St Margaret, Cley-subsequent-the-Sea, Norfolk
In 2004 I wrote: ‘It is repetitious to observe that East Anglia was the industrial heartland of late medieval England, or that this nation was a devout Catholic nation at the time, or even that the collision of these two details resulted in some of the most splendid church architecture in Europe.
Virtually every parish church in the land bears some proof of this, but it is specially apparent in the centres of electrical power of all those situations: at Lavenham in Suffolk, where by the excellent wool merchants held court, at Salle and East Harling in Norfolk, in which terrific landed family members competed to affect the crown, and below at Cley, as soon as at the harbour mouth of Blakeney Haven, the great north Norfolk conurbation of ports, where by the streets thronged with rich retailers and their workers.
Today, the harbour is shed to us, but you can even now make out its form if you stand in Wiveton churchyard and seem back across to Cley, 50 percent a mile off. At Blakeney alone, the quayside survives with some of its properties to aid a reconstruction in the brain but Cley has very little now besides its church and a few cottages, a village eco-friendly and a windmill. Ironically, you wouldn’t even know that the sea was shut.
Of the four churches of Blakeney Haven, St Margaret was the biggest, grandest and most costly. It is however all of these items these days. It is replete with all people aspects we uncover most exciting when we pay a visit to a medieval East Anglian church: a seven sacrament font, bench finishes depicting people and mythical creatures, brasses, bosses, stalls and the most elaborate niches in the kingdom, a smattering of aged glass, and memorable tracery that, being Adorned alternatively than Perpendicular, is unfamiliar in East Anglia. We have explored somewhere else on my internet site, at Salle and Cawston, exactly why these churches were crafted so significant and elaborate. Properly, St Margaret is a different remarkable testimony.
The location is pretty, on a mild increase earlier mentioned the village inexperienced. The graveyard is scattered, quite a few of the stones 18th century, and not lined up in medical rows by misguided 1970s lawn-mower lovers. If you appear in late spring the graveyard is uncut, entire of wild bouquets and tall grasses, but in this September morning it was neat and trim, a velvet mount for the church.
What you see is, at first sight, complex. The large nave with its aisles and clerestory is all of a piece. The offset tower is rather indicate, and though it appears to be most likely it was supposed for rebuilding, the large and beautiful west window implies that it would have been in the same spot. The chancel is also curiously basic, and at some point would have been replaced. Two transepts stick out to north and south, the southern a single roofless and glassless, that to the north solely ruinous.
The merchant de Vaux loved ones were being dependable for rebuilding the church, and the new nave was created to the south of the unique nave, which was then demolished and changed with an aisle. You can even now see its roofline on the east deal with of the tower. The learn mason was William Ramsey, one particular of the most considerable in England the Ramsey family members were accountable for the Palace of Westminster and areas of Norwich Cathedral. Operate began in the 1320s, and proceeded promptly until the setting up was really properly finish by the mid-1340s. This is an early date for the complete rebuilding of an East Anglian church, and exhibits that here, in Blakeney Haven, the new funds was early. It would not be for a hundred decades that Suffolk and south Norfolk families have been in a place to do the similar. Why was this? Partly, the wealth of the Blakeney Haven ports did not count just on East Anglian cloth. But there was an additional, a lot more apocalyptic aspect.
In advance of Ramsey could change his consideration to the chancel and the trouble of that blessed tower, a new and frightening pestilence attained England. For any one living in a port, conditions brought from overseas have been an every day hazard that experienced to be balanced towards whole employment and chances for prosperity development. Even so, this was one thing on a magnificent scale, a strain of bubonic plague that achieved the south coast ports in August 1348 and that by the dismal late winter months of 1349 had attained Norfolk. Most likely 50 % the inhabitants died, despite the fact that in the ports there appears to have been a greater survival amount perhaps there was additional immunity owing to preceding publicity. On the other hand, Ramsey and his son the two died, and the perform of the ports was disrupted for numerous generations. The Victorians, relishing the gothic horror of the disaster, looked again from their individual cholera-plagued century and termed it the Black Demise.
Half a century later, trade, self-confidence, and a renewed obsession with the cult of the lifeless led to far more revenue being lavished on St Margaret. This was the time that the mighty south porch was designed, a Perpendicular fortress that guards, alternatively uneasily, the Decorated entrance. The church was more furnished with a mighty rood screen, elaborately carved woodwork, and glass and a seven sacrament font supposed to assert the official doctrine of the Catholic Church. By the early sixteenth century, Cley church was at a peak of its glory, but incredibly speedily all those instances ended up to tumble.
