Tag: england

Monumental Tales

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St Nicholas Church, Denston

Our medieval themed treats for the week away in Suffolk included visits to two Grade I listed buildings with interlinked family ties. The first was the parish church of St Nicholas in the neighbouring parish of Denston, regarded as one of the finest late perpendicular village churches in England. (https://shct.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Denston-Suffolk.pdf)

We had a chat with three local parishioners who were doing housekeeping on the late afternoon of our visit. Learned that by the 1980’s the church roof was in imminent danger of collapse and that the parish (pop.100) raised, with outside help from individuals and church restoration charities £90,000 to completely re-roof the building and undertake other essential repairs.

The east end window is a C19th addition, consisting of an eye catching  medley of original medieval glass fragments manufactured in Norwich.

Because it was never significantly altered after the reformation a host of lively original wood carvings of animals on bench ends and roof timbers remain. The mellow stone and timber are displayed at their best in a space lifted with light, thanks to the wide aisle and high clerestory windows. A wonderfully calm and ethereal space which I felt would lend itself well to concerts and talks.

Sir John Denston portrayed at Long Melford Church

One of the landowners involved in the textile trade that so enriched this part of the world was Sir John Denston of Denston Hall (1420-1463) He married Katherine Clopton whose family were among the richest and most powerful of Suffolk’s wool merchants, based at Kentwell Hall not far away, near Long Melford.

Long Melford Holy Trinity; Image Church Website

Set imposingly along a ridge at the north end of Long Melford, Holy Trinity is St Nicolas writ large, Hailed as one of England’s grandest parish churches its elegant mass is complete with adjoining Lady Chapel. Its grace is further enhanced with attractive churchyard flower planting between buttresses.

Almost cathedral like in its structure and internal aura, the church miraculously retains eight bays of late medieval glass. Being  likenesses of mostly secular figures, members of powerful local families, they were spared destruction after the Reformation and during the civil wars of the C17th.

One of those grandees immortalised in glass is Elizabeth Talbot, an heiress married to the region’s rising Yorkist magnate Sir John Howard (Later Duke of Norfolk, killed at Bosworth fighting for Richard III) We’re invited to look closely and decide whether or not she was the model for the Duchess of Hearts in Sir John Tenniel’s illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The artist is known to have visited and admired these windows.

Tenniel illustration for Alice: Image credit British Museum

Sir John Denston, as befits his status and family connections, has a bay all to himself. Various grand monuments to the Clopton dynasty are here too. Sir John Clopton had a vicarious existence balancing loyalties in the Wars of the Roses. Perhaps it was in gratitude for his survival after battle and subsequent imprisonment that he funded the church’s restoration in its present form between 1462 –1497.

The final resting place of John and Katherine Denston though is back at St Nicholas. And what a monument. Startling to encounter when unprepared, as we were. It’s believed to be the only remaining double cadaver church tomb anywhere in the country. The couple’s stone effigies lie undercover, in process of decay, exposed in shrouds of wool tied over their heads. Sir John’s likeness is strikingly macabre in its exposed state. Memento Mori indeed. Son-in-law John Broughton and Sir John Howard were charged under Denston’s will to set up St Nicholas as a Collegiate Church in 1475. A resident warden and priests were paid to pray in perpetuity for the deceased’s soul. That eternity only lasted awhile as the final stage of dissolution during Edward VI’s reign in 1548 bought the practice to an end.

Another curious ecclesiastical monument, once common but now rare, is the display of arms of a local landowning family within their parish church. Here in the south chapel – safely out of thieves reach – are helm, tabard and sword of the Robinson family, later occupants of Denston Hall.

Medieval Wool Trade: Credit Look & Learn Magazine

All in all some interesting connections and an immersive experience in Church of England buildings which retain a strong sense of former Catholic orthodoxy and vernacular artistic exuberance. Much is owed hereabouts to a wealth creating home spun industry built on the backs of sheep.

Star of the East

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Country dwellers like us could take a shine to any city that presents like East Anglia’s regional centre. The centre of Norwich feels more like a town than a metropolis, retaining ancient street patterns while much new building complements the old. Following the trend of breaking  identity down into quarters also suits it well. We stayed two nights at the Maids Head, a venerable independent family hotel, right in the centre. The inhouse hire offer of Bentleys and bicycles must be unique.

From this base on Tombland (Old Norse for ‘open ground’) we took an evening stroll along the quayside that skirts the encircling River Wensum, from Fye bridge to Pull’s ferry. Thanks to the demolition of the former city gas works in recent times that stretch of riverside path is now continuous.

