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St Peter,
Walpole St Peter
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Having
now visited several thousand English churches, it
is inevitable that some of them begin to blur
into each other. But there are other churches
which stick so firmly in the mind that they are
easily familiar, and return visits to them are
eagerly anticipated. And yet, these are the very
churches at which it is always possible to notice
something new, and this church is one of them,
for not unreasonably St Peter is one of the dozen
best and most famous parish churches in England.
Alec Clifton-Taylor thought it was the
best. Of course, such claims can made for
many big churches; but St Peter is not just
special for its size. It is indeed magnificent,
but also infinitely subtle, the fruit of
circumstance and the ebb and flow of centuries.
There is a sense of community and continuity as
well; this is no mere museum, and it is not
simply St Peter's historic survivals that attract
its champions. At 160 feet long it dwarfs other
East Anglian giants like Southwold, Blythburgh,
Cley and Cawston. Only Salle gives it a run for
its money. It is also a welcoming church, as all
great churches should be. But even if it were
kept locked, which it isn't, there would still be
so much to see here that it would be worth the
journey.
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This part
of the county has a character more commonly associated
with Cambridgeshire, and of course we are only a couple
of miles from the Nene which forms the border between the
two counties. Walpole St Peter is closer to Peterborough
and Cambridge than it is to Norwich. Indeed, it is closer
to Leicester than it is to Great Yarmouth at the other
end of Norfolk, a reminder that this is a BIG county.
Today, the Norfolk marshland villages tend to be rather
mundane, apart from their churches of course. In this
curiously remote area around the Wash delineated by Lynn,
Wisbech and Boston, there is an agri-industrial
shabbiness accentuated by the flat of the land. But you
need to imagine the enormous wealth of this area in the
late medieval period. The silt washed by the great rivers
out of the Fens was superb for growing crops. East
Anglia, with the densest population in England, provided
a ready market, and the proximity of the great ports gave
easy access for exports. And then there was the Midlands
and the North which could be accessed by the east coast
ports.
The landowners and merchants became seriously wealthy,
and according to custom bequeathed enhancements to their
parish churches to encourage their fellow parishioners to
pray for their souls after they were dead. This was
nothing to do with the size of the local population; in
England's Catholic days, these buildings were not
intended merely for congregational worship. The fixtures
and fittings of the parish churches reflected the volume
of devotion, not just the volume of people. In areas
where there was serious wealth, the entire church might
be rebuilt.
But here at Walpole St Peter there was another imperative
for rebuilding the church. In the terrible floods of the
1330s, the church here was destroyed, apart from its
tower. Before it could be rebuilt in the fashionable
Decorated style, the Black Death came along and took away
fully half of the local population. However, the economic
effects of the pestilence would turn out to be rather
good for East Anglia in the long term, and by the
early-15th century churches were being rebuilt on a grand
scale all over Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire.
Walpole has two late medieval churches - St Andrew on the
other side of the village is very fine, but St Peter is
the one that puts it in the shade.
The nave came first, the chancel following a few decades
after. Eventually, the tower would also have been
rebuilt, in a similar scale to the rest of the church.
How amazing it might have been! We only need to look a
few miles over the border to Boston to see what could
have been possible. But the English Reformation of the
16th century brought an end to the need for bequests, and
so the late 13th century tower remains in place to this
day.
The vast church sits hemmed in to the north and east by
its wide churchyard. The battlemented nave and chancel
are a magnificent sight, most commonly first seen from
the village street to the north. Rendering accentuates
the reddishness of the stone, and the finest moment is
probably the conjunction between nave and chancel; spired
roodstair turrets rise to the gable, and at the apex is a
glorious sanctus bell turret. The stairway on the north
side is supported by a small figure who has been
variously interpreted as the Greek god Atlas, the Fenland
giant Hickathrift, or as anyone else I suppose.
The chancel is beautiful, but its most striking feature
is the tunnel that goes beneath its eastern end. One of
the features of the late medieval English Catholic church
was liturgical processions, but when this chancel was
extended in the 15th century it took the building right
up to the boundary of consecrated ground. To enable
processions still to circumnavigate this building, the
tunnel was placed beneath the high altar. Such
passageways are more common under towers, and there are
several examples of this in Norfolk, but that option was
obviously not possible here.
There are
lots of interesting bosses in the vaulting. It isn't just
the medieval past that has left its mark here. The floor
of the tunnel is flagged, and there are horse-rings in
the wall from the 18th and 19th century when it served
the more mundane purpose of stabling during services.
