NEWS
Churchyard 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 PLANNING
Ride & 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 screen
In 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 DIARY
Sunday 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, [email protected]