St George, Stowlangtoft, Suffolk
Offered that our parish church buildings almost with out exception underwent restorations in the 19th Century, it must be clear that when we enter a medieval church, we are encountering a Victorian vision of the medieval. Even when the real furnishings and fittings are medieval, the total piece is nevertheless a Victorian conception.
Inevitably, the dilemma occurs of what was there just before the restoration and what was not. The clear answer is that we should believe that very little is as it very first appears.
A prime example of a church that assumes a continuity that might not essentially be the fact is in this article in the flat fields in between Woolpit and Ixworth. This component of Suffolk can be somewhat bleak in winter season, but in summer season the churchyard listed here is verdant and golden, as beautiful a place as any in the county. The church is substantial, and yet unusually slender. It sits on a mound that has been reduce down on 1 side by the street. In the churchyard you can find the nicely-recognised memorial to the artwork critic Peter Fuller and his unborn son, killed in a car or truck crash in 1990.
In the churchyard wall there is what appears to be broken medieval window tracery, which is worthy of noticing, for hereby hangs a tale.
St George is a person of the fantastic Suffolk church buildings. Although it may possibly externally surface a minor significant, and is by no indicates as grand as Blythburgh, Lengthy Melford and the rest, it is a treasure home of the medieval inside of. Unusually for a church of its day, it was all rebuilt in 1 go, in the late 14th century, and the perpendicular home windows are not however total of the ‘walls of glass’ confidence that the subsequent century would see. The tracery appears to have been repaired, and possibly even renewed, which may well clarify the tracery in the churchyard wall. On the other hand, it does not take significantly to see that the tracery in the wall is not perpendicular at all, but adorned. So it may perhaps be that the damaged tracery is from the authentic church that the late 14th century church changed. But the wall alone just isn’t medieval, so the place had it been all those decades? Is it feasible that the existing window tracery is not medieval at all?
Stowlangtoft church featured in Simon Jenkins’ book England’s Thousand Most effective Church buildings, which sends a great deal of website visitors to its locked doorway, and could aid stave off the inescapable for a though, for there is no serious congregation in this article any extra and the church is moribund. Normal solutions are held across the fields at Pakenham, and St George is now only made use of on distinctive occasions. The crucial is kept across the street, where the incredibly great girl informed me in February 2018 that the church is now headed for redundancy. It looks likely that care of it will be conveyed into the hands of the Churches Conservation Believe in.
You stage in by the chancel doorway (the lock listed here is extremely awkward, but do persevere) and if you are something like me you will head straight down to the west conclusion exactly where you will find the font. Likethe window tracery, it asks some thoughts. Unusually, it characteristics a Saint on seven of the panels, Christ currently being on the westwards encounter. Mortlock dates it to the early 14th century, and the Saints it reveals are acquainted cults from that time: St Margaret, St Catherine, St Peter and St Paul, and considerably less generally St George. The cult of St George was at its top in the early a long time of the 14th century. Mortlock describes the font as mutilated, and it absolutely just isn’t seeking its finest. But I feel there is more likely on listed here than fulfills the eye. Fonts had been plastered in excess of in Elizabethan instances, and only aid that stood proud of the plaster was mutilated. These are all shallow reliefs, and I do not believe they have been mutilated at all. To my eye at least, this stonework seems weathered. I marvel if this font was eliminated from the church, most likely in the mid-17th century, and served an outside reason right until it was returned in the 19th century.
The story of this church in the 19th century is well-documented. In 1832, as section of his grand tour of Suffolk, David Davy visited, and was pleased to locate that the church was at previous going through fix. The chancel had been roofless, and the nave employed for expert services. A new Rectory was staying created. Who was the catalyst guiding all this? His title was Samuel Rickards, and he was Rector here for just about the middle forty a long time of the 19th century. Roy Tricker notes that he was a great close friend of John Henry Newman, the upcoming Cardinal, and they usually corresponded on the matter of the pre-Reformation purchasing of English churches. It is appealing to assume how, at this seminal moment, Rickards could possibly have educated the believed of the Oxford Motion. Unfortunately, when Newman grew to become a Catholic, Rickards broke off all correspondence with him.
