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

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 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
• 
  Large church porch at St Nicolas' Church, Rønne (Denmark)
• 
  Nederluleå Church, Sweden
• 
  Porch at Savior Cathedral at Spaso-Prilutsky Monastery

See also

• Lychgate

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. name for room above church porch.
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.)
7. https://www.svenskakyrkan.se/vapenhus

External links

• Media related to Church porches at Wikimedia Commons

External links

Media related to Church porches at Wikimedia Commons