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 nation at the time, or even that the collision of these two info resulted in some of the most splendid church architecture in Europe.
Practically each and every parish church in the land bears some evidence of this, but it is especially apparent in the centres of electrical power of those people times: at Lavenham in Suffolk, the place the terrific wool retailers held court docket, at Salle and East Harling in Norfolk, the place fantastic landed people competed to impact the crown, and in this article at Cley, when at the harbour mouth of Blakeney Haven, the wonderful north Norfolk conurbation of ports, wherever the streets thronged with wealthy merchants and their workers.
Now, the harbour is shed to us, but you can nonetheless make out its form if you stand in Wiveton churchyard and glance back again throughout to Cley, half a mile off. At Blakeney itself, the quayside survives with some of its structures to assistance a reconstruction in the thoughts but Cley has absolutely nothing now other than its church and a handful of cottages, a village inexperienced and a windmill. Ironically, you wouldn’t even know that the sea was shut.
Of the 4 church buildings of Blakeney Haven, St Margaret was the most significant, grandest and most costly. It is however all of these things currently. It is replete with all those people features we find most fascinating when we visit a medieval East Anglian church: a seven sacrament font, bench ends depicting people and mythical creatures, brasses, bosses, stalls and the most elaborate niches in the kingdom, a smattering of aged glass, and unforgettable tracery that, staying Decorated instead than Perpendicular, is unfamiliar in East Anglia. We have explored in other places on my website, at Salle and Cawston, just why these churches have been constructed so large and elaborate. Effectively, St Margaret is a further impressive testimony.
The placing is beautiful, on a mild rise earlier mentioned the village environmentally friendly. The graveyard is scattered, numerous of the stones 18th century, and not lined up in medical rows by misguided 1970s garden-mower enthusiasts. If you come in late spring the graveyard is uncut, whole of wild bouquets 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 initially sight, intricate. The vast nave with its aisles and clerestory is all of a piece. The offset tower is instead suggest, and even though it looks most likely it was intended for rebuilding, the large and stunning west window indicates that it would have been in the identical put. The chancel is also curiously easy, and inevitably would have been changed. Two transepts stick out to north and south, the southern one particular roofless and glassless, that to the north solely ruinous.
The merchant de Vaux family had been dependable for rebuilding the church, and the new nave was crafted to the south of the first nave, which was then demolished and changed with an aisle. You can continue to see its roofline on the east experience of the tower. The master mason was William Ramsey, a person of the most considerable in England the Ramsey household were dependable for the Palace of Westminster and components of Norwich Cathedral. Perform commenced in the 1320s, and proceeded promptly until finally the setting up was rather perfectly complete by the mid-1340s. This is an early date for the comprehensive rebuilding of an East Anglian church, and displays that right here, in Blakeney Haven, the new income was early. It would not be for a hundred several years that Suffolk and south Norfolk households were in a place to do the similar. Why was this? Partly, the wealth of the Blakeney Haven ports did not depend just on East Anglian fabric. But there was an additional, extra apocalyptic element.
Ahead of Ramsey could change his interest to the chancel and the challenge of that blessed tower, a new and frightening pestilence reached England. For any one residing in a port, disorders brought from abroad ended up an day to day hazard that had to be well balanced versus complete work and prospects for prosperity generation. Even so, this was anything on a breathtaking 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. Most likely fifty percent the populace died, though in the ports there seems to have been a better survival amount possibly there was far more immunity because of to earlier exposure. Having said that, Ramsey and his son both equally died, and the function of the ports was disrupted for a number of generations. The Victorians, relishing the gothic horror of the disaster, seemed back again from their personal cholera-plagued century and called it the Black Loss of life.
Fifty percent a century afterwards, trade, assurance, and a renewed obsession with the cult of the dead led to additional revenue remaining lavished on St Margaret. This was the time that the mighty south porch was built, a Perpendicular fortress that guards, somewhat uneasily, the Adorned entrance. The church was more furnished with a mighty rood screen, 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 promptly these periods were to tumble.
