I was born in Norfolk and lived in Suffolk. So I believed I understood those people two counties. But of class there is a lot 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 pal, Simon K, operates a fabulous web-site, which I url to on EA churches, and on his Suffolk Church webpage he has frequented 707 Suffolk churches, and 909 Norfolk church buildings. That is a large amount of churches for two counties to share, and a lot of of these churches are ancient, flint crafted, spherical towered or have wall paintings, wood roof angels or one thing worthy of the hard work of going to see or looking for out the keyholder to gain entry.
What I imply is that there is no way another person who only had their very own car or truck right until 1984, and had minor desire in church buildings 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 main street, I was using a shorter lower to be part of the A14 and from there to the A12 and south on what I hoped my my final journey of the year to lowestoft as Mom is now out of healthcare facility and in the treatment of district nurses in purchase to get set again on her toes.
So I observed the tower of St George from about half a mile away, and imagined I had plenty of time to go about and see inside of if I could.
I parked at the finish of a cul-de-sac of new bungalows, and as I stroll up the lender to the gate into the churchyard, the clean up lines of the tower, very well, towered over me.
In the porch I attempted the doorway and found it locked, but the keyholder record designed it distinct that the closest one particular, at Xmas Cottage, was just more than the highway. So, why not attempt, Ian?
I went to the cottage and rang the bell. I had to fill out my details in a ledger, a reasonable measure. But I showed by driving licence to verify that I was who I claimed. Minimal did I know the tiny village I lived in experienced been found. A lot more of that in a moment.
Inside of St George, you eye is stolen by the wonderful pew finishes animals of all sorts, authentic and imaginary, and most experienced not been defaced, only people of noticeable human form. One with the overall body of a rooster but a clear human encounter had been still left by yourself, therefore is the madness of the puritan’s head.
I made a decision that I would file each pew end determine, and numerous full pew finishes so superb that they have been.
There is the feint outline of a enormous 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 detail Simon goes below. It is alarmed, so you cannot appear at them as well intently, regrettably, but such is a signal of the occasions.
I took the keys back, and the lady of the property arrived to speak to me as she experienced been told by her partner that I was from Cliffe in Kent, which is where by her loved ones is from. Sadly, I am not from, nor dwell in Cliffe. For the moment there was in fact two Cliffs in Kent, just one on the Hoo Peninsular, where her family members is from, and 1 in the vicinity of to Dover. Many several years ago, Cliffe in the vicinity of to Dover was termed WestCliffe to differentiate it from its namesake further north. I explained this to her, but mentioned St Helen in Cliffe is 1 of my favorite Kent church buildings, developed of alternate levels of black and light-weight flints and stone, in sunlight it glistens and sparkles.
While St George right here in Stowlangtoft is a fine church, it is in a poor condition of fix, and is thanks to be produced redundant in the new 12 months. Constantly unhappy when that occurs to a parish church, but it is probable to be taken more than by the CCT, but then who will volunteer to hold it tidy when the aged wardens and keyholders are far too outdated.
Stowlangtoft is a wonderful church and so glad am I that I spent 40 minutes of my time to take a look at it. Go to see it now ahead of it is much too late!
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In the summer months of 2003, this web site grew to become a six-element series on BBC Radio Suffolk. A thing I claimed in the fourth programme, about Hessett, created a good sum of correspondence. Referring to the way a lot of churches were being 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 whole piece is continue to a Victorian conception.
Individuals wrote to me and mentioned points like “but in that case, Simon, how do we know what was there at first and what wasn’t?”. To which my reply was the enigmatic “think that practically nothing is as it to start with appears, as Sherlock Holmes mentioned”. And if he failed to, then he should really have done.
A prime instance of a church that assumes a continuity that may possibly not actually be the real truth is here in the flat fields amongst Woolpit and Ixworth. This part of Suffolk can be alternatively bleak, in particular in late October, but England’s very best summer and autumn for many years had left the churchyard right here verdant and golden, as lovely a position as any I’d viewed that 12 months. The church is large, and sits on a mound that has been lower down on a single facet by the road. I walked up the slope, previous the memorial to the artwork critic Peter Fuller and his unborn son, which never fails to shift me. It is by the sculptor Glynn Williams, and Sister Wendy Beckett states of it that it cannot be pinned down and encapsulated, it defeats the groups of the mere head and sings to us of our deeper self.
Confused as you may perhaps be by it, never are unsuccessful to place the damaged window tracery that has been utilised to establish the wall here, for thus hangs a tale.
