It was absolutely dire

Another lecture in yet another remote church in the east of county. This one was not as erudite as others I have been to recently. In fact, there was something fraudulent about the whole set-up.

The village was set on level lands which had originally been long strips of flat land rising from the marshes. The Sunday afternoon was warm, with gentle sunshine. I drove there through well-kept farmland, the hedgerows subtly becoming more gentrified and displaying specimen trees as I neared the settlement, the whole landscape shape-shifting into micro Edwardian suburbia as I entered the village itself.

Although the village was big, it was not so big that it justified such an enormous medieval church - one of truly vast proportions. The medieval economy had been based on wool, transported by water since the land routes were (and still are) constricted by strategic natural bottlenecks. The wealth generated by the wool paid for the church and the draining of the marshes.

Entering the building, the construction was on such a scale that I felt like a citizen of Lilliput among the towering columns. Most of the windows were of clear glass, so light fell down on you from all angles. The acoustics were particularly good, which meant that the slightest noise (footsteps, whispered conversations, clinking of tea cups) was accentuated and magnified.



The chief treasure of the church is a medieval ladder (see above) that goes forty feet from the ground to the first level of the tower. The area under the tower was a sort of kitchen where ladies were preparing cups of tea (rows of teacups on a trestle table, very big white enamel teapots, immaculate tea towels). One of the ladies told me the ladder was made of primeval wood reclaimed by medieval monks from the ancient marsh (this marsh wood was greatly prized in the medieval period as it had lain in the mineral-rich water for several millenia and in the process had acquired an extremely tough, pliable, boiled quality that resembles modern plastic).



Above: another view of the ladder (note the sun streaming through the gothic arched window to the left). Apparently the ladder is still in use. Pevsner writes gleefully about this survival from the pre-industrial age.

Gradually other people arrived for the talk. They stood around in couples and small groups, drinking tea and whispering to each other. A large number of foreigners (unusual for such an out-of-the-way place) were attending the lecture - I heard them talking in French, Spanish and German (or was it Dutch?).

The lecture was on the career of a very minor sixteenth-century explorer who had been born in the village. This historical connection had been obscure and unremarked until “discovered” by a Rector in the 1950s who single-handedly built it up into a tourist attraction, bringing a buoyant level of income into the village. The result was a Festival-of-Britain-style mixture of earnestness and frivolity (like orange-flavoured cod liver oil - the nasty taste of the history disguised by dressing-up and silly re-enactments).

The lecture was delivered by a retired local headmaster. It was absolutely dire. Every suspicion I have ever harboured about the abysmal teaching of history in state schools was confirmed. Disjointed, laboriously politically correct, WRONG. I felt like heckling him. He walked up and down the low stages set up in the side-aisles (where an Oberammergau-like play is performed at weekends on the subject of the explorer) beaming at us as he showed off. It was all garbage from start to finish.

Eventually I just walked out.

I left the group clustered round the declaiming teacher. I walked past the ladies at their trestle tables loaded with tea cups. I walked through the great gothic entrance arch and down the long avenue of yew trees, back to my car.