Framlingham, Suffolk

Show of strength 

Framlingham Castle looks very impressive as you approach it from the town. Today the entrance is along a path bounded by hedges, across a small 16th century bridge over a defensive ditch, and through the gatehouse. The main defensive element is the stout curtain wall, punctuated by 13 rectangular towers. Inside, built against the walls were the main accommodation buildings including a chamber block and chapel of which only fragments remain.

The defensive walls look strong, as well they might, because they were home to the Bigod family, earls of Norfolk and in the 12th and 13th centuries probably the most powerful family in Suffolk. Hugh Bigod was famously astute at changing sides during the civil war that erupted in the 12th century between the two rival claimants to the throne, Stephen and Matilda. However, when Henry II became king, he sought to curtail Hugh’s power, took over the castle, and dismantled it…although he finally gave the estate back to Hugh. Hugh’s son Roger rebuilt the outer walls of the castle, probably completing them by 1213, when King John stayed at Framlingham.

Although the walls and towers certainly look the part, the towers are not as substantial as they seem from outside – they are open at the back and most have no inner floors for accommodation, just an upper wooden bridge to allow defenders (and now visitors) to walk along the upper part of the walls. They would, though, have provided defending arches with a useful vantage point from which to observe, and shoot, approaching enemies. Another showy feature was added later. A number of the towers have particularly ornate tall chimneys. These were added in the 15th century, by which time the Bigod line had died out and the castle was held by the Dukes of Norfolk. My photograph shows three chimneys, though there are several more. Hardly any of them were ever connected to fireplaces – the towers, after all had no rear walls. They seem to have been there primarily as rather superficial status symbols. ‘We live in the lap of luxury here,’ they seem to say.

We are used to thinking of castles as military buildings, built to be as strong as possible for defensive reasons, and devoid of anything approaching comfort, let alone luxury. According to this view, if a castle bore status symbols, they’d come in the form of defensive bells and whistles – an extra-strong drawbridge, perhaps, or a supersized moat. The towers at Framlingham could be said to fall into this category. But the chimneys are different, speaking of an image of comfort and sophistication. The more work is done on castles, the more this sort of thing emerges – some castles had not just vast banqueting halls, but elaborate gardens, for example. A castle was a home as well as a fortress.

Dennington, Suffolk

 

One foot or two?

When you hear that a church is furnished with medieval benches, you wonder what to expect. They were often an extensive canvas for woodcarvers. Bench ends alone offered vast scope for a talented carver. In the past I have noticed on this blog a bagpiper in a Cornish church and a fox dressed as a bishop in Somerset. Here’s another unusual subject from the church at Dennington in Suffolk – a mythical creature called a sciapod.* The usual definition, drawn from classical sources such as the ancient Greek dramatist Aristophanes (in The Birds) and Pliny the Elder (in his Natural History) and medieval bestiaries, describes a human figure with a single leg ending in a very large foot. The creature is portrayed lying down and using its foot as a sun shade. Its name comes from the Greek ‘shadow-foot’.

All the depictions I’ve seen show a creature with a single leg and foot. A British example is the famous medieval map of the world (Mappa Mundi) in Hereford cathedral, where these single-legged humanoids are shown in India and in the far south of the inhabited world. However, looking closely at the Dennington sciapod he appears to have a pair of legs and feet, both of the same form. This seems to make him unorthodox, but we are in the world of myth and legend after all, so why should there not be variations in iconography?

What is such a weird beast doing in a church? There are interpretations that attempt to place sciapods in the context of arguments against sin – they are ‘deformed’ beings whose bodies show the results of sin. Other writers simply saw them as monsters that we should fear. St Augustine applied the criterion of rationality – if they were capable of rational thought, he believed, they were human, have a soul, and deserve to be treated as such. Whether they’re meant to remind us of the dangers of evil, or to point out that appearances can be deceptive, or to protect us from evil spirits, or whether they were valued mainly for amusement value, like the figures and creatures drawn in the margins of many medieval religious books, they warrant our notice, and their creators command our respect.†

- - - - -

* I know of only one other example in a English church, although there may be others.

† For a good account of the marginal figures in medieval manuscripts and similar images, see Michael Camille, Image on the Edge (Reaktion Books, 2019).

Needham Market, Suffolk

House move

As I approached Needham Market on my Suffolk trip late last year, this house caught my eye and once I’d got my bearings I went back to have a look at it. With its big thatched roof and squarish proportions it reminded me of certain toll houses, built to act as landmarks and to be easily spotted on the road. Except that this house was set back from the road, not at all a good position for a toll house. So I supposed it was probably simply a cottage orné, an example of that rustic and decorative kind of house that became popular in the 18th and 19th centuries.

