Church porch

A church porch is a room-like structure at a church's main entrance.^[3] A porch protects from the weather to some extent. Some porches have an outer door, others a simple gate, and in some cases the outer opening is not closed in any way.

The porch at St Wulfram's Church, Grantham, like many others of the period, has a room above the porch. It once provided lodging for the priest, but now houses the Francis Trigge Chained Library. Such a room is sometimes called a parvise^[4] which spelt as parvis normally means an open space or colonnade in front of a church entrance.

In Scandinavia and Germany the porch of a church is often called by names meaning weaponhouse.^[5] It used to be believed that visitors stored their weapons there because of a prohibition against carrying weapons into the sanctuary, or into houses in general;^[6] this is now considered apocryphal by most accepted sources, and the weaponhouse is considered more likely to have functioned as a guardroom or armoury to store weapons in case of need.^[7]

Examples

St Wulfram's Grantham, England: The church porch which houses the chained library
Church Porch with lattice gate, intended mainly to prevent birds nesting in the porch. St Guthlac, Little Ponton (England)
Billingshurst Church, England
Keutschach am See Church, Austria
Østerlars Church, Denmark
Porch of the Tolchkovo Church, Russia

References

^ Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England North Somerset and Bristol (Penguin, 1979), p. 352.
^ Images of England (accessed 3 September 2009)
^ "Historic Churches > Dictionary". British Express. Retrieved 2 September 2015.
^ Baron Grimthorpe, Edmund Beckett (1856). Lectures on Church-building: with Some Practical Remarks on Bells and Clocks. Bell and Daldy. p. 198. name for room above church porch.
^ For example, Norwegian våpenhus
^ Harrison, James A.; Sharp, Robert, eds. (January 2006). "Project Gutenberg's Beowulf". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 14 August 2007. (Note l. 325. Cf. l. 397.)
^ "Vapenhus".