There are still prebendaries of North and South Grantham in
Salisbury, who presented to the vicarage until 1870; but their connection
with the prebendal church is now severed save in name, and, while the
impropriation has passed into other hands, the vicar is collated by the
Bishop of Lincoln.
On its first connection with the Cathedral of Sarum the church was much
smaller than it is now. As we stand beneath the tower and look along
the nave, we shall see that the second pillar east of the tower in both
arcades is a pier composed of a broad mass of wall with a respond on
either side; and, coming nearer, we shall see that the western respond is
much later in character than the eastern. Across the space between these
composite piers, covering their site, and extending a little farther
to north and south, came the west front of the twelfth-century church,
possibly even that of the church mentioned in 1085.[67] It had no aisles;
its side walls stood a little outside the line of the present arcades,
where their foundations still exist. Of its connection with the chancel
we can say nothing, but high up in the north wall of the chancel there is
“herring-bone” masonry; there is “Norman” tooling on the stones in the
wall below the east window, and in the south wall it is possible that
some of the masonry is of the same date. If the chancel was originally of
its present length, it was as long as the nave—a most unusual proportion
in Norman times; but the nave may have extended farther east, or there
may have been a tower between nave and chancel. If so, the tower was
possibly built either as a continuation upward of the eastern parts
of the nave walls, or straight from the ground without transepts. The
imposing provisions for a rood-screen in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries removed all possible traces of the earlier arrangement.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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