St Mary Magdalen, Wiggenhall St Mary Magdalen, Norfolk
You cross the broad, lazy Great Ouse, and at as soon as Norfolk improvements. The rippling countryside flattens out, the horizon straightens. Norfolk’s trees disappear, aside from the odd just one or two that flame like beacons down below the perpendicular sky. There usually are not seriously fields any longer, just vast prairies, and the villages are perfunctory. This is the Marshland.
Pevsner mentions really few buildings west of the Ouse – other than the excellent churches, some of which are among the England’s finest. In his e book England’s Thousand Finest Churches, Simon Jenkins features no considerably less than 10 of the Norfolk marshland church buildings. There are only 9 for the complete of Northumberland.
Magdalen is, potentially, shut adequate to the relaxation of Norfolk to even now be a suitable East Anglian village, and a quite a single at that. A person to savour if you are heading west and about to suggestion off the edge of the true county into that unusual, sinking landscape beyond inexorably, water spilt right here would roll into Lincolnshire. But the church is a marshland church, large bold and lovely with that air of chiarascuro familiar from its neighbours, a a little bit decayed natural beauty with the smell of aged wood and moist in the air.
The village can take its title from St Mary of Magdala, of system, mainly because it is really one of the Wiggenhalls. Around the yrs, Wiggenhall St Mary Magdalene has come to be a bit of a mouthful, specially supplied the existence of the close by parish of Wiggenhall St Mary, the place there is no real village. So, Magdalen it has turn out to be, incidentally giving its name to a railway station on the Cambridge to Kings Lynn line. St Mary of Magdala is 1 of my favorite Saints, and so it was a enjoyment to check out a complete village named following her. The church is a stunning assemblage of pink brick, flint and stone, wholly natural and organic as it rises venerably in the slim graveyard. It is all pretty substantially 15th century, built on wool money, although as is popular in East Anglia the good tower is previously, on the eve of the Black Death. If it had at any time been rebuilt, this would have been a person of the most impressive churches in England.
You phase into a big making, entire of light-weight, a dusty air slipping slowly but surely. At the west close, there is a unusual tiny door into the foundation of the tower – I question if the rebuilding of the nave elevated the level of the ground – and on both side of it the continues to be of the rood monitor are propped up, just 4 panels depicting the evangelistic symbols. Now, this is really curious – the symbols do not usually show up on roodscreens. My instinct was that they may well be later, but the work absolutely seems to be medieval, and the experience of Matthew’s winged guy has been scratched out.
A great deal of the character of the nave will come from the woodwork, a pleasing mixture of basic medieval benches and 19th century box pews beneath the authentic 15th century roof, which is somewhat rustic in character with alternating hammerbeams and queen posts.
Just as neighbouring Wiggenhall St Mary has the most significant collection of medieval bench finishes in Norfolk, St Mary Magdalen has the premier collection of 15th century stained glass figures. There are about forty of them, scattered in the upper lights of the north aisle. Even so, they are somewhat specialist assortment, and not simply identifiable to the untutored eye, since alternatively than acquainted Apostles and Saints they primarily stand for Bishops, Archbishops and Popes.
Simon Cotton, in the church guideline, presents an great key to them. Ann Eljenholm Nichols’ e book Early Artwork of Norfolk, in all probability the greatest e book at any time penned about the medieval church buildings of Norfolk, shows that additional than a number of of them are one of a kind representations in the county, and potentially in the Kingdom. Most of them have scrolls, and with binoculars you can decipher some of the inscriptions, but couple have their acquainted symbols with them.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2016-09-10 09:26:00
Tagged: , Wiggenhall , Mary , Magdalene , magdalen , Norfolk , East Anglia
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