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 country 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 every single parish church in the land bears some evidence of this, but it is specially obvious in the centres of power of those people occasions: at Lavenham in Suffolk, exactly where the terrific wool retailers held court, at Salle and East Harling in Norfolk, exactly where good landed families competed to influence the crown, and listed here at Cley, at the time at the harbour mouth of Blakeney Haven, the good north Norfolk conurbation of ports, where the streets thronged with rich retailers and their staff.
Now, the harbour is dropped to us, but you can even now make out its condition if you stand in Wiveton churchyard and look again across to Cley, fifty percent a mile off. At Blakeney by itself, the quayside survives with some of its properties to assist a reconstruction in the head but Cley has nothing now apart from its church and a few cottages, a village green and a windmill. Ironically, you wouldn’t even know that the sea was close.
Of the four churches of Blakeney Haven, St Margaret was the biggest, grandest and most highly-priced. It is continue to all of these factors today. It is replete with all individuals features we locate most thrilling when we take a look at a medieval East Anglian church: a seven sacrament font, bench ends depicting persons and mythical creatures, brasses, bosses, stalls and the most elaborate niches in the kingdom, a smattering of previous glass, and memorable tracery that, remaining Embellished rather than Perpendicular, is unfamiliar in East Anglia. We have explored in other places on my internet site, at Salle and Cawston, just why these churches were being built so significant and elaborate. Very well, St Margaret is one more impressive testimony.
The environment is charming, on a gentle increase previously mentioned the village eco-friendly. The graveyard is scattered, numerous of the stones 18th century, and not lined up in scientific rows by misguided 1970s garden-mower lovers. If you arrive in late spring the graveyard is uncut, whole of wild flowers and tall grasses, but in this September morning it was neat and trim, a velvet mount for the church.
What you see is, at to start with sight, sophisticated. The huge nave with its aisles and clerestory is all of a piece. The offset tower is fairly imply, and despite the fact that it appears possible it was supposed for rebuilding, the massive and gorgeous west window implies that it would have been in the very same area. The chancel is also curiously easy, and ultimately would have been changed. Two transepts stick out to north and south, the southern one roofless and glassless, that to the north completely ruinous.
The merchant de Vaux spouse and children have been accountable for rebuilding the church, and the new nave was built to the south of the initial nave, which was then demolished and changed with an aisle. You can nevertheless see its roofline on the east confront of the tower. The grasp mason was William Ramsey, a single of the most important in England the Ramsey family were responsible for the Palace of Westminster and parts of Norwich Cathedral. Operate commenced in the 1320s, and proceeded quickly right up until the building was rather properly total by the mid-1340s. This is an early date for the full rebuilding of an East Anglian church, and reveals that below, in Blakeney Haven, the new money was early. It would not be for a hundred years that Suffolk and south Norfolk people were being in a place to do the exact. Why was this? Partly, the wealth of the Blakeney Haven ports did not count just on East Anglian cloth. But there was an additional, extra apocalyptic issue.
Right before Ramsey could flip his notice to the chancel and the problem of that blessed tower, a new and scary pestilence attained England. For any individual living in a port, conditions introduced from overseas were being an everyday hazard that had to be balanced towards comprehensive employment and prospects for wealth development. Even so, this was a thing on a impressive scale, a strain of bubonic plague that reached the south coastline ports in August 1348 and that by the dismal late winter months of 1349 had achieved Norfolk. Most likely fifty percent the populace died, despite the fact that in the ports there would seem to have been a higher survival level possibly there was extra immunity owing to previous publicity. Having said that, Ramsey and his son each died, and the work of the ports was disrupted for several generations. The Victorians, relishing the gothic horror of the catastrophe, looked again from their possess cholera-plagued century and identified as it the Black Dying.
50 % a century later on, trade, confidence, and a renewed obsession with the cult of the useless led to a lot more funds getting lavished on St Margaret. This was the time that the mighty south porch was designed, a Perpendicular fortress that guards, alternatively uneasily, the Embellished entrance. The church was even further furnished with a mighty rood display screen, elaborately carved woodwork, and glass and a seven sacrament font supposed to assert the official doctrine of the Catholic Church. By the early sixteenth century, Cley church was at a peak of its glory, but really rapidly people periods have been to tumble.
The English Reformation introduced to an abrupt stop the will need for bequests, and all work on creating the making stopped. And, state protestantism would sow the seeds that would enable England emerge as an insular, capitalist country, switching styles of trade, and carrying out away with the will need for Blakeney Haven, pushing Norfolk back again into the aid of a very long, agricultural snooze.