All through the program of the 1840s and 1850s, Rickards remodeled Stowlangtoft church. He received the excellent Ipswich woodcarver Henry Ringham in to restore, replicate and complete the marvellous established of bench ends – Ringham did the same issue at Woolpit, a handful of miles away. Ringham’s perform is so fantastic that it is at times really hard for the inexperienced eye to detect it. However, as at Woolpit, Ringham only copied animals listed here, and the weirder things is all medieval, and in all probability dates from the rebuilding of the church. The glory of Stowlangtoft’s bench ends is partly the sheer amount – there are potentially 60 carvings – but also that there are a number of one of a kind topics.
The carvings look to be aspect of the exact group as Woolpit and Tostock – you will recognise the unicorn, the chained bear, the bull playing a harp, the chicken with a man’s head, from identical carvings in other places. And then ideally that very little alarm bell in your read should commence to go “Hmmmm…..” because some of the carvings listed here are obviously not from the same group. It is difficult to imagine that the mermaid and the owl, for illustration, are from the similar workshop, or even from the similar decade. The benches themselves are no clue, as it was prevalent practice in the 19th century to replace medieval bench ends on present day benches, or on medieval benches, or even on modern-day benches designed out of medieval timber (as happened at Blythburgh). Could it be that Samuel Rickards observed some of these bench finishes elsewhere? Could he have been the sort of human being to do a factor like that?
Nicely, sure he could. As Roy Tricker recollects, the medieval roof at the tractarian Thomas Mozley’s church at Cholderton in Wiltshire is East Anglian. Rickards obtained it right after acquiring it in storage in Ipswich docks. It presumably came from one of the Ipswich church buildings. In the ferment of the fantastic 19th century restoration of our English churches, there was loads of medieval junk lying around, a great deal of it going begging. But was Samuel Rickards the form of human being to counterfeit his church’s medieval inheritance?
Very well, of course he most likely was. The faux-medieval roundels in the windows of the nave are plainly not medieval at all, but were in truth the perform of the youthful Lucy Rickards, daughter of Samuel Rickards himself. Some are clearly to the youthful girl’s structure, and Pevsner notes that some others are copied from medieval manuscript illustrations in the British Museum, even though the Holy Kinship and Presentation in the Temple roundels at least are really near copies of the Flemish roundels of the exact topics in Nowton church on the other side of Bury St Edmunds.
Actually medieval is the extensive St Christopher wall-portray nonetheless discernible on the north wall. It was in all probability a person of the previous to be painted. The bench ends are medieval, of class, as is the fine rood-display dado, albeit repainted. There is even some medieval figure glass in the upper tracery of some of the home windows, which includes St Agnes keeping a lamb and four Previous Testomony prophets. The laughable stone pulpit is Rickard’s fee, and the do the job of William White. What can Rickards have been wondering of? But we stage through into the chancel, and abruptly the total issue moves up a gear. For right here are some issues that are genuinely exceptional.
In a county well-known for its woodwork, the furnishings of Stowlangtoft’s chancel are amazing, even awe-inspiring. Behind the rood screen dado is Suffolk’s most entire set of return stalls. Most hanging are the figures that sort finials to the stall finishes. They are individuals in the Mass, which include two Monks, two servers and two acolytes. The determine of the Priest at a prayer desk should be one of the most effective medieval photographs in Suffolk, and Mortlock believed the stalls the very best in England.
The benches that confront eastwards are misericords, and beneath them are wonderful factors: angels, lions and wodewoses, evangelistic symbols and crowned heads. A hawk captures a hare, a dragon sticks out its tongue. In between the seats are weird oriental faces.
