| The previous Wednesday, Antony arrived from Walsingham, and I took him to Sudbury to show him the shrine of our Lady. It was made by two Walsingham craftsmen, James and Lilian Dagless, for the Roman Catholic church in Sudbury. The priest at that time, Fr Moir, reinstated it — and his mother, a Protestant, paid for it.
My mother thought he should have been hanged for doing this, although not drawn and quartered, as she was a devout Christian.
The Virgin and Child, covered in gold leaf, and she in a Mary-blue robe, glitter beneath a canopy. They were carried in procession from the banks of the Stour to the chapel (then a barn) of St Bartholomew. This on the Feast of the Assumption. “Well,” said Mother, “you would think we were in Italy!”
The shrine’s original home was in the marvellous collegiate church of St Gregory a few yards up the river bank. It was where I worshipped as a boy, and where my sister was married. It has a glorious telescopic font cover from the late Middle Ages. On Ash Wednesday, curtains would have been hung from its dizzy finials. Antony, seeing it for the first time, is moved by its beauty, touching the still-bright scarlet of apostle-less niches gently, recognising its holiness as I recognise its history.
To the south of the church, the porch and the chapel of St Anne, the Virgin’s mother, are conjoined. This is where the shrine of our Lady originally stood, but where a pair of vast aldermanic tomb-chests now take up the space: Alderman Carter, no less, whose charity they proclaim. “This day” — in Latin — “a Sudbury camel passed through the eye of the Needle.”
A grander local benefactor, Archbishop Simon of Sudbury, had founded a college here in 1375. One of its miserere seats, its arms as smooth as silk from the resting palms of centuries, clunks upwards to reveal the Archbishop’s beloved dog. I used to wonder if it sat at his feet in church. Alas, poor local lad, he came a cropper over the poll tax, and was beheaded by the mob during the Peasants’ Revolt.
The head gazes through the glass of one of those hatches such as used to be seen in ticket offices, and is irreverently known as “the nut” by choirboys. But I am profoundly moved by it, by its sightless elegance, and its huge fate. Did his colleague carry it from its spike in London to his church in Sudbury out of love, or in the hope that it would do for Sudbury what that other murdered archbishop did for Canterbury? Antony stares at this eloquent skull in his quiet thinking way.
Outside, gulls whirl above the river. Did Simon swim in it? He had crowned the boy king Richard II. Like many East Anglians, he was naturally radical. Events — office — did for him.
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