Parwich Tympanum & Anglo Saxon Heritage - St Peter - Parwich, Derbyshire, UK - Signs of History on Waymarking.com

An information board in the west tower of St Peter's church, Parwich, with some history of the church, and its Anglo Saxon origins.

"The Old Church in Parwich -
The Norman Conquest saw a surge in church building, and a new church was built in Parwich in the 1100s. This church would have been similar to those surviving at Alsop en le Dale and Kniveton.

The Parwich Tympanum -
A tympanum is a recessed semi-circular stone over a doorway, often decorated with carvings. We know little about the history of the Parwich tympanum - it is carved out of grit stone, probably from Stanton Moor, and was rediscovered during the demolition of the old Norman church, over the south door and under plaster and whitewash. It may have been deliberately concealed during the Puritans’ purge of church decorations in the mid 1600s. Experts give a very wide range of dates for the style of the carving, from 700 to 1200 AD. This means it could have been made for the Norman church when it was built in the 1100s, or been reused from a possible older Saxon church on the site.

For a non-literate congregation, with the Bible and services in Latin, a language they could not understand, our Anglo-Saxon forebears were to some extent dependent on church paintings and carvings to understand their religion. These images became known as the Biblia Pauperum or the poor man’s Bible. Some were direct representations of biblical scenes, but others like the tympanum used symbols that now require interpretation for the modern audience.

The Present Church -
The old church was demolished by the Victorians to make way for the bigger modern Church we have today. The Tympanum was installed in its present exterior location in 1872/3, above the west doorway. The resultant cycles of wet and dry have caused flaking of the surface of the stone.

The Replica -
In 2006 it was decided that attempting to move the stone back inside the Church would involve an unacceptable risk of breakage, and therefore the only option was to leave it in its present exterior location, even though further deterioration would be inevitable. The National Conservation Centre of Liverpool undertook a laser scan of the original in situ, and created a 3-dimensional computer model of the stone. This was then used to create the replica of the stone, installed on the north wall inside the tower in June 2008, as a permanent record of the onginal."

SOURCE - infomation board

Group that erected the marker: Parwich History Society Address of where the marker is located. Approximate if necessary: St Peter Smithy Close Parwich, Derbyshire England DE6 1QT URL of a web site with more information about the history mentioned on the sign: Not listed

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