All Saints, Hitcham

 This is a big church at the lower end of a very long village, South West of Stowmarket. The village  must be a couple of miles from one end to the other and the church is tucked away at the end.

It's long and wide and light inside and it's obvious that this was once the Priory of Ely's most valuable church in the past with money spent on it and always a high profile cleric in charge.

The font is very impressive with a carved and decorated cover.

The chancel was rebuilt in the 19th century by one of the rectors - Alexander Grant -  who was there for 40 years. It is equally impressive - very wide and high.

The Dado is the only remaining part of the Rood screen and shows angels rather than saints although they've all had their faces rubbed out by the 16th century reformers

Boards just inside the church tell the story of the lands belonging to the church. The rent from these added to the churches wealth.

Often the Coat of Arms of a king are just on a painted board but here in Hitcham even in 1937 money was spent on something carved and gilded and coloured.  

In the wide North Aisle are several boards about the most famous rector here John Stevens Henslow. Funded recently by the Heritage Lottery. 

Below is from the Suffolk Churches Website

Henslow was a remarkable man by anyone's standards. He was Regius Professor of Botany at Cambridge University in the 1830s, and was looked on with enough favour to secure the lucrative Hitcham rectorship. However, rather than send a poorly-paid curate to do his work for him, which would have been the usual early 19th century Trollopeian way, he followed in John Manner's footsteps, and came to Hitcham himself.

It is hard now to imagine what a contrast this remote place must have been with cosmopolitan Cambridge, barely 40 miles away. Henslow wrote in his diary that he had come to "a woefully neglected parish, where the inhabitants, with regard to food and clothing and the means of observing the decencies of life, were far below the average scale of the peasant class in England." It is recorded that his first congregation here in this vast space was insufficient to fill one pew.

Over the course of the next 25 years, he turned his parish upside down, applying his scientific knowledge to the antiquated and conservative farming methods of the local farmers. He increased their prosperity, and that of the poor farm labourers. He started a school, and an institute of adult education. He led outings through the local countryside, and would sometimes take the whole parish on the train to London, including one trip to the great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park. It was said that the entire village emptied on these occasions, travelling by cart and on foot to Stowmarket railway station, and then on to London.

"Everyone is to be in good humour", he told his parishioners, "accommodating to all, and especially attentive to the ladies of the party. If the weather should prove unpropitious, every one is to make the best of it, and not to complain more than he can possibly help."

It is said that, on holiday at Felixstowe, he realised the fertilizing properties of the coprolite nodules in the cliffs there, and interested two local farming brothers so much that they set up a fertiliser processing factory at Ipswich docks. Their name was Fison.

This poster proudly lists the people who rang a peal of the 8 bells here recently. You have to be very fit to stand and ring for nearly 3 hours!

The ropes in the bell tower

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