I was born in Norfolk and lived in Suffolk. So I assumed I knew all those two counties. But of program there is 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 fantastic site, which I url to on EA churches, and on his Suffolk Church page he has visited 707 Suffolk church buildings, and 909 Norfolk churches. That is a large amount of church buildings for two counties to share, and a lot of of these church buildings are historic, flint designed, spherical towered or have wall paintings, wooden roof angels or one thing well worth the hard work of heading to see or seeking out the keyholder to obtain obtain.
What I necessarily mean is that there is no way anyone who only experienced their have vehicle until eventually 1984, and had small curiosity 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 using a small reduce to be part of the A14 and from there to the A12 and south on what I hoped my my previous trip of the yr to lowestoft as Mom is now out of clinic and in the treatment of district nurses in purchase to get set again on her feet.
So I observed the tower of St George from about fifty percent a mile absent, and believed I experienced enough time to go more than and see inside if I could.
I parked at the stop of a cul-de-sac of new bungalows, and as I walk up the financial institution to the gate into the churchyard, the thoroughly clean traces of the tower, very well, towered above me.
In the porch I tried using the doorway and observed it locked, but the keyholder checklist created it crystal clear that the closest 1, at Xmas Cottage, was just above the highway. So, why not check out, Ian?
I went to the cottage and rang the bell. I experienced to fill out my details in a ledger, a wise measure. But I confirmed by driving licence to verify that I was who I claimed. Minimal did I know the modest village I lived in had been observed. Additional of that in a moment.
Within St George, you eye is stolen by the incredible pew finishes animals of all kinds, serious and imaginary, and most had not been defaced, only all those of evident human variety. Just one with the human body of a chicken but a apparent human confront experienced been remaining by yourself, consequently is the madness of the puritan’s brain.
I determined that I would document each pew finish determine, and numerous complete pew finishes so great that they had been.
There is the feint define of a large wall portray, Simon says it was of St. Christopher. It would have been most impressive when freshly painted. There is also a fine established of misericords.
St George’s glory is the altarpiece, into detail Simon goes beneath. It is alarmed, so you can not glimpse at them far too intently, unfortunately, but these types of is a indication of the moments.
I took the keys again, and the girl of the house came to converse to me as she experienced been informed by her husband that I was from Cliffe in Kent, which is where her family members is from. Regrettably, I am not from, nor dwell in Cliffe. For when there was certainly two Cliffs in Kent, one particular on the Hoo Peninsular, exactly where her spouse and children is from, and one particular around to Dover. Lots of decades back, Cliffe in the vicinity of to Dover was called WestCliffe to differentiate it from its namesake further more north. I stated this to her, but reported St Helen in Cliffe is one particular of my favorite Kent church buildings, designed of alternate levels of black and gentle flints and stone, in sunlight it glistens and sparkles.
While St George right here in Stowlangtoft is a fantastic church, it is in a weak condition of maintenance, and is thanks to be produced redundant in the new year. Usually unfortunate when that transpires to a parish church, but it is probably to be taken more than by the CCT, but then who will volunteer to retain it tidy when the previous wardens and keyholders are much too aged.
Stowlangtoft is a magnificent church and so happy am I that I used 40 minutes of my time to check out 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 grew to become a 6-aspect collection on BBC Radio Suffolk. A thing I said in the fourth programme, about Hessett, generated a fair total of correspondence. Referring to the way quite a few churches ended up restored in the 19th century, I noticed that when we enter a medieval church, we are encountering a Victorian vision of the medieval even when the real furnishings and fittings are medieval, the entire piece is continue to a Victorian conception.
Men and women wrote to me and reported items like “but in that situation, Simon, how do we know what was there initially and what wasn’t?”. To which my reply was the enigmatic “presume that practically nothing is as it initially appears, as Sherlock Holmes stated”. And if he did not, then he need to have accomplished.
A prime illustration of a church that assumes a continuity that may well not essentially be the truth is right here in the flat fields concerning Woolpit and Ixworth. This portion of Suffolk can be fairly bleak, specifically in late Oct, but England’s very best summer months and autumn for a long time experienced remaining the churchyard right here verdant and golden, as wonderful a area as any I might noticed that calendar year. The church is massive, and sits on a mound that has been cut down on one particular side by the street. I walked up the slope, past the memorial to the artwork critic Peter Fuller and his unborn son, which by no means fails to move me. It is by the sculptor Glynn Williams, and Sister Wendy Beckett states of it that it cannot be pinned down and encapsulated, it defeats the classes of the mere intellect and sings to us of our deeper self.
Confused as you may perhaps be by it, do not are unsuccessful to location the damaged window tracery that has been used to create the wall right here, for therefore hangs a tale.
