NEWSWe are sad to report the death of Penny Banks on the 3rd September. Her Cremation took place on the 25th September and was followed by a Wake in Barsham Church. Penny’s ashes were interred in Barsham Churchyard alongside those of her daughter and parents.The Quinquennial Inspection of the church fabric was carried out on the 23rdSeptember by architect Ruth Blackman. We await her report. More than 50 people witnessed the moving spectacle of the rood illuminated in a shaft of light from the setting sun at the Autumn Equinox.Harvest Festival at Barsham on Sunday 28th September was celebrated in fine style. Glorious flower arrangements and striking displays of produce created a colourful backdrop for the day’s services. The choir graced Choral Evensong with the anthem With Wonder Lord we See your Works. At Harvest Supper in the village hall 46 guests enjoyed a sumptuous feast at charmingly decorated tables. It was a most congenial evening, and its success was down to the team who worked so hard to plan, prepare and serve the food and drinks, to decorate the tables, and to clear up afterwards. All thanks to them.Amongst our guests at supper, we were pleased to welcome Roz Armstrong, who is attached to the benefice and Lightwave as Ordinand in Training.Representatives of the PCCs of Bungay and Mettingham, Barsham with Shipmeadow and the Lightwave Core Team met for a Benefice Awayday on Saturday 11th October at All Hallows Ditchingham. To express our appreciation and thanks for their dedication and service, the PCC entertained Barsham’s volunteer clergy at the annual ‘Clergy Lunch’ at White House Barn, Barsham on the 15th October. After filling Love Boxes, please keep them at home until a date is given for bringing them to church. The Blessing of the Love Boxes will be on Sunday 26th October. A team of six wrapped a second batch of Love Boxes on the 2nd October and the next wrapping session will be at 2.30pm on Thursday 26th October: all help much appreciated. Cheryl thanks the riders, striders and welcomers who contributed to the £1,475.00 raised at this year’s Ride and Stride event. This was a record result (£1000.00 in 2024; £1,016.00 in 2023; and £869.00 in 2022) following a fantastic effort by all at Barsham Church, sponsors and participants. Half of this sum comes to Barsham and we can also access SHCT grants in the future. Congratulations to Neville Smith on his part in a BBC Radio Suffolk report, broadcast on the 19th September, about the Suffolk Wildlife Trust’s initiative to promote habitats across the county through Private Nature Reserves. A team from Community Payback has tidied the parking area and church drive and installed new disabled parking signs.The Revd Pam Bayliss sends thanks for the 181 items donated to the Beccles Food Bank in September, including 90 items at Harvest Festival. FORWARD PLANNINGRemembrance Sunday, 9th November – Please arrive for 10.45am to allow time for the Reading of Names and the two-minutes silence at 11am.Service of Remembrance at Barsham Village Hall, Tuesday 11thNovember, Revd Graham Naylor – The hall will be open from 10.15 for a 10.45am start. Parking on the village hall paddock. Refreshments available afterwards with optional donation. Everyone welcome.Christmas Carol Service, Thursday 18th December at 6.30pm – Followed by refreshments including mince pies and mulled wine. SNIPPETS – The Pelican in her PietyIf, like me, you have gazed up at the chancel arch and admired the winged ‘angel’ crowning the arch, look again more closely! I realised recently that this is not an angel at all, but a pelican. It sits on its nest surrounded by its young, plucking at its own breast to feed them (cover photo). This motif is known as the ‘Pelican in Her Piety’ and is well established in Christian art, appearing in stained glass, roof bosses, altar frontals, lecterns, carvings and so on. The motif appears on the 16th century processional cross carried by Malcolm at the start of our services, and the truncated body of a bird on the end of the medieval pew at the front of the nave is possibly the remains of a pelican, perhaps desecrated at the Reformation. The image of the mother pelican feeding her young in an act of self-sacrifice has its roots in pre-Christian Roman legend and was taken up in early Christianity as an obvious analogy with Christ’s sacrifice. The Pelican in Her Piety had become a powerful image of Christ’s Passion by at least the 3rd century – St Augustine of Hippo referred to it in the late 4th century – and from the 12th century it was a staple feature of liturgical tradition. In the mid-13th century St Thomas Aquinas calls Christ ‘pie pelicane, Jesu Domine’ (the pious pelican, Lord Jesus), and in the early 14th century Dante described Christ as ‘our Pelican who shed His blood in order to give eternal life to the children of men’. When Richard Foxe, Bishop of Winchester, founded Corpus Christi College, Oxford in 1517, he included the pelican in its coat of arms. A century later, the King James Bible translated a prophesy of Jesus in Psalm 102 as ‘I am like a pelican in the wilderness’.The act of the mother pelican saving her young by feeding them with her own blood became a metaphor for Christ’s body and blood in the Eucharist, and in the Anglo-Catholic Revival of the 19th century the image was adopted as a reminder of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Thus, at Barsham the Revd RAJ Suckling had the image of the Pelican in Her Piety incorporated in the design of the plaster ceiling of the chancel, where it was symbolically located on the two plaster panels immediately above the altar.NOVEMBER DIARYSunday 2nd November – All Saints. