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English Church Architecture.
PARHAM,
St. Mary
(TM 310 606),
SUFFOLK.
(Bedrock:
Neogene to Quaternary, Crag Group.)
A village
church with close similarities to St. George's church, Stowlangtoft,
most
probably built by the same mason during the
reign of Richard II (1377-1399).

The question of whether or not it is
pertinent
to talk about 'the mediaeval mason' is a subject that has fiercely divided
architectural historians in recent decades, with many taking the view that the
very concept of 'authorship', defined as the consideration of a work of art as an expression of an
individual's creative skill and personality, had no currency before the Tudor
period. This supposition has coincided with the passing from fashion of
connoisseurship as an approach to art history more generally, whereby the identity of
individual artists was previously sought by stylistic analysis, in favour of
such modern obsessions as understanding art as an expression of ethnicity,
colonialism, gender, 'the male gaze', or similar issues, and since some academics have built their
reputations on the basis of these new studies, they naturally seek to defend them
vigorously.
This shift in the focus of art history has
not gone completely unchallenged however, albeit that some of the greatest
champions of 'the old school' have since passed away too. One such was Dr.
John Harvey (1911-97), whose biographical dictionary English Medieval Architects
(Gloucester, Alan Sutton, 1987) identified some 1,700 men of varying importance,
who appear to have been responsible for buildings or part-buildings in England
before 1550, and who argued that the only reason the men who designed mediaeval
buildings are so little known is that no-one makes the
effort to discover them. This theme was subsequently taken up at a local level in
Suffolk by the late Birkin Haward (1912-2002), who tried to group Suffolk's
mediaeval churches on the basis of their aisle arcades (Suffolk Mediaeval
Church Arcades, Hitcham, Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History, 1993)
and who, in particular, went on to pick out on stylistic grounds, a dozen churches in mid
Suffolk that appear to have been part-built by the same master mason, referred
to by name in a building estimate for work at Wingfield church as 'Hawe[s],
mason of Ocolte' (Master Mason Hawes of Occold, Ipswich, Suffolk
Institute of Archaeology and History, 2000).
This led the writer to attempt to apply a similar
methodology to another group of Suffolk churches
with striking similarities to one another and to the
church of St. George, Stowlangtoft, in particular,
and by good fortune, it subsequently proved possible
to provide a degree of support for the findings
through documentary evidence. Readers
wishing to understand how this was done and the
conclusions reached - as well, of course, to judge
for themselves the validity of the exercise - should
first read the page for Stowlangtoft, then (in any
order) the pages for Brettenham, Holton St. Mary,
Norton, Preston St. Mary, Rattlesden, Rickinghall
Superior and Thrandeston, and then finally, in this
precise order, the pages for Sproughton, Fressingfield,
Wortham, Wingfield, Parham and Brundish.
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This is a very interesting building even
though it is no longer an attractive one as four of the nave windows
(all three to the south and one to the north) have lost their
tracery (apparently since Pevsner's visit in 1961) and received
instead just an ugly central mullion whose sole purpose can only be
to prop up the arch. Fortunately, the original tracery still
survives in the easternmost N. window (illustrated right) and
the W. window to the tower, which are virtually identical to windows in more
than a dozen other churches in the county, of which St. George’s,
Stowlangtoft, is the 'type' example. Although aisleless and
modest in size, St. George's is a handsome church, dateable from
various pieces of evidence to the final decade of the fourteenth
century, and significantly, a near date seems to be attributable to
the church here at Parham, which is believed to have been the gift
of William de Ufford, 2nd Earl of Suffolk, who died in 1382 and
whose shield can be seen above the priest's N. doorway to the
chancel and on the south face of the font. (See the
photographs below.) Thus St. Mary's may
actually have been the prototype for the later church at Stowlangtoft,
designed by the same mason with the benefit of further experience -
a possibility that at least stands up better to scrutiny than
the judgement of most writers. Nikolaus Pevsner and James
Bettley for example (The Buildings of England: Suffolk East,
New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2015, p. 454) correctly
ascribe the nave to William d'Ufford but describe the
tower as Decorated, seemingly on the strength of the enormous,
eroded niche above the window to the west.
Yet compare the
profile of the tower from the southeast with the profile of
Stowlangtoft's tower from the same direction: they are
virtually identical. D.P. Mortlock (The Guide to Suffolk Churches,
Cambridge, The Lutterworth Press, 2009, pp. 377-378) and the British
Listed Buildings web-site, on the other hand, accept the fact that
the tower and nave were constructed together c. 1370, but consider
the windows to be later additions.
%20-%20parham%206.jpg) %20-%20parham%202.jpg)
In fact, the windows at Parham differ in
a three minor respects from the design at Stowlangtoft: the
central pair of ogee sub-lights are cinquefoil-cusped instead of
trefoiled; the eyelet contains an octfoil rather than a
quatrefoil; and the little linking element above and between
the lights is an inverted "V", not an inverted "U". The subtle
changes made in the later work (i.e. at Stowlangtoft), can
probably be said to produce a
slightly better effect and were probably introduced for that reason,
but lest they be thought to weaken the connection between the two
churches, there are plenty of other remarkable similarities to
notice: the windows at both are two-light and
segmental-pointed, formed of two-centred cinquefoiled lights and
four straight-sided sub-lights, the inner pair, ogee-pointed and the
outer pair, two-centred (as precisely described on the page in this
web-site for Sproughton); they are linked at both churches by a
string course at the springing level of the lights and separated
below by buttresses decorated with flushwork rectangles; the
diagonal buttresses of the tower are similarly embellished and, in
both cases, have four set-offs; and both churches - except, in the
case of Parham, for the chancel - are topped by plain parapets
without battlements, giving rise to the slightly curious, truncated
appearance to the tower. That the chancel here at St. Mary's
is not contemporary is shown by the two windows on either side, which,
together with the similar N. window to the nave, immediately
east of the porch, though also Perpendicular and of similar
dimensions, have supermullioned tracery of entirely conventional design.
This is presumably the work of a different time or hand or both.
Different again - and surely fifteenth century by now - is the
rather grand N. porch (shown left), with a flushwork basal frieze, battlements
decorated with flushwork arches in the merlons and carved shields in
octfoils beneath the embrasures, three tiers of flushwork arches on
the N. front and diagonal buttresses, a canopied niche above the
apex of the doorway, and a doorway bearing a series of complex
mouldings springing from two engaged shafts.

