St Margaret, Cley-next-the-Sea, Norfolk
In 2004 I wrote: ‘It is repetitious to notice that East Anglia was the industrial heartland of late medieval England, or that this country was a devout Catholic nation at the time, or even that the collision of these two points resulted in some of the most splendid church architecture in Europe.
Pretty much just about every parish church in the land bears some proof of this, but it is specifically clear in the centres of electricity of those situations: at Lavenham in Suffolk, the place the fantastic wool merchants held court, at Salle and East Harling in Norfolk, wherever fantastic landed people competed to impact the crown, and right here at Cley, when at the harbour mouth of Blakeney Haven, the fantastic north Norfolk conurbation of ports, where by the streets thronged with wealthy merchants and their staff.
Right now, the harbour is lost to us, but you can however make out its form if you stand in Wiveton churchyard and search back again throughout to Cley, fifty percent a mile off. At Blakeney alone, the quayside survives with some of its buildings to assist a reconstruction in the head but Cley has nothing now except its church and a several cottages, a village inexperienced and a windmill. Ironically, you would not even know that the sea was near.
Of the four churches of Blakeney Haven, St Margaret was the most significant, grandest and most expensive. It is continue to all of these factors these days. It is replete with all those people features we locate most thrilling when we take a look at a medieval East Anglian church: a 7 sacrament font, bench ends depicting folks and legendary creatures, brasses, bosses, stalls and the most elaborate niches in the kingdom, a smattering of outdated glass, and unforgettable tracery that, being Embellished somewhat than Perpendicular, is unfamiliar in East Anglia. We have explored in other places on my web site, at Salle and Cawston, accurately why these churches were being developed so substantial and elaborate. Properly, St Margaret is an additional impressive testimony.
The location is beautiful, on a light rise higher than the village eco-friendly. The graveyard is scattered, lots of of the stones 18th century, and not lined up in clinical rows by misguided 1970s garden-mower enthusiasts. If you occur in late spring the graveyard is uncut, whole of wild flowers and tall grasses, but in this September early morning it was neat and trim, a velvet mount for the church.
What you see is, at to start with sight, complicated. The huge nave with its aisles and clerestory is all of a piece. The offset tower is instead necessarily mean, and although it would seem possible it was intended for rebuilding, the substantial and gorgeous west window implies that it would have been in the identical area. The chancel is also curiously very simple, and at some point would have been changed. Two transepts adhere out to north and south, the southern a single roofless and glassless, that to the north solely ruinous.
The service provider de Vaux family members ended up dependable for rebuilding the church, and the new nave was built to the south of the first nave, which was then demolished and changed with an aisle. You can nonetheless see its roofline on the east face of the tower. The master mason was William Ramsey, just one of the most substantial in England the Ramsey relatives ended up dependable for the Palace of Westminster and components of Norwich Cathedral. Get the job done started in the 1320s, and proceeded swiftly right until the setting up was very perfectly full by the mid-1340s. This is an early day for the finish rebuilding of an East Anglian church, and reveals that below, in Blakeney Haven, the new dollars was early. It would not be for a hundred a long time that Suffolk and south Norfolk families had been in a placement to do the exact same. Why was this? Partly, the prosperity of the Blakeney Haven ports did not rely just on East Anglian cloth. But there was another, far more apocalyptic variable.
Prior to Ramsey could flip his focus to the chancel and the trouble of that blessed tower, a new and scary pestilence attained England. For anyone living in a port, illnesses brought from overseas had been an day to day hazard that had to be well balanced in opposition to total work and chances for wealth development. Even so, this was anything on a stunning scale, a pressure of bubonic plague that achieved the south coast ports in August 1348 and that by the dismal late winter months of 1349 experienced reached Norfolk. Probably 50 percent the population died, whilst in the ports there appears to be to have been a higher survival rate maybe there was much more immunity owing to preceding exposure. Even so, Ramsey and his son both of those died, and the operate of the ports was disrupted for quite a few generations. The Victorians, relishing the gothic horror of the disaster, appeared back from their very own cholera-plagued century and referred to as it the Black Death.
50 percent a century later on, trade, self-confidence, and a renewed obsession with the cult of the lifeless led to additional revenue becoming lavished on St Margaret. This was the time that the mighty south porch was built, a Perpendicular fortress that guards, alternatively uneasily, the Decorated entrance. The church was further more furnished with a mighty rood monitor, elaborately carved woodwork, and glass and a seven sacrament font meant to assert the formal doctrine of the Catholic Church. By the early sixteenth century, Cley church was at a peak of its glory, but incredibly promptly people situations ended up to tumble.