Curiosities here included seeing the remains of a sluice gate and swan pit. With their wings clipped the birds were once culled for feasts at the neighbouring Great Hospital. Formerly part of a monastery and still linked to the cathedral, it continues its caring role as a sheltered housing complex – minus the swan diet.

We watched a male bird waddling along the path while his mate sat on a nearby nest in the reedy corner of a fenced off pond.

Cow Tower (c.1398) is an early example of an elevated gun battery set on a bend in the river. Originally part of the medieval city wall, it  looms up as a flinty floorless finger against the tranquil watery scene below.

Later, in the castle, we’d see the work of Romantic era artists from East Anglia like John Sell Cotman and John Crome. Here’s Crome’s bucolic summer view of the riverside hereabouts in 1819.

Bishops Bridge is a striking original structure of stone and brick, dating from 1340. The oldest span over the Wensum and once a major portal in the settlement’s walled defences. Terraced housing and small houseboats moored on the opposite bank give a peaceful counterpoint to passing traffic. A reminder of navigation that brought boats back and forth to the city’s teeming quays, helping Norwich develop as a major population centre of medieval England. Home to a thriving nexus of craftsmen, artisans and merchants.

The stone used to build Norwich cathedral was imported  all the way from Caen in Normandy. To accommodate that final leg a short canal was dug here in the 1090’s, linking waterway to building site. Now long filled in we passed under the overarching ferryman’s house heading along the cut’s former course, now Ferry Lane, to the Cathedral close.

Next day found us digging further the city’s rich Norman legacy. From the newly refurbished castle to that imposing cathedral. The medieval splendour of the roof bosses in the cathedral is something to behold (preferably with binoculars!) Deeply impressed with the degree of visual narrative power so cleverly compressed in those vivid stone roundels.

The bosses were incorporated into the new stone roof of the late C15th. Yet for most of their existence they have been hidden from view, whitewashed over from the Reformation until late Victorian times. In 1932 they got repainted in their original bright colours.

An extraordinary achievement, 255 in total, looking down from on high above nave and choir, depicting biblical scenes and characters, from the Creation to the Last Judgement. I wondered if the much loved mystery plays performed by trades guilds through the streets of Norwich and other big towns had  inspired the stonemasons in their turn.  

One of the best meals of our holiday was had in this gracious medieval building, the Britons Arms.  In the early C15th this was a ‘Beguinage’, a community of lay single women who devoted themselves to a life of prayer and charitable work. Today its secular tenants create some great dishes cooked with care and skill in the most relaxed and ambient of settings.

Taking a break from matters medieval, we stumbled upon a hidden gem, the Plantation Garden, situated just outside the centre. It’s a redundant chalk pit lovingly fashioned in the second half of the C19th into a charming  green oasis by local businessman Henry Trevor, often re-using redundant building material in the process. The villa he had built as his family home overlooks the tree bordered steep sided three acre spread.

And finally…the steps of the C20th Art Deco City Hall not only give a fine view over the permanent market to the castle keep beyond but also yield overlooked sights of their own.

18 large round plaques grace the great bronze doors of the hall, chronicling Norwich’s history and its diverse businesses… I particularly liked this one of the former soda works.

We only saw a fraction of what Norwich has to offer and would gladly return to experience more. With a medieval church round every city centre corner, a maze of lanes and alleys, a wealth of business large and small, independents and chains, with its universities, museums and the wider cultural offer its civic star is rising. May its light continue to shine.

Sizergh The Day

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I’ve visited a lot of National Trust properties during my adult life. In the 1980s & 1990’s it was as an actor/researcher with their young people’s theatre company, devising and staging immersive dramas. More recently I was a welcome host then garden volunteer at Cherryburn, the Tyne valley farm that was Thomas Bewick’s childhood home. But it’s as an ordinary member that I’d rate a day spent on the Sizergh Castle estate near Kendal in Westmorland as one of the most coherent and harmonious of visitor experiences.

This happy outcome was due to an ideal combination of activities. A fine walk with varied views, seasonal garden delights and characterful castle interiors, rounded off with sampling the scones offer in the café.

The Sizergh estate came to the National Trust in 1950 after centuries in the ownership of one family, the Stricklands, whose Anglo-Norman ancestors inherited it through marriage in 1239. The family still retain part of the house as their private home. The 1,600 acre (647 hectare) estate is commercially farmed by tenants while rangers develop and manage nature restoration and greater access projects in and around the agricultural framework.  

