NEWSOn the day of the Autumn Equinox (23rd September), late afternoon cloud cover brought disappointment for those who came to see the illumination of the rood, though the previous day hovering cloud gave way at the last moment to enable a welcome display. The church was looking splendid for Harvest Festival on Sunday 27th September, with colourful displays of autumn fruits, produce and vegetation (photo, front cover), and handsome floral arrangements. The PCC is grateful to all those who worked so hard to create such beautiful decoration. Choral Evensong included the hymn For the Beauty of the Earth, charmingly sung by the choir as an anthem. The guest preacher was Canon Fr John Thackray, Vicar of St Mary at the Elms, Ipswich and Representative of the Bishop of Richborough. His fine sermon was entertaining, strong in message and widely remarked upon afterwards. At Harvest Supper in the village hall the 43 guests enjoyed a magnificent meal at charmingly decorated tables. The immense amount of work that went into the planning, preparation and serving of the meal should not be underestimated and I am sure we are all most grateful for the dedication of the team behind it and, indeed, for the setting up of the hall and the clearing up afterwards. Certainly, it was a most enjoyable and hugely appreciated occasion for the guests. Please return your Love Boxes to the church between Sunday 18th and Friday 23rdOctober, in time to be blessed at Sunday service on 25th October. Thanks to Cheryl for organising this scheme and thank you for your support. We are most grateful to Doreen Springall for the work she puts into her farm gate sales of produce at Boundary Farm, resulting recently in a donation to the church of £180.00. Doreen has also donated an archive of church-related documents, a magnificent scrapbook recording the community efforts to raise funds for the restoration of the church following the fire of 1979, and an oil painting of the firemen at work during the fire. Following recommendations in the architect’s Quinquennial Inspection Report, Theo Wells has been working on repairs to the church fabric. Outside the building, he has repaired the detached render to the north sanctuary wall and repointed the bed-joints to the north sanctuary parapet coping stones. He has also repointed the open joints in the jamb stones around the south sanctuary window and the silence chamber windows in the tower, as well as the open glazing grooves around the central south chancel window. He has also repointed joints on the buttresses and the outer arch of the porch, and secured the unstable joint where the west wall of the porch meets the nave. Inside the church, Theo has removed cracked and flaking plaster by the north door, on the south nave wall and above the vestry door and in due course he will re-plaster these areas. There is plenty still to do! The October sales table will be on Sunday 25th and the November sales table on Sunday 22ndNovember.Amy delivered 232 items to the Beccles Foodbank in September, including 90 items donated at Harvest Festival. FORWARD PLANNINGRemembrance Sunday, 8th November: Please arrive at church in good time before 10.45am. The service will begin at 10.50am with the first hymn, followed by the Reading of Names, and the two-minutes silence at 11am.Service of Remembrance, Barsham Village Hall, Wednesday 11thNovember: The hall will be open from 10.15 for a 10.45am start. Parking on the paddock. Refreshments available afterwards with optional donation. Christmas Carol Service: 6.30pm, Monday 21st December with guest preacher The Right Reverend Luke Irvine-Capel, Bishop of Richborough. The service will be followed by refreshments, including mince pies and mulled wine. SNIPPETS – Advent: expectation and preparationThe Church of England website provides a timely reminder of the significance of the Season of Advent, which marks the beginning of the liturgical year in Western Christianity. Advent looks back as well as forward: it is both a preparation for the Christmas celebration of the birth of Christ, and an expectation of his second coming and divine judgement at the end of time. The website talks of the ‘modern reluctance to confront the theme of divine judgement’ and points out that traditionally, in expectation of divine judgement, sermons and meditations during advent have covered the Four Last Things: Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell. The Anglican Church today emphasizes expectation rather than penitence, but when Advent first emerged as a season in the liturgical calendar in the 4th or 5th century, it was a 40-day season of solemn penitence, like Lent. Later, in the medieval English Church, the season of Advent was reduced to the familiar four Sundays before Christmas Day, but the theme of penitence remained strong. Public celebrations, weddings, the pursuit of legal disputes and warfare were some of the things thought to be inappropriate during Advent, and some people practised fasting on certain days of the week. Much more recently, the Anglican Church has adopted a number of Lent customs from elsewhere. The custom of lighting candles on an advent wreath arrived in England from Northern Europe in the 19th century, the lighting of a new candle each week symbolizing the light of Christ drawing nearer. The Christingle is a custom borrowed from the Moravian Church, arriving here only in the later 20th century. Meanwhile, out there in the secular commercial world, Advent calendars originated in the early 20th century, and the first chocolate Advent calendars arrived in the 1950s!November DiarySunday 1st November – All Saints. