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Had a day out with Timeline Events at the Mid Suffolk Railway. Great to get some shots that you can only do on an orgaised shoot with re-enactors.
Another very rare outing of Ipswich Buses Dennis Lance 162 on Debenham High School Contract 303, in place of the usual Volvo Olympian, due to a fallen tree on the route.
Here we see former Westcliff-on-Sea Motor Services ECW bodied Bristol K5G type - AJN 825 as it pulls into Brockford & Wetheringsett Station yard while taking part in the Mid Suffolk Light Railway’s Bus Day.
Saxtead Green Post Windmill is a Grade II listed post mill at Saxtead Green in Suffolk which is also a Scheduled monument and has been restored. It is a post mill with a three-storey roundhouse. The mill has four Patent sails carried on a cast-iron windshaft and is winded by a fantail. The mill has two pairs of millstones in the breast. All the machinery is of cast iron except the Brake Wheel, which is of oak.
According to the Manorial Records there has been a windmill in Saxtead since 1287. The current Saxtead Green Mill dates back to at least 1796 when the miller was Amos Webber. The mill was raised a total of three times during its working life. The mill was tailwinded c. 1853. Around this time, the sails were destroyed and remade but in 1854 Whitmore and Binyon, the Wickham Market millwrights fitted new cast iron machinery and windshaft, and the layout of the machinery changed from Head and Tail to Breast stones. It was in this year that the mill was raised for the third time.
Collins, the Melton millwright worked on the mill in the 1870s and Whitmore and Binyon again worked on the mill in the 1890s. From 1926 millwright Jesse Wightman (who was initially apprenticed to A S Aldred the Miller) assisted the owner with repairs until the mill ceased working commercially on the death of the last miller in 1947. The mill was completely rebuilt between 1957 and 1960 under the supervision of Jesse Wightman. A replacement crowntree was obtained from a windmill at Wetheringsett which had been demolished. The mill has been in the care of English Heritage since 1984.
On the south wall of the chancel is the brass figures of John Eyre 1561 & wife Margaret Blennerhassett Spelman 1558
"Here do lye John Eyer, late Receyvor Generale to Elizabethe the Quenes Majestie in the Counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Cantabridge, and Huntynton, and one of the Maisters of her hyghe Court of Chancerye, and Margaret his Wyfe, one of the daughters of Sir Thomas Bleverhaiset of Frens Knight, late Wyfe of John Spelman Esquire, Sone and Heyre apparent of Syr John Spelman Knyght, which John Eyre dy'd the xxth Daye of May, the Yere of our Lord MV LXI. and in the thirde Yere of the Raing of Elizabeth by the Grace of God Quene of England, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faithe, and the said Margaret dy'd the xvth Day of December in the Yere of our Lord MDLVIII".
John's scroll reads "with the Lord there is Mercy
and on Margaret's "and with hym is plenteous redemption"
Above are 3 shields :
Over John - 1st Quarterly in 1st and 4th arg. on a chevron in a bordure ingrailed sab. bezant three quaterfoils arg. (Eyre), in the 2d and 3d Townsend.
Middle quarterly Eyre and Spelman, escutcheon,
Over Margaret - quarterly Eyre and Townsend; impaling 1st, Blennerhasset, and his quarterings in the second place Lowdham. In the fourth Orton. In the fifth Skelton
Margaret 1558 was the daughter of Sir Thomas Blennerhassett of Frenze 1531 flic.kr/p/rp8dxz & Margaret d1561 flic.kr/p/qsrvxx daughter of John Braham of Wetheringsett and Joan Reyden 1519 www.flickr.com/gp/52219527@N00/30oPQ
She m1 John Spelman 1545 www.flickr.com/gp/52219527@N00/76C330 only son of Judge Sir John Spelman and Elizabeth Frowyke www.flickr.com/gp/52219527@N00/9Rj86X co-heiress daughter of Henry Frowyke of Gunnersby / Gunnersbury, Middlesex & 2nd wife Margaret daughter of Ralph Leigh by Elizabeth Langley
Children - 2 sons & 2 daughters
1. Thomas dsp
2. John Spelman of Narburgh 1581 www.flickr.com/gp/52219527@N00/H69W16 m1 Judith 1570 daughter of Sir Clement Higham of Barrow Suffolk flic.kr/p/ag3hJy by 2nd wife Anne Waldegrave Bures m2 Catherine, daughter of William Saunders of Ewell in Surrey
She m2 John Eyre dsp 1561 <of Lyn, Receiver General to Queen Elizabeth for the counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgshire & Huntingdon
John Eyre was a great purchaser of religious houses that were dissolved by King Henry VIII. and bought of that King, the Friars Carmelites, the Gray Friers, the Friars Preachers or Black Friars, and the Augustin Friars at Lynn, &c. He also possessed Bury abbey. - Church of All Saints, Narborough Norfolk
It's been a while since I stepped into a church, so when I knew I was going to Suffolk at the weekend, I asked a friend whoch ones I should visit, and was told that this is one of the top churches in England, not just Suffolk.
Set a hundred yards or so from the main road that is chocked with traffic which runs between the county towns of Suffolk and Norfolk, it is down a lovely quiet lane, past some grand large houses, and set back from the road in a small churchyard is St Mary.
You enter through a small Norman doorway, into a body of a small and simple church, bt one filled with delights.
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From the moment that you see it across the fields, you know that St Mary is something special. At first the silhouette perhaps, or a stain of gold that resolves as you approach into a solid little Norman church. The thatched roof is charming, and set against is a small square tower, also crowned in thatch. There is a stubborn timelessness about it, a silent witness to long centuries. There isn’t really a village, and St Mary sits lonely in the fields. At night it is floodlit and floats above the darkness. On winter days, the low light catches its honeyed walls across ploughed furrows. In summer, the entrancing trees gather, a setting for a diadem.
This has always been a special place for me. I was captivated at an early stage of my life in Suffolk. And it was while visiting here in late 1998 that I first got the idea for this website, and decided to do it. Thornham Parva was the first entry. In common with most of the very earliest entries, it wasn’t terribly good – I hadn’t even taken any photographs.
But that was an excuse to return again and again, and when this website was featured on BBC Television’s Songs of Praise in 2000, the interview was recorded here at St Mary. They filmed me cycling the narrow lanes round about in the sub-zero temperatures of late-January; if anything, it was even colder inside the church, and my breath clouded the air as I became quite possibly the first person ever to say the Hail Mary on prime-time television.
Thornham Parva, of course, isn’t just special to me. It is one of the most remarkable churches in East Anglia, a treasure house, an aesthetic pleasure, a delight. It is a perfect antidote to the triumphalism of nearby Eye, an intensely rural collision of historical circumstances that have left us a moving and coherent document of our Suffolk past. When Cautley’s revising editors came this way in 1975 they found the church in a bit of a state, and even feared for its future. That it is now the perfect model of a well-cared-for English parish church is a tribute to the energy and enthusiasm of the tiny handful of local parishioners who have nursed it back to health.
The church gets a fair number of visitors, because its fame has spread far and wide. As an example, I popped in here a few years back with my daughter. She was about five years old at the time, and without me noticing she signed the visitors book with our full address (not something I would normally advise). Within a fortnight, I had received a nice postcard from Israel, from a user of this site who had spotted the entry in the visitors book. It is not surprising that the church does get visitors from all over the world, because St Mary is worth seeing, and worth going to see. In particular, it has, not one, but two astonishing survivals. If they were in the Victoria and Albert Museum you would willingly travel to London to see them, and pay handsomely for doing so. And yet here they are, in the fields that punctuate the Thornham woods, in a church which is open every day.
You step directly down into the church from a small Norman doorway in the north side. A gorgeous 18th century gallery curves above you – there’s no other like it in Suffolk. It was made tiny, to fit in this tiny space. Unfortunately, the stairway is now kept locked so, unless you contact a churchwarden first, you can’t see the clever way the carpenter engineered benches that open and close over the gangway to allow more seating space. The gallery is a reminder that St Mary was the church of the ordinary people; The neighbpouring village is Thorenham Magna, and the local big house Thornham Hall, the home of the Hennikers, is beside the church at Thornham Magna. However, it was at the big house, or more accurately in one of its barns, that in the 1920s was found and donated to this church the remarkable Thornham retable. It was restored in the early years of this century, and returned to St Mary, now standing proud behind alarmed glass.
The retable is only part of a much larger altarpiece that probably once stood in the Priory at Thetford in Norfolk. The rest of the piece can be found in the Musee de Cluny in Paris. The retable was rescued and hidden after the Anglican Reformation destroyed the priory, along with so many of England’s treasures. Perhaps it was taken by recusant Catholics to use in their devotions. More likely, it was simply rescued because it is beautiful. From left to right, the figures are St Dominic (Thetford was a Dominican Priory); St Catherine; St John the Baptist; St Paul; a rood group of the Blessed Virgin, Christ and St John; St Peter; St Edmund; St Margaret; St Peter Martyr (another Dominican). The retable dates from the height of the Decorated period, in the decades before the Black Death. They are probably the most alive, and lively, medieval figures in Suffolk; St Catherine in particular looks as if she is stepping through an archway from dancing in a garden.
As if the retable were not enough, the walls of St Mary are lined with some of Suffolk’s most fascinating wall-paintings. They rank with those at Wissington, and date broadly from the early years of the 14th century, and are in two ranges; on the south wall is the story of the early years of Christ. On the north wall is the martyrdom of St Edmund. This is amazingly rare; fragments survive not far off at Troston, but there is only one other sequence of the martyrdom surviving in the whole of the Kingdom.
Both sequences are organised chronologically from right to left. This may seem awkward, but effectively they start in the south west corner of the church and continue anti-clockwise around to the north-west corner. Unfortunately, the paintings on the west wall are now lost to us, behind the gallery.
On the south side, it is reasonable to assume that the very first painting, on the south side of the west wall, was an Annunciation – the angel appearing to Mary. This is lost. A fragment of the next frame survives, just poking up above the south end of the gallery. This is the Visitation, and we see Mary embracing her cousin Elizabeth. The Visitation was a very important part of medieval devotions, because of the way it balances and connects with the Assumption; the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, on August 15th, was one of the most significant feast days in the English medieval calendar, and the Assumption was probably the dedication of the majority of Suffolk churches. The other images in the sequence are clearer. We see the angel appearing to the shepherds, and then Christ sits on his mothers lap while the shepherds adore him. Note the way we have lost the adoring figures because of the later punching through of a window. Similarly, the next frame, the Presentation in the temple, has also suffered from fenestration. We often talk about Victorian vandalism of medieval churches, but here is a prime example of destruction caused by 15th century ‘restoration’.
What was the point of this sequence? A lot of nonsense is talked about wallpaintings and stained glass being ‘the poor mans Bible’ for peasants who couldn’t read. This analysis suggests that they were destroyed during the 16th century Anglican Reformation because ‘they were no longer needed’. In fact, the Anglicans destroyed them because they were Catholic devotional tools – the wall paintings on the south side here form a rosary sequence, pictures for meditation while saying prayers with the aid of rosary beads. Often this was done during Mass. If the Anglicans were to turn our churches into congregational preaching houses, the wall paintings had to go.
Intriguingly, the wall paintings here may have been whitewashed even before there were theological reasons for doing so. Most of the windows that punch through the wall paintings date from the 15th century, not the 16th. Could there have been a general redecoration at this time? Whichever, they were whitewashed, to be rediscovered in a kinder, gentler age. When the ranges here were uncovered by the Victorians, the south range was easily recognisable. But the north range wasn’t. For many years, it was thought to represent the martyrdom of St Catherine, because of the large wheel above the way you came in. It was only at the time the paintings were restored in the late 1970s that it became clear that here was something much more exciting.
The sequence begins at the eastern end of the range, and you can click on the images below to enlarge them. We see Edmund fleeing the Viking attack on a town, possibly Rendlesham, home of the Wuffings, the East Anglian royal family. The actual martyrdom is lost because of another of those great windows, but we next see Edmund’s decapitated head being put back on the body by a group of monks. Then, the body is carried off to its shrine at Bedricsworth (soon to become St Edmundsbury) while the wolf that found and guarded the head looks on. The final image on the north wall shows the wheel of a bullock cart crossing a bridge – delightfully, the bridge is represented by the arch of the doorway. This depicts an event that happened some time after. St Edmund’s body (by now sanctified and canonised) is being taken away to escape a later assault by Vikings. It approaches a bridge that is simply too narrow to allow the cart to pass. Miraculously, the cart crosses the bridge, and the Vikings are foiled.
Perhaps there was a final image on the north side of the west wall. Perhaps it showed the fabulous shrine at Bury itself. We can never be sure.
Although it is sad that we have lost so much of both sequences because of later alterations, it has to be said that the walls of this church are beautiful. The late medieval windows, which include some excellent 20th century glass by Lawrence Whistler, the paraffin lamps, the memorials to churchwardens, all add rather than detract. The screen is tiny and over-restored, but you can still see the sawn-off ends of the rood beam and the floor of the rood loft.
Standing in the rood screen, the retable behind you for a moment, the full beauty of the gallery can be seen, and above it a circular Saxon window. You can step outside and see how it is hidden by the tower. The tower itself is surprisingly late; we are told that in the 1480s it was the work of Richard Cutting and John Mason. Apparently, they were sued for defective workmanship, but it still appears to be standing.
The graveyard is an interesting one. As well as several significant musicians, it includes the grave of the great 20th century architect Basil Spence, designer of Coventry Cathedral, the Kensington and Chelsea barracks in London, and Britains best university campus, the University of Sussex - to name but three. Ironically, his 1980s gravestone appears to be wearing away. One hopes he used better materials for his buildings.
Simon Knott, 1998, rewritten 2003, revised February 2009
www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/thornhamentry.htm
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The Thornhams, Magna and Parva, flank Thornham Hall and its park. Until the end of the 19thc. the estate boasted a hall, Tudor with an 18thc. facade, surrounded by an extensive park. Most of the hall was demolishedc.1900, and the rest was destroyed by fire in the late 1940s. The present hall is modern, and the estate has been converted for use as a field centre, a commercial market garden and a site for small businesses. Excavations in the estate have provided evidence of continuous occupation in the area from the Neolithic period to the present. The surrounding landscape is flattish and given over to arable cultivation. Thornham Parva lies to the N of the hall, some 2 miles W of Eye in central North Suffolk. The settlement is dispersed and sparsely populated with no real centre apart from the church, which lies just off the road from Thornham Magna and the Hall.
St Mary's has a nave and chancel in one, covered with a thatched roof, and a low W tower with a thatched pyramid roof. The church is of flint with ashlar dressings. The nave is apparently 12thc., with N and S doorways and a S window surviving from that period, but a round window visible in the interior W wall of the nave is said to be late Anglo-Saxon by Cautley. A flowing tracery window has been added on the S wall, and 15thc. windows have been inserted towards the W end. There is no chancel arch, and two Y-tracery windows on the lateral walls towards the E suggest a date ofc.1300 for the chancel. The E window is three-light reticulated, and there is a 15thc. S window. The tower is of knapped flint with no buttresses; it has a tall plinth course and a 15thc. main W window. Its E quoins are of brick, as are the upper windows, except for their ashlar ogee heads, suggesting an 18thc. date for the top of the tower. St Mary's is celebrated as the home of a 14thc. retable, probably painted for the Dominican house at Thetford. It was discovered in a stable loft at Thornham Hall in 1927 and given to the church by Lord Henniker. Romanesque work recorded here is found on the two nave doorways and the S nave window.
Thornham Parva was held by Robert Malet in 1086. There were various small parcels here before the Conquest: 7 acres held by two free men commended to Eadric (these were held by Robert’s mother in 1086); 28 acres held by 8 free men commended to Wulfgifu; 15 acres held by two free men, one commended to Wulfgifu; and 14 acres held by Sigeric, also commended to Wulfgifu (these three holdings in the hands of Robert Malet in 1086). There was three parts of a church in 1086 with 10 acres of free land. The present lords of Thornham are the Hennikers; it has been in the family since the mid-18thc.
South Hartismere benefice, i.e. Gislingham, Mellis, Stoke Ash, Thorndon with Rishangles, Thornham Magna, Thornham Parva, Thwaite and Wetheringsett cum Brockford.
In its shed being serviced prior to working the following day, This loco was originally at The British Sugar Company, Wissington. This line weaved its way through the fields of Sugar Beet.
Brockford Station, Wetheringsett, Suffolk
The MSLR hosted a visit by Hudswell Clarke 0-6-0ST 1208 / 1916 for three weeks in June 2018. HC 1208 was built for the Ministry of Munitions and worked at the ordnance depot at Gretna until it was sold to the Nidd Valley Light Railway in 1922. The NVLR opened in 1904 and was built to enable construction of the Bradford Corporation reservoirs in the upper part of the Nidd Valley. On arrival, the loco was named MITCHELL in honour of Bradford's chief waterworks engineer. Mitchell resigned in 1930 and the railway was quick to honour his successor, William Illingworth. It was perhaps something of a discourtesy to Mitchell to deprive him of his engine, so it now carries both names, MITCHELL on the left side an ILLINGWORTH on the right side.
After closure of the Nidd Valley Lt Rly in 1934, the engine was returned to the makers (HC) and resold to Sir Robert McAlpine, and later Mowlems. It was used on various major construction contracts including Ebbw Vale Steelworks and was in use until at least the mid 1950s, eventually passing into private preservation in the 1970s. It remained out of public view until quite recently, when Stephen Middleton (restorer of several vintage 4-wheel carriages on the Yorkshire Dales Railway, under the name "Stately Trains") purchased it, in a dismantled state. Following an extensive rebuild costing over £100,000 it returned to service in the spring of 2017.
(Historical notes from Harold Bowtell’s book ‘Reservoir Railways of the Yorkshire Dales’).
The MSLR hosted a visit by Hudswell Clarke 0-6-0ST 1208 / 1916 for three weeks in June 2018. HC 1208 was built for the Ministry of Munitions and worked at the ordnance depot at Gretna until it was sold to the Nidd Valley Light Railway in 1922. The NVLR opened in 1904 and was built to enable construction of the Bradford Corporation reservoirs in the upper part of the Nidd Valley. On arrival, the loco was named MITCHELL in honour of Bradford's chief waterworks engineer. Mitchell resigned in 1930 and the railway was quick to honour his successor, William Illingworth. It was perhaps something of a discourtesy to Mitchell to deprive him of his engine, so it now carries both names, MITCHELL on the left side an ILLINGWORTH on the right side.
After closure of the Nidd Valley Lt Rly in 1934, the engine was returned to the makers (HC) and resold to Sir Robert McAlpine, and later Mowlems. It was used on various major construction contracts including Ebbw Vale Steelworks and was in use until at least the mid 1950s, eventually passing into private preservation in the 1970s. It remained out of public view until quite recently, when Stephen Middleton (restorer of several vintage 4-wheel carriages on the Yorkshire Dales Railway, under the name "Stately Trains") purchased it, in a dismantled state. Following an extensive rebuild costing over £100,000 it returned to service in the spring of 2017.
(Historical notes from Harold Bowtell’s book ‘Reservoir Railways of the Yorkshire Dales’).
"Here lyeth buryed the Bodys of Syre John Spelman Knyght and Secondary Justice of the Kyngs Bench, and Dame Elizabeth his wyfe, which had riii Sonnes and vii Danghters of there Bodyes between them begitten, the which Syr John decessyd the 26th day of February, in the yere of our Lord God 1545 , and the said Dame Elizabeth decessyd the 5th day of November, in the yere of our Lord 1536 , on whose Sowls Jesu have Mercy, Amen"
John's scroll reads - Jesu Fili Dei, misecere mei. (Jesus son of God, have mercy on me)
Elizabeth's scroll reads - Salbator M...., memento mei. (Saviour, remember me)
Elizabeth's cloak has the arms of Frowyk and Sturgeon quarterly.
Above them is Christ rising from the tomb
Sir John Spelman dressed in his judge's robes. He was a successful barrister, & a Justice of the King's Bench being present at the trial of Sir Thomas More. He rebuilt Narborough Hall
He was the 3rd son of Henry Spelman 1496 & Ela www.flickr.com/gp/52219527@N00/t4X4td heiress daughter of William Narborough. He was heir to his 2 elder brothers William & Henry who died without issue
He m Elizabeth Frowyke 1479-1557 co-heiress daughter of Henry Frowyke of Gunnersby / Gunnersbury, Middlesex & 2nd wife Margaret daughter of Ralph Leigh by Elizabeth Langley
She was the grand daughter of Thomas Frowyke & heiress Joanna Sturgeon
Children - 13 sons & 7 daughters
1. Henry died an infant
2. John 1545 www.flickr.com/gp/52219527@N00/CqWT01 Margaret 1558 daughter of Sir Thomas Blennerhassett of Frenze 1531 flic.kr/p/rp8dxz & Margaret d1561 www.flickr.com/gp/52219527@N00/4M48ZE daughter of John Braham of Wetheringsett and Joan Reyden 1519 www.flickr.com/gp/52219527@N00/30oPQ
3. Francis ,clerk ,1578
4. Erasmus 1512- after 1567 of Beeston m Ursula daughter of Edward Baynton of Devizes Wilts & Elizabeth Sulliard / Sulyard: Ursula was the widow of Edmund Thoresby of Lyn
5. Henry 1581 of Congham m1 Anne Knyvett dsp c1560 daughter of Sir Thomas Knyvet 1512 of Buckenham, Norfolk, by Muriel Howard 1512 widow of John Grey, Viscount Lisle 1504, and daughter of Thomas Howard 1524' 2nd Duke of Norfolk, by 1st wife, Elizabeth Tilney flic.kr/p/PsVFj m2 Frances 1622 daughter of William Saunders 1571 of Ewell & 1st wife Joan 1539 co-heir of William Marston 1512 of Horton near Epsom, Surrey, by Beatrice / Beatrix Barlee, (Joan was the widow of Nicholas Mynne 1528)
6. Michael b1521 of Whinburgh m Margaret daughter of George Duke of Brampton Suffolk
7. Jerome 1576
8. William m Catherine daughter of Cornelius von Stonhove, a judge in Holland.
1. Elizabeth m 1531 Edmund son of Thomas de Grey by Elizabeth daughter of Sir Richard fitz Lewes flic.kr/p/zrXg1r of Ingrave & Thorndon Essex & 1st wife Alice daughter of John Harleston of Shimpling by Margery Bardwell
2. Dorothy 1508-1552 m1 1524 William Cobb m2 Thomas son of Sir John Heydon and Catherine Willoughby flic.kr/p/kbg35T of Baconsthorpe
3. Ella 1515-1564 m George Jerningham / Jernegan; 1515-1559 eldest son of Sir John Jermingham of Somerleyton by Bridget, daughter of Sir Robert Drury of Hawstead; Grandson of Sir Robert Drury and Ann Calthorpe www.flickr.com/photos/52219527@N00/4258436115/
4. Bridget 1599 m (2nd wife) Osbert of Feltwell flic.kr/p/VDAF1M son of Francis Mundeford / Moundeford / Monford and Margaret Thoresby flic.kr/p/Vs7DsK
5. Martha m Alexander Brockdish of Brockdish
6. Alice m Francis Soame of Wantisden Suffolk
7 Anne died unmarried
www.oxford-shakespeare.com/Probate/PROB_11-63-400.pdf
www.british-history.ac.uk/topographical-hist-norfolk/vol6... - Church of All Saints, Narborough Norfolk
The bus was bought new in 1949 by South Notts bus company of Gotham, Nottinghamshire. The original colours consisted of blue panels and bonnet with marron roof, wings and grill with white window surrounds.
It was bought in 1969 by Bunny Hill motors, then sold on in 1975 to a new owner near Rugby.
In 1997 it was found rotting away in a field near Coventry and was fully restored by hand by two bus enthusiasts.Together they used the bus for shows and trips between 1999 and 2006. It saw hardly any use in 2007.
It was finally purchased by Hugh & Marion Wilson in December 2008. It was resprayed into its present colours by Trevor Simmons Coaches of Needham Market.
It's been a while since I stepped into a church, so when I knew I was going to Suffolk at the weekend, I asked a friend whoch ones I should visit, and was told that this is one of the top churches in England, not just Suffolk.
Set a hundred yards or so from the main road that is chocked with traffic which runs between the county towns of Suffolk and Norfolk, it is down a lovely quiet lane, past some grand large houses, and set back from the road in a small churchyard is St Mary.
You enter through a small Norman doorway, into a body of a small and simple church, bt one filled with delights.
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From the moment that you see it across the fields, you know that St Mary is something special. At first the silhouette perhaps, or a stain of gold that resolves as you approach into a solid little Norman church. The thatched roof is charming, and set against is a small square tower, also crowned in thatch. There is a stubborn timelessness about it, a silent witness to long centuries. There isn’t really a village, and St Mary sits lonely in the fields. At night it is floodlit and floats above the darkness. On winter days, the low light catches its honeyed walls across ploughed furrows. In summer, the entrancing trees gather, a setting for a diadem.
This has always been a special place for me. I was captivated at an early stage of my life in Suffolk. And it was while visiting here in late 1998 that I first got the idea for this website, and decided to do it. Thornham Parva was the first entry. In common with most of the very earliest entries, it wasn’t terribly good – I hadn’t even taken any photographs.
But that was an excuse to return again and again, and when this website was featured on BBC Television’s Songs of Praise in 2000, the interview was recorded here at St Mary. They filmed me cycling the narrow lanes round about in the sub-zero temperatures of late-January; if anything, it was even colder inside the church, and my breath clouded the air as I became quite possibly the first person ever to say the Hail Mary on prime-time television.
Thornham Parva, of course, isn’t just special to me. It is one of the most remarkable churches in East Anglia, a treasure house, an aesthetic pleasure, a delight. It is a perfect antidote to the triumphalism of nearby Eye, an intensely rural collision of historical circumstances that have left us a moving and coherent document of our Suffolk past. When Cautley’s revising editors came this way in 1975 they found the church in a bit of a state, and even feared for its future. That it is now the perfect model of a well-cared-for English parish church is a tribute to the energy and enthusiasm of the tiny handful of local parishioners who have nursed it back to health.
The church gets a fair number of visitors, because its fame has spread far and wide. As an example, I popped in here a few years back with my daughter. She was about five years old at the time, and without me noticing she signed the visitors book with our full address (not something I would normally advise). Within a fortnight, I had received a nice postcard from Israel, from a user of this site who had spotted the entry in the visitors book. It is not surprising that the church does get visitors from all over the world, because St Mary is worth seeing, and worth going to see. In particular, it has, not one, but two astonishing survivals. If they were in the Victoria and Albert Museum you would willingly travel to London to see them, and pay handsomely for doing so. And yet here they are, in the fields that punctuate the Thornham woods, in a church which is open every day.
You step directly down into the church from a small Norman doorway in the north side. A gorgeous 18th century gallery curves above you – there’s no other like it in Suffolk. It was made tiny, to fit in this tiny space. Unfortunately, the stairway is now kept locked so, unless you contact a churchwarden first, you can’t see the clever way the carpenter engineered benches that open and close over the gangway to allow more seating space. The gallery is a reminder that St Mary was the church of the ordinary people; The neighbpouring village is Thorenham Magna, and the local big house Thornham Hall, the home of the Hennikers, is beside the church at Thornham Magna. However, it was at the big house, or more accurately in one of its barns, that in the 1920s was found and donated to this church the remarkable Thornham retable. It was restored in the early years of this century, and returned to St Mary, now standing proud behind alarmed glass.
The retable is only part of a much larger altarpiece that probably once stood in the Priory at Thetford in Norfolk. The rest of the piece can be found in the Musee de Cluny in Paris. The retable was rescued and hidden after the Anglican Reformation destroyed the priory, along with so many of England’s treasures. Perhaps it was taken by recusant Catholics to use in their devotions. More likely, it was simply rescued because it is beautiful. From left to right, the figures are St Dominic (Thetford was a Dominican Priory); St Catherine; St John the Baptist; St Paul; a rood group of the Blessed Virgin, Christ and St John; St Peter; St Edmund; St Margaret; St Peter Martyr (another Dominican). The retable dates from the height of the Decorated period, in the decades before the Black Death. They are probably the most alive, and lively, medieval figures in Suffolk; St Catherine in particular looks as if she is stepping through an archway from dancing in a garden.
As if the retable were not enough, the walls of St Mary are lined with some of Suffolk’s most fascinating wall-paintings. They rank with those at Wissington, and date broadly from the early years of the 14th century, and are in two ranges; on the south wall is the story of the early years of Christ. On the north wall is the martyrdom of St Edmund. This is amazingly rare; fragments survive not far off at Troston, but there is only one other sequence of the martyrdom surviving in the whole of the Kingdom.
Both sequences are organised chronologically from right to left. This may seem awkward, but effectively they start in the south west corner of the church and continue anti-clockwise around to the north-west corner. Unfortunately, the paintings on the west wall are now lost to us, behind the gallery.
On the south side, it is reasonable to assume that the very first painting, on the south side of the west wall, was an Annunciation – the angel appearing to Mary. This is lost. A fragment of the next frame survives, just poking up above the south end of the gallery. This is the Visitation, and we see Mary embracing her cousin Elizabeth. The Visitation was a very important part of medieval devotions, because of the way it balances and connects with the Assumption; the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, on August 15th, was one of the most significant feast days in the English medieval calendar, and the Assumption was probably the dedication of the majority of Suffolk churches. The other images in the sequence are clearer. We see the angel appearing to the shepherds, and then Christ sits on his mothers lap while the shepherds adore him. Note the way we have lost the adoring figures because of the later punching through of a window. Similarly, the next frame, the Presentation in the temple, has also suffered from fenestration. We often talk about Victorian vandalism of medieval churches, but here is a prime example of destruction caused by 15th century ‘restoration’.
What was the point of this sequence? A lot of nonsense is talked about wallpaintings and stained glass being ‘the poor mans Bible’ for peasants who couldn’t read. This analysis suggests that they were destroyed during the 16th century Anglican Reformation because ‘they were no longer needed’. In fact, the Anglicans destroyed them because they were Catholic devotional tools – the wall paintings on the south side here form a rosary sequence, pictures for meditation while saying prayers with the aid of rosary beads. Often this was done during Mass. If the Anglicans were to turn our churches into congregational preaching houses, the wall paintings had to go.
Intriguingly, the wall paintings here may have been whitewashed even before there were theological reasons for doing so. Most of the windows that punch through the wall paintings date from the 15th century, not the 16th. Could there have been a general redecoration at this time? Whichever, they were whitewashed, to be rediscovered in a kinder, gentler age. When the ranges here were uncovered by the Victorians, the south range was easily recognisable. But the north range wasn’t. For many years, it was thought to represent the martyrdom of St Catherine, because of the large wheel above the way you came in. It was only at the time the paintings were restored in the late 1970s that it became clear that here was something much more exciting.
