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Holy Trinity, Blythburgh, Suffolk by Jelltex

There is a point in our lives when we, the children, become the adults in the relationship with our parents.

It will come for most of us, no one tells you this will happen, and you are unprepared for it. But it comes

And each of us has a different relationship with our parents than everyone else, what's right for me, and my views, do not apply to you.

Yesterday, was the funeral of the person I have known longer than anyone else on this earth, now that my family is all gone. Margaret and Brian were married a few weeks before mine, and moved into the new build bungalow also a few weeks before my parents.

They also had one child, a son, and Douglas and I have been friends longer than I have been friends with anyone else, although he is a year younger than me.

I have my views on Margaret, but the reason I travelled back to Suffolk for her funeral, was to be there for Douggie, and give him the support he has given me through three weddings and two funerals.

Norfolk isn't far away, and the funeral and wake were taking place just a mile or two over the border from Suffolk, but the roads beyond Ipswich are poor, twisty and where there are accidents or roadworks, no real alternative routes.

I was also leaving just before six, so had to get across the Thames at Dartford and up the A12 during rush hour, so it wouldn't be easy. But at least there would be no rain.

I was up at five, dressed and washed, with time to drink a coffee before leaving. Loading the car with me and my camera bag, as I had plans in case I had time, to visit a church or two.

It was dark up the M20 to Dartford, and busy with traffic, but I made good time, and listened to a loop of old music podcasts all day, so chat and music kept me awake.

I got onto the M25 with no problem, and through the tunnels with only a slight slowdown, but on the other side there were queues.

Despite not wanting to spend money on a new railway, there is always money for road and junction improvements, even if it will just increase traffic. So it is that the M25/A12 junction is being upgraded, and with narrow lanes, speed restrictions, jams began a good four miles before the roadworks started.

I forced my way to the left hand lane, which became a filter lane, meaning it was much quicker than the remaining four lanes. But then came the roundabout. The roundabout under the motorway is the reason the improvements are needed, and queueing traffic blocks the junctions and causes even more backlogs.

Of course, traffic lights on roundabouts are never good ideas, so I was confronted with a wall of traffic, so when the light went green, I went in front of a track before it could shuffle forward and block more of the junction, then there was some clear road.

And ducking into the extreme left hand lane, I dodged past the queuing traffic that was blocking the exit from the A12, and onto clear road.

Yay.

The sky was clear, the sun about to rise, and it was going to be a glorious day.

Just north of Chelmsford, I stopped for breakfast: two sausage rolls and a coffee from Greggs, then filled up the tank and on my way north.

More traffic at Ipswich where the A12 meets the A14 to get over the Orwell, but then clear traffic again after ten minutes delay.

Soon, though, the road narrows to two lane blacktop, and all is well until you meet a slower vehicle. Like a tractor as we did soon after Whickham Market.

For 15 long minutes the tractor lead a growing snake of cars along the winding lanes until it pulled over and we could get past.

Blythburgh was always the marker when travelling back from Ipswich or beyond, that we were nearly home. he handsome church sits high, for Suffolk, overlooking the village and river which is mostly mudflats.

The busy A12 skirts close, but you get to the church via a narrow land, leaving the modern world far behind.

The church opened at nine, it was nearly half past, it was probably open before nine, and was open when I pushed the porch door.

Inside is an unspoilt space, grey wood that have witnessed the centuries so that their vigour has faded to almost no colour of all.

Its the roof people come for. Wooden beams and pairs of wooden angels. I have brought my big lens so to snap them.

My plan was to visit the large and impressive church in Southwold. I turned off the A12 and drove along the straight road into the town, where I found multiple sets of roadworks, and few places to park for a short time, anywhere near the church.

My back is achy, so I wanted somewhere close to park. Anyway, I drove round the town twice, found nowhere to park, so turned the car round and headed back north, until I came to South Cove.

South Cove is a small village, a few farms really, but has a fine, if rustic, well-proportioned church, set in a large churchyard.

And the church was open, so small the wide angle lens wasn't needed, and with windows close to the floor too, no big lens needed either.

Next town up is Kessingland, which until the 80s had the A12 running through the centre of it, but now a bypass lays to the west and the village is quiet. I don't think I had been of the main street, so I went in search of the church, and found it on Church Street.

Obviously.

I rarely research churches before I visit, so nothing prepared me for the interior of St Edmund.

It seems in the last two years, they church had sourced some banners with apt slogans on, banners which were made to look like large tapered ensigns, hanging from or along the supports of the roof.

A man was practicing on the organ, and the notes echoed round the church. Not only does the church have banners, it has ship's wheels and other nautical stuff, although most traditionalists won't like it, I think it hangs together, and if the congregation wants it thus, who are we to argue?