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP), Barsham. Revd Jonathan Olanczuk SSC.Sunday 8th November – Third Sunday before Advent. 10.50am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Canon John Fellows.Sunday 15th November – Second Sunday before Advent. 11.15am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Desmond Banister SSC.Sunday 22nd November – Christ the King. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Graham Naylor. Sunday 29th November – First Sunday of Advent. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Graham Naylor. Church correspondent: Robert Bacon 07867 306016, robert.bacon@yahoo.co.uk
NEWSWeather permitting, the sinking sun will illuminate the rood at the Autumn Equinox at approximately 5.50pm on September 22nd, 23rd and 24th.Haymaking took place over four days in the week of 17th August. We are hugely appreciative of the industrious Community Payback team, which tackled the entire churchyard, including the thick jungle in the ‘plague pit area’ and the back wall. Many thanks to those who came to support the hard-working Community Payback team, and thanks especially to Chris for so kindly providing such greatly appreciated ploughman’s lunches each day. Cheryl is grateful to those who helped at the two Love Box wrapping sessions. Love Boxes are now available for collection at the back of the church: do take one – or some – and fill them with small gifts destined for children in orphanages in Eastern Europe at Christmas. We are working with the charity T4U this year and once again we are grateful to Beccles Lions for paying for the transport. Leaflets are available to explain what to put in the boxes. Please return your boxes no earlier than mid-October and no later than Friday 23rd October. They will be blessed at Sunday service on 25th October.Diana, Cheryl and Sarah contributed spectacular arrangements to the Mettingham Flower Festival, held at All Saints church over the August Bank Holiday weekend. Cheryl’s striking display for the 15th century octagonal font made for a fine welcome on arrival, Diana’s arrangement lit up the back of the south aisle with radiant colours (pictured, front page), and Sarah’s arrangements beautified the sanctuary. The PCC met for routine business on Thursday 3rd September. The PCC is grateful to Peter Gasgoyne for his refurbishment of the porch bird-screen. The church bells have been serviced and Theo Wells has started work on various fabric repairsboth inside and outside the church. Congratulations to Cheryl, David, Amy, Neville and Pat Smith whose efforts in the Ride & Stride event on Saturday 12th September raised approximately £1,000.00 in sponsorship, much of which will also attract Gift Aid. Thanks as well to the volunteers who manned the church to receive visitors at Barsham. The proceeds go to the Suffolk Historic Churches Trust, with half automatically allocated to Holy Trinity Barsham.The 2027 Church Calendar produced by ChurchWarden Publications Ltd features a photo of Holy Trinity Barsham for the month of June. Cheryl will put a sample on display and orders can be made through her. The August sales table, organised by Chris and including her gift tags, raised an impressive £165.00. The October sales table will be on Sunday 25th.The Beccles Foodbank was grateful to receive 150 items from the Barsham congregation in August. FORWARD PLANNINGHarvest Festival will take place on Sunday 27th September with Choral Evensong at 5.30pm and Harvest Supper in the village hall at 7pm. Our preacher is to be Canon Fr John Thackray, who is Vicar of St Mary at the Elms, Ipswich and Representative of the Bishop of Richborough. Christmas Carol Service: 6.30pm, Monday 21st December with The Right Reverend Luke Irvine-Capel, Bishop of Richborough.SNIPPETS – Flowers in Church We are fortunate indeed at Barsham to enjoy such accomplished and beautiful flower arrangements for most of the year, and we appreciate the skill and dedication of our team of flower arrangers. But displaying decorative cut flowers in church is a relatively modern custom, only becoming acceptable in Anglican churches from the mid-19thcentury.Flowers and greenery were used in the medieval church, though less for decoration and more usually for liturgical purposes, for instance on feast days, saints’ days and major festivals like Palm Sunday and Corpus Christi. Symbolic use of flowers and floral imagery was common too: five-petalled red flowers representing the five wounds of Christ, the iris representing the Trinity, the white lily and the rose representing the purity of the Virgin Mary, or a red rose representing Christ’s blood and martyrdom, and so on. After the mid-16th century Reformation, the use of flowers and greenery