St Michael, Peasenhall

home index e-mail what's new?

www.suffolkchurches.co.uk - a journey through the churches of Suffolk

As James Bettley notes in his revision of the East Suffolk volume of the Buildings of England series, the rebuilding of the 1860s was at the expense of the Brookes of Sibton Park, and the architect was Robert Chantrell. Chantrell is best known today for his complete rebuilding of Leeds Parish Church some twenty years earlier, at the time the largest church built in England since St Paul's Cathedral more than two centuries earlier. Peasenhall provided a much smaller and simpler project for a man then approaching his seventies. The contractor was Henry Ringham of Ipswich, greatly concerned at that time with the refurnishing of the large church of St Mary le Tower in that town, today Ipswich Minster. This may explain why there are none of his customary high quality bench ends here, and in fact Ringham was declared bankrupt in 1862, perhaps financially overstretched by taking on too many projects and staff. At the time of the 1861 census he had 49 employees in his St John's Road workshop.

Stepping inside, you can see that, understandably and more than most Suffolk country churches, Peasenhall church is what Pevsner sometimes called an end in itself rather than the accretion of centuries. However, one unusual survival here is the font which must be 12th or early 13th Century. It's been partly repaired, presumably at the time of the rebuilding, but I don't think I've seen the wavy lined banding with inset arrowheads on a font anywhere else in East Anglia. It has been reset on a solid stone column which looks somewhat out of sorts with it. It was probably intended to be on the floor, although, intriguingly, the early 13th Century was when the raising of fonts to facilitate infant baptism became pretty well universal, and the chamfered corners here suggest that it might originally have been set on four legs.

The 1861 east window dominates the small church, as it was intended to do. It's by Thomas Willement, typical of his work and good of its kind, the Crucifixion flanked by the symbols of the four Evangelists, the Pelican in her Piety and the Agnus Dei. James Bettley records that the tower window was made locally, by Henry Fisk of Yoxford. The west gallery came in the 1890s, and then in the 1970s the space beneath it was made into a meeting room which dominates the view to the west. All in all it feels a very serviceable building, obviously well used and well-cared for, of a suitable size for the services and liturgies of a modern Anglican congregation.

If you have heard of Peasenhall before, it might be because of the sensation of the Peasenhall Murder. On the morning of 1 June 1902, Rose Harsent, a servant employed at Providence House to the north of the churchyard, was found lying dead at the foot of the stairs to her bedroom. Her throat had been cut. A local man, William Gardiner, was tried for her murder, but the jury could not reach a verdict, so he was acquitted. He lived on in Peasenhall under a veil of suspicion until the 1940s. As the writer of the Wikipedia page on the incident notes enthusiastically, it is a classic 'unsolved' country house murder, committed near midnight, during a thunderstorm, and with ingredients of mystery. A recent television investigation into the murder concluded that the perpetrator was probably Gardiner's wife, in a fit of jealousy. Rose is buried in the village cemetery on the back lane towards Bruisyard.