Introduction

THE REBUILDING of the nave and west tower of Swaffham parish church in the second half of the fifteenth century was an ambitious project which is also very well documented. The aim of this paper is to explore it from two perspectives, broadly speaking architectural and historical. In doing so, I seek to bring out the particularities of the building aesthetically and as a community enterprise. The first section introduces some key issues in the historiography of fifteenth-century architecture in England in order to question some assumptions which, I suggest, still bedevil the subject. The second section focuses on Swaffham itself: both the building of the church and the circumstances in which the work was undertaken. This section is necessarily longer and more detailed than the first as it seeks to integrate complex documentary and physical evidence in order to relate these to the tastes and loyalties of named individuals. Although the practicalities of construction, aesthetic preferences and the ‘politics’ of motivation can be viewed as discrete, separable fields of enquiry, they shed light on each other and we gain a richer understanding if they are considered together.

Part 1: ‘Perpendicular’ in Norfolk

Shelton is a village ten miles south of Norwich. In his entry on the church Pevsner writes the following: ‘Apart from the great fenland churches and St Peter Mancroft in Norwich, Norfolk has hardly more than half a dozen Perp churches of the first order. Shelton is one of them. It was built for Sir Ralph Shelton, who in his will made in March 1497 ordered his executors to “make up completely the church of Shelton aforesaid, in masonry, tymber, iron and leede, according to the form as I have begun it”.’ There are two points of particular note here in relation to this paper. The first is that Shelton appears to be a single patron building. The specificity of Ralph Shelton's will, mentioning four media, suggests he really had a controlling hand over a range of operatives – plumbers, smiths, carpenters, masons – and that the form of the church was that which he had initiated and he wanted it adhered to. This was a squire who may well have been personally very interested in building and indeed it shows.