St Margaret, Cley-up coming-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 state at the time, or even that the collision of these two facts resulted in some of the most splendid church architecture in Europe.
Practically each parish church in the land bears some proof of this, but it is significantly obvious in the centres of energy of those times: at Lavenham in Suffolk, wherever the wonderful wool merchants held court docket, at Salle and East Harling in Norfolk, in which fantastic landed people competed to influence the crown, and here at Cley, when at the harbour mouth of Blakeney Haven, the excellent north Norfolk conurbation of ports, wherever the streets thronged with rich retailers and their workers.
Today, the harbour is dropped to us, but you can still make out its condition if you stand in Wiveton churchyard and glance back across to Cley, half a mile off. At Blakeney by itself, the quayside survives with some of its properties to assistance a reconstruction in the head but Cley has absolutely nothing now except its church and a couple of cottages, a village eco-friendly and a windmill. Ironically, you wouldn’t even know that the sea was near.
Of the four church buildings of Blakeney Haven, St Margaret was the largest, grandest and most expensive. It is nevertheless all of these matters today. It is replete with all individuals factors we obtain most fascinating when we check out a medieval East Anglian church: a seven sacrament font, bench finishes depicting men and women and legendary creatures, brasses, bosses, stalls and the most elaborate niches in the kingdom, a smattering of aged glass, and memorable tracery that, currently being Decorated instead than Perpendicular, is unfamiliar in East Anglia. We have explored elsewhere on my web page, at Salle and Cawston, precisely why these church buildings have been designed so massive and elaborate. Nicely, St Margaret is a different extraordinary testimony.
The placing is lovely, on a light rise higher than the village eco-friendly. The graveyard is scattered, a lot of of the stones 18th century, and not lined up in medical rows by misguided 1970s garden-mower lovers. If you occur in late spring the graveyard is uncut, complete of wild bouquets and tall grasses, but in this September morning it was neat and trim, a velvet mount for the church.
What you see is, at first sight, sophisticated. The vast nave with its aisles and clerestory is all of a piece. The offset tower is fairly signify, and despite the fact that it looks most likely it was intended for rebuilding, the enormous and beautiful west window implies that it would have been in the exact same spot. The chancel is also curiously straightforward, and eventually would have been replaced. Two transepts adhere out to north and south, the southern one particular roofless and glassless, that to the north totally ruinous.
The service provider de Vaux household ended up responsible for rebuilding the church, and the new nave was created 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 confront of the tower. The learn mason was William Ramsey, one of the most significant in England the Ramsey spouse and children had been responsible for the Palace of Westminster and pieces of Norwich Cathedral. Get the job done started in the 1320s, and proceeded promptly right until the setting up was really properly total by the mid-1340s. This is an early day for the full 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 many years that Suffolk and south Norfolk households ended up in a position to do the very same. Why was this? Partly, the wealth of the Blakeney Haven ports did not depend just on East Anglian cloth. But there was a further, extra apocalyptic variable.
Before Ramsey could turn his focus to the chancel and the dilemma of that blessed tower, a new and scary pestilence arrived at England. For any one residing in a port, health conditions introduced from abroad were an daily hazard that had to be well balanced in opposition to comprehensive employment and options for wealth creation. Even so, this was some thing on a impressive scale, a pressure of bubonic plague that reached the south coastline ports in August 1348 and that by the dismal late winter months of 1349 experienced attained Norfolk. Possibly fifty percent the population died, even though in the ports there seems to have been a bigger survival amount perhaps there was far more immunity because of to prior exposure. Having said that, Ramsey and his son both equally died, and the work of the ports was disrupted for quite a few generations. The Victorians, relishing the gothic horror of the disaster, appeared back from their individual cholera-plagued century and known as it the Black Death.
Fifty percent a century afterwards, trade, self confidence, and a renewed obsession with the cult of the useless led to additional funds being lavished on St Margaret. This was the time that the mighty south porch was built, a Perpendicular fortress that guards, instead uneasily, the Embellished entrance. The church was even more furnished with a mighty rood monitor, 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 incredibly quickly people instances have been to tumble.
