St Margaret, Cley-following-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 country was a devout Catholic country at the time, or even that the collision of these two facts resulted in some of the most splendid church architecture in Europe.
Nearly each and every parish church in the land bears some evidence of this, but it is specifically apparent in the centres of electrical power of those times: at Lavenham in Suffolk, in which the wonderful wool merchants held court docket, at Salle and East Harling in Norfolk, the place great landed people competed to affect the crown, and here at Cley, the moment at the harbour mouth of Blakeney Haven, the great north Norfolk conurbation of ports, where the streets thronged with rich merchants and their employees.
These days, the harbour is dropped to us, but you can continue to make out its form if you stand in Wiveton churchyard and appear again across to Cley, 50 percent a mile off. At Blakeney by itself, the quayside survives with some of its properties to assistance a reconstruction in the mind but Cley has nothing now except its church and a couple of cottages, a village eco-friendly and a windmill. Ironically, you would not even know that the sea was shut.
Of the four church buildings of Blakeney Haven, St Margaret was the greatest, grandest and most expensive. It is nonetheless all of these points today. It is replete with all those people components we discover most remarkable when we visit 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 old glass, and memorable tracery that, becoming Adorned relatively than Perpendicular, is unfamiliar in East Anglia. We have explored elsewhere on my web site, at Salle and Cawston, precisely why these churches ended up constructed so large and elaborate. Well, St Margaret is one more amazing testimony.
The environment is charming, on a mild rise higher than the village inexperienced. The graveyard is scattered, lots of of the stones 18th century, and not lined up in medical rows by misguided 1970s garden-mower lovers. If you appear in late spring the graveyard is uncut, whole 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 very first sight, elaborate. The huge nave with its aisles and clerestory is all of a piece. The offset tower is rather necessarily mean, and although it looks probable it was meant for rebuilding, the substantial and beautiful west window suggests that it would have been in the exact spot. The chancel is also curiously basic, and eventually would have been changed. Two transepts adhere out to north and south, the southern one particular roofless and glassless, that to the north entirely ruinous.
The service provider de Vaux family have been responsible for rebuilding the church, and the new nave was built to the south of the initial nave, which was then demolished and changed with an aisle. You can however see its roofline on the east deal with of the tower. The master mason was William Ramsey, 1 of the most considerable in England the Ramsey household were responsible for the Palace of Westminster and pieces of Norwich Cathedral. Perform started in the 1320s, and proceeded swiftly right up until the constructing was quite properly entire by the mid-1340s. This is an early date for the comprehensive rebuilding of an East Anglian church, and exhibits that right here, in Blakeney Haven, the new cash was early. It would not be for a hundred many years that Suffolk and south Norfolk family members were in a position to do the same. Why was this? Partly, the wealth of the Blakeney Haven ports did not count just on East Anglian cloth. But there was one more, extra apocalyptic variable.
In advance of Ramsey could transform his attention to the chancel and the challenge of that blessed tower, a new and scary pestilence achieved England. For everyone dwelling in a port, conditions introduced from abroad ended up an daily hazard that had to be balanced towards complete employment and prospects for prosperity creation. Even so, this was one thing on a spectacular scale, a strain of bubonic plague that arrived at the south coastline ports in August 1348 and that by the dismal late winter months of 1349 experienced achieved Norfolk. Possibly fifty percent the inhabitants died, although in the ports there seems to have been a larger survival charge probably there was much more immunity thanks to past publicity. On the other hand, Ramsey and his son both died, and the function of the ports was disrupted for several generations. The Victorians, relishing the gothic horror of the disaster, looked back from their personal cholera-plagued century and identified as it the Black Death.
Half a century later on, trade, self-confidence, and a renewed obsession with the cult of the useless led to much more dollars being lavished on St Margaret. This was the time that the mighty south porch was developed, a Perpendicular fortress that guards, relatively uneasily, the Decorated entrance. The church was more furnished with a mighty rood display, elaborately carved woodwork, and glass and a seven sacrament font intended 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 people situations had been to tumble.
The English Reformation introduced to an abrupt end the need for bequests, and all get the job done on creating the creating stopped. And, state protestantism would sow the seeds that would assistance England emerge as an insular, capitalist nation, switching patterns of trade, and accomplishing absent with the have to have for Blakeney Haven, pushing Norfolk again into the aid of a very long, agricultural rest.