St George, in scenario you will not know, is one particular of the wonderful Suffolk church buildings. While it may externally seem a little extreme, and is by no suggests as grand as Blythburgh, Lengthy Melford and the rest, it is a treasure residence of the medieval within. Unusually for a church of its day, it was all rebuilt in 1 go, in the late 14th century, and the perpendicular home windows are not but entire of the ‘walls of glass’ self-assurance that the subsequent century would see. The tracery seems to have been fixed, and potentially even renewed, which may possibly explain why there is broken medieval tracery in the churchyard wall. However, it doesn’t get a lot to see that the tracery in the wall is not perpendicular at all, but adorned. So it may be that the broken tracery is from the first church that the late 14th century church changed. But the wall is not medieval, so where had it been all people several years?
One more survival from the before church is the font. It also asks some thoughts. Unusually, it options a Saint on seven of the panels, Christ getting 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 much less normally St George. The cult of St George was at its height in the early years of the 14th century. Mortlock describes the font as mutilated, and it surely is just not searching its best. But I imagine there is additional likely on below than fulfills the eye. Fonts were being plastered around in Elizabethan instances, and only aid that stood very pleased 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 least, this stonework seems weathered. I question if this font was taken out from the church, likely in the mid-17th century, and served an out of doors objective until finally 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 happy to obtain that the church was at final undergoing mend. The chancel experienced been roofless, and the nave utilized for expert services. A new Rectory was remaining crafted. Who was the catalyst behind all this? His title was Samuel Rickards, and he was Rector here for almost the middle forty several years of the 19th century. Roy Tricker notes that he was a good friend of John Henry Newman, the foreseeable future Cardinal, and they generally corresponded on the subject of the pre-Reformation ordering of English church buildings. It is intriguing to assume how, at this seminal moment, Rickards could possibly have knowledgeable the believed of the Oxford Movement. Unfortunately, when Newman grew to become a Catholic Rickards broke off all correspondence with him.
All through the program of the 1840s and 1850s, Rickards reworked Stowlangtoft church. He received the excellent Ipswich woodcarver Henry Ringham in to restore, replicate and entire the marvellous established of bench finishes – Ringham did the identical issue at Woolpit, a couple miles absent. Ringham’s do the job is so superior that it is at times hard for the inexperienced eye to detect it however, as at Woolpit, Ringham only copied animals below, and the wierder things is all medieval, and likely 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 many distinctive subjects you can see some of them down below.
The carvings show up to be part of the similar team as Woolpit and Tostock – you will recognise the unicorn, the chained bear, the bull enjoying a harp, the chicken with a man’s head, from equivalent carvings in other places. And then ideally that minimal alarm bell in your listened to really should start to go “Hmmmm…..” since some of the carvings below are plainly not from the very same team. It is tough to believe that that the mermaid and the owl, for case in point, are from the exact workshop, or even from the very same 10 years. The benches themselves are no clue it was typical follow in the 19th century to swap medieval bench finishes on contemporary benches, or on medieval benches, or even on modern day benches made out of medieval timber (as transpired at Blythburgh). Could it be that Samuel Rickards uncovered some of these bench finishes elsewhere? Could he have been the variety of human being to do a issue like that?
Nicely, of course he could. As Roy Tricker remembers, the medieval roof at the tractarian Thomas Mozley’s church at Cholderton in Wiltshire is a single that Rickards obtained just after acquiring it in storage in Ipswich docks. In the ferment of the great 19th century restoration of our English church buildings, there was loads of medieval junk lying all-around, substantially of it heading begging. But was Samuel Rickards the sort of particular person to counterfeit his church’s medieval inheritance?
Perfectly, yes he possibly was. Search at the medieval roundels in the center window on the south side of the nave. The 4 evangelists are higher than and beneath two outstanding representations of the Presentation in the Temple and the Baptism of Christ. You can see them beneath click on them to enlarge them. Sadly, they are not medieval at all, and it is commonly accepted that they ended up painted by a daughter of Samuel Rickards himself. There is some thing very similar the other facet of Bury at Hawstead.
Genuinely medieval is the broad St Christopher wall-portray even now discernible on the north wall. It was in all probability one of the last to be painted. The bench finishes are medieval, of system, as is the wonderful rood-display screen 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 do the job of William White. What can Rickards have been contemplating of? But we step by way of into the chancel, and out of the blue the entire detail moves up a gear. For here are some points that are definitely extraordinary.
In a county famed for its woodwork, the furnishings of Stowlangtoft’s chancel are amazing, even awe-inspiring. Powering the rood display screen dado is Suffolk’s most complete set of return stalls. Most putting are the figures that variety finials to the stall ends. They are individuals in the Mass, together with two Monks, two servers and two acolytes. The determine of the Priest at a prayer desk need to be a person of the finest medieval pictures in Suffolk Mortlock thought the stalls the very best in England. I was in this article with my good friend Aidan of Sylly Suffolk fame, and he experienced earlier photographed and written about these carving a a few of decades back. But even he discovered one thing new to photograph, and a hush fell on the chancel as we explored.