The English Reformation brought to an abrupt finish the require for bequests, and all work on acquiring the setting up stopped. And, condition protestantism would sow the seeds that would help England emerge as an insular, capitalist nation, altering designs of trade, and carrying out absent with the have to have for Blakeney Haven, pushing Norfolk back into the relief of a prolonged, agricultural snooze.
So, you choose a walk about the outdoors of St Margaret, the window tracery a text reserve of the way English architecture formulated more than the generations. The most gorgeous is that in the south transept, tasteful lights that establish to a cluster of huge quatrefoils. This was competed on the eve of the Black Dying, and is probably at the really apex of English inventive endeavour. But I think that it was in no way loaded with glass. I can see no proof that the transepts had been finished in time for their use prior to the pestilence, or that there was ever a require to use them immediately after the restoration from it. And, then, of program, the Reformation intervened.
You action into the church through the south porch, with its flanking shields of the Holy Trinity and the Devices of the enthusiasm. Higher than, in the vaulting, are bosses. One particular exhibits an indignant lady chasing a fox that has stolen her wonderful cockerel. A different, demonstrates two devils beating the bare buttocks of a 3rd figure. There is also an Assumption of the Blessed Virgin.
Grand Perpendicular is so prevalent in East Anglia that there is an unfamiliarity about the nave that is amazing, a feast for the senses. The west close of the church has been cleared, creating a cathedral-vastness, and the light, whilst not gloomy, does not have that white East Anglian quality familiar from Perpendicular structures. The odor is of age instead than home furniture polish, a creamy dampness that recollects former company relatively than decay. The honeyed stone is also by some means overseas in this heartland of flint. It impacts the seem in a various way. The creating requires a selected sum of awe that is not just thanks to its sizing.
We arrived about an hour before a wedding was because of to start out, and as we explored the building we noticed preparations construct, the pews get started to fill, the minister and choir commence to gown, until finally we felt we had been intruding, and remaining just as the bride arrived. But though I was not completely distracted from documenting the setting up, it was a reminder to me just how important weddings have develop into to the Church of England, not just in phrases of the cash flow they make, but as a final bastion of the grounding of Faith in everyday people’s life. They could no extended have their children baptised, they may perhaps no extended arrive on a Sunday at all but marriage is the position that straightforward Christianity touches their life – that, and their funeral, of system, though ever more persons are far more militantly atheist about demise than they are about appreciate.
The seven sacrament font seems fairly lonely in its clearing, and is not the most magnificent of its variety, although the imagery is a minimal unusual. The Past Rites, (NW) seem to display the Priest lying on the bed on prime of the dying guy. Confession (NE) demonstrates the Priest and confessing man facing each individual other throughout a shriving bench. Affirmation (E) is the most powerful of all, because it appears to show a tonsured Priest somewhat than a bishop blessing a group of people that include kids and infants. Mass (SW) is revealed from at the rear of, the Priest elevating the host when the acolytes on possibly facet kneel and maintain tapers. The eighth and odd panel is missing, but was likely the Crucifixion.
The most spectacularly un-East Anglian attribute of the church are the terrific impression niches that line the arcades. They are large. Beneath the pedestals are depicted figures, which include musicians (1 performs a fife and drum), St George dispatching a dragon and a fearsome lion with a bone. There are traces of original color, and they are simply just impressive.
Additional homely are the bench finishes, including a beautiful mermaid, a number of figures looking through books, and a poppyhead carved with a deal with sticking out its tongue, of a variety often called Scandal, whilst I have by no means been persuaded by this. There are lots of brasses, some in the north aisle and other people scattered all-around the south doorway, which includes two figures in their shrouds, and a single fragment depicting a team of 6 weepers. In the north aisle is a interesting selection of donated and gathered ephemera, some suggesting that in the latest previous this was a pretty Anglo-catholic area, such as a stunning Russian Orthodox cross. I rushed all over using images when the church loaded with wedding ceremony visitors.
And so, it was time to go. I made a decision that I was impressed by this church, but that I didn’t love it. Wanting all-around at the splendour of William Ramsey’s work, at what survives of its elaborate furnishings, and sensing the echoes of the loaded sacramental existence it once hosted, I experienced a unexpected eyesight of apocalypse – not of the Black Demise so considerably, as of the finish of a way of existence replaced by a little something so wholly different in a several brief years of Reformation. This church had been designed for so a lot extra than congregational worship, but this was all it could now do. It was as if the Anglican group was camped out uneasily in its ruins, in the vastness of something so wholly further than their creativeness.’
Posted by Simon Knott on 2022-03-30 11:18:35
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