St George, Stowlangtoft, Suffolk
Specified that our parish church buildings almost devoid of exception underwent restorations in the 19th Century, it really should be clear that when we enter a medieval church, we are encountering a Victorian vision of the medieval. Even when the genuine furnishings and fittings are medieval, the entire piece is continue to a Victorian conception.
Inevitably, the query arises of what was there ahead of the restoration and what was not. The evident solution is that we must think that absolutely nothing is as it to start with seems.
A primary illustration of a church that assumes a continuity that might not truly be the fact is below in the flat fields involving Woolpit and Ixworth. This section of Suffolk can be instead bleak in wintertime, but in summer time the churchyard listed here is verdant and golden, as lovely a location as any in the county. The church is huge, and yet unusually slim. It sits on a mound that has been minimize down on a single aspect by the street. In the churchyard you’ll find the properly-recognised memorial to the artwork critic Peter Fuller and his unborn son, killed in a car or truck crash in 1990.
In the churchyard wall there is what appears to be damaged medieval window tracery, which is well worth noticing, for hereby hangs a tale.
St George is one of the good Suffolk church buildings. While it could externally seem a minor serious, and is by no suggests as grand as Blythburgh, Extensive Melford and the rest, it is a treasure home of the medieval inside of. Unusually for a church of its day, it was all rebuilt in just one go, in the late 14th century, and the perpendicular windows are not however full of the ‘walls of glass’ self-assurance that the subsequent century would see. The tracery appears to have been fixed, and potentially even renewed, which might clarify the tracery in the churchyard wall. On the other hand, it does not consider considerably to see that the tracery in the wall is not perpendicular at all, but adorned. So it might be that the broken tracery is from the initial church that the late 14th century church changed. But the wall by itself is not medieval, so exactly where experienced it been all those several years? Is it possible that the current window tracery is not medieval at all?
Stowlangtoft church showcased in Simon Jenkins’ ebook England’s Thousand Ideal Church buildings, which sends a lot of guests to its locked doorway, and may support stave off the inevitable for a even though, for there is no serious congregation listed here any additional and the church is moribund. Common products and services are held throughout the fields at Pakenham, and St George is now only utilised on exclusive situations. The essential is retained across the street, exactly where the very pleasant girl instructed me in February 2018 that the church is now headed for redundancy. It would seem possible that treatment of it will be conveyed into the arms of the Church buildings Conservation Have confidence in.
You move in by means of the chancel door (the lock listed here is extremely awkward, but do persevere) and if you are just about anything like me you will head straight down to the west finish where by you will come across the font. Likethe window tracery, it asks some questions. Unusually, it characteristics a Saint on seven of the panels, Christ staying on the westwards facial area. Mortlock dates it to the early 14th century, and the Saints it demonstrates are common cults from that time: St Margaret, St Catherine, St Peter and St Paul, and considerably less generally St George. The cult of St George was at its peak in the early yrs of the 14th century. Mortlock describes the font as mutilated, and it absolutely is not on the lookout its finest. But I feel there is much more heading on below than meets the eye. Fonts have been plastered around in Elizabethan periods, and only relief that stood happy of the plaster was mutilated. These are all shallow reliefs, and I do not believe they have been mutilated at all. To my eye at the very least, this stonework seems weathered. I speculate if this font was taken out from the church, probably in the mid-17th century, and served an outdoor intent until finally it was returned in the 19th century.
The story of this church in the 19th century is perfectly-documented. In 1832, as aspect of his grand tour of Suffolk, David Davy frequented, and was delighted to discover that the church was at very last undergoing fix. The chancel experienced been roofless, and the nave used for solutions. A new Rectory was being designed. Who was the catalyst powering all this? His identify was Samuel Rickards, and he was Rector in this article for practically the center forty decades of the 19th century. Roy Tricker notes that he was a fantastic mate of John Henry Newman, the long term Cardinal, and they typically corresponded on the subject of the pre-Reformation purchasing of English churches. It is interesting to think how, at this seminal moment, Rickards could possibly have educated the believed of the Oxford Motion. Regrettably, when Newman turned a Catholic, Rickards broke off all correspondence with him.
