I was born in Norfolk and lived in Suffolk. So I considered I knew all those two counties. But of course there is additional 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 friend, Simon K, operates a wonderful site, which I link to on EA church buildings, and on his Suffolk Church webpage he has visited 707 Suffolk church buildings, and 909 Norfolk churches. That is a whole lot of churches for two counties to share, and many of all those churches are historical, flint created, spherical towered or have wall paintings, picket roof angels or something truly worth the effort and hard work of going to see or seeking out the keyholder to achieve accessibility.
What I indicate is that there is no way somebody who only had their personal auto until finally 1984, and experienced small 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 saw St George from the key road, I was getting a limited cut to be a part of the A14 and from there to the A12 and south on what I hoped my my final vacation of the yr to lowestoft as Mother is now out of clinic and in the care of district nurses in order to get set back again on her ft.
So I observed the tower of St George from about fifty percent a mile away, and thought I had enough time to go more than and see inside of if I could.
I parked at the finish of a cul-de-sac of new bungalows, and as I stroll up the lender to the gate into the churchyard, the cleanse lines of the tower, properly, towered about me.
In the porch I tried the doorway and found it locked, but the keyholder listing produced it distinct that the closest 1, at Xmas Cottage, was just in excess of the highway. So, why not check out, Ian?
I went to the cottage and rang the bell. I had to fill out my aspects in a ledger, a reasonable measure. But I showed by driving licence to prove that I was who I claimed. Minor did I know the modest village I lived in had been seen. A lot more of that in a minute.
Inside St George, you eye is stolen by the amazing pew finishes animals of all kinds, real and imaginary, and most experienced not been defaced, only all those of noticeable human form. One particular with the body of a chicken but a clear human deal with experienced been remaining on your own, consequently is the insanity of the puritan’s brain.
I resolved that I would history each individual pew end figure, and numerous whole pew finishes so excellent that they were.
There is the feint outline of a massive wall painting, Simon states it was of St. Christopher. It would have been most extraordinary when freshly painted. There is also a good set of misericords.
St George’s glory is the altarpiece, into element Simon goes underneath. It is alarmed, so you can not glance at them way too intently, sadly, but such is a sign of the moments.
I took the keys again, and the girl of the dwelling arrived to communicate to me as she had been advised by her spouse that I was from Cliffe in Kent, which is exactly where her family is from. Unfortunately, I am not from, nor are living in Cliffe. For after there was certainly two Cliffs in Kent, just one on the Hoo Peninsular, wherever her family members is from, and a single around to Dover. Several a long time ago, Cliffe near to Dover was identified as WestCliffe to differentiate it from its namesake even more north. I stated this to her, but stated St Helen in Cliffe is one particular of my favourite Kent churches, designed of alternate levels of black and gentle flints and stone, in sunlight it glistens and sparkles.
Even though St George below in Stowlangtoft is a high-quality church, it is in a very poor state of maintenance, and is due to be produced redundant in the new yr. Often unhappy when that comes about to a parish church, but it is probably to be taken in excess of by the CCT, but then who will volunteer to hold it tidy when the outdated wardens and keyholders are also previous.
Stowlangtoft is a fantastic church and so glad am I that I spent 40 minutes of my time to pay a visit to it. Go to see it now prior to it is much too late!
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In the summer season of 2003, this web site turned a six-component series on BBC Radio Suffolk. One thing I reported in the fourth programme, about Hessett, generated a fair sum of correspondence. Referring to the way many churches had been restored in the 19th century, I observed that when we enter a medieval church, we are encountering a Victorian vision of the medieval even when the genuine furnishings and fittings are medieval, the complete piece is however a Victorian conception.
Individuals wrote to me and reported matters like “but in that scenario, Simon, how do we know what was there at first and what was not?”. To which my reply was the enigmatic “assume that almost nothing is as it first appears, as Sherlock Holmes mentioned”. And if he did not, then he really should have performed.
A prime case in point of a church that assumes a continuity that may possibly not actually be the fact is here in the flat fields between Woolpit and Ixworth. This part of Suffolk can be relatively bleak, particularly in late Oct, but England’s finest summer season and autumn for many years experienced still left the churchyard below verdant and golden, as lovely a area as any I’d viewed that yr. The church is massive, and sits on a mound that has been slice down on 1 aspect by the road. I walked up the slope, earlier the memorial to the artwork critic Peter Fuller and his unborn son, which by no means fails to transfer me. It is by the sculptor Glynn Williams, and Sister Wendy Beckett states of it that it can not be pinned down and encapsulated, it defeats the classes of the mere brain and sings to us of our deeper self.
Overcome as you might be by it, do not fall short to spot the damaged window tracery that has been applied to create the wall here, for therefore hangs a tale.
