SOUTH AISLE
At the east end of the aisle is another section of four mediaeval stalls, two of them with misericords, either from the rood screen or possibly the choir – the right-hand end looks as if it might have stood against a wall. The aisle has four stained glass windows, all by Clayton & Bell. Starting from the east, they are “The Master is come” (1875): Acts of Mercy (1878): the Annunciation, the Presentation in the Temple and the Flight to Egypt (1878): and in the est window the Last Supper (1922). On the south wall there is the memorial to the dead of the village in both World Wars, with a ceramic poppy in the corner, one of the 880,000 planted in the moat of the Tower of London in 2018 to commemorate the centenary of the Armistice. Over it is the laid-up standard of the Stoke branch of the Royal British Legion.
The royal arms over the south door were restored in ????, but placed there in accordance with the Act of Queen Elizabeth I of 1558 that all churches should display the arms. They are a rather amusing example of avoiding “unnecessary expenditure”, because they are the blazon used between 1714, the accession of King George I, and 31st December 1800, in the reign of King George III, but simply re-labelled VR for Queen Victoria. The arms of the King of France (three fleurs de lis) were then deleted, a mere 379 years after the infant Henry VI was obliged to cede the French throne to his uncle Charles VII. It is sometimes suggested that its deletion was a condition of the Peace of Amiens on 25th March 1802, but that is not the case.
The arms show what are to us the customary three leopards of England, the lion rampant of Scotland, and the harp of Ireland, but the fourth quarter is the blazon of the Georges as Electors of Hanover. It shows the two lions of Brunswick, the blue lion of Luneberg, and the white horse of Hanover, and in the middle an “inescutcheon” of the crown of Charlemagne, to indicate that the Elector was ex-officio Treasurer of the Holy Roman Empire. The electors were the seven men nominally supposed in an open meeting of every aristocrat in Germany to elect the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation – the Archbishops of Cologne, Mainz and Trier; and the King of Bohemia, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, the Duke of Saxony, and the Margrave of Brandenburg. By 1800 the title had long been hereditary in the Hapsburg Emperors of Austria.
