The Terracotta Trail

John Blatchly

Norman Scarfe has always been intrigued by the Renaissance work of high quality of the 1520s and 1530s at Layer Marney, Shrubland and Oxborough, all in the latest Italian fashion of the time, and discernibly by the same craftsmen. After the Suffolk Institute excursion he led to Shrubland inMay 1982, he suggested ‘a brief article … including illustrations of the whole local group of terracotta windows … and the Higham drawing’. What appeared was certainly brief, with only one drawing, and something fuller is now overdue.1 We therefore invite him to take with us a longer journey from north Essex to west Norfolk following a hypothetical sequence of execution of this most decorative work, noting the links between families using and recommending the terracotta artists, and the inspiration behind some oft-repeated details. That Bedingfields of the same generation were involved in inviting the craftsmen into their own counties in succession was merely noted en passant by Evelyn Wood; and decorated windows in three Suffolk churches nearby have often and wrongly been alleged to have been rescued and resited from the Old Hall at Shrubland after its partial demolition in the nineteenth century. New work at Barham, Henley and Barking churches was in fact ordered by Sir Philip Bothe of Shrubland, probably after the craftsmen had finished making windows for the chapel at his mansion there in about 1525. It should be stated at the outset that contemporary work in terracotta in Suffolk at Westhorpe Hall, Wolsey's College in Ipswich, and in Norfolk at East Barsham Hall and Great Snoring Rectory is in quite different styles, probably the work of other schools of craftsmen.