English Church Architecture.
STRATFORD ST. MARY, St. Mary (TM 052 346), SUFFOLK. (Bedrock: Eocene, London Clay.)
One of a number of mid to late fifteenth century churches in East Anglia, showing the influence of the master masons who worked on King's College Chapel in Cambridge.
The church butts up against the B1029, which creates a difficulty as the only way to see the N. front properly is to stand in the middle of the road and hope not to be run down by the speeding traffic. There is flushwork decoration everywhere, admittedly not as finely wrought as in the S. porches at Ardleigh and Great Bromley, a few miles to the south (in Essex), but at Stratford St. Mary, knapped flint is the principal facing material on all parts - over the W. tower, aisled nave, chancel, chapels and N. porch. No church could possibly use it more extensively.
St. Mary's is essentially a late fifteenth/ early sixteenth century building,
over-restored
in 1878 by Henry Woodyer (1816-96). (The date appears in flushwork in
the tower S. wall, high up next to the bell-openings.) Woodyer was
briefly pupil to William Butterfield (in 1844), his senior by a mere two years, and for thirteen years
after that, he worked from an office in Butterfield's house. Yet in
spite of enjoying what appears to have been a perfectly amicable
professional relationship, the two men were not temperamentally close,
for Woodyer was flamboyant and capricious while Butterfield was abstemious,
disciplined and single-minded, and so it is probably not surprising that
although Woodyer could almost equal Butterfield in his very best work
(most notably at Highnam, Gloucestershire), he lacked Butterfield's focus
Inside the building, other matters come to the fore. The graceful
four-bay nave arcades,
which were probably complete by c. 1480,
are carried on lozenge-shaped piers with attached semicircular shafts
towards the openings and semi-octagonal shafts with hollowed sides to the north
and south, separated by wide casements, producing a section which is so similar to
that employed at St.
Nicholas's, Denston and St. Ethelbert's, Hessett,
that the mason seems certain to have been the same (Birkin Haward, Suffolk Mediaeval
Church Arcades, Hitcham, Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History, 1993,
p. 354). (See the N. aisle arcade, left.) He was almost
certainly Simon
Clerk, by turns,
master mason at Eton College, King's College Chapel and Bury St.
Edmunds Abbey. (See the entry for Denston church for a more detailed
consideration of Clerk's style.) However, the arches that now spring
from these piers appear to have been reduced in height and given their present four-centred
form shortly afterwards when the clerestory was added, and
because they are now ogee-pointed in the idiosyncratic
manner seen at
neighbouring Dedham, and only a few miles further away, at St. James & St. Paul's church, Colchester
(both in Essex),
then it seems that the mason responsible was probably Robert Antell,
who, as at Dedham, so also here, drew the ogee
points and the semi-octagonal shafts on the
sides of the piers facing the nave, up to frame the clerestory
windows,
The chancel arch has a complex profile and is carried on three orders of coloured marble shafts with black stone bands imitating shaft-rings. This is by Woodyer and is actually quite attractive. Alas, not so the font, which stands on eight marble shafts and is decorated on the faces of the bowl, alternately with a carved scene of the apostles gathered round the central figure of Christ, and by an inlaid pattern in coloured marbles. The details are fair and either design with, perhaps, just the simplest of variations, would have done better on its own. Served up together, they merely show Woodyer's inability to judge when enough was enough.
[Related buildings the reader may wish to examine on this web-site include Burwell and Isleham in Cambridgeshire, Colchester SS. James & Paul, Dedham, Saffron Walden and Thaxted in Essex, and Cavendish, Denston, Hessett, Lavenham and Long Melford in Suffolk.]
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