CENTRE POINT
To discover the peculiar genius of his nation, an Englishman should visit his parish church
SIMON JENKINS
Iam stepping down from this column for a while to embark on a quest for the thou- sand finest churches in England. It may take the rest of my life. Long a hobby, church exploration has become a fascina- tion. Each spire rising on the horizon above its rampart of trees is an enticement to a work of art hidden beneath. Each avenue of yews, each gabled porch is a gateway to England's most secret museum. Gather together every church and you have a gallery of richness matched only by Eng- land's country houses, yet both older and more accessible. Since the pleasure of this museum lies in its dispersal, seeing it is a lifetime's adventure. I want to bring it at least within the covers of a book. Most enthusiasts could attempt the best hundred and perhaps visit them in a year. To find and describe a thousand will take time.
This is not a pilgrimage of faith. To John Betjeman, a parish church was the Angli- can creed in wood and stone, 'familiar 17th-century phrases echoing down arcades of ancient stone'. Enter a church with Bet- jeman and he noted the words of scripture on the wall, the furnishings of the altar, the sacrament reserved. His fellow knight- errant on this quest, Nikolaus Pevsner, was of a different cast. To him a church was a work of archaeology. Pevsner was fascinat- ed by dates, styles, records and items. His guides are the Domesday record of English churches but are a little bloodless. I am of a third persuasion, that of the genial Alec Clifton-Taylor, who viewed a church as a work of art (and wrote a masterpiece of that title), a vernacular creation of men and women, unknown and unsung over the cen- turies, left to us in trust for the future.
At least until the 15th century, a church was the artefact of local artists and crafts- men, working with local materials and vary- ing the designs of itinerant masons and priests to suit local taste. They poured into their churches all the pride and wealth their community could muster. Windows, capi- tals, doorways, chantries, tombs were fash- ioned from the earth, wood and stone round them, which in turn influenced their aesthetic, or so Clifton-Taylor convincingly argued. The church, at least until the devel- opment of the country mansion, was the most extravagant and accomplished work of art in a neighbourhood. In the 19th cen- tury it became so again.
Foreign tourists visiting the British Museum in London are often mystified by what they regard as its misnomer. The build- ing contains a display not of British objects but of objects gathered by Britons mostly from the rest of the world, from Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, India. To discover the peculiar genius of England, especially Eng- land in the Middle Ages, the enthusiast must seek out a dispersed museum. He must visit the ancestral places of worship of cathedral cities, towns and villages.
Few Britons are prepared to do this. They have done a round of stately homes, but few have explored their nation's past as Frenchmen or Germans proudly explore theirs. Most well-travelled Englishmen will boast of their knowledge of the castles of the Loire or the churches of Rome or the islands of Greece. But ask them about the Victorian screens of Yorkshire or the fonts of Hereford or the towers of Somerset and they will assume you are speaking of some strictly provincial attraction. The cultured Briton holds fast to the traditions of the Grand Tour. Proper art is foreign.
Ten thousand pre-Reformation churches survive in England atone, plus a similar number of post-Reformation, mostly Victo- rian ones. Only France has a comparable collection. Choosing the best thousand as `works of art' is not easy, but it roughly cov- ers the buildings that, in Michelin terms, are 'worth the detour'. I am confining myself to England and omitting cathedrals. I include churches of other denominations, as well as churches declared redundant.
A familiar game is to pick the nation's (or the world's) top ten cathedrals, novels, com- posers or prime ministers. Picking the top ten churches is harder. Some clamour for inclusion: Cirencester and Burford among the citadels of 'woolgothic', the Midlands masterpieces at Warwick and Fotheringhay, East Anglia's Blythburgh and Lavenham, Lincolnshire's Grantham, Boston and Louth, and surely the noblest parish church in Eng- land, Bristol's St Mary Redcliffe. Then there are those whose atmosphere triumphs over a more modest architecture: the nautical domesticity of St Mary Whitby, or the aristo- cratic plush of Rycote in Oxfordshire, or the galleries of ancient sculpture at Kilpeck in the Welsh Marches, or Adderbury in Oxfordshire. Some churches have a capaci- ty to move us independent of their physical presence, the Saxon churches of the West Sussex downlands or the Norman chapels of Devon and Cornwall.
Perhaps a third of the 'top' thousand fall within just five counties: Somerset, Suffolk, Norfolk, Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. These were primarily wool counties and the great era of church building (or rebuilding) was the 14th and 15th centuries when England's wealth was founded on wool. Not until these structures decayed in the 19th century was the wealth found to restore them. The mod- em eye has yet to appreciate restoration as art rather than as a defacing of art. Try as I may, I cannot like the scraped walls and pil- lars, the yellow stone windows, the mass- produced stained glass. Like Clifton-Taylor, I feel towards Victorian glass as the 16th- century iconoclasts felt towards its glorious mediaeval precursor. They smashed it to let in the light of day. I would just put the Vic- torian stuff in store.
Betjeman complained that atheists treat- ed churches as 'inadequately developed building sites' — and that Anglicans often did likewise. I believe we are beginning to see churches as more than the places of worship of one religious sect. Mr John Martin Robinson's recent Treasures of the English Churches points out that 'more than any other old buildings they are the tangi- ble expression and receptacle of English history . . . works of art still used and loved and forming part of their original architec- tural setting'. They are appallingly neglect- ed, not least by their own communities. Praise be to the few dedicated custodians who still keep them open and clean.
I have never felt that parish churches `belong' to the Church of England. They belong to the villages and towns whose artists and craftsmen, whose tithes and taxes, built them and supported them throughout histo- ry. The Church cannot maintain this support alone, least of all after its late financial deba- cle. Sooner or later those communities will have to resume guardianship. They will have to view their church as their principal civic glory.
Simon Jenkins writes for the Times.
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