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Jonathan Olanczuk.Sunday 9th November – Third Sunday before Advent. Remembrance Sunday.10.45 for 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Canon John Fellows.Sunday 16th November – Second Sunday before Advent. 11.15am Sung Eucharist (BCP), Barsham. Revd Desmond Banister.Sunday 23rd November – Christ the King. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Graham Naylor.Sunday 30th November – First Sunday of Advent. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Philip Merry. Church correspondent: Robert Bacon 07867 306016, robert.bacon@yahoo.co.uk
NEWSOn Saturday September 6th an audience of more than 50 people attended Dr Barry Darch’s fascinating talk on the Rede family of Beccles and Barsham and enjoyed a magnificent ‘Barsham tea’ afterwards. The PCC is most grateful to Barry for preparing and delivering this talk as part of the fundraising effort for making safe the dilapidated Rede tomb in the churchyard (photo). Special thanks as well to everyone who prepared the teatime delights and helped to serve and clear up afterwards. We also thank our visitors, whose kind donations raised £301.00. Work has been undertaken to clear the entrance to the Rede tomb so that the church architect, Ruth Blackman, can assess the integrity of the structure during her Quinquennial Inspection visit on September 23rd. In the process some two tons of rubble has been removed. Congratulations to Cheryl, Amy, Sarah Jane, David, Neville and Pat on their efforts visiting churches on the day of the Ride, Stride & Drive, Saturday September 13th. Between them they raised more than £1,200.00 for the Suffolk Historic Churches Trust. Half of this sponsorship money will be allocated to Barsham Church. Many thanks as well to the volunteers who manned the reception desk at Barsham on the day.A team of six started off the Love Box wrapping season on September 3rd. The next session is on Thursday October 2nd at 2.30pm – all help welcomed.The PCC met to conduct routine business on Thursday 11th September. This was John Randall’s last meeting before retiring from the PCC and he was warmly thanked for his contributions over six years of valuable service. Sarah Jane’s next market stall is scheduled for September 26th. She would be grateful for any unwanted household goods in good condition to add to her stall. She continues to raise funds for the Rede tomb repair project. The August sales table organised by Jenny produced a fantastic £180.00. The September sales table has been cancelled so as not to clash with the Harvest festivities.Amy passes on thanks from the Revd Pam Bayliss at St Luke’s Beccles for the 156 items contributed to the Beccles Food Bank in August. FORWARD PLANNINGAutumn Equinox, Monday September 22nd: Weather permitting, the illumination of the rood will be at about 5.50pm on September 21st, 22nd and 23rd. Harvest Festival Choral Evensong, 5.30pm on Sunday September 28th. Harvest Supper follows at 7pm in the village hall. Tickets for Harvest Supper can be purchased from Bridget at £12.50 each.SNIPPETS – Raise the Song of Harvest Home The safe gathering in of crops at harvest has probably been a matter for celebration and thanksgiving in most cultures since prehistory, and with good reason, for a fruitful harvest ensured a community’s survival through winter. In ancient Israel it was the custom to celebrate the first fruits as well as the end of harvest: ‘Celebrate the Harvest Festival, to honour the Lord your God, by bringing him a freewill offering in proportion to the blessing he has given you’ (Deuteronomy, 16:10). Fast forward to early medieval England, not long converted to Christianity, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle mentions Lammas, the Feast of the First Fruits, which is thought to have been a Christian adaption of a native pagan tradition. On August 1stat Lammas – or ‘Loaf-Mass’ – a loaf of bread baked from the first of the new wheat crop was offered at Mass. By the high medieval period in England, the Church’s role in the agricultural cycle was well established with several holy days marking the harvest season. Lammas continued as a celebration of first fruits, and the end of harvest – ‘harvest home’ – was celebrated on St Rusticus Day (September 24th), also known as the ‘Feast of Ingathering’, and at Michaelmas (September 29th). Michaelmas, the Feast of St Michael and All Angels, marked the formal end of the harvest season and the end of the farming year. The