St Matthew, Portman Highway, Ipswich
In the 1960s, Ipswich went mad. City planners devised a plan whereby the populace would rise to 50 % a million, and the current city centre would be encircled and crossed by urban motorways. They failed to get extremely significantly prior to the men in white coats arrived and took them away, releasing them into the wild someplace like Croydon or Wolverhampton but the towering Civic Centre, the brutalist police station and courts buildings ended up evidence of their ambitions (the Civic Centre has due to the fact been demolished), and the four lane Civic Drive cuts across what was the Mount residential location, the small terraces all demolished to make way for the 20th century.
Now, the new Ipswich approach designates this entire region for household use, and the civil servants have all moved down to the river. This new approach, if it emerges, can only provide St Matthew properly, sitting beside Civic Push as it does, and slice off from the city centre by it.
St Matthew is, potentially, considerably less very well-acknowledged than the other doing work town centre churches. Partly, this is because it is the only 1 of them which is held locked, but also mainly because it is this kind of an exertion to get to if you are a visitor. Because of this, lots of persons really don’t realise that it contains a treasure of countrywide worth. It is the early 16th Century font, which is quite compared with any other in Suffolk, and potentially is exclusive in England.
Right before we appear to it, the church developing itself is well worth analyzing. This have to at the time have been pretty a modest church, but is now a big one. Its main is 15th century, such as the decrease portion of the tower. Nothing at all else is. Its 19th century expansion can be discussed by the proximity of the Ipswich Barracks, for this turned the Garrison church. This resulted in the enormous aisles, as large as the nave. The chancel was also rebuilt, but retaining its medieval roof.
Until eventually 1970, the church was hemmed in to the east, but the construction of Civic Drive opened up this look at, which isn’t really a notably excellent 1, notably from the north east. It comes as a shock to locate the west stop on Portman Street quite so pastoral, but the concealed graveyard bordering the tower is pretty lovely, and would at the time have been the common perspective. Ancestor hunters will be horrified to master that the better portion of the graveyard was crafted in excess of in the 1960s, with the design of a church faculty to the south. All those people graves are under the playground now. The aspect of the graveyard to the east fell foul of the road, and people straight away further than the chancel ended up turned into a garden, now the preserve of homeless drinkers. A footpath runs along the north facet, which will choose you as a result of to the most important entrance, the west doorway, beneath the tower. You step into a broadly Victorian interior, and obtain the font in the north aisle.
East Anglia is popular for its 7 Sacrament fonts, 13 of which are in Suffolk. These display the 7 sacraments of the Catholic Church, and are unusual survivals so considerably Catholic iconography was destroyed by the Protestant reformers of the 16th century, and the Puritans of the 17th century.
In this article at St Matthew, we obtain an even rarer survival of England’s Catholic earlier a series of images of functions involved with the Blessed Virgin Mary.
In advance of describing it, I have to make the position that this actually is 1 of the dozen most critical and significant medieval artwork survivals in Suffolk, and just one of the best late medieval fonts in England. There is very little as fantastic as this in the Victorian and Albert Museum, or in the British Museum. I make this point basically because on each occasion that I have visited, the individual accompanying me (they do not let you vist the church on your individual) did not look to realise really how crucial the font was, and gave the impression that the parish, though they treatment for it lovingly, also did not realise what a treasure, what a jewel, they experienced on the premises. “It really is pretty really,” mentioned the woman when I visited in September 2016.
Of the 8 panels, two bear Tudor roses, but 5 of them depict functions in the tale of Mary, mom of Jesus. These five reliefs, and a sixth of the Baptism of Christ, are wonderful art objects. They demonstrate the Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin, The Adoration of the Magi, the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, the Coronation of the Queen of Heaven, and the Mom of God Enthroned. The guideline publications all explain these as the 5 Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary. In reality, this is technically not the circumstance, though surely the font was meant for use in rosary meditations. Immediately after extensive research, the late John Blatchly confirmed convincingly that this font was compensated for by the Rector John Bailey to celebrate the Miracle of the Maid of Ipswich, which occured in the parish in 1516 and was held in renown all more than England in the couple brief years remaining in advance of the Reformation intervened.