St George, in circumstance you really don’t know, is a person of the wonderful Suffolk church buildings. Whilst it could externally show up a tiny intense, and is by no signifies as grand as Blythburgh, Long Melford and the rest, it is a treasure house of the medieval within. Unusually for a church of its day, it was all rebuilt in one go, in the late 14th century, and the perpendicular windows are not however whole 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 possibly demonstrate why there is broken medieval tracery in the churchyard wall. Even so, it doesn’t take much to see that the tracery in the wall is not perpendicular at all, but decorated. So it may possibly be that the broken tracery is from the original church that the late 14th century church replaced. But the wall isn’t really medieval, so exactly where had it been all all those years?
One more survival from the before church is the font. It also asks some thoughts. Unusually, it characteristics a Saint on seven of the panels, Christ staying on the westwards facial area. Mortlock dates it to the early 14th century, and the Saints it shows are acquainted cults from that time: St Margaret, St Catherine, St Peter and St Paul, and considerably less typically 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 undoubtedly isn’t really searching its greatest. But I consider there is additional likely on right here than satisfies the eye. Fonts were being plastered around in Elizabethan moments, and only reduction that stood very pleased 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 appears weathered. I wonder if this font was taken off from the church, probably in the mid-17th century, and served an outdoor goal right up until it was returned in the 19th century.
The story of this church in the 19th century is very well-documented. In 1832, as portion of his grand tour of Suffolk, David Davy frequented, and was delighted to find that the church was at last undergoing fix. The chancel had been roofless, and the nave applied for products and services. A new Rectory was becoming created. Who was the catalyst powering all this? His identify was Samuel Rickards, and he was Rector listed here for almost the middle forty years of the 19th century. Roy Tricker notes that he was a good good friend of John Henry Newman, the upcoming Cardinal, and they often corresponded on the topic of the pre-Reformation purchasing of English church buildings. It is attention-grabbing to imagine how, at this seminal instant, Rickards may possibly have knowledgeable the assumed of the Oxford Motion. Unfortunately, when Newman turned a Catholic Rickards broke off all correspondence with him.
During the class of the 1840s and 1850s, Rickards reworked Stowlangtoft church. He obtained the good Ipswich woodcarver Henry Ringham in to restore, replicate and total the marvellous set of bench ends – Ringham did the exact point at Woolpit, a couple miles away. Ringham’s work is so superior that it is often challenging for the inexperienced eye to detect it even so, as at Woolpit, Ringham only copied animals listed here, and the wierder stuff is all medieval, and most likely dates from the rebuilding of the church. The glory of Stowlangtoft’s bench ends is partly the sheer quantity – there are perhaps 60 carvings – but also that there are several unique topics you can see some of them underneath.
The carvings surface to be element of the very same team as Woolpit and Tostock – you will recognise the unicorn, the chained bear, the bull actively playing a harp, the bird with a man’s head, from comparable carvings somewhere else. And then hopefully that minor alarm bell in your read really should start off to go “Hmmmm…..” because some of the carvings listed here are evidently not from the same group. It is tough to consider that the mermaid and the owl, for instance, are from the same workshop, or even from the very same ten years. The benches themselves are no clue it was widespread follow in the 19th century to change medieval bench finishes on modern-day benches, or on medieval benches, or even on contemporary benches made out of medieval timber (as transpired at Blythburgh). Could it be that Samuel Rickards observed some of these bench finishes elsewhere? Could he have been the form of particular person to do a issue like that?
Well, of course he could. As Roy Tricker remembers, the medieval roof at the tractarian Thomas Mozley’s church at Cholderton in Wiltshire is one particular that Rickards obtained right after discovering it in storage in Ipswich docks. In the ferment of the terrific 19th century restoration of our English churches, there was hundreds of medieval junk lying all-around, a lot of it heading begging. But was Samuel Rickards the kind of particular person to counterfeit his church’s medieval inheritance?
Nicely, of course he likely was. Seem at the medieval roundels in the center window on the south facet of the nave. The four evangelists are over and beneath two outstanding representations of the Presentation in the Temple and the Baptism of Christ. You can see them underneath click on on them to enlarge them. Sadly, they are not medieval at all, and it is commonly accepted that they were being painted by a daughter of Samuel Rickards himself. There is a little something similar the other side of Bury at Hawstead.
Actually medieval is the large St Christopher wall-painting even now discernible on the north wall. It was probably one particular of the past to be painted. The bench ends are medieval, of class, as is the high-quality rood-display screen 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 perform of William White. What can Rickards have been contemplating of? But we stage through into the chancel, and out of the blue the full matter moves up a equipment. For here are some items that are definitely impressive.
In a county renowned for its woodwork, the furnishings of Stowlangtoft’s chancel are spectacular, even awe-inspiring. At the rear of the rood display dado is Suffolk’s most finish set of return stalls. Most putting are the figures that form finials to the stall ends. They are contributors in the Mass, which include two Priests, two servers and two acolytes. The figure of the Priest at a prayer desk have to be just one of the best medieval pictures in Suffolk Mortlock believed the stalls the greatest in England. I was right here with my good friend Aidan of Sylly Suffolk fame, and he experienced beforehand photographed and created about these carving a a pair of decades ago. But even he observed anything new to photograph, and a hush fell on the chancel as we explored.
