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There is
a West Bergholt, but it is away in Essex,
on the other side of Colchester, and to
most Suffolkers ours is simply Bergholt.
It is, in fact, one of Suffolk's more
populous rural parishes, but doesn't
appear so, because of the way the village
staggers out into hamlets and
settlements. It has more pubs than any
other village in the county, and if all
the houses were gathered together it
would probably be considered a small
town. Many of the people who live here
commute to Ipswich, Colchester and
Manningtree, which is surprisingly close.
Indeed, part of East Bergholt runs into Brantham, itself virtually
a suburb of that Essex town. One of Bergholt's
hamlets is more famous than Bergholt
itself. This is Flatford, which after
Sutton Hoo is probably Suffolk's single
biggest tourist attraction. The Mill and
Willie Lott's Cottage were both derelict
by the early years of the 20th century,
but they were rescued and restored.
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Today, thousands
of people visit them every year, enthusiastic
Americans rubbing shoulders with courting couples
and badly behaved schoolchildren. In summer you
can't move here, the ice creams cost a fortune
and the queue for hiring boats is like something
out of Disneyworld.
All this, of
course, is the fault of the artist John
Constable, whose paintings of the mill pond and
the buildings beside it can be found on a
thousand calendars, placemats and chocolate box
lids. Along with that of Thomas Gainsborough, who
was born a few miles away, Constable's work is
considered by many to sum up the spirit of
Suffolk and its wide open skies. But both had to
leave the county to achieve fame and fortune.
Unlike Thomas Hardy, whose work constantly harks
back with nostalgia to the Dorset of his youth,
both Constable and Gainsborough moved on to other
and greater things.
Constable's work
appears so safe to us today, it is hard to
remember that it was considered controversial at
the time. The genius of Constable himself was
never recognised in England in his lifetime, it
was the French who acclaimed him, and it was in
Paris that his pictures caused a sensation. But
then, there are so many things that the English
have needed the French to take a lead in, without
wanting to admit it.
Constable is
famous for being the miller's son. Actually, his
father was the mill-owner, which isn't quite the
same thing. White's 1844 Directory of Suffolk
lists him as a corn miller and coal and
corn merchant. He was a businessman, and
also owned the mill up river at Dedham. The young
Constable had the leisure to paint, but as he
grew older, he was frustrated by not being able
to make a living out of it. He finally achieved
security, and the freedom to follow his vocation,
by marrying into money. His wife, Maria Bicknell,
inherited £20,000, about four million in today's
money, from her grandfather, who was the Rector
of St Mary.
The church stands
in as idyllic a spot as you'll find, surrounded
by substantial pretty houses at a turn in the
road. Across the way stands Old Hall, a huge agglomeration of
19th century buildings looking rather like a
workhouse. The statue of Mary facing across to
the church might make you think Old Hall once had
a religious purpose, and you'd be right.
If you approach
the church from the east, you are presented with
a splendid late Perpendicular exterior. The
unfinished eastern face of the nave shows that a
similarly grand chancel was also planned. Here is
the wool wealth we have met nearby at Stoke-by-Nayland, Stratford St Mary, and all the way up the
Stour valley. Here are the devotional fruits of
the industrial heartland of 15th century England.
If you were wealthy in those years, you added
something to your parish church as a focus for
the prayers of the living after your death. You
wanted to spend as little time in purgatory as
possible, and if you were wealthy, you might have
more reason than the poor to suspect that you
might not make it into Heaven in a hurry.
If your parish had
lots of seriously wealthy people, you
pretty much got the whole church rebuilt. This
happened at Lavenham, and Long Melford, in Sudbury and Glemsford, and a dozen or so other
places. And it happened here. Throughout the 15th
and early 16th centuries, a succession of wills
bequeath money for the building of chapels, aisles, clerestories and rood
turrets.
The interior was beautified and magnified. Among
the benefactors were the De Veres of Old Hall,
and the Coles.
