Churches

St Mary, Mildenhall

First appeared on Sylly Suffolk website, 1998

MILDENHALL St Mary's is magnificent. Massive in scale - 168ft by 65ft (51m x 20m) with a 120ft (36.5m) tower that dominates the town - it has an almost cathedral-like grandeur outside.

Inside it is one of those rare buildings that makes you pause and draw a sharp involuntary intake of breath. It is extraordinary and sad that it is so little loved that to have this experience one must visit on a shopping day and borrow the key from a hardware store.

As you enter the church you are immediately struck by the sense of space.

The width of the nave and aisles, the slenderness of the pillars, and the size and number of the windows give it an airy quality. But what takes the breath away is the roof.

If the wooden hammerbeam roof, adorned with carved angels, is the typical Suffolk artform, this is its masterpiece. There can be few more extraordinary roofs in Christendom.

The structure itself is a triumph of engineering design, but it is the angels and other figures that make it truly memorable. These are not pretty, polite or discreet angels as you might find in other churches. These are solid, lifesized people with splendid wings, each one an individual with a real face and a real character.

Their sheer size makes them seem close, but in fact the nave is high and the Protestant zealots who elsewhere mutilated such images simply could not reach them. Several are peppered with marks of 17th century shot - one appears to have had its right eye shot out, but retains a stoical dignity.

Even more remarkable is the variety of human, animal and fantastical figures carved into the beams and supports of the roof in the north aisle.

Costume in some of the scenes enables this work to be dated quite precisely to the 1430s. Some time later a frustrated image-wrecker set to work to damage or destroy the beam carvings - and left the head of his pike embedded in one of the figures, where it remains to this day (pictured below).

The church also contains a number of fascinating memorials. There are a number of plaques to Bunburys, at least one of whom would have been alive when Oscar Wilde immortalised the name in his play The Importance of Being Earnest.

There is an elegant marble tomb effigy of the Elizabethan soldier Sir Henry North, whose resemblance to his contemporary William Shakespeare goes beyond his splendid ruff and the style of facial hair.

And there is a tragic tribute by a later Sir Henry North, whose 1670 epitaph for his wife mourns: "You are happy because your life has ended, I am desolate for I cannot die". Sadly, but unsurprisingly, he later took that matter into his own hands.

The church in which all these interesting folk lie was largely built in the 14th century and achieved much its present form in the 1420s. Much of the money and impetus for the renovations then probably came from Sir Henry Barton, a Mildenhall man who was twice Lord Mayor of London. In 1405, as London's Sheriff, he introduced the city's first street-lighting. That, no doubt, was a wonder in its day. St Mary's remains a wonder.