Church porch

The highly decorated two-storey porch of St Mary's, Yatton, England[1][2]

A church porch is a room-like structure at a church's main entrance.[3] In most Christian churches the main door is on the south side, and a Porch protects from the weather to some extent. Some porches have an outer door, others a simple gate, and in some cases the outer opening is not closed in any way.

The porch at St Wulfram's Church, Grantham, like many others of the period, has a room above the porch, which once provided lodging for the priest but now houses Francis Trigge Chained Library. Such a room is sometimes called a parvise[4] although the word more normally means an open space or colonnade outside the entrance of a church.

In Scandinavia the porch of a church is often called by names meaning weaponhouse.[5] Visitors stored their weapons there because of a prohibition against carrying weapons into the sanctuary, or into houses in general.[6]

Examples

See also

References

  1. Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England North Somerset and Bristol (Penguin, 1979), p. 352.
  2. Images of England (accessed 3 September 2009)
  3. "Historic Churches > Dictionary". British Express. Retrieved 2 September 2015.
  4. Baron Grimthorpe, Edmund Beckett (1856). Lectures on Church-building: with Some Practical Remarks on Bells and Clocks. Bell and Daldy. p. 198.
  5. For example, Norwegian våpenhus
  6. Harrison, James A.; Sharp, Robert, eds. (January 2006). "Project Gutenberg's Beowulf". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 14 August 2007. (Note l. 325. Cf. l. 397.)

Media related to Church porches at Wikimedia Commons


This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 3/23/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.