Lamarsh

From Wiston to Lamarsh and that rare thing an Essex Church with a round Tower but if I'm brutally honest that was the only interest I found here. Holy Innocents is utterly lacking in interior interest and almost entirely lacks merit - however I will give it marks for the round Tower, being open and location.

HOLY INNOCENTS. Round tower, plastered, with Norman windows. The roof with dormers belongs to the restoration of 1859, and looks it. Nave and chancel in one, mostly with early C14 windows. The chancel E lancets are not original. S porch early C16 brick, plain. - SCREEN. Two traceried panels to each division; C15. - PLATE. Cup and Paten of 1691.

LAMARSH. Its cottages are dainty, its tower is rare and ancient, one of the six round towers in Essex and one of only three known to have been built by the Normans. It was partly restored about 250 years ago. The odd-looking spire with its little dormer windows is modern, but one of the lancet windows is 12th century. The nave walls may be Norman, but the chancel was refashioned 600 years ago. There is 15th century woodwork in the ten bays of the screen. Tudor builders added the brick porch, which shelters a doorway and a handsome door just as old. Fine trees surround Daw’s Hall, a 16th century house with a 14th century crowned head carved on a boss over one of its doors.

Simon K -

I headed east from Twinstead, so the wind was behind me again (but how can a west wind be so bitter?) and had to choose between Lamarsh and Alphamstone next. Lamarsh made sense to do first, if I was planning to continue south, so I turned on to what my father-in-law calls 'the back road' from Sudbury to Bures and was very quickly surprised by the somewhat surreal apparition of Holy Innocents church.

Open. A round-towered church, but the entire building is encased in a pleasing greenish-white render, and the top of the tower is surmounted by an elaborate octagonal spire with fairytale dormer windows, by Arthur Blomfield, an architect I don't usually warm to.

The whole effect is of a bit broken off of a castle belonging to Mad Ludwig of Bavaria, which as you may imagine I liked very much.

A sign on the door warns you that the church is alarmed from 2000h to 0700h each night - 'the church contains no valuables, but we alarm it to prevent damage caused by break-ins'. It adds, almost as an afterthought, that 'this village church is always open every day from 0700h to 2000h', obviously a relic of its anglo-catholic heyday.

A big, wide, pleasing interior, perfect to set off the two great features. One is a long 15th Century roodscreen, beautifully elegant with bubbly tracery. It is stripped and varnished, so there is no surviving paint, but even so, it is lovely.

And beyond it is a beautiful curiosity. The east window was three wide-spaced lancets, typical of Bloomfield. However, they have been filled with stunning Arts and Crafts Movement glass by Mary Lowndes, perhaps the leading female artist in any medium of the last years of the 19th and first years of the 20th centuries. She is best known today for her work for the suffragette movement - she designed their posters. These are huge, near-floor-to-ceiling lancets, but what makes them more remarkable is that she did not do them all in one go, coming back over a period of almost 20 years to do the three windows.

They are so very good, and I immediately elected this church my favourite of the day so far.

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Langham

From Dedham it was on to Langham and St Mary, which I was convinced would be locked due to its isolated position, but to my surprise, and pleasure, found it open (in fact on this trip almost everywhere was open which warmed the cockles). The very fact of its openness overcame the slightly boring interior although the nave roof is impressive and I rather liked the somewhat shabby exterior.

ST MARY. The church lies right in a wood with only Church Farm (timber-framed, C17) nearby and Langham Hall (plain, c. 1740) at a distance. Norman nave, now only recognizable by the NE quoins of Roman bricks. The one small N window looks all new but may be renewed correctly. Later C13 W tower with later diagonal buttresses, battlements with crocketed pinnacles, but cusped lancet windows. C14 S aisle with low six-bay arcade of octagonal piers and double-chamfered arches. The windows of the aisle are also of the C14, the E window of an unusual variety: straightheaded, of five lights with slender ogee heads. In the S wall a recess with three heads, two as label-stops, one as keystone in the apex. The chancel is C14 too, see for example the reticulated tracery of the E window. - BENCHENDS. With poppy-heads, two with angel figures. - INSCRIPTION in the porch, mid C19, cast iron, no doubt not in situ:

The Dumb Animals Humble Petition.

Rest Drivers rest on this steep hill,

Dumb Beasts pray use with all good will.

Goad not, scourge not, with thonged whips,

Let not one curse escape your lips.

God sees and hears.

MONUMENT. Margaret Maud d. 1853, with sarcophagus and soul soaring up. By Manning of London. 

LANGHAM. Its tower on the hill is memorable in the story of British art, for on the top of it John Constable would sit and work, having climbed the ladder which is still the only way up.

