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English Church Architecture.
RATTLESDEN, St. Nicholas
(TL 978 591),
SUFFOLK.
(Bedrock:
Neogene to Quaternary, Crag Group.)
A substantial village
church, part-built by the 'Master of Stowlangtoft'
during the
reign of Richard II (1377-1399).
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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 quite a big, impressive building
which has a number of different affinities with other local churches.
Consisting of a W. tower with a shingled broach spire, a five-bay aisled
nave with a S. porch, and a chancel, it is constructed of flint and pebble
rubble with dressings of Clipsham or
Casterton stone from the Middle Jurassic Series wherever the work dates from
the 1883 restoration of 1883, carried out to the designs of Sir Arthur
Blomfield (1829-99). (Roy Tricker, St. Nicholas Church, Rattlesden,
Suffolk: a History, Margate, The Church Publishers, undated, p.5.)
Blomfield's contribution includes the
pinnacles at the corners of the aisles and a considerable proportion of the
stonework of the
windows. However, the church belongs essentially to early Decorated
and Perpendicular times and there is still important work remaining
from both periods. The former is responsible for the tower, the aisle arcades
and the S. doorway inside the porch
(illustrated left),
the last of which has two orders of shafts with fillets integral with the
jambs and three rolls with fillets around the arch, which still
clearly owe a debt to Early English (thirteenth century) forms. The circular window
above contains a wheel of bifoils, similar to the chancel N. windows at Stanningfield.
The tower, which rises in three stages supported by clasping buttresses, has
probably been remodelled by Blomfield, who also added the spire.
The tower arch bears three hollow chamfers which die into the jambs, the
chancel arch has two of these springing from heavy semi-octagonal responds,
and the excellent nave arcades have double-hollow-chamfered arches rising
from octagonal piers, with hollowed sides and incised cinquefoil-cusped arches
immediately below the capitals (see
the N. arcade pier, right)
in the manner seen at Lakenheath, Norton and Walsham-le-Willows,
where the mason was probably the same.
Turning
to the Perpendicular work and beginning with the chancel, this has a
two-storeyed mediaeval N. vestry, which the church guide describes as a
sacristy and which Pevsner ignores, reminiscent of similar additions at Cockfield and Hitcham,
where they were probably once dwellings for acolyte priests. Further west, a window
into the chancel copies those to the south, which are three-light
with
inverted daggers above the outer lights and two tiers of reticulation units separated by supertransoms above the
central lights, like the chancel
windows at Great Shelford, Cambridgeshire, dated by Dr. John Harvey to
1396 - 1411 (The Perpendicular Style, London, Batsford, 1978,
pp. 125 & 142). The
five-light, two-centred E. window
(illustrated left)
displays intersecting subarcuation of the lights in threes, through
reticulation, and two tiers of supertransoms above lights 2 and 4.
(See the glossary
for an explanation of these terms.)
Around all these chancel windows there is the voussoir-like arrangement of
brick alternating with flint, so often
found locally. The aisle windows
(shown in the photograph, right)
are identical to those at Stowlangtoft and elsewhere,
at the first of which they can be ascribed to c. 1390. It seems
likely therefore, that all are work of the same master mason, using the same
templates. The battlements, which are probably a later addition, are
decorated with carved blank tracery that continues around the porch, and a
partly-projecting stair turret between the easternmost S. aisle bays, gives
access to a rood loft (shown below). The clerestory is composed of
three-light supermullioned windows with stepped lights, strong mullions, and
supermullions
splitting into 'Y's at the top. The masonry around them is faced
with knapped flints and the battlements are decorated in flushwork
reminiscent of Long Melford
(that is, with pairs of blank arches on the embrasures and shields in blank octfoils
in the merlons), where the work is dated 1481. The two-light side windows
to the porch have supermullioned tracery with split
'Y's, the south front is decorated with four tiers of blank
arches, and there is a canopied niche above the apex of the outer doorway, with
shafts with capitals decorated with fleurons, set in a square surround with
spandrels filled with blank quatrefoils and daggers. Inside the porch,
an earlier roof-line is fossilized above the inner doorway and the wheel window described above.
The church
contains some notable
woodwork, of which by far the most striking is that of the elaborate and
attractive parclose and rood screens with interconnecting lofts
(seen below left).
They were designed by G.H. Fellowes Prynne
and date only from 1916, but they show how the mediaeval screens must once have
been arranged, with access to the
rood loft via the stair turret in the S. aisle S. wall, then the parclose
loft round two sides of
the S. chapel (west and north), and the wooden stair and stone steps
rising from this to pass through an opening in the south side of the chancel
arch. Older furnishings include the seventeenth
century hexagonal pulpit with two tiers of panelling, the communion rails
with turned balusters of similar or early eighteenth century date, and the double
hammerbeam nave roof, now almost entirely by Blomfield. The boarded chancel
roof of ogee section, has been created by panelling over another of single hammerbeam construction.
With its
castellated purlins and shallow carved bosses, it is similar in its present
form to the chancel roof at Cockfield and almost identical to the chancel
roof at Hitcham.
Finally, a note must
be added on the ornate octagonal font. (See the photograph, right.)
Its deep bowl has a castellated rim and faces lavishly carved with crocketed,
cinquefoiled ogees between pinnacles rising from carved heads at
the angles, while the stem features a very small, two-bay, blank
ogee-pointed arcade on every side. The date of the work could be a couple of decades later than that of the aisle arcades but
stylistically, the gap is wider. |