopened by the Bishop of Winchester on 16 April 1868, the restoration carried out, in the parish historian Couper's judgment, "with restraint", returning the interior very nearly to its fifteenth-century state; All Saints' Church was built soon after for the growing town. The steeple was refaced in oak in 1874, the present Benson clock started at noon on 7 June 1890, and the Victorian stained glass includes an east window of 1870 by Jean-Baptiste Capronnier of Brussels and an archangels window of 1899 to the brewer Henry Hall. After the First World War the Lady Chapel was restored as the war memorial Chapel of St Michael and St George, dedicated in 1920, with the fallen recorded from the vicar's wartime vellum roll. A new ring of eight bells by Gillett and Johnston came in 1926, the cracking tower was reinforced with steel and concrete in 1932, electric light replaced gas in 1939, and the parish centre of St Lawrence Hall was built south of the church in 1970, in a building where a fourteenth-century sundial still marks the hours on an east buttress and the south door still carries the bullet holes of 1643.