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The notoriously busy A1120
bypasses Framlingham,
but hurtles through the neighbouring
straggle of Saxtead on its impatient
journey to the coast. Saxtead's most
famous building is its post-mill,
familiar to owners of Pevsner's Suffolk
from the back cover; it sits on Saxtead
Green about half a mile from All Saints. The
church is a far less prominent building
than the mill. It lost its tower on the
8th July 1805, one of several in the
county that collapsed before the
Victorians had a chance to restore them.
One wonders what the Suffolk landscape
would be like today if the Oxford Movement
had never happened. The surviving little
structure with its odd western face is
constrained within and hidden by a tight
churchyard full of mature trees, which
look very beautiful, but make
photographing the exterior in summer
difficult. You could easily drive past
without noticing it. The porch is a
typical 15th century Suffolk job, all flushwork
and niches. The church it stands against
is much older, and we still see it
largely in its 13th and 14th century
form.
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All
inside is neat and clean, a typical small Suffolk
parish church. Apart from the 17th century holy table and
communion rails, the furnishings are all 19th
century and later. But the benches retain some
medieval ends; these are very vandalised, but
retain traces of some figures. Mortlock thought
that they were done by the same carver as those
at neighbouring Tannington - indeed,
they may even have come from the same church. A
curious square window beside the lower door to
the rood loft stair was
probably created when the stairway was removed.
There is a fine decalogue board and royal arms.
One
of the most interesting features of the church is
the set of stocks and whipping post in the porch.
Similar survivals can be seen in the porches at Redlingfield and South
Elmham St Margaret and also
at Ufford where they
are by the gate. I think this set is the best of
all, though. They bear a warning to 'Fear God and
Honour the King' - none of this wishy-washy
liberal nonsense in the 18th century Church of
England.
| But really, to step outside
again is to save the best until last,
because Saxtead's beautifully overgrown
graveyard is an utter delight to explore,
especially on a sunny day in late spring
or early summer. Here, as Thomas Gray
famously observed in the middle years of
the 18th Century, Beneath those
rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade, Where
heaves the turf in many a mould'ring
heap, Each in his narrow cell for ever
laid, The rude forefathers of the hamlet
sleep. Here are the blacksmith and
the ploughman in their serried crooked
ranks, the old couples married for sixty
years and then dying within a few weeks
of each other, and their children, taken
from them in infancy, or childhood, or
early adulthood. The Pipes and the
Mannings, the Wightmans and the Buttons,
the Davys and the Bardwells, the surnames
repeated down the long Saxtead
generations. And
some of the children do not lie here at
all of course, the inscriptions merely
remembering their disappearance into the
mud and blood of Flanders and the Somme a
century ago, just a name now in the
parish that gave them birth; but who, all
across England, are increasingly still
remembered.
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Simon Knott, August 2011
  
  
   
   
   
   
  
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