St Mary, Parham, Suffolk
By a great sleight of hand, the A12 dual carriageway threads via the most intensely rural heart of Suffolk, and but a mile or so from its study course you would not even know it was there. Very small, lovely villages are joined by lattices of little lanes which meander sleepily about the fields and copses of sprawling, vacant parishes. They are in no particular hurry to get any place. In the villages you can even now obtain the occasional previous-fashioned pub, and for miles all-around the churches are all open up just about every working day, quite much.
Parham has no pub, but it does have a interesting church. The coronary heart of the village, pronounce Parrum, is not considerably off the active road which connects Framlingham to the A12, and the church is established in a little dip with historical homes in attendance. It dates from a big rebuilding of the late 14th Century. You enter the churchyard by a pretty thatched lychgate in the north-west corner, and the graves sprawl absent south and eastwards, an eye-catching but specifically uneven and bumpy graveyard.
At initial sight, the most striking feature of the exterior of the church is the substantial market on the western encounter of the tower. It possibly held a rood team, the crucifixion in the center, with John the Evangelist and Mary the Mother of God on either aspect. You can see that it would have had a most elaborate cover. The jap buttresses of the tower are parallel to the tower jap confront and there are no battlements on the tower, making it seem to be somewhat critical, especially with the very low nave roof. The nave windows are tall and stately, generating the church seem to be somewhat more substantial than it in fact is. There was a significant refurbishment a hundred yrs afterwards, therefore the substantial window beneath the area of interest, and the grand north porch, now a vestry.
Unusually for Suffolk, you enter the church from the west, beneath the gallery. The inside is astonishingly spacious, given that there are no aisles. The building is whole of light – there is pretty minor coloured glass, and the dado panels of the rood screen had been taken off in the 1880s, leaving just the tracery painted in a homosexual crimson and green. It gave Cautley the horrors, and even designed Mortlock tut, but I relatively like it. The entire constructing has a feeling of room because of it, abnormal in a church so comprehensively restored in the 1880s. The reredos over and above is a straightforward and seemly framework, a cobbling jointly of 17th century woodwork with a image of the Very last Supper in the Russian design. I would have appreciated to have recognised the place it arrived from. Higher than it is some fantastic 15th Century glass, albeit restored. 4 angel musicians in the upper tracery look on with the major faces of that century.
England’s medieval churches are deposit and treasure residences of the folk memory of their parish. In this article at Parham the Corrance loved ones were the people at the Huge Home. Frederick Snowden Corrance was the Conservative MP for East Suffolk, and in 1872 his 9 year old only son Charles laid the very first stone (nevertheless it was in all probability a brick) of the village school. The creating has now absent, but the determination plaque survives, and is in the church. It notes that the school was crafted by voluntary contributions of the landowners of this parish. Another plaque data that, in the subsequent 10 years, the roofs and pews ended up changed by a bequest from George Corrance, who was presumably Charles Corrance’s grandfather. His uncle, an additional Charles, was vicar at the time.
There is a very good established of Restoration royal arms, suggesting the locals had been happy to see the back of the Commonwealth. But, curiously, if the 17th century communion rails seem odd, it is mainly because alternate balusters have been removed by someone who, presumably, considered it was a fantastic strategy at the time. Remembering Archbishop Laud’s main purpose for putting in such factors in the very first position, maybe they just wished to let the dogs again in.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2016-09-05 18:35:39
Tagged: , Parham , Suffolk , East Anglia , church
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