I was born in Norfolk and lived in Suffolk. So I imagined I realized these two counties. But of study course there is extra to Norfolk than Norwich, Cromer, Yarmouth and Kings Lynn, as there is to Suffolk than Ipswich, Lowestoft, Stowmarket and Bury St. Edmunds. And so on My pal, Simon K, runs a amazing website, which I backlink to on EA church buildings, and on his Suffolk Church page he has frequented 707 Suffolk churches, and 909 Norfolk church buildings. That is a lot of churches for two counties to share, and lots of of these church buildings are historic, flint designed, round towered or have wall paintings, wood roof angels or a thing well worth the energy of likely to see or looking for out the keyholder to achieve access.
What I suggest is that there is no way an individual who only experienced their own motor vehicle until eventually 1984, and experienced little fascination in churches or parishes could have heard of most of the parishes in the two counties, and so a parish church like St George.
I saw St George from the key street, I was getting a brief reduce to join the A14 and from there to the A12 and south on what I hoped my my previous journey of the year to lowestoft as Mother is now out of medical center and in the treatment of district nurses in purchase to get place again on her toes.
So I observed the tower of St George from about 50 percent a mile absent, and thought I had ample time to go more than and see within if I could.
I parked at the stop of a cul-de-sac of new bungalows, and as I stroll up the financial institution to the gate into the churchyard, the clear lines of the tower, nicely, towered about me.
In the porch I tried the doorway and discovered it locked, but the keyholder listing manufactured it very clear that the nearest a single, at Xmas Cottage, was just above the street. So, why not test, Ian?
I went to the cottage and rang the bell. I had to fill out my particulars in a ledger, a wise evaluate. But I showed by driving licence to confirm that I was who I claimed. Small did I know the modest village I lived in experienced been recognized. Much more of that in a minute.
Inside of St George, you eye is stolen by the magnificent pew ends animals of all varieties, authentic and imaginary, and most experienced not been defaced, only those of apparent human variety. One with the overall body of a chicken but a clear human facial area experienced been remaining by itself, therefore is the insanity of the puritan’s intellect.
I made the decision that I would record every pew end determine, and many total pew finishes so amazing that they have been.
There is the feint define of a substantial wall portray, Simon states it was of St. Christopher. It would have been most extraordinary when freshly painted. There is also a wonderful established of misericords.
St George’s glory is the altarpiece, into depth Simon goes beneath. It is alarmed, so you are unable to appear at them too closely, regrettably, but these types of is a indicator of the occasions.
I took the keys back, and the woman of the dwelling came to talk to me as she had been told by her partner that I was from Cliffe in Kent, which is exactly where her family is from. Unfortunately, I am not from, nor reside in Cliffe. For once there was in truth two Cliffs in Kent, just one on the Hoo Peninsular, where her loved ones is from, and one particular close to to Dover. A lot of a long time ago, Cliffe near to Dover was named WestCliffe to differentiate it from its namesake further more north. I explained this to her, but mentioned St Helen in Cliffe is one of my favourite Kent churches, created of alternate levels of black and gentle flints and stone, in daylight it glistens and sparkles.
Despite the fact that St George right here in Stowlangtoft is a fine church, it is in a weak point out of repair service, and is thanks to be manufactured redundant in the new calendar year. Often unhappy when that transpires to a parish church, but it is probable to be taken in excess of by the CCT, but then who will volunteer to hold it tidy when the old wardens and keyholders are much too aged.
Stowlangtoft is a incredible church and so glad am I that I expended 40 minutes of my time to go to it. Go to see it now prior to it is too late!
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In the summer of 2003, this website grew to become a 6-aspect sequence on BBC Radio Suffolk. Something I claimed in the fourth programme, about Hessett, produced a fair amount of correspondence. Referring to the way quite a few churches have been restored in the 19th century, I noticed that when we enter a medieval church, we are encountering a Victorian eyesight of the medieval even when the real furnishings and fittings are medieval, the entire piece is nevertheless a Victorian conception.
