900-year-old Church of Our Lady, tucked away behind Seaton Delaval Hall on the A190, has several features which make it a rarity, perhaps unique:
- Despite its age (it was built by Hubert de Laval and dedicated in 1102 by Bishop Flambard, of Durham), it has only been a parish church since 1891. Before that it was a private chapel for nearly 800 years.
- Its chancel, choir and nave are separated by superb Norman arches and to have two in a building of this size is very unusual.
- A blocked up window and stonework in the north wall of the nave and the top section of the font suggest pre-Norman origins but the nave also has a classical 18th century ceiling. So we have an Anglo-Saxon/Norman church with a Georgian ceiling!
- The church is one of very few in the Church of England dedicated solely to Our Lady – indeed it may be the only one.
Other features include 13th century effigies of a knight and a lady, eight cusped panels from about the same period containing shields bearing Delaval and other arms, a piscina bowl with credence shelf above possibly from the 14th century, six hatchments of the Delaval and Astley families, and the tracery from a 14th century window at the east end (the window was replaced in 1861 and the old tracery, carved out of one piece of stone, was placed against the south wall outside the church until it was built into the wall above the door of the entrance porch, constructed in 1895).
The stained glass in the windows is all Victorian. The window in the east end wall is believed to be by William Wailes, of Newcastle, and most of the others are by his successors, Wailes and Strang. The one exception is in the south wall of the choir. The Prince of Wales window, possibly by Thomas Willement, was bought in 1841 by Sir Jacob Astley, later Lord Hastings, and came from the Colosseum in Regents Park, London. It was thought at that time to depict the Black Prince and it was not until the late 1990s that it was discovered that it in fact shows Prince Arthur, eldest son of Henry VII and brother of Henry VIII. It is a copy of a light in the Magnificat Window, in Great Malvern Priory.
Robert Delaval was baptised in the church on June 22, 1263, and Henry Delaval on January 12, 1343.
Mystery surrounds the identities of a knight and his lady, whose chest tombs were placed in the church in the 13th Century. They could be either Sir Eustace Delaval, who died in 1258 and his wife Constance de Baliol, or Sir Henry Delaval, who died in 1271, and his wife Mary de Biddleston. For 400 years the Delavals were buried in the church crypt, with the last internment in 1796. At the end of the 19th Century the crypt was opened and a record made of the six coffins which could be identified. Plates from two of the caskets are mounted on the church walls.
Among the occupants of the vault, now bricked up, are Sir Frances Delaval and Admiral George Delaval, the builder of Seaton Delaval Hall, who died near the house after falling from his horse.
The base of an obelisk marks the spot.
But the puzzle concerns the corpse of a man in the crypt who is not a Delaval. Sir Alexander Ruthven was buried in the vault in 1722.
Also in the crypt is Lord John Delaval's mistress Elizabeth Hicks, who was 16 when the relationship began and who died in her 20s in 1796.
Hubert de la Val went on the First Crusade and helped his uncle Robert of Normandy rescue the Holy Sepulchre from the heathen.
