Taunton, Somerset

I'm afraid I found St Mary Magdalene, open, disappointing in no large part because of Jenkins' three star rating which raised my expectations. Granted his assertion that it "has the noblest parish tower in England" is bold but you could not dispute that "the approach from the west...is a happy one". Sadly the interior does not live up to its exterior having been viciously restored, even the otherwise splendid nave roof looks garish and overblown. It is, I grant you, huge and urban in look and feel but is ultimately underwhelming.

ST MARY MAGDALENE. Here more than anywhere one is puzzled by the contrast of scale and care between tower and body of the church. The church is big, and its double aisles are certainly an effort to do the exceptional. Yet much more would have been needed for an interior to stand up to the pomp and circumstance of this 163 ft high tower. It was rebuilt from the ground in 1862 by Ferrey and Sir G. G. Scott. But the job was apparently done extremely carefully and no visual damage has come of it. The design of the tower is brought out to perfection by the Hammet Street approach, an C18 idea of course and quite alien to medieval conceptions. But it is only from a greater distance that one realizes to the full how capricious the contour of the tower is, with the pinnacles standing distant from the wall below the battlements, and with the whole crown projecting so that it would be top-heavy if air were not let through all its parts, the filigree battlements and the filigree top pinnacles. It is like looking through lace, an effect which one often experiences inside churches in looking at Late Gothic chantry chapels, but rarely outside. Yet with all its fancies it is still very much English Perp in that all major lines are kept straight, and nothing of the flowing and swelling occurs which France or Germany or Spain would have indulged in at the time. The time incidentally can be determined by wills offering money for the building of the tower. They date from 1488 to 1514.

Now in detail. The tower has set-back buttresses with attached pinnacles on three tiers and then the already mentioned very big and tall detached pinnacles set diagonally. They reach up to the bell-openings. The W front has a W doorway with big spandrels filled by defaced scenes of the legend of the Magdalen. Above is a transomed five-light window. Doorway and window are flanked by niches for images. Then follows what is unique at Taunton: three tiers of twin three-light windows with transoms and Somerset tracery. So instead of a contrast between bare wall and a blossoming out into open and ornamented forms at the bell-stage, Taunton prefers an even display of its riches. The first tiers of these window stages are of about the same size, the bell-stage is a good deal taller. All the windows are transomed and have Somerset tracery, below all of them run quatrefoil friezes, and all are flanked by shafts and pinnacles. In addition the transoms of the bell-openings and the windows immediately below are enriched by demi-figures of angels. Furthermore, the lower two tiers of windows carry crocketed ogee gables, above the bell-openings the whole wall is blank panelling, and then yet another quatrefoil frieze prepares for the crown. This consists of very large battlements pierced in two-storeyed arcading. At the angles stand uncommonly tall pinnacles. They have four little storeys and then a crocketed spirelet. Once again, all this is pierced. Finally to accompany battlements and pinnacles there are, corbelled out from the corners and the middle of the sides, yet thinner wholly detached shafts with pinnacles.

On the S side there are three niches at the level of the W window niches, on the N side only two, because here the stair-turret rises - but not, as is the Somerset custom, higher than the crown.

The rest of the exterior of the church is easily described. The aisles have five-light W windows, the clerestory four-light windows. The N side is less important than the S side, the former has only a plain parapet and is of red sandstone, the latter is of Ham Hill ashlar and has a parapet with pierced quatrefoils. This is continued over the chancel and the S porch, whereas the nave parapet is pierced in a frieze of trefoils in triangles. The S porch is of two storeys and made the subsidiary centre of display. It carries the date 1508. Three niches above the doorway, the middle one carried on a candelabra-like support. Star-vault inside.

The peculiarity of the interior is its double aisles of six bays, the inner narrower than the outer. They differ in date. The arcade between the two N aisles is indeed the only conspicuous survival of the church before the present one. It dates from the later C13. The piers are circular with four attached shafts, the capitals are of simple moulded form, and the arches double-chamfered. The E arch ending the inner aisle also belongs to this period, and more, perhaps even earlier work survives, less articulate, round the chancel arch. The rest is Perp, and there the surprise is that no more is done to distinguish this large parish church from others in the county. The piers have the standard four-hollows section. In one of them is a large niche filled by a C19 statue. The capitals of the piers are a handsome set of angel-busts. Angel-busts also high up in the capitals of the panelled tower arch. Higher up still a fine fan-vault. On head-stops in the spandrels of the arcade rise thin shafts which carry niches and lead on to the roof (cf. Martock). The roof has the moderate Somerset pitch with cusped tie-beams, king-posts, and angels against the kingposts. Little tracery.

FURNISHINGS. FONT. Of the familiar octagonal Perp type but all the details just a little more elaborate than usual. - REREDOS. By G. E. Street, 1869-72, when the E end was renewed. - STAINED GLASS. S chapel, S window. Some C17 and C18 bits. - PLATE. Two Chalices and Covers and three Flagons 1639; Almsdish 1699; two Salvers 1773. - MONUMENTS. Elizabethan Plate with six panels containing shields, achievement above the central one on the upper tier. It commemorates Thomas More d. 1576. - Robert Graye d. 1635. Life-size standing figure flanked by columns which carry a segmental pediment without base. - Many later minor tablets, e.g. by King of Bath 1808. - In the churchyard, SE of the church, a tomb-chest apparently of the Early Tudor decades. On a quatrefoil frieze, segment-headed cusped arches.

For miles we see the stately tower of St Mary Magdalene, rising 163 feet high, its four stages lit by windows, its buttressed pinnacles at each corner, its summit crowned with pinnacles and turrets on the high panelled parapet. There are statues in niches by the noble west window, and in the spandrels of the doorway are mediaeval carvings of Judgment and Doom. The delicate fan-vaulted ceiling of the tower completes its splendour.

We come in by the south porch, which has on it the date 1508. Two curious animals peer out from the buttresses, and in three elaborate canopied niches over the outer doorway are Crucifixion scenes, with the thieves on their crosses, and Mary and John at the feet of Jesus. The hands and feet and the heart of Our Lord are carved on the inner doorway. The vaulted ceiling of the porch is rich with fllowery bosses, and the porch has a room above it.

The nave is remarkable for having four aisles, and a forest of slender pillars rises with clustered columns to the clerestory, some of  the pillars carved with angels, some from the old 13th century church, the rest from the 15th, and one of them with a delicate niche from which the gentle face of Mary Magdalene looks out, a modern sculpture. More angels look down from the massive roof beams of this mediaeval nave, and figures of the Twelve Apostles fill the niches between the great clerestory windows, where 15th century glass glitters with little scenes and saints. There is more ancient glass in St Andrew’s Chapel, picturing the marriage feast at Cana.

There is on the wall a monument with a gaily painted figure of Robert Gray, his head bare, his beard pointed, his ruff starched, and a red cloak over his black gown. He built the almshouses in East Street, and when he died in 1685 he was so beloved that they gave him this epitaph:

Taunton bare him, London bred him,
Piety trained him, Virtue led him.

Flickr.