St Lawrence, Great Waldingfield

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Bequests continued, and Simon Cotton in his magnificent Building the late Medieval Suffolk Church records John Siday, who in 1498 gave part of the proceeds of the sale of a tenement in nearby Newton to the perfomacion of the rode lofte all the bred of the ele (which is to say the construction of a rood loft across the the breadth of the aisle) on the north side of the church of Moche Waldyngfylde church aforesaide accordyng to the bodie of the same church. Such bequests continued until the very eve of the Reformation, indicating the immense merchant wealth in this area at the time. In 1534, one John Sudey, who was perhaps the son or grandson of the John Siday who'd paid for the rood loft, left 40 shillings (£2000 in today's money) to gilding and painting the tabernacle of St Edmund, which would fall foul to the injunctions against images within less than a decade. It's possible to build up a picture from these and other bequests of the vibrant late medieval life of this place, and East Anglia is an area with more medieval survivals in its churches than most. However, as we shall see inside, that is not the case at Great Waldingfield. Still, the exterior remains as a witness to those times.

Most unusually in south Suffolk these days, Great Waldingfield church is kept locked, although there is now a keyholder notice. Assuming someone is available, you step through the flushworked south porch into the south aisle. The first impression is of John Hakewill's major restoration of the nave in the 1870s. He was the brother of the more famous Edward Hakewill, but he had often designed the furnishings for his brother's restorations. His work here was enthusiastic and overwhelming, replacing not only the furnishings but also the roofs and the window tracery. However, there are a few medieval survivals. if you look up into the clerestory the 15th Century coursing on both sides is carved with heads, grotesques and fleurons. Some 15th Century glass is collected together in the upper lights of the south aisle east window. And there's also the font, which is a curiosity. It is deeply cut with fleurons and shields, very much in the style of the early 15th Century, but Sam Mortlock pointed out that one of the faces has a small section of triangular patterning, and he suggests that this was originally a square 12th Century font that was later converted for the new fashion of octagonal fonts. Given the sheer wealth of this area at the time it seems an unusual thing to have done, and begs the question if the font came from this church in the first place. The towering font cover forms a memorial to the dead of the Great War.

Turning eastwards, the glory of Great Waldingfield church comes into view, for in the 1860s, flushed with the success of his All Saints Margaret Street in London, the great William Butterfield turned up here to rebuild the chancel. He reused the 17th Century altar rails from St Michael Cornhill in the City of London as a screen. They'd been removed by George Gilbert Scott as part of his restoration there a few years earlier. Butterfield brought with him his favourite stained glass designer, Alexander Gibbs, and the richness of the chancel is a testament to their partnership. Gibbs's east window depicts the Adoration of the Magi and Shepherds, and another window on the south side of the chancel the Presentation in the Temple and the Baptism of Christ. The west window is also by Gibbs.

Butterfield was a great enthusiast for encaustic tiles, using them on the walls as well as the floor. Here at Great Waldingfield they have an elegant restraint which is not always the case elsewhere. However, the real fireworks at Great Waldingfield are to be found in the remarkable sanctuary walls, forming a great three-sided reredos set with mosaics. A plaque in a piscina on the north side explains all, with a quote from Isaiah: The Lord alone shall be exalted in that day and the idols he shall utterly abolish. The marbles in these mosaics were collected in the ruins of heathen temples in old Rome AD 1867-1869. 'Old Rome' means the Roman Empire, and Emily and Louisa Baily, two sisters of the rector, travelled extensively in the Middle East and north Africa in the middle years of the 19th Century. They collected their stones in the Holy Land and in Egypt, and were the first European women known to have travelled alone beyond the second cataract of the River Nile into modern Sudan. The stones they brought back in trunks and carpet bags were sliced thinly thanks to a new industrial process of the time, and used to create varying designs across the three walls. The central cross is made up of stones collected in the tomb of Rameses II. There's some concern now that the reredos is deteriorating. The metal brackets are corroding and some stones are falling off, and so a major restoration project is currently in hand.

Coming back into the nave, a few of John Hakewill's windows have glass by Lavers, Barraud & Westlake in the 1880s, none of it of any great significance, although the glass at the west end of the north aisle is a curiosity. It remembers Emily Baily, one of the women responsible for the stones in the sanctuary. She died in 1885, and the lower part of the window depicts a group of Europeans watching an evangelist on his knees preaching to people who are clearly intended to represent the different cultures and nations of the world. It's an odd thing, but taken in the context of their travels and what they brought home, it makes sense. Henry Kirby, her father's predecessor as rector here, recorded the busy life of the parish in his return to the 1851 Census of Religious Worship. At the time the parish had a population of 659, and Kirby claimed an attendance for morning worship of 118, which was pretty good going in enthusiastically non-conformist Suffolk, and that number did not include the scholars. As you would expect, even more turned up for the afternoon sermon, almost two hundred, for whle rural East Anglians were often suspicious of ceremonial worship they did like a good sermon. The scholars who had no choice but to attend were also there, and Kirby noted that schoolrooms are generally wanted in parish, rector, proprietors and occupiers of land in parish have raised a subscription exceeding £200 and memorialised Committee of Council on Education to aid them in erection of schoolhouse. A much earlier rector back in the Elizabethan era was John Hopkins. He's best known today for co-producing the first metrical version of the psalms to be published in England, but he was also one of the collaborators on Foxe's Book of Martyrs, the virulently anti-Catholic textbook installed in every English church by Elizabeth to ensure that people didn't feel too wistful for their pre-Reformation heritage and its prayers for the dead.