St George, Stowlangtoft, Suffolk
Supplied that our parish church buildings pretty much with out exception underwent restorations in the 19th Century, it must be noticeable that when we enter a medieval church, we are encountering a Victorian eyesight of the medieval. Even when the genuine furnishings and fittings are medieval, the whole piece is continue to a Victorian conception.
Inevitably, the dilemma arises of what was there right before the restoration and what was not. The obvious reply is that we should think that nothing at all is as it first seems.
A prime instance of a church that assumes a continuity that may well not basically be the real truth is listed here in the flat fields involving Woolpit and Ixworth. This part of Suffolk can be relatively bleak in wintertime, but in summer months the churchyard listed here is verdant and golden, as wonderful a put as any in the county. The church is significant, and yet unusually slim. It sits on a mound that has been minimize down on a person aspect by the road. In the churchyard you are going to discover the perfectly-regarded memorial to the art critic Peter Fuller and his unborn son, killed in a auto crash in 1990.
In the churchyard wall there is what seems to be broken medieval window tracery, which is worth noticing, for hereby hangs a tale.
St George is 1 of the good Suffolk churches. Even though it could externally appear a minimal serious, and is by no implies as grand as Blythburgh, Long Melford and the rest, it is a treasure house of the medieval within. Unusually for a church of its day, it was all rebuilt in a single go, in the late 14th century, and the perpendicular windows are not nonetheless total of the ‘walls of glass’ self-assurance that the subsequent century would see. The tracery seems to have been repaired, and maybe even renewed, which may describe the tracery in the churchyard wall. Nonetheless, it does not acquire a lot to see that the tracery in the wall is not perpendicular at all, but decorated. So it could be that the damaged tracery is from the original church that the late 14th century church replaced. But the wall by itself isn’t really medieval, so exactly where experienced it been all those people several years? Is it doable that the current window tracery is not medieval at all?
Stowlangtoft church featured in Simon Jenkins’ e-book England’s Thousand Very best Churches, which sends a good deal of guests to its locked doorway, and might enable stave off the unavoidable for a even though, for there is no real congregation in this article any a lot more and the church is moribund. Frequent companies are held across the fields at Pakenham, and St George is now only used on distinctive situations. The vital is held across the highway, wherever the pretty nice woman informed me in February 2018 that the church is now headed for redundancy. It looks probably that care of it will be conveyed into the hands of the Church buildings Conservation Have confidence in.
You move in as a result of the chancel doorway (the lock in this article is pretty uncomfortable, but do persevere) and if you are nearly anything like me you will head straight down to the west conclusion the place you will discover the font. Likethe window tracery, it asks some issues. Unusually, it options a Saint on 7 of the panels, Christ getting on the westwards experience. Mortlock dates it to the early 14th century, and the Saints it shows are common cults from that time: St Margaret, St Catherine, St Peter and St Paul, and much less frequently St George. The cult of St George was at its top in the early a long time of the 14th century. Mortlock describes the font as mutilated, and it surely isn’t really hunting its best. But I think there is a lot more going on here than fulfills the eye. Fonts have been plastered around in Elizabethan moments, and only reduction that stood proud of the plaster was mutilated. These are all shallow reliefs, and I do not imagine they have been mutilated at all. To my eye at minimum, this stonework appears weathered. I wonder if this font was eliminated from the church, almost certainly in the mid-17th century, and served an out of doors intent right up until it was returned in the 19th century.
The story of this church in the 19th century is perfectly-documented. In 1832, as section of his grand tour of Suffolk, David Davy visited, and was delighted to find that the church was at last going through fix. The chancel experienced been roofless, and the nave used for providers. A new Rectory was being crafted. Who was the catalyst powering all this? His name was Samuel Rickards, and he was Rector here for almost the middle forty several years of the 19th century. Roy Tricker notes that he was a very good friend of John Henry Newman, the long term Cardinal, and they normally corresponded on the subject of the pre-Reformation purchasing of English churches. It is interesting to feel how, at this seminal moment, Rickards may well have informed the believed of the Oxford Motion. Unfortunately, when Newman grew to become a Catholic, Rickards broke off all correspondence with him.
