St George, Stowlangtoft, Suffolk
A duplicate of a Flemish roundel at Nowton, Suffolk.
Offered that our parish churches pretty much with no exception underwent restorations in the 19th Century, it need to be apparent 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 even now a Victorian conception.
Inevitably, the problem arises of what was there ahead of the restoration and what wasn’t. The clear reply is that we ought to presume that almost nothing is as it initial appears.
A primary example of a church that assumes a continuity that may not in fact be the truth is below in the flat fields amongst Woolpit and Ixworth. This portion of Suffolk can be relatively bleak in winter, but in summertime the churchyard here is verdant and golden, as stunning a position as any in the county. The church is big, and yet unusually slender. It sits on a mound that has been lower down on one facet by the highway. In the churchyard you will come across the very well-acknowledged memorial to the art critic Peter Fuller and his unborn son, killed in a auto crash in 1990.
In the churchyard wall there is what appears to be broken medieval window tracery, which is truly worth noticing, for hereby hangs a tale.
St George is one of the wonderful Suffolk church buildings. Whilst it may well externally surface a very little severe, and is by no implies as grand as Blythburgh, Extensive Melford and the relaxation, it is a treasure home of the medieval within. Unusually for a church of its day, it was all rebuilt in a single go, in the late 14th century, and the perpendicular windows are not however total of the ‘walls of glass’ confidence that the subsequent century would see. The tracery appears to have been fixed, and maybe even renewed, which may well describe the tracery in the churchyard wall. Having said that, it isn’t going to take substantially to see that the tracery in the wall is not perpendicular at all, but adorned. So it may perhaps be that the broken tracery is from the first church that the late 14th century church changed. But the wall itself just isn’t medieval, so in which had it been all those years? Is it attainable that the recent window tracery is not medieval at all?
Stowlangtoft church featured in Simon Jenkins’ book England’s Thousand Greatest Churches, which sends loads of website visitors to its locked doorway, and may possibly help stave off the inescapable for a when, for there is no real congregation in this article any additional and the church is moribund. Frequent companies are held throughout the fields at Pakenham, and St George is now only used on specific occasions. The essential is stored across the highway, wherever the pretty pleasant girl advised me in February 2018 that the church is now headed for redundancy. It seems most likely that care of it will be conveyed into the hands of the Church buildings Conservation Belief.
You action in via the chancel doorway (the lock in this article is very awkward, but do persevere) and if you are nearly anything like me you will head straight down to the west conclude where by you will discover the font. Likethe window tracery, it asks some issues. Unusually, it options a Saint on 7 of the panels, Christ remaining on the westwards facial area. Mortlock dates it to the early 14th century, and the Saints it reveals are acquainted cults from that time: St Margaret, St Catherine, St Peter and St Paul, and much less generally St George. The cult of St George was at its height in the early several years of the 14th century. Mortlock describes the font as mutilated, and it definitely isn’t really wanting its finest. But I feel there is additional likely on right here than satisfies the eye. Fonts have been plastered over in Elizabethan periods, and only relief that stood happy of the plaster was mutilated. These are all shallow reliefs, and I do not assume they have been mutilated at all. To my eye at the very least, this stonework seems weathered. I speculate if this font was removed from the church, almost certainly in the mid-17th century, and served an outdoor goal right up until it was returned in the 19th century.
The tale of this church in the 19th century is properly-documented. In 1832, as part of his grand tour of Suffolk, David Davy visited, and was pleased to discover that the church was at past going through repair. The chancel experienced been roofless, and the nave applied for companies. A new Rectory was remaining designed. Who was the catalyst guiding all this? His title was Samuel Rickards, and he was Rector below for practically the center forty decades of the 19th century. Roy Tricker notes that he was a fantastic friend of John Henry Newman, the foreseeable future Cardinal, and they frequently corresponded on the topic of the pre-Reformation buying of English church buildings. It is appealing to feel how, at this seminal second, Rickards could have knowledgeable the assumed of the Oxford Movement. Sadly, when Newman grew to become a Catholic, Rickards broke off all correspondence with him.
All through the study course of the 1840s and 1850s, Rickards transformed Stowlangtoft church. He bought the wonderful Ipswich woodcarver Henry Ringham in to restore, replicate and finish the marvellous established of bench finishes – Ringham did the identical point at Woolpit, a number of miles absent. Ringham’s work is so good that it is from time to time really hard for the inexperienced eye to detect it. Nonetheless, as at Woolpit, Ringham only copied animals here, and the weirder things is all medieval, and almost certainly dates from the rebuilding of the church. The glory of Stowlangtoft’s bench ends is partly the sheer quantity – there are perhaps 60 carvings – but also that there are quite a few distinctive subjects.
The carvings look to be part of the same group as Woolpit and Tostock – you will recognise the unicorn, the chained bear, the bull participating in a harp, the chook with a man’s head, from related carvings somewhere else. And then ideally that minimal alarm bell in your read really should begin to go “Hmmmm…..” due to the fact some of the carvings in this article are obviously not from the exact group. It is challenging to feel that the mermaid and the owl, for instance, are from the exact workshop, or even from the very same 10 years. The benches by themselves are no clue, as it was popular apply in the 19th century to swap medieval bench finishes on modern-day benches, or on medieval benches, or even on present day benches produced out of medieval timber (as transpired at Blythburgh). Could it be that Samuel Rickards observed some of these bench finishes somewhere else? Could he have been the sort of particular person to do a detail like that?
