St Andrew, Thurning

Thurning's church sits in the middle of nowhere, and your first approach to the south is past a small structure that was once the rector's stable, for he had a long trek each Sunday from Wood Dalling. From this side the building appears truncated, and moving round to the east the reason unfolds. Here are the remains of the chancel, which was demolished in the early 18th Century when it had fallen into ruin, and in any case at a time when few chancels served a liturgical purpose. As Pevsner neatly puts it, in 1719 the rector was excused the duty of rebuilding it. The surprise is the fine reticulated tracery of the east window, which was obviously moved westwards and used to fill in the former chancel arch.

I revisited Thurning on an utterly foul day of heavy rain in November 2022, and so it was a relief as much as a pleasure to step inside. It had been a good eight years since my previous visit, but the interior of Thurning church is not easily forgotten, for it is a rare surviving example of what Simon Cotton has called socially stratified seating. Dark 18th Century box pews are shoehorned into the north aisle and at the west end of the nave, while plainer benches are arrayed facing east. The box pews are focused on the grand triple-decker pulpit on the south side of the nave, but they are focused on the benches too, for the box pews were intended for the gentry, and the benches for the servants and labourers. Along the south wall is a line of hat pegs. The arrangement was the work of the rector in the 1820s, who took advantage of the rebuilding of the chapel of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge to obtain the furnishings and bring them here. The late Sam Mortlock tells us that well into the 1920s it was considered proper here for male servants to sit on the right hand side, and female servants on the left. Most interestingly, the box pews have been labelled in recent years with the name of the House or Farm that paid its pew rent before such things were done away with in the late 19th Century. Among them are Lime Tree Farm, Rookery Farm and Thurning Hall.

The altar is contained within an elegant set of three-sided altar rails, and on the walls above are grand memorials, as if the seating arrangement were not sufficient to put the workers in their place. William Wake was appointed by the East India Company as their Chief at Anjengo on the coast of Malabar where, after some years residence, he was made Chief of Tellicherry. In 1741 he was chosen by the Court of Directors, President and Governor of Bombay which post (during a war with France, and in very critical situations) he filled with honor to himself. The memorial goes on to tell us that he embarked for England in November 1751 and in his passage home died in January 1750/51 at the Cape of Good Hope. Anjengo was the European name for the modern town of Anchuthengu in south India, and Tellicherry was Thalassery.

Of course, there are no surviving voices of the servants and labourers here, except perhaps for the building itself. In the introduction to his often-maligned England's Thousand Best Churches, the journalist Simon Jenkins makes the very telling point that the churches of England are a dispersed gallery of vernacular art... a church is a museum, and should be proud of that fact. This caused some controversy at the time, but of course he was not suggesting that this was all a church was, and as it happens I agree with him. I'd go further, and say that such buildings are in themselves a touchstone to the past. It's not just the visible that links us to the lost generations. Sam Mortlock adored this little church. Here are dignity, intimacy and comeliness, he wrote, with a proper regard for the niceties of social distinction, the age caught like a fly in amber.

Simon Knott, November 2022

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