All Saints, Hitcham, Suffolk
If you don’t know mid-Suffolk, you may perhaps well be shocked by the hills which roll throughout the place in between Stowmarket and Hadleigh, as if this was not East Anglia at all. In this remotest element of the county, miles from the closest town, villages just take on a self-adequate air, and Hitcham is the major of them. Its church, All Saints, sits high in a large open churchyard on the outskirts of the village. The residence reverse the entrance to the graveyard was the medieval guild corridor. This is a huge church, and was when the centre of 1 of the county’s greatest parishes. It was the Priory of Ely’s most precious dwelling in the entire of the county, really worth twice as much as any other, and was consequently bestowed on favoured clerics.
This situation ongoing when the patronage was taken around by the state after the Reformation, and to be made rector of Hitcham remained a attractive appointment very well into the 20th Century. As the great guidebook notes, some rectors of this parish realized fame and influence. Consider Adam Easton, for instance. In the 14th Century, he was made a cardinal when nonetheless rector right here. Even so, as he was also Archdeacon of Shetland, Orkney and Dorset, as perfectly as Prior of Saint Agnes at Ferrara in Italy and the individual secretary to Pope Urban VI, a single assumes that he did not commit a great deal of his time on parish business enterprise. His successor John Bremore was the personal secretary to the antipope John XXIII at Avignon, so presumably he failed to stay in the parish either.
John Whytewell, Rector during the Reformation, was chaplain to Thomas Cranmer, while, contrary to that stubborn character, he been given a royal pardon from Mary. Coming ahead to the 17th Century, Laurence Bretton was a stable Laudian, making certain his unavoidable elimination by the Puritans as a scandalous minister (for which, read ‘liberal intellectual’). His successor, Miles Burket, had also been a Laudian, but in a Vicar of Bray fashion he became the Puritan preacher below, and died in poverty just after the Restoration.
Mostly, the Rectors in this article seem to have been a jolly ton. John Matters, in the first a long time of the 19th century, was well known for his befriending of, and treatment for, the weak of the parish, matched only by his neglect of his ecclesiastical responsibility. He is quoted in the guideline as possessing a favourite indicating: He that drinks robust beer, and goes to bed quite mellow, lives as he should, and dies a hearty fellow. And his successor was Hitcham’s most popular rector of all, but we will occur again to him in a moment.
Hitcham was not property to a excellent landed spouse and children, so it was the ability and prosperity of Ely priory that designed this church. It is a grand affair, fully rebuilt in the 14th and 15th centuries. A person glance tells you that this was not a piecemeal building. Mortlock observes that the grand flushwork porch is extremely like the a single at neighbouring Bildeston, but it does not feel so imposing below versus this large making. There is a really odd quit on the 15th century doorway. The a single on the still left is a lion, but on the proper there seems to be a wild person and a tree surrounded by a picket fence.
At initial sight, the interior is slightly disappointing. Huge and plain, it is as if it experienced been scraped thoroughly clean by Miles Burket’s cronies, possibly in reaction to the incumbency of Laurence Bretton. The brick floors are beautiful, and the great 14th century aches of the arcades get to proper up into the clerestory, but the heavy Victorian woodwork offers it all a sombre truly feel.
The hammerbeam roof was rebuilt after the Reformation, and includes heaps of unfamiliar secular imagery, the heraldry of the State. However, there is some dispute about exactly when this happened, why, and how much was renewed. The arms of both equally James I and Charles I are below, giving a day in the first third of the 17th century, but the pineapple pendants look far more current. At the west end, nonetheless, there are a couple of secretive green adult men on the hammer beam ends, which need to be from an earlier age. Just one concept indicates that the roof was fixed in a hurry after a hearth, and then beautified later on.
The chancel is a 19th century rebuilding (a photograph of this party, which applied to be at the west finish, is relatively alarming, like a gap-toothed Madonna) and it is evidence of the Anglo-catholic enthusiasm of Alexander Grant, Rector for the previous 40 years of the 19th Century. At close by Kettlebaston, this enthusiasm was realised by the Vicar there in the kind of a beautiful minor shrine, but in this article, some thing extra grandiloquent was intended. That’s why the 5 techniques up to the chancel, and two far more up to the sanctuary, consultant of the 7 sacraments of the Catholic Church, and common from 19th century London Anglo-catholic church buildings. There is no evidence that Anglo-catholicism ever took these types of a firm foothold below, even though.
The chancel is so grand, some guests ought to conveniently forget the remains of the rood screen. Only the dado survives, but it is worth a appear for the reason that in its place of saints the panels depict angels holding the devices of the Enthusiasm. A little something related can be witnessed at Blundeston in the north of the county, and there are also angels on the screen at Southwold of course. Not astonishingly, they had been vandalised by the 16th century reformers. What is a lot more stunning is that they have survived at all. Presumably they were moved to their present situation at the time of the 19th century reordering, but when Arthur Mee arrived listed here in the 1930s, he could scarcely discern them as figures, and imagined them saints. So they’ve been restored, likely below the influence of Munro Cautley when he was diocesan architect.