However, the history of what is now called the Mustard Pot is not quite as simple as that. It turns out that it was built as a toll house, and the gatekeeper must have sheltered under the generous eaves hundreds of times when it was pouring with rain. But when it fulfilled this function, it was not on its current site. It originally stood at Brockford, not far from Mendlesham, by the road that is now the A140. When the A140 was widened in 1972, the house was threatened with demolition, so a Mr Sniechowski of Ipswich, who thought it was worth preserving, had it taken down and moved to Needham Market.*

The roof was removed in one piece – thatch, timbers and all – put on a trailer and driven, very slowly, to the new site. Then the walls were dismantled – they are timber-framed structures beneath the external plaster – taken to the new site and reassembled. The original idea was for the building to be used by fishermen who were angling at the nearby Needham Lake, but Mr Sniechowski died soon after the house’s re-erection and apparently this idea was not taken up. The building served as a dwelling before being taken over by a veterinary practice, which is still its use today. Moving entire houses is a very unusual practice in the UK, most often undertaken by the various open-air museums whose mission it is to preserve unused historic buildings. It’s good that Mr Sniechowski had the vision to move this small house, ensuring the survival of a useful and picturesque building.

- - - - -

* My thanks to the Stowe Veterinary Centre’s website for information about this unusual house move.

Needham Market, Suffolk

 

Embarrassment of riches?

This is the magnificent railway station building at Needham Market, an impressive Jacobean revival design by Frederick Barnes, who designed numerous stations on the Ipswich and Bury Railway. It’s one of the most outstanding stations on the line, a visual feast of towers, gables and mullioned windows – I think only Bury St Edmunds competes with it in this neck of the woods. The impressive, partly diapered brickwork is enhanced by dressings in Caen stone, a material sometimes found in medieval English cathedrals. Needham Market station closed in the great station cull of the 1960s, but by 1971 it had opened again, although this building had been let to tenants. It is, after all, on the large side for a small town.*

When the station was built – during the railway boom, in 1846–7 – it was still more magnificent than it is today. The square end towers had curvaceous ogee roofs and the three gables were in the Dutch style, also with multiple curves. At some point in the station’s history, these features were modified, giving the end towers crenellated parapets and the gables straight sloping edges. It’s not clear exactly when these alterations were made. Gordon Biddle, in his book Britain’s Historic Railway Buildings, cites a photograph of 1912, which shows the station in its original form. An Aerofilms image of 1928 shows it the way it looks today, so the changes were made long before the station’s short-lived closure.

Whatever the reason the building was altered, it’s still worth noticing. It speaks of a time when a station was not something that was thought best to hide away behind other buildings. Frederick Barnes and the Ipswich and Bury Railway did Needham Market proud.

- - - - -

* The most recent census put the population at around 5,000.

Bramfield, Suffolk

Sinuous

One of the joys of my travels around England is going somewhere to visit one building and finding some other structure that gives me as much pleasure, or more, than what I was originally looking for. In Bramfield, south of Halesworth in Suffolk, I found something, if a bit less absorbing than the medieval church I was seeking, something still of interest, and right opposite the churchyard too. Even before I pulled up, I saw it, this long stretch of sinuous brick wall, a crinkle-crankle wall as it’s called, undulating its way into the distance.

I’ve noticed another such wall before on this blog, in Worcestershire, much nearer my home patch. But Suffolk is the true heartland of the crinkle-crankle wall (the very name is said to be Suffolk dialect for sinuous), so a ’native specimen’ was something to be noticed, especially one of such good length. For those who don’t know, the usual explanation for such a curvaceous wall is that it saves bricks. The wall gains its strength from the curves and so can be built with a single layer of brickwork, whereas a straight wall needs two layers (and sometimes buttresses) to stay up.*

Crinkle-crankle walls became popular in Suffolk in the 18th century and I’ve seen those that date from the 19th and even 20th centuries. This one is probably late-18th or early-19th century and marks the northern boundary of the grounds of Bramfield Hall. It’s impressive, and nicely begins with a gateway built in the contrasting materials of dark flint pebbles and pale white brickwork, also traditional Suffolk materials. Most people find these serpentine walls very attractive – curves have an appeal, especially in a context where we’d normally expect a straight line. Visual appeal is of course is another reason why you might build a wall in this unusual way, its repeated curves complementing the rounded arch of the gateway in the foreground.

- - - - -

* Of course a curving wall is longer than a straight one, but the number of bricks required is apparently still smaller.

