The Quatrefoil & Pelham Buckle

On the South face of the tower is a carved panel clearly showing a quatrefoil shape inside a circle, with Plantagenet roses and fleur de Lys motifs, sketched in a watercolour (c.1800) by Henry George Oldfield.

Of especial interest in this is the easily overlooked symbol towards the upper left of the surround. This is a Pelham buckle, and there were also three, now destroyed, carved into the West door. 

The Pelham Buckle symbol was granted to John de Pelham, whose family had owned the manors of Pelham, Hertfordshire since before the Norman Conquest, in recognition of Pelham’s role in the capture of the French King Jean II at Poitiers in 1356.  King Jean was  imprisoned at Hertford Castle; and Thundridge and Ware’s monastic properties were seized from the alien St Evroul / Elbrulf Abbey (Normandy).  William Blaauw, a noted local historian and Mark Anthony Lower, an authority on the ecclesiastical Pelham Buckles of Sussex, published articles that they considered the Thundridge Pelham Buckle to be the oldest of the Pelham monuments subsequently displayed on several Sussex church buildings endowed by Pelham’s son and his descendants.

Why the buckle allegedly appears here first and uniquely outside Sussex remains a mystery.