St Margaret, Cley-following-the-Sea, Norfolk
In 2004 I wrote: ‘It is repetitious to notice that East Anglia was the industrial heartland of late medieval England, or that this country was a devout Catholic region at the time, or even that the collision of these two facts resulted in some of the most splendid church architecture in Europe.
Just about just about every parish church in the land bears some evidence of this, but it is particularly noticeable in the centres of energy of people periods: at Lavenham in Suffolk, wherever the good wool merchants held court, at Salle and East Harling in Norfolk, where by excellent landed people competed to affect the crown, and below at Cley, the moment at the harbour mouth of Blakeney Haven, the excellent north Norfolk conurbation of ports, exactly where the streets thronged with rich merchants and their workers.
Right now, the harbour is misplaced to us, but you can nonetheless make out its shape if you stand in Wiveton churchyard and glance back again throughout to Cley, half a mile off. At Blakeney by itself, the quayside survives with some of its buildings to help a reconstruction in the thoughts but Cley has almost nothing now other than its church and a couple of cottages, a village green and a windmill. Ironically, you wouldn’t even know that the sea was close.
Of the 4 churches of Blakeney Haven, St Margaret was the most significant, grandest and most highly-priced. It is however all of these items now. It is replete with all people factors we find most exciting when we take a look at a medieval East Anglian church: a 7 sacrament font, bench finishes depicting persons and legendary creatures, brasses, bosses, stalls and the most elaborate niches in the kingdom, a smattering of outdated glass, and unforgettable tracery that, being Embellished fairly than Perpendicular, is unfamiliar in East Anglia. We have explored elsewhere on my web page, at Salle and Cawston, exactly why these churches were being created so significant and elaborate. Properly, St Margaret is another exceptional testimony.
The setting is attractive, on a light increase above the village eco-friendly. The graveyard is scattered, a lot of of the stones 18th century, and not lined up in clinical rows by misguided 1970s garden-mower fans. If you come in late spring the graveyard is uncut, total of wild bouquets and tall grasses, but in this September morning it was neat and trim, a velvet mount for the church.
What you see is, at very first sight, elaborate. The huge nave with its aisles and clerestory is all of a piece. The offset tower is somewhat necessarily mean, and even though it appears very likely it was meant for rebuilding, the enormous and gorgeous west window implies that it would have been in the very same area. The chancel is also curiously easy, and inevitably would have been changed. Two transepts stick out to north and south, the southern a person roofless and glassless, that to the north fully ruinous.
The merchant de Vaux spouse and children were accountable for rebuilding the church, and the new nave was created to the south of the original nave, which was then demolished and changed with an aisle. You can even now see its roofline on the east confront of the tower. The learn mason was William Ramsey, one particular of the most major in England the Ramsey relatives ended up responsible for the Palace of Westminster and elements of Norwich Cathedral. Function began in the 1320s, and proceeded quickly until the constructing was fairly well total by the mid-1340s. This is an early day for the full rebuilding of an East Anglian church, and exhibits that here, in Blakeney Haven, the new income was early. It would not be for a hundred a long time that Suffolk and south Norfolk family members ended up in a position to do the same. Why was this? Partly, the prosperity of the Blakeney Haven ports did not count just on East Anglian cloth. But there was one more, additional apocalyptic factor.
Just before Ramsey could convert his awareness to the chancel and the trouble of that blessed tower, a new and frightening pestilence attained England. For any one dwelling in a port, diseases introduced from abroad were an day to day hazard that had to be balanced towards complete employment and opportunities for wealth development. Even so, this was anything on a breathtaking scale, a pressure of bubonic plague that reached the south coastline ports in August 1348 and that by the dismal late wintertime months of 1349 had reached Norfolk. Perhaps 50 % the populace died, even though in the ports there appears to have been a bigger survival level potentially there was additional immunity thanks to former exposure. Nevertheless, Ramsey and his son the two died, and the work of the ports was disrupted for quite a few generations. The Victorians, relishing the gothic horror of the disaster, looked back again from their possess cholera-plagued century and known as it the Black Demise.
50 percent a century later, trade, self confidence, and a renewed obsession with the cult of the dead led to a lot more funds currently being lavished on St Margaret. This was the time that the mighty south porch was built, a Perpendicular fortress that guards, relatively uneasily, the Embellished entrance. The church was further furnished with a mighty rood screen, elaborately carved woodwork, and glass and a seven sacrament font supposed 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 those people occasions were being to tumble.
