THIS CHAPTER DISCUSSES architectural themes and variations by identifying the form and content of East Anglian church porches built between c.1240 and c.1540. Key adjustments made to the design and conception of porches through to c.1540 were changes of greater significance than the adoption of current style. Observable shifts in the architectural form of church porches imply often subtle, sometimes more blatant, reappraisals of what porches could do and how they did it. As the previous chapter has demonstrated these buildings were intimately associated with the medieval life-course, neither neutral nor passive. This chapter continues our exploration of relationships between people and architectural spaces, attending to the formal details of buildings as a category of object and investigating how meaning was embedded in their design. To counteract any bias or predilection for the special or remarkable, the discussion is limited to East Anglia and the wealth of extant porches great and small built during the medieval period. The survey benefits from capturing the full scope of church porches as realised in this wealthy and populous region. Bounded to north and east by the North Sea, to the west by Cambridgeshire and the Isle of Ely (the kingdom of Mercia) and to the south by Essex (kingdom of the East Saxons), East Anglia is a geographical area of approximately 3650 square miles (9454 sq km) defined as much by its history as its physiography. Current political and governmental definitions include Cambridgeshire but for the purposes of this book East Anglia is understood to comprise the modern-day counties of Norfolk and Suffolk, thus approximating the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of the East Angles and the medieval ecclesiastical diocese of Norwich.

Church Porches in East Anglia, c.1240–c.1400

The earliest extant lateral porches in East Anglia are those at West Walton, built c.1240, and Great Massingham, built c.1280. Although it has been suggested that the two heavy cruck timbers which form the porch façade at Somersham, in Suffolk, date from the late thirteenth century, on comparison with Frating and Aldham (both in Essex) Somersham is more plausibly one of many fourteenth-century timber porches in Suffolk. The paucity of thirteenth-century porches in East Anglia contrasts with their relative prevalence in counties to the north and west, especially Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire.