St Margaret, Cley-upcoming-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 country was a devout Catholic region at the time, or even that the collision of these two info resulted in some of the most splendid church architecture in Europe.
Pretty much each parish church in the land bears some proof of this, but it is notably obvious in the centres of ability of those moments: at Lavenham in Suffolk, the place the wonderful wool retailers held courtroom, at Salle and East Harling in Norfolk, wherever fantastic landed people competed to impact the crown, and right here at Cley, as soon as at the harbour mouth of Blakeney Haven, the wonderful north Norfolk conurbation of ports, where by the streets thronged with rich merchants and their personnel.
Today, the harbour is missing to us, but you can nevertheless make out its shape if you stand in Wiveton churchyard and glimpse back across to Cley, half a mile off. At Blakeney by itself, the quayside survives with some of its structures to support a reconstruction in the head but Cley has almost nothing now apart from its church and a handful of cottages, a village environmentally friendly and a windmill. Ironically, you would not even know that the sea was near.
Of the 4 church buildings of Blakeney Haven, St Margaret was the biggest, grandest and most high-priced. It is nevertheless all of these matters today. It is replete with all those aspects we obtain most remarkable when we go to a medieval East Anglian church: a 7 sacrament font, bench ends depicting people and mythical creatures, brasses, bosses, stalls and the most elaborate niches in the kingdom, a smattering of outdated glass, and unforgettable tracery that, getting Adorned instead than Perpendicular, is unfamiliar in East Anglia. We have explored somewhere else on my website, at Salle and Cawston, just why these church buildings were being built so significant and elaborate. Effectively, St Margaret is an additional outstanding testimony.
The setting is attractive, on a gentle increase higher than the village green. The graveyard is scattered, a lot of of the stones 18th century, and not lined up in clinical rows by misguided 1970s lawn-mower fans. If you come in late spring the graveyard is uncut, full of wild flowers and tall grasses, but in this September early morning it was neat and trim, a velvet mount for the church.
What you see is, at 1st sight, sophisticated. The extensive nave with its aisles and clerestory is all of a piece. The offset tower is somewhat imply, and while it appears to be possible it was intended for rebuilding, the substantial and gorgeous west window implies that it would have been in the very same put. The chancel is also curiously simple, and ultimately would have been changed. Two transepts stick out to north and south, the southern a person roofless and glassless, that to the north fully ruinous.
The merchant de Vaux loved ones ended up dependable for rebuilding the church, and the new nave was designed to the south of the first nave, which was then demolished and replaced with an aisle. You can even now see its roofline on the east encounter of the tower. The learn mason was William Ramsey, one of the most substantial in England the Ramsey loved ones have been liable for the Palace of Westminster and pieces of Norwich Cathedral. Function started in the 1320s, and proceeded swiftly until the developing was really perfectly full by the mid-1340s. This is an early day for the entire rebuilding of an East Anglian church, and reveals that in this article, in Blakeney Haven, the new cash was early. It would not be for a hundred yrs that Suffolk and south Norfolk families were in a place to do the similar. Why was this? Partly, the wealth of the Blakeney Haven ports did not rely just on East Anglian fabric. But there was a further, much more apocalyptic component.
Right before Ramsey could convert his attention to the chancel and the dilemma of that blessed tower, a new and horrifying pestilence arrived at England. For any one living in a port, diseases brought from overseas have been an every day hazard that experienced to be balanced from complete work and chances for prosperity generation. Even so, this was a thing on a breathtaking scale, a strain of bubonic plague that attained the south coastline ports in August 1348 and that by the dismal late wintertime months of 1349 experienced attained Norfolk. Most likely 50 % the populace died, despite the fact that in the ports there appears to be to have been a bigger survival rate potentially there was more immunity thanks to previous exposure. Having said that, Ramsey and his son both died, and the get the job done of the ports was disrupted for numerous generations. The Victorians, relishing the gothic horror of the catastrophe, appeared back again from their individual cholera-plagued century and called it the Black Dying.
50 % a century later on, trade, self esteem, and a renewed obsession with the cult of the useless led to far more funds getting lavished on St Margaret. This was the time that the mighty south porch was designed, a Perpendicular fortress that guards, alternatively uneasily, the Embellished entrance. The church was further more furnished with a mighty rood monitor, elaborately carved woodwork, and glass and a 7 sacrament font intended to assert the official doctrine of the Catholic Church. By the early sixteenth century, Cley church was at a peak of its glory, but really promptly those people instances ended up to tumble.
