St Margaret, Cley-subsequent-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 nation at the time, or even that the collision of these two facts resulted in some of the most splendid church architecture in Europe.
Nearly each and every parish church in the land bears some proof of this, but it is specially evident in the centres of power of these situations: at Lavenham in Suffolk, where the good wool merchants held courtroom, at Salle and East Harling in Norfolk, the place excellent landed families competed to affect the crown, and right here at Cley, as soon as at the harbour mouth of Blakeney Haven, the great north Norfolk conurbation of ports, where by the streets thronged with rich merchants and their employees.
Right now, the harbour is missing to us, but you can nevertheless make out its shape if you stand in Wiveton churchyard and glimpse back again across to Cley, half a mile off. At Blakeney alone, the quayside survives with some of its properties to support a reconstruction in the thoughts but Cley has absolutely nothing now except its church and a handful of cottages, a village eco-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 expensive. It is still all of these factors these days. It is replete with all all those things we find most enjoyable when we take a look at 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 aged glass, and unforgettable tracery that, becoming Decorated rather than Perpendicular, is unfamiliar in East Anglia. We have explored elsewhere on my internet site, at Salle and Cawston, accurately why these church buildings were being constructed so large and elaborate. Perfectly, St Margaret is an additional outstanding testimony.
The environment is charming, on a mild increase previously mentioned the village inexperienced. The graveyard is scattered, several of the stones 18th century, and not lined up in medical rows by misguided 1970s lawn-mower lovers. If you come in late spring the graveyard is uncut, entire 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, sophisticated. The wide nave with its aisles and clerestory is all of a piece. The offset tower is instead signify, and even though it appears to be probably it was meant for rebuilding, the substantial and gorgeous west window implies that it would have been in the exact put. The chancel is also curiously basic, and eventually would have been changed. Two transepts stick out to north and south, the southern 1 roofless and glassless, that to the north totally ruinous.
The merchant de Vaux household had been dependable for rebuilding the church, and the new nave was created to the south of the initial nave, which was then demolished and replaced with an aisle. You can nonetheless see its roofline on the east face of the tower. The learn mason was William Ramsey, a single of the most significant in England the Ramsey spouse and children had been liable for the Palace of Westminster and elements of Norwich Cathedral. Work began in the 1320s, and proceeded swiftly until finally the constructing was quite well total by the mid-1340s. This is an early day for the comprehensive rebuilding of an East Anglian church, and shows that right here, in Blakeney Haven, the new revenue was early. It would not be for a hundred years that Suffolk and south Norfolk family members have been in a posture to do the exact. Why was this? Partly, the prosperity of the Blakeney Haven ports did not depend just on East Anglian fabric. But there was a further, a lot more apocalyptic variable.
Right before Ramsey could flip his interest to the chancel and the problem of that blessed tower, a new and scary pestilence reached England. For anybody residing in a port, diseases introduced from overseas ended up an each day hazard that had to be balanced against comprehensive employment and alternatives for prosperity creation. Even so, this was one thing on a magnificent scale, a pressure of bubonic plague that reached the south coastline ports in August 1348 and that by the dismal late winter season months of 1349 experienced attained Norfolk. Possibly 50 % the population died, though in the ports there seems to have been a larger survival amount perhaps there was extra immunity due to earlier publicity. Having said that, Ramsey and his son each died, and the operate of the ports was disrupted for various generations. The Victorians, relishing the gothic horror of the disaster, seemed again from their very own cholera-plagued century and termed it the Black Dying.
Half a century later on, trade, self confidence, and a renewed obsession with the cult of the lifeless led to much more funds getting lavished on St Margaret. This was the time that the mighty south porch was constructed, a Perpendicular fortress that guards, fairly uneasily, the Embellished entrance. The church was additional furnished with a mighty rood monitor, elaborately carved woodwork, and glass and a 7 sacrament font meant to assert the formal doctrine of the Catholic Church. By the early sixteenth century, Cley church was at a peak of its glory, but incredibly speedily these situations ended up to tumble.
The English Reformation introduced to an abrupt stop the require for bequests, and all get the job done on creating the developing stopped. And, point out protestantism would sow the seeds that would assist England emerge as an insular, capitalist nation, transforming styles of trade, and carrying out away with the have to have for Blakeney Haven, pushing Norfolk back again into the relief of a prolonged, agricultural slumber.
