St James the Less, Colchester, Essex

St James the Less is a new built Roman Catholic church which was open but contains little of interest - so much so that Mee ignores it completely.

ST JAMES THE LESS, R.C. Priory Street. 1837 by JJ Scoles (GR), white brick, in the Norman style. Enlarged and re-decorated 1904-10. Wide interior with Norman columns, clerestory, chancel arch and apse. Exterior without tower, but with the typical angle turrets of the (Gothic) Commissioners’ Churches of the early C19. The Presbytery to the r., attached to the church, and also Neo-Norman.

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St James the Great, Colchester, Essex

St James the Great was, as seems the norm in Colchester, locked which is a shame as the interior sounds interesting. In the churchyard is a CWGC headstone dated 1960.

ST JAMES THE GREATER, High Street. The chancel and chancel chapels of this church, high up above the rise of East Hill into High Street, are perhaps the best Perp work in Colchester. The rest of the church is of less importance. The NW angle of the nave is proof of Norman origin. The W tower may be C13 (see one upper s window) altered in the CT4. Diagonal buttresses and battlements. The odd little spire does not belong to the restoration of 1871. Of that date the clerestory windows, and N and s aisle windows. The N and S chancel chapels and the chancel E end are faced with knapped flint. The N chapel in addition, as it faces the street, has a parapet decorated with a frieze of triangles with trefoils alternately the right and the wrong way up. Internally the chancel is splendidly tall with a five-light E window and tall N and S arcades. The piers are lozenge-shaped with four slim shafts and four long shallow diagonal hollows. The two chapels have large three-light windows and ceilings with prettily carved beams. The S chapel E window has even four lights. Both chapels have flat ceilings. with pretty carved beams. The nave arcades are more curious but less impressive. They are of four different varieties, in chronological order SE (two bays, octagonal pier, arches with one concave and one convex moulding; c. 1300), NE (two bays, octagonal pier, arches with two hollow chamfers; mid C14), then SW and NW differing only in minor features (C15 piers with, towards the nave, as their central motif, thin polygonal shafts without capitals). - STAINED GLASS. S chapel E and SE. Tall figures of apostles, c. 1850, said to have been obtained from Belgium or Holland.- PLATE. Salver of 1705; two flagons 1752. - MONUMENTS. Brasses of 1569 and 1584 in the chancel floor. -  Arthur Winsley d. 1727. Standing wall-monument with semi-reclining figure in informal dress.

St James’s church on East Hill was begun in the 11th century and stands near the Roman wall by the east gate. It belongs to all our three building centuries, and its tower has Roman bricks. The chapel and the chancel have their original roofs, and the tower and the vestry have 15th century doors. The font was new when the doors were hung. Hanging on the wall is a big picture of the Nativity by George Carter. There is a 16th century brass with portraits of John Maynard and his wife (she headless), and at the west end reclines Arthur Winsley, a remarkable figure meditating, wearing a cloak and holding a book in which we read "Go and do likewise? He founded 12 charity houses 200 years ago.

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St Giles, Colchester, Essex

St Giles was originally built on part of St John's Abbey cemetery around AD 1150 and contains work from every century since. It was declared redundant in 1956 and then used as a St John Ambulance depot until 1975 when it was converted into a masonic centre.

ST GILES, just off St John’s Green. Small; nave with chancel and N chapel. The W tower of timber, weatherboarded, as well as the present interior of the nave are of 1819. Thin N and S arcade shafts and W gallery. Box pews. Flat ceiling. The N windows however, with Perp tracery all straightened out, may well be the posthumous Gothic of the C17, as the Royal Commission suggests. Of 1907 (Sir A. Blomfield & Son) the brick N and S chancel arcades and the S chapel. But the brick S porch is original early C16 work. In the chancel E of the S arcade a C13 lancet window has been discovered. N chapel of c. 1500. - DOOR, N doorway, C14 with rich tracery. - PALL. Of the Lucas family, dated 1628. Purple velvet with embroidery; oval.

It was after the siege that two heroes of Colchester, Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle, were shot on the spot marked by an obelisk in the Castle Park. The siege had lasted 12 weeks when Fairfax pressed on the Royalist forces and ended it. Dogs, cats, rats, and horses had been eaten by the people, and not a crumb of food remained. Lucas and Lisle were led out to the spot marked by this monument, and Lucas was shot saying, "I am ready for you, rebels; now do your worst." Then Lisle was brought forward, kissed the body of his dead friend, and stood before the firing squad, which he invited to come nearer. "I’ll warrant you we will hit you," said one, and Lisle replied, "I have been nearer you, friends, when you have missed me." They lie in St Giles’s church, under an immense black marble stone which tells us that they were barbarously murdered in cold blood.

