I was born in Norfolk and lived in Suffolk. So I considered I understood all those two counties. But of training course there is a lot 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 buddy, Simon K, runs a wonderful website, which I link to on EA church buildings, and on his Suffolk Church web page he has frequented 707 Suffolk churches, and 909 Norfolk churches. That is a great deal of church buildings for two counties to share, and several of people church buildings are historic, flint constructed, round towered or have wall paintings, wood roof angels or something well worth the exertion of heading to see or searching for out the keyholder to obtain accessibility.
What I necessarily mean is that there is no way a person who only experienced their personal motor vehicle until eventually 1984, and experienced minimal interest 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 noticed St George from the most important highway, I was using a short reduce to sign up for the A14 and from there to the A12 and south on what I hoped my my previous vacation of the calendar year to lowestoft as Mom is now out of medical center and in the care of district nurses in order to get put back on her ft.
So I observed the tower of St George from about 50 percent a mile away, and believed I experienced ample time to go over and see within if I could.
I parked at the finish of a cul-de-sac of new bungalows, and as I stroll up the bank to the gate into the churchyard, the thoroughly clean traces of the tower, properly, towered above me.
In the porch I tried out the door and discovered it locked, but the keyholder checklist created it very clear that the nearest a single, at Christmas Cottage, was just more than the road. So, why not consider, Ian?
I went to the cottage and rang the bell. I had to fill out my information in a ledger, a wise evaluate. But I confirmed by driving licence to establish that I was who I claimed. Minimal did I know the tiny village I lived in had been recognized. Additional of that in a minute.
Inside of St George, you eye is stolen by the fabulous pew ends animals of all kinds, authentic and imaginary, and most experienced not been defaced, only those of apparent human form. A single with the physique of a hen but a very clear human deal with experienced been left on your own, hence is the madness of the puritan’s thoughts.
I made a decision that I would document each and every pew end determine, and quite a few entire pew ends so amazing that they were being.
There is the feint outline of a huge wall portray, Simon claims it was of St. Christopher. It would have been most outstanding when freshly painted. There is also a great set of misericords.
St George’s glory is the altarpiece, into detail Simon goes down below. It is alarmed, so you can not glimpse at them as well closely, sadly, but this kind of is a sign of the moments.
I took the keys again, and the woman of the residence came to discuss to me as she experienced been explained to by her partner that I was from Cliffe in Kent, which is the place her relatives is from. Regrettably, I am not from, nor dwell in Cliffe. For when there was certainly two Cliffs in Kent, one on the Hoo Peninsular, the place her relatives is from, and a person in the vicinity of to Dover. Several decades back, Cliffe in close proximity to to Dover was called WestCliffe to differentiate it from its namesake even more north. I discussed this to her, but mentioned St Helen in Cliffe is a single of my favorite Kent church buildings, created of alternate levels of black and light flints and stone, in daylight it glistens and sparkles.
Despite the fact that St George listed here in Stowlangtoft is a high-quality church, it is in a poor state of repair service, and is owing to be created redundant in the new 12 months. Usually unhappy when that transpires to a parish church, but it is possible to be taken more than by the CCT, but then who will volunteer to retain it tidy when the previous wardens and keyholders are as well outdated.
Stowlangtoft is a wonderful church and so glad am I that I put in 40 minutes of my time to take a look at it. Go to see it now in advance of it is way too late!
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In the summertime of 2003, this site became a six-section collection on BBC Radio Suffolk. Something I mentioned in the fourth programme, about Hessett, produced a good sum of correspondence. Referring to the way a lot of churches have 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 real furnishings and fittings are medieval, the whole piece is nonetheless a Victorian conception.
Persons wrote to me and explained matters like “but in that case, Simon, how do we know what was there initially and what was not?”. To which my reply was the enigmatic “think that nothing at all is as it first appears, as Sherlock Holmes claimed”. And if he didn’t, then he should have done.
A primary instance of a church that assumes a continuity that may possibly not in fact be the fact is in this article in the flat fields concerning Woolpit and Ixworth. This component of Suffolk can be relatively bleak, in particular in late October, but England’s finest summer and autumn for many years had still left the churchyard below verdant and golden, as beautiful a spot as any I might viewed that 12 months. The church is big, and sits on a mound that has been slice down on a single facet by the highway. I walked up the slope, past the memorial to the artwork critic Peter Fuller and his unborn son, which never fails to go me. It is by the sculptor Glynn Williams, and Sister Wendy Beckett states of it that it simply cannot be pinned down and encapsulated, it defeats the categories of the mere head and sings to us of our deeper self.
Overcome as you may perhaps be by it, will not are unsuccessful to location the damaged window tracery that has been utilized to create the wall in this article, for therefore hangs a tale.
