St Martin, Thompson, Norfolk
The Brecks sprawl throughout the border amongst south-west Norfolk and north-west Suffolk, a unusual, restless position of sandy heaths and managed forests. The northern part is stranger however, for in 1943 the army commandeered far more than 30,000 acres of land as a education space in planning for the D-Day landings. This included the evacuation of a selection of villages on land belonging to Lord Walsingham, not minimum because the Military required the properties for practising door-to-door fighting, and while the villagers ended up promised that they could return after the War, this never happened. Today, the Stanta Struggle Teaching Location is a ghostly area, the medieval churches of its 4 historic parishes marooned beyond public gaze in a landscape that has not substantially altered in virtually eighty yrs other than the disruption of live fire training and the surreal building of an Afghan village.
The villages around the Coaching Spot are lonely, and Thompson is a single of them. The road that operates south of the town of Watton requires you by the Merton estate with its Corridor and round-towered church, and then just right before you reach Thompson there is a small monument set guiding rails at the corner of a lane. This is the Tottington war memorial. Tottington was just one of the villages evacuated in 1943, and the lane listed here the moment led down into it and grew to become its major street. It is now poignantly marked as a dead conclusion, reaching a army gate right after a number of hundred yards.
Instead, the highway carries on down into Thompson, a village large plenty of to have a school and a pub, but with a curiously distant experience, not the very least because the lanes that guide off to the west are marked highway shut ½ mile, as if even now it could be a short-term evaluate. As usually with East Anglian parishes the church is set away from the key village in a modest settlement along a back lane, and here things get appealing in a different way, for Thompson was dwelling to a university of monks, and some of the faculty buildings nevertheless endure. The church stands tall previously mentioned the encompassing fields with a few cottages and the university farm for organization, and as John Vigar observes in his book Churches of Norfolk, the journeys of the priests amongst household and church will have to have been a familiar sight to the local peasantry in the Center Ages.
It is constantly with some anticipation and pleasure that I tactic this church, for it is one particular of the loveliest and most appealing churches in all Norfolk, firmly seated in an historical room and thoroughly lord of all close to. It is just about all the operate of the two centuries just before the Reformation, for it was in 1349, coincident with and maybe in reaction to the Black Loss of life, that the faculty was established at Thompson by the Shardlow spouse and children for priests to pray for their souls, but also for the operate of the parish, as we will see. Significantly of the rebuilding and refurbishing of the church from then until eventually the Reformation was underway in the 1530s was as a consequence of that foundation.
This is a relatively huge church. The nave is aisleless, but the chancel is extensive and huge. This tells us one thing about the priorities of the higher education and the Shardlows. The church unfolds from west to east in more or considerably less the buy that it was developed, though the curious quick, high transept chapel on the south aspect dates from the really eve of the Reformation. The vast nave roof is also a curiosity, as we will see inside of, due to the fact it is a single span scissor-braced roof which, as Cautley observed, was generally copied by the Victorians but this is a rare surviving medieval illustration. The problem with roofs of this kind is that they have a tendency to unfold more than the generations, and as I produce this is a issue that the parishioners of Thompson are obtaining to deal with.
The south porch is tall with a tripartite established of impression niches previously mentioned the entrance. Mortlock wondered if this experienced been window tracery and that the porch as soon as had an upper home, for it has obviously been shortened at some time. The inside of the porch, with its brick floor and 14th Century doorway and old doorway, is a taste of matters to appear, for you move into one particular of the most atmospheric of all Norfolk’s churches. There is not a single pane of colored glass, and white gentle floods the extensive nave with its silvered woodwork and outdated stone. The benches are mainly 15th Century, but in the early 17th Century there was a major campaign of refurbishment at Thompson and the benches were specified carved poppyhead bench ends, generally in the shapes of fruit and bouquets but such as one particular pretty perky human head on the south side. The 14th Century font in the north-west corner is contemporary with the founding of the faculty. This and the measurement of the nave displays that the Shardlows intended their church for parochial use.
The mix of 14th Century and 17th Century get the job done below is a content one particular, and is partly thanks to that most opposite of guardians, neglect. The mend and make do frame of mind of the puritans provided a most idiosyncratic pulpit. At initial sight it seems to be a triple-decker, but in truth it is a cobbling together of at the very least 3 distinct constructions. The wine-glass pulpit by itself is probably from the late 15th Century, and added to it are a modified panelled pew as a stall for the minister and a bench and desk for the parish clerk. To the south of it is the compact transept chapel, likely intended for a chantry altar and erected at about the time the pulpit was added.
A counterpoint to the pulpit is 1 of Norfolk’s loveliest outdated screens driving it, its woodwork pale, the shafts turned like barbers poles and the dado stencilled with bouquets. You step by means of it into the emptiness of the long chancel. A couple surviving stalls with misericord seats that would after have been employed by the monks of the faculty line the north and south walls. The upper lights of the tall Embellished tracery of the home windows has been crammed in at some time, probably as a momentary measure in the 17th Century. At this time the chancel was reroofed as the initials RF and the date 1648 on two of the corbels exhibit. This is an interesting day, for reroofing a chancel at this time is very likely to have been to allow it to be made use of for a secular use, maybe as a college. However, approximately contemporary with the roof are the altar rails. These are curious in by themselves, for they have a groove along their size as if they may possibly be employed for propping up publications, though it is difficult to see why this would be. Over and above the rail, the church saves its best delight till very last, for up in the sanctuary is a person of Norfolk’s most gorgeous sets of sedilia, the seats applied by the ministers celebrating at Mass. The alarming environmentally friendly men have stared out of its spandrels for almost 7 hundred several years.
Quite tiny occurred right here throughout the 19th Century, and the church was practically deserted in the early 20th Century until the intervention of Prince Duleep Singh, whose assist a plaque remembers in the transept. That the combination of the 14th, 15th and 17th Century work below is so harmonious results in an illusion that it was intentional, but of training course what we are viewing is the battleground of strategies that was so frequently erased by nicely-this means Victorian enthusiasm.
This was the favourite church of Norfolk churches professional the late Tom Muckley, who usually stayed at Higher education Farm in Thompson when he was going to Norfolk. On various situations when I fulfilled up with him there I obtained to communicate to Lavender, the owner. She was a impressive man or woman. The daughter of Lord Walsingham, she had been in her early twenties when the Military took in excess of her family’s land. Now in her eighties, she was still passionate about the injustice of it not staying returned. She lies at peace now near to the entrance of Thompson’s churchyard.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2022-11-03 10:59:58
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