Introduction

The corpse path wended its way through stubbly, flint-filled fields, all the time focused on the church’s great bell tower, black with winter rain. The mud that stuck to my boots made me understand how difficult the path could be over the winter for pallbearers as they carried their burden toward St Mary’s, which looms reassuringly over the Wiltshire village of Steeple Ashton. Its pinnacle-crowded heights make it one of the finest medieval church exteriors – and a suitable place for the ‘Way of the Dead’ to end.

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I took a turn around its high stone walls, going clockwise for good luck, and studied the church’s decaying pinnacles, flying buttresses, battlements and gurning gargoyles, green with moss. These architectural terms are all familiar to me, as I’ve spent the past thirty-five years working as a stonemason.

Together with my business partner Andy, we are very much in the ‘journeyman’ tradition; our small team at Minerva Stone Conservation travel from job to job repairing medieval churches. St Mary’s was to be our next job, so I had come to assess the condition of its crumbling stonework.

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As well as repairing masonry and monuments, I’ve spent time in every part of the church, working with specialist craftspeople as they replaced stolen lead, rehung and tuned the bells, or with conservators as they worked to reframe stained-glass windows or prevent the surface of wall paintings from further flaking away.

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For many years, I thought it a great shame that the churches we were working on – many of which represented the finest architecture in their area and were filled with the most remarkable arts and crafts – were taken for granted by locals and given only a cursory glance by visitors. Recently, I’ve noticed a change; increasing numbers are interested in finding out what’s happening behind the ‘Closed for Repairs’ sign hung on the porch door, and I often act as an informal guide.

As we progress around the nave, or if I invite them to climb our scaffolding, they are keen to learn about the meaning and symbolism of the architecture and artworks – what the furnishings and features were for, how they were used and what they can tell us about the lives of past parishioners.

Noticing how most were unfamiliar with what they were seeing, I put together a handout explaining what the parts of the church are for. As the years rolled on, its contents grew from the obvious things that you would expect to see – the lychgate, font and pews – to more idiosyncratic items, from the prehistoric standing stones that were repurposed into crosses and now stand in churchyards to the meaning of how saints and devils were portrayed in the doom paintings and

stained glass that depict the Day of Judgement. But it is the marks left by ordinary parishioners, such as the work of a local carpenter who might have crafted the pews centuries ago, and the graffiti, both sacred and profane, that covers them, that fascinate visitors the most.

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Working on churches in this way has got under my skin.​ Some people ‘go to church’; I ‘go to churches’. I probably spend more time in places of worship than the Archbishop of Canterbury – alongside my day job, I have since the late1980s been on an unending ‘church crawl’ (to borrow the phrase coined by Sir John Betjeman), during which I’ve visited over half of Britain’s approximately ten thousand churches of medieval origin and many of Ireland’s.

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This mania deepened when, in 1998, I was awarded a William Morris Craft Fellowship by the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (affectionately known as the SPAB), which meant that I could travel the country visiting ancient churches to learn about the importance of tradition in their repair from other craftspeople, architects, surveyors and artists.

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I often thought that some sort of handbook on a church’s architecture, features and furnishings would have been helpful during my travels. Unfortunately, none seemed to exist, and so now, some 120 entries later, here it is. To avoid the book becoming a list, and to give it some colour and personal insight, it is based on my own experiences.

Church Going is not a history of church architecture; plenty of other works cover that aspect (including my first book, The Stonemason). Church Going instead tells the story of medieval churches by exploring their often overlooked physical parts.

As pre-Reformation churches were built and decorated to a formula, what I’ve seen in Devon, say, will also apply (with some regional differences) to the churches of Yorkshire. In undertaking this epic journey, I seek to explain how the history and evolution of churches throughout our islands and the lives of the people who used them are interlinked.

I progress through a series of vignettes, first around the graveyard and the church’s exterior, and then up the spiral staircase to the top of the tower. A walk through the people’s part of the church, the nave, will lead the reader through to the area around the chancel arch that will often be the church’s richest and most interesting part, with its rood screens and doom paintings that mark the division into the chancel’s hallowed space.

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It is hardly surprising that most readers will be unfamiliar with the meaning of a church’s artworks and furnishings; many of the features that I list were used as part of the liturgy of the Catholic Church, before the waves of Protestant reform of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that have come to be known as the Reformation made their use redundant, and they have been ignored ever since.

Many churches are less well used than at any other time in their existence, and their quietness often gives the impression that they have always been sleepy and out of the way. In reality, they were anything but. For many centuries, they were the most prominent and busiest building in their community, as the indents of musket and cannonballs from the Civil War that pepper the walls of St Mary’s testify, and so offer as close an encounter with the past as it is possible to get.

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Most churches were built, at a time of great artistic vitality, in the Gothic style and would have brimmed with light and life. Their golden age was ‘the long fifteenth century’, which only ended when the Reformation kicked off in the 1530s; everywhere, it seems, there were people making glass, cutting stone, painting artworks onto wet plaster, or carving and gilding wood. It was the most extraordinary explosion of

creativity our islands have ever seen, when something almost

radioactive seemed to grip the earth.

