All Saints, Gazeley, Suffolk
All Saints at Gazeley, close to Newmarket, was the initial church that I visited soon after an worldwide crew of experts conclusively proved that God did not exist. Consequently commences the first write-up about Gazeley parish church that I wrote for the Suffolk Churches website, back in May 2003. At that phase, I had frequented a lot more than 600 Suffolk churches, and the site was going in the direction of a sort of completion. The entries were turning into longer and tending a lot more towards the philosophical. The acquisition of a digital digital camera meant that I could presently see I would have to have to do the total great deal again, but that would be in the upcoming. For now, I had Norfolk in my sights, and there was an conclusion-of-term experience to what I was writing about Suffolk. I am afraid that All Saints, Gazeley, took the complete brunt of it.
The article generated a truthful total of correspondence, as you may perhaps envision. It was reviewed on BBC Radio Suffolk. I was questioned somewhat cautiously about it by somebody in the Diocese.
The parish them selves took it alternatively effectively. To be trustworthy, I experienced caught them at a lower ebb, and they welcomed the publicity. I had also frequented them straight away prior to a time of terrific modify, when heads had fallen, but loins ended up about to be girded, and the Church of England was stirring by itself once again in that pretty village. Just one of the positive aspects of browsing each individual parish church in East Anglia is that you also get to see every single parish, of training course, and I shortly fell in really like with these sleepy, fats villages together the Cambridgeshire border. I would shift there tomorrow, pretty fortunately.
Nevertheless, the short article nonetheless would make the position I was originally seeking to make, and the distinction involving then and now exhibits this distinctive location in a gentle it carefully warrants, for this is one of East Anglia’s loveliest churches, and warrants all the website visitors it can get. In any case, I assumed so then, and I certainly assume so now.
Right here is what I wrote in 2003: ‘All Saints at Gazeley, close to Newmarket, was the 1st church that I visited right after an intercontinental workforce of researchers conclusively proved that God did not exist. I was intrigued to know how a wealthy, reasonably huge Suffolk village would react to this obstacle. What would they do with their church? I had a concept. I suspected that the aged church buildings would proceed to locate a group use. Little teams of persons would even now congregate on a Sunday mornings to sing comforting songs and really feel excellent about each individual other. The church buildings would continue to be applied by secular partners seeking a fancy wedding day, and the community villagers would nonetheless want to be buried in the graveyard. But the making would no for a longer time have a Christian use.
It was with some dismay, nevertheless, that I arrived in Gazeley to find out that the rot experienced previously set in. The 1st indicator of this was the way in which the large home windows experiencing onto the street experienced holes the dimensions of compact rocks in them. This was disturbing, specifically due to the fact the east window at Gazeley is one of the most impressive Decorated windows in East Anglia. The head of the window is composed of two sophisticated overlapping trefoils, but there is no head to the arch, the head by itself owning cusps. You can see it in the still left hand column Cautley assumed it was special.
I went and tried the doorway, but of study course it was locked. At any time because the announcement of God’s non-existence, heads have dropped in the Anglican local community, and numerous of them no for a longer period have the will to welcome strangers and readers. I went next doorway to the Rectory. I knocked on the doorway, rang the bell. Nobody arrived. Potentially the Rector experienced fled city. I experienced tried using phoning a number of numbers I experienced taken from the Diocesan web-site, but no person had answered. There had been keyholders detailed in the church porch, but no cell phone quantities. Gazeley is a relatively massive village, and we failed to have a avenue map, but by driving close to (sorry about the carbon monoxide, individuals) we tracked some of the properties down. Various automobiles have been on the driveways exterior (as I explained, this is a rich village) but no person came to the door. Potentially they experienced provided up in despair. I felt Gazeley’s unusual torpor starting to settle on me like snow.
We discovered the house where the final deal with was meant to be. I went to the facet doorway, and finally someone answered. “Of course?” he was quite curt, so I really don’t know who he was anticipating. I, even so, was a design of attraction and fantastic manners, and explained my mission to see inside Gazeley church, and that I comprehended he was a keyholder, a churchwarden in simple fact. His wife arrived to the kitchen doorway behind him, to see who it was. I could smell cooking, and I assumed that they were being both about to take in, the time currently being 5pm on a Saturday.