Today, the
exterior is stunning, a festival of stone and
flintwork, a testimony to the quality of the
materials of half a millenium ago. Love and money
were lavished here. And then, you wander up to
the west end of the church, and the illusion of
medieval wealth and permanence dissolves. For
here, you find the haunting ruin of a vast tower
base. It reaches barely to the level of the
clerestory, and then peters out in a confusion of
fixtures and footings. Time has melted them, five
hundred years exposure to the elements has given
them strange curves and contours. And,
inevitably, you ask what happened here?
All over Suffolk,
you find the remains of collapsed towers. Flint
and rubble are high-maintenance materials, and
why not? At the time of the construction of our
medieval churches, there was no reason to think
that a day would come when there would no longer
be a will to maintain them. It seems
extraordinary to us now, but it was no different
to the way people put up high-maintenance,
high-energy-consumption buildings in the cheap
fuel optimism of the 1960s. It was the
Reformation that did for the churches. Suddenly,
fixtures and fittings were foolish, vainglorious
and superstitious things. The preaching of the
Word and the creation of a National Church were
the new order. Purgatory disappeared in a puff of
logic, and several centuries of neglect set in.
Towers collapsed
throughout the 17th, 18th and early 19th
centuries. At Alderton, the tower came crashing
down during divine service one Sunday morning in
1821, killing a cow. I assume that the cow was
outside the church at the time. Something had to
be done, and it was the Oxford Movement revival
of the Church of England that led to a renewed
interest in the buildings and fabric. The
Victorians are accused of ruining churches, but
in most places they actually saved them from
oblivion. At Stanton All Saints, the church was almost
completely rebuilt, except for the tower, and as
a consequence it was the tower that collapsed, as
recently as 1906.
However, none of
this applies to East Bergholt. Quite simply, the
tower here was never built. Here we stand,
looking at a church on the eve of the Reformation
(ignore the red brick facing and the funny little
turret, an 18th century affectation). A few miles
away at Dedham and Stratford, wonderful towers
were raised to the glory of God and for the
salvation of the souls of their benefactors in
the early years of the 16th century. And an even
more glorious one was planned here, but the
Catholic Church ran out of time. The reformers
took over, the wealth of the parishes was
appropriated to the Crown, and East Bergholt's
tower would never be built.
There is a story,
widely believed in Suffolk, but firmly debunked
by the church guide I must add, that the reason
the tower was not built was that the materials
were diverted by Cardinal Wolsey for his College
in Ipswich, and that his fall from grace meant
that funding dried up. There is no evidence for
this tale, and probably the myth has arisen
because one of the benefactors of the proposed
tower was a local family by the name of
Cardinall. That the tower was commenced in a fit
of optimism, there is no doubt, for barely
discernible now, but recorded within the last
century, is the date 1525 inscribed on a
pediment.
Building the tower
hard against the western boundary of the
churchyard meant that a processional way had to
be built beneath it. You can see the same thing
at Combs, Ipswich St Lawrence and Stanton St John. The extraordinary skill
of the 16th century master-masons enabled a wide,
high archway, and what seem impossibly narrow
corners. It is these, perhaps, that have
encouraged visitors over the years to think that
the tower collapsed because it was unstable.
The absence of a
tower has given St Mary something you'll rarely
see elsewhere in England, although there are a
couple near here just over the Essex border. If
you wander around to the north side of the
church, you'll find a medieval bell cage, which
you can peep into, and see the five bells at
close quarters. This dates from 1531, and is all
the more remarkable because it was probably built
as a temporary structure. The bells are the
heaviest peal of five in the world, and were rung
by hand, until there was a terrible accident in
1999. Because of this, the bells were among the
few Suffolk peals not to ring in the millennium.
But they have since been returned to use, after a
major project to make them safer. It is worth
visiting on a Sunday morning to see them rung.

Beside the bell
cage, the rood turret rises like a castle keep.