Framlingham, Suffolk

 

First post

I’d been to Framlingham before, but was not switched on enough to look properly at the post boxes. What a sadly missed opportunity! 

Now, I know that for many people even a slight preoccupation with post boxes is thought to be the preserve of the anorak.* And yet I’d argue (hoping not to get too dull about it) that these small items of street furniture both look good in our towns and villages and provide some insight into social history.

So, in Framlingham the other week, I paused to appreciate one of two such boxes in a very rare early design – octagonal boxes with vertical slits, probably dating to about 1856. This is really early in the history of the post box. When the standard penny post for letters was introduced in 1840, there were no post boxes at all. To post a letter you had to take it to a ‘Receiving Office’ or wait for a man ringing a bell to walk down your street and give your letter to him.

In 1852, the first free-standing post boxes were installed on Jersey; these proved successful and the following year the first of (eventually) thousands of boxes began to be seen on streets on the British mainland. They were all made of cast iron and took a column-like form,† with a vertical slit for the letters. There was no standard design,¶ but this example in Framlingham is one of the earliest still in use. It exhibits many of the features common to later boxes – the initials or cipher of the monarch, a display panel for collection times, a locking door, and so on. It was made by Andrew Handyside, ironfounder of Derby, and probably dates to 1856 or 1857 – Handyside began to produce boxes with horizonal slits in 1857. Horizontal letter slots became the norm, and by 1866 the first national standard box was introduced.

If all this is much too like anorak-speak for you, you’ve probably stopped reading by now. But if you’re still with me you’ll appreciate that such rare early boxes illuminate a bit of postal history and enhance the handful of streets and lanes where they still exist.

- - - - -

* Informal British English. Anorak: person who has an obsessive interest in something generally thought to be ‘dull and unsociable’ (thanks to Chambers Dictionary for the last phrase).

† Some resembled columns very closely, like the fluted one in Malvern, subject of an earlier post.

¶ To begin with, there was no uniform colour either. Red became the standard hue in 1884.

Wickham Market, Suffolk

Light industry

By the River Deben and at the foot of Wickham Market’s High Street lies this cluster of buildings: ‘An attractive group,’ says Pevsner, laconically. Indeed it is, a throw-back to a time when industrial buildings could look both purposeful and pretty. The river, the ducks, and bright light under stormy clouds help the picture too.

What we’re looking at takes us back to the 18th and 19th centuries. The central building is an 18th-century corn mill, weatherboarded in the typical style of this part of East Anglia. The mill leet passes under the twin-arched brick-faced bridge (itself thought to be 19th-century) to the mill to provide its power. A lot of the original machinery remains inside. The mill’s lucam (the projecting structure that contained a hoist) still survives high on the right-hand end.

To the left of the central mill and adjoining it is a white-brick house, still with its windows with the small panes they would have had when the house was first built in the early-19th century. It would have been the miller’s house and the large central window with its semi-circular top suggests that behind is the main staircase, which must be well lit and probably spacious. One gets an impression of understated prosperity.

The brick-built structure on the right-hand side of the picture is another mill. This is again 19th-century and was purpose-built as a steam-powered mill with solid walls able to withstand the vibrations that a steam engine and its connected machinery would produce. The windows have cast-iron lintels now painted white and the lucam is still there, pointing towards the equivalent structure on the older mill. The small structure on the right with the round-headed window is said to be the original engine house – the chimney stack was taken down at some stage. The engine that ran there was made by local firm Whitmore and Binyon, the subject of my previous post, and is now at the Food Museum (formerly the Museum of East Anglian Life).

So milling no longer takes place here, but the buildings usefully survive – the mill parts house variously storage and a shop selling such things as logs for wood-burning stoves. While the buildings are in use, they are likely to be looked after, preserved, and shown off to their best by the light of the sun.

Wickham Market, Suffolk

Cast-iron evidence

The Resident Wise Woman reported that she’d noticed an intriguing pair of iron gateposts a few hundred yards away from where we were staying in the Suffolk town of Wickham Market. Before long I was out on their trail and quickly found the posts, with their fluted uprights and extraordinary spiky finials, which resemble some sort of close-combat weapon, such as a medieval mace. The posts are between some white brick buildings on the town’s main street. A little research revealed their story.*

The gateposts flank the former entrance to the works of Whitmore and Binyon, which in the 19th century was a major employer in the town. Nathaniel Whitmore was a millwright at the end of the 18th century; subsequent generations grew the business, producing not only equipment for milling, but also several kinds of metal goods, from bedsteads to steam engines. From their beginnings as a small local concern, the firm grew top employ some 200 people and by 1868, the Whitmores were joined by George Binyon, a successful engineer and entrepreneur, who brought expertise in agricultural engineering.

