Church of St Peter, Great Berkhamsted

The Parish Church of St Peter, Great Berkhamsted, is one of the largest medieval churches in Hertfordshire — a Grade II* listed Church of England parish church that has stood at the centre of the market town of Berkhamsted for some eight hundred years. Rising from the High Street behind its eighty-five-foot clock tower, the church is medieval in origin, its oldest fabric dating from about 1200, and its architecture spans at least five periods, chiefly of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, before a sweeping Victorian restoration by William Butterfield. For centuries its closeness to Berkhamsted Castle gave St Peter's an unusually royal character, with the reigning monarch acting in person as patron to each new rector; today, those royal ties relinquished, it serves simply as the principal parish church of the town, where the feast of St Peter is still marked each summer by the Petertide fair.

St Peter's is not the oldest church in the area — that distinction belongs to St Mary's at Northchurch, a little over a mile to the north-west, which is thought to be Saxon and appears in the Domesday Book of 1086. The advowson of a Berkhamsted church, probably St Mary's, together with that of the castle chapel, was granted between 1087 and 1104 by William, Count of Mortain, to the abbey of Grestein in Normandy, and the parish of Great Berkhamsted was formed around the same time. St Mary's was the original mother church until the larger St Peter's superseded it after the Norman Conquest, when political and ecclesiastical power shifted south to the area around the castle; by the fourteenth century St Mary's village had taken the name Northchurch to distinguish it from St Peter's. The exact foundation date of the town church is uncertain, but historians place it around 1222, the year the first known rector, Robert de Tuardo, was instituted by Hugh of Wells, Bishop of Lincoln — for St Peter's then lay in the vast Diocese of Lincoln, passing to Rochester in 1843 and finally to the new Diocese of St Albans in 1877.

A brass plaque inside the church lists every rector from the thirteenth century to the present, and the names tell the parish's story. The fourteenth century saw a startling turnover, almost certainly because the Black Death cut short so many lives: between 1369 and 1386 St Peter's had eight successive rectors, the briefest being Thomas Payne, whose tenure lasted just nine days. One fourteenth-century rector, John de Waltham, went on to become Bishop of Salisbury and enjoyed so close a friendship with King Richard II that, after his death, Richard had him buried in Westminster Abbey in the Chapel of Edward the Confessor — the only man not of royal blood to lie in the royal chapel. The sixteenth century brought the Incent family, commemorated by brasses: Robert Incent was secretary to Cicely, Duchess of York, at the castle, and his son John Incent rose to be Dean of St Paul's Cathedral and in 1541 founded Berkhamsted School. The Incent family house still stands on the High Street opposite the church as "Dean Incent's House".

The English Civil War caught St Peter's directly. Rector John Napier was ejected by Parliament and replaced by a succession of "intruder" priests, though he went on recording his own children's baptisms in the parish register, signing himself rector, and was finally restored to the living in 1670. Although no battle was fought nearby, Berkhamsted lay on the road between London and Aylesbury, and in 1648 General Fairfax requisitioned the church itself as a military prison for soldiers captured at the Siege of Colchester; because the church was crowded with maimed and hungry men, Fairfax ordered the windows taken out, and when the building was returned the vestry had to levy a special tax of twopence an acre on local landowners to pay for new glass. After the Restoration, one parishioner rose remarkably high: John Sayer became chief cook to Charles II, lived at Berkhamsted Place, and was known to the diarist Samuel Pepys, who recorded a merry morning in the King's wine cellar with "Mr Sayres, the Master Cook", confessing that "I drank so much wine that I was not fit for business". On his death in 1682 Sayer left £1,000 to build a row of almshouses on the High Street for six poor widows; completed in 1684 and still standing, they bear the inscription "A gift of John Sayer, 1684", and his elaborate marble tomb stands in the church's Lady Chapel.

