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A Suffolk
mardle at the gates of St Mary.
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What do you do
if you've got an hour to spare in Elmswell? Where do you go? Easy - you go to
Wetherden.
I had been royally
entertained by Elmswell's fascinating church of St John the
Divine, and was looking
forward to putting my bike on the train at the
village station for home after a long day's
cycling.
But the train
didn't go until 6pm, so I had time to cycle on
through the hilly lanes to the next village,
Wetherden, where St Mary is at the heart of its
community.
The key was
obtained nearby, but St Mary is well worth a
visit anyway for the spectacular exterior,
especially to the south aisle.
Mortlock describes it as 'lavish', and the word
is exactly right. It was built in the middle of
the 15th century by Sir John Sulyard, and
completed by his widow's second husband Sir
Thomas Bourchier.
The Sulyards were
a prominent Suffolk family, who later became
recusants. They intermarried with the Garneys,
who we have met at Kenton and Redlingfield.
Sir John was Chief
Justice to Richard II, which may be why the
family didn't respond too well to the whims and
fancies of the Tudors.
The most striking
feature of the exterior on the south aisle is the
series of shields and symbols cut into the
buttresses and the base course. The most famous
of these is the Annunciation lily cut into the
buttress immediately to the east of the porch.
In a shallow
niche, it instantly recalls the same thing set in
the shaft of the fonts at Woodbridge and Great Glemham.
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Wholly religous in its
symbolism, it survived a significant iconoclastic assault
on this building, probably because it wasn't recognised
as such.
The
porchway set into the south aisle. The aisle was
built from this end, a lavish riot of flushwork
and symbolism.
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Lilies of
the Annunciation, set in a buttress niche,
familiar from the same thing on a smaller scale
on the Woodbridge and Great Glemham fonts.
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The tower is a century
earlier, and the west door is flanked by delicious
niches. At first sight, we are reminded of Parham, and Wetheringsett, and
perhaps Friston, and assume this was a rood group. And yet, the central, upper niche is
smaller than the others, and so the proportions don't
seem right. Perhaps the upper niche contained a Madonna,
and the other two St Peter and St Paul, a common grouping
of the three most significant Saints in the genesis of
the Catholic Church.
The west
doorway, flanked and surmounted by niches.
And so we go inside. Like
several around here, this church has a superb 15th
century roof; like Woolpit, it was
extensively restored in the 19th century. The roof in the
aisle must be contemporary, but seems of a finer quality
- is it a different kind of wood? Someone would know. One
of the angels has fallen, or been removed, and now stands
propped up in the south east corner.
There is some
decent 19th century glass, although it is
improved greatly by the thrill of the delicate,
soaring arcade, which helps fill the church with
light.
Because of this, even the
hatchments can't make the aisle seem gloomy, or
the heavily vandalised Sulyard tomb, on which
revenge seems to have been heartily wreaked by
17th century protestants.
As if this wasn't enough, William
Dowsing had a field day
here.
Dowsing, the official
government visitor to the counties of
Cambridgeshire and Suffolk, came this way on
Monday February 5th, 1644, looking for evidence
of Catholic worship.
His role, which was largely
self-appointed, was to strip the churches of
ritualist apparatus installed under the Laudian regime of the 1630s, as well as
surviving features that had been missed by the
iconoclasts of a century earlier.
Most parishes took this task on
for themselves, but some didn't.
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The
superb arcade, into the west end of the south
aisle.
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Dowsing was particularly
wary of parishes that had 'scandalous ministers' - that
is to say, theological liberals as Rectors.
Monday 5th of February was
a particularly busy day for Dowsing. Like all good
Puritans, he rested on the Sabbath, but had planned a
preliminary tour of Cambridgeshire for the following
week. Trevor Cooper, the editor of the new edition of the
Dowsing Journals, suggests that on this, the final day of his
initial Suffolk tour, he may have carried with him some
inkling of the enormity of his task.
Dowsing set off from Needham Market that morning, travelling over the fields to Badley (an identical journey can be made today) and
then on into Stowmarket. It must have been about lunchtime that he
arrived in Wetherden, having bypassed Haughley. He must have already realised there was much
to do here - the influence of the Sulyards was a strong
and obstructive one.
The
battered Sulyard monument - Puritan revenge?
Almost certainly. Dowsing wanted to send a strong
message to the people of this scandalous parish.