People today wrote to me and explained things like “but in that situation, Simon, how do we know what was there at first and what wasn’t?”. To which my reply was the enigmatic “think that absolutely nothing is as it initial appears, as Sherlock Holmes reported”. And if he failed to, then he should have performed.
A prime case in point of a church that assumes a continuity that may well not essentially be the real truth is in this article in the flat fields concerning Woolpit and Ixworth. This component of Suffolk can be relatively bleak, particularly in late October, but England’s greatest summer time and autumn for decades experienced left the churchyard below verdant and golden, as gorgeous a area as any I’d found that calendar year. The church is big, and sits on a mound that has been lower down on a single aspect by the highway. I walked up the slope, previous the memorial to the art critic Peter Fuller and his unborn son, which under no circumstances fails to transfer me. It is by the sculptor Glynn Williams, and Sister Wendy Beckett claims of it that it are not able to be pinned down and encapsulated, it defeats the classes of the mere brain and sings to us of our deeper self.
Overcome as you may well be by it, never fall short to spot the broken window tracery that has been employed to establish the wall below, for therefore hangs a tale.
St George, in circumstance you you should not know, is a person of the good Suffolk churches. Whilst it may possibly externally show up a little severe, and is by no means as grand as Blythburgh, Very long Melford and the relaxation, it is a treasure property of the medieval inside. Unusually for a church of its date, it was all rebuilt in one particular go, in the late 14th century, and the perpendicular home windows are not however total of the ‘walls of glass’ self esteem that the subsequent century would see. The tracery seems to have been fixed, and potentially even renewed, which might make clear why there is broken medieval tracery in the churchyard wall. Having said that, it does not take much to see that the tracery in the wall is not perpendicular at all, but decorated. So it may possibly be that the damaged tracery is from the authentic church that the late 14th century church changed. But the wall isn’t really medieval, so where had it been all these a long time?
Another survival from the before church is the font. It also asks some issues. Unusually, it characteristics a Saint on seven of the panels, Christ staying on the westwards experience. Mortlock dates it to the early 14th century, and the Saints it shows are acquainted cults from that time: St Margaret, St Catherine, St Peter and St Paul, and significantly less generally St George. The cult of St George was at its top in the early years of the 14th century. Mortlock describes the font as mutilated, and it certainly is just not wanting its ideal. But I feel there is more heading on listed here than meets the eye. Fonts were plastered around in Elizabethan occasions, and only aid that stood proud of the plaster was mutilated. These are all shallow reliefs, and I do not think they have been mutilated at all. To my eye at the very least, this stonework seems weathered. I surprise if this font was taken out from the church, almost certainly in the mid-17th century, and served an out of doors purpose till it was returned in the 19th century.
The story of this church in the 19th century is properly-documented. In 1832, as portion of his grand tour of Suffolk, David Davy frequented, and was delighted to obtain that the church was at very last undergoing fix. The chancel had been roofless, and the nave used for expert services. A new Rectory was currently being built. Who was the catalyst powering all this? His identify was Samuel Rickards, and he was Rector here for pretty much the center forty a long time of the 19th century. Roy Tricker notes that he was a superior buddy of John Henry Newman, the upcoming Cardinal, and they generally corresponded on the issue of the pre-Reformation purchasing of English church buildings. It is attention-grabbing to think how, at this seminal instant, Rickards may have educated the considered of the Oxford Movement. Sadly, when Newman turned a Catholic Rickards broke off all correspondence with him.
In the course of the program of the 1840s and 1850s, Rickards transformed Stowlangtoft church. He obtained the wonderful Ipswich woodcarver Henry Ringham in to restore, replicate and complete the marvellous established of bench finishes – Ringham did the same point at Woolpit, a handful of miles absent. Ringham’s get the job done is so good that it is in some cases tricky for the inexperienced eye to detect it nonetheless, as at Woolpit, Ringham only copied animals in this article, and the wierder things is all medieval, and almost certainly dates from the rebuilding of the church. The glory of Stowlangtoft’s bench finishes is partly the sheer amount – there are most likely 60 carvings – but also that there are numerous distinctive topics you can see some of them underneath.
