All Saints, Woodton

The churches come thick and fast in this part of south-east Norfolk, and Woodton church sits on a gentle ridge in the lane to the north of its village, looking across to its near neighbour Bedingham church beyond it to the south. The church is set back some way from the road, and presents its somewhat stark low rendered south aisle and chancel as you approach. There is no clerestory, and the nave and chancel run together under one roof. The window tracery suggests a construction over a period from the late 13th to the mid-14th Centuries, the aisle coming last. The tower both pre- and post-dates all this, the lower part being of the 12th Century, the upper part and bell stage coming last of all towards the end of the medieval period.

This being one of the splendid Hempnall group of parishes, the church is open every day. You step into the separated western bay of the aisle and then through the arcade into a space with a feeling of intimacy under the relatively low scissor-braced roofs. The font is a curiosity, because although it is one of the 13th Century Purbeck marble series common in east Norfolk, its arches have been recut, or more accurately reinscribed, and the bowl set on columns in the style of an earlier period.

The little chapel at the east end of the south aisle must have been of some importance. There is a squint through to the chancel with a corbel head looking down, and in the window above there are surviving panels of 14th Century glass. St Catherine with her wheel and St Margaret with her cross staff and dragon are reset in two quatrefoil windows, and there are also the instruments of the passion and a fragmentary cluster of acorns and oak leaves.

The glass in the east window of the chancel is a curiosity. It depicts three subjects, the Baptism of Christ, the Temptation of Christ and Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. It dates from 1863 and was made by Lavers & Barraud, and was originally set at Tinterden church, Kent. However, it is said that the parishioners there were uncomfortable with the depiction of the devil in the central light, and in 1934 the glass was bought by Frederick Lee, the rector of Woodton. The story goes that on its arrival at Woodton it was found that the glass in the central light was too wide, and so the left hand edge with the devil on was cut off, but it seems likely that Lee would have known this before making his purchase.

There are a number of memorials in the chancel to the Suckling family who we have already met a few miles off at Barsham in Suffolk, the most notable of which is of the 1650s and tells us in its inscription that this is ye portraicture of Ann ye wife of Robert Suckling. She kneels in her winding sheet at her prayer desk, facing uncomfortably close to the east wall. Back in the nave is a brass plate to a member of an earlier family of significance in the parish, the Coppings, the inscription asking us to pray for the soul of Thomas Koppyng on howys soul Jesu have mercy AD MDXXXII.

Brass plates on the chancel wall remember the only two sons of Frederick Lee, the previously mentioned rector of Woodton, who were both killed in the First World War. Frederick died March 1st 1916 at the age of 21 years from Pneumonia contracted while on duty at the Military School of Signalling near Otley, Yorkshire, while his brother Richard was killed while on service testing a new design of aeroplane at Mousehold, Norwich on June 23rd 1917. He was 29 years old. Further west, another brass memorial to a lost boy of the War remembers the grandson of one of Frederick Lee's predecessors, Frederick Long, who shared his grandfather's name. He was killed in the Great War on the Menin Road, August 24th 1917. Yet another earlier rector, John Yelloly, was the father of Sarah Boddicott, whose 1890s memorial in the nave mentions a number of other Yelloly and Suckling relatives and records that she was the last of a once large and most united family. The late 19th Century screen in Barsham church was erected in memory of Yelloly.

Simon Knott, October 2021

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