The white brick buildings on either side of the gate, which I’d taken to be houses and a shop, were in fact offices of Whitmore and Binyon, together with a shop where customers could call to discuss an order for a steam engine or a pair of gatepoists. From these premises and the factory at the rear, steam engines for mills were dispatched across Suffolk and beyond and diamond-washing equipment was made for the three main diamond mines in South Africa. The company exhibited at major milling exhibitions and had an office in Mark Street, in the City of London. The company seems to have done very well – but for a relatively short time. By 1902 it was in trouble and the works and contents were sold off. From the street, this striking pair of gateposts and modest range of buildings is a quiet testimony to what was once here. Surviving steam engines, including one in the Museum of East Anglian Life that once powered a mill down the road, provide further reminders of a once successful firm.†

- - - - -

* See for example Wickham Market Movers and Shapers, here.

† I plan to do a further post about the mill for which this engine was built.

Aldeburgh, Suffolk

Tower of strength

In the Napoleonic era, Britain feared a French invasion and between 1796 and 1815, a string of 103 towers were built along England’s south and east coasts, to house soldiers and guns to help protect the country from attackers. These fortified structures were known as Martello towers, a name that derives from a defensive tower on Punta Mortella in Corsica – the name of the original got misspelled and the misspelling stuck.* Martello Towers are generally elliptical in plan and brick built. The total height was 33 feet and diameters varied from 45 to 55 feet. The walls were up to 13 feet thick and it has been estimated that around 700,000 bricks were used in each tower. One or more cannon were mounted on a rotating platform on the roof. The two floors below provided accommodation for soldiers and stores.

I was reminded of all this the other day when in Aldeburgh. I’d not visited its Martello tower, the most northerly of the British network, since my first visit to the town, years ago. decided to walk south along the beach to the tower, which when it was built was not thought of as being in Aldeburgh at all, but in the lost village of Slaughden, which later succumbed to the coastal erosion that is such a challenge to life on many parts of the East Anglian coast. I wanted to have a look at the tower again because it’s unique in England’s series of such towers, being built on a quatrefoil (or four-leaf clover) plan.¶ This gives it a different look from the other towers and also allows a different set-up for the guns on the roof – there were at first two, then four guns, one for each ‘lobe’ of the quatrefoil. Inside, the upper floor provided accommodation (for eight soldiers, five NCOs and a commanding officer), while the lower floor was for stores containing food, fuel, and gunpowder, the latter kept on the landward side and reached from a separate stair.

When, in the 1930s, the Ministry of Defence decided the tower no longer had any military use, they sold it to private owners who converted it to a dwelling by adding a studio on top. This, however, fell out of use and both the addition and the tower deteriorated. The Landmark Trust acquired the tower in 1971 and converted it for use as holiday accommodation. The Trust have made their usual good job of restoring the building carefully and fitting it out to provide a comfortable (if, on this occasion, unconventional) holiday let.† Whether you want to stay in it, or just admire it from the outside, it’s an impressive testament to the efforts of both the original builders and those who saved it from its slide into decay.

- - - - -

* The Corsican tower, manned with a garrison of 38 and just three guns, withstood an attack by two British naval ships (with a total of 106 guns). The British clearly thought they could learn something from this.

¶ This larger and more complex plan suggests that the structure may contain at least one million bricks.

† I am indebted to the Landmark Trust’s website for information about the tower’s history.

Lavenham, Suffolk

Pebbles and nodules

Regions said to be poor in building stone (or far enough away from good stone to make transport prohibitively expensive for all but the most high status structures) often display ingenuity in the way builders use what is available. One example is the use of pebbles and nodules of such materials as flint, chert and quartzite, all of which are found in and near Suffolk, among other areas. These rounded or irregular forms seem at first unpromising building materials, but they have all been used to make pleasing walls. I was reminded of them when I came across this picture of a section of wall in Lavenham when looking through my photographs for something else.

The wall has obligingly fallen into disrepair, giving us an insight into how it was constructed, There seems to be a core of brick combined with rubble, together with areas of brickwork on the surface that must key into the core masonry and give the structure strength. Much of the outer surface, however, is covered with pebbles and small nodules of stone. The majority of these stones come in various shades of grey and are probably flint. There are also a small number of orangey stones, which are likely to be chert. They’re all arranged roughly in courses and stick out a lot from the mortar in which they are embedded, which may have eroded away with time to produce the very knobbly effect.

