Russell Reeve, St. Peter Mancroft, Norwich, From Bethel Street, c1940. V&A Museum, London.
Norwich contains thirty-seven old churches,(1) not counting the Cathedral; and in this respect, though there are some forty larger cities in England, it is surpassed by London only.(2) Moreover, Norwich is exceptionally fortunate in the quality of the bells hung in its churches.(3) Anyone who cares to sit in the Market Place at half-past ten on a sunny Sunday morning may enjoy a memorable experience. The warm air seems translated into music.
At the raised south-west corner of the square, where Bethel Street(4) enters it, stands the parish church of St. Peter Mancroft. The site, on which an earlier church was built by the Normans,(5) was the great meadow attached to the castle, the magna crofta; and it is of this that the name Mancroft is a corruption. The Norman church, having fallen into disrepair, was (in the graceful phrase of our day) scheduled for demolition in 1390, but the first stone of the existing church was not laid for another forty years. Completion and consecration took place in 1455. On two if not three occasions it underwent restoration in Victorian times.(6)
How high the tower is, where to look for the grave and monuments of Sir Thomas Browne,(7) what the vestry contains, and which architectural features are characteristic of Norfolk perpendicular – all this and much more can be found in any reputable guide-book as well as in the leaflets obtainable in the church itself. But what, for one reason or another, nobody mentions is the change that has recently befallen the setting of the old church. Mr. Reeve has drawn it from an angle where it still has the quality of dominance that used to belong to it. Had he drawn it from the east or north side of the Market Place, he would have been compelled to show it utterly dwarfed by the City Hall, erected in 1938.(8) Such changes in proportion are common enough to-day, and are perhaps none the better for being as a rule so gradual as to pass unnoticed by almost everybody. Here the whole outlook, the very bearings of the central square, were altered at one blow. The church which, from the conformation of the ground and from its own virtues, drew all eyes to itself now stands suddenly shrunken beside the palace of the City Fathers. Even people who have come specially to see the church cannot give it their immediate attention. Even those who do not admire the City Hall find it impossible to postpone that building to their second glance.
Recording Britain, Vol 2, Norfolk, p 152-153.
Image: Russell Reeve.
Text: Arnold Nottage Palmer
1. Today, there are in fact 31 surviving medieval parish churches in Norwich, of which this is the largest. A total of 58 stood at one time, meaning that 27 have been lost, many during the religious turmoil of the 16th century and some others during WWII air raids.
2. This makes sense when you consider that during the 15th century Norwich was England’s second largest city.
3. There are 14 bells at St. Peter Mancroft. An original 12 were cast in 1775, and of these, 11 are still in use today. The tenor bell which split in 1814 had to be re-cast. In 1909, the ring was augmented with a flat 6th bell and a 14th bell (another treble) was installed in 1997. The peal is in the key of C and the tenor bell weighs 37cwt (1.85 tons). The founders of the 1775 peal were Messrs. Pack & Chapman, which denotes that they were cast at the famed Whitechapel Bell Foundry in London, which had cast the Liberty Bell some 23 years earlier, and was later to cast Big Ben in 1858.
4. Bethel Street was home to the Bethel Hospital, the first purpose-built psychiatric facility in Britain (opened in 1713). The hospital itself was built on the site of the former Committee House, a Parliamentary stronghold at the centre of the so-called ‘Great Blow’, a pro-Royalist riot in 1648, which resulted in the largest recorded explosion of the 17th century, following the accidental detonation of 98 barrels of gunpowder. The blast destroyed much of the original stained glass work at St. Peter Mancroft. Many of the remaining fragments became part of the East Window, which survives today (see note 6).
5. Its Norman foundation apparently dates to 1075.
6. This includes work related to the re-positioning of much of the church’s original medieval stained glass, the majority of which can now be found in the magnificent East Window. For a truly deep dive into this subject, see David King’s The Medieval Stained Glass of St Peter Mancroft, Norwich: (Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi, OUP, 2006).
7. Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), was a 17th-century English physician, writer, and polymath known for his eloquent works blending science, religion, and philosophy. Browne was buried in St. Peter Mancroft. In 1840, when work was being done on the church, his coffin was accidentally rediscovered. His skull was removed and later ended up at the Norfolk & Norwich Hospital Museum. It remained separated from his body for over a century, until 1922, when it was finally reinterred in the church chancel, restoring Browne’s remains to their one original resting place. This story forms an important part of W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (1995), which takes as its central structural conceit its narrator’s perambulations around East Anglia. Sebald taught at the University of East Anglia, during my years as a student there in the mid-Nineties.
8. The imposing City Hall, built in the Art Deco style and Grade II listed in 1971, dominates Norwich’s central market square.