I was born in Norfolk and lived in Suffolk. So I imagined I knew these two counties. But of class there is much more to Norfolk than Norwich, Cromer, Yarmouth and Kings Lynn, as there is to Suffolk than Ipswich, Lowestoft, Stowmarket and Bury St. Edmunds. And so on My mate, Simon K, operates a magnificent internet site, which I link to on EA churches, and on his Suffolk Church site he has visited 707 Suffolk church buildings, and 909 Norfolk church buildings. That is a lot of churches for two counties to share, and quite a few of these churches are ancient, flint designed, round towered or have wall paintings, picket roof angels or a thing value the work of heading to see or looking for out the keyholder to obtain accessibility.
What I mean is that there is no way anyone who only had their own auto right up until 1984, and experienced minor fascination in churches or parishes could have read of most of the parishes in the two counties, and so a parish church like St George.
I saw St George from the principal highway, I was having a shorter reduce to join the A14 and from there to the A12 and south on what I hoped my my very last journey of the 12 months to lowestoft as Mother is now out of hospital and in the treatment of district nurses in get to get put back on her ft.
So I observed the tower of St George from about 50 percent a mile absent, and imagined I had adequate time to go around and see within if I could.
I parked at the conclusion of a cul-de-sac of new bungalows, and as I walk up the bank to the gate into the churchyard, the clear lines of the tower, properly, towered over me.
In the porch I tried the doorway and discovered it locked, but the keyholder listing built it distinct that the closest one particular, at Christmas Cottage, was just more than the highway. So, why not try out, Ian?
I went to the cottage and rang the bell. I had to fill out my specifics in a ledger, a smart evaluate. But I confirmed by driving licence to confirm that I was who I claimed. Minimal did I know the little village I lived in experienced been seen. Much more of that in a minute.
Inside St George, you eye is stolen by the incredible pew ends animals of all kinds, authentic and imaginary, and most experienced not been defaced, only people of clear human sort. One with the human body of a chicken but a distinct human confront experienced been still left by itself, therefore is the insanity of the puritan’s head.
I resolved that I would document each individual pew conclusion figure, and several full pew ends so superb that they were.
There is the feint outline of a large wall portray, Simon claims it was of St. Christopher. It would have been most remarkable when freshly painted. There is also a great established of misericords.
St George’s glory is the altarpiece, into depth Simon goes below. It is alarmed, so you can not appear at them too closely, regrettably, but this sort of is a indicator of the instances.
I took the keys back again, and the woman of the dwelling came to communicate to me as she experienced been told by her spouse that I was from Cliffe in Kent, which is where her spouse and children is from. Unfortunately, I am not from, nor reside in Cliffe. For at the time there was without a doubt two Cliffs in Kent, 1 on the Hoo Peninsular, where her spouse and children is from, and a person in close proximity to to Dover. Several several years ago, Cliffe around to Dover was identified as WestCliffe to differentiate it from its namesake even further north. I defined this to her, but explained St Helen in Cliffe is one of my favourite Kent churches, constructed of alternate layers of black and light-weight flints and stone, in daylight it glistens and sparkles.
While St George listed here in Stowlangtoft is a great church, it is in a inadequate condition of restore, and is thanks to be manufactured redundant in the new year. Constantly sad when that transpires to a parish church, but it is likely to be taken about by the CCT, but then who will volunteer to retain it tidy when the aged wardens and keyholders are also outdated.
Stowlangtoft is a wonderful church and so happy am I that I invested 40 minutes of my time to visit it. Go to see it now in advance of it is way too late!
——————————————-
In the summer months of 2003, this web-site grew to become a 6-component series on BBC Radio Suffolk. Some thing I mentioned in the fourth programme, about Hessett, generated a good amount of money of correspondence. Referring to the way several church buildings had been restored in the 19th century, I observed 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 full piece is nevertheless a Victorian conception.
Men and women wrote to me and said factors like “but in that case, Simon, how do we know what was there at first and what wasn’t?”. To which my reply was the enigmatic “believe that very little is as it very first appears, as Sherlock Holmes claimed”. And if he failed to, then he should really have accomplished.
A key instance of a church that assumes a continuity that may not really be the real truth is listed here in the flat fields amongst Woolpit and Ixworth. This section of Suffolk can be fairly bleak, specially in late October, but England’s greatest summer and autumn for a long time had still left the churchyard here verdant and golden, as attractive a location as any I would witnessed that yr. The church is large, and sits on a mound that has been cut down on one facet by the road. I walked up the slope, earlier the memorial to the art critic Peter Fuller and his unborn son, which by no means fails to go me. It is by the sculptor Glynn Williams, and Sister Wendy Beckett suggests of it that it are unable to be pinned down and encapsulated, it defeats the classes of the mere intellect and sings to us of our deeper self.
Confused as you might be by it, do not are unsuccessful to spot the broken window tracery that has been employed to develop the wall in this article, for therefore hangs a tale.