The well signposted Sizergh Fell trail provided lots of interest.  At the 400’ summit, overlooking Morecambe Bay to the south,  we came across remains of neolithic burial sites and traces of Romano-British settlements peeping through cropped turf and brambles at the edge of a huge swathe of tussocky anthills. Traditional British breeds of beef cattle are kept here, well adapted to this kind of upland grazing. Fittingly, the old English derivation of the name Strickland apparently means bullock pasture.

The track dips then rises to follow the limestone ridge, yielding fine views across the Lyth valley levels up into the mountainous heart of the Lake District. A brief ferocious hail storm cleared the grey clouds and let some sunshine in. Emerging from Brigsteer woods we  found ourselves at  Helsington Church, sheltered by its tree bordered burial ground now carpeted by daffodils and white starred wood anemones.

Inside the modest  light filled  interior the Georgian church’s distinctive decorative feature is wonderfully revealed…A whole wall depiction of supplicant female angels in a setting of Lakeland fells framing the altar below.

Dating from 1919, the painting commemorates those who gave their lives in the Great War.  Along with the altar paintings depicting flowers and other motifs, it was the work of a  female artist  who lodged at Sizergh Castle, Marion de Saumarez (1885-1978). Executed in oils on canvas the composition was stretched on battens and secured to the wall.

On our gradual descent back to the start we appreciated  the quality work put in by the rangers to make this circular trail so user friendly.

From  bespoke gate latches  to the  limestone dry stone walls strengthened by through ties of metal wire and wood block. This particularly thick wall also had extra stock proofing on the field side in the form of blackthorn hedging, which was just now coming into flower.

Down at Holeslack farm (now holiday accommodation) new laid hedges framed a damson orchard. In the old barn were bundles of hazel rods harvested from the neighbouring wood, no doubt to be used in hedge laying and other tasks about public parts of the estate.

The building is also playing host to a temporary exhibition celebrating the often undervalued and overlooked role of women in upland hill farming in the 21st century. Illustrated by great images of said women at work on their farms, their number including profiled chroniclers of rural life like Andrea Meanwell (Tebay) and Helen Rebanks (Matterdale).

A walk through Holeslack woods revealed the wide paths and smooth surface to allow buggies and wheelchairs easy access. Dogs Mercury – an indicator of ancient woodland – is here in abundance. A branching path led us to a platform overlooking a wildlife pond on the woodland’s lowest edge, framed by arches of live willow wands. A nice touch.

The gardens at Sizergh are a delight. Conversations with one of the gardeners about the narcissi as we strolled through gave extra pleasure to the discoveries.

The wide borders, cordons of pears against orchard walls, herb beds framed and sheltered by reflective slate; an extensive sunken limestone rockery with pools, shrubs, trees and alpines giving way to large formal ponds, steps and terraces that frame the castle’s impressive south elevation.

The castle core is the most impressive architectural feature to my eyes.. That’s the oldest section, the 60’ high C14th Pele or Solar tower. It also has the original spiral staircase which the little boy  inside me was quietly thrilled to descend at the end of our visit.

Inside the great square tower and its elegant Jacobean extension the takeaway impression is of dark oak floors and wall panels punctuated by huge sculpted fire surrounds within massively thick walls, enlightened and enriched by fine furniture and hangings. There are also generations of family portraits, alongside those of the Stuart monarchs many of them served. So close an association in fact that Thomas Strickland was forced into exile in France alongside fellow catholic James II after the Glorious revolution of 1688, never to return. His successors were fortunate to retrieve the family seat after protracted legal action.

In the 1890’s another dip in fortunes saw the selling off of the inlaid wainscoting that gave the Elizabethan bedroom at the top of great tower its name. A very rare survivor in a country house of oak panelling inlaid with pale poplar in floral and geometric patterns. London’s V&A museum had bought the panels from the family and displayed them throughout the 20th century. The story gets a happy ending when the NT and the V&A struck a deal, facilitating their refit in aitu in the 21st century.  We’d like to return too, to experience the garden in another season and explore those parts of the wider estate we’d not had time to discover this time around.

Footnote: returning home next day the weather turned  truly elemental in a way that only Cumbrian weather can. We spent a happy morning out of the biblical deluge, enchanted by the Windermere Jetty Museum in its impressive architect designed home on the lake at Bowness. It houses an extraordinary collection of craft associated with Lakeland waters and also offers – weather permitting – trips aboard steam powered vessels on Windermere.

