Church porch
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
- St Wulfram's Grantham, England: The church porch which houses the chained library
- Church Porch with lattice gate, intended mainly to prevent birds nesting in the porch. St Guthlac, Little Ponton (England)
- Billingshurst Church, England
- Keutschach am See Church, Austria
- Østerlars Church, Denmark
- Large church porch at St Nicolas' Church, Rønne (Denmark)
- Nederluleå Church, Sweden
See also
References
- ↑ Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England North Somerset and Bristol (Penguin, 1979), p. 352.
- ↑ Images of England (accessed 3 September 2009)
- ↑ "Historic Churches > Dictionary". British Express. Retrieved 2 September 2015.
- ↑ Baron Grimthorpe, Edmund Beckett (1856). Lectures on Church-building: with Some Practical Remarks on Bells and Clocks. Bell and Daldy. p. 198.
- ↑ For example, Norwegian våpenhus
- ↑ Harrison, James A.; Sharp, Robert, eds. (January 2006). "Project Gutenberg's Beowulf". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 14 August 2007. (Note l. 325. Cf. l. 397.)
External links
- Media related to Church porches at Wikimedia Commons
External links
Media related to Church porches at Wikimedia Commons