St George, Stowlangtoft, Suffolk
Presented that our parish churches almost with no exception underwent restorations in the 19th Century, it really should be obvious that when we enter a medieval church, we are encountering a Victorian vision of the medieval. Even when the precise furnishings and fittings are medieval, the entire piece is even now a Victorian conception.
Inevitably, the concern arises of what was there before the restoration and what was not. The apparent remedy is that we must presume that very little is as it very first appears.
A prime illustration of a church that assumes a continuity that could not really be the real truth is in this article in the flat fields between Woolpit and Ixworth. This element of Suffolk can be rather bleak in wintertime, but in summertime the churchyard listed here is verdant and golden, as gorgeous a spot as any in the county. The church is large, and but unusually narrow. It sits on a mound that has been slice down on one particular facet by the highway. In the churchyard you may locate the properly-known memorial to the art critic Peter Fuller and his unborn son, killed in a car or truck crash in 1990.
In the churchyard wall there is what seems to be broken medieval window tracery, which is value noticing, for hereby hangs a tale.
St George is just one of the excellent Suffolk church buildings. Though it may well externally surface a minor serious, and is by no means as grand as Blythburgh, Long Melford and the rest, it is a treasure residence of the medieval within. Unusually for a church of its date, it was all rebuilt in one go, in the late 14th century, and the perpendicular windows are not yet full of the ‘walls of glass’ self-confidence that the subsequent century would see. The tracery appears to have been fixed, and potentially even renewed, which may perhaps make clear the tracery in the churchyard wall. Nevertheless, it doesn’t get significantly to see that the tracery in the wall is not perpendicular at all, but decorated. So it may perhaps be that the damaged tracery is from the authentic church that the late 14th century church changed. But the wall itself is just not medieval, so wherever experienced it been all those people many years? Is it possible that the current window tracery is not medieval at all?
Stowlangtoft church showcased in Simon Jenkins’ guide England’s Thousand Greatest Churches, which sends a great deal of people to its locked doorway, and may help stave off the unavoidable for a though, for there is no true congregation listed here any much more and the church is moribund. Standard expert services are held throughout the fields at Pakenham, and St George is now only made use of on distinctive instances. The important is stored throughout the highway, wherever the very good 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 palms of the Church buildings Conservation Have faith in.
You action in via the chancel doorway (the lock below is really awkward, but do persevere) and if you are nearly anything like me you will head straight down to the west close where you will discover the font. Likethe window tracery, it asks some concerns. Unusually, it capabilities a Saint on seven of the panels, Christ 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 fewer normally St George. The cult of St George was at its height in the early several years of the 14th century. Mortlock describes the font as mutilated, and it surely isn’t searching its finest. But I believe there is much more heading on listed here than meets the eye. Fonts have been plastered about in Elizabethan situations, and only aid that stood proud of the plaster was mutilated. These are all shallow reliefs, and I do not consider they have been mutilated at all. To my eye at least, this stonework appears weathered. I speculate if this font was removed from the church, almost certainly in the mid-17th century, and served an out of doors purpose right up until 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 locate that the church was at final going through repair. The chancel experienced been roofless, and the nave employed for companies. A new Rectory was becoming constructed. Who was the catalyst powering all this? His name was Samuel Rickards, and he was Rector listed here for nearly the middle forty decades of the 19th century. Roy Tricker notes that he was a excellent pal of John Henry Newman, the long run Cardinal, and they usually corresponded on the issue of the pre-Reformation buying of English church buildings. It is appealing to think how, at this seminal minute, Rickards may have educated the considered of the Oxford Motion. Unfortunately, when Newman grew to become a Catholic, Rickards broke off all correspondence with him.
In the course of the study course of the 1840s and 1850s, Rickards reworked Stowlangtoft church. He acquired the great Ipswich woodcarver Henry Ringham in to restore, replicate and finish the marvellous set of bench finishes – Ringham did the exact detail at Woolpit, a couple miles away. Ringham’s work is so superior that it is in some cases really hard for the inexperienced eye to detect it. However, as at Woolpit, Ringham only copied animals right here, and the weirder things is all medieval, and almost certainly dates from the rebuilding of the church. The glory of Stowlangtoft’s bench ends is partly the sheer quantity – there are possibly 60 carvings – but also that there are various exceptional subjects.
The carvings show up to be portion of the exact 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 related carvings in other places. And then ideally that minimal alarm bell in your read really should start out to go “Hmmmm…..” because some of the carvings right here are evidently not from the similar group. It is challenging to believe that that the mermaid and the owl, for example, are from the identical workshop, or even from the exact same ten years. The benches on their own are no clue, as it was prevalent apply in the 19th century to substitute medieval bench ends on modern benches, or on medieval benches, or even on fashionable benches created out of medieval timber (as took place at Blythburgh). Could it be that Samuel Rickards uncovered some of these bench ends somewhere else? Could he have been the variety of human being to do a point like that?
Effectively, 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 just after discovering it in storage in Ipswich docks. It presumably arrived from a person of the Ipswich church buildings. In the ferment of the excellent 19th century restoration of our English church buildings, there was loads of medieval junk lying all over, significantly of it likely begging. But was Samuel Rickards the form of particular person to counterfeit his church’s medieval inheritance?
