Church porch
The highly decorated two-storey porch of St Mary's, Yatton, England [1] [2] A church porch is a room-like structure at a church's main entrance. [3] A porch protects from the weather to some extent. Some porches have an outer door, others a simple gate, and in some cases the outer opening is not closed in any way. The porch at St Wulfram's Church, Grantham, like many others of the period, has a room above the porch. It once provided lodging for the priest, but now houses Francis Trigge Chained Library. Such a room is sometimes called a parvise [4] although that word more normally means an open space or colonnade outside the entrance of a church. In Scandinavia and Germany the porch of a church is often called by names meaning weaponhouse . [5] It used to be believed that visitors stored their weapons there because of a prohibition against carrying weapons into the sanctuary, or into houses in general [6] ; this is now considered apocryphal by most accepted ...