in church was largely lost alongside other traditional visual forms of devotion such as lights (candles) and images. Flowers were not explicitly banned, but they were regarded by the reformers as unnecessary and frivolous, too much associated with Roman Catholicism and, at worse, a sensual snare – ‘a sinful fascination’. It was only with the 19th century Anglo-Catholic Revival that flowers in church as we know them today started to become acceptable. The ‘ritualists’ of the Oxford Movement campaigned to re-introduce some pre-Reformation practices, pushing back on what they regarded as some of the greater excesses of hardline Protestantism, and this included the restoration of floral decoration. In similar vein, Anglo-Catholic church architects and decorative designers of the Cambridge Camden Society and the Ecclesiological Society were promoting a return to medieval forms in their work, including floral motifs. Meanwhile, a growing enthusiasm and fashion for cut flowers in the homes of the burgeoning middle classes drove a massive expansion of the commercial hothouse industry, making cut flowers widely available for the first time. However, the return of flowers to Anglican churches did not come without a struggle. The practice of decorating churches with cut flowers was fiercely resisted by the conservative Evangelical wing of the Anglican Church, which continued to regard it as morally dubious and too close to medieval Roman Catholicism. It was only after a series of court battles in the second half of the 19th century that the legality of floral decoration in church was accepted, albeit only on certain conditions, including a prohibition on placing them on the altar, and forbidding their use in any liturgical ritual.October DiarySunday 4th October – Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP), Barsham. Revd Jonathan Olanczuk SSC.Sunday 11th October – Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Canon John Fellows.Sunday 18th October – Twentieth Sunday after Trinity. 11.15am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Desmond Banister SSC.Sunday 25th October – Twenty-first Sunday after Trinity. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Graham Naylor. Church correspondent: Robert Bacon 07867 306016, robert.bacon@yahoo.co.uk
NEWSChurchyard haymaking starts on Monday 17th August with the Community Payback team undertaking the heavy labour. Help with raking the cut grass will be much appreciated: please bring a rake and gloves if you can. Chris Bardsley will kindly provide a lovely ploughman’s lunch. A small team met on Thursday 13th August to wrap shoeboxes for this winter’s Lovebox campaign. The next wrapping session will be on Monday 14thSeptember at 2pm. All help is much appreciated: please let Cheryl know if you are able to help. Several members of the Barsham Flower Team will join those from Bungay and Mettingham to put together the floral arrangements for the Mettingham Flower Festival at All Saints Church on the Bank Holiday weekend of 29th-31st August, from 10am to 4pm. Refreshments and cakes will be available. Do support this colourful event!Holy Trinity Barsham’s page on the website A Church Near You attracted 620 views in the first week of August, 2,846 over the previous month, and 37,028 in the preceding year. Quite some interest!The swifts appear to have set off on their August migration to sub-Saran Africa. They were frequently present around the tower this summer but did not nest. Perhaps they will next year! Collections in July amounted to £834.00 with a further £164.09 donated through the card reader. In addition, the online sales of some donated items raised a further £192.00. The July sales table organised by Jenny raised £80.00. The next sales table will be on Sunday 23rd August.July’s Foodbank donations amounted to 135 items. We have been asked for now to prioritise juices and tinned meat in our donations. FORWARD PLANNINGRide & Stride, Saturday 12th September, 9am-5pm. Sponsorship forms and a sign-up sheet for helpers are at the back of the church. Please do sponsor participants as half the proceeds come directly to Barsham. Harvest Festival, Sunday 27th September – Choral Evensong at 5.30pm will be followed by Harvest Supper in the village hall at 7pm. Tickets for supper cost £12.50 and are available from Bridget.SNIPPETS – The Marian ‘VV’ and the Barsham screenIn common with many English medieval churches, Barsham has a collection of so-called ‘ritual protection marks’, thinly scratched into the central column of the 14thcentury arcade between nave and chapel. They include patterns of dots, merels (grid patterns), butterflies, crosses and the ‘VV’ symbol. The precise meaning of these enigmatic symbols is not always clear but they are thought by scholars of graffiti to have been a defence against the malign supernatural forces that medieval man believed in and feared – fears amplified by the images of devils, demons and strange creatures that featured in some church decorative art to serve as a warning against sin. Their presence in church probably suggests that they worked in parallel with conventional Christian belief, rather than replacing it. The VV