All Saints, Great Fransham

We are in the lanes between Swaffham and Dereham here, and in fact Great Fransham's neighbouring parish Little Fransham straddles the busy A47, but Great Fransham itself is away to the north in the peace of the fields. As you sometimes find in East Anglia, the village of the 'Great' parish is much smaller than the 'Little' one. The old Dereham to Swaffham railway line ran to the north of the church. The Greats and the Littles are in abundance around here, and White was so confused in his 1845 Norfolk Directory that he allotted All Saints a round tower. He was probably getting his notes confused with Great Ryburgh to the north.

The tower is the oldest part of the church as we see it today, the late 13th Century becoming the 14th Century. The church appears to have been pretty well complete by the time the Black Death came along in the 1340s. But after the Reformation the building fell on hard times. Probably the population was never very large, and so without any further need for spaces for liturgical processions, the south aisle was demolished. This often happened in Norfolk, for it meant a smaller church which was easier both to heat and to maintain, and everyone had a view of the pulpit which had replaced the altars as the focus for worship. However, whereas at many churches where this happened the arcade was filled in to form a new outer wall, here the Early English arcade leans like something no longer needed against a new south nave wall, which is of course exactly right. Probably it was felt that the leaning arcade would not stand if it was filled in. Four hundred years later, the Victorians redid most of the windows, including the jolly tracery in the east window, but that was about it.

Great Fransham is home to one of Norfolk's best military brasses, Sir Geoffrey de Fransham's figure of 1414. In the intimacy of such a small space it is imposing, and rather moving. He stands under a complete cusped canopy, a lion under his feet. Nearby is Cecily Legge of 1500 in her winding sheet.

Great Fransham church's plain, simple interior is accentuated by the lack of coloured glass, the woodwork of the furnishings rather sombre and you feel this might still be a place for sermons rather than liturgical processions. The octagonal 15th Century font with its shields may well have been the gift of the de Fransham family, but otherwise not much else survives from the early church. In any case, perhaps the most interesting of the furnishings here is from the 20th Century. This is the Art Deco war memorial, in pressed copper to the design of Sidney Hunt for the firm of Osborne & Co. Below the names, a triumphant St Michael dispatches a dragon.

Sidney Hunt's work is highly thought of today, and it is unusual to find it in a country church. Hunt was an English artist who was one of the members of the European Avant Garde movement of the 1920s, and he was probably better known abroad than at home. His work was considered on a par with the work of movements in Europe like Mecano and De Stijl. Like his near-contemporary Eric Gill, one of his specialisms was bookplates, and in this field his best known work is not always comfortable viewing through today's eyes, often featuring homoerotic abstractions of young men in bathing scenes. Hunt was killed in the London blitz while working in his studio.

Simon Knott, February 2022

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