Bures is a good aged riverside village, a city nearly, partly in Suffolk and partly in Essex. The very same was as soon as accurate of nearby Sudbury, but the Ballingdon district there was drawn into Suffolk by boundary variations in the 1950s. Tradition survives listed here, and this is however a split town. The Essex side is called Bures Hamlet, but is now the greater element, with a railway station and housing estates.
The River Stour is the county border, and it flows not considerably from the western edge of the churchyard. The Suffolk side designs alone Bures St Mary, although I am advised that this church was not committed to St Mary right until the 19th century Anglican revival, when a single of the results of the Oxford Motion was a renewed desire in church dedications. Numerous of these were restored by effectively-this means antiquarians sorting via the historical documents of the Diocese of Norwich, and the confusion arose mainly because of a now-vanished chapel in the churchyard dedicated to the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin. In truth, the devotion of this church in medieval occasions was probably to the feast of All Saints.
The north side of the church faces the avenue, despite the fact that you can enter the church by way of either the north or the south porches. Both are wonderful. The crimson brick early 16th century south porch is stately and grand, a holy drinking water stoup with supporting figures, and a broad open up area inside of suited for the perform of parish small business. There is a fearsome exterior headstop small on the west side, which need to undoubtedly be more mature than the porch – 13th century, I must believe. Either the Tudors reused it, or the Victorians placed it below through their restoration.
The other striking feature of the exterior is the crimson brick massing of the Waldegrave chantry on the south facet of the chancel, its east window somewhat grander than that of the chancel alone. Previously mentioned the porches rises Richard de Waldegrave’s tower of the late 14th century. Having said that, the foundation of the tower is a survival of an earlier a person, and on its southern facet is a curious tomb recess, now empty.
St Mary is a quintessential Anglican church, its 19th and 20th century reorderings usual of thousands of substantial, affluent buildings. But there are strange matters in this church, all truly worth likely to see. If you look up, you will see that the ceiling is composed of flat, wood styles, with present day lights units established into them. Mortlock credits the woodwork to Ewan Christian, who carried out the 19th century restoration. The lighting procedure is from the 1990s. The arcades are lit from beneath, developing the effect of an undercroft.
In the sanctuary and to the north of the altar, 1 of the Waldegrave tombs sits grandly beside the higher camp Victoriana. It has been instead battered by the fortunes of heritage its brass has lengthy absent, but the grand angel corbels that supported its also-vanished wood cover survive. It is to Richard de Waldegrave, who created the tower, and it was applied as an Easter sepulchre. Wodewoses, East Anglia’s wild adult men of the woods, the corners.
And then, to the south of the chancel is the Waldegrave chantry. A tomb in the south east corner, in fact a cobbling together of two different Waldegrave tombs, has misplaced its brasses, but the standing memorial to the west is extra total. Along the front, the children kneel in prayer. Their legs are curiously swirly, and somebody recently said to me that they glance as if they have been extruded out of a cake decorating set. The memorial remembers a William Waldegrave who died in the early 17th century, and the much more you glance at it the odder it gets. For instance, while the 10 weepers are in their typical place, there are no effigies of the remembered dead. Even odder, the memorial inscription is on the again of the tomb, and ordinarily out of sight. This memorial is curiously awkwardly put, and feels fairly in the way, right until you don’t forget that for three hundred years immediately after the Reformation the liturgy experienced no need to have for gangways for processions, or for sights of altars. The tomb was likely placed intentionally so.
The Waldegraves were being not popular folks in this parish, seemingly. At the time of the Anglican reformers in the 1540s, there was a general rebellion right here and the destruction in the church was so critical that the churchwardens were punished. A hundred many years afterwards, the puritans meted out their fundamentalist justice to the Waldegrave small children, taking away their fingers. And still, this rather unsightly tomb nevertheless sits right here, and who remembers the puritans now?
The area of the tomb is maybe a pity, for the reason that the eastward look at in the chapel is otherwise its triumph. The five light-weight window consists of a fashionable glass memorial to the Waldegraves, which include the Catholic inscription that, of our charity, we should pray for their souls. The Sarum screen backing the altar beneath is really helpful.
Heading again into the human body of the church, a wood effigy of a knight rests in peace on a north aisle window recess, which is definitely not its authentic location. It dates from about 1330, and is built of chestnut. No one particular seriously is aware who he is, whilst some textbooks point out somebody called Richard de Cornard. The lion less than his ft has a relatively sad expression, I believe. Suffolk’s only other wood medieval effigies are at Boxted and Heveningham. Mortlock states that the survival of his protect is notable and exceptional.This knight effigy might or may not have occur from Bures church initially, and there is no way of telling now.
The most abnormal feature of St Mary is some thing you would not detect, or even assume to seem for except if you understood it was there. This is a bizarre small octagonal segment that juts out about ten feet up on the jap face of the south aspect of the chancel arch. It is, of all matters, a piscina. What is it undertaking up there? We will need to imagine the rood monitor, rood beam and rood loft, and all the liturgical paraphernalia of the pre-Reformation church. The rood loft right here had an altar on it, and this piscina served the altar. Why is it so unusual? Basically, this chancel arch was developed with a drain inside of it. Most rood loft altars ought to have managed with a takeaway bowl. An amazing detail, in lots of methods.
I’m usually mindful together the River Stour of how civilised the south of Suffolk appears to be, and how wild Essex looks beyond it, as if the 21st century hadn’t rather created it nevertheless alongside the narrow lanes from County Hall at Chelmsford. North Essex is superb cycling and church-checking out nation, but people appear to be to know the Suffolk side most effective. In the corner of the churchyard is a parish war memorial which is unconventional, and probably distinctive. It remembers The adult men of Bures St Mary and Bures Hamlet who gave their lives for King and Place in the Terrific War, which of system is to say the misplaced boys in two unique counties.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2019-08-10 09:34:29
Tagged: , bures , suffolk , east anglia
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