Churches

St Mary, Earl Stonham

First appeared on Sylly Suffolk website, 2000

OPPOSITE the entrance door of Earl Stonham church is a 15th century wooden bench with a motto carved on the armrest. At first just the one world "Orate" is visible, making it seem as if the rest is somehow broken off or missing: in fact the words continue round the elbow so the rest of the phrase, "pro Necolai Houk" appears on the other side.

This is a striking and unusual relic of the church's Catholic past that goes right to the heart of pre- Reformation England. The Latin words translate as "Pray for Nicholas Hook" - or for his soul.

In late medieval England the church was a meeting-place of the living and the dead. Nicholas Hook, or his heirs, were hoping - even expecting - that the prayers of the living would speed his passage through Purgatory to Paradise. It was equally expected that the prayers of the dead, especially the saints, might aid the living in this world.

This was the "superstition" that the Protestant reformers of the 16th century, and their Puritan successors a century later, were so eager to root out.

The plea for Nicholas Hook, being in wood and at a convenient height, should have been an easy target for the iconoclasts. Its survival is evidence that the reformers were not quite so rigorous here as in many places - or it may be that the absence of the word "anima" (soul) was its saving.

There is plenty in this glorious church to show that the iconoclasts were active here.

The nave roof is a particularly ornate and beautiful example of the East Anglian hammerbeam form, carved and carpentered in a rich russet chestnut. The bulky angels on its protruding beams are reminiscent of those on Suffolk's finest roof, at Mildenhall, but all have been decapitated, probably in the 1640s. Some of the shields they hold have also had their imagery removed - it is just possible to see that one bore the Y-shaped insignia of the Holy Trinity.

Others have survived intact including, surprisingly, two bearing symbols of the Passion (hammer and pincers) and the Mass (wafer and chalice). A bishop (not, perhaps, exactly an angel) has lost his head, but retains his mitre, which might itself have been expected to be a target of the reformers' wrath. There are the heads and wings of angels intact on the coving and intricate foliage on the wallplate and in the spandrels.

The wall-posts supporting the roof also have figures carved on them but these, presumably saints, have all been defaced.

The imagery on the gorgeously carved 15th century font is also richly Catholic, with a Sacred Heart very like the one just up the hill at Little Stonham - these two fonts are so similar they are undoubtedly the same craftsman's work. Here too a Trinity badge, held by a defaced angel, has been carefully carved off a shield, leaving its outline dimly visible, while another shield bears an image that is no longer recognisable.

Overall, though, the damage to the font is slight and it may well be that it was plastered over in the Reformation. The same is undoubtedly true of the great Doom painting over the chancel arch (though the covering may have been limewash, not plaster).

Even on a dull day, this painting is startlingly lit by a diagonal light. The yellow ray is so strong one assumes at first that a spotlight has been left on: in fact the glow is from a small window high in the south wall that would have been inserted to illuminate the rood when there was one - and a dramatic effect it must have made.

Though St Mary's is lit by a very attractive clerestory, it has no aisles. Instead the medieval need for eastern walls for subsidiary altars was met by a transept, unusual in Suffolk. This was built in the 13th and 14th centuries, yet weirdly the "wall-posts" of the 15th century roof protrude down past both arches, becoming a kind of pendant that can play no supporting role. They are not, in truth, very decorative either - they merely show that the roofmaker, though highly skilled in his art, was unused to crossing transepts and did not really know how to cope with the problem.

The bagpiper and the dragon

The east wall of the north transept apparently once bore a painting of a pilgrimage. The painting itself has been lost, but it is commemorated in an attractive watercolour sketch hanging in its place. The west wall of the south transept a fragment survives of what was apparently a scene from the tale of St George and the dragon.

The chancel is essentially a Victorian reconstruction, more sensitive to its medieval surroundings than most. It does contain some 15th century benches, with some very interesting carvings.

There is a headless pelican reviving the chicks in her nest; remains of a wodewose and a splendidly demonic dragon; most unusually, there is a bagpiper playing something very like the Northumbrian version of an instrument we would no longer associate with East Anglia.