Inside the church, the chancel and tower
arches carry a series of rolls and hollows supported on
semi-octagonal responds with deeply moulded capitals, but the most
significant feature, for it can be seen at Fressingfield, Wortham
and Wingfield, all of which have 'Stowlangtoft-type' windows, are the narrow flat
chamfers outside the responds (in this case, on the sides facing the
nave only), running up to terminate in incised trefoiled arches, barely 2"
square, just under the capitals.
(See the photograph, left, showing the chancel arch N. respond
viewed from the nave.) Yet another connection is provided by
the segmental-pointed hood-moulds above the rere-arches to the nave
doorways. (The
hood-mould above the S. doorway here, and the arms of George II
above that, are illustrated
in the
photograph below right.) Unrelated features in the nave
include an
unmoulded arched recess on either side of the chancel arch, that
once presumably held statues, and the rood stair in the N. wall of
the nave, immediately to the west. The capitals of the chancel arch
have been mutilated where formerly they held a rood loft.

Furnishings in the building
include the octagonal font, already mentioned, with the Ufford arms
on the south face of the bowl and various Decorated and
Perpendicular tracery patterns on the other faces, all of which were presumably still current at the time of
the church's construction. The nave roof is of very
low-pitched couple construction, and in this respect again is very
similar to Stowlangtoft, suggesting not only that these buildings shared a
mason but that the mason also brought with him his preferred master carpenter. This
supports an inference drawn by Birkin Haward, writing in 1993 (Medieval Church Arcades,
Hitcham, Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and
History, 1993, pp. 117 & 119). The Parham roof seems to have been considerably
restored but the point is still valid, especially as no weathering
line of a former, more steeply-pitched roof, is visible on the
external E. wall of the tower.
Thus the many common features described here show there is a very strong
likelihood that the churches listed in the test box at the head of
this page, were indeed built, altered or refenestrated under the
direction of the same master mason during the closing decades of the
fourteenth century. Nevertheless, however strong that
likelihood is, it is inevitably still only a theory, rather than a
guaranteed proven fact. It would be good to have some
documentary evidence to back up these ascriptions, and for
that, the interested reader may wish to turn to the entry on this
web-site for Brundish.
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