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Friendless Churches

28 Jan, 9 tweets, 3 min read

Saltfleetby church was built on a salt marsh. The landscape is melancholic. Long straight roads, drainage ditches, desultory farmsteads, big medieval churches. Flat land with empty horizons.
It all points to a long-lost prosperity... The clue is in the name: Saltfleetby.
#thread

Until the 1600s this area was an international port trading with Scandinavia and Northern Europe. The name comes from salt-making which began in the Bronze Age and declined in the Middle Ages.

2/

There’s a Norwegian story about why the sea is salty. It starts at Christmas time. A poor man worries about feeding his family. He asks his rich brother for help. The brother will only help if he ventures into the underworld. The poor man agrees... and takes a joint of meat.

3/

The man sets out for the underworld… On the way he meets a stranger who tells him that devils in the underworld will offer to buy his meat for great sums of money… The stranger warns that he must *only* sell the meat for a mill that hangs on a wall in the underworld.

4/

Sure enough, when the man gets to the underworld, he is offered money for his meat. But instead he exchanges it for the mill. The man trudges home to his family. He sets the mill on the table and turns the handle. To his astonishment, it grinds out a feast for his family!

5/

The next day, the man’s brother pops in to see how the trip into the underworld went… The man shows his brother the magic mill. In his jealousy, the brother cuts the man’s throat and makes off with the mill.

6/

The man takes the mill into the town… where he meets some sailors that are trying to buy salt to preserve meat. The man tells this this mill will grind out all the salt they need. So, the mill is exchanged for fish.

7/

The sailors set off. One day as they are sailing over the North Sea and grinding salt, a terrible storm breaks.

The ship is wrecked.

The mill tumbles out and sinks to the bottom of the ocean floor, where it continues to grind out salt… making the sea salty.

#FolkloreThursday

Final tweet: last month we started major repairs on the tower. Lots of stone repairs are needed, as well as a new roof. We’ll share updates over the next few months.

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More from @friendschurches

Friendless Churches

@friendschurches

26 Jan

We have a medieval stained glass conundrum.

We think this fragment at St Mary's, Hardmead, Buckinghamshire depicts a dog (but we're not sure) playing a pipe (or maybe not).

#thread

Could it be a canine St Christopher? In Eastern Orthodox tradition, St Christopher has at times been depicted as a cynocephalus - a race of dog-headed beings once believed to have walked the earth, along with other strange forms of human such as blemmyae, donestre, and skiapodes.

This idea did permeate to the West; German bishop and poet Walter of Speyer portrayed St. Christopher as a cynocephalic giant from Canaan, who ate human flesh and barked. Only after he was baptised did he receive a human head.

Read 8 tweets

Friendless Churches

@friendschurches

25 Jan

@hisdoryan

Today's #thread is brought to you by wonderful Welsh history blogger @hisdoryan!

Did you know that the 25th of January is St Dwynwen’s Day (Dydd Santes Dwynwen) here in Wales?

St Dwynwen is the Welsh patron saint of lovers. ❤️ ...

In the famous story, Dwynwen fell in love with Maelon Dafodrill but she was already betrothed by her father to another prince.

Dwynwen fled to the forest, where she prayed that God would make her forget her love. She fell asleep, and was visited by an angel with a potion that erased all memory of Maelon and turned him into a block of ice.

Read 12 tweets

Friendless Churches

@friendschurches

22 Jan

There’s such a romance to brick: they're moulded to fit a human hand, light enough to be carried, and have a soft warmth of colour and texture.

The Romans brought bricks to England, but when they left, they seemed to take brick-making with them.

#thread

Really, it wasn’t until the 15th century that brick came back into widespread use.

2/

Traditional bricks were made simply from clay or a clay and sand mix.

For a good brick, you need two types of clay: a plastic clay and a sand-rich, non-plastic clay to off-set the tendency of the former to shrink and warp during firing.

3/

Read 11 tweets

Friendless Churches

@friendschurches

21 Jan

Suspended in space.
A glimpse of work in progress of our new stained-glass windows at St Peter’s, Wickham Bishops, Essex. Artist, Ben Finn, is crafting four new windows to replace the polycarbonate sheeting that was put in as temporary glazing when we rescued the church.
#thread

You see, in 1850, St Peter’s, found itself on the wrong side of the tracks.
Literally.

2/

With the arrival of the railway, the village migrated eastward and a new church was built there.

The old church fell into disuse and neglect, and victim to vandalism. Out of sight, the church spiralled into decay. The threat of demolition loomed. It seemed like a lost cause.

3/

Read 8 tweets

Friendless Churches

@friendschurches

16 Jan

In the Vale of Aylesbury, there’s a low-lying region of heavy clays and soft sands. Along this belt, the earth was mixed with water and straw to make wychert. The unbaked earth was used to build, in essence mud buildings.. including the Strict & Particular chapel of 1792.
#thread

Wychert (or wichert, or witchert) means white earth – referring to the high chalk content - and is Buckinghamshire’s answer to the cob or earth-wall buildings typically found in Devon and Dorset.

2/

Wychert walls begin with a base of rubble, knowns as grumplings. From this, the wychert mix is laid layers (called berries*) of about 18”, and allowed to dry and harden before the next layer is added.
Construction is slow.

*I’m not making this up.

3/

Read 6 tweets

Friendless Churches

@friendschurches

15 Jan

Uno by name, uno by nature.

St Beuno is one of the most important saints in North Wales. And though he did lead a solitary life, his name is actually Old Welsh Bou[g]nou, which loosely means ‘knowing cattle’. To this day, Beuno is the patron saint of sick cattle.

#thread

From this, you might imagine Beuno came from an agricultural background… But no! He was the grandson of Powys prince born in the 7th century. However, Beuno chose the monastic life over the monarchic and packed off to Bangor, where he became an abbot.

2/7

Beuno was an active missionary. Eleven churches are dedicated to him, including one in Culbone, Somerset… which is England’s smallest church and can only hold about 16 people. It’s believed the church is built on the site of Beuno’s hermit cell.

📸: Richard Mascall

3/7

Read 7 tweets

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