high-spirited feasting and revelry that always accompanied ‘harvest home’ was known in East Anglia as a ‘Horkey’. These harvest thanksgiving observances in church came to an end with the Protestant Reformation. In 1536 the holy days associated with harvest were abolished and the various iterations of the Book of Common Prayer excluded all mention of harvest, both in its Table of Feasts to be Observed and in its Prayers and Thanksgivings upon Several Occasions. Harvest celebrations became an entirely secular affair. The feasting, drinking, dancing and merriment that had always run alongside the sacred celebrations now continued alone. The modern tradition of Harvest Festival is usually said to have begun in 1843, when the Revd Robert Hawker, the eccentric Vicar of Morwenstowe in Cornwall, introduced a special harvest thanksgiving service that became an annual event. The story goes that Hawker’s harvest thanksgiving service rapidly caught on and spread across the nation.In fact, the idea of harvest thanksgiving in church had already been launched on a nationwide basis half a century earlier when the Church of England began to designate certain Thanksgiving Days in years of plentiful harvest to thank God for His bounty. There were Harvest Thanksgivings, for instance, in 1796, 1801, 1810, 1813, 1832 and 1842, and continuing into the 1850s. It seems likely that this was as much the impetus and model for the annual Harvest Festival that we know in the Anglican Church as was Hawker’s initiative. Whatever its origins, the tradition of Harvest Festival had become popular and widely established by the 1860s and was formally adopted in the Anglican Church calendar in 1862. By then, special harvest hymns had been written for the occasion: Come ye thankful people, come (1844), and We plough the fields and scatter (translated from the German in 1861). So too the custom of decking out the church with produce, at first the final sheaf of corn from the harvest and later, more elaborate decorations of flowers, fruit and vegetables. Some churches began to organise harvest suppers, and these might perhaps be seen today as a distant echo of the ancient secular harvest home celebrations – the Horkeys – that died out with the dramatic shrinkage of the agrarian workforce brought on by the mechanization of farming. Such are the roots of the Barsham Harvest Festival and Supper.OCTOBER DIARYSunday 5th October – Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Jonathan Olanczuk.Sunday 12th October – Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Canon John Fellows.Sunday 19th October – Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity. 11.15am Sung Eucharist (BCP), Barsham. Revd Desmond Banister.Sunday 26th October – Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Graham Naylor.Church correspondent: Robert Bacon 07867 306016, robert.bacon@yahoo.co.uk
NEWS18 walkers and three dogs took part in Cheryl’s Barsham walk on Saturday 19thJuly. This was a most successful social occasion with half of the participants from Barsham and half from Hempnall. From Barsham church, the four-mile route took us to Ringsfield church via the old main road to Barsham Bridge Cottages and the track past Lodge Farm. Taking the bridleway from Ringsfield Old Hall to Ringsfield New Hall, the return leg brought us back along Hall Road and then Clarkes Lane to the church and a magnificent and most welcome tea. Many thanks to Cheryl for organising the event and to all those who baked, served and cleared the lovely tea. The PCC is grateful for donations made for the tea, totalling £210.00.Bell ringers from the Friends of Derick Obergene Ringing Society came to ring the church bells on Monday morning 28th July. A large congregation gathered on Thursday 7th September for the funeral and burial of Victor Smith of Barsham.Haymaking began on Saturday 9th August and continued through the following week from Tuesday 12th. The mowing was undertaken by the Community Payback Team and the raking largely by members of the church (front cover picture: the Tuesday team). Once again this year, Chris Bardsley kindly provided her delicious ploughman’s lunches – so welcome after a morning’s hard labour in the sun! We are grateful to Community Payback for their cheerful support. The architect’s Quinquennial Inspection has been arranged for Tuesday 23rdSeptember with church architect Ruth Blackman. Sarah Jane’s next market stall is scheduled for 26th September. She would be grateful for any unwanted household goods in good condition to add to her stall. The July sales table organised by Chris Bardsley raised a magnificent £171.00. Amy reports that we contributed 169 items to the Beccles Food Bank in July. FORWARD PLANNINGA talk by Dr Barry Darch, Saturday 6th September at 2pm in Barsham Church: Righteous or Roguish? The Redes of Beccles and Barsham: 400 years of a prominent local family. A delicious Barsham tea will be available afterwards and donations for the talk and tea are invited to contribute to the cost of making safe the Rede tomb in the churchyard. Booking in advance not