St George, Stowlangtoft, Suffolk
Presented that our parish church buildings nearly without the need of exception underwent restorations in the 19th Century, it must be obvious that when we enter a medieval church, we are encountering a Victorian eyesight of the medieval. Even when the actual furnishings and fittings are medieval, the full piece is still a Victorian conception.
Inevitably, the query arises of what was there ahead of the restoration and what wasn’t. The apparent answer is that we ought to suppose that nothing is as it to start with seems.
A primary case in point of a church that assumes a continuity that could not truly be the real truth is below in the flat fields between Woolpit and Ixworth. This part of Suffolk can be alternatively bleak in winter season, but in summer time the churchyard below is verdant and golden, as wonderful a position as any in the county. The church is huge, and yet unusually slender. It sits on a mound that has been slash down on just one aspect by the road. In the churchyard you are going to locate the perfectly-known memorial to the artwork critic Peter Fuller and his unborn son, killed in a motor vehicle crash in 1990.
In the churchyard wall there is what appears to be damaged medieval window tracery, which is worthy of noticing, for hereby hangs a tale.
St George is just one of the terrific Suffolk churches. Though it could externally surface a tiny serious, and is by no indicates as grand as Blythburgh, Extended Melford and the relaxation, it is a treasure dwelling of the medieval inside of. Unusually for a church of its date, it was all rebuilt in a single go, in the late 14th century, and the perpendicular windows are not still entire of the ‘walls of glass’ self confidence that the subsequent century would see. The tracery seems to have been repaired, and potentially even renewed, which may perhaps demonstrate the tracery in the churchyard wall. However, it isn’t going to acquire substantially to see that the tracery in the wall is not perpendicular at all, but decorated. So it may possibly be that the broken tracery is from the unique church that the late 14th century church changed. But the wall alone isn’t really medieval, so the place had it been all these several years? Is it doable that the existing window tracery is not medieval at all?
Stowlangtoft church featured in Simon Jenkins’ e book England’s Thousand Finest Church buildings, which sends plenty of visitors to its locked doorway, and could enable stave off the unavoidable for a although, for there is no real congregation here any additional and the church is moribund. Standard providers are held across the fields at Pakenham, and St George is now only used on specific situations. The important is retained across the road, the place the very nice lady told me in February 2018 that the church is now headed for redundancy. It seems likely that care of it will be conveyed into the hands of the Church buildings Conservation Have faith in.
You phase in as a result of the chancel door (the lock here is extremely awkward, but do persevere) and if you are everything like me you will head straight down to the west end the place you will uncover the font. Likethe window tracery, it asks some inquiries. Unusually, it options a Saint on seven of the panels, Christ getting on the westwards facial area. Mortlock dates it to the early 14th century, and the Saints it displays are familiar cults from that time: St Margaret, St Catherine, St Peter and St Paul, and fewer typically St George. The cult of St George was at its top in the early decades of the 14th century. Mortlock describes the font as mutilated, and it unquestionably isn’t on the lookout its greatest. But I think there is more likely on below than fulfills the eye. Fonts were being plastered in excess of in Elizabethan occasions, and only reduction that stood proud of the plaster was mutilated. These are all shallow reliefs, and I do not think they have been mutilated at all. To my eye at least, this stonework seems weathered. I speculate if this font was removed from the church, likely in the mid-17th century, and served an outside function until finally it was returned in the 19th century.
The story of this church in the 19th century is nicely-documented. In 1832, as portion of his grand tour of Suffolk, David Davy frequented, and was happy to locate that the church was at previous going through restore. The chancel had been roofless, and the nave utilized for services. A new Rectory was becoming developed. Who was the catalyst driving all this? His name was Samuel Rickards, and he was Rector in this article for almost the middle forty a long time of the 19th century. Roy Tricker notes that he was a great buddy of John Henry Newman, the foreseeable future Cardinal, and they frequently corresponded on the topic of the pre-Reformation purchasing of English church buildings. It is appealing to feel how, at this seminal moment, Rickards may possibly have knowledgeable the assumed of the Oxford Movement. Regrettably, when Newman grew to become a Catholic, Rickards broke off all correspondence with him.