Next stop was South Cove, which I had forgotten I had visited before, so redid all my shots. But this time did see the panel featuring St Michael behind the font, where the rood steps began.

A small, perfect, church, perfect for a small country parish.

I take my shots and leave, driving back onto the A12 and heading into Lowestoft, my main task was to drive over the new bridge which spans Lake Lothing.

The town had been waiting since at least 1966 for a new bridge, and the 3rd crossing was opened in September, and offers fine views as you drive across.

I went to see the old family home. It has been renovated and looks splendid, and not much like it was when sold four years back, it looks cared for and lived in, which is what the buyer promised us he would do.

So then to the crematorium, a drive north through Gunton and past Hopton where Dougie lives, then through the housing estate behind the area hospital to the car park, and then wait.

Margaret was 89, had a long life, but friends of the same age are few, and families are now scattered. So, one can never be sure how many will attend. The chapel was half full at least, with people coming from Kent, Wiltshire and even California to be there.

The celebrant spoke for twenty minutes, saying nice things as they have to do. But, avoiding, or just hinting at faults. Whatever she had done in her life to Dougie, he still loved her, and he was in bits.

Afterward we lined up to shake his hand or give him and Pennie a hug, and allowed me to tell him he was the brother I never had. He was always there for me, and will be there for him.

More tears.

There was a wake at the pub in Hopton, but there was no one I knew other than Dougie and Penny, so I had a drink and made my excuses. These things are really for family and close friends, so I left at quarter to three, hoping to get home before midnight.

In the end, I made good time, I was going round Ipswich before four, and at the M25 junction less than an hour later, and was able to easily join it and zoom round to the bridge. No queues on the southbound side, but the queue northbound went all the way back to the M20 junction, so six mines.

I zoomed on.

I got home at ten past six, happy to have done it and go home in under three and a half hours. Dinner was defrosted ragu, pasta and reheated focaccia, which we were sitting down to eat twenty minutes after getting in.

Phew.

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Perhaps some counties have a church which sums them up. If there has to be one for Suffolk, it must be the church of the Most Holy Trinity, Blythburgh. Here is the late medieval Suffolk imagination writ large, as large as it gets, and not overwritten by the Anglican triumphalism of the 19th century. Blythburgh church is often compared with its near neighbour, St Edmund at Southwold, but this isn't a fair comparison - Southwold church is much grander, and full of urban confidence. Probably a better comparison is with St Margaret, Lowestoft, for there, too, the Reformation intervened before the tower could be rebuilt. The two churches have a lot in common, but Blythburgh has the saving grace. It is so fascinating, so stunningly beautiful, by virtue of a factor that is rare in Anglican parish churches: sheer neglect.

Holy Trinity, Blythburgh, is the church that Suffolk people know and love best, and because of this it has generated some extraordinary legends. The first is that Blythburgh, now a tiny village bisected by the fearsome A12 between London and the east coast ports, was once a thriving medieval town. This idea is used to explain the size of the church; in reality, it is almost certainly not the case. Blythburgh has always been small. But it did have an important medieval priory, and thus its church attracted enough wealthy piety on the eve of the Reformation to bankroll a spectacular rebuilding.

It is to Lavenham, Long Melford, Mildenhall, Southwold and here that we come to see the late 15th century Suffolk aesthetic in perfection. But for my money, Holy Trinity, Blythburgh, is the most significant medieval art object in the county, ranking alongside Salle in Norfolk. Look up at the clerestory; it seems impossible, there is so much glass, so little stone; and yet it rides the building with an air of permanence. Beneath, there is a coyness about the aisles that I prefer to the mathematics of Lavenham. Here, it could not have been done otherwise; it distils human architectural experience. If St Peter and St Paul at Lavenham is man talking to God, Holy Trinity at Blythburgh is God talking to man.

At the east end, a curious series of initials in Lombardic script stretch across the outer chancel wall. You can see an image of this at the top. It reads A-N-JS-B-S-T-M-S-A-H-K-R. This probably stands for Ad Nomina JesuS, Beati Sanctae Trinitas, Maria Sanctorem Anne Honorem Katherine Reconstructus ('In the name of the blessed Jesus, the Holy Trinity, and in honour of Holy Mary, Anne and Katherine, this was rebuilt'). A fanciful theory is that they are the initials of the wives of the donors. However, note the symbol of the Trinity in the T stone, and I think this is a clue to the whole piece.

