St Margaret, Cley-upcoming-the-Sea, Norfolk
In 2004 I wrote: ‘It is repetitious to notice that East Anglia was the industrial heartland of late medieval England, or that this country was a devout Catholic nation at the time, or even that the collision of these two info resulted in some of the most splendid church architecture in Europe.
Almost just about every parish church in the land bears some evidence of this, but it is particularly apparent in the centres of ability of those people occasions: at Lavenham in Suffolk, exactly where the fantastic wool retailers held courtroom, at Salle and East Harling in Norfolk, where excellent landed family members competed to influence the crown, and here at Cley, when at the harbour mouth of Blakeney Haven, the great north Norfolk conurbation of ports, exactly where the streets thronged with wealthy merchants and their employees.
These days, the harbour is dropped to us, but you can even now make out its shape if you stand in Wiveton churchyard and glimpse back again across to Cley, fifty percent a mile off. At Blakeney itself, the quayside survives with some of its buildings to assistance a reconstruction in the intellect but Cley has nothing at all now besides its church and a handful of cottages, a village green and a windmill. Ironically, you wouldn’t even know that the sea was near.
Of the four churches of Blakeney Haven, St Margaret was the largest, grandest and most highly-priced. It is continue to all of these items these days. It is replete with all these components we discover most fascinating when we visit a medieval East Anglian church: a seven sacrament font, bench ends depicting people today and mythical creatures, brasses, bosses, stalls and the most elaborate niches in the kingdom, a smattering of previous glass, and unforgettable tracery that, getting Adorned alternatively than Perpendicular, is unfamiliar in East Anglia. We have explored somewhere else on my website, at Salle and Cawston, precisely why these church buildings had been created so massive and elaborate. Well, St Margaret is a different remarkable testimony.
The environment is wonderful, on a light rise over the village environmentally friendly. The graveyard is scattered, lots of of the stones 18th century, and not lined up in medical rows by misguided 1970s lawn-mower enthusiasts. If you occur in late spring the graveyard is uncut, complete 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, elaborate. The wide nave with its aisles and clerestory is all of a piece. The offset tower is somewhat signify, and though it appears very likely it was meant for rebuilding, the big and lovely west window suggests that it would have been in the similar spot. The chancel is also curiously straightforward, and eventually would have been replaced. Two transepts adhere out to north and south, the southern 1 roofless and glassless, that to the north totally ruinous.
The service provider de Vaux spouse and children were dependable for rebuilding the church, and the new nave was created to the south of the primary nave, which was then demolished and replaced with an aisle. You can even now see its roofline on the east deal with of the tower. The grasp mason was William Ramsey, 1 of the most considerable in England the Ramsey loved ones were dependable for the Palace of Westminster and areas of Norwich Cathedral. Function started in the 1320s, and proceeded rapidly till the developing was pretty very well total by the mid-1340s. This is an early date for the total rebuilding of an East Anglian church, and reveals that right here, in Blakeney Haven, the new money was early. It would not be for a hundred a long time that Suffolk and south Norfolk people had been in a situation to do the exact. Why was this? Partly, the wealth of the Blakeney Haven ports did not count just on East Anglian fabric. But there was one more, far more apocalyptic component.
Before Ramsey could switch his interest to the chancel and the difficulty of that blessed tower, a new and horrifying pestilence reached England. For any individual dwelling in a port, disorders brought from overseas were being an everyday hazard that had to be balanced against complete employment and prospects for wealth generation. Even so, this was a thing on a breathtaking scale, a strain of bubonic plague that reached the south coastline ports in August 1348 and that by the dismal late winter season months of 1349 had reached Norfolk. Maybe half the population died, while in the ports there appears to have been a increased survival amount maybe there was far more immunity due to former publicity. On the other hand, Ramsey and his son equally died, and the get the job done of the ports was disrupted for numerous generations. The Victorians, relishing the gothic horror of the disaster, seemed back again from their individual cholera-plagued century and termed it the Black Death.
Half a century afterwards, trade, assurance, and a renewed obsession with the cult of the lifeless led to extra funds being lavished on St Margaret. This was the time that the mighty south porch was crafted, a Perpendicular fortress that guards, relatively uneasily, the Decorated entrance. The church was further more furnished with a mighty rood screen, elaborately carved woodwork, and glass and a 7 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 pretty promptly people times ended up to tumble.
