St Peter and St Paul, Northleach

St Peter and St Paul stands just off the Market Place in Northleach, a small market town that grew rich on Cotswold wool. Its woolmen paid for its rebuilding in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and their brasses, set into the floor, are among the finest in England. It is one of the great wool churches, listed Grade I, and open every day.

History

Northleach was a planned town. Gloucester Abbey, lord of the manor, founded it as a borough and market around 1220, offering settlers three years free of rent. By the late fourteenth century it was one of the chief markets for Cotswold wool, where local woolmen dealt with the staplers of London and Calais and with Italian buyers, and the church shows where the profits went.

The rebuilding

There was a church here in the twelfth century, but the building you see is almost all of the late Middle Ages. The Victoria County History puts the tower, the widening of the south aisle and the south porch first, in the later fourteenth century. In the middle of the fifteenth century the nave was remodelled, largely at the expense of John Fortey, a woolman who died in 1458 and left money to finish it; Historic England credits him with the clerestory that floods the nave with light. William Bicknell and his wife Margaret built the south chapel in 1489. The listing dates differ: it gives the tower to about 1400, the clerestory to about 1445 to 1455, and the south aisle and porch to about 1460 to 1480, with the date 1489 carved on a corbel in the south chapel.

The woolmen

The names on the brasses are the town's merchant families: the Forteys, Thomas, who died in 1447, and John; William Midwinter, who died in 1501; the Bushes, the Taylors and the Serches. The wool trade had left the town by the middle of the sixteenth century, and its clothmaking dwindled through the seventeenth, but the church the woolmen built remained.

Restoration

James Brooks restored and refitted the church in 1884, the tower was repaired in 1897, and in the early 1960s a re-ordering brought a new east window by Christopher Webb. Six bells were cast in 1700 by William and Robert Corr of Aldbourne, and two more were added in 1897 for Queen Victoria's jubilee, making a ring of eight.

What to see

Start at the south porch, two storeys high with pinnacles and buttresses. Over the door sits a medieval statue of the Virgin, and other medieval figures survive in the niches of its front. Inside, look up at the lierne vault with its carved bosses, including human heads. The room above has its own medieval fireplace.

In the nave, the tall Perpendicular arcades rise to Fortey's clerestory, and over the chancel arch is a great window, a feature of the Cotswold wool churches. The goblet-shaped stone pulpit is fifteenth century, and the font of the late fourteenth century is carved with portrait heads, angels playing instruments and devils round the base.

The brasses

The brasses are the treasure. The Victoria County History counts one of the largest surviving collections of medieval brasses in England, most of them to woolmen of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Look for an unnamed woolman and his wife of about 1400; Thomas Fortey with his wife Agnes; John Fortey, with his feet on a woolpack; John Taylor and Joan; a brass probably to William Midwinter and Agnes; Robert Serche, a mercer, and Anne; William Launder, vicar, of about 1524; and Thomas Bush and Joan, with the arms of the Calais staple. There are fragments of the Bicknell brasses in the south chapel and a wall brass to Maud Parker, who died in 1585.

Visiting

The church is open every day from 9am to 5pm, and entry is free. The National Churches Trust lists level access to the main areas, dogs welcome, and parking on the street at the church; free public toilets are in the Market Place, open 9am to 6pm in summer and 9am to 5pm in winter, with an accessible toilet opened by a RADAR key. The clock chimes the quarters, and every three hours, at noon, 3pm, 6pm and 9pm, a carillon on the eight bells plays the hymn O Worship the King, the benefice says, so time a visit for noon. The old clock of about 1700, which had no face, now stands in the north chapel. The Sunday service is at 11am, and the benefice office is open on Wednesday and Friday mornings.

Getting there

Northleach is just off the A40 between Oxford and Cheltenham, where it crosses the A429 Fosse Way. Park free on the street in the Market Place; the church is on Mill End (GL54 3HL), a short walk away. Pulhams buses stop in the Market Place: the 855 about hourly from Monday to Saturday, and the X52 about every two hours, with a couple of journeys each way on Sundays. On foot, Northleach, Hampnett and the Saltway, a 7.2km walk without stiles, starts in the Square and comes back down into the town past the church.

Nearby

The Wheatsheaf, a seventeenth-century coaching inn, is a few steps away, and Lynwood & Co is a café in the Island House on the Market Place. At the Fosse Way crossroads on the edge of town is the Old Prison, and a mile north-west is the painted Norman church of St George, Hampnett. For the other great wool churches, see St John the Baptist, Cirencester, St Mary's, Fairford and St John the Baptist, Burford, and our story on the wool churches of the Cotswolds tells how they came to be.