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St Andrew, Belchamp St Paul

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The three Belchamp parishes sprawl against the Suffolk border. Belchamp St Paul is the most northerly and has the largest of their villages, although its church is set alone about a mile to the north of the village on the road to Cavendish. The parish name comes from its manor being in the ownership of the Dean and Chapter of St Paul's Cathedral in London, as with nearby Wickham St Paul. This probably explains the size of the church here, for as James Bettley explains it was rebuilt following a visitation in 1458, completed by 1490. The extensive flintwork is offset by some massive red brick buttresses, and there were restorations of the nave and chancel by Arthur Blomfield in the 1870s and of the tower by Walter Caroe in the first years of the 20th Century. You step into an interior which looks at first sight pretty much all of Blomfield's restoration, the north aisle feeling curiously separate through the low arcade. As at nearby Belchamp Otten the chancel roof is scissor-braced, the sanctuary below ordered for Anglo-Catholic worship with six large candlesticks on the altar and an old-fashioned sanctuary lamp. The tower arch is filled with a light wood screen of the 1990s, with engraved figures in the glass above of the Blessed Virgin and Christ Child and a rather feminine St Edmund. Older survivals include the 15th Century font, which as at nearby Bulmer has a green man on one of its panels, and a number of early modern brasses including two of the 1590s to William and Elizabeth Golding, a knight and several groups of children. The furnishings in the nave are Blomfield's, but the stalls with their misericord seats in the chancel are late 15th Century. The large seated figures that form the finials at the ends are of a very high quality and are unlike any that I've come across elsewhere in north Essex or south Suffolk. Could they have come from another church, perhaps even a cathedral or abbey? An intriguing thought, considering who owned the manor at the time. The antiquarian and ghost story writer Montagu Rhodes James obviously knew Belchamp St Paul, for he set the ending of his story Count Magnus in the village, and a gruesome ending it is too. Simon Knott, January 2022 Follow these journeys as they happen at Last Of England Twitter.

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