There was something about the arrangement of the north aisle that seemed puzzlingly familiar

I had gone to a hilltop church to look at some examples of Saxon sculpture. By hilltop I mean right on top of a cone-shaped hill with a terrific wind blowing even on a still cloudless sunny day. The view was spectacular but the wind was so fierce that we (Marie-Astrid and myself) were glad to get inside (although the hill itself is of considerable interest being a mixture of yellow-pink dolomite and grey carboniferous limestone and incorporating thousands of sea-fossils thrust upwards when the hill was formed three hundred million years ago).

It was a big building, built on the grand medieval scale. At one time a great family had dominated the local area and enriched the church (more for their glory you would suspect, rather than as an expression of piety). But the family had died out and now only their monuments remain in the elevated isolated church with the wind whistling round.

I didn’t have much time to look around as Marie-Astrid doesn’t much care for old buildings and had imposed a time limit (she was driving). My original intention was to photograph the Saxon carvings, “discovered” (actually they had been there for centuries unnoticed and unregarded) by the late Sir Alfred Clapham, world authority on Romanesque architecture and sculpture (see his masterful essay: Disputed Examples of Pre-Conquest Sculpture), in a process of analytical deduction worthy of Sherlock Holmes. But as usually happens, once we were in the place I got distracted by all the other things there were to see.



Above: Looking across the nave, you can see the black wood pew on the left with the private family chapel on the right.

In particular I was intrigued by the arrangement in the north aisle where a monstrous family pew stood side by side with a railed-off family mausoleum. The pew was a huge wooden kiosk dated 1627, and exhibited all the vanity of the landed gentry in the seventeenth century (ornate balusters, friezes of cherubs, gigantic heraldic achievements). Next door the family chapel, protected by heavy iron grills, contained recumbent effigies carved from Chellaston alabaster.



Above: I know I’ve said this before, but at the risk of broing you, an “achievement” is when your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and all sixteen great-great-grandparents were entitled to a coat of arms – all the various arms are then displayed on an escutcheon known as an achievement. This example has many more than sixteen arms, so it’s a sort of super achievement. There are no “supporters” so the family was not noble, and probably just stayed in its own locality making very careful marriages generation after generation.



Above: Standing in the family mausoleum and looking towards the family pew, you can walk out of one door and into the other.

There was something about the arrangement of the north aisle that seemed puzzlingly familiar. It was the idea of the living sitting side-by-side with the dead. And then into my mind “pinged” the line from Henry Scott-Holland: “Death is nothing at all, I have only slipped away into the next room”.

Unfortunately the famous poem of Canon Henry Scott-Holland has become so over-familiar that it has lost a lot of its impact, but you can read the full text here:

http://www.poeticexpressions.co.uk/POEMS/Death%20is%20nothing%20at%20all%20-%20Canon%20Henry%20Scott-Holland.htm