In the course of the program of the 1840s and 1850s, Rickards transformed Stowlangtoft church. He obtained the fantastic Ipswich woodcarver Henry Ringham in to restore, replicate and finish the marvellous set of bench ends – Ringham did the identical detail at Woolpit, a several miles absent. Ringham’s do the job is so excellent that it is at times difficult for the inexperienced eye to detect it. Nevertheless, as at Woolpit, Ringham only copied animals in this article, and the weirder things is all medieval, and in all probability dates from the rebuilding of the church. The glory of Stowlangtoft’s bench ends is partly the sheer amount – there are most likely 60 carvings – but also that there are quite a few exclusive topics.
The carvings seem to be section of the identical group as Woolpit and Tostock – you will recognise the unicorn, the chained bear, the bull enjoying a harp, the chicken with a man’s head, from identical carvings in other places. And then with any luck , that small alarm bell in your listened to should really begin to go “Hmmmm…..” because some of the carvings below are evidently not from the similar team. It is tough to believe that the mermaid and the owl, for example, are from the similar workshop, or even from the identical decade. The benches them selves are no clue, as it was widespread practice in the 19th century to replace medieval bench finishes on present day benches, or on medieval benches, or even on modern-day benches designed out of medieval timber (as occurred at Blythburgh). Could it be that Samuel Rickards uncovered some of these bench ends somewhere else? Could he have been the form of person to do a point like that?
Very well, certainly he could. As Roy Tricker remembers, the medieval roof at the tractarian Thomas Mozley’s church at Cholderton in Wiltshire is East Anglian. Rickards obtained it immediately after getting it in storage in Ipswich docks. It presumably came from a single of the Ipswich church buildings. In the ferment of the good 19th century restoration of our English churches, there was loads of medieval junk lying close to, considerably of it going begging. But was Samuel Rickards the sort of particular person to counterfeit his church’s medieval inheritance?
Perfectly, of course he in all probability was. The faux-medieval roundels in the home windows of the nave are plainly not medieval at all, but ended up in truth the operate of the youthful Lucy Rickards, daughter of Samuel Rickards himself. Some are plainly to the young girl’s style, and Pevsner notes that other people are copied from medieval manuscript illustrations in the British Museum, despite the fact that the Holy Kinship and Presentation in the Temple roundels at the very least are quite shut copies of the Flemish roundels of the identical topics in Nowton church on the other aspect of Bury St Edmunds.
Actually medieval is the large St Christopher wall-painting still discernible on the north wall. It was possibly a person of the previous to be painted. The bench finishes are medieval, of program, as is the high-quality rood-display screen dado, albeit repainted. There is even some medieval figure glass in the upper tracery of some of the home windows, which include St Agnes holding a lamb and four Aged Testament prophets. The laughable stone pulpit is Rickard’s commission, and the operate of William White. What can Rickards have been imagining of? But we action by into the chancel, and quickly the whole detail moves up a gear. For right here are some items that are truly remarkable.
In a county famed for its woodwork, the furnishings of Stowlangtoft’s chancel are spectacular, even awe-inspiring. Powering the rood screen dado is Suffolk’s most entire set of return stalls. Most hanging are the figures that type finials to the stall finishes. They are contributors in the Mass, including two Priests, two servers and two acolytes. The determine of the Priest at a prayer desk need to be one particular of the most effective medieval illustrations or photos in Suffolk, and Mortlock assumed the stalls the greatest in England.
The benches that facial area eastwards are misericords, and beneath them are superb things: angels, lions and wodewoses, evangelistic symbols and topped heads. A hawk captures a hare, a dragon sticks out its tongue. Involving the seats are unusual oriental faces.