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Much of this was destroyed within just a few years by the asteroid strikes of the Reformation, revolution and Civil War, when Protestant iconoclasts sought to reverse what they thought of as superstition and set about the dazzling – but now lost – Catholic world with a zeal only matched in modern times by the Taliban.

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Despite the terror and destruction that was unleashed, however, an astonishing amount has survived. Some of this art and sculpture, such as the Mercers’ Hall Christ in the City of London or the tremendous recumbent likeness of Jesse, the father of King David, in St Mary’s, Abergavenny, are of international importance, as are the various screens, pews, pulpits and benches that elsewhere form the finest collection of medieval church woodwork in Europe.

A recurrent theme of this book is how much was hidden away by churchwardens when soldiers or iconoclasts, in the guise of government commissioners came.

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It’s not unusual, as we go about unpicking a church wall or roof, to discover some part of a smashed carving of a saint or crucifixion scene.

Few new churches were built – or old ones fitted out – before the country settled down politically with the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660. This slowly led to the great rebuilding of medieval churches in Victorian times.

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I’ve included very little work from the nineteenth century in Church Going. Although undoubtedly skilled, much of it was (with a handful

of exceptions) overconfident and not respectful of the original work. Often, it will be little more than a fantasy medieval facsimile of what the architect and vicar thought a medieval church ought to look like. The materials the Victorians used tend not to match well with earlier work and are often alien to the local area. Pews or roof joists may be of pitch pine from North America; blockhouse-sized pulpits in depressingly dark-veined Italian marble will feel overwrought. Encaustic floor tiles look machine-made and over-coloured, as does so much stained glass, which, except for the output of a handful of gifted studios, have filled windows with overbearingly pious and sentimental subject matter.

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All of this is a far cry from the subtlety of materials used to build such churches as St Mary’s, Steeple Ashton, in the pre-industrial age, where everything I could see of its walls and roof had been brought by ox-cart once it had been cut out of the local bedrock or felled from the woods of the surrounding parish. This localness will give a church a particular terroir (to steal a term from winemaking) and atmosphere.

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In my work and travels, I’ve been careful not to forget that churches are holy places for Christians who come to them to worship or have their own private conversation with God. But for many others, churches have become sacred in a new way.

They often find the interior moves them beyond religion and want little more than the reassuring presence of a hard old bench to sit on and a quiet atmosphere to take in.

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‘Atmosphere’ should have its own entry in this book – it’s usually been as tangible a presence as anything else I’ve seen in my church crawls. Now and again, I’ve felt this atmosphere fuse with some other unexplained agency to bend the doubts of this particular faith fence-sitter.

It was immediately apparent as I entered Steeple Ashton’s nave on the first day of our project. The early morning was still dark, but the church was already open. Even in the gloom I could sense how grand the

medieval interior was, with its fine starburst-like vaulting and Gothic arcade. It was not just the architecture that made the place feel revered. Dawn was strengthening to warm the east window, which filtered a mist of soft golden sunlight into the chancel; I felt the essence of something unknown loosening from its walls, like the warmth of a night storage heater. In some way, this fused the synaptic with the momentary to fill that small space between my head and heart. I didn’t feel that the building’s architecture, art or sculpture could explain the

effect; it had perhaps more to do with the embodied emotion and devotion left by many generations of parishioners.

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I’ve limited my explorations to parish churches, no two of which are the same. Each will have its own personality, but there are two in particular that I will return to time and again, as they are the churches I know best, having worked extensively on them: St Mary’s at Steeple Ashton, Wiltshire, to which I have already introduced you; and St Mary’s at

Hemington in Somerset – which I also return to because it has a nearly full repertoire of the features and furnishings you would expect to see in a typical country church.

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Cathedrals are largely absent, but I have included the abbeys and priories that became parish churches following the Reformation. Since

more pre-Reformation features survive in remote rural areas, where the reformers’ influence was less intense, there is an unintended bias towards these humbler country churches.

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The photos were all taken by me, and the drawings and illustrations are by my wife, Clare Venables, and our daughter, Violet Venables Ziminski. To further help guide the visitor, directions to each feature mentioned can be found at www.church-going.co.uk, which includes a map of where all the churches mentioned can be found.

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Church attendance is in huge decline; some are at the point of crisis, with tiny congregations and limited funding to keep them maintained and open. To survive, they need to inspire more people to visit, and locals, both religious and non-religious, to use them for worship and community use.

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Many are put off because they feel that churches are unapproachable and unfamiliar. I hope that a reader who once might have been baffled by ‘what rood-lofts were’, as Philip Larkin puts it in his poem ‘Church Going’, will, after reading this book, look at their furnishings and features with new eyes.

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Churches are still a ‘serious house on serious earth’, but if one person feels more inclined to beat that old corpse path to the churchyard, push open the porch door, and find something of interest within, I will have succeeded in my aim.