He had been to school at Dedham, a mile or two away, and was friendly with John Fisher, the rector here, who offered to make him schoolmaster in the village. He is said to have painted one of his pictures of the lovely Stour valley from this tower; and it was another John Fisher, a nephew of the kindly rector, who became one of his lifelong friends.

The tower was ancient when Constable first saw it, for it was begun in the 13th century, carried up in the 14th, and completed with a brick parapet and pinnacles by Tudor builders. The nave has Roman bricks used again by the Normans, and the chancel a little pointed window of about 1200. The interior is dominated by the work of the 14th century men, from its nave roof to its arches and many of its windows. They fashioned the tomb recess with its three quaint heads, and the grotesque monsters with flowing manes on the little priest’s door. There are some coffin lids 700 years old, a timber almsbox possibly older, and two Tudor bench-ends richly carved with crowns and lions and solemn angels. A modern lychgate is touchingly dedicated to a mother in memory of her care and teaching; and among the church’s neighbours are Langham Hall, a modern house with old panelling on its walls inside, and Church Farm, a 17th century house with a two-storeyed porch.

One of the most delightful houses hereabouts is Valley House of the 16th century, with a staircase wing and a most attractive porch added a few decades later. The porch has four big brackets carved with spiral ornament, and the staircase is fine with exquisite balusters, rich newel posts, a series of carved vases, and a quaint figure of a woman. Not soon forgotten is Valley House, with its buttresses and windows and triple chimney-stacks, all making a fine array.

Simon K -

Open. An idyllic setting, and so pretty and remote after the last tourist spot. I am greeted by Jerry, the church cat, and what I took to be his brother. They are obviously well used to greeting hikers through the Dedham Vale who stop here for lunch! A sign on the door asks you to make sure that Jerry is not left inside when you leave the church, as 'he can't reach the handle'.

I expect this church is always open, and it really is lovely inside and out. Nothing terribly exciting, just a sense of its own 19th and early 20th Century past, and the crispness of a restoration in 2000. I liked it a great deal.

Incidentally, I believe that Langham is one of just two placenames found in all three counties of Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex. The other is the less surprising Sutton.

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Dedham

Taking advantage of 'Back to School' my next run saw me in Constable country with Dedham being my first port of call. St Mary the Virgin is an imposing building, presumably built on the back of the wool trade, and the exterior is very impressive and rather beautiful whilst the interior left me somewhat disinterested. It's not that it lacks merit but just felt over restored and sterile - having said that it was my first outing since acquiring a wide angle lens and I put that to good use here.

ST MARY THE VIRGIN. One of the most prosperous Perp churches of Essex, the visible proof of the flourishing cloth trade of the town. The weaving industry seems to have started in the C14. The arrival of Flemish weavers under Edward III is known. Prosperity came to an end in the C17. In 1642 a petition was delivered to the King for help for the depressed condition of the town. Prosperity seems to have reached its climax in the course of the C15. The church is its principal witness. The chief donors seem to have been the Webbes and the Gurdons. Building began in 1492 and went on quickly. The N aisle was a special commemorative piece to the two leading families. On the ground floor of the tower appear the initials and merchants’ marks of the Webbes. In 1519 Stephen Denton left £100 ‘for the battlyment of the steeple’. So the tower and the whole church were probably complete by about 1520 - built it appears at one go and without change of plan. It stands large along the main street, but its S side still faces the fields. It has a long nave with clerestory, a long chancel, two tall porches (that on the N two-storeyed) and a W tower about 130 ft high. The length of the church is about 170 ft. The whole building is more in a Suffolk than an Essex style.

The W tower of knapped flint has big polygonal clasping buttresses with much stone dressing, a very large four-light W window, three-light bell-openings, battlements with flushwork decoration and tall crocketed pinnacles. The ground floor of the tower forms a passageway from N to S. It has a depressed pointed vault entirely panelled with tracery, quatrefoils, roses and portcullis, etc. The aisles have three-light windows with depressed pointed heads, the chancel taller two-centred windows - of five lights at the E end, of three on the sides. The wall of the N side is treated as the show-side. The base for example has flushwork panels and the parapet battlements. The N porch uses flushwork for base, buttresses, and battlements. The doorway has lions couchant on the l. and r., tracery in the spandrels, and niches l. and r. of the upper window. The inside is airy and clear, six bays of identical slender piers with a section of thin shafts with capitals and broad shallow diagonal hollows without capitals. The roof of low pitch rests on shafts rising from the capitals as well as the apexes of the arches; for there are twice as many clerestory windows as arcade arches. These arches are four-centred. The chancel is not flanked by chapels.

