St Margaret, Cley-next-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 nation 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.
Just about every parish church in the land bears some evidence of this, but it is notably evident in the centres of electricity of individuals instances: at Lavenham in Suffolk, where by the good wool merchants held court, at Salle and East Harling in Norfolk, in which terrific landed family members competed to affect the crown, and listed here at Cley, the moment at the harbour mouth of Blakeney Haven, the good north Norfolk conurbation of ports, the place the streets thronged with rich merchants and their workers.
Now, the harbour is lost to us, but you can nonetheless make out its condition if you stand in Wiveton churchyard and glimpse back again throughout to Cley, 50 % a mile off. At Blakeney by itself, the quayside survives with some of its buildings to help a reconstruction in the thoughts but Cley has nothing now except its church and a couple of cottages, a village inexperienced and a windmill. Ironically, you would not even know that the sea was near.
Of the four church buildings of Blakeney Haven, St Margaret was the largest, grandest and most expensive. It is nonetheless all of these factors these days. It is replete with all these components we uncover most fascinating when we take a look at a medieval East Anglian church: a seven sacrament font, bench ends depicting men and women and legendary creatures, brasses, bosses, stalls and the most elaborate niches in the kingdom, a smattering of outdated glass, and unforgettable tracery that, currently being Adorned somewhat than Perpendicular, is unfamiliar in East Anglia. We have explored in other places on my website, at Salle and Cawston, precisely why these church buildings ended up crafted so significant and elaborate. Very well, St Margaret is yet another impressive testimony.
The setting is attractive, on a mild increase earlier mentioned the village inexperienced. The graveyard is scattered, several of the stones 18th century, and not lined up in scientific rows by misguided 1970s garden-mower fans. 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 initially sight, advanced. The wide nave with its aisles and clerestory is all of a piece. The offset tower is relatively signify, and whilst it looks probable it was intended for rebuilding, the big and lovely west window suggests that it would have been in the similar location. The chancel is also curiously uncomplicated, 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 relatives had been dependable for rebuilding the church, and the new nave was built to the south of the initial nave, which was then demolished and changed with an aisle. You can however see its roofline on the east confront of the tower. The master mason was William Ramsey, one particular of the most major in England the Ramsey family have been dependable for the Palace of Westminster and parts of Norwich Cathedral. Function began in the 1320s, and proceeded quickly until eventually the developing was pretty perfectly finish by the mid-1340s. This is an early day for the full rebuilding of an East Anglian church, and displays that right here, in Blakeney Haven, the new money was early. It would not be for a hundred yrs that Suffolk and south Norfolk people have been in a place to do the exact. Why was this? Partly, the wealth of the Blakeney Haven ports did not depend just on East Anglian fabric. But there was a further, a lot more apocalyptic component.
Ahead of Ramsey could change his attention to the chancel and the difficulty of that blessed tower, a new and frightening pestilence achieved England. For everyone dwelling in a port, health conditions brought from overseas have been an every day hazard that experienced to be balanced towards complete work and opportunities for wealth generation. Even so, this was a little something on a impressive scale, a strain of bubonic plague that reached the south coastline ports in August 1348 and that by the dismal late winter season months of 1349 had attained Norfolk. Maybe 50 % the inhabitants died, while in the ports there appears to have been a higher survival amount probably there was additional immunity because of to previous exposure. Even so, Ramsey and his son both died, and the do the job of the ports was disrupted for a number of generations. The Victorians, relishing the gothic horror of the catastrophe, looked again from their own cholera-plagued century and identified as it the Black Dying.
50 percent a century later on, trade, assurance, and a renewed obsession with the cult of the lifeless led to a lot more money being lavished on St Margaret. This was the time that the mighty south porch was crafted, a Perpendicular fortress that guards, relatively uneasily, the Embellished entrance. The church was even further furnished with a mighty rood screen, elaborately carved woodwork, and glass and a seven sacrament font intended 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 promptly people situations have been to tumble.
The English Reformation brought to an abrupt close the have to have for bequests, and all operate on acquiring the developing stopped. And, point out protestantism would sow the seeds that would aid England arise as an insular, capitalist country, modifying styles of trade, and carrying out away with the want for Blakeney Haven, pushing Norfolk back again into the aid of a prolonged, agricultural rest.