The English Reformation brought to an abrupt finish the will need for bequests, and all operate on developing the setting up stopped. And, condition protestantism would sow the seeds that would assistance England emerge as an insular, capitalist nation, altering styles of trade, and doing absent with the have to have for Blakeney Haven, pushing Norfolk again into the aid of a prolonged, agricultural slumber.
So, you get a walk all over the exterior of St Margaret, the window tracery a text reserve of the way English architecture created about the hundreds of years. The most lovely is that in the south transept, exquisite lights that build to a cluster of broad quatrefoils. This was competed on the eve of the Black Dying, and is possibly at the quite apex of English artistic endeavour. But I imagine that it was in no way stuffed with glass. I can see no proof that the transepts were concluded in time for their use right before the pestilence, or that there was ever a need to use them right after the recovery from it. And, then, of system, the Reformation intervened.
You action into the church by the south porch, with its flanking shields of the Holy Trinity and the Devices of the enthusiasm. Above, in the vaulting, are bosses. One demonstrates an indignant girl chasing a fox that has stolen her impressive cockerel. A further, shows two devils beating the bare buttocks of a 3rd determine. There is also an Assumption of the Blessed Virgin.
Grand Perpendicular is so popular in East Anglia that there is an unfamiliarity about the nave that is amazing, a feast for the senses. The west stop of the church has been cleared, producing a cathedral-vastness, and the light-weight, while not gloomy, does not have that white East Anglian quality common from Perpendicular properties. The smell is of age alternatively than household furniture polish, a creamy dampness that recollects previous small business somewhat than decay. The honeyed stone is also by some means overseas in this heartland of flint. It has an effect on the audio in a unique way. The making needs a specific sum of awe that is not just because of to its sizing.
We arrived about an hour ahead of a marriage was due to commence, and as we explored the building we observed preparations construct, the pews start to fill, the minister and choir start out to robe, until we felt we ended up intruding, and still left just as the bride arrived. But though I was not wholly distracted from documenting the constructing, it was a reminder to me just how critical weddings have turn out to be to the Church of England, not just in terms of the profits they make, but as a previous bastion of the grounding of Religion in everyday people’s lives. They could no extended have their small children baptised, they may possibly no longer arrive on a Sunday at all but marriage is the place that basic Christianity touches their lives – that, and their funeral, of system, although ever more persons are additional militantly atheist about death than they are about adore.
The 7 sacrament font appears to be rather lonely in its clearing, and is not the most magnificent of its variety, despite the fact that the imagery is a minor strange. The Very last Rites, (NW) seem to demonstrate the Priest lying on the bed on top of the dying male. Confession (NE) reveals the Priest and confessing person struggling with each other throughout a shriving bench. Affirmation (E) is the most compelling of all, for the reason that it seems to present a tonsured Priest alternatively than a bishop blessing a team of persons that consist of young children and toddlers. Mass (SW) is proven from behind, the Priest elevating the host even though the acolytes on both aspect kneel and maintain tapers. The eighth and odd panel is lost, but was in all probability the Crucifixion.
The most spectacularly un-East Anglian function of the church are the great picture niches that line the arcades. They are large. Beneath the pedestals are depicted figures, which includes musicians (just one plays a fife and drum), St George dispatching a dragon and a fearsome lion with a bone. There are traces of original colour, and they are only breathtaking.
Extra homely are the bench finishes, together with a attractive mermaid, numerous figures examining guides, and a poppyhead carved with a face sticking out its tongue, of a variety often termed Scandal, whilst I have hardly ever been certain by this. There are several brasses, some in the north aisle and other individuals scattered close to the south doorway, including two figures in their shrouds, and one fragment depicting a group of 6 weepers. In the north aisle is a intriguing collection of donated and collected ephemera, some suggesting that in the modern past this was a relatively Anglo-catholic place, such as a gorgeous Russian Orthodox cross. I rushed around using photos though the church crammed with wedding day guests.
And so, it was time to go. I made a decision that I was amazed by this church, but that I failed to really like it. Seeking about at the splendour of William Ramsey’s get the job done, at what survives of its elaborate furnishings, and sensing the echoes of the prosperous sacramental lifetime it at the time hosted, I experienced a sudden eyesight of apocalypse – not of the Black Death so a lot, as of the finish of a way of daily life changed by a thing so wholly different in a number of short yrs of Reformation. This church had been built for so a lot far more than congregational worship, but this was all it could now do. It was as if the Anglican community was camped out uneasily in its ruins, in the vastness of one thing so wholly further than their creativeness.’
Posted by Simon Knott on 2022-03-30 11:18:54
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