I was born in Norfolk and lived in Suffolk. So I believed I knew individuals two counties. But of program there is additional 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 friend, Simon K, operates a magnificent web page, which I backlink to on EA churches, and on his Suffolk Church site he has visited 707 Suffolk church buildings, and 909 Norfolk churches. That is a good deal of church buildings for two counties to share, and a lot of of those people churches are historic, flint built, round towered or have wall paintings, wood roof angels or a little something truly worth the exertion of going to see or trying to find out the keyholder to obtain obtain.
What I imply is that there is no way an individual who only experienced their possess automobile right up until 1984, and had small curiosity 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 noticed St George from the primary street, I was getting a limited slice to be a part of the A14 and from there to the A12 and south on what I hoped my my last journey of the yr to lowestoft as Mom is now out of clinic and in the care of district nurses in buy to get set back on her feet.
So I observed the tower of St George from about 50 % a mile absent, and considered I experienced sufficient time to go more than and see inside 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 traces of the tower, effectively, towered around me.
In the porch I attempted the door and identified it locked, but the keyholder record designed it very clear that the closest just one, at Xmas Cottage, was just over the highway. So, why not attempt, Ian?
I went to the cottage and rang the bell. I had to fill out my aspects in a ledger, a wise evaluate. But I showed by driving licence to demonstrate that I was who I claimed. Tiny did I know the tiny village I lived in experienced been seen. Additional of that in a moment.
Inside St George, you eye is stolen by the amazing pew ends animals of all varieties, serious and imaginary, and most experienced not been defaced, only these of obvious human variety. A person with the body of a hen but a distinct human confront experienced been left by yourself, thus is the madness of the puritan’s head.
I made the decision that I would history every pew close figure, and lots of full pew ends so superb that they have been.
There is the feint define of a massive wall portray, Simon suggests it was of St. Christopher. It would have been most remarkable when freshly painted. There is also a high-quality established of misericords.
St George’s glory is the altarpiece, into element Simon goes underneath. It is alarmed, so you can not seem at them as well closely, sadly, but this sort of is a sign of the periods.
I took the keys again, and the lady of the house came to converse to me as she had been explained to by her spouse that I was from Cliffe in Kent, which is the place her household is from. Sadly, I am not from, nor reside in Cliffe. For when there was in fact two Cliffs in Kent, just one on the Hoo Peninsular, exactly where her household is from, and 1 in close proximity to to Dover. Quite a few years back, Cliffe near to Dover was referred to as WestCliffe to differentiate it from its namesake even further north. I stated this to her, but said St Helen in Cliffe is 1 of my favorite Kent church buildings, designed of alternate levels of black and mild flints and stone, in sunlight it glistens and sparkles.
While St George here in Stowlangtoft is a great church, it is in a very poor point out of mend, and is owing to be designed redundant in the new year. Normally unhappy when that happens to a parish church, but it is likely to be taken above by the CCT, but then who will volunteer to continue to keep it tidy when the old wardens and keyholders are also outdated.
Stowlangtoft is a wonderful church and so happy am I that I put in 40 minutes of my time to visit it. Go to see it now just before it is also late!
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In the summer of 2003, this website grew to become a 6-section sequence on BBC Radio Suffolk. Some thing I mentioned in the fourth programme, about Hessett, created a honest volume of correspondence. Referring to the way lots of churches have been restored in the 19th century, I observed that when we enter a medieval church, we are encountering a Victorian vision of the medieval even when the actual furnishings and fittings are medieval, the total piece is nonetheless a Victorian conception.
Folks wrote to me and said things like “but in that situation, Simon, how do we know what was there originally and what wasn’t?”. To which my reply was the enigmatic “assume that very little is as it first seems, as Sherlock Holmes said”. And if he failed to, then he ought to have carried out.
A prime instance of a church that assumes a continuity that may perhaps not really be the reality is in this article in the flat fields between Woolpit and Ixworth. This element of Suffolk can be relatively bleak, specially in late Oct, but England’s greatest summer time and autumn for decades experienced left the churchyard below verdant and golden, as attractive a place as any I’d found that year. The church is big, and sits on a mound that has been reduce down on a person aspect by the highway. I walked up the slope, previous the memorial to the artwork critic Peter Fuller and his unborn son, which by no means fails to shift me. It is by the sculptor Glynn Williams, and Sister Wendy Beckett suggests of it that it cannot be pinned down and encapsulated, it defeats the categories of the mere head and sings to us of our further self.
Overcome as you might be by it, do not are unsuccessful to place the damaged window tracery that has been employed to create the wall below, for thus hangs a tale.
St George, in case you don’t know, is a single of the great Suffolk churches. Despite the fact that it might externally look a very little extreme, and is by no means as grand as Blythburgh, Long Melford and the rest, it is a treasure property of the medieval inside. Unusually for a church of its date, it was all rebuilt in one go, in the late 14th century, and the perpendicular home windows are not but entire of the ‘walls of glass’ confidence that the subsequent century would see. The tracery appears to have been fixed, and possibly even renewed, which may possibly demonstrate why there is broken medieval tracery in the churchyard wall. On the other hand, it does not take considerably to see that the tracery in the wall is not perpendicular at all, but decorated. So it may be that the broken tracery is from the original church that the late 14th century church changed. But the wall is just not medieval, so where by had it been all people several years?