The carvings appear to be component of the very same team as Woolpit and Tostock – you will recognise the unicorn, the chained bear, the bull taking part in a harp, the chook with a man’s head, from similar carvings in other places. And then with any luck , that minimal alarm bell in your listened to really should start off to go “Hmmmm…..” for the reason that some of the carvings right here are clearly not from the identical team. It is hard to think that the mermaid and the owl, for instance, are from the very same workshop, or even from the exact same ten years. The benches them selves are no clue it was common follow in the 19th century to switch medieval bench finishes on present day benches, or on medieval benches, or even on modern benches manufactured out of medieval timber (as happened at Blythburgh). Could it be that Samuel Rickards uncovered some of these bench ends somewhere else? Could he have been the form of man or woman to do a factor like that?
Perfectly, sure he could. As Roy Tricker recalls, the medieval roof at the tractarian Thomas Mozley’s church at Cholderton in Wiltshire is a person that Rickards obtained immediately after getting it in storage in Ipswich docks. In the ferment of the wonderful 19th century restoration of our English churches, there was hundreds of medieval junk lying all around, significantly of it heading begging. But was Samuel Rickards the sort of person to counterfeit his church’s medieval inheritance?
Effectively, certainly he in all probability was. Appear at the medieval roundels in the center window on the south side of the nave. The 4 evangelists are above and under two exceptional representations of the Presentation in the Temple and the Baptism of Christ. You can see them beneath click on on them to enlarge them. Sad to say, they are not medieval at all, and it is frequently approved that they were painted by a daughter of Samuel Rickards himself. There is anything related the other facet of Bury at Hawstead.
Certainly medieval is the extensive St Christopher wall-portray still discernible on the north wall. It was in all probability a single of the final to be painted. The bench finishes are medieval, of study course, as is the great rood-display dado, albeit repainted. There is even some medieval glass in the upper tracery of some of the home windows. The laughable stone pulpit is Rickard’s fee, and the work of William White. What can Rickards have been imagining of? But we stage via into the chancel, and quickly the entire detail moves up a gear. For in this article are some matters that are genuinely amazing.
In a county renowned for its woodwork, the furnishings of Stowlangtoft’s chancel are spectacular, even awe-inspiring. Powering the rood display screen dado is Suffolk’s most complete set of return stalls. Most hanging are the figures that sort finials to the stall ends. They are members in the Mass, including two Monks, two servers and two acolytes. The determine of the Priest at a prayer desk will have to be 1 of the best medieval illustrations or photos in Suffolk Mortlock assumed the stalls the best in England. I was right here with my friend Aidan of Sylly Suffolk fame, and he experienced earlier photographed and penned about these carving a a pair of many years in the past. But even he observed something new to photograph, and a hush fell on the chancel as we explored.
The benches that encounter eastwards are misericords, and beneath them are fantastic matters: angels, lions and wodewoses, evangelistic symbols and crowned heads. A hawk captures a hare, a dragon sticks out its tongue. Between the seats are odd oriental faces. Some of them are beneath click on on them to enlarge them.
Now, you know what I am likely to ask upcoming. How a lot of this is from this church initially? It all seems medieval perform, and there is no reason to imagine it may well not have been moved somewhere else in the church when the chancel was open up to the aspects. What proof have we got?
To begin with, we should discover that the only other Suffolk church with such a large range of medieval misericords of this top quality is just a mile absent, at Norton. I you should not ask you to see this as major, simply to notice it in passing. Next, I am no carpenter, but it does glimpse to me as nevertheless two sets of furnishings have been cobbled alongside one another the stalls that back on to the display screen seem to have been integrated into the larger composition of stalls and desks that front them and the north and south partitions.