Very 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 acquired it following locating it in storage in Ipswich docks. It presumably arrived from one of the Ipswich churches. In the ferment of the wonderful 19th century restoration of our English churches, there was loads of medieval junk lying about, substantially of it going begging. But was Samuel Rickards the form of particular person to counterfeit his church’s medieval inheritance?
Properly, of course he possibly was. The fake-medieval roundels in the home windows of the nave are clearly not medieval at all, but had been in reality the operate of the young Lucy Rickards, daughter of Samuel Rickards himself. Some are evidently to the younger girl’s design, and Pevsner notes that other folks are copied from medieval manuscript illustrations in the British Museum, although the Holy Kinship and Presentation in the Temple roundels at the very least are incredibly near copies of the Flemish roundels of the exact same subjects in Nowton church on the other aspect of Bury St Edmunds.
Really medieval is the vast St Christopher wall-portray still discernible on the north wall. It was likely 1 of the last to be painted. The bench finishes are medieval, of training course, as is the wonderful rood-screen dado, albeit repainted. There is even some medieval determine glass in the higher tracery of some of the home windows, including St Agnes keeping a lamb and four Old Testomony prophets. The laughable stone pulpit is Rickard’s fee, and the do the job of William White. What can Rickards have been imagining of? But we phase through into the chancel, and quickly the entire factor moves up a equipment. For right here are some things that are genuinely exceptional.
In a county well-known for its woodwork, the furnishings of Stowlangtoft’s chancel are amazing, even awe-inspiring. Behind the rood monitor dado is Suffolk’s most finish established of return stalls. Most striking are the figures that type finials to the stall ends. They are participants in the Mass, which includes two Priests, two servers and two acolytes. The figure of the Priest at a prayer desk need to be a person of the very best medieval visuals in Suffolk, and Mortlock considered the stalls the greatest in England.
The benches that experience eastwards are misericords, and beneath them are amazing points: angels, lions and wodewoses, evangelistic symbols and crowned heads. A hawk captures a hare, a dragon sticks out its tongue. Between the seats are strange oriental faces.
Now, you know what I am likely to inquire future. How significantly of this is from this church initially? It all seems medieval function, and there is no motive to believe that it could not have been moved elsewhere in the church when the chancel was open to the elements. What evidence have we obtained?
To begin with, we really should notice that the only other Suffolk church with such a huge selection of medieval misericords of this high-quality is just a mile absent, at Norton. I really don’t ask you to see this as significant, just to see it in passing. Next, I am no carpenter, but it does look to me as while two sets of furnishings have been cobbled alongside one another the stalls that back on to the monitor appear to have been integrated into the bigger structure of stalls and desks that entrance them and the north and south partitions.
Having said that, if you appear intently 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 balance I am inclined to consider that the larger aspect of the stall construction was in this church originally from when it was rebuilt. And the misericords? Effectively, I do not know. But I believe they have to be thought of as section of the similar established as those at Norton. In which circumstance they may well have come from the similar church, which could have been this just one, but may possibly not have been. Just about definitely, the stalls at Norton did not arrive from Norton church, and folklore has it that they were initially in the quire of Bury Abbey.
Other extraordinary points in St George include FE Howard’s gorgeous war memorial in the previous north doorway, and in the reverse corner of the nave Hugh Easton’s unexpectedly lovely St George, which serves the identical reason. He is not an artist I generally admire, but it is as excellent as his get the job done at Elveden. Back again up in the chancel is a delightful painted pipe organ which was evidently exhibited at, and acquired from, the Good Exhibition of 1851.
But St George at Stowlangtoft is, of study course, most well-known for the Flemish carvings that flank the rather hefty altarpiece. They were specified to the church by Henry Wilson of Stowlangtoft Corridor, who allegedly observed them in an Ixworth junk store. They present photos from the crucifixion tale, but are not Stations of the Cross as some guides counsel. They date from the 1480s, and have been almost certainly the altarpiece of a French or Flemish monastery that was sacked through the French Revolution. The carvings have been after brightly painted, and piled up in a block fairly than unfold out in a line. The niches, and crowning arches earlier mentioned them, are 19th century.
1 chilly winter’s night in January 1977, a gang of burglars broke into this locked church and stole them. Almost nothing more was seen or listened to of them until 1982, when they have been discovered on display in an Amsterdam art gallery. Their journey experienced been a convoluted 1. Taken to Holland, they had been utilized as security for a personal loan which was defaulted on. The new operator was then burgled, and the carvings were being fenced to an Amsterdam junk seller. They ended up purchased from his shop, and taken to the museum, which immediately discovered them as 15th century carvings. They place them on display, and a Dutch lady who had go through about the Stowlangtoft theft recognised them.
The parish instituted legal proceedings to get them back. An injunction was taken out to prevent the new owner taking away them from the museum. The parish lost the circumstance, leaving them with a monstrous legal monthly bill, but the tale has a satisfied ending. A Dutch businessman negotiated their acquire from the proprietor, paid out off the authorized payments, and returned the carvings to Stowlangtoft. Seemingly this was all at extensive price, but the businessman gave the present in thanks for Britain’s liberation of Holland from the Nazis. No, thank you, sir.
Nowadays, the carvings are preset firmly in position and alarmed, so they would not be going walkabout yet again. But a tiny section of me miracles if they genuinely ought to be right here at all. Positive, they are medieval, but they were not right here at first, and they were not even in England initially. Wouldn’t it be much better if they had been displayed someplace safer, the place persons could pay to see them, and provide some cash flow for the upkeep of the church creating? And then, whisper it, when St George is taken on by the CCT they could even be equipped to leave it open.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2018-02-13 10:33:29
Tagged: , Stowlangtoft , Suffolk , east Anglia
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