St Margaret, Saxlingham

When I first wrote about this church nearly twenty years ago I remarked how stark this building appeared to me on first meeting. This tends to be an area of gentle Decorated survivals, and although some money was thrown about in the 15th Century, there are few such uncompromisingly Perpendicular village churches as this one. Sir Alfred Jodrell, who completely rebuilt neighbouring Glandford, bankrolled the 1890s restoration here, and it was comprehensive. As Mortlock points out, it feels a bit like entering a Victorian gothic church rather than a medieval one. It is only once inside that you realise quite how small the church is, and the simple, plain interior is dominated by an excellent east window of about 1930 by Powell & Sons, depicting Christ preaching from the boat on the lake, and flanked by a sower and a reaper. The window is wide, the church is small and It is rare for a church to be quite so focused on a single window like this.

And yet, if you had come here before the late 18th Century you would have seen something quite different. After the Reformation, and before the Victorian Anglican revival, chancels fell out of use. What was to be done with them? Some became vestries, or school rooms, or meeting rooms, or even storage areas. Here at Saxlingham, the chancel was filled with a massive monument to the wife of Sir Christopher Heydon, who died in 1597. A century earlier, his ancestor had rebuilt Salthouse church in an effort to negotiate purgatory on a raft of resulting intercessory prayer; but protestant Sir Christopher could only ask to be remembered, and my goodness he set up an aide-memoire of gargantuan proportions. Blomefield, in his History of Norfolk, described it as a sumptuous monument, which takes up almost the entire building, being raised in form of an Egyptian pyramid of marble and stone, supported by pillars, and reaching almost to the top of the chancel. The pyramid had a grand alcove in which knelt the alabaster Lady Mirabel, wife of Sir Christopher, and the whole piece was surrounded by life-size effigies of their eight children, as well as four massive Doric pillars. In 1740 the engraver Tom Martin illustrated it, remarking that it almost fills the chancell, being so big that there is hardly room to walk around it.

It was taken down in 1789 as being dangerous (Mortlock observes that this must have seemed a good excuse) and almost nothing of it survives. However, there are still a couple of fragments. In an image niche to the north of the chancel arch kneels the alabaster Lady Mirabel, looking slightly sheepish I thought. On the other side of the arch is her bible, the text inscribed on being from a pre-Authorised version of the Bible. Mortlock also notes one surviving echo of Sir Alfred Jodrell's Anglo-Catholic enthusiasms. The organ here comes originally from St Barnabas, Kentish Town, that great North London High Church shrine.

Simon Knott, May 2022

Follow these journeys as they happen at Last Of England Twitter.