Churches

St Andrew, Northwold

First appeared in Let's Talk! Norfolk, October 2004

Against the north wall of the chancel in the grand and lovely medieval church of Northwold, four soldiers recline beneath trees. Though their faces are much damaged, and one has completely lost his head, they clearly wear armour from the reign of Richard II (1367-99). Above them are three vaulted bays of intricate gothic tracery, perfect miniatures of windows and ceilings far grander than you expect to find in a Norfolk village.

The soft chalk of which this whole ensemble is carved has worn badly over the centuries, but it remains one of the finest surviving Easter sepulchres in England.

You can find sepulchres in the chancels of many medieval churches. Very often they double as niches for tombs or memorial effigies. Very few indeed - and no others in East Anglia - are as grand as this one.

This was a focal point in the medieval ceremonies of Easter. Here, on Good Friday, the villagers would perform the ritual known as Creeping to the Cross - shuffling on their knees to kiss a crucifix.

Then a barefoot priest would wrap the cross and place it, along with a pyx containing a consecrated wafer representing the "host", or body of Christ, into the sepulchre.

The sepulchre would then be curtained off and surrounded by burning candles, or "lights". Watch would be kept until the morning of Easter Sunday, when the host would be removed, with much ceremony, to the high altar for a mass representing the Resurrection.

Despite their distinctly non-Biblical attire, the four knights at the foot of the Northwold sepulchre depict soldiers asleep while guarding Christ's tomb. The subject was a familiar one in the medieval mystery plays, which may sometimes have been staged in Northwold.

Also popular with travelling players and their audiences was the legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead. This too is depicted here, in a fragment of wall-painting revealed beneath the crumbling plaster of the north wall.

In this tale, three grand and well-dressed hunters - perhaps kings - encounter three walking corpses in a wood. The caption to the image would be: "As you are, so were we. As we are, so will you be."

The reminder that everyone dies might have seemed scarcely necessary in the century of the Black Death, but it might also have been a chilling illustration to a sermon on the sin of Pride.

Two of the dead - both naked, and one distinctly skeletal - can still be made out in the Northwold painting. Rather clearer is the tethered hawk on the over-dressed wrist of one of the hunters.