The English Reformation brought to an abrupt conclusion the need for bequests, and all work on building the creating stopped. And, state protestantism would sow the seeds that would help England emerge as an insular, capitalist country, altering designs of trade, and performing away with the need for Blakeney Haven, pushing Norfolk back into the reduction of a very long, agricultural rest.
So, you consider a stroll around the exterior of St Margaret, the window tracery a text guide of the way English architecture created over the generations. The most beautiful is that in the south transept, exquisite lights that create to a cluster of huge quatrefoils. This was competed on the eve of the Black Death, and is possibly at the quite apex of English inventive endeavour. But I imagine that it was hardly ever crammed with glass. I can see no evidence that the transepts had been accomplished in time for their use just before the pestilence, or that there was at any time a need to have to use them immediately after the restoration from it. And, then, of program, the Reformation intervened.
You move into the church as a result of the south porch, with its flanking shields of the Holy Trinity and the Devices of the enthusiasm. Over, in the vaulting, are bosses. 1 demonstrates an indignant female chasing a fox that has stolen her impressive cockerel. One more, shows two devils beating the bare buttocks of a third figure. There is also an Assumption of the Blessed Virgin.
Grand Perpendicular is so frequent in East Anglia that there is an unfamiliarity about the nave that is breathtaking, a feast for the senses. The west close of the church has been cleared, building a cathedral-vastness, and the light-weight, though not gloomy, does not have that white East Anglian top quality common from Perpendicular properties. The scent is of age rather than furnishings polish, a creamy dampness that remembers former business enterprise somewhat than decay. The honeyed stone is also somehow foreign in this heartland of flint. It influences the sound in a different way. The making demands a sure amount of money of awe that is not just because of to its measurement.
We arrived about an hour ahead of a marriage was thanks to start, and as we explored the developing we noticed preparations develop, the pews get started to fill, the minister and choir start off to robe, until finally we felt we ended up intruding, and left just as the bride arrived. But although I was not entirely distracted from documenting the making, it was a reminder to me just how critical weddings have grow to be to the Church of England, not just in phrases of the cash flow they generate, but as a very last bastion of the grounding of Faith in everyday people’s lives. They might no extended have their youngsters baptised, they may possibly no longer occur on a Sunday at all but marriage is the spot that easy Christianity touches their life – that, and their funeral, of course, though ever more men and women are extra militantly atheist about loss of life than they are about love.
The 7 sacrament font seems to be instead lonely in its clearing, and is not the most magnificent of its form, though the imagery is a small unusual. The Final Rites, (NW) seem to display the Priest lying on the mattress on top of the dying man. Confession (NE) demonstrates the Priest and confessing guy dealing with every single other throughout a shriving bench. Confirmation (E) is the most persuasive of all, for the reason that it seems to clearly show a tonsured Priest instead than a bishop blessing a group of individuals that include things like youngsters and toddlers. Mass (SW) is proven from at the rear of, the Priest elevating the host though the acolytes on possibly side kneel and keep tapers. The eighth and odd panel is shed, but was in all probability the Crucifixion.
The most spectacularly un-East Anglian feature of the church are the good picture niches that line the arcades. They are big. Beneath the pedestals are depicted figures, such as musicians (1 plays a fife and drum), St George dispatching a dragon and a fearsome lion with a bone. There are traces of initial color, and they are simply just spectacular.
Far more homely are the bench ends, like a gorgeous mermaid, numerous figures studying books, and a poppyhead carved with a face sticking out its tongue, of a style sometimes called Scandal, though I have never ever been confident by this. There are lots of brasses, some in the north aisle and other folks scattered all around the south door, which include two figures in their shrouds, and one fragment depicting a team of six weepers. In the north aisle is a fascinating assortment of donated and gathered ephemera, some suggesting that in the recent past this was a pretty Anglo-catholic area, like a gorgeous Russian Orthodox cross. I rushed all-around having images though the church filled with wedding ceremony attendees.
And so, it was time to go. I made a decision that I was amazed by this church, but that I didn’t enjoy it. Wanting around at the splendour of William Ramsey’s get the job done, at what survives of its elaborate furnishings, and sensing the echoes of the abundant sacramental life it at the time hosted, I had a unexpected eyesight of apocalypse – not of the Black Demise so a great deal, as of the conclude of a way of everyday living replaced by anything so wholly different in a number of quick many years of Reformation. This church experienced been created for so substantially additional than congregational worship, but this was all it could now do. It was as if the Anglican group was camped out uneasily in its ruins, in the vastness of one thing so wholly over and above their imagination.’
Posted by Simon Knott on 2022-03-30 11:18:45
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