St Matthew, Ipswich

www.suffolkchurches.co.uk - a journey through the churches of Suffolk

This must once have been quite a small building, but events over the centuries have enlarged into the church we see today. The core is 15th Century, including the lower part of the tower. The 19th Century expansion was substantial, made necessary by the proximity of the Ipswich Barracks, for this became the Garrison church. This explains the size of the aisles which are as wide as the nave, and were intended to increase capacity as much as to allow for the revival of processions. The chancel was also rebuilt, but retained its medieval roof.

Until 1970 the church was hemmed in to the east, but the construction of Civic Drive opened up this view, which isn't a particularly good one. This end of the church is entirely Victorian, and when you look at it you realise that it was built into existing buildings and wasn't intended to be seen. Because of this, it comes as a surprise to find that the west end on Portman Road is by contrast quite pastoral, a pretty setting for the tower. Before the destruction of the houses to the east this would have been the familiar view, the churchyard stretching away to the south, but this in turn was partly built over in the 1960s with the construction of the new roads and of a church school. The part of the graveyard immediately beyond the chancel on Civic Drive was turned into a small garden. A footpath runs along the north side which will bring you through to the main entrance, the west door under the tower. You step into a broadly Victorian interior, and find the font in the north aisle.

East Anglia is famous for its Seven Sacrament fonts, 13 of which are in Suffolk. These show the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church, and are rare survivals. So much English medieval Catholic iconography was destroyed by the Protestant reformers of the 16th century, and the Puritans of the 17th century. Here at St Matthew we find an even rarer survival of England's Catholic past, a font whose panels show a sequence of images of events in the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Before describing it, I have to make the point that this really is one of the dozen most important and significant medieval art survivals in Suffolk, and one of the finest late medieval fonts in England. There is nothing as good as this in the Victorian and Albert Museum, or in the British Museum. I make this point simply because on every occasion that I have visited, the person accompanying me (they don't let you visit the church on your own) did not seem to realise quite how important the font was, and gave the impression that the parish, though they care for it lovingly, also did not realise what a treasure, what a jewel, they had on the premises. "It's quite pretty," said the lady when I visited in September 2016. The leaflet in the church describes it as 14th Century, which the nice lady took as holy writ and didn't really believe me when I suggested that it wasn't.

In fact, it was made during the second decade of the 16th Century. Of the eight panels, one has a Tudor rose and another a foliage pattern, but five of them depict events in the devotional story of Mary, mother of Jesus. These five reliefs, and a sixth of the Baptism of Christ, are amazing art objects. They show the Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin with Gabriel unfurling a banner from which a dove emerges to whisper in Mary's ear; The Adoration of the Magi, with the wise men pulling a blanket away from the Blessed Virgin and child as if to symbolise their revelation to the world; the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, with Mary radiating glory in a mandala, which four angels use to convey her up to heaven in bodily form; the Coronation of the Queen of Heaven, the crowned figures of God the Father and God the Son placing a crown on the Blessed Virgin's head while the Dove of the Holy Spirit races down directly above her; and the Mother of God Enthroned, the crowned figure of the Blessed Virgin sitting on the left of and looking at (and thus paying homage to) her crowned son on the right, who is holding an orb.

The late Dr John Blatchly thought that this last panel of the Mother of God enthroned was intended as a representation of Catherine of Aragon and her husband Henry VIII. The evidence for this is circumstantial, but there is no doubt that this font is an artifact of the ongoing early 16th Century drama which would eventually result in the English Reformation. John Blatchly's research showed that this font was paid for and installed by the rector of St Matthew, one John Bailey, to celebrate the Miracle of the Maid of Ipswich, which occured in this very parish in 1516 and was held in renown all over England in the few short years left before the Reformation intervened. The popularity of the Miracle, in which Joan, a young Ipswich girl, has a near-death encounter and experiences visions of the Virgin Mary, was widely used by the Catholic Church as a buttress against the murmurings of reformers.

In their book The Miracles of Lady Lane, John Blatchly and Diarmaid MacCulloch give a fascinating and often convoluted account of the battles between Bailey and a much more significant local figure, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. Ipswich was Wolsey's power base, and he attempted to consolidate his power by taking control of the Shrine of Our Lady of Grace of Ipswich which just happened to be in the parish of St Matthew, a hundred yards or so to the east of this church. The shrine was one of the most popular pilgrimage sites in England. Bailey's celebration of the Miracle was partly a way of competing with Wolsey for fame and influence in the town, but also of increasing his own hold on control of the Shrine. Those who visited the shrine would also come to St Matthew and tell their bedes around the panels of the font. The devotion to Our Lady of Grace and the celebration of the Miracle of the Maid of Ipswich would become intertwined. Church and shrine would become inseparable parts of the same pilgrim experience. Between 1517 and 1522, both Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon made journeys to the shrine, set beside the Westgate in the parish of St Matthew. They probably visited the church as well. Other visitors included the the future saint Thomas More, and of course Wolsey himself. But in 1525 Bailey died and left the way open for the Cardinal, who in his turn would completely over-reach himself and fall in his own way just five years later. Henry's divorce from Catherine would entail a break with Rome and over the next thirty years the birth of a new Church of England. It is the kind of thing Trollope would have written about if he had been around in the 16th Century.