Erosion, moisture and frost certainly seem to have affected the wall badly, as a large area of the pebble surface had come away when I took this photograph a couple of years ago. Water has probably got in at the top and then frozen, in spite of what looks like a top course of hard grey (aka ‘blue’) bricks, designed to protect the wall and probably added later than the rest of the structure. Full marks for effort. Perhaps with a little care and attention, what is still in part a very attractive wall could be put right – maybe it already has been.

Halesworth, Suffolk

Not quite lost

My interest in medieval art and architecture has taken me into churches by the score, from cavernous cathedrals in big cities to tiny, unregarded parish churches, sometimes in remote locations up tracks or in fields. So often in these buildings, I’m reminded of the numberless images that have been lost or partly lost to the depredations of the Reformation, to vandalism, to time. The paintings and carvings in English medieval churches, fading to nothing or brighter, but with faces hacked or scratched away, are some of the most tantalising works of art anywhere. Now and then, however, I’m pulled up short by secular imagery in a similar state, like the woodcarvings on the exterior timbers of medieval houses, from Stratford-upon-Avon or Tewkesbury in the west to Lavenham in the east, or, also in the east, at Halesworth.

What a shock to the innocent shopper in Halesworth is the carving on this otherwise unremarkable shopfront. A pair of lions, stretched out horizontally to fit both the available space and heraldic convention, flank a shield that must have borne a coat of arms (please click on the image to enlarge it). On either end are smaller scenes with beasts. The small carving on the left (in my picture below) depicts an eagle holding in its talons a human figure with something in its right hand. This scene may be the abduction of Ganymede, cup-bearer to the gods, by Zeus. The corresponding subject on the right looks like an episode out of the story of Reynard the fox and has been interpreted as Reynard n his role as physician, holding a basket of herbs, while the goose holds a flask. One theory about the coat of arms is that it was that of the de Argentein family – Margaret de Argentein was said to have been a medieval resident, and the family held the role of cupbearers to the royal family until 1424, which gives relevance to the image of Ganymede.

The combination of high-status heraldry and more folkish images of foxes and geese is interesting, but should not be surprising to anyone who has visited a few medieval churches. Church art often combines or juxtaposes carvings or paintings of saints and angels with imagery that’s earthy, comic, or sometimes simply lewd. All human life was there, along with heavenly life too. Cherished survivors like these Suffolk carvings add yet more to the diversity.

Bungay, Suffolk

 

Oddly enough…

On our recent visit to Bungay in Suffolk we found much to satisfy our architectural curiosity – medieval churches, a market cross, a castle (closed and with the builders in at the time of our visit). But as usual, a casual stroll around the town threw up many less spectacular pleasures. Even so, it was a last-minute impulse that sent me down Chaucer Street, and I’m glad it did, because I found this building in the full-blown polychrome brick style that was popular in the 1860s and 1870s. In that period of architectural showing-off, even a minor building could be as jazzy and eye-boggling as a shopfront from the 1960s.

The frontage bears a large sign saying ‘Masonic Rooms’, giving no doubt about its current purpose. Freemasons have met in Bungay since 1862, when the warrant for the local lodge was issued. Most of us are used to thinking of the Freemasons as a secretive group (though that is much less the case today than it used to be), but the secrecy does not extend to their architecture. In this case, the building stands out proudly from its rather plain red brick and painted brick neighbours. It would be difficult to miss, with its striped archers and patterned stretches of wall in three shades of brick – red, buff, and the shade of grey known in bricky circles as ‘blue’. There’s some stone too, in the gable especially, to add to the rich mix, and the roof is covered in pantiles of two colours. The stone roundel in the gable encloses an octofoil that framed a symbol (perhaps a hand or a coat of arms) that has now worn away.

This building was a small surprise to me, but a bigger surprise ensued when I looked it up in the Suffolk: East volume of Nikolaus Pevsner’s Buildings of England series. According to Pevsner, the structure was ‘apparently built for the Oddfellows in 1910, but its exuberant polychromy looking a good forty years earlier’. So this building, not originally masonic at all, was put up when the architectural fashion was for the curves, swirls and plant motifs of Art Nouveau. Who cares now, though, that the building was behind the times? A big ‘thank you’ to the Oddfellows for being exuberant and colourful.

Snape, Suffolk

 

Vernacular nostalgia

Sanding by the river at Snape Maltings and looking across at this house I was suddenly transported back decades to the time when, as a small boy, I began to realise that houses varied in their appearance according to whereabouts in England they were. It must have been on one of our family trips from Gloucestershire to visit my grandparents in rural Lincolnshire. It had been pointed out to me that many of the older houses in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds were built of local limestone; although we did not live in such a house, I soon got used to seeing them everywhere in the area around where we lived. In Lincolnshire, by contrast, my maternal grandparents lived in a tiny farm worker’s cottage built of brick with a clay-tiled roof. My cousin’s farmhouse was bigger but similar in materials and overall architectural style. In perceiving the differences between these kinds of vernacular architecture I was starting to develop a sense of place.

