Our church and the Old Palace next door, both beautiful but very different, one built largely of flint and the other in brick, together tell part of a fascinating story about ancient buildings and the materials used in their construction. To us the sight of a flint church seems entirely normal and the finest examples – churches like Long Melford and Southwold – are stunning, but such buildings are rare outside the South-East and East Anglia and almost unknown outside Britain. So what is the story and what are the alternatives?

You might think of brick as a possibility and we are familiar with the cathedral tower at St Albans, constructed out of bricks salvaged from Roman Verulamium, but brick churches were, in fact, very rare in Britain until Victorian times, and we had no other brick cathedrals until work started at Westminster (the Catholic Cathedral) and Guildford early in the twentieth century.

The main reason for this, is that brick manufacture stopped in Britain when the Romans left in the fifth century and did not resume on any scale for another thousand years. During that time buildings of any size were built of stone. In the North and West this was of course no problem but in the South and East the nearest sources of good building stone were far away. The Normans imported stone from Caen and later supplies came from quarries around Stamford, but transport over such distances made things very expensive. At St Eth’s the only part built entirely of stone is the Salisbury Chapel, probably with limestone from Ancaster in Lincolnshire.

An ingenious, more affordable and, as I have said, uniquely British alternative is the flintwork which we see at St Eth’s. Local flints gathered from the fields or chalk pits, are set into lime mortar with some details like the west door carved in clunch, a very soft local stone, and with good building stone just for a few key elements like the buttresses. The flint was renewed for most parts of the church during the 1870s restoration, but the tower, dating from 1470, is in something much closer to its original state.

Now we come to something of a puzzle though, because Bishop John Morton while building our tower in flint was, at the same time, building his own palace next door in brick, which had become fashionable after manufacture re-started in the early 1400s. He was not alone in making this distinction. At Tattershall in Lincolnshire the magnificent 1430s castle was built in brick with the church next door in stone and likewise at Trinity College in Cambridge the stone chapel stands out from the surrounding brickwork of the Great Court. Brick was used for many of the country’s most important buildings throughout this period, including Hampton Court, the most splendid of Tudor Palaces, but it was not used at all for churches until much later, following the Great Fire, and only very rarely until the Nineteenth Century.

In this, England differs significantly from Continental Europe where brick had been used continuously since Roman times and where it is used for many great churches and cathedrals such as those in Lubeck and Albi.

I can think of no practical reason why this distinction should have been maintained and brick had great advantages when good stone was scarce because it could be made locally. If you venture, for instance, into the south eastern part of Hatfield Park you will find Brick Kiln Wood.

The tradition that only stone could be used to build the House of God appears though to have remained unshakeable even when it was being used for the magnificent houses of Kings and Bishops. The contrasting materials at the top of Fore Street are not an accident but a fine example of an important but curiously English building tradition.

Opinion

Stone, Flint and Brick

RMArchitects

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