St George, Stowlangtoft, Suffolk
Offered that our parish churches virtually devoid of exception underwent restorations in the 19th Century, it need to be noticeable that when we enter a medieval church, we are encountering a Victorian eyesight of the medieval. Even when the actual furnishings and fittings are medieval, the total piece is continue to a Victorian conception.
Inevitably, the dilemma occurs of what was there just before the restoration and what was not. The clear solution is that we ought to think that very little is as it initially seems.
A key instance of a church that assumes a continuity that may well not truly be the truth is right here in the flat fields concerning Woolpit and Ixworth. This element of Suffolk can be rather bleak in wintertime, but in summer season the churchyard right here is verdant and golden, as lovely a spot as any in the county. The church is huge, and but unusually slim. It sits on a mound that has been minimize down on just one facet by the highway. In the churchyard you will find the nicely-known 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 appears to be broken medieval window tracery, which is really worth noticing, for hereby hangs a tale.
St George is just one of the excellent Suffolk church buildings. Although it may well externally surface a minor significant, and is by no suggests as grand as Blythburgh, Extensive Melford and the relaxation, it is a treasure dwelling of the medieval inside. Unusually for a church of its date, it was all rebuilt in one particular go, in the late 14th century, and the perpendicular home windows are not still total of the ‘walls of glass’ self-confidence that the subsequent century would see. The tracery appears to have been repaired, and potentially even renewed, which may clarify the tracery in the churchyard wall. Nevertheless, it would not choose a great deal to see that the tracery in the wall is not perpendicular at all, but decorated. So it could be that the broken tracery is from the primary church that the late 14th century church changed. But the wall alone isn’t medieval, so in which experienced it been all individuals years? Is it possible that the latest window tracery is not medieval at all?
Stowlangtoft church highlighted in Simon Jenkins’ e-book England’s Thousand Very best Church buildings, which sends plenty of site visitors to its locked doorway, and may well enable stave off the inevitable for a although, for there is no genuine congregation below any additional and the church is moribund. Frequent expert services are held throughout the fields at Pakenham, and St George is now only employed on special events. The important is saved throughout the highway, the place the extremely awesome woman told me in February 2018 that the church is now headed for redundancy. It seems most likely that treatment of it will be conveyed into the hands of the Church buildings Conservation Belief.
You phase in via the chancel door (the lock right here is very awkward, but do persevere) and if you are everything like me you will head straight down to the west end in which you will locate the font. Likethe window tracery, it asks some issues. Unusually, it characteristics a Saint on 7 of the panels, Christ currently being on the westwards confront. Mortlock dates it to the early 14th century, and the Saints it exhibits are familiar cults from that time: St Margaret, St Catherine, St Peter and St Paul, and much less typically St George. The cult of St George was at its height in the early decades of the 14th century. Mortlock describes the font as mutilated, and it certainly just isn’t searching its best. But I feel there is additional likely on right here than satisfies the eye. Fonts had been plastered more than in Elizabethan times, and only aid that stood happy of the plaster was mutilated. These are all shallow reliefs, and I do not believe they have been mutilated at all. To my eye at minimum, this stonework seems weathered. I surprise if this font was taken out from the church, possibly in the mid-17th century, and served an out of doors function until eventually it was returned in the 19th century.
The story of this church in the 19th century is effectively-documented. In 1832, as portion of his grand tour of Suffolk, David Davy frequented, and was pleased to obtain that the church was at final undergoing repair. The chancel had been roofless, and the nave utilized for solutions. A new Rectory was staying developed. Who was the catalyst driving all this? His title was Samuel Rickards, and he was Rector in this article for practically the center forty yrs of the 19th century. Roy Tricker notes that he was a excellent buddy of John Henry Newman, the foreseeable future Cardinal, and they typically corresponded on the issue of the pre-Reformation buying of English churches. It is attention-grabbing to think how, at this seminal moment, Rickards may possibly have knowledgeable the imagined of the Oxford Motion. Unfortunately, when Newman became a Catholic, Rickards broke off all correspondence with him.
In the course of the system of the 1840s and 1850s, Rickards reworked Stowlangtoft church. He obtained the fantastic Ipswich woodcarver Henry Ringham in to restore, replicate and complete the marvellous set of bench finishes – Ringham did the very same matter at Woolpit, a number of miles away. Ringham’s do the job is so excellent that it is in some cases really hard for the inexperienced eye to detect it. Even so, as at Woolpit, Ringham only copied animals in this article, and the weirder things is all medieval, and probably dates from the rebuilding of the church. The glory of Stowlangtoft’s bench finishes is partly the sheer amount – there are possibly 60 carvings – but also that there are numerous exceptional subjects.
The carvings show up to be part of the very same team as Woolpit and Tostock – you will recognise the unicorn, the chained bear, the bull actively playing a harp, the hen with a man’s head, from related carvings in other places. And then hopefully that very little alarm bell in your listened to really should get started to go “Hmmmm…..” mainly because some of the carvings here are obviously not from the exact group. It is hard to believe that that the mermaid and the owl, for case in point, are from the exact same workshop, or even from the identical ten years. The benches on their own are no clue, as it was typical observe in the 19th century to exchange medieval bench finishes on modern-day benches, or on medieval benches, or even on modern benches made out of medieval timber (as occurred at Blythburgh). Could it be that Samuel Rickards observed some of these bench ends in other places? Could he have been the type of particular person to do a issue like that?