The English Reformation introduced to an abrupt close the have to have for bequests, and all work on building the building stopped. And, state protestantism would sow the seeds that would help England arise as an insular, capitalist nation, transforming designs of trade, and carrying out absent with the want for Blakeney Haven, pushing Norfolk back into the relief of a extensive, agricultural snooze.
So, you acquire a wander all around the outside the house of St Margaret, the window tracery a textual content e book of the way English architecture produced about the generations. The most beautiful is that in the south transept, tasteful lights that build to a cluster of extensive quatrefoils. This was competed on the eve of the Black Demise, and is possibly at the really apex of English creative endeavour. But I feel that it was never ever filled with glass. I can see no evidence that the transepts were finished in time for their use prior to the pestilence, or that there was at any time a need to use them immediately after the restoration from it. And, then, of program, the Reformation intervened.
You action into the church by the south porch, with its flanking shields of the Holy Trinity and the Devices of the enthusiasm. Higher than, in the vaulting, are bosses. A person exhibits an angry girl chasing a fox that has stolen her impressive 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 widespread in East Anglia that there is an unfamiliarity about the nave that is amazing, a feast for the senses. The west stop of the church has been cleared, creating a cathedral-vastness, and the mild, while not gloomy, does not have that white East Anglian high-quality familiar from Perpendicular structures. The smell is of age instead than furnishings polish, a creamy dampness that recalls former business alternatively than decay. The honeyed stone is also by some means foreign in this heartland of flint. It has an effect on the sound in a diverse way. The building requires a specific quantity of awe that is not just thanks to its measurement.
We arrived about an hour prior to a wedding day was because of to get started, and as we explored the building we noticed preparations build, the pews start off to fill, the minister and choir start off to gown, until finally we felt we were being intruding, and remaining just as the bride arrived. But whilst I was not totally distracted from documenting the making, it was a reminder to me just how vital weddings have turn into to the Church of England, not just in terms of the income they make, but as a last bastion of the grounding of Faith in regular people’s life. They may no extended have their kids baptised, they might no more time come on a Sunday at all but marriage is the spot that straightforward Christianity touches their lives – that, and their funeral, of course, even though progressively folks are far more militantly atheist about death than they are about love.
The 7 sacrament font looks instead lonely in its clearing, and is not the most breathtaking of its variety, while the imagery is a little abnormal. The Very last Rites, (NW) surface to display the Priest lying on the bed on top rated of the dying person. Confession (NE) displays the Priest and confessing man facing every single other across a shriving bench. Affirmation (E) is the most persuasive of all, mainly because it appears to show a tonsured Priest instead than a bishop blessing a team of folks that consist of little ones and toddlers. Mass (SW) is shown from behind, the Priest elevating the host while the acolytes on both aspect kneel and maintain tapers. The eighth and odd panel is missing, but was likely the Crucifixion.
The most spectacularly un-East Anglian element of the church are the terrific image niches that line the arcades. They are big. Beneath the pedestals are depicted figures, including musicians (a single performs a fife and drum), St George dispatching a dragon and a fearsome lion with a bone. There are traces of authentic color, and they are simply breathtaking.
Extra homely are the bench ends, such as a lovely mermaid, many figures reading through textbooks, and a poppyhead carved with a deal with sticking out its tongue, of a kind often called Scandal, despite the fact that I have never been certain by this. There are lots of brasses, some in the north aisle and other people scattered all around the south doorway, which include two figures in their shrouds, and 1 fragment depicting a group of 6 weepers. In the north aisle is a intriguing collection of donated and gathered ephemera, some suggesting that in the new previous this was a quite Anglo-catholic put, including a gorgeous Russian Orthodox cross. I rushed about getting photos when the church crammed with marriage ceremony visitors.
And so, it was time to go. I resolved that I was impressed by this church, but that I did not really like it. Hunting all over at the splendour of William Ramsey’s function, at what survives of its elaborate furnishings, and sensing the echoes of the wealthy sacramental lifestyle it once hosted, I had a unexpected eyesight of apocalypse – not of the Black Dying so considerably, as of the close of a way of lifetime replaced by a thing so wholly various in a few brief years of Reformation. This church had been crafted for so a great deal 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 one thing so wholly further than their creativeness.’
Posted by Simon Knott on 2022-03-30 11:18:40
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