St James the Great, Stoke Orchard

The Chapel of St James the Great in Stoke Orchard, Gloucestershire, is a Grade I former chapel-of-ease whose late-twelfth-century nave holds the only surviving English wall-painting cycle of the life of St James of Compostela.

Overview

Historic England dates the nave to about 1170 and the chancel to the fourteenth century. The church was long a chapel-of-ease to Bishops Cleeve (it was formerly listed as the Church of St Peter). Walls mix dressed limestone and rubble, with rendering on the west and south; the chancel is coursed limestone and blue lias under a stone-slate roof. A twelfth-century round-headed north door retains early strap hinges with animal-head decoration. A fourteenth-century bellcote stands at the east end of the nave.

Inside, a thirteenth-century pointed chancel arch sits on twelfth-century scalloped responds. The circular limestone font, with intersecting blind arcading, is twelfth-century. Wall paintings of five periods survive in the nave. The earliest scheme, of about 1190–1220, comprises twenty-eight scenes of the life of St James, restored in preference to later layers in 1953–55. Later fragments include a fifteenth-century St Christopher, a sixteenth-century black-letter text, seventeenth-century window borders and a crowned rose, and eighteenth-century texts with Hanoverian royal arms. A plastered coved nave ceiling is dated 1723. The church is in the Diocese of Gloucester and the Severnside Benefice.

Further Information

• Historic England list entry 1091878
• Severnside Benefice: Stoke Orchard