During the program of the 1840s and 1850s, Rickards reworked Stowlangtoft church. He acquired the great Ipswich woodcarver Henry Ringham in to restore, replicate and comprehensive the marvellous established of bench ends – Ringham did the same point at Woolpit, a few miles absent. Ringham’s get the job done is so excellent that it is occasionally challenging for the inexperienced eye to detect it. However, as at Woolpit, Ringham only copied animals here, and the weirder stuff is all medieval, and likely dates from the rebuilding of the church. The glory of Stowlangtoft’s bench finishes is partly the sheer amount – there are perhaps 60 carvings – but also that there are several unique subjects.
The carvings look to be section of the exact group as Woolpit and Tostock – you will recognise the unicorn, the chained bear, the bull participating in a harp, the chicken with a man’s head, from comparable carvings somewhere else. And then ideally that very little alarm bell in your read really should commence to go “Hmmmm…..” mainly because some of the carvings in this article are obviously not from the exact same team. It is really hard to believe that that the mermaid and the owl, for instance, are from the exact same workshop, or even from the similar ten years. The benches them selves are no clue, as it was popular observe in the 19th century to exchange medieval bench finishes on fashionable benches, or on medieval benches, or even on modern day benches built 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 sort of individual to do a issue like that?
Well, indeed he could. As Roy Tricker recalls, the medieval roof at the tractarian Thomas Mozley’s church at Cholderton in Wiltshire is East Anglian. Rickards obtained it right after obtaining it in storage in Ipswich docks. It presumably arrived from a person of the Ipswich churches. In the ferment of the terrific 19th century restoration of our English church buildings, there was masses of medieval junk lying all over, significantly of it going begging. But was Samuel Rickards the variety of man or woman to counterfeit his church’s medieval inheritance?
Nicely, of course he most likely was. The fake-medieval roundels in the windows of the nave are plainly not medieval at all, but were in reality the operate of the youthful Lucy Rickards, daughter of Samuel Rickards himself. Some are plainly to the young girl’s design, and Pevsner notes that others are copied from medieval manuscript illustrations in the British Museum, even though the Holy Kinship and Presentation in the Temple roundels at least are incredibly shut copies of the Flemish roundels of the same subjects in Nowton church on the other aspect of Bury St Edmunds.
Definitely medieval is the vast St Christopher wall-portray however discernible on the north wall. It was almost certainly one of the past to be painted. The bench ends are medieval, of training course, as is the high-quality rood-screen dado, albeit repainted. There is even some medieval figure glass in the higher tracery of some of the windows, which include St Agnes holding a lamb and four Previous Testomony prophets. The laughable stone pulpit is Rickard’s commission, and the perform of William White. What can Rickards have been wondering of? But we stage by means of into the chancel, and abruptly the total matter moves up a gear. For listed here are some points that are certainly outstanding.
In a county famed for its woodwork, the furnishings of Stowlangtoft’s chancel are spectacular, even awe-inspiring. At the rear of the rood display screen dado is Suffolk’s most comprehensive set of return stalls. Most placing are the figures that sort finials to the stall finishes. They are contributors in the Mass, including two Monks, two servers and two acolytes. The figure of the Priest at a prayer desk should be 1 of the very best medieval images in Suffolk, and Mortlock thought the stalls the very best in England.
The benches that confront eastwards are misericords, and beneath them are fantastic points: angels, lions and wodewoses, evangelistic symbols and crowned heads. A hawk captures a hare, a dragon sticks out its tongue. Involving the seats are bizarre oriental faces.
Now, you know what I am going to ask next. How a great deal of this is from this church originally? It all appears medieval perform, and there is no rationale to feel it may possibly not have been moved elsewhere in the church when the chancel was open up to the features. What evidence have we got?