The sequence begins at the eastern end of the range, and you can click on the images below to enlarge them. We see Edmund fleeing the Viking attack on a town, possibly Rendlesham, home of the Wuffings, the East Anglian royal family. The actual martyrdom is lost because of another of those great windows, but we next see Edmund’s decapitated head being put back on the body by a group of monks. Then, the body is carried off to its shrine at Bedricsworth (soon to become St Edmundsbury) while the wolf that found and guarded the head looks on. The final image on the north wall shows the wheel of a bullock cart crossing a bridge – delightfully, the bridge is represented by the arch of the doorway. This depicts an event that happened some time after. St Edmund’s body (by now sanctified and canonised) is being taken away to escape a later assault by Vikings. It approaches a bridge that is simply too narrow to allow the cart to pass. Miraculously, the cart crosses the bridge, and the Vikings are foiled.
Perhaps there was a final image on the north side of the west wall. Perhaps it showed the fabulous shrine at Bury itself. We can never be sure.
Although it is sad that we have lost so much of both sequences because of later alterations, it has to be said that the walls of this church are beautiful. The late medieval windows, which include some excellent 20th century glass by Lawrence Whistler, the paraffin lamps, the memorials to churchwardens, all add rather than detract. The screen is tiny and over-restored, but you can still see the sawn-off ends of the rood beam and the floor of the rood loft.
Standing in the rood screen, the retable behind you for a moment, the full beauty of the gallery can be seen, and above it a circular Saxon window. You can step outside and see how it is hidden by the tower. The tower itself is surprisingly late; we are told that in the 1480s it was the work of Richard Cutting and John Mason. Apparently, they were sued for defective workmanship, but it still appears to be standing.
The graveyard is an interesting one. As well as several significant musicians, it includes the grave of the great 20th century architect Basil Spence, designer of Coventry Cathedral, the Kensington and Chelsea barracks in London, and Britains best university campus, the University of Sussex - to name but three. Ironically, his 1980s gravestone appears to be wearing away. One hopes he used better materials for his buildings.
Simon Knott, 1998, rewritten 2003, revised February 2009
www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/thornhamentry.htm
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The Thornhams, Magna and Parva, flank Thornham Hall and its park. Until the end of the 19thc. the estate boasted a hall, Tudor with an 18thc. facade, surrounded by an extensive park. Most of the hall was demolishedc.1900, and the rest was destroyed by fire in the late 1940s. The present hall is modern, and the estate has been converted for use as a field centre, a commercial market garden and a site for small businesses. Excavations in the estate have provided evidence of continuous occupation in the area from the Neolithic period to the present. The surrounding landscape is flattish and given over to arable cultivation. Thornham Parva lies to the N of the hall, some 2 miles W of Eye in central North Suffolk. The settlement is dispersed and sparsely populated with no real centre apart from the church, which lies just off the road from Thornham Magna and the Hall.
St Mary's has a nave and chancel in one, covered with a thatched roof, and a low W tower with a thatched pyramid roof. The church is of flint with ashlar dressings. The nave is apparently 12thc., with N and S doorways and a S window surviving from that period, but a round window visible in the interior W wall of the nave is said to be late Anglo-Saxon by Cautley. A flowing tracery window has been added on the S wall, and 15thc. windows have been inserted towards the W end. There is no chancel arch, and two Y-tracery windows on the lateral walls towards the E suggest a date ofc.1300 for the chancel. The E window is three-light reticulated, and there is a 15thc. S window. The tower is of knapped flint with no buttresses; it has a tall plinth course and a 15thc. main W window. Its E quoins are of brick, as are the upper windows, except for their ashlar ogee heads, suggesting an 18thc. date for the top of the tower. St Mary's is celebrated as the home of a 14thc. retable, probably painted for the Dominican house at Thetford. It was discovered in a stable loft at Thornham Hall in 1927 and given to the church by Lord Henniker. Romanesque work recorded here is found on the two nave doorways and the S nave window.
Thornham Parva was held by Robert Malet in 1086. There were various small parcels here before the Conquest: 7 acres held by two free men commended to Eadric (these were held by Robert’s mother in 1086); 28 acres held by 8 free men commended to Wulfgifu; 15 acres held by two free men, one commended to Wulfgifu; and 14 acres held by Sigeric, also commended to Wulfgifu (these three holdings in the hands of Robert Malet in 1086). There was three parts of a church in 1086 with 10 acres of free land. The present lords of Thornham are the Hennikers; it has been in the family since the mid-18thc.
South Hartismere benefice, i.e. Gislingham, Mellis, Stoke Ash, Thorndon with Rishangles, Thornham Magna, Thornham Parva, Thwaite and Wetheringsett cum Brockford.
IN MEMORIAM
1914-1918
2493(S) Stoker George Arthur Ashfield, Royal Naval Reserve, HMS Pembroke.
Born in 1892 birth Hinderclay, Suffolk.
George died of illness on Thursday 25th. February 1915. He is buried in Grave: B. U. 1624 at Linthorpe Cemetery, Middlesbrough.
G/61103 Private Arthur Blake, 17th. Battalion, Royal Fusiliers.
Arthur was killed in action in the Battle of Cambrai on Friday 30th. November 1917. He has no known grave and is commemorated on Panel 3 and 4 of the Cambrai Memorial, Louverval, Nord, France.
55417 Private Walter Thomas Cross, 55th. Battalion, Machine Gun Corps (Infantry).
The son of David and Eliza Cross.
Husband of Annie Elizabeth Cross of Honey Pot Hall, Wattisfield.
Walter died, aged 34, on Tuesday 26th. March 1918. He is buried in Grave: IX. A. 17 at Lapugnot Military Cemetery, Pas de Calais, France with the personal inscription,
'IN DEATH NOT DIVIDED'
726 Private Edward Kerry, 2nd. Battalion, London Regiment (Royal Fusiliers).
The son of Mrs. Amelia Goodwin, of The Maltings, Wattisfield.
Edward died, aged 24, on Friday 12th. May 1916 from diabetes as a result of shell shock from explosions on active service. He was buried on 16th. May in the SE part of Wattisfield cemetery with a family headstone with the personnel inscription,
'FOR HIS COUNTRY'S SAKE'
13753 Private Leslie Charles Kerry, 9th. Battalion, Suffolk Regiment.
The son of Mr. W. Kerry of Archway House, Wattisfield.
Leslie died of wounds, aged 21, on Monday 18th. September 1916, received in an attack on The Quadrilateral. He is buried in Grave: II. F. 6 at la Neuville British Cemetery, Corbie, Somme, Picardie, France.
13751 Private Bertie Alick Knapp, 9th. Battalion, Suffolk Regiment.
Born in 1897, the son of Mr. C. A. and Mrs. C. Knapp of Redgrave, Suffolk.
Bertie was killed in action, aged 20, during an attack on The Quadrilateral on Saturday 16th. September 1916. He has no known grave and is commemorated on Pier and Face 1 C and 2 A of the Thiepval Memorial, Somme, Picardie, France.
104368 Lance Corporal Frank William Landymore, 1st. Canadian Mounted Rifles (Saskatchewan Regiment).
Born on 31st. October 1892, the son of Thomas and Elizabeth Landymore of Sandy Lane, Wattisfield.
Frank was killed in action, aged 24, during an attack on Regina Trench on Sunday 1st. October 1916. He was buried in an unmarked grave at map reference 57d. R. 23. a. 1. 1. Later identified by his ID disc, his body was found with his watch and a fountain pen, and was reburied in Grave: XIII. C. 8 at Serre Road Cemetery No. 2, Somme, Picardie, France.
Commemorated on Page 116 of the First World War Book of Remembrance, The Canadian Virtual War Memorial.
48109 Private James Benjamin Landymore, 1st. Garrison Battalion, Northamptonshire Regiment.
Husband of F. R. Fisk, formerly Landymore, of Hepworth, Diss, Norfolk.
James died, aged 20, on Monday 19th. August 1918. He is buried in Grave: B. 19 at Port Said War Memorial Cemetery, Egypt.
12332 Private Ernest William Landymore, 2nd. Battalion, The Queen's (Royal West Surrey Regiment).
The son of Mrs A. Claydon of The Street, Wattisfield.
Enlisted on 26th. February 1916.
Discharged from the Army on 13th. August 1917.
Earnest died, aged 24, on Friday 2nd. November 1917. He was buried on 8th. November in Wattisfield Cemetery.
14014 Private George Miller, 8th. Battalion, Suffolk Regiment.
Brother of Donald Miller of Wattisfield, next of kin.
George died of wounds on Thursday 7th. December 1916. He is buried in the SE part of Wattisfield cemetery
G/12334 Private Clarence William Moule, 8th. Battalion, The Queen's (Royal West Surrey Regiment).
Born in 1895, the son of Mr. W. and Annie Theresa Moule of Crown Hill, Botesdale, Suffolk.
Clarence was killed in action, aged 22, on Wednesday 1st. August 1917. He has no known grave and is commemorated on Panel 13 of the Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial, West-Vlaanderen, Belgium.
61312 Rifleman Edgar Redvers Moule, 5th. Battalion, King's Royal Rifle Corps.
Born at Wattisfield, the son of William and Annie Teresa Moule, of 'La Chaume', Wortham, Suffolk.
Edgar died, aged 18, on Wednesday 6th. November 1918. He is buried in Wattisfield Cemetery with the personal inscription,
'IN THE MIDST OF LIFE
WE ARE IN DEATH'
206052 Private George Rivett, 1st. Battalion, London Regiment (Royal Fusiliers).
The son of Arthur and Harriet Rivett of Hinderclay Road, Wattisfield.
George died, aged 23, on Saturday 2nd. December 1918. He is buried in Wattisfield Cemetery.
9696 Private Walter Rust, 11th. Battalion, Suffolk Regiment.
Walter died on Easter Monday 9th. April 1917. He was buried in a marked grave at map reference G6. C8. 5 and was later reburied in Grave: III. F. 14 at Roclincourt Valley Cemetery, Pas de Calais, France.
* Not listed on the memorial *
34093 Private Christopher Charles Cross, 2nd. Battalion, Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry.
Born in Wetheringsett, Suffolk, the son of Robert Cole of Wetheringsett.
Husband of Maud May Elizabeth Cole of Walnut Tree Cottage, Wattisfield.
Resident of Diss, Norfolk.
Christopher was killed in action, aged 40, on Thursday 7th. December 1916. He has no known grave and is commemorated on the Doiran Memorial, Doirani, Kilkis, Greece.
1939-1945
C/JX 171820 Boy 1st. Class Christopher Lawrence Bean, Queen Elizabeth class battleship HMS Barham (04), Royal Navy.
The son of Charles Richard and Ellen Beatrice Bean of Wattisfield.
On the afternoon of 24th. November 1941, Barham left Alexandria, Egypt as part of the 1st. Battle Squadron. The following morning, the German submarine U-331, commanded by Oberleutnant zur See Hans-Diedrich von Tiesenhausen, detected the faint engine noises of the British ships and moved to intercept. At around 16:00 Tiesenhausen ordered his boat to battle stations. An ASDIC operator aboard one of the leading destroyers HMS Jervis, detected the submarine at 16:18 at an estimated range of 900–1,100 yards (820–1,010 m), but the contact was disregarded. U-331 thus passed through the screen and was in a position to fire her torpedoes after the leading ship, HMS Queen Elizabeth, had passed her by and the second ship, Barham, was closing rapidly. Tiesenhausen ordered all four bow torpedo tubes fired at a range of 410 yards (375 m) at 16:25. Possibly due to her closeness to HMS Valiant's bow wave and discharging the torpedoes, the boat's conning tower broached the surface and was fruitlessly engaged by one of the battleship's 'pom-pom"s' at a range of about 30 yards (27 m). The boat dived out of control after she broached, reaching an indicated depth of 869 ft. (265 m), well below her design depth rating of 490 ft (150 m), before she stabilised without any damage. U-331 was not attacked by the escorting destroyers and reached port on 3rd. December. Tiesenhausen was not certain of the results of his attack and radioed that he had hit a Queen Elizabeth class battleship with one torpedo.
There was no time for evasive action by Barham, and three of the four torpedoes struck amidships so closely together as to throw up a single massive water column. Barham quickly capsized to port and was lying on her side when a massive magazine explosion occurred. Barham sank in position 32.34N 26.24N only 4 minutes after she was torpedoed.
The Board of Enquiry into the sinking ascribed the final explosion to a fire in the 4 inch magazines outboard of the main 15 inch magazines, which would have then spread to and detonated the contents of the main magazines.
Due to the speed at which she sank, 862 officers and ratings were killed, including 2 who died of their wounds after being rescued. The destroyer HMS Hotspur rescued 337 survivors, while the Australian destroyer HMAS Nizam reportedly rescued 150 men. Captain Geoffrey Cooke went down with his ship.
From aboard HMS Valiant, Barham's sinking was captured by Gaumont News cameraman John Turner who shot 2 minutes of movie film, all he had left in his camera. This film became one of the most poignant shots in the whole war.
Christopher died, aged 17, on Tuesday 25th. November 1941. He has no known grave and is commemorated on Panel 45, 2 of the Chatham Naval Memorial, Chatham, Kent.
Third Officer William Branford Brothers, S S Box Hill of London, Merchant Navy.
The son of William and Ethel Brothers of Framlingham, Suffolk.
The 5,677 gross ton steam cargo ship Box Hill was built in 1920 as the S S Glentworth by Hawthorn Leslie & Co. Ltd. of Hebburn-on-Tyne, Newcastle, with the yard number 490.
On Sunday 31st. December, Box Hill, then owned by the Surrey Steam Ship Co. Ltd. of London was carrying a cargo of 8,452 tons of wheat from St. John, New Brunswick, Canada to Hull when she hit a German laid mine and was lost 9 nautical miles off the Humber lightvessel. The ship broke completely in half and sank almost immediately. Her mainmast and funnel were showing above the surface facing south-east, while her bow section pointed south-west. She had a crew of twenty two, all of whom were lost.
William died, aged 24. He has no known grave and is commemorated on Panel 18 of the Tower Hill Memorial, London.
In 1952 the wreck of the Box Hill was dispersed using heavy explosives.
1446953 Leading Aircraftman Edgar James Stevens, Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, 284 Squadron, RAF.
The son of Ida H. Stevens, and stepson of Walter Cooper of Wattisfield.
Edgar died, aged 22, on Saturday 23rd. October 1943. He was buried in Bari Civil Cemetery and was reburied on 25th. August 1944 in Grave: XIV. A. 22 at Bari War Cemetery, Bari, Puglia, Italy with the personal inscription,
'HE GAVE HIS LIFE
FOR THOSE HE LOVED.
SADLY MISSED
AND ALWAYS REMEMBERED'
This memorial is in St. Margaret's church at Wattisfield.
Mid Suffolk Light Railway this afternoon, Bagnall 0-4-0 'Nick' in the platform. The original station was situated slightly to the West , the recreated one is on the site of the old cattle dock.
It's been a while since I stepped into a church, so when I knew I was going to Suffolk at the weekend, I asked a friend whoch ones I should visit, and was told that this is one of the top churches in England, not just Suffolk.
Set a hundred yards or so from the main road that is chocked with traffic which runs between the county towns of Suffolk and Norfolk, it is down a lovely quiet lane, past some grand large houses, and set back from the road in a small churchyard is St Mary.
You enter through a small Norman doorway, into a body of a small and simple church, bt one filled with delights.
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From the moment that you see it across the fields, you know that St Mary is something special. At first the silhouette perhaps, or a stain of gold that resolves as you approach into a solid little Norman church. The thatched roof is charming, and set against is a small square tower, also crowned in thatch. There is a stubborn timelessness about it, a silent witness to long centuries. There isn’t really a village, and St Mary sits lonely in the fields. At night it is floodlit and floats above the darkness. On winter days, the low light catches its honeyed walls across ploughed furrows. In summer, the entrancing trees gather, a setting for a diadem.
This has always been a special place for me. I was captivated at an early stage of my life in Suffolk. And it was while visiting here in late 1998 that I first got the idea for this website, and decided to do it. Thornham Parva was the first entry. In common with most of the very earliest entries, it wasn’t terribly good – I hadn’t even taken any photographs.
But that was an excuse to return again and again, and when this website was featured on BBC Television’s Songs of Praise in 2000, the interview was recorded here at St Mary. They filmed me cycling the narrow lanes round about in the sub-zero temperatures of late-January; if anything, it was even colder inside the church, and my breath clouded the air as I became quite possibly the first person ever to say the Hail Mary on prime-time television.
Thornham Parva, of course, isn’t just special to me. It is one of the most remarkable churches in East Anglia, a treasure house, an aesthetic pleasure, a delight. It is a perfect antidote to the triumphalism of nearby Eye, an intensely rural collision of historical circumstances that have left us a moving and coherent document of our Suffolk past. When Cautley’s revising editors came this way in 1975 they found the church in a bit of a state, and even feared for its future. That it is now the perfect model of a well-cared-for English parish church is a tribute to the energy and enthusiasm of the tiny handful of local parishioners who have nursed it back to health.
The church gets a fair number of visitors, because its fame has spread far and wide. As an example, I popped in here a few years back with my daughter. She was about five years old at the time, and without me noticing she signed the visitors book with our full address (not something I would normally advise). Within a fortnight, I had received a nice postcard from Israel, from a user of this site who had spotted the entry in the visitors book. It is not surprising that the church does get visitors from all over the world, because St Mary is worth seeing, and worth going to see. In particular, it has, not one, but two astonishing survivals. If they were in the Victoria and Albert Museum you would willingly travel to London to see them, and pay handsomely for doing so. And yet here they are, in the fields that punctuate the Thornham woods, in a church which is open every day.
You step directly down into the church from a small Norman doorway in the north side. A gorgeous 18th century gallery curves above you – there’s no other like it in Suffolk. It was made tiny, to fit in this tiny space. Unfortunately, the stairway is now kept locked so, unless you contact a churchwarden first, you can’t see the clever way the carpenter engineered benches that open and close over the gangway to allow more seating space. The gallery is a reminder that St Mary was the church of the ordinary people; The neighbpouring village is Thorenham Magna, and the local big house Thornham Hall, the home of the Hennikers, is beside the church at Thornham Magna. However, it was at the big house, or more accurately in one of its barns, that in the 1920s was found and donated to this church the remarkable Thornham retable. It was restored in the early years of this century, and returned to St Mary, now standing proud behind alarmed glass.
The retable is only part of a much larger altarpiece that probably once stood in the Priory at Thetford in Norfolk. The rest of the piece can be found in the Musee de Cluny in Paris. The retable was rescued and hidden after the Anglican Reformation destroyed the priory, along with so many of England’s treasures. Perhaps it was taken by recusant Catholics to use in their devotions. More likely, it was simply rescued because it is beautiful. From left to right, the figures are St Dominic (Thetford was a Dominican Priory); St Catherine; St John the Baptist; St Paul; a rood group of the Blessed Virgin, Christ and St John; St Peter; St Edmund; St Margaret; St Peter Martyr (another Dominican). The retable dates from the height of the Decorated period, in the decades before the Black Death. They are probably the most alive, and lively, medieval figures in Suffolk; St Catherine in particular looks as if she is stepping through an archway from dancing in a garden.
As if the retable were not enough, the walls of St Mary are lined with some of Suffolk’s most fascinating wall-paintings. They rank with those at Wissington, and date broadly from the early years of the 14th century, and are in two ranges; on the south wall is the story of the early years of Christ. On the north wall is the martyrdom of St Edmund. This is amazingly rare; fragments survive not far off at Troston, but there is only one other sequence of the martyrdom surviving in the whole of the Kingdom.
Both sequences are organised chronologically from right to left. This may seem awkward, but effectively they start in the south west corner of the church and continue anti-clockwise around to the north-west corner. Unfortunately, the paintings on the west wall are now lost to us, behind the gallery.
On the south side, it is reasonable to assume that the very first painting, on the south side of the west wall, was an Annunciation – the angel appearing to Mary. This is lost. A fragment of the next frame survives, just poking up above the south end of the gallery. This is the Visitation, and we see Mary embracing her cousin Elizabeth. The Visitation was a very important part of medieval devotions, because of the way it balances and connects with the Assumption; the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, on August 15th, was one of the most significant feast days in the English medieval calendar, and the Assumption was probably the dedication of the majority of Suffolk churches. The other images in the sequence are clearer. We see the angel appearing to the shepherds, and then Christ sits on his mothers lap while the shepherds adore him. Note the way we have lost the adoring figures because of the later punching through of a window. Similarly, the next frame, the Presentation in the temple, has also suffered from fenestration. We often talk about Victorian vandalism of medieval churches, but here is a prime example of destruction caused by 15th century ‘restoration’.
What was the point of this sequence? A lot of nonsense is talked about wallpaintings and stained glass being ‘the poor mans Bible’ for peasants who couldn’t read. This analysis suggests that they were destroyed during the 16th century Anglican Reformation because ‘they were no longer needed’. In fact, the Anglicans destroyed them because they were Catholic devotional tools – the wall paintings on the south side here form a rosary sequence, pictures for meditation while saying prayers with the aid of rosary beads. Often this was done during Mass. If the Anglicans were to turn our churches into congregational preaching houses, the wall paintings had to go.
Intriguingly, the wall paintings here may have been whitewashed even before there were theological reasons for doing so. Most of the windows that punch through the wall paintings date from the 15th century, not the 16th. Could there have been a general redecoration at this time? Whichever, they were whitewashed, to be rediscovered in a kinder, gentler age. When the ranges here were uncovered by the Victorians, the south range was easily recognisable. But the north range wasn’t. For many years, it was thought to represent the martyrdom of St Catherine, because of the large wheel above the way you came in. It was only at the time the paintings were restored in the late 1970s that it became clear that here was something much more exciting.
The sequence begins at the eastern end of the range, and you can click on the images below to enlarge them. We see Edmund fleeing the Viking attack on a town, possibly Rendlesham, home of the Wuffings, the East Anglian royal family. The actual martyrdom is lost because of another of those great windows, but we next see Edmund’s decapitated head being put back on the body by a group of monks. Then, the body is carried off to its shrine at Bedricsworth (soon to become St Edmundsbury) while the wolf that found and guarded the head looks on. The final image on the north wall shows the wheel of a bullock cart crossing a bridge – delightfully, the bridge is represented by the arch of the doorway. This depicts an event that happened some time after. St Edmund’s body (by now sanctified and canonised) is being taken away to escape a later assault by Vikings. It approaches a bridge that is simply too narrow to allow the cart to pass. Miraculously, the cart crosses the bridge, and the Vikings are foiled.
Perhaps there was a final image on the north side of the west wall. Perhaps it showed the fabulous shrine at Bury itself. We can never be sure.
Although it is sad that we have lost so much of both sequences because of later alterations, it has to be said that the walls of this church are beautiful. The late medieval windows, which include some excellent 20th century glass by Lawrence Whistler, the paraffin lamps, the memorials to churchwardens, all add rather than detract. The screen is tiny and over-restored, but you can still see the sawn-off ends of the rood beam and the floor of the rood loft.
Standing in the rood screen, the retable behind you for a moment, the full beauty of the gallery can be seen, and above it a circular Saxon window. You can step outside and see how it is hidden by the tower. The tower itself is surprisingly late; we are told that in the 1480s it was the work of Richard Cutting and John Mason. Apparently, they were sued for defective workmanship, but it still appears to be standing.
The graveyard is an interesting one. As well as several significant musicians, it includes the grave of the great 20th century architect Basil Spence, designer of Coventry Cathedral, the Kensington and Chelsea barracks in London, and Britains best university campus, the University of Sussex - to name but three. Ironically, his 1980s gravestone appears to be wearing away. One hopes he used better materials for his buildings.
Simon Knott, 1998, rewritten 2003, revised February 2009
www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/thornhamentry.htm
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The Thornhams, Magna and Parva, flank Thornham Hall and its park. Until the end of the 19thc. the estate boasted a hall, Tudor with an 18thc. facade, surrounded by an extensive park. Most of the hall was demolishedc.1900, and the rest was destroyed by fire in the late 1940s. The present hall is modern, and the estate has been converted for use as a field centre, a commercial market garden and a site for small businesses. Excavations in the estate have provided evidence of continuous occupation in the area from the Neolithic period to the present. The surrounding landscape is flattish and given over to arable cultivation. Thornham Parva lies to the N of the hall, some 2 miles W of Eye in central North Suffolk. The settlement is dispersed and sparsely populated with no real centre apart from the church, which lies just off the road from Thornham Magna and the Hall.
St Mary's has a nave and chancel in one, covered with a thatched roof, and a low W tower with a thatched pyramid roof. The church is of flint with ashlar dressings. The nave is apparently 12thc., with N and S doorways and a S window surviving from that period, but a round window visible in the interior W wall of the nave is said to be late Anglo-Saxon by Cautley. A flowing tracery window has been added on the S wall, and 15thc. windows have been inserted towards the W end. There is no chancel arch, and two Y-tracery windows on the lateral walls towards the E suggest a date ofc.1300 for the chancel. The E window is three-light reticulated, and there is a 15thc. S window. The tower is of knapped flint with no buttresses; it has a tall plinth course and a 15thc. main W window. Its E quoins are of brick, as are the upper windows, except for their ashlar ogee heads, suggesting an 18thc. date for the top of the tower. St Mary's is celebrated as the home of a 14thc. retable, probably painted for the Dominican house at Thetford. It was discovered in a stable loft at Thornham Hall in 1927 and given to the church by Lord Henniker. Romanesque work recorded here is found on the two nave doorways and the S nave window.
Thornham Parva was held by Robert Malet in 1086. There were various small parcels here before the Conquest: 7 acres held by two free men commended to Eadric (these were held by Robert’s mother in 1086); 28 acres held by 8 free men commended to Wulfgifu; 15 acres held by two free men, one commended to Wulfgifu; and 14 acres held by Sigeric, also commended to Wulfgifu (these three holdings in the hands of Robert Malet in 1086). There was three parts of a church in 1086 with 10 acres of free land. The present lords of Thornham are the Hennikers; it has been in the family since the mid-18thc.
South Hartismere benefice, i.e. Gislingham, Mellis, Stoke Ash, Thorndon with Rishangles, Thornham Magna, Thornham Parva, Thwaite and Wetheringsett cum Brockford.
It's been a while since I stepped into a church, so when I knew I was going to Suffolk at the weekend, I asked a friend whoch ones I should visit, and was told that this is one of the top churches in England, not just Suffolk.
Set a hundred yards or so from the main road that is chocked with traffic which runs between the county towns of Suffolk and Norfolk, it is down a lovely quiet lane, past some grand large houses, and set back from the road in a small churchyard is St Mary.
You enter through a small Norman doorway, into a body of a small and simple church, bt one filled with delights.
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From the moment that you see it across the fields, you know that St Mary is something special. At first the silhouette perhaps, or a stain of gold that resolves as you approach into a solid little Norman church. The thatched roof is charming, and set against is a small square tower, also crowned in thatch. There is a stubborn timelessness about it, a silent witness to long centuries. There isn’t really a village, and St Mary sits lonely in the fields. At night it is floodlit and floats above the darkness. On winter days, the low light catches its honeyed walls across ploughed furrows. In summer, the entrancing trees gather, a setting for a diadem.
This has always been a special place for me. I was captivated at an early stage of my life in Suffolk. And it was while visiting here in late 1998 that I first got the idea for this website, and decided to do it. Thornham Parva was the first entry. In common with most of the very earliest entries, it wasn’t terribly good – I hadn’t even taken any photographs.
But that was an excuse to return again and again, and when this website was featured on BBC Television’s Songs of Praise in 2000, the interview was recorded here at St Mary. They filmed me cycling the narrow lanes round about in the sub-zero temperatures of late-January; if anything, it was even colder inside the church, and my breath clouded the air as I became quite possibly the first person ever to say the Hail Mary on prime-time television.
Thornham Parva, of course, isn’t just special to me. It is one of the most remarkable churches in East Anglia, a treasure house, an aesthetic pleasure, a delight. It is a perfect antidote to the triumphalism of nearby Eye, an intensely rural collision of historical circumstances that have left us a moving and coherent document of our Suffolk past. When Cautley’s revising editors came this way in 1975 they found the church in a bit of a state, and even feared for its future. That it is now the perfect model of a well-cared-for English parish church is a tribute to the energy and enthusiasm of the tiny handful of local parishioners who have nursed it back to health.
The church gets a fair number of visitors, because its fame has spread far and wide. As an example, I popped in here a few years back with my daughter. She was about five years old at the time, and without me noticing she signed the visitors book with our full address (not something I would normally advise). Within a fortnight, I had received a nice postcard from Israel, from a user of this site who had spotted the entry in the visitors book. It is not surprising that the church does get visitors from all over the world, because St Mary is worth seeing, and worth going to see. In particular, it has, not one, but two astonishing survivals. If they were in the Victoria and Albert Museum you would willingly travel to London to see them, and pay handsomely for doing so. And yet here they are, in the fields that punctuate the Thornham woods, in a church which is open every day.
You step directly down into the church from a small Norman doorway in the north side. A gorgeous 18th century gallery curves above you – there’s no other like it in Suffolk. It was made tiny, to fit in this tiny space. Unfortunately, the stairway is now kept locked so, unless you contact a churchwarden first, you can’t see the clever way the carpenter engineered benches that open and close over the gangway to allow more seating space. The gallery is a reminder that St Mary was the church of the ordinary people; The neighbpouring village is Thorenham Magna, and the local big house Thornham Hall, the home of the Hennikers, is beside the church at Thornham Magna. However, it was at the big house, or more accurately in one of its barns, that in the 1920s was found and donated to this church the remarkable Thornham retable. It was restored in the early years of this century, and returned to St Mary, now standing proud behind alarmed glass.
The retable is only part of a much larger altarpiece that probably once stood in the Priory at Thetford in Norfolk. The rest of the piece can be found in the Musee de Cluny in Paris. The retable was rescued and hidden after the Anglican Reformation destroyed the priory, along with so many of England’s treasures. Perhaps it was taken by recusant Catholics to use in their devotions. More likely, it was simply rescued because it is beautiful. From left to right, the figures are St Dominic (Thetford was a Dominican Priory); St Catherine; St John the Baptist; St Paul; a rood group of the Blessed Virgin, Christ and St John; St Peter; St Edmund; St Margaret; St Peter Martyr (another Dominican). The retable dates from the height of the Decorated period, in the decades before the Black Death. They are probably the most alive, and lively, medieval figures in Suffolk; St Catherine in particular looks as if she is stepping through an archway from dancing in a garden.
As if the retable were not enough, the walls of St Mary are lined with some of Suffolk’s most fascinating wall-paintings. They rank with those at Wissington, and date broadly from the early years of the 14th century, and are in two ranges; on the south wall is the story of the early years of Christ. On the north wall is the martyrdom of St Edmund. This is amazingly rare; fragments survive not far off at Troston, but there is only one other sequence of the martyrdom surviving in the whole of the Kingdom.
Both sequences are organised chronologically from right to left. This may seem awkward, but effectively they start in the south west corner of the church and continue anti-clockwise around to the north-west corner. Unfortunately, the paintings on the west wall are now lost to us, behind the gallery.
On the south side, it is reasonable to assume that the very first painting, on the south side of the west wall, was an Annunciation – the angel appearing to Mary. This is lost. A fragment of the next frame survives, just poking up above the south end of the gallery. This is the Visitation, and we see Mary embracing her cousin Elizabeth. The Visitation was a very important part of medieval devotions, because of the way it balances and connects with the Assumption; the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, on August 15th, was one of the most significant feast days in the English medieval calendar, and the Assumption was probably the dedication of the majority of Suffolk churches. The other images in the sequence are clearer. We see the angel appearing to the shepherds, and then Christ sits on his mothers lap while the shepherds adore him. Note the way we have lost the adoring figures because of the later punching through of a window. Similarly, the next frame, the Presentation in the temple, has also suffered from fenestration. We often talk about Victorian vandalism of medieval churches, but here is a prime example of destruction caused by 15th century ‘restoration’.
