St Margaret, Cley-future-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 specifics resulted in some of the most splendid church architecture in Europe.
Almost every parish church in the land bears some evidence of this, but it is particularly evident in the centres of ability of all those moments: at Lavenham in Suffolk, where the fantastic wool merchants held court, at Salle and East Harling in Norfolk, in which fantastic landed family members competed to impact the crown, and below at Cley, at the time at the harbour mouth of Blakeney Haven, the excellent north Norfolk conurbation of ports, where the streets thronged with wealthy merchants and their personnel.
Right now, the harbour is shed to us, but you can nevertheless make out its shape if you stand in Wiveton churchyard and look again across to Cley, 50 % a mile off. At Blakeney alone, the quayside survives with some of its properties to assistance a reconstruction in the thoughts but Cley has absolutely nothing now besides its church and a handful of cottages, a village environmentally friendly and a windmill. Ironically, you would not even know that the sea was close.
Of the four churches of Blakeney Haven, St Margaret was the most significant, grandest and most costly. It is however all of these factors right now. It is replete with all people aspects we discover most interesting when we pay a visit to a medieval East Anglian church: a seven sacrament font, bench finishes depicting folks and mythical creatures, brasses, bosses, stalls and the most elaborate niches in the kingdom, a smattering of previous glass, and unforgettable tracery that, remaining Adorned alternatively than Perpendicular, is unfamiliar in East Anglia. We have explored elsewhere on my internet site, at Salle and Cawston, specifically why these churches have been crafted so significant and elaborate. Well, St Margaret is an additional exceptional testimony.
The setting is wonderful, on a light increase higher than the village green. The graveyard is scattered, quite a few of the stones 18th century, and not lined up in clinical rows by misguided 1970s lawn-mower fanatics. If you arrive in late spring the graveyard is uncut, complete of wild flowers 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, advanced. The large nave with its aisles and clerestory is all of a piece. The offset tower is relatively signify, and even though it appears probably it was supposed for rebuilding, the big and lovely west window suggests that it would have been in the very same put. The chancel is also curiously simple, and inevitably would have been replaced. Two transepts stick out to north and south, the southern a person roofless and glassless, that to the north totally ruinous.
The merchant de Vaux family have been accountable for rebuilding the church, and the new nave was constructed to the south of the initial nave, which was then demolished and changed with an aisle. You can nevertheless see its roofline on the east encounter of the tower. The grasp mason was William Ramsey, a person of the most significant in England the Ramsey family were responsible for the Palace of Westminster and pieces of Norwich Cathedral. Work started in the 1320s, and proceeded promptly until eventually the building was very well full by the mid-1340s. This is an early date for the finish rebuilding of an East Anglian church, and shows that below, in Blakeney Haven, the new income was early. It would not be for a hundred years that Suffolk and south Norfolk people have been in a situation to do the identical. Why was this? Partly, the wealth of the Blakeney Haven ports did not rely just on East Anglian fabric. But there was a different, more apocalyptic element.
Right before Ramsey could change his notice to the chancel and the trouble of that blessed tower, a new and terrifying pestilence reached England. For anybody dwelling in a port, health conditions introduced from overseas were an every day hazard that experienced to be balanced from full employment and options for wealth creation. Even so, this was a thing on a amazing scale, a strain of bubonic plague that arrived at the south coast ports in August 1348 and that by the dismal late winter months of 1349 had reached Norfolk. Probably 50 % the inhabitants died, although in the ports there appears to have been a larger survival price possibly there was a lot more immunity because of to former exposure. Nevertheless, Ramsey and his son each died, and the function of the ports was disrupted for a number of generations. The Victorians, relishing the gothic horror of the catastrophe, seemed back from their have cholera-plagued century and referred to as it the Black Death.
50 percent a century later on, trade, self-assurance, and a renewed obsession with the cult of the lifeless led to a lot more revenue getting lavished on St Margaret. This was the time that the mighty south porch was built, a Perpendicular fortress that guards, fairly uneasily, the Adorned entrance. The church was more furnished with a mighty rood display screen, elaborately carved woodwork, and glass and a 7 sacrament font meant to assert the official doctrine of the Catholic Church. By the early sixteenth century, Cley church was at a peak of its glory, but extremely rapidly those people moments were being to tumble.