We know that the rosary was a massively well-liked devotion in medieval England, and that a individuals ‘bedes’ have been their most valued possession. They played a main aspect in personalized devotion, but had been also vital as a way of taking part in the liturgy, and an expression of communal piety. Most pre-Reformation memorials demonstrate people holding their rosary beads. Even so, what we now feel of as the Rosary sequence only dates from the 14th century or so, and was only a person among a lot of – the so-called Dominican Rosary, which is now the predominant meditation. The rosary was greatly popularised in England by St Thomas of Canterbury in the 12th century, who devised a sequence of seven joyful mysteries, which includes the Adoration of the Magi and the Assumption. Most sequences were of 5 meditations, and we will have to presume that this is what we come across in this article. In time, the Joyful Mysteries would come to be Mary’s earthly experiences, and the Glorious Mysteries her heavenly ones.
Because particular devotion was deemed a diversion from congregational worship, and Marian devotion was thought superstitious, the rosary was fully anathematised by the 16th century Protestant reformers, and tries were designed to publish it out of record, by destroying images of it. Inside forty several years of this font staying developed, possession of rosary beads was punishable by dying in England.
The survival of an image of the Assumption is especially appealing. We however have substantially surviving evidence of religious existence in England in advance of the Church of England came along, but it does not definitely reveal to us the relative importance of various devotions, basically since some of the significant cults and their images – St Thomas of Canterbury, for instance – ended up ruthlessly rooted out and destroyed. The Assumption is a different situation in point. 15th and early 16th century wills and bequests expose a good devotion to the Blessed Virgin, significantly to the feast of the Assumption, which is celebrated on August 15th.
This is at the peak of the harvest, of program, and it is not hard to see the relationship between this feast and the fruits of the farming yr, or the relevance to farmworkers of a pageant at this time. Much more than 200 Suffolk parish churches have been dedicated to the Assumption. When the dedications of Anglican church buildings have been restored in the 19th century, immediately after numerous generations of disuse, these typically became ‘St Mary’, whilst some have been restored the right way because, notably Ufford. The Church of England, of course, does not recognise the doctrine of the Assumption.
Of equivalent significance are the other visuals, of class amazing survivals. And why the Baptism of Christ? In truth, this is the most typical ‘odd panel out’ on the 7 Sacrament fonts, and shows us the significance of ‘anointing to serve’ in the medieval church. The medieval church didn’t see Baptism as a mere naming ceremony, or welcoming ceremony, as so many people feel to do today. It was the sacrament by which folks gained their fee as Christians.
The north aisle also retains panels from the rood monitor, constructed into a 19th century monitor.You may well skip these, since chairs are stacked towards them. 3 of the panels show bishops, and the other two exhibit cheering crowds of 7 and 9 persons respectively. I do not think that these can be in their original configuration. Roy Tricker thought that the crowds have been portraits of parishioners, but I have noticed elsewhere a recommendation that this may possibly have been the display screen to the chantry altar of the guild of Erasmus, which was proven right here.
There is obvious proof of the locale of at minimum one particular nave altar, because a squint kicks in from the north aisle. There are two fantastic 17th century wall memorials in the chancel, the most effective getting to Anthony Penning and his wife, depicting their children weeping, some holding skulls to exhibit that they pre-deceased their mom and dad.
Significantly of the 19th century woodwork is from the workshops of two major 19th century Ipswich carpenters, Henry Ringham and John Corder. Ringham’s perform can be uncovered in a number of Suffolk church buildings, most notably St Mary le Tower and Great Bealings, though Corder was an architect liable for quite a few restorations, which include Swilland. The two have Ipswich streets named immediately after them.
The church has an in depth collection of late 19th and early 20th Century glass, not all of it excellent, but happily by a extensive variety of workshops. The good curiosity is the window in the east stop of the south aisle, which depicts Jane Trimmer Gaye, wife of a 19th Century Rector, flanked by feminine users of her husband’s flock with pictures of delivery and dying. It was designed by her brother Frank Howard, and made by George Hedgeland. Another oddity is Percy Bacon’s Christ flanked by St Edmund and St Felix – for the final hundred yrs the Saints have stood there with their names transposed.
There is a frankly purposeful modern-day monitor, with a curious Anglo-catholic style rood, which seems most out of location, for St Matthew nowadays is quite a lot in the evangelical tradition. But the girl who authorized me entry thought it ‘nice’, so I assume no person minds.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2016-09-13 06:21:00
Tagged: , St , Matthew , Ipswich , Suffolk , East Anglia , church
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