There are many similar houses to those Lincolnshire ones in East Anglia too. This one in Snape reminded me instantly of what I’d grown used to in Lincolnshire. Walls of brick laid in Flemish bond, curvy pantiles on the roof. Shallow brick arches over the windows and doorways. Such houses are testimony to the fact that in many areas hereabouts, the local building stone (flint or chalk) is not as well suited to construction as Cotswold limestone. Bricks began to be used in East Anglia earlier in the Middle Ages than in most parts of England – thanks largely to sea contact with the Low Countries, where bricks were common.

Hence these lovely houses, built in a material that people soon grew to like, adding aesthetic preference to practicality. There was a time, when I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, when houses like this were regarded as old fashioned. They had low ceilings (look how close the windows are to the roof in this Suffolk example). They were ‘pokey’. Bigger windows made houses that were lighter. And so on. Thanks to depopulation following the mechanisation of agriculture, many were simply demolished, like my grandparents’ house in its field. Now they’re fashionable again, as more and more people appreciate traditional buildings and their practical advantages (small windows and rooms are easier to keep warm, for example). I think there are enough of them left so that they can still be part of that blend of the natural and the man-made that comes to together to create a sense of place.

Kelsale, Suffolk

Small mercy

The most dramatic aspect of the work of late-19th century architect E. S. Prior at Kelsale church (the building in my previous post) is not strictly part of the church at all. It’s the lychgate, the like of which I’ve not seen before. What an extraordinary, dynamic design. Rather than create the usual four-square structure, with a simple pitched roof above a stone or timber structure, Prior conceived something more organic. The wooden supports have a curved profile, so that they appear to lean inwards slightly. They’re massive and the roof they support overhangs deeply and curves round and up into a narrow termination shaped almost like a small spire. At the front of this spirelet is a mandorla-shaped niche, of the kind that sometimes frames the figure of Christ in Majesty. However, there is now no image in the niche, and the eye follows the roof line up to a simple terracotta finial.

This lychgate was built in 1890 and its curvaceous roof seems to point to the Art Nouveau style, just coming into fashion around that time. It also bears some similarity to the roofs of certain Thai Buddhist temples, which may or may not be a coincidence. It shows, at any rate, an architect’s ideas taking flight not in some high-profile job in a city, but in a small village far away from the limelight. A small mercy for which any building buff or church crawler can be thankful.

Season’s greetings to all my readers. May there be more mercies, small and large, in the coming year.

Kelsale, Suffolk

Craft and harmony

In the Victorian era, church restorations were regular, bread-and-butter work for many architects. The ideas of the Oxford Movement and of influential architects like A. W. N. Pugin had encouraged a reaction against the plain and simple church buildings of the 18th century, with their boxy interiors and classical details, and a return to the ornate Gothic of the Middle Ages. Restorers often tidied up the Gothic of their medieval predecessors, too, so a row of ancient windows from different periods and in different shapes and sizes would be replaced by a set of matching Gothic windows. Other habits of Victorian restorers, such as scraping off the plaster from interior walls, replacing box pews with Gothic-looking ones, raising the floor level of the chancel, and so on, changed the character of many a church and removed layers of historic fabric. The great artist, writer, designer and polemicist, William Morris, argued against this approach, advocating repair rather than wholesale restoration, and founding the SPAB to promote this approach and monitor progress. Many of the most distinguished late-19th century architects followed Morris, or at least took up some of his ideas, and church repair of the 1880s and 1890s is often more tactful and historically sensitive than what went on before.

The architects who worked on the restoration of Kelsale church in Suffolk, Norman Shaw and his pupil E. S. Prior, were close to this tradition. There is a variety of window designs, the interior walls are still plastered, and the seating is 19th-century, but in a very plain and simple mode (Prior copying a design of his master Shaw). I felt, strolling around the church one day in November, that the additions, including the benches, were sympathetic to the building while also speaking of craft and skill. The same is true of the screen between the nave and chancel. Rather using wood, as was usual, the restorers chose wrought iron and brass. The makers were Pratt and Son, and their filigree ironwork does a good job of separating the two spaces while allowing the congregation to see the altar clearly from their seats. I show a detail of the spiralling forms, stylised leaves, and crosses on one of the gates in the screen.

