Bures is a good outdated riverside village, a town nearly, partly in Suffolk and partly in Essex. The very same was the moment true of close by Sudbury, but the Ballingdon district there was drawn into Suffolk by boundary alterations in the 1950s. Tradition survives right here, and this is continue to a split city. The Essex facet is identified as Bures Hamlet, but is now the larger component, with a railway station and housing estates.
The River Stour is the county border, and it flows not considerably from the western edge of the churchyard. The Suffolk aspect kinds alone Bures St Mary, though I am informed that this church was not dedicated to St Mary right up until the 19th century Anglican revival, when one of the success of the Oxford Movement was a renewed curiosity in church dedications. Quite a few of these had been restored by effectively-which means antiquarians sorting by way of the historic records of the Diocese of Norwich, and the confusion arose since of a now-vanished chapel in the churchyard focused to the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin. In point, the perseverance of this church in medieval moments was most likely to the feast of All Saints.
The north facet of the church faces the road, although you can enter the church via either the north or the south porches. Equally are attractive. The pink brick early 16th century south porch is stately and grand, a holy water stoup with supporting figures, and a huge open area inside of suited for the carry out of parish organization. There is a fearsome exterior headstop minimal on the west aspect, which have to surely be older than the porch – 13th century, I should consider. Either the Tudors reused it, or the Victorians positioned it listed here for the duration of their restoration.
The other placing feature of the exterior is the crimson brick massing of the Waldegrave chantry on the south facet of the chancel, its east window fairly grander than that of the chancel itself. Earlier mentioned the porches rises Richard de Waldegrave’s tower of the late 14th century. On the other hand, the base of the tower is a survival of an before one particular, and on its southern aspect is a curious tomb recess, now vacant.
St Mary is a quintessential Anglican church, its 19th and 20th century reorderings common of thousands of substantial, prosperous structures. But there are abnormal items in this church, all well worth going to see. If you glance up, you will see that the ceiling is made up of flat, wooden designs, with modern day lights models established into them. Mortlock credits the woodwork to Ewan Christian, who carried out the 19th century restoration. The lights program is from the 1990s. The arcades are lit from beneath, creating the effect of an undercroft.
In the sanctuary and to the north of the altar, a single of the Waldegrave tombs sits grandly beside the higher camp Victoriana. It has been fairly battered by the fortunes of heritage its brass has lengthy gone, but the grand angel corbels that supported its also-vanished wood cover survive. It is to Richard de Waldegrave, who built the tower, and it was made use of as an Easter sepulchre. Wodewoses, East Anglia’s wild males of the woods, the corners.
And then, to the south of the chancel is the Waldegrave chantry. A tomb in the south east corner, essentially a cobbling collectively of two separate Waldegrave tombs, has missing its brasses, but the standing memorial to the west is extra total. Along the entrance, the young children kneel in prayer. Their legs are curiously swirly, and somebody lately stated 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 much more you glance at it the odder it will get. For occasion, while the ten weepers are in their typical placement, there are no effigies of the remembered dead. Even odder, the memorial inscription is on the again of the tomb, and ordinarily out of sight. This memorial is curiously awkwardly positioned, and feels somewhat in the way, right up until you recall that for 3 hundred a long time right after the Reformation the liturgy had no need to have for gangways for processions, or for sights of altars. The tomb was in all probability placed deliberately so.
The Waldegraves were being not popular folks in this parish, evidently. At the time of the Anglican reformers in the 1540s, there was a typical uprising right here and the destruction in the church was so intense that the churchwardens have been punished. A hundred yrs later, the puritans meted out their fundamentalist justice to the Waldegrave children, getting rid of their hands. And nevertheless, this instead unattractive tomb continue to sits listed here, and who remembers the puritans now?
The locale of the tomb is possibly a pity, for the reason that the eastward look at in the chapel is otherwise its triumph. The five light-weight window contains a present day glass memorial to the Waldegraves, together with the Catholic inscription that, of our charity, we must pray for their souls. The Sarum monitor backing the altar beneath is extremely successful.
Heading again into the system of the church, a picket effigy of a knight rests in peace on a north aisle window recess, which is clearly not its first put. It dates from about 1330, and is produced of chestnut. No a person really knows who he is, while some textbooks mention a person called Richard de Cornard. The lion below his ft has a somewhat unhappy expression, I believe. Suffolk’s only other picket medieval effigies are at Boxted and Heveningham. Mortlock claims that the survival of his shield is noteworthy and uncommon.This knight effigy might or might not have occur from Bures church at first, and there is no way of telling now.
The most unconventional feature of St Mary is something you would not notice, or even think to glimpse for unless you understood it was there. This is a odd tiny octagonal section that juts out about 10 ft up on the eastern encounter of the south side of the chancel arch. It is, of all issues, a piscina. What is it doing up there? We have to have to imagine the rood screen, rood beam and rood loft, and all the liturgical paraphernalia of the pre-Reformation church. The rood loft below had an altar on it, and this piscina served the altar. Why is it so uncommon? Only, this chancel arch was developed with a drain within it. Most rood loft altars will have to have managed with a takeaway bowl. An remarkable detail, in many means.
I’m always acutely aware along the River Stour of how civilised the south of Suffolk seems, and how wild Essex seems to be over and above it, as if the 21st century hadn’t pretty produced it still along the slim lanes from County Corridor at Chelmsford. North Essex is superb cycling and church-checking out place, but persons appear to be to know the Suffolk aspect most effective. In the corner of the churchyard is a parish war memorial which is uncommon, and probably exclusive. It remembers The men of Bures St Mary and Bures Hamlet who gave their lives for King and Place in the Wonderful War, which of class is to say the misplaced boys in two different counties.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2019-08-10 09:34:29
Tagged: , bures , suffolk , east anglia
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