St Mary Magdalen, Wiggenhall St Mary Magdalen, Norfolk
You cross the vast, lazy Terrific Ouse, and at once Norfolk improvements. The rippling countryside flattens out, the horizon straightens. Norfolk’s trees vanish, aside from the odd just one or two that flame like beacons beneath the perpendicular sky. There aren’t definitely fields any more, just wide prairies, and the villages are perfunctory. This is the Marshland.
Pevsner mentions quite several structures west of the Ouse – other than the wonderful church buildings, some of which are among England’s very best. In his ebook England’s Thousand Finest Church buildings, Simon Jenkins includes no a lot less than ten of the Norfolk marshland churches. There are only nine for the total of Northumberland.
Magdalen is, potentially, shut adequate to the relaxation of Norfolk to nevertheless be a suitable East Anglian village, and a rather a single at that. 1 to savour if you are heading west and about to idea off the edge of the actual county into that peculiar, sinking landscape further than inexorably, drinking water spilt below would roll into Lincolnshire. But the church is a marshland church, significant daring and wonderful with that air of chiarascuro familiar from its neighbours, a a bit decayed splendor with the odor of previous wooden and damp in the air.
The village usually takes its name from St Mary of Magdala, of class, simply because it is genuinely just one of the Wiggenhalls. In excess of the decades, Wiggenhall St Mary Magdalene has turn out to be a bit of a mouthful, notably specified the existence of the nearby parish of Wiggenhall St Mary, wherever there is no serious village. So, Magdalen it has turn into, incidentally giving its identify to a railway station on the Cambridge to Kings Lynn line. St Mary of Magdala is a single of my favourite Saints, and so it was a pleasure to check out a entire village named right after her. The church is a attractive assemblage of pink brick, flint and stone, wholly organic and natural as it rises venerably in the slender graveyard. It is all really significantly 15th century, constructed on wool dollars, although as is prevalent in East Anglia the excellent tower is before, on the eve of the Black Demise. If it had ever been rebuilt, this would have been one of the most wonderful churches in England.
You stage into a large making, whole of mild, a dusty air slipping bit by bit. At the west finish, there is a peculiar minimal door into the foundation of the tower – I speculate if the rebuilding of the nave elevated the degree of the floor – and on either side of it the stays of the rood display screen are propped up, just 4 panels depicting the evangelistic symbols. Now, this is incredibly curious – the symbols do not generally show up on roodscreens. My intuition was that they could be later, but the function undoubtedly appears to be like medieval, and the deal with of Matthew’s winged male has been scratched out.
A great deal of the character of the nave will come from the woodwork, a satisfying combination of very simple medieval benches and 19th century box pews beneath the authentic 15th century roof, which is instead rustic in character with alternating hammerbeams and queen posts.
Just as neighbouring Wiggenhall St Mary has the largest selection of medieval bench finishes in Norfolk, St Mary Magdalen has the major assortment of 15th century stained glass figures. There are about forty of them, scattered in the upper lights of the north aisle. Even so, they are relatively expert collection, and not quickly identifiable to the untutored eye, for the reason that fairly than familiar Apostles and Saints they primarily characterize Bishops, Archbishops and Popes.
Simon Cotton, in the church manual, delivers an exceptional key to them. Ann Eljenholm Nichols’ e-book Early Artwork of Norfolk, almost certainly the finest guide ever written about the medieval church buildings of Norfolk, shows that much more than a handful of of them are one of a kind representations in the county, and maybe in the Kingdom. Most of them have scrolls, and with binoculars you can decipher some of the inscriptions, but number of have their familiar symbols with them.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2016-09-10 09:25:18
Tagged: , Wiggenhall , Mary , Magdalene , magdalen , Norfolk , East Anglia
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