Church of St Mary and St Andrew, Stoke Rochford

The Church of St Mary and St Andrew, Stoke Rochford, also known as St Andrew and St Mary's, is a Grade I listed Church of England parish church standing in the village of Stoke Rochford, five miles south of Grantham on the western edge of the Lincolnshire Vales in South Kesteven. Set within the Stoke Rochford conservation area between two great country houses, it is above all a church of two families: for centuries the north chapel and aisle have held the memorials of the Turnors of Stoke Rochford Hall, while the south chapel and aisle belong to the Cholmeleys of Easton Hall, making the building one of the richest treasuries of family monuments in Lincolnshire. The church serves the ecclesiastical parish of Stoke Rochford with Easton within the Colsterworth Group of Parishes in the Diocese of Lincoln.

The story begins with two churches, not one. Domesday Book in 1086 recorded the settlements of Stoke, North Stoke, Ganthorpe and Easton without priest or complete church, but physical evidence suggests an eleventh-century origin for the South Stoke building, and by the late twelfth century records name a church of St Andrew at North Stoke and St Mary at South Stoke. The two livings were held as a mediety, their tithes and income shared equally, until 13 June 1776, when the parishes were merged under the patronage of Salisbury Cathedral's Prebendary of South Grantham; South Stoke's church took on the dedication of its vanished partner to become St Andrew and St Mary. North Stoke's parsonage had burned in 1697, and the township itself was demolished between 1841 and 1843 when Stoke Rochford Hall was rebuilt and its park enlarged. Excavation of the likely site of North Stoke St Andrew's in 1968 yielded pottery from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries, and fragments of an eleventh-century limestone cross with interlace patterns, found in the ruins early in the twentieth century, now rest in the churchyard. A third lost church haunts the parish too: the deserted medieval village of Ganthorpe, with its chapel, lay at the north of what became the Stoke Rochford estate, and a sculptured slab of about the early fourteenth century, thought to portray John de Neville of Ganthorpe and his wife, recumbent figures with dogs at their feet, was found in a field there and laid in the north chapel in the nineteenth century.

The oldest fabric is the essentially Norman nave, whose north arcade of circular piers with scalloped cushion capitals may predate 1150, and the lower stages of the west tower, where Pevsner thought a hood mould could be eleventh-century; the belfry stage was added in the thirteenth century, and the whole is crowned by an embattled parapet with crocketed pinnacles. The fifteenth century gave the church its chancel chapels and its name. The Rochford family, who came to England with the Norman Conquest and took their name from Rochford in Essex, gave theirs to the manor and parish; between 1344 and 1409 six of them served as High Sheriff of Lincolnshire, one guarded the captive King John II of France at Somerton Castle, and Sir Ralph Rochford, granted free warren at Stoke by the king in 1448, built the south chapel that year. His brother Henry Rochford added the north chapel in the 1460s, the last of the family name at Stoke. Henry's widow Elizabeth Scrope, daughter of the fourth Baron Scrope of Bolton and widow of a knight killed at Towton, then married Oliver St John, stepfather-in-law to Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII; Oliver and Elizabeth lie beneath a black marble slab with brasses in the chancel, near the brass of Henry Rochford himself. Two anonymous fifteenth-century stone chest tombs flank the altar, one panelled with quatrefoils, the other with cusped ogee arches, their occupants unknown.

The manor descended through the Stanhope, Skeffington, Ellys and other families until 1637, when Sir John Harrison passed it to his daughter Margaret, wife of Edmund Turnor, knighted in 1663 for loyalty to Charles I. Sir Edmund, who gave the church its pews in 1700, erected during his own lifetime the towering seventeen-foot monument of black and white marble on the north chapel wall, with its Ionic columns, heraldic shields and segmented pediment, commemorating himself, Dame Margaret and their descendants. Across the church, the south chapel had passed into the keeping of the Cholmeleys, who acquired Easton manor in 1606. Their great monument, erected by Montague Cholmeley in February 1641 for his parents Henry and Elizabeth, is one of the finest of its date in the county: richly carved and once wholly painted and gilded, it shows the parents kneeling in prayer facing each other across a gabled ark, a swaddled infant lying before them, their sons kneeling at the sides beneath a portico of columns, the whole crowned by a full heraldic achievement. Its inscriptions record generations of the family buried beneath the south aisle, among them merchants who traded in Cádiz and London and a son who died returning from Mocha on his third voyage to the East Indies.

The nineteenth century brought restoration costing £2,000, funded by the Turnors, Cholmeleys and others, including an 1846 remodelling of the chancel; a lath and plaster chancel arch inserted then was removed in 1936. The north chapel gained its finest Victorian piece in 1896: the white marble sepulchral reredos to Christopher Turnor, rebuilder of Stoke Rochford Hall and MP for South Lincolnshire, and his wife Lady Caroline, daughter of the Earl of Winchilsea, designed by Turnor himself with relief portrait roundels and niches of saints. The chancel reredos of 1911, a painted stone relief of the Crucifixion flanked by saints including Hugh of Lincoln and Gilbert of Sempringham, was designed by Mary Fraser Tytler, the artist wife of George Frederic Watts, while the font cover of about 1900, painted by Jessie Bayes with scenes of the childhood of Christ to a design by Christopher Turnor, echoes the staircase panels of the Hall; Bayes also painted Our Lord in Glory on the chancel ceiling. The aisles carry their family plaques: Herbert Broke Turnor, who died in 1881 in the mountains of Tibet seventy-five miles from Ladakh; Lieutenant Christopher Randolph Turnor of the 10th Royal Hussars, killed near Ypres in 1914; and on the Cholmeley side, the east window to Sir Montague Cholmeley, fourth Baronet, captain in the Grenadier Guards, killed near Festubert in 1914, with a marble memorial naming six Cholmeleys who died in the First World War and one on the Murmansk Front in 1919.

The twentieth century wove the church into larger histories. The external tower clock of 1920 is the parish's First World War memorial. Operation Market Garden, the airborne assault on Arnhem, was planned at Stoke Rochford Hall in 1944, and plaques beside the tower arch honour the 2nd Battalion, Parachute Regiment, trained in the district, whose veterans have returned to the church each year for an annual commemoration; another records the battalion's losses at Bruneval and in Sicily. A memorial service in 2006 remembered the Canadian and British crew of a Lancaster bomber that crashed in the Hall's grounds in April 1945, and the west window of 1947 replaced one destroyed by enemy action in 1941. A plaque in the south aisle honours Algernon Augustus Markham, rector from 1933 who became Bishop of Grantham in 1937. The church returned briefly to national attention in 2012, when Emily McCorquodale, niece of Diana, Princess of Wales, married James Hutt here, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, Prince Harry and Earl Spencer among the congregation.

Architecturally the church is a palimpsest of ashlar and limestone rubble: Norman nave, Early English south arcade with foliate capitals, fourteenth-century Decorated north chancel arcade with quatrefoil piers, Perpendicular south chancel arcade, fifteenth-century chapels on moulded plinths with pinnacled buttresses, a thirteenth-century north porch with stone benches, and clerestory windows lighting a nave whose proportions have hardly changed in eight centuries. Pevsner lamented the scraped surfaces left by Victorian restorers, but the accumulation of seven centuries of monuments, from the de Neville slab to the parachute regiment plaques, gives the interior a density of memory few village churches can match. Listed Grade I in 1966, with a parish register dating from 1663 and a peal history recorded since the eighteenth century, St Mary and St Andrew's remains a working parish church of the Colsterworth group, still serving the estate villages whose halls and families built, embellished and filled it.