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He planned to deal with Elmswell and Tostock later
in the afternoon, before arriving in Bury, where he would spend the night. Even
so, with the help of some very sympathetic
churchwardens, he was also able to survey the two
huge Bury churches of St Mary and St James before the day was out. In all, he
would deal with eight churches this day. His tour that Monday involved a journey
of some 20 miles. This is good going, on a
February day when the light fades early, on
horseback in the days before proper roads.
In his journal, he
records his activities at Wetherden: We brake
100 superstitious pictures in Sr Edward
Silliard's eile; and gave order to break down 60
more; and to take down 68 cherubims; and to
levell the steps in the chancell; there was
takeing up 19 superstitious inscriptions, that
weighed 65 pounds.
So, in the space
of an hour or so, St Mary underwent a thorough
restructuring. It is interesting to differentiate
betwen the work that Dowsing carries out himself,
and that which he delegates to deputies and
churchwardens.
The superstitous
pictures are in stained glass, in the windows;
Dowsing himself destroys all of those in the
aisle, but not 60 others - perhaps these were
awkward to reach, or perhaps the churchwardens
asked if they could leave them until it was
possible to replace them with plain glass - we'll
never know. One imagines Dowsing taking a few
swipes with his hammer at the monument to the
hated Sulyards as he passed it, although he
doesn't mention this.
He also orders the
taking down of cherubims - these were the angels
on the roof hammer beams, the work of several
days, and something he felt safe to delegate,
along with the removal of the chancel steps
installed by the Laudians a decade earlier.
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Most interesting of all is
that Dowsing suggests he lifted all the brass
inscriptions himself. These were considered
superstitious, because they asked for prayers for the
soul of the dead person, or said that he or she committed
their soul into the hands of God - both these ideas were
theologically anathema to the Puritans. It was the words cuius
anime proptietur Deus on the monument that goaded
the exasperated Dowsing.
Nineteen inscriptions is a
lot, and in general Dowsing was careful not to damage the
images of the dead people themselves, or any heraldic
devices or decorations - indeed, he often fond it
necessary only to remove or deface the part of the
inscription that suggested Catholic belief.
So what happened here?
Today, only one brass survives, set in the chancel. It is
likely in any case that many Suffolk brasses were
actually stolen or destroyed in the 18th and 19th century
by collectors, vandals and thieves, and that may have
been what happened here.
Tucking
into an acorn.
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Still, 65 pounds of brass
seems an awful lot. Clearly, the only reason for
weighing it is if it was going to be melted down,
which sounds shocking, but isn't really - the
Puritans were pragmatists, and the money they
raised for the parishes was given back to them to
be used for essential maintenance and charitable
works (unlike the theft perpetrated under Henry
VIII and Edward VI a century earlier). Perhaps the brasses had already been
lifted and weighed by enthusiastic parishioners
before Dowsing's visit, and he is merely
recording here the official detail. Again, we
shall never know.
But for me, the real joy of St
Mary is its bench ends.
Some are 15th century, some are
excellent 19th century replicas.
In quality, the medieval work
ranks with neighbouring Tostock and Woolpit,
although I'm not entirely convinced that it came
from the same workshop.
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Not
someone you'd want to meet on a dark night.
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| My favourite is the gorgeous
Victorian wolf - at least, I don't think it is a
bear. |
| The charm of the later work is
that it is not particularly exact - this isn't
the work of Henry Ringham, for example, but of
some local jobbing carpenter. I'm also fond of the squirrel that tucks
into an acorn, its tail tucked neatly behind its
back.
Some of them are ambiguous -
what appears to be a medieval horse licking its
haunches is in fact a unicorn, its horn now
missing, but scratching its backside like those
at Honington and Ixworth Thorpe.
A dog looks on in wonder.
Quite a few of the creatures
are eating; a dog carries a duck, as at Woolpit and Tostock. One
of the 19th century ones is probably an owl, but
might be a buzzard, and has a tiny shrew in its
beak.
Why are they here? There are
many theories, and I discuss this at some length
on the entry for Woolpit.
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What are
you doing? A dog watches the hornless unicorn.
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You step back outside into
a splendid churchyard, full of 18th and 19th century
memorials, and sloping suddenly down towards the east -
lots to explore.
So there you are, then;
this little known church is a box of delights, and not
too far off the beaten track. I recommend it to your
attention.
St
Mary, Wetherden, is located in the heart of this pretty
village just to the north of the A14, betwen the Elmswell
and Haughley Bends junctions. I found it locked, with a
helpful keyholder a hundred yards away.
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