Churches

St Mary, Rougham

First appeared on Sylly Suffolk website, 2001

IN 1536, at the Dissolution of Bury St Edmunds Abbey, the manor of Rougham was sold to John Drury "under licence of King Henry VIII" for £862 16s 8d. At his death 20 years later, Drury willed eight marks (£5 6s 8d) to pay for a priest "for ever" to pray for the souls of his parents and himself "in the parish church of Rougham" - and a house, known as "the Chantery House", for the priest to live in.

In this case "for ever" was a tragically optimistic proposition. The role of the chantry priest, such as Drury hoped to endow, had been ruthlessly eradicated in the Reformation of Edward VI and only revived when the Catholic Queen Mary came to the throne in 1553. When John Drury died, Mary herself had only two years to live, and with her would pass Catholicism as the official religion of the realm.

The abbots of Bury, just four miles away, had been lords of the manor at Rougham since before Domesday (1086) - but the Drury family had had a bit to say in the life of the village and the church for some time too.

The stately 15th century west tower - one of the finest in a county of fine Perpendicular towers - already bore the single word "Drury" in large black flint letters on its north parapet. If Robert Drury could have illuminated his name in flashing neon, he would have. The inscription on the south side, "Pray for the sowle of John Tillot", is restrained by comparison. Both are more prominent than the monogram M (for Mary) on the east.

An earlier Drury, Lord Roger, is commemorated, alongside his wife Margery, in a brass in the floor of the north aisle. Apart from being a beautiful piece of work, this brass is notable for two striking reasons.

Though Lady Margery's date of death is given precisely as September 3, 1405, husband Roger's is left to read (in Latin) "... day of the month of ... Anno dni Mccc... " Clearly, the brass was made in his lifetime, before the turn of the 15th century, and his final date (actually 1418) never filled in.

The second fascinating fact, which again tells us much about the history of brasses, is that the figures are so similar to those of Sir William and Lady Alionora de Burgate at Burgate as to suggest a form of mass-production.

It has been said (by DP Mortlock in his generally excellent Suffolk Churches series) that the figures of the women are identical. This is not quite true, though the suggestion that they are the work of the same hand is persuasive. In fact the two knights are even more alike, differing only in the fact that Burgate wears a moustache. These are clearly stylised images with no attempt at individual portraiture. (At Burgate, intriguingly, it is Lady Alionora whose date of death is missing, while her husband is recorded as dying "on the vigil of St James the Apostle" 1409).

Like a large number of Suffolk churches, Rougham's stands in splendid near-isolation a good distance from its village. A common explanation for this phenomenon is the decamping of villagers during the Black Death of 1349: in many cases this dramatic scenario is highly suspect, but at Rougham it seems the people did indeed torch the village, leaving only the stone edifice of the church, and rebuild their homes half a mile to the south.

Now with a 20th century school and rectory and a couple of farm cottages for company, the Drury-Tillot tower is a most impressive landmark, though it is surrounded by a rather over-neat churchyard. The eye-catching single-storey south porch, pierced by large, unglazed "Venetian gothic" windows, sports a large and lumpen gargoyle with hands over its ears, though there is scarcely any noise for it to block out - not since the demise of the World War II Rougham airbase.

Nearby, a pair of surprising blind arches low down in the wall of the 14th century south aisle are believed to be the marks of intra-mural burials. The buttresses supporting the wall are clearly of later date, as are the rather fine Decorated windows. The battlements of this aisle bear roundels, one of which has a carved head which is said to represent the severed head of John the Baptist served upon a platter - it certainly looks like it, whatever the artist intended.

Inside, as outside, this is a church of pleasant, rather stolid dignity. The chief pleasure is a good hammerbeam roof to the nave, well lit by a high, attractive clerestory . There are both angels on the beam-ends and apostles on the wall-posts - all beheaded in one or other of the waves of post-medieval iconoclasm.

The early 16th century benches also had angels on their elbow-rests: the saw-marks are still clearly visible where they were taken off, leaving the cushion-like clouds on which they stood.

A more shocking loss, because more recent, is on the now sadly blank space above the chancel arch. In 1856 the church restorers uncovered a Doom painting there. It was apparently still there in 1900, so what happened to it?