What was the point of this sequence? A lot of nonsense is talked about wallpaintings and stained glass being ‘the poor mans Bible’ for peasants who couldn’t read. This analysis suggests that they were destroyed during the 16th century Anglican Reformation because ‘they were no longer needed’. In fact, the Anglicans destroyed them because they were Catholic devotional tools – the wall paintings on the south side here form a rosary sequence, pictures for meditation while saying prayers with the aid of rosary beads. Often this was done during Mass. If the Anglicans were to turn our churches into congregational preaching houses, the wall paintings had to go.
Intriguingly, the wall paintings here may have been whitewashed even before there were theological reasons for doing so. Most of the windows that punch through the wall paintings date from the 15th century, not the 16th. Could there have been a general redecoration at this time? Whichever, they were whitewashed, to be rediscovered in a kinder, gentler age. When the ranges here were uncovered by the Victorians, the south range was easily recognisable. But the north range wasn’t. For many years, it was thought to represent the martyrdom of St Catherine, because of the large wheel above the way you came in. It was only at the time the paintings were restored in the late 1970s that it became clear that here was something much more exciting.
The sequence begins at the eastern end of the range, and you can click on the images below to enlarge them. We see Edmund fleeing the Viking attack on a town, possibly Rendlesham, home of the Wuffings, the East Anglian royal family. The actual martyrdom is lost because of another of those great windows, but we next see Edmund’s decapitated head being put back on the body by a group of monks. Then, the body is carried off to its shrine at Bedricsworth (soon to become St Edmundsbury) while the wolf that found and guarded the head looks on. The final image on the north wall shows the wheel of a bullock cart crossing a bridge – delightfully, the bridge is represented by the arch of the doorway. This depicts an event that happened some time after. St Edmund’s body (by now sanctified and canonised) is being taken away to escape a later assault by Vikings. It approaches a bridge that is simply too narrow to allow the cart to pass. Miraculously, the cart crosses the bridge, and the Vikings are foiled.
Perhaps there was a final image on the north side of the west wall. Perhaps it showed the fabulous shrine at Bury itself. We can never be sure.
Although it is sad that we have lost so much of both sequences because of later alterations, it has to be said that the walls of this church are beautiful. The late medieval windows, which include some excellent 20th century glass by Lawrence Whistler, the paraffin lamps, the memorials to churchwardens, all add rather than detract. The screen is tiny and over-restored, but you can still see the sawn-off ends of the rood beam and the floor of the rood loft.
Standing in the rood screen, the retable behind you for a moment, the full beauty of the gallery can be seen, and above it a circular Saxon window. You can step outside and see how it is hidden by the tower. The tower itself is surprisingly late; we are told that in the 1480s it was the work of Richard Cutting and John Mason. Apparently, they were sued for defective workmanship, but it still appears to be standing.
The graveyard is an interesting one. As well as several significant musicians, it includes the grave of the great 20th century architect Basil Spence, designer of Coventry Cathedral, the Kensington and Chelsea barracks in London, and Britains best university campus, the University of Sussex - to name but three. Ironically, his 1980s gravestone appears to be wearing away. One hopes he used better materials for his buildings.
Simon Knott, 1998, rewritten 2003, revised February 2009
www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/thornhamentry.htm
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The Thornhams, Magna and Parva, flank Thornham Hall and its park. Until the end of the 19thc. the estate boasted a hall, Tudor with an 18thc. facade, surrounded by an extensive park. Most of the hall was demolishedc.1900, and the rest was destroyed by fire in the late 1940s. The present hall is modern, and the estate has been converted for use as a field centre, a commercial market garden and a site for small businesses. Excavations in the estate have provided evidence of continuous occupation in the area from the Neolithic period to the present. The surrounding landscape is flattish and given over to arable cultivation. Thornham Parva lies to the N of the hall, some 2 miles W of Eye in central North Suffolk. The settlement is dispersed and sparsely populated with no real centre apart from the church, which lies just off the road from Thornham Magna and the Hall.
St Mary's has a nave and chancel in one, covered with a thatched roof, and a low W tower with a thatched pyramid roof. The church is of flint with ashlar dressings. The nave is apparently 12thc., with N and S doorways and a S window surviving from that period, but a round window visible in the interior W wall of the nave is said to be late Anglo-Saxon by Cautley. A flowing tracery window has been added on the S wall, and 15thc. windows have been inserted towards the W end. There is no chancel arch, and two Y-tracery windows on the lateral walls towards the E suggest a date ofc.1300 for the chancel. The E window is three-light reticulated, and there is a 15thc. S window. The tower is of knapped flint with no buttresses; it has a tall plinth course and a 15thc. main W window. Its E quoins are of brick, as are the upper windows, except for their ashlar ogee heads, suggesting an 18thc. date for the top of the tower. St Mary's is celebrated as the home of a 14thc. retable, probably painted for the Dominican house at Thetford. It was discovered in a stable loft at Thornham Hall in 1927 and given to the church by Lord Henniker. Romanesque work recorded here is found on the two nave doorways and the S nave window.
Thornham Parva was held by Robert Malet in 1086. There were various small parcels here before the Conquest: 7 acres held by two free men commended to Eadric (these were held by Robert’s mother in 1086); 28 acres held by 8 free men commended to Wulfgifu; 15 acres held by two free men, one commended to Wulfgifu; and 14 acres held by Sigeric, also commended to Wulfgifu (these three holdings in the hands of Robert Malet in 1086). There was three parts of a church in 1086 with 10 acres of free land. The present lords of Thornham are the Hennikers; it has been in the family since the mid-18thc.
South Hartismere benefice, i.e. Gislingham, Mellis, Stoke Ash, Thorndon with Rishangles, Thornham Magna, Thornham Parva, Thwaite and Wetheringsett cum Brockford.
The MSLR hosted a visit by Hudswell Clarke 0-6-0ST 1208 / 1916 for three weeks in June 2018. HC 1208 was built for the Ministry of Munitions and worked at the ordnance depot at Gretna until it was sold to the Nidd Valley Light Railway in 1922. The NVLR opened in 1904 and was built to enable construction of the Bradford Corporation reservoirs in the upper part of the Nidd Valley. On arrival, the loco was named MITCHELL in honour of Bradford's chief waterworks engineer. Mitchell resigned in 1930 and the railway was quick to honour his successor, William Illingworth. It was perhaps something of a discourtesy to Mitchell to deprive him of his engine, so it now carries both names, MITCHELL on the left side an ILLINGWORTH on the right side.
After closure of the Nidd Valley Lt Rly in 1934, the engine was returned to the makers (HC) and resold to Sir Robert McAlpine, and later Mowlems. It was used on various major construction contracts including Ebbw Vale Steelworks and was in use until at least the mid 1950s, eventually passing into private preservation in the 1970s. It remained out of public view until quite recently, when Stephen Middleton (restorer of several vintage 4-wheel carriages on the Yorkshire Dales Railway, under the name "Stately Trains") purchased it, in a dismantled state. Following an extensive rebuild costing over £100,000 it returned to service in the spring of 2017.
(Historical notes from Harold Bowtell’s book ‘Reservoir Railways of the Yorkshire Dales’).
"Here lyeth buryed the Bodys of Syre John Spelman Knyght and Secondary Justice of the Kyngs Bench, and Dame Elizabeth his wyfe, which had riii Sonnes and vii Danghters of there Bodyes between them begitten, the which Syr John decessyd the 26th day of February, in the yere of our Lord God 1545 , and the said Dame Elizabeth decessyd the 5th day of November, in the yere of our Lord 1536 , on whose Sowls Jesu have Mercy, Amen"
John's scroll reads - Jesu Fili Dei, misecere mei. (Jesus son of God, have mercy on me)
Elizabeth's scroll reads - Salbator M...., memento mei. (Saviour, remember me)
Elizabeth's cloak has the arms of Frowyk and Sturgeon quarterly.
Above them is Christ rising from the tomb
Sir John Spelman dressed in his judge's robes. He was a successful barrister, & a Justice of the King's Bench being present at the trial of Sir Thomas More. He rebuilt Narborough Hall
He was the 3rd son of Henry Spelman 1496 & Ela www.flickr.com/gp/52219527@N00/t4X4td heiress daughter of William Narborough. He was heir to his 2 elder brothers William & Henry who died without issue
He m Elizabeth Frowyke 1479-1557 co-heiress daughter of Henry Frowyke of Gunnersby / Gunnersbury, Middlesex & 2nd wife Margaret daughter of Ralph Leigh by Elizabeth Langley
She was the grand daughter of Thomas Frowyke & heiress Joanna Sturgeon
Children - 13 sons & 7 daughters
1. Henry died an infant
2. John 1545 www.flickr.com/gp/52219527@N00/CqWT01 Margaret 1558 daughter of Sir Thomas Blennerhassett of Frenze 1531 flic.kr/p/rp8dxz & Margaret d1561 www.flickr.com/gp/52219527@N00/4M48ZE daughter of John Braham of Wetheringsett and Joan Reyden 1519 www.flickr.com/gp/52219527@N00/30oPQ
3. Francis ,clerk ,1578
4. Erasmus 1512- after 1567 of Beeston m Ursula daughter of Edward Baynton of Devizes Wilts & Elizabeth Sulliard / Sulyard: Ursula was the widow of Edmund Thoresby of Lyn
5. Henry 1581 of Congham m1 Anne Knyvett dsp c1560 daughter of Sir Thomas Knyvet 1512 of Buckenham, Norfolk, by Muriel Howard 1512 widow of John Grey, Viscount Lisle 1504, and daughter of Thomas Howard 1524' 2nd Duke of Norfolk, by 1st wife, Elizabeth Tilney flic.kr/p/PsVFj m2 Frances 1622 daughter of William Saunders 1571 of Ewell & 1st wife Joan 1539 co-heir of William Marston 1512 of Horton near Epsom, Surrey, by Beatrice / Beatrix Barlee, (Joan was the widow of Nicholas Mynne 1528)
6. Michael b1521 of Whinburgh m Margaret daughter of George Duke of Brampton Suffolk
7. Jerome 1576
8. William m Catherine daughter of Cornelius von Stonhove, a judge in Holland.
1. Elizabeth m 1531 Edmund son of Thomas de Grey by Elizabeth daughter of Sir Richard fitz Lewes flic.kr/p/zrXg1r of Ingrave & Thorndon Essex & 1st wife Alice daughter of John Harleston of Shimpling by Margery Bardwell
2. Dorothy 1508-1552 m1 1524 William Cobb m2 Thomas son of Sir John Heydon and Catherine Willoughby flic.kr/p/kbg35T of Baconsthorpe
3. Ella 1515-1564 m George Jerningham / Jernegan; 1515-1559 eldest son of Sir John Jermingham of Somerleyton by Bridget, daughter of Sir Robert Drury of Hawstead; Grandson of Sir Robert Drury and Ann Calthorpe www.flickr.com/photos/52219527@N00/4258436115/
4. Bridget 1599 m (2nd wife) Osbert of Feltwell flic.kr/p/VDAF1M son of Francis Mundeford / Moundeford / Monford and Margaret Thoresby flic.kr/p/Vs7DsK
5. Martha m Alexander Brockdish of Brockdish
6. Alice m Francis Soame of Wantisden Suffolk
7 Anne died unmarried
www.oxford-shakespeare.com/Probate/PROB_11-63-400.pdf
www.british-history.ac.uk/topographical-hist-norfolk/vol6... - Church of All Saints, Narborough Norfolk
It's been a while since I stepped into a church, so when I knew I was going to Suffolk at the weekend, I asked a friend whoch ones I should visit, and was told that this is one of the top churches in England, not just Suffolk.
Set a hundred yards or so from the main road that is chocked with traffic which runs between the county towns of Suffolk and Norfolk, it is down a lovely quiet lane, past some grand large houses, and set back from the road in a small churchyard is St Mary.
You enter through a small Norman doorway, into a body of a small and simple church, bt one filled with delights.
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From the moment that you see it across the fields, you know that St Mary is something special. At first the silhouette perhaps, or a stain of gold that resolves as you approach into a solid little Norman church. The thatched roof is charming, and set against is a small square tower, also crowned in thatch. There is a stubborn timelessness about it, a silent witness to long centuries. There isn’t really a village, and St Mary sits lonely in the fields. At night it is floodlit and floats above the darkness. On winter days, the low light catches its honeyed walls across ploughed furrows. In summer, the entrancing trees gather, a setting for a diadem.
This has always been a special place for me. I was captivated at an early stage of my life in Suffolk. And it was while visiting here in late 1998 that I first got the idea for this website, and decided to do it. Thornham Parva was the first entry. In common with most of the very earliest entries, it wasn’t terribly good – I hadn’t even taken any photographs.
But that was an excuse to return again and again, and when this website was featured on BBC Television’s Songs of Praise in 2000, the interview was recorded here at St Mary. They filmed me cycling the narrow lanes round about in the sub-zero temperatures of late-January; if anything, it was even colder inside the church, and my breath clouded the air as I became quite possibly the first person ever to say the Hail Mary on prime-time television.
Thornham Parva, of course, isn’t just special to me. It is one of the most remarkable churches in East Anglia, a treasure house, an aesthetic pleasure, a delight. It is a perfect antidote to the triumphalism of nearby Eye, an intensely rural collision of historical circumstances that have left us a moving and coherent document of our Suffolk past. When Cautley’s revising editors came this way in 1975 they found the church in a bit of a state, and even feared for its future. That it is now the perfect model of a well-cared-for English parish church is a tribute to the energy and enthusiasm of the tiny handful of local parishioners who have nursed it back to health.
The church gets a fair number of visitors, because its fame has spread far and wide. As an example, I popped in here a few years back with my daughter. She was about five years old at the time, and without me noticing she signed the visitors book with our full address (not something I would normally advise). Within a fortnight, I had received a nice postcard from Israel, from a user of this site who had spotted the entry in the visitors book. It is not surprising that the church does get visitors from all over the world, because St Mary is worth seeing, and worth going to see. In particular, it has, not one, but two astonishing survivals. If they were in the Victoria and Albert Museum you would willingly travel to London to see them, and pay handsomely for doing so. And yet here they are, in the fields that punctuate the Thornham woods, in a church which is open every day.
You step directly down into the church from a small Norman doorway in the north side. A gorgeous 18th century gallery curves above you – there’s no other like it in Suffolk. It was made tiny, to fit in this tiny space. Unfortunately, the stairway is now kept locked so, unless you contact a churchwarden first, you can’t see the clever way the carpenter engineered benches that open and close over the gangway to allow more seating space. The gallery is a reminder that St Mary was the church of the ordinary people; The neighbpouring village is Thorenham Magna, and the local big house Thornham Hall, the home of the Hennikers, is beside the church at Thornham Magna. However, it was at the big house, or more accurately in one of its barns, that in the 1920s was found and donated to this church the remarkable Thornham retable. It was restored in the early years of this century, and returned to St Mary, now standing proud behind alarmed glass.
The retable is only part of a much larger altarpiece that probably once stood in the Priory at Thetford in Norfolk. The rest of the piece can be found in the Musee de Cluny in Paris. The retable was rescued and hidden after the Anglican Reformation destroyed the priory, along with so many of England’s treasures. Perhaps it was taken by recusant Catholics to use in their devotions. More likely, it was simply rescued because it is beautiful. From left to right, the figures are St Dominic (Thetford was a Dominican Priory); St Catherine; St John the Baptist; St Paul; a rood group of the Blessed Virgin, Christ and St John; St Peter; St Edmund; St Margaret; St Peter Martyr (another Dominican). The retable dates from the height of the Decorated period, in the decades before the Black Death. They are probably the most alive, and lively, medieval figures in Suffolk; St Catherine in particular looks as if she is stepping through an archway from dancing in a garden.
As if the retable were not enough, the walls of St Mary are lined with some of Suffolk’s most fascinating wall-paintings. They rank with those at Wissington, and date broadly from the early years of the 14th century, and are in two ranges; on the south wall is the story of the early years of Christ. On the north wall is the martyrdom of St Edmund. This is amazingly rare; fragments survive not far off at Troston, but there is only one other sequence of the martyrdom surviving in the whole of the Kingdom.
Both sequences are organised chronologically from right to left. This may seem awkward, but effectively they start in the south west corner of the church and continue anti-clockwise around to the north-west corner. Unfortunately, the paintings on the west wall are now lost to us, behind the gallery.
On the south side, it is reasonable to assume that the very first painting, on the south side of the west wall, was an Annunciation – the angel appearing to Mary. This is lost. A fragment of the next frame survives, just poking up above the south end of the gallery. This is the Visitation, and we see Mary embracing her cousin Elizabeth. The Visitation was a very important part of medieval devotions, because of the way it balances and connects with the Assumption; the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, on August 15th, was one of the most significant feast days in the English medieval calendar, and the Assumption was probably the dedication of the majority of Suffolk churches. The other images in the sequence are clearer. We see the angel appearing to the shepherds, and then Christ sits on his mothers lap while the shepherds adore him. Note the way we have lost the adoring figures because of the later punching through of a window. Similarly, the next frame, the Presentation in the temple, has also suffered from fenestration. We often talk about Victorian vandalism of medieval churches, but here is a prime example of destruction caused by 15th century ‘restoration’.
What was the point of this sequence? A lot of nonsense is talked about wallpaintings and stained glass being ‘the poor mans Bible’ for peasants who couldn’t read. This analysis suggests that they were destroyed during the 16th century Anglican Reformation because ‘they were no longer needed’. In fact, the Anglicans destroyed them because they were Catholic devotional tools – the wall paintings on the south side here form a rosary sequence, pictures for meditation while saying prayers with the aid of rosary beads. Often this was done during Mass. If the Anglicans were to turn our churches into congregational preaching houses, the wall paintings had to go.
Intriguingly, the wall paintings here may have been whitewashed even before there were theological reasons for doing so. Most of the windows that punch through the wall paintings date from the 15th century, not the 16th. Could there have been a general redecoration at this time? Whichever, they were whitewashed, to be rediscovered in a kinder, gentler age. When the ranges here were uncovered by the Victorians, the south range was easily recognisable. But the north range wasn’t. For many years, it was thought to represent the martyrdom of St Catherine, because of the large wheel above the way you came in. It was only at the time the paintings were restored in the late 1970s that it became clear that here was something much more exciting.
The sequence begins at the eastern end of the range, and you can click on the images below to enlarge them. We see Edmund fleeing the Viking attack on a town, possibly Rendlesham, home of the Wuffings, the East Anglian royal family. The actual martyrdom is lost because of another of those great windows, but we next see Edmund’s decapitated head being put back on the body by a group of monks. Then, the body is carried off to its shrine at Bedricsworth (soon to become St Edmundsbury) while the wolf that found and guarded the head looks on. The final image on the north wall shows the wheel of a bullock cart crossing a bridge – delightfully, the bridge is represented by the arch of the doorway. This depicts an event that happened some time after. St Edmund’s body (by now sanctified and canonised) is being taken away to escape a later assault by Vikings. It approaches a bridge that is simply too narrow to allow the cart to pass. Miraculously, the cart crosses the bridge, and the Vikings are foiled.
Perhaps there was a final image on the north side of the west wall. Perhaps it showed the fabulous shrine at Bury itself. We can never be sure.
Although it is sad that we have lost so much of both sequences because of later alterations, it has to be said that the walls of this church are beautiful. The late medieval windows, which include some excellent 20th century glass by Lawrence Whistler, the paraffin lamps, the memorials to churchwardens, all add rather than detract. The screen is tiny and over-restored, but you can still see the sawn-off ends of the rood beam and the floor of the rood loft.
Standing in the rood screen, the retable behind you for a moment, the full beauty of the gallery can be seen, and above it a circular Saxon window. You can step outside and see how it is hidden by the tower. The tower itself is surprisingly late; we are told that in the 1480s it was the work of Richard Cutting and John Mason. Apparently, they were sued for defective workmanship, but it still appears to be standing.
The graveyard is an interesting one. As well as several significant musicians, it includes the grave of the great 20th century architect Basil Spence, designer of Coventry Cathedral, the Kensington and Chelsea barracks in London, and Britains best university campus, the University of Sussex - to name but three. Ironically, his 1980s gravestone appears to be wearing away. One hopes he used better materials for his buildings.
Simon Knott, 1998, rewritten 2003, revised February 2009
www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/thornhamentry.htm
----------------------------------------
The Thornhams, Magna and Parva, flank Thornham Hall and its park. Until the end of the 19thc. the estate boasted a hall, Tudor with an 18thc. facade, surrounded by an extensive park. Most of the hall was demolishedc.1900, and the rest was destroyed by fire in the late 1940s. The present hall is modern, and the estate has been converted for use as a field centre, a commercial market garden and a site for small businesses. Excavations in the estate have provided evidence of continuous occupation in the area from the Neolithic period to the present. The surrounding landscape is flattish and given over to arable cultivation. Thornham Parva lies to the N of the hall, some 2 miles W of Eye in central North Suffolk. The settlement is dispersed and sparsely populated with no real centre apart from the church, which lies just off the road from Thornham Magna and the Hall.
St Mary's has a nave and chancel in one, covered with a thatched roof, and a low W tower with a thatched pyramid roof. The church is of flint with ashlar dressings. The nave is apparently 12thc., with N and S doorways and a S window surviving from that period, but a round window visible in the interior W wall of the nave is said to be late Anglo-Saxon by Cautley. A flowing tracery window has been added on the S wall, and 15thc. windows have been inserted towards the W end. There is no chancel arch, and two Y-tracery windows on the lateral walls towards the E suggest a date ofc.1300 for the chancel. The E window is three-light reticulated, and there is a 15thc. S window. The tower is of knapped flint with no buttresses; it has a tall plinth course and a 15thc. main W window. Its E quoins are of brick, as are the upper windows, except for their ashlar ogee heads, suggesting an 18thc. date for the top of the tower. St Mary's is celebrated as the home of a 14thc. retable, probably painted for the Dominican house at Thetford. It was discovered in a stable loft at Thornham Hall in 1927 and given to the church by Lord Henniker. Romanesque work recorded here is found on the two nave doorways and the S nave window.
Thornham Parva was held by Robert Malet in 1086. There were various small parcels here before the Conquest: 7 acres held by two free men commended to Eadric (these were held by Robert’s mother in 1086); 28 acres held by 8 free men commended to Wulfgifu; 15 acres held by two free men, one commended to Wulfgifu; and 14 acres held by Sigeric, also commended to Wulfgifu (these three holdings in the hands of Robert Malet in 1086). There was three parts of a church in 1086 with 10 acres of free land. The present lords of Thornham are the Hennikers; it has been in the family since the mid-18thc.
South Hartismere benefice, i.e. Gislingham, Mellis, Stoke Ash, Thorndon with Rishangles, Thornham Magna, Thornham Parva, Thwaite and Wetheringsett cum Brockford.
It's been a while since I stepped into a church, so when I knew I was going to Suffolk at the weekend, I asked a friend whoch ones I should visit, and was told that this is one of the top churches in England, not just Suffolk.
Set a hundred yards or so from the main road that is chocked with traffic which runs between the county towns of Suffolk and Norfolk, it is down a lovely quiet lane, past some grand large houses, and set back from the road in a small churchyard is St Mary.
You enter through a small Norman doorway, into a body of a small and simple church, bt one filled with delights.
----------------------------------------------
From the moment that you see it across the fields, you know that St Mary is something special. At first the silhouette perhaps, or a stain of gold that resolves as you approach into a solid little Norman church. The thatched roof is charming, and set against is a small square tower, also crowned in thatch. There is a stubborn timelessness about it, a silent witness to long centuries. There isn’t really a village, and St Mary sits lonely in the fields. At night it is floodlit and floats above the darkness. On winter days, the low light catches its honeyed walls across ploughed furrows. In summer, the entrancing trees gather, a setting for a diadem.
This has always been a special place for me. I was captivated at an early stage of my life in Suffolk. And it was while visiting here in late 1998 that I first got the idea for this website, and decided to do it. Thornham Parva was the first entry. In common with most of the very earliest entries, it wasn’t terribly good – I hadn’t even taken any photographs.
But that was an excuse to return again and again, and when this website was featured on BBC Television’s Songs of Praise in 2000, the interview was recorded here at St Mary. They filmed me cycling the narrow lanes round about in the sub-zero temperatures of late-January; if anything, it was even colder inside the church, and my breath clouded the air as I became quite possibly the first person ever to say the Hail Mary on prime-time television.
Thornham Parva, of course, isn’t just special to me. It is one of the most remarkable churches in East Anglia, a treasure house, an aesthetic pleasure, a delight. It is a perfect antidote to the triumphalism of nearby Eye, an intensely rural collision of historical circumstances that have left us a moving and coherent document of our Suffolk past. When Cautley’s revising editors came this way in 1975 they found the church in a bit of a state, and even feared for its future. That it is now the perfect model of a well-cared-for English parish church is a tribute to the energy and enthusiasm of the tiny handful of local parishioners who have nursed it back to health.
The church gets a fair number of visitors, because its fame has spread far and wide. As an example, I popped in here a few years back with my daughter. She was about five years old at the time, and without me noticing she signed the visitors book with our full address (not something I would normally advise). Within a fortnight, I had received a nice postcard from Israel, from a user of this site who had spotted the entry in the visitors book. It is not surprising that the church does get visitors from all over the world, because St Mary is worth seeing, and worth going to see. In particular, it has, not one, but two astonishing survivals. If they were in the Victoria and Albert Museum you would willingly travel to London to see them, and pay handsomely for doing so. And yet here they are, in the fields that punctuate the Thornham woods, in a church which is open every day.
You step directly down into the church from a small Norman doorway in the north side. A gorgeous 18th century gallery curves above you – there’s no other like it in Suffolk. It was made tiny, to fit in this tiny space. Unfortunately, the stairway is now kept locked so, unless you contact a churchwarden first, you can’t see the clever way the carpenter engineered benches that open and close over the gangway to allow more seating space. The gallery is a reminder that St Mary was the church of the ordinary people; The neighbpouring village is Thorenham Magna, and the local big house Thornham Hall, the home of the Hennikers, is beside the church at Thornham Magna. However, it was at the big house, or more accurately in one of its barns, that in the 1920s was found and donated to this church the remarkable Thornham retable. It was restored in the early years of this century, and returned to St Mary, now standing proud behind alarmed glass.
The retable is only part of a much larger altarpiece that probably once stood in the Priory at Thetford in Norfolk. The rest of the piece can be found in the Musee de Cluny in Paris. The retable was rescued and hidden after the Anglican Reformation destroyed the priory, along with so many of England’s treasures. Perhaps it was taken by recusant Catholics to use in their devotions. More likely, it was simply rescued because it is beautiful. From left to right, the figures are St Dominic (Thetford was a Dominican Priory); St Catherine; St John the Baptist; St Paul; a rood group of the Blessed Virgin, Christ and St John; St Peter; St Edmund; St Margaret; St Peter Martyr (another Dominican). The retable dates from the height of the Decorated period, in the decades before the Black Death. They are probably the most alive, and lively, medieval figures in Suffolk; St Catherine in particular looks as if she is stepping through an archway from dancing in a garden.
As if the retable were not enough, the walls of St Mary are lined with some of Suffolk’s most fascinating wall-paintings. They rank with those at Wissington, and date broadly from the early years of the 14th century, and are in two ranges; on the south wall is the story of the early years of Christ. On the north wall is the martyrdom of St Edmund. This is amazingly rare; fragments survive not far off at Troston, but there is only one other sequence of the martyrdom surviving in the whole of the Kingdom.
Both sequences are organised chronologically from right to left. This may seem awkward, but effectively they start in the south west corner of the church and continue anti-clockwise around to the north-west corner. Unfortunately, the paintings on the west wall are now lost to us, behind the gallery.
On the south side, it is reasonable to assume that the very first painting, on the south side of the west wall, was an Annunciation – the angel appearing to Mary. This is lost. A fragment of the next frame survives, just poking up above the south end of the gallery. This is the Visitation, and we see Mary embracing her cousin Elizabeth. The Visitation was a very important part of medieval devotions, because of the way it balances and connects with the Assumption; the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, on August 15th, was one of the most significant feast days in the English medieval calendar, and the Assumption was probably the dedication of the majority of Suffolk churches. The other images in the sequence are clearer. We see the angel appearing to the shepherds, and then Christ sits on his mothers lap while the shepherds adore him. Note the way we have lost the adoring figures because of the later punching through of a window. Similarly, the next frame, the Presentation in the temple, has also suffered from fenestration. We often talk about Victorian vandalism of medieval churches, but here is a prime example of destruction caused by 15th century ‘restoration’.
What was the point of this sequence? A lot of nonsense is talked about wallpaintings and stained glass being ‘the poor mans Bible’ for peasants who couldn’t read. This analysis suggests that they were destroyed during the 16th century Anglican Reformation because ‘they were no longer needed’. In fact, the Anglicans destroyed them because they were Catholic devotional tools – the wall paintings on the south side here form a rosary sequence, pictures for meditation while saying prayers with the aid of rosary beads. Often this was done during Mass. If the Anglicans were to turn our churches into congregational preaching houses, the wall paintings had to go.
Intriguingly, the wall paintings here may have been whitewashed even before there were theological reasons for doing so. Most of the windows that punch through the wall paintings date from the 15th century, not the 16th. Could there have been a general redecoration at this time? Whichever, they were whitewashed, to be rediscovered in a kinder, gentler age. When the ranges here were uncovered by the Victorians, the south range was easily recognisable. But the north range wasn’t. For many years, it was thought to represent the martyrdom of St Catherine, because of the large wheel above the way you came in. It was only at the time the paintings were restored in the late 1970s that it became clear that here was something much more exciting.
The sequence begins at the eastern end of the range, and you can click on the images below to enlarge them. We see Edmund fleeing the Viking attack on a town, possibly Rendlesham, home of the Wuffings, the East Anglian royal family. The actual martyrdom is lost because of another of those great windows, but we next see Edmund’s decapitated head being put back on the body by a group of monks. Then, the body is carried off to its shrine at Bedricsworth (soon to become St Edmundsbury) while the wolf that found and guarded the head looks on. The final image on the north wall shows the wheel of a bullock cart crossing a bridge – delightfully, the bridge is represented by the arch of the doorway. This depicts an event that happened some time after. St Edmund’s body (by now sanctified and canonised) is being taken away to escape a later assault by Vikings. It approaches a bridge that is simply too narrow to allow the cart to pass. Miraculously, the cart crosses the bridge, and the Vikings are foiled.
Perhaps there was a final image on the north side of the west wall. Perhaps it showed the fabulous shrine at Bury itself. We can never be sure.
Although it is sad that we have lost so much of both sequences because of later alterations, it has to be said that the walls of this church are beautiful. The late medieval windows, which include some excellent 20th century glass by Lawrence Whistler, the paraffin lamps, the memorials to churchwardens, all add rather than detract. The screen is tiny and over-restored, but you can still see the sawn-off ends of the rood beam and the floor of the rood loft.