The benches that deal with eastwards are misericords, and beneath them are great things: 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 below click on on them to enlarge them.
Now, you know what I am likely to talk to future. How a great deal of this is from this church initially? It all appears medieval do the job, and there is no reason to feel it may not have been moved in other places in the church when the chancel was open to the aspects. What evidence have we got?
For starters, we ought to detect that the only other Suffolk church with these types of a big quantity of medieval misericords of this high-quality is just a mile absent, at Norton. I really don’t question you to see this as considerable, simply to observe it in passing. Next, I am no carpenter, but it does search to me as though two sets of furnishings have been cobbled jointly the stalls that again on to the display appear to have been integrated into the much larger structure of stalls and desks that entrance them and the north and south partitions.
On the other hand, if you look 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 look on the rood display, and the Ashfields were the key donors when the church was rebuilt in the 14th century. So on equilibrium I am inclined to consider that the increased element of the stall construction was in this church at first from when it was rebuilt. And the misericords? Very well, I never know. But I think they have to be deemed as component of the exact established as these at Norton. In which circumstance they could have arrive from the very same church, which may perhaps have been this one particular, but may possibly not have been. Just about unquestionably, the stalls at Norton did not come from Norton church, and folklore has it that they have been initially in the quire of Bury Abbey. Hmm….
Other impressive matters in St George include FE Howard’s lovely war memorial in the previous north doorway, and in the reverse corner of the nave Hugh Easton’s magnificent St George, which serves the exact reason. It is as great as his perform at Elveden. Again up in the chancel is a pleasant painted pipe organ which was evidently exhibited at, and obtained from, the Good Exhibition of 1851.
But St George at Stowlangtoft is, of study course, most well known for the Flemish carvings that flank the alternatively hefty altarpiece. They had been provided to the church by Henry Wilson of Stowlangtoft Hall, who allegedly uncovered them in an Ixworth junk shop. They clearly show illustrations or photos from the crucifixion tale, but are not Stations of the Cross as some guides propose. They date from the 1480s, and had been just about surely the altarpiece of a French or Flemish monastery that was sacked all through the French Revolution. I experienced seen something equivalent at Baumes-les-Messieurs in the French Jura a several months before. There, the carvings are brightly painted, as these at the time ended up, and piled up in a block rather than distribute out in a line. The niches, and crowning arches above them, are 19th century. My favorite pictures are the Pieta and the Mouth of Hell. Click on the photographs under.
A single chilly winter’s night in January 1977, a gang of robbers broke into this locked church and stole them. Practically nothing extra was viewed or heard of them until eventually 1982, when they had been found on display screen in an Amsterdam art gallery. Their journey had been a convoluted one particular taken to Holland, they had been employed as safety for a mortgage which was defaulted on. The new owner was then burgled, and the carvings had been fenced to an Amsterdam junk seller. They ended up purchased from his shop, and taken to the museum, which straight away recognized them as 15th century carvings. They set them on display, and a Dutch girl who experienced browse about the Stowlangtoft theft recognised them.
The parish instituted authorized proceedings to get them back an injunction was taken out to stop the new proprietor eradicating them from the museum. The parish misplaced the circumstance, leaving them with a monstrous authorized bill but the story has a pleased ending. A Dutch businessman negotiated their buy from the owner, paid out off the legal charges, and returned the carvings to Stowlangtoft. Seemingly this was all at broad price, but the businessman gave the reward in thanks for Britain’s liberation of Holland for the Nazis. No, thank you, sir.
Right now, the carvings are mounted firmly in spot and alarmed, so they will never be likely walkabout again. But a little component of me miracles if they seriously really should be listed here at all. Sure, they are medieval, but they weren’t here originally they were not even in England originally. Would not it be improved if they were being displayed somewhere safer, where persons could pay back to see them, and provide some income for the upkeep of the church creating? And then, whisper it, St George may possibly even be held open.
St George, Stowlangtoft, is in the village significant road. A few keyholders are shown, two of them instantly reverse. I am instructed that Wednesday is not a fantastic time to attempt and get the essential – it is market place day in Bury.
Simon Knott
www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/stowlangtoft.htm
Posted by Jelltex on 2017-12-17 14:43:15
Tagged: , St George , Stowlangtoft , Suffolk , pew , ends , carved pew finishes , Jelltex , Jelltecks , church
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