symbol is by far the most common item of medieval church graffiti, sometimes with the arms of the Vs crossed (as at Barsham) and sometimes upside down, making an M. The traditional interpretation links it with the popular medieval cult of the Virgin Mary, with the VV as a shorthand for Virgo Virginum (Virgin of Virgins) and when inverted as an M for Maria. It might be seen as an expression of piety or as an appeal to the Virgin for favour or protection. It is the only protection mark known to appear in orthodox, ‘official’ church decoration, for instance in decorative flintwork, floor tiles, and memorial brasses. Although the mid-16th century Protestant Reformation imposed legislation intended to change religious observance and belief, including the suppression of the cult of the Virgin Mary, in practice it must have taken a generation or two to make a serious impact on popular culture, habit and belief. In his book Medieval Graffiti – The Lost Voices of England’s Churches, Matthew Champion writes that the VV symbol, almost alone amongst protection marks, managed to survive the Protestant Reformation. This raises an intriguing question about the significance of the VV pattern in the fretwork of Barsham’s 17th century chancel screen (front cover photo). Most obviously, it seems to have been intended to echo the pattern of the tracery of the East window, which probably predates the screen by at least a century. But is that all? What if the designer of the fretwork consciously had the dual intent of matching the window tracery AND referencing the cult of the Virgin via the Marian VV? The screen is thought to have been erected by Joseph Fleming, Rector of Barsham during the early years of William Laud’s Archbishopric in the 1630s. To combat the growing influence of Puritanism, Laud tried to re-establish some traditional pre-Reformation values and practices, including a high reverence for the sanctity of the Virgin Mary. He preserved her feast days, supported the erection of a statue of the Virgin and Child at St Mary’s church, Oxford, and defended theologians whose writings revered the Virgin. Laud also sought to re-sanctify the moribund east end of churches. Protestant reforms during the second half of the 16th century had rendered chancels all but redundant: screens had been taken down and altars were removed to be replaced by communion tables in the nave. The focus of the service had shifted from the ritual conducted by the priest beyond the chancel screen to the nave and the pulpit for the teaching of the Word. Fleming was evidently a Laudian rather than a Puritan rector for he set about re-sanctifying the east end of the church, repairing the chancel roof, protecting the communion table with rails (a fragment of which sits today by the pulpit steps), and almost certainly returning the communion table to the chancel behind the newly erected screen.Was the fretwork in Fleming’s screen a discreet but deliberate reference to the Virgin Mary? I don’t think the proposition is too fanciful: but deliberate or not, the VV motif in Fleming’s new screen quite likely stirred a collective memory of former pieties and would have been a comfort to those who still clung privately to the old reverence of the Virgin.SEPTEMBER DIARYSunday 6th September – Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP), Barsham. Revd Jonathan Olanczuk SSC.Sunday 13th September – Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Canon John Fellows.Sunday 20th September – Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity. 11.15am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Desmond Banister SSC.Sunday 27th September – Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP) & 5.30pm Choral Evensong. Revd Graham Naylor. Church correspondent: Robert Bacon 07867 306016, robert.bacon@yahoo.co.uk
NEWSA rich feast and excellent company in beautiful surroundings and mercifully mild temperatures made for a perfect annual Summer Lunch in the grounds of St Bartholomew’s Shipmeadow on Wednesday 1st July. We are grateful to Nick and Jenny Caddick for hosting the event and for kindly showing guests the restored panels of the east window. Huge thanks to the chefs who prepared such delicious dishes (not all of whom are in the front cover photo), and whose dedication is so often evident in the splendid fare we enjoy at church events. Thanks too to Sarah Jane for organising a very successful raffle, which raised £269.00. The event raised £1,121.00 for the Fabric Fund, with the re-thatching of the nave roof the priority. On Wednesday 24th June the Community Payback team tidied the car parking area, weeded and trimmed the path from lychgate to porch, mowed paths through the churchyard and cleared the area around the tin shed. It was one of the hottest days of the year and the team worked tirelessly through the heat without fuss or complaint and finished the day in good spirits having done a magnificent job. The Community Payback team is booked again for the churchyard haymaking from Monday 17th August. They will undertake the heavy labour, but all helpers are welcome to support the team, for instance by raking the cut grass. If you can, please bring