two churches

This morning I went on a tour of two churches, St John at Great Wenham, still a working parish church, and All Saints at Little Wenham, now in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust. Apparently they hate it when people refer to their churches as 'redundant'.  Our guide was a former field officer for the eastern region of the Churches Conservation Trust, and so I learned more than I might have by just wandering about and looking at them.  Great Wenham is not generally open in any event, theft and vandalism being endemic problems for rural Suffolk churches.

There has probably been a church on the site at Great Wenham since Saxon times.  The church is mentioned in the Domesday book, and what we see now dates from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, or at least I think that is what our guide said.  I didn't take notes, thinking it would seem rather odd, and if I'd wanted to remember dates I should have.  The chancel is older than the nave, and the nave older than the tower, and then the whole thing was heavily restored in the mid nineteenth century by a wealthy and enthusiastic Rector.  As our guide said, we should not dismiss the Victorian work out of hand, since it was done with great craftsmanship and in a style historically in keeping with the original fabric.  And he was right, the new (Victorian) roof was a beautiful piece of work.

The organ occupies the whole of the arch between the nave and the tower, so that the enterprising Victorian Rector was obliged to burrow down beneath the tower to make a little vestry.  One of the local keepers of the church told us that it was a superb organ, one of the best in the region, so good that the organists of St Pauls and Westminster Abbey had come to play it. At the opposite end of the church are some rare Medieval encaustic tiles.  I thought the shape of the windows in the tower was rather nice as well.  John Constable's sister is buried in the churchyard. The parishioners who had turned out to serve us coffee and home made cakes were very hospitable, and I recognised one of them from my plant centre days and because she ran the novelty dog show we went to a few years ago.  It's a small world along the Essex-Suffolk border, or at least the subsection of it that occupies itself with gardens and church visits and animals.

The church at Little Wenham is not quite of this world.  It is reached up a long, unmade track, past first one and then another timber framed house that I thought must be the old house I'd read about the previous day on Wikipedia, before discovering that both were twentieth century, and that the actual old manor house was the crenellated, stone built tower we could just see from the church.  It is a surviving fortified Medieval manor house and must be one of the oldest houses in East Anglia.  All Saints church is slightly more recent than St John, but was not done up by the Victorians.  Indeed, after the roof collapsed in the latter part of the nineteenth century the parish council was all set to vote to demolish it, until one lone voice in the meeting protested that the old church had been there for six hundred years and they should let 'er be.  The parishioners changed their minds, and in the early twentieth century a benefactor paid an Ipswich architect to do a sensitive but limited restoration.

All Saints now has a very plain, historically appropriate roof.  Some Medieval wall paintings remain, and a very fine brass.  A small door high in the wall marks the place where the end of the rood screen would once have stood, and the tiny, very narrow steps up to it are accessible, though I didn't try to squeeze up because they were so grubby and I was wearing a relatively tidy sweater and we were going for lunch in the pub afterwards.  The pews are a mixed set, taken from nearby Capel St May when they were having a clear out, some recent but a couple genuine early Tudor with linenfold panelling (and narrow and spectacularly uncomfortable.  You wouldn't doze through the sermon).

There are bats in the church, which is all very good in as far as they are rare, interesting and protected animals, but not so good from the point of the view of the fabric of the building.  If you want to know whether mystery small, thin, brown droppings are from bats or mice you can tell by rolling them between thumb and finger, according to our guide.  If they crumble to dust they were from a bat, and consisted of insect carapaces, hence the crumbliness.  If they don't crumble then you have just fingered some mouse poo.