In this kind of a rich parish, probably it is not astonishing that minor else medieval survives. The converse of this, of course, that the restoration of this church has generally delivered function of high-quality. Though the benches are significant, they do carry several bench finishes which are possibly the work of the good Ipswich woodcarver Henry Ringham. The ideal are the four evangelistic symbols towards the front. In fact, the guidebook implies that the benches ended up removed from the church toward the conclusion of the 19th century and changed with chairs as at Rattlesden and Kettlebaston, only to be returned at the behest of the eccentric and splendidly-named Maxwell Maxwell-Gumbleton, who was jointly Bishop of Dunwich and Rector of Hitcham in the 1930s and 1940s. Maxwell-Gumbleton experienced a Bishop’s throne constructed, which he installed in the chancel. It should have presented his parishioners something to feel about. It is still there nowadays, and is replicated in a little bit far more modest form by the churchwardens’ seats at the west conclude. Maxwell-Gumbleton’s also are the George VI coat of arms, dated 1937, and a beautiful contemporary font go over, offered as a memorial.
From an before age are the incredibly elaborate brass inlay in entrance of the sanctuary, and the mid-17th century memorial to a Waldegrave in the north aisle, more austere than it would have been twenty a long time in advance of or following. In the south aisle there is a copy of the Adoration of the Magi by Rubens, which is in Kings Higher education Chapel. At very first, I could not work out why it appears to be like a minor odd, and then it hit me – it is in reverse.
Quite a few decades back, I chatted with a churchwarden listed here, and she explained to me tha, despite the fact that 42 guys in this parish lost their lives in the very first entire world war, only 28 of them are remembered on the war memorial below. She prompt that this was potentially for the reason that the other people were from chapel households, or perhaps the families experienced moved away just before the memorial was installed. What ever, it gave me pause for thought, for if a related condition exists in other parishes, then we may possibly believe that several hundreds of people who gave their life have, in simple fact, been forgotten.
But one particular identify stands out in this parish as eternally currently being related with it. You may possibly neglect the straightforward memorial in the chancel by Thomas Woolner, and you can surely skip the small memorial plaque previously mentioned the door as you arrived in, but equally are worthy of a glimpse for the reason that they the two remember the same particular person, the wonderful John Stevens Henslow.
Henslow was a exceptional guy by anyone’s benchmarks. He was Regius Professor of Botany at Cambridge College in the 1830s, and was appeared on with enough favour to secure the beneficial Hitcham rectorship. However, alternatively than ship a poorly-paid out curate to do his get the job done for him, which would have been the common early 19th century Trollopeian way, he adopted in John Manner’s footsteps, and arrived to Hitcham himself.
It is tough now to think about what a distinction this remote position must have been with cosmopolitan Cambridge, scarcely 40 miles absent. Henslow wrote in his diary that he had occur to “a woefully neglected parish, where by the inhabitants, with regard to foodstuff and apparel and the usually means of observing the decencies of everyday living, were being significantly beneath the typical scale of the peasant course in England.” It is recorded that his to start with congregation in this article in this broad area was insufficient to fill one particular pew.
More than the system of the future 25 decades, he turned his parish upside down, applying his scientific understanding to the antiquated and conservative farming approaches of the area farmers. He improved their prosperity, and that of the poor farm labourers. He begun a faculty, and an institute of grownup training. He led outings as a result of the local countryside, and would often take the whole parish on the prepare to London, together with just one journey to the terrific Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park. It was reported that the total village emptied on these events, travelling by cart and on foot to Stowmarket railway station, and then on to London.
“Every person is to be in excellent humour”, he advised his parishioners, “accommodating to all, and particularly attentive to the females of the occasion. If the weather ought to verify unpropitious, each a person is to make the most effective of it, and not to complain far more than he can perhaps assist.”
It is explained that, on holiday at Felixstowe, he realised the fertilizing homes of the coprolite nodules in the cliffs there, and interested two local farming brothers so a great deal that they set up a fertiliser processing manufacturing unit at Ipswich docks. Their title was Fison.
But an even more well known name associated with Henslow is Charles Darwin, a single of Henslow’s college students at Cambridge. Henslow inspired Darwin to examine the development of species, acquiring him a location aboard HMS Beagle, the scientific survey ship. Darwin despatched his notes and samples back again to Henslow, who circulated them in the scientific community. Darwin came back again to England to come across himself a celeb. The foundation of The Origin of Species was place jointly at Hitcham Rectory, whilst Henslow would later repudiate its conclusions.
Most importantly, nonetheless, as much as my kids have been involved when they have been more youthful, Henslow was the guiding light-weight at the rear of the opening of Ipswich Museum, which however retains just one of the best 19th century normal background collections in the state. A portrait of him hangs in the entrance hall, and the name of a road in the east of the city remembers him.
He died at the fairly youthful age of 65. His predecessor had been the jolly John Matters. His successor was the Anglo-catholic enthusiast Alexander Grant, who, as very well as rebuilding the chancel, is nevertheless remembered in the village for getting the aspect of the staff for the duration of the lock-out strike of 1874, when he allowed them to use the church developing for their meetings.
These a few amazing adult males amongst them spanned the total 19th century listed here. Trollope himself could not have prepared a greater novel.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2018-11-24 08:51:09
Tagged: , Hitcham , Suffolk , east anglia
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