Monument record GAZ 017 - Church of All Saints

All Saints Church, Gazeley, is situated to the SW of the parish. There is no record of a church in the Domesday book. The chancel & W tower are early Decorated, the nave Decorated and Perpendicular, the aisles, vestry & S porch are Perpendicular. It is a flint rubble structure with areas of rendering to the porch & chancel. It is a substantial early C14 church with late C15 alterations. Chancel: an unusual E window with 3-lights below a cusped trefoil; fine piscina integral with a double window-seat sedilia; on the N wall is a projecting aumbry with crocketted canopy. The nave has 4 bay arcades with quatrefoil piers; the chancel arch & tower arch are broad & similar in type. The tower is C14, but the upper level was partly rebuilt in 1884. On the E face are weatherings for 2 previous nave roofs, & the sanctus bell opening is now above the nave roof. The W doorway is also C14. The late C15 work includes raising of rebuilding of aisle walls for large 3-light windows & of nave walls for new clerestory. Complete re-roofing was carried out. The porch is C15. The font is C14 & octagonal. The screen is mainly late C16, complete up to rood beam, but much restored. The pulpit is octagonal, circa 1500, with sunken traceried panels between buttresses, heavily restored in C19 (S1).
Scarfe records this as a possible minster (S2).

2007: Six timbers from the south aisle were sampled for dendrochronological dating. Sampling was curtailed at this site after only six timbers had been cored, as the remaining timbers were judged to be from faster-grown trees than those sampled, and the cores taken had yielded relatively short sequences. Nevertheless, three sequences, all from the west end of the roof, did cross-match, and a 92-year long site sequence was dated to the period AD 1312-1403. Only one timber retained sapwood, giving a likely felling date of AD 1371-1403, whilst a second timber retained the heartwood-sapwood boundary, giving a likely felling date range of AD 1412-44. Clearly, these two timbers give two non-overlapping felling date ranges, but with the third timber sequence also ending in the late fourteenth century, an early fifteenth-century date for the roof is suggested, but cannot be conclusively proven due to the lack of dating evidence from the centre and eastern end of the roof. (S3)

Included in the Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History annual round up of individual finds and discoveries for 2007 (S4).