Standing in the rood screen, the retable behind you for a moment, the full beauty of the gallery can be seen, and above it a circular Saxon window. You can step outside and see how it is hidden by the tower. The tower itself is surprisingly late; we are told that in the 1480s it was the work of Richard Cutting and John Mason. Apparently, they were sued for defective workmanship, but it still appears to be standing.
The graveyard is an interesting one. As well as several significant musicians, it includes the grave of the great 20th century architect Basil Spence, designer of Coventry Cathedral, the Kensington and Chelsea barracks in London, and Britains best university campus, the University of Sussex - to name but three. Ironically, his 1980s gravestone appears to be wearing away. One hopes he used better materials for his buildings.
Simon Knott, 1998, rewritten 2003, revised February 2009
www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/thornhamentry.htm
----------------------------------------
The Thornhams, Magna and Parva, flank Thornham Hall and its park. Until the end of the 19thc. the estate boasted a hall, Tudor with an 18thc. facade, surrounded by an extensive park. Most of the hall was demolishedc.1900, and the rest was destroyed by fire in the late 1940s. The present hall is modern, and the estate has been converted for use as a field centre, a commercial market garden and a site for small businesses. Excavations in the estate have provided evidence of continuous occupation in the area from the Neolithic period to the present. The surrounding landscape is flattish and given over to arable cultivation. Thornham Parva lies to the N of the hall, some 2 miles W of Eye in central North Suffolk. The settlement is dispersed and sparsely populated with no real centre apart from the church, which lies just off the road from Thornham Magna and the Hall.
St Mary's has a nave and chancel in one, covered with a thatched roof, and a low W tower with a thatched pyramid roof. The church is of flint with ashlar dressings. The nave is apparently 12thc., with N and S doorways and a S window surviving from that period, but a round window visible in the interior W wall of the nave is said to be late Anglo-Saxon by Cautley. A flowing tracery window has been added on the S wall, and 15thc. windows have been inserted towards the W end. There is no chancel arch, and two Y-tracery windows on the lateral walls towards the E suggest a date ofc.1300 for the chancel. The E window is three-light reticulated, and there is a 15thc. S window. The tower is of knapped flint with no buttresses; it has a tall plinth course and a 15thc. main W window. Its E quoins are of brick, as are the upper windows, except for their ashlar ogee heads, suggesting an 18thc. date for the top of the tower. St Mary's is celebrated as the home of a 14thc. retable, probably painted for the Dominican house at Thetford. It was discovered in a stable loft at Thornham Hall in 1927 and given to the church by Lord Henniker. Romanesque work recorded here is found on the two nave doorways and the S nave window.
Thornham Parva was held by Robert Malet in 1086. There were various small parcels here before the Conquest: 7 acres held by two free men commended to Eadric (these were held by Robert’s mother in 1086); 28 acres held by 8 free men commended to Wulfgifu; 15 acres held by two free men, one commended to Wulfgifu; and 14 acres held by Sigeric, also commended to Wulfgifu (these three holdings in the hands of Robert Malet in 1086). There was three parts of a church in 1086 with 10 acres of free land. The present lords of Thornham are the Hennikers; it has been in the family since the mid-18thc.
South Hartismere benefice, i.e. Gislingham, Mellis, Stoke Ash, Thorndon with Rishangles, Thornham Magna, Thornham Parva, Thwaite and Wetheringsett cum Brockford.
It's been a while since I stepped into a church, so when I knew I was going to Suffolk at the weekend, I asked a friend whoch ones I should visit, and was told that this is one of the top churches in England, not just Suffolk.
Set a hundred yards or so from the main road that is chocked with traffic which runs between the county towns of Suffolk and Norfolk, it is down a lovely quiet lane, past some grand large houses, and set back from the road in a small churchyard is St Mary.
You enter through a small Norman doorway, into a body of a small and simple church, bt one filled with delights.
----------------------------------------------
From the moment that you see it across the fields, you know that St Mary is something special. At first the silhouette perhaps, or a stain of gold that resolves as you approach into a solid little Norman church. The thatched roof is charming, and set against is a small square tower, also crowned in thatch. There is a stubborn timelessness about it, a silent witness to long centuries. There isn’t really a village, and St Mary sits lonely in the fields. At night it is floodlit and floats above the darkness. On winter days, the low light catches its honeyed walls across ploughed furrows. In summer, the entrancing trees gather, a setting for a diadem.
This has always been a special place for me. I was captivated at an early stage of my life in Suffolk. And it was while visiting here in late 1998 that I first got the idea for this website, and decided to do it. Thornham Parva was the first entry. In common with most of the very earliest entries, it wasn’t terribly good – I hadn’t even taken any photographs.
But that was an excuse to return again and again, and when this website was featured on BBC Television’s Songs of Praise in 2000, the interview was recorded here at St Mary. They filmed me cycling the narrow lanes round about in the sub-zero temperatures of late-January; if anything, it was even colder inside the church, and my breath clouded the air as I became quite possibly the first person ever to say the Hail Mary on prime-time television.
Thornham Parva, of course, isn’t just special to me. It is one of the most remarkable churches in East Anglia, a treasure house, an aesthetic pleasure, a delight. It is a perfect antidote to the triumphalism of nearby Eye, an intensely rural collision of historical circumstances that have left us a moving and coherent document of our Suffolk past. When Cautley’s revising editors came this way in 1975 they found the church in a bit of a state, and even feared for its future. That it is now the perfect model of a well-cared-for English parish church is a tribute to the energy and enthusiasm of the tiny handful of local parishioners who have nursed it back to health.
The church gets a fair number of visitors, because its fame has spread far and wide. As an example, I popped in here a few years back with my daughter. She was about five years old at the time, and without me noticing she signed the visitors book with our full address (not something I would normally advise). Within a fortnight, I had received a nice postcard from Israel, from a user of this site who had spotted the entry in the visitors book. It is not surprising that the church does get visitors from all over the world, because St Mary is worth seeing, and worth going to see. In particular, it has, not one, but two astonishing survivals. If they were in the Victoria and Albert Museum you would willingly travel to London to see them, and pay handsomely for doing so. And yet here they are, in the fields that punctuate the Thornham woods, in a church which is open every day.
You step directly down into the church from a small Norman doorway in the north side. A gorgeous 18th century gallery curves above you – there’s no other like it in Suffolk. It was made tiny, to fit in this tiny space. Unfortunately, the stairway is now kept locked so, unless you contact a churchwarden first, you can’t see the clever way the carpenter engineered benches that open and close over the gangway to allow more seating space. The gallery is a reminder that St Mary was the church of the ordinary people; The neighbpouring village is Thorenham Magna, and the local big house Thornham Hall, the home of the Hennikers, is beside the church at Thornham Magna. However, it was at the big house, or more accurately in one of its barns, that in the 1920s was found and donated to this church the remarkable Thornham retable. It was restored in the early years of this century, and returned to St Mary, now standing proud behind alarmed glass.
The retable is only part of a much larger altarpiece that probably once stood in the Priory at Thetford in Norfolk. The rest of the piece can be found in the Musee de Cluny in Paris. The retable was rescued and hidden after the Anglican Reformation destroyed the priory, along with so many of England’s treasures. Perhaps it was taken by recusant Catholics to use in their devotions. More likely, it was simply rescued because it is beautiful. From left to right, the figures are St Dominic (Thetford was a Dominican Priory); St Catherine; St John the Baptist; St Paul; a rood group of the Blessed Virgin, Christ and St John; St Peter; St Edmund; St Margaret; St Peter Martyr (another Dominican). The retable dates from the height of the Decorated period, in the decades before the Black Death. They are probably the most alive, and lively, medieval figures in Suffolk; St Catherine in particular looks as if she is stepping through an archway from dancing in a garden.
As if the retable were not enough, the walls of St Mary are lined with some of Suffolk’s most fascinating wall-paintings. They rank with those at Wissington, and date broadly from the early years of the 14th century, and are in two ranges; on the south wall is the story of the early years of Christ. On the north wall is the martyrdom of St Edmund. This is amazingly rare; fragments survive not far off at Troston, but there is only one other sequence of the martyrdom surviving in the whole of the Kingdom.
Both sequences are organised chronologically from right to left. This may seem awkward, but effectively they start in the south west corner of the church and continue anti-clockwise around to the north-west corner. Unfortunately, the paintings on the west wall are now lost to us, behind the gallery.
On the south side, it is reasonable to assume that the very first painting, on the south side of the west wall, was an Annunciation – the angel appearing to Mary. This is lost. A fragment of the next frame survives, just poking up above the south end of the gallery. This is the Visitation, and we see Mary embracing her cousin Elizabeth. The Visitation was a very important part of medieval devotions, because of the way it balances and connects with the Assumption; the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, on August 15th, was one of the most significant feast days in the English medieval calendar, and the Assumption was probably the dedication of the majority of Suffolk churches. The other images in the sequence are clearer. We see the angel appearing to the shepherds, and then Christ sits on his mothers lap while the shepherds adore him. Note the way we have lost the adoring figures because of the later punching through of a window. Similarly, the next frame, the Presentation in the temple, has also suffered from fenestration. We often talk about Victorian vandalism of medieval churches, but here is a prime example of destruction caused by 15th century ‘restoration’.
What was the point of this sequence? A lot of nonsense is talked about wallpaintings and stained glass being ‘the poor mans Bible’ for peasants who couldn’t read. This analysis suggests that they were destroyed during the 16th century Anglican Reformation because ‘they were no longer needed’. In fact, the Anglicans destroyed them because they were Catholic devotional tools – the wall paintings on the south side here form a rosary sequence, pictures for meditation while saying prayers with the aid of rosary beads. Often this was done during Mass. If the Anglicans were to turn our churches into congregational preaching houses, the wall paintings had to go.
Intriguingly, the wall paintings here may have been whitewashed even before there were theological reasons for doing so. Most of the windows that punch through the wall paintings date from the 15th century, not the 16th. Could there have been a general redecoration at this time? Whichever, they were whitewashed, to be rediscovered in a kinder, gentler age. When the ranges here were uncovered by the Victorians, the south range was easily recognisable. But the north range wasn’t. For many years, it was thought to represent the martyrdom of St Catherine, because of the large wheel above the way you came in. It was only at the time the paintings were restored in the late 1970s that it became clear that here was something much more exciting.
The sequence begins at the eastern end of the range, and you can click on the images below to enlarge them. We see Edmund fleeing the Viking attack on a town, possibly Rendlesham, home of the Wuffings, the East Anglian royal family. The actual martyrdom is lost because of another of those great windows, but we next see Edmund’s decapitated head being put back on the body by a group of monks. Then, the body is carried off to its shrine at Bedricsworth (soon to become St Edmundsbury) while the wolf that found and guarded the head looks on. The final image on the north wall shows the wheel of a bullock cart crossing a bridge – delightfully, the bridge is represented by the arch of the doorway. This depicts an event that happened some time after. St Edmund’s body (by now sanctified and canonised) is being taken away to escape a later assault by Vikings. It approaches a bridge that is simply too narrow to allow the cart to pass. Miraculously, the cart crosses the bridge, and the Vikings are foiled.
Perhaps there was a final image on the north side of the west wall. Perhaps it showed the fabulous shrine at Bury itself. We can never be sure.
Although it is sad that we have lost so much of both sequences because of later alterations, it has to be said that the walls of this church are beautiful. The late medieval windows, which include some excellent 20th century glass by Lawrence Whistler, the paraffin lamps, the memorials to churchwardens, all add rather than detract. The screen is tiny and over-restored, but you can still see the sawn-off ends of the rood beam and the floor of the rood loft.
Standing in the rood screen, the retable behind you for a moment, the full beauty of the gallery can be seen, and above it a circular Saxon window. You can step outside and see how it is hidden by the tower. The tower itself is surprisingly late; we are told that in the 1480s it was the work of Richard Cutting and John Mason. Apparently, they were sued for defective workmanship, but it still appears to be standing.
The graveyard is an interesting one. As well as several significant musicians, it includes the grave of the great 20th century architect Basil Spence, designer of Coventry Cathedral, the Kensington and Chelsea barracks in London, and Britains best university campus, the University of Sussex - to name but three. Ironically, his 1980s gravestone appears to be wearing away. One hopes he used better materials for his buildings.
Simon Knott, 1998, rewritten 2003, revised February 2009
www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/thornhamentry.htm
----------------------------------------
The Thornhams, Magna and Parva, flank Thornham Hall and its park. Until the end of the 19thc. the estate boasted a hall, Tudor with an 18thc. facade, surrounded by an extensive park. Most of the hall was demolishedc.1900, and the rest was destroyed by fire in the late 1940s. The present hall is modern, and the estate has been converted for use as a field centre, a commercial market garden and a site for small businesses. Excavations in the estate have provided evidence of continuous occupation in the area from the Neolithic period to the present. The surrounding landscape is flattish and given over to arable cultivation. Thornham Parva lies to the N of the hall, some 2 miles W of Eye in central North Suffolk. The settlement is dispersed and sparsely populated with no real centre apart from the church, which lies just off the road from Thornham Magna and the Hall.
St Mary's has a nave and chancel in one, covered with a thatched roof, and a low W tower with a thatched pyramid roof. The church is of flint with ashlar dressings. The nave is apparently 12thc., with N and S doorways and a S window surviving from that period, but a round window visible in the interior W wall of the nave is said to be late Anglo-Saxon by Cautley. A flowing tracery window has been added on the S wall, and 15thc. windows have been inserted towards the W end. There is no chancel arch, and two Y-tracery windows on the lateral walls towards the E suggest a date ofc.1300 for the chancel. The E window is three-light reticulated, and there is a 15thc. S window. The tower is of knapped flint with no buttresses; it has a tall plinth course and a 15thc. main W window. Its E quoins are of brick, as are the upper windows, except for their ashlar ogee heads, suggesting an 18thc. date for the top of the tower. St Mary's is celebrated as the home of a 14thc. retable, probably painted for the Dominican house at Thetford. It was discovered in a stable loft at Thornham Hall in 1927 and given to the church by Lord Henniker. Romanesque work recorded here is found on the two nave doorways and the S nave window.
Thornham Parva was held by Robert Malet in 1086. There were various small parcels here before the Conquest: 7 acres held by two free men commended to Eadric (these were held by Robert’s mother in 1086); 28 acres held by 8 free men commended to Wulfgifu; 15 acres held by two free men, one commended to Wulfgifu; and 14 acres held by Sigeric, also commended to Wulfgifu (these three holdings in the hands of Robert Malet in 1086). There was three parts of a church in 1086 with 10 acres of free land. The present lords of Thornham are the Hennikers; it has been in the family since the mid-18thc.
South Hartismere benefice, i.e. Gislingham, Mellis, Stoke Ash, Thorndon with Rishangles, Thornham Magna, Thornham Parva, Thwaite and Wetheringsett cum Brockford.
It's been a while since I stepped into a church, so when I knew I was going to Suffolk at the weekend, I asked a friend whoch ones I should visit, and was told that this is one of the top churches in England, not just Suffolk.
Set a hundred yards or so from the main road that is chocked with traffic which runs between the county towns of Suffolk and Norfolk, it is down a lovely quiet lane, past some grand large houses, and set back from the road in a small churchyard is St Mary.
You enter through a small Norman doorway, into a body of a small and simple church, bt one filled with delights.
----------------------------------------------
From the moment that you see it across the fields, you know that St Mary is something special. At first the silhouette perhaps, or a stain of gold that resolves as you approach into a solid little Norman church. The thatched roof is charming, and set against is a small square tower, also crowned in thatch. There is a stubborn timelessness about it, a silent witness to long centuries. There isn’t really a village, and St Mary sits lonely in the fields. At night it is floodlit and floats above the darkness. On winter days, the low light catches its honeyed walls across ploughed furrows. In summer, the entrancing trees gather, a setting for a diadem.
This has always been a special place for me. I was captivated at an early stage of my life in Suffolk. And it was while visiting here in late 1998 that I first got the idea for this website, and decided to do it. Thornham Parva was the first entry. In common with most of the very earliest entries, it wasn’t terribly good – I hadn’t even taken any photographs.
But that was an excuse to return again and again, and when this website was featured on BBC Television’s Songs of Praise in 2000, the interview was recorded here at St Mary. They filmed me cycling the narrow lanes round about in the sub-zero temperatures of late-January; if anything, it was even colder inside the church, and my breath clouded the air as I became quite possibly the first person ever to say the Hail Mary on prime-time television.
Thornham Parva, of course, isn’t just special to me. It is one of the most remarkable churches in East Anglia, a treasure house, an aesthetic pleasure, a delight. It is a perfect antidote to the triumphalism of nearby Eye, an intensely rural collision of historical circumstances that have left us a moving and coherent document of our Suffolk past. When Cautley’s revising editors came this way in 1975 they found the church in a bit of a state, and even feared for its future. That it is now the perfect model of a well-cared-for English parish church is a tribute to the energy and enthusiasm of the tiny handful of local parishioners who have nursed it back to health.
The church gets a fair number of visitors, because its fame has spread far and wide. As an example, I popped in here a few years back with my daughter. She was about five years old at the time, and without me noticing she signed the visitors book with our full address (not something I would normally advise). Within a fortnight, I had received a nice postcard from Israel, from a user of this site who had spotted the entry in the visitors book. It is not surprising that the church does get visitors from all over the world, because St Mary is worth seeing, and worth going to see. In particular, it has, not one, but two astonishing survivals. If they were in the Victoria and Albert Museum you would willingly travel to London to see them, and pay handsomely for doing so. And yet here they are, in the fields that punctuate the Thornham woods, in a church which is open every day.
You step directly down into the church from a small Norman doorway in the north side. A gorgeous 18th century gallery curves above you – there’s no other like it in Suffolk. It was made tiny, to fit in this tiny space. Unfortunately, the stairway is now kept locked so, unless you contact a churchwarden first, you can’t see the clever way the carpenter engineered benches that open and close over the gangway to allow more seating space. The gallery is a reminder that St Mary was the church of the ordinary people; The neighbpouring village is Thorenham Magna, and the local big house Thornham Hall, the home of the Hennikers, is beside the church at Thornham Magna. However, it was at the big house, or more accurately in one of its barns, that in the 1920s was found and donated to this church the remarkable Thornham retable. It was restored in the early years of this century, and returned to St Mary, now standing proud behind alarmed glass.
The retable is only part of a much larger altarpiece that probably once stood in the Priory at Thetford in Norfolk. The rest of the piece can be found in the Musee de Cluny in Paris. The retable was rescued and hidden after the Anglican Reformation destroyed the priory, along with so many of England’s treasures. Perhaps it was taken by recusant Catholics to use in their devotions. More likely, it was simply rescued because it is beautiful. From left to right, the figures are St Dominic (Thetford was a Dominican Priory); St Catherine; St John the Baptist; St Paul; a rood group of the Blessed Virgin, Christ and St John; St Peter; St Edmund; St Margaret; St Peter Martyr (another Dominican). The retable dates from the height of the Decorated period, in the decades before the Black Death. They are probably the most alive, and lively, medieval figures in Suffolk; St Catherine in particular looks as if she is stepping through an archway from dancing in a garden.
As if the retable were not enough, the walls of St Mary are lined with some of Suffolk’s most fascinating wall-paintings. They rank with those at Wissington, and date broadly from the early years of the 14th century, and are in two ranges; on the south wall is the story of the early years of Christ. On the north wall is the martyrdom of St Edmund. This is amazingly rare; fragments survive not far off at Troston, but there is only one other sequence of the martyrdom surviving in the whole of the Kingdom.
Both sequences are organised chronologically from right to left. This may seem awkward, but effectively they start in the south west corner of the church and continue anti-clockwise around to the north-west corner. Unfortunately, the paintings on the west wall are now lost to us, behind the gallery.
On the south side, it is reasonable to assume that the very first painting, on the south side of the west wall, was an Annunciation – the angel appearing to Mary. This is lost. A fragment of the next frame survives, just poking up above the south end of the gallery. This is the Visitation, and we see Mary embracing her cousin Elizabeth. The Visitation was a very important part of medieval devotions, because of the way it balances and connects with the Assumption; the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, on August 15th, was one of the most significant feast days in the English medieval calendar, and the Assumption was probably the dedication of the majority of Suffolk churches. The other images in the sequence are clearer. We see the angel appearing to the shepherds, and then Christ sits on his mothers lap while the shepherds adore him. Note the way we have lost the adoring figures because of the later punching through of a window. Similarly, the next frame, the Presentation in the temple, has also suffered from fenestration. We often talk about Victorian vandalism of medieval churches, but here is a prime example of destruction caused by 15th century ‘restoration’.
What was the point of this sequence? A lot of nonsense is talked about wallpaintings and stained glass being ‘the poor mans Bible’ for peasants who couldn’t read. This analysis suggests that they were destroyed during the 16th century Anglican Reformation because ‘they were no longer needed’. In fact, the Anglicans destroyed them because they were Catholic devotional tools – the wall paintings on the south side here form a rosary sequence, pictures for meditation while saying prayers with the aid of rosary beads. Often this was done during Mass. If the Anglicans were to turn our churches into congregational preaching houses, the wall paintings had to go.
Intriguingly, the wall paintings here may have been whitewashed even before there were theological reasons for doing so. Most of the windows that punch through the wall paintings date from the 15th century, not the 16th. Could there have been a general redecoration at this time? Whichever, they were whitewashed, to be rediscovered in a kinder, gentler age. When the ranges here were uncovered by the Victorians, the south range was easily recognisable. But the north range wasn’t. For many years, it was thought to represent the martyrdom of St Catherine, because of the large wheel above the way you came in. It was only at the time the paintings were restored in the late 1970s that it became clear that here was something much more exciting.
The sequence begins at the eastern end of the range, and you can click on the images below to enlarge them. We see Edmund fleeing the Viking attack on a town, possibly Rendlesham, home of the Wuffings, the East Anglian royal family. The actual martyrdom is lost because of another of those great windows, but we next see Edmund’s decapitated head being put back on the body by a group of monks. Then, the body is carried off to its shrine at Bedricsworth (soon to become St Edmundsbury) while the wolf that found and guarded the head looks on. The final image on the north wall shows the wheel of a bullock cart crossing a bridge – delightfully, the bridge is represented by the arch of the doorway. This depicts an event that happened some time after. St Edmund’s body (by now sanctified and canonised) is being taken away to escape a later assault by Vikings. It approaches a bridge that is simply too narrow to allow the cart to pass. Miraculously, the cart crosses the bridge, and the Vikings are foiled.
Perhaps there was a final image on the north side of the west wall. Perhaps it showed the fabulous shrine at Bury itself. We can never be sure.
Although it is sad that we have lost so much of both sequences because of later alterations, it has to be said that the walls of this church are beautiful. The late medieval windows, which include some excellent 20th century glass by Lawrence Whistler, the paraffin lamps, the memorials to churchwardens, all add rather than detract. The screen is tiny and over-restored, but you can still see the sawn-off ends of the rood beam and the floor of the rood loft.
Standing in the rood screen, the retable behind you for a moment, the full beauty of the gallery can be seen, and above it a circular Saxon window. You can step outside and see how it is hidden by the tower. The tower itself is surprisingly late; we are told that in the 1480s it was the work of Richard Cutting and John Mason. Apparently, they were sued for defective workmanship, but it still appears to be standing.
The graveyard is an interesting one. As well as several significant musicians, it includes the grave of the great 20th century architect Basil Spence, designer of Coventry Cathedral, the Kensington and Chelsea barracks in London, and Britains best university campus, the University of Sussex - to name but three. Ironically, his 1980s gravestone appears to be wearing away. One hopes he used better materials for his buildings.
Simon Knott, 1998, rewritten 2003, revised February 2009
www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/thornhamentry.htm
----------------------------------------
The Thornhams, Magna and Parva, flank Thornham Hall and its park. Until the end of the 19thc. the estate boasted a hall, Tudor with an 18thc. facade, surrounded by an extensive park. Most of the hall was demolishedc.1900, and the rest was destroyed by fire in the late 1940s. The present hall is modern, and the estate has been converted for use as a field centre, a commercial market garden and a site for small businesses. Excavations in the estate have provided evidence of continuous occupation in the area from the Neolithic period to the present. The surrounding landscape is flattish and given over to arable cultivation. Thornham Parva lies to the N of the hall, some 2 miles W of Eye in central North Suffolk. The settlement is dispersed and sparsely populated with no real centre apart from the church, which lies just off the road from Thornham Magna and the Hall.
St Mary's has a nave and chancel in one, covered with a thatched roof, and a low W tower with a thatched pyramid roof. The church is of flint with ashlar dressings. The nave is apparently 12thc., with N and S doorways and a S window surviving from that period, but a round window visible in the interior W wall of the nave is said to be late Anglo-Saxon by Cautley. A flowing tracery window has been added on the S wall, and 15thc. windows have been inserted towards the W end. There is no chancel arch, and two Y-tracery windows on the lateral walls towards the E suggest a date ofc.1300 for the chancel. The E window is three-light reticulated, and there is a 15thc. S window. The tower is of knapped flint with no buttresses; it has a tall plinth course and a 15thc. main W window. Its E quoins are of brick, as are the upper windows, except for their ashlar ogee heads, suggesting an 18thc. date for the top of the tower. St Mary's is celebrated as the home of a 14thc. retable, probably painted for the Dominican house at Thetford. It was discovered in a stable loft at Thornham Hall in 1927 and given to the church by Lord Henniker. Romanesque work recorded here is found on the two nave doorways and the S nave window.
Thornham Parva was held by Robert Malet in 1086. There were various small parcels here before the Conquest: 7 acres held by two free men commended to Eadric (these were held by Robert’s mother in 1086); 28 acres held by 8 free men commended to Wulfgifu; 15 acres held by two free men, one commended to Wulfgifu; and 14 acres held by Sigeric, also commended to Wulfgifu (these three holdings in the hands of Robert Malet in 1086). There was three parts of a church in 1086 with 10 acres of free land. The present lords of Thornham are the Hennikers; it has been in the family since the mid-18thc.
South Hartismere benefice, i.e. Gislingham, Mellis, Stoke Ash, Thorndon with Rishangles, Thornham Magna, Thornham Parva, Thwaite and Wetheringsett cum Brockford.
Up until a few years ago this was a rather scruffy independent known as Mendlesham Group Fuel, Mendlesham Group being a local to this area haulage company. Sometime between 2011 and the present day it switched to BP and the whole site was tidied up rather well. A premier store was installed and the car showroom was rejuvenated. www.google.co.uk/maps/@52.2624684,1.1019046,3a,75y,150.08...
It's been a while since I stepped into a church, so when I knew I was going to Suffolk at the weekend, I asked a friend whoch ones I should visit, and was told that this is one of the top churches in England, not just Suffolk.
Set a hundred yards or so from the main road that is chocked with traffic which runs between the county towns of Suffolk and Norfolk, it is down a lovely quiet lane, past some grand large houses, and set back from the road in a small churchyard is St Mary.
You enter through a small Norman doorway, into a body of a small and simple church, bt one filled with delights.
----------------------------------------------
From the moment that you see it across the fields, you know that St Mary is something special. At first the silhouette perhaps, or a stain of gold that resolves as you approach into a solid little Norman church. The thatched roof is charming, and set against is a small square tower, also crowned in thatch. There is a stubborn timelessness about it, a silent witness to long centuries. There isn’t really a village, and St Mary sits lonely in the fields. At night it is floodlit and floats above the darkness. On winter days, the low light catches its honeyed walls across ploughed furrows. In summer, the entrancing trees gather, a setting for a diadem.
This has always been a special place for me. I was captivated at an early stage of my life in Suffolk. And it was while visiting here in late 1998 that I first got the idea for this website, and decided to do it. Thornham Parva was the first entry. In common with most of the very earliest entries, it wasn’t terribly good – I hadn’t even taken any photographs.
But that was an excuse to return again and again, and when this website was featured on BBC Television’s Songs of Praise in 2000, the interview was recorded here at St Mary. They filmed me cycling the narrow lanes round about in the sub-zero temperatures of late-January; if anything, it was even colder inside the church, and my breath clouded the air as I became quite possibly the first person ever to say the Hail Mary on prime-time television.
Thornham Parva, of course, isn’t just special to me. It is one of the most remarkable churches in East Anglia, a treasure house, an aesthetic pleasure, a delight. It is a perfect antidote to the triumphalism of nearby Eye, an intensely rural collision of historical circumstances that have left us a moving and coherent document of our Suffolk past. When Cautley’s revising editors came this way in 1975 they found the church in a bit of a state, and even feared for its future. That it is now the perfect model of a well-cared-for English parish church is a tribute to the energy and enthusiasm of the tiny handful of local parishioners who have nursed it back to health.
The church gets a fair number of visitors, because its fame has spread far and wide. As an example, I popped in here a few years back with my daughter. She was about five years old at the time, and without me noticing she signed the visitors book with our full address (not something I would normally advise). Within a fortnight, I had received a nice postcard from Israel, from a user of this site who had spotted the entry in the visitors book. It is not surprising that the church does get visitors from all over the world, because St Mary is worth seeing, and worth going to see. In particular, it has, not one, but two astonishing survivals. If they were in the Victoria and Albert Museum you would willingly travel to London to see them, and pay handsomely for doing so. And yet here they are, in the fields that punctuate the Thornham woods, in a church which is open every day.
You step directly down into the church from a small Norman doorway in the north side. A gorgeous 18th century gallery curves above you – there’s no other like it in Suffolk. It was made tiny, to fit in this tiny space. Unfortunately, the stairway is now kept locked so, unless you contact a churchwarden first, you can’t see the clever way the carpenter engineered benches that open and close over the gangway to allow more seating space. The gallery is a reminder that St Mary was the church of the ordinary people; The neighbpouring village is Thorenham Magna, and the local big house Thornham Hall, the home of the Hennikers, is beside the church at Thornham Magna. However, it was at the big house, or more accurately in one of its barns, that in the 1920s was found and donated to this church the remarkable Thornham retable. It was restored in the early years of this century, and returned to St Mary, now standing proud behind alarmed glass.
The retable is only part of a much larger altarpiece that probably once stood in the Priory at Thetford in Norfolk. The rest of the piece can be found in the Musee de Cluny in Paris. The retable was rescued and hidden after the Anglican Reformation destroyed the priory, along with so many of England’s treasures. Perhaps it was taken by recusant Catholics to use in their devotions. More likely, it was simply rescued because it is beautiful. From left to right, the figures are St Dominic (Thetford was a Dominican Priory); St Catherine; St John the Baptist; St Paul; a rood group of the Blessed Virgin, Christ and St John; St Peter; St Edmund; St Margaret; St Peter Martyr (another Dominican). The retable dates from the height of the Decorated period, in the decades before the Black Death. They are probably the most alive, and lively, medieval figures in Suffolk; St Catherine in particular looks as if she is stepping through an archway from dancing in a garden.
As if the retable were not enough, the walls of St Mary are lined with some of Suffolk’s most fascinating wall-paintings. They rank with those at Wissington, and date broadly from the early years of the 14th century, and are in two ranges; on the south wall is the story of the early years of Christ. On the north wall is the martyrdom of St Edmund. This is amazingly rare; fragments survive not far off at Troston, but there is only one other sequence of the martyrdom surviving in the whole of the Kingdom.
