St Mary Magdalen, Wiggenhall St Mary Magdalen, Norfolk
You cross the wide, lazy Fantastic Ouse, and at after Norfolk modifications. The rippling countryside flattens out, the horizon straightens. Norfolk’s trees disappear, apart from the odd one particular or two that flame like beacons beneath the perpendicular sky. There aren’t definitely fields anymore, just large prairies, and the villages are perfunctory. This is the Marshland.
Pevsner mentions very few properties west of the Ouse – except the fantastic church buildings, some of which are between England’s greatest. In his book England’s Thousand Finest Churches, Simon Jenkins includes no less than 10 of the Norfolk marshland church buildings. There are only 9 for the complete of Northumberland.
Magdalen is, probably, shut adequate to the rest of Norfolk to still be a correct East Anglian village, and a rather one particular at that. One to savour if you are heading west and about to tip off the edge of the serious county into that strange, sinking landscape past inexorably, drinking water spilt below would roll into Lincolnshire. But the church is a marshland church, large bold and gorgeous with that air of chiarascuro familiar from its neighbours, a somewhat decayed magnificence with the odor of aged wooden and damp in the air.
The village requires its name from St Mary of Magdala, of program, for the reason that it is seriously a single of the Wiggenhalls. Over the a long time, Wiggenhall St Mary Magdalene has turn into a little bit of a mouthful, specially given the presence of the nearby parish of Wiggenhall St Mary, where by there is no true village. So, Magdalen it has turn out to be, by the way supplying its name to a railway station on the Cambridge to Kings Lynn line. St Mary of Magdala is a person of my favorite Saints, and so it was a satisfaction to stop by a full village named soon after her. The church is a lovely assemblage of red brick, flint and stone, wholly organic and natural as it rises venerably in the slender graveyard. It is all very considerably 15th century, developed on wool cash, while as is frequent in East Anglia the terrific tower is previously, on the eve of the Black Dying. If it had at any time been rebuilt, this would have been a single of the most magnificent churches in England.
You move into a substantial making, comprehensive of gentle, a dusty air falling slowly and gradually. At the west finish, there is a unusual very little doorway into the foundation of the tower – I surprise if the rebuilding of the nave elevated the stage of the floor – and on either side of it the remains of the rood monitor are propped up, just four panels depicting the evangelistic symbols. Now, this is quite curious – the symbols do not normally show up on roodscreens. My intuition was that they may be later, but the do the job definitely appears to be medieval, and the experience of Matthew’s winged man has been scratched out.
Considerably of the character of the nave arrives from the woodwork, a pleasing mixture of simple medieval benches and 19th century box pews beneath the initial 15th century roof, which is somewhat rustic in character with alternating hammerbeams and queen posts.
Just as neighbouring Wiggenhall St Mary has the most significant collection of medieval bench finishes in Norfolk, St Mary Magdalen has the most significant selection of 15th century stained glass figures. There are about forty of them, scattered in the higher lights of the north aisle. Nevertheless, they are instead expert assortment, and not easily identifiable to the untutored eye, simply because alternatively than familiar Apostles and Saints they generally represent Bishops, Archbishops and Popes.
Simon Cotton, in the church guidebook, offers an fantastic important to them. Ann Eljenholm Nichols’ e-book Early Art of Norfolk, almost certainly the finest e-book at any time created about the medieval church buildings of Norfolk, demonstrates that more than a handful of of them are one of a kind representations in the county, and possibly in the Kingdom. Most of them have scrolls, and with binoculars you can decipher some of the inscriptions, but couple of have their familiar symbols with them.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2016-09-10 16:36:42
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