Now, you know what I am heading to check with subsequent. How significantly of this is from this church at first? It all seems medieval work, and there is no rationale to feel it could not have been moved somewhere else in the church when the chancel was open to the features. What proof have we acquired?
For starters, we should detect that the only other Suffolk church with such a big quantity of medieval misericords of this good quality is just a mile away, at Norton. I do not inquire you to see this as substantial, simply to recognize it in passing. Next, I am no carpenter, but it does look to me as nevertheless two sets of furnishings have been cobbled jointly the stalls that back on to the display screen look to have been integrated into the much larger composition of stalls and desks that entrance them and the north and south partitions.
Nonetheless, if you seem closely at the figures of the two Deacons, you will see that they are bearing shields of the Ashfield and Peche people. The Ashfield arms also look on the rood monitor, and the Ashfields were being the big donors when the church was rebuilt in the 14th century. So on balance I am inclined to feel that the higher component of the stall construction was in this church at first from when it was rebuilt. And the misericords? Perfectly, I will not know. But I imagine they have to be deemed as component of the exact same established as people at Norton. In which situation they could have arrive from the exact church, which may possibly have been this one, but may not have been. Practically definitely, the stalls at Norton did not arrive from Norton church, and folklore has it that they were initially in the quire of Bury Abbey.
Other impressive issues in St George contain FE Howard’s stunning war memorial in the previous north doorway, and in the opposite corner of the nave Hugh Easton’s unexpectedly beautiful St George, which serves the exact same reason. He is not an artist I usually admire, but it is as superior as his do the job at Elveden. Again up in the chancel is a delightful painted pipe organ which was apparently exhibited at, and acquired from, the Wonderful Exhibition of 1851.
But St George at Stowlangtoft is, of study course, most famed for the Flemish carvings that flank the relatively significant altarpiece. They were being presented to the church by Henry Wilson of Stowlangtoft Corridor, who allegedly observed them in an Ixworth junk store. They exhibit photos from the crucifixion story, but are not Stations of the Cross as some guides recommend. They date from the 1480s, and had been just about definitely the altarpiece of a French or Flemish monastery that was sacked in the course of the French Revolution. The carvings ended up once brightly painted, and piled up in a block fairly than spread out in a line. The niches, and crowning arches previously mentioned them, are 19th century.
Just one cold winter’s evening in January 1977, a gang of thieves broke into this locked church and stole them. Very little far more was noticed or listened to of them until 1982, when they had been uncovered on display in an Amsterdam art gallery. Their journey experienced been a convoluted one. Taken to Holland, they ended up used as stability for a personal loan which was defaulted on. The new proprietor was then burgled, and the carvings ended up fenced to an Amsterdam junk dealer. They were acquired from his store, and taken to the museum, which promptly determined them as 15th century carvings. They put them on show, and a Dutch lady who had go through about the Stowlangtoft theft recognised them.
The parish instituted lawful proceedings to get them back again. An injunction was taken out to prevent the new owner taking away them from the museum. The parish shed the scenario, leaving them with a monstrous authorized invoice, but the tale has a satisfied ending. A Dutch businessman negotiated their order from the proprietor, paid off the legal bills, and returned the carvings to Stowlangtoft. Seemingly this was all at huge cost, but the businessman gave the gift in thanks for Britain’s liberation of Holland from the Nazis. No, thank you, sir.
These days, the carvings are set firmly in put and alarmed, so they is not going to be going walkabout yet again. But a tiny component of me wonders if they definitely should really be in this article at all. Confident, they are medieval, but they weren’t in this article initially, and they weren’t even in England originally. Wouldn’t it be better if they were being shown somewhere safer, where by individuals could pay to see them, and provide some earnings for the upkeep of the church constructing? And then, whisper it, when St George is taken on by the CCT they might even be ready to depart it open up.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2018-02-13 10:33:12
Tagged: , Stowlangtoft , Suffolk , east Anglia
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