St Margaret, Cley-subsequent-the-Sea, Norfolk
In 2004 I wrote: ‘It is repetitious to observe 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 information resulted in some of the most splendid church architecture in Europe.
Almost just about every parish church in the land bears some evidence of this, but it is specially apparent in the centres of ability of those times: at Lavenham in Suffolk, wherever the terrific wool retailers held court, at Salle and East Harling in Norfolk, wherever wonderful landed family members competed to impact the crown, and in this article at Cley, when at the harbour mouth of Blakeney Haven, the wonderful north Norfolk conurbation of ports, where the streets thronged with rich retailers and their staff.
Today, the harbour is missing to us, but you can however make out its shape if you stand in Wiveton churchyard and glance again across to Cley, 50 % a mile off. At Blakeney itself, the quayside survives with some of its properties to support a reconstruction in the intellect but Cley has very little now other than its church and a several cottages, a village green and a windmill. Ironically, you wouldn’t even know that the sea was shut.
Of the 4 church buildings of Blakeney Haven, St Margaret was the biggest, grandest and most highly-priced. It is even now all of these points now. It is replete with all individuals aspects we uncover most thrilling when we go to a medieval East Anglian church: a 7 sacrament font, bench ends depicting folks and mythical creatures, brasses, bosses, stalls and the most elaborate niches in the kingdom, a smattering of outdated glass, and unforgettable tracery that, being Adorned relatively than Perpendicular, is unfamiliar in East Anglia. We have explored in other places on my site, at Salle and Cawston, accurately why these churches had been crafted so significant and elaborate. Nicely, St Margaret is another outstanding testimony.
The setting is pretty, on a gentle rise earlier mentioned the village environmentally friendly. The graveyard is scattered, lots of of the stones 18th century, and not lined up in clinical rows by misguided 1970s lawn-mower fanatics. If you occur in late spring the graveyard is uncut, total 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 first sight, advanced. The huge nave with its aisles and clerestory is all of a piece. The offset tower is fairly mean, and though it seems probably it was meant for rebuilding, the huge and stunning west window indicates that it would have been in the identical area. The chancel is also curiously simple, and eventually would have been changed. Two transepts adhere out to north and south, the southern one particular roofless and glassless, that to the north solely ruinous.
The service provider de Vaux family members have been responsible for rebuilding the church, and the new nave was crafted to the south of the original nave, which was then demolished and replaced with an aisle. You can still see its roofline on the east encounter of the tower. The master mason was William Ramsey, one of the most major in England the Ramsey household were being responsible for the Palace of Westminster and parts of Norwich Cathedral. Operate started in the 1320s, and proceeded immediately until the making was really very well entire by the mid-1340s. This is an early date for the total rebuilding of an East Anglian church, and exhibits that listed here, in Blakeney Haven, the new cash was early. It would not be for a hundred yrs that Suffolk and south Norfolk family members ended up in a place to do the exact same. Why was this? Partly, the prosperity of the Blakeney Haven ports did not depend just on East Anglian fabric. But there was one more, much more apocalyptic component.
Prior to Ramsey could flip his attention to the chancel and the challenge of that blessed tower, a new and terrifying pestilence achieved England. For any one living in a port, disorders introduced from abroad were an day-to-day hazard that had to be well balanced against full work and chances for wealth development. Even so, this was a thing on a breathtaking scale, a pressure of bubonic plague that achieved the south coast ports in August 1348 and that by the dismal late wintertime months of 1349 experienced attained Norfolk. Potentially fifty percent the populace died, although in the ports there would seem to have been a higher survival charge perhaps there was additional immunity thanks to past exposure. Nonetheless, Ramsey and his son the two died, and the get the job done of the ports was disrupted for a number of generations. The Victorians, relishing the gothic horror of the catastrophe, looked back again from their have cholera-plagued century and called it the Black Loss of life.
50 percent a century later, trade, self-assurance, and a renewed obsession with the cult of the lifeless led to much more income being lavished on St Margaret. This was the time that the mighty south porch was developed, a Perpendicular fortress that guards, rather uneasily, the Embellished entrance. The church was even further furnished with a mighty rood screen, elaborately carved woodwork, and glass and a 7 sacrament font intended to assert the formal doctrine of the Catholic Church. By the early sixteenth century, Cley church was at a peak of its glory, but extremely rapidly people times have been to tumble.
