History of St Peter's Church, Wenhaston

 

Welcome to St Peter's Church, Wenhaston

Church interior

Three Saxon stones embedded in the East wall are the only remaining evidence that there was a church in Wenhaston some time prior to its mention in the Domesday book of 1086. There are two Norman slit windows, two 12th-century lancet windows and a 13th-century sanctuary knocker on the South door. Tower and nave arcade are late 14th-century, the porch and the font 15th-century, the North aisle was probably built in the 1530s and the Jacobean pulpit was built in 1620.

The first vicar of Wenhaston named in a list in the church was Syr Ernesin in 1217, and from 1290 there is an unbroken line of 60 vicars to 1996, when Wenhaston became a constituent parish of the Blyth Valley Team Ministry.

St Peter's suffered in 1644 at the hands of the Parliamentary Visitor, commissioned by the Parliamentary forces to remove all superstitious images and writings from churches in the eastern counties. His men took the organ and the font cover from the church, broke the stained glass windows, destroyed the altar, the chancel steps and angels carved on the roof beams, and obliged the churchwardens to pay them 5s.6d for the labour of doing so.

The present organ was built in 1810 and bought to Wenhaston from Marylebone Parish Church in 1950.

There is a ring of six bells, the oldest on record of these dated 1386 (recast in 1956), and the oldest survivor the tenor bell of 1450. Both these bells are thought to have come from Blythburgh Priory, close by the parish.

Source: Wenhaston: Millennial History of a Suffolk village, by Keith Johnceline. Wenhaston,  1998.

Doom rood-screen

This detail from the church's great treasure, the 'Doom', a medieval rood-screen painting on wood of the Last Judgement, shows St Peter with the key to Heaven receiving lost souls. Now thought to have been painted by East Anglian journeymen in the 1520s, on a new screen spanning the chancel arch, it was boarded up and whitewashed over in 1547 in response to the demand of Edward VI for the abolition of paintings and pictures in churches; it remained hidden from the view of the Parliamentary Visitor's men a century later, and wholly forgotten until 1892, when it was re-discovered in the course of reconstruction of the East end of the church.

It is now considered to be the finest Doom of its period in England. Images of the painting are online on www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/wenhaston.html and on www.wenhaston.net

Source: The Wenhaston Doom [Text copyright Judith Middleton-Stewart 2006]. £3.50 from St Peter's.