Churches

St Mary, Stoke by Nayland

First appeared on Sylly Suffolk website, 2000

ONE of Suffolk's loveliest churches, Stoke by Nayland is also arguably its grandest. It certainly has grand connections - and remains pretty much as it was rebuilt in the 15th century by one of England's grandest families.

Among the surviving brasses - the indented slabs show there were once many more - is one for a Lady Catherine Howard, who died here in 1452. The strangely primitive engraving might confuse a student of costume history, for it was in fact made 80 years after the lady died - by which time her great-granddaughter Anne Boleyn was on the point of becoming Queen of England by marrying Henry VIII. Within another 10 years another of the Lady Catherine's great-granddaughters, her exact namesake, had become Henry's fifth wife and, like Anne Boleyn before her, been beheaded for alleged fornication. The bloodline still had one more queen to come, though, when Anne Boleyn's daughter Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558.

The story of Stoke by Nayland church, though, might be said to have begun in 1398, when Sir John Howard came here to wed Alice de Tendring. Her father, Sir William de Tendring - whose memorial brass is the oldest and finest in the church - fought alongside Henry V at Agincourt. The alliance by marriage of his family with the already powerful Howards made Tendring Hall at Stoke a seat of real influence in the land.

Little remains of the church in which that wedding took place, for Sir John Howard himself commissioned its rebuilding after his father-in-law's death in 1421 (13 years after the making of his brass). The combined Howard-de Tendring arms are in evidence throughout the splendid building, which was completed around 1481 by Sir John's grandson and namesake.

This second Sir John Howard was husband of the first Lady Catherine mentioned above and descended, on his mother's side, from Thomas Mowbray, the 1st Duke of Norfolk. Bizarrely, and confusingly, 84 years after Mowbray's death in Venice, Howard too was created "1st Duke of Norfolk" in 1483. This was not a small thing, since a duke is next to a prince in that arcane structure the British nobility, and as high as you can get without being royal. Sir John did not enjoy his elevated status long, though, before he departed this life on August 22, 1485, at the Battle of Bosworth Field, where Richard III also met his end and the Tudor age began.

The dishonour of being on the losing side did not impede Howard's son Thomas for too long, though he spent three years in the Tower of London after being wounded and captured at Bosworth. Restored to the dukedom by Henry VII, he went on to achieve fame by leading an English army to defeat the Scots at Flodden in Northumberland in 1513.

All these dukes have small parts in Shakespeare's history plays, but it is the fourth duke, another Thomas, who is probably best remembered, at least by those who have seen the movie Elizabeth.

As head of the leading Catholic family in England, he was not surprisingly a favourite of Queen Mary Tudor: more remarkably, he managed to retain his position as "the most powerful man in England" under Protestant Elizabeth - at least partly, no doubt, on account of their shared Howard blood. He even survived a rebellious attempt to place the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots on the English throne with himself as her king - but was finally executed in 1572 for another plot to replace Elizabeth with Mary, this time involving a Spanish invasion. Nine years before he was stripped of his life, Norfolk had been stripped of his estates, and that was the end of the Howards' link with Stoke by Nayland.

The most prominent memorials in the church are grand 17th century ones to a Sir Francis Mannock and Lady Anne Windsor, but the whole building is essentially a Howard monument.

The 120ft tower, largely brick-built, with two tall windows on each side, unusual buttressed turrets at each corner, and striking pinnacles, is a landmark as handsome as any in Suffolk. It appears in several paintings by England's favourite landscape artist, John Constable.

The battlemented clerestory, chancel and aisles form a harmonious whole both outside and in - and if we can curse the puritan William Dowsing for "braking down an 100 superstitious Pictures", the loss of all that medieval stained glass undoubtedly brightened up the interior, allowing us to appreciate the elegance of the arcades and the breathtaking height and grace of the west arch.

Though often described as one of Suffolk's great "wool churches", Stoke really came from older money and an older sensibility. It is a church that lifts both the eye and the spirit high, quite unlike the oppressiveness of Lavenham, the wool church par excellence .

It would be worth a trip to Stoke just to see the 15th century south doors, which are astonishingly richly and intricately carved in oak which has aged to a silvery grey. With fine architectural detail and figures like statues in canopied niches, they are like a scale model of a great gothic cathedral facade. Two of the figures have been tentatively identified as the Blessed Virgin and King David, and the whole thing as a Jesse tree, or family tree of Christ.

The 15th century font is well worth a close look, too. Octagonal, as usual for the period, it has the emblems of the four evangelists on four of its faces, as do so many others. What is not so usual is that the other four sides appear to depict the gospel-writers themselves, in deliciously individual carvings that seem to take you right into the scriptorium of a medieval monastery. If they are indeed meant to represent the evangelists, Dowsing obviously failed to identify them as such, for he left them happily intact.