The star of the De Veres is bold upon it. The
church looms above you, a sense intensified by
the tightness of the graveyard. A mighty tower
here would have been a remarkable thing. You walk
through the fascinating graveyard back around to
the south side, and enter by the substantial
porch. You step into an almost entirely 19th
century interior. But before we blame the
Victorians for too much, remember that this
church was probably entirely scoured by the
Anglicans and the Puritans in the 16th and 17th
centuries. There is considerable evidence to show
that the 17th century puritans were particularly
strong in this parish, and that protestantism had
a free hand in the destruction of the interior of
the church. The government's official visitor to
the churches of Suffolk, William
Dowsing,
lived in the adjacent parish of Stratford St
Mary, where the minister was sequestered for his
sacramentalist beliefs. But Dowsing didn't even
bother to visit East Bergholt, suggesting that he
knew the church well, and did not think there was
a need to do so. In addition, the protestant
credentials of the minister here were never
questioned.
By the 18th
century, St Mary contained box pews, a preaching
platform, texts on the walls, and probably not a
lot else. This was entirely unsuited to the
liturgical requirements of the 19th Century
Oxford Movement revival, which sought a return to
the sacramental religion of the medieval Church,
and so the inside St Mary underwent a complete
refurbishment in the 1860s and 1870s. And it is
all done well enough, if a little severely. It is
good that the brick floor survived. The gloomy
windows lend the nave a degree of gravitas, and
the austerity of the 1920s rood beam makes of it
a serious thing. The font is a Victorian
curiosity, very like that at Stratford St Mary, unfamiliar in Suffolk,
but found in a thousand urban Anglo-catholic
temples.
There are some
medieval survivals. In the north wall of the
sanctuary stands a heavily restored Easter
Sepulchre.
At the back survive traces of medieval paint,
probably a representation of the risen Christ,
which would be concealed by a veil until the
first light of Easter morning. Also in the
sanctuary are an image niche, and traces of a consecration
cross. But
it is the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries
which give St Mary its particular character. In
the north aisle is a small memorial to John
Mattinson, who was for Eleven years the
Beloved School Master of this Town, and then
Unfortunately Shott the 23rd November 1723.
I wondered if he suffered this fate during the
execution of his duties. Nearby, another
inscription reminds us that what ere thou art
here reader, see in this pale glass what thou
shalt be, despised worms and putrid slime, then
dust forgot and lost in time.
Thankfully, given
that there is so much of it, the 19th century
glass is good, especially in the south aisle. I
am intrigued by the 1873 glass in the south aisle
chapel which remembers a woman who loved much,
but which does not name her. The 20th century
glass is even better. Most of it is at the west
end, but the very best of all, a fabulous Virgin
and Child by the great Francis Skeat and probably
dating from the 1930s, is now almost completely
obscured by the organ.
Isn't it strange,
the way that churches in tourist hotspots attract
so many visitors? Perhaps it is because visiting
the parish church is an essential way of getting
to the heart of a community, a touchstone down
the centuries. That is certainly true at East
Bergholt. Wandering around the cluttered
graveyard, and spotting the pleasing and elegant
red brick tomb chests, I had an impression of the
independence and prosperity of a large English
village in the centuries before the world would
it change forever.
It must
always have been a pleasant place to
live. In 1844, White's Directory comments
on its well-stocked shops and
handsome mansions. At the time,
there were about 1500 inhabitants, but it
had once been larger, a market town no
less, although the market had fallen into
disuse by the 18th century. It must have
been well known to travellers from London
heading into East Anglia, handily placed
halfway between Colchester and Ipswich
for the watering of horses and stopping
for provisions. But times change. East
Bergholt was more or less bypassed by the
industrial revolution. This quietness was
itself a symptom of change, because a
typical Victorian rural settlement busied
itself here, and remembered itself in its
parish church and is thus still
essentially visible to us to day.
Here is
the sense of a constant change, a
touchstone; here is what happened to us.
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