St George, in scenario you really don’t know, is one of the fantastic Suffolk church buildings. Despite the fact that it may well externally show up a small significant, and is by no usually means as grand as Blythburgh, Prolonged Melford and the relaxation, 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 still comprehensive of the ‘walls of glass’ self-assurance that the subsequent century would see. The tracery seems to have been fixed, and possibly even renewed, which could make clear why there is damaged medieval tracery in the churchyard wall. Nevertheless, it isn’t going to just take a great deal 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 replaced. But the wall isn’t really medieval, so in which had it been all all those many years?
A further survival from the earlier church is the font. It also asks some issues. Unusually, it characteristics a Saint on seven of the panels, Christ staying on the westwards deal with. Mortlock dates it to the early 14th century, and the Saints it demonstrates are acquainted cults from that time: St Margaret, St Catherine, St Peter and St Paul, and a lot less commonly St George. The cult of St George was at its top in the early years of the 14th century. Mortlock describes the font as mutilated, and it certainly just isn’t searching its ideal. But I imagine there is far more heading on here than meets the eye. Fonts ended up plastered over in Elizabethan occasions, and only reduction that stood proud of the plaster was mutilated. These are all shallow reliefs, and I do not feel they have been mutilated at all. To my eye at least, this stonework seems weathered. I surprise if this font was taken out from the church, probably in the mid-17th century, and served an outside goal right until it was returned in the 19th century.
The tale of this church in the 19th century is well-documented. In 1832, as aspect of his grand tour of Suffolk, David Davy visited, and was delighted to come across that the church was at previous undergoing mend. The chancel experienced been roofless, and the nave utilised for providers. A new Rectory was becoming built. Who was the catalyst behind all this? His name was Samuel Rickards, and he was Rector here for pretty much the center forty a long time of the 19th century. Roy Tricker notes that he was a fantastic close friend of John Henry Newman, the potential Cardinal, and they generally corresponded on the issue of the pre-Reformation ordering of English churches. It is intriguing to consider how, at this seminal second, Rickards might have knowledgeable the considered of the Oxford Movement. Regrettably, when Newman grew to become a Catholic Rickards broke off all correspondence with him.
In the course of the class of the 1840s and 1850s, Rickards remodeled Stowlangtoft church. He got the fantastic Ipswich woodcarver Henry Ringham in to restore, replicate and finish the marvellous set of bench finishes – Ringham did the identical thing at Woolpit, a couple miles away. Ringham’s function is so fantastic that it is occasionally difficult for the inexperienced eye to detect it on the other hand, as at Woolpit, Ringham only copied animals here, and the wierder stuff is all medieval, and almost certainly dates from the rebuilding of the church. The glory of Stowlangtoft’s bench finishes is partly the sheer quantity – there are probably 60 carvings – but also that there are several unique subjects you can see some of them down below.
The carvings look to be portion of the very same team as Woolpit and Tostock – you will recognise the unicorn, the chained bear, the bull playing a harp, the hen with a man’s head, from similar carvings somewhere else. And then with any luck , that little alarm bell in your listened to should really get started to go “Hmmmm…..” mainly because some of the carvings below are plainly not from the identical group. It is difficult to believe that that the mermaid and the owl, for example, are from the similar workshop, or even from the identical ten years. The benches them selves are no clue it was prevalent observe in the 19th century to change medieval bench finishes on modern benches, or on medieval benches, or even on modern-day benches created out of medieval timber (as took place at Blythburgh). Could it be that Samuel Rickards located some of these bench ends elsewhere? Could he have been the kind of man or woman to do a thing like that?
Well, sure he could. As Roy Tricker recollects, the medieval roof at the tractarian Thomas Mozley’s church at Cholderton in Wiltshire is just one that Rickards obtained following obtaining it in storage in Ipswich docks. In the ferment of the excellent 19th century restoration of our English churches, there was hundreds of medieval junk lying close to, substantially of it going begging. But was Samuel Rickards the type of human being to counterfeit his church’s medieval inheritance?
Effectively, of course he possibly was. Glance at the medieval roundels in the middle window on the south aspect of the nave. The 4 evangelists are previously mentioned and down below two excellent representations of the Presentation in the Temple and the Baptism of Christ. You can see them down below click on them to enlarge them. Regrettably, they are not medieval at all, and it is typically recognized that they have been painted by a daughter of Samuel Rickards himself. There is some thing identical the other side of Bury at Hawstead.
Genuinely medieval is the extensive St Christopher wall-painting nonetheless discernible on the north wall. It was probably a person of the very last to be painted. The bench finishes are medieval, of study course, as is the great rood-display screen dado, albeit repainted. There is even some medieval glass in the upper tracery of some of the windows. The laughable stone pulpit is Rickard’s commission, and the operate of William White. What can Rickards have been contemplating of? But we action by means of into the chancel, and abruptly the whole point moves up a gear. For in this article are some points that are definitely remarkable.
In a county well-known for its woodwork, the furnishings of Stowlangtoft’s chancel are spectacular, even awe-inspiring. Driving the rood screen dado is Suffolk’s most complete established of return stalls. Most putting are the figures that kind finials to the stall ends. They are individuals in the Mass, which includes two Clergymen, two servers and two acolytes. The figure of the Priest at a prayer desk will have to be one particular of the ideal medieval illustrations or photos in Suffolk Mortlock believed the stalls the best in England. I was below with my good friend Aidan of Sylly Suffolk fame, and he experienced previously photographed and composed about these carving a a few of decades in the past. But even he found some thing new to photograph, and a hush fell on the chancel as we explored.
