It had been years
since I'd last visited Thorpe Morieux,
seventeen of them in fact, which probably
makes it my longest gap between visits to
any Suffolk village or its church. Thorpe
Morieux is not really on the way to
anywhere, it is one of those lost, remote
Suffolk villages in the hills between
Stowmarket and Hadleigh, a good five
miles from the nearest major road. It is
not particularly quaint, or picturesque.
It's a working village, surrounded by
rolling farmland. This is one of the last
places in Suffolk where you really cannot
hear the hum of distant traffic. For the
people who live here, Lavenham is the
local big town, which says it all really.
Morieux, pronounced M'-roo, was
the name of one of the parish manors.
This arrangement of the parish name is
far more common in Essex, but something
similar happened elsewhere in Suffolk at
Stonham Aspal.
St Mary is a church that you always see
for the first time across the fields. No
matter from which way you approach, there
it is in the green valley below. There is
no village centre, and the walk up to the
church is between cow fields, which
seemed to me vaguely reminiscent of
Yorkshire, an illusion helped by the
surrounding hills.
You approach from the west, and the
elegant tower thrusts up beyond the
lychgate. The church is hemmed in on the
south side by the tightness of the
churchyard which sprawls to the north and
west, but in any case it is the fields
around which provide the real setting. St
Mary is a a good example of that moment
where Dec is becoming Perp, everything in
the right place, an archetypal village
church. The wood and brick 15th century
porch is simple and beautiful.
You step down rather suddenly into the
interior, and the nave falls away rapidly
towards the east. Two spectacular sights
await. The first is the grand
transitional font. This is one of the few
parts of Suffolk where Norman fonts are
commonly found, and you can see how
design had moved on in the century or so
since the Norman font at nearby Great
Bricett, for here we no longer have
elaborate reliefs, but the style is
increasingly elegant. In the decades to
come, fonts would lose their squareness
as well, but for now this one still
broods magnificently. Beyond the font is
more elegance, for the organ came from
the Curzon chapel in Mayfair, and
brightens up what can be a gloomy nave on
a dull day. This is not to disparage the
glass, of course, which is good of its
kind, especially of the 20th and early
21st Centuries. Most striking is Meg
Lawrence's 2002 window depicting St Peter
and St Paul in her now familiar style.    
 
Nearby, the 1920s brought
Arthur Moore's overly sentimental St
George and St Francis, but note the small
child seated at the foot of St George,
appearing to play with the dragon as if
it were a favoured pet. I wondered if it
might be a portrait of the dedicatee, but
in fact this is a WWI memorial window to
two Temple brothers. Oddly, neither of
them is on the war memorial.
The east window of the previous century
features glass by the O'Connor brothers,
which has been partly reset in clear
glass - did it come from elsewhere
originally? The baby Jesus in the
nativity scene is rather alarming, I'm
afraid. Some of the other glass may be by
Burlison & Grylls, and I thought I
detected the hand of William Wailes in
one of the other windows, although none
of these are signed. Most intriguing of
all is a window in memory of the nine
year old Louisa Temple, who died in 1877.
It shows her seated on the lap of Christ,
and may be an early work by Ward &
Hughes.
There is an unusual image bracket set in
the south wall, all vines and ivy.
Mortlock thinks it 15th century, and not
in its original location. It seems to
have been found and moved at the time of
the 19th century restoration, and later
made to form part of the war memorial.
Probably it was beside the altar to St
Nicholas, who Cautley says was the patron
of a guild here in the years before the
Reformation.
The chancel arch is flanked by two
hatchments. Now, I'm not a great one for
hatchments, but the one to the south of
the arch is interesting because it is the
latest in Suffolk, and one of the last in
England. It dates from 1934, and is for
one of the Warners of Thorpe Hall.
Stepping into the large chancel, there
are two fairly decent memorials to that
ubiquitous family in this part of the
world, the Fiskes. The better one, on the
north wall, dates from the late 18th
century. They are elegant and restrained,
and not too imposing. The sill of the
sanctuary south window opposite drops to
show that there was a sedilia here once,
but any remains of it have been lost. The
13th century angled piscina beside it
survives, with an elegant column
separating the two parts.
Altogether then a handsome building, and
well worth a visit, with its setting in
the remote mid-Suffolk hills amid the now
quiet farmyards which bustled in an
earlier, busier age than today. Now,
nothing very much at all seems to happen
in Thorpe Morieux. Cycling onward up the
steep lonely road towards Hitcham, I
looked back into the valley, and saw the
impressive Thorpe Hall rise like a moon
behind St Mary.
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