St Margaret, Cley-up coming-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 region at the time, or even that the collision of these two info resulted in some of the most splendid church architecture in Europe.
Pretty much each individual parish church in the land bears some proof of this, but it is specifically apparent in the centres of electricity of people occasions: at Lavenham in Suffolk, where the good wool retailers held courtroom, at Salle and East Harling in Norfolk, where by terrific landed households competed to influence the crown, and listed here at Cley, when at the harbour mouth of Blakeney Haven, the excellent north Norfolk conurbation of ports, exactly where the streets thronged with rich merchants and their workers.
These days, the harbour is missing to us, but you can continue to make out its condition if you stand in Wiveton churchyard and glimpse back throughout to Cley, 50 percent a mile off. At Blakeney itself, the quayside survives with some of its properties to assistance a reconstruction in the mind but Cley has practically nothing now other than its church and a few cottages, a village environmentally friendly and a windmill. Ironically, you wouldn’t even know that the sea was near.
Of the 4 church buildings of Blakeney Haven, St Margaret was the most significant, grandest and most highly-priced. It is still all of these factors currently. It is replete with all those things we come across most fascinating when we check out 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persons and mythical creatures, brasses, bosses, stalls and the most elaborate niches in the kingdom, a smattering of outdated glass, and unforgettable tracery that, becoming Adorned alternatively than Perpendicular, is unfamiliar in East Anglia. We have explored elsewhere on my internet site, at Salle and Cawston, precisely why these churches had been designed so big and elaborate. Very well, St Margaret is an additional extraordinary testimony.
The placing is attractive, on a light rise higher than the village environmentally friendly. The graveyard is scattered, many of the stones 18th century, and not lined up in medical rows by misguided 1970s lawn-mower lovers. If you occur in late spring the graveyard is uncut, full 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, intricate. The wide nave with its aisles and clerestory is all of a piece. The offset tower is rather indicate, and despite the fact that it appears most likely it was meant for rebuilding, the enormous and gorgeous west window implies that it would have been in the exact put. The chancel is also curiously easy, and at some point would have been replaced. Two transepts stick out to north and south, the southern a person roofless and glassless, that to the north entirely ruinous.
The merchant de Vaux family were liable for rebuilding the church, and the new nave was built to the south of the authentic 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 learn mason was William Ramsey, a single of the most significant in England the Ramsey loved ones ended up accountable for the Palace of Westminster and areas of Norwich Cathedral. Perform began in the 1320s, and proceeded speedily until eventually the creating was quite perfectly full by the mid-1340s. This is an early day for the total rebuilding of an East Anglian church, and demonstrates that here, in Blakeney Haven, the new income was early. It would not be for a hundred many years that Suffolk and south Norfolk households were in a place to do the same. Why was this? Partly, the prosperity of the Blakeney Haven ports did not depend just on East Anglian fabric. But there was yet another, a lot more apocalyptic element.
In advance of Ramsey could turn his interest to the chancel and the issue of that blessed tower, a new and frightening pestilence arrived at England. For any person dwelling in a port, ailments brought from overseas were an day-to-day hazard that had to be balanced against whole employment and options for wealth creation. Even so, this was one thing on a spectacular scale, a pressure of bubonic plague that reached the south coastline ports in August 1348 and that by the dismal late winter months of 1349 had attained Norfolk. Most likely fifty percent the populace died, although in the ports there would seem to have been a greater survival fee most likely there was additional immunity owing to former publicity. Even so, 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, looked back from their own cholera-plagued century and named it the Black Loss of life.
Fifty percent a century later on, trade, self-assurance, and a renewed obsession with the cult of the lifeless led to more cash getting lavished on St Margaret. This was the time that the mighty south porch was crafted, a Perpendicular fortress that guards, somewhat uneasily, the Adorned entrance. The church was further furnished with a mighty rood display, 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 really immediately those people times have been to tumble.
