St Mary, Tasburgh

Tasburgh is a large and busy village just off of the main Ipswich to Norwich road, but its parish church sits away from the houses, in a wide churchyard on the way to Tharston. The little lane that heads up to it from the south is so sunken and narrow that it has been designated one-way only. The tree-lined path leads up to the north porch, and the somewhat stark round tower rises above the west end. Unusually, it is round all the way to the top without the need for an octagonal bell stage or even battlements, but as Pevsner points out there are two layers of blank arcading that begin about halfway up. They are almost certainly 11th Century, and mark where the first tower ended. It was extended upwards in the 13th Century for the placing of bells. The church that heads east of it is substantially of the 15th Century, but without the aisles and clerestories typical of rebuildings of that period. A modern meeting room is set on the south side, quiet and not unsuccessful. To the south-east of the church is the last resting place of Professor Sir Malcolm Bradbury, founder of the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia but better known to most of us as the author of the outrageously funny 1975 novel The History Man.

The north porch is home to glass depicting the Four Seasons by Paul Quail, not an artist whose work I usually admire, but these are rather good. You step past them into a church that feels pleasingly old-fashioned, with brick floors and white light falling from large windows in white walls. The west end of the nave has been cleared of clutter since I was last here about ten years ago, a good setting for the font which is contemporary with the late medieval rebuilding, though not in the familiar East Anglian 15th Century style, instead having decorative panels with fleurons. The font cover is one of those curious 17th Century minimalist pieces that seem as much mathematics as art. A text on the wall in the Elizabethan style is surely modern, but perhaps it is a repainting of what was there before. And it is not the only sleight of hand here, for what at first sight appears to be an 18th Century memorial on the west wall in fact remembers Charles Harvey who died in 1928, one of a number of early 20th Century memorials in East Anglia successfully made in an older style.

Up in the chancel, a large memorial is shoe-horned into the space where the sedilia once were. It is a tombchest with a backdrop and three shields on the front, typical of the late 16th Century. There seems to be no record of who it was for. More impressive is the alabaster mural monument to Thomas Newce, who died in 1629. In the north window of the chancel nearby is a lozenge of glass which depicts what I assume was his father, Sir Thomas Newce, with his two wives, an unusual survival. Lastly, the east window of the 1890s, which comes as something of a contrast to the clear glass of the other windows. It depicts the allegorical figure of Charity flanked by Christ healing the sick and then welcoming the children under a riot of canopy work. It is very good of its kind, and it would be interesting to know who the workshop was.

Simon Knott, June 2022

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