I was born in Norfolk and lived in Suffolk. So I considered I realized these two counties. But of program there is far more 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 good friend, Simon K, operates a fantastic web page, which I website link to on EA church buildings, and on his Suffolk Church web page he has visited 707 Suffolk church buildings, and 909 Norfolk church buildings. That is a ton of churches for two counties to share, and numerous of those people churches are historic, flint constructed, spherical towered or have wall paintings, wood roof angels or anything value the energy of likely to see or seeking out the keyholder to acquire access.
What I necessarily mean is that there is no way an individual who only had their possess motor vehicle until 1984, and had small interest 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 observed St George from the principal street, I was getting a limited lower to be part of the A14 and from there to the A12 and south on what I hoped my my very last journey of the year to lowestoft as Mom is now out of medical center and in the treatment of district nurses in purchase to get put back again on her ft.
So I noticed the tower of St George from about 50 % a mile absent, and thought I experienced plenty of time to go around and see inside of if I could.
I parked at the close of a cul-de-sac of new bungalows, and as I stroll up the bank to the gate into the churchyard, the cleanse traces of the tower, perfectly, towered above me.
In the porch I attempted the door and uncovered it locked, but the keyholder list made it clear that the nearest a single, at Christmas Cottage, was just above the street. So, why not consider, 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 establish that I was who I claimed. Very little did I know the smaller village I lived in experienced been discovered. Extra of that in a minute.
Inside of St George, you eye is stolen by the magnificent pew ends animals of all forms, authentic and imaginary, and most had not been defaced, only those people of apparent human form. Just one with the system of a rooster but a distinct human face experienced been left by itself, hence is the madness of the puritan’s head.
I decided that I would report every pew end determine, and many complete pew finishes so superb that they have been.
There is the feint define of a large wall painting, Simon suggests it was of St. Christopher. It would have been most amazing when freshly painted. There is also a wonderful set of misericords.
St George’s glory is the altarpiece, into detail Simon goes below. It is alarmed, so you simply cannot search at them far too intently, sadly, but this kind of is a sign of the periods.
I took the keys back again, and the lady of the home came to discuss to me as she experienced been advised by her spouse that I was from Cliffe in Kent, which is in which her family is from. Regrettably, I am not from, nor reside in Cliffe. For the moment there was indeed two Cliffs in Kent, just one on the Hoo Peninsular, wherever her spouse and children is from, and one particular in the vicinity of to Dover. Many a long time in the past, Cliffe near to Dover was known as WestCliffe to differentiate it from its namesake further north. I discussed this to her, but mentioned St Helen in Cliffe is one particular of my favourite Kent churches, crafted of alternate levels of black and mild flints and stone, in daylight it glistens and sparkles.
Although St George below in Stowlangtoft is a good church, it is in a weak point out of mend, and is thanks to be created redundant in the new 12 months. Always unhappy when that comes about to a parish church, but it is probable to be taken around by the CCT, but then who will volunteer to hold it tidy when the outdated wardens and keyholders are as well old.
Stowlangtoft is a incredible church and so glad am I that I put in 40 minutes of my time to go to it. Go to see it now prior to it is much too late!
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In the summer season of 2003, this website turned a 6-element sequence on BBC Radio Suffolk. Anything I stated in the fourth programme, about Hessett, produced a reasonable volume of correspondence. Referring to the way numerous church buildings have been restored in the 19th century, I observed that when we enter a medieval church, we are encountering a Victorian eyesight of the medieval even when the genuine furnishings and fittings are medieval, the total piece is even now a Victorian conception.
People wrote to me and claimed issues like “but in that situation, Simon, how do we know what was there originally and what was not?”. To which my reply was the enigmatic “suppose that very little is as it very first seems, as Sherlock Holmes said”. And if he failed to, then he should have performed.
A key case in point of a church that assumes a continuity that could not basically be the truth is here in the flat fields in between Woolpit and Ixworth. This portion of Suffolk can be relatively bleak, especially in late October, but England’s best summer and autumn for many years had left the churchyard below verdant and golden, as stunning a area as any I might witnessed that calendar year. The church is substantial, and sits on a mound that has been slash down on a single facet by the road. I walked up the slope, past the memorial to the art critic Peter Fuller and his unborn son, which never fails to shift me. It is by the sculptor Glynn Williams, and Sister Wendy Beckett suggests of it that it can not be pinned down and encapsulated, it defeats the classes of the mere thoughts and sings to us of our deeper self.
Overwhelmed as you could be by it, never fall short to location the damaged window tracery that has been utilized to develop the wall here, for therefore hangs a tale.
