St Andrew, Thursford

On a bright day in spring there can be few lovelier sights than seeing Thursford's church from the east sitting in its little hollow in the fields. It is only when you are closer that you begin to see what a curious structure it is. We are in that area between Fakenham and Holt of pretty little villages connected by tiny lanes, but there isn't really much of a Thursford village. If people have heard of the place, it is probably because of the famous collection of pipe organs a mile or so off. To reach the church though, you have to go down a narrow, hilly lane to find the drive to the Hall, beside which which the church sits. Beyond the Hall, fields and copses spread for miles across an increasingly hilly landscape that sprawls towards Walsingham and the sea beyond.

Even from a distance, you can see that the 19th Century was busy here. In fact, apart from the tower and the north doorway, the church was almost completely rebuilt in the early 1860s by William Lightly for the Chad family of the Hall. They were paying for what they got, a view, including some impressive gargoyles worthy of a French Cathedral that face away from the lane towards the Hall. They were paying for rather more, too, for the family clearly had High Church sympathies, and you step into a building of brooding darkness despite the lack of coloured glass in the nave that faces towards a chancel kitted out for shadowy, incense-led worship.

The glass scheme in the chancel was by Powell & Sons, and is generally considered some of their best 19th Century work of all. The east window depicting small scenes of individual saints is to the design of Albert Moore, and Pevsner went into rhapsodies over it, declaring the window one of the most beautiful of its time in England, or indeed Europe, which seems hard on Robert Bayne who was bringing his extraordinary eye to the Heaton & Butler firm at this very time. In any case, the glass either side of the chancel is probably more memorable, to the design of Harry Ellis Wooldridge Ellis a dozen years later. It depicts St Mary and St Joseph to the north, and St Cecilia and St Chad to the south. The only old glass is in the south aisle, a 1587 royal arms of Elizabeth I which until about 20 years ago was hidden away in the vestry.

The font was renewed along with everything else, the sides set with deep reliefs that include the symbols of the Evangelists and the Crucifixion facing eastwards. An oddity is the south transept, because it is designed on two levels, with the Chad family chapel on the upper level, and the lower level presumably their mausoleum. Facing back into the aisle from the upper level, an inscription over the arch reads To the Glory of God and in Memory of Sir Charles Chad this Church was Restored. The upper floor is now in use as a meeting room, but it must be said that not a lot else here has changed since the 1860s rebuilding, giving it a rather sad, faded atmosphere. It was built as a Big House church, but it no longer fulfills that role, and the congregation must rattle around these days on the grand benching for which no expense was spared at the time.

A decade before the rebuilding, at the time of the 1851 Census of Religious Worship, the population of the parish was a little under three hundred and fifty people, of whom fifty came to church on the morning of the census. This seems rather low for what was effectively an estate church, but the hundreds who turned up for worship in the non-conformist chapels of nearby Fakenham may well explain it. This was the census year in which the populations of most rural parishes were reaching their peak, but it was still before the 19th Century Anglican revival got fully underway in East Anglia. In any case, both parish population and congregation must be much lower today.

Simon Knott, May 2022

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