“The church is locked”, he mentioned. I agreed that this was the circumstance, and puzzled if access was feasible. “It was open up earlier currently, you really should have appear then”, he noticed. I concurred that it would have been greater, but that we experienced been visiting other church buildings, and had only just arrived in Gazeley. He assumed for a 2nd. “I’ll have to occur with you.” The person checked that the twenty minutes I had advised would not deprive him of his tea, and walked with me up to the church. On the way, the guy defined how he and his wife experienced expended the day preparing the church for the harvest pageant. I built a mental note that this was yet another occasion that had survived the loss of life of God, as would Xmas in all probability.
We walked across the extensive open up graveyard, and I looked up at the fantastic ship of Gazeley church. There is no doubt which county you are in listed here, the entire rebuilding of the nave with clerestory and aisles was at the get started of the 16th century, and as at Blythburgh they failed to get all over to rebuilding the tower right before the Protestant Reformation intervened. The big chancel experienced been developed on the eve of the Black Dying, and has similarities with the a single at Mildenhall. Maybe a rebuilding was planned, but it hardly ever happened. The tower was largely reconstructed in the 19th century.
To my surprise, he took us not to either south or north porch, but to the great west door. This led us beneath the tower and driving the organ, and we stepped into darkness. Daylight was fading, but below it should be normally gloomy, among the broom cabinets and stacks of junk. The churchwarden discovered the mild switches, and we walked all around the organ into the overall body of the church.
Again in the days when God however existed, I had been to Gazeley church before. It experienced been a vivid, chilly February early morning in 1999, and I was biking from Newmarket to Ipswich. I’d arrived in Gazeley to locate the church open up, and experienced imagined it beautiful. There was a fragile stability concerning regard for the medieval and the calls for of the modern-day liturgy. It felt at the moment a home of prayer and a spiritual touchstone to the lengthy generations. Nevertheless, the slight crimp in all this was that, at the time, the typical Sunday congregation of Gazeley church experienced been decreased to solitary figures. The exact same was real of neighbouring Kentford. The Rector might not have been to blame he was quite energetic in in his pastoral pursuits in the village, and people even now turned up for the huge instances. But I wondered what effect all this experienced experienced, and asked the churchwarden.
He was really candid. He told me that they experienced had a terrible time of it. The electoral roll had fallen to just a few people today, and this is not a small village. No person required to occur to church any more. He experienced lived in the village for many years, and experienced witnessed all this happen. It was only in the previous calendar year or so that he felt the church experienced been turned all around by the new Rector (the just one I experienced suspected of leaving city). Now, there were extra than 20 of them, and they felt like a suitable local community all over again, he explained.
I identified this exciting. The earlier Rector had been a Ahead in Religion-supporting Anglo-catholic, and this sort of a tradition was not terribly well-liked with the fits at Diocesan Household. The new Rector experienced moved the church back again towards the mainstream.
I appeared all-around the extensive open nave. All Saints is just one of the biggest churches in the west of the county, and it should choose a superior five hundred individuals to make it come to feel total. I tried to envision what it should have been like below, just three in the congregation.
The warden and his wife had tried really hard to beautify the church for the harvest pageant, and it seemed particularly attractive towards the east. The greenery on the tombchest and piscina was extremely well performed. But inevitably the fruit and greens ended up sparse, and there was no disguising the common air of shabbiness and decay beneath the decoration. I felt a little bit sorry for the churchwarden, for he experienced stuck with the area by way of thick and skinny, and clearly liked it. The chancel and central eastern component of the nave were being clear and tidy, but all all over had been the encroaching shadows, and listed here lurked the dust and dust.
