See
also:
A
full index of Suffolk churches
My
personal Top 60 Suffolk churches
1. Holy Suffolk
Medieval Suffolk was Seely Suffolk, or
Holy Suffolk. The counties of Suffolk and
Norfolk between them have more than
twelve hundred surviving medieval
churches, roughly one in eight of all
those in England. Suffolk, the smaller
county, has five hundred of these, giving
it today something like one medieval
church per thousand population. That
population was much smaller in medieval
times, and there can never have been a
time when all these churches were full.
But this is to miss the point, since they
were not built for the congregational
Anglican worship they are mostly used for
today. Before the Reformation these were
all Catholic churches, and they were
built for Catholic worship. Not just for
the celebration of Mass, which was in any
case not usually intended as a
congregational event, but for private
devotions, the sacraments and for prayers
for the dead. The naves contained altars
and chapels, not box-pews and children's
corners. The aisles were designed for
liturgical processions, not just to
increase capacity. We need to remind
ourselves of this if we are to appreciate
fully what our ancestors have left
behind.
What are the threads of continuity? A
popular image of a rural parish church is
of the Harvest Festival, but in fact
Harvest Festivals were an invention of
the 19th Century. We think of the
Christmas Eve service with its lessons
and carols, the candles flickering on the
altar. But again, altar candles had
fallen into disuse at the Reformation,
being thought idolatrous, until the
Anglican revival of the 19th Century
brought them back. The first Festival of
Nine Lessons and Carols was held at Truro
Cathedral in 1880, and its first
appearance in its traditional setting of
Kings College Chapel in Cambridge
happened as recently as 1918. There
are threads of continuity, but
perhaps they are not immediately obvious.
2. The Suffolk church - an
invented tradition?
I am going to suggest that the typical
Suffolk country church is essentially a
19th Century invention. This is generally
true, even where the bulk of the church
itself is medieval. There are few Suffolk
churches that the 19th Century left
untouched. Even when the Victorians did
not make structural alterations, the
liturgical plan of virtually every
Suffolk church is that asserted by the
Cambridge Camden Society and Oxford
Movement Tractarians in the middle years
of that century. There are even fewer
Suffolk churches where that 19th Century
liturgical integrity has been altered
since, other than perhaps the removal of
heavy benches and their replacement with
modern chairs.
Between about 1840 and 1900, the interior
of almost every Suffolk church went from
being that of a preaching house to a
space in which the liturgy might be
celebrated in a seemly and fitting
manner. Chancels, in some cases closed
since the Reformation and used as
schools, meeting rooms, mausoleums and
vestries, were opened up for worship
again. At Bramford, Little
Bealings, Wickhambrook and
elsewhere, the benches were turned back
to face the east after several hundred
years of facing a pulpit in the body of
the nave. Medieval fixtures and
furnishings, forgotten, ignored or
neglected for hundreds of years, were
uncovered during restorations, sometimes
clumsily repaired or even replaced, and
enthusiastically pressed back into
service. Suffolk's churches were, in
almost every case, beautified again.
At the heart of this Victorian vision, at
a time when the Industrial Revolution had
turned the world upside down in both
cities and the countryside, was a
restoration of tradition. Until this
point, the Church of England had
emphasised the break that had happened at
the Reformation in the mid-16th Century.
Indeed, it defined the very nature of
Anglicanism as a Reformed Church freed
from idolatry and superstition. The 16th
Century Reformation in England (and
particularly in East Anglia) was a
violent, traumatic and destructive event,
far more so than the excesses of the
likes of the iconoclast William Dowsing
and the puritans of a century later. And
yet by the first decades of the 19th
Century a new idea was spreading through
the church like wildfire. The plan was to
restore the Catholicity of the Church of
England.