Yet another survival from the previously church is the font. It also asks some concerns. Unusually, it capabilities a Saint on seven of the panels, Christ staying on the westwards facial area. Mortlock dates it to the early 14th century, and the Saints it displays are common cults from that time: St Margaret, St Catherine, St Peter and St Paul, and less frequently St George. The cult of St George was at its height in the early decades of the 14th century. Mortlock describes the font as mutilated, and it surely isn’t really on the lookout its finest. But I think there is extra likely on right here than fulfills the eye. Fonts had been plastered in excess of in Elizabethan periods, and only reduction that stood happy of the plaster was mutilated. These are all shallow reliefs, and I do not believe they have been mutilated at all. To my eye at minimum, this stonework seems weathered. I wonder if this font was removed from the church, likely in the mid-17th century, and served an out of doors objective until it was returned in the 19th century.
The tale of this church in the 19th century is very well-documented. In 1832, as aspect of his grand tour of Suffolk, David Davy frequented, and was pleased to locate that the church was at past undergoing fix. The chancel had been roofless, and the nave employed for companies. A new Rectory was being designed. Who was the catalyst powering all this? His identify was Samuel Rickards, and he was Rector here for pretty much the center forty decades of the 19th century. Roy Tricker notes that he was a superior good friend of John Henry Newman, the potential Cardinal, and they often corresponded on the subject of the pre-Reformation buying of English church buildings. It is exciting to believe how, at this seminal moment, Rickards could possibly have informed the assumed of the Oxford Motion. Sadly, when Newman turned a Catholic Rickards broke off all correspondence with him.
All through the training course of the 1840s and 1850s, Rickards reworked Stowlangtoft church. He acquired the terrific Ipswich woodcarver Henry Ringham in to restore, replicate and complete the marvellous set of bench finishes – Ringham did the exact matter at Woolpit, a handful of miles absent. Ringham’s do the job is so great that it is sometimes hard for the inexperienced eye to detect it however, as at Woolpit, Ringham only copied animals in this article, and the wierder things is all medieval, and possibly dates from the rebuilding of the church. The glory of Stowlangtoft’s bench finishes is partly the sheer amount – there are potentially 60 carvings – but also that there are a number of one of a kind subjects you can see some of them below.
The carvings show up to be section of the similar team as Woolpit and Tostock – you will recognise the unicorn, the chained bear, the bull enjoying a harp, the fowl with a man’s head, from related carvings somewhere else. And then with any luck , that small alarm bell in your listened to should start out to go “Hmmmm…..” simply because some of the carvings listed here are clearly not from the identical group. It is tough to consider that the mermaid and the owl, for illustration, are from the same workshop, or even from the identical decade. The benches on their own are no clue it was popular practice in the 19th century to change medieval bench ends on modern day benches, or on medieval benches, or even on present day benches produced out of medieval timber (as took place at Blythburgh). Could it be that Samuel Rickards located some of these bench finishes elsewhere? Could he have been the sort of particular person to do a issue like that?
Effectively, yes he could. As Roy Tricker recollects, the medieval roof at the tractarian Thomas Mozley’s church at Cholderton in Wiltshire is just one that Rickards acquired after locating it in storage in Ipswich docks. In the ferment of the excellent 19th century restoration of our English church buildings, there was hundreds of medieval junk lying close to, significantly of it likely begging. But was Samuel Rickards the kind of human being to counterfeit his church’s medieval inheritance?
Very well, sure he almost certainly was. Look at the medieval roundels in the center window on the south aspect of the nave. The 4 evangelists are higher than and below two excellent representations of the Presentation in the Temple and the Baptism of Christ. You can see them underneath click on on them to enlarge them. Regrettably, they are not medieval at all, and it is normally acknowledged that they ended up painted by a daughter of Samuel Rickards himself. There is a little something related the other facet of Bury at Hawstead.
Certainly medieval is the huge St Christopher wall-painting still discernible on the north wall. It was probably one of the past to be painted. The bench finishes are medieval, of system, as is the good rood-monitor dado, albeit repainted. There is even some medieval glass in the higher tracery of some of the windows. The laughable stone pulpit is Rickard’s commission, and the work of William White. What can Rickards have been thinking of? But we step as a result of into the chancel, and suddenly the complete detail moves up a equipment. For listed here are some factors that are genuinely remarkable.
In a county renowned for its woodwork, the furnishings of Stowlangtoft’s chancel are amazing, even awe-inspiring. Powering the rood display screen dado is Suffolk’s most total established of return stalls. Most striking are the figures that form finials to the stall finishes. They are individuals in the Mass, together with two Clergymen, two servers and two acolytes. The figure of the Priest at a prayer desk will have to be a person of the very best medieval photos in Suffolk Mortlock thought the stalls the very best in England. I was listed here with my close friend Aidan of Sylly Suffolk fame, and he experienced earlier photographed and created about these carving a a couple of a long time ago. But even he uncovered one thing new to photograph, and a hush fell on the chancel as we explored.
