Churches

St Edmund, Acle

First appeared in Let's Talk! Norfolk, March 2005

IS this the face of God? On his shoulder is a dove representing the Holy Spirit, and between his knees the cross on which his son was crucified.

The image of the Holy Trinity appears on the east face of the fine font in St Edmund's parish church in Acle.

Like most medieval fonts depicting religious subjects, it was first defaced and then plastered over in the 16th-century Reformation.

Victorian restorers who replaced the smashed head of the Father gave him a face of rare grace and dignity. What makes the whole image most affecting, though, is the bare cross, which still bears the holes where the attached figure of Christ - which must have been wooden, or perhaps of metal - was removed by the reformers.

The font is dated 1410: other images around its eight sides include the emblems of the four evangelists and a pieta - Mary cradling Christ's dead body. The faces of mother and son are Victorian too, though much of the colour on the font is apparently its original paint.

An even rarer and more astonishing survival, uncovered in 1912, is to be found in the chancel. There is something of a mystery to it.

A lengthy inscription, in medieval Latin, it was written in charcoal on the bare plaster. Translated, it reads:

Oh lamentable death, how many dost thou cast into the pit!
Anon the infants fade away, and of the aged death makes an end.
Now these, now those, thou ravagest, O death on every side;
Those that wear horns or veils, fate spareth not.
Therefore, while in the world the brute beast plague rages hour by hour,
With prayer and with remembrance deplore death's deadliness.

In 1349 the Black Death swept across East Anglia, as it had all of Europe, killing between a third and a half of the population. Some villages were wiped out completely.

One imagines Acle's priest confined in his church, saying countless masses for the dead and writing those words while awaiting his turn. The references to "horns" and "veils" have been taken to mean popular women's head-dresses of the time.

The trouble with this interpretation is that the chancel was not built until 1362. But we need not give up our romantic, and chilling, vision entirely.

Fashions in headwear had not moved on much in 13 years. And though the Black Death was the first and worst of the plague's visitations, it made frequent reappearances for another three centuries. Indeed, 1362 was itself described in Norfolk as "a lamentable year of pestilence".

No wonder people at that time paid so much time and attention to their church, and the link it provided with the life beyond this one.