Figures stand on pedestals atop the south side and east end. The most easterly is unusual, a crowned old man sitting on a throne directly on the gable end. This is a medieval image of God the Father, a rare survival. Moving westwards from here we find the Blessed Virgin in prayerful pose, Christ as the Saviour of the World holding an orb in one hand and blessing with the other, and then a collared bear with a ragged staff, a seated woodwose, another bear, this time with a collar and bell, and last of all a fox with a goose in its mouth, his jaws grasping the neck:

The porch is part of the late 15th century rebuilding, but it was considerably restored in the early 20th century. Interestingly, the angels crowning the battlements look medieval - but they weren't there in 1900, so must have come from somewhere else. Pretty much all the porch's features of interest date from this time. These include the small medieval font pressed into service as a holy water stoup, and image niche above the doors. This has been filled in more recent years by an image if the Holy Trinity; God the Father holds the Son suspended while a dove representing the Holy Spirit alights; you can see medieval versions of this at Framlingham and Little Glemham. Of all medieval imagery, this was the most frowned upon by puritans. An image of God the Father was thought the most suspicious of all idolatries. Indeed, as late as the 1870s, when the Reverend White edited the first popular edition of the Diary of William Dowsing, he actually congratulated Dowsing on destroying images of the Holy Trinity in the course of his 1644 progress through the counties of Suffolk and Cambridgeshire.

William Dowsing visited on the morning on April 9th, 1644. It was a Tuesday, and he had spent most of the week in the area. The previous day he'd been at Southwold and Walberswick to the east, but preceded his visit here with one to Blyford, which lies to the west, so he was probably staying overnight at the family home in Laxfield. He found twenty images in stained glass to take to task (a surprisingly small number, given the size of the place) and two hundred more that were inaccessible that morning (probably in the great east window). Three brass inscriptions incurred his wrath (but again, this is curious; there were many more) and he also ordered down the cross on the porch and the cross on the tower. Most significantly of all, he decided the angels in the roof should go.

Lots of Suffolk churches have angels in their roofs. None are like Blythburgh's. You step inside, and there they are, exactly as you've seen them in books and in photographs. They are awesome, breathtaking. There are twelve of them. Perhaps there were once twenty. How would you get them down if ordered to do so? The roof is so high, and the stencilling of IHS symbols would also have to go.

Perhaps this was already indistinct by the time Dowsing visited. Perhaps Tuesday, 9th of April 1644 was a dull day.

Several of the angels are peppered with lead shot. Here is another of those Suffolk legends; that Dowsing and the churchwardens fired muskets at the angels to try and bring them down. But when the angels were restored in the 1970s, the lead shot removed was found to be 18th century; contemporary with them there is a note in the churchwardens accounts that men were paid for shooting jackdaws living inside the building, so that probably explains where the shot came from. Here are some details of that wonderful roof:

The otherwise splendid church guide also repeats the error that the Holy Trinity symbol in the porch filled a gap that had been 'empty since 1644'. But there was certainly no image in it when Dowsing arrived here, or anywhere else in Suffolk; statues were completely outlawed by injunctions in the early years of the reign of Edward VI, almost a hundred years before the morning of Dowsing's visit.

Another feature used as evidence of puritan destruction is the ring fixed into the most westerly pillar of the north arcade. Cromwell's men stabled their horses here, apparently. Well, it almost certainly is a ring for tying horses to, and the broken bricks at the cleared west end also suggest this; but there is no reason to think that Cromwell and the puritans were responsible. For a full century before Cromwell, and for nearly two hundred years afterwards, a church as big as this would have had a multitude of uses. Holy Trinity was built for the rituals of the Catholic church; once these were no longer allowed, a village like Blythburgh, which can never have had more than 500 people, would have seen it as an asset in other ways. It was only with the 19th century sacramental revival brought about by the Oxford Movement that we started getting all holy again about our parish churches. Perhaps it was used as an overnight stables for passing travellers on the main road; not an un-Christian use for it to be put to, I think.

In August 1577, a great storm brought down the steeple, which fell into the church and damaged the font. This was at the height of Elizabethan superstition, and the devil was blamed; his hoof marks can still be seen on the church door. Supposedly, a black dog ran through the church, killing two parishioners; he was seen the same day at St Mary, Bungay. Black Shuck is the East Anglian devil dog, the feared hound of the marshes; and Holy Trinity is the self-styled Cathedral of the Marshes, so it is appropriate that he appeared here. You can see where the font has been broken. You can also see that this was one of the rare, beautiful seven sacrament fonts, similar in style to the one at Westhall; but, like those at neighbouring Wenhaston and Southwold, it has been completely stripped of imagery. Almost certainly, this was in the 1540s, but there is a story that the font at Wenhaston was chiselled clean as part of the 19th century restoration. More importantly in any case, the storm, or the dog, or the devil, damaged the roof; it would not be properly repaired for more than 400 years. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, accounts note that Holy Trinity is not impregnable to the weather. By the 19th century, parishioners attended divine service with umbrellas. By the 1880s, it was a positively dangerous building to be in, and the Bishop of Norwich ordered it closed.

