Norman arch over the south door, possibly circa 1180-1190. The decoration has been described as a chevron moulding, but could be better described as 'roughly wrought tooth ornament, small sunk roundels, and rounded label moulding'.
"St Andrew's church has traces of its Anglo-Saxon origins, although the building mostly dates from about 1180–90, with early thirteenth century arcades and various modifications in the late thirteenth century. The building was well-restored in the nineteenth century. Look out for the interesting Romanesque doorway and fourteenth century font. The thirteenth century tower is surmounted by a low broach spire of about 1230. A late sixteenth century priest's house survives, much restored, to the south of the church."
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"The carved stone arch over the doorway through which you enter the church is one of Its oldest surviving features; it dates from about 1180-1190. So does the main body of the church, its walls and the outer eight of its ten large columns: probably also the font used then as now to hold the water for baptisms and the stoup. All these are made of stone, which was in good supply in Rutland and that has been Important for their survival. This is especially true for the stoup which stood in the porch; it held holy water, the use of which was a practice which came under great attack in the religious upheavals of the 1500’s and 1600’s. Very few ancient stoups now survive and this one may have been buried outside in the churchyard to keep it safe in those troubled times.
In 1180-1190 the church was probably much darker inside than today. The upper windows (the Clerestory) were not added for another 250 years or so. just after Oakham church was built. But the columns show that the building was already substantial How did Hambleton come to have such a building?
Part of the answer lies in the overall history of England. In much of England in the 1100’s there was a surge of church and civic building. The Norman kings and barons had consolidated the hold over England which William the Conqueror had won by defeating Harold and the Saxon army at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. The pillars, arches and doorways of a similar in design to those here are to be found in other Rutland churches from the same period; the Great Hall of nearby Oakham Castle was built at this time.
The other part of the explanation for a substantial stone church being built in Hambleton towards the end of the 1100’s lies in us location at the top of a steep hill overlooking the fertile Vale of Catmose. This natural vantage point has been a place of human habitation since at least 600 AD (and probably also of religious worship and of burial). The great Norman survey of 1086, Domesday Book, and other records, show that by Saxon times, i.e. a thousand years and more ago, Hambleton was the major settlement of the area we now know as Rutland. The hill top community held a commanding position in the centre of this area and it was the senior village in a grouping of seven. Its “manor”, i.e. principal lands, was in royal hands as part of the dowry (marriage lands) of Aelfryth, mother of the Saxon King Ethelred (known as the Unready). It was then in the hands of Emma his wife and later of Edith, wife of King Edward (known as the Confessor). Edith’s Rutland connections live on today, in the name of the village Edith Weston, now divided from Hambleton by Rutland Water. In King Edward’s time the church in Hambleton was important enough to be the mother church of St Peter’s Church, Stamford; and only a little while later Domesday Book records as many as three churches as attaching to Hambleton – all the more remarkable, since only four Rutland towns or villages are recorded as having churches at all (the others being Oakham, which was rebuilt 200 years later, Whitwell and Ridlington).
We can now only guess what our Saxon church looked like. We cannot even be sure that it was then known as St Andrew’s. “Andrew” possibly being a corruption of the old English “Audrey” or Etheldreda, a popular saint in eastern England, of royal blood related to Edmund, King and Martyr, patron saint of the church only a couple of miles away down the hill at Egleton.
By Norman times, however, St Andrew was firmly established as the church’s patron saint; his is the name in several accounts which tell us that, by royal direction, Westminster Abbey in London held the power to appoint the priest in charge at the Hambleton church. “Albert the Lotharingian clerk” is the earliest recorded priest at the time of the Domesday survey, i.e. about 100 years before the 1180-1190 building.
In 1231 the powers and rights attaching to the church, which included a pension of 20 shillings a year from the church of St Peter’s, Stamford, are recorded as belonging to the Bishop of Lincoln rather than to Westminster Abbey; in 1235 the Lincoln Bishop-elect, by name Grostete (“Bighead”) appointed John de Dyham to Hambleton, but reserving 40 marks a year to the Dean and chapter of Lincoln.
John was the “incumbent”, the official priest for the whole parish of Hambleton. He was not the only priest in the group of villages which made up the parish. It is likely that there was a junior, assistant priest. In addition at least one household in the village had its own chapel and priest. Records survive which show that the Bishop of Lincoln gave a license to a John Talbot of Lower Hambleton for a private chapel but he had to pay dues once a year to St Andrew’s. He and his family had also to attend St Andrew’s services on Sundays.
Around this time, i.e. in the early 1200’s, the tower was built. The church will have started to look from the outside much as it does today, particularly from a distance in the valley below. Inside it would have been darker – windows were much narrower than most of those now in place and there was no clerestory. The tall thin “lancet” windows, now glazed with the “rainbow glass” and “St Martin” date from the early 1200’s, but none of the larger windows frame work had yet been made, let alone the glass that we see today. Following the building of the tower, little of what happened in the next 200 years has left a major mark on the church that we now see. There was a re-building, probably in the early 1300’s, when windows were added at ground level on the North side – the exact position of which was adjusted in a later reconstruction. Essentially the North aisle stone window tracery, the frame work, are still those of the 1300’s. From this time to date various pieces of carved stonework, in particular the sedilia (triple stone seating) and piscine (basin) in the Chancel, two coffin slabs with incised crosses at the front of the Nave and two coffin lids one of a man and one of a woman; these are believed to have been benefactors of the church, perhaps the man was Lord Bodlesmere, who in 1315 as “Lord of the Manor of Hambleton” had an official permit to hold a weekly market and an annual fair in August. At this time the village stretched not only along the top of the hill as Upper Hambleton (as it is still known on maps) but down the hill as Middle Hambleton and beyond to The Old Hall (Jacobean) and across the Gwash as Nether Hambleton which is flooded by Rutland Water.
Markets and a fair and benefactors suggest that Hambleton continued to be a village of some wealth, but perhaps less than previously. There may have been other strains and stresses too. There were renewed squabbles between Lincoln and Westminster as to which of them had the better title to St Andrew’s and the lands that went with it. There was a high turnover of priests in the mid 1300s. At some date, quite possibly from this period, some of the other Rutland villages which had been subsidiary to Hambleton became independent. In addition, in 1349/50 Hambleton was hit by the Black Death, a devastating outbreak of bubonic plague in which many towns and villages lost upwards of half their inhabitants, a human tragedy with major economic consequences."
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