The spark that lit the flames was perhaps
the 1830s reform acts which fully
decriminalised Roman Catholicism in
England, and allowed the Catholic Church
to return to this country in some
triumph. What did this mean for
Anglicanism? The break with Rome had
stripped away corruption and papist
excesses, but did it also mean that the
Church of England was no longer an
Apostolic Church? Was the Church of
England now little more than just another
protestant sect in comparison with the
Catholic Church? In response, the
writings of the Oxford Movement
galvanised Anglicanism, declaring it a
National Church that derived its
authority from the very earliest of
Christian missionaries to these shores.
As a consequence, there was a renewal of
interest in liturgy, furnishings and
vestments, a new enthusiasm for saints
and sacraments, for piety and personal
devotions. The consequent reinvigoration
of the Church meant that the Reformation
was seen increasingly as, in fact, not a
fracture any longer, but as a necessary
evolution from the medieval Church to the
modern Church, an evolution which had
been, if not smooth exactly, then
certainly popular, part of a triumphalist
national story. This was the motivation
to heal the damage by restoring churches
to their pre-Reformation integrity, the
Camden Society explaining exactly how
this might be done.
This affects our reading of any medieval
church, since the past has been tinkered
with. The world we see is not as we had
believed it to be. The completeness of
this revision, from the idea of a
fracturing Reformation to one of a smooth
transition, has become so firm that we
will find no shortage of those who decry
work of the Victorian restorers, for it
is easy to imagine that the Victorians
were altering perfectly good medieval
interiors. This is simply not the case.
The inside of churches had undergone
traumatic and radical alterations
throughout the period from the 1540s to
the1840s. In addition, many rural parish
churches had suffered considerable
neglect. A large minority (perhaps, in
Suffolk, a small majority) of churches
had by the early years of the 19th
Century fallen into a poor state of
repair, a problem made worse by the
moribund state of the Church of England
in East Anglia. In many places, very few
people attended the parish church on a
Sunday, preferring the enthusiasms of the
non-conformist chapels, especially in the
towns. The 19th Century revival not only
renewed the church buildings, it revived
the Church of England itself.
3. The Golden Age.
The great period of prosperity in Suffolk
was the that of the 15th and early 16th
Centuries. This is when the grandest
Suffolk churches were rebuilt. Because of
this, Suffolk's finest churches are
Perpendicular in style. In the south of
Suffolk are the great wool churches,
although more properly these should be
called cloth churches, since it was the
manufacture of cloth that created the
wealth to pay for them. To travel
up the River Brett from Hadleigh through Kersey and Lindsey to Lavenham, or up the
River Stour from Sudbury through Long Melford and Cavendish to Clare, is to
journey through the industrial heartland
of medieval Suffolk. The churches along
the way reflect the great wealth
generated at that time. There are also
the great churches of the coast, built on
the wealth of the ports. You can diverge
eastwards off of the A12 Ipswich to
Lowestoft road every few miles, and end
up at a spectacular Perpendicular church,
none more so perhaps than at Blythburgh, which is
right on the road. No admirer of large,
triumphal churches would want to miss Framlingham, Lavenham, Long Melford, Eye, Southwold, Stoke by
Nayland and many others, although
of course there are other smaller
churches of this time which are equally
fine and equally rewarding, the best of
all of them being Denston.
4. The age-old heart
of the community.
In Suffolk as elsewhere, most medieval
churches are an accretion over the
centuries, and present different styles
of architecture in different parts of the
building. The churches were built
primarily for the Catholic Church to
administer word and sacrament to the
people of the parish, but even more so
they were used for the private devotions
of the people, and for a liturgy that
involved processions, shrines and other
physical manifestations of worship. And
this was a time when popular religion was
much more social than it is now, there
was no stark contrast between the
communitarianism of medieval Catholicism,
and the regular expression of social
relationships. What else were the
churches used for? They were virtually
the only substantial buildings outside of
the main towns, and they were spacious
inside. So, we can assume that the naves
were used for meetings and
entertainments, for celebrations, and for
the regular business of the village. They
were perhaps also used for storage, and
even as defence in times of danger,
although by the time Suffolk's greatest
churches were built this would have been
a thing of the past. Some of Suffolk's
very best churches have evidence of their
liturgical life over the whole of the
medieval period, perhaps best of all at Westhall but also
impressively at Kedington.