First of all, we need to observe that the only other Suffolk church with this sort of a significant selection of medieval misericords of this quality is just a mile absent, at Norton. I do not request you to see this as sizeable, merely to detect it in passing. Next, I am no carpenter, but it does look to me as nevertheless two sets of furnishings have been cobbled with each other the stalls that again on to the display screen show up to have been built-in into the greater structure of stalls and desks that entrance them and the north and south walls.
Nevertheless, if you seem carefully at the figures of the two Deacons, you will see that they are bearing shields of the Ashfield and Peche family members. The Ashfield arms also show up on the rood monitor, and the Ashfields had been the key donors when the church was rebuilt in the 14th century. So on stability I am inclined to believe that the larger section of the stall framework was in this church originally from when it was rebuilt. And the misericords? Perfectly, I really don’t know. But I assume they have to be regarded as element of the exact established as people at Norton. In which situation they may have arrive from the exact church, which may well have been this just one, but may not have been. Virtually surely, the stalls at Norton did not appear from Norton church, and folklore has it that they have been initially in the quire of Bury Abbey.
Other impressive issues in St George consist of FE Howard’s lovely war memorial in the former north doorway, and in the reverse corner of the nave Hugh Easton’s unexpectedly stunning St George, which serves the very same reason. He is not an artist I ordinarily admire, but it is as great as his operate at Elveden. Again up in the chancel is a pleasant painted pipe organ which was evidently exhibited at, and obtained from, the Fantastic Exhibition of 1851.
But St George at Stowlangtoft is, of course, most renowned for the Flemish carvings that flank the rather heavy altarpiece. They were presented to the church by Henry Wilson of Stowlangtoft Corridor, who allegedly observed them in an Ixworth junk store. They demonstrate images from the crucifixion story, but are not Stations of the Cross as some guides advise. They day from the 1480s, and were being practically definitely the altarpiece of a French or Flemish monastery that was sacked throughout the French Revolution. The carvings were the moment brightly painted, and piled up in a block rather than distribute out in a line. The niches, and crowning arches over them, are 19th century.
One particular cold winter’s evening in January 1977, a gang of burglars broke into this locked church and stole them. Nothing much more was seen or heard of them till 1982, when they were being found out on display screen in an Amsterdam art gallery. Their journey had been a convoluted one. Taken to Holland, they have been utilized as stability for a bank loan which was defaulted upon. The new proprietor was then burgled, and the carvings have been fenced to an Amsterdam junk seller. They had been acquired from his shop, and taken to the museum, which promptly determined them as 15th century carvings. They place them on display, and a Dutch woman who experienced read about the Stowlangtoft theft recognised them.
The parish instituted legal proceedings to get them again. An injunction was taken out to cease the new proprietor removing them from the museum. The parish shed the case, leaving them with a monstrous lawful invoice, but the story has a pleased ending. A Dutch businessman negotiated their obtain from the proprietor, compensated off the authorized expenditures, and returned the carvings to Stowlangtoft. Seemingly this was all at huge charge, but the businessman gave the gift in many thanks for Britain’s liberation of Holland from the Nazis. No, thank you, sir.
Right now, the carvings are set firmly in area and alarmed, so they will not likely be likely walkabout yet again. But a very little section of me wonders if they actually ought to be in this article at all. Positive, they are medieval, but they were not listed here originally, and they weren’t even in England initially. Wouldn’t it be improved if they had been exhibited someplace safer, where people could pay out to see them, and deliver some income for the upkeep of the church constructing? And then, whisper it, when St George is taken on by the CCT they could possibly even be equipped to leave it open.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2018-02-13 18:02:36
Tagged: , Stowlangtoft , Suffolk , east Anglia
#furnishings #Do-it-yourself #woodwork #woodworking #freedownload#woodworkingprojects #woodsmith ,wooden craft, wooden planer, wonderful woodworking, picket chairs, wooden doing the job tools, common woodworking, woodworking textbooks, woodworking workbench programs