Both sequences are organised chronologically from right to left. This may seem awkward, but effectively they start in the south west corner of the church and continue anti-clockwise around to the north-west corner. Unfortunately, the paintings on the west wall are now lost to us, behind the gallery.
On the south side, it is reasonable to assume that the very first painting, on the south side of the west wall, was an Annunciation – the angel appearing to Mary. This is lost. A fragment of the next frame survives, just poking up above the south end of the gallery. This is the Visitation, and we see Mary embracing her cousin Elizabeth. The Visitation was a very important part of medieval devotions, because of the way it balances and connects with the Assumption; the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, on August 15th, was one of the most significant feast days in the English medieval calendar, and the Assumption was probably the dedication of the majority of Suffolk churches. The other images in the sequence are clearer. We see the angel appearing to the shepherds, and then Christ sits on his mothers lap while the shepherds adore him. Note the way we have lost the adoring figures because of the later punching through of a window. Similarly, the next frame, the Presentation in the temple, has also suffered from fenestration. We often talk about Victorian vandalism of medieval churches, but here is a prime example of destruction caused by 15th century ‘restoration’.
What was the point of this sequence? A lot of nonsense is talked about wallpaintings and stained glass being ‘the poor mans Bible’ for peasants who couldn’t read. This analysis suggests that they were destroyed during the 16th century Anglican Reformation because ‘they were no longer needed’. In fact, the Anglicans destroyed them because they were Catholic devotional tools – the wall paintings on the south side here form a rosary sequence, pictures for meditation while saying prayers with the aid of rosary beads. Often this was done during Mass. If the Anglicans were to turn our churches into congregational preaching houses, the wall paintings had to go.
Intriguingly, the wall paintings here may have been whitewashed even before there were theological reasons for doing so. Most of the windows that punch through the wall paintings date from the 15th century, not the 16th. Could there have been a general redecoration at this time? Whichever, they were whitewashed, to be rediscovered in a kinder, gentler age. When the ranges here were uncovered by the Victorians, the south range was easily recognisable. But the north range wasn’t. For many years, it was thought to represent the martyrdom of St Catherine, because of the large wheel above the way you came in. It was only at the time the paintings were restored in the late 1970s that it became clear that here was something much more exciting.
The sequence begins at the eastern end of the range, and you can click on the images below to enlarge them. We see Edmund fleeing the Viking attack on a town, possibly Rendlesham, home of the Wuffings, the East Anglian royal family. The actual martyrdom is lost because of another of those great windows, but we next see Edmund’s decapitated head being put back on the body by a group of monks. Then, the body is carried off to its shrine at Bedricsworth (soon to become St Edmundsbury) while the wolf that found and guarded the head looks on. The final image on the north wall shows the wheel of a bullock cart crossing a bridge – delightfully, the bridge is represented by the arch of the doorway. This depicts an event that happened some time after. St Edmund’s body (by now sanctified and canonised) is being taken away to escape a later assault by Vikings. It approaches a bridge that is simply too narrow to allow the cart to pass. Miraculously, the cart crosses the bridge, and the Vikings are foiled.
Perhaps there was a final image on the north side of the west wall. Perhaps it showed the fabulous shrine at Bury itself. We can never be sure.
Although it is sad that we have lost so much of both sequences because of later alterations, it has to be said that the walls of this church are beautiful. The late medieval windows, which include some excellent 20th century glass by Lawrence Whistler, the paraffin lamps, the memorials to churchwardens, all add rather than detract. The screen is tiny and over-restored, but you can still see the sawn-off ends of the rood beam and the floor of the rood loft.
Standing in the rood screen, the retable behind you for a moment, the full beauty of the gallery can be seen, and above it a circular Saxon window. You can step outside and see how it is hidden by the tower. The tower itself is surprisingly late; we are told that in the 1480s it was the work of Richard Cutting and John Mason. Apparently, they were sued for defective workmanship, but it still appears to be standing.
The graveyard is an interesting one. As well as several significant musicians, it includes the grave of the great 20th century architect Basil Spence, designer of Coventry Cathedral, the Kensington and Chelsea barracks in London, and Britains best university campus, the University of Sussex - to name but three. Ironically, his 1980s gravestone appears to be wearing away. One hopes he used better materials for his buildings.
Simon Knott, 1998, rewritten 2003, revised February 2009
www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/thornhamentry.htm
----------------------------------------
The Thornhams, Magna and Parva, flank Thornham Hall and its park. Until the end of the 19thc. the estate boasted a hall, Tudor with an 18thc. facade, surrounded by an extensive park. Most of the hall was demolishedc.1900, and the rest was destroyed by fire in the late 1940s. The present hall is modern, and the estate has been converted for use as a field centre, a commercial market garden and a site for small businesses. Excavations in the estate have provided evidence of continuous occupation in the area from the Neolithic period to the present. The surrounding landscape is flattish and given over to arable cultivation. Thornham Parva lies to the N of the hall, some 2 miles W of Eye in central North Suffolk. The settlement is dispersed and sparsely populated with no real centre apart from the church, which lies just off the road from Thornham Magna and the Hall.
St Mary's has a nave and chancel in one, covered with a thatched roof, and a low W tower with a thatched pyramid roof. The church is of flint with ashlar dressings. The nave is apparently 12thc., with N and S doorways and a S window surviving from that period, but a round window visible in the interior W wall of the nave is said to be late Anglo-Saxon by Cautley. A flowing tracery window has been added on the S wall, and 15thc. windows have been inserted towards the W end. There is no chancel arch, and two Y-tracery windows on the lateral walls towards the E suggest a date ofc.1300 for the chancel. The E window is three-light reticulated, and there is a 15thc. S window. The tower is of knapped flint with no buttresses; it has a tall plinth course and a 15thc. main W window. Its E quoins are of brick, as are the upper windows, except for their ashlar ogee heads, suggesting an 18thc. date for the top of the tower. St Mary's is celebrated as the home of a 14thc. retable, probably painted for the Dominican house at Thetford. It was discovered in a stable loft at Thornham Hall in 1927 and given to the church by Lord Henniker. Romanesque work recorded here is found on the two nave doorways and the S nave window.
Thornham Parva was held by Robert Malet in 1086. There were various small parcels here before the Conquest: 7 acres held by two free men commended to Eadric (these were held by Robert’s mother in 1086); 28 acres held by 8 free men commended to Wulfgifu; 15 acres held by two free men, one commended to Wulfgifu; and 14 acres held by Sigeric, also commended to Wulfgifu (these three holdings in the hands of Robert Malet in 1086). There was three parts of a church in 1086 with 10 acres of free land. The present lords of Thornham are the Hennikers; it has been in the family since the mid-18thc.
South Hartismere benefice, i.e. Gislingham, Mellis, Stoke Ash, Thorndon with Rishangles, Thornham Magna, Thornham Parva, Thwaite and Wetheringsett cum Brockford.
It's been a while since I stepped into a church, so when I knew I was going to Suffolk at the weekend, I asked a friend whoch ones I should visit, and was told that this is one of the top churches in England, not just Suffolk.
Set a hundred yards or so from the main road that is chocked with traffic which runs between the county towns of Suffolk and Norfolk, it is down a lovely quiet lane, past some grand large houses, and set back from the road in a small churchyard is St Mary.
You enter through a small Norman doorway, into a body of a small and simple church, bt one filled with delights.
----------------------------------------------
From the moment that you see it across the fields, you know that St Mary is something special. At first the silhouette perhaps, or a stain of gold that resolves as you approach into a solid little Norman church. The thatched roof is charming, and set against is a small square tower, also crowned in thatch. There is a stubborn timelessness about it, a silent witness to long centuries. There isn’t really a village, and St Mary sits lonely in the fields. At night it is floodlit and floats above the darkness. On winter days, the low light catches its honeyed walls across ploughed furrows. In summer, the entrancing trees gather, a setting for a diadem.
This has always been a special place for me. I was captivated at an early stage of my life in Suffolk. And it was while visiting here in late 1998 that I first got the idea for this website, and decided to do it. Thornham Parva was the first entry. In common with most of the very earliest entries, it wasn’t terribly good – I hadn’t even taken any photographs.
But that was an excuse to return again and again, and when this website was featured on BBC Television’s Songs of Praise in 2000, the interview was recorded here at St Mary. They filmed me cycling the narrow lanes round about in the sub-zero temperatures of late-January; if anything, it was even colder inside the church, and my breath clouded the air as I became quite possibly the first person ever to say the Hail Mary on prime-time television.
Thornham Parva, of course, isn’t just special to me. It is one of the most remarkable churches in East Anglia, a treasure house, an aesthetic pleasure, a delight. It is a perfect antidote to the triumphalism of nearby Eye, an intensely rural collision of historical circumstances that have left us a moving and coherent document of our Suffolk past. When Cautley’s revising editors came this way in 1975 they found the church in a bit of a state, and even feared for its future. That it is now the perfect model of a well-cared-for English parish church is a tribute to the energy and enthusiasm of the tiny handful of local parishioners who have nursed it back to health.
The church gets a fair number of visitors, because its fame has spread far and wide. As an example, I popped in here a few years back with my daughter. She was about five years old at the time, and without me noticing she signed the visitors book with our full address (not something I would normally advise). Within a fortnight, I had received a nice postcard from Israel, from a user of this site who had spotted the entry in the visitors book. It is not surprising that the church does get visitors from all over the world, because St Mary is worth seeing, and worth going to see. In particular, it has, not one, but two astonishing survivals. If they were in the Victoria and Albert Museum you would willingly travel to London to see them, and pay handsomely for doing so. And yet here they are, in the fields that punctuate the Thornham woods, in a church which is open every day.
You step directly down into the church from a small Norman doorway in the north side. A gorgeous 18th century gallery curves above you – there’s no other like it in Suffolk. It was made tiny, to fit in this tiny space. Unfortunately, the stairway is now kept locked so, unless you contact a churchwarden first, you can’t see the clever way the carpenter engineered benches that open and close over the gangway to allow more seating space. The gallery is a reminder that St Mary was the church of the ordinary people; The neighbpouring village is Thorenham Magna, and the local big house Thornham Hall, the home of the Hennikers, is beside the church at Thornham Magna. However, it was at the big house, or more accurately in one of its barns, that in the 1920s was found and donated to this church the remarkable Thornham retable. It was restored in the early years of this century, and returned to St Mary, now standing proud behind alarmed glass.
The retable is only part of a much larger altarpiece that probably once stood in the Priory at Thetford in Norfolk. The rest of the piece can be found in the Musee de Cluny in Paris. The retable was rescued and hidden after the Anglican Reformation destroyed the priory, along with so many of England’s treasures. Perhaps it was taken by recusant Catholics to use in their devotions. More likely, it was simply rescued because it is beautiful. From left to right, the figures are St Dominic (Thetford was a Dominican Priory); St Catherine; St John the Baptist; St Paul; a rood group of the Blessed Virgin, Christ and St John; St Peter; St Edmund; St Margaret; St Peter Martyr (another Dominican). The retable dates from the height of the Decorated period, in the decades before the Black Death. They are probably the most alive, and lively, medieval figures in Suffolk; St Catherine in particular looks as if she is stepping through an archway from dancing in a garden.
As if the retable were not enough, the walls of St Mary are lined with some of Suffolk’s most fascinating wall-paintings. They rank with those at Wissington, and date broadly from the early years of the 14th century, and are in two ranges; on the south wall is the story of the early years of Christ. On the north wall is the martyrdom of St Edmund. This is amazingly rare; fragments survive not far off at Troston, but there is only one other sequence of the martyrdom surviving in the whole of the Kingdom.
Both sequences are organised chronologically from right to left. This may seem awkward, but effectively they start in the south west corner of the church and continue anti-clockwise around to the north-west corner. Unfortunately, the paintings on the west wall are now lost to us, behind the gallery.
On the south side, it is reasonable to assume that the very first painting, on the south side of the west wall, was an Annunciation – the angel appearing to Mary. This is lost. A fragment of the next frame survives, just poking up above the south end of the gallery. This is the Visitation, and we see Mary embracing her cousin Elizabeth. The Visitation was a very important part of medieval devotions, because of the way it balances and connects with the Assumption; the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, on August 15th, was one of the most significant feast days in the English medieval calendar, and the Assumption was probably the dedication of the majority of Suffolk churches. The other images in the sequence are clearer. We see the angel appearing to the shepherds, and then Christ sits on his mothers lap while the shepherds adore him. Note the way we have lost the adoring figures because of the later punching through of a window. Similarly, the next frame, the Presentation in the temple, has also suffered from fenestration. We often talk about Victorian vandalism of medieval churches, but here is a prime example of destruction caused by 15th century ‘restoration’.
What was the point of this sequence? A lot of nonsense is talked about wallpaintings and stained glass being ‘the poor mans Bible’ for peasants who couldn’t read. This analysis suggests that they were destroyed during the 16th century Anglican Reformation because ‘they were no longer needed’. In fact, the Anglicans destroyed them because they were Catholic devotional tools – the wall paintings on the south side here form a rosary sequence, pictures for meditation while saying prayers with the aid of rosary beads. Often this was done during Mass. If the Anglicans were to turn our churches into congregational preaching houses, the wall paintings had to go.
Intriguingly, the wall paintings here may have been whitewashed even before there were theological reasons for doing so. Most of the windows that punch through the wall paintings date from the 15th century, not the 16th. Could there have been a general redecoration at this time? Whichever, they were whitewashed, to be rediscovered in a kinder, gentler age. When the ranges here were uncovered by the Victorians, the south range was easily recognisable. But the north range wasn’t. For many years, it was thought to represent the martyrdom of St Catherine, because of the large wheel above the way you came in. It was only at the time the paintings were restored in the late 1970s that it became clear that here was something much more exciting.
The sequence begins at the eastern end of the range, and you can click on the images below to enlarge them. We see Edmund fleeing the Viking attack on a town, possibly Rendlesham, home of the Wuffings, the East Anglian royal family. The actual martyrdom is lost because of another of those great windows, but we next see Edmund’s decapitated head being put back on the body by a group of monks. Then, the body is carried off to its shrine at Bedricsworth (soon to become St Edmundsbury) while the wolf that found and guarded the head looks on. The final image on the north wall shows the wheel of a bullock cart crossing a bridge – delightfully, the bridge is represented by the arch of the doorway. This depicts an event that happened some time after. St Edmund’s body (by now sanctified and canonised) is being taken away to escape a later assault by Vikings. It approaches a bridge that is simply too narrow to allow the cart to pass. Miraculously, the cart crosses the bridge, and the Vikings are foiled.
Perhaps there was a final image on the north side of the west wall. Perhaps it showed the fabulous shrine at Bury itself. We can never be sure.
Although it is sad that we have lost so much of both sequences because of later alterations, it has to be said that the walls of this church are beautiful. The late medieval windows, which include some excellent 20th century glass by Lawrence Whistler, the paraffin lamps, the memorials to churchwardens, all add rather than detract. The screen is tiny and over-restored, but you can still see the sawn-off ends of the rood beam and the floor of the rood loft.
Standing in the rood screen, the retable behind you for a moment, the full beauty of the gallery can be seen, and above it a circular Saxon window. You can step outside and see how it is hidden by the tower. The tower itself is surprisingly late; we are told that in the 1480s it was the work of Richard Cutting and John Mason. Apparently, they were sued for defective workmanship, but it still appears to be standing.
The graveyard is an interesting one. As well as several significant musicians, it includes the grave of the great 20th century architect Basil Spence, designer of Coventry Cathedral, the Kensington and Chelsea barracks in London, and Britains best university campus, the University of Sussex - to name but three. Ironically, his 1980s gravestone appears to be wearing away. One hopes he used better materials for his buildings.
Simon Knott, 1998, rewritten 2003, revised February 2009
www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/thornhamentry.htm
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The Thornhams, Magna and Parva, flank Thornham Hall and its park. Until the end of the 19thc. the estate boasted a hall, Tudor with an 18thc. facade, surrounded by an extensive park. Most of the hall was demolishedc.1900, and the rest was destroyed by fire in the late 1940s. The present hall is modern, and the estate has been converted for use as a field centre, a commercial market garden and a site for small businesses. Excavations in the estate have provided evidence of continuous occupation in the area from the Neolithic period to the present. The surrounding landscape is flattish and given over to arable cultivation. Thornham Parva lies to the N of the hall, some 2 miles W of Eye in central North Suffolk. The settlement is dispersed and sparsely populated with no real centre apart from the church, which lies just off the road from Thornham Magna and the Hall.
St Mary's has a nave and chancel in one, covered with a thatched roof, and a low W tower with a thatched pyramid roof. The church is of flint with ashlar dressings. The nave is apparently 12thc., with N and S doorways and a S window surviving from that period, but a round window visible in the interior W wall of the nave is said to be late Anglo-Saxon by Cautley. A flowing tracery window has been added on the S wall, and 15thc. windows have been inserted towards the W end. There is no chancel arch, and two Y-tracery windows on the lateral walls towards the E suggest a date ofc.1300 for the chancel. The E window is three-light reticulated, and there is a 15thc. S window. The tower is of knapped flint with no buttresses; it has a tall plinth course and a 15thc. main W window. Its E quoins are of brick, as are the upper windows, except for their ashlar ogee heads, suggesting an 18thc. date for the top of the tower. St Mary's is celebrated as the home of a 14thc. retable, probably painted for the Dominican house at Thetford. It was discovered in a stable loft at Thornham Hall in 1927 and given to the church by Lord Henniker. Romanesque work recorded here is found on the two nave doorways and the S nave window.
Thornham Parva was held by Robert Malet in 1086. There were various small parcels here before the Conquest: 7 acres held by two free men commended to Eadric (these were held by Robert’s mother in 1086); 28 acres held by 8 free men commended to Wulfgifu; 15 acres held by two free men, one commended to Wulfgifu; and 14 acres held by Sigeric, also commended to Wulfgifu (these three holdings in the hands of Robert Malet in 1086). There was three parts of a church in 1086 with 10 acres of free land. The present lords of Thornham are the Hennikers; it has been in the family since the mid-18thc.
South Hartismere benefice, i.e. Gislingham, Mellis, Stoke Ash, Thorndon with Rishangles, Thornham Magna, Thornham Parva, Thwaite and Wetheringsett cum Brockford.
To the memory of
RICHARD HAKLUYT
Rector of this Parish
1590 – 1616
Geographer, editor of travel narratives,
and exponent of English overseas
trade, exploration, and settlement.
This plaque was dedicated on the
occasion of the 400th anniversary
of his death on 23 November 1616
Richard Hakluyt (1553 – 23 November 1616) was an English writer. He is known for promoting the English colonization of North America through his works, notably Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America (1582) and The Principal Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoueries of the English Nation (1589–1600).
Hakluyt was educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford. Between 1583 and 1588 he was chaplain and secretary to Sir Edward Stafford, English ambassador at the French court. An ordained priest, Hakluyt held important positions at Bristol Cathedral and Westminster Abbey and was personal chaplain to Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, principal Secretary of State to Elizabeth I and James I. He was the chief promoter of a petition to James I for letters patent to colonize Virginia, which were granted to the London Company and Plymouth Company (referred to collectively as the Virginia Company) in 1606. The Hakluyt Society, which publishes scholarly editions of primary records of voyages and travels, was named after him in its 1846 formation.
Richard Hakluyt, the second of four sons, was born in Eyton in Herefordshire in 1553. Hakluyt's father, also named Richard Hakluyt, was a member of the Worshipful Company of Skinners whose members dealt in skins and furs. He died in 1557 when his son was aged about five years, and his wife Margery followed soon after. Hakluyt's cousin, also named Richard Hakluyt, of the Middle Temple, became his guardian.
While a Queen's Scholar at Westminster School, Hakluyt visited his guardian, whose conversation, illustrated by "certain bookes of cosmographie, an universall mappe, and the Bible", made Hakluyt resolve to "prosecute that knowledge, and kind of literature". Entering Christ Church, Oxford, in 1570 with financial support from the Skinners' Company, "his exercises of duty first performed", he set out to read all the printed or written voyages and discoveries that he could find. He took his Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) on 19 February 1574, and shortly after taking his Master of Arts (M.A.) on 27 June 1577, began giving public lectures in geography. He was the first to show "both the old imperfectly composed and the new lately reformed mappes, globes, spheares, and other instruments of this art". Hakluyt held on to his studentship at Christ Church between 1577 and 1586, although after 1583 he was no longer resident in Oxford.
Hakluyt was ordained in 1578, the same year he began to receive a "pension" from the Worshipful Company of Clothworkers to study divinity. The pension would have lapsed in 1583, but William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, intervened to have it extended until 1586 to aid Hakluyt's geographical research.
At the English Embassy in Paris
Hakluyt's first publication was one that he wrote himself, Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America and the Ilands Adjacent unto the Same, Made First of all by our Englishmen and Afterwards by the Frenchmen and Britons (1582).
Hakluyt's Voyages brought him to the notice of Lord Howard of Effingham, and Sir Edward Stafford, Lord Howard's brother-in-law. At the age of 30, being acquainted with "the chiefest captaines at sea, the greatest merchants, and the best mariners of our nation", he was selected as chaplain and secretary to accompany Stafford, now English ambassador at the French court, to Paris in 1583. In accordance with the instructions of Secretary Francis Walsingham, he occupied himself chiefly in collecting information of the Spanish and French movements, and "making diligent inquirie of such things as might yield any light unto our westerne discoveries in America". Although this was his only visit to Continental Europe in his life, he was angered to hear the limitations of the English in terms of travel being discussed in Paris.
The first fruits of Hakluyt's labours in Paris were embodied in his important work entitled A Particuler Discourse Concerninge the Greate Necessitie and Manifolde Commodyties That Are Like to Growe to This Realme of Englande by the Westerne Discoueries Lately Attempted, Written in the Yere 1584, which Sir Walter Raleigh commissioned him to prepare. The manuscript, lost for almost 300 years, was published for the first time in 1877. Hakluyt revisited England in 1584, and laid a copy of the Discourse before Elizabeth I (to whom it had been dedicated) together with his analysis in Latin of Aristotle's Politicks. His objective was to recommend the enterprise of planting the English race in the unsettled parts of North America, and thus gain the Queen's support for Raleigh's expedition. In May 1585 when Hakluyt was in Paris with the English Embassy, the Queen granted to him the next prebendary at Bristol Cathedral that should become vacant, to which he was admitted in 1585 or 1586 and held with other preferments till his death.
Hakluyt's other works during his time in Paris consisted mainly of translations and compilations, with his own dedications and prefaces. These latter writings, together with a few letters, are the only extant material out of which a biography of him can be framed. Hakluyt interested himself in the publication of the manuscript journal of René Goulaine de Laudonnière, L'histoire notable de la Floride située ès Indes Occidentales in Paris in 1586. The attention that the book excited in Paris encouraged Hakluyt to prepare an English translation and publish it in London under the title A Notable Historie Containing Foure Voyages Made by Certayne French Captaynes unto Florida (1587). The same year, his edition of Peter Martyr d'Anghiera's De Orbe Nouo Decades Octo saw the light at Paris. This work contains an exceedingly-rare copperplate map dedicated to Hakluyt and signed F.G. (supposed to be Francis Gualle); it is the first on which the name "Virginia" appears.
Return to England
In 1588 Hakluyt finally returned to England with Douglas Sheffield, Baroness Sheffield, after a residence in France of nearly five years. In 1589 he published the first edition of his chief work, The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation, using eyewitness accounts as far as possible. In the preface to this he announced the intended publication of the first terrestrial globe made in England by Emery Molyneux.
Between 1598 and 1600 appeared the final, reconstructed and greatly enlarged edition of The Principal Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoueries of the English Nation in three volumes. In the dedication of the second volume (1599) to his patron, Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, Hakluyt strongly urged the minister as to the expediency of colonizing Virginia. A few copies of this monumental work contain a map of great rarity, the first on the Mercator projection made in England according to the true principles laid down by Edward Wright. Hakluyt's great collection has been called "the Prose Epic of the modern English nation" by historian James Anthony Froude.
On 20 April 1590 Hakluyt was instituted to the clergy house of Wetheringsett-cum-Brockford, Suffolk, by Lady Stafford, who was the Dowager Baroness Sheffield. He held this position until his death, and resided in Wetheringsett through the 1590s and frequently thereafter. In 1599, he became an adviser to the newly-founded East India Company, and in 1601 he edited a translation from the Portuguese of Antonio Galvão's The Discoveries of the World.
Later life
In the late 1590s Hakluyt became the client and personal chaplain of Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, Lord Burghley's son, who was to be Hakluyt's most fruitful patron. Hakluyt dedicated to Cecil the second (1599) and third volumes (1600) of the expanded edition of Principal Navigations and also his edition of Galvão's Discoveries (1601). Cecil, who was the principal Secretary of State to Elizabeth I and James I, rewarded him by installing him as prebendary of the Dean and Chapter of Westminster on 4 May 1602. In the following year, he was elected archdeacon of the Abbey. These religious occupations have occasioned reconsideration of the role played by spiritual concerns in Hakluyt's writings on exploration, settlement, and England's relations with its Catholic rivals.
Hakluyt was married twice, once in or about 1594 and again in 1604. In the licence of Hakluyt's second marriage dated 30 March 1604, he is described as one of the chaplains of the Savoy Hospital; this position was also conferred on him by Cecil. His will refers to chambers occupied by him there up to the time of his death, and in another official document he is styled Doctor of Divinity (D.D.).
Hakluyt was also a leading adventurer of the Charter of the Virginia Company of London as a director thereof in 1589. In 1605 he secured the prospective living of Jamestown, the intended capital of the intended colony of Virginia. When the colony was at last established in 1607, he supplied this benefice with its chaplain, Robert Hunt. In 1606 he appears as the chief promoter of the petition to James I for letters patent to colonize Virginia, which were granted on 10 April 1606. His last publication was a translation of Hernando de Soto's discoveries in Florida, entitled Virginia Richly Valued, by the Description of the Maine Land of Florida, Her Next Neighbour (1609). This work was intended to encourage the young colony of Virginia; Scottish historian William Robertson wrote of Hakluyt, "England is more indebted for its American possessions than to any man of that age."
Hakluyt prepared an English translation of Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius' Mare Liberum (1609), a treatise that sought to demonstrate that the Dutch had the right to trade freely in the East Indies, contrary to Spanish and Portuguese claims of sovereignty over the seas, in the early 17th century. Helen Thornton has suggested that the translation was commissioned by Thomas Smythe who became treasurer of the Virginia Company in 1609 and was also Governor of the East India Company. In that year, Hakluyt was a consultant to the Company when it was renewing its charter. Grotius' arguments supported England's right to trade in the Indies. The translation may also have been part of the propaganda encouraging English people to settle in Virginia. In Mare Liberum, Grotius denied that the 1493 donation by Pope Alexander VI that had divided the oceans between Spain and Portugal entitled Spain to make territorial claims to North America. Instead, he stressed the importance of occupation, which was favourable to the English as they and not the Spanish had occupied Virginia. Grotius also argued that the seas should be freely navigable by all, which was useful since the England to Virginia route crossed seas which the Portuguese claimed. However, it is not clear why Hakluyt's translation was not published in his lifetime. George Bruner Parks has theorized that publication at that time would have been inconvenient to England because after England had successfully helped Holland and Spain to negotiate the Twelve Years' Truce during the Eighty Years' War, the work would have supported English claims for free seas against Spain, but not its claims for closed seas against Holland. Hakluyt's handwritten manuscript, MS Petyt 529, in Inner Temple Library in London was eventually published as The Free Sea for the first time in 2004.
In 1591, Hakluyt inherited family property upon the death of his elder brother Thomas; a year later, upon the death of his youngest brother Edmund, he inherited additional property which derived from his uncle. In 1612 Hakluyt became a charter member of the North-west Passage Company.
By the time of his death, he had amassed a small fortune out of his various emoluments and preferments, of which the last was the clergy house of Gedney, Lincolnshire, presented to him by his younger brother Oliver in 1612. Unfortunately, his wealth was squandered by his only son.
Hakluyt died on 23 November 1616, probably in London, and was buried on 26 November in Westminster Abbey; by an error in the abbey register his burial is recorded under the year 1626. A number of his manuscripts, sufficient to form a fourth volume of his collections of 1598–1600, fell into the hands of Samuel Purchas, who inserted them in an abridged form in his Pilgrimes (1625–1626). Others, consisting chiefly of notes gathered from contemporary authors, are preserved at the University of Oxford.
Hakluyt is principally remembered for his efforts in promoting and supporting the settlement of North America by the English through his writings.
Hakluyt also encouraged the production of geographical and historical writings by others. It was at Hakluyt's suggestion that Robert Parke translated Juan González de Mendoza's The History of the Great and Mighty Kingdom of China and the Situation Thereof (1588–1590),[30] John Pory made his version of Leo Africanus's A Geographical Historie of Africa (1600), and P. Erondelle translated Marc Lescarbot's Nova Francia (1609)
Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hakluyt
(The piece also includes a stained glass image of him from Bristol Cathedral).
For more on the church of All Saints, Wetheringsett, see:-
It's been a while since I stepped into a church, so when I knew I was going to Suffolk at the weekend, I asked a friend whoch ones I should visit, and was told that this is one of the top churches in England, not just Suffolk.
Set a hundred yards or so from the main road that is chocked with traffic which runs between the county towns of Suffolk and Norfolk, it is down a lovely quiet lane, past some grand large houses, and set back from the road in a small churchyard is St Mary.
You enter through a small Norman doorway, into a body of a small and simple church, bt one filled with delights.
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From the moment that you see it across the fields, you know that St Mary is something special. At first the silhouette perhaps, or a stain of gold that resolves as you approach into a solid little Norman church. The thatched roof is charming, and set against is a small square tower, also crowned in thatch. There is a stubborn timelessness about it, a silent witness to long centuries. There isn’t really a village, and St Mary sits lonely in the fields. At night it is floodlit and floats above the darkness. On winter days, the low light catches its honeyed walls across ploughed furrows. In summer, the entrancing trees gather, a setting for a diadem.
This has always been a special place for me. I was captivated at an early stage of my life in Suffolk. And it was while visiting here in late 1998 that I first got the idea for this website, and decided to do it. Thornham Parva was the first entry. In common with most of the very earliest entries, it wasn’t terribly good – I hadn’t even taken any photographs.
But that was an excuse to return again and again, and when this website was featured on BBC Television’s Songs of Praise in 2000, the interview was recorded here at St Mary. They filmed me cycling the narrow lanes round about in the sub-zero temperatures of late-January; if anything, it was even colder inside the church, and my breath clouded the air as I became quite possibly the first person ever to say the Hail Mary on prime-time television.
Thornham Parva, of course, isn’t just special to me. It is one of the most remarkable churches in East Anglia, a treasure house, an aesthetic pleasure, a delight. It is a perfect antidote to the triumphalism of nearby Eye, an intensely rural collision of historical circumstances that have left us a moving and coherent document of our Suffolk past. When Cautley’s revising editors came this way in 1975 they found the church in a bit of a state, and even feared for its future. That it is now the perfect model of a well-cared-for English parish church is a tribute to the energy and enthusiasm of the tiny handful of local parishioners who have nursed it back to health.
