St Mary’s Plain

St Mary’s Plain with its ancient round-towered church and grassy churchyard provides a welcome oasis in this semi-industrial, semi-residential area. Although both church and adjacent Pykerell’s house suffered damage during the war, both have since been well restored.

Less fortunate was St Mary’s Baptist church on the south side of the plain, whose history is an interesting one. It was during the seventeenth century that the Baptist movement first came into being, at a time when the Free Churches could neither own property nor indeed have any legal existence, meetings having to be held in private houses under the cloak of secrecy. With the passing of the Toleration Act of 1689, however, premises were hired for the purpose until 1744, when the community of fifty poor men and women purchased the present site in St Mary’s parish, a brick and flint meeting house adapted from existing buildings being opened there for worship in the following year. In 1812 under Joseph Kinghorn’s pastorship a new chapel took its place, this chapel being enlarged in 1839 under William Brock and again in 1886. Other notable nineteenth-century ministers included George Gould and J. H. Shakespeare, neither of whom could have witnessed such troubled scenes in the building’s history as occurred during the ministry of the Reverend Gilbert Laws.

About one hour after the close of the morning service on Sunday, 10th September 1939, a fire spread from the organ gallery by way of the choir pews to the fine vaulted ceiled roof. This very soon crashed down, damaging the pulpit (one of the treasures of the church) and many of the pews. Sufficient of the building remained, however, to enable it to be reconstructed to its original design, Stanley Wearing being appointed architect for the work. Such furniture as had to be replaced was also made to harmonise with the older work, pitchpine being used to match the old materials. The reopening of the church took place on Sunday, 22nd September 1940, a new organ being dedicated on 22nd February 1941.

The life of the rebuilt chapel was a very brief one, for during the early morning of 27th June 1942, it shared the fate of many other well-known city buildings and was totally gutted by fire. The adjoining schoolrooms were also destroyed. After this event arrangements were made for Sunday services to be held in the Stuart Hall, arrangements which continued until 1950 when services were transferred to the newly built school hall in Duke Street. On 5th July 1951, the Reverend Gilbert Laws laid the foundation stone of the new church (Stanley Wearing was again the architect) and the opening service was held one year later on Saturday, 27th September 1952.

In addition to the Baptist church and a Zoar chapel there is, on the north side, a parish church. The latter is by far the oldest of the three; its round tower built by Saxon labour some nine hundred years ago, though the remainder of the church was largely rebuilt about four hundred years later.

The future of St Mary’s church has been placed in jeopardy on a number of past occasions. At the end of the nineteenth century it had been allowed to fall into such a state of disrepair that services were held only irregularly, and it is said that in rainy weather umbrellas were a necessity inside as well as outside the church. When the Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society visited there in 1898 it was, according to their annual report, “sad to see the state of ruin into which this fine building has been allowed to fall, and the hope was expressed that it would soon be re-opened for the benefit of the large population amidst which it stands”. Some ten years later that hope had been achieved: the stonework had been repaired, the roof put in order and the semi-collapsed fourteenth-century belfry taken down. At the same time the true date of the tower was revealed when the four original belfry windows were discovered and unblocked, revealing double-angular heads supported on round central shafts.

The six bells which were formerly here were all cast in Norwich. The two largest were late pre-Reformation; two others were made by John Brend in 1640and the other two by Brasyer. Because of their unusually small size they have been called a “toy” peal. From 1909 until 1939 the church was in regular use for Sunday school and children’s services, but the bells were not used; in November 1936, an application was made to the Norwich Consistory Court to have them sold to the modern church of St Catherine, Mile Cross. There they have been hung “dead”; that in to say, they may be chimed but not swung. It is unlikely they will provoke the local inhabitants into wishing upon the ringer a fate once desired for the Mancroft campanologists, whose activities led an old parish clerk to record the following lines:

Ye rascally ringers - inveterate foes,

Disturbers of those who are fond of repose;

I wish, for the peace and quiet of these lands,

That ye had round your necks what ye pull with your hands.