Why had Holy Trinity not been restored? Simply, this is a big church, with a tiny village. There was no rich patron, and in any case the parishioners had a passion for Methodism. Probably, repairs had been mooted, but not a wholesale restoration as we have seen at Lavenham, Long Melford and Southwold. By the 1880s, attention in England had turned to the preservation of medieval detail; in short, restorations were not as ignorant as they had been a quarter of a century earlier. Suggestions that Holy Trinity should be restored in the manner of the other three were blocked by the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings, and this owed a lot to the energy of William Morris, the Society's secretary.

The slow, patient restoration of this building took the best part of a century; indeed, when I first visited in the 1980s I was still aware of a sense of decay.

Nothing could be further from the truth today. You step into a wide, white, open space, one of England's great church interiors. There, high above you, is the glorious roof and the angels of God. The brick floors spread around the scraped font, which still bears its dedicatory inscription and standing places for participants. You turn into the central gangway, and more than twenty empty indents for brasses stretch before you. Dowsing can be blamed for the destruction of hardly any of them. In reality, you see the work of 18th and 19th century thieves and collectors.

The bench-ends are superb. The benches themselves were reconstructed in the late 19th century, supposedly from the main post of Westleton windmill, but the ends are some of the county's finest medieval images. There are partial sets of basically three series: the Seven Deadly Sins, the Seven Works of Mercy, and the Labours of the Seasons. There are also angels bearing symbols of the Holy Trinity and the Crown. There are other figures too, obscure and fragmentary and whose purpose is unclear, as if surviving figments of a broken dream. The quality of what remains makes you grieve for what has been lost.

The rood screen is a disappointment; most of it is modern, and the medieval bits perfunctory and scoured. Having said this, note how tiny the exit from the north aisle rood loft stair is. Also at this end of the church, a scattering of medieval glass, mainly angels. There is more in the south aisle, including a collection of shields of the Holy Trinity:

But step through the central aisle to see something remarkable. The priest and choir stalls are fronted by exquisite carvings of the Apostles, the Evangelists, John the Baptist, St Stephen, Mary Queen of Heaven and Christ in Majesty. Seeing these eighteen carvings is a bit like gobbling up a very large box of chocolates, but it is worth stopping to consider quite how genuine they all are. For a start, there could not have been choir stalls here in medieval times, and in any case we know that these desks and their frontages were in the north aisle chapel until the 19th century. They were used as school benches in the 17th century; they still bear holes for inkpots, and the graffiti of a bored Dutch child (his father was probably working on draining the marshes) is dated 1665. There is nothing at all like them anywhere else in Suffolk.

Whatever, the east end of the chancel and aisles are thrillingly modern, wholly devotional. In the north aisle, traditionally the Hopton chantry, extraordinary friezes of skeletons become symbols of the four evangelists behind the altar. Beside them is Peter Ball's beautiful Madonna and Child. Separating the south aisle chapel from the sanctuary is is one of Suffolk's biggest Easter sepulchres, tomb of the Hoptons. Behind the high altar, branches arranged like huge stag antlers spread dramatically. It is all just about perfect. Tucked to one side of the organ is a clockjack; Suffolk has two, and the other is down-river at Southwold. They date from the late 17th century, and presumably once struck the hours; at high church Blythburgh and Southwold today, they are used to announce the entry of the ministers.

This is a wonderful church to wander around in, the light and the air changing with the seasons, a suffused sense of the numinous presenting its different faces according to the time of day and time of year. Come here on a bright spring morning, or in the drowsy heat of a summer's day. Come on a cold winter afternoon as the colours fade and the smell of woodsmoke from neighbouring cottages weaves a spell above the old stone floors and woodwork. And before you leave, find the doorway in the south-west corner of the nave. It opens onto a low, narrow stairway. You can go up it. It leads up into the parvise storey of the south porch, now reappointed and dedicated as a tiny chapel, a peaceful spot to spend a few moments before continuing your journey.

You may be reading this entry in a far-off land; or perhaps you are here at home. Whatever, if you have not visited this church, then I urge you to do so. It is the most beautiful church in Suffolk, a wonderful art object, and it is always open in daylight. It remains one of the most significant medieval buildings in England. If you only visit one of Suffolk's churches, then make it this one

Simon Knott, 2014.

www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/Blythburgh.htm