Bures is a wonderful old riverside village, a city practically, partly in Suffolk and partly in Essex. The identical was once correct of nearby Sudbury, but the Ballingdon district there was drawn into Suffolk by boundary adjustments in the 1950s. Tradition survives here, and this is nonetheless a break up city. The Essex side is called Bures Hamlet, but is now the much larger element, with a railway station and housing estates.
The River Stour is the county border, and it flows not much from the western edge of the churchyard. The Suffolk side kinds itself Bures St Mary, although I am instructed that this church was not devoted to St Mary right until the 19th century Anglican revival, when a single of the outcomes of the Oxford Motion was a renewed fascination in church dedications. Numerous of these had been restored by very well-indicating antiquarians sorting by means of the historical documents of the Diocese of Norwich, and the confusion arose due to the fact of a now-vanished chapel in the churchyard focused to the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin. In actuality, the devotion of this church in medieval situations was most likely to the feast of All Saints.
The north facet of the church faces the avenue, although you can enter the church via possibly the north or the south porches. Equally are pretty. The pink brick early 16th century south porch is stately and grand, a holy drinking water stoup with supporting figures, and a wide open up house inside of suited for the conduct of parish enterprise. There is a fearsome exterior headstop minimal on the west facet, which need to surely be older than the porch – 13th century, I must think. Either the Tudors reused it, or the Victorians positioned it right here during their restoration.
The other striking feature of the exterior is the purple brick massing of the Waldegrave chantry on the south aspect of the chancel, its east window fairly grander than that of the chancel itself. Higher than the porches rises Richard de Waldegrave’s tower of the late 14th century. Nonetheless, the foundation of the tower is a survival of an previously a person, and on its southern aspect is a curious tomb recess, now vacant.
St Mary is a quintessential Anglican church, its 19th and 20th century reorderings typical of thousands of significant, prosperous buildings. But there are uncommon points in this church, all worth likely to see. If you appear up, you will see that the ceiling is made up of flat, picket styles, with modern-day lighting units set into them. Mortlock credits the woodwork to Ewan Christian, who carried out the 19th century restoration. The lighting system is from the 1990s. The arcades are lit from beneath, creating the effect of an undercroft.
In the sanctuary and to the north of the altar, a person of the Waldegrave tombs sits grandly beside the large camp Victoriana. It has been instead battered by the fortunes of heritage its brass has long long gone, but the grand angel corbels that supported its also-vanished picket canopy endure. It is to Richard de Waldegrave, who designed the tower, and it was utilised as an Easter sepulchre. Wodewoses, East Anglia’s wild guys of the woods, the corners.
And then, to the south of the chancel is the Waldegrave chantry. A tomb in the south east corner, truly a cobbling alongside one another of two different Waldegrave tombs, has misplaced its brasses, but the standing memorial to the west is additional full. Alongside the entrance, the youngsters kneel in prayer. Their legs are curiously swirly, and another person just lately reported to me that they search as if they have been extruded out of a cake decorating established. The memorial remembers a William Waldegrave who died in the early 17th century, and the additional you appear at it the odder it will get. For occasion, although the ten weepers are in their common placement, there are no effigies of the remembered dead. Even odder, the memorial inscription is on the back again of the tomb, and ordinarily out of sight. This memorial is curiously awkwardly placed, and feels instead in the way, till you try to remember that for a few hundred decades just after the Reformation the liturgy experienced no have to have for gangways for processions, or for sights of altars. The tomb was probably placed intentionally so.
The Waldegraves had been not preferred men and women in this parish, apparently. At the time of the Anglican reformers in the 1540s, there was a normal rebellion here and the destruction in the church was so significant that the churchwardens have been punished. A hundred several years later on, the puritans meted out their fundamentalist justice to the Waldegrave small children, removing their hands. And nevertheless, this alternatively ugly tomb however sits in this article, and who remembers the puritans now?
The locale of the tomb is probably a pity, since the eastward see in the chapel is otherwise its triumph. The five light window contains a modern-day glass memorial to the Waldegraves, such as the Catholic inscription that, of our charity, we should pray for their souls. The Sarum display backing the altar beneath is very effective.
Heading back into the body of the church, a picket effigy of a knight rests in peace on a north aisle window recess, which is obviously not its authentic spot. It dates from about 1330, and is produced of chestnut. No a single really knows who he is, despite the fact that some books point out someone known as Richard de Cornard. The lion beneath his ft has a rather unfortunate expression, I believe. Suffolk’s only other wood medieval effigies are at Boxted and Heveningham. Mortlock says that the survival of his defend is noteworthy and uncommon.This knight effigy might or may perhaps not have arrive from Bures church at first, and there is no way of telling now.
The most abnormal characteristic of St Mary is a thing you would not discover, or even assume to seem for unless you knew it was there. This is a bizarre small octagonal phase that juts out about 10 feet up on the jap experience of the south side of the chancel arch. It is, of all matters, a piscina. What is it accomplishing up there? We have to have to envision the rood monitor, rood beam and rood loft, and all the liturgical paraphernalia of the pre-Reformation church. The rood loft listed here had an altar on it, and this piscina served the altar. Why is it so rare? Just, this chancel arch was developed with a drain inside of it. Most rood loft altars have to have managed with a takeaway bowl. An incredible matter, in several methods.
I am generally aware alongside the River Stour of how civilised the south of Suffolk seems, and how wild Essex seems over and above it, as if the 21st century hadn’t very manufactured it nonetheless along the slim lanes from County Hall at Chelmsford. North Essex is great biking and church-checking out country, but individuals seem to be to know the Suffolk facet greatest. In the corner of the churchyard is a parish war memorial which is unusual, and quite possibly exclusive. It remembers The adult men of Bures St Mary and Bures Hamlet who gave their lives for King and Region in the Fantastic War, which of training course is to say the dropped boys in two various counties.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2019-08-10 09:34:27
Tagged: , bures , suffolk , east anglia
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