Having said that, if you glance carefully at the figures of the two Deacons, you will see that they are bearing shields of the Ashfield and Peche families. The Ashfield arms also show up on the rood monitor, and the Ashfields were the big donors when the church was rebuilt in the 14th century. So on harmony I am inclined to imagine that the increased portion of the stall construction was in this church initially from when it was rebuilt. And the misericords? Very well, I never know. But I feel they have to be considered as element of the very same set as those people at Norton. In which case they could have arrive from the similar church, which may have been this one particular, but may possibly not have been. Pretty much undoubtedly, the stalls at Norton did not arrive from Norton church, and folklore has it that they have been initially in the quire of Bury Abbey. Hmm….
Other impressive things in St George include FE Howard’s gorgeous war memorial in the previous north doorway, and in the opposite corner of the nave Hugh Easton’s attractive St George, which serves the exact same reason. It is as very good as his perform at Elveden. Again up in the chancel is a delightful painted pipe organ which was apparently exhibited at, and acquired from, the Excellent Exhibition of 1851.
But St George at Stowlangtoft is, of study course, most well known for the Flemish carvings that flank the alternatively weighty altarpiece. They have been specified to the church by Henry Wilson of Stowlangtoft Corridor, who allegedly found them in an Ixworth junk shop. They show photos from the crucifixion story, but are not Stations of the Cross as some guides propose. They date from the 1480s, and have been virtually definitely the altarpiece of a French or Flemish monastery that was sacked throughout the French Revolution. I had viewed something related at Baumes-les-Messieurs in the French Jura a couple months in advance of. There, the carvings are brightly painted, as these when ended up, and piled up in a block fairly than distribute out in a line. The niches, and crowning arches above them, are 19th century. My favourite illustrations or photos are the Pieta and the Mouth of Hell. Click on the illustrations or photos below.
A single cold winter’s evening in January 1977, a gang of intruders broke into this locked church and stole them. Nothing far more was observed or listened to of them until 1982, when they had been discovered on screen in an Amsterdam artwork gallery. Their journey had been a convoluted 1 taken to Holland, they were utilized as safety for a financial loan which was defaulted upon. The new owner was then burgled, and the carvings were being fenced to an Amsterdam junk supplier. They ended up bought from his store, and taken to the museum, which straight away discovered them as 15th century carvings. They put them on screen, and a Dutch female who had browse about the Stowlangtoft theft recognised them.
The parish instituted lawful proceedings to get them back again an injunction was taken out to halt the new proprietor taking away them from the museum. The parish dropped the case, leaving them with a monstrous lawful monthly bill but the tale has a content ending. A Dutch businessman negotiated their invest in from the operator, paid off the legal bills, and returned the carvings to Stowlangtoft. Evidently this was all at broad price tag, but the businessman gave the gift in thanks for Britain’s liberation of Holland for the Nazis. No, thank you, sir.
Right now, the carvings are mounted firmly in put and alarmed, so they won’t be heading walkabout all over again. But a very little portion of me wonders if they actually ought to be listed here at all. Positive, they are medieval, but they weren’t listed here at first they were not even in England initially. Would not it be improved if they have been exhibited somewhere safer, the place men and women could pay to see them, and deliver some cash flow for the maintenance of the church creating? And then, whisper it, St George could possibly even be stored open up.
St George, Stowlangtoft, is in the village higher road. A few keyholders are detailed, two of them immediately reverse. I am told that Wednesday is not a fantastic time to check out and get the essential – it is sector working day in Bury.
Simon Knott
www.suffolkchurches.co.united kingdom/stowlangtoft.htm
Posted by Jelltex on 2017-12-17 14:43:45
Tagged: , St George , Stowlangtoft , Suffolk , pew , finishes , carved pew ends , Jelltex , Jelltecks , church
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