Perfectly, certainly he possibly was. The fake-medieval roundels in the home windows of the nave are obviously not medieval at all, but were being in simple fact the work of the young Lucy Rickards, daughter of Samuel Rickards himself. Some are evidently to the young girl’s layout, and Pevsner notes that other individuals are copied from medieval manuscript illustrations in the British Museum, even though the Holy Kinship and Presentation in the Temple roundels at minimum are incredibly close copies of the Flemish roundels of the identical subjects in Nowton church on the other side of Bury St Edmunds.
Really medieval is the large St Christopher wall-painting continue to discernible on the north wall. It was in all probability one particular of the final to be painted. The bench ends are medieval, of course, as is the wonderful rood-display screen dado, albeit repainted. There is even some medieval determine glass in the higher tracery of some of the home windows, which includes St Agnes keeping a lamb and four Previous Testomony prophets. The laughable stone pulpit is Rickard’s commission, and the do the job of William White. What can Rickards have been contemplating of? But we action by means of into the chancel, and quickly the full issue moves up a gear. For right here are some issues that are genuinely amazing.
In a county well-known for its woodwork, the furnishings of Stowlangtoft’s chancel are spectacular, even awe-inspiring. Guiding the rood display screen dado is Suffolk’s most complete set of return stalls. Most placing are the figures that variety finials to the stall finishes. They are participants in the Mass, which includes two Priests, two servers and two acolytes. The determine of the Priest at a prayer desk should be a person of the greatest medieval pictures in Suffolk, and Mortlock believed the stalls the greatest in England.
The benches that facial area eastwards are misericords, and beneath them are fantastic things: angels, lions and wodewoses, evangelistic symbols and topped 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 inquire upcoming. How a great deal of this is from this church originally? It all appears medieval function, and there is no cause to consider it might not have been moved somewhere else in the church when the chancel was open up to the factors. What proof have we obtained?
First of all, we really should detect that the only other Suffolk church with such a massive number of medieval misericords of this high-quality is just a mile away, at Norton. I will not inquire you to see this as sizeable, simply to detect it in passing. Next, I am no carpenter, but it does search to me as nevertheless two sets of furnishings have been cobbled jointly the stalls that back again on to the screen look to have been built-in into the greater composition of stalls and desks that front them and the north and south walls.
Nonetheless, if you appear 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 show up on the rood monitor, and the Ashfields ended up the key donors when the church was rebuilt in the 14th century. So on balance I am inclined to feel that the higher component of the stall construction was in this church originally from when it was rebuilt. And the misericords? Very well, I will not know. But I imagine they have to be viewed as as part of the similar established as individuals at Norton. In which situation they might have arrive from the exact same church, which may perhaps have been this just one, but may perhaps not have been. Practically absolutely, the stalls at Norton did not come from Norton church, and folklore has it that they have been at first in the quire of Bury Abbey.
Other exceptional points in St George contain FE Howard’s lovely war memorial in the previous north doorway, and in the opposite corner of the nave Hugh Easton’s unexpectedly magnificent St George, which serves the same goal. He is not an artist I ordinarily admire, but it is as very good as his function at Elveden. Back up in the chancel is a delightful painted pipe organ which was apparently exhibited at, and obtained from, the Good Exhibition of 1851.
But St George at Stowlangtoft is, of system, most well-known for the Flemish carvings that flank the alternatively weighty altarpiece. They ended up offered to the church by Henry Wilson of Stowlangtoft Corridor, who allegedly observed them in an Ixworth junk store. They display illustrations or photos from the crucifixion story, but are not Stations of the Cross as some guides advise. They date from the 1480s, and have been just about certainly the altarpiece of a French or Flemish monastery that was sacked throughout the French Revolution. The carvings have been after brightly painted, and piled up in a block relatively than spread out in a line. The niches, and crowning arches over them, are 19th century.
1 cold winter’s night in January 1977, a gang of burglars broke into this locked church and stole them. Nothing far more was seen or listened to of them right up until 1982, when they were learned on display screen in an Amsterdam art gallery. Their journey had been a convoluted one. Taken to Holland, they have been used as safety for a financial loan which was defaulted upon. The new proprietor was then burgled, and the carvings were being fenced to an Amsterdam junk dealer. They were being acquired from his shop, and taken to the museum, which promptly recognized them as 15th century carvings. They set them on show, and a Dutch woman who had go through about the Stowlangtoft theft recognised them.
The parish instituted legal proceedings to get them back again. An injunction was taken out to prevent the new owner eliminating them from the museum. The parish misplaced the circumstance, leaving them with a monstrous lawful invoice, but the story has a satisfied ending. A Dutch businessman negotiated their obtain from the owner, paid out off the authorized costs, and returned the carvings to Stowlangtoft. Evidently this was all at huge charge, but the businessman gave the present in thanks for Britain’s liberation of Holland from the Nazis. No, thank you, sir.
Nowadays, the carvings are fastened firmly in spot and alarmed, so they would not be going walkabout all over again. But a tiny portion of me miracles if they truly should really be below at all. Guaranteed, they are medieval, but they were not right here originally, and they were not even in England originally. Would not it be improved if they ended up displayed somewhere safer, wherever people could shell out to see them, and provide some profits for the maintenance of the church constructing? And then, whisper it, when St George is taken on by the CCT they may even be equipped to leave it open up.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2018-02-13 18:04:14
Tagged: , Stowlangtoft , Suffolk , east anglia , church
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