St Margaret, Cley, Norfolk
It is repetitious to observe that East Anglia was the industrial heartland of late medieval England, or that this country was a devout Catholic place at the time, or even that the collision of these two information resulted in some of the most spendid church architecture in Europe. Practically each parish church in the land bears some proof of this, but it is particularly obvious in the centres of electrical power of people occasions: at Lavenham in Suffolk, where the fantastic wool retailers held courtroom, at Salle and East Harling in Norfolk, wherever terrific landed people competed to influence the crown, and below at Cley, the moment at the harbour mouth of Blakeney Haven, the fantastic north Norfolk conurbation of ports, exactly where the streets thronged with rich merchants and their workers.
These days, the harbour is missing to us, but you can however make out its shape if you stand in Wiveton churchyard and seem back again throughout to Cley, half a mile off. At Blakeney by itself, the quayside survives with some of its properties to assist a reconstruction in the brain but Cley has almost nothing now other than its church and a several cottages, a village green and a windmill. Ironically, you would not even know that the sea was near.
Of the four churches of Blakeney Haven, St Margaret was the most important, grandest and most high-priced. It is still all of these things currently. It is replete with all all those factors we uncover most remarkable when we go to a medieval East Anglian church: a 7 sacrament font, bench finishes depicting individuals and mythical creatures, brasses, bosses, stalls and the most elaborate niches in the kingdom, a smattering of aged glass, and beautiful tracery that, becoming Decorated alternatively than Perpendicular, is unfamiliar in East Anglia. We have explored in other places on this website, in the introduction to Salle and Cawston, just why these churches were being designed so large and elaborate. Effectively, St Margaret is a further beautiful testimony.
The setting is wonderful, on a gentle rise over the village eco-friendly. The graveyard is scattered, quite a few of the stones 18th century, and not lined up in scientific rows by misguided 1970s lawn-mower fans. If you arrive in late spring the graveyard is uncut, entire of wild flowers 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 extensive nave with its aisles and clerestory is all of a piece. The offset tower is instead imply, and although it would seem possible it was meant for rebuilding, the huge and stunning west window indicates that it would have been in the very same spot. The chancel is also curiously straightforward, and ultimately would have been changed. Two transepts stick out to north and south, the southern just one roofless and glassless, that to the north completely ruinous.
The service provider de Vaux family were accountable for rebuilding the church, and the new nave was constructed to the south of the authentic nave, which was then demolished and changed with an aisle. You can nonetheless see its roofline on the east deal with of the tower. The grasp mason was WIlliam Ramsey, just one of the most substantial in England the Ramsey relatives ended up liable for the Palace of Westminster and pieces of Norwich Cathedral. Operate commenced in the 1320s, and proceeded promptly until the setting up was fairly well complete by the mid-1340s. This is an early date for the comprehensive rebuilding of an East Anglian church, and displays that here, in Blakeney Haven, the new income was early. It would not be for a hundred a long time that Suffolk and south Norfolk people were in a placement to do the identical. Why was this? Partly, the prosperity of the Blakeney Haven ports did not count just on East Anglian cloth. But there was one more, additional apocalyptic issue.
Prior to Ramsey could convert his attention to the chancel and the issue of that blessed tower, a new and horrifying pestilence attained England. For anybody residing in a port, ailments brought from overseas were being an day to day hazard that experienced to be balanced versus complete work and chances for prosperity development. Even so, this was some thing on a spectacular scale, a strain of bubonic plague that achieved the south coast ports in August 1348 and that by the dismal late wintertime months of 1349 had attained Norfolk. Maybe half the populace died, whilst in the ports there seems to have been a better survival amount perhaps there was additional immunity due to previous exposure. Nevertheless, Ramsey and his son both of those died, and the work of the ports was disrupted for various generations. The Victorians, relishing the gothic horror of the catastrophe, looked again from their possess cholera-plagued century and known as it the Black Death.
Half a century later on, trade, self-assurance, and a renewed obsession with the cult of the dead led to a lot more dollars becoming lavished on St Margaret. This was the time that the mighty south porch was crafted, a Perpendicular fortress that guards, somewhat uneasily, the Decorated entrance. The church was further more furnished with a mighty rood display, elaborately carved woodwork, and glass and a seven sacrament font intended to assert the formal doctrine of the Catholic Church. By the early sixteenth century, Cley church was at a peak of its glory, but really immediately all those times had been to tumble. The English Reformation brought to an abrupt finish the require for bequests, and all get the job done on developing the setting up stopped. And, condition protestantism would sow the seeds that would aid England emerge as an insular, capitalist country, transforming patterns of trade, and executing absent with the need for Blakeney Haven, pushing Norfolk again into the aid of a very long, agricultural slumber.