5. The early medieval period.
Going back before the Golden Age of
church-building, Suffolk has about forty
of England's one hundred and twenty-odd
round towers. All but ten of the rest are
in Norfolk. Why were they built? Some
have argued that they were originally
defensive towers, and, indeed, in many
cases they are older than the body of the
church that stands against them. But this
is true of some square towers too, and
only one of the round towers in Suffolk
stands alone. To look up at the great
round tower of Wortham church is
to see that some defensive purpose must
have been intended there. But that cannot
have been the case for the majority.
Other people have argued that they were
lookout towers, or beacons, although
surely that would be true of any high
point? There is not an easy source of
building stone in East Anglia, and it's
been suggested that this is the reason
for building round towers, so you didn't
need to form corners. But I'm not sure it
would be any easier to build the towers
round, and the main motivation for
building round towers was probably one of
fashion. They exist across the North Sea
in Holland and Germany too, though they
are curiously absent from much of the
rest of England. Round towers continued
to be built in East Anglia into the 12th
and even 13th Centuries, and probably
there were once many more of them that
have since been rebuilt square in the
fashion of the later medieval period.
It's surely no coincidence that the
greatest concentration of surviving round
towers is in north-east Suffolk and
south-east Norfolk, an area where there
was not the same degree of late medieval
wealth as in the rest of East Anglia.
Suffolk also had one of the
great Norman abbeys, at Bury St Edmunds.
The ruins are haunting despite their
setting in a municipal park, and to visit
cathedrals over the border in Ely and
Norwich is to imagine what might have
been here. Despite the wealth of the late
medieval period, there are still some
good small-scale Norman survivals, again,
mostly in out of the way places like Wissington and Wordwell. Going
still further back, there are the ruins
of South Elmham
Minster, hidden in the woods and
still not fully understood.
6. The Reformation and after.
What happened at the Reformation in
Suffolk? The first great state-sponsored
wave of iconoclasm in the late
1530s/early 1540s seems to have been
focused largely on popular manifestations
of the cult of the dead, especially after
the suppression of chantries, and on
popular representations of the efficacy
of pilgrimages and intercessions. These
included statues of Mary and the saints
(nearly all of which disappeared very
early), so-called Doom paintings and
other large scale representations of
intercession (for instance, Mary tipping
the balance of the scales at Cowlinge,
which fortunately was whitewashed) and
saints on the parclose screens of chantry
chapels. Unlike the roods and rood lofts
above them, rood screens were usually
retained, unless the local reformers were
very enthusiastic, and later on their
retention was required by law under
Elizabeth I. The saints on the
roodscreens were usually painted over or
had their faces scratched out as a
salutary warning.
Suffolk's most famous image, that of the Shrine
of Our Lady of Grace at Ipswich,
was supposedly taken to Chelsea along
with other famous images of Our Lady
(Walsingham, Northampton, etc) and
publicly burned. However, there is some
evidence that images stripped from
churches in the 1530s and 1540s (a
hundred years before Government Visitor
William Dowsing came wrecking interiors)
were actually sold abroad, since the
accumulation of wealth seems to have been
as important as any ideological motive.
There's a fairly convincing case that the
image of Mary in the church at Nettuno in
Italy is that of Our Lady of
Ipswich.
What survived this Reformation
iconoclasm? For very practical reasons,
much stained glass would have survived,
simply because of the expense of
replacing it with plain glass. William
Dowsing, the itinerant 17th Century
iconoclast, regularly records in his
journal images in glass that he earmarked
for destruction. Bench ends and fonts
which had representations of the Catholic
sacraments and teachings survive today,
and must have been retained for practical
reasons, and indeed Dowsing vented his
furious cold logic on some of these as
well, but not often. This suggests that
they had in many cases been covered, the
fonts plastered over and the benches
boxed in. Paintings were usually
whitewashed, since this was the simplest
way of removing them. Even if Dowsing had
visited Wenhaston, he would
not have seen the Wenhaston Doom for it
had been hidden for a hundred years by
the time he cut his swathe across the
county. More intellectual, less graspable
aspects of Catholic theology also
survived by being covered or pressed into
new uses - piscinas, aumbries, sedilia
and so on. More practically, images in
difficult to reach places (roofs,
external turrets, etc) also survived the
16th Century onslaught.
