Churches

St Mary, Woodbridge

First appeared on Sylly Suffolk website, 1998

WOODBRIDGE is one of England's loveliest little market towns, with its traditional boatyards, restored tide-mill, ancient pubs and old red-brick shire hall (now housing the Museum of the Suffolk Horse) on its historic market hill. Right at its heart stands the rather grand church, with one of Suffolk's most splendid Perpendicular towers - seen to advantage from nowhere in the town.

Outside, the large west window can be seen only from a disused corner of the graveyard; the pinnacled tower itself, though 108ft high, has its feet in a dip in the hillside and is all but hidden from view even in the nearby market. From the distance of the river and the overlooking heights of Sutton Hoo beyond, however, it is enough of a landmark that a barrel of pitch was hauled to the top in 1803 so that if Napoleon's forces invaded, the church itself could become a beacon. Happily it was never lit.

St Mary's was built in one continuous process from 1400 to 1450, a replacement for a Saxon church, probably a 10th century building, which served both the parish and the adjoining Augustinian priory. Such sharing arrangements often led to conflicts, but though it was built at the expense of the townsfolk, the new church continued to be used by the monks of the priory, to which it was joined until the monastery's dissolution in 1537. The Abbey School now stands on the old monastic site.

As Woodbridge grew, this church too became cramped for a booming population: old drawings show both aisles filled not only with box pews at floor level, but raised wooden galleries above. These were installed in 1638 and must seriously have darkened what today is a pleasantly bright, though sadly Victorianised interior.

The church's most striking feature was once its 15th century rood screen, which was very tall and stretched from wall to wall, with 44 painted panels depicted saints. Today just a few of these panels remain, scratched and faded, behind glass on the north and south walls. The replacement lower screen is a hideous Victorian affair, which deserves its indignity of having electric cables and a plug socket thrust through it.

The font on a font - the sacrament of baptism

Mass - note the houseling cloth, and the chalice

Penance - see the devil flee

Extreme unction - the curious tilt of the dying man's bed is exactly as at Denston

The church guidebook commits the common Suffolk error of attributing all attacks on church artworks to the bureaucratic fanatic William Dowsing, who came here on January 27, 1644. In fact, one observer had written of the screen 13 years earlier: "How glorious it was when it was all standing may be discerned by that which remaineth" - a statement we might echo in so many churches today.

Dowsing, in fact, was so scrupulous in recording exactly what he did have destroyed that it seems improbable and unnecessary to credit him with extra acts of vandalism. The desecration of St Mary's splendid font, for example, was quite certainly undertaken during the savagely anti-Catholic reign of Edward VI (1547-53), when its proselytising imagery of the seven Catholic sacraments would have been utter anathema.

The extraordinary butterfly headdresses shown in two of the carvings date this lovely font to the 1480s - H Munro Cautley, in his Suffolk Churches and their Treasures, even dares date it precisely to 1483. That makes it the same age as the similar fonts at Denston and Great Glemham - Cautley thinks they came from different workshops, but their similarities far outweigh their differences.

Even defaced as they are, the carvings give fascinating and delightful glimpses into pre-Reformation religious life.

The seven sacraments portrayed are baptism, confirmation, matrimony, ordination, mass, penance, and extreme unction (anointing the dying). The eighth face, as at Denston and Great Glemham, shows the crucifixion.

Traces of red paint on the shaft of the depicted font in the baptism scene suggest just how brightly coloured this actual font would have been when new. There is more colour in the penance scene, where the priest takes the confession of a head-dressed woman in a shriving pew with gaudy green and red traceried panels - behind her a devil flees over the shoulder of an attendant acolyte.

The mass scene has a very human dimension as well as showing telling details of the ritual. A man and a woman both kneel to receive the Host from the priest, with a houseling cloth held out before them to catch any holy crumbs. On the altar behind stands a chalice.

The scenes of confirmation and ordination are quite alike, with the central figure of a robed bishop carrying a crozier and with an attendant at his left hand: at confirmation, he lays his hand on a thin-legged youth in a short tunic, while at ordination the newly-made priest kneels, wearing a chasuble with a richly embroidered cross on the back.

As with nearly all these seven-sacrament fonts (there are 13 in Suffolk, 23 in Norfolk and two elsewhere) the figures have had their faces removed, if not their whole heads: two have been obliterated so thoroughly that the iconoclasts' anger can still be sensed. They were the crucified figure of Christ (a graven image of the foulest idolatrous kind, in the eyes of the Protestant reformers), and that of the bride in the wedding scene. In their absence they retain a powerfulness that defies the zealot's hammer.