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Oakley is one of
the beautiful, rolling little parishes on the south bank
of the Waveney, sparsely populated and little-visited,
although the church will be familiar to thousands of
drivers for being visible on its rise from the main Diss
to Yarmouth road which runs about half a mile to the
north on the Norfolk side of the border.
I had originally visited all these lovely north Suffolk
churches by bike back in the 1990s at a time when they
were mostly kept locked, the keyholders often distant
enough to make the journey to get the key a despiriting
and frustrating experience. But nowadays they are all
open and thriving. However, it must be said that it would
be hard to describe a place like Oakley as thriving, for
it is such a profoundly sleepy place. The church sits
alone in the fields with just one house for company, the
graveyard tree-shrouded and silent apart from the birds.
It feels a very long way from the 21st century, and it
seemed incredible that we were less than a hundred miles
from the centre of London.
The church looks bigger than it is. The 14th century
tower and 15th century porch are familiar from hundreds
of other East Anglian churches, but there are no aisles,
no clerestory. This is a simple church made to look grand
by the enthusiasms of confident ages. The porch at one
time had two storeys, but the floor has now gone. There
is a nice collection of medieval fragments in the side
windows, and some good 1960s glass up in the parvise. The
medieval glass includes the top part of a St Christopher
carrying the Christ child on his shoulders, a Priest, and
the head of Christ as the Man of Sorrows, and what I take
to be a 15th century primrose, which could so easily have
been copied from the life in this churchyard.
For centuries, Oakley has been a joint parish with the
neighbouring busier parish of Brome. It seems to have
been a wealthy benefice, for when George Paterson was
Rector here for forty years in the 19th century, he was
receiving more than £650 a year, something like
£130,000 in today's money. By the 1860s, he was
contributing some of his riches to the Kerrison family's
rebuilding of Brome church, the work of the great Thomas
Jekyll. Incidentally, the 1851 Census of Religious
Worship is revealing about Brome and Oakley. The combined
parishes had a population of 650, and a regular Sunday
morning attendance of just over a hundred - the two
churches alternated weekly in holding morning and evening
services. That means about one in six of the population
were attending the parish church on a Sunday morning,
which is well above average for East Anglia, where it was
usually about one in ten. This lower figure was because
of the enthusiasm in Norfolk and especially Suffolk for
non-conformism - Congregational, Baptist and Methodist
chapels often attracted bigger congregations. However,
there was nothing like that here. The nearest chapel was
in Hoxne, but that attracted barely thirty people on a
Sunday morning. The census noted that there were five
Baptist families in the combined parishes, but that was
all. It seems more likely that most people in Brome and
Oakley simply didn't go to church in the middle of the
19th century.
Anglican congregations generally rose during the second
half of the 19th century, reaching a peak in the years
after the First World War, before slowly falling away
again. Those years of plenty are often reflected in the
furnishings and decorations, and that is certainly so
here at Oakley. You step into what seems at first sight a
simple, humble building. The font is primitive, set
directly against the north wall as was often the way
before Victorian restorations. This feels a church of the
ordinary people, as ordinary as Brome's church is
extraordinary. And yet, the wealth of Paterson and the
Kerrison family is felt even here, for there is a good
range of early 20th Century glass in the south and east
windows, and another grand reredos in the sanctuary.
If Brome was Lord Kerrison's baby, then Oakley appears to
have been George Paterson's. The subjects of the glass
suggest his enthusiasms, including what must have been
some fairly obscure Saints at the time including St Denys
and St Longinus. Best of all, some of the large figures
in the Ward & Hughes glass on the south side have
been given the faces of members of the Paterson family.
Most striking is probably St Denys, who has the head of
Mrs Paterson's brother. The most memorable glass is
probably that of the Presentation in the Temple, a
memoril to Pterson's mother Jessey. She is depicted as
Anna, Mary as Paterson's wife and perhaps Simeon is his
father, or even Paterson himself. Amongst all this
splendour is one quieter, later window which looks as if
it was designed by the King workshop of Norwich. It
remembers Maude Tacon of Brome Hall who bankrolled the
fabulous Anglo-Catholic makeover of Eye church at the
hands of her friend Ninian Comper.
And indeed St Nicholas is a church which does not shout,
or wear its treasures on its sleeve. As if acknowledging
this, two empty image niches on the north wall are
beautiful but puzzling. They look awkward, as if there
should be a matching smaller niche on the right side.
We'd normally expect a triple niche like this to contain
a rood group, a crucifixion in the middle flanked by the
Blessed Virgin and St John. But what if there were only
ever two?
Up in the sanctuary is a simple early 17th memorial to
Sir William Cornwallis. This is a fairly typical piece of
the period, with the required amount of puritan piety,
unlike the extravaganza to his father Thomas at Brome -
but Thomas had died a Catholic, just seven years before
his son. The gilt reredos was given by the Walker family,
who are also remembered by the HMS Captain memorial in
Hoxne church. It depicts the last supper, and is so
languid that St John appears asleep, with his head on the
table. Perhaps that is fitting, in this beautiful, sleepy
place.
Simon
Knott, February 2020
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