Sacred mysteries: Norfolk's finest church magnified

Inside the church that has been called the finest in its county.

What looks like an angel holding a coat of arms is in fact a diagram of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity

Take binoculars if you’re going to Salle. Munro Cautley, who studied every detail of 500 medieval churches in Norfolk, called St Peter and St Paul, Salle, the finest in the county, which is saying something. Its 126ft tower can be seen over the fields, for hardly anyone lives nearby. But it is not for the exterior that the binoculars are needed.

Inside, is an impression of space, with light from large windows in the aisles and the clerestory above high arches. There can never have been more than 400-500 people in the parish. “So this huge building was never full, and was never intended to be full: its space was intended to be the setting for elaborate liturgy and processions involving the whole parish, but also for the smaller-scale worship in screened off family chantry-chapels,” writes Eamon Duffy in his new Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition (Bloomsbury, £20).

Last week, writing about Whitsun customs, I mentioned the young people’s clubs in Salle that in the Middle Ages raised money for the parish upkeep. But the church itself deserves attention. This is where the binoculars come in.

We now quite like the white light coming through uncoloured perpendicular windows. But WLE Parsons in his lovingly compiled Salle (1937) calls the stained glass that once filled the chancel windows its “great original glory”. We must imagine “jewelled glass, which increased rather than diminished the brilliance of the light”.

One remaining fragment in the East window shows an angel holding what looks like a coat of arms. It is, if you focus your glasses, a diagram of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. In the middle is the word “God”, Deus. In three corners are the Latin words for Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In a border linking Father and Son are engraved the words non est, “is not”, and the same between Son and Holy Spirit, and between Holy Spirit and Father. But each person is linked to the central Deus by the word est:the Son is God and so on.

Angels swarm, too, on the roof beams of the chancel – 159 of them, someone counted, which survived the saws and hammers of the iconoclasts, out of an original tally of 276. And along the ridge inside the chancel roof are nine carved wooden bosses of scenes from the life of Christ. They are not strictly bosses, the pedants insist, not being keystones, but carvings attached to the roof. Photos in Parsons’s book show them whitewashed, but now they are scrubbed to the wood-grain. Originally, I think, they would have been carefully coloured.

Traces of colour remain on the medieval wooden crane sticking out from the balcony of the tower to raise the wonderfully tall canopy over the font. The font itself features eight angels – one worshipping at a scene of the Crucifixion, the rest holding symbols for the seven sacraments depicted in panels above them. Someone has knocked the font about a bit, but an inscription survives on the step, asking prayers for Thomas Luce and his wife and their son Robert, chaplain.

Robert Luce died in 1456, while the church was being ornamented. He was chaplain to the guild of the Assumption, a lay association whose devotions took place in a chapel in the North transept where he is buried. Through such guilds, as many as six clergy were attached to the church at once, saying Mass, giving spiritual counsel and becoming part of life in this small parish. One was prosecuted for poaching a rabbit. Several left benefactions of books, vestments and doles for the poor.

Salle also benefited much from gifts from local gentry – the Briggses, Brewses, even the Boleyns, one of whom, Simon Boleyn, a chaplain too, is buried in the nave.

Eamon Duffy does for Salle in a chapter what he did for the parish of Morebath in a book: brings it to life. St Peter and St Paul can never again be thought of as an empty space.