Seating for the Medieval Monk

St Lawrence’s Church, Canon Pyon, Herefordshire, England

Canon Pyon is a village and civil parish on the A4110 road. St Lawrence’s stands isolated from the main population of the parish. It is of 13th 14th and 15th century date, built of sandstone rubble and ashlar with tiled roofs, and was restored in 1865, 1870, 1897 and around 1922.

The general quality of the oak woodwork is high. This appears to have started early : the elaborate and fully restored oak chancel screen is probably 15th century, and the screen that divides the chancel from the north chapel is of similar design and date.

The choir stalls in the chancel reputedly came from nearby Wormsley Priory and are 16th century with carved misericords and moulded arms. However, in English Church Woodwork (Batsford 1927) Howard & Crossley criticised the view that the presence of of stalls in a parish church was a sure sign that it was in some way monastic and denounced “… absurd traditions … invented to the effect that the stalls have been brought from some destroyed abbey [as] … absolutely false, being based on the failure of the nineteenth-century antiquary to appreciate the grandeur of parochial services before the Reformation in even the minor parish churches.”

Source:: Wellington and the Pyons