FONT. Octagonal with the symbols of the Evangelists and angels, the figures thoroughly defaced. - DOOR in N doorway. With tracery panelling and one band of small figures in niches. - STAINED GLASS. In the chancel by Kempe, E window 1902, N and S windows 1907. - PLATE. Handsome set of 1784.

MONUMENTS. The chief monument is to Thomas Webbe, erected by his son John Webbe. It is in the N aisle, built up to reach into the window space - a proud but not an imaginative piece. The decoration is copious but all too much a repetition of quatrefoil friezes, large and small, and with and without shields. The tomb-chest has two of them, in one the Webbe initials. The back of the depressed pointed recess has more, the soffit of the recess yet more. Above the recess a framed stone panel with the indents of Thomas Webbe and his family. Battlements and pinnacles above. - John Roger d. 1636, frontal demi-figure in a niche, the ornament of the gristly kind fashionable in the second third of the C17.

DEDHAM. It is just over the border from Constable’s Suffolk, the near neighbour of Flatford Mill, with landscapes familiar to us because Constable painted them. Still a delightful little place in the valley of the Stour, it has many a cottage, shop, farm, and inn bearing witness to the days of its prosperity from the 15th to the 17th century. Then Dedham was an important centre of the wool merchants, and there stands on its outskirts still a wool merchant’s house and factory of two storeys and attics, timbered and plastered, complete with courtyard and gateway. It is known as Southnelds.

The master weaver lived in one of the projecting wings, and the 400-year-old doors and the moulded ceiling beams are still in their place. The house is unique in the county.

Facing the church is the best of the old buildings of the High Street, an inn with stables built for horses which might have taken part in Tudor pageantry; it has a timber-framed stairway in its open courtyard.

Dedham has a church magnificent, built about 1500 by one of its princely merchants, Thomas Webbe, who lies in the north aisle on a richly carved tomb. He built his battlemented tower so that a carriage can pass beneath it, covering an area of 250 square feet and rising 130 feet to the top of its pinnacles, which spring from octagonal buttresses. Its vaulted roof is adorned with traceried panels, flowers, shields, and other devices. In the south porch the builders reset the 14th century doorway and they gave the north porch two storeys and hung in it a door which was one of the most perfect examples of carving in Essex, with saints and angels in canopied niches. Time has been unfaithful to it, but we can still trace the figures of Christ and the Madonna.

We notice that two leaves of this door have been cut across, and thereby hangs a tale. It was done in order that galleries could be erected in the church in the days of King James and King Charles, for in those times even this great church of Dedham would not hold the people who came to hear the Puritan vicar, John Rogers. He was for over 30 years one of the famous preachers of his age, and was described by one who knew him as "the most awakening divine in England." His tomb is in the churchyard, and in the chancel on one of the walls, carved in a niche, is a bust of him in a skull cap, ruff, and gown.

Near the bust of John Rogers is a stone with a fine little bronze figure on the top in memory of a man who made it the delight of his declining years to befriend the poor of Dedham. The old font has been rescued from a hiding-place under the floor, and its figures of angels, evangelists, and cherubs are sadly worn. It has a cover with a pathetic interest because it was made from the timbers of the Royal George; they were part of that bitter tragedy of 1782 when the great warship sank off Portsmouth:

When Kempenfelt went down

With twice four hundred men.

She had gone down complete, heeling on her side, and it was of these timbers we see at Dedham that Cowper wrote:

Her timbers yet are sound,

And she may float again,

Full charged with England’s thunder,

And plough the distant main....

The poet did not know that the timbers were rotten and that the ship went down through the neglect of the Admiralty. The timbers are a tragic witness to a cruel betrayal of our seamen. There are more splendid timbers in the roof, fragments of old glass in the windows, carvings on the font, mason’s marks, and many attractive details which hold our attention in this fine church, monument of an industry which has passed from this old home of merchant princes.

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Sturmer

I've been close to St Mary several times but never had time to visit, it's always been on my way back home when time was running out - and I'm glad I found time to stop last week.

It's tiny with a Tudor brick south porch, a bijou tower and is old. Unfortunately it was locked but there was a keyholder sign although the address label for where the key is held has long since faded and fallen off.

The Norman arch and tympanum of the south door are very high quality - I wonder what is hidden in the church.