The increased you appeared, the filthier it turned. The clerestory windows have been coated in grime, and the lower elements cloaked in a long time of cobwebs. The medieval cross beams are nonetheless in area, but the Victorian roof above is leaky, and locations of damp confirmed higher than the substantial arcades. It appeared unlikely that all this could have occurred in the limited time given that the Geneva declaration of 2007 declared all religion in a Supreme Being to be ‘utterly null and void’. Mortlock had commented on the weak problem of the royal arms as prolonged ago as 1988. Could it be that they have been in this condition when this developing was continue to in use for Christian worship?
Obtaining observed the stone holes in the windows, I was mightily relieved that the Victorians had reset the medieval glass up in the clerestory. This looks a curious detail to have accomplished, because it defeats the objective of a clerestory, but if they had not performed so then we could have lost it. The glass matches the tracery in the north aisle windows, so that is likely wherever they arrived from. I experienced witnessed them on my preceding stop by, but could not try to remember where by they were, and when I requested the keyholder he did not seem to be conscious that the church experienced any medieval glass. Inevitably I identified it. There are angels, three Saints and some shields, most of which are heraldic but two exhibit the devices of the enthusiasm and the Holy Trinity. I would not be surprised to study that some of the shields are 19th century, but the figures are all unique late 15th or early 16th century. The Saints are an unknown Bishop, the hacksaw-wielding St Religion and just one of my favourites, St Apollonia. She it was who was invoked by medieval persons in opposition to toothache.
It struck me as I gazed up that several parish churches had a great deal less to drop than Gazeley. At 1 time, these spots were being lively hubs of non secular communities, but now they would be still left to wither and die. Some would grow to be residences of program, but Gazeley’s church is significantly far too massive. Some could be saved as examples of our redundant belief devices, but right here at Gazeley there would be as well a great deal to tidy up and sort out. So All Saints at Gazeley should be regarded as just as a treasure house. Here, then, is a manual to why it should survive the 2007 Geneva Declaration.
First of all, the chancel. Below, the area designed by the clearing of litter tends to make it at once mysterious and wonderful. Above, the early 16th century waggon roof is Suffolk’s finest of its variety. Mortlock details out the tiny angels bearing scrolls, the wheat ears and the vine sprays, and the surviving traces of colour. The low side window on the south facet however has its hinges, for here it was that updraught to the rood would have despatched the candles flickering in the mystical church of the 14th century. On the south facet of the sanctuary is an exquisitely carved arched recess, that would not surface to have ever experienced a door, and may have been a quite unusual objective-designed Easter sepulchre at the time of the 1330s rebuilding. Opposite is a substantial and stunningly beautiful piscina, and beside it are sedilia that finish in an arm rest carved in the condition of a beast. It is a person of the most significant Adorned moments in Suffolk.
On the flooring of the chancel there is a tiny, great chalice brass, 1 of only two surviving in Suffolk. The other is at Rendham. Not considerably away is the indent of a different chalice brass – or probably it was for the exact same just one, and the brass has been moved for some reason. There are two chalice indents at Westhall, but nowhere else in Suffolk. Chalice brasses had been well-known memorials for Monks in the 15th and early 16th centuries, and hence were reasonable match for reformers. Heigham memorials of the late 16th century are on the partitions. Again in the south aisle there is a splendid tombchest in Purbeck marble. It has shed its brasses, but the indents exhibit us exactly where they have been, as do other indents in the aisle flooring. Some heraldic brass shields survive, and clearly show that Heighams have been buried listed here. Brass inscriptions survive in the nave and the chancel, courting from the late 16th and early 17th hundreds of years.
Piled up and decrepit in the south west corner are some extraordinary 14th century benches with pierced tracery backs. Some of them show up to spell out phrases, Mortlock imagined 1 could possibly say Salaman Sayet. The block of benches to the north look to have been created employing sections of the 15th century rood loft. Additional north, the early 17th century benches may well appear crude, but were being almost certainly the perform of the village carpenter.
The 14th century font is a amazing case in point of the tracery pattern series that appeared in the many years just before the Black Demise. They may possibly have been intended to distribute suggestions at that time of excellent artistic and intellectual flowering prior to it was so cruelly snatched away. The go over is 17th century.
