Description:
Location from Sillitoe's 'Saturday night & Sunday morning'.
The oldest part of the church is the tower, with a 12th century lower stage, and continued upwards at different dates. The rest of the church has been entirely rebuilt in the 14th century, to which rebuilding, perhaps, the following (from Thoroton’s History) refers:—
“In the year 1356 Sampson de Strelley “had licence that he and his parishioners of that village might hear sermons for the space of a year in the chappel situate within his manor of the said village, because the parish church was not then fully built.”
The church then took its present plan, a nave of three bays with aisles, and a chancel with two short transepts forming side chapels opening into the chancel and aisles by arches.
The lofty nave arcade has octagonal pillars, flat responds with chamfered edge and corbels supporting the inner order of the arches. Two of these corbels should be specially noticed for their female heads with very elegant drapery folds of the couvrechef. That at the N.E. of the nave has also a gorget or chin-cloth, a form of wimple probably indicating that the wearer was a widow.
A clerestory of plain three-light windows is an addition to the original structure, of course entailing an alteration of the roofs of nave and aisle, and at least one of the south aisle windows. The roof of the nave was restored and repainted in 1855, as shown on a shield in its western bay.
The glory of the church is the almost perfect 15th century screen, with its overhanging cove of tracery supporting the beams of the rood loft. It stands on its original stone plinth (like the screen at Newark). It owes its wonderful preservation to its having been boarded up until its restoration, and only suffered damage from an opening about two feet square being cut in it on the south side.
The pulpit is made up of four old carved oak panels and has a Jacobean canopy of the 17th century.
The font is a plain hexagonal bowl, with its two staples for securing the cover.
In the chancel are three miserere seats on each side, with good carving under some of the movable seats.
Some remains of old glass are preserved: in the north aisle are some 14th century fragments, one a figure of a bishop with the inscription I. D. UGBERTUS. In the south transept there are several medallions of Flemish glass of the 16th and 17th century, among them being some of a series of the Virtues (Fortitudo, Intelligentia), a coat of arms, dated 1573, and a Crucifixion (Frau Hoes glase macher 1661).
Information from http://www.nottshistory.org.uk/articles/tts/tts1906/summer/strelleychurch1.htm
The church also holds tombs and monuments of the Strelley family.