St Margaret, Cley-subsequent-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 region at the time, or even that the collision of these two details resulted in some of the most splendid church architecture in Europe.
Almost every single parish church in the land bears some proof of this, but it is significantly noticeable in the centres of power of these occasions: at Lavenham in Suffolk, where by the wonderful wool retailers held court docket, at Salle and East Harling in Norfolk, wherever great landed family members competed to influence the crown, and listed here at Cley, when at the harbour mouth of Blakeney Haven, the good north Norfolk conurbation of ports, exactly where the streets thronged with rich merchants and their workers.
These days, the harbour is missing to us, but you can even now make out its condition if you stand in Wiveton churchyard and glimpse back throughout to Cley, 50 % a mile off. At Blakeney by itself, the quayside survives with some of its properties to enable a reconstruction in the mind but Cley has practically nothing now except its church and a couple cottages, a village eco-friendly and a windmill. Ironically, you would not even know that the sea was shut.
Of the 4 churches of Blakeney Haven, St Margaret was the major, grandest and most highly-priced. It is nonetheless all of these items these days. It is replete with all people factors we locate most remarkable when we check out a medieval East Anglian church: a seven sacrament font, bench finishes depicting people today and legendary creatures, brasses, bosses, stalls and the most elaborate niches in the kingdom, a smattering of old glass, and memorable tracery that, staying Embellished alternatively than Perpendicular, is unfamiliar in East Anglia. We have explored in other places on my web site, at Salle and Cawston, specifically why these church buildings were being built so big and elaborate. Perfectly, St Margaret is a different outstanding testimony.
The placing is beautiful, on a gentle rise previously mentioned the village environmentally friendly. The graveyard is scattered, numerous of the stones 18th century, and not lined up in scientific rows by misguided 1970s garden-mower fanatics. If you arrive in late spring the graveyard is uncut, comprehensive 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 to start with sight, complex. The huge nave with its aisles and clerestory is all of a piece. The offset tower is somewhat imply, and although it looks probably it was meant for rebuilding, the massive and beautiful west window suggests that it would have been in the identical place. The chancel is also curiously uncomplicated, and inevitably would have been changed. Two transepts adhere out to north and south, the southern a person roofless and glassless, that to the north totally ruinous.
The merchant de Vaux family members were responsible for rebuilding the church, and the new nave was built to the south of the unique nave, which was then demolished and replaced with an aisle. You can still see its roofline on the east experience of the tower. The learn mason was William Ramsey, one of the most substantial in England the Ramsey family were being accountable for the Palace of Westminster and areas of Norwich Cathedral. Perform commenced in the 1320s, and proceeded swiftly until the developing was pretty effectively finish by the mid-1340s. This is an early day for the complete rebuilding of an East Anglian church, and demonstrates that in this article, in Blakeney Haven, the new dollars was early. It would not be for a hundred several years that Suffolk and south Norfolk people have been in a posture to do the very same. Why was this? Partly, the prosperity of the Blakeney Haven ports did not rely just on East Anglian fabric. But there was yet another, more apocalyptic aspect.
In advance of Ramsey could transform his focus to the chancel and the issue of that blessed tower, a new and scary pestilence attained England. For any one dwelling in a port, conditions brought from abroad ended up an day-to-day hazard that experienced to be well balanced versus complete work and possibilities for prosperity generation. Even so, this was a little something on a stunning scale, a pressure of bubonic plague that achieved the south coast ports in August 1348 and that by the dismal late winter months of 1349 experienced attained Norfolk. Most likely 50 percent the inhabitants died, despite the fact that in the ports there would seem to have been a greater survival fee perhaps there was extra immunity due to preceding exposure. Even so, Ramsey and his son each died, and the get the job done of the ports was disrupted for many generations. The Victorians, relishing the gothic horror of the catastrophe, appeared again from their have cholera-plagued century and named it the Black Demise.
50 % a century afterwards, trade, assurance, and a renewed obsession with the cult of the dead led to a lot more revenue becoming lavished on St Margaret. This was the time that the mighty south porch was developed, a Perpendicular fortress that guards, somewhat uneasily, the Adorned entrance. The church was even more furnished with a mighty rood monitor, elaborately carved woodwork, and glass and a seven 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 really speedily those people situations were being to tumble.