The medieval church of St Giles by the gateway of the abbey is chiefly interesting for its 17th century wooden tower, a 600-year-old door, and the graves of Lucas and Lisle. Framed in oak are copies of the brasses from their coffins.

St Botolph, Colchester, Essex

St Botolph is a hideous building dating to 1836 which stands beside the ruins of the priory church destroyed in the civil war. The remains are magnificent and it must have been an astonishing sight before its destruction.

ST BOTOLPH’S PRIORY. The most important and impressive ecclesiastical monument of Colchester; the ruin of an Early Norman church of considerable size. St Botolph’s was founded late in the C11 as the first British house of Augustinian Canons. What remains is a ruin, and the ruin only of the W front and the nave (108 ft long). Transepts and E end have completely disappeared. The church was built of rubble with plenty of Roman bricks, used in the walls as well as more consistently for dressings. The W front is broad; the two towers stand outside the aisles, not identical incidentally either in size or in shape. There are three portals; the middle one of four orders of columns, the capitals with finely intertwined scrolls or decorated scallops (badly preserved), the arches with much zigzag. Above the portals, but with the middle one cutting into it, two tiers of intersected arches without capitals. Nothing survives of the towers. Inside the facade a passage, carried on a tunnel-vault, runs on the first floor from one tower to the other, open to the nave. The nave has mighty circular piers (5 ft 8 ins. in diameter). They have no proper capitals and support a gallery with unsubdivided openings as large as the arcade. The arches are single-stepped and unmoulded on both floors. Flat pilaster strips stand on the circular piers to divide the bays of the gallery from each other. The aisles were groin-vaulted. The building is immensely impressive as a ruin, but the grim severity which the absence of all surface embellishments gives may have been a quality of the church even when it was new. It would share this quality with the contemporary Benedictine St Albans and to a certain degree with all Early Norman buildings.

The 12-week siege of the town ruined the great Norman church of St Botolph, but it left this massive structure the chief sight of the town next to the castle, if not the finest single spectacle the town has. Truly magnificent these ruins are, standing by the new church which is in the style of the old one. The west front is as the Civil War left it, the great central doorway finer than anything at the castle, and one of the aisle doorways still standing next to it.

Above them are tiers of narrow Norman arches, all simplicity itself compared with the great doorway, which has five depths of carving and six pillars. We walk through into the nave and are staggered by its stupendous piers, each rising like a mighty monument from the grass, some of the arches complete from the floor to the height of the roof, and all open to the sky. At the east end of the wall are three windows which show us three changing styles, Norman, 13th century, and 14th - the simple and massive Norman strength, the lightness of the Early English, and the elaborate Decorated style. This marvellous arcade has looked as we see it since the Civil War, but what we see men have looked on for 800 years, and the bricks of which this place is made are a thousand years older than that; they are Roman. There must be a hundred thousand of them in this impressive ruin.

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Lion Walk, Colchester, Essex

Lion Walk United Reform church has an extraordinarily tall, thin spire quite unlike anything I've seen on a URC building before now. First built in 1863 it was rebuilt in 1884 following an earthquake.

CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, Lion Walk 1863, by Frederick Barnes of Ipswich. In the geometrical style. The very tall NW spire, a landmark, was rebuilt after the earthquake of 1884.

Mee doesn't mention it.

Holy Trinity, Colchester, Essex

Holy Trinity boasts a Saxon tower and arch both of which are really rather special. The church is now a cafe and as such is open.

HOLY TRINITY, Trinity Street. The W tower is the only Anglo-Saxon monument of Colchester. Built with plenty of Roman bricks, and crowned by a recent low pyramid roof. Small W doorway with triangular head, a wholly Saxon feature. E arch, into the nave with odd capitals of the responds in three steps of brick, without any mouldings. Saxon upper windows, the bell-openings developed as twin windows, but not separated by a turned shaft or colonnette as usual. On the sides below that stage traces of a blank arcade. The rest of the church is of 1886, except for the E end of the chancel with an early C14 three-light window with flowing tracery, and the outside of the S aisle and the S porch which are of the C15. - FONT. Perp, octagonal, with shields and nobbly foliage in the panels. - PLATE. Fine Mazer, C15.