St George, in scenario you don’t know, is a single of the wonderful Suffolk churches. Even though it may well externally look a minor intense, and is by no implies as grand as Blythburgh, Extensive Melford and the relaxation, it is a treasure house of the medieval inside of. Unusually for a church of its date, it was all rebuilt in just one go, in the late 14th century, and the perpendicular windows are not but comprehensive of the ‘walls of glass’ confidence that the subsequent century would see. The tracery appears to have been repaired, and perhaps even renewed, which may well reveal why there is broken medieval tracery in the churchyard wall. Nonetheless, it won’t consider considerably to see that the tracery in the wall is not perpendicular at all, but adorned. So it may perhaps be that the damaged tracery is from the original church that the late 14th century church changed. But the wall isn’t really medieval, so where by had it been all these years?
A further survival from the earlier church is the font. It also asks some thoughts. Unusually, it characteristics a Saint on seven of the panels, Christ getting on the westwards confront. Mortlock dates it to the early 14th century, and the Saints it displays are common cults from that time: St Margaret, St Catherine, St Peter and St Paul, and less frequently St George. The cult of St George was at its top in the early a long time of the 14th century. Mortlock describes the font as mutilated, and it certainly isn’t really seeking its greatest. But I feel there is more likely on here than satisfies the eye. Fonts ended up plastered more than in Elizabethan occasions, and only relief that stood very pleased of the plaster was mutilated. These are all shallow reliefs, and I do not assume they have been mutilated at all. To my eye at minimum, this stonework seems weathered. I marvel if this font was taken out from the church, most likely in the mid-17th century, and served an out of doors objective right until it was returned in the 19th century.
The story of this church in the 19th century is very well-documented. In 1832, as section of his grand tour of Suffolk, David Davy frequented, and was delighted to find that the church was at final going through mend. The chancel experienced been roofless, and the nave employed for services. A new Rectory was remaining crafted. Who was the catalyst behind all this? His title was Samuel Rickards, and he was Rector here for almost the center forty many years of the 19th century. Roy Tricker notes that he was a great good friend of John Henry Newman, the foreseeable future Cardinal, and they generally corresponded on the matter of the pre-Reformation purchasing of English churches. It is attention-grabbing to feel how, at this seminal minute, Rickards could have knowledgeable the assumed of the Oxford Movement. Unfortunately, when Newman became a Catholic Rickards broke off all correspondence with him.
Throughout the study course of the 1840s and 1850s, Rickards remodeled Stowlangtoft church. He bought the good Ipswich woodcarver Henry Ringham in to restore, replicate and entire the marvellous established of bench finishes – Ringham did the same issue at Woolpit, a number of miles away. Ringham’s work is so good that it is often really hard for the inexperienced eye to detect it having said that, as at Woolpit, Ringham only copied animals listed here, and the wierder things 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 various unique topics you can see some of them beneath.
The carvings surface to be aspect of the very same group as Woolpit and Tostock – you will recognise the unicorn, the chained bear, the bull taking part in a harp, the bird with a man’s head, from similar carvings in other places. And then with any luck , that minor alarm bell in your read must begin to go “Hmmmm…..” since some of the carvings below are evidently not from the very same team. It is challenging to feel that the mermaid and the owl, for example, are from the very same workshop, or even from the exact decade. The benches themselves are no clue it was typical practice in the 19th century to change medieval bench ends on present day benches, or on medieval benches, or even on contemporary benches produced out of medieval timber (as transpired at Blythburgh). Could it be that Samuel Rickards located some of these bench finishes in other places? Could he have been the sort of individual to do a thing like that?
Very well, certainly he could. As Roy Tricker recalls, the medieval roof at the tractarian Thomas Mozley’s church at Cholderton in Wiltshire is a person that Rickards obtained following obtaining it in storage in Ipswich docks. In the ferment of the great 19th century restoration of our English churches, there was masses of medieval junk lying close to, much of it heading begging. But was Samuel Rickards the variety of man or woman to counterfeit his church’s medieval inheritance?
Well, indeed he possibly was. Look at the medieval roundels in the center window on the south facet of the nave. The 4 evangelists are earlier mentioned and beneath two wonderful representations of the Presentation in the Temple and the Baptism of Christ. You can see them underneath click on on them to enlarge them. Unfortunately, they are not medieval at all, and it is commonly approved that they had been painted by a daughter of Samuel Rickards himself. There is anything identical the other side of Bury at Hawstead.
Definitely medieval is the extensive St Christopher wall-painting however discernible on the north wall. It was almost certainly one particular of the very last to be painted. The bench finishes are medieval, of course, as is the fantastic rood-monitor dado, albeit repainted. There is even some medieval glass in the higher tracery of some of the home windows. The laughable stone pulpit is Rickard’s commission, and the work of William White. What can Rickards have been thinking of? But we move via into the chancel, and instantly the complete point moves up a gear. For below are some points that are genuinely remarkable.