The church gets a fair number of visitors, because its fame has spread far and wide. As an example, I popped in here a few years back with my daughter. She was about five years old at the time, and without me noticing she signed the visitors book with our full address (not something I would normally advise). Within a fortnight, I had received a nice postcard from Israel, from a user of this site who had spotted the entry in the visitors book. It is not surprising that the church does get visitors from all over the world, because St Mary is worth seeing, and worth going to see. In particular, it has, not one, but two astonishing survivals. If they were in the Victoria and Albert Museum you would willingly travel to London to see them, and pay handsomely for doing so. And yet here they are, in the fields that punctuate the Thornham woods, in a church which is open every day.
You step directly down into the church from a small Norman doorway in the north side. A gorgeous 18th century gallery curves above you – there’s no other like it in Suffolk. It was made tiny, to fit in this tiny space. Unfortunately, the stairway is now kept locked so, unless you contact a churchwarden first, you can’t see the clever way the carpenter engineered benches that open and close over the gangway to allow more seating space. The gallery is a reminder that St Mary was the church of the ordinary people; The neighbpouring village is Thorenham Magna, and the local big house Thornham Hall, the home of the Hennikers, is beside the church at Thornham Magna. However, it was at the big house, or more accurately in one of its barns, that in the 1920s was found and donated to this church the remarkable Thornham retable. It was restored in the early years of this century, and returned to St Mary, now standing proud behind alarmed glass.
The retable is only part of a much larger altarpiece that probably once stood in the Priory at Thetford in Norfolk. The rest of the piece can be found in the Musee de Cluny in Paris. The retable was rescued and hidden after the Anglican Reformation destroyed the priory, along with so many of England’s treasures. Perhaps it was taken by recusant Catholics to use in their devotions. More likely, it was simply rescued because it is beautiful. From left to right, the figures are St Dominic (Thetford was a Dominican Priory); St Catherine; St John the Baptist; St Paul; a rood group of the Blessed Virgin, Christ and St John; St Peter; St Edmund; St Margaret; St Peter Martyr (another Dominican). The retable dates from the height of the Decorated period, in the decades before the Black Death. They are probably the most alive, and lively, medieval figures in Suffolk; St Catherine in particular looks as if she is stepping through an archway from dancing in a garden.
As if the retable were not enough, the walls of St Mary are lined with some of Suffolk’s most fascinating wall-paintings. They rank with those at Wissington, and date broadly from the early years of the 14th century, and are in two ranges; on the south wall is the story of the early years of Christ. On the north wall is the martyrdom of St Edmund. This is amazingly rare; fragments survive not far off at Troston, but there is only one other sequence of the martyrdom surviving in the whole of the Kingdom.
Both sequences are organised chronologically from right to left. This may seem awkward, but effectively they start in the south west corner of the church and continue anti-clockwise around to the north-west corner. Unfortunately, the paintings on the west wall are now lost to us, behind the gallery.
On the south side, it is reasonable to assume that the very first painting, on the south side of the west wall, was an Annunciation – the angel appearing to Mary. This is lost. A fragment of the next frame survives, just poking up above the south end of the gallery. This is the Visitation, and we see Mary embracing her cousin Elizabeth. The Visitation was a very important part of medieval devotions, because of the way it balances and connects with the Assumption; the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, on August 15th, was one of the most significant feast days in the English medieval calendar, and the Assumption was probably the dedication of the majority of Suffolk churches. The other images in the sequence are clearer. We see the angel appearing to the shepherds, and then Christ sits on his mothers lap while the shepherds adore him. Note the way we have lost the adoring figures because of the later punching through of a window. Similarly, the next frame, the Presentation in the temple, has also suffered from fenestration. We often talk about Victorian vandalism of medieval churches, but here is a prime example of destruction caused by 15th century ‘restoration’.
What was the point of this sequence? A lot of nonsense is talked about wallpaintings and stained glass being ‘the poor mans Bible’ for peasants who couldn’t read. This analysis suggests that they were destroyed during the 16th century Anglican Reformation because ‘they were no longer needed’. In fact, the Anglicans destroyed them because they were Catholic devotional tools – the wall paintings on the south side here form a rosary sequence, pictures for meditation while saying prayers with the aid of rosary beads. Often this was done during Mass. If the Anglicans were to turn our churches into congregational preaching houses, the wall paintings had to go.
Intriguingly, the wall paintings here may have been whitewashed even before there were theological reasons for doing so. Most of the windows that punch through the wall paintings date from the 15th century, not the 16th. Could there have been a general redecoration at this time? Whichever, they were whitewashed, to be rediscovered in a kinder, gentler age. When the ranges here were uncovered by the Victorians, the south range was easily recognisable. But the north range wasn’t. For many years, it was thought to represent the martyrdom of St Catherine, because of the large wheel above the way you came in. It was only at the time the paintings were restored in the late 1970s that it became clear that here was something much more exciting.
The sequence begins at the eastern end of the range, and you can click on the images below to enlarge them. We see Edmund fleeing the Viking attack on a town, possibly Rendlesham, home of the Wuffings, the East Anglian royal family. The actual martyrdom is lost because of another of those great windows, but we next see Edmund’s decapitated head being put back on the body by a group of monks. Then, the body is carried off to its shrine at Bedricsworth (soon to become St Edmundsbury) while the wolf that found and guarded the head looks on. The final image on the north wall shows the wheel of a bullock cart crossing a bridge – delightfully, the bridge is represented by the arch of the doorway. This depicts an event that happened some time after. St Edmund’s body (by now sanctified and canonised) is being taken away to escape a later assault by Vikings. It approaches a bridge that is simply too narrow to allow the cart to pass. Miraculously, the cart crosses the bridge, and the Vikings are foiled.
Perhaps there was a final image on the north side of the west wall. Perhaps it showed the fabulous shrine at Bury itself. We can never be sure.
Although it is sad that we have lost so much of both sequences because of later alterations, it has to be said that the walls of this church are beautiful. The late medieval windows, which include some excellent 20th century glass by Lawrence Whistler, the paraffin lamps, the memorials to churchwardens, all add rather than detract. The screen is tiny and over-restored, but you can still see the sawn-off ends of the rood beam and the floor of the rood loft.
Standing in the rood screen, the retable behind you for a moment, the full beauty of the gallery can be seen, and above it a circular Saxon window. You can step outside and see how it is hidden by the tower. The tower itself is surprisingly late; we are told that in the 1480s it was the work of Richard Cutting and John Mason. Apparently, they were sued for defective workmanship, but it still appears to be standing.
The graveyard is an interesting one. As well as several significant musicians, it includes the grave of the great 20th century architect Basil Spence, designer of Coventry Cathedral, the Kensington and Chelsea barracks in London, and Britains best university campus, the University of Sussex - to name but three. Ironically, his 1980s gravestone appears to be wearing away. One hopes he used better materials for his buildings.
Simon Knott, 1998, rewritten 2003, revised February 2009
www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/thornhamentry.htm
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The Thornhams, Magna and Parva, flank Thornham Hall and its park. Until the end of the 19thc. the estate boasted a hall, Tudor with an 18thc. facade, surrounded by an extensive park. Most of the hall was demolishedc.1900, and the rest was destroyed by fire in the late 1940s. The present hall is modern, and the estate has been converted for use as a field centre, a commercial market garden and a site for small businesses. Excavations in the estate have provided evidence of continuous occupation in the area from the Neolithic period to the present. The surrounding landscape is flattish and given over to arable cultivation. Thornham Parva lies to the N of the hall, some 2 miles W of Eye in central North Suffolk. The settlement is dispersed and sparsely populated with no real centre apart from the church, which lies just off the road from Thornham Magna and the Hall.
St Mary's has a nave and chancel in one, covered with a thatched roof, and a low W tower with a thatched pyramid roof. The church is of flint with ashlar dressings. The nave is apparently 12thc., with N and S doorways and a S window surviving from that period, but a round window visible in the interior W wall of the nave is said to be late Anglo-Saxon by Cautley. A flowing tracery window has been added on the S wall, and 15thc. windows have been inserted towards the W end. There is no chancel arch, and two Y-tracery windows on the lateral walls towards the E suggest a date ofc.1300 for the chancel. The E window is three-light reticulated, and there is a 15thc. S window. The tower is of knapped flint with no buttresses; it has a tall plinth course and a 15thc. main W window. Its E quoins are of brick, as are the upper windows, except for their ashlar ogee heads, suggesting an 18thc. date for the top of the tower. St Mary's is celebrated as the home of a 14thc. retable, probably painted for the Dominican house at Thetford. It was discovered in a stable loft at Thornham Hall in 1927 and given to the church by Lord Henniker. Romanesque work recorded here is found on the two nave doorways and the S nave window.
Thornham Parva was held by Robert Malet in 1086. There were various small parcels here before the Conquest: 7 acres held by two free men commended to Eadric (these were held by Robert’s mother in 1086); 28 acres held by 8 free men commended to Wulfgifu; 15 acres held by two free men, one commended to Wulfgifu; and 14 acres held by Sigeric, also commended to Wulfgifu (these three holdings in the hands of Robert Malet in 1086). There was three parts of a church in 1086 with 10 acres of free land. The present lords of Thornham are the Hennikers; it has been in the family since the mid-18thc.
South Hartismere benefice, i.e. Gislingham, Mellis, Stoke Ash, Thorndon with Rishangles, Thornham Magna, Thornham Parva, Thwaite and Wetheringsett cum Brockford.
It's been a while since I stepped into a church, so when I knew I was going to Suffolk at the weekend, I asked a friend whoch ones I should visit, and was told that this is one of the top churches in England, not just Suffolk.
Set a hundred yards or so from the main road that is chocked with traffic which runs between the county towns of Suffolk and Norfolk, it is down a lovely quiet lane, past some grand large houses, and set back from the road in a small churchyard is St Mary.
You enter through a small Norman doorway, into a body of a small and simple church, bt one filled with delights.
----------------------------------------------
From the moment that you see it across the fields, you know that St Mary is something special. At first the silhouette perhaps, or a stain of gold that resolves as you approach into a solid little Norman church. The thatched roof is charming, and set against is a small square tower, also crowned in thatch. There is a stubborn timelessness about it, a silent witness to long centuries. There isn’t really a village, and St Mary sits lonely in the fields. At night it is floodlit and floats above the darkness. On winter days, the low light catches its honeyed walls across ploughed furrows. In summer, the entrancing trees gather, a setting for a diadem.
This has always been a special place for me. I was captivated at an early stage of my life in Suffolk. And it was while visiting here in late 1998 that I first got the idea for this website, and decided to do it. Thornham Parva was the first entry. In common with most of the very earliest entries, it wasn’t terribly good – I hadn’t even taken any photographs.
But that was an excuse to return again and again, and when this website was featured on BBC Television’s Songs of Praise in 2000, the interview was recorded here at St Mary. They filmed me cycling the narrow lanes round about in the sub-zero temperatures of late-January; if anything, it was even colder inside the church, and my breath clouded the air as I became quite possibly the first person ever to say the Hail Mary on prime-time television.
Thornham Parva, of course, isn’t just special to me. It is one of the most remarkable churches in East Anglia, a treasure house, an aesthetic pleasure, a delight. It is a perfect antidote to the triumphalism of nearby Eye, an intensely rural collision of historical circumstances that have left us a moving and coherent document of our Suffolk past. When Cautley’s revising editors came this way in 1975 they found the church in a bit of a state, and even feared for its future. That it is now the perfect model of a well-cared-for English parish church is a tribute to the energy and enthusiasm of the tiny handful of local parishioners who have nursed it back to health.
The church gets a fair number of visitors, because its fame has spread far and wide. As an example, I popped in here a few years back with my daughter. She was about five years old at the time, and without me noticing she signed the visitors book with our full address (not something I would normally advise). Within a fortnight, I had received a nice postcard from Israel, from a user of this site who had spotted the entry in the visitors book. It is not surprising that the church does get visitors from all over the world, because St Mary is worth seeing, and worth going to see. In particular, it has, not one, but two astonishing survivals. If they were in the Victoria and Albert Museum you would willingly travel to London to see them, and pay handsomely for doing so. And yet here they are, in the fields that punctuate the Thornham woods, in a church which is open every day.
You step directly down into the church from a small Norman doorway in the north side. A gorgeous 18th century gallery curves above you – there’s no other like it in Suffolk. It was made tiny, to fit in this tiny space. Unfortunately, the stairway is now kept locked so, unless you contact a churchwarden first, you can’t see the clever way the carpenter engineered benches that open and close over the gangway to allow more seating space. The gallery is a reminder that St Mary was the church of the ordinary people; The neighbpouring village is Thorenham Magna, and the local big house Thornham Hall, the home of the Hennikers, is beside the church at Thornham Magna. However, it was at the big house, or more accurately in one of its barns, that in the 1920s was found and donated to this church the remarkable Thornham retable. It was restored in the early years of this century, and returned to St Mary, now standing proud behind alarmed glass.
The retable is only part of a much larger altarpiece that probably once stood in the Priory at Thetford in Norfolk. The rest of the piece can be found in the Musee de Cluny in Paris. The retable was rescued and hidden after the Anglican Reformation destroyed the priory, along with so many of England’s treasures. Perhaps it was taken by recusant Catholics to use in their devotions. More likely, it was simply rescued because it is beautiful. From left to right, the figures are St Dominic (Thetford was a Dominican Priory); St Catherine; St John the Baptist; St Paul; a rood group of the Blessed Virgin, Christ and St John; St Peter; St Edmund; St Margaret; St Peter Martyr (another Dominican). The retable dates from the height of the Decorated period, in the decades before the Black Death. They are probably the most alive, and lively, medieval figures in Suffolk; St Catherine in particular looks as if she is stepping through an archway from dancing in a garden.
As if the retable were not enough, the walls of St Mary are lined with some of Suffolk’s most fascinating wall-paintings. They rank with those at Wissington, and date broadly from the early years of the 14th century, and are in two ranges; on the south wall is the story of the early years of Christ. On the north wall is the martyrdom of St Edmund. This is amazingly rare; fragments survive not far off at Troston, but there is only one other sequence of the martyrdom surviving in the whole of the Kingdom.
Both sequences are organised chronologically from right to left. This may seem awkward, but effectively they start in the south west corner of the church and continue anti-clockwise around to the north-west corner. Unfortunately, the paintings on the west wall are now lost to us, behind the gallery.
On the south side, it is reasonable to assume that the very first painting, on the south side of the west wall, was an Annunciation – the angel appearing to Mary. This is lost. A fragment of the next frame survives, just poking up above the south end of the gallery. This is the Visitation, and we see Mary embracing her cousin Elizabeth. The Visitation was a very important part of medieval devotions, because of the way it balances and connects with the Assumption; the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, on August 15th, was one of the most significant feast days in the English medieval calendar, and the Assumption was probably the dedication of the majority of Suffolk churches. The other images in the sequence are clearer. We see the angel appearing to the shepherds, and then Christ sits on his mothers lap while the shepherds adore him. Note the way we have lost the adoring figures because of the later punching through of a window. Similarly, the next frame, the Presentation in the temple, has also suffered from fenestration. We often talk about Victorian vandalism of medieval churches, but here is a prime example of destruction caused by 15th century ‘restoration’.
What was the point of this sequence? A lot of nonsense is talked about wallpaintings and stained glass being ‘the poor mans Bible’ for peasants who couldn’t read. This analysis suggests that they were destroyed during the 16th century Anglican Reformation because ‘they were no longer needed’. In fact, the Anglicans destroyed them because they were Catholic devotional tools – the wall paintings on the south side here form a rosary sequence, pictures for meditation while saying prayers with the aid of rosary beads. Often this was done during Mass. If the Anglicans were to turn our churches into congregational preaching houses, the wall paintings had to go.
Intriguingly, the wall paintings here may have been whitewashed even before there were theological reasons for doing so. Most of the windows that punch through the wall paintings date from the 15th century, not the 16th. Could there have been a general redecoration at this time? Whichever, they were whitewashed, to be rediscovered in a kinder, gentler age. When the ranges here were uncovered by the Victorians, the south range was easily recognisable. But the north range wasn’t. For many years, it was thought to represent the martyrdom of St Catherine, because of the large wheel above the way you came in. It was only at the time the paintings were restored in the late 1970s that it became clear that here was something much more exciting.
The sequence begins at the eastern end of the range, and you can click on the images below to enlarge them. We see Edmund fleeing the Viking attack on a town, possibly Rendlesham, home of the Wuffings, the East Anglian royal family. The actual martyrdom is lost because of another of those great windows, but we next see Edmund’s decapitated head being put back on the body by a group of monks. Then, the body is carried off to its shrine at Bedricsworth (soon to become St Edmundsbury) while the wolf that found and guarded the head looks on. The final image on the north wall shows the wheel of a bullock cart crossing a bridge – delightfully, the bridge is represented by the arch of the doorway. This depicts an event that happened some time after. St Edmund’s body (by now sanctified and canonised) is being taken away to escape a later assault by Vikings. It approaches a bridge that is simply too narrow to allow the cart to pass. Miraculously, the cart crosses the bridge, and the Vikings are foiled.
Perhaps there was a final image on the north side of the west wall. Perhaps it showed the fabulous shrine at Bury itself. We can never be sure.
Although it is sad that we have lost so much of both sequences because of later alterations, it has to be said that the walls of this church are beautiful. The late medieval windows, which include some excellent 20th century glass by Lawrence Whistler, the paraffin lamps, the memorials to churchwardens, all add rather than detract. The screen is tiny and over-restored, but you can still see the sawn-off ends of the rood beam and the floor of the rood loft.
Standing in the rood screen, the retable behind you for a moment, the full beauty of the gallery can be seen, and above it a circular Saxon window. You can step outside and see how it is hidden by the tower. The tower itself is surprisingly late; we are told that in the 1480s it was the work of Richard Cutting and John Mason. Apparently, they were sued for defective workmanship, but it still appears to be standing.
The graveyard is an interesting one. As well as several significant musicians, it includes the grave of the great 20th century architect Basil Spence, designer of Coventry Cathedral, the Kensington and Chelsea barracks in London, and Britains best university campus, the University of Sussex - to name but three. Ironically, his 1980s gravestone appears to be wearing away. One hopes he used better materials for his buildings.
Simon Knott, 1998, rewritten 2003, revised February 2009
www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/thornhamentry.htm
----------------------------------------
The Thornhams, Magna and Parva, flank Thornham Hall and its park. Until the end of the 19thc. the estate boasted a hall, Tudor with an 18thc. facade, surrounded by an extensive park. Most of the hall was demolishedc.1900, and the rest was destroyed by fire in the late 1940s. The present hall is modern, and the estate has been converted for use as a field centre, a commercial market garden and a site for small businesses. Excavations in the estate have provided evidence of continuous occupation in the area from the Neolithic period to the present. The surrounding landscape is flattish and given over to arable cultivation. Thornham Parva lies to the N of the hall, some 2 miles W of Eye in central North Suffolk. The settlement is dispersed and sparsely populated with no real centre apart from the church, which lies just off the road from Thornham Magna and the Hall.
St Mary's has a nave and chancel in one, covered with a thatched roof, and a low W tower with a thatched pyramid roof. The church is of flint with ashlar dressings. The nave is apparently 12thc., with N and S doorways and a S window surviving from that period, but a round window visible in the interior W wall of the nave is said to be late Anglo-Saxon by Cautley. A flowing tracery window has been added on the S wall, and 15thc. windows have been inserted towards the W end. There is no chancel arch, and two Y-tracery windows on the lateral walls towards the E suggest a date ofc.1300 for the chancel. The E window is three-light reticulated, and there is a 15thc. S window. The tower is of knapped flint with no buttresses; it has a tall plinth course and a 15thc. main W window. Its E quoins are of brick, as are the upper windows, except for their ashlar ogee heads, suggesting an 18thc. date for the top of the tower. St Mary's is celebrated as the home of a 14thc. retable, probably painted for the Dominican house at Thetford. It was discovered in a stable loft at Thornham Hall in 1927 and given to the church by Lord Henniker. Romanesque work recorded here is found on the two nave doorways and the S nave window.
Thornham Parva was held by Robert Malet in 1086. There were various small parcels here before the Conquest: 7 acres held by two free men commended to Eadric (these were held by Robert’s mother in 1086); 28 acres held by 8 free men commended to Wulfgifu; 15 acres held by two free men, one commended to Wulfgifu; and 14 acres held by Sigeric, also commended to Wulfgifu (these three holdings in the hands of Robert Malet in 1086). There was three parts of a church in 1086 with 10 acres of free land. The present lords of Thornham are the Hennikers; it has been in the family since the mid-18thc.
South Hartismere benefice, i.e. Gislingham, Mellis, Stoke Ash, Thorndon with Rishangles, Thornham Magna, Thornham Parva, Thwaite and Wetheringsett cum Brockford.
It's been a while since I stepped into a church, so when I knew I was going to Suffolk at the weekend, I asked a friend whoch ones I should visit, and was told that this is one of the top churches in England, not just Suffolk.
Set a hundred yards or so from the main road that is chocked with traffic which runs between the county towns of Suffolk and Norfolk, it is down a lovely quiet lane, past some grand large houses, and set back from the road in a small churchyard is St Mary.
You enter through a small Norman doorway, into a body of a small and simple church, bt one filled with delights.
----------------------------------------------
From the moment that you see it across the fields, you know that St Mary is something special. At first the silhouette perhaps, or a stain of gold that resolves as you approach into a solid little Norman church. The thatched roof is charming, and set against is a small square tower, also crowned in thatch. There is a stubborn timelessness about it, a silent witness to long centuries. There isn’t really a village, and St Mary sits lonely in the fields. At night it is floodlit and floats above the darkness. On winter days, the low light catches its honeyed walls across ploughed furrows. In summer, the entrancing trees gather, a setting for a diadem.
This has always been a special place for me. I was captivated at an early stage of my life in Suffolk. And it was while visiting here in late 1998 that I first got the idea for this website, and decided to do it. Thornham Parva was the first entry. In common with most of the very earliest entries, it wasn’t terribly good – I hadn’t even taken any photographs.
But that was an excuse to return again and again, and when this website was featured on BBC Television’s Songs of Praise in 2000, the interview was recorded here at St Mary. They filmed me cycling the narrow lanes round about in the sub-zero temperatures of late-January; if anything, it was even colder inside the church, and my breath clouded the air as I became quite possibly the first person ever to say the Hail Mary on prime-time television.
Thornham Parva, of course, isn’t just special to me. It is one of the most remarkable churches in East Anglia, a treasure house, an aesthetic pleasure, a delight. It is a perfect antidote to the triumphalism of nearby Eye, an intensely rural collision of historical circumstances that have left us a moving and coherent document of our Suffolk past. When Cautley’s revising editors came this way in 1975 they found the church in a bit of a state, and even feared for its future. That it is now the perfect model of a well-cared-for English parish church is a tribute to the energy and enthusiasm of the tiny handful of local parishioners who have nursed it back to health.
The church gets a fair number of visitors, because its fame has spread far and wide. As an example, I popped in here a few years back with my daughter. She was about five years old at the time, and without me noticing she signed the visitors book with our full address (not something I would normally advise). Within a fortnight, I had received a nice postcard from Israel, from a user of this site who had spotted the entry in the visitors book. It is not surprising that the church does get visitors from all over the world, because St Mary is worth seeing, and worth going to see. In particular, it has, not one, but two astonishing survivals. If they were in the Victoria and Albert Museum you would willingly travel to London to see them, and pay handsomely for doing so. And yet here they are, in the fields that punctuate the Thornham woods, in a church which is open every day.
You step directly down into the church from a small Norman doorway in the north side. A gorgeous 18th century gallery curves above you – there’s no other like it in Suffolk. It was made tiny, to fit in this tiny space. Unfortunately, the stairway is now kept locked so, unless you contact a churchwarden first, you can’t see the clever way the carpenter engineered benches that open and close over the gangway to allow more seating space. The gallery is a reminder that St Mary was the church of the ordinary people; The neighbpouring village is Thorenham Magna, and the local big house Thornham Hall, the home of the Hennikers, is beside the church at Thornham Magna. However, it was at the big house, or more accurately in one of its barns, that in the 1920s was found and donated to this church the remarkable Thornham retable. It was restored in the early years of this century, and returned to St Mary, now standing proud behind alarmed glass.
The retable is only part of a much larger altarpiece that probably once stood in the Priory at Thetford in Norfolk. The rest of the piece can be found in the Musee de Cluny in Paris. The retable was rescued and hidden after the Anglican Reformation destroyed the priory, along with so many of England’s treasures. Perhaps it was taken by recusant Catholics to use in their devotions. More likely, it was simply rescued because it is beautiful. From left to right, the figures are St Dominic (Thetford was a Dominican Priory); St Catherine; St John the Baptist; St Paul; a rood group of the Blessed Virgin, Christ and St John; St Peter; St Edmund; St Margaret; St Peter Martyr (another Dominican). The retable dates from the height of the Decorated period, in the decades before the Black Death. They are probably the most alive, and lively, medieval figures in Suffolk; St Catherine in particular looks as if she is stepping through an archway from dancing in a garden.
As if the retable were not enough, the walls of St Mary are lined with some of Suffolk’s most fascinating wall-paintings. They rank with those at Wissington, and date broadly from the early years of the 14th century, and are in two ranges; on the south wall is the story of the early years of Christ. On the north wall is the martyrdom of St Edmund. This is amazingly rare; fragments survive not far off at Troston, but there is only one other sequence of the martyrdom surviving in the whole of the Kingdom.
Both sequences are organised chronologically from right to left. This may seem awkward, but effectively they start in the south west corner of the church and continue anti-clockwise around to the north-west corner. Unfortunately, the paintings on the west wall are now lost to us, behind the gallery.
On the south side, it is reasonable to assume that the very first painting, on the south side of the west wall, was an Annunciation – the angel appearing to Mary. This is lost. A fragment of the next frame survives, just poking up above the south end of the gallery. This is the Visitation, and we see Mary embracing her cousin Elizabeth. The Visitation was a very important part of medieval devotions, because of the way it balances and connects with the Assumption; the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, on August 15th, was one of the most significant feast days in the English medieval calendar, and the Assumption was probably the dedication of the majority of Suffolk churches. The other images in the sequence are clearer. We see the angel appearing to the shepherds, and then Christ sits on his mothers lap while the shepherds adore him. Note the way we have lost the adoring figures because of the later punching through of a window. Similarly, the next frame, the Presentation in the temple, has also suffered from fenestration. We often talk about Victorian vandalism of medieval churches, but here is a prime example of destruction caused by 15th century ‘restoration’.
What was the point of this sequence? A lot of nonsense is talked about wallpaintings and stained glass being ‘the poor mans Bible’ for peasants who couldn’t read. This analysis suggests that they were destroyed during the 16th century Anglican Reformation because ‘they were no longer needed’. In fact, the Anglicans destroyed them because they were Catholic devotional tools – the wall paintings on the south side here form a rosary sequence, pictures for meditation while saying prayers with the aid of rosary beads. Often this was done during Mass. If the Anglicans were to turn our churches into congregational preaching houses, the wall paintings had to go.
Intriguingly, the wall paintings here may have been whitewashed even before there were theological reasons for doing so. Most of the windows that punch through the wall paintings date from the 15th century, not the 16th. Could there have been a general redecoration at this time? Whichever, they were whitewashed, to be rediscovered in a kinder, gentler age. When the ranges here were uncovered by the Victorians, the south range was easily recognisable. But the north range wasn’t. For many years, it was thought to represent the martyrdom of St Catherine, because of the large wheel above the way you came in. It was only at the time the paintings were restored in the late 1970s that it became clear that here was something much more exciting.
The sequence begins at the eastern end of the range, and you can click on the images below to enlarge them. We see Edmund fleeing the Viking attack on a town, possibly Rendlesham, home of the Wuffings, the East Anglian royal family. The actual martyrdom is lost because of another of those great windows, but we next see Edmund’s decapitated head being put back on the body by a group of monks. Then, the body is carried off to its shrine at Bedricsworth (soon to become St Edmundsbury) while the wolf that found and guarded the head looks on. The final image on the north wall shows the wheel of a bullock cart crossing a bridge – delightfully, the bridge is represented by the arch of the doorway. This depicts an event that happened some time after. St Edmund’s body (by now sanctified and canonised) is being taken away to escape a later assault by Vikings. It approaches a bridge that is simply too narrow to allow the cart to pass. Miraculously, the cart crosses the bridge, and the Vikings are foiled.
Perhaps there was a final image on the north side of the west wall. Perhaps it showed the fabulous shrine at Bury itself. We can never be sure.
Although it is sad that we have lost so much of both sequences because of later alterations, it has to be said that the walls of this church are beautiful. The late medieval windows, which include some excellent 20th century glass by Lawrence Whistler, the paraffin lamps, the memorials to churchwardens, all add rather than detract. The screen is tiny and over-restored, but you can still see the sawn-off ends of the rood beam and the floor of the rood loft.
Standing in the rood screen, the retable behind you for a moment, the full beauty of the gallery can be seen, and above it a circular Saxon window. You can step outside and see how it is hidden by the tower. The tower itself is surprisingly late; we are told that in the 1480s it was the work of Richard Cutting and John Mason. Apparently, they were sued for defective workmanship, but it still appears to be standing.
The graveyard is an interesting one. As well as several significant musicians, it includes the grave of the great 20th century architect Basil Spence, designer of Coventry Cathedral, the Kensington and Chelsea barracks in London, and Britains best university campus, the University of Sussex - to name but three. Ironically, his 1980s gravestone appears to be wearing away. One hopes he used better materials for his buildings.
Simon Knott, 1998, rewritten 2003, revised February 2009
www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/thornhamentry.htm
----------------------------------------
The Thornhams, Magna and Parva, flank Thornham Hall and its park. Until the end of the 19thc. the estate boasted a hall, Tudor with an 18thc. facade, surrounded by an extensive park. Most of the hall was demolishedc.1900, and the rest was destroyed by fire in the late 1940s. The present hall is modern, and the estate has been converted for use as a field centre, a commercial market garden and a site for small businesses. Excavations in the estate have provided evidence of continuous occupation in the area from the Neolithic period to the present. The surrounding landscape is flattish and given over to arable cultivation. Thornham Parva lies to the N of the hall, some 2 miles W of Eye in central North Suffolk. The settlement is dispersed and sparsely populated with no real centre apart from the church, which lies just off the road from Thornham Magna and the Hall.
St Mary's has a nave and chancel in one, covered with a thatched roof, and a low W tower with a thatched pyramid roof. The church is of flint with ashlar dressings. The nave is apparently 12thc., with N and S doorways and a S window surviving from that period, but a round window visible in the interior W wall of the nave is said to be late Anglo-Saxon by Cautley. A flowing tracery window has been added on the S wall, and 15thc. windows have been inserted towards the W end. There is no chancel arch, and two Y-tracery windows on the lateral walls towards the E suggest a date ofc.1300 for the chancel. The E window is three-light reticulated, and there is a 15thc. S window. The tower is of knapped flint with no buttresses; it has a tall plinth course and a 15thc. main W window. Its E quoins are of brick, as are the upper windows, except for their ashlar ogee heads, suggesting an 18thc. date for the top of the tower. St Mary's is celebrated as the home of a 14thc. retable, probably painted for the Dominican house at Thetford. It was discovered in a stable loft at Thornham Hall in 1927 and given to the church by Lord Henniker. Romanesque work recorded here is found on the two nave doorways and the S nave window.
