Church porch
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A church porch is a room-like structure at a church's main entrance.[3] 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. It once provided lodging for the priest, but now houses the Francis Trigge Chained Library. Such a room is sometimes called a parvise[4] which spelt as parvis normally means an open space or colonnade in front of a church entrance.
In Scandinavia and Germany the porch of a church is often called by names meaning weaponhouse.[5] It used to be believed that visitors stored their weapons there because of a prohibition against carrying weapons into the sanctuary, or into houses in general;[6] this is now considered apocryphal by most accepted sources, and the weaponhouse is considered more likely to have functioned as a guardroom or armoury to store weapons in case of need.[7]
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
- Porch of the Tolchkovo Church, Russia
See also
- Lychgate
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.
name for room above church porch.
- ^ 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.)
- ^ "Vapenhus".
External links
Media related to Church porches at Wikimedia Commons
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