The earliest part of the church is the thirteenth-century north porch
with its groined roof, and a beautiful double doorway, now blocked up,
leading from the porch to S. Thomas's chapel. West of the porch, in
the Archdeacon's chapel, is another blocked window, a fine example of
the Decorated type. The nave is of the first half of the fourteenth
century, and was built before the chancel. The fresco of the Last
Judgment, which could once be discerned above the chancel arch, is now
obliterated. As in S. Michael's the mullions of the fifteenth-century
clear-story windows are continued to the top of the arches of the
nave, forming a series of stone panels. Marler's-chapel, leading out of
the north chancel-aisle, is the latest part of the structure, belonging
to the sixteenth century. The stone pulpit dates from about 1470. The
lectern, which is also antique, aroused the suspicions of the Puritans,
and in 1654 there was some talk of selling it, a transaction which was
happily not accomplished, though the "eagle" at S. Michael's, the gift
of William Botoner, had been sold at so much the pound a few years
before.
Scarcely a vestige now remains of the ancient stained glass which once
made the church beautiful. Its disappearance was owing not perhaps so
much to Puritan zeal, as to the deliberate action of the authorities in
the last century. From 1774 to 1787 the masons of Coventry must have
revelled in the work of mutilating the window traceries, and the old
glass after being taken down was never put back. The old sexton told
the antiquary, Sharp, particulars of the famous window, wherein Leofric
and Godiva were represented, the former holding a charter with the
words:
"I, Luriche, for love of thee
Doe make Coventre Tol-free."
But this was removed in 1779; but a few last fragments of glass are
now in the window of the Archdeacon's chapel. A small figure is
seen holding a spray of leaves and part of a horse; there are also
architectural fragments in the stained glass that appear in Stukeley's
drawing of the Godiva window, but they are very insignificant and
broken.
In this same chapel is a brass to John Whitehead (1597) and his two
wives in Elizabethan costume, and a monument in Philemon Holland
(1636), once master of the grammar school, translator of Camden's
_Britannia_. The font is of the fifteenth century. Close to the west
door is a fine Elizabethan alms-box.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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