The Dunhams sit in the rolling landscape north of the Swaffham to Dereham road, both of them small villages huddled by large country houses. East Anglian churches are generally not known for their Saxon survivals, for this was a wealthy area in the later medieval period and there was always money for updates and rebuilds. However, Great Dunham church is remarkable, because the greater part of its structure preserves its Saxon origins almost in their entirety. When you first see it from the road it seems most unfamiliar if you are used to Norfolk country churches. Take away the parapet of the central tower, the porch and the west window, and this is the church that was erected while the Saxons were learning to to be Normans in the second half of the 11th Century, being open to new building techniques but using the styles and motifs they had learned from their forebears. Below the west window is the original triangular-headed doorway that once led into the gloom of the nave. The double bell openings in the tower are supported by recessed shafts, with round windows above. The very top of the tower and the chancel beyond the tower were rebuilt in the 15th Century, a time which also brought large Perpendicular windows to let the light into the darkness.

You enter through the porch. The battered 15th Century font bowl ahead of you has shields alternating with the symbols of the Evangelists, with angels below the bowl. And then you turn to the east. To stand at the west end of the nave and look through the crossing is to see a journey between two very different mindsets. Despite the later medieval windows, the nave walls retain the blank arcading typical of pre-Conquest churches. When they ran the full length to the crossing and were lit by candlelight this must have seemed an atmospheric and mysterious place. Beyond, the space beneath the tower with its massive 11th Century arches is primitive.

But to step into the delicate chancel is to be thrown forward in time half a millennium, to that epoch after the Black Death when churches were being furnished lavishly with images that reinforced orthodox Cathlic doctrine and enabled the lituriges of the late medieval church. A century before the Reformation, there was a change of emphasis from private devotions to an act of corporate worship, a movement that reached its height in the15th Century. Naves were benched, fonts often replaced, the great roods erected, and pulpits were installed which allowed the Priest a hierarchical presence among the people. Large windows and clerestories were put in place to light up older churches. Here at Great Dunham it is as if we are seeing that transition as we wander through the building, and even today the chancel here feels an entirely different space to that of the nave.

The 19th Century restoration was sparing, dealing mostly with the furnishings and bringing the only coloured glass in the place, the east window by Powell & Sons of the 1930s I should think, the Risen Christ flanked by Abraham and St Andrew. Oddly, Birkin Haward thought they were St Luke and St Mark, but most likely he was confued by the symbols of the four evangelists which sit awkwardly in each corner of the composition. The 17th Century pulpit and reading desk survived the restoration, and all in all this is a pleasing place, quite different from almost every other medieval parish church in Norfolk.

Simon Knott, October 2022

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i.m. Peter Stephens (1938-2020) who liked this church a lot.