St Andrew and St Mary, Langham

Langham is a quiet agricultural village set a couple of miles back from the busy coast, and it doesn't seem to have much to do with the tourist hotspots of Wells and Blakeney, which is just as it should be. In this context its church is surprisingly large and grand. It seems to have been rebuilt in one long campaign from the late 14th Century, judging by the north aisle, through to the early 16th Century. Money was left for a new set of bells in the 1490s, giving a date for the completion of the tower, and the north porch came from a bequest about twenty years later. There is a south aisle but none on the north side, and the late addition of the north porch suggests that none was ever intended. The two sides of the church have quite different characters, that to the north tall and severe, while the south side is more comfortably typical of a late medieval East Anglian church with its clerestory above the aisle. Pevsner felt that the restoration of the 1860s had left it consequently lacking interest outside, although this seems harsh.

You step inside to a tall, narrow nave, its height accentuated by the lack of a north aisle and the lowness of the south aisle beyond. There's a curious blank archway in the north wall just beyond the doorway. Was it once the entrance before the early 16th Century porch was built? Pevsner wondered if it might have been the entrance to a chapel, and such things do exist beside porches, at St Gregory in Sudbury, Suffolk for example. To the east of it is a memorial to Captain Frederick Marryat RN, who died in 1848 and was best known to later generations as the author of The Children of the New Forest, hugely popular until relatively recently. He is buried in the churchyard just to the south-west of the tower. Still further along the north wall is the church's most memorable feature, the 1890s glass by Edward Burne-Jones depicting the figures of Fides and Spes, 'Faith' and 'Hope'.

As is common, Burne-Jones cartoons were regularly reused by the workshop, and in fact the exact same design can be found without the dark background at Sculthorpe in north-west Norfolk, where Charitas also puts in an appearance. Burne-Jones used the imagery of St John for Spes, the allegorical figure holding a poisoned chalice. The glass seems to have been part of a wider scheme beginning in the 1890s to bring the church up to speed, including the rustic yet lovely devotional reredos dated 1922 which was installed in the lady chapel in the south aisle. In contrast, the long chancel now seems austere, even stark, in contrast with the remnants of those heady days.

There are a couple of curiosities. The royal arms are charged with the Stuart standard of the 17th Century, England and France impaled in the first and fourth quarters, and lettered for Queen Anne, the last of the Stuart monarchs. But Anne's arms after the Act of Union in 1707 impaled England and Scotland instead, and these arms do not bear her motto of Semper Eadem but Dieu et mon Droit, and they are dated 1740, during the reign of George II! A good example of the way a country parish showed continued loyalty to the monarch of the day without commissioning new sets of arms.

Another oddity is the font, which is one of the arcaded Purbeck marble types of the 13th Century more familiar from east Norfolk. It predates the current church. These fonts are often found within easy reach of seaports, for they were brought around the coast from Dorset by sea. The curiosity here is that the bowl is inscribed with the words Alice Nettleton baptised the 14th day of April 1692. This of course is after the re-establishment of the Church of England after the years of the Commonwealth, a time when many fonts were being restored to use. This makes me wonder if, although it is a little late, this inscription marks the return of the font to the church. In which case, of course, it may not have come from this church originally at all, for one would have expected such a comprehensive rebuilding as happened here in the late medieval period also to have provided a new font. This may well have been removed earlier in the 17th Century and either destroyed or pressed into use as a sheep trough, as often seems to have happened. When the time came to restore sacramental baptism maybe this older font was found instead. Of course, we will never know.

Simon Knott, March 2022

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