St Margaret, Cley-future-the-Sea, Norfolk
In 2004 I wrote: ‘It is repetitious to observe that East Anglia was the industrial heartland of late medieval England, or that this country was a devout Catholic state at the time, or even that the collision of these two information resulted in some of the most splendid church architecture in Europe.
Practically every parish church in the land bears some proof of this, but it is notably apparent in the centres of ability of people periods: at Lavenham in Suffolk, the place the good wool retailers held court, at Salle and East Harling in Norfolk, in which great landed people competed to influence the crown, and below at Cley, when at the harbour mouth of Blakeney Haven, the excellent north Norfolk conurbation of ports, where by the streets thronged with rich merchants and their workers.
Today, the harbour is shed to us, but you can nonetheless make out its shape if you stand in Wiveton churchyard and search back throughout to Cley, half a mile off. At Blakeney by itself, the quayside survives with some of its structures to assist a reconstruction in the head but Cley has absolutely nothing now other than its church and a number of cottages, a village green and a windmill. Ironically, you would not even know that the sea was close.
Of the four churches of Blakeney Haven, St Margaret was the major, grandest and most costly. It is nevertheless all of these points nowadays. It is replete with all people components we obtain most interesting when we visit a medieval East Anglian church: a seven sacrament font, bench ends depicting men and women and legendary creatures, brasses, bosses, stalls and the most elaborate niches in the kingdom, a smattering of old glass, and memorable tracery that, getting Embellished alternatively than Perpendicular, is unfamiliar in East Anglia. We have explored in other places on my site, at Salle and Cawston, specifically why these church buildings ended up built so significant and elaborate. Nicely, St Margaret is a further exceptional testimony.
The placing is wonderful, on a gentle increase earlier mentioned the village inexperienced. The graveyard is scattered, lots of of the stones 18th century, and not lined up in medical rows by misguided 1970s lawn-mower enthusiasts. If you occur in late spring the graveyard is uncut, whole 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 first sight, advanced. The extensive nave with its aisles and clerestory is all of a piece. The offset tower is somewhat necessarily mean, and even though it looks likely it was meant for rebuilding, the substantial and stunning west window indicates that it would have been in the similar spot. The chancel is also curiously simple, and at some point would have been replaced. Two transepts adhere out to north and south, the southern a person roofless and glassless, that to the north fully ruinous.
The merchant de Vaux loved ones have been responsible for rebuilding the church, and the new nave was constructed to the south of the unique nave, which was then demolished and replaced with an aisle. You can however see its roofline on the east face of the tower. The master mason was William Ramsey, 1 of the most significant in England the Ramsey household had been accountable for the Palace of Westminster and pieces of Norwich Cathedral. Operate started in the 1320s, and proceeded swiftly right until the building was quite perfectly entire by the mid-1340s. This is an early day for the total rebuilding of an East Anglian church, and exhibits that below, in Blakeney Haven, the new income was early. It would not be for a hundred a long time that Suffolk and south Norfolk people had been in a position to do the very same. Why was this? Partly, the prosperity of the Blakeney Haven ports did not count just on East Anglian cloth. But there was a different, much more apocalyptic aspect.
Right before Ramsey could flip his focus to the chancel and the issue of that blessed tower, a new and frightening pestilence arrived at England. For any person residing in a port, ailments brought from overseas were an daily hazard that experienced to be balanced towards entire employment and possibilities for wealth development. Even so, this was some thing on a amazing scale, a pressure of bubonic plague that arrived at the south coast ports in August 1348 and that by the dismal late wintertime months of 1349 experienced reached Norfolk. Probably half the inhabitants died, although in the ports there seems to have been a bigger survival price perhaps there was extra immunity owing to past exposure. Nonetheless, Ramsey and his son the two died, and the operate of the ports was disrupted for numerous generations. The Victorians, relishing the gothic horror of the catastrophe, appeared again from their individual cholera-plagued century and termed it the Black Demise.
50 percent a century later, trade, self-confidence, and a renewed obsession with the cult of the dead led to additional funds staying lavished on St Margaret. This was the time that the mighty south porch was built, a Perpendicular fortress that guards, alternatively uneasily, the Embellished entrance. The church was additional furnished with a mighty rood display, elaborately carved woodwork, and glass and a 7 sacrament font supposed to assert the official doctrine of the Catholic Church. By the early sixteenth century, Cley church was at a peak of its glory, but extremely swiftly these moments were being to tumble.