What really made our day though was when we eventually got to Castlerigg. Situated on a shoulder of hillside, between Keswick and the town’s neighbouring mountains this impressive stone circle is estimated to be some 3,000 years old.

Rediscovered by romantic era influencers of the early C19th like Wordsworth and Burns this mysterious round of huge stones then stood marooned within a ploughed field. The most likely reason the circle’s single stone outlier was moved and repositioned in a corner of the field was to ease passage for the plough and team. The ghosted form of rigg and furrow (ridge & furrow) is still evident  in the flattened corrugated ground. A challenge to stay upright when fiercely buffeted by fierce wind and rain but the effect was extra spectacular and – more selfishly – the weather helped keep this spell binding picture free of fellow humans for a while!

Medieval Treasures

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Where are the men who came before us/ Who led hounds and hawks to the hunt, / Who commanded fields and woods? / Where are the elegant ladies in their boudoirs / Who braided gold through their hair / And had such fair complexions?

Extract from an anonymous poem c. 1275, trans. Michael R Burch)

There are more than one and a quarter million objects on display in the Victoria & Albert Museum. Since 2009 the medieval and Renaissance treasures are displayed in five galleries in that vast C19th cultural complex. On our recent London visit we confined ourselves to just one gallery, and were not disappointed with what was discovered. Here’s a bit about a handful of treasures on display connected with the west and north of England.

The wealth and power of a medieval English king pales in comparison to the richest and most splendid of European courts upheld by the magnificent Dukes of Burgundy, centred on what is now roughly southern Holland and northern Belgium. These towns and cities were the nexus of the continent’s major  trading  centres in luxury goods and services. This huge Flemish tapestry dated 1425-30, completely covers the gallery end wall. Formerly lodged at Hardwick Hall Derbyshire it was accepted by HMG in lieu of death duties on the estate of the 10th Duke of Devonshire.

Conspicuous wealth is on show here, the tapestry’s narrative function as great as that of its role decorating and insulating a castle or household interior. Only Kings and aristocrats were allowed to hunt game, like the bears and boars depicted here, and participants attire is strictly status related, eschewing practical hunting clobber. The ladies fur for example is miniver, an expensive pelt from the bellies of hundreds of Baltic squirrels culled in winter.

Three unique half-life size oak figures stand out against a background of the  great tapestry. A knight, his squire and man-at-arms; three orders of society in a great feudal household. Dating from the early 1500’s, they’re believed to have supported heraldic devices, and were placed high in the great hall of Kirkoswald or Naworth castle in Cumberland, properties held by the powerful Dacre dynasty. The armed man’s helmet or sallet was an essential piece of soldering kit but it also limited the wearer’s vision and impaired his breathing. In 1461, during the battle of Towton, a helmetless Lord Dacre was killed by an arrow while taking  a desperately needed drink of water. A monument marks the fatal spot of that terrible battle in the Wars of the Roses. (We visited in 2025 https://stephentomlin.co.uk/2025/05/01/towton-field/) 

The tragic epic romance of Tristan and Isolde in Cornwall had huge appeal to the wealthy elites right across Europe and lots of art work reference it. This superb broadcloth bed covering, made in Florence for a rich merchant family between 1360-1400, really goes to town on the tale.

It’s a wonderful display of compressed narrative detail chronicling the epic story, with extra pieces attached at various times, fashioned from linen and cotton. Kim, who comes from a long line of quilters, was particularly impressed with the skill involved in its execution.  

Surviving examples of luxury medieval Islamic glassware are exceptionally rare so this pristine one from Syria or Egypt dated to c.1350 has special significance. A talisman of the Musgrave family at their seat of Hartley castle and later at Edenhall in Cumbria ‘The Luck of Eden Hall’ has been protected in part by the 15th century leather case and – if local legend is to be  believed – by fleeing fairies,  who left it in human hands with the warning ‘If this cup should break or fall / Farewell the luck of Eden Hall.’ Curiously, in northern farming circles it remains customary to gift ‘luck money’ to the buyer of one’s stock at market as a token of goodwill.

Finally…this small C14th alabaster fragment of a lost altarpiece from a Midlands church is a fine example of a deposition. The top figure’s steadying arm on the cross and Joseph of Aramathea’s handling of the slumped body of Christ help fix a moment of tender compassion. The odd missing head or hands of the other figures bear witness to the vagaries of time, or the action of iconoclasts. Along with the faded original bright colouring, this narrative scene exudes a sense of loss and sacrifice.