your own rake (and gloves). As ever, Chris Bardsley will kindly provide a lovely ploughman’s lunch. Cheryl invites anyone who can help wrap shoeboxes for this winter’s Lovebox campaign to come to a shoebox wrapping session at the church on Thursday 13th August at 2pm. The session is always a good ‘social’. The shoeboxes are to be blessed at Sunday service on 25th October. The PCC met for routine business on Thursday 9th July.The sales table organised by Jenny raised £100.00.Amy reports that the Foodbank was grateful to receive 138 items in June. FORWARD PLANNINGSuffolk Historic Churches Trust Ride & Stride, Saturday 12th September,9am-5pm. This event raises funds for the repair and restoration of churches and chapels. Participants are sponsored to walk, ride or drive around participating churches in the area. Half the money raised comes to Holy Trinity Barsham and the other half to a central fund, from which grants are made. Cheryl is the Barsham organiser and Beccles area coordinator, and participants may collect sponsorship forms from her in August. There will be a sign-up sheet in the church for those willing to volunteer to staff the church on a rota basis on the day to register participants as they check in. Harvest Festival, Sunday 27th September – Choral Evensong at 5.30pm will be followed as usual by Harvest Supper in the village hall at 7pm. Tickets, costing£12.50, will be on sale from Bridget in due course. SNIPPETS – Barsham’s thatched nave in contextThe architect’s Quinquennial Inspection Report identified some significant deterioration of the nave thatch, especially in the ridge and south side, where there are areas of slippage and a build-up of moss and lichen. With an estimated five to seven years of life left in the thatch, the PCC is arranging for several master thatchers to offer their opinion on the nature and cost of the remedial work required and is simultaneously directing fundraising efforts towards the Fabric Fund for this purpose. It is generally accepted that the life expectancy of a thatched roof is anything from 40 to 70 years, with ridge replacements perhaps every two or three decades. Longevity depends on the materials used, environmental conditions, and the skill of the craftsmen. Water reed has better durability than long straw thatch, and at Barsham we are lucky to have Norfolk water reed. Exposure to wind, rain and sun plays a part in the deterioration of thatch, as do pollutants and poor ventilation. It helps that the church is not entirely hemmed in by trees, and that Barsham is in one of the drier parts of Britain and some distance from sources of urban airborne pollution. Records show that the nave was completely re-thatched in 1906 and again in 1980, and it may have been rethatched at some point in between. The ridge would have been renewed more frequently, most recently in 2011. Today, most of the UK’s surviving thatched churches are in East Anglia, with approximately 100 in Norfolk, and Barsham being one of 30 in Suffolk. This distribution is no accident, bearing in mind the ready availability of Norfolk water reed. The nave at Barsham has almost certainly always been thatched since it was built a thousand years ago. Indeed, in Saxon and Norman times most village churches throughout the land would have been thatched. The use of thatch in domestic as well as ecclesiastical architecture was well established by the Norman era: the first written record of thatching dates from c.700 AD and archaeological evidence suggests its common use at least as far back as the Bronze Age. In some parts of the country, where water reed was not readily available, long-straw thatch was used, usually a wheat and rye combination, or sometimes barley and oats. Sedge was another possibility, and other variations included gorse in parts of Southeast England, bracken on the moors of the Southwest, and heather in the Northeast and Scotland. By the late 13th century, the use of thatch was dying out in urban centres, where the risk of fire spreading amongst tightly packed houses was all too real. In 1212 London banned the use of thatch and other cities followed. In the countryside, thatch survived as the principal roofing material until the industrial revolution, when the canals and the railways enabled cheaper and easier transportation of the more durable slate and tile. Here at Barsham in 2026, we await with interest the recommendations of the master thatchers, and in due course it will be fascinating to watch the craftsmen at work.AUGUST DIARYSunday 2nd August – Ninth Sunday after Trinity. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP), Barsham. Revd Jonathan Olanczuk SSC.Sunday 9th August – Tenth Sunday after Trinity. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Canon John Fellows.Sunday 16th August – Eleventh Sunday after Trinity. 11.15am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Desmond Banister SSC.Sunday 23rd August – Twelfth Sunday after Trinity. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Graham Naylor. Sunday 30th August – Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Graham Naylor. Church correspondent: Robert Bacon 07867 306016, robert.bacon@yahoo.co.uk
