St Margaret, Cley-subsequent-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 region at the time, or even that the collision of these two information resulted in some of the most splendid church architecture in Europe.
Nearly every parish church in the land bears some proof of this, but it is particularly obvious in the centres of energy of those instances: at Lavenham in Suffolk, wherever the great wool merchants held court docket, at Salle and East Harling in Norfolk, wherever terrific landed families competed to impact the crown, and below at Cley, as soon as at the harbour mouth of Blakeney Haven, the wonderful north Norfolk conurbation of ports, exactly where the streets thronged with rich merchants and their personnel.
Right now, the harbour is dropped to us, but you can however make out its form if you stand in Wiveton churchyard and search back across to Cley, 50 % a mile off. At Blakeney itself, the quayside survives with some of its properties to assist a reconstruction in the brain but Cley has nothing at all now besides 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 4 churches of Blakeney Haven, St Margaret was the largest, grandest and most expensive. It is still all of these things these days. It is replete with all individuals features we obtain most enjoyable when we check out a medieval East Anglian church: a seven sacrament font, bench finishes depicting persons and legendary creatures, brasses, bosses, stalls and the most elaborate niches in the kingdom, a smattering of outdated glass, and unforgettable tracery that, staying Decorated somewhat than Perpendicular, is unfamiliar in East Anglia. We have explored elsewhere on my internet site, at Salle and Cawston, particularly why these churches were being developed so massive and elaborate. Perfectly, St Margaret is another outstanding testimony.
The environment is charming, on a mild increase above the village environmentally friendly. The graveyard is scattered, several of the stones 18th century, and not lined up in medical rows by misguided 1970s lawn-mower fanatics. If you occur in late spring the graveyard is uncut, total 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, complicated. The wide nave with its aisles and clerestory is all of a piece. The offset tower is rather mean, and whilst it seems most likely it was supposed for rebuilding, the big and wonderful west window suggests that it would have been in the exact put. The chancel is also curiously straightforward, and sooner or later would have been changed. Two transepts stick out to north and south, the southern a single roofless and glassless, that to the north totally ruinous.
The merchant de Vaux household ended up dependable for rebuilding the church, and the new nave was designed to the south of the initial nave, which was then demolished and replaced with an aisle. You can still see its roofline on the east experience of the tower. The grasp mason was William Ramsey, just one of the most important in England the Ramsey household were accountable for the Palace of Westminster and components of Norwich Cathedral. Perform started in the 1320s, and proceeded swiftly till the developing was pretty effectively total by the mid-1340s. This is an early day for the comprehensive rebuilding of an East Anglian church, and displays that below, 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 position to do the very same. Why was this? Partly, the prosperity of the Blakeney Haven ports did not rely just on East Anglian cloth. But there was one more, extra apocalyptic component.
Ahead of Ramsey could flip his attention to the chancel and the challenge of that blessed tower, a new and terrifying pestilence achieved England. For everyone living in a port, illnesses introduced from abroad were being an everyday hazard that experienced to be well balanced towards full employment and alternatives for wealth creation. Even so, this was a little something on a stunning scale, a strain of bubonic plague that achieved the south coastline ports in August 1348 and that by the dismal late winter months of 1349 experienced arrived at Norfolk. Possibly 50 percent the population died, although in the ports there would seem to have been a bigger survival charge most likely there was a lot more immunity because of to preceding publicity. Having said that, Ramsey and his son both of those 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 very own cholera-plagued century and termed it the Black Demise.
50 % a century later on, trade, self-confidence, and a renewed obsession with the cult of the lifeless led to additional dollars staying lavished on St Margaret. This was the time that the mighty south porch was built, a Perpendicular fortress that guards, relatively uneasily, the Adorned 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 formal doctrine of the Catholic Church. By the early sixteenth century, Cley church was at a peak of its glory, but extremely immediately these times ended up to tumble.
