St James' Church, Aslackby

St James' Church, Aslackby, formally dedicated to St James the Great, the son of Zebedee, is a Grade I listed Church of England parish church in the small Lincolnshire village of Aslackby, seven miles north of Bourne on the eastern edge of the South Kesteven Lincolnshire Vales. Its special significance lies in its historic association with the Aslackby Preceptory of the Knights Templar, whose round chapel once stood beside it, and in the unusual arch details of its fourteenth-century tower. It serves the ecclesiastical parish of Aslackby as one of six churches in the Billingborough Group of Parishes, fittingly named the Gilbertine Benefice, in the Deanery of Lafford and the Diocese of Lincoln, alongside the churches of Horbling, Billingborough, Sempringham, Dowsby and Pointon.

No church or priest at Aslackby is recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086; the village's documented Christian history begins instead with the crusading orders. The Knights Templar established a preceptory at Aslackby in the twelfth century, with the benefactor Hubert de Rye providing a church and round chapel for the order in 1164, and the preceptory itself probably founded in 1194 following the patronage of Robert de Rye in 1185. The first mentioned priest, Geoffrey de Temple in 1225, was attendant to the Templars. When the order was suppressed, King Edward II appropriated the preceptory in 1312, and by 1338 it had passed to the Knights Hospitaller as a messuage with church and lands worth £40 a year, under the control of Henry, third Earl of Lancaster, administered thereafter with the former Templar property of Temple Bruer; the first Hospitaller-sponsored priest, Nicholas de Camelton, arrived in 1321. After the dissolution of the monasteries the lands were granted in 1541-42 to Edward, Lord Clinton and his wife Ursula. Parts of the original Templar round church survived until about 1800, latterly absorbed into a farmhouse, and the last preceptory tower was demolished as late as 1891. The present church was begun around 1300, conjoined to the appropriated Templar property, extended in the mid-fifteenth century, and restored in 1856, when the chancel was rebuilt. The parish register dates from 1558.

The church is built of limestone ashlar and coursed ironstone rubble, in Early English and Perpendicular styles, with chancel, nave, north and south aisles, west tower and south porch. The early fourteenth-century tower is its glory and its puzzle: two stages partly clasped by the aisles, with angled buttresses rising to crocketed pinnacles set away from the tower face, a five-sided stair turret at the north-west, gargoyles at the clerestory parapet height, and an embattled parapet with corner pinnacles. Above the moulded west doorway with its great iron-hinged plank doors is a large blocked pointed arch edged with round moulded jambs ending in open cusped devices, enclosing a Perpendicular window of panel tracery; matching blocked arches on the north and south sides are cut through by the later aisles, and Pevsner debated whether they are relieving arches or pure decoration. The thirteenth-century north aisle and early fourteenth-century south aisle carry windows of cusped ogee lights and intersecting Y-tracery, the south parapet enriched with a seventeenth-century cusped fretwork frieze. The mid-fifteenth-century clerestory lights the Perpendicular nave through three pairs of two-light windows a side, beneath an embattled parapet with a diamond frieze, meeting at the south-east an octagonal castellated stair turret with faceted spire; a gabled bell-cot for a sanctus bell crowns the east gable. The fifteenth-century south porch, gabled with cross finial and crocketed pinnacles, shelters stone benches and the iron-hinged nave door. The chancel of 1856 is roofed in Collyweston slate, with Y-traceried windows and, just east of its east window, the iron-railed table tomb of Mary Skelton, who died in 1767.

Inside, the tall thirteenth-century tower arch rises on triple shafts to the height of the nave clerestory, its hood mould ending in the same open cusped devices found on the blocked arches and the chancel arch, a recurring signature of the church's masons. The three-bay nave arcades of the thirteenth century stand on piers of four rounded columns with continuous annulets and five-sided Doric-faced capitals, and the fifteenth-century tie-beam nave roof was restored in the nineteenth century. Beneath the tower arch stands the fourteenth-century octagonal font, its plinth carved with twin flower-head reliefs and its bowl with quatrefoils, shields and blind tracery, under a wooden cover with pink scrolls and a gold-painted urn. The south aisle keeps a fourteenth-century piscina under a cusped ogee head and the small doorway to a vanished rood loft, served by the external turret; the north aisle holds a still finer piscina with a seven-cusped arch under an entablature of three floriate carvings topped by crenellations, along with aumbries in both aisles and chancel. The tower contains four bells, one cast by Thomas Newcombe of Leicester around 1550 and three by Tobias Norris of Stamford between 1611 and about 1683, of which three are still rung. In the tower hangs the restored eighteenth-century Hanoverian royal coat of arms, probably displaced from the chancel arch at the 1856 restoration and kept in storage for perhaps a hundred and fifty years until the parish brought it out in 2008 and restored it.

The church's later history is one of patrons, thieves and community spirit. Through the Victorian era the living was in the gift of the Barstow family, layman R. F. Barstow holding the impropriated tithes and glebe worth £453 a year by 1840, and the Reverend John Smithson Barstow serving as both patron and incumbent until 1906, when Robert Stanley Coupland began a vicariate that lasted into the 1930s; the handwritten dedication in the south porch, signed by Coupland and his churchwardens, records that the tower's blue and gold memorial clock was erected in 1920 in honour of all Aslackby men who served in the war of 1914-19, while a pink marble plaque in the chancel and brasses in the nave name the eleven who died. The church was listed Grade I on 30 October 1968. In 2007 thieves from Lithuania stripped £13,000 of lead from the roof, part of a spree of twenty such thefts that did a million pounds of damage across Lincolnshire. The parish answered adversity with renewal: a five-year community fundraising campaign culminated in a £135,000 refurbishment in 2010, aided by a £10,000 National Churches Trust grant, which created a tower meeting room behind a new traceried oak screen, a kitchen, toilets and central heating. The accompanying archaeological monitoring uncovered human remains, reburied with dignity, stone foundations predating the tower, possible post holes hinting at timber predecessors, an early medieval floor of layered straw, and pottery spanning the fifth to the nineteenth centuries. Country Life featured the church in July 2009 under the title "Let there be light", praising the restoration of the Hanoverian arms "by the community", and in 2012 St James' took the £5,000 runner-up prize and silver medal in the magazine's Village Church for Village Life Award. That same year the Lincolnshire International Chamber Music Festival brought the composer Sally Beamish for a "Meet the Composer" event with children's string workshops, and a recital by the classical pianist Ashley Wass, to a building that now hosts concerts, talks, family activities and a film club alongside its ancient round of worship — the Templars' village church remade, once again, as the centre of its community.