Towton Field

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‘Recall the cold of Towton on Palm Sunday before dawn…fastidious trumpets shrilling into the ruck: some trampled acres, parched, sodden or blanched by sleet, stuck with strange postured dead. Recall the winds flurrying, darkness over the human mire.’ (Geoffrey Hill: King Log)

On 29th March 1461 two great armies met in battle outside the village of Towton, on the high wide limestone ridge country between Leeds and York. This was to prove a watershed event in the intermittent C15th civil conflict known as the ‘Wars of the Roses’. A dynastic power struggle between the aristocratic affinity who supported the pious Lancastrian King Henry V1, led by his fearsome warrior wife, Margaret of Anjou and the charismatic Yorkist claimant to the throne, Edward Earl of March, heir to the rival house of York

The Lancastrian forces were mainly northerners, the Yorkists drawn mostly from the south and midlands. The 19 year old Edward had lost both his father, Richard Duke of York and younger brother Edmund, Duke of Rutland at the Battle of Wakefield three months earlier. Edward’s revengeful victory at Towton lead to the deposition and imprisonment of Henry, the exile of Margaret and to him being crowned as Edward IV.

The weather played a key role in determining the battle’s outcome that fateful Palm Sunday. A snowstorm blinded the oncoming Lancastrian forces and the mass of Yorkist arrows borne on the bitter wind inflicted heavy losses on their tight battle formations. This pressurised the Lancastrian host to advance through the teeth of the storm, which in turn pushed the Yorkists backward. Only the last minute arrival of reinforcements from the south, led by the Duke of Norfolk, halted their slow retreat and raised the morale.  After yet more fierce hand to hand combat the Lancastrian army finally broke. Panic and hot pursuit ensued. The main line of retreat for the fleeing soldiery was on the old London road towards Tadcaster, over a narrow bridge crossing the Cock Beck below, to the west.

Some escaped that way while others, the mass of lightly protected infantry and archers, were not so lucky. No quarter would be asked or given. Jammed with the dead and dying, a desperate brute slaughter took place, the beck running red with the blood of butchered bodies that piled up, damming its course. Towton would go down in history as the biggest, longest and bloodiest of battles to be fought on British soil. 

The late April day we visited was clear skied, cool and fresh. After a good pub lunch at the Rockingham Arms in Towton village we drove down the B road to where the official ‘Battlefield Walk’ started, by a simple monument known as the Dacre Cross, named after a Lancastrian lord killed in the battle. A weathered wreath of red and white roses left at its base to mark the anniversary a couple of weeks earlier lent the exposed spot a melancholy air. The path sets out alongside fertile soil recently sown and banked, Toblerone like, for potatoes. One couldn’t help wondering if the blood and bone spilt here, albeit centuries since, makes for a good crop year on year.

The lie of the land proved crucial to the course and outcome of the fighting and the locally based volunteers of the Towton Battlefield Society have done a great job in establishing and maintaining  the 2.5 mile trail, complete with information boards at key points. 

On one side stretches the undulating main battlefield site, where thousands of soldiers fought in hand to hand combat. Recently unearthed archaeological evidence points to the use of small cannon on the field of battle, a first for any in England. Excavations on private land around the village property of Towton Hall thirty years ago also revealed 50 skeletons dated to this period, packed into a mass grave, all displaying signs of injury or violence.

Today this section of the former great field system has been sown for what we took for either barley or wheat, surrounded by headlands of some kind of green manure, then grass banks or wire, with hardly a hedge in sight to break or block the overview..

On the other side of the path the land falls suddenly and steeply down to the narrow winding Cock beck, a tributary of the River Wharfe.. Here we gazed over a typical pastoral scene of deciduous woodland within pastureland on which ewes and lambs were grazing, with willows, alder and poplars hiding the waterside at bottom.

I’m struck by the mass of white flowers we passed – dead nettle, stitchwort and crab apple blossom, combined with the presence of those Spring lambs, that somehow, unconsciously adds to the symbolism of the Yorkist victory here at the heart of the White Rose county.

The warfare these days is between landowners and poachers, as the vehicular concrete barriers we came across at roadside field entrances testify to. Whether poaching of gamebirds, deer or hares (or all) remains unknown.

Towton Battlefield walk is an engaging accessible circuit, rarely busy one suspects. We encountered only four people on our stroll, all dog walkers, and the way is clearly interpreted and cared for. It has a particular atmosphere and ably communicates the brute horror of medieval warfare, made more so when seen against an overlay of the modern day farmed countryside. Well worth a visit, especially at a time of year somewhere near the anniversary. Find out more at the Battlefield Society’s website: www.towton.org.uk