So, you acquire a stroll all-around the outdoors of St Margaret, the window tracery a textual content ebook of the way English architecture created around the hundreds of years. The most gorgeous is that in the south transept, stylish lights that establish to a cluster of vast quatrefoils. This was competed on the eve of the Black Demise, and is almost certainly at the quite apex of English artistic endeavour. But I assume that it was by no means loaded with glass. I can see no evidence that the transepts have been completed in time for their use right before the pestilence, or that there was at any time a need to use them right after the restoration from it. And, then, of training course, the Reformation intervened.
You action into the church as a result of the south porch, with its flanking shields of the Holy Trinity and the Devices of the passion. Higher than, in the vaulting, are bosses. Just one shows an indignant female chasing a fox that has stolen her magnificent cockerel. An additional, demonstrates two devils beating the bare buttocks of a third figure. There is also an Assumption of the Blessed Virgin.
Grand Perpendicular is so popular in East Anglia that there is an unfamiliarity about the nave that is breathtaking, a feast for the senses. The west finish of the church has been cleared, making a cathedral-vastness, and the mild, whilst not gloomy, does not have that white East Anglian good quality common from Perpendicular properties. The smell is of age somewhat than household furniture polish, a creamy dampness that recalls former company alternatively than decay. The honeyed stone is also by some means international in this heartland of flint. It affects the seem in a different way. The constructing needs a sure amount of awe that is not just because of to its sizing.
We arrived about an hour before a wedding day was because of to begin, and as we explored the developing we saw preparations develop, the pews start to fill, the minister and choir commence to gown, till we felt we were being intruding, and left just as the bride arrived. But even though I was not completely distracted from documenting the setting up, it was a reminder to me just how important weddings have turn into to the Church of England, not just in phrases of the cash flow they generate, but as a final bastion of the grounding of Faith in regular people’s lives. They may well no longer have their small children baptised, they might no for a longer time appear on a Sunday at all but relationship is the spot that uncomplicated Christianity touches their life – that, and their funeral, of program, though ever more men and women are a lot more militantly atheist about loss of life than they are about adore.
The seven sacrament font appears to be like alternatively lonely in its clearing, and is not the most magnificent of its type, though the imagery is a minor strange. The Previous Rites, (NW) surface to clearly show the Priest lying on the mattress on major of the dying guy. Confession (NE) displays the Priest and confessing man going through every other throughout a shriving bench. Confirmation (E) is the most compelling of all, for the reason that it seems to exhibit a tonsured Priest instead than a bishop blessing a team of men and women that include things like youngsters and babies. Mass (SW) is shown from behind, the Priest elevating the host while the acolytes on possibly side kneel and hold tapers. The eighth and odd panel is dropped, but was almost certainly the Crucifixion.
The most spectacularly un-East Anglian element of the church are the fantastic picture niches that line the arcades. They are substantial. Beneath the pedestals are depicted figures, like musicians (1 plays a fife and drum), St George dispatching a dragon and a fearsome lion with a bone. There are traces of initial colour, and they are merely breathtaking.
Far more homely are the bench finishes, such as a wonderful mermaid, several figures looking at guides, and a poppyhead carved with a facial area sticking out its tongue, of a sort at times identified as Scandal, while I have under no circumstances been certain by this. There are lots of brasses, some in the north aisle and other individuals scattered all-around the south door, which include two figures in their shrouds, and a single fragment depicting a group of six weepers. In the north aisle is a intriguing selection of donated and gathered ephemera, some suggesting that in the modern earlier this was a fairly Anglo-catholic spot, like a beautiful Russian Orthodox cross. I rushed all around using photographs when the church stuffed with wedding ceremony guests.
And so, it was time to go. I determined that I was amazed by this church, but that I didn’t appreciate it. Wanting all over at the splendour of William Ramsey’s operate, at what survives of its elaborate furnishings, and sensing the echoes of the abundant sacramental daily life it when hosted, I had a sudden vision of apocalypse – not of the Black Loss of life so a great deal, as of the stop of a way of lifetime changed by a thing so wholly diverse in a handful of short decades of Reformation. This church had been constructed for so significantly a lot more 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 a little something so wholly over and above their creativity.’
Posted by Simon Knott on 2022-03-30 11:18:31
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