A hundred years later, William Dowsing's
mission was essentially one of advising
parishes on how to 'purify' their
churches. Although this included dealing
with surviving medieval imagery, it was
mostly aimed at the recent reforms of
Archbishop Laud which had required
churches to return the altar to the
chancel, to raise it up on steps and to
enclose it behind rails. This was
considered idolatrous by the puritans,
and Dowsing's journal records dozens of
occasions when he required parishes to
remove rails and steps to the altar. He
was also insistent that the Catholic
prayer clauses of inscriptions be
removed, especially in brass. Orate
pro anima (pray for the soul of) was
regularly crudely excised, leaving the
rest of the inscription intact. He
demanded that churchwardens climb into
and onto roofs to remove the hard of
access images that had survived the
Reformation of a century earlier.
It is important to remember that
puritanism in East Anglia was popular. It
was unusual for Dowsing to encounter any
resistance. In the main, churchwardens
would have welcomed his visits, since it
ensured they were conforming with the
Ordinances against Idolatry and
Superstition of 1643 and 1644, and so
they did not risk being fined. Dowsing
charged a noble for his advice, which was
six shillings and eightpence. He would
often reduce this by half if he felt the
parish had already made an honest effort.
In comparison, the fine for not
conforming with the ordinances was twenty
shillings, and there was no limit to how
often it could be applied. And of course,
just as at the Reformation, there would
have been plenty of local yobs waiting
with ladders and hammers, ready to join
in. The Souldiers Catechisme,
issued to the New Model Army in 1644,
suggests that nothing ought to be
done in a tumultuous manner. But seeing
God hath put the sword of reformation
into the soldiers hand, I think it is not
amiss that they should cancel and
demolish those monuments of superstition
and idolatry, especially seeing the
magistrate and the minister that should
have done it formerly neglected it.
Dowsing is vilified so strongly today
because he kept careful notes on his work
in his journal, that's all. And of course
in the main the puritans carried out
their acts of destruction from religious
conviction, whereas many of their
predecessors at the Reformation of a
century earlier saw it as an opportunity
for profit (melting down images, selling
them, etc) or for the sheer thrill of
destruction. There are surviving accounts
of roving gangs of hooligans destroying
the furnishings of churches in London in
the 1540s, and the same thing probably
happened in Ipswich, and was little more
than state-sanctioned drunken vandalism.
After the traumas and
disruptions of the 17th Century, Suffolk
settled down to the Church of England's
long 18th Century sleep. Churches which
have a feel of this time are some of the
loveliest, perhaps best of all at Badley, sitting
out on the edge of the woods more than a
mile from the nearest road. Ramsholt, Cowlinge and the
very early 19th Century refurnishing of Rushbrooke are also
well worth a visit.
7. New beginnings, new
traditions.
Despite being generally rural in
character, the Industrial Revolution had
a significant effect upon Suffolk, as the
means of distribution and the new
technologies altered and improved
patterns of farming, and increased the
populations of towns. Of course, Suffolk
has few Victorian Anglican churches
outside of the towns, for the obvious and
simple reason that it didn't need them.
There are however excellent 19th Century
and early 20th Century Catholic churches
at Lowestoft, Bungay and Beccles, at St Pancras in Ipswich
and St Edmund in Bury St
Edmunds. Leiston has what is
probably the most memorable Victorian
Anglican parish church, the work of
Edward Lamb, and Ipswich has the grandest
in Richard Phipson's rebuilding of St Mary le
Tower. Other major new churches
included St John at Bury St
Edmunds, St John the
Baptist in Felixstowe, and St John at
Lowestoft, the last of these since
demolished. In the countryside, Flixton St
Mary is probably the most
interesting. Of course, as already
discussed, churches in Suffolk were
restored extensively, although not so
much in poorer rural areas, and some of
these restorations are very fine indeed. Barsham and Kelsale spring to
mind, along with Mildred Holland's
extravaganza at Huntingfield.