Properly, sure he could. As Roy Tricker remembers, the medieval roof at the tractarian Thomas Mozley’s church at Cholderton in Wiltshire is East Anglian. Rickards acquired it soon after finding it in storage in Ipswich docks. It presumably came from one of the Ipswich church buildings. In the ferment of the great 19th century restoration of our English churches, there was masses of medieval junk lying all-around, substantially of it heading begging. But was Samuel Rickards the variety of person to counterfeit his church’s medieval inheritance?
Well, yes he likely was. The fake-medieval roundels in the home windows of the nave are evidently not medieval at all, but were in fact the function of the young Lucy Rickards, daughter of Samuel Rickards himself. Some are plainly to the young girl’s layout, and Pevsner notes that many others are copied from medieval manuscript illustrations in the British Museum, even though the Holy Kinship and Presentation in the Temple roundels at minimum are pretty shut copies of the Flemish roundels of the identical subjects in Nowton church on the other aspect of Bury St Edmunds.
Certainly medieval is the broad St Christopher wall-portray however discernible on the north wall. It was almost certainly one of the final to be painted. The bench ends are medieval, of course, as is the good rood-monitor dado, albeit repainted. There is even some medieval determine glass in the upper tracery of some of the windows, such as St Agnes holding a lamb and 4 Old Testament prophets. The laughable stone pulpit is Rickard’s commission, and the work of William White. What can Rickards have been thinking of? But we stage via into the chancel, and abruptly the full issue moves up a equipment. For below are some things that are genuinely outstanding.
In a county renowned for its woodwork, the furnishings of Stowlangtoft’s chancel are amazing, even awe-inspiring. Behind the rood screen dado is Suffolk’s most total established of return stalls. Most placing are the figures that kind finials to the stall finishes. They are members in the Mass, which include two Clergymen, two servers and two acolytes. The determine of the Priest at a prayer desk have to be a person of the ideal medieval photographs in Suffolk, and Mortlock assumed the stalls the finest in England.
The benches that confront eastwards are misericords, and beneath them are excellent issues: angels, lions and wodewoses, evangelistic symbols and crowned heads. A hawk captures a hare, a dragon sticks out its tongue. Between the seats are bizarre oriental faces.
Now, you know what I am going to request up coming. How a great deal of this is from this church initially? It all appears medieval perform, and there is no explanation to feel it might not have been moved somewhere else in the church when the chancel was open to the features. What proof have we acquired?
For starters, we need to recognize that the only other Suffolk church with such a massive amount of medieval misericords of this high quality is just a mile away, at Norton. I you should not talk to you to see this as considerable, basically to discover it in passing. Next, I am no carpenter, but it does look to me as though two sets of furnishings have been cobbled collectively the stalls that back on to the display screen appear to have been built-in into the larger sized composition of stalls and desks that front them and the north and south partitions.
On the other hand, if you appear carefully 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 seem on the rood display screen, and the Ashfields had been the key donors when the church was rebuilt in the 14th century. So on stability I am inclined to feel that the increased part of the stall framework was in this church originally from when it was rebuilt. And the misericords? Well, I never know. But I believe they have to be thought of as section of the similar established as individuals at Norton. In which situation they may well have appear from the exact same church, which might have been this one, but may possibly not have been. Virtually certainly, the stalls at Norton did not come from Norton church, and folklore has it that they ended up at first in the quire of Bury Abbey.
Other amazing items in St George contain FE Howard’s attractive war memorial in the previous north doorway, and in the opposite corner of the nave Hugh Easton’s unexpectedly gorgeous St George, which serves the exact goal. He is not an artist I generally admire, but it is as excellent as his work at Elveden. Back up in the chancel is a delightful painted pipe organ which was evidently exhibited at, and acquired from, the Wonderful Exhibition of 1851.
But St George at Stowlangtoft is, of system, most well-known for the Flemish carvings that flank the rather heavy altarpiece. They had been supplied to the church by Henry Wilson of Stowlangtoft Corridor, who allegedly identified them in an Ixworth junk store. They clearly show photographs from the crucifixion tale, but are not Stations of the Cross as some guides suggest. They day from the 1480s, and ended up almost absolutely the altarpiece of a French or Flemish monastery that was sacked through 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 above them, are 19th century.
One chilly winter’s night in January 1977, a gang of intruders broke into this locked church and stole them. Practically nothing a lot more was found or listened to of them right until 1982, when they were learned on display in an Amsterdam artwork gallery. Their journey experienced been a convoluted just one. Taken to Holland, they had been utilised as protection for a loan which was defaulted upon. The new proprietor was then burgled, and the carvings were fenced to an Amsterdam junk supplier. They were acquired from his store, and taken to the museum, which promptly identified them as 15th century carvings. They place them on screen, and a Dutch girl who experienced examine about the Stowlangtoft theft recognised them.
The parish instituted legal proceedings to get them back. An injunction was taken out to halt the new owner getting rid of them from the museum. The parish dropped the situation, leaving them with a monstrous legal monthly bill, but the tale has a content ending. A Dutch businessman negotiated their order from the owner, compensated off the legal bills, and returned the carvings to Stowlangtoft. Evidently this was all at broad price tag, but the businessman gave the gift in thanks for Britain’s liberation of Holland from the Nazis. No, thank you, sir.
These days, the carvings are mounted firmly in put and alarmed, so they would not be likely walkabout once more. But a very little component of me miracles if they definitely should be listed here at all. Confident, they are medieval, but they were not right here initially, and they were not even in England originally. Wouldn’t it be much better if they had been shown somewhere safer, in which people could pay out to see them, and deliver some profits for the upkeep of the church constructing? And then, whisper it, when St George is taken on by the CCT they might even be ready to go away it open up.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2018-02-13 18:13:16
Tagged: , Stowlangtoft , Suffolk , east anglia , church
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