St George, in circumstance you do not know, is one of the terrific Suffolk church buildings. Even though it may externally seem a tiny extreme, and is by no indicates as grand as Blythburgh, Extensive Melford and the relaxation, it is a treasure residence of the medieval inside. Unusually for a church of its date, it was all rebuilt in one go, in the late 14th century, and the perpendicular home windows are not but full of the ‘walls of glass’ self esteem that the subsequent century would see. The tracery appears to have been repaired, and maybe even renewed, which may perhaps reveal why there is damaged medieval tracery in the churchyard wall. Even so, it does not just take a great deal to see that the tracery in the wall is not perpendicular at all, but decorated. So it may well be that the broken tracery is from the primary church that the late 14th century church replaced. But the wall isn’t really medieval, so the place had it been all those decades?
A different survival from the previously church is the font. It also asks some queries. Unusually, it characteristics a Saint on seven of the panels, Christ becoming on the westwards encounter. 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 significantly less usually St George. The cult of St George was at its top in the early decades of the 14th century. Mortlock describes the font as mutilated, and it surely just isn’t searching its finest. But I consider there is additional going on in this article than meets the eye. Fonts were plastered about in Elizabethan situations, and only relief that stood proud 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 least, this stonework seems weathered. I surprise if this font was eradicated from the church, most likely in the mid-17th century, and served an outdoor objective until eventually it was returned in the 19th century.
The story of this church in the 19th century is properly-documented. In 1832, as section of his grand tour of Suffolk, David Davy visited, and was happy to locate that the church was at past going through restore. The chancel had been roofless, and the nave applied for providers. A new Rectory was becoming developed. Who was the catalyst driving all this? His name was Samuel Rickards, and he was Rector in this article for just about the middle forty decades of the 19th century. Roy Tricker notes that he was a good close friend of John Henry Newman, the foreseeable future Cardinal, and they normally corresponded on the topic of the pre-Reformation purchasing of English churches. It is intriguing to assume how, at this seminal instant, Rickards could possibly have informed the considered of the Oxford Movement. Regrettably, when Newman grew to become a Catholic Rickards broke off all correspondence with him.
All through the class of the 1840s and 1850s, Rickards transformed Stowlangtoft church. He received the terrific Ipswich woodcarver Henry Ringham in to restore, replicate and full the marvellous established of bench finishes – Ringham did the similar detail at Woolpit, a couple miles away. Ringham’s work is so fantastic that it is at times tricky for the inexperienced eye to detect it on the other hand, as at Woolpit, Ringham only copied animals in this article, and the wierder stuff is all medieval, and most likely dates from the rebuilding of the church. The glory of Stowlangtoft’s bench finishes is partly the sheer quantity – there are maybe 60 carvings – but also that there are several unique subjects you can see some of them beneath.
The carvings surface to be part of the identical group 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 similar carvings somewhere else. And then hopefully that little alarm bell in your read should really start off to go “Hmmmm…..” since some of the carvings listed here are clearly not from the similar group. It is hard to imagine that the mermaid and the owl, for example, are from the identical workshop, or even from the same ten years. The benches them selves are no clue it was popular observe in the 19th century to replace medieval bench ends on contemporary benches, or on medieval benches, or even on contemporary benches made out of medieval timber (as took place at Blythburgh). Could it be that Samuel Rickards observed some of these bench ends in other places? Could he have been the form of person to do a thing like that?
Nicely, of course he could. As Roy Tricker remembers, the medieval roof at the tractarian Thomas Mozley’s church at Cholderton in Wiltshire is 1 that Rickards acquired following getting it in storage in Ipswich docks. In the ferment of the great 19th century restoration of our English church buildings, there was hundreds of medieval junk lying all over, considerably of it likely begging. But was Samuel Rickards the kind of man or woman to counterfeit his church’s medieval inheritance?
Nicely, yes he most likely was. Glimpse at the medieval roundels in the middle window on the south side of the nave. The four evangelists are earlier mentioned and below two superb representations of the Presentation in the Temple and the Baptism of Christ. You can see them down below click on on them to enlarge them. Sadly, they are not medieval at all, and it is commonly acknowledged that they were being painted by a daughter of Samuel Rickards himself. There is some thing related the other aspect of Bury at Hawstead.
Genuinely medieval is the huge St Christopher wall-portray nonetheless discernible on the north wall. It was probably one particular of the final to be painted. The bench finishes are medieval, of training course, as is the fantastic rood-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 function of William White. What can Rickards have been wondering of? But we move by into the chancel, and instantly the total matter moves up a equipment. For here are some items that are truly amazing.