St Botolph’s has been the noblest of all Colchester’s churches, for though the town has many they have little to attract us. We may run round them all very quickly. No traveller will miss the best church tower still standing in the town, with the fine triangular doorway looking on to a quaint narrow street leading to the town hall at one end and the abbey gate at the other, and in the middle of it, opposite the little Saxon tower, the old home of Queen Elizabeth’s electrical wizard, William Gilbert.

This tower of Holy Trinity is one of the finest possessions of the town, and it has still hanging in it on its old hinges a door which may have been opened for Queen Elizabeth. The tower is built of Roman bricks and stands as the Saxons left it. The door by which we come in at the south porch has also been opening and shutting for 500 years, and has a fine rose for its knocker. Looking down into the nave is a fox carrying off a goose and a lion having a meal, and there are 15th century glass roundels in the windows. The font is also 15th century, and the church has one of the rare medieval mazer bowls, with a silver rim.

Here, in an unknown grave, lies the most renowned composer of those madrigals for which Elizabethan music was famous, William Wilbye. He lived in a house near the church for the last ten years of his life, and was buried here in 1638. Hardly any manuscripts of his are preserved, but his madrigals have been sung by every generation since his own. They are very beautiful and some of the best known are Stay, Corydon; Adieu Sweet Amaryllis; and Flora gave me fairest flowers.

But the chief interest in the church is the alabaster carving which tells us that here lies William Gilbert, the wonder man of Queen Elizabeth’s court, her physician, who used to amuse her with electrical experiments. He was the first man who used the word Electricity, and perhaps the first man to have any practical knowledge of it. He lived across the street, where Queen Elizabeth is said to have visited him in 1579, and we may be sure he would point out this Saxon tower, and probably he opened one of these very doors for her. We may go through the archway facing the church and see the delightful white house in which Gilbert lived, with a bay window perched under its overhanging storey and three dormers in the roof. It is Tymperleys, a lovely little place.

Gilbert was one of the giants of learning in Elizabethan England. It was he who coined the word electricity. The ancient Greeks had discovered that amber could be made to attract other bodies; and Gilbert thought of extending friction to other things and found that what was true of amber was true of such substances as sulphur, resin, sealing-wax. He investigated magnetism and declared that the whole earth was one vast magnet, setting forth the truth, unproved until the advent of Michael Faraday two centuries later, that electricity and magnetism are two emanations of the same fundamental force pervading Nature. Francis Bacon, unfit to hold a candle to him in mathematical and physical knowledge, attacked the great discovery, but Gilbert was nobly vindicated by Galileo, who loved his book for the daring with which it traversed dogmatic and untested principles. "I extremely praise, admire, and envy this author," Galileo wrote; "I think him, moreover, worthy of the greatest praise for the many new and true observations he has made, to the disgrace of so many vain and fabling authors who repeat everything they hear from the foolish vulgar, without attempting to satisfy themselves by experiment." Gilbert, who grasped the relations between the earth and the moon, and realised that the moon is responsible for the tides, invented two appliances for finding the latitude by astronomical observation.

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All Saints, Colchester, Essex

Colchester town centre was a disappointment - only one of ten churches was open (not including All Saints which is now the Natural History Museum), most of the buildings have been either over restored or are Victorian and, having left in sunshine, it rained.

All Saints sits opposite Colchester Castle, now redundant it is essentially a Victorian re-build and currently, as aforesaid, is the home of the Natural History Museum and as such there's little of interest remaining visible.

ALL SAINTS, High Street. In an impressive position, facing the modern opening towards the castle. Little else of interest, except the fine W tower of flint, with diagonal buttresses and flint and ashlar decoration of the battlements. Big three-light bell-openings. The rest mostly 1861. C15 the pier between chancel and N chapel - of the familiar four-shafts-and-four-hollows - section. Double-chamfered arches. - STAINED GLASS. The N windows pretty, no doubt of c. 1861, the W window by Kemps 1905. - PLATE. Early C17 Cup on baluster stem; large Cup and small Paten of 1714; Flagon of 1777.

In the High Street are the churches of All Saints and St Nicholas*, All Saints with a 16th century tower faced with flints, an old door, and a fine lion and unicorn in spandrels; St Nicholas with a medieval bell, a Norman piscina, an altar table and three chests of the 17th century, and a painting which was the old altarpiece of the vanished church of St Runwald, a church dating from Saxon times which used to stand in the middle of the street.

*St Nicholas has since been demolished.

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