Views of the south side of the church are hindered by a
vast and beautiful copper beech, but there is no hiding
the vastness of the south porch, one of the biggest and
finest in Norfolk. The parvise window is as big as nave
windows elsewhere; the keys of St Peter decorate the
footstool of one of the niches.
And here are some of the finest medieval bosses in
Norfolk. The two main ones are the Assumption of the
Blessed Virgin, and the Last Judgement. There are
characterful animals in the other bosses. Figures in
niches include a Pieta, a Madonna and child, and a
pilgrim with a staff, pack, and shell on his hat. Also in
the porch is a sign reminding you to remove your patens,
the hardy wooden clogs common to 19th century farm
workers.
So much to
see, then, even before you come to push open the original
medieval door! And then you do, and the birdsong and
leaf-thresh of the summer morning outside falls away, and
you enter the cool of a serious stone space. The first
impression is of height, because the vista to the east is
cut off by an elegant 17th century screen, as at nearby
Terrington St Clement. The unifying of nave and tower,
almost a century apart, is accomplished by sprung
buttresses high up on the west wall, each carved with a
figure. Here are the Elizabethan communion table, a hudd
( the sentry box-like device intended to keep 18th
century Rectors dry at the graveside) and the
perpendicular light through the west windows.
And then you step through the pedimented entrance through
the screen into the body of the church, and the building
begins to unfold before you. Your journey through it
begins.
Some huge churches impose themselves on you. St Peter
doesn't. It isn't Salle or Long Melford. But neither is
it jaunty and immediately accessible like Terrington St
Clement or Southwold, nor full of light and air like
Blythburgh. St Peter is a complex space, the sum of its
parts, like Cley, and yet more than them, with a sense of
being an act of worship in itself.
One of the delights of Walpole St Peter is that many of
the furnishings reveal the hands of local craftsmen; the
roodscreen dado Saints, for example. There are twelve of
them, their naive character reminiscent of Westhall. The
six outer saints are women, the inner ones apostles. The
two sets are clearly by different hands, and the late Tom
Muckley wondered if they were, in fact, from two
different screens.
On the north side are St Catherine, the rare subject of
the Blessed Virgin and Christchild, St Margaret (the
processional cross with which she dispatches the dragon
is unfinished), St John, St James and St Thomas. On the
south side are St Peter, St Paul, St Andrew, St Mary of
Magdala, St Dorothy and St Barbara. I was delighted to be
asked recently for the use of my photographs for the
information board which explains it.
The nave
has a feel that is at once ancient and vital, not so much
of age as of timelessness, of continuity. It's the sheer
mixture of woodwork that impresses - silvery oak broods
in the white light from the high windows. The best of the
medieval work is in the south aisle, where the benches
are tiered and face inwards. A massive dark wood pulpit
and tester broods over the north side. Above all this
rises the pale cream of the arcades, topped by the gold
of the hanging candelabras, and the towering, serious
early 17th century font cover. The font is clearly one of
the Seven Sacraments series; but, as at the great
churches of Blythburgh and Southwold in Suffolk, the
panels have been completely erased. A dedicatory
inscription is dated 1537.
As well as wood, metal. The candelabras provide a focus,
but there is also one of the latten medieval lecterns
familiar from elsewhere in Norfolk, the little lions
perky at its feet. The south aisle chapel has a lovely
parclose screen with a spiked iron gate. In the north
aisle, the chapel has been neatly furnished for smaller
scale worship.
And
then you step through into the chancel, and this
is something else again. Here is true grandeur.
This immense spaces rises fully twenty-one steps
from nave floor to high altar. Here is the late
medieval imagination writ large, compromised in
the years since, but largely restored by the late
Victorians. You step from subtlety to richness.
Niches and arcading flank the walls leading the
eye east, their blankness becoming sedilia. In
the high niches where once were images, 17th and
18th century worthies have their memorials.
Everything leads the eye to the great east
window, where excellent 19th century glass
completes your journey through the Queen of the
Marshlands.
Simon Jenkins, in the often-maligned England's
Thousand Best Churches, tends to cast a cold and
even sardonic eye on most buildings as he passes
by, but at Walpole St Peter even his breath was
taken away: it is a place not of curiosity
but of subtle proportion, of the play of light on
stone and wood. If English churches were Dutch
Old Masters, this would be St Pieter de Hooch. |
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Simon Knott, September 2005, updated April 2017
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