ST MARY. Away from the village, amid trees, with Sturmer Hall to the W. An C11 nave the only evidence of which is the unrebated N doorway with a lintel decorated with a chequer pattern. C12 S doorway with one order of columns carrying scalloped capitals, zigzag in the arch, two heads like projecting knobs at the top of the door jambs, and a tympanum decorated with two ornamental crosses and two rosettes. The latter may mean sun and moon, but why two crosses? And why this completely unplanned arrangement? It looks like nothing but incompetence, and it seems an odd incompetence that cannot put two almost identical shapes on the same level. The chancel is Norman too, as shown by one small N window. It was altered in the E.E. style, when three smallish separate lancet windows were inserted at the E end. C14 W tower with diagonal buttresses and pyramid roof. Early C16 S porch of brick with stepped gable. The nave roof has double hammerbeams, but they are small and the spandrels are all decorated with rather thin tracery. - PLATE. Small secular goblet of 1676.

STURMER. Ancient Britons were buried in the mound we see here in a field, Saxon masons began the building of the little church, and 15th century men fashioned the timber framework of Sturmer Hall, now refaced with modern brick. The work of the Saxons is still seen in the nave and in the little north doorway no longer used, its tympanum carved with squares. The Normans re-fashioned the chancel and built the doorway on the south, which has weird heads below a tympanum crudely patterned. The porch is of Tudor brick with a crowstepped gable, and there is a studded Tudor door in the chancel. The nave has a double hammerbeam roof, decorated about 1500 with pierced tracery and carved wall-plates. One of the windows has two shields in 15th century glass. This small place is linked with our greatest naval victory, for we read here of William Hicks, who was a middy on HMS Conqueror when she sailed into Nelson’s last fight. He was rector here for 44 years, with a tale to tell the village children that must have made their history books seem dull.

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Ridgewell

St Lawrence left me strangely flat, perhaps because of the glories of Sudbury or perhaps because it's not very interesting.

ST LAURENCE. All C15 except for an unexplained, probably re-used piece of C13 blank arcading in the N wall of the vestry. W tower with angle buttresses, some flint decoration at the foot, battlements and a higher stair-turret. Embattled S porch. Windows with Perp tracery. N arcade with piers with semi-polygonal shafts, small to the arches, and large, without capitals, to the nave; two-centred arches. Clerestory with embattled cill. N chancel chapel with octagonal pier and semi-octagonal responds carrying embattled capitals. Delicately detailed nave roof with collar-beams on arched braces, every second resting on shafts which stand on corbels. All beams and rafters moulded. - SCREEN. Four divisions of the dado remain, with elaborate tracery including mouchette-wheels. - PULPIT. C17, plain. - LECTERN. Octagonal with a heavy foot decorated with fleurons. Book-rest new. - PLATE. Cup of 1564.

RIDGEWELL. Many little Roman relics of far-off days have been dug up in this village. Its houses today gather about a spacious green. One of the older ones, Ridgewell Hill Farm, was built a year after the Armada and has kept three sides of its moat. It has carved bargeboards, chimney-stacks with eight-sided shafts, and original panelling in the dining-room. Moat Farm and Essex Hall belong to the next century. The church is mostly 500 years old, and has two valued possessions, a screen richly carved by 15th century men and an oak bier made about the same time. Also 15th century are the roofs of nave and chance] (the nave roof fine with leafy bosses, wall-plates, and little figures in niches in the brackets); the base of the lectern with its square flowers; two plain stalls in the chancel; and the font, which has old tiles in the platform by it. The doorway inside the porch is a hundred years older, and so is the north arcade. There is a peephole in the chancel arch, a little 15th century glass made up with a modern scene of the Crucifixion, and a graceful 17th century pulpit with panelled sides and a fluted frieze.

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Bulmer

Turning for home I crossed back into Essex and headed for Bulmer (after a futile search for Middleton, which, once again, my satnav refused to accept exists and I saw no signs for it but then I was somewhat lost).

St Andrew took an age to find and, when I did, wasn't hugely rewarding - a very nice font, with a green man, and two good modern windows - but the setting was beautiful.

ST ANDREW. The emphasis of the church lies on its chancel, unusually long, of early C14 style, with a band inside going all the way and rising and falling to give way to the S doorway, the windows, the sedilia and the piscina. The sedilia and the (double) piscina have cusped arches on detached shafts. The chancel roof is much later, c. 1500, and has collar-beams on braces with a little tracery in the spandrels. The braces rest on angel figures. N arcade, also C14, with octagonal piers and double-chamfered arches. C15 W tower with diagonal buttresses, some flint and stone chequer-work at the base, and battlements. - PULPIT. C18; panelling and a little inlay.