In a county well known for its woodwork, the furnishings of Stowlangtoft’s chancel are spectacular, even awe-inspiring. Behind the rood monitor dado is Suffolk’s most complete established of return stalls. Most placing are the figures that kind finials to the stall ends. They are participants in the Mass, like two Monks, two servers and two acolytes. The figure of the Priest at a prayer desk ought to be a person of the best medieval photographs in Suffolk Mortlock believed the stalls the greatest in England. I was right here with my pal Aidan of Sylly Suffolk fame, and he experienced earlier photographed and published about these carving a a few of years back. But even he discovered something new to photograph, and a hush fell on the chancel as we explored.
The benches that experience eastwards are misericords, and beneath them are fantastic matters: angels, lions and wodewoses, evangelistic symbols and crowned heads. A hawk captures a hare, a dragon sticks out its tongue. Concerning the seats are weird oriental faces. Some of them are under click on on them to enlarge them.
Now, you know what I am likely to ask future. How a lot of this is from this church originally? It all seems medieval operate, and there is no motive to feel it could possibly not have been moved somewhere else in the church when the chancel was open up to the factors. What evidence have we got?
Firstly, we must observe that the only other Suffolk church with such a significant variety of medieval misericords of this quality is just a mile absent, at Norton. I never talk to you to see this as significant, basically to detect it in passing. Secondly, I am no carpenter, but it does look to me as although two sets of furnishings have been cobbled together the stalls that back on to the display look to have been integrated into the larger sized framework of stalls and desks that entrance them and the north and south walls.
On the other hand, if you glimpse closely 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 appear on the rood display screen, and the Ashfields were being the significant donors when the church was rebuilt in the 14th century. So on harmony I am inclined to think that the better aspect of the stall composition was in this church at first from when it was rebuilt. And the misericords? Properly, I really don’t know. But I believe they have to be regarded as as section of the same established as those people at Norton. In which situation they may possibly have appear from the exact same church, which may perhaps have been this one particular, but might not have been. Practically surely, the stalls at Norton did not appear from Norton church, and folklore has it that they were being initially in the quire of Bury Abbey. Hmm….
Other amazing issues in St George incorporate FE Howard’s attractive war memorial in the former north doorway, and in the opposite corner of the nave Hugh Easton’s attractive St George, which serves the similar goal. It is as good as his do the job at Elveden. Back again up in the chancel is a delightful painted pipe organ which was seemingly exhibited at, and acquired from, the Wonderful Exhibition of 1851.
But St George at Stowlangtoft is, of training course, most famous for the Flemish carvings that flank the alternatively weighty altarpiece. They have been presented to the church by Henry Wilson of Stowlangtoft Hall, who allegedly uncovered them in an Ixworth junk store. They display visuals from the crucifixion tale, but are not Stations of the Cross as some guides counsel. They date from the 1480s, and were pretty much unquestionably the altarpiece of a French or Flemish monastery that was sacked throughout the French Revolution. I had found something comparable at Baumes-les-Messieurs in the French Jura a couple of months in advance of. There, the carvings are brightly painted, as these at the time were, and piled up in a block rather than spread out in a line. The niches, and crowning arches previously mentioned them, are 19th century. My favorite photographs are the Pieta and the Mouth of Hell. Click on on the photos beneath.
One particular cold winter’s evening in January 1977, a gang of robbers broke into this locked church and stole them. Nothing extra was found or read of them till 1982, when they have been uncovered on show in an Amsterdam artwork gallery. Their journey had been a convoluted just one taken to Holland, they have been utilized as safety for a mortgage which was defaulted upon. The new proprietor was then burgled, and the carvings had been fenced to an Amsterdam junk supplier. They were being purchased from his shop, and taken to the museum, which quickly recognized them as 15th century carvings. They put them on exhibit, and a Dutch woman who had read through about the Stowlangtoft theft recognised them.
The parish instituted lawful proceedings to get them again an injunction was taken out to quit the new proprietor eradicating them from the museum. The parish missing the circumstance, leaving them with a monstrous legal bill but the story has a pleased ending. A Dutch businessman negotiated their acquire from the proprietor, paid off the authorized charges, and returned the carvings to Stowlangtoft. Seemingly this was all at vast price, but the businessman gave the gift in many thanks for Britain’s liberation of Holland for the Nazis. No, thank you, sir.
Nowadays, the carvings are set firmly in spot and alarmed, so they won’t be going walkabout once more. But a minor section of me wonders if they genuinely should be here at all. Confident, they are medieval, but they were not here at first they were not even in England originally. Wouldn’t it be improved if they were exhibited somewhere safer, wherever persons could pay to see them, and present some earnings for the maintenance of the church developing? And then, whisper it, St George could possibly even be kept open.
St George, Stowlangtoft, is in the village higher avenue. Three keyholders are outlined, two of them instantly opposite. I am explained to that Wednesday is not a great time to test and get the essential – it is marketplace working day in Bury.
Simon Knott
www.suffolkchurches.co.united kingdom/stowlangtoft.htm
Posted by Jelltex on 2017-12-17 14:44:00
Tagged: , St George , Stowlangtoft , Suffolk , pew , ends , carved pew finishes , Jelltex , Jelltecks , church
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