St Paul's Church, Stamford

The parish church dedicated to St Paul lay just within the town walls in the north-eastern corner of the medieval town and contains some of the earliest fabric of all Stamford churches having been built no later than 1152. It was in the patronage of the Priory of Saint-Fromond in Normandy in the mid eleventh century but had come into the hands of lay patrons by 1413. Of what remains, the two east bays of the south wall are first half of the twelfth century and although the proportions suggest the church was large, with a nave of four or five bays, the plan of the church at that time is unknown; it may have been rectangular without a chancel. "Externally the arched corbel table, the flat…