So, you acquire a wander all over the exterior of St Margaret, the window tracery a textual content e-book of the way English architecture developed more than the centuries. The most lovely is that in the south transept, tasteful lights that build to a cluster of wide quatrefoils. This was competed on the eve of the Black Demise, and is most likely at the really apex of English creative endeavour. But I believe that it was never ever filled with glass. I can see no proof that the transepts had been finished in time for their use ahead of the pestilence, or that there was ever a need to use them just after the recovery from it. And, then, of program, the Reformation intervened.
You move into the church via the south porch, with its flanking shields of the Holy Trinity and the Devices of the enthusiasm. Previously mentioned, in the vaulting, are bosses. 1 exhibits an angry woman chasing a fox that has stolen her impressive cockerel. An additional, curiously, reveals a man and a girl beating the bare buttocks of a third figure. There is also an Assumption.
Grand Perpendicular is so frequent in East Anglia that there is an unfamiliarity about the nave that is spectacular, a feast for the senses. The west finish of the church has been cleared, creating a cathedral-vastness, and the gentle, although not gloomy, does not have that white East Anglian high quality familar from Perpendicular structures. The smell is of age somewhat than furniture polish, a creamy dampness that recalls previous company rather than decay. The honeyed stone is also by some means overseas in this heartland of flint. It has an effect on the seem in a distinctive way. The making calls for a particular sum of awe that is not just because of to its dimension.
We arrived about an hour right before a wedding ceremony was owing to commence, and as we explored the creating we observed preparations create, the pews get started to fill, the minister and choir start off to robe, right until we felt we were being intruding, and left just as the bride arrived. But although I was not entirely distracted from documenting the creating, it was a reminder to me just how important weddings have grow to be to the Church of England, not just in terms of the profits they crank out, but as a very last bastion of the grounding of Faith in normal people’s life. They could no extended have their kids baptised, they may well no for a longer time arrive on a Sunday at all but relationship is the place that basic Christianity touches their lives – that, and their funeral, of class, even though significantly people today are much more militantly atheist about loss of life than they are about really like.
The 7 sacrament font looks rather lonely in its clearing, and is not the most stunning of its form, while the imagery is a minor abnormal. The Very last Rites, (NW) look to demonstrate the Priest lying on the bed on top rated of the dying male. Confession (NE) exhibits the Priest and confessing gentleman struggling with each individual other throughout a shriving bench. Confirmation (E) is the most compelling of all, simply because it appears to display a tonsured Priest rather than a bishop blessing a team of folks that involve small children and infants. Mass (SW) is proven from behind, the Priest elevating the host while the acolytes on both side kneel and maintain tapers. The eighth panel is dropped, but was most likely the Crucifixion.
The most spectacularly un-East Anglian feature of the church are the fantastic image niches that line the arcades. They are large. Beneath the pedestals are depicted figures, including musicians (one performs a fife and drum), St George dispatching a dragon and a fearsome lion with a bone. There are traces of authentic colour, and they are only breathtaking. Far more homely are the bench ends, such as a gorgeous mermaid, numerous figures examining textbooks, and a poppyhead carved with a facial area sticking out its tongue, of a form at times termed Scandal, despite the fact that I have never been confident by this. There are quite a few brasses, some in the north aisle and some others scattered all over the south doorway, which include one particular beautiful fragment depicting a group of 6 weepers.
In the north aisle is a intriguing selection of donated and gathered ephemera, some suggesting that in the current past this was a reasonably Anglo-catholic area, including a lovely Russian Orthodox cross. I rushed all over getting pictures whilst the church loaded with wedding ceremony friends.
And so, it was time to go. I resolved that I was amazed by this church, but that I failed to enjoy it. Hunting all over at the splendour of William Ramsey’s function, at what survives of its elaborate furnishings, and sensing the echoes of the rich sacramental daily life it once hosted, I had a sudden eyesight of apocalypse – not of the Black Loss of life so significantly, as of the conclusion of a way of existence changed by a little something so wholly diverse in a few brief many years of Reformation. This church had been built for so a great deal more than congregational worship, but this was all it could now do as if the Anglican community was camped out uneasily in its ruins, in the vastness of something so wholly over and above their creativeness. (2004)
Additional funerary symbols: www.flickr.com/photos/norfolkodyssey/sets/72157628759778647/
Extra Norfolk church buildings: www.norfolkchurches.co.united kingdom/mainpage.htm
Posted by Simon Knott on 2013-10-20 06:02:51
Tagged: , Norfolk , Cley , cley-next-to-the-sea , Cley subsequent sea , FS2013
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