The English Reformation brought to an abrupt close the have to have for bequests, and all do the job on creating the setting up stopped. And, point out protestantism would sow the seeds that would assist England arise as an insular, capitalist country, switching designs of trade, and doing absent with the require for Blakeney Haven, pushing Norfolk again into the reduction of a extensive, agricultural sleep.
So, you get a wander all over the outdoors of St Margaret, the window tracery a text e book of the way English architecture created over the generations. The most gorgeous is that in the south transept, stylish lights that build to a cluster of huge quatrefoils. This was competed on the eve of the Black Demise, and is likely at the incredibly apex of English artistic endeavour. But I consider that it was never ever filled with glass. I can see no proof that the transepts have been accomplished in time for their use in advance of the pestilence, or that there was ever a require to use them following the recovery from it. And, then, of system, the Reformation intervened.
You phase into the church as a result of the south porch, with its flanking shields of the Holy Trinity and the Instruments of the passion. Above, in the vaulting, are bosses. 1 exhibits an angry female chasing a fox that has stolen her spectacular 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 typical in East Anglia that there is an unfamiliarity about the nave that is amazing, a feast for the senses. The west conclusion of the church has been cleared, making a cathedral-vastness, and the mild, even though not gloomy, does not have that white East Anglian quality common from Perpendicular properties. The odor is of age instead than furniture polish, a creamy dampness that recalls previous business enterprise fairly than decay. The honeyed stone is also someway overseas in this heartland of flint. It has an effect on the audio in a different way. The developing needs a specified amount of money of awe that is not just owing to its sizing.
We arrived about an hour before a wedding was due to begin, and as we explored the building we observed preparations make, the pews get started to fill, the minister and choir begin to gown, right up until we felt we had been intruding, and remaining 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 vital weddings have grow to be to the Church of England, not just in phrases of the profits they deliver, but as a past bastion of the grounding of Religion in common people’s life. They could no for a longer time have their young children baptised, they may possibly no extended come on a Sunday at all but marriage is the area that straightforward Christianity touches their lives – that, and their funeral, of class, while significantly individuals are additional militantly atheist about dying than they are about like.
The seven sacrament font seems rather lonely in its clearing, and is not the most amazing of its variety, even though the imagery is a minimal abnormal. The Last Rites, (NW) show up to demonstrate the Priest lying on the bed on leading of the dying person. Confession (NE) reveals the Priest and confessing guy dealing with each other throughout a shriving bench. Affirmation (E) is the most compelling of all, simply because it seems to present a tonsured Priest fairly than a bishop blessing a group of people that consist of youngsters and infants. Mass (SW) is shown from driving, the Priest elevating the host even though the acolytes on possibly facet kneel and hold tapers. The eighth and odd panel is shed, but was likely 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, together with musicians (a person performs a fife and drum), St George dispatching a dragon and a fearsome lion with a bone. There are traces of unique color, and they are basically spectacular.
More homely are the bench ends, together with a beautiful mermaid, various figures looking at textbooks, and a poppyhead carved with a facial area sticking out its tongue, of a sort often referred to as Scandal, though I have by no means been convinced by this. There are quite a few brasses, some in the north aisle and others scattered all over the south door, which include two figures in their shrouds, and a person fragment depicting a team of six weepers. In the north aisle is a interesting selection of donated and collected ephemera, some suggesting that in the latest past this was a fairly Anglo-catholic location, including a wonderful Russian Orthodox cross. I rushed close to getting pictures when the church loaded with wedding ceremony visitors.
And so, it was time to go. I made the decision that I was impressed by this church, but that I failed to adore it. Seeking all over at the splendour of William Ramsey’s get the job done, at what survives of its elaborate furnishings, and sensing the echoes of the wealthy sacramental everyday living it once hosted, I had a sudden vision of apocalypse – not of the Black Demise so substantially, as of the stop of a way of everyday living changed by anything so wholly various in a several limited a long time of Reformation. This church had been built for so much far more 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 some thing so wholly over and above their imagination.’
Posted by Simon Knott on 2022-03-30 11:18:37
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