necessary. Ride, Stride & Drive, Saturday 13th September, 9am-5pm. Yellow sponsorship forms are available at the back of the church: when collecting sponsors, please ask them to give their full name, postal address and postcode, and to tick the Gift Aid box if they are taxpayers. There is also a sign-up sheet for those willing to join the rota of those manning the church on the day: helpers can also be sponsored for their efforts. Any questions about this event should be addressed to Cheryl.The Autumn Equinox is on Monday 22nd September. Cloud cover permitting, the illumination of the rood will be visible on the 21st, 22nd and 23rd September at about 5.50pm. The display is usually best on the day of the Equinox. Harvest Festival Evensong will be held at 5.30pm on Sunday 28th September. Harvest Supper follows at 7pm in the village hall. Tickets for Harvest Supper can be purchased from Bridget at £12.50 each.SNIPPETS – Making hay while the sun shinesThe annual haymaking in the churchyard is, of course, intended to keep the churchyard tidy and to encourage the regeneration of its diverse and precious flora and fauna. It is perhaps an echo of the hay-making that was for thousands of years, from the dawn of settled farming in Neolithic times until the recent age of mechanisation, one of the most important agricultural operations of the year. Hay was a staple crop, and haymaking was vital to the livelihood and survival of agrarian communities that depended on the power of horse and ox. Without hay – dried fodder – livestock could not survive the winter. Hay was also the main transport fuel right up to the age of mechanised transport in the 20th century. It enabled horse-drawn transport to operate around the year and to reach into regions without grazing. It should be no surprise that in Domesday Book at least 80% of the settlements recorded had their own hay meadows, and the frequent references to haymaking in medieval manuscripts, and its representation in the art and literature of later centuries reflects its central role in rural life. Think no further than Millet, Van Gogh, John Clare and Thomas Hardy, for instance.The timing of haymaking was crucial to its success. The leaf and seed material in hay, not the stalk, contains the nutritional value, so mowing had to be timed for when the leaf was at its maximum size and the seed nearly ripe. This required experience and judgement as well as luck, for a period of dry weather at the right time was essential. To get the job done before the hay was over-ripened or spoiled by rain, haymaking called for all hands – men, women and children – from across the social spectrum. This common purpose and the collaboration and cooperation that accompanied it served to strengthen social bonds and to maintain a sense of community. It was a feature of rural life now lost. Until the mid-19th century, and much later in some parts, mowing the hay was done by hand, using scythes. The cut herbage had to be turned and ‘tedded’ (spread out) to aerate and dry it as rapidly as possible to avoid fermentation. It was then raked into ‘windrows’, ready to be collected and piled into haystacks or carted to haylofts. Rainfall during the curing process could be a disaster. The damp caused leaching and moulding, which could ruin the entire crop, hence the idiom that survives into our own times: ‘make hay while the sun shines’.SEPTEMBER DIARYSunday 7th September – Twelfth Sunday after Trinity. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Jonathan Olanczuk.Sunday 14th September – Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Canon John Fellows.Sunday 21st September – Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity. 11.15am Sung Eucharist (BCP), Barsham. Revd Desmond Banister.Sunday 28th September – Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Graham Naylor.Sunday 28th September – Harvest Festival Evensong, 5.30pm. Revd Graham Naylor.Church correspondent: Robert Bacon 07867 306016, robert.bacon@yahoo.co.uk
NEWSThe annual Summer Lunch in the former churchyard at St Bartholomew’s Shipmeadow on 25th June was a triumph: a most congenial occasion with over 70 guests enjoying excellent company and a fabulous array of sumptuous culinary delights. Favoured with a fine day, it was the only day that week to escape strong winds. We extend our grateful thanks to Nick and Jenny Caddick for their hospitality and for welcoming us to the grounds of St Bartholomew’s, and to all those who cooked, catered and helped set up and clear away. Our Patronal Evensong on Trinity Sunday saw the inauguration of the handsome new service books. The service was followed by fizz and tasty bites. The Rev’d Graham played the organ at Sunday service on 13th July, and afterwards we were delighted to celebrate his birthday with customary Barsham hospitality. The Rt Revd Dr Joanne Grenfell has been appointed as the new Bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich. She takes up the position later this year and we look forward to welcoming her to Barsham in due course. Currently Bishop of Stepney in London, Bishop Joanne is