St Mary, Hassingham

Norfolk can have few more beautiful settings for a church than here at Hassingham. St Mary sits elegantly in its steep churchyard on a bank below the woods and above the winding, deeply cut lanes where the land falls away to the marshes and the River Yare beyond. This is not a landscape designed for cars, but what a joy it is to cycle or walk around this rolling, secretive area between Norwich and Reedham! When I first explored this area some twenty years ago, most of its churches were kept locked, but with a few exceptions they are now open every day. One of those few exceptions is, I'm afraid, Hassingham, but at least there is a keyholder notice now. The churchyard was idyllic when we revisited on a beautiful day in June 2022, the headstones adrift among the wild flowers and long grasses. A 19th Century marker beside the path reads Keep thy foot when beneath our feet and o'er our head is equal warning given, beneath us lie the countless dead, above us only heaven. O gently gently shouldst thou speak and softly softly tread, where in the church's peaceful shade with solemn words the Dead are laid in their last lowly bed. There's another one of these markers at neighbouring Buckenham.

Hassingham's church is curious of aspect, because unusually for a humble round-towered church it has a tall chancel, which creates an illusion of the building climbing the bank. The Norman south doorway is simple and yet lovely, one of several such around here which suggest a more homely approach to decoration in the 12th Century than some of the more glamorous, grand Norman doorways on the other side of the river. However, much has happened here since. The 15th Century brought new windows and the elegant flushwork bell stage of the tower, and then a plaque above the south doorway remembers the rebuilding of the body of the church in 1849. I assume that the height of the chancel replicates what was there before.

This is an early date for a 19th Century restoration, and so inside you might expect a fairly rustic, low-brow interior, before the ecclesiologists and ritualists came along and explained what the Gothic Revival should be about. In fact, this church was destroyed by fire in 1971, and the interior as we see it today dates almost entirely from after that date. This kind of thing is not always done well, but at Hassingham I think it was. The walls are white, the floors are brick, and the furnishings so simple that they are barely there. The font from the 1849 restoration survives. The clear glass of the nave fills the building with light, and then up in the chancel is a small collection of old glass. That in the east window includes continental roundels of the 17th Century, while in the side windows are angel musicians which incorporate some fragments of 15th Century Norwich School glass. It is a place to lift the heart, and how good it would be if this church could be open to the pilgrims and strangers who wander these lonely lanes!

Extraordinary as it may seem, this tiny and remote parish was the setting for a curious event which opened a major chapter in the history of the English Church. In the autumn of 1798, inspired by the proto-anarchist writings of William Godwin, a 29 year old woman, Catherine Welby, set up a community in the village here with her younger brother Adlard. They planned to put into practice the social ideals of pantisocracy, a movement which believed that, within small groups withdrawn from the world, a new and more equitable social order might arise.

Catherine was said to be a strong-minded and independent woman, open to the beauty of the world and rigorous in her investigation of it. Rosemary Hill, the biographer, noted her capacity for passionate, even hysterical tirades. While living at Hassingham, Catherine travelled to Yarmouth and saw the sea for the first time. The community lasted a year, and during this time, Catherine seem to have undergone some kind of religious conversion. She took her radical, uncompromising, mystical Christianity back to London, where in 1802 she married a flamboyant French Catholic emigré. Their first son would be Augustus Welby Pugin, the most influential of all 19th Century architects and designers, but, more than this, the man who articulated and promoted the theological reasoning behind the Gothic Revival. Because of him, England, and its churches, would never be the same again.

Simon Knott, June 2022

Follow these journeys as they happen at Last Of England Twitter.