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Bacton is
not the most picturesque of Suffolk's
villages. With its thoroughly
non-identical Siamese twin, Cotton, it
straddles the B1113 Stowmarket to
Rickinghall road; you turn west, and the
railway bridge heralds a sense of the
urban. The presence of a middle school in
the village means that this can be a very
busy place at certain times of the day.
The setting of St Mary is also a fairly
urban one; houses and another school
encroach, but it rides it all well, for
this is a large, externally grand church.
The view is finest from the north-east.
One symptom of the urban spirit is, I'm
afraid, that I have always found St Mary
locked (although, of course, most Ipswich
churches are left open). This great late
medieval church is not as well known as
some. Externally, the tower is not its
best feature, despite the surviving 14th
Century bell windows. Mortlock thought
the strangely rounded 'Norman' west door
was actually the work of William
Butterfield, the restoring architect in
the 1860s. Certainly, there is no other
Norman evidence here.
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The finest
feature of the exterior is the late 15th Century
clerestory, a match for that at Walsham le
Willows, a few miles off. It has sacred monograms
between each window, picked out in fluchwork,
including the Holy Trinity and St Catherine, and
there is a dedicatory inscription asking you to
pray for the souls of Robert Goche and his wife
(on the north side) and Sir James Hobart and his
family (on the south).
When
I visit a grand church like this, I often
anticipate disappointment before stepping inside.
Will I find the great medieval building that this
once was, or the mundane Victorian restoration
which rescued it from decay? In a way, you get
both here. Your hopes are indeed fulfilled, for
here we have one of Suffolk's best double hammerbeam roofs. It is so good, that
work in this style is often referred to as 'a
Bacton roof' - there's another across the way at Cotton, almost certainly the work
of the same craftsmen. Another exciting medieval
survival is the substantial remains of a doom
painting above the chancel arch. The central area
is destroyed, but we see below the various
activities that roll into action as a soul
approaches judgement. The dead rise from their
graves, and St Peter is beautifully clear as he
stands at the narrow gate of Heaven welcoming in
the new Saints.
The
disappointment of the 19th century restoration is
a double one, for it is the work of that great
ground-breaker, William
Butterfield,
who produced some excellent work in the county at
Sudbury St Peter and Lawshall, not to mention
Ipswich St Mary at Stoke. This is certainly not
bad. But it doesn't thrill, or even raise the
spirits. It is enlivened by later Morris & Co
glass in the east window, which even in its 1920s
incarnation stands out as superior here. It forms
a war memorial, and reuses cartoons from much
earlier in the workshop's days. The best are the
four evangelists, by Edward Burne-Jones, first
used at Paisley parish church in 1876. They sway
elegantly, their evangelistic symbols passing
over their shoulders. The angels in the row above
are also by Burne Jones, but the other figures
are by John Henry Dearle, the workshop's chief
designer after the deaths of Morris and
Burne-Jones.

Coming back to
Bacton in the spring of 2009 after ten years
away, I was pleased to find I liked the church a
great deal more than I'd remembered. It is ful of
interest, with intriguing little details to
ponder, and on this bright day was full of light.
The elegant screen seems rather awkwardly placed,
and this is because it originally came from the
south aisle, where it formed a parclose to a
chapel. To the north of it is a painted
inscription behind the pulpit to Thomas and
Dorothy Smythe, who died in 1702 and 1728.
Another husband and wife are commemorated down at
the west end of the aisle, by almost identical
cartouche memorials facing each other across from
the south and north arcades. George and Jane
Pretyman died in the 1730s, and you might think
that their memorials were made at the same time
if it were not for slight differences that
suggest one was copied from the other, probably
by a different mason. The winged skulls at the
bottom are particularly fiendish.
A number of the
benches are medieval, and some of the
bench ends are medieval too, I think. One
shows a monk in a pulpit with an eagle,
which may be intended as St John but
might just as easily be intended to
represent the reading of the Gospel. The
19th century dog and lion nearby are also
very good. All in all, this is a fine
church. From Bacton, you are spoiled for
choice for others. Within a few miles are
Cotton, Wyverstone, Westhorpe, Mendlesham, Gislingham and Gipping. A curiosity about
this area is what a Godless lot they seem
to have been in the middle of the 19th
Century. At the time of the 1851 Census
of Religious Worship, most Anglican
churches could reasonably expect an
attendance of about a third of the parish
population on a Sunday, and in some parts
of Suffolk this rose to almost a half. In
this area to the north of Stowmarket,
which was always strong non-conformist
territory, Anglican congregations were
rarely more than a tenth of the
population, with Bacton one of the worst
examples - out of the 901 people living
in the parish at the time of the census,
just 25 attended St Mary on the Sunday
morning. And it doesn't seem that the
missing souls were going anywhere else -
260 attended Cotton Methodist Church in
the afternoon, but that was in the
adjoining parish where another 571 people
lived. Bacton's own Wesleyan and
Primitive Methodist churches managed
about 60 each, but unless the people were
going down the road to the Baptists at
Stowmarket, it looks as if they simply
stayed at home.
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