The news these days seems just so full of horror. So full of
terror, death and destruction. The temptation is to simply give up reading it
at all. To close your eyes and your mind to the deliberate acts of wilful
hatred, in the hope that they will simply go away. It is tempting too for us to
look upon these acts from afar, condemn them amongst our friends and upon
social media, and to simply refer to them as though they are the acts of the
uncivilised, of the unenlightened. To take nothing away from the immense individual
suffering and human tragedy of it all, for those of us who care about history and
cultural heritage the news is bleak indeed. Historic sites are now, well and
truly, in the front line. Sacred objects are smashed, museums looted, and
entire historic cultures are being wiped from the archaeological map. A modern
horror inflicted upon the ancient world. As ancient temples to long forgotten
gods feel the bite of sledge hammers and cheaply bought western explosives, as four
thousand year old statues are smashed and scattered, it is all too easy for the
good people of Budleigh Salterton or Saffron Walden to pause over their second
latte, and condemn these acts as the work of bigots, zealots and the
uneducated. However, it is worth remembering that it was, in historical terms,
only a very short time ago that the good burghers of Melton Constable and Bishop's Stortford were carrying out just such iconoclasm in their own local parish
churches.
Most people who know anything of English history understand
that there was a time when we attacked our own places of worship, stripped the
images from the walls and woodwork, and smashed the splendours of the medieval
church. However, when confronted with such destruction the most common reaction
is to place the blame fairly and squarely upon the cropped heads of Oliver
Cromwell's puritan soldiery. The parliamentary stronghold of East Anglia,
swarming in our imaginations with bible-bashing puritans and roundhead
ironclads, most certainly suffered such attacks during the period of the
English Civil Wars of the mid-seventeenth century. However, in terms of the
destruction of the artworks and glories of the medieval church the real damage
had been done over half a century before Oliver and his shock troops had even
been born. Whilst there are cases of such seventeenth century destruction, with
the notebooks of the notorious iconoclast William Dowsing still surviving in
witness to these acts, the churches that they entered had already been largely
stripped of their medieval beauty. To place the blame upon the roundheads is,
in some respects, to follow the easy route. It is simple to look at the itinerant
puritan fanatics and the visiting rough soldiery and conclude that it was
violence born of indoctrination and ignorance. It is far harder to accept that
such wanton destruction, such an attack on beauty and devotion, was actually
carried out by the parishioners themselves. That such iconoclasm was undertaken
by, in some cases, the children and grandchildren of the people who made
bequests and offerings to create such objects of beauty in the first place.
In 1530 the parish church was essentially medieval in
character. A place of vibrant wall paintings, bright stained glass, luminous
alabasters and gaudily painted statues. A place of imagery, angels and the
saints. By 1550, only two decades later, almost all of this was gone. The
statues had been taken down, much of the glass was gone, the rich embroidered
vestments had been sold off, and the wall paintings lay hidden beneath coat
upon coat of fresh lime-wash. Whilst the changes were monumental they were also
incremental. While it may be true to say that the process was begun, as many
people will undoubtedly assume, in the closing years of the reign of Henry
VIII, the process was a relatively slow one. Many of the major changes, changes
that we still see around us today, actually took place long after Henry's
death, in the short but turbulent reign of his son Edward VI.
Under the influence of 'reforming' advisors, and brought up
to be a devout protestant, Edward oversaw the deliberate and piecemeal
destruction of the medieval catholic church. It was a targeted and sustained
attack on the fabric, furnishings and social structure of the medieval parish.
Whilst some have argued that these were changes welcomed by many at a parish
level, as evidenced by the lack of resistance to the changes themselves, it
must be noted that the reformation was a gradual process. It was a gradual
chipping away at the foundations of medieval faith and belief, until the whole
structure had been built anew. It was a series of small acts, each in itself
largely innocuous, that taken together resulted in fundamental change.
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| Bressingham, Norfolk |
It was the statute against the veneration of images that
left such a trail of obvious destruction that can still be traced through
almost every East Anglian church. The act was uncompromising, with orders being given to
‘utterly extinct and destroy’ images ‘so that there remain no memory of the
same’. It was this act that led to the covering over of wall
paintings, the dismantling or defacement of rood screens, angel roofs and
stained glass windows. At Bressingham in south Norfolk the masterpieces of
carving that decorated every bench end were attacked with chisels, with each
human face hacked from the timber. At North Elmham the world class painted
panels that formed the rood screen were removed from their frames, turned
upside down and used as floor boards. At Colkirk the beautiful late medieval
glass panels were smashed from the tracery, only for fragments to be recovered
from the churchyard centuries later. At Houghton St Giles the parish chose to
leave the magnificent rood screen in place, but instead roughly gouged out the
complete faces of every individual saint, whilst at mighty Attleborough church
the multi-tiered doom painting above the chancel arch disappeared for centuries
beneath layers of whitewash. It was, quite simply, an attack on medieval art of
a scale never seen before or since; destruction on a truly horrific scale.
