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| St. Peter's Bromyard |
Bromyard lies on the A44 about 10 miles east of Leominster and about 13 miles west of Worcester. It is in a very rural area as indeed is most of Herefordshire, which has only a handful of towns including Hereford, Leominster, Ledbury, Ross-on-Wye, Bromyard and Kington.
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| St. Peter's Bromyard |
When you see St. Peter's in Bromyard you know immediately that it has an interesting history as it has a tower in the centre rather than at the west end like so many parish churches. There are records of Bromyard going back to Anglo-Saxon times when it is mentioned in a charter of 840 AD as Bromgeard meaning an enclosure with broom or gorse. The charter mentions that there was a manor and a minster. A minster was a community of priests, widespread in late Anglo-Saxon England but gradually replaced by parishes. Bromyard appears in the Domesday Book of 1085 as Bromgerde which at the time was one of the largest settlements in the county. The town dates to the 12th century, possibly to when Richard de Capella was Bishop of Hereford in the period from 1121-1127. St. Peter's as it appears now has Norman features from about 1175 but there is much 14th century work too. My picture below shows a doorway that has an arch that one normally associates with the Norman period. The altar table is said to have come from Hereford Cathedral in 1805. There is an effigy of St. Peter holding two keys over the door which I managed to miss out of the picture. Within the church there are a number of recesses which probably held tombs. The parish registers are some of the oldest in the county going back to the inception of registers in 1538.
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| Norman Door | Choir and Chancel | |
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| Tower | View across the nave |
Wikipedia article on Bromyard
1.0 Strict 