Our Lady and St. Edward

Introduction

Our Lady and Saint Edward in Driffield is a small Roman Catholic church designed by Edward Simpson and built in 1886 in Romanesque style using brick and terracotta.

History

The church was constructed following a visit to Driffield by Bishop Lacy in 1883. Lady Herries of Everingham Hall near Market Weighton paid for the church.

Architecture and furnishings

The church is built of red brick mainly laid to English Garden Wall bond with yellow terracotta dressings and a clay tile roof. The plan comprises an apse, a chancel with a shallow projection to the north forming a small side chapel, and an aisle-less nave. The roof is continuous over the nave and chancel, extending as a cat-slide over the small side chapel. A gabled bellcote rises at the west end and a stone cross forms a finial to the east end.

The nave is of five bays with the north porch at the western end. The apse, built in header bond and smoothly rounded, has five evenly spaced lancets. The chancel and sanctuary arches are wide, each supported by three orders of stone columns, with three arch rings decorated with seven bands of Romanesque ornamentation in yellow terracotta. The roof structure is exposed, with arched braced principal trusses supported by shaped corbels, the common rafters being scissor-braced.

The semicircular apse roof has an arch-braced kingpost. The stone high altar has an arcaded front. A low stone arcade forms an altar rail beneath the chancel arch. The nave contains simple oak open-backed bench pews with kneelers.

Affixed to the nave walls are the Stations of the Cross, being painted panels in round arched wooden frames. To the west wall there is a large framed painted canvas of the Virgin and Child, thought to be a copy of a C16 Italian painting. A tall boiler chimney rises from the intersection between the roofs of the vestry and nave. The west end has three lancet windows, the central one being shorter but set higher.

The single bay chancel projects slightly to the north, forming a side chapel, and has triple lancets to both north and south elevations. The vestry extends as a low cross wing from the eastern two bays of the south nave wall, lit by two lancets on the east side which break the eaves line and are accommodated by a plain verged gable. The west elevation has a Romanesque doorway. Window and doorway reveals are deep, their round-arched heads featuring a selection of yellow terracotta ornamentation: those to the nave showing variation between windows and those in the apse being identically detailed.

Just below the window reveals there is a billet string course and a moulded string course links the windows at impost level. There is no division between the chancel and the small side chapel to the north. The main entrance to the church has a modern, inner porch: this is not of special interest. One of the two doorways to the vestry forms the entrance to a confessional.

The nave windows contain blue and purple coloured glass accentuating the arrangement of chevron and square lattice leading. The only pictorial stained glass in the church is in the three central windows of the apse. The right hand lancet of the apse contains an image of the Virgin and Child, the left hand one an image of St Edward, in memory of Lord and Lady Herries, founder of the church. The centre lancet showing Christ's crucifixion is in memory of Edith Mary Forster.