St George, Stowlangtoft, Suffolk
Provided that our parish church buildings almost without the need of exception underwent restorations in the 19th Century, it really should be evident that when we enter a medieval church, we are encountering a Victorian vision of the medieval. Even when the real furnishings and fittings are medieval, the whole piece is however a Victorian conception.
Inevitably, the problem occurs of what was there just before the restoration and what was not. The evident remedy is that we should assume that practically nothing is as it initially seems.
A prime instance of a church that assumes a continuity that may not truly be the real truth is below in the flat fields among Woolpit and Ixworth. This part of Suffolk can be instead bleak in wintertime, but in summer time the churchyard in this article is verdant and golden, as lovely a area as any in the county. The church is significant, and however unusually slender. It sits on a mound that has been lower down on one aspect by the road. In the churchyard you can uncover the very well-recognised memorial to the artwork critic Peter Fuller and his unborn son, killed in a car crash in 1990.
In the churchyard wall there is what seems to be damaged medieval window tracery, which is worthy of noticing, for hereby hangs a tale.
St George is a person of the terrific Suffolk church buildings. Even though it may possibly externally show up a minimal significant, and is by no suggests as grand as Blythburgh, Lengthy Melford and the rest, it is a treasure property of the medieval within. 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 nonetheless complete of the ‘walls of glass’ assurance that the subsequent century would see. The tracery seems to have been fixed, and quite possibly even renewed, which might explain the tracery in the churchyard wall. However, it will not consider substantially to see that the tracery in the wall is not perpendicular at all, but embellished. So it may be that the broken tracery is from the first church that the late 14th century church replaced. But the wall itself isn’t really medieval, so the place experienced it been all all those a long time? Is it attainable that the present window tracery is not medieval at all?
Stowlangtoft church showcased in Simon Jenkins’ e book England’s Thousand Best Churches, which sends a great deal of people to its locked doorway, and could help stave off the unavoidable for a even though, for there is no authentic congregation listed here any a lot more and the church is moribund. Normal companies are held throughout the fields at Pakenham, and St George is now only made use of on particular occasions. The essential is retained across the highway, wherever the extremely pleasant woman instructed me in February 2018 that the church is now headed for redundancy. It would seem most likely that care of it will be conveyed into the fingers of the Church buildings Conservation Have confidence in.
You step in by means of the chancel doorway (the lock in this article is very uncomfortable, but do persevere) and if you are just about anything like me you will head straight down to the west finish in which you will discover the font. Likethe window tracery, it asks some issues. Unusually, it functions a Saint on seven of the panels, Christ staying on the westwards face. Mortlock dates it to the early 14th century, and the Saints it shows are familiar cults from that time: St Margaret, St Catherine, St Peter and St Paul, and fewer commonly St George. The cult of St George was at its peak in the early years of the 14th century. Mortlock describes the font as mutilated, and it undoubtedly just isn’t hunting its finest. But I think there is extra going on below than meets the eye. Fonts ended up plastered in excess of in Elizabethan instances, 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 appears weathered. I question if this font was removed from the church, in all probability in the mid-17th century, and served an outdoor function until finally it was returned in the 19th century.
The story of this church in the 19th century is well-documented. In 1832, as element of his grand tour of Suffolk, David Davy frequented, and was happy to obtain that the church was at previous going through repair. The chancel experienced been roofless, and the nave applied for products and services. A new Rectory was currently being built. Who was the catalyst powering all this? His title was Samuel Rickards, and he was Rector here for practically the middle forty several years of the 19th century. Roy Tricker notes that he was a great friend of John Henry Newman, the foreseeable future Cardinal, and they frequently corresponded on the issue of the pre-Reformation ordering of English church buildings. It is exciting to feel how, at this seminal second, Rickards may well have knowledgeable the thought of the Oxford Movement. Regrettably, when Newman became a Catholic, Rickards broke off all correspondence with him.
All through the training course of the 1840s and 1850s, Rickards transformed Stowlangtoft church. He got the excellent Ipswich woodcarver Henry Ringham in to restore, replicate and entire the marvellous set of bench ends – Ringham did the identical point at Woolpit, a few miles absent. Ringham’s do the job is so very good that it is from time to time tricky for the inexperienced eye to detect it. Nevertheless, as at Woolpit, Ringham only copied animals listed here, and the weirder things is all medieval, and most likely dates from the rebuilding of the church. The glory of Stowlangtoft’s bench ends is partly the sheer amount – there are most likely 60 carvings – but also that there are several distinctive topics.
The carvings appear to be element of the same group 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 similar carvings somewhere else. And then with any luck , that minimal alarm bell in your heard ought to get started to go “Hmmmm…..” since some of the carvings right here are obviously not from the identical group. It is challenging to believe that that the mermaid and the owl, for instance, are from the exact workshop, or even from the exact same ten years. The benches them selves are no clue, as it was frequent follow in the 19th century to switch medieval bench finishes on modern benches, or on medieval benches, or even on fashionable benches manufactured out of medieval timber (as happened at Blythburgh). Could it be that Samuel Rickards identified some of these bench finishes elsewhere? Could he have been the type of person to do a thing like that?
Very well, certainly he could. As Roy Tricker recollects, the medieval roof at the tractarian Thomas Mozley’s church at Cholderton in Wiltshire is East Anglian. Rickards obtained it following locating it in storage in Ipswich docks. It presumably came from one of the Ipswich churches. In the ferment of the fantastic 19th century restoration of our English church buildings, there was masses of medieval junk lying about, significantly of it going begging. But was Samuel Rickards the kind of person to counterfeit his church’s medieval inheritance?
