The church as you see was completed in 1484, the Lady Chapel in 1496, and the Clopton Chapel is from about the same date. The only part of the structure older than that is the five bays of the arcading at the west end of the nave, which are considered on architectural grounds to be about a century earlier, and perhaps the porch (of which more later). The only modern part of the structure is the tower, which dates from 1903 and was built as Long Melford's commemoration of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. By any standards it is a great improvement on the brick tower built in 1725. That tower replaced the original, which was destroyed by lightning around 1710, and the present tower was built round it.

Now go up the north aisle. Before passing through the screen to the area at the back of the organ (known as the Kentwell Aisle), you'll see in the wall an alabaster has-relief of the Adoration of the Magi, the wise men from the East who brought gold, frankincense and myrrh to the Infant Jesus. It's said to date from about 1350 (in other words, U's some 130 years older than the present church) and was dug up from underneath the chancel floor in the eighteen century. It's possibly part of an alabaster altar disposed of at the Reformation and recorded as having been bought by one of the Cloptons, in which case it was buried thus in the hope that it would one day be discovered.

In the Kentwell Aisle you'll see in the north wall the recessed tomb of Sir William Clopton, father of John the founder of this church, and on the floor are several fine brasses in memory of members of the Clopton family. Once a year on Trinity Sunday, the town of Hadleigh places one red rose on the tomb of William Clopton.  The door by Sir William's tomb was traditionally used by the Cloptons coming over from Kentwell, and there is a holy water stoup incorporated into the tomb especially for their use.

East of the Kentwell Aisle is the Clopton Chantry Chapel. Chantries were in origin specially endowed chapels or altars where a priest received a fee for saying Masses on behalf of the soul of a departed person - a system which at Us worst has been described as salvation for money down. Nowadays this chapel makes a friendly and intimate place for midweek services, prayer groups and the like; and the Sacrament is reserved here so that it can be taken to the sick.

From the Clopton Chapel we go round into the chancel On the way note: (i) the double squint giving a view from the Kentwell Aisle towards the high altar, and (ii) the various memorials to members of the Hyde Parker family, who have been living at Melford Hall since 1786. It was at the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801 that Admiral Hyde
Parker sent Nelson the signal to which he turned his blind eye.

Now stand in front of the high altar. John Clopton's tomb is now on our left. Originally it ranked as an Easter Sepulchre, i.e. the Reserved Sacrament was placed here from Maundy Thursday until Easter Day; nowadays it is used as the credence table far Holy Communion services at the high altar. The reredos above the high altar is made of Caen stone and is based on Albrecht Dürer's painting of the Crucifixion. It was given in 1877 by the mother of the then Rector, Charles Martyn. Martyn was one of the greatest pastors to have been Rector of Long Melford and was as generous with his money as his mother had been before him.

Immediately to the right of the high altar is the Cordell tomb. Sir William Cordell was Speaker of the House of Commons under Queen Mary Tudor and Master of the Rolls under the first Queen Elizabeth. He rebuilt Melford Hall and died there in 1581. Three years before his death he entertained Queen Elizabeth there in such style that, it is said, the Suffolk gentry had a desperate job keeping up with him. The effigy shows him not as a lawyer but as a knight-at-arms with a cockatrice at his feet (looking away because its look would kill if you didn't look first). The four female figures represent Prudence, Justice, Fortitude and Temperance, but (as if to balance the account!) the jolly Greek god Bacchus appears on the canopy above. Sir William was the founder of the Trinity Hospital, the almshouses on the Green opposite the church. His career shows him as a good survivor- a very necessary quality for eminent men in those days.
To the right of the high altar is the Martyn Chapel. The Martyn family (no relation of Charles Martyn the Victorian Rector) lived at Melford Place in the southern part of the village and were among the greatest givers to the church in its early days. The fine brasses in this chapel are, among other things, a witness to the high incidence of infant mortality in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. After the Reformation the Martyns remained loyal to the Pope, and it is from Roger Martyn, who died in 1615 aged eighty-nine and whose brass