Not far from the town of Swaffham sits the surprisingly large and purposeful village of Sporle in this landscape where wide parishes more familiarly have straggling populations. The long street is flanked by a stream, and a little bridge takes you across to the church. St Mary sits at the top of a long churchyard, and I couldn't help wondering if it had once been full of headstones that have been cleared by lawnmower enthusiasts, probably in the 1950s or 1960s. Whatever, it's a splendid building, its west tower facing down to the road lie a great bird folding its wings behind. At first sight it looks like a good example of Early English drifting into Decorated, but there was a major restoration here in the 1890s by the often clumsy diocesan surveyor Herbert Green, as we will see inside. Pevsner gives an unusually detailed description of the exterior which I won't repeat here, but it is clear that if Green's rebuilding of roofs, clerestory, arcade and north chancel chapel are faithful - a big if, I think - then this large church was complete before most of Norfolk's larger churches.

The first impression on stepping inside is quite how large and dark this building is. The nave windows are filled with printed quarries that on a dull day give the effect of being underwater. They were intended as a counterpoint to flickering candles, no doubt, but Green's restoration was so overwhelming in its use of serious tiling and dark wood that this feels entirely the 19th Century interior of an urban church. But as you wander, Sporle begins to give up its secrets, and the greatest of these is a remarkable sequence of paintings telling the story of St Catherine from the Golden Legend.

The sequence is towards the east end of the south aisle wall, and there are about twenty-four scenes. Pevsner points out the self-evident truth: there are two distinct series, the first of which, consisting of the initial eleven frames, he dated to about 1400, and the rest to a few decades later. The candle beam of a parclose screen still runs between the south aisle and the middle of the painting, suggesting that it post-dates it. One of the intriguing features of the second series is how it echoes more the familiar Passion sequence. In the middle of the series, for example, St Catherine is brought before the king and then beaten and mocked, just as Passion sequences show Christ brought before Pilate before his own humiliation. And, as in Passion sequences, her mockers are shown with exaggerated mock-Jewish features and clothes in the familiar antisemitic trope of the time.

The further east you go, the more interesting the church is. The north aisle and the chancel chapels feel like a series of rooms that you wander finding piscina after piscina of different ages, arcades which alter and contrast, places which appear to have once been exposed to the elements, and so on. With the caveat that it is not entirely clear exactly what Herbert Green did to the structure, it looks as if the entire building, pretty much, was in place before the Black Death. After that, there was window tracery and the famous wall painting to come, but that's about all. The font is a typical 13th Century Purbeck marble octagonal job, though further from the coast than most, reset on a 19th century colonnade, presumably by Green. His stone pulpit at the other end of the nave is unusually reached by a doorway which cuts through the former rood loft stair doorway. It is a bit odd, but jolly enough. It's as well that most other churches don't have one like this, but I'm glad it exists somewhere.

Simon Knott, October 2022

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