Churches

St Margaret, Thrandeston

First appeared on Sylly Suffolk website, 2001

"THE past is another country, they do things differently there."

This is really why I like old churches, because to visit them with open eyes is to make a sight-seeing trip to that other country. But it helps to understand at least something of the language - and the interpreters of the more recent past are not always all that helpful.

Thrandeston is a nice little village, a classic example of that illusion of remoteness that Suffolk does so well. And St Margaret's is a nice little church, mostly 15th century, but with dollops of Victorian applique which are not all unappealing.

What makes it exceptional is a pair of wooden carved figures on the choirstalls.

There are of course a lot of wooden figures in Suffolk churches, many of them delightful, many fascinating - and many to be found on this website - but these appear to be unique, and certainly pose a mystery.

The church's anonymous single-sheet guide is unforthcoming: "The choir stalls are 15th and late 16th century with panelled and traceried frontals, poppyhead ends and, on the north side two figures."

This tells you more than Cautley, who fails to mention them at all. Arthur Mee, or more likely his local representative, in The King's England series, dribbles: "It seemed to us that the figures were like the carvings of some Polynesian tribe ... and we found ourselves wondering if they had been brought here by George Lee, who died last century in the South Sea Islands." Imaginative piffle, as usual - overlooking the way the dark wood of the carvings belongs in its surroundings, the European features of the figures, and the fact that the rather curious bobbed hairstyle matches that of the headstops on both window mouldings of the south porch, which seem to be the only genuinely medieval heads remaining among of wealth of Victoria whimsy.

Mortlock, as usual, is more acute, though he too is coy about committing himself. He describes the "extraordinary" figures well, then adds: "It is tempting to think of them as witches."

And here I confess: I succumb to that temptation.

Take a look, consider the symbolism of the hitched-up skirt and uncovered knee of one figure, the rather brazen (for its time) buttoned bodice of the other. What can it mean but sexual abandon, temptress-hood - strongly associated in the medieval mind with witches (or Jews - but then the dividing line between those "enemies of Christianity" was often pretty thin in the common mind).

Then there are the creatures they are holding. Mortlock identifies them as an owl and a cat, and I agree with him. Both creatures of the night, both remarked upon in the medieval bestiary for their ability to see in the dark: in the owl's case this is specifically associated with the Jews, who "when our Lord came to save them, rejected Him ... and preferred the darkness to the light." And both, of course, deeply ingrained in English culture as the familiars of witches.

So what are these two lovely witches doing here? And what an irony (though in fact an explicable one) that the bench-end figures of saints Peter and John in the nave, and the welcoming St Margaret in her niche over the south porch door, should have been defaced while those two deeply un-Christian - even anti-Christian - figures should have survived so wonderfully intact. (The explanation is this: to the iconoclasts of the Reformation, and their Puritan successors, what had to be destroyed were idols that might be objects of devotion, or associated with intercession for the dead - which could not be so of a witch or, for that matter, a wodewose).

Suffolk has a pretty grim history with regard to the persecution of women (and men) accused of witchcraft. The self-appointed, self-styled Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, cut a merry murderous swathe across the county. And it has been argued that America's infamous Salem witch trials took their judicial precedent from the awful fate of two old dears from Lowestoft, Rose Cullender and Amy Duny, and the part played in their downfall by the future Chief Justice of the King's Bench, the "devout, learned and sensible" Sir Matthew Hale.

These horrors, however, were perpetrated in the savage 17th century. What would the attitude towards supposed witches have been 200 years earlier - and why might they have been depicted here?

The official status of witches as enemies of the "true Church" began in 1484 - around the apparent time the Thrandeston figures were carved - with Innocent VIII's papal bull "Summis Desideranter". This gave the Inquisition in Germany licence for the "correcting, imprisoning, punishing and chastising" of "devils male and female" who are guilty of "incantations, charms and conjurings" and " other abominable superstitions".

This is strikingly like the language that would soon be used to describe the practice of the Catholic faith itself - suggesting that "superstition", as so often, is simply a derogatory term for an older form of religion. But was there really a religion of witchcraft?

Clearly the "witches" were neither Jews nor Christian heretics - the Inquisition needed no new licence to persecute and torture them . But unlike those groups, if the witches really had a faith of their own, they left no documentary evidence of it.

The likelihood is that the victims of the witch-hunters were of many types, alike only in being different in some way from the populace at large.

If a scapegoat was wanted for some real or imagined calamity, and no Jews were handy to suffer their traditional "retribution", then some poor woman, perhaps steeped in healing lore or "magic", would do just as well. She might be old, a loner, an eccentric - or she might not. She might be locally notable for having uncommon knowledge (one thinks of the routine killing of intellectuals, or anyone with glasses, in Pol Pot's Cambodia) - or she might not. Something as simple as a birthmark might be deemed "the devil's mark" if anyone chose to level an accusation, either through malice or their own over-imaginative superstition.

Over and over again, throughout late medieval and early "modern" times, the evidence suggests that supposed witches invented their bizarre and fantastical "crimes" under torture - because such a "confession" was the only way to make the torture stop.

But real or illusory, witchcraft was believed to be evil, a compact with the devil. And remarkably, even to this day it seems almost shocking, or thrilling, to see the image of a witch in church. Why this should be is problematic, unless it is simply the rarity value.

Of course not all medieval figures in churches are saints, by any means. We enjoy a profusion of wodewoses, green men, imps, demons and beasts both real and mythical, benign and malign. Perhaps what is so surprising about the Thrandeston witches is their very humanity, as if the carver knew them personally. Which perhaps he did.

• Since writing this article, I have noticed a pair of figures very similar to the "witches" discussed here, carved in a large ornate mantelpiece, now in Christchurch Mansion in Ipswich. This apparently 17th-century mantel was rescued, I believe, from a former merchant's house in the town. Its age and the striking similarity to the Thrandeston figures obviously casts doubt on the 15th-century dating on which some of the above speculation was based - but probably adds credence to the idenfitication of the figures as witches. It also raises the question whether they were originally carved for the church, or moved there from some domestic setting.