St George, Stowlangtoft, Suffolk
Given that our parish churches almost devoid of exception underwent restorations in the 19th Century, it ought to 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 entire piece is even now a Victorian conception.
Inevitably, the dilemma arises of what was there just before the restoration and what was not. The apparent solution is that we must assume that absolutely nothing is as it to start with seems.
A prime instance of a church that assumes a continuity that could not essentially be the real truth is in this article in the flat fields among Woolpit and Ixworth. This portion of Suffolk can be instead bleak in winter, but in summer the churchyard right here is verdant and golden, as wonderful a put as any in the county. The church is significant, and nonetheless unusually narrow. It sits on a mound that has been slice down on one particular side by the street. In the churchyard you may locate the well-recognized memorial to the artwork critic Peter Fuller and his unborn son, killed in a auto crash in 1990.
In the churchyard wall there is what seems to be broken medieval window tracery, which is well worth noticing, for hereby hangs a tale.
St George is one particular of the excellent Suffolk church buildings. While it might externally appear a very little severe, and is by no means as grand as Blythburgh, Long Melford and the rest, it is a treasure residence of the medieval inside. Unusually for a church of its date, it was all rebuilt in a person go, in the late 14th century, and the perpendicular 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 quite possibly even renewed, which may well reveal the tracery in the churchyard wall. On the other hand, it isn’t going to choose a great deal to see that the tracery in the wall is not perpendicular at all, but embellished. So it may possibly be that the damaged tracery is from the authentic church that the late 14th century church replaced. But the wall alone is just not medieval, so wherever experienced it been all these yrs? Is it probable that the existing window tracery is not medieval at all?
Stowlangtoft church featured in Simon Jenkins’ e book England’s Thousand Very best Churches, which sends a lot of website visitors to its locked doorway, and may possibly assistance stave off the inescapable for a though, for there is no actual congregation right here any far more and the church is moribund. Common expert services are held across the fields at Pakenham, and St George is now only employed on unique occasions. The important is retained across the highway, the place the extremely pleasant girl explained to me in February 2018 that the church is now headed for redundancy. It seems very likely that treatment of it will be conveyed into the hands of the Church buildings Conservation Belief.
You action in by way of the chancel doorway (the lock here is pretty uncomfortable, but do persevere) and if you are just about anything like me you will head straight down to the west close wherever you will obtain the font. Likethe window tracery, it asks some thoughts. Unusually, it characteristics a Saint on seven of the panels, Christ being on the westwards face. Mortlock dates it to the early 14th century, and the Saints it demonstrates are common cults from that time: St Margaret, St Catherine, St Peter and St Paul, and considerably less normally St George. The cult of St George was at its peak in the early decades of the 14th century. Mortlock describes the font as mutilated, and it certainly just isn’t looking its very best. But I imagine there is more going on in this article than meets the eye. Fonts had been plastered around in Elizabethan times, and only aid that stood very pleased 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 the very least, this stonework appears weathered. I surprise if this font was taken out from the church, probably in the mid-17th century, and served an outside function right until it was returned in the 19th century.
The story of this church in the 19th century is properly-documented. In 1832, as portion of his grand tour of Suffolk, David Davy frequented, and was delighted to come across that the church was at final going through maintenance. The chancel experienced been roofless, and the nave applied for solutions. A new Rectory was being created. Who was the catalyst guiding all this? His name was Samuel Rickards, and he was Rector listed here for just about the center forty yrs of the 19th century. Roy Tricker notes that he was a excellent good friend of John Henry Newman, the long term Cardinal, and they typically corresponded on the subject of the pre-Reformation buying of English church buildings. It is fascinating to think how, at this seminal minute, Rickards may possibly have informed the assumed of the Oxford Motion. Sadly, when Newman grew to become a Catholic, Rickards broke off all correspondence with him.
During the training course of the 1840s and 1850s, Rickards remodeled Stowlangtoft church. He received the terrific Ipswich woodcarver Henry Ringham in to restore, replicate and complete the marvellous established of bench finishes – Ringham did the same point at Woolpit, a several miles away. Ringham’s do the job is so good that it is from time to time hard for the inexperienced eye to detect it. Having said that, as at Woolpit, Ringham only copied animals listed here, and the weirder 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 most likely 60 carvings – but also that there are several distinctive topics.
The carvings appear to be aspect of the identical group as Woolpit and Tostock – you will recognise the unicorn, the chained bear, the bull playing a harp, the fowl with a man’s head, from identical carvings in other places. And then hopefully that minimal alarm bell in your read should really commence to go “Hmmmm…..” simply because some of the carvings listed here are obviously not from the similar group. It is tough to consider that the mermaid and the owl, for example, are from the very same workshop, or even from the exact same ten years. The benches by themselves are no clue, as it was common apply in the 19th century to change medieval bench ends on contemporary benches, or on medieval benches, or even on modern benches designed out of medieval timber (as transpired at Blythburgh). Could it be that Samuel Rickards located some of these bench ends elsewhere? Could he have been the variety of human being to do a point like that?
Well, sure he could. As Roy Tricker recalls, the medieval roof at the tractarian Thomas Mozley’s church at Cholderton in Wiltshire is East Anglian. Rickards obtained it immediately after finding it in storage in Ipswich docks. It presumably arrived from a single of the Ipswich churches. In the ferment of the fantastic 19th century restoration of our English churches, there was loads of medieval junk lying all around, significantly of it likely begging. But was Samuel Rickards the form of person to counterfeit his church’s medieval inheritance?
