St Margaret, Cley-subsequent-the-Sea, Norfolk
In 2004 I wrote: ‘It is repetitious to notice that East Anglia was the industrial heartland of late medieval England, or that this country was a devout Catholic nation at the time, or even that the collision of these two info resulted in some of the most splendid church architecture in Europe.
Practically every parish church in the land bears some proof of this, but it is especially apparent in the centres of electric power of all those occasions: at Lavenham in Suffolk, wherever the great wool merchants held courtroom, at Salle and East Harling in Norfolk, wherever great landed households competed to influence the crown, and in this article at Cley, the moment at the harbour mouth of Blakeney Haven, the fantastic north Norfolk conurbation of ports, exactly where the streets thronged with wealthy retailers and their staff.
Right now, the harbour is shed to us, but you can continue to make out its form if you stand in Wiveton churchyard and search back again across to Cley, fifty percent a mile off. At Blakeney by itself, the quayside survives with some of its structures to assist a reconstruction in the brain but Cley has almost nothing now other than its church and a couple of cottages, a village inexperienced 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 major, grandest and most high-priced. It is however all of these things nowadays. It is replete with all people components we obtain most fascinating when we check out a medieval East Anglian church: a seven sacrament font, bench ends depicting men and women and mythical creatures, brasses, bosses, stalls and the most elaborate niches in the kingdom, a smattering of outdated glass, and unforgettable tracery that, remaining Decorated somewhat than Perpendicular, is unfamiliar in East Anglia. We have explored somewhere else on my internet site, at Salle and Cawston, specifically why these church buildings ended up crafted so large and elaborate. Properly, St Margaret is a further outstanding testimony.
The placing is lovely, on a light rise over the village inexperienced. The graveyard is scattered, a lot of of the stones 18th century, and not lined up in clinical rows by misguided 1970s garden-mower fans. If you arrive in late spring the graveyard is uncut, whole 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 initially sight, advanced. The vast nave with its aisles and clerestory is all of a piece. The offset tower is relatively suggest, and even though it would seem probable it was intended for rebuilding, the huge and wonderful west window suggests that it would have been in the exact same location. The chancel is also curiously very simple, and finally would have been replaced. Two transepts stick out to north and south, the southern a single roofless and glassless, that to the north totally ruinous.
The service provider de Vaux family ended up liable for rebuilding the church, and the new nave was crafted to the south of the original nave, which was then demolished and changed with an aisle. You can even now see its roofline on the east encounter of the tower. The grasp mason was William Ramsey, one particular of the most considerable in England the Ramsey spouse and children had been responsible for the Palace of Westminster and pieces of Norwich Cathedral. Do the job commenced in the 1320s, and proceeded promptly until eventually the developing was very very well total by the mid-1340s. This is an early date for the entire rebuilding of an East Anglian church, and demonstrates that below, in Blakeney Haven, the new cash was early. It would not be for a hundred decades that Suffolk and south Norfolk people ended up in a posture to do the same. Why was this? Partly, the wealth of the Blakeney Haven ports did not rely just on East Anglian fabric. But there was yet another, far more apocalyptic variable.
Ahead of Ramsey could flip his focus to the chancel and the trouble of that blessed tower, a new and frightening pestilence attained England. For any one residing in a port, conditions introduced from abroad have been an each day hazard that had to be balanced in opposition to whole work and alternatives for wealth generation. Even so, this was a thing on a spectacular scale, a strain of bubonic plague that attained the south coast ports in August 1348 and that by the dismal late winter months of 1349 had arrived at Norfolk. Most likely 50 percent the populace died, even though in the ports there would seem to have been a bigger survival price possibly there was more immunity thanks to past exposure. Even so, Ramsey and his son the two died, and the perform of the ports was disrupted for several generations. The Victorians, relishing the gothic horror of the disaster, seemed again from their own cholera-plagued century and termed it the Black Demise.
Half a century later, trade, self-confidence, and a renewed obsession with the cult of the dead led to a lot more revenue becoming lavished on St Margaret. This was the time that the mighty south porch was created, a Perpendicular fortress that guards, instead uneasily, the Embellished entrance. The church was further more furnished with a mighty rood screen, elaborately carved woodwork, and glass and a seven sacrament font meant to assert the official doctrine of the Catholic Church. By the early sixteenth century, Cley church was at a peak of its glory, but incredibly immediately all those times had been to tumble.