The spot is certainly superb, but few persons appear to be to know about it, and fewer seem to treatment. If it had been cleanse, tidy and open up, Simon Jenkins England’s Thousand Ideal Church buildings would not have been equipped to resist it. Should really the survival of this sort of a treasure retailer depend on the existence of God or the ongoing apply of the Christian religion? Or might there be other reasons to keep this remarkable setting up in a thing like its existing integrity? It demands thousands invested on it, hundreds of 1000’s, but is this some thing that we as a country or society really should take into consideration really worth doing? Will it be enough to photograph it all and then enable it slide, or do we have to have to rescue this building ahead of it is as well late?
Progressively, it seemed to me that what the parish essential was not condemnation for the state the developing was in, but encouragement to place it correct. I pointed out numerous of the capabilities outlined higher than, but I think the bad person was commencing to sign-up rather what a task he had on his palms, so I fell peaceful. I did reassure him that the creating truly was the accountability of us all, and not just the Church of England it was the coronary heart and touchstone of the whole village, and not just of his faith neighborhood.
We would been there for almost an hour. I took pity, and presented to lock up and return the crucial to his dwelling. He assumed about it for a moment. I guessed he was weighing up no matter whether or not he trustworthy us to make the church safe, but he just claimed “you you should not want to carry the essential back, it is a yale lock. Just enable yourself out, and let the doorway close powering you.” And he stated goodbye and went house – fairly additional thoughtfully, I worry, than he had remaining it.
It was dark. I place out the lights, and stood for a minute in the broad gloom, in the infinite stillness. I listened to the seem of my personal respiratory. I understood this was the most endangered making I had visited so far on my travels. But I’m identified we will not get rid of it.’
And that was that. At the stop of the first posting, I experienced pointed out that the 2007 Geneva Declaration on the non-existence of God was, of program, totally fictitious. This was partly to reassure the good people of Gazeley, but also to help save perplexing any excitable Dawkinsites. Gazeley church was, following all, nevertheless in use for Christian worship. I also pointed out that the relaxation of the short article was absolutely genuine as issues had stood in May 2003. Having said that, around the next handful of months I obtained a range of e-mails from people today in the parish telling me how the church was currently being taken to undertaking, tidied up, cleaned out, and, even far more significant, produced obtainable. Coming back again in Might 2008 I was delighted to discover than equally the south and north doorways had been now open, and I stepped out of the sunlight into an inside which positively shouted its welcome to pilgrims and strangers. Potentially it aided that it was these types of a beautiful day, for the interior was total of light falling throughout ancient stone and woodwork. Every little thing shone with like and treatment. Rather frankly, it lifted the heart. Possibly the most going sight was of the brightly coloured children’s desk and chairs, which have been given pride of spot at the east conclusion of the south aisle, instead than getting tucked absent beneath the tower or powering the font. Owning after virtually dropped its congregation altogether, the community at Gazeley now puts its kid’s corner in a popular posture, where absolutely everyone can see it.
The huge open up space of the chancel was even now one particular of the loveliest interiors I understood in Suffolk, but now it had something else, a feeling of hope. Wonderful points experienced took place listed here. I described it later on to a Catholic Priest close friend of mine, and he said he hoped I understood I’d found the ability of the Holy Spirit at perform. And probably that is so. Definitely, the electrical power and imagination of the persons listed here have been fired by some thing. I preferred to come across somebody to ask about it, to discover out how issues stood now. But there was no 1, and so the constructing spoke for them.
Back again outdoors in the graveyard, the puppy daisies clustered and waved their solar-kissed faces in the mild breeze. The ancient developing will have to have identified quite a few late-Might times like this about the centuries, but imagine of all the changes that it has identified within! The common buffeting of the winds of background continue to leaves room for neighborhood squalls and lightning strikes. All Saints has recognized these, but for now a blessed serene reigns listed here. Very long could it continue being so.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2019-06-24 05:15:29
Tagged: , Gazeley , Suffolk , east Anglia
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