The English Reformation introduced to an abrupt close the want for bequests, and all work on producing the constructing stopped. And, condition protestantism would sow the seeds that would support England arise as an insular, capitalist country, shifting designs of trade, and accomplishing away with the need to have for Blakeney Haven, pushing Norfolk back again into the relief of a extended, agricultural rest.
So, you just take a stroll all over the outside of St Margaret, the window tracery a textual content ebook of the way English architecture formulated about the hundreds of years. The most lovely is that in the south transept, tasteful lights that make to a cluster of wide quatrefoils. This was competed on the eve of the Black Dying, and is most likely at the extremely apex of English creative endeavour. But I feel that it was by no means stuffed with glass. I can see no proof that the transepts were being finished in time for their use just before the pestilence, or that there was at any time a need to use them right after the recovery from it. And, then, of course, the Reformation intervened.
You move into the church by means of the south porch, with its flanking shields of the Holy Trinity and the Devices of the passion. Over, in the vaulting, are bosses. One exhibits an offended girl chasing a fox that has stolen her wonderful cockerel. An additional, displays two devils beating the bare buttocks of a 3rd figure. 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 spectacular, a feast for the senses. The west end of the church has been cleared, developing a cathedral-vastness, and the light-weight, though not gloomy, does not have that white East Anglian good quality familiar from Perpendicular structures. The scent is of age instead than household furniture polish, a creamy dampness that remembers former enterprise somewhat than decay. The honeyed stone is also in some way international in this heartland of flint. It influences the audio in a different way. The developing needs a particular sum of awe that is not just thanks to its sizing.
We arrived about an hour ahead of a marriage ceremony was because of to start out, and as we explored the building we observed preparations build, the pews start off to fill, the minister and choir start to robe, until finally we felt we had been intruding, and left just as the bride arrived. But when I was not entirely distracted from documenting the making, 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 earnings they make, but as a last bastion of the grounding of Religion in standard people’s lives. They may no for a longer period have their children baptised, they may well no lengthier come on a Sunday at all but relationship is the put that basic Christianity touches their life – that, and their funeral, of system, while progressively people are more militantly atheist about loss of life than they are about adore.
The seven sacrament font appears to be instead lonely in its clearing, and is not the most breathtaking of its sort, even though the imagery is a minimal unconventional. The Previous Rites, (NW) appear to exhibit the Priest lying on the bed on top rated of the dying male. Confession (NE) reveals the Priest and confessing man dealing with just about every other throughout a shriving bench. Confirmation (E) is the most persuasive of all, mainly because it seems to clearly show a tonsured Priest instead than a bishop blessing a team of people that involve small children and babies. Mass (SW) is demonstrated from at the rear of, the Priest elevating the host even though the acolytes on possibly facet kneel and maintain tapers. The eighth and odd panel is misplaced, but was in all probability the Crucifixion.
The most spectacularly un-East Anglian feature of the church are the wonderful image niches that line the arcades. They are huge. Beneath the pedestals are depicted figures, together with musicians (1 performs 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 simply just breathtaking.
Far more homely are the bench finishes, which include a attractive mermaid, numerous figures reading publications, and a poppyhead carved with a face sticking out its tongue, of a sort at times called Scandal, though I have hardly ever been persuaded by this. There are quite a few brasses, some in the north aisle and many others scattered all-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 collection of donated and gathered ephemera, some suggesting that in the modern past this was a rather Anglo-catholic location, including a wonderful Russian Orthodox cross. I rushed all over using pictures whilst the church stuffed with wedding friends.
And so, it was time to go. I made a decision that I was amazed by this church, but that I failed to enjoy 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 wealthy sacramental existence it once hosted, I had a sudden eyesight of apocalypse – not of the Black Loss of life so a lot, as of the end of a way of existence replaced by anything so wholly distinct in a number of brief a long time of Reformation. This church experienced been constructed for so a great deal extra 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 one thing so wholly further than their creativity.’
Posted by Simon Knott on 2022-03-30 11:18:38
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