The English Reformation brought to an abrupt finish the will need for bequests, and all do the job on producing the creating stopped. And, point out protestantism would sow the seeds that would support England emerge as an insular, capitalist nation, shifting designs of trade, and doing absent with the require for Blakeney Haven, pushing Norfolk back into the relief of a extensive, agricultural rest.
So, you choose a walk about the outside of St Margaret, the window tracery a textual content ebook of the way English architecture produced more than the centuries. The most attractive is that in the south transept, elegant lights that make to a cluster of vast quatrefoils. This was competed on the eve of the Black Death, and is probably at the extremely apex of English inventive endeavour. But I feel that it was under no circumstances stuffed with glass. I can see no evidence that the transepts were done in time for their use ahead of the pestilence, or that there was at any time a need to use them immediately after the recovery from it. And, then, of course, the Reformation intervened.
You action into the church by way of the south porch, with its flanking shields of the Holy Trinity and the Devices of the enthusiasm. Previously mentioned, in the vaulting, are bosses. Just one shows an indignant lady chasing a fox that has stolen her outstanding cockerel. A further, exhibits two devils beating the bare buttocks of a third figure. There is also an Assumption of the Blessed Virgin.
Grand Perpendicular is so prevalent in East Anglia that there is an unfamiliarity about the nave that is amazing, a feast for the senses. The west stop of the church has been cleared, building a cathedral-vastness, and the light-weight, though not gloomy, does not have that white East Anglian excellent familiar from Perpendicular structures. The scent is of age instead than furnishings polish, a creamy dampness that remembers previous business rather than decay. The honeyed stone is also by some means overseas in this heartland of flint. It has an effect on the audio in a distinct way. The making calls for a specific quantity of awe that is not just due to its size.
We arrived about an hour just before a wedding was due to start off, and as we explored the creating we noticed preparations build, the pews start to fill, the minister and choir start off to gown, until finally we felt we were intruding, and still left just as the bride arrived. But though I was not fully distracted from documenting the creating, it was a reminder to me just how critical weddings have develop into to the Church of England, not just in conditions of the earnings they generate, but as a very last bastion of the grounding of Faith in regular people’s lives. They may no for a longer time have their small children baptised, they could no extended occur on a Sunday at all but relationship is the spot that easy Christianity touches their lives – that, and their funeral, of study course, even though more and more men and women are a lot more militantly atheist about death than they are about love.
The 7 sacrament font appears to be like fairly lonely in its clearing, and is not the most amazing of its variety, though the imagery is a minimal uncommon. The Past Rites, (NW) appear to present the Priest lying on the bed on leading of the dying person. Confession (NE) exhibits the Priest and confessing man struggling with every single other across a shriving bench. Confirmation (E) is the most persuasive of all, for the reason that it appears to demonstrate a tonsured Priest alternatively than a bishop blessing a group of people that involve youngsters and toddlers. Mass (SW) is revealed from powering, the Priest elevating the host while the acolytes on both facet kneel and hold tapers. The eighth and odd panel is lost, but was possibly the Crucifixion.
The most spectacularly un-East Anglian feature of the church are the good picture niches that line the arcades. They are massive. Beneath the pedestals are depicted figures, including musicians (one particular plays a fife and drum), St George dispatching a dragon and a fearsome lion with a bone. There are traces of first colour, and they are merely stunning.
Extra homely are the bench finishes, like a wonderful mermaid, various figures reading textbooks, and a poppyhead carved with a confront sticking out its tongue, of a form sometimes identified as Scandal, although I have under no circumstances been convinced by this. There are several brasses, some in the north aisle and other folks scattered around the south doorway, including two figures in their shrouds, and just one fragment depicting a team of six weepers. In the north aisle is a fascinating assortment of donated and gathered ephemera, some suggesting that in the the latest past this was a pretty Anglo-catholic put, like a stunning Russian Orthodox cross. I rushed all over using photos even though the church stuffed with wedding friends.
And so, it was time to go. I determined that I was impressed by this church, but that I did not like it. Looking all-around at the splendour of William Ramsey’s do the job, at what survives of its elaborate furnishings, and sensing the echoes of the abundant sacramental life it as soon as hosted, I experienced a unexpected vision of apocalypse – not of the Black Loss of life so a lot, as of the stop of a way of lifetime replaced by some thing so wholly different in a few shorter decades of Reformation. This church experienced been constructed for so substantially additional than congregational worship, but this was all it could now do. It was as if the Anglican local community was camped out uneasily in its ruins, in the vastness of a little something so wholly beyond their creativity.’
Posted by Simon Knott on 2022-03-30 11:18:46
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