The English Reformation brought to an abrupt finish the will need for bequests, and all get the job done on creating the making stopped. And, condition protestantism would sow the seeds that would assistance England arise as an insular, capitalist country, changing styles of trade, and doing away with the need to have for Blakeney Haven, pushing Norfolk again into the aid of a extensive, agricultural sleep.
So, you choose a walk around the outdoors of St Margaret, the window tracery a textual content ebook of the way English architecture designed around the hundreds of years. The most attractive is that in the south transept, classy lights that develop to a cluster of broad quatrefoils. This was competed on the eve of the Black Dying, and is most likely at the extremely apex of English artistic endeavour. But I consider that it was hardly ever loaded with glass. I can see no proof that the transepts have been done in time for their use prior to the pestilence, or that there was at any time a will need to use them soon after the recovery from it. And, then, of training course, the Reformation intervened.
You phase into the church through the south porch, with its flanking shields of the Holy Trinity and the Devices of the passion. Above, in the vaulting, are bosses. Just one displays an indignant female chasing a fox that has stolen her impressive cockerel. Yet another, shows two devils beating the bare buttocks of a 3rd figure. There is also an Assumption of the Blessed Virgin.
Grand Perpendicular is so common in East Anglia that there is an unfamiliarity about the nave that is spectacular, a feast for the senses. The west conclude of the church has been cleared, developing a cathedral-vastness, and the mild, while not gloomy, does not have that white East Anglian high quality common from Perpendicular structures. The smell is of age instead than household furniture polish, a creamy dampness that remembers former business enterprise relatively than decay. The honeyed stone is also by some means foreign in this heartland of flint. It has an effect on the audio in a diverse way. The creating requires a specific quantity of awe that is not just because of to its size.
We arrived about an hour in advance of a wedding day was due to commence, and as we explored the creating we saw preparations create, the pews start to fill, the minister and choir start off to robe, until eventually we felt we had been intruding, and still left just as the bride arrived. But when I was not wholly distracted from documenting the setting up, it was a reminder to me just how important weddings have turn out to be to the Church of England, not just in conditions of the income they deliver, but as a past bastion of the grounding of Faith in standard people’s lives. They might no more time have their small children baptised, they may possibly no extended occur on a Sunday at all but relationship is the location that easy Christianity touches their life – that, and their funeral, of class, though more and more people are additional militantly atheist about death than they are about really like.
The 7 sacrament font looks alternatively lonely in its clearing, and is not the most breathtaking of its sort, despite the fact that the imagery is a very little unusual. The Very last Rites, (NW) seem to clearly show the Priest lying on the mattress on top of the dying man. Confession (NE) exhibits the Priest and confessing guy experiencing every single other across a shriving bench. Confirmation (E) is the most persuasive of all, because it seems to exhibit a tonsured Priest somewhat than a bishop blessing a team of folks that include children and toddlers. Mass (SW) is demonstrated from powering, the Priest elevating the host when the acolytes on possibly side kneel and keep tapers. The eighth and odd panel is lost, but was possibly the Crucifixion.
The most spectacularly un-East Anglian element of the church are the wonderful graphic niches that line the arcades. They are large. Beneath the pedestals are depicted figures, such as musicians (one plays a fife and drum), St George dispatching a dragon and a fearsome lion with a bone. There are traces of initial colour, and they are merely stunning.
Much more homely are the bench finishes, such as a stunning mermaid, a number of figures studying textbooks, and a poppyhead carved with a experience sticking out its tongue, of a variety in some cases known as Scandal, despite the fact that I have in no way been certain by this. There are numerous brasses, some in the north aisle and other people scattered all over the south door, together with two figures in their shrouds, and one particular fragment depicting a team of six weepers. In the north aisle is a intriguing selection of donated and collected ephemera, some suggesting that in the current earlier this was a reasonably Anglo-catholic put, which include a gorgeous Russian Orthodox cross. I rushed close to having photos though the church stuffed with wedding ceremony visitors.
And so, it was time to go. I decided that I was amazed by this church, but that I did not adore it. Hunting close to at the splendour of William Ramsey’s get the job done, at what survives of its elaborate furnishings, and sensing the echoes of the abundant sacramental life it as soon as hosted, I had a sudden eyesight of apocalypse – not of the Black Dying so much, as of the finish of a way of everyday living replaced by one thing so wholly various in a several brief a long time of Reformation. This church experienced been designed for so a lot additional than congregational worship, but this was all it could now do. It was as if the Anglican neighborhood was camped out uneasily in its ruins, in the vastness of one thing so wholly further than their imagination.’
Posted by Simon Knott on 2022-03-30 11:18:43
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