So, you consider a stroll close to the exterior of St Margaret, the window tracery a text reserve of the way English architecture developed over the centuries. The most stunning is that in the south transept, classy lights that make to a cluster of large quatrefoils. This was competed on the eve of the Black Death, and is likely at the incredibly apex of English artistic endeavour. But I imagine that it was by no means filled with glass. I can see no evidence that the transepts ended up completed in time for their use right before the pestilence, or that there was ever a will need to use them following the recovery from it. And, then, of program, the Reformation intervened.
You move into the church by way of the south porch, with its flanking shields of the Holy Trinity and the Devices of the enthusiasm. Higher than, in the vaulting, are bosses. A single shows an angry girl chasing a fox that has stolen her magnificent cockerel. Another, reveals two devils beating the bare buttocks of a 3rd figure. There is also an Assumption of the Blessed Virgin.
Grand Perpendicular is so widespread in East Anglia that there is an unfamiliarity about the nave that is spectacular, a feast for the senses. The west stop of the church has been cleared, building a cathedral-vastness, and the light-weight, while not gloomy, does not have that white East Anglian excellent common from Perpendicular buildings. The smell is of age alternatively than home furnishings polish, a creamy dampness that recalls former business enterprise rather than decay. The honeyed stone is also in some way international in this heartland of flint. It affects the seem in a unique way. The developing demands a sure volume of awe that is not just because of to its measurement.
We arrived about an hour before a wedding day was because of to commence, and as we explored the constructing we observed preparations build, the pews get started to fill, the minister and choir start to gown, right until we felt we were being intruding, and remaining just as the bride arrived. But whilst I was not wholly distracted from documenting the building, it was a reminder to me just how vital weddings have turn out to be to the Church of England, not just in terms of the cash flow they generate, but as a very last bastion of the grounding of Religion in common people’s life. They might no for a longer period have their young children baptised, they may well no for a longer time come on a Sunday at all but marriage is the location that easy Christianity touches their lives – that, and their funeral, of program, though more and more people are a lot more militantly atheist about loss of life than they are about appreciate.
The 7 sacrament font appears to be fairly lonely in its clearing, and is not the most magnificent of its type, though the imagery is a minimal strange. The Very last Rites, (NW) show up to clearly show the Priest lying on the mattress on prime of the dying man. Confession (NE) displays the Priest and confessing guy facing each other throughout a shriving bench. Affirmation (E) is the most compelling of all, due to the fact it appears to present a tonsured Priest rather than a bishop blessing a team of people that incorporate kids and babies. Mass (SW) is demonstrated from driving, the Priest elevating the host even though the acolytes on possibly facet kneel and maintain tapers. The eighth and odd panel is lost, but was in all probability the Crucifixion.
The most spectacularly un-East Anglian aspect of the church are the excellent graphic niches that line the arcades. They are enormous. Beneath the pedestals are depicted figures, together with musicians (a single performs a fife and drum), St George dispatching a dragon and a fearsome lion with a bone. There are traces of first color, and they are just magnificent.
Extra homely are the bench ends, which includes a wonderful mermaid, many figures reading textbooks, and a poppyhead carved with a face sticking out its tongue, of a form often known as Scandal, while I have never been persuaded by this. There are a lot of brasses, some in the north aisle and other individuals scattered close to the south doorway, which includes two figures in their shrouds, and one fragment depicting a team of six weepers. In the north aisle is a intriguing assortment of donated and gathered ephemera, some suggesting that in the the latest past this was a relatively Anglo-catholic spot, together with a wonderful Russian Orthodox cross. I rushed about having photos while the church stuffed with wedding day company.
And so, it was time to go. I made a decision that I was amazed by this church, but that I failed to enjoy it. Seeking all over at the splendour of William Ramsey’s work, at what survives of its elaborate furnishings, and sensing the echoes of the abundant sacramental life it when hosted, I experienced a unexpected vision of apocalypse – not of the Black Dying so significantly, as of the conclude of a way of lifetime changed by something so wholly distinctive in a couple limited a long time of Reformation. This church experienced been designed for so substantially extra than congregational worship, but this was all it could now do. It was as if the Anglican local community was camped out uneasily in its ruins, in the vastness of a little something so wholly beyond their creativeness.’
Posted by Simon Knott on 2022-03-30 11:18:34
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