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Everybody who has
written about Withersdale church seems to have liked it.
Mortlock called it a dear little church, Simon
Jenkins thought it unusually atmospheric,
Cautley recommended its unspoilt interior, and
Arthur Mee, whatever you may think of his writing,
obviously cared for the place, mentioning as he does half
a dozen pathetic old benches... which once held an
honoured place in God's house and are now a shelter from
the sun for a few of God's sheep.
The church sits right beside the busy Halesworth to
Harleston road, which perhaps you wouldn't expect from
its reputation for being remote and peaceful. You reach
the towerless church through an old wooden gate on the
north side of the sloping churchyard, passing 18th and
19th Century headstones as you come round to the porch on
the south side. As you pass the east end you can see that
the church is not entirely constructed from rendered
rubble, for the east wall has been partly rebuilt in red
brick, and the window frame above is made of wood, a
memory of times past and a hint of things to come.
On the occasion of my first visit back at the start of
the century I found the south side of the building
dappled in late winter sunlight, and I remembered how
Arthur Mee had found this church surrounded by elm trees,
long gone today but their leaves must also have sent
shadows scurrying along this wall. At the eastern end of
the roof ridge is a pretty weather-boarded turret, the
little porch beneath it on the south side. Although the
church is visibly Norman in construction, the turret and
porch have a later historical resonance, because the
appear to have been the 1690s gift of William Sancroft,
who had once been Archbishop of Canterbury. Fressingfield
was his native village, and Fressingfield church is a
medieval wonder, and it is not too fanciful to imagine
that Sancroft made St Mary Magdalene his quiet project.
On a sunny day you step into a cool light suffusing the
nave and chancel. You can climb up to the tiny gallery at
the west end of the nave to look down on the space below.
St Mary Magdalene is a relatively unspoiled prayerbook
church, its interior almost entirely of the 17th Century,
with some sympathetic Victorian additions. The pulpit is
against the north wall as at All Saints South Elmham,
partly to break away from the tradition of worship being
focused on the east, but also perhaps to take full
advantage of the theatrical sunlight from the windows in
the south wall. The pulpit is tiny, barely two feet
across, and the benches face it, and so do the box pews
to south and east. The woodwork is mellow, breathing a
calmness into the silence, while the chancel beyond is
lovely, a little altar guarded by three-sided rails
beneath an elegant east window, on that winter day in
2002 with two brass vases of early pussy willow sweet
upon its cloth. The benches are simple, perhaps carved
locally, and have candle-pricks set in the top of their
bench ends. A surviving interloper in all this prayer
book sobriety is the Norman font, carved with a tree of
life and a grinning face and set upon a modern brick
base.
There is a crisp and elegant confidence to the interior,
a lingering sense of the 17th Century English Church
which had furnished it. A Church which, despite so many
traumas in the previous century and a half, had finally
come to represent both the simplicity of the Puritans and
the seemliness of the Anglicans, and that was the
Elizabethan Settlement fulfilled. This was the Church
that William Sancroft inherited after Oliver Cromwell's
Commonwealth came to an end. Sancroft was made Dean of St
Paul's Cathedral in London, witnessing its destruction by
fire in 1666, and overseeing the beginning of its
rebuilding in the classical style, and such a contrast
with St Mary Magdalene it must have made that perhaps he
sometimes wished he was back here. In 1678 he was made
Archbishop of Canterbury. A High Anglican, he crowned the
Catholic James II with some misgivings, but he then
refused to recognise the Protestant coup of William III
in 1689, returning to Suffolk, to Fressingfield and
Withersdale, where he died in 1693.
To sit in the silence of the shadowed pews here knowing
this is to feel a distant beat, the quiet trick of
history turned and played. Think of the certainty that
this interior represented, the triumph of the will, of
belief over mystery, and how the rationalist,
superstitious 18th Century parishioners who worshipped
here could not have conceived of the great sacramental
fire which would one day flame out of Oxford and lick
their Church clean. Even so, the interior that they made
their own persists today.
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