also the Lead Safeguarding Bishop for the Church of England. Prior to ordination Bishop Joanne was a lecturer in English Literature at Oriel College, Oxford. The PCC met for routine business on Thursday 10th July. The old churchyard bench, repaired and restored, is now positioned in a peaceful spot in the churchyard under the east window. Copies of the Prayer Book magazine are available for loan at the back of the church. Please return them when finished. As many as ten swifts at a time have been seen over the churchyard. In addition, a jackdaw has been spotted feeding its young in one of the putlog holes high up on the face of the tower. The sales table organised by Jenny raised an excellent £120.00. The Summer Lunch raised a magnificent total of £1,320.00, comprising ticket sales of £883.00 with £348.00 from the raffle and £89.00 from the sale of drinks. We contributed 153 items to the Beccles Food Bank in June. FORWARD PLANNINGHaymaking will start on Monday 11th August and will continue for much of the week. The work will be led by the Community Payback Team, which has been keeping the parking area tidy this summer. Please do come and lend a hand if you can on any day and for whatever time you can manage. Raking hay is the chief task. It is helpful if you can bring your own rake. Chris Bardsley has kindly offered to provide her delicious ploughman’s lunch each day: please let her or Malcolm know if you are likely to be in for lunch so that she can cater appropriately for the numbers. The annual Suffolk Historic Churches Trust Ride, Stride & Drive, Saturday 13th September, 9am-5pm. The SHCT charity raises funds for the repair and restoration of churches and chapels in Suffolk. Of the money you might raise by sponsorship, half will come direct to Holy Trinity Barsham and the remainder placed in a central fund from which grants are made. Dick Carter is the Barsham organiser and Cheryl Coutts is the Beccles area coordinator. Participants are sponsored to walk, ride or drive around participating churches in the area – in the villages or around the town. From the beginning of August there will be yellow sponsorship forms available at the back of the church: when collecting sponsors, please ask them to give their full name, postal address and postcode, and to tick the Gift Aid box if they are taxpayers. There will also be a sign-up sheet for those willing to help by manning the church on a rota basis on the day, and helpers can also be sponsored for their efforts. Dr Barry Darch’s talk on the Redes of Beccles, Saturday 6th September at 2pm, Barsham Church, with a Barsham tea afterwards. SNIPPETS – St Bartholomew’s Church, ShipmeadowSitting in the churchyard at St Bartholomew’s, enjoying the summer lunch and taking in its glorious ambience, one cannot but notice how different the church is from Holy Trinity Barsham, most obviously with its shorter nave and chancel, its tiled roof, north porch and square tower. It feels very different and yet their stories have distinct parallels. The two churches are of a similar age: naves of the 11th or 12th century and chancels of the 14th. Both are constructed of flint rubble with stone dressings, albeit the plaster overlaying the flint survives better at Shipmeadow than at Barsham. The ancient round tower at Barsham is strikingly different from the square tower at Shipmeadow, but the addition of a new belfry of flint decorated with the newly fashionable building material, brick, at Barsham in the early 16th century echoes the building of a whole new tower of flint dressed with brick at Shipmeadow in the same period.In the 19th century both Shipmeadow and Barsham were important centres of the Anglo-Catholic revival in the Waveney Valley. Both benefitted from the work of Frederick Eden, one of the leading designers of Anglo-Catholic interior embellishment, most notably in his designs for new stained glass (and thereby hangs an intriguing tale for another time).Shipmeadow’s story diverges from that of Barsham however, in the community it served, both living and dead. From 1767 to 1938 the Rector of Shipmeadow was chaplain to the Wangford Hundred Workhouse at Shipmeadow, and from 1854 to 1859 to the Shipmeadow Penitentiary in Locks Lane. Inmates of the workhouse unfortunate enough to die there were buried in the churchyard at St Bartholomew’s, and the women of the Penitentiary walked up to the church every Sunday for morning service.AUGUST DIARYSunday 3rd August – Seventh Sunday after Trinity. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Jonathan Olanczuk.Sunday 10th August – Eighth Sunday after Trinity. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Canon John Fellows.Sunday 17th August – Ninth Sunday after Trinity. 11.15am Sung Eucharist (BCP), Barsham. Revd Desmond Banister.Sunday 24th August – Tenth Sunday after Trinity. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Graham Naylor.Sunday 31st August – Eleventh Sunday after Trinity. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Jonathan Olanczuk.Church correspondent: Robert Bacon 07867 306016, robert.bacon@yahoo.co.uk
