St Peter, Bromyard

St Peter’s is a Grade I parish church on Church Lane, Bromyard, Herefordshire, on the site of a minster recorded around 840. The present cruciform church is late twelfth-century and later, with a fourteenth-century crossing tower.

Overview

Historic England lists a church of sandstone rubble with a slate roof: nave, early fourteenth-century chancel, north and south aisles, and a central embattled tower with a circular stair at the north-east corner. Three Norman doorways survive, two reset; the north aisle doorway has three shafts to each side. Above the south doorway is a shallow-relief figure of St Peter that may be Anglo-Saxon, with a consecration cross. The north transept has Geometrical tracery of before 1300; other windows are fourteenth-century intersecting or Y-tracery. The west window dates from 1937, the east from 1933. Interior arcades have differing capitals: scalloped to the south, leaf to the north (c.1210). The font is Norman, a sculptured tub with hoops and a Tree of Life, dated around 1160.

Parish history records some of the earliest surviving registers in the country, begun in 1538. The churchyard closed in 1915. The church remains open daily in the Diocese of Hereford.

Further Information

• Historic England list entry 1307758
• St Peter’s, Bromyard