The benches that experience eastwards are misericords, and beneath them are superb factors: angels, lions and wodewoses, evangelistic symbols and topped heads. A hawk captures a hare, a dragon sticks out its tongue. Involving the seats are odd oriental faces. Some of them are underneath click on on them to enlarge them.
Now, you know what I am heading to talk to future. How considerably of this is from this church originally? It all seems medieval get the job done, and there is no reason to believe it may well not have been moved somewhere else in the church when the chancel was open up to the components. What proof have we obtained?
To begin with, we really should detect that the only other Suffolk church with this kind of a significant amount of medieval misericords of this high quality is just a mile away, at Norton. I do not talk to you to see this as sizeable, basically to detect it in passing. Secondly, I am no carpenter, but it does glimpse to me as though two sets of furnishings have been cobbled alongside one another the stalls that back again on to the monitor seem to have been built-in into the much larger framework of stalls and desks that front them and the north and south walls.
On the other hand, if you search carefully at the figures of the two Deacons, you will see that they are bearing shields of the Ashfield and Peche people. The Ashfield arms also look on the rood monitor, and the Ashfields ended up the significant donors when the church was rebuilt in the 14th century. So on equilibrium I am inclined to assume that the bigger portion of the stall construction was in this church originally from when it was rebuilt. And the misericords? Perfectly, I never know. But I feel they have to be deemed as aspect of the same established as these at Norton. In which circumstance they may perhaps have arrive from the exact church, which may well have been this one, but might not have been. Just about certainly, the stalls at Norton did not arrive from Norton church, and folklore has it that they had been at first in the quire of Bury Abbey. Hmm….
Other extraordinary things in St George consist of FE Howard’s gorgeous war memorial in the previous north doorway, and in the reverse corner of the nave Hugh Easton’s magnificent St George, which serves the similar purpose. It is as good as his operate at Elveden. Back up in the chancel is a delightful painted pipe organ which was seemingly exhibited at, and acquired from, the Terrific Exhibition of 1851.
But St George at Stowlangtoft is, of system, most famous for the Flemish carvings that flank the instead weighty altarpiece. They were being provided to the church by Henry Wilson of Stowlangtoft Corridor, who allegedly discovered them in an Ixworth junk store. They clearly show illustrations or photos from the crucifixion story, but are not Stations of the Cross as some guides suggest. They date from the 1480s, and ended up almost certainly the altarpiece of a French or Flemish monastery that was sacked through the French Revolution. I had noticed one thing similar at Baumes-les-Messieurs in the French Jura a handful of months in advance of. There, the carvings are brightly painted, as these as soon as had been, and piled up in a block fairly than distribute out in a line. The niches, and crowning arches higher than them, are 19th century. My favourite photos are the Pieta and the Mouth of Hell. Simply click on the photographs down below.
Just one chilly winter’s night in January 1977, a gang of robbers broke into this locked church and stole them. Almost nothing additional was viewed or listened to of them until finally 1982, when they ended up discovered on screen in an Amsterdam artwork gallery. Their journey had been a convoluted one particular taken to Holland, they were being employed as stability for a mortgage which was defaulted on. The new operator was then burgled, and the carvings were fenced to an Amsterdam junk seller. They were purchased from his store, and taken to the museum, which right away discovered them as 15th century carvings. They put them on screen, and a Dutch woman who experienced study about the Stowlangtoft theft recognised them.
The parish instituted authorized proceedings to get them again an injunction was taken out to stop the new owner removing them from the museum. The parish missing the situation, leaving them with a monstrous lawful bill but the story has a joyful ending. A Dutch businessman negotiated their acquire from the operator, paid off the authorized payments, and returned the carvings to Stowlangtoft. Seemingly this was all at extensive value, but the businessman gave the gift in thanks for Britain’s liberation of Holland for the Nazis. No, thank you, sir.
Currently, the carvings are set firmly in place and alarmed, so they would not be going walkabout yet again. But a minimal part of me wonders if they seriously should be listed here at all. Guaranteed, they are medieval, but they weren’t right here originally they were not even in England originally. Wouldn’t it be far better if they were displayed someplace safer, exactly where persons could spend to see them, and supply some earnings for the upkeep of the church making? And then, whisper it, St George may possibly even be kept open up.
St George, Stowlangtoft, is in the village superior street. 3 keyholders are stated, two of them straight away opposite. I am told that Wednesday is not a excellent time to try and get the key – it is market day in Bury.
Simon Knott
www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/stowlangtoft.htm
Posted by Jelltex on 2017-12-17 14:43:42
Tagged: , St George , Stowlangtoft , Suffolk , pew , ends , carved pew finishes , Jelltex , Jelltecks , church
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