St Margaret, Cley-future-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 nation was a devout Catholic country at the time, or even that the collision of these two info resulted in some of the most splendid church architecture in Europe.
Almost each and every parish church in the land bears some proof of this, but it is especially clear in the centres of ability of all those situations: at Lavenham in Suffolk, the place the wonderful wool retailers held court docket, at Salle and East Harling in Norfolk, where by good landed households competed to influence the crown, and below at Cley, as soon as at the harbour mouth of Blakeney Haven, the excellent north Norfolk conurbation of ports, exactly where the streets thronged with rich merchants and their personnel.
Today, the harbour is shed to us, but you can nevertheless make out its shape if you stand in Wiveton churchyard and appear again throughout to Cley, 50 % a mile off. At Blakeney itself, the quayside survives with some of its buildings to assist a reconstruction in the head but Cley has nothing at all now apart from its church and a several cottages, a village eco-friendly and a windmill. Ironically, you would not even know that the sea was shut.
Of the four church buildings of Blakeney Haven, St Margaret was the largest, grandest and most costly. It is continue to all of these points today. It is replete with all individuals factors we uncover most thrilling when we visit a medieval East Anglian church: a 7 sacrament font, bench finishes depicting persons and mythical creatures, brasses, bosses, stalls and the most elaborate niches in the kingdom, a smattering of previous glass, and unforgettable tracery that, remaining Embellished relatively than Perpendicular, is unfamiliar in East Anglia. We have explored in other places on my web-site, at Salle and Cawston, particularly why these churches have been designed so huge and elaborate. Very well, St Margaret is yet another impressive testimony.
The placing is beautiful, on a mild increase over the village environmentally friendly. The graveyard is scattered, several of the stones 18th century, and not lined up in clinical rows by misguided 1970s garden-mower enthusiasts. If you come in late spring the graveyard is uncut, complete of wild flowers and tall grasses, but in this September morning it was neat and trim, a velvet mount for the church.
What you see is, at 1st sight, complex. The huge nave with its aisles and clerestory is all of a piece. The offset tower is relatively suggest, and though it looks very likely it was intended for rebuilding, the enormous and beautiful west window indicates that it would have been in the similar area. The chancel is also curiously simple, and inevitably would have been changed. Two transepts stick out to north and south, the southern just one roofless and glassless, that to the north completely ruinous.
The merchant de Vaux family members were being accountable for rebuilding the church, and the new nave was crafted to the south of the authentic nave, which was then demolished and replaced with an aisle. You can even now see its roofline on the east face of the tower. The learn mason was William Ramsey, just one of the most sizeable in England the Ramsey family had been dependable for the Palace of Westminster and pieces of Norwich Cathedral. Work began in the 1320s, and proceeded swiftly till the developing was fairly very well entire by the mid-1340s. This is an early day for the total rebuilding of an East Anglian church, and exhibits that listed here, in Blakeney Haven, the new dollars was early. It would not be for a hundred a long time that Suffolk and south Norfolk families had been in a posture to do the exact same. Why was this? Partly, the wealth of the Blakeney Haven ports did not rely just on East Anglian cloth. But there was a different, far more apocalyptic element.
Ahead of Ramsey could transform his awareness to the chancel and the dilemma of that blessed tower, a new and terrifying pestilence achieved England. For any one living in a port, diseases brought from overseas ended up an daily hazard that experienced to be well balanced towards comprehensive employment and alternatives for prosperity development. Even so, this was anything on a stunning scale, a strain of bubonic plague that attained the south coastline ports in August 1348 and that by the dismal late winter months of 1349 experienced achieved Norfolk. Most likely half the inhabitants died, though in the ports there appears to be to have been a higher survival price maybe there was much more immunity due to preceding exposure. On the other hand, Ramsey and his son both equally died, and the perform of the ports was disrupted for quite a few generations. The Victorians, relishing the gothic horror of the disaster, looked back again from their individual cholera-plagued century and named it the Black Demise.
Fifty percent a century later, trade, assurance, and a renewed obsession with the cult of the lifeless led to much more funds becoming lavished on St Margaret. This was the time that the mighty south porch was designed, a Perpendicular fortress that guards, fairly uneasily, the Decorated entrance. The church was even further furnished with a mighty rood screen, elaborately carved woodwork, and glass and a 7 sacrament font meant to assert the formal doctrine of the Catholic Church. By the early sixteenth century, Cley church was at a peak of its glory, but pretty immediately people moments had been to tumble.