So, you choose a wander all over the outside the house of St Margaret, the window tracery a textual content e book of the way English architecture designed around the hundreds of years. The most wonderful is that in the south transept, sophisticated lights that make to a cluster of wide quatrefoils. This was competed on the eve of the Black Demise, and is likely at the pretty apex of English inventive endeavour. But I imagine that it was never crammed with glass. I can see no proof that the transepts ended up accomplished in time for their use ahead of the pestilence, or that there was ever a need to use them right after the restoration from it. And, then, of class, the Reformation intervened.
You action into the church by way of the south porch, with its flanking shields of the Holy Trinity and the Devices of the enthusiasm. Earlier mentioned, in the vaulting, are bosses. One demonstrates an offended female chasing a fox that has stolen her superb cockerel. A different, reveals two devils beating the bare buttocks of a third determine. There is also an Assumption of the Blessed Virgin.
Grand Perpendicular is so prevalent in East Anglia that there is an unfamiliarity about the nave that is spectacular, a feast for the senses. The west conclusion of the church has been cleared, generating a cathedral-vastness, and the gentle, although not gloomy, does not have that white East Anglian good quality common from Perpendicular properties. The smell is of age somewhat than home furniture polish, a creamy dampness that recollects former enterprise rather than decay. The honeyed stone is also someway overseas in this heartland of flint. It impacts the sound in a distinctive way. The making demands a particular volume of awe that is not just because of to its sizing.
We arrived about an hour before a marriage was because of to commence, and as we explored the developing we saw preparations establish, the pews commence to fill, the minister and choir get started to robe, right until we felt we were being intruding, and left just as the bride arrived. But although I was not absolutely distracted from documenting the creating, it was a reminder to me just how critical weddings have come to be to the Church of England, not just in terms of the profits they create, but as a very last bastion of the grounding of Faith in everyday people’s life. They may perhaps no for a longer time have their young children baptised, they might no for a longer period occur on a Sunday at all but relationship is the put that very simple Christianity touches their life – that, and their funeral, of training course, whilst ever more persons are much more militantly atheist about demise than they are about enjoy.
The 7 sacrament font looks somewhat lonely in its clearing, and is not the most impressive of its kind, despite the fact that the imagery is a minor unconventional. The Final Rites, (NW) look to display the Priest lying on the bed on major of the dying person. Confession (NE) exhibits the Priest and confessing guy experiencing each other throughout a shriving bench. Confirmation (E) is the most persuasive of all, simply because it seems to display a tonsured Priest rather than a bishop blessing a group of individuals that involve children and infants. Mass (SW) is demonstrated from guiding, the Priest elevating the host when the acolytes on either aspect kneel and hold tapers. The eighth and odd panel is dropped, but was most likely the Crucifixion.
The most spectacularly un-East Anglian function of the church are the fantastic graphic niches that line the arcades. They are big. Beneath the pedestals are depicted figures, which includes musicians (a person performs a fife and drum), St George dispatching a dragon and a fearsome lion with a bone. There are traces of original color, and they are merely impressive.
Additional homely are the bench finishes, which include a beautiful mermaid, numerous figures reading through books, and a poppyhead carved with a experience sticking out its tongue, of a form at times known as Scandal, despite the fact that I have by no means been confident by this. There are many brasses, some in the north aisle and others scattered close to the south doorway, including two figures in their shrouds, and 1 fragment depicting a team of six weepers. In the north aisle is a intriguing collection of donated and gathered ephemera, some suggesting that in the modern earlier this was a relatively Anglo-catholic put, such as a beautiful Russian Orthodox cross. I rushed around taking images although the church crammed with wedding friends.
And so, it was time to go. I resolved that I was amazed by this church, but that I failed to really like it. Searching about at the splendour of William Ramsey’s operate, at what survives of its elaborate furnishings, and sensing the echoes of the loaded sacramental lifestyle it at the time hosted, I experienced a sudden vision of apocalypse – not of the Black Dying so substantially, as of the close of a way of daily life changed by a little something so wholly distinct in a couple small a long time of Reformation. This church had been developed for so a great deal extra than congregational worship, but this was all it could now do. It was as if the Anglican local community was camped out uneasily in its ruins, in the vastness of a little something so wholly over and above their creativeness.’
Posted by Simon Knott on 2022-03-30 11:18:38
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