Churches

St Mary, Burwell

First appeared in Let's Talk! Cambridgeshire, June 2004

Grand, stately Burwell St Mary's

ON Wednesday, January 3, 1644, a company of men set out from Cambridge, led by William Dowsing, a Suffolk puritan.

Civil war was raging across the land, and Dowsing had been given a special job to do by the Earl of Manchester, leader of the Parliamentarian forces in eastern England. It was his task - one he was eager for - to visit churches across East Anglia, removing all trace of the "superstition" that had been creeping back into common worship.

Much of the old Catholic imagery had been removed at the time of the Reformation, a century earlier. But Dowsing was embarking on a painstaking wrecking tour, destroying stone, wood and glass images of angels, saints, crucifixes and much other paraphernalia of the old religion.

He had done a thorough job in the colleges and city of Cambridge itself. As winter turned to spring, he would cut a swathe of destruction across much of Suffolk .

On that first day setting out into rural Cambridgeshire, he left his mark on Fen Ditton and Swaffham Prior. His last stop before evening was at Burwell.

It is hard to imagine now that Burwell, a sizeable village on the edge of the fens near Newmarket , was once a port - but it was. River traffic made it a highly prosperous place in the Middle Ages, and by the mid-15th century it was rich enough to employ Reginald Ely, the king's mason, to rebuild the church.

He had just completed work on King's College Chapel, and it seems he went on from there to Burwell, overseeing the creation of one of eastern England 's grandest churches.

St Mary's is a stately building, its great Perpendicular tower a landmark for many miles around.

But to appreciate its glories fully you will need strong neck muscles and strong binoculars.

Dowsing, the puritan inspector, did not have special lenses. In the fading gloom of a winter's afternoon he probably didn't see the carvings high up beneath the roof. Or if he did, he failed to recognise their significance. Or perhaps he thought they were so high above the worshippers' heads, they were simply not worth the trouble of fetching ladders to wreck them.

Two hounds catch a hare on Burwell's wonderful wall-plates

Long noses, castles on their backs - these are elephants

Admiring themselves in a mirror - these are tigers

And this is the Assumption - angels accompanying the Virgin on her journey to Heaven

For whatever reason, Dowsing's journal entry for Burwell is short: "We brake downe a great many superstitious pictures."

This means he had the glass put out of the windows - and heavens knows what was lost in that hour or so. But we still have the joy of those carvings.

All round the nave, chancel and aisles of this great church, the wooden wall-plates supporting the roof bear a rich collection of 15th-century carvings.

Some, like the beautifully lifelike hounds cornering a hare, would not have offended Dowsing if he had seen them.

Others, like the hand of God or the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, were deeply Catholic - in Dowsing's terms, outrageously superstitious.

Two scenes which occur more than once, he might simply not have understood. Concerning the elephant, recognisable chiefly by the castle on its back, and the tiger, identified by its mirror, they come from the medieval bestiary.

This was an ancient collection of descriptions and tales of animals, real and mythical, all told to reveal a religious moral. Highly popular in the 14th and 15th centuries, it was out of fashion and probably forgotten in Dowsing's time.