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
NEWSTickets are now on sale for the Summer Lunch, which is to be held on Wednesday 1st July from 12.30pm at St Bartholomew’s Shipmeadow. Tickets cost £12.50 and can be purchased in advance from Bridget. All welcome and do bring guests. Cheryl’s Church Walking Group meets again on Sunday 28th June at 2pm at Barsham Church for a ramble of about 3.5 miles through Barsham and Shipmeadow. Tea will be served at the church afterwards. All welcome.The magnificent organ recital given by Dr David Flood on Saturday 30th May attracted a large and appreciative audience, filling both the nave and chapel, and spilling over into the choir stalls. David’s choice of music explored a range of styles and moods and included well-known as well as less familiar pieces. The beautiful and delicate Entry of Polymnie by Rameau was a favourite for many and the recital concluded with Widor’s epic and much-loved Toccata in F. A fabulous Barsham tea rounded off a memorable afternoon. Donations raised a net sum of £710.00, designated for the rethatching of the nave roof. Our grateful thanks to David Flood and to those who worked so hard to produce the tea.On Trinity Sunday, 31st May, we were delighted to welcome The Ven Rich Henderson, Archdeacon of Suffolk, to preach at our Patronal Evensong service. For the anthem the choir sang beautifully the hymn Affirm Anew the Threefold Name, sung in four parts to the tune Kingsfold, a traditional English country tune adapted by Ralph Vaughan Williams. Fizz and delicious canapés followed. Thanks to all who made this such a splendid occasion. As our churchwardens, Bridget and Cheryl attended the annual Archdeacon’s Visitation Service for the Waveney and Blyth Deanery at St Michael’s Beccles on Monday 8th June.Adrian Ramsey MP has been invited to attend the next Deanery Synod on 1st July to hear the PCC’s concerns about the suspension of the Listed Places of Worship Scheme, which since 2004 has provided grants towards the cost of VAT paid on church repairs.Swifts have been seen flying around the tower, responding to the electronic swift calls, but as yet there is no sign of nesting. The sales table organised by Sarah Jane raised £95.00. The Gift Aid rebate on donations and collections, received from HMRC in May, amounted to £5,235.43. Amy reports that 212 items were donated to the Foodbank in May. FORWARD PLANNINGHaymaking will take place in the week of Monday 17th August. The work will be undertaken largely by a Community Payback team, but we are encouraged to support the team and all helpers are welcome. As ever, Chris Bardsley will kindly provide a lovely ploughman’s lunch. SNIPPETS – The Summer Lunch: a blast from the past.The annual Barsham with Shipmeadow Summer Lunch is perhaps a faint echo of a tradition that was almost entirely lost during the Protestant Reformation of the 16thand 17th centuries. So-called ‘church ales’ were a church-led community celebration involving eating, drinking and entertainments, usually in the churchyard. They were a means of raising funds for keeping the church in good repair as well as alms for the poor. Church ales were a fixture in the calendar of most parishes in medieval England, often linked to the Church calendar, marking a church’s patronal festival or, quite commonly, at Whitsun. In many cases the churchwardens were responsible for brewing the ale and providing a plentiful and varied feast, though members of the community might also contribute. The ale that flowed liberally and the high spirits that followed no doubt took the sting out of the inflated prices that served to maximise income from the event. Entertainments might typically include music and singing, Morris dancing, sports, mystery plays dramatizing stories from the Bible, and costumed pageants. In a tradition known as ‘king play’ a low-ranking member of the community presided over the events of the day as mock monarch. Church ales were noted for their over-exuberance and alcohol-fuelled excesses. In the increasingly regulated world of Elizabethan England the secular authorities, who appreciated the role of church ales in promoting social cohesion, were nonetheless concerned about drunkenness and its potential for disorder, violence and criminality. The religious authorities, and especially those of Puritan persuasion, were concerned that church ales promoted sinful behaviour: idleness, gluttony, lasciviousness, and that they were a ‘popish’ tradition, rooted in the pre-Reformation Catholic calendar.So it was that by the early years of the 17th century church ales were suppressed and went into sharp decline. For half a century from the 1590s a series of Local Orders caused local magistrates and judges to crack down on church ales. In 1604 the Church of England’s Canon 88 banned the drinking of alcohol on church grounds and forbade churchwardens to allow church ales to take place in churches, church houses or churchyards. By the end of the century the age-old tradition of church ales had been lost completely. At our Summer Lunch at the beginning of July we might not have the entertainments typical of medieval church ales, but there will be plentiful feasting, some drinking and an excellent community spirit, and the proceeds of ticket sales will contribute towards the upkeep of the church. I doubt the authorities – religious or secular – will need to worry too much about criminality or sinfulness.July DiarySunday 5th July – Fifth Sunday after Trinity. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP), Barsham. Revd Jonathan Olanczuk SSC.Sunday 12th July – Sixth Sunday after Trinity. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Canon John Fellows.Sunday 19th July – Seventh Sunday after Trinity. 11.15am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Desmond Banister SSC.Sunday 26th July – Eighth Sunday after Trinity. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Graham Naylor. Church correspondent: Robert Bacon 07867 306016, robert.bacon@yahoo.co.uk
