Church porch
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
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St Wulfram's Grantham, England: The church porch which houses the chained library
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Church Porch with lattice gate, intended mainly to prevent birds nesting in the porch. St Guthlac, Little Ponton (England)
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Billingshurst Church, England
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Keutschach am See Church, Austria
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Østerlars Church, Denmark
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Porch of the Tolchkovo Church, Russia
See also
References
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- ↑ Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England North Somerset and Bristol (Penguin, 1979), p. 352.
- ↑ Images of England (accessed 3 September 2009)
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- ↑ For example, Norwegian våpenhus
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