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St Margaret is that
rare thing among the Saints; it is a
proper village. It is also the biggest of
the South Elmhams, stretching for half a
mile or so along the curving road between
Homersfield
and Halesworth.
For much of the way, council houses add a
touch of life to the place, several of
them with roadside stalls selling eggs,
flowers and apples. I liked this a lot.
The church is in the
tightest part of the curve, with a hemmed
in graveyard full of close packed 18th
and 19th century graves. The best of
these is in the south wall, for Dan and
Buck, who died in the 1720s. It reads, in
part: In Fine, All must to their cold
Graves. But the Religious Actions of
these two Just Do smell sweet in Death
and blossom in the dust.
The 14th century
tower has pretty little windows in its
stair turret, but the outside was
generally sanitised by our old friend Phipson in
the 1870s. In the porch, you'll find the
village stocks; it takes a moment or two
to work out what is strange about them,
and then it hits you. There is an odd
number of holes. Possibly, centuries of
inbreeding had resulted in an 18th
century race of felons with three legs.
Or possibly not. Shaking off this
disturbing vision (which, nevertheless,
should remind us not to take historical
evidence at face value) and stepping
through the Norman south doorway, you
enter this lovely little church.
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The roof is simple yet beautiful,
accentuated by the high tower arch, and the
lovely glass in the west window. It is probably
by FC Eden, who was very busy indeed a few miles
off at Barsham. Of all
the Saints, St Margaret appears to have been the
one which was most High Church in the 19th
Century. Geenrally, Anglo-catholicism reached
East Anglia late, most places not becoming
enthusiastic about it until well into the 20th
Century, but there were a couple of early
hotspots, one of which was Barsham and
Shipmeadow, the homes of the Sucklings, who were
recruited to the cause as early as the 1860s.
This also seems to have been an
uncharacteristically wealthy parish, and as well
as the Eden glass there is good glass here by the
Ward & Hughes and Clayton & Bell
workshops.Generally, everything is finished to
the highest quality here. A striking feature of
the chancel is the early 16th Century Easter
Sepulchre; it is a late one, crisply
carved, but if it was also a tombchest then we no
longer know who it belonged to. It is small,
compact, like its church. A rare survival, and
one easily missed, is the section of the rood screen
dado in the corner of the sanctuary. The
figures are barely discernible, but Mortlock thought
that one of them was probably St Hubert, a unique
survival in East Anglia.
A
curiosity is the graffiti in the cement
above the tower doorway. Graffiti is
fairly common in East Anglian churches,
especially from the 17th century when the
local puritans seem to have taken to
producing it with their sleeves rolled up
as a positive duty, but this is earlier
and more elaborate than most. On the
right hand side is the name John
Sellynge in an Elizabethan script,
and to the left is an elaborate rose,
which may have been a
consecration cross, but which was
probably intended as nothing more than a
beautiful mathematical design. It must
have taken hours.
This is a small
church, richly furnished and pleasing to
the eye. I think that St Margaret is the
most interesting and beautiful of all the
churches in the Saints, and it is
entirely to its credit that it is open to
visitors every day.
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