St Edmund, Horningtoft

This pretty church sits on the edge of its village, just to the south of Fakenham among the fields and copses that are quintessential rural Norfolk. The building seems to have been all of a piece, going up as Early English was getting into its stride at the start of the 13th Century. At one time there was a west tower, but it collapsed in the 1790s. From the outside you can still see where the tower arch was, now filled in and buttressed. This seems to be a result of a major restoration of the 1870s, which Pevsner tells us also got rid of the tall 17th south porch which appears in Ladbroke's drawing, and also brought the bellcote above. You enter the church below it and step into a tall light interior thanks to the lightly-coloured glass quarries.

The font is a good if recut example of the typical East Anglian font of which hundreds survive, with alternating angels and lions on the bowl, and lions and buttresses that must once have been woodwoses on the shaft. Looking east, the restoration renewed the chancel arch, and generally left a pleasing, crisp feel without the urbanising influence of heavy wood and encaustic tiles found so often elsewhere. Instead, whoever was responsible for the work here seems to have had both skill and imagination. A new screen was fashioned out of fragments of the old, which judging by the unused piece of parclose now reset in the chancel must have been a substantial one. The screen, altar and pulpit were painted (stencilled?) with delightful floral patterns, which Bill Wilson in the revised Buildings of England volume for Norfolk suggests were copied from Pugin's Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament. Something lovely to find in the Norfolk fields.

Simon Knott, September 2021

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