St Mary and St Peter’s Church, Harlaxton

St Mary and St Peter's Church, Harlaxton, is a Grade I listed Church of England parish church in the estate village of Harlaxton, two miles south-east of Grantham at the eastern edge of the Vale of Belvoir in the South Kesteven district of Lincolnshire. Standing within the Harlaxton conservation area, in the shadow of the famous Victorian extravaganza of Harlaxton Manor, the church is celebrated for its association with the manor's de Ligne and Gregory families, whose memorials fill its chapels, for the alabaster effigies of about 1410 attributed to Sir Richard Rickhill and his wife Elizabeth, and for its crocketed spire rising above the ironstone roofs of the village. It serves the Harlaxton Group of Parishes in the Deanery of Loveden and the Diocese of Lincoln, alongside the churches of Denton, Stroxton, Woolsthorpe and Wyville.

No church or priest at Harlaxton appears in Domesday Book, and the parish's story begins, according to English Heritage, between 1174 and 1185, when land to build a church was given by Matilda, granddaughter of William the Conqueror. Parts of the present structure date from the late twelfth century, with additions and alterations through the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth, and by 1535 Harlaxton supported one of the nine chantries in the deanery of Grantham. The earliest recorded priest is Gilbert de Segrave in 1291, and the parish register runs from 1558, embracing Wyville with Hungerton until 1813. The building grew in the manner of prosperous Lincolnshire villages: a north nave arcade of the late twelfth century, judged Transitional by Cox and Early English by Pevsner, its four bays on round late Norman piers; a south arcade of the early thirteenth century on octagonal piers; a chancel and side chapels of about 1325 to 1350, the north chapel rebuilt in the early fifteenth century along with the north aisle; and the splendid four-stage tower, Decorated below and Perpendicular above, finished with battlements, corner pinnacles and the crocketed recessed octagonal spire with its lucarnes and weathercock, restored in 1885.

The Victorians left their mark with the thoroughness Pevsner deplored. The interior was restored in 1856-58, when the south porch was rebuilt in what he calls imitation Early English, and an elegant Gothic carved oak rood screen recorded before that restoration disappeared; John Oldrid Scott restored the interior again in 1890-91 at a cost of £1,200, work Pevsner thought grossly over-restored, and Cox records a further campaign in 1898. The plain wooden roofs on arch braces, finished with carved stone corbel angels, date from the mid-nineteenth century, as do the Perpendicular-style rood screen, parclose screens and mirrored choir stalls that now divide chancel and chapels. The chancel's east window glass is by Ward and Hughes, with further glass by Powell and Sons and Cox and Sons, and the octagonal font of about 1400, recut but retaining a carving of Christ holding a chalice, stands as the medieval survivor among the furnishings. The church plate is distinguished: a chalice, cover and paten of 1711 by the Huguenot silversmith David Willaume, silver-gilt flagon and almsbasin of 1713-14 by John Ward, and Georgian pieces by Smith and Sharp and by Denzilow.

The tower carries six bells spanning four and a half centuries of founding: one of about 1500 from the Nottingham foundry, one by Henry Oldfield of about 1620, one by Hugh Watts of 1635, two by Robert Taylor of 1820, and a treble of 1946 by John Taylor and Company, given by the family and parishioners of the rector Alban Sackett Hope, whose memorial hangs on the tower arch; the bells were rehung in a new steel frame by the Loughborough foundry in 1925. Apart from the peal hangs a sanctus bell of about 1699, whose story is one of the church's most charming: at some unknown date an anonymous benefactor endowed the rector with an acre and a half of land, ever afterwards called Day Bell Close, on condition that the sanctus bell be rung as a call to prayer at four in the morning and eight at night, every day.

The chapels flanking the chancel are the church's treasury of memory. In the north chapel, beneath an elaborately canopied niche with angels bearing shields in the spandrels, lies the early fifteenth-century tomb with two recumbent alabaster figures attributed to Sir Richard Rickhill and his wife Elizabeth, or, in Cox's account, to William Rickhill, Justice of the Common Pleas, about 1410. Beside it stands the black-marble-lidded table tomb of Sir Daniel de Ligne, who died in March 1686, and his wife Lady Elizabeth, of the Flemish family who purchased the manor of Harlaxton in the seventeenth century. A Baroque wall memorial of 1742, crowned by a cockerel from the de Ligne arms above gathered drapes and scrollwork, commemorates Daniel de Ligne the younger and his nephew and heir Cadwallader Glynne, recording Glynne's bequest of five pounds a year to the poor of Harlaxton in perpetuity; another remembers George Gregory, who died in 1758, and his wife Ann, who had inherited the de Ligne estates, erected by their four sons. The south chapel, with its piscina, aumbry, stoup, canopied tomb niche and brass to William Strood and his wife Agnes, both of whom died in 1448, holds the Gregory tablets, including those to Daniel Gregory and to George de Ligne Gregory, who died in 1822, beneath a knight's helm and twin coats of arms; it was the next generation of this family that built the great manor beside the village. The chancel east window was given by the widow of John Sherwin Gregory of Harlaxton Manor, High Sheriff of Nottinghamshire, who died in 1869, and the north aisle preserves the affecting eighteenth-century memorial of the rector Edward Saul, prebendary of Lincoln, who erected it in 1744 to his virtuous wife Arabella, his daughter Beaumont, who resigned her soul to God after a languishing sickness aged twenty, and his mother-in-law Cassandra Beaumont, a primitive Christian widow full of good works who directed her own burial beside her much-loved daughter and granddaughter in her ninety-first year. A framed benefactors' board in the tower records the parish's old charities, from John Usher and Edward Deligne's gifts for the blind, lame, aged and impotent to Cassandra Beaumont's ten pounds for books, and two lozenge-shaped funerary hatchments hang there, each bearing the motto Resurgam, I shall rise again. A plaque commemorates the parish's dead of the First World War, and the painted Royal Arms of the early nineteenth century in the north aisle carry the names of De Ligne Gregory and the churchwardens of the day.

The living itself tells the history of the English parish economy: tithes replaced by 1795 with a cornrent supported by sixty-three acres of glebe; the Reverend Henry Mirehouse holding a £550 living with two hundred acres in 1855 under the patronage of the prebendary of South Grantham; Edward Garfit, prebendary of Lincoln, holding it from 1867 in the gift of Queen's College, Oxford; and by 1933 the rectory united with Wyville with Hungerton in the alternate gift of Queen's College and T. S. Pearson Gregory of the manor. The churchyard is itself a listed landscape in miniature, with fifteen Grade II listed chest tombs of the early nineteenth century, coffin-shaped, sarcophagus-shaped, buttressed and balustered, among them that of Henry Blakelock, upholsterer to the Duke of Rutland, and five listed slate headstones of the eighteenth century, one carved with skull and bones, one signed by the mason Stephen Staveley of Melton. Listed Grade I in 1966, repaired with help from the Society of Antiquaries' William and Jane Morris Fund, and investigated by an archaeological watching brief in 2005 that turned up a stone fragment, small bones and a skull during heating works, the church of St Mary and St Peter remains what eight centuries of squires, rectors and villagers have made it: the parish church of one of Lincolnshire's most picturesque estate villages, its day bell's endowment still written into the names of its fields.