The English Reformation brought to an abrupt stop the need for bequests, and all operate on building the constructing stopped. And, point out protestantism would sow the seeds that would support England arise as an insular, capitalist country, modifying designs of trade, and undertaking away with the need for Blakeney Haven, pushing Norfolk back again into the relief of a lengthy, agricultural rest.
So, you choose a walk around the outside the house of St Margaret, the window tracery a textual content reserve of the way English architecture developed over the generations. The most gorgeous 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 Loss of life, and is likely at the incredibly apex of English creative endeavour. But I consider that it was hardly ever stuffed with glass. I can see no evidence that the transepts were accomplished in time for their use before the pestilence, or that there was at any time a need to have to use them immediately after the recovery from it. And, then, of study course, 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 enthusiasm. Earlier mentioned, in the vaulting, are bosses. A person reveals an angry girl chasing a fox that has stolen her superb cockerel. One more, displays two devils beating the bare buttocks of a 3rd determine. There is also an Assumption of the Blessed Virgin.
Grand Perpendicular is so typical 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, developing a cathedral-vastness, and the gentle, although not gloomy, does not have that white East Anglian high-quality common from Perpendicular properties. The odor is of age fairly than furniture polish, a creamy dampness that remembers former business rather than decay. The honeyed stone is also by some means overseas in this heartland of flint. It has an effect on the seem in a diverse way. The building requires a particular sum of awe that is not just because of to its dimension.
We arrived about an hour in advance of a wedding day was owing to start, and as we explored the building we saw preparations build, the pews begin to fill, the minister and choir begin to gown, right up until we felt we have been intruding, and left just as the bride arrived. But whilst I was not totally distracted from documenting the setting up, it was a reminder to me just how significant weddings have grow to be to the Church of England, not just in phrases of the income they make, but as a previous bastion of the grounding of Religion in ordinary people’s life. They may perhaps no more time have their little ones baptised, they may perhaps no lengthier come on a Sunday at all but relationship is the location that basic Christianity touches their lives – that, and their funeral, of course, despite the fact that progressively men and women are more militantly atheist about death than they are about like.
The seven sacrament font appears to be like relatively lonely in its clearing, and is not the most magnificent of its form, despite the fact that the imagery is a very little uncommon. The Previous Rites, (NW) appear to show the Priest lying on the bed on prime of the dying man. Confession (NE) demonstrates the Priest and confessing person dealing with every single other across a shriving bench. Affirmation (E) is the most persuasive of all, since it seems to display a tonsured Priest relatively than a bishop blessing a team of folks that involve little ones and infants. Mass (SW) is proven from powering, the Priest elevating the host although the acolytes on both facet kneel and maintain tapers. The eighth and odd panel is dropped, but was most likely the Crucifixion.
The most spectacularly un-East Anglian aspect of the church are the excellent graphic niches that line the arcades. They are big. Beneath the pedestals are depicted figures, which include musicians (one particular performs a fife and drum), St George dispatching a dragon and a fearsome lion with a bone. There are traces of original colour, and they are just amazing.
A lot more homely are the bench finishes, which includes a beautiful mermaid, various figures looking at guides, and a poppyhead carved with a deal with sticking out its tongue, of a form at times referred to as Scandal, even though I have under no circumstances been confident by this. There are a lot of brasses, some in the north aisle and others scattered about the south door, together with two figures in their shrouds, and just one fragment depicting a group of six weepers. In the north aisle is a intriguing assortment of donated and gathered ephemera, some suggesting that in the new earlier this was a rather Anglo-catholic spot, which includes a wonderful Russian Orthodox cross. I rushed all around getting photographs whilst the church crammed with marriage company.
And so, it was time to go. I made the decision that I was amazed by this church, but that I failed to adore it. Seeking around at the splendour of William Ramsey’s get the job done, at what survives of its elaborate furnishings, and sensing the echoes of the abundant sacramental existence it when hosted, I had a unexpected eyesight of apocalypse – not of the Black Death so much, as of the conclusion of a way of everyday living replaced by a little something so wholly various in a several shorter many years of Reformation. This church had been crafted for so much far 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 a little something so wholly beyond their creativity.’
Posted by Simon Knott on 2022-03-30 11:18:40
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