The Church, the Village and Its People, 1400-1500
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Wighton: the church, the village and its people, 1400-1500 Nicholas Andrew Trend Doctor of Philosophy University of East Anglia School of Art, Media and American Studies (AMA) September 2017 © This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that use of any information derived there from must be in accordance with current UK Copyright Law. In addition, any quotation or extract must include full attribution. All Saints, Wighton from the east 2 Abstract When, how, by whom and in what circumstances were Norfolk’s medieval churches rebuilt in the long fifteenth century? Despite the importance of this extraordinary and historic burst of architectural creativity, the answers to these key questions have long proved elusive. A perceived lack of archaeological and documentary evidence has left historians largely in the dark. This thesis addresses the gap in our knowledge by focusing on a single church and village - All Saints in Wighton, near the north coast of the county. The choice of such an apparently narrow subject has allowed a sustained and intense focus on both the fabric of the building and the scattered, partial evidence which survives in the archives. And while the focus has been narrow, the approach taken has been broad and creative. It has included an analysis of masons’ marks, the counting of arch voussoirs, an unusually wide, eclectic and exhaustive collation and investigation of surviving documents, together with detailed comparisons with other churches in the vicinity. As such it aims to offer a new model for architectural and social historical research and - hopefully - it will be regarded as a success. The research has identified a reliable chronology for the nave and chancel of All Saints, estimated the cost of its construction and established the most likely model of fundraising needed to raise that money. It has reconstructed the village economy and its community in some detail and identified and profiled the individuals who were most likely to have paid for the project. Lastly, as a consequence of its investigations, it has proposed significant revisions in the date of important stained glass at All Saints and several other Norfolk churches. 3 The nave of All Saints, Wighton 4 Contents Preface .................................................................................................................... 6 Acknowledgements ................................................................................................ 8 Introduction ........................................................................................................... 9 Chapter One: the dating and construction of the fabric ..................................... 15 Chapter Two: the windows and the stained glass ................................................ 47 Chapter Three: economy and society, 1400-1500 ............................................. 101 Chapter Four: the village and the parishioners .................................................. 131 Conclusions ........................................................................................................ 169 Abbreviations ..................................................................................................... 174 Bibliography ....................................................................................................... 175 Appendix One: Evidence for dating churches with shared masons’ marks ....... 194 Appendix Two: The Gigges family (1383-1506) ......................................... 198-203 Maps and plates Maps ................................................................................................................... 206 Historic images of Wighton church ................................................................... 208 The church today ............................................................................................... 210 Examples of masons’ marks ............................................................................... 212 The stained glass at Wighton ...................................................................... 214-240 5 Preface Few of our parochial country churches have any remarks or memorials left of their particular founders, or the time of their building… our ignorance in this case is owing to the great length of time since their foundation, the many alterations and additions that have been made in the churches themselves, and the great disorders and confusions that have happened since the time of their foundation, which have not only defaced and ruined the records and evidences, but even the marble stones and brasses, which would have given us a clear light. Francis Blomefield,c. 17501 On a grey September day in 2014 a funeral was held in All Saints church, Wighton, a small village three miles from the north Norfolk coast. The deceased, a man named Dennis Seaman, had been born in Little Walsingham, the next door village, in 1930. He had married a woman from Wighton and had lived there for the rest of his life. He was born before electricity came to the village, when the windmill was still standing, the local school still held classes, and at a time when tractors were rare, much of the land was still worked with horses, the crops were hoed by hand, and harvest was an event requiring the combined efforts of the entire community. In short, he was one of the last surviving villagers to have witnessed life in this part of Norfolk before the widespread industrialisation of agriculture, the growth of consumerism and the pursuit of leisure changed it fundamentally. Remarkably, he was also a member of the first generation to have witnessed a major reconstruction of the church for more than five centuries. Dennis, who worked in the building trade, had been chairman of the parish council for over 50 years, was church warden for 40 years 1 Blomefield 1805-10, vol. 6, 222. 6 and served on the Parochial Church Council even longer. He was on the PCC when the medieval tower of All Saints collapsed in 1965 and was one of those who had overseen its reconstruction in 1975-76. This was funded by the near miraculous intervention of a Canadian businessman, Leeds Richardson, who was visiting Wighton to look for the graves of his forbears and, shocked by the stunted state of the tower, determined to pay to have it rebuilt. In his will, Dennis, a religious man, had asked that his body rest overnight in the nave on the eve of his funeral, a rare throwback to an old tradition. He was buried near the western entrance to the graveyard and, on the day before the service, warm from his work, the gravedigger talked to me volubly of the bones he had unearthed while digging. It was disconcertingly reminiscent of the opening of Act Five of Hamlet. There was no Yorick, but among others, he had found a child’s skull and he claimed to have dug through two or three earlier burials. Perhaps among those bones were the mortal remains of some of the villagers who, six centuries earlier, had witnessed the transformation of All Saints. It had, like many parish churches in England, been entirely remodelled in the fifteenth century, with a new nave and chancel, much bigger windows and a high clerestory which flooded the building with light. Little is known about the details of medieval funerals. The service for Dennis Seaman certainly owed much more to the traditions of the Victorian Church of England than to those of the fifteenth-century Church of Rome. But it was part of the same historical continuum and the extremely unusual sight of a full nave, the traditional burial in the graveyard, some 200 or 300 mourners filing out of the porch to witness the committal, and the unearthing of the bones of villagers past, was a rare moment when that continuum was explicitly highlighted. The funeral came halfway through the research for this thesis and, for me, it confirmed two key instincts which lie behind it. The first is a sense of the physical importance of the church and its graveyard to the history of the village. Wighton is now an insignificant place. Many of its houses are used as holiday accommodation and, typically, barely a dozen people turn out for church services. The time when All Saints was the fulcrum of local life - of birth, death and marriage, of holidays and festivals, of moral instruction and spiritual comfort, of shared values and communal efforts - has all but faded. Very likely the importance of the church to the village will wain further. But for the time being, it remains as the only surviving monument to an era when most people were born, lived and died in the same community and, in the case of Wighton, a time when it was one of the most prosperous and populous villages in the vicinity. The second instinct which inspired this thesis is a desire to reconnect our understanding of the fabric of such buildings with the people who originally constructed and used them. It is a connection which has long been overlooked, but which has proved to be fertile ground - both as a way of understanding a fifteenth-century Norfolk village, and the rebuilding of its church. 7 Acknowledgements For Sophie I am especially indebted to my supervisors at the University of East Anglia: Professors Sandy Heslop and Mark Bailey, whose patience and positivity have known no bounds. Many others have helped me over the last seven years including especially: Sophia Kral, Dr Anthony Smith, Dr Elizabeth Rutledge, Beatrice Rae-Smith, Dave Bescoby,