St Botolph, Banningham

Banningham is a pleasant village not far from Aylsham, its houses and pub gathered around an impressive church shoehorned into its tight churchyard. The great tower is one of the tallest in these parts, rising in four stages with a parapet on top. The church was rebuilt in the decades from the late 14th Century onwards, the chancel coming first, although there have been some problems with its stability. In the 17th Century a substantial tie beam was put in to keep the chancel together, the east end was rebuilt in the 1860s and there was a major restoration as recently as 1986 which, as Pevsner notes, even extended to rebuilding the chancel arch.

The church you step into is full of character, and quite unlike others in this part of Norfolk. The 19th Century benches arrayed in the nave have no central gangway, while the two aisles are packed with box pews. Simon Cotton points out that this is a surviving example of 'socially stratified' seating, where the working families sit on the benches in the middle and the 'superior' classes are in the box pews keeping an eye on them. Such arrangements were once more common, but the 19th Century Anglican revival generally did away with them. On the wall above the north arcade are two impressive wall paintings. St George dispatches a dragon, and St Christopher wades through the water. There is a third, indistinct wall painting in the north aisle, perhaps a Jesse Tree.

It's worth mentioning that both these wall paintings have lost their upper third because when the roof was raised in the later 15th century the clerestory was punched through them. This is a reminder that many wall paintings, especially if of non-biblical and non-doctrinal subjects, were discarded fully a century before the Reformation, during the late medieval Church's attempt to impose Catholic orthodoxy on these remote rural parishes, and were not lost as an act of wilful destruction. The roof above largely survives from that rebuilding, with wingless angels holding books attached to each beam. But the most memorable survivals here are the fragments of late medieval glass, mostly set in a south aisle window. The figures are mostly restored, particularly the heads which were often the first resort of the hammers of gleeful iconoclasts.

The fragments are arranged around the upper part of a figure of Christ, the Man of Sorrows, a popular early 16th Century devotion. It shows a dignified Christ with tears of blood weeping from his crown of thorns onto his body. A number of the figures are fragments from the Orders of Angels, and although none of the figures are complete there is enough to show which were Seraphim, Cherubim, Angels and Powers. St John the Evangelist stands with his eagle in front of him, and beside him is another evangelist with a replacement angel head whose evangelistic symbol is tantalisingly lost. Intriguingly, on fragment is of a church with a bell in its bellcote. Across in the north aisle an Annunciation scene has been rebuilt. Parts of Gabriel are 15th century but I think the figure of Mary is wholly 20th Century.

Even on this gloomy day in November 2022 the church felt full of light, the church narrowing to the raised high chancel. Beside it in the south aisle there is a small chapel which Pevsner points out was probably that of the Guild of St John mentioned in will evidence. The 1920s glass in this aisle of the crucifixion isn't signed, but I wondered if it might be by the workshop of William Morris of Westminster. It certainly adds to the character of this side of the church. More interesting perhaps is the glass at the east end of the north aisle. It depicts St Paul and St John, and it is clearly by Joseph Grant of Costessey, working in the 1850s. Grant, like most of the village of Costessey, was a Catholic, and seems to have been largely influenced by the collection of 16th Century German glass in the chapel of Costessey Hall. It is quite likely that he was not often exposed to the more familiar style of the major English workshops. The biggest collection of his work is at Wighton.

Simon Knott, November 2022

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