If the screen is very obvious to the eye, along with details such as more ironwork (for example, light fittings) and stained glass (which includes some pieces by William Morris’s firm), there are more subtle pleasures too. One of my favourite things about this church is how Prior enhanced some of the windows without going to the expense of pictorial stained glass. A number of have coloured glass in pastel shades set within attractive patterns of glazing bars. It shows how even a modest window can look good, and a small window like the one in my second photograph can provide subtle visual pleasure, or form a pleasant background to a flower arrangement. Church flowers were themselves something that became widely popular in the Victorian period. Here’s a small arrangement in front of one of Prior’s windows. Art in harmony with nature.

Wissington, Suffolk

Emerging from the mere

Almost the first thing you see when entering the church of St Mary at Wissington* is a large wall painting of a dragon, high on the north wall. It’s dated to the 14th century and may relate to an account in a chronicle of 1405 by the monk Henry de Blaneford of St Albans Abbey. Henry tells how a dragon appeared from a mere or marshy area near Bures. It was a creature with a long body and tail, a crested head, and saw-like teeth. It was said to have killed a herd of sheep near Bures and its hard skin repelled the arrows of those who gathered to try and kill it. The chronicler goes on:

The servants of Sir Richard Waldegrave who owns the land haunted by the dragon came forth to shoot it with arrows which sprang back from its ribs as if they were metal of [or?] hard stone and from the spines of its back with a jangling as if they were hitting bronze plates, and flew far away because its skin was impenetrable. Almost the whole county was summoned to slaughter it but when it saw that it was to be shot at again, it fled into the marsh, hid in the reeds and was seen no more.

Some say that the village of Wormingford near Bures may have taken its name from the dragon or worm (the latter being an old word for a serpent or dragon).† It’s certainly true that the association of the beast with the local area has not gone away. In 2012, the Jubilee year of Queen Elizabeth II, the figure of a large dragon was cut into a hillside near Bures.

The dragon in medieval Christianity is a symbol of destructive evil, particularly the evil associated with paganism. He also represents Satan. You often find the dragon represented with St George, as part of the story in which the saint kills the evil creature. St Margaret of Antioch is another saint associated with a dragon – she escaped after being swallowed by the creature. St Michael is another dragon-slaying saint. Sometimes the dragon is seen alone as a warning against evil. The position of the creature in this painting, high up and quite near the roof, made me doubt at first that he was originally accompanied by one of the dragon-slaying saints. There is no obvious evidence of a figure near the beast, and the background of the image is confused because it seems to have been painted over an early picture. Given the legend about the Bures dragon, however, the painting carries a strong local, as well as a more general Christian, resonance.

- - - - -

* Also known as Wiston

† It was originally Widermund’s or Withermund’s ford, but it’s possible that the change to Wormingford may have been due, in whole or in part, to the legend of the dragon. Ronald Blythe, who lived near Wormingford, was one advocate of the derivation from the dragon – see the excellent selection of his writings, Next to Nature (2022).

Lavenham, Suffolk

In plain sight

Back in 2015 I read Matthew Champion’s fascinating book Medieval Graffiti and was alerted to the interesting array of ‘unofficial’ marks and inscriptions in English churches. This has inspired at least two posts on this bog – one on overlapping Vs, said to refer to the Virgin Mary (‘Virgo Virginum’, Virgin of virgns), another illustrating the outline of a human hand and some initials within a shield. A further common motif used in church graffiti is what is now widely known as the daisywheel, a series of arcs drawn within a circle, which combine to create an image resembling a six-petalled flower. When staying in Lavenham, Suffolk, just before Christmas, I was intrigued to come across such a daisywheel not in a church but on a wooden beam above a fireplace at Lavenham Guildhall.

The usual interpretation. of such marks is that they provide protection from evil spirits. In churches they are often placed near doorways or arches, suggesting that they prevent or discourage evil spirits form entering the building. Drawing a ritual protection mark above a fireplace suggests that it stops such spirits entering the building down the chimney.

Fireplaces are of course important places in a building – they’re the source of heat for comfort and cooking, of course, but in addition are focal points and symbols of the house and home, and of the people who live in the building or use it. For these reasons as well as the fact that the chimney offers a potential way in for evil forces, they’re a place to look out for protection marks in secular buildings. The famous ‘witch marks’ I have seen in a Worcestershire pub are also located in fireplaces – in this case on the hearth itself.

While the pub’s ‘witch marks’ consist of white circles made with chalk, daisywheels are usually incised into the wood or plaster. Matthew Champion suggests that they were made using the points of shears, a tool much used in the late Middle Ages when it’s thought many of these marks were made. He has tried making them with shears himself, with successful results. For centuries these marks were unregarded because they are easy to miss when one is not looking for them. Now scholars such as Champion have alerted us to their presence, more and more are being rediscovered, hiding as it were in plain sight.

