St Andrew, Kirby Bedon

From a map you might think that the village of Kirby Bedon is disconcertingly close to the Norwich southern bypass, but in fact it lies in a gentle fold of the Yare Valley, a land of fields and copses, and pretty villages like this one. Coming back here towards the end of March 2022 I was delighted to find the churchyard a sea of daffodils, the little church sitting in splendour among them. Pevsner records that Diocesan architect Richard Phipson rebuilt the tower in 1884, and that the church itself is mostly of 1876, the year of the first restoration. This makes it sound rather a dull place, but in fact there is rather more to it than meets the eye, and while the outer walls may well be Phipson's work, and the overall feel is of a 12th Century Norman church elaborated and extended in later medieval times, and then made good by the Victorians. So, a typical rural south Norfolk parish church, in fact, and Phipson himself is buried in the churchyard.

You enter through a Norman doorway, as so often in this part of the world, but this one has the added excitement of what is close to being its original door. Pevsner dated the timbers to the 13th Century, but felt that the ironwork was likely to be of the century before, and is thus contemporary with the doorway. The nave is small and simple, the church aisleless and pretty much of its 19th Century restorations, but it has a feeling of simplicity and stillness, at one with its village. There are some notable late medieval brasses surviving from the earlier church. A heart brass with three scrolls emerging from it is anonymous, but dates from the 15th Century. Nearby, the corpses of William Dussyng and his wife are wrapped up in their winding sheets on a pair of early 16th Century figure brasses, a reminder to us all of where we are going in the end.

A well-to-do local family in the late 16th Century were the Sheppards, and Richard and Anne Sheppard kneel in quiet content across a prayer desk. There are a fair number of other mural monuments from then until the 19th Century, including a fine memorial of 1730 to Francis Kremer. A curiosity is a small table set on the north wall of the chancel, which reads this monument was repaired Anno Dom 1664 at the charge of a grandson of the entombed viz Nicolas Sheppard rector of this church on whose soul Jesus have mercy. The memorial to which it refers appears no longer to be in existence, but the date of the tablet suggests a repair after damage done to it during the Civil War and Commonwealth period. The request for Jesus to have mercy on his soul is a surprisingly militant one for this date, for the puritans who had ruled the roost for the last few decades would certainly have disapproved of it. One thing that would have done well to survive their attentions if it had been in the church at the time is a small fragment of medieval glass in a south nave window, which depicts an angel scribing a manuscript onto vellum. He writes with a blade, and then fills the cut with ink.

The east window despicts Christ the Good Shepherd and is by Jones & Willis, 1937. The other glass is by Hardman & Co I think, and dates from the 1870s restoration. The perils of empire are illustrated by a simple memorial to two 19th Century Fitzgerald brothers. Martin was a Lieutenant in the 53rd Regiment of the Bengal Native Infantry, and he was lost at sea with all passengers and crew of the Schooner "Favorite" off Bass Straits in May 1852, shortly before the soldiers of his Regiment took part in the great uprising that has become known as the First Indian War of Independence. His brother Henry was in the thick of it. A lieutenant in the 10th Regiment of the Bengal Native Infantry, and he was killed near Cawnpore in the Great Mutiny of 1857.

The churchyard looks down onto the Yare marshes, and is home to a mausoleum with the proportions of a fabulously well-to-do garden shed. It is the last resting place of the troubled Sir Robert John Harvey. Harvey had been one of the two MPs for Thetford, but when the constituency boundaries were reformed in the 1860s he found himself kicked upstairs to a baronetcy. The family had made their fortune as bankers, and Harvey took over the running of the Crown Bank, presiding over its spectacular collapse in the late summer of 1870. In despair, he shot himself. By one of those bizarre ironies of history, his co-MP at Thetford had been Alexander Baring, whose own family bank would have an even more spectacular and newsworthy collapse more than a century later.

Directly across the lane and barely a hundred yards away are the remains of Kirby Bedon's former other parish church, the round-towered St Mary. Well worth a look, although since I was last here the last parts of the tower bell stage have fallen, and the remains are now cordoned off.

Simon Knott, April 2022

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