The English Reformation introduced to an abrupt conclusion the need for bequests, and all do the job on building the constructing stopped. And, point out protestantism would sow the seeds that would aid England arise as an insular, capitalist country, switching designs of trade, and undertaking away with the need to have for Blakeney Haven, pushing Norfolk back again into the relief of a prolonged, agricultural slumber.
So, you take a wander around the outside the house of St Margaret, the window tracery a textual content e-book of the way English architecture made around the hundreds of years. The most lovely is that in the south transept, elegant lights that create to a cluster of extensive quatrefoils. This was competed on the eve of the Black Dying, and is almost certainly at the incredibly apex of English inventive endeavour. But I assume that it was hardly ever stuffed with glass. I can see no evidence that the transepts were done in time for their use in advance of the pestilence, or that there was at any time a need to have to use them after the recovery from it. And, then, of program, the Reformation intervened.
You step into the church by way of the south porch, with its flanking shields of the Holy Trinity and the Instruments of the passion. Over, in the vaulting, are bosses. A person shows an indignant female chasing a fox that has stolen her impressive cockerel. One more, demonstrates two devils beating the bare buttocks of a 3rd figure. There is also an Assumption of the Blessed Virgin.
Grand Perpendicular is so widespread in East Anglia that there is an unfamiliarity about the nave that is breathtaking, a feast for the senses. The west stop 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 high quality familiar from Perpendicular buildings. The smell is of age relatively than furniture polish, a creamy dampness that remembers former business enterprise alternatively than decay. The honeyed stone is also in some way foreign in this heartland of flint. It impacts the sound in a distinct way. The creating calls for a sure amount of money of awe that is not just because of to its measurement.
We arrived about an hour in advance of a wedding day was due to get started, and as we explored the setting up we observed preparations make, the pews begin to fill, the minister and choir start to robe, right until we felt we ended up intruding, and remaining just as the bride arrived. But though I was not wholly distracted from documenting the building, it was a reminder to me just how important weddings have grow to be to the Church of England, not just in phrases of the cash flow they generate, but as a very last bastion of the grounding of Religion in everyday people’s lives. They may well no more time have their children baptised, they may well no extended appear on a Sunday at all but marriage is the area that simple Christianity touches their life – that, and their funeral, of class, although increasingly persons are a lot more militantly atheist about death than they are about really like.
The seven sacrament font looks rather lonely in its clearing, and is not the most stunning of its type, even though the imagery is a minimal uncommon. The Past Rites, (NW) surface to exhibit the Priest lying on the bed on top rated of the dying man. Confession (NE) shows the Priest and confessing guy struggling with just about every other throughout a shriving bench. Confirmation (E) is the most powerful of all, since it appears to present a tonsured Priest fairly than a bishop blessing a team of persons that incorporate young children and infants. Mass (SW) is shown from driving, the Priest elevating the host although the acolytes on both facet kneel and hold tapers. The eighth and odd panel is dropped, but was probably the Crucifixion.
The most spectacularly un-East Anglian attribute of the church are the good graphic niches that line the arcades. They are enormous. Beneath the pedestals are depicted figures, which include musicians (a person plays a fife and drum), St George dispatching a dragon and a fearsome lion with a bone. There are traces of primary colour, and they are only magnificent.
A lot more homely are the bench ends, including a beautiful mermaid, many figures reading guides, and a poppyhead carved with a facial area sticking out its tongue, of a sort from time to time named Scandal, despite the fact that I have by no means been convinced by this. There are a lot of brasses, some in the north aisle and other individuals scattered all over the south doorway, like two figures in their shrouds, and one particular fragment depicting a group of 6 weepers. In the north aisle is a intriguing collection of donated and collected ephemera, some suggesting that in the the latest past this was a fairly Anglo-catholic spot, which include a stunning Russian Orthodox cross. I rushed close to using images whilst the church loaded with wedding attendees.
And so, it was time to go. I decided that I was amazed by this church, but that I failed to adore it. Searching close to at the splendour of William Ramsey’s work, at what survives of its elaborate furnishings, and sensing the echoes of the rich sacramental life it after hosted, I experienced a unexpected vision of apocalypse – not of the Black Demise so a lot, as of the finish of a way of everyday living changed by something so wholly unique in a few shorter years of Reformation. This church had been crafted for so considerably much more than congregational worship, but this was all it could now do. It was as if the Anglican neighborhood was camped out uneasily in its ruins, in the vastness of anything so wholly further than their creativity.’
Posted by Simon Knott on 2022-03-30 11:18:56
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