Bures is a great previous riverside village, a city just about, partly in Suffolk and partly in Essex. The very same was once correct of nearby Sudbury, but the Ballingdon district there was drawn into Suffolk by boundary alterations in the 1950s. Custom survives listed here, and this is continue to a break up city. The Essex aspect is referred to as Bures Hamlet, but is now the larger sized element, with a railway station and housing estates.
The River Stour is the county border, and it flows not much from the western edge of the churchyard. The Suffolk side models by itself Bures St Mary, although I am explained to that this church was not dedicated to St Mary until the 19th century Anglican revival, when just one of the success of the Oxford Movement was a renewed fascination in church dedications. Lots of of these ended up restored by well-indicating antiquarians sorting by the historic records of the Diocese of Norwich, and the confusion arose simply because of a now-vanished chapel in the churchyard focused to the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin. In point, the dedication of this church in medieval occasions was possibly to the feast of All Saints.
The north aspect of the church faces the street, though you can enter the church through possibly the north or the south porches. Both are pretty. The pink brick early 16th century south porch is stately and grand, a holy water stoup with supporting figures, and a wide open place inside of suited for the conduct of parish small business. There is a fearsome exterior headstop very low on the west side, which should certainly be older than the porch – 13th century, I really should imagine. Both the Tudors reused it, or the Victorians positioned it below through their restoration.
The other putting function of the exterior is the pink brick massing of the Waldegrave chantry on the south side of the chancel, its east window considerably grander than that of the chancel itself. Higher than the porches rises Richard de Waldegrave’s tower of the late 14th century. However, the foundation of the tower is a survival of an before one, and on its southern aspect is a curious tomb recess, now empty.
St Mary is a quintessential Anglican church, its 19th and 20th century reorderings normal of thousands of huge, prosperous buildings. But there are strange things in this church, all truly worth likely to see. If you look up, you will see that the ceiling is composed of flat, picket patterns, with present day lighting units set into them. Mortlock credits the woodwork to Ewan Christian, who carried out the 19th century restoration. The lights system is from the 1990s. The arcades are lit from beneath, creating the outcome of an undercroft.
In the sanctuary and to the north of the altar, 1 of the Waldegrave tombs sits grandly beside the significant camp Victoriana. It has been instead battered by the fortunes of history its brass has extensive gone, but the grand angel corbels that supported its also-vanished picket canopy endure. It is to Richard de Waldegrave, who developed the tower, and it was applied as an Easter sepulchre. Wodewoses, East Anglia’s wild gentlemen of the woods, the corners.
And then, to the south of the chancel is the Waldegrave chantry. A tomb in the south east corner, really a cobbling alongside one another of two independent Waldegrave tombs, has misplaced its brasses, but the standing memorial to the west is additional full. Along the front, the kids kneel in prayer. Their legs are curiously swirly, and a person recently explained to me that they glance as if they have been extruded out of a cake decorating set. The memorial remembers a William Waldegrave who died in the early 17th century, and the far more you glimpse at it the odder it gets. For instance, despite the fact that the 10 weepers are in their common placement, there are no effigies of the remembered dead. Even odder, the memorial inscription is on the back again of the tomb, and ordinarily out of sight. This memorial is curiously awkwardly positioned, and feels relatively in the way, until eventually you try to remember that for a few hundred yrs right after the Reformation the liturgy experienced no want for gangways for processions, or for views of altars. The tomb was possibly placed intentionally so.
The Waldegraves had been not well-liked people in this parish, evidently. At the time of the Anglican reformers in the 1540s, there was a basic uprising listed here and the destruction in the church was so significant that the churchwardens had been punished. A hundred years afterwards, the puritans meted out their fundamentalist justice to the Waldegrave kids, eliminating their hands. And nonetheless, this relatively unattractive tomb nonetheless sits listed here, and who remembers the puritans now?
The site of the tomb is potentially a pity, simply because the eastward check out in the chapel is in any other case its triumph. The 5 gentle window consists of a contemporary glass memorial to the Waldegraves, such as the Catholic inscription that, of our charity, we should pray for their souls. The Sarum display screen backing the altar beneath is really successful.
Heading again into the human body of the church, a wood effigy of a knight rests in peace on a north aisle window recess, which is certainly not its original place. It dates from about 1330, and is manufactured of chestnut. No a single definitely is aware who he is, despite the fact that some textbooks point out an individual termed Richard de Cornard. The lion underneath his ft has a somewhat unhappy expression, I feel. Suffolk’s only other wood medieval effigies are at Boxted and Heveningham. Mortlock suggests that the survival of his defend is notable and unusual.This knight effigy could or may well not have appear from Bures church originally, and there is no way of telling now.
The most unconventional element of St Mary is something you would not notice, or even think to glance for except you knew it was there. This is a unusual little octagonal section that juts out about 10 ft up on the jap facial area of the south facet of the chancel arch. It is, of all points, a piscina. What is it doing up there? We need to have to consider the rood monitor, rood beam and rood loft, and all the liturgical paraphernalia of the pre-Reformation church. The rood loft here had an altar on it, and this piscina served the altar. Why is it so exceptional? Merely, this chancel arch was developed with a drain inside of it. Most rood loft altars need to have managed with a takeaway bowl. An extraordinary point, in quite a few techniques.
I am often aware together the River Stour of how civilised the south of Suffolk would seem, and how wild Essex appears to be like past it, as if the 21st century hadn’t fairly manufactured it however together the narrow lanes from County Corridor at Chelmsford. North Essex is great cycling and church-discovering place, but individuals appear to be to know the Suffolk aspect best. In the corner of the churchyard is a parish war memorial which is abnormal, and possibly exclusive. It remembers The gentlemen of Bures St Mary and Bures Hamlet who gave their lives for King and Country in the Terrific War, which of training course is to say the missing boys in two different counties.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2019-08-10 09:34:30
Tagged: , bures , suffolk , east anglia
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