In a county renowned 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 placing are the figures that kind finials to the stall finishes. They are participants in the Mass, including two Priests, two servers and two acolytes. The determine of the Priest at a prayer desk have to be just one of the best medieval images in Suffolk Mortlock believed the stalls the best in England. I was in this article with my pal Aidan of Sylly Suffolk fame, and he had beforehand photographed and published about these carving a a few of a long time in the past. But even he identified anything new to photograph, and a hush fell on the chancel as we explored.
The benches that facial area eastwards are misericords, and beneath them are amazing 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 odd oriental faces. Some of them are beneath click on them to enlarge them.
Now, you know what I am likely to inquire subsequent. How much of this is from this church originally? It all seems medieval work, and there is no cause to feel it could not have been moved elsewhere in the church when the chancel was open up to the things. What proof have we acquired?
For starters, we ought to detect that the only other Suffolk church with these a large variety of medieval misericords of this high quality is just a mile absent, at Norton. I don’t request you to see this as major, merely to notice it in passing. Next, I am no carpenter, but it does appear to me as however two sets of furnishings have been cobbled alongside one another the stalls that back on to the display screen look to have been built-in into the larger framework of stalls and desks that entrance them and the north and south partitions.
Nevertheless, if you appear carefully at the figures of the two Deacons, you will see that they are bearing shields of the Ashfield and Peche families. The Ashfield arms also seem on the rood monitor, and the Ashfields had been the important donors when the church was rebuilt in the 14th century. So on balance I am inclined to feel that the greater section of the stall construction was in this church at first from when it was rebuilt. And the misericords? Well, I never know. But I assume they have to be regarded as as section of the exact same established as all those at Norton. In which situation they may well have come from the very same church, which may possibly have been this 1, but may well not have been. Practically surely, the stalls at Norton did not come from Norton church, and folklore has it that they ended up originally in the quire of Bury Abbey. Hmm….
Other exceptional things in St George include FE Howard’s lovely war memorial in the previous north doorway, and in the opposite corner of the nave Hugh Easton’s magnificent St George, which serves the exact same goal. It is as good as his function at Elveden. Back up in the chancel is a delightful painted pipe organ which was evidently 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 fairly significant altarpiece. They were provided to the church by Henry Wilson of Stowlangtoft Corridor, who allegedly found them in an Ixworth junk store. They demonstrate pictures from the crucifixion story, but are not Stations of the Cross as some guides counsel. They day from the 1480s, and had been almost surely the altarpiece of a French or Flemish monastery that was sacked all through the French Revolution. I had observed anything related at Baumes-les-Messieurs in the French Jura a couple months just before. There, the carvings are brightly painted, as these after had been, and piled up in a block somewhat than distribute out in a line. The niches, and crowning arches earlier mentioned them, are 19th century. My favorite photos are the Pieta and the Mouth of Hell. Simply click on the visuals down below.
One chilly winter’s night time in January 1977, a gang of robbers broke into this locked church and stole them. Nothing more was found or read of them right until 1982, when they were found on show in an Amsterdam art gallery. Their journey had been a convoluted a single taken to Holland, they were used as safety for a financial loan which was defaulted upon. The new operator was then burgled, and the carvings ended up fenced to an Amsterdam junk vendor. They had been purchased from his store, and taken to the museum, which right away identified them as 15th century carvings. They put them on display, and a Dutch lady who had go through about the Stowlangtoft theft recognised them.
The parish instituted authorized proceedings to get them back an injunction was taken out to stop the new proprietor eradicating them from the museum. The parish missing the scenario, leaving them with a monstrous lawful invoice but the tale has a happy ending. A Dutch businessman negotiated their invest in from the operator, compensated off the legal expenses, and returned the carvings to Stowlangtoft. Evidently this was all at large price, but the businessman gave the reward in thanks for Britain’s liberation of Holland for the Nazis. No, thank you, sir.
Right now, the carvings are set firmly in location and alarmed, so they will not be heading walkabout again. But a minor aspect of me wonders if they actually really should be right here at all. Confident, they are medieval, but they were not listed here initially they weren’t even in England at first. Would not it be greater if they were shown someplace safer, where persons could shell out to see them, and offer some profits for the servicing of the church setting up? And then, whisper it, St George may well even be kept open up.
St George, Stowlangtoft, is in the village higher road. A few keyholders are shown, two of them promptly reverse. I am told that Wednesday is not a great time to consider and get the critical – it is market day in Bury.
Simon Knott
www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/stowlangtoft.htm
Posted by Jelltex on 2017-12-17 14:43:27
Tagged: , St George , Stowlangtoft , Suffolk , pew , finishes , carved pew finishes , Jelltex , Jelltecks , church
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