This attractive, modestly priced and informative handbook is a worthy successor to such antiquarian classics as Roe’s Ancient Coffers and Cupboards. It is endowed with a forensically focused text, honed, no doubt, through the author’s long experience as a Romano-British archaeologist. Whether tourist, ecclesiologist or churchwarden, the user of this book will benefit from the author’s insightful and sensitive perspective on his native county, one of the largest in England, and endowed with a collection of some 500 medieval churches, many renowned for the quality of their structural woodwork and fittings.
The nearest approach to this self-imposed in-depth single-county focus is Lewer and Wall Reference Lewer and Wall1913, which, however, contains a seventy-three-page introduction on English chests. The only other county monograph is Morgan Reference Morgan1947. Such monographs are likely to remain a rarity, on account of the labour involved in inspecting every item in a county’s collection. In this instance, as the author would readily admit, the logistics of visiting more than 300 buildings in his spare time were impracticable for a full-time Historic Buildings inspector. Enterprisingly, Sherlock made selective, but invaluable, use of the descriptive list of chests in 293 Suffolk churches, compiled in the late 1920s by Suffolk antiquary Claude Morley, when he was the excursions secretary of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History.
The book consists of a thirty-eight-page exposition of the chest, its material, construction and function, from the late twelfth to the early nineteenth century, illustrating its arguments with examples from Suffolk, as well as a comprehensive sixty-four-page gazetteer. Crucially, the text is liberally illustrated, almost entirely in colour.
Treading in the steps of Jane Geddes, the author displays an unmistakably archaeological approach to the subject. This brings the phenomenon down to earth, where it belongs, as is well demonstrated by this census of objects, only a few of which would be likely ever to darken the doors of a Royal Academy exhibition. In the case of the pre-Reformation examples, which are easily in the majority, the principal preoccupation in their manufacture was security. They are largely undecorated functional objects, the bank deposit boxes of their day. The efficacy of how thief-proof they were – by virtue of their careful manufacture, complex locking systems and often protective armour plating – completely overrides any modern notions of aesthetics. Even so, an ancient church chest inheres a certain unavoidable and self-sufficient aura, indissolubly bound up with its unglamorous but essential role at the historical centre of the life of an English parish community. The author draws out this appeal very successfully, to the extent that the book, which fills a lacuna in modern woodwork studies, looks set to become a minor classic of the genre.
Where possible, effective use is made of manuscript sources, such as the surviving records of former religious houses, and the now much-quoted sixteenth-century list of church goods at Long Melford Church, as well as churchwardens’ accounts and secular wills and inventories. There is a useful section on the surviving Baltic pine chests in English churches, one-third of which are located in Suffolk. Mostly with coved poplar lids, they were shipped to ports such as Boston, King’s Lynn and Ipswich on the back of the Hanseatic sea-borne trade, mostly from the end of the fourteenth century (the author benefited considerably from the recent work of Gavin Simpson in this connection, published in the conference transactions of the British Archaeological Association’s 2005 King’s Lynn conference).
The introductory essay is meticulous in its approach, and has certainly overtaken its antiquarian predecessors as a key point of reference. For ironwork – including blacksmithing, hinges, locks, lock plates and keys, lids, money slots, tills and secret compartments – no detail is shirked. There is also a typological survey of the major joinery forms encountered.
Prior to 1700, Suffolk has just three dated chests. The author regrets that, for dating purposes, the ‘subjective’ art-historical method still inevitably prevails. Although the dating by dendrochronology has recently been attempted on three Suffolk chests (at Icklingham, Earl Stonham and Chevington), regrettably none of them produced satisfactory results, and all three tested the limits of the technique.
Apart from the Gdansk chests, the so-called ‘Flanders’ chests are frequently mentioned in English wills and inventories. Whether they were imported or made here by denizened Flemish craftsmen is unknown. The late fourteenth-century clamp-chests – with intricate tracery arcading and geometrical decoration on the fronts, and mythical beasts on the stiles, at Alnwick, Brancepeth, Derby (St Peter’s), Kirkleatham and Wath (both in Yorkshire), Chevington, Suffolk, and elsewhere – have traditionally been thought to be Flemish. However, the author suggests that, although on the face of it a North Country workshop seems likely given the location of most of them, on stylistic grounds they seem closest to English East Anglian art.
We are probably on surer ground with the five ‘tilting’ chests in England, one of which is at Southwold. Here, and at York Minster, is depicted a mounted knight slaying a dragon. Traditionally, they have been considered English. However, in 1888, Arthur Marshall suggested that the Southwold chest was French, which is probably nearer the mark. Another Suffolk chest, at Burgate, once bore a painted scene of a knight on horseback. Were these chests connected with the creation in 1390 of the Brotherhood of St George based at Rougemont in Burgundy? Such questions tend to go unanswered in a subject area that often remains stubbornly resistant to enlightened interpretation.
Although Suffolk’s sixteenth- and seventeenth-century chests display less concern with security and constructional ingenuity, an increasing and varied interest in decoration is noticeable throughout England. Of particular note are the long chest at St Mary, Bury St Edmund’s, probably late sixteenth century and possibly Flemish, with panels displaying an unusual treatment of linenfold; three very striking low-relief foliate panels on the Elizabethan chest at St Margaret’s, Ipswich; a very late display of chip-carved roundels on the early Stuart chest at Kettlebaston; and at Rickinghall Superior, a somewhat crudely carved early Tudor chest, with medallioned bust in the centre. Similar medallioned busts can be seen on a better quality chest at Pykenham’s Gatehouse, Ipswich, whose provenance, now lost, is most probably Suffolk, given its ‘nicked corners’, a frequent and possibly unique, feature of Suffolk chests first noticed by Morley.
Perhaps the most unusual of Suffolk’s post-medieval chests is an early Stuart example at Great Ashfield. The three front panels are carved with a shepherd wearing a smock and ‘rimed’ hat, carrying his crook, the head and shoulders of his wife in a Renaissance-type headdress, and in the centre a horned ram’s head portrayed in an unequivocally Italianate early Baroque style. On the lid is a lizard carved in high relief against a stippled ground, probably a unique feature on an English chest. This church also has a splendid, testered, late Elizabethan-type pulpit on short bulbous legs, late Elizabethan altar rails, and two more chests, which make it well worth a visit.
It is not possible to do justice to the enormous collection of material discussed in this informative book, which can only be properly absorbed with use over time. We owe a debt to the author for his patience and persistence in pursuing his goal.
