Bures is a fine
old riverside village, a town almost, partly in Suffolk
and partly in Essex. The same was once true of nearby
Sudbury, but the Ballingdon district there was drawn into
Suffolk by boundary changes in the 1950s. Tradition
survives here, and this is still a split town. The Essex
side is called Bures Hamlet, but is now the larger part,
with a railway station and housing estates.
The River Stour is the county border, and it flows not
far from the western edge of the churchyard. The Suffolk
side styles itself Bures St Mary, although I am told that
this church was not dedicated to St Mary until the 19th
century Anglican revival, when one of the results of the
Oxford Movement was a renewed interest in church
dedications. Many of these were restored by well-meaning
antiquarians sorting through the ancient records of the
Diocese of Norwich, and the confusion arose because of a
now-vanished chapel in the churchyard dedicated to the
Assumption of the Blessed Virgin. In fact, the dedication
of this church in medieval times was probably to the
feast of All Saints.
The north side of the church faces the street, although
you can enter the church through either the north or the
south porches. Both are lovely. The red brick early 16th
century south porch is stately and grand, a holy water
stoup with supporting figures, and a wide open space
inside suited for the conduct of parish business. There
is a fearsome exterior headstop low on the west side,
which must surely be older than the porch - 13th century,
I should think. Either the Tudors reused it, or the
Victorians placed it here during their restoration.
The other striking feature of the exterior is the red
brick massing of the Waldegrave chantry on the south side
of the chancel, its east window somewhat grander than
that of the chancel itself. Above the porches rises
Richard de Waldegrave's tower of the late 14th century.
However, the base of the tower is a survival of an
earlier one, and on its southern side is a curious tomb
recess, now empty.
St Mary is a quintessential Anglican church, its 19th and
20th century reorderings typical of thousands of large,
prosperous buildings. But there are unusual things in
this church, all worth going to see. If you look up, you
will see that the ceiling consists of flat, wooden
patterns, with modern lighting units set into them.
Mortlock credits the woodwork to Ewan Christian, who
carried out the 19th century restoration. The lighting
system is from the 1990s. The arcades are lit from
beneath, creating the effect of an undercroft.
In the sanctuary and to the north of the altar, one of
the Waldegrave tombs sits grandly beside the high camp
Victoriana. It has been rather battered by the fortunes
of history; its brass has long gone, but the grand angel
corbels that supported its also-vanished wooden canopy
survive. It is to Richard de Waldegrave, who built the
tower, and it was used as an Easter sepulchre. Wodewoses,
East Anglia's wild men of the woods, guard the corners.
And then, to the south
of the chancel is the Waldegrave chantry. A tomb in the
south east corner, actually a cobbling together of two
separate Waldegrave tombs, has lost its brasses, but the
standing memorial to the west is more complete. Along the
front, the children kneel in prayer. Their legs are
curiously swirly, and someone recently said to me that
they look as if they have been extruded out of a cake
decorating set. The memorial remembers a William
Waldegrave who died in the early 17th century, and the
more you look at it the odder it gets. For instance,
although the twelve weepers are in their conventional
position, there are no effigies of the remembered dead.
Even odder, the memorial inscription is on the back of
the tomb, and ordinarily out of sight. This memorial is
curiously awkwardly placed, and feels rather in the way,
until you remember that for three hundred years after the
Reformation the liturgy had no need for gangways for
processions, or for views of altars. The tomb was
probably placed deliberately so.
The Waldegraves were
not popular people in this parish, apparently. At the
time of the Anglican reformers in the 1540s, there was a
general uprising here and the destruction in the church
was so severe that the churchwardens were punished. A
hundred years later, the puritans meted out their
fundamentalist justice to the Waldegrave children,
removing their hands. And yet, this rather ugly tomb
still sits here, and who remembers the puritans now?
The location of the tomb is perhaps a pity, because the
eastward view in the chapel is otherwise its triumph. The
five light window contains 1920s glass by Horace
Wilkinson. It is a memorial to the Waldegraves and the
Proberts who succeeded them. Interestingly, memorial
inscriptions have been added to it over the years, most
reently in 1997 and 2012.
Heading back into the body of the church, a wooden effigy
of a knight rests in peace on a north aisle window
recess, which is obviously not its original place. It
dates from about 1330, and is made of chestnut. No one
really knows who he is, although some books mention
someone called Richard de Cornard. The lion under his
feet has a rather sad expression, I think. Suffolk's only
other wooden medieval effigies are at Boxted and
Heveningham. Mortlock says that the survival of his
shield is notable and rare.This knight effigy may or may
not have come from Bures church originally, and there is
no way of telling now.
The most unusual
feature of St Mary is something you would not notice, or
even think to look for unless you knew it was there. This
is a strange little octagonal segment that juts out about
ten feet up on the eastern face of the south side of the
chancel arch. It is, of all things, a piscina. What is it
doing up there? We need to imagine the rood screen, rood
beam and rood loft, and all the liturgical paraphernalia
of the pre-Reformation church. The rood loft here had an
altar on it, and this piscina served the altar. Why is it
so rare? Simply, this chancel arch was built with a drain
inside it. Most rood loft altars must have managed with a
takeaway bowl. An extraordinary thing, in many ways.
I'm always conscious along the River Stour of how
civilised the south of Suffolk seems, and how wild Essex
looks beyond it, as if the 21st century hadn't quite made
it yet along the narrow lanes from County Hall at
Chelmsford. North Essex is wonderful cycling and
church-exploring country, but people seem to know the
Suffolk side best. In the corner of the churchyard is a
parish war memorial which is unusual, and possibly
unique. It remembers The men of Bures St Mary and
Bures Hamlet who gave their lives for King and Country in
the Great War, which of course is to say the lost
boys in two different counties.
