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 country was a devout Catholic place at the time, or even that the collision of these two points resulted in some of the most splendid church architecture in Europe.
Just about every single parish church in the land bears some evidence of this, but it is specifically obvious in the centres of energy of those people periods: at Lavenham in Suffolk, wherever the great wool merchants held courtroom, at Salle and East Harling in Norfolk, the place wonderful landed households competed to affect the crown, and here at Cley, after at the harbour mouth of Blakeney Haven, the wonderful north Norfolk conurbation of ports, exactly where the streets thronged with rich retailers and their personnel.
Currently, the harbour is lost to us, but you can even now make out its condition if you stand in Wiveton churchyard and glimpse again across to Cley, half a mile off. At Blakeney alone, the quayside survives with some of its buildings to enable a reconstruction in the brain but Cley has very little now other than its church and a couple cottages, a village eco-friendly and a windmill. Ironically, you wouldn’t even know that the sea was close.
Of the 4 churches of Blakeney Haven, St Margaret was the major, grandest and most costly. It is still all of these points right now. It is replete with all those components we discover most enjoyable when we take a look at a medieval East Anglian church: a 7 sacrament font, bench finishes depicting persons and mythical creatures, brasses, bosses, stalls and the most elaborate niches in the kingdom, a smattering of outdated glass, and unforgettable tracery that, remaining Embellished alternatively than Perpendicular, is unfamiliar in East Anglia. We have explored in other places on my web site, at Salle and Cawston, precisely why these church buildings were being created so big and elaborate. Effectively, St Margaret is another remarkable testimony.
The environment is attractive, on a gentle increase above the village eco-friendly. The graveyard is scattered, several of the stones 18th century, and not lined up in clinical rows by misguided 1970s garden-mower fanatics. If you occur in late spring the graveyard is uncut, entire of wild flowers and tall grasses, but in this September early morning it was neat and trim, a velvet mount for the church.
What you see is, at 1st sight, sophisticated. The wide nave with its aisles and clerestory is all of a piece. The offset tower is instead indicate, and while it appears most likely it was intended for rebuilding, the big and lovely west window implies that it would have been in the very same place. The chancel is also curiously straightforward, and finally would have been replaced. Two transepts adhere out to north and south, the southern 1 roofless and glassless, that to the north completely ruinous.
The merchant de Vaux spouse and children have been accountable for rebuilding the church, and the new nave was constructed to the south of the original nave, which was then demolished and replaced with an aisle. You can continue to see its roofline on the east encounter of the tower. The grasp mason was William Ramsey, just one of the most sizeable in England the Ramsey spouse and children were liable for the Palace of Westminster and elements of Norwich Cathedral. Function commenced in the 1320s, and proceeded rapidly until the making was pretty well entire by the mid-1340s. This is an early date for the entire rebuilding of an East Anglian church, and reveals that below, in Blakeney Haven, the new income was early. It would not be for a hundred many years that Suffolk and south Norfolk family members have been in a posture 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 yet another, more apocalyptic factor.
Ahead of Ramsey could switch his awareness to the chancel and the issue of that blessed tower, a new and frightening pestilence arrived at England. For anybody dwelling in a port, diseases introduced from abroad had been an each day hazard that experienced to be well balanced in opposition to entire employment and alternatives for wealth development. Even so, this was something on a magnificent scale, a pressure of bubonic plague that attained the south coastline ports in August 1348 and that by the dismal late winter season months of 1349 experienced arrived at Norfolk. Possibly fifty percent the inhabitants died, whilst in the ports there would seem to have been a higher survival fee potentially there was much more immunity due to prior publicity. On the other hand, Ramsey and his son both of those died, and the do the job of the ports was disrupted for many generations. The Victorians, relishing the gothic horror of the disaster, appeared back from their have cholera-plagued century and referred to as it the Black Dying.
Half a century later on, trade, self-assurance, and a renewed obsession with the cult of the dead led to additional revenue staying lavished on St Margaret. This was the time that the mighty south porch was crafted, a Perpendicular fortress that guards, fairly uneasily, the Embellished entrance. The church was further furnished with a mighty rood screen, elaborately carved woodwork, and glass and a 7 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 very immediately all those moments were being to tumble.