Even fewer new churches were built in
Suffolk in the 20th Century, and of
these, few are interesting. Felixstowe
has the most exciting Anglican church of
the century in St Andrew, the 1932
work of Raymond Erith and Hilda Mason,
and the first pre-cast concrete church in
Britain. All Hallows of 1938 in
Ipswich is Munro Cautley's finest hour, a
church entirely in the Art Deco style,
largely surviving in its original
incarnation. Of the same year is St Thomas, also in
Ipswich, by Cachemaille Day. There are
many 20th century Catholic churches in
Suffolk, although none of the post-war
ones are as interesting as that at Aldeburgh of about
1910, which had a round tower which was
lost to bomb damage, and Kesgrave, of 1930
and later, not an exciting building but
it is notable for its large range of
stained glass windows by Margaret Agnes
Rope and her cousin Margaret Edith Rope.
Perhaps the best post-war churches in
Suffolk are not Anglican or Catholic at
all, but Castle Hill
Congregational Church (now URC)
in Ipswich by Johns, Slater and Haward,
and Trinity
Methodist Church in
Lowestoft by Walter Thompson. The best
single 20th Century refurbishment of a
medieval church is that of Kettlebaston, a vividly
furnished Anglo-Catholic shrine in the
hills.
8. The Way We Live Now.
Most of Suffolk's medieval churches are
in the care of the Diocese of St
Edmundsbury and Ipswich or the Diocese of
Norwich. About a dozen under-used
medieval churches were sold off in the
1970s with some awful results,
particularly at Mickfield and Claydon, although
both were later rescued. Some were
converted into homes, others fell more
happily into the hands of local and
national trusts. But there are too
many churches for the CofE to reasonably
use, and about one in twelve medieval
Suffolk churches (and almost half of
those in Ipswich) are now no longer used
for public worship. It is quite
unreasonable, too, for local communities
to be expected to pay for the upkeep of
these churches. Suffolk has a dozen or
more churches that in many other counties
would be the finest. Some of these are in
tiny villages. The Church of England has
tried to ensure the proper pastoral care
of its parishioners by gathering its
parishes together into benefices, each
under the care of one minister or
pastoral team. Some of these benefices
are large. And already there are
benefices that tire
of church-hopping every Sunday, and
not unreasonably would prefer to settle
in a single building. This will be
accelerated as individual congregations
shrink, and they are shrinking faster in
some parts of Suffolk than on average,
because of the age of the members of some
congregations.
What, then, is to happen to
all our historic churches? There are
reasons for optimism. We are already
going back to a time when village
churches had more uses than simply for
worship. An increasing number of churches
have installed kitchens and toilets,
allowing them to be used for concerts and
other performances, or as arts and
exhibition spaces. And intriguingly they
might also be used by other faith
communities. Suffolk's growing Catholic
population is already holding some of its
Saturday evening masses in Anglican
parish churches. The Methodist
communities in some villages also use the
parish church now. And yet, it is hard to
see how this will be enough. We all agree
that these buildings need to be
preserved, but not on who is to pay for
this to happen. The Suffolk Historic
Churches Trust and the Churches
Conservation Trust do excellent work. But
can posterity be guaranteed by charity?
For already, there are churches in
danger, because there simply isn't enough
money to go round. This demand will
increase as Victorian restorations reach
the natural end of their structural life.
Meanwhile, the Church of England, their
main custodian, enters a period of
transition, conscious that many of its
buildings are a drain on its resources.
It will be interesting to see what the
next quarter of a century brings.
Simon Knott,
Suffolk, 2022
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