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Sudbury is one of the best
of Suffolk's market towns, tucked against the
River Stour and the Essex border. It actually
straddled the border until 1974 when that was
moved further south, but there is a sense in
which it still belongs to both counties. Only
five Suffolk towns were large and prosperous
enough in the medieval period to be divided up
into parishes, and Sudbury was one of them.
However, and surprisingly perhaps, this grand
late medieval church which dominates the market
hill was not a parish church, but a chapel of
ease to St Gregory down by the river. The first
church was here in the 13th Century, but early on
in the following century a major rebuilding was
undertaken. James Bettley, in the revised Buildings
of England volume for West Suffolk,
attributes this to the major expansion of the
town under Elizabeth de Burgh, and the
construction of a new market place. But in the
1340s work came to a halt, as what we would later
come to know as the Black Death swept across East
Anglia. When work resumed, one imagines with a
new urgency, the tower seems to have been the
priority, and work on it may have been nearly
complete by 1376, when Thomas Export left 3s 4d
to the hanging of the great bell. However,
this isn't a great deal of money, and it's more
likely perhaps that Export was adding his name to
a project for the future, in expectation that he
would be included in the prayers for the dead
that would accrue. Peter Northeast and Simon
Cotton found a further bequest to the bells in
1426, and then by the middle of the century there
were bequests to the furnishing of the church.
Thomas Syberton left 40 shillings (about £2000
in today's money) towards a new font in 1456,
there were bequests to the panelling and paving
of the interior, and as late as the 1490s there
was still money being left towards the bells. Today, St Peter is a stately ship of
a building, and I think this is as fine a setting
as that of any urban church in East Anglia.
Looking at it externally, you can see the way
that the aisles taper towards the east, the south
wall of the nave in particular forming an
irregular line and the chancel leaning into this
side. It is not hard to imagine that the new
church so enthusiastically erected in the late
14th and 15th Centuries had to be squeezed
between existing properties, long since gone.
There is a grand south porch, but the main
entrance for many years has been through the west
doorway that faces the market hill. However, it
has been a long time since those going through it
have been on their way to a service, because St
Peter was declared redundant in 1972, one of the
first to be so under the new legislation. Outside
this entrance stands a statue of Sudbury's most
famous son, the artist Thomas Gainsborough,
although the Gainsboroughs themselves worshipped
at Sudbury's third medieval church, All Saints,
where you'll find their mausoleum. I'm afraid
that St Peter was dreadfully neglected for many
years, occasionally being opened up to be used
for concerts, craft fairs, christmas card sales
and the like. It wasn't hard to agree with former
parishioners with whom I occasionally got into
conversation that it should never have been
declared redundant, that a parochial use should
have been found for it. However, after more than
half a century of redundancy it was taken in hand
by the Churches Conservation Trust and local arts
charities, a great deal of money was spent on it
and it has been converted into an arts centre for
Sudbury.
Stepping inside, the first
impression is of a wide open and empty space,
spick and span and immaculately repaired. Almost
all the glass in the church is the work of
Hardman & Co of Birmingham over several
decades, which not only tell the tale of that
workshop's development, but also neatly link the
two major restorations that happened here four
decades apart. First came William Butterfield in
the 1850s. He discarded all the 18th Century
furnishings, replacing them with his own,
restored the chancel to use beyond the medieval
screen, which was unfortunately repainted as part
of his project, and set the replacement of the
glass in motion. Next came George Bodley in the
1890s. He transformed the chancel into a space
fitting for High Church worship, with a
magnificent reredos, the Crucifixion flanked by
the Blessed Virgin and St John, with the
Annunciation below flanked by angels holding
banners reading Gloria in Excelsis and In
Terra Pax.
      
    
Bodley's restoration also
brought tiled and stencilled walls that were
unfortunately destroyed as part of an
ill-conceived modernisation in 1964, when the
building had only eight years left of liturgical
life. It does seem, however, that some of the
stencilling is beginning to show through the
overpainting in the sanctuary. The early 15th
Century font now sits at the east end of the
south aisle. This seems a shame. I assume that it
was moved to ease access, but the three Ipswich
town centre medieval churches that have been
converted for use as public venues, St Peter, St
Stephen and St Lawrence, have all retained their
font in its proper place at the west end, despite
the west doors still being in use. Panels
depicting Moses and Aaron hang at the west end of
the nave. Pevsner credits them to Robert
Cardinall in 1715, and says that they were part
of the former reredos, although I think he
must mean the decalogue. One of the windows at
the west end remembers the dead of the South
African War, with the names of the various
battles and the date May 31st 1902. Peace
would last a bare twelve years before the theatre
of slaughter moved to Europe. The walls seem
bereft of memorials for a large urban church, but
of course these were all installed a few hundred
yards off in St Gregory. One unusual one is not
to a person at all, but to Sudbury Grammar
School, closed as a result of the change to
comprehensive education in the 1970s. It recalls
its life from 1481 to 1972, for 481 years
preparing young men for the service of their
communities. The church closed the same
year.
The 1851 Census of
Religious Worship did not paint an optimistic
picture of Anglican church attendance in Suffolk,
especially not in urban parishes. However, Robert
Rudland, the registrar making the return for St
Peter, decided to chance his arm. The church
is a large and always well filled, he
reported, before going on to claim a general
congregation on a Sunday morning of a thousand!
This would have made it one of the very largest
attendances of any church in East Anglia.
However, since the other Sudbury churches and
chapels between them reported a combined
attendance that morning of a further 1600 people,
at a time when the population of the town was
under 2000, we may fairly deduce that there was a
certain amount of competitive exaggeration going
on among the clergy in Sudbury. In fairness to Mr
Rudland, he did have the grace to append the
return that it is not possible to answer
these queries with sufficient accuracy. And
more than half a century on it is hard to imagine
the ghosts of Robert Rudland's congregation
hanging on here, exaggerated or otherwise,
everything is so renewed and revitalised, the few
medieval survivals sanitised, the 19th Century
work merging comfortably into the welcome new
life of the building.
Something else remains -
just. The joint parish of St Gregory and St Peter
had a school about halfway between the two
churches. The writer Ronald Blythe was one of its
pupils, and remembered it fondly. It closed and
was demolished in the early 1990s, and the former
playground is now a car park. It is easy to stand
there and imagine the parish children of a
century or more ago running around. Ghosts too,
of a kind. The gateway with its inscription
survives on North Street.
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