The English Reformation brought to an abrupt stop the will need for bequests, and all perform on creating the constructing stopped. And, condition protestantism would sow the seeds that would help England emerge as an insular, capitalist country, changing designs of trade, and doing away with the want for Blakeney Haven, pushing Norfolk again into the relief of a long, agricultural sleep.
So, you get a walk all around the outside the house of St Margaret, the window tracery a text reserve of the way English architecture produced around the hundreds of years. The most beautiful is that in the south transept, tasteful lights that establish to a cluster of vast quatrefoils. This was competed on the eve of the Black Death, and is in all probability at the incredibly apex of English inventive endeavour. But I feel that it was under no circumstances loaded with glass. I can see no proof that the transepts have been finished in time for their use right before the pestilence, or that there was at any time a will need to use them just after the recovery from it. And, then, of program, the Reformation intervened.
You action into the church via the south porch, with its flanking shields of the Holy Trinity and the Devices of the passion. Earlier mentioned, in the vaulting, are bosses. A person exhibits an angry lady chasing a fox that has stolen her wonderful cockerel. One more, reveals two devils beating the bare buttocks of a 3rd determine. There is also an Assumption of the Blessed Virgin.
Grand Perpendicular is so popular in East Anglia that there is an unfamiliarity about the nave that is amazing, a feast for the senses. The west finish of the church has been cleared, producing a cathedral-vastness, and the gentle, even though not gloomy, does not have that white East Anglian high-quality familiar from Perpendicular properties. The smell is of age rather than home furnishings polish, a creamy dampness that remembers former business enterprise relatively than decay. The honeyed stone is also by some means overseas in this heartland of flint. It affects the seem in a unique way. The constructing needs a selected total of awe that is not just because of to its size.
We arrived about an hour ahead of a wedding day was because of to commence, and as we explored the making we saw preparations develop, the pews start off to fill, the minister and choir start off to gown, right up until we felt we have been intruding, and left just as the bride arrived. But whilst I was not completely distracted from documenting the making, it was a reminder to me just how important weddings have come to be to the Church of England, not just in conditions of the money they deliver, but as a very last bastion of the grounding of Faith in regular people’s lives. They might no lengthier have their young children baptised, they may well no lengthier occur on a Sunday at all but relationship is the put that simple Christianity touches their life – that, and their funeral, of course, despite the fact that significantly people today are far more militantly atheist about dying than they are about appreciate.
The seven sacrament font seems somewhat lonely in its clearing, and is not the most breathtaking of its sort, although the imagery is a minor uncommon. The Previous Rites, (NW) show up to exhibit the Priest lying on the mattress on leading of the dying guy. Confession (NE) reveals the Priest and confessing male going through every single other throughout a shriving bench. Affirmation (E) is the most powerful of all, simply because it appears to exhibit a tonsured Priest alternatively than a bishop blessing a team of individuals that include things like kids and babies. Mass (SW) is demonstrated from powering, the Priest elevating the host when the acolytes on both aspect kneel and maintain tapers. The eighth and odd panel is misplaced, but was likely the Crucifixion.
The most spectacularly un-East Anglian function of the church are the fantastic impression niches that line the arcades. They are large. Beneath the pedestals are depicted figures, which includes musicians (one particular performs a fife and drum), St George dispatching a dragon and a fearsome lion with a bone. There are traces of first color, and they are basically amazing.
A lot more homely are the bench ends, together with a wonderful mermaid, various figures studying textbooks, and a poppyhead carved with a face sticking out its tongue, of a variety often termed Scandal, whilst I have hardly ever been confident by this. There are many brasses, some in the north aisle and some others scattered close to the south doorway, together with two figures in their shrouds, and just one fragment depicting a team of 6 weepers. In the north aisle is a fascinating collection of donated and collected ephemera, some suggesting that in the modern earlier this was a fairly Anglo-catholic put, which include a stunning Russian Orthodox cross. I rushed close to having photos when the church stuffed with marriage attendees.
And so, it was time to go. I made the decision that I was impressed by this church, but that I failed to appreciate it. Hunting close to at the splendour of William Ramsey’s work, at what survives of its elaborate furnishings, and sensing the echoes of the rich sacramental daily life it as soon as hosted, I experienced a unexpected vision of apocalypse – not of the Black Dying so significantly, as of the end of a way of lifestyle changed by a thing so wholly different in a handful of quick many years of Reformation. This church had been designed for so considerably much more than congregational worship, but this was all it could now do. It was as if the Anglican local community was camped out uneasily in its ruins, in the vastness of something so wholly past their creativity.’
Posted by Simon Knott on 2022-03-30 11:18:40
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