Nothing To Hurt The Eye

That's according to Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, the great authority on English architecture. "There's nothing in Dedham to hurt the eye", he said and rated it the finest small town in the region. 

And there's a word to cause confusion and controversy. While my American friends mock me for calling the tiniest stream "a river", we are equally baffled as to why they call a couple of houses at a crossroads "a town". Here we are usually pretty sure whether we're in a town or a village, though there are some instances where there is some debate. And Dedham's a good example.

It's not just a matter of size either; you can get very small towns and large sprawling villages. Towns generally have denser housing, much of it built directly on the side of the street. A village usually has just one Anglican church and, in this part of the country, quite often a non-conformist chapel. Towns have more shops than villages and perhaps a market too. Towns attract people from the surrounding villages to their shops, schools and other services. Villages have farms, whereas towns seldom do. But there are exceptions to all these rules. We know what we mean!

But what about Dedham. Well, it certainly used to be a town and still has more shops and pubs than you'd expect in a village of this size. But whereas other towns have got larger during the last couple of centuries, Dedham has stayed much the same size. So you're walking along what feels like a small-town street and suddenly you're in countryside! Their own website calls it a village.

And here's the Old Grammar School where the young John Constable attended. You'd normally only find a grammar school in a town these days (and this one's not a grammar school any longer).

It still has a number of quaint shops and cafés, but they presumably rely on the tourist trade passing through the village. And there are a number of pubs too....

In the last post I told you about some of the artists who've lived along the River Stour, but here's another. British readers might remember Tom Keating. In the 1970s and 80s he became something of a household name as a celebrated forger of artworks. He claimed to have produced more than 2,000 paintings in the styles of 150 different artists. He quite often included "deliberate mistakes" in his forgeries, just to make the art experts and dealers look foolish. He lived in Dedham and he painted the pub sign for his local, The Sun. Unless he's fooled everybody once again!

But you probably knew, I'd be heading for the church. The tower can be seen from miles around, perhaps more easily than from in the village itself, or even from within its own church yard!

You enter through some ancient oak doors. Those figures carved in the niches were presumably defaced by Puritans.

Inside it feels like a "town church", though I'd be hard put to explain exactly what I mean by that phrase too!

And it's here, high on the wall, that we find one of John Constable's three known Biblical paintings. It was commissioned by his uncle, who promised to pay him the large sum of £200 for the work. He wanted to present it to the Archbishop so that...wait for it...he might look more favourably on the uncle's application for licenses for alehouses. Unfortunately the great churchman died before the picture was completed and Constable never got the much-needed cash. The model for the painting may well have been Constable's older brother, Golding.

This memorial is to IOHANNES ROGERSIVS, otherwise known as John Rogers or "Roaring Rogers", a famous puritan preacher (and, presumably, shouter) in his day. As a student he twice sold all his books to finance his "vices" and when he took to religion he did so with the same gusto and recklessness, preaching without notes or prayer books and stirring up huge crowds. On at least one occasion he preached to over a thousand people gathered in the churchyard, bellowing his message from a turret above the porch.

Dedham was quite a hotbed of Puritanism and in 1635 a group of them set sail for New England. The exact history of how they came to found the town of Dedham, Massachusetts, is complicated, but some of these modern benches in the church commemorate the event. 

There's a lot of stained glass to enjoy....

Most of it dates from the early years of the twentieth century and is the work of Kempe's workshop. Charles Eamer Kempe was an interesting character; if he could have overcome a bad stammer he might have been a clergyman, but instead he studied under William Morris to be a designer of stained-glass windows. In this capacity he produced hundreds of works of art for churches across the country, reaching far more people than he ever would have done as a preacher.

After photographing the chancel we'll make our way outside again.

An unusual archway leads directly beneath the tower. Such structures are usually processional arches dating from the time when services included a great deal of moving around inside and outside the church. Here the tower must have been built right up to the edge of the consecrated ground, making an arch necessary to complete a procession around the outside of the building.

And with that we'll make our way out through the church gate and into the charming streets of this village/town. The road opposite will lead us, on this hottest day of the year (and last day of the school holidays) down to the river and a scene of colour, movement and joy.

                                                                                                                       (Photo from Les)

Take care.