The benches that face eastwards are misericords, and beneath them are excellent factors: angels, lions and wodewoses, evangelistic symbols and crowned heads. A hawk captures a hare, a dragon sticks out its tongue. In between the seats are strange oriental faces. Some of them are underneath click on them to enlarge them.
Now, you know what I am going to question subsequent. How substantially of this is from this church at first? It all seems medieval do the job, and there is no explanation to believe it could possibly not have been moved somewhere else in the church when the chancel was open up to the things. What proof have we bought?
Firstly, we should really discover that the only other Suffolk church with this kind of a large quantity of medieval misericords of this quality is just a mile absent, at Norton. I don’t inquire you to see this as substantial, basically to recognize it in passing. Secondly, I am no carpenter, but it does glimpse to me as however two sets of furnishings have been cobbled alongside one another the stalls that again on to the screen look to have been integrated into the much larger construction of stalls and desks that entrance them and the north and south walls.
Having said that, if you look 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 look on the rood monitor, and the Ashfields were being the major donors when the church was rebuilt in the 14th century. So on harmony I am inclined to feel that the larger portion of the stall construction was in this church at first from when it was rebuilt. And the misericords? Nicely, I do not know. But I think they have to be deemed as element of the same established as these at Norton. In which scenario they could have occur from the same church, which may possibly have been this one particular, but might not have been. Virtually definitely, the stalls at Norton did not arrive from Norton church, and folklore has it that they had been initially in the quire of Bury Abbey. Hmm….
Other remarkable points in St George involve FE Howard’s attractive war memorial in the former north doorway, and in the reverse corner of the nave Hugh Easton’s lovely St George, which serves the very same reason. It is as good as his get the job done at Elveden. Again up in the chancel is a delightful painted pipe organ which was seemingly exhibited at, and acquired from, the Great Exhibition of 1851.
But St George at Stowlangtoft is, of system, most famous for the Flemish carvings that flank the instead large altarpiece. They were presented to the church by Henry Wilson of Stowlangtoft Hall, who allegedly discovered them in an Ixworth junk shop. They show photos from the crucifixion tale, but are not Stations of the Cross as some guides suggest. They date from the 1480s, and have been almost undoubtedly the altarpiece of a French or Flemish monastery that was sacked in the course of the French Revolution. I experienced seen a little something related at Baumes-les-Messieurs in the French Jura a number of months in advance of. There, the carvings are brightly painted, as these after had been, and piled up in a block rather than spread out in a line. The niches, and crowning arches higher than them, are 19th century. My favorite illustrations or photos are the Pieta and the Mouth of Hell. Click on on the visuals beneath.
A person cold winter’s night in January 1977, a gang of intruders broke into this locked church and stole them. Practically nothing additional was seen or read of them right until 1982, when they have been uncovered on screen in an Amsterdam artwork gallery. Their journey experienced been a convoluted just one taken to Holland, they have been applied as security for a financial loan which was defaulted on. The new proprietor was then burgled, and the carvings had been fenced to an Amsterdam junk seller. They ended up purchased from his shop, and taken to the museum, which right away determined them as 15th century carvings. They put them on display, and a Dutch lady who experienced study about the Stowlangtoft theft recognised them.
The parish instituted authorized proceedings to get them again an injunction was taken out to quit the new proprietor eliminating them from the museum. The parish missing the scenario, leaving them with a monstrous lawful invoice but the tale has a joyful ending. A Dutch businessman negotiated their acquire from the owner, paid off the legal payments, and returned the carvings to Stowlangtoft. Evidently this was all at broad value, but the businessman gave the gift in thanks for Britain’s liberation of Holland for the Nazis. No, thank you, sir.
Right now, the carvings are fastened firmly in spot and alarmed, so they would not be heading walkabout once again. But a little element of me wonders if they actually need to be listed here at all. Positive, they are medieval, but they weren’t here at first they weren’t even in England initially. Wouldn’t it be superior if they were exhibited someplace safer, where by people could spend to see them, and give some cash flow for the servicing of the church creating? And then, whisper it, St George may well even be held open.
St George, Stowlangtoft, is in the village superior avenue. Three keyholders are detailed, two of them promptly opposite. I am informed that Wednesday is not a fantastic time to check out and get the critical – it is marketplace working day in Bury.
Simon Knott
www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/stowlangtoft.htm
Posted by Jelltex on 2017-12-17 14:43:43
Tagged: , St George , Stowlangtoft , Suffolk , pew , ends , carved pew finishes , Jelltex , Jelltecks , church
#home furniture #Do-it-yourself #woodwork #woodworking #freedownload#woodworkingprojects #woodsmith ,wooden craft, wood planer, great woodworking, wood chairs, wood doing the job tools, well-known woodworking, woodworking publications, woodworking workbench programs