St George, in situation you don’t know, is one of the great Suffolk church buildings. Although it might externally appear a tiny significant, and is by no suggests as grand as Blythburgh, Prolonged Melford and the rest, it is a treasure house of the medieval inside of. Unusually for a church of its date, it was all rebuilt in just one go, in the late 14th century, and the perpendicular windows are not yet whole of the ‘walls of glass’ confidence that the subsequent century would see. The tracery appears to have been repaired, and quite possibly even renewed, which might demonstrate why there is broken medieval tracery in the churchyard wall. On the other hand, it isn’t going to take considerably to see that the tracery in the wall is not perpendicular at all, but decorated. So it may possibly be that the broken tracery is from the unique church that the late 14th century church replaced. But the wall isn’t really medieval, so wherever had it been all these a long time?
A different survival from the previously church is the font. It also asks some thoughts. Unusually, it attributes a Saint on 7 of the panels, Christ currently being on the westwards deal with. 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 less normally St George. The cult of St George was at its top in the early decades of the 14th century. Mortlock describes the font as mutilated, and it surely isn’t really wanting its very best. But I feel there is extra going on here than fulfills the eye. Fonts had been plastered over in Elizabethan moments, and only reduction that stood proud of the plaster was mutilated. These are all shallow reliefs, and I do not imagine they have been mutilated at all. To my eye at minimum, this stonework seems weathered. I surprise if this font was taken off from the church, almost certainly in the mid-17th century, and served an out of doors purpose right until it was returned in the 19th century.
The tale of this church in the 19th century is effectively-documented. In 1832, as section of his grand tour of Suffolk, David Davy frequented, and was delighted to obtain that the church was at very last undergoing maintenance. The chancel experienced been roofless, and the nave utilized for providers. A new Rectory was becoming constructed. Who was the catalyst at the rear of all this? His identify was Samuel Rickards, and he was Rector listed here for virtually the middle forty many years of the 19th century. Roy Tricker notes that he was a great close friend of John Henry Newman, the potential Cardinal, and they usually corresponded on the issue of the pre-Reformation buying of English church buildings. It is exciting to think how, at this seminal second, Rickards may have informed the thought of the Oxford Motion. Unfortunately, when Newman became a Catholic Rickards broke off all correspondence with him.
Throughout the class of the 1840s and 1850s, Rickards reworked Stowlangtoft church. He got the excellent Ipswich woodcarver Henry Ringham in to restore, replicate and full the marvellous set of bench finishes – Ringham did the similar point at Woolpit, a few miles absent. Ringham’s function is so excellent that it is in some cases tricky for the inexperienced eye to detect it however, as at Woolpit, Ringham only copied animals below, and the wierder things is all medieval, and possibly dates from the rebuilding of the church. The glory of Stowlangtoft’s bench ends is partly the sheer quantity – there are possibly 60 carvings – but also that there are many distinctive subjects you can see some of them under.
The carvings appear to be component of the identical team as Woolpit and Tostock – you will recognise the unicorn, the chained bear, the bull taking part in a harp, the fowl with a man’s head, from very similar carvings elsewhere. And then hopefully that very little alarm bell in your read ought to get started to go “Hmmmm…..” because some of the carvings listed here are clearly not from the exact group. It is difficult to feel that the mermaid and the owl, for illustration, are from the identical workshop, or even from the same decade. The benches themselves are no clue it was widespread observe in the 19th century to exchange medieval bench ends on modern day benches, or on medieval benches, or even on modern benches produced out of medieval timber (as occurred at Blythburgh). Could it be that Samuel Rickards uncovered some of these bench finishes in other places? Could he have been the form of person to do a matter like that?
Perfectly, yes he could. As Roy Tricker recollects, the medieval roof at the tractarian Thomas Mozley’s church at Cholderton in Wiltshire is 1 that Rickards acquired soon after finding it in storage in Ipswich docks. In the ferment of the great 19th century restoration of our English churches, there was loads of medieval junk lying about, significantly of it going begging. But was Samuel Rickards the sort of individual to counterfeit his church’s medieval inheritance?
Very well, indeed he likely was. Glimpse at the medieval roundels in the center window on the south facet of the nave. The four evangelists are above and underneath two superb representations of the Presentation in the Temple and the Baptism of Christ. You can see them beneath click on them to enlarge them. Sad to say, they are not medieval at all, and it is typically recognized that they were being painted by a daughter of Samuel Rickards himself. There is something comparable the other side of Bury at Hawstead.
Really medieval is the broad St Christopher wall-painting nonetheless discernible on the north wall. It was almost certainly a single of the final to be painted. The bench finishes are medieval, of program, as is the high-quality 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 operate of William White. What can Rickards have been considering of? But we action through into the chancel, and abruptly the entire thing moves up a equipment. For here are some items that are genuinely outstanding.
In a county famed for its woodwork, the furnishings of Stowlangtoft’s chancel are amazing, even awe-inspiring. Guiding the rood display screen dado is Suffolk’s most full established of return stalls. Most striking are the figures that form finials to the stall finishes. They are participants in the Mass, like two Clergymen, two servers and two acolytes. The determine of the Priest at a prayer desk have to be one particular of the finest medieval photographs in Suffolk Mortlock imagined the stalls the best in England. I was in this article with my close friend Aidan of Sylly Suffolk fame, and he experienced previously photographed and penned about these carving a a couple of a long time in the past. But even he discovered anything new to photograph, and a hush fell on the chancel as we explored.