Properly, yes he likely was. The fake-medieval roundels in the windows of the nave are evidently not medieval at all, but were being in simple fact the operate of the younger Lucy Rickards, daughter of Samuel Rickards himself. Some are plainly to the younger girl’s design, and Pevsner notes that others are copied from medieval manuscript illustrations in the British Museum, whilst the Holy Kinship and Presentation in the Temple roundels at minimum are extremely close copies of the Flemish roundels of the similar subjects in Nowton church on the other side of Bury St Edmunds.
Definitely medieval is the vast St Christopher wall-portray nonetheless discernible on the north wall. It was possibly one of the final to be painted. The bench ends are medieval, of study course, as is the high-quality rood-display dado, albeit repainted. There is even some medieval determine glass in the upper tracery of some of the windows, like St Agnes holding a lamb and four Old Testament prophets. The laughable stone pulpit is Rickard’s fee, and the work of William White. What can Rickards have been thinking of? But we move through into the chancel, and quickly the complete detail moves up a equipment. For listed here are some things that are definitely remarkable.
In a county popular for its woodwork, the furnishings of Stowlangtoft’s chancel are amazing, even awe-inspiring. Powering the rood screen dado is Suffolk’s most total established of return stalls. Most placing are the figures that sort finials to the stall ends. They are contributors in the Mass, like two Monks, two servers and two acolytes. The figure of the Priest at a prayer desk must be a person of the greatest medieval photographs in Suffolk, and Mortlock imagined the stalls the finest in England.
The benches that experience eastwards are misericords, and beneath them are excellent items: angels, lions and wodewoses, evangelistic symbols and crowned heads. A hawk captures a hare, a dragon sticks out its tongue. Concerning the seats are bizarre oriental faces.
Now, you know what I am heading to request future. How considerably of this is from this church at first? It all seems medieval get the job done, and there is no rationale to feel it could not have been moved in other places in the church when the chancel was open to the elements. What proof have we acquired?
Firstly, we should discover that the only other Suffolk church with these types of a significant number of medieval misericords of this quality is just a mile absent, at Norton. I don’t ask you to see this as considerable, merely to notice it in passing. Secondly, I am no carpenter, but it does glimpse to me as however two sets of furnishings have been cobbled together the stalls that again on to the screen surface to have been integrated into the bigger construction of stalls and desks that entrance them and the north and south walls.
Nevertheless, if you seem intently 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 show up on the rood display, and the Ashfields ended up the big donors when the church was rebuilt in the 14th century. So on balance I am inclined to assume that the higher component of the stall framework was in this church initially from when it was rebuilt. And the misericords? Well, I do not know. But I imagine they have to be considered as aspect of the similar set as people at Norton. In which circumstance they may have arrive from the very same church, which may have been this one particular, but may well not have been. Practically surely, 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.
Other extraordinary factors in St George incorporate FE Howard’s wonderful war memorial in the previous north doorway, and in the reverse corner of the nave Hugh Easton’s unexpectedly gorgeous St George, which serves the exact same function. He is not an artist I commonly admire, but it is as superior as his get the job done at Elveden. Again up in the chancel is a pleasant painted pipe organ which was apparently exhibited at, and obtained from, the Fantastic Exhibition of 1851.
But St George at Stowlangtoft is, of course, most popular for the Flemish carvings that flank the instead heavy altarpiece. They ended up specified to the church by Henry Wilson of Stowlangtoft Corridor, who allegedly identified them in an Ixworth junk shop. They clearly show visuals from the crucifixion story, but are not Stations of the Cross as some guides advise. They date from the 1480s, and have been virtually undoubtedly the altarpiece of a French or Flemish monastery that was sacked all through the French Revolution. The carvings had been at the time brightly painted, and piled up in a block alternatively than spread out in a line. The niches, and crowning arches previously mentioned them, are 19th century.
A single cold winter’s evening in January 1977, a gang of robbers broke into this locked church and stole them. Almost nothing more was seen or listened to of them until eventually 1982, when they had been uncovered on exhibit in an Amsterdam art gallery. Their journey experienced been a convoluted a person. Taken to Holland, they were applied as security for a personal loan which was defaulted upon. The new operator was then burgled, and the carvings ended up fenced to an Amsterdam junk supplier. They were being acquired from his store, and taken to the museum, which immediately determined them as 15th century carvings. They set them on show, and a Dutch female who experienced study about the Stowlangtoft theft recognised them.
The parish instituted lawful proceedings to get them again. An injunction was taken out to stop the new owner eradicating them from the museum. The parish misplaced the scenario, leaving them with a monstrous authorized bill, but the tale has a pleased ending. A Dutch businessman negotiated their buy from the proprietor, paid out off the legal bills, and returned the carvings to Stowlangtoft. Apparently this was all at broad value, but the businessman gave the reward in many thanks for Britain’s liberation of Holland from the Nazis. No, thank you, sir.
Right now, the carvings are set firmly in spot and alarmed, so they would not be going walkabout once more. But a minimal section of me wonders if they actually need to be here at all. Sure, they are medieval, but they were not in this article initially, and they were not even in England at first. Wouldn’t it be improved if they had been exhibited somewhere safer, the place individuals could pay out to see them, and supply some cash flow for the servicing of the church constructing? And then, whisper it, when St George is taken on by the CCT they could possibly even be ready to go away it open up.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2018-02-13 18:08:14
Tagged: , Stowlangtoft , Suffolk , east Anglia
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