Hadleigh, Suffolk

 

Anyone for coffee?

One last post from the fascinating Suffolk town of Hadleigh, before I move on…

Having enjoyed seeing Hadleigh’s church, Deanery Tower, and Market Hall complex, we moved on to the High Street in search of a coffee, and found…the coffee tavern. This is a building of the 1670s and, when one pauses to look at it, it’s a stunner. It’s actually timber-framed, but plastered over so that the framework is not immediately obvious. The upper floor, with its magnificent row of original 17th-century windows, together with the dormered and overhanging roof, are typical of the period. The windows especially are outstanding, featuring arched central lights with elaborate leadwork and a carved head in the middle – high-class woodwork and design reminiscent of the more famous Sparrowe’s House in Ipswich. The cornice and series of dentil-like brackets helping to support the roof are impressive too.

The upper floor overhangs the ground floor slightly, and would originally have overhung more. However, in the 19th century a series of new ground-floor frontages were built under the overhang to create the shop fronts we see today. Did the building originally house shops? It may well have done, given its setting on the Hight Street, but today the structure is usually referred to as the Coffee Tavern. ‘Coffee tavern’ is a term usually used for places of refreshment set up in the late-19th century as part of the temperance movement. In an attempt to reduce the amount of alcohol consumed (drunkenness was said to lead to crime and violence), some groups set up temperance cafés, hotels, and billiard halls. Non-alcoholic drinks were served. All or part of the building was used for this purpose in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. One record from around 1900 describes both a coffee tavern and a printing office on the site. At some point the coffee tavern closed, but among the current occupiers are a printer and a coffee shop. The tradition goes on. We enjoyed both our coffee and the architecture.

Hadleigh, Suffolk

Clinging on

I do like an old wall. Walls around the gardens of town houses, kitchen garden walls, churchyard walls, crinkle-crankle walls in orchards. A 19th-century brick wall marks the western edge of the churchyard at Hadleigh. Pleasant enough in itself, this wall seems to have offered the chance for an interesting bit of antiquarianism – two late-medieval stone doorways and some very decayed niches from the same period are incorporated into the brickwork. My photograph shows the doorway nearest to the Deanery Tower featured in my previous post. It has a later, Gothic-style door leading to the land adjacent to the tower and its stone surround is now very worn. Above the arch, one can just about make out a row of seven carved quatrefoils. The arch itself has carefully carved mouldings.

I don’t know where this bit of medieval masonry came from. Was it part of the Deanery that William Pykenham was building when he died, of which the tower is the survivor? Was it a doorway in the nearby church that was later replaced? Did it come from some other vanished structure? Who knows? But I’m glad the 19th-century builders, so often too eager to replace rather than preserve, spared this doorway and the other architectural fragments in this wall.

Hadleigh, Suffolk

Showpiece

This spectacular building of 1495 overlooks the churchyard at Hadleigh, no distance at all from the Guildhall-Town Hall complex in my previous post. Where the latter is a striking timber-framed vernacular building, this gatehouse is a highly elaborate piece of architecture built by someone who wanted to assert their status. That person was William Pykenham, who held the senior ecclesiastical offices of Dean and Rector of Hadliegh and Archdeacon of Suffolk in the late-15th century. It was to be the entrance to a palatial residence which was never completed because Pakenham died shortly after the tower was built. The adjoining building is the 19th-century Deanery House.

Known as the Deanery Tower, Pykenham’s gatehouse is brick-built and the brickwork was produced with the kind of virtuoso craftsmanship that one associates with grand East Anglian buildings such as Oxburgh Hall. The lovely red brick is complemented by diaper (i.e. diamond) patterns in dark, almost black brick, running up the wall on either side of the main windows. The stand-out features of the tower are the polygonal turrets at each corner, adorned with cusped arches, quatrefoils, and very fancy battlements. There are also very showy tall chimneys with spiral brickwork in the Elizabethan style, but these are 19th-century additions. Some of the other adornments have gone – the tower is said to have borne the initials W. P. to identify its owner and carvings of fish – very likely pike – as punning symbols of the owner’s surname. All in all, although at 43 feet tall it is dwarfed by the nearby church spire, it is an outstanding architectural vanity project that wears its age well.*

- - - - -

* An interesting aspect of the Deanery’s history is that a meeting held here in July 1833 led to the start of the Oxford Movement, which set the agenda for the 19th-century developments, especially in the use of ritual, that shaped the Church of England in the 19th century.