IV. The Norman Church and Door at Stillingfleet, North Yorkshire

Abstract

The great age and unusual character of the south door of St. Helen's Church, Stillingfleet, now in North Yorkshire but formerly in the East Riding, has engaged the attention of antiquaries since the early days of archaeological study. The door and the fine twelfth-century doorway in which it is set have been recorded repeatedly in drawings, photographs, manuscript notes, and published accounts. The systematic account of the church published by Charles Hodgson Fowler in 1877, on the occasion of his restoration of St. Helen's, together with the plans and elevations preserved with the faculty papers, is the basic point of reference (Fowler, 1877; Borthwick Inst. PR 21 STIL). Nevertheless since Hodgson Fowler's day few scholars concerned either with the historic buildings of the locality, or with the general trends of vernacular art in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, or with church ironwork, or church carpentry, have resisted the temptation to comment on the door. Most agree within relatively narrow limits about the date of the doorway, but opinion has been diverse about the date of the door itself. It is a complex structure evidently comprising much original woodwork with additions and alterations from a number of restorations, and there is various structural and decorative ironwork. Hodgson Fowler seems to have been responsible for a sensitive though far-reaching restoration and he was thus probably in possession of more facts about its construction and character than was any later worker until recently. He seems to have been in no doubt, taking the evidence as a whole, that both doorway and door belong to the twelfth century. Most later commentators have been more impressed by the supposed Scandinavian character of the decorative metalwork, and W. G. Collingwood followed by Talbot Rice, Pevsner, and more recently Baggs have questioned the contemporaneity of door and doorway, suggesting that the door might perhaps belong to the eleventh century, and it is included in Wilson's catalogue of Anglo-Saxon metalwork.