St Peter, Brooke

Brooke is a large, attractive village with a village green and pond at its heart. It is situated just off of the Norwich to Bungay road about seven miles south of Norwich, and its church is a handsome building, a pleasing mix of ancient flint and bright red brick buttresses. The round tower is 12th Century, but Pevsner noted the way the flintwork changes as it rises, with later bell openings, suggesting a long or possibly even a second campaign. The 15th Century chequer-work parapet at the top echoes the bell stages on some other round towers, and looks curiously as if a giant hand might be able to unscrew it like the lid of a jar. Looking at the chancel, the rebuilding of the church appears to have been begun in the 14th Century, although diocesan surveyor John Brown's restoration of 1849 at least replaced the windows. The nave and its north aisle came later, the aisle with a clerestory despite the low height of the nave. There is neither aisle nor clerestory on the south side, and the addition of a porch at that time suggests that none was ever planned. The north aisle may have replaced a shorter earlier one, for Pevsner noted that of the four bays of the arcade inside, two are 15th Century in style but the other two were simply cut through the wall of an earlier nave.

When they rebuilt the nave they replaced the south door, and it survives in situ, decorative cusped arcading on its upper half. You step through it into a wide, square, light nave. There is very little coloured glass, and the overwhelming impression is that this is a church of some quality in terms of its furnishings. To the west of them, Brooke's great treasure is one of the best examples of East Anglia's thirty-odd Seven Sacrament fonts. It dates from about 1470, and is similar to the font at Seething up the road, which was probably recut using Brooke as a pattern. These fonts, depicting the sacraments of the Catholic Church, were part of a late 15th and early 16th Century project to enforce orthodoxy, ensuring that the souls of their donors were prayed for it the correct manner. Ironically, the rich local families that paid for them were often the very same people who would oversee the introduction and enforcement of Protestantism over the next half century.

From the east, the panels depict Mass, the Priest with his back to the viewer raising the host, with a missal on the altar and a server on each side; Confirmation (NE), a crowd of young people gathered about a Priest; Ordination (N), a Bishop anointing the head of a Deacon; Baptism (NW); Crucifixion (W), the most common subject for the odd panel out; Last Rites (SW), the dying man's bed at an angle; Confession (S), the Priest seated as the penitents approach; Matrimony (SE) the Priest joining the hands of a couple. The font sits on a large pedestal with a platform to the west for the priest to stand on. Medieval fonts were designed for the total immersion of infants, which explains their shape. This practice disappeared after the Reformation, the act of baptism becoming a more symbolic act, but you can see the babe being lowered into the water on the Baptism panel here. The Brooke font retains extensive traces of colour, and in the sequence of angels underneath the bowl, some are holding scrolls on which the painted text still visible.

Above the font is a west gallery on cast iron pillars. It probably dates from John Brown's restoration, given that it has the royal arms of Victoria on the front. The quality of two 18th Century memorials to Thomas Seaman and John Fowle are a testament of the wealth of a large village close to one of the most prosperous cities in the Kingdom at the time. The glass of about 1930 in the chancel east window is suitably subdued, the figures of Faith, Hope and Charity which are likely to be by William Morris of Westminster in a style which recalls that of several decades earlier.

Behind the pulpit, the hourglass stand is an occasionally-found reminder of the importance of the Sunday afternoon sermon before the late 19th Century sacramental revival in the Church of England. Consistently, the returns for the 1851 Census of Religious Worship show a greater enthusiasm for the sermon than for either morning or evening worship. At Brooke, for instance, where of the eight hundred people who lived in the parish, only sixty of them were at the service on the morning of the census, but more than two hundred attended the afternoon sermon. It may well be that non-conformists were keen to hear the sermon after attending the morning service at their own churches and chapels, but in fact Brooke had a Particular Baptist chapel too, and the numbers there were similar, fifty in the morning and a hundred and fifty in the afternoon. The hourglass was to ensure that the preacher did not short-change his audience, but the sermon fell out of fashion as the altar retook its place from the pulpit as the central focus for Anglican worship, likely changing the parishioners' understanding of the nature of their church, and perhaps widening the divide between neighbouring church and chapel goers.

Simon Knott, April 2022

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