Through the study course of the 1840s and 1850s, Rickards transformed Stowlangtoft church. He acquired the good Ipswich woodcarver Henry Ringham in to restore, replicate and entire the marvellous set of bench finishes – Ringham did the exact issue at Woolpit, a couple of miles away. Ringham’s get the job done is so good that it is sometimes tough for the inexperienced eye to detect it. Having said that, as at Woolpit, Ringham only copied animals right here, and the weirder stuff is all medieval, and possibly dates from the rebuilding of the church. The glory of Stowlangtoft’s bench ends is partly the sheer quantity – there are probably 60 carvings – but also that there are many one of a kind topics.
The carvings look to be portion of the similar team as Woolpit and Tostock – you will recognise the unicorn, the chained bear, the bull taking part in a harp, the bird with a man’s head, from very similar carvings somewhere else. And then with any luck , that tiny alarm bell in your listened to must begin to go “Hmmmm…..” for the reason that some of the carvings below are clearly not from the very same group. It is tricky to feel that the mermaid and the owl, for example, are from the similar workshop, or even from the similar ten years. The benches them selves are no clue, as it was frequent practice in the 19th century to substitute medieval bench ends on modern-day benches, or on medieval benches, or even on modern-day benches created out of medieval timber (as took place at Blythburgh). Could it be that Samuel Rickards identified some of these bench ends somewhere else? Could he have been the type of man or woman to do a factor like that?
Well, of course he could. As Roy Tricker recollects, the medieval roof at the tractarian Thomas Mozley’s church at Cholderton in Wiltshire is East Anglian. Rickards obtained it soon after locating it in storage in Ipswich docks. It presumably arrived from one of the Ipswich churches. In the ferment of the terrific 19th century restoration of our English churches, there was hundreds of medieval junk lying all around, considerably of it heading begging. But was Samuel Rickards the sort of particular person to counterfeit his church’s medieval inheritance?
Perfectly, certainly he most likely was. The fake-medieval roundels in the windows of the nave are plainly not medieval at all, but were in actuality the operate of the young Lucy Rickards, daughter of Samuel Rickards himself. Some are obviously to the young girl’s style and design, and Pevsner notes that others are copied from medieval manuscript illustrations in the British Museum, though the Holy Kinship and Presentation in the Temple roundels at minimum are extremely shut copies of the Flemish roundels of the very same topics in Nowton church on the other aspect of Bury St Edmunds.
Really medieval is the broad St Christopher wall-painting however discernible on the north wall. It was probably one particular of the last to be painted. The bench finishes are medieval, of program, as is the good rood-monitor dado, albeit repainted. There is even some medieval determine glass in the higher tracery of some of the home windows, such as St Agnes holding a lamb and 4 Outdated Testomony prophets. The laughable stone pulpit is Rickard’s commission, and the function of William White. What can Rickards have been wondering of? But we action as a result of into the chancel, and instantly the complete detail moves up a gear. For in this article are some factors that are certainly exceptional.
In a county popular for its woodwork, the furnishings of Stowlangtoft’s chancel are amazing, even awe-inspiring. At the rear of the rood monitor dado is Suffolk’s most finish set of return stalls. Most hanging are the figures that type finials to the stall finishes. They are members in the Mass, which include two Monks, two servers and two acolytes. The figure of the Priest at a prayer desk should be 1 of the best medieval illustrations or photos in Suffolk, and Mortlock imagined the stalls the best in England.
The benches that experience eastwards are misericords, and beneath them are excellent things: angels, lions and wodewoses, evangelistic symbols and crowned heads. A hawk captures a hare, a dragon sticks out its tongue. Among the seats are odd oriental faces.