Now, you know what I am likely to inquire upcoming. How a lot of this is from this church at first? It all seems medieval do the job, and there is no purpose to imagine it may well not have been moved somewhere else in the church when the chancel was open up to the things. What proof have we bought?
To start with, we must detect that the only other Suffolk church with this sort of a big quantity of medieval misericords of this top quality is just a mile away, at Norton. I you should not talk to you to see this as important, basically to detect it in passing. Secondly, I am no carpenter, but it does search to me as though two sets of furnishings have been cobbled alongside one another the stalls that back on to the display screen look to have been built-in into the greater structure of stalls and desks that entrance them and the north and south walls.
Nonetheless, if you appear intently at the figures of the two Deacons, you will see that they are bearing shields of the Ashfield and Peche family members. The Ashfield arms also appear on the rood display screen, and the Ashfields have been the main donors when the church was rebuilt in the 14th century. So on stability I am inclined to feel that the increased element of the stall structure was in this church initially from when it was rebuilt. And the misericords? Perfectly, I will not know. But I consider they have to be deemed as part of the very same established as individuals at Norton. In which situation they might have come from the exact church, which could have been this a person, but may perhaps not have been. Practically certainly, the stalls at Norton did not come from Norton church, and folklore has it that they have been at first in the quire of Bury Abbey.
Other remarkable issues in St George involve FE Howard’s wonderful war memorial in the previous north doorway, and in the reverse corner of the nave Hugh Easton’s unexpectedly lovely St George, which serves the very same intent. He is not an artist I ordinarily admire, but it is as superior as his operate at Elveden. Back up in the chancel is a pleasant painted pipe organ which was evidently exhibited at, and obtained from, the Fantastic Exhibition of 1851.
But St George at Stowlangtoft is, of class, most popular for the Flemish carvings that flank the instead major altarpiece. They were being given to the church by Henry Wilson of Stowlangtoft Hall, who allegedly found them in an Ixworth junk shop. They display photos from the crucifixion story, but are not Stations of the Cross as some guides propose. They day from the 1480s, and were being almost definitely the altarpiece of a French or Flemish monastery that was sacked through the French Revolution. The carvings have been the moment brightly painted, and piled up in a block rather than unfold out in a line. The niches, and crowning arches higher than them, are 19th century.
A person cold winter’s night in January 1977, a gang of thieves broke into this locked church and stole them. Absolutely nothing a lot more was noticed or read of them until finally 1982, when they have been found on display in an Amsterdam artwork gallery. Their journey experienced been a convoluted a single. Taken to Holland, they had been employed as safety for a personal loan which was defaulted on. The new proprietor was then burgled, and the carvings ended up fenced to an Amsterdam junk supplier. They were being bought from his shop, and taken to the museum, which promptly identified them as 15th century carvings. They put them on display, and a Dutch woman who experienced study about the Stowlangtoft theft recognised them.
The parish instituted authorized proceedings to get them back. An injunction was taken out to end the new proprietor eliminating them from the museum. The parish misplaced the case, leaving them with a monstrous authorized invoice, but the story has a pleased ending. A Dutch businessman negotiated their buy from the proprietor, paid out off the legal bills, and returned the carvings to Stowlangtoft. Apparently this was all at wide price tag, but the businessman gave the gift in many thanks for Britain’s liberation of Holland from the Nazis. No, thank you, sir.
These days, the carvings are mounted firmly in put and alarmed, so they would not be going walkabout once again. But a very little part of me wonders if they genuinely should really be right here at all. Positive, they are medieval, but they weren’t here at first, and they were not even in England initially. Would not it be greater if they ended up displayed somewhere safer, where by individuals could pay back to see them, and deliver some income for the upkeep of the church setting up? And then, whisper it, when St George is taken on by the CCT they may even be in a position to depart it open up.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2018-02-13 10:33:33
Tagged: , Stowlangtoft , Suffolk , east Anglia
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