The English Reformation introduced to an abrupt stop the want for bequests, and all get the job done on acquiring the developing stopped. And, point out protestantism would sow the seeds that would aid England emerge as an insular, capitalist country, switching styles of trade, and executing absent with the want for Blakeney Haven, pushing Norfolk back again into the reduction of a long, agricultural sleep.
So, you consider a walk all-around the outside of St Margaret, the window tracery a text reserve of the way English architecture produced more than the generations. The most stunning is that in the south transept, elegant lights that make to a cluster of vast quatrefoils. This was competed on the eve of the Black Death, and is most likely at the pretty apex of English artistic endeavour. But I think that it was hardly ever filled with glass. I can see no proof that the transepts were finished in time for their use right before the pestilence, or that there was ever a have to have to use them immediately after the restoration from it. And, then, of study course, 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 passion. Earlier mentioned, in the vaulting, are bosses. One reveals an indignant woman chasing a fox that has stolen her superb cockerel. One more, shows two devils beating the bare buttocks of a 3rd 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 spectacular, a feast for the senses. The west end of the church has been cleared, generating a cathedral-vastness, and the light-weight, though not gloomy, does not have that white East Anglian excellent acquainted from Perpendicular structures. The smell is of age relatively than home furnishings polish, a creamy dampness that recalls former enterprise instead than decay. The honeyed stone is also in some way international in this heartland of flint. It impacts the sound in a various way. The constructing demands a certain amount of money of awe that is not just thanks to its size.
We arrived about an hour ahead of a marriage was because of to start out, and as we explored the setting up we noticed preparations build, the pews commence to fill, the minister and choir commence to gown, until we felt we have been intruding, and remaining just as the bride arrived. But although I was not wholly distracted from documenting the constructing, it was a reminder to me just how crucial weddings have come to be to the Church of England, not just in terms of the cash flow they crank out, but as a past bastion of the grounding of Faith in common people’s life. They may no extended have their little ones baptised, they might no for a longer period arrive on a Sunday at all but marriage is the place that easy Christianity touches their life – that, and their funeral, of training course, while increasingly people today are much more militantly atheist about demise than they are about really like.
The seven sacrament font seems fairly lonely in its clearing, and is not the most stunning of its type, despite the fact that the imagery is a minor abnormal. The Very last Rites, (NW) seem to present the Priest lying on the bed on top of the dying guy. Confession (NE) exhibits the Priest and confessing guy experiencing every single other throughout a shriving bench. Affirmation (E) is the most compelling of all, due to the fact it seems to present a tonsured Priest fairly than a bishop blessing a team of persons that include kids and babies. Mass (SW) is revealed from at the rear of, the Priest elevating the host when the acolytes on both aspect kneel and hold tapers. The eighth and odd panel is missing, but was almost certainly the Crucifixion.
The most spectacularly un-East Anglian function of the church are the excellent image niches that line the arcades. They are massive. Beneath the pedestals are depicted figures, like musicians (a single plays a fife and drum), St George dispatching a dragon and a fearsome lion with a bone. There are traces of original color, and they are only breathtaking.
Far more homely are the bench finishes, including a gorgeous mermaid, many figures examining books, and a poppyhead carved with a facial area sticking out its tongue, of a variety at times called Scandal, while I have under no circumstances been certain by this. There are a lot of brasses, some in the north aisle and many others scattered around the south door, which includes two figures in their shrouds, and just one fragment depicting a team of six weepers. In the north aisle is a fascinating selection of donated and collected ephemera, some suggesting that in the recent previous this was a quite Anglo-catholic position, such as a beautiful Russian Orthodox cross. I rushed around taking pictures when the church stuffed with wedding company.
And so, it was time to go. I decided that I was impressed by this church, but that I failed to really like it. On the lookout all over at the splendour of William Ramsey’s function, at what survives of its elaborate furnishings, and sensing the echoes of the prosperous sacramental life it as soon as hosted, I experienced a sudden vision of apocalypse – not of the Black Dying so considerably, as of the close of a way of existence changed by a little something so wholly distinct in a couple small decades of Reformation. This church experienced been designed for so substantially a lot 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 a little something so wholly over and above their imagination.’
Posted by Simon Knott on 2022-03-30 11:18:40
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