The English Reformation brought to an abrupt stop the will need for bequests, and all operate on building the developing stopped. And, state protestantism would sow the seeds that would assistance England emerge as an insular, capitalist nation, changing patterns of trade, and performing away with the will need for Blakeney Haven, pushing Norfolk again into the aid of a long, agricultural snooze.
So, you take a stroll all around the outside of St Margaret, the window tracery a text reserve of the way English architecture created more than the generations. The most wonderful is that in the south transept, sophisticated lights that establish to a cluster of large quatrefoils. This was competed on the eve of the Black Dying, and is probably at the quite apex of English inventive endeavour. But I believe that it was under no circumstances filled with glass. I can see no evidence that the transepts were accomplished in time for their use ahead of the pestilence, or that there was at any time a need to have to use them right after the recovery 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. Over, in the vaulting, are bosses. A person exhibits an angry lady chasing a fox that has stolen her outstanding cockerel. One more, reveals two devils beating the bare buttocks of a third 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 spectacular, a feast for the senses. The west stop of the church has been cleared, producing a cathedral-vastness, and the light, whilst not gloomy, does not have that white East Anglian good quality common from Perpendicular structures. The scent is of age instead than home furniture polish, a creamy dampness that recollects former business enterprise instead than decay. The honeyed stone is also in some way international in this heartland of flint. It impacts the seem in a various way. The making requires a particular total of awe that is not just owing to its dimension.
We arrived about an hour right before a marriage ceremony was due to start, and as we explored the building we noticed preparations create, the pews start to fill, the minister and choir start off to gown, until we felt we were intruding, and remaining just as the bride arrived. But when I was not wholly distracted from documenting the constructing, it was a reminder to me just how critical weddings have grow to be to the Church of England, not just in conditions of the revenue they make, but as a past bastion of the grounding of Religion in normal people’s lives. They might no for a longer time have their children baptised, they may possibly no longer appear on a Sunday at all but relationship is the location that simple Christianity touches their life – that, and their funeral, of course, though ever more men and women are extra militantly atheist about death than they are about adore.
The seven sacrament font seems to be fairly lonely in its clearing, and is not the most stunning of its kind, whilst the imagery is a minor strange. The Past Rites, (NW) show up to exhibit the Priest lying on the bed on top of the dying man. Confession (NE) shows the Priest and confessing male facing each other throughout a shriving bench. Affirmation (E) is the most powerful of all, because it seems to display a tonsured Priest fairly than a bishop blessing a group of people that contain little ones and infants. Mass (SW) is proven from guiding, the Priest elevating the host though the acolytes on either aspect kneel and hold tapers. The eighth and odd panel is shed, but was probably the Crucifixion.
The most spectacularly un-East Anglian aspect of the church are the fantastic image niches that line the arcades. They are huge. Beneath the pedestals are depicted figures, which includes musicians (a single performs a fife and drum), St George dispatching a dragon and a fearsome lion with a bone. There are traces of unique colour, and they are basically magnificent.
A lot more homely are the bench finishes, which include a attractive mermaid, several figures looking at publications, and a poppyhead carved with a experience sticking out its tongue, of a variety at times called Scandal, even though I have by no means been persuaded by this. There are lots of brasses, some in the north aisle and others scattered close to the south door, which includes two figures in their shrouds, and one fragment depicting a team of six weepers. In the north aisle is a fascinating collection of donated and gathered ephemera, some suggesting that in the new earlier this was a quite Anglo-catholic area, together with a gorgeous Russian Orthodox cross. I rushed about taking images although the church filled with wedding ceremony company.
And so, it was time to go. I determined 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 existence it once hosted, I had a sudden eyesight of apocalypse – not of the Black Loss of life so significantly, as of the close of a way of existence replaced by a thing so wholly unique in a several shorter a long time of Reformation. This church experienced been constructed for so substantially 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 outside of their creativity.’
Posted by Simon Knott on 2022-03-30 11:18:25
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