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| North Elmham, Norfolk |
What is perhaps the most surprising thing is just how much
beauty has survived in East Anglia's churches. Given the periods of destruction
and unrestrained iconoclasm, the fact that almost every church, almost without
exception, contains at least one noteworthy survival is something of a puzzle -
but something also to be endlessly thankful for. It is clear that in some
cases, as at North Elmham, the survival of such rare beauty was simply a matter
of chance. In other cases though it must have been a matter of deliberate
choice. A parish that saw those objects of, now unorthodox, beauty and chose to
defy or ignore directions for their destruction. A congregation for whom the
links created by such objects to their own parish past, and their own
ancestors, was far too strong to simply be put aside on the orders of a distant
authority.
It would, however, be wrong to assume that such objects were
destroyed without thought and without care. At the tiny parish church of
Wellingham in central Norfolk can still be seen one of the very last medieval
rood screens made in East Anglia prior to the reformation. The upper section
has been long gone for centuries, but the lower section still survives - and it
is a rare survival indeed. Images of St George and the dragon, St Sebastian, and
Christ accompanied by the instruments of the Passion, are almost as fresh today
as on the day they were first painted. The screen was a gift to the church in
memory of Robert Dorant and his wives, with the dedicatory inscription dated
1532 - a bare few years before the first stirrings of the reformation that
would lay waste hundreds of screens just such as this one. However, in
Wellingham, the parish appears to have taken a different approach. The
parishioners chose to follow the injunction against imagery, but in the most
half hearted way possible. Many of them would have undoubtedly still remembered
Robert Dorant and his wives, and so the action they took was barely action at
all. Although some of the faces are gone from the screen, St George's horse
being one puzzling example, many of the other bear only the very lightest of
scratches. A few neatly incised crosshatched lines made with the very sharpest
of knives. The screen had been defaced - but you would have had to get pretty
close to it, as you do today, to even notice the markings. They had done their
duty by the law, the church, and the king - but more importantly done their
duty to the memory of old Robert.
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| Wellingham, Norfolk |
Such restraint wasn't just to be found at Wellingham. The
stunning screen at Thornham on the Norfolk coast, donated to the church in the
late fifteenth century by the wealthy local merchant William Millar, suffered similarly
half-hearted scratchings - leaving us, thankfully, with another medieval jewel
in the crown of East Anglian churches. Such restraint, particularly under
pressure from both church and state, must have been by parish-wide agreement. A
tacit understanding to do only the very minimum that was required. Whilst the
fundamentalists may have held sway within the administration what occurred at a
parish level was, quite frankly, the business of the parish. Sadly such cases
were not the norm.
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| Thornham, Norfolk |
At Binham priory, a few miles south of the north Norfolk
coast, is perhaps one of the most poignant reminders of the destruction caused
by the fundamentalism of the English reformation. Encased now behind perspex is
the forlorn remains of what must have once been one of the most beautiful rood
screens in the region. The upper section, undoubtedly once filled with
delicately carved timbers and fine tracery, has long since gone; recycled,
destroyed, or simply crumbled to dust by centuries of woodworm and rot.
However, part of the lower section, the dado, survives. During the reformation,
as most of the priory was dismantled around it, leaving only the nave to act as
the parish church, this section was redecorated. In line with the official
policy of the day, the images of the saints were lime-washed over. With a new emphasis
being placed upon the word of God, rather than elaborate imagery, the screen
was covered instead the excerpts of religious text. This seemingly wanton
destruction was also one of the most beneficial acts of the whole reformation,
for instead of being defaced and destroyed, the images of bright faced saints
were preserved fully intact beneath the later paintwork. Now, nearly five
centuries later, the lime-wash of the reformation has begun to peel from the
surface of the screen. The panels of text are literally falling away from the
woodwork, and the faces of the golden robed saints, are once more being
revealed in all their original glory and splendour. So here, at least at this
one special site, the effects of a small part of the English reformation were
only temporary, and the saints are once more returning the Binham...
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| Binham Priory, Norfolk |
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