The benches that encounter eastwards are misericords, and beneath them are wonderful things: angels, lions and wodewoses, evangelistic symbols and crowned heads. A hawk captures a hare, a dragon sticks out its tongue. Amongst the seats are odd oriental faces. Some of them are beneath simply click on them to enlarge them.
Now, you know what I am heading to question future. How substantially of this is from this church initially? It all seems medieval work, and there is no reason to believe that it may well not have been moved elsewhere in the church when the chancel was open up to the components. What proof have we got?
For starters, we ought to observe that the only other Suffolk church with this sort of a large selection of medieval misericords of this high-quality is just a mile away, at Norton. I do not question you to see this as substantial, just to notice it in passing. Next, I am no carpenter, but it does glance to me as although two sets of furnishings have been cobbled alongside one another the stalls that back on to the screen seem to have been built-in into the more substantial composition of stalls and desks that front them and the north and south partitions.
Having said that, if you look closely at the figures of the two Deacons, you will see that they are bearing shields of the Ashfield and Peche households. The Ashfield arms also appear on the rood display screen, and the Ashfields were the major donors when the church was rebuilt in the 14th century. So on harmony I am inclined to think that the larger element of the stall framework was in this church initially from when it was rebuilt. And the misericords? Nicely, I don’t know. But I feel they have to be deemed as part of the identical established as people at Norton. In which case they could have arrive from the very same church, which may possibly have been this a single, but might not have been. Virtually definitely, the stalls at Norton did not come from Norton church, and folklore has it that they had been initially in the quire of Bury Abbey. Hmm….
Other outstanding points in St George include things like FE Howard’s beautiful war memorial in the previous north doorway, and in the reverse corner of the nave Hugh Easton’s stunning St George, which serves the exact same function. It is as good as his perform at Elveden. Back again up in the chancel is a delightful painted pipe organ which was seemingly exhibited at, and acquired from, the Wonderful Exhibition of 1851.
But St George at Stowlangtoft is, of system, most famed for the Flemish carvings that flank the alternatively weighty altarpiece. They were provided to the church by Henry Wilson of Stowlangtoft Hall, who allegedly identified them in an Ixworth junk shop. They show pictures from the crucifixion tale, but are not Stations of the Cross as some guides advise. They date from the 1480s, and have been almost undoubtedly the altarpiece of a French or Flemish monastery that was sacked through the French Revolution. I had observed one thing comparable at Baumes-les-Messieurs in the French Jura a couple of months just before. There, the carvings are brightly painted, as these the moment had been, and piled up in a block relatively than spread out in a line. The niches, and crowning arches previously mentioned them, are 19th century. My favourite pictures are the Pieta and the Mouth of Hell. Simply click on the photographs beneath.
Just one cold winter’s night in January 1977, a gang of robbers broke into this locked church and stole them. Practically nothing far more was viewed or read of them right up until 1982, when they had been discovered on display in an Amsterdam art gallery. Their journey experienced been a convoluted just one taken to Holland, they were being made use of as stability for a personal loan which was defaulted on. The new proprietor was then burgled, and the carvings have been fenced to an Amsterdam junk vendor. They were acquired from his store, and taken to the museum, which quickly identified them as 15th century carvings. They set them on display screen, and a Dutch woman who experienced go through about the Stowlangtoft theft recognised them.
The parish instituted lawful proceedings to get them again an injunction was taken out to prevent the new owner taking away them from the museum. The parish missing the situation, leaving them with a monstrous lawful bill but the tale has a delighted ending. A Dutch businessman negotiated their invest in from the operator, compensated off the lawful costs, and returned the carvings to Stowlangtoft. Seemingly this was all at vast expense, but the businessman gave the gift in thanks for Britain’s liberation of Holland for the Nazis. No, thank you, sir.
Today, the carvings are mounted firmly in place and alarmed, so they will never be going walkabout once more. But a small element of me wonders if they definitely really should be in this article at all. Confident, they are medieval, but they were not in this article originally they weren’t even in England at first. Would not it be improved if they had been exhibited someplace safer, the place people could fork out to see them, and present some revenue for the maintenance of the church developing? And then, whisper it, St George might even be saved open up.
St George, Stowlangtoft, is in the village high avenue. A few keyholders are outlined, two of them straight away opposite. I am informed that Wednesday is not a superior time to try out and get the essential – it is marketplace day in Bury.
Simon Knott
www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/stowlangtoft.htm
Posted by Jelltex on 2017-12-18 05:47:36
Tagged: , St George , Stowlangtoft , Suffolk , Church , Jelltex , Jelltecks
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