Great Yeldham
St. Andrew’s Church, Great Yeldham
Church Location
Church Road, Great Yeldham, CO9 4PT
Patrons
Prime Minister on behalf of Her Majesty
Lord Chancellor
The Lord Bishop of Chelmsford
Duchy of Lancaster
Parish
Population 1700
ER 33
Number of Church Schools 1
History
Taken, with kind permission, from A Select Guide to Essex Churches And Chapels by members of the Friends of Essex Churches. Edited by John Fitch.
“The church forms an attractive group with the Hall and the old rectory, overlooking to busy A1017 and the spreading village.
Its most impressive feature is its handsome late fifteenth-century west tower. Built in a pleasing misture of rubble, brick and puddingstone with freestone dressings, it has three-light transomed bell openings, a projecting staircase, and a stone parapet with stepped battlements, pinnacles and intermediate figures of angels, and house six bells. This ambitious structure, seen to best advantage from due south, dominates the unpretentious church beneath it. It had evidently been the earlier intention, perhaps due to the awkward lie of the land, to build an equally large tower to serve as an entrance porch, on the south side of the nave, after the fashion of several Suffolk churches around Ipswich. When this was abandoned in favour of a west tower, the unfinished south tower became the porch with a room above it, now the choir vestry, and was completed with a Tudor brick stepped gable.
The church itself is briefly described. Besides nave, chancel and north aisle, it has a small south transept/chapel adjoining the porch, with some good movements and a 1627 brass (Symonds). Fittings include a cleverly restored screen with three painted panels surviving, thought to represent (left to right) St Ursula, St Eligius, patron saint of blacksmiths, and St. Edmund, king and martyr, seventeenth-century pulpit, good twentieth-century panelling in the sanctuary, and the Royal Arms of George III. The east window c.1860 is by Hardman and there is one of St Andrew by Leonard Walker, also in the chancel.”
St. Andrew’s Church Great Yeldham is in need of considerable restoration.
Our current project is estimated to cost £4,000.
Can you help us in any way, however small?
