Holbrook

All Saints, Holbrook

The Shotley peninsula is a pastoral scattering of gentle hamlets along high hedged lanes that thread over hills and through woodlands. Other settlements line the Orwell estuary, the full drama of the wide water and forests beyond constantly on show. No wonder Ipswich people long to live there.

The peninsula has only two places of any real size; broad functional Shotley itself, at the eastern tip, and Holbrook to the west, a rather more prosperous proposition.

The west window. All Saints has one of Suffolk's south towers.

Holbrook is home to the famous Royal Hospital School, a vast 1930s neo-classical confection designed for the sons and daughters of the Navy. Its campanile tower is a landmark for miles around; you can see it from tower blocks in the centre of Ipswich. The school inhabits a large campus to the south of the village, and injects lifeblood into the local economy. So here we still have jobs, and shops, a high school and a couple of pubs. Oh, and a pretty village church, behind a high hedge. The village is rather a suburban one, I fear; such an economy generates and thrives on traffic, and all the peninsula comes here to stock up.

All Saints is full of interest, not least since it contains the monument to one of the arch-villains of the English Reformation. We'll come to him in a moment.

The southern tower flanks a considerable nave (the north aisle is Victorian) and the roundels for consecration crosses survive around the exterior.

We step inside to a welcoming interior. This is a busy church, often in use, and the only one in the benefice that is kept open.

We find a huge memorial on the south side, with chairs aligned across from it to form a chapel. Otherwise, this is pretty well all Victorian - more than this, it is the work of Richard Phipson, almost hallmarked as typically 19th Century Suffolk.

Sir John Clenche is the figure above his wife on the huge memorial in the south aisle. Clenche was High Sheriff of Suffolk, but is more famous (and more notorious) for being the judge who sentenced Saint Margaret Clitherow to death.

Judge Clenche sleeping more soundly than St Margaret Clitherow ever did.

In 1586, Margaret Clitherow, a middle-class wife of a York butcher, was accused of treason against the state.

This was a catch-all charge designed to root out Catholicism; she was told, as all martyrs of the time were, that the charges would be dropped if she renounced Catholicism, and conformed to the Anglican church.

This she refused to do, and also refused to enter a plea, saying that "having made no offence, I need no trial".

Clenche's sentence was that "...you shall return to the place from whence you came, and in the lower part of the prison be stripped naked, laid down upon the ground, and so much weight laid upon you as you are able to bear, and thus you shall continue for three days; the third day you shall have a sharp stone laid under your back, and your hands and feet shall be tied to posts that, more weight being laid upon you, you may be pressed to death."

Popular Catholic martyrology has it that Clitherow's only problem with her sentence was the bit about being stripped naked; the night before she was crushed, she supposedly made a shift to wear. This was not allowed her, but it was placed over the lower part of her body to preserve her modesty from the paying spectators.

The final sentence was carried out on the 25th of March 1586. Brennan's Martyrs of the English Reformation recalls that a stone the size of a man's fist was placed under her back, her arms were stretched out and tied with cords provided; a door was placed upon her, and stones piled upon it by some beggars hired for the purpose. Her last words were 'Jesu have mercy upon me!' and when her chest was crushed her ribs protruded, and she was left in this postion for six hours.

The body was thrown on a dunghill on the outskirts of the city, but was rescued after six weeks by local Catholics, who found it 'free of putrefaction'. In May 1970 she was canonised as one of the martyrs of England and Wales by Pope Paul VI; the story of her martyrdom can be seen in stained glass just across the border at the church of Our Lady and the English Martyrs in Cambridge.

All Saints, Holbrook, is on the main street through the village, the B1080 Stutton to Ipswich road. I found it open.