So, you just take a walk all over the outside of St Margaret, the window tracery a textual content guide of the way English architecture developed around the centuries. The most stunning is that in the south transept, tasteful lights that make to a cluster of large quatrefoils. This was competed on the eve of the Black Death, and is most likely at the extremely apex of English inventive endeavour. But I feel that it was never filled with glass. I can see no proof that the transepts were finished in time for their use in advance of the pestilence, or that there was at any time a will need to use them after the restoration from it. And, then, of training course, the Reformation intervened.
You step into the church by the south porch, with its flanking shields of the Holy Trinity and the Instruments of the enthusiasm. Over, in the vaulting, are bosses. Just one demonstrates an offended girl chasing a fox that has stolen her spectacular cockerel. A further, displays two devils beating the bare buttocks of a third figure. 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 spectacular, a feast for the senses. The west end of the church has been cleared, producing a cathedral-vastness, and the gentle, when not gloomy, does not have that white East Anglian high-quality acquainted from Perpendicular buildings. The odor is of age rather than furnishings polish, a creamy dampness that recalls previous enterprise instead than decay. The honeyed stone is also by some means overseas in this heartland of flint. It impacts the audio in a distinctive way. The creating requires a selected sum of awe that is not just thanks to its dimension.
We arrived about an hour prior to a wedding was owing to start out, and as we explored the developing we observed preparations build, the pews commence to fill, the minister and choir get started to gown, right up until we felt we were being intruding, and still left just as the bride arrived. But though I was not totally distracted from documenting the making, it was a reminder to me just how important weddings have turn into to the Church of England, not just in terms of the earnings they produce, but as a very last bastion of the grounding of Religion in regular people’s life. They may well no for a longer period have their young children baptised, they may well no more time occur on a Sunday at all but relationship is the place that very simple Christianity touches their lives – that, and their funeral, of training course, despite the fact that ever more people are a lot more militantly atheist about death than they are about appreciate.
The 7 sacrament font looks somewhat lonely in its clearing, and is not the most breathtaking of its type, though the imagery is a little uncommon. The Very last Rites, (NW) surface to exhibit the Priest lying on the bed on prime of the dying male. Confession (NE) reveals the Priest and confessing gentleman dealing with each and every other across a shriving bench. Affirmation (E) is the most persuasive of all, mainly because it seems to show a tonsured Priest relatively than a bishop blessing a group of individuals that incorporate small children and toddlers. Mass (SW) is proven from behind, the Priest elevating the host whilst the acolytes on possibly side kneel and maintain tapers. The eighth and odd panel is dropped, but was almost certainly the Crucifixion.
The most spectacularly un-East Anglian characteristic of the church are the terrific picture niches that line the arcades. They are big. Beneath the pedestals are depicted figures, which include musicians (1 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 basically spectacular.
Additional homely are the bench finishes, which includes a gorgeous mermaid, several figures studying publications, and a poppyhead carved with a deal with sticking out its tongue, of a form occasionally called Scandal, despite the fact that I have never been confident by this. There are a lot of brasses, some in the north aisle and others scattered close to the south doorway, such as two figures in their shrouds, and a single fragment depicting a group of 6 weepers. In the north aisle is a interesting selection of donated and collected ephemera, some suggesting that in the latest earlier this was a fairly Anglo-catholic spot, together with a beautiful Russian Orthodox cross. I rushed all-around taking photos even though the church loaded with wedding ceremony company.
And so, it was time to go. I resolved that I was amazed by this church, but that I failed to really like it. Looking all-around at the splendour of William Ramsey’s operate, at what survives of its elaborate furnishings, and sensing the echoes of the rich sacramental lifetime it the moment hosted, I had a sudden vision of apocalypse – not of the Black Dying so a great deal, as of the close of a way of existence replaced by one thing so wholly unique in a couple limited decades of Reformation. This church experienced been crafted for so much much 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 some thing so wholly outside of their imagination.’
Posted by Simon Knott on 2022-03-30 11:18:26
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