BULMER. Its finest possession has been in the church 500 years, a font beautifully carved and wonderfully preserved. It has an octagonal bowl and stands on a graceful panelled base. Seven of the sides have angels, double roses, and a shield bearing a thumb-screw; but the one we liked best shows a genial face between branches of grapes, with vine leaves coming from its mouth. The tower is 15th century and there are 14th century arches in the nave with a richly moulded doorway of the same age; but the chief interest of the building is in the 14th century chancel, which has a fine little arcade in the sanctuary wall, and a Tudor roof with canopied angels holding shields* and the instruments of the Passion. In two windows is a little old glass. An opening outside one of the walls is blocked with bricks which appear to be Roman.

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* Either I missed these or they are no longer extant.

Sible Hedingham

Another trip to, predominantly, south Suffolk began with a visit to St Peter where, unbeknownst to me,there is a monument to my children's 19th great grandfather Sir John Hawkwood (I'll leave it to Arthur to fill you in on him).

Despite the size of the church this is a surprisingly spartan interior - or perhaps not, it's almost in Suffolk (and has a very Suffolk feel to it) and I suppose Dowsing came to visit - but is light, airy and appealing. I rather liked the reredos.

ST PETER. Except for the W tower a church dating from about 1330-40. The window tracery is typical and not of special interest.* The W window of the tower also belongs to that period, although the tower itself with its angle buttresses carried up in four set-offs and its stepped battlements is of early C16. Buttresses are also carried down into the inside the church. The quatrefoil clerestory windows are not original, but the back-splays may indicate that the form is correct (cf. Little Sampford). The arcades between nave and aisles and the chancel arch have octagonal or semi-octagonal supports and double-chamfered arches. The most interesting feature of the church is the MONUMENT in the S aisle, a low tomb-chest like a seat, decorated with six cusped panels holding shields. Big ogee arch flanked by buttresses. The spandrels have Perp panelling. The monument is considered to be a cenotaph for Sir John Hawkwood d. 1394 who, the son of a tanner at Sible Hedingham, rose to be a condottiere of the Florentine army and the son-in-law of a Duke of Milan. He is buried in Florence Cathedral, where a fresco by Paolo Uccello commemorates him.

* But the chancel E window was made during the C19 restoration of the church.

SIBLE HEDINGHAM. Among its inns, houses, and cottages, some with 15th century roofs, Tudor and Jacobean detail abounds, but the chief interest centres in Hawkwoods, a timbered and plastered 16th century house with a hound and a coronet over its doorway. The house perpetuates the name of a family which, settled here from the time of King John, produced a towering lawless man who became the wonder and terror of medieval Italy.

Roman tiles in the walls of the church tell of the days of Caesar’s Britain, but it was a 14th century Hawkwood who raised the present church. Over a window of the grey embattled tower, in which rings a bell 600 years old, a bold hawk is carved as an architectural pun on the family name, a conceit variously repeated indoors. An angel guards the entrance to the 16th century porch, which has roof bosses carved with the Bourchier knot, and the star of the De Veres, whose great Norman castle is in the next village. In a corner of the tower is a little nail-studded Tudor door leading to the stair turret. The wide nave has two arcades, and a modern font on a 15th century stem. Two bays of the roof spanning the south aisle are 16th century, and have finely carved timbers showing stars and boars. The chancel has two Jacobean chairs.

But the pride of the church is the place in which it is believed lay Sir John Hawkwood, who was brought here wrapped in cloth-of-gold from his tomb in the Duomo, Florence, where we have stood before his memorial. Here in Sible Hedingham, unless our history is false, they laid him in 1394, in a magnificent tomb of which now remains only a canopied recess, resplendent with hawk, boar, pelican, and hunting figures.

It was on the petition of the king that Florence delivered up the warrior who was to her as saint and hero. The name of this son of a tanner was to resound for a generation throughout Europe. He went to the wars with Edward the Third and the Black Prince, and fought at Crecy and Poitiers. Seeking fresh worlds to conquer, he moved on into Italy and there formed what was called the White Company. He lived avowedly to foment war, regular or guerilla, on the widest scale. "God give you peace," was the greeting to him of two gentle friars. "God take away your alms," he answered them; "know ye not that I live on war, and that peace would undo me; and that just as I live on war so do you on alms?" Where rival cities were so many petty republics constantly at war, Hawkwood and his dauntless men-at-arms were almost continuously in demand. He fought for Pisa against Florence, for Perugia against the pope; he fought for this man today and that man tomorrow. When his White Company was taken over by the pope Hawkwood fought for him.

Renowned and terrible, a magnificent hireling, he passed from command to command until in 1390 he settled down permanently as General of the Florentine forces. There as ever he was a brilliant commander, and when he died in 1394 he was given a magnificent funeral, and his portrait by Giotto is in a great procession of figures placed in the cathedral. Tradition has it that Richard the Second brought the body home and that it was buried here.

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