Blatchly and MacCulloch's book is memorable as a picture of the incredible religious fervour in Ipswich in the early years of the 16th Century, a tale of near-hysterical enthusiasms that would spill over into passion and violence. Blatchly notes that the sequence of at least some of the Marian images on the font was replicated by a sequence of inns down the mile of Ipswich's main street, now the line of Carr Street, Tavern Street and Westgate Street, which led to the shrine. One of the inns, the Salutation (ie, Annunciation) at the start of Carr Street survives in business under the same name to this day. But in time of course Ipswich would become well-known as the most puritan of towns in the most puritan of England's regions.

Remarkably, two of the four figures around the base are probably intended as Joan, the Maid of Ipswich, and John Bailey the Rector himself.

Most guide books describe the panels of the font as the five Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary. In fact, this is technically not the case, although certainly the font was intended for use in rosary meditations. We know that the rosary was a hugely popular devotion in medieval England, and that a persons 'bedes' were their most valued possession. They played a major part in personal devotion, but were also important as a way of participating in the liturgy, and as an expression of communal piety. Many pre-Reformation memorials show people holding their rosary beads. However, what we now think of as the Rosary sequence only dates from the 14th century or so, and was one among several in common usage. Praying with the rosary had been greatly popularised in England by St Thomas of Canterbury in the 12th century, who devised a series of seven joyful mysteries, including the Adoration of the Magi and the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin. Most sequences were of five meditations. In time, the Joyful Mysteries would come to be Mary's earthly experiences, and the Glorious Mysteries her heavenly ones.

Because personal devotion was considered a diversion from congregational worship, and Marian devotion was thought superstitious, the rosary was completely anathematised by the 16th century Protestant reformers, and attempts were made to write it out of history by destroying images of it on brasses and memorials. Within forty years of this font being produced, use of rosary beads was a criminal act in England.

The survival of an image of the Assumption is particularly interesting. We still have much surviving evidence of religious life in England before the Church of England came along, but it does not really reveal to us the relative significance of different devotions, simply because some of the major cults and their images were ruthlessly rooted out and destroyed. The Assumption is a case in point. 15th and early 16th Century wills and bequests reveal a great devotion to the Blessed Virgin, particularly to the feast of the Assumption, which is celebrated on August 15th.

This is at the height of the harvest, of course, and it is not difficult to see the connection between this feast and the culmination of the farming year, or the importance to farmworkers of a festival at this time. More than 200 Suffolk parish churches were dedicated to the Assumption. When the dedications of Anglican churches were restored in the 19th century after several centuries of disuse these generally became 'St Mary', although some have been restored correctly since, at Haughley and Ufford for example. The Church of England, of course, does not recognise the doctrine of the Assumption.

Of equal significance are the other images, all remarkable survivals. And why the Baptism of Christ? In fact, this is the most common 'odd panel out' on the Seven Sacrament fonts, and reminds us of the significance of baptism in the medieval church. It was the sacrament by which infants received their mystical commission to the Christian life and to the daily life of the parish, and was by total immersion, hence the size of medieval font bowls.

Within thirty years of this font being installed here, injunctions against images proscribed its panels. Most likely it was plastered over, for the parish would still need a font. The bowl still shows traces of plaster today.

The font is not quite the only medieval survival here, for the north aisle also retains panels from the rood screen, built into a 19th century screen. You might miss these, because ordinarily chairs are stacked against them. Three of the panels show bishops, and the other two show cheering crowds of seven and nine people respectively. I do not think that these can be in their original configuration. Roy Tricker thought that the crowds were portraits of parishioners, which may be so, in which case these may besurviving panels of the screen to the chantry altar of the guild of Erasmus, which was established here.

There is clear evidence of the location of at least one nave altar, since a squint kicks in from the north aisle. There are two good 17th century wall memorials in the chancel, the best being to Anthony Penning and his wife depicting their children weeping, some holding skulls to show that they pre-deceased their parents.

Much of the 19th century woodwork is from the workshops of two major 19th century Ipswich carpenters, Henry Ringham and John Corder. Ringham's work can be found in several Suffolk churches, most notably St Mary le Tower, Woolpit and Great Bealings, while Corder was an architect responsible for several restorations, including Swilland. Both have Ipswich roads named after them. The church has an extensive collection of late 19th and early 20th Century glass, not all of it good, but happily by a wide variety of workshops. The great curiosity is the window in the east end of the south aisle, which depicts Jane Trimmer Gaye, wife of a 19th Century rector, flanked by female members of her husband's flock with images of birth and death. It was designed by her brother Frank Howard, and made by George Hedgeland. Another oddity is Percy Bacon's Christ flanked by St Edmund and St Felix - for the last hundred years the Saints have stood here with their names transposed. There is a frankly functional modern screen, with a curious Anglo-catholic style rood which looks most out of place, for St Matthew today is very much in the evangelical tradition. But the lady who allowed me entry told me that people liked it, so I expect nobody minds too much.

Simon Knott, August 2020