The New Murrey and Blue blog

Thanks so much for posting this – news to me, I must admit.
The first thing to note, of course, is that this wouldn’t be the only church in the country to carry an heraldic clue to patronage by Richard and Anne. But it is rather odd. All I can find by googling are pictures of the above porch, which is the south porch, together with claims that this is the one built by Richard and Anne and that carries the arms of Neville and York. But the two circular blobs on either side of the door ar completely indecipherable in the photos – maybe they had arms in them, maybe not. And that doorway doesn’t look very 15th century in style to me – don’t know what anyone else thinks. So I checked the Victoria County History and found no mention of any arms of York and Warwick, and all it has to say about the South Porch was the following:
“The south doorway has a late 12th-century pointed arch of two orders, the outer moulded and resting on side shafts with scalloped capitals and square abaci and the inner order chamfered.”

Interestingly, though, the VCH also informs that Stanford was one of the manors that Queen Anne Neville conferred on Queens’ College, Cambridge.

Perhaps this evidence that this manor went to Anne in 1474 was the foundation of the story about the nature of the arms (?) in the South Porch, and then that led to the tale of the marriage. . . .

Unless anyone knows different.

Anyhow, if Anne was in St. Martin’s Sanctuary prior to the wedding (which took place in 1472-3, before she came to own any manors), she would surely have avoided travelling all that way to marry because she would have been dependent on Richard’s men for an escort, which could easily have been classed as abduction and used to annul the marriage. Perhaps the likeliest thing is that she married in the chapel in St. Martin’s?

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