The benches that encounter eastwards are misericords, and beneath them are superb factors: angels, lions and wodewoses, evangelistic symbols and topped heads. A hawk captures a hare, a dragon sticks out its tongue. Between the seats are odd oriental faces. Some of them are below click on them to enlarge them.
Now, you know what I am likely to check with up coming. How significantly of this is from this church originally? It all appears medieval work, and there is no motive to believe that it may possibly not have been moved somewhere else in the church when the chancel was open up to the things. What evidence have we bought?
To start with, we ought to detect that the only other Suffolk church with these types of a substantial number of medieval misericords of this high quality is just a mile absent, at Norton. I don’t ask you to see this as significant, simply to observe it in passing. Next, I am no carpenter, but it does seem to me as although two sets of furnishings have been cobbled with each other the stalls that back on to the display surface to have been integrated into the greater structure of stalls and desks that front them and the north and south walls.
However, if you seem carefully at the figures of the two Deacons, you will see that they are bearing shields of the Ashfield and Peche people. The Ashfield arms also seem on the rood display, and the Ashfields were the main donors when the church was rebuilt in the 14th century. So on harmony I am inclined to believe that the larger section of the stall framework was in this church originally from when it was rebuilt. And the misericords? Well, I really don’t know. But I feel they have to be regarded as portion of the identical set as these at Norton. In which scenario they may perhaps have arrive from the identical church, which may well have been this 1, but may not have been. Pretty much definitely, the stalls at Norton did not arrive from Norton church, and folklore has it that they were at first in the quire of Bury Abbey. Hmm….
Other impressive matters in St George include things like FE Howard’s wonderful war memorial in the former north doorway, and in the reverse corner of the nave Hugh Easton’s lovely St George, which serves the same purpose. It is as very good as his work at Elveden. Back up in the chancel is a delightful painted pipe organ which was seemingly exhibited at, and acquired from, the Excellent Exhibition of 1851.
But St George at Stowlangtoft is, of program, most well known for the Flemish carvings that flank the instead significant altarpiece. They were being given to the church by Henry Wilson of Stowlangtoft Hall, who allegedly identified them in an Ixworth junk store. They display images from the crucifixion tale, but are not Stations of the Cross as some guides counsel. They date from the 1480s, and had been just about surely the altarpiece of a French or Flemish monastery that was sacked for the duration of the French Revolution. I experienced observed something very similar at Baumes-les-Messieurs in the French Jura a few weeks ahead of. There, the carvings are brightly painted, as these once had been, and piled up in a block instead than distribute out in a line. The niches, and crowning arches above them, are 19th century. My favourite illustrations or photos are the Pieta and the Mouth of Hell. Simply click on the photos down below.
Just one cold winter’s evening in January 1977, a gang of intruders broke into this locked church and stole them. Almost nothing additional was viewed or heard of them right until 1982, when they had been discovered on display in an Amsterdam artwork gallery. Their journey experienced been a convoluted a person taken to Holland, they were used as stability for a mortgage which was defaulted upon. The new owner was then burgled, and the carvings were being fenced to an Amsterdam junk vendor. They had been purchased from his store, and taken to the museum, which immediately recognized them as 15th century carvings. They set them on display screen, and a Dutch lady who had go through about the Stowlangtoft theft recognised them.
The parish instituted legal proceedings to get them back an injunction was taken out to prevent the new owner eliminating them from the museum. The parish lost the situation, leaving them with a monstrous lawful invoice but the story has a satisfied ending. A Dutch businessman negotiated their buy from the owner, compensated off the lawful costs, and returned the carvings to Stowlangtoft. Apparently this was all at vast price, but the businessman gave the reward in thanks for Britain’s liberation of Holland for the Nazis. No, thank you, sir.
Currently, the carvings are mounted firmly in place and alarmed, so they won’t be likely walkabout again. But a little aspect of me miracles if they definitely need to be right here at all. Confident, they are medieval, but they weren’t in this article at first they were not even in England at first. Wouldn’t it be superior if they ended up exhibited somewhere safer, where men and women could shell out to see them, and give some money for the routine maintenance of the church setting up? And then, whisper it, St George might even be stored open.
St George, Stowlangtoft, is in the village high street. Three keyholders are detailed, two of them quickly opposite. I am told that Wednesday is not a very good time to try and get the key – it is industry day in Bury.
Simon Knott
www.suffolkchurches.co.british isles/stowlangtoft.htm
Posted by Jelltex on 2017-12-17 14:43:23
Tagged: , St George , Stowlangtoft , Suffolk , pew , finishes , carved pew ends , Jelltex , Jelltecks , church
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