Effectively, of course he almost certainly was. The faux-medieval roundels in the windows of the nave are clearly not medieval at all, but have been in actuality the function of the youthful Lucy Rickards, daughter of Samuel Rickards himself. Some are evidently to the younger girl’s style, and Pevsner notes that many others are copied from medieval manuscript illustrations in the British Museum, while the Holy Kinship and Presentation in the Temple roundels at least are really near copies of the Flemish roundels of the exact same topics in Nowton church on the other aspect of Bury St Edmunds.
Certainly medieval is the extensive St Christopher wall-portray nonetheless discernible on the north wall. It was likely one of the past to be painted. The bench finishes are medieval, of class, as is the fantastic rood-display screen dado, albeit repainted. There is even some medieval figure glass in the higher tracery of some of the windows, like St Agnes holding a lamb and four Old Testomony prophets. The laughable stone pulpit is Rickard’s commission, and the work of William White. What can Rickards have been imagining of? But we move by means of into the chancel, and quickly the whole point moves up a gear. For in this article are some factors that are actually exceptional.
In a county well known for its woodwork, the furnishings of Stowlangtoft’s chancel are breathtaking, even awe-inspiring. Guiding the rood display screen dado is Suffolk’s most total established of return stalls. Most striking are the figures that type finials to the stall ends. They are members in the Mass, such as two Monks, two servers and two acolytes. The determine of the Priest at a prayer desk should be one particular of the very best medieval illustrations or photos in Suffolk, and Mortlock assumed the stalls the best in England.
The benches that facial area 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. Amongst the seats are bizarre oriental faces.
Now, you know what I am likely to request following. How significantly of this is from this church at first? It all seems medieval get the job done, and there is no reason to imagine it could possibly not have been moved elsewhere in the church when the chancel was open up to the aspects. What proof have we obtained?
To start with, we must detect that the only other Suffolk church with these a significant quantity of medieval misericords of this high quality is just a mile absent, at Norton. I do not inquire you to see this as substantial, merely to notice it in passing. Next, I am no carpenter, but it does seem to me as although two sets of furnishings have been cobbled collectively the stalls that back on to the display show up to have been integrated into the greater composition of stalls and desks that entrance them and the north and south walls.
Having said that, if you glimpse carefully at the figures of the two Deacons, you will see that they are bearing shields of the Ashfield and Peche family members. The Ashfield arms also look on the rood display screen, and the Ashfields were the major donors when the church was rebuilt in the 14th century. So on equilibrium I am inclined to think that the higher aspect of the stall construction was in this church at first from when it was rebuilt. And the misericords? Effectively, I never know. But I believe they have to be considered as part of the same set as people at Norton. In which circumstance they may have appear from the identical church, which might have been this a single, but may possibly not have been. Nearly surely, the stalls at Norton did not arrive from Norton church, and folklore has it that they ended up at first in the quire of Bury Abbey.
Other amazing things in St George incorporate FE Howard’s wonderful war memorial in the former north doorway, and in the reverse corner of the nave Hugh Easton’s unexpectedly magnificent St George, which serves the identical goal. He is not an artist I normally admire, but it is as superior as his do the job at Elveden. Back up in the chancel is a delightful painted pipe organ which was apparently exhibited at, and acquired from, the Excellent Exhibition of 1851.
But St George at Stowlangtoft is, of course, most well-known for the Flemish carvings that flank the instead hefty altarpiece. They have been offered to the church by Henry Wilson of Stowlangtoft Corridor, who allegedly observed them in an Ixworth junk shop. They clearly show photos from the crucifixion tale, but are not Stations of the Cross as some guides recommend. They date from the 1480s, and were virtually absolutely the altarpiece of a French or Flemish monastery that was sacked during the French Revolution. The carvings were being as soon as brightly painted, and piled up in a block alternatively than spread out in a line. The niches, and crowning arches higher than them, are 19th century.
A person cold winter’s night time in January 1977, a gang of robbers broke into this locked church and stole them. Practically nothing additional was viewed or listened to of them until 1982, when they ended up uncovered on show in an Amsterdam art gallery. Their journey had been a convoluted one. Taken to Holland, they have been applied as safety for a bank loan which was defaulted on. The new owner was then burgled, and the carvings ended up fenced to an Amsterdam junk seller. They ended up purchased from his store, and taken to the museum, which quickly identified them as 15th century carvings. They place them on exhibit, and a Dutch female who experienced read through about the Stowlangtoft theft recognised them.
The parish instituted authorized proceedings to get them back again. An injunction was taken out to stop the new owner eradicating them from the museum. The parish lost the situation, leaving them with a monstrous authorized bill, but the tale has a content ending. A Dutch businessman negotiated their obtain from the proprietor, compensated off the legal payments, and returned the carvings to Stowlangtoft. Apparently this was all at vast cost, but the businessman gave the present in thanks for Britain’s liberation of Holland from the Nazis. No, thank you, sir.
Now, the carvings are set firmly in place and alarmed, so they would not be going walkabout once more. But a tiny section of me miracles if they genuinely should be in this article at all. Guaranteed, they are medieval, but they weren’t here initially, and they weren’t even in England at first. Would not it be superior if they were being shown someplace safer, in which people today could shell out to see them, and provide some income for the upkeep of the church constructing? And then, whisper it, when St George is taken on by the CCT they could possibly even be equipped to go away it open.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2018-02-13 18:06:14
Tagged: , Stowlangtoft , Suffolk , east anglia , church
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