The church's most famous son was the poet and hymn-writer William Cowper, born in Berkhamsted in 1731 — his father John Cowper was rector from 1722 to 1756 — and baptised at St Peter's; Cowper's hymns became staples of the Evangelical movement and of Anglican hymn books. The royal connection ran through the rectory itself: from 1381, when Richard II presented Peter de Burton, the reigning monarch acted as patron to each new rector, a tradition that continued more or less unbroken until Charles II presented Robert Brabant in 1681, after which the Princes of Wales took on the duty, and finally the Earls of Brownlow once the local Duchy of Cornwall estates were sold to the Ashridge Estate in 1862.

Architecturally, St Peter's is a cruciform church measuring 168 feet from the west door to the east window, with transepts 90 feet across. The oldest part is the chancel of about 1200, in the Early English style; the transepts belong to the Decorated period of Edward II's reign. The building grew westward rapidly in the thirteenth century — nave, transepts and crossing following soon after the chancel — with the aisles added in 1230, St Catherine's Chapel built about 1320, the irregular St John's Chantry raised on the south aisle around 1350 for the boys and masters of Berkhamsted School, a clerestory added in 1450, and the whole crowned in 1545–46 when the tower was raised to its present eighty-five feet. A vivid eighteenth-century episode caught the decay of the fabric: the schoolboys and masters narrowly escaped when, moments after they left the chantry, its main beam gave way and the ceiling fell — and the collapse uncovered medieval paintings of the Apostles and St George that had been whitewashed over by Puritan iconoclasts during the Civil War. Two great nineteenth-century restorations followed: the controversial 1820 campaign by Jeffry Wyattville, architect of Ashridge House, which destroyed many original features and stuccoed the outer walls; and the more sympathetic 1870–71 restoration by the Gothic Revival architect William Butterfield, who raised the chancel roof and floor, refloored the nave, installed new oak benches, re-faced the exterior in flint flushwork, and let more light into the nave through clear clerestory windows — though he too obliterated the rediscovered pillar paintings. A further restoration between 1956 and 1960 re-roofed tower and nave and re-ordered the interior, bringing the high altar forward under the tower crossing and re-mounting the gilded fifteenth-century rood screen as a reredos behind it.

The furnishings reward exploration. The high altar stands on a raised white marble floor beneath the crossing, backed by the gilded screen with its twelve saints; nearby hangs the long brass roll of rectors from 1222 onward. The late Gothic Revival pulpit of 1910, carved with angels by Harry Hems, the seventeenth-century parish chest, and the marble tomb of Sir John Cornwallis, a councillor of Edward VI, are all here. The St John's Chantry, once the school's place of worship, now holds the choir stalls and the organ — built by Peter Collins of Redbourn in 1986, in a brightly coloured English oak case, incorporating pipework from an earlier Walker instrument — together with brasses to the Incent family and to John Raven, squire to Edward the Black Prince at the castle. The thirteenth-century Lady Chapel, light and spacious, carries the ball-flower ornament of the Decorated period and holds John Sayer's tomb and the effigies thought to be of Henry of Berkhamsted, constable to the Black Prince, in medieval armour beside his wife. St Catherine's Chapel of about 1320 has medieval tombs and an alabaster reredos copied from Winchester Cathedral. The old chancel, now a vestry, keeps a mosaic reredos and a memorial to Ann Cowper, the poet's mother, inscribed with his own valedictory lines, "These lines, though weak, are as herself sincere".

The tower, finished in 1546, holds a peal of eight bells recast in 1837 by Mears of Whitechapel from bells of 1553. St Peter's is also a treasury of stained glass by the leading Victorian makers — Heaton & Butler, Clayton & Bell, Charles Eamer Kempe, Nathaniel Westlake and James Powell & Sons — including a window memorialising William Cowper, a Heaton & Butler west window awarded a medal at the 1867 Paris Exhibition, and a millennium window of 2000 by David Peace and Sally Scott etched with Cowper's poetry, images of Berkhamsted and scenes of nature. From a Norman mother church superseded after the Conquest to a poet's baptism, a Civil War prison and eight centuries of royal patrons, St Peter's gathers the whole history of its town under one great Hertfordshire roof — and remains, today, its living parish church.