The Cirencester Parish Church of Saint John Baptist is located just south of the abbey grounds and faces the Marketplace to the west. This is one of the medieval buildings in Cirencester that existed in 1395 when I set Templar’s Prophecy,the fourth novel in the Lady Apollonia West Country Mystery Series. My heroine lived on Dyer Street and would have passed the church every time she would have walked to the Marketplace or Cirencester Abbey. She and others in the story had occasion to visit the church itself.
The origins of this church were tied to the foundation of the abbey in the 12th century. The new abbey was built on the side of a minster church founded in the eighth or ninth century. It was to replace that church that Saint John Baptist was built as the new parish church. Enlarged over the centuries, it is now one of the largest parish churches in England as pictured to the top left.
In March of 2013, my husband and I were in Cirencester and visited the church several times including two Sunday mornings when we worshipped there. It is an impressive church, grandly built because of the money generated by the wool trade in the town. The aisles on either side of the nave are wide. The internal length of the church is 158 feet and the width 104 feet.
Today there are several features which have been added after 1395, so one must mentally ignore these to get a feeling for the church at the time of my book. The impressive tower at the west end of the church was built five years after my story. The large Trinity Chapel was added to the north wall of the nave in the 15th century as was the multi-storey porch built outside the South door. The roof of the nave was raised by a height of 20 feet in 1520 at the expense of the town’s merchants. As one sits in the nave and looks towards the chancel rather than upwards, one sees the church much as it was at the time of my story.
For more on the Church of St John Baptist, click on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_St._John_the_Baptist,_Cirencester .
Tags: Chaucer's England, historical fiction, medieval mysteries