The English Reformation introduced to an abrupt stop the need to have for bequests, and all operate on developing the making stopped. And, point out protestantism would sow the seeds that would assistance England arise as an insular, capitalist nation, changing styles of trade, and executing absent with the require for Blakeney Haven, pushing Norfolk back again into the aid of a extended, agricultural sleep.
So, you consider a walk all around the exterior of St Margaret, the window tracery a textual content e book of the way English architecture produced in excess of the generations. The most wonderful is that in the south transept, exquisite lights that develop to a cluster of extensive quatrefoils. This was competed on the eve of the Black Loss of life, and is most likely at the extremely apex of English inventive endeavour. But I think that it was hardly ever filled with glass. I can see no proof that the transepts had been accomplished in time for their use before the pestilence, or that there was at any time a need to have to use them just after the recovery from it. And, then, of training course, the Reformation intervened.
You stage into the church by the south porch, with its flanking shields of the Holy Trinity and the Instruments of the enthusiasm. Earlier mentioned, in the vaulting, are bosses. A person demonstrates an angry girl chasing a fox that has stolen her wonderful cockerel. One more, displays two devils beating the bare buttocks of a 3rd determine. 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 conclude of the church has been cleared, producing a cathedral-vastness, and the gentle, while not gloomy, does not have that white East Anglian top quality common from Perpendicular structures. The smell is of age rather than home furnishings polish, a creamy dampness that remembers former enterprise fairly than decay. The honeyed stone is also by some means foreign in this heartland of flint. It has an effect on the seem in a unique way. The making needs a specific total of awe that is not just thanks to its sizing.
We arrived about an hour ahead of a wedding ceremony was because of to start off, and as we explored the building we saw preparations build, the pews start off to fill, the minister and choir start out to robe, right until we felt we had been intruding, and left just as the bride arrived. But although I was not absolutely distracted from documenting the building, it was a reminder to me just how essential weddings have come to be to the Church of England, not just in phrases of the profits they create, but as a last bastion of the grounding of Religion in everyday people’s life. They may perhaps no more time have their kids baptised, they may no lengthier come on a Sunday at all but relationship is the place that simple Christianity touches their life – that, and their funeral, of study course, even though more and more people are more militantly atheist about loss of life than they are about love.
The 7 sacrament font seems rather lonely in its clearing, and is not the most stunning of its sort, while the imagery is a very little abnormal. The Last Rites, (NW) surface to present the Priest lying on the bed on prime of the dying guy. Confession (NE) exhibits the Priest and confessing gentleman going through just about every other throughout a shriving bench. Affirmation (E) is the most compelling of all, since it seems to exhibit a tonsured Priest relatively than a bishop blessing a team of persons that incorporate small children and toddlers. Mass (SW) is demonstrated from driving, the Priest elevating the host even though the acolytes on either aspect kneel and keep tapers. The eighth and odd panel is dropped, but was almost certainly the Crucifixion.
The most spectacularly un-East Anglian feature of the church are the excellent image niches that line the arcades. They are big. Beneath the pedestals are depicted figures, which include musicians (one 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 just spectacular.
A lot more homely are the bench ends, which include a lovely mermaid, several figures reading books, and a poppyhead carved with a face sticking out its tongue, of a sort sometimes called Scandal, though I have by no means been persuaded by this. There are numerous brasses, some in the north aisle and many others scattered all around the south door, like two figures in their shrouds, and just one fragment depicting a team of six weepers. In the north aisle is a intriguing collection of donated and collected ephemera, some suggesting that in the recent earlier this was a quite Anglo-catholic location, which include a beautiful Russian Orthodox cross. I rushed all over taking photographs while the church stuffed with marriage ceremony attendees.
And so, it was time to go. I decided that I was amazed by this church, but that I failed to appreciate it. Wanting about at the splendour of William Ramsey’s operate, at what survives of its elaborate furnishings, and sensing the echoes of the abundant sacramental life it as soon as hosted, I had a unexpected eyesight of apocalypse – not of the Black Death so a great deal, as of the conclude of a way of lifestyle replaced by a little something so wholly various in a couple brief decades of Reformation. This church experienced been designed for so considerably 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 outside of their creativeness.’
Posted by Simon Knott on 2022-03-30 11:18:27
Tagged:
#furnishings #Do it yourself #woodwork #woodworking #freedownload#woodworkingprojects #woodsmith ,wood craft, wood planer, great woodworking, picket chairs, wood operating applications, well known woodworking, woodworking guides, woodworking workbench plans