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St
Thomas, Foxley
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The
area between Norwich and Fakenham, either side of
the busy A1067, is a happy place to be a church
explorer. Five miles or more either side of the
road, almost all the churches are either open or
accessible, and some of Norfolk's best and most
interesting churches are in the area. The road
actually splits the village of Foxley in half,
and not in a good way. When it was rebuilt in the
1990s, the road managed to bypass most of the
settlements in its path, but here at Foxley it
drives right through the middle, dividing the
village into two quite separate parts. At busy
times of the day it can be difficult to get from
one to the other. The church is on the north
side, along a narrow lane among the older houses.
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I have
always been fond of the setting of St Thomas. Its narrow,
walled graveyard above the village street, and the old
houses that pack closely to it, give it a real sense of
rural England, but of the business of the countryside
rather than of its remoteness. It is a typical small East
Anglian village church. The building itself is very
simple; not much happened here during the great East
Anglian church rebuilding days of the 15th century. The
chancel is 13th century, the narrow tower and nave a
little later. There are some pleasant red brick details,
and the big porch was given a rather alarming 19th
century interior decoration, which has now faded.
My
fondness for St Thomas had been tested by the fact that,
in four visits over some five years, I had never managed
to get inside before. However, the keyholder notice now
lists no less than three keyholders, so you stand a fair
chance of finding one of them in. The key, incidentally,
is one of the biggest I've ever borrowed in the county.
Even
without the history, St Thomas is a particularly
lovely church to step into. It is light and airy,
with a feeling of being tall, the white walls
setting off the simple furnishings. Clear glass
fills the east window, flooding the chancel with
light, and the brick floors are a delight. There is a
fine west gallery, and the font with its 17th
century cover sits beneath it. There is some
fairly early Victorian stained glass depicting
the four Evangelists in what is still really a
pre-ecclesiological style. The benches are
rustic, local creations of the 17th century, and
everything conspires to offset Foxley's great
treasure, the late 15th century rood screen.
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At first
sight, it is as simple and understated as the church.
Indeed, if you see it for the first time with the gates
open, you might not even notice it. But there are a
number of things about it that mark it as being of
outstanding interest. The first of these is the gates.
When you close them, they form a rank of four superbly
painted figures. They are the Latin Doctors of the
Catholic Church, Saint Augustine, St Gregory, St Jerome
and St Ambrose. St Jerome in particular is delightfully
rendered. He holds an open music score, and I only wished
I knew enough about medieval notation to be able to work
out what he is singing.
At the
feet of St Jerome and St Ambrose are two further figures,
a man and a woman. These are the donors of the screen,
John Waymont and his wife. Scrolls that unwind from their
mouths ask us to pray for their souls.
And there is something else, which you might
miss unless you look for it. The upper part of the screen
has been sawn off at some point, and then reattached. Now
Mortlock suggests that the cutting down was done during
the furious vandalism of images promoted by the boy King
Edward VI in the late 1540s, and the repair came the
following decade under Mary I. This may be so, and Tom
Muckley had recently sent me a quote from the book Medieval
Rood Screens of the Southern Marches which states
that the rood-screen at Foxley, Norfolk, cut down to
the wainscot during the reign of Edward VI, had its upper
half reinstated during the reign of Mary. The screen
still stands today, the metal strap plates fastening the
standards back together clearly visible.
As
I say, this may well be the case, but unless
there is evidence for it which I have not seen, I
am going to suggest another possibility, that
both the cutting down and the raising up were
done later, during the early years of the reign
of Elizabeth, probably in the late 1550s or early
1560s. While the new regime demanded the removal
of roods and rood lofts, the screens themselves
had to stay. This injunction appears to have been
misunderstood at first in several places, and I
think that Foxley may well have been such a place
where over-enthusastic reformers had to make good
their iconoclasm. A 16th century temporary
repair, perhaps, which survives to this day. |
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Simon Knott, September 2006
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