The English Reformation introduced to an abrupt stop the need to have for bequests, and all perform on building the developing stopped. And, condition protestantism would sow the seeds that would support England arise as an insular, capitalist nation, changing styles of trade, and doing away with the want for Blakeney Haven, pushing Norfolk back into the reduction of a long, agricultural snooze.
So, you just take a walk all around the outdoors of St Margaret, the window tracery a text e-book of the way English architecture created around the generations. The most attractive is that in the south transept, elegant lights that construct to a cluster of huge quatrefoils. This was competed on the eve of the Black Loss of life, and is possibly at the incredibly apex of English inventive endeavour. But I feel that it was never ever stuffed with glass. I can see no evidence that the transepts were completed in time for their use prior to the pestilence, or that there was at any time a need to use them soon after the restoration from it. And, then, of class, the Reformation intervened.
You move into the church by way of the south porch, with its flanking shields of the Holy Trinity and the Instruments of the enthusiasm. Previously mentioned, in the vaulting, are bosses. A person exhibits an indignant lady chasing a fox that has stolen her wonderful cockerel. Another, demonstrates two devils beating the bare buttocks of a 3rd figure. There is also an Assumption of the Blessed Virgin.
Grand Perpendicular is so common in East Anglia that there is an unfamiliarity about the nave that is breathtaking, a feast for the senses. The west end of the church has been cleared, developing a cathedral-vastness, and the light-weight, even though not gloomy, does not have that white East Anglian top quality acquainted from Perpendicular buildings. The scent is of age rather than furniture polish, a creamy dampness that recollects previous business alternatively than decay. The honeyed stone is also in some way overseas in this heartland of flint. It affects the audio in a diverse way. The developing calls for a certain quantity of awe that is not just because of to its dimension.
We arrived about an hour ahead of a wedding was due to start, and as we explored the making we observed preparations construct, the pews commence to fill, the minister and choir start off to gown, till we felt we ended up intruding, and still left just as the bride arrived. But even though I was not completely distracted from documenting the developing, it was a reminder to me just how important weddings have become to the Church of England, not just in terms of the cash flow they generate, but as a last bastion of the grounding of Faith in regular people’s life. They may no longer have their little ones baptised, they might no more time come on a Sunday at all but marriage is the area that uncomplicated Christianity touches their lives – that, and their funeral, of class, even though more and more men and women are much more militantly atheist about death than they are about like.
The seven sacrament font seems to be rather lonely in its clearing, and is not the most breathtaking of its variety, while the imagery is a little abnormal. The Final Rites, (NW) seem to present the Priest lying on the bed on prime of the dying gentleman. Confession (NE) shows the Priest and confessing male experiencing each individual other throughout a shriving bench. Confirmation (E) is the most persuasive of all, since it appears to demonstrate a tonsured Priest rather than a bishop blessing a group of persons that incorporate youngsters and babies. Mass (SW) is proven from driving, the Priest elevating the host while the acolytes on either side kneel and keep tapers. The eighth and odd panel is lost, but was most likely the Crucifixion.
The most spectacularly un-East Anglian function of the church are the terrific picture niches that line the arcades. They are huge. 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 original colour, and they are simply breathtaking.
A lot more homely are the bench ends, which include a gorgeous mermaid, a number of figures looking at guides, and a poppyhead carved with a experience sticking out its tongue, of a variety occasionally named Scandal, although I have never ever been persuaded by this. There are numerous brasses, some in the north aisle and other people scattered close to the south doorway, which include two figures in their shrouds, and a person fragment depicting a team of 6 weepers. In the north aisle is a intriguing assortment of donated and gathered ephemera, some suggesting that in the latest earlier this was a pretty Anglo-catholic location, such as a stunning Russian Orthodox cross. I rushed all around taking images even though the church crammed with wedding day visitors.
And so, it was time to go. I resolved that I was amazed by this church, but that I did not enjoy it. Seeking about at the splendour of William Ramsey’s perform, 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 Death so substantially, as of the end of a way of lifestyle replaced by one thing so wholly distinctive in a couple of limited many years of Reformation. This church had been developed for so substantially far more than congregational worship, but this was all it could now do. It was as if the Anglican local community was camped out uneasily in its ruins, in the vastness of a little something so wholly over and above their imagination.’
Posted by Simon Knott on 2022-03-30 11:18:27
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