Now, you know what I am heading to inquire future. How substantially of this is from this church initially? It all seems medieval function, and there is no purpose to believe it might not have been moved somewhere else in the church when the chancel was open up to the aspects. What proof have we received?
To begin with, we should detect that the only other Suffolk church with these types of a significant selection of medieval misericords of this high-quality is just a mile away, at Norton. I really don’t inquire you to see this as substantial, simply to detect it in passing. Next, I am no carpenter, but it does look to me as although two sets of furnishings have been cobbled together the stalls that back again on to the display appear to have been built-in into the larger sized structure of stalls and desks that front them and the north and south walls.
However, if you look carefully at the figures of the two Deacons, you will see that they are bearing shields of the Ashfield and Peche people. The Ashfield arms also seem on the rood display screen, and the Ashfields have been the major donors when the church was rebuilt in the 14th century. So on harmony I am inclined to assume that the larger element of the stall structure was in this church at first from when it was rebuilt. And the misericords? Very well, I never know. But I imagine they have to be viewed as as portion of the identical established as all those at Norton. In which scenario they could have arrive from the exact same church, which may well have been this 1, but could not have been. Almost unquestionably, the stalls at Norton did not occur from Norton church, and folklore has it that they had been originally in the quire of Bury Abbey.
Other amazing matters in St George include things like FE Howard’s stunning war memorial in the previous north doorway, and in the reverse corner of the nave Hugh Easton’s unexpectedly beautiful St George, which serves the exact purpose. He is not an artist I ordinarily admire, but it is as fantastic as his function at Elveden. Back up in the chancel is a pleasant painted pipe organ which was evidently exhibited at, and acquired from, the Terrific Exhibition of 1851.
But St George at Stowlangtoft is, of program, most famous for the Flemish carvings that flank the somewhat large altarpiece. They ended up given to the church by Henry Wilson of Stowlangtoft Hall, who allegedly observed them in an Ixworth junk shop. They show photos from the crucifixion tale, but are not Stations of the Cross as some guides advise. They day from the 1480s, and ended up almost certainly the altarpiece of a French or Flemish monastery that was sacked during the French Revolution. The carvings had been the moment brightly painted, and piled up in a block somewhat than spread out in a line. The niches, and crowning arches earlier mentioned them, are 19th century.
A single cold winter’s evening in January 1977, a gang of thieves broke into this locked church and stole them. Nothing more was viewed or read of them until finally 1982, when they have been uncovered on display in an Amsterdam art gallery. Their journey experienced been a convoluted one particular. Taken to Holland, they ended up utilised as safety for a bank loan which was defaulted on. The new proprietor was then burgled, and the carvings were being fenced to an Amsterdam junk seller. They have been acquired from his shop, and taken to the museum, which right away identified them as 15th century carvings. They put them on display, and a Dutch woman who experienced go through about the Stowlangtoft theft recognised them.
The parish instituted lawful proceedings to get them back again. An injunction was taken out to stop the new proprietor eradicating them from the museum. The parish shed the case, leaving them with a monstrous legal monthly bill, but the story has a satisfied ending. A Dutch businessman negotiated their order from the owner, paid off the authorized expenses, and returned the carvings to Stowlangtoft. Apparently this was all at wide price, but the businessman gave the present in thanks for Britain’s liberation of Holland from the Nazis. No, thank you, sir.
Currently, the carvings are preset firmly in place and alarmed, so they will never be likely walkabout again. But a small component of me miracles if they really should really be listed here at all. Confident, they are medieval, but they weren’t here originally, and they were not even in England at first. Would not it be improved if they were being shown someplace safer, exactly where individuals could shell out to see them, and present some revenue for the upkeep of the church developing? And then, whisper it, when St George is taken on by the CCT they could possibly even be capable to leave it open up.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2018-02-13 10:33:19
Tagged: , Stowlangtoft , Suffolk , east Anglia
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