St Mary the Virgin Church East Bergholt Suffolk

The church stands in the old part of the village among narrow lanes and across from Old Hall, once a Catholic convent and today a well-known commune. You approach the church from the east, and the splendid late medieval exterior unfolds before you with its aisles and clerestories, a festival of stone and flintwork and a testimony to the quality of the design and the materials of half a millennium ago. Here are the devotional fruits of the industrial heartland of 15th Century England. If you were wealthy in those years, you added something to your parish church as a focus for the prayers of the living after your death. You wanted to spend as little time in purgatory as possible, and if you were wealthy, you might have more reason than the poor to suspect that you might not make it into Heaven in a hurry.
If your parish had lots of seriously wealthy people, as was the case here in the busy cloth-making parish of East Bergholt, you pretty much got the whole church rebuilt. However, when you reach the west end of the church the grandeur dissolves, for you can see that the tower was never completed. It reaches barely to the level of the clerestory, and then it peters out in a confusion of fixtures and footings. Time has melted them, five hundred years exposure to the elements has given them strange curves and contours, as if this were the ruin of a collapsed tower, which it isn't. A surprising number of bequests to the rebuilding of East Bergholt church survive. From the mid-15th Century onwards, large amounts of money were left to both the structure and the furnishings, and by the early 16th Century they start to specifically mention the tower. It seems to have been begun in the mid-1520s, but the final bequest was in 1542 when one Thomas Grithe left a hundred marks to the steple, and then that was it. The tower had been commenced in a fit of optimism, but the Reformation now intervened, and bequests dried up, for who would want to contribute money to a church where prayers for the dead were now circumscribed, and in any case the money would be likely to be sequestered by the state?
Ironically, the tower was begun hard against the western edge of the churchyard, and so a processional way had to be cut beneath the tower to allow for the liturgical processions of Holy Week and certain saints days. You can see the same thing under the towers at Combs, Stanton St John and at St Lawrence in Ipswich. What would the completed tower built to scale against this great church have looked like? Perhaps nearby Dedham and Stoke-by-Nayland provide the answer. However, the absence of a tower has given St Mary something you'll rarely see elsewhere in England, for on the north side of the churchyard they hung the bells in a ground level bell cage.

[@tabadrone]

Parabens pelo seu trabalho. Assistindo aqui do Ceará Brasil Congratulations for your work. Watching here from Ceará Brazil LIKE dado. Ja sou inscrito. Liked. I am a subscriber already.

[@DroneHorizons584]

Thank you, much appreciated

[@mickeytheviewmoo]

Great views

[@DroneHorizons584]

Thank you