NEWS
We look forward to the arrival of our new Rector, The Revd Graham Naylor, in the early part of the coming year. The following notice was received from the Bishop’s office at the beginning of December:
‘The Right Revd Martin Seeley, the Bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich, is delighted to announce that The Revd Graham Naylor has been appointed as Rector of the Bungay Benefice. Graham is presently Assistant Curate in the Lavenham with Preston Benefice. A date for Graham’s Institution and Induction service will be confirmed in due course. The Bishop wishes to pass on his thanks to all those involved in the process of Graham’s appointment, and he assures you of his prayers. Please pray for Graham as he prepares for his move.’
The nave was full for the Carol Service on 19th December (cover photo). The candlelight and the solo first verse of Once in Royal, sung beautifully by Cheryl, set the atmosphere. The choir gave strong leadership in the carols, their descants from time to time soaring into the rafters, and it was wonderful, as ever, to have the magnificent organ playing of David Bunkell.
After the service the draw took place for the beautifully decorated Christmas cake and a hamper full of treats, and the evening concluded with cheerful mingling and refreshments: mulled wine, spiced apple juice, mince pies, cheese straws and hot sausage rolls. Very many thanks to those who contributed items for the hamper, and to Jean Cooksley who made the Christmas cake.
We are grateful to the Parish Council for purchasing the new churchyard bench, which commemorates the coronation of Charles III. Thanks in particular are due to Peter Holmes, who ordered the bench, and to David Adcroft who delivered it with Peter to the churchyard. We hope to have the old bench repaired and placed elsewhere in the churchyard.
Many thanks to the team of brass cleaners who buffed up the church brass in the week before Christmas.
A team of four (Cheryl Coutts, David Ulph, Dominique and Robert Bacon) represented Barsham at the annual Mettingham inter-churches quiz in late November. They were runners-up to St Michael’s Beccles, who beat them by one point. Another quiz, hosted by Emmanuel Church, Bungay is planned for the early part of next year. It would be good to put out two teams – if others are interested?
The last sales table of the year was organised by Cherry and yielded £75.00, bringing the annual total raised for 2024 to a magnificent £1,197.00.
Barsham Parochial Church Council acknowledges with deep gratitude a very generous donation of £2,000.00.
182 items, including clothes, were donated to the Food Bank in November. Thank you for your continued support.
Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to the life of Holy Trinity Barsham this year: in worship, at special events, in the upkeep and beautification of the church and churchyard, and in the support of charitable causes. In particular, we are grateful for the important work of the working party preparing the new service book. We also extend our gratitude to our licensed retired clergy, our organist David Bunkell, and thanks to the churchwardens and the PCC for their commitment to the varied tasks that keep the church functioning and in good order.
SNIPPETS – The Christmas turkey
The turkey, a North American fowl, was unknown in Europe until 500 years ago. It was introduced to Spain and Italy in about 1520 by the Spanish conquistadores, at that time ravaging the Aztec empire in Mexico. The bird probably made it to England by the 1530s and was likely so named in English because ‘Turkey’ or ‘Turkish’ were used as shorthand for foreign exoticism, in much the same way that the word ‘French’ was used at the time to imply that something was unsavoury!
At the feasts of the affluent, where peacock had once dominated the table, turkey was soon seen as an alternative, favoured for its taste, its size and its exotic origins. Pope Pius V’s chef declared turkey meat to be ‘much whiter and softer than that of the common peacock’. The earliest surviving recipe for turkey in England was in A Book of Cookrye (1584): the bird was to be filled with a ‘good store of butter’ and then baked for five hours. Sir Kenelm Digby’s 17th century recipe for ‘souced turkey’, involved a boned turkey being boiled in wine and vinegar, seasoned with salt, covered with more vinegar and then stored for a month, while another recipe had the meat salted for 10 days before being pickled with mace and nutmeg.
Turkeys typically hatched in late Spring and grew to full maturity in about seven months. Thus ready for the table in December, they became closely associated with feasting at Christmas. Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery (1747) described a ‘Yorkshire Christmas pie’, which included a fowl, a partridge and a pigeon, all stuffed inside a turkey.
By the 1570s Norfolk and Suffolk were established as the principal turkey breeding counties of England. Poultry rearing was already a tradition there and fodder crops like buckwheat and turnip were plentiful. In his travelogue, A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, Daniel Defoe reported: ‘This county of Suffolk is particularly famous for furnishing the city of London, and all the counties round, with turkeys; and that tis thought, there are more turkeys bred in this county, and the part of Norfolk that adjoins to it, than in all the rest of England’.
Well before Defoe’s day, the turkey had become popular Christmas fare in London, and Norfolk and Suffolk farmers supplied its markets. Before the relatively recent introduction of refrigeration, the birds had to arrive at market alive, so the farmers marched the birds the 100 miles or so in huge turkey drives through the autumn and early winter. Defoe reported that typically some 300 droves of turkeys passed in one season into Essex over Stratford Bridge on the River Stour, and each drove contained between 300 and 1,000 birds, which he supposed made at least 150,000 on this route alone. ‘And yet’, he reported, ‘this is one of the least passages, the numbers which travel by New Market Heath, and the open country and the forest, and also the numbers that come by Sudbury and Clare, being many more’. It is said that a thousand turkeys could be managed by just two drovers. Progress was slow as turkeys walk at about one mile an hour, and as the march was hard on the turkeys’ feet, they were shod with leather boots. The first flocks had to set off in August and they fed on the post-harvest stubble in the fields as they went.
Defoe also reported on a more ingenious way some farmers found to deliver the birds to market more quickly and less onerously: ‘Besides these methods of driving these creatures on foot, they have of late also invented a new method of carriage, being carts… with four stories or stages, to put the creatures in one above another, by which invention one cart will carry a very great number; and for the smoother going, they drive with two horses a-breast, like a coach…changing horses they travel night and day; so that they bring the fowls 70, 80, or 100 miles in two days and one night’.
Almost impossible to imagine today, the annual spectacle of hundreds of turkeys being driven along the lanes of East Anglia remained commonplace into the early years of the 20th century.
JANUARY DIARY
Sunday 5th January – Second Sunday of Christmas (and celebrating Epiphany, which is on 6th January). 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Jonathan Olanczuk.
Sunday 12th January – First Sunday of Epiphany: the Baptism of Christ. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Canon John Fellows.
Sunday 19th January – Second Sunday of Epiphany. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Desmond Banister.
Sunday 26th January – Third Sunday of Epiphany. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP). RevdJonathan Olanczuk.
Church correspondent: Robert Bacon 07867 306016, [email protected]