Wolverhampton St Peter in 1859

WOLVERHAMPTON (ST. PETER). The collegiate chapter consists of a dean and five (till lately seven) non-resident prebendaries, with a net revenue of £641, received by the dean, who is likewise Dean of Windsor, to which office this deanery is permanently attached; each of the prebendaries has a separate revenue from his prebend.

The LIVING is a perpetual curacy; net income £103; patron, the Dean: those tithes payable to the Duke of Cleveland have been commuted for £715. The church, built in the reign of Edward III., and formerly one of the king's free chapels, to which many immunities were granted, is a spacious cruciform structure, partly in the early decorated, but principally in the later English style, with a handsome square embattled tower rising from the centre, the upper part of which is a very fine specimen of the later style; it has been lately repewed by subscription.

The piers and arches of the nave and transepts, if not of the early English, are of that style merging into the decorated; the pulpit, of one entire stone, is adorned with sculpture; and an octagonal font, of great antiquity, supported on a shaft the faces, of which are embellished with the figures of St. Anthony, St. Paul, and St. Peter, in bass-relief, is richly ornamented with bosses, flowers, and foliage.

In the chancel, which is in the Italian style, are, a fine statue of brass, erected in honour of Admiral Sir Richard Leveson, who commanded under Sir Francis Drake against the Spanish Armada, and a monument to the memory of Colonel John Lane, the protector of Charles II. after the battle of Worcester: in what was anciently the Lady chapel is an alabaster monument to John Lane and his wife, the former represented in armour. In the churchyard, which is inclosed with a handsome iron palisade, is a column twenty feet high, divided into compartments, highly enriched with sculpture of various designs, supposed to be either of Saxon or Danish origin.

Near its south-western angle is a large vault, the roof of which is finely groined, and supported on one central pillar; the walls are three yards in thickness, and on both sides of the doorway are slight vestiges of sculpture; the interior is in good preservation. It appears to have been the basement story of some edifice, probably connected with the monastery of Wulfrana, the exact site of which has not been ascertained. 

 

[Description(s) from The Topographical Dictionary of England (1859) by Samuel Lewis - Transcribed by Mike Harbach ©2020]