St. Nicholas, Cuddington, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, England
St Nicholas, Cuddington, Buckinghamshire
Cuddington is a village in the W of central Buckinghamshire, 5 miles W of Aylesbury. It stands on the rising ground on the E
bank of the river Thame in rolling wooded pasture, and the church is in the centre of the village.
St Nicholas’s has a nave with N and S aisles, no clerestory and a S porch, a chancel with a N vestry and a W tower. The
building history is a complicated one, not entirely resolved. The S arcade is of 4 bays and the N of 3 slightly wider ones, but
the N aisle does not extend as far W as the S. It may have been shortened by a bay, according to Pevsner. In the S aisle is
a transverse arch, connected to pier 2. To the E of this the aisle was widened c.1300 to form a chapel. This transverse
arch, the two arcades and the chancel arch belong together stylistically (although they differ slightly in their details), and are
dateable by their sculpture to the early 13thc, except for two trumpet-scallop capitals, one in each of the nave arcades,
which must be a decade or more earlier and are presumed to have been reused. The S nave doorway belongs to the
mid-13thc, and its porch was added by Street in 1856-57. The chancel has details suggesting a date around 1300, and the
tower is 15thc with diagonal W buttresses and an octagonal N stair that rises higher than the embattled parapet and has its
own battlement. The church was restored by G. E. Street in 1856-57. Features recorded below are the two nave arcades
(on account of the reused capitals they contain) and the font. Photographs of the other features described above are
included as an aid to understanding this complex building.
History
Cuddington is not mentioned by name in the Domesday Survey, but may have been included with Haddenham (held by the
archbishop of Canterbury). Certainly in the 1220s Cuddington church was a chapel of Haddenham parish. By 1309 the
advowson was held by Merton priory (Surrey) and in that year the church was appropriated by the priory. It became a
parish in its own right in 1855, and is now part of the benefice of Haddenham with Cuddington, Kingsey and Aston Sandford.