The English Reformation brought to an abrupt close the have to have for bequests, and all perform on building the building stopped. And, condition protestantism would sow the seeds that would enable England emerge as an insular, capitalist nation, altering designs of trade, and doing away with the will need for Blakeney Haven, pushing Norfolk back again into the aid of a extended, agricultural sleep.
So, you consider a walk all around the outside of St Margaret, the window tracery a textual content reserve of the way English architecture created over the generations. The most lovely is that in the south transept, stylish lights that establish to a cluster of wide quatrefoils. This was competed on the eve of the Black Loss of life, and is possibly at the extremely apex of English inventive endeavour. But I assume that it was by no means crammed with glass. I can see no evidence that the transepts were accomplished in time for their use before the pestilence, or that there was ever a have to have to use them following the restoration from it. And, then, of system, the Reformation intervened.
You phase into the church through the south porch, with its flanking shields of the Holy Trinity and the Instruments of the enthusiasm. Previously mentioned, in the vaulting, are bosses. One particular shows an indignant female chasing a fox that has stolen her outstanding cockerel. Yet another, exhibits two devils beating the bare buttocks of a third figure. There is also an Assumption of the Blessed Virgin.
Grand Perpendicular is so common in East Anglia that there is an unfamiliarity about the nave that is spectacular, a feast for the senses. The west conclude of the church has been cleared, producing a cathedral-vastness, and the light-weight, though not gloomy, does not have that white East Anglian quality acquainted from Perpendicular buildings. The smell is of age alternatively than furnishings polish, a creamy dampness that recalls former business somewhat than decay. The honeyed stone is also by some means foreign in this heartland of flint. It affects the audio in a unique way. The making requires a particular amount of awe that is not just due to its dimension.
We arrived about an hour prior to a wedding day was thanks to commence, and as we explored the creating we noticed preparations build, the pews start to fill, the minister and choir start off to gown, right until we felt we were intruding, and still left just as the bride arrived. But even though I was not totally distracted from documenting the constructing, it was a reminder to me just how crucial weddings have become to the Church of England, not just in phrases of the cash flow they deliver, but as a past bastion of the grounding of Religion in common people’s life. They could no more time have their young children baptised, they may no extended appear on a Sunday at all but marriage is the location that basic Christianity touches their lives – that, and their funeral, of study course, whilst more and more folks are far more militantly atheist about dying than they are about like.
The 7 sacrament font looks alternatively lonely in its clearing, and is not the most stunning of its type, even though the imagery is a small strange. The Final Rites, (NW) seem to present the Priest lying on the bed on best of the dying gentleman. Confession (NE) demonstrates the Priest and confessing gentleman facing each individual other throughout a shriving bench. Confirmation (E) is the most persuasive of all, simply because it appears to demonstrate a tonsured Priest instead than a bishop blessing a team of individuals that involve small children and infants. Mass (SW) is proven from at the rear of, the Priest elevating the host although the acolytes on either side kneel and keep tapers. The eighth and odd panel is lost, but was likely the Crucifixion.
The most spectacularly un-East Anglian characteristic of the church are the fantastic picture niches that line the arcades. They are massive. Beneath the pedestals are depicted figures, such as musicians (a person plays a fife and drum), St George dispatching a dragon and a fearsome lion with a bone. There are traces of primary colour, and they are simply just stunning.
A lot more homely are the bench finishes, such as a stunning mermaid, many figures examining books, and a poppyhead carved with a confront sticking out its tongue, of a style in some cases referred to as Scandal, even though I have in no way been persuaded by this. There are quite a few brasses, some in the north aisle and others scattered around the south door, including two figures in their shrouds, and just one fragment depicting a group of 6 weepers. In the north aisle is a interesting selection of donated and collected ephemera, some suggesting that in the modern past this was a fairly Anglo-catholic place, like a beautiful Russian Orthodox cross. I rushed about having images whilst the church crammed with wedding day visitors.
And so, it was time to go. I decided that I was impressed by this church, but that I did not love it. On the lookout about at the splendour of William Ramsey’s function, at what survives of its elaborate furnishings, and sensing the echoes of the prosperous sacramental everyday living it as soon as hosted, I experienced a sudden eyesight of apocalypse – not of the Black Demise so considerably, as of the conclusion of a way of daily life replaced by some thing so wholly various in a few small several years of Reformation. This church experienced been crafted for so significantly more than congregational worship, but this was all it could now do. It was as if the Anglican neighborhood was camped out uneasily in its ruins, in the vastness of one thing so wholly outside of their creativity.’
Posted by Simon Knott on 2022-03-30 11:18:44
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