The church is sited on the highest point (55 metre contour) of the ridge between the Rivers Stour and Box.   It is a position, “high and lifted up”, which must always have impressed itself as apart, a place of worship.   A first Christian church there might have been built following the visit of St.Cedd to Polstead, across the Box valley, in the 7th century, but the first written record of the village and its church is in the will of Earl Aelfgar (CE 946) in which he speaks of a priory in Stoke founded to pray for the souls of his ancestors.   Doubt has sometimes been cast on which Stoke is being referred to – Stoke by Clare has been offered instead.  

It is first necessary to point out that Nayland was not a recognised community at that time, so plain “Stoke” had to serve.   The family  of Aelfgar consisted of his wife Wiswith (who gave her name to Wissington, near Nayland), their son Aethelweard, who had apparently died before 946; their daughter Aethelflead (will dated c.975) who married “Duke” Athelstan and had no surviving children, but appears to have died before 1000; and their daughter Aelffled (will dated c.1000), married to Earl Brihtnoth (killed at the Battle of Maldon in 991), who also had no surviving children.   This latter will, as given by the last of her line, is very detailed in respect of the family’s land holdings, which were mainly bequeathed to monasteries. The great majority of the places mentioned fall within a 25km radius of Stoke by Nayland, which reinforces the “Stoke” being this village.   They were clearly immensely rich:  Aelfgar bequeathed £5 of gold to the king (Eadred), today (2026) worth a quarter of a million pounds.

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Given the tumult of the Viking invasions of 9th century, it hardly seems likely that the priory would have been founded before the 880s, when the local Danish warlord Guthrum was converted to Christianity and baptised by Alfred, making the political situation in Suffolk more or less stable.   As it is, the plan of the nave is of typically Anglo-Saxon proportions, 1.7 to 1, rather than the 2:1 customary with the Normans.   The whole area around the church has been surveyed with ground-penetrating radar to find the priory, but no traces have been found, and we are driven to the conclusion that the priory building underlies the church.   Examination of the foundations exposed by repair work in the early 1960s determined that at least the lower part of the walls is early 14th century.

Suffolk lacks building stone, so that the structure is essentially lime “concrete”, laid down after each harvest in layers of perhaps a metre at a time to avoid the mass of damp material slumping (it takes several days and temperatures of more than 10C for lime mortar to cure).   The stone in the present building must have been (expensively) imported by sea either from Northamptonshire or Caen.   It is astonishing to contemplate the labour involved in gathering the hundreds of tons of flints which make up the bulk of the structure, work which would have engaged mostly the women and children of the parish after the harvest.   There is Roman tile visible in the structure in various places and Roman fragments were found under the chancel floor in 1965,  but there is no evidence of any building from which it came:  it could well be that there was a villa on the slope below the church, as that is the sort of site – on light soil, sheltered below the ridge, facing south, and with water – favoured by the Romans.   The church builders would have been delighted to pillage a source of material so convenient!  Two other considerations arise from this:  first, every gramme of the building has passed through human hands, and given the investment in time and labour, it seems unlikely that new builders would ignore or discard work already done:  and, contrary to what monkish chroniclers will have one believe, the masons were clearly not illiterate.   They may not have been able to read the office for the day, but they must have had some means of communicating their requirements to the quarry.

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The Saxon priory was obviously imposing, and ever since its foundation the leading families of the area have used the church as their burial place. The Domesday survey of 1086 seldom mentions churches, but in the case of Stoke it does, noting that it had 60 acres of land.   The manor belonged to Robert Fitzwymarc, a Breton in high office under King Edward the Confessor:  his grandson founded a Cluniac priory at Prittlewell (Southend on Sea) and endowed it with the rectory at Stoke, which in 1291 was valued at the enormous sum of £40.

Clearly proprietors of this degree of wealth would not have tolerated a church in an old-fashioned style, so we must suppose it was brought up to date in the 12th century, and again in the 14th, when John de Peyton added the St.Edmund’s or Peyton chapel off the north aisle in about 1300.   It seems probable that the present chancel was tacked on to the east end during the 14th century:  the slight lopsidedness of the north aisle arch may be evidence of movement of the south wall after the original east wall had been taken down.   The only surviving features of that phase of the building’s life are the Decorated style west window of the north aisle and the 13th century piscina in the Mannock chapel, the north chapel in the chancel.

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The building as we see it today is in the Perpendicular style of the 15th century, but the greatest work of that century is the tower, thought to have been built between 1440 and 1462.   This is an innovative and massive brick construction of which John Constable says it is the church’s “grandest feature, which from its commanding height seems to impress on the surrounding country its own sacred dignity of character.”   It stands clear of the body of the church, connected only by a neck-like extension of the nave.   The design is dominated by the huge buttresses, set diagonally, whose outline is softened by the niches set in the outer faces:  it does not seem likely that these have ever been peopled – there is no evidence of inaccurate musket fire around them, and it would have to be a singularly brave man to allow himself to be lowered down to topple the statues!  It is described as “a terrific opening act for the golden age of Suffolk towers”, which include Eye and Lavenham.   It also started the fashion for hiding the tower stair within one of the buttresses.   Its openings are unconventional for their day, in that the ceremonial west door (the Guildhall stands on the opposite side of the street) and the west window are a pair, with identical mouldings and ogee head motif, while above the door are panels of the arms of Howard impaling Tendring.   A detailed architectural assessment of the tower may be found in Julian Flannery’s FIFTY ENGLISH STEEPLES (Thames & Hudson 2016).   On the south side of the southwest buttress a bronze pin has been let into the stone, which is an Ordnance Survey triangulation point.

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Over the centuries maintenance and repair work has of course been done on the building – for example, Lady Katherine de Tendring in her will of 1403 left a very generous £10 for the repair of the church, and there is record of the interior being replastered in the late 17th century.

On 20th August 1864 the tower was struck by lightning, making the northwest pinnacle explode. In 1865 the next major work took place both inside and outside, when the south aisle was re-roofed (in softwood, not oak), new clerestory windows were installed, and the piers of the nave were underpinned:  the interior work is detailed below.   In the 1930s there was a campaign against death watch beetle in the roofs, and in the 1960s French drains were dug round the perimeter of the church to try and alleviate damp, the roof was re-leaded, the floor of the Mannock chapel was re-laid and reinforced over the Mannock family vault, the north and south sanctuary windows reglazed with clear glass, as were the clerestory windows, and the entire nave floor east of the font area  paved in woodblock with brick floors in the aisles.

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