Silly Suffolk they call it – and who am I to contradict
them? Obviously no idea who ‘them’ is, but I was brought up as a polite middle
class boy and it was instilled in to me that it is rude to contradict anyone.
Not really on. Not British. Not done. Indeed, had the German army actually made
it over the channel in 1940, demanding allegiance to the thousand year Reich and
insisting on coffee at breakfast, rumour has it that members of my family were
ready to repel them with hard stares, bristling facial hair and mumbled
expression of “not on, dear chap”. Where was I? Ah yes, silly Suffolk.
Well the Suffolk survey has begun. The border was crossed
and no resistance was met. You’ve seen the website, admired the cheap graphics
and, I hope, taken a good long hard look at the amazing graffiti. And it really
is amazing. Suffolk has some amazing churches. Some really fantastic medieval monuments
to money, power and sheep. Churches such as Long Melford and Lavenham, built
with the profits from the wool trade, soar above the landscape. Delicate
lace-like tracery mingled with the hard brutality of Barnack stone. The slabs
of dark grey roof lead flattening the golden walls that vault towards the sky,
carried by stone angels, anchoring them and squashing them back on to the earth.
They are, in short, pretty darned good. Quite nice. Bit special.
However, for me the real gems of Suffolk – silly Suffolk –
are not the great stone cathedrals of Long Melford, Bury and Lavenham. Indeed,
despite their grandeur and history, they really leave me a little cold. They
are too rich, too well maintained, too restored. They have a beauty, but it is
a remote and detached beauty. It is impersonal, exquisite and largely barren of
emotion. Whilst Simon Jenkins might get unnaturally excited viewing their soaring
pinnacles and fornication (look it up), I find them dead and empty monuments.
Like an empty display case in the British museum. The right thing, in the right
place - but with nothing inside to engage the emotions or interest. Sorry
Simon.
For me the real gems of Silly Suffolk are the small out of
the way churches. Churches rarely visited by the coach parties and guidebook
followers. They are the churches that have, despite plague, flood, famine, fire
and the idiosyncrasies of Victorian clergy, survived virtually un-touched. They
are the churches where medieval hands carved deep into medieval stone, leaving
us a record of a past that never made it to the manuscript bestsellers of the
day. Churches like Troston, where demons stalk the chancel arch, Parham, where
a fleet of medieval ships continue in their centuries long voyage, and
Weybread, where a medieval knight still battles an unseen dragon across the
stonework. They are the churches that
never attract much attention, never make the front pages (unless the vicar has
been particularly inventive), and have just remained. They have just remained
as they are. Cared for by a few dozen local people, proud of their own little
medieval gem, and continued to exist. And they are all out there waiting for us
to rediscover them. Hundreds of secret time machines to the past.
As the surveys progress in both counties I am sure that
these similarities and differences will become more apparent. We are the same –
but different. Neither one better than the other, but with strange and
intriguing local oddities. Rather says it all about East Anglia I feel. So is
it really Silly Suffolk? Well I’ve never thought of it as so. When the Danes
first landed here, intent on pillage and conquest (but with an option on rape
should the opportunity present itself), they saw it as a blessed place. A place
of lush greenery and wealth. A place that, in the end, they adopted as their
own. Where dynasties and families grew
alongside each other, that resulted, eventually, in the building of our many
hundreds of medieval churches. Those first Danish invaders, landing their
longships on the golden sands of our East Anglian beaches, called it the Summer
Country. It would be rude to contradict…