Thornham Parva was held by Robert Malet in 1086. There were various small parcels here before the Conquest: 7 acres held by two free men commended to Eadric (these were held by Robert’s mother in 1086); 28 acres held by 8 free men commended to Wulfgifu; 15 acres held by two free men, one commended to Wulfgifu; and 14 acres held by Sigeric, also commended to Wulfgifu (these three holdings in the hands of Robert Malet in 1086). There was three parts of a church in 1086 with 10 acres of free land. The present lords of Thornham are the Hennikers; it has been in the family since the mid-18thc.
South Hartismere benefice, i.e. Gislingham, Mellis, Stoke Ash, Thorndon with Rishangles, Thornham Magna, Thornham Parva, Thwaite and Wetheringsett cum Brockford.
It's been a while since I stepped into a church, so when I knew I was going to Suffolk at the weekend, I asked a friend whoch ones I should visit, and was told that this is one of the top churches in England, not just Suffolk.
Set a hundred yards or so from the main road that is chocked with traffic which runs between the county towns of Suffolk and Norfolk, it is down a lovely quiet lane, past some grand large houses, and set back from the road in a small churchyard is St Mary.
You enter through a small Norman doorway, into a body of a small and simple church, bt one filled with delights.
----------------------------------------------
From the moment that you see it across the fields, you know that St Mary is something special. At first the silhouette perhaps, or a stain of gold that resolves as you approach into a solid little Norman church. The thatched roof is charming, and set against is a small square tower, also crowned in thatch. There is a stubborn timelessness about it, a silent witness to long centuries. There isn’t really a village, and St Mary sits lonely in the fields. At night it is floodlit and floats above the darkness. On winter days, the low light catches its honeyed walls across ploughed furrows. In summer, the entrancing trees gather, a setting for a diadem.
This has always been a special place for me. I was captivated at an early stage of my life in Suffolk. And it was while visiting here in late 1998 that I first got the idea for this website, and decided to do it. Thornham Parva was the first entry. In common with most of the very earliest entries, it wasn’t terribly good – I hadn’t even taken any photographs.
But that was an excuse to return again and again, and when this website was featured on BBC Television’s Songs of Praise in 2000, the interview was recorded here at St Mary. They filmed me cycling the narrow lanes round about in the sub-zero temperatures of late-January; if anything, it was even colder inside the church, and my breath clouded the air as I became quite possibly the first person ever to say the Hail Mary on prime-time television.
Thornham Parva, of course, isn’t just special to me. It is one of the most remarkable churches in East Anglia, a treasure house, an aesthetic pleasure, a delight. It is a perfect antidote to the triumphalism of nearby Eye, an intensely rural collision of historical circumstances that have left us a moving and coherent document of our Suffolk past. When Cautley’s revising editors came this way in 1975 they found the church in a bit of a state, and even feared for its future. That it is now the perfect model of a well-cared-for English parish church is a tribute to the energy and enthusiasm of the tiny handful of local parishioners who have nursed it back to health.
The church gets a fair number of visitors, because its fame has spread far and wide. As an example, I popped in here a few years back with my daughter. She was about five years old at the time, and without me noticing she signed the visitors book with our full address (not something I would normally advise). Within a fortnight, I had received a nice postcard from Israel, from a user of this site who had spotted the entry in the visitors book. It is not surprising that the church does get visitors from all over the world, because St Mary is worth seeing, and worth going to see. In particular, it has, not one, but two astonishing survivals. If they were in the Victoria and Albert Museum you would willingly travel to London to see them, and pay handsomely for doing so. And yet here they are, in the fields that punctuate the Thornham woods, in a church which is open every day.
You step directly down into the church from a small Norman doorway in the north side. A gorgeous 18th century gallery curves above you – there’s no other like it in Suffolk. It was made tiny, to fit in this tiny space. Unfortunately, the stairway is now kept locked so, unless you contact a churchwarden first, you can’t see the clever way the carpenter engineered benches that open and close over the gangway to allow more seating space. The gallery is a reminder that St Mary was the church of the ordinary people; The neighbpouring village is Thorenham Magna, and the local big house Thornham Hall, the home of the Hennikers, is beside the church at Thornham Magna. However, it was at the big house, or more accurately in one of its barns, that in the 1920s was found and donated to this church the remarkable Thornham retable. It was restored in the early years of this century, and returned to St Mary, now standing proud behind alarmed glass.
The retable is only part of a much larger altarpiece that probably once stood in the Priory at Thetford in Norfolk. The rest of the piece can be found in the Musee de Cluny in Paris. The retable was rescued and hidden after the Anglican Reformation destroyed the priory, along with so many of England’s treasures. Perhaps it was taken by recusant Catholics to use in their devotions. More likely, it was simply rescued because it is beautiful. From left to right, the figures are St Dominic (Thetford was a Dominican Priory); St Catherine; St John the Baptist; St Paul; a rood group of the Blessed Virgin, Christ and St John; St Peter; St Edmund; St Margaret; St Peter Martyr (another Dominican). The retable dates from the height of the Decorated period, in the decades before the Black Death. They are probably the most alive, and lively, medieval figures in Suffolk; St Catherine in particular looks as if she is stepping through an archway from dancing in a garden.
As if the retable were not enough, the walls of St Mary are lined with some of Suffolk’s most fascinating wall-paintings. They rank with those at Wissington, and date broadly from the early years of the 14th century, and are in two ranges; on the south wall is the story of the early years of Christ. On the north wall is the martyrdom of St Edmund. This is amazingly rare; fragments survive not far off at Troston, but there is only one other sequence of the martyrdom surviving in the whole of the Kingdom.
Both sequences are organised chronologically from right to left. This may seem awkward, but effectively they start in the south west corner of the church and continue anti-clockwise around to the north-west corner. Unfortunately, the paintings on the west wall are now lost to us, behind the gallery.
On the south side, it is reasonable to assume that the very first painting, on the south side of the west wall, was an Annunciation – the angel appearing to Mary. This is lost. A fragment of the next frame survives, just poking up above the south end of the gallery. This is the Visitation, and we see Mary embracing her cousin Elizabeth. The Visitation was a very important part of medieval devotions, because of the way it balances and connects with the Assumption; the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, on August 15th, was one of the most significant feast days in the English medieval calendar, and the Assumption was probably the dedication of the majority of Suffolk churches. The other images in the sequence are clearer. We see the angel appearing to the shepherds, and then Christ sits on his mothers lap while the shepherds adore him. Note the way we have lost the adoring figures because of the later punching through of a window. Similarly, the next frame, the Presentation in the temple, has also suffered from fenestration. We often talk about Victorian vandalism of medieval churches, but here is a prime example of destruction caused by 15th century ‘restoration’.
What was the point of this sequence? A lot of nonsense is talked about wallpaintings and stained glass being ‘the poor mans Bible’ for peasants who couldn’t read. This analysis suggests that they were destroyed during the 16th century Anglican Reformation because ‘they were no longer needed’. In fact, the Anglicans destroyed them because they were Catholic devotional tools – the wall paintings on the south side here form a rosary sequence, pictures for meditation while saying prayers with the aid of rosary beads. Often this was done during Mass. If the Anglicans were to turn our churches into congregational preaching houses, the wall paintings had to go.
Intriguingly, the wall paintings here may have been whitewashed even before there were theological reasons for doing so. Most of the windows that punch through the wall paintings date from the 15th century, not the 16th. Could there have been a general redecoration at this time? Whichever, they were whitewashed, to be rediscovered in a kinder, gentler age. When the ranges here were uncovered by the Victorians, the south range was easily recognisable. But the north range wasn’t. For many years, it was thought to represent the martyrdom of St Catherine, because of the large wheel above the way you came in. It was only at the time the paintings were restored in the late 1970s that it became clear that here was something much more exciting.
The sequence begins at the eastern end of the range, and you can click on the images below to enlarge them. We see Edmund fleeing the Viking attack on a town, possibly Rendlesham, home of the Wuffings, the East Anglian royal family. The actual martyrdom is lost because of another of those great windows, but we next see Edmund’s decapitated head being put back on the body by a group of monks. Then, the body is carried off to its shrine at Bedricsworth (soon to become St Edmundsbury) while the wolf that found and guarded the head looks on. The final image on the north wall shows the wheel of a bullock cart crossing a bridge – delightfully, the bridge is represented by the arch of the doorway. This depicts an event that happened some time after. St Edmund’s body (by now sanctified and canonised) is being taken away to escape a later assault by Vikings. It approaches a bridge that is simply too narrow to allow the cart to pass. Miraculously, the cart crosses the bridge, and the Vikings are foiled.
Perhaps there was a final image on the north side of the west wall. Perhaps it showed the fabulous shrine at Bury itself. We can never be sure.
Although it is sad that we have lost so much of both sequences because of later alterations, it has to be said that the walls of this church are beautiful. The late medieval windows, which include some excellent 20th century glass by Lawrence Whistler, the paraffin lamps, the memorials to churchwardens, all add rather than detract. The screen is tiny and over-restored, but you can still see the sawn-off ends of the rood beam and the floor of the rood loft.
Standing in the rood screen, the retable behind you for a moment, the full beauty of the gallery can be seen, and above it a circular Saxon window. You can step outside and see how it is hidden by the tower. The tower itself is surprisingly late; we are told that in the 1480s it was the work of Richard Cutting and John Mason. Apparently, they were sued for defective workmanship, but it still appears to be standing.
The graveyard is an interesting one. As well as several significant musicians, it includes the grave of the great 20th century architect Basil Spence, designer of Coventry Cathedral, the Kensington and Chelsea barracks in London, and Britains best university campus, the University of Sussex - to name but three. Ironically, his 1980s gravestone appears to be wearing away. One hopes he used better materials for his buildings.
Simon Knott, 1998, rewritten 2003, revised February 2009
www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/thornhamentry.htm
----------------------------------------
The Thornhams, Magna and Parva, flank Thornham Hall and its park. Until the end of the 19thc. the estate boasted a hall, Tudor with an 18thc. facade, surrounded by an extensive park. Most of the hall was demolishedc.1900, and the rest was destroyed by fire in the late 1940s. The present hall is modern, and the estate has been converted for use as a field centre, a commercial market garden and a site for small businesses. Excavations in the estate have provided evidence of continuous occupation in the area from the Neolithic period to the present. The surrounding landscape is flattish and given over to arable cultivation. Thornham Parva lies to the N of the hall, some 2 miles W of Eye in central North Suffolk. The settlement is dispersed and sparsely populated with no real centre apart from the church, which lies just off the road from Thornham Magna and the Hall.
St Mary's has a nave and chancel in one, covered with a thatched roof, and a low W tower with a thatched pyramid roof. The church is of flint with ashlar dressings. The nave is apparently 12thc., with N and S doorways and a S window surviving from that period, but a round window visible in the interior W wall of the nave is said to be late Anglo-Saxon by Cautley. A flowing tracery window has been added on the S wall, and 15thc. windows have been inserted towards the W end. There is no chancel arch, and two Y-tracery windows on the lateral walls towards the E suggest a date ofc.1300 for the chancel. The E window is three-light reticulated, and there is a 15thc. S window. The tower is of knapped flint with no buttresses; it has a tall plinth course and a 15thc. main W window. Its E quoins are of brick, as are the upper windows, except for their ashlar ogee heads, suggesting an 18thc. date for the top of the tower. St Mary's is celebrated as the home of a 14thc. retable, probably painted for the Dominican house at Thetford. It was discovered in a stable loft at Thornham Hall in 1927 and given to the church by Lord Henniker. Romanesque work recorded here is found on the two nave doorways and the S nave window.
Thornham Parva was held by Robert Malet in 1086. There were various small parcels here before the Conquest: 7 acres held by two free men commended to Eadric (these were held by Robert’s mother in 1086); 28 acres held by 8 free men commended to Wulfgifu; 15 acres held by two free men, one commended to Wulfgifu; and 14 acres held by Sigeric, also commended to Wulfgifu (these three holdings in the hands of Robert Malet in 1086). There was three parts of a church in 1086 with 10 acres of free land. The present lords of Thornham are the Hennikers; it has been in the family since the mid-18thc.
South Hartismere benefice, i.e. Gislingham, Mellis, Stoke Ash, Thorndon with Rishangles, Thornham Magna, Thornham Parva, Thwaite and Wetheringsett cum Brockford.
It's been a while since I stepped into a church, so when I knew I was going to Suffolk at the weekend, I asked a friend whoch ones I should visit, and was told that this is one of the top churches in England, not just Suffolk.
Set a hundred yards or so from the main road that is chocked with traffic which runs between the county towns of Suffolk and Norfolk, it is down a lovely quiet lane, past some grand large houses, and set back from the road in a small churchyard is St Mary.
You enter through a small Norman doorway, into a body of a small and simple church, bt one filled with delights.
----------------------------------------------
From the moment that you see it across the fields, you know that St Mary is something special. At first the silhouette perhaps, or a stain of gold that resolves as you approach into a solid little Norman church. The thatched roof is charming, and set against is a small square tower, also crowned in thatch. There is a stubborn timelessness about it, a silent witness to long centuries. There isn’t really a village, and St Mary sits lonely in the fields. At night it is floodlit and floats above the darkness. On winter days, the low light catches its honeyed walls across ploughed furrows. In summer, the entrancing trees gather, a setting for a diadem.
This has always been a special place for me. I was captivated at an early stage of my life in Suffolk. And it was while visiting here in late 1998 that I first got the idea for this website, and decided to do it. Thornham Parva was the first entry. In common with most of the very earliest entries, it wasn’t terribly good – I hadn’t even taken any photographs.
But that was an excuse to return again and again, and when this website was featured on BBC Television’s Songs of Praise in 2000, the interview was recorded here at St Mary. They filmed me cycling the narrow lanes round about in the sub-zero temperatures of late-January; if anything, it was even colder inside the church, and my breath clouded the air as I became quite possibly the first person ever to say the Hail Mary on prime-time television.
Thornham Parva, of course, isn’t just special to me. It is one of the most remarkable churches in East Anglia, a treasure house, an aesthetic pleasure, a delight. It is a perfect antidote to the triumphalism of nearby Eye, an intensely rural collision of historical circumstances that have left us a moving and coherent document of our Suffolk past. When Cautley’s revising editors came this way in 1975 they found the church in a bit of a state, and even feared for its future. That it is now the perfect model of a well-cared-for English parish church is a tribute to the energy and enthusiasm of the tiny handful of local parishioners who have nursed it back to health.
The church gets a fair number of visitors, because its fame has spread far and wide. As an example, I popped in here a few years back with my daughter. She was about five years old at the time, and without me noticing she signed the visitors book with our full address (not something I would normally advise). Within a fortnight, I had received a nice postcard from Israel, from a user of this site who had spotted the entry in the visitors book. It is not surprising that the church does get visitors from all over the world, because St Mary is worth seeing, and worth going to see. In particular, it has, not one, but two astonishing survivals. If they were in the Victoria and Albert Museum you would willingly travel to London to see them, and pay handsomely for doing so. And yet here they are, in the fields that punctuate the Thornham woods, in a church which is open every day.
You step directly down into the church from a small Norman doorway in the north side. A gorgeous 18th century gallery curves above you – there’s no other like it in Suffolk. It was made tiny, to fit in this tiny space. Unfortunately, the stairway is now kept locked so, unless you contact a churchwarden first, you can’t see the clever way the carpenter engineered benches that open and close over the gangway to allow more seating space. The gallery is a reminder that St Mary was the church of the ordinary people; The neighbpouring village is Thorenham Magna, and the local big house Thornham Hall, the home of the Hennikers, is beside the church at Thornham Magna. However, it was at the big house, or more accurately in one of its barns, that in the 1920s was found and donated to this church the remarkable Thornham retable. It was restored in the early years of this century, and returned to St Mary, now standing proud behind alarmed glass.
The retable is only part of a much larger altarpiece that probably once stood in the Priory at Thetford in Norfolk. The rest of the piece can be found in the Musee de Cluny in Paris. The retable was rescued and hidden after the Anglican Reformation destroyed the priory, along with so many of England’s treasures. Perhaps it was taken by recusant Catholics to use in their devotions. More likely, it was simply rescued because it is beautiful. From left to right, the figures are St Dominic (Thetford was a Dominican Priory); St Catherine; St John the Baptist; St Paul; a rood group of the Blessed Virgin, Christ and St John; St Peter; St Edmund; St Margaret; St Peter Martyr (another Dominican). The retable dates from the height of the Decorated period, in the decades before the Black Death. They are probably the most alive, and lively, medieval figures in Suffolk; St Catherine in particular looks as if she is stepping through an archway from dancing in a garden.
As if the retable were not enough, the walls of St Mary are lined with some of Suffolk’s most fascinating wall-paintings. They rank with those at Wissington, and date broadly from the early years of the 14th century, and are in two ranges; on the south wall is the story of the early years of Christ. On the north wall is the martyrdom of St Edmund. This is amazingly rare; fragments survive not far off at Troston, but there is only one other sequence of the martyrdom surviving in the whole of the Kingdom.
Both sequences are organised chronologically from right to left. This may seem awkward, but effectively they start in the south west corner of the church and continue anti-clockwise around to the north-west corner. Unfortunately, the paintings on the west wall are now lost to us, behind the gallery.
On the south side, it is reasonable to assume that the very first painting, on the south side of the west wall, was an Annunciation – the angel appearing to Mary. This is lost. A fragment of the next frame survives, just poking up above the south end of the gallery. This is the Visitation, and we see Mary embracing her cousin Elizabeth. The Visitation was a very important part of medieval devotions, because of the way it balances and connects with the Assumption; the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, on August 15th, was one of the most significant feast days in the English medieval calendar, and the Assumption was probably the dedication of the majority of Suffolk churches. The other images in the sequence are clearer. We see the angel appearing to the shepherds, and then Christ sits on his mothers lap while the shepherds adore him. Note the way we have lost the adoring figures because of the later punching through of a window. Similarly, the next frame, the Presentation in the temple, has also suffered from fenestration. We often talk about Victorian vandalism of medieval churches, but here is a prime example of destruction caused by 15th century ‘restoration’.
What was the point of this sequence? A lot of nonsense is talked about wallpaintings and stained glass being ‘the poor mans Bible’ for peasants who couldn’t read. This analysis suggests that they were destroyed during the 16th century Anglican Reformation because ‘they were no longer needed’. In fact, the Anglicans destroyed them because they were Catholic devotional tools – the wall paintings on the south side here form a rosary sequence, pictures for meditation while saying prayers with the aid of rosary beads. Often this was done during Mass. If the Anglicans were to turn our churches into congregational preaching houses, the wall paintings had to go.
Intriguingly, the wall paintings here may have been whitewashed even before there were theological reasons for doing so. Most of the windows that punch through the wall paintings date from the 15th century, not the 16th. Could there have been a general redecoration at this time? Whichever, they were whitewashed, to be rediscovered in a kinder, gentler age. When the ranges here were uncovered by the Victorians, the south range was easily recognisable. But the north range wasn’t. For many years, it was thought to represent the martyrdom of St Catherine, because of the large wheel above the way you came in. It was only at the time the paintings were restored in the late 1970s that it became clear that here was something much more exciting.
The sequence begins at the eastern end of the range, and you can click on the images below to enlarge them. We see Edmund fleeing the Viking attack on a town, possibly Rendlesham, home of the Wuffings, the East Anglian royal family. The actual martyrdom is lost because of another of those great windows, but we next see Edmund’s decapitated head being put back on the body by a group of monks. Then, the body is carried off to its shrine at Bedricsworth (soon to become St Edmundsbury) while the wolf that found and guarded the head looks on. The final image on the north wall shows the wheel of a bullock cart crossing a bridge – delightfully, the bridge is represented by the arch of the doorway. This depicts an event that happened some time after. St Edmund’s body (by now sanctified and canonised) is being taken away to escape a later assault by Vikings. It approaches a bridge that is simply too narrow to allow the cart to pass. Miraculously, the cart crosses the bridge, and the Vikings are foiled.
Perhaps there was a final image on the north side of the west wall. Perhaps it showed the fabulous shrine at Bury itself. We can never be sure.
Although it is sad that we have lost so much of both sequences because of later alterations, it has to be said that the walls of this church are beautiful. The late medieval windows, which include some excellent 20th century glass by Lawrence Whistler, the paraffin lamps, the memorials to churchwardens, all add rather than detract. The screen is tiny and over-restored, but you can still see the sawn-off ends of the rood beam and the floor of the rood loft.
Standing in the rood screen, the retable behind you for a moment, the full beauty of the gallery can be seen, and above it a circular Saxon window. You can step outside and see how it is hidden by the tower. The tower itself is surprisingly late; we are told that in the 1480s it was the work of Richard Cutting and John Mason. Apparently, they were sued for defective workmanship, but it still appears to be standing.
The graveyard is an interesting one. As well as several significant musicians, it includes the grave of the great 20th century architect Basil Spence, designer of Coventry Cathedral, the Kensington and Chelsea barracks in London, and Britains best university campus, the University of Sussex - to name but three. Ironically, his 1980s gravestone appears to be wearing away. One hopes he used better materials for his buildings.
Simon Knott, 1998, rewritten 2003, revised February 2009
www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/thornhamentry.htm
----------------------------------------
The Thornhams, Magna and Parva, flank Thornham Hall and its park. Until the end of the 19thc. the estate boasted a hall, Tudor with an 18thc. facade, surrounded by an extensive park. Most of the hall was demolishedc.1900, and the rest was destroyed by fire in the late 1940s. The present hall is modern, and the estate has been converted for use as a field centre, a commercial market garden and a site for small businesses. Excavations in the estate have provided evidence of continuous occupation in the area from the Neolithic period to the present. The surrounding landscape is flattish and given over to arable cultivation. Thornham Parva lies to the N of the hall, some 2 miles W of Eye in central North Suffolk. The settlement is dispersed and sparsely populated with no real centre apart from the church, which lies just off the road from Thornham Magna and the Hall.
St Mary's has a nave and chancel in one, covered with a thatched roof, and a low W tower with a thatched pyramid roof. The church is of flint with ashlar dressings. The nave is apparently 12thc., with N and S doorways and a S window surviving from that period, but a round window visible in the interior W wall of the nave is said to be late Anglo-Saxon by Cautley. A flowing tracery window has been added on the S wall, and 15thc. windows have been inserted towards the W end. There is no chancel arch, and two Y-tracery windows on the lateral walls towards the E suggest a date ofc.1300 for the chancel. The E window is three-light reticulated, and there is a 15thc. S window. The tower is of knapped flint with no buttresses; it has a tall plinth course and a 15thc. main W window. Its E quoins are of brick, as are the upper windows, except for their ashlar ogee heads, suggesting an 18thc. date for the top of the tower. St Mary's is celebrated as the home of a 14thc. retable, probably painted for the Dominican house at Thetford. It was discovered in a stable loft at Thornham Hall in 1927 and given to the church by Lord Henniker. Romanesque work recorded here is found on the two nave doorways and the S nave window.
Thornham Parva was held by Robert Malet in 1086. There were various small parcels here before the Conquest: 7 acres held by two free men commended to Eadric (these were held by Robert’s mother in 1086); 28 acres held by 8 free men commended to Wulfgifu; 15 acres held by two free men, one commended to Wulfgifu; and 14 acres held by Sigeric, also commended to Wulfgifu (these three holdings in the hands of Robert Malet in 1086). There was three parts of a church in 1086 with 10 acres of free land. The present lords of Thornham are the Hennikers; it has been in the family since the mid-18thc.
South Hartismere benefice, i.e. Gislingham, Mellis, Stoke Ash, Thorndon with Rishangles, Thornham Magna, Thornham Parva, Thwaite and Wetheringsett cum Brockford.
It's been a while since I stepped into a church, so when I knew I was going to Suffolk at the weekend, I asked a friend whoch ones I should visit, and was told that this is one of the top churches in England, not just Suffolk.
Set a hundred yards or so from the main road that is chocked with traffic which runs between the county towns of Suffolk and Norfolk, it is down a lovely quiet lane, past some grand large houses, and set back from the road in a small churchyard is St Mary.
You enter through a small Norman doorway, into a body of a small and simple church, bt one filled with delights.
----------------------------------------------
From the moment that you see it across the fields, you know that St Mary is something special. At first the silhouette perhaps, or a stain of gold that resolves as you approach into a solid little Norman church. The thatched roof is charming, and set against is a small square tower, also crowned in thatch. There is a stubborn timelessness about it, a silent witness to long centuries. There isn’t really a village, and St Mary sits lonely in the fields. At night it is floodlit and floats above the darkness. On winter days, the low light catches its honeyed walls across ploughed furrows. In summer, the entrancing trees gather, a setting for a diadem.
This has always been a special place for me. I was captivated at an early stage of my life in Suffolk. And it was while visiting here in late 1998 that I first got the idea for this website, and decided to do it. Thornham Parva was the first entry. In common with most of the very earliest entries, it wasn’t terribly good – I hadn’t even taken any photographs.
But that was an excuse to return again and again, and when this website was featured on BBC Television’s Songs of Praise in 2000, the interview was recorded here at St Mary. They filmed me cycling the narrow lanes round about in the sub-zero temperatures of late-January; if anything, it was even colder inside the church, and my breath clouded the air as I became quite possibly the first person ever to say the Hail Mary on prime-time television.
Thornham Parva, of course, isn’t just special to me. It is one of the most remarkable churches in East Anglia, a treasure house, an aesthetic pleasure, a delight. It is a perfect antidote to the triumphalism of nearby Eye, an intensely rural collision of historical circumstances that have left us a moving and coherent document of our Suffolk past. When Cautley’s revising editors came this way in 1975 they found the church in a bit of a state, and even feared for its future. That it is now the perfect model of a well-cared-for English parish church is a tribute to the energy and enthusiasm of the tiny handful of local parishioners who have nursed it back to health.
The church gets a fair number of visitors, because its fame has spread far and wide. As an example, I popped in here a few years back with my daughter. She was about five years old at the time, and without me noticing she signed the visitors book with our full address (not something I would normally advise). Within a fortnight, I had received a nice postcard from Israel, from a user of this site who had spotted the entry in the visitors book. It is not surprising that the church does get visitors from all over the world, because St Mary is worth seeing, and worth going to see. In particular, it has, not one, but two astonishing survivals. If they were in the Victoria and Albert Museum you would willingly travel to London to see them, and pay handsomely for doing so. And yet here they are, in the fields that punctuate the Thornham woods, in a church which is open every day.
You step directly down into the church from a small Norman doorway in the north side. A gorgeous 18th century gallery curves above you – there’s no other like it in Suffolk. It was made tiny, to fit in this tiny space. Unfortunately, the stairway is now kept locked so, unless you contact a churchwarden first, you can’t see the clever way the carpenter engineered benches that open and close over the gangway to allow more seating space. The gallery is a reminder that St Mary was the church of the ordinary people; The neighbpouring village is Thorenham Magna, and the local big house Thornham Hall, the home of the Hennikers, is beside the church at Thornham Magna. However, it was at the big house, or more accurately in one of its barns, that in the 1920s was found and donated to this church the remarkable Thornham retable. It was restored in the early years of this century, and returned to St Mary, now standing proud behind alarmed glass.
The retable is only part of a much larger altarpiece that probably once stood in the Priory at Thetford in Norfolk. The rest of the piece can be found in the Musee de Cluny in Paris. The retable was rescued and hidden after the Anglican Reformation destroyed the priory, along with so many of England’s treasures. Perhaps it was taken by recusant Catholics to use in their devotions. More likely, it was simply rescued because it is beautiful. From left to right, the figures are St Dominic (Thetford was a Dominican Priory); St Catherine; St John the Baptist; St Paul; a rood group of the Blessed Virgin, Christ and St John; St Peter; St Edmund; St Margaret; St Peter Martyr (another Dominican). The retable dates from the height of the Decorated period, in the decades before the Black Death. They are probably the most alive, and lively, medieval figures in Suffolk; St Catherine in particular looks as if she is stepping through an archway from dancing in a garden.
As if the retable were not enough, the walls of St Mary are lined with some of Suffolk’s most fascinating wall-paintings. They rank with those at Wissington, and date broadly from the early years of the 14th century, and are in two ranges; on the south wall is the story of the early years of Christ. On the north wall is the martyrdom of St Edmund. This is amazingly rare; fragments survive not far off at Troston, but there is only one other sequence of the martyrdom surviving in the whole of the Kingdom.
Both sequences are organised chronologically from right to left. This may seem awkward, but effectively they start in the south west corner of the church and continue anti-clockwise around to the north-west corner. Unfortunately, the paintings on the west wall are now lost to us, behind the gallery.
On the south side, it is reasonable to assume that the very first painting, on the south side of the west wall, was an Annunciation – the angel appearing to Mary. This is lost. A fragment of the next frame survives, just poking up above the south end of the gallery. This is the Visitation, and we see Mary embracing her cousin Elizabeth. The Visitation was a very important part of medieval devotions, because of the way it balances and connects with the Assumption; the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, on August 15th, was one of the most significant feast days in the English medieval calendar, and the Assumption was probably the dedication of the majority of Suffolk churches. The other images in the sequence are clearer. We see the angel appearing to the shepherds, and then Christ sits on his mothers lap while the shepherds adore him. Note the way we have lost the adoring figures because of the later punching through of a window. Similarly, the next frame, the Presentation in the temple, has also suffered from fenestration. We often talk about Victorian vandalism of medieval churches, but here is a prime example of destruction caused by 15th century ‘restoration’.
What was the point of this sequence? A lot of nonsense is talked about wallpaintings and stained glass being ‘the poor mans Bible’ for peasants who couldn’t read. This analysis suggests that they were destroyed during the 16th century Anglican Reformation because ‘they were no longer needed’. In fact, the Anglicans destroyed them because they were Catholic devotional tools – the wall paintings on the south side here form a rosary sequence, pictures for meditation while saying prayers with the aid of rosary beads. Often this was done during Mass. If the Anglicans were to turn our churches into congregational preaching houses, the wall paintings had to go.
Intriguingly, the wall paintings here may have been whitewashed even before there were theological reasons for doing so. Most of the windows that punch through the wall paintings date from the 15th century, not the 16th. Could there have been a general redecoration at this time? Whichever, they were whitewashed, to be rediscovered in a kinder, gentler age. When the ranges here were uncovered by the Victorians, the south range was easily recognisable. But the north range wasn’t. For many years, it was thought to represent the martyrdom of St Catherine, because of the large wheel above the way you came in. It was only at the time the paintings were restored in the late 1970s that it became clear that here was something much more exciting.
The sequence begins at the eastern end of the range, and you can click on the images below to enlarge them. We see Edmund fleeing the Viking attack on a town, possibly Rendlesham, home of the Wuffings, the East Anglian royal family. The actual martyrdom is lost because of another of those great windows, but we next see Edmund’s decapitated head being put back on the body by a group of monks. Then, the body is carried off to its shrine at Bedricsworth (soon to become St Edmundsbury) while the wolf that found and guarded the head looks on. The final image on the north wall shows the wheel of a bullock cart crossing a bridge – delightfully, the bridge is represented by the arch of the doorway. This depicts an event that happened some time after. St Edmund’s body (by now sanctified and canonised) is being taken away to escape a later assault by Vikings. It approaches a bridge that is simply too narrow to allow the cart to pass. Miraculously, the cart crosses the bridge, and the Vikings are foiled.
Perhaps there was a final image on the north side of the west wall. Perhaps it showed the fabulous shrine at Bury itself. We can never be sure.
Although it is sad that we have lost so much of both sequences because of later alterations, it has to be said that the walls of this church are beautiful. The late medieval windows, which include some excellent 20th century glass by Lawrence Whistler, the paraffin lamps, the memorials to churchwardens, all add rather than detract. The screen is tiny and over-restored, but you can still see the sawn-off ends of the rood beam and the floor of the rood loft.
Standing in the rood screen, the retable behind you for a moment, the full beauty of the gallery can be seen, and above it a circular Saxon window. You can step outside and see how it is hidden by the tower. The tower itself is surprisingly late; we are told that in the 1480s it was the work of Richard Cutting and John Mason. Apparently, they were sued for defective workmanship, but it still appears to be standing.
The graveyard is an interesting one. As well as several significant musicians, it includes the grave of the great 20th century architect Basil Spence, designer of Coventry Cathedral, the Kensington and Chelsea barracks in London, and Britains best university campus, the University of Sussex - to name but three. Ironically, his 1980s gravestone appears to be wearing away. One hopes he used better materials for his buildings.
Simon Knott, 1998, rewritten 2003, revised February 2009
www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/thornhamentry.htm
----------------------------------------
The Thornhams, Magna and Parva, flank Thornham Hall and its park. Until the end of the 19thc. the estate boasted a hall, Tudor with an 18thc. facade, surrounded by an extensive park. Most of the hall was demolishedc.1900, and the rest was destroyed by fire in the late 1940s. The present hall is modern, and the estate has been converted for use as a field centre, a commercial market garden and a site for small businesses. Excavations in the estate have provided evidence of continuous occupation in the area from the Neolithic period to the present. The surrounding landscape is flattish and given over to arable cultivation. Thornham Parva lies to the N of the hall, some 2 miles W of Eye in central North Suffolk. The settlement is dispersed and sparsely populated with no real centre apart from the church, which lies just off the road from Thornham Magna and the Hall.
St Mary's has a nave and chancel in one, covered with a thatched roof, and a low W tower with a thatched pyramid roof. The church is of flint with ashlar dressings. The nave is apparently 12thc., with N and S doorways and a S window surviving from that period, but a round window visible in the interior W wall of the nave is said to be late Anglo-Saxon by Cautley. A flowing tracery window has been added on the S wall, and 15thc. windows have been inserted towards the W end. There is no chancel arch, and two Y-tracery windows on the lateral walls towards the E suggest a date ofc.1300 for the chancel. The E window is three-light reticulated, and there is a 15thc. S window. The tower is of knapped flint with no buttresses; it has a tall plinth course and a 15thc. main W window. Its E quoins are of brick, as are the upper windows, except for their ashlar ogee heads, suggesting an 18thc. date for the top of the tower. St Mary's is celebrated as the home of a 14thc. retable, probably painted for the Dominican house at Thetford. It was discovered in a stable loft at Thornham Hall in 1927 and given to the church by Lord Henniker. Romanesque work recorded here is found on the two nave doorways and the S nave window.
Thornham Parva was held by Robert Malet in 1086. There were various small parcels here before the Conquest: 7 acres held by two free men commended to Eadric (these were held by Robert’s mother in 1086); 28 acres held by 8 free men commended to Wulfgifu; 15 acres held by two free men, one commended to Wulfgifu; and 14 acres held by Sigeric, also commended to Wulfgifu (these three holdings in the hands of Robert Malet in 1086). There was three parts of a church in 1086 with 10 acres of free land. The present lords of Thornham are the Hennikers; it has been in the family since the mid-18thc.
South Hartismere benefice, i.e. Gislingham, Mellis, Stoke Ash, Thorndon with Rishangles, Thornham Magna, Thornham Parva, Thwaite and Wetheringsett cum Brockford.
It's been a while since I stepped into a church, so when I knew I was going to Suffolk at the weekend, I asked a friend whoch ones I should visit, and was told that this is one of the top churches in England, not just Suffolk.
Set a hundred yards or so from the main road that is chocked with traffic which runs between the county towns of Suffolk and Norfolk, it is down a lovely quiet lane, past some grand large houses, and set back from the road in a small churchyard is St Mary.
You enter through a small Norman doorway, into a body of a small and simple church, bt one filled with delights.
----------------------------------------------
From the moment that you see it across the fields, you know that St Mary is something special. At first the silhouette perhaps, or a stain of gold that resolves as you approach into a solid little Norman church. The thatched roof is charming, and set against is a small square tower, also crowned in thatch. There is a stubborn timelessness about it, a silent witness to long centuries. There isn’t really a village, and St Mary sits lonely in the fields. At night it is floodlit and floats above the darkness. On winter days, the low light catches its honeyed walls across ploughed furrows. In summer, the entrancing trees gather, a setting for a diadem.
This has always been a special place for me. I was captivated at an early stage of my life in Suffolk. And it was while visiting here in late 1998 that I first got the idea for this website, and decided to do it. Thornham Parva was the first entry. In common with most of the very earliest entries, it wasn’t terribly good – I hadn’t even taken any photographs.
But that was an excuse to return again and again, and when this website was featured on BBC Television’s Songs of Praise in 2000, the interview was recorded here at St Mary. They filmed me cycling the narrow lanes round about in the sub-zero temperatures of late-January; if anything, it was even colder inside the church, and my breath clouded the air as I became quite possibly the first person ever to say the Hail Mary on prime-time television.
Thornham Parva, of course, isn’t just special to me. It is one of the most remarkable churches in East Anglia, a treasure house, an aesthetic pleasure, a delight. It is a perfect antidote to the triumphalism of nearby Eye, an intensely rural collision of historical circumstances that have left us a moving and coherent document of our Suffolk past. When Cautley’s revising editors came this way in 1975 they found the church in a bit of a state, and even feared for its future. That it is now the perfect model of a well-cared-for English parish church is a tribute to the energy and enthusiasm of the tiny handful of local parishioners who have nursed it back to health.
The church gets a fair number of visitors, because its fame has spread far and wide. As an example, I popped in here a few years back with my daughter. She was about five years old at the time, and without me noticing she signed the visitors book with our full address (not something I would normally advise). Within a fortnight, I had received a nice postcard from Israel, from a user of this site who had spotted the entry in the visitors book. It is not surprising that the church does get visitors from all over the world, because St Mary is worth seeing, and worth going to see. In particular, it has, not one, but two astonishing survivals. If they were in the Victoria and Albert Museum you would willingly travel to London to see them, and pay handsomely for doing so. And yet here they are, in the fields that punctuate the Thornham woods, in a church which is open every day.
You step directly down into the church from a small Norman doorway in the north side. A gorgeous 18th century gallery curves above you – there’s no other like it in Suffolk. It was made tiny, to fit in this tiny space. Unfortunately, the stairway is now kept locked so, unless you contact a churchwarden first, you can’t see the clever way the carpenter engineered benches that open and close over the gangway to allow more seating space. The gallery is a reminder that St Mary was the church of the ordinary people; The neighbpouring village is Thorenham Magna, and the local big house Thornham Hall, the home of the Hennikers, is beside the church at Thornham Magna. However, it was at the big house, or more accurately in one of its barns, that in the 1920s was found and donated to this church the remarkable Thornham retable. It was restored in the early years of this century, and returned to St Mary, now standing proud behind alarmed glass.
The retable is only part of a much larger altarpiece that probably once stood in the Priory at Thetford in Norfolk. The rest of the piece can be found in the Musee de Cluny in Paris. The retable was rescued and hidden after the Anglican Reformation destroyed the priory, along with so many of England’s treasures. Perhaps it was taken by recusant Catholics to use in their devotions. More likely, it was simply rescued because it is beautiful. From left to right, the figures are St Dominic (Thetford was a Dominican Priory); St Catherine; St John the Baptist; St Paul; a rood group of the Blessed Virgin, Christ and St John; St Peter; St Edmund; St Margaret; St Peter Martyr (another Dominican). The retable dates from the height of the Decorated period, in the decades before the Black Death. They are probably the most alive, and lively, medieval figures in Suffolk; St Catherine in particular looks as if she is stepping through an archway from dancing in a garden.
As if the retable were not enough, the walls of St Mary are lined with some of Suffolk’s most fascinating wall-paintings. They rank with those at Wissington, and date broadly from the early years of the 14th century, and are in two ranges; on the south wall is the story of the early years of Christ. On the north wall is the martyrdom of St Edmund. This is amazingly rare; fragments survive not far off at Troston, but there is only one other sequence of the martyrdom surviving in the whole of the Kingdom.
Both sequences are organised chronologically from right to left. This may seem awkward, but effectively they start in the south west corner of the church and continue anti-clockwise around to the north-west corner. Unfortunately, the paintings on the west wall are now lost to us, behind the gallery.
On the south side, it is reasonable to assume that the very first painting, on the south side of the west wall, was an Annunciation – the angel appearing to Mary. This is lost. A fragment of the next frame survives, just poking up above the south end of the gallery. This is the Visitation, and we see Mary embracing her cousin Elizabeth. The Visitation was a very important part of medieval devotions, because of the way it balances and connects with the Assumption; the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, on August 15th, was one of the most significant feast days in the English medieval calendar, and the Assumption was probably the dedication of the majority of Suffolk churches. The other images in the sequence are clearer. We see the angel appearing to the shepherds, and then Christ sits on his mothers lap while the shepherds adore him. Note the way we have lost the adoring figures because of the later punching through of a window. Similarly, the next frame, the Presentation in the temple, has also suffered from fenestration. We often talk about Victorian vandalism of medieval churches, but here is a prime example of destruction caused by 15th century ‘restoration’.
What was the point of this sequence? A lot of nonsense is talked about wallpaintings and stained glass being ‘the poor mans Bible’ for peasants who couldn’t read. This analysis suggests that they were destroyed during the 16th century Anglican Reformation because ‘they were no longer needed’. In fact, the Anglicans destroyed them because they were Catholic devotional tools – the wall paintings on the south side here form a rosary sequence, pictures for meditation while saying prayers with the aid of rosary beads. Often this was done during Mass. If the Anglicans were to turn our churches into congregational preaching houses, the wall paintings had to go.
Intriguingly, the wall paintings here may have been whitewashed even before there were theological reasons for doing so. Most of the windows that punch through the wall paintings date from the 15th century, not the 16th. Could there have been a general redecoration at this time? Whichever, they were whitewashed, to be rediscovered in a kinder, gentler age. When the ranges here were uncovered by the Victorians, the south range was easily recognisable. But the north range wasn’t. For many years, it was thought to represent the martyrdom of St Catherine, because of the large wheel above the way you came in. It was only at the time the paintings were restored in the late 1970s that it became clear that here was something much more exciting.
The sequence begins at the eastern end of the range, and you can click on the images below to enlarge them. We see Edmund fleeing the Viking attack on a town, possibly Rendlesham, home of the Wuffings, the East Anglian royal family. The actual martyrdom is lost because of another of those great windows, but we next see Edmund’s decapitated head being put back on the body by a group of monks. Then, the body is carried off to its shrine at Bedricsworth (soon to become St Edmundsbury) while the wolf that found and guarded the head looks on. The final image on the north wall shows the wheel of a bullock cart crossing a bridge – delightfully, the bridge is represented by the arch of the doorway. This depicts an event that happened some time after. St Edmund’s body (by now sanctified and canonised) is being taken away to escape a later assault by Vikings. It approaches a bridge that is simply too narrow to allow the cart to pass. Miraculously, the cart crosses the bridge, and the Vikings are foiled.
Perhaps there was a final image on the north side of the west wall. Perhaps it showed the fabulous shrine at Bury itself. We can never be sure.
Although it is sad that we have lost so much of both sequences because of later alterations, it has to be said that the walls of this church are beautiful. The late medieval windows, which include some excellent 20th century glass by Lawrence Whistler, the paraffin lamps, the memorials to churchwardens, all add rather than detract. The screen is tiny and over-restored, but you can still see the sawn-off ends of the rood beam and the floor of the rood loft.
Standing in the rood screen, the retable behind you for a moment, the full beauty of the gallery can be seen, and above it a circular Saxon window. You can step outside and see how it is hidden by the tower. The tower itself is surprisingly late; we are told that in the 1480s it was the work of Richard Cutting and John Mason. Apparently, they were sued for defective workmanship, but it still appears to be standing.
The graveyard is an interesting one. As well as several significant musicians, it includes the grave of the great 20th century architect Basil Spence, designer of Coventry Cathedral, the Kensington and Chelsea barracks in London, and Britains best university campus, the University of Sussex - to name but three. Ironically, his 1980s gravestone appears to be wearing away. One hopes he used better materials for his buildings.
Simon Knott, 1998, rewritten 2003, revised February 2009
www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/thornhamentry.htm
----------------------------------------
The Thornhams, Magna and Parva, flank Thornham Hall and its park. Until the end of the 19thc. the estate boasted a hall, Tudor with an 18thc. facade, surrounded by an extensive park. Most of the hall was demolishedc.1900, and the rest was destroyed by fire in the late 1940s. The present hall is modern, and the estate has been converted for use as a field centre, a commercial market garden and a site for small businesses. Excavations in the estate have provided evidence of continuous occupation in the area from the Neolithic period to the present. The surrounding landscape is flattish and given over to arable cultivation. Thornham Parva lies to the N of the hall, some 2 miles W of Eye in central North Suffolk. The settlement is dispersed and sparsely populated with no real centre apart from the church, which lies just off the road from Thornham Magna and the Hall.
St Mary's has a nave and chancel in one, covered with a thatched roof, and a low W tower with a thatched pyramid roof. The church is of flint with ashlar dressings. The nave is apparently 12thc., with N and S doorways and a S window surviving from that period, but a round window visible in the interior W wall of the nave is said to be late Anglo-Saxon by Cautley. A flowing tracery window has been added on the S wall, and 15thc. windows have been inserted towards the W end. There is no chancel arch, and two Y-tracery windows on the lateral walls towards the E suggest a date ofc.1300 for the chancel. The E window is three-light reticulated, and there is a 15thc. S window. The tower is of knapped flint with no buttresses; it has a tall plinth course and a 15thc. main W window. Its E quoins are of brick, as are the upper windows, except for their ashlar ogee heads, suggesting an 18thc. date for the top of the tower. St Mary's is celebrated as the home of a 14thc. retable, probably painted for the Dominican house at Thetford. It was discovered in a stable loft at Thornham Hall in 1927 and given to the church by Lord Henniker. Romanesque work recorded here is found on the two nave doorways and the S nave window.
Thornham Parva was held by Robert Malet in 1086. There were various small parcels here before the Conquest: 7 acres held by two free men commended to Eadric (these were held by Robert’s mother in 1086); 28 acres held by 8 free men commended to Wulfgifu; 15 acres held by two free men, one commended to Wulfgifu; and 14 acres held by Sigeric, also commended to Wulfgifu (these three holdings in the hands of Robert Malet in 1086). There was three parts of a church in 1086 with 10 acres of free land. The present lords of Thornham are the Hennikers; it has been in the family since the mid-18thc.
South Hartismere benefice, i.e. Gislingham, Mellis, Stoke Ash, Thorndon with Rishangles, Thornham Magna, Thornham Parva, Thwaite and Wetheringsett cum Brockford.
It's been a while since I stepped into a church, so when I knew I was going to Suffolk at the weekend, I asked a friend whoch ones I should visit, and was told that this is one of the top churches in England, not just Suffolk.
Set a hundred yards or so from the main road that is chocked with traffic which runs between the county towns of Suffolk and Norfolk, it is down a lovely quiet lane, past some grand large houses, and set back from the road in a small churchyard is St Mary.
You enter through a small Norman doorway, into a body of a small and simple church, bt one filled with delights.
----------------------------------------------
From the moment that you see it across the fields, you know that St Mary is something special. At first the silhouette perhaps, or a stain of gold that resolves as you approach into a solid little Norman church. The thatched roof is charming, and set against is a small square tower, also crowned in thatch. There is a stubborn timelessness about it, a silent witness to long centuries. There isn’t really a village, and St Mary sits lonely in the fields. At night it is floodlit and floats above the darkness. On winter days, the low light catches its honeyed walls across ploughed furrows. In summer, the entrancing trees gather, a setting for a diadem.
This has always been a special place for me. I was captivated at an early stage of my life in Suffolk. And it was while visiting here in late 1998 that I first got the idea for this website, and decided to do it. Thornham Parva was the first entry. In common with most of the very earliest entries, it wasn’t terribly good – I hadn’t even taken any photographs.
But that was an excuse to return again and again, and when this website was featured on BBC Television’s Songs of Praise in 2000, the interview was recorded here at St Mary. They filmed me cycling the narrow lanes round about in the sub-zero temperatures of late-January; if anything, it was even colder inside the church, and my breath clouded the air as I became quite possibly the first person ever to say the Hail Mary on prime-time television.
Thornham Parva, of course, isn’t just special to me. It is one of the most remarkable churches in East Anglia, a treasure house, an aesthetic pleasure, a delight. It is a perfect antidote to the triumphalism of nearby Eye, an intensely rural collision of historical circumstances that have left us a moving and coherent document of our Suffolk past. When Cautley’s revising editors came this way in 1975 they found the church in a bit of a state, and even feared for its future. That it is now the perfect model of a well-cared-for English parish church is a tribute to the energy and enthusiasm of the tiny handful of local parishioners who have nursed it back to health.
The church gets a fair number of visitors, because its fame has spread far and wide. As an example, I popped in here a few years back with my daughter. She was about five years old at the time, and without me noticing she signed the visitors book with our full address (not something I would normally advise). Within a fortnight, I had received a nice postcard from Israel, from a user of this site who had spotted the entry in the visitors book. It is not surprising that the church does get visitors from all over the world, because St Mary is worth seeing, and worth going to see. In particular, it has, not one, but two astonishing survivals. If they were in the Victoria and Albert Museum you would willingly travel to London to see them, and pay handsomely for doing so. And yet here they are, in the fields that punctuate the Thornham woods, in a church which is open every day.
You step directly down into the church from a small Norman doorway in the north side. A gorgeous 18th century gallery curves above you – there’s no other like it in Suffolk. It was made tiny, to fit in this tiny space. Unfortunately, the stairway is now kept locked so, unless you contact a churchwarden first, you can’t see the clever way the carpenter engineered benches that open and close over the gangway to allow more seating space. The gallery is a reminder that St Mary was the church of the ordinary people; The neighbpouring village is Thorenham Magna, and the local big house Thornham Hall, the home of the Hennikers, is beside the church at Thornham Magna. However, it was at the big house, or more accurately in one of its barns, that in the 1920s was found and donated to this church the remarkable Thornham retable. It was restored in the early years of this century, and returned to St Mary, now standing proud behind alarmed glass.
The retable is only part of a much larger altarpiece that probably once stood in the Priory at Thetford in Norfolk. The rest of the piece can be found in the Musee de Cluny in Paris. The retable was rescued and hidden after the Anglican Reformation destroyed the priory, along with so many of England’s treasures. Perhaps it was taken by recusant Catholics to use in their devotions. More likely, it was simply rescued because it is beautiful. From left to right, the figures are St Dominic (Thetford was a Dominican Priory); St Catherine; St John the Baptist; St Paul; a rood group of the Blessed Virgin, Christ and St John; St Peter; St Edmund; St Margaret; St Peter Martyr (another Dominican). The retable dates from the height of the Decorated period, in the decades before the Black Death. They are probably the most alive, and lively, medieval figures in Suffolk; St Catherine in particular looks as if she is stepping through an archway from dancing in a garden.
As if the retable were not enough, the walls of St Mary are lined with some of Suffolk’s most fascinating wall-paintings. They rank with those at Wissington, and date broadly from the early years of the 14th century, and are in two ranges; on the south wall is the story of the early years of Christ. On the north wall is the martyrdom of St Edmund. This is amazingly rare; fragments survive not far off at Troston, but there is only one other sequence of the martyrdom surviving in the whole of the Kingdom.
Both sequences are organised chronologically from right to left. This may seem awkward, but effectively they start in the south west corner of the church and continue anti-clockwise around to the north-west corner. Unfortunately, the paintings on the west wall are now lost to us, behind the gallery.
On the south side, it is reasonable to assume that the very first painting, on the south side of the west wall, was an Annunciation – the angel appearing to Mary. This is lost. A fragment of the next frame survives, just poking up above the south end of the gallery. This is the Visitation, and we see Mary embracing her cousin Elizabeth. The Visitation was a very important part of medieval devotions, because of the way it balances and connects with the Assumption; the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, on August 15th, was one of the most significant feast days in the English medieval calendar, and the Assumption was probably the dedication of the majority of Suffolk churches. The other images in the sequence are clearer. We see the angel appearing to the shepherds, and then Christ sits on his mothers lap while the shepherds adore him. Note the way we have lost the adoring figures because of the later punching through of a window. Similarly, the next frame, the Presentation in the temple, has also suffered from fenestration. We often talk about Victorian vandalism of medieval churches, but here is a prime example of destruction caused by 15th century ‘restoration’.
What was the point of this sequence? A lot of nonsense is talked about wallpaintings and stained glass being ‘the poor mans Bible’ for peasants who couldn’t read. This analysis suggests that they were destroyed during the 16th century Anglican Reformation because ‘they were no longer needed’. In fact, the Anglicans destroyed them because they were Catholic devotional tools – the wall paintings on the south side here form a rosary sequence, pictures for meditation while saying prayers with the aid of rosary beads. Often this was done during Mass. If the Anglicans were to turn our churches into congregational preaching houses, the wall paintings had to go.
Intriguingly, the wall paintings here may have been whitewashed even before there were theological reasons for doing so. Most of the windows that punch through the wall paintings date from the 15th century, not the 16th. Could there have been a general redecoration at this time? Whichever, they were whitewashed, to be rediscovered in a kinder, gentler age. When the ranges here were uncovered by the Victorians, the south range was easily recognisable. But the north range wasn’t. For many years, it was thought to represent the martyrdom of St Catherine, because of the large wheel above the way you came in. It was only at the time the paintings were restored in the late 1970s that it became clear that here was something much more exciting.
The sequence begins at the eastern end of the range, and you can click on the images below to enlarge them. We see Edmund fleeing the Viking attack on a town, possibly Rendlesham, home of the Wuffings, the East Anglian royal family. The actual martyrdom is lost because of another of those great windows, but we next see Edmund’s decapitated head being put back on the body by a group of monks. Then, the body is carried off to its shrine at Bedricsworth (soon to become St Edmundsbury) while the wolf that found and guarded the head looks on. The final image on the north wall shows the wheel of a bullock cart crossing a bridge – delightfully, the bridge is represented by the arch of the doorway. This depicts an event that happened some time after. St Edmund’s body (by now sanctified and canonised) is being taken away to escape a later assault by Vikings. It approaches a bridge that is simply too narrow to allow the cart to pass. Miraculously, the cart crosses the bridge, and the Vikings are foiled.
Perhaps there was a final image on the north side of the west wall. Perhaps it showed the fabulous shrine at Bury itself. We can never be sure.
Although it is sad that we have lost so much of both sequences because of later alterations, it has to be said that the walls of this church are beautiful. The late medieval windows, which include some excellent 20th century glass by Lawrence Whistler, the paraffin lamps, the memorials to churchwardens, all add rather than detract. The screen is tiny and over-restored, but you can still see the sawn-off ends of the rood beam and the floor of the rood loft.
Standing in the rood screen, the retable behind you for a moment, the full beauty of the gallery can be seen, and above it a circular Saxon window. You can step outside and see how it is hidden by the tower. The tower itself is surprisingly late; we are told that in the 1480s it was the work of Richard Cutting and John Mason. Apparently, they were sued for defective workmanship, but it still appears to be standing.
The graveyard is an interesting one. As well as several significant musicians, it includes the grave of the great 20th century architect Basil Spence, designer of Coventry Cathedral, the Kensington and Chelsea barracks in London, and Britains best university campus, the University of Sussex - to name but three. Ironically, his 1980s gravestone appears to be wearing away. One hopes he used better materials for his buildings.
Simon Knott, 1998, rewritten 2003, revised February 2009
www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/thornhamentry.htm
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The Thornhams, Magna and Parva, flank Thornham Hall and its park. Until the end of the 19thc. the estate boasted a hall, Tudor with an 18thc. facade, surrounded by an extensive park. Most of the hall was demolishedc.1900, and the rest was destroyed by fire in the late 1940s. The present hall is modern, and the estate has been converted for use as a field centre, a commercial market garden and a site for small businesses. Excavations in the estate have provided evidence of continuous occupation in the area from the Neolithic period to the present. The surrounding landscape is flattish and given over to arable cultivation. Thornham Parva lies to the N of the hall, some 2 miles W of Eye in central North Suffolk. The settlement is dispersed and sparsely populated with no real centre apart from the church, which lies just off the road from Thornham Magna and the Hall.
St Mary's has a nave and chancel in one, covered with a thatched roof, and a low W tower with a thatched pyramid roof. The church is of flint with ashlar dressings. The nave is apparently 12thc., with N and S doorways and a S window surviving from that period, but a round window visible in the interior W wall of the nave is said to be late Anglo-Saxon by Cautley. A flowing tracery window has been added on the S wall, and 15thc. windows have been inserted towards the W end. There is no chancel arch, and two Y-tracery windows on the lateral walls towards the E suggest a date ofc.1300 for the chancel. The E window is three-light reticulated, and there is a 15thc. S window. The tower is of knapped flint with no buttresses; it has a tall plinth course and a 15thc. main W window. Its E quoins are of brick, as are the upper windows, except for their ashlar ogee heads, suggesting an 18thc. date for the top of the tower. St Mary's is celebrated as the home of a 14thc. retable, probably painted for the Dominican house at Thetford. It was discovered in a stable loft at Thornham Hall in 1927 and given to the church by Lord Henniker. Romanesque work recorded here is found on the two nave doorways and the S nave window.
Thornham Parva was held by Robert Malet in 1086. There were various small parcels here before the Conquest: 7 acres held by two free men commended to Eadric (these were held by Robert’s mother in 1086); 28 acres held by 8 free men commended to Wulfgifu; 15 acres held by two free men, one commended to Wulfgifu; and 14 acres held by Sigeric, also commended to Wulfgifu (these three holdings in the hands of Robert Malet in 1086). There was three parts of a church in 1086 with 10 acres of free land. The present lords of Thornham are the Hennikers; it has been in the family since the mid-18thc.
South Hartismere benefice, i.e. Gislingham, Mellis, Stoke Ash, Thorndon with Rishangles, Thornham Magna, Thornham Parva, Thwaite and Wetheringsett cum Brockford.
"Here lyeth buryed the Bodys of Syre John Spelman Knyght and Secondary Justice of the Kyngs Bench, and Dame Elizabeth his wyfe, which had riii Sonnes and vii Danghters of there Bodyes between them begitten, the which Syr John decessyd the 26th day of February, in the yere of our Lord God 1545 , and the said Dame Elizabeth decessyd the 5th day of November, in the yere of our Lord 1536 , on whose Sowls Jesu have Mercy, Amen"
John's scroll reads - Jesu Fili Dei, misecere mei. (Jesus son of God, have mercy on me)
Elizabeth's scroll reads - Salbator M...., memento mei. (Saviour, remember me)
Elizabeth's cloak has the arms of Frowyk and Sturgeon quarterly.
Above them is Christ rising from the tomb
Sir John Spelman dressed in his judge's robes. He was a successful barrister, & a Justice of the King's Bench being present at the trial of Sir Thomas More. He rebuilt Narborough Hall
He was the 3rd son of Henry Spelman 1496 & Ela www.flickr.com/gp/52219527@N00/t4X4td heiress daughter of William Narborough. He was heir to his 2 elder brothers William & Henry who died without issue
He m Elizabeth Frowyke 1479-1557 co-heiress daughter of Henry Frowyke of Gunnersby / Gunnersbury, Middlesex & 2nd wife Margaret daughter of Ralph Leigh by Elizabeth Langley
She was the grand daughter of Thomas Frowyke & heiress Joanna Sturgeon
Children - 13 sons & 7 daughters
1. Henry died an infant
2. John 1545 www.flickr.com/gp/52219527@N00/CqWT01 Margaret 1558 daughter of Sir Thomas Blennerhassett of Frenze 1531 flic.kr/p/rp8dxz & Margaret d1561 www.flickr.com/gp/52219527@N00/4M48ZE daughter of John Braham of Wetheringsett and Joan Reyden 1519 www.flickr.com/gp/52219527@N00/30oPQ
3. Francis ,clerk ,1578
4. Erasmus 1512- after 1567 of Beeston m Ursula daughter of Edward Baynton of Devizes Wilts & Elizabeth Sulliard / Sulyard: Ursula was the widow of Edmund Thoresby of Lyn
5. Henry 1581 of Congham m1 Anne Knyvett dsp c1560 daughter of Sir Thomas Knyvet 1512 of Buckenham, Norfolk, by Muriel Howard 1512 widow of John Grey, Viscount Lisle 1504, and daughter of Thomas Howard 1524' 2nd Duke of Norfolk, by 1st wife, Elizabeth Tilney flic.kr/p/PsVFj m2 Frances 1622 daughter of William Saunders 1571 of Ewell & 1st wife Joan 1539 co-heir of William Marston 1512 of Horton near Epsom, Surrey, by Beatrice / Beatrix Barlee, (Joan was the widow of Nicholas Mynne 1528)
6. Michael b1521 of Whinburgh m Margaret daughter of George Duke of Brampton Suffolk
7. Jerome 1576
8. William m Catherine daughter of Cornelius von Stonhove, a judge in Holland.
1. Elizabeth m 1531 Edmund son of Thomas de Grey by Elizabeth daughter of Sir Richard fitz Lewes flic.kr/p/zrXg1r of Ingrave & Thorndon Essex & 1st wife Alice daughter of John Harleston of Shimpling by Margery Bardwell
2. Dorothy 1508-1552 m1 1524 William Cobb m2 Thomas son of Sir John Heydon and Catherine Willoughby flic.kr/p/kbg35T of Baconsthorpe
3. Ella 1515-1564 m George Jerningham / Jernegan; 1515-1559 eldest son of Sir John Jermingham of Somerleyton by Bridget, daughter of Sir Robert Drury of Hawstead; Grandson of Sir Robert Drury and Ann Calthorpe www.flickr.com/photos/52219527@N00/4258436115/
4. Bridget 1599 m (2nd wife) Osbert of Feltwell flic.kr/p/VDAF1M son of Francis Mundeford / Moundeford / Monford and Margaret Thoresby flic.kr/p/Vs7DsK
5. Martha m Alexander Brockdish of Brockdish
6. Alice m Francis Soame of Wantisden Suffolk
7 Anne died unmarried
www.oxford-shakespeare.com/Probate/PROB_11-63-400.pdf
www.british-history.ac.uk/topographical-hist-norfolk/vol6... - Church of All Saints, Narborough Norfolk