Another occasion when St Mary’s was in danger came on 2nd August 1942, when in the early hours of the morning fire bombs ignited the roof timbers at the “crossing” of nave and transepts. The blaze was fortunately extinguished before too much damage had been done, and after repairs had been carried out and the walls colourwashed a re-opening service was held in June 1950. After that, the church was seldom used for its original purpose, and in 1974 it was declared redundant.

In 1979 plans were drawn up to convert the church into a theatre, to be named the Luke Hansard playhouse after the reporter of parliamentary proceedings who was baptised here, but because of lack of support this idea was not taken up. A year later the Friends of Norwich Churches decided to rent St Mary’s from the Norwich Historic Churches Trust for their new headquarters. They hoped to keep it as a “church of mediaeval times” and to hold concerts, meetings and exhibitions. It was officially opened as such in June 1981, by Lady Harrod, but after only two years the Friends had to give it up on financial grounds. Eventually towards the end of 1985 the building was opened as a craft and design centre, which use not only enables the public to patronise local initiative but permits them to enjoy the surroundings of one of the city’s most delightful churches. This use is perhaps all the more appropriate because a number of the Norwich School of Painters have had connections with the church. John Crome was married here in 1792, and several of his children were baptised here. John Sell Cotman was also baptised here in 1782, and Robert Ladbroke was buried in its churchyard in 1843.

When I took photographs here in 1937 my attention was particularly drawn to the fifteenth-century pulpit, carved with the linen-fold pattern and supporting an hourglass; to the mural tablet on the south wall of the chancel depicting Clement Hyrne, who died in 1596, his wife and three children; and to a much older inscription on the west wall of the nave which was then in a sadly deteriorating condition in spite (or perhaps because) of a protective glass frame placed over it earlier in the twentieth century. This old inscription records in Norman-French that Thomas de Lingcole had given a wax taper and a lamp to the altar of the Holy Trinity; he was a tanner and bailiff of the city who died in 1298. Also of outstanding interest are the archbraced chancel roof, with its traceried panels, and the fine fifteenth-century roof over the “crossing”, with its remarkable arrangement of timbers adorned with carved angels and bosses.

There is one further building in St Mary’s Plain that merits attention – Pykerell’s House, the only thatched house remaining within the city walls on this side of the river. The historian John Kirkpatrick described it thus at the beginning of the eighteenth century:

There is a handsome hall of the ancient fashion open to the top of the roof, with two doors for buttery and pantry as in college halls; and two large windows now in part stopped up. In one, in roundels represented in painted glass, the twelve months of the year. In the parlour is a curious ancient portal with antique Cornish, carved with four escutcheons.

What remains is in fact the southern part of a late fifteenth-century merchant’s house that followed the plan of most large houses of that time. This usually consisted of a hall or general living room under a high open timber roof, with a two-storey wing at either end, one containing private rooms for the use of the family and the other housing kitchen offices. Entrances to the latter were usually divided from the hall by a screened passage.

Here at Pykerell’s House the buttery and pantry were in the wing that faces the street, and the site of the kitchen was probably that now occupied by the Zoar chapel next door. In the hall behind a floor was put in halfway up some time after Kirkpatrick described it, so one now has to go upstairs to see the tie beam and queen post construction of the roof. The original oriel windows to north and south of the hall no longer exist, but one of the arches and part of the other remain, with shields in the spandrels now blank.

The house was built and first inhabited by Thomas Pykerell, mercer, who was Sheriff in 1513 and Mayor in 1525, 1533 and 1538. He died in 1545 and was buried in the north aisle of St Mary’s Church. By his will he gave £20 for two scholars at Cambridge in four years, and a black gown each to twenty poor men dwelling “in this side the water”. In 1860 the building was an inn with the sign of the Recruiting Sergeant, and the yard at the rear was even then known as Pykerell’s Yard. It was later the Rosemary Tavern, but by the 1930s was being considered for demolition under a slum clearance scheme.

Following representations by various interested bodies, it was purchased and preserved by the Norfolk Archaeological Trust. On 2nd August 1942, firebombs did much damage: the thatch was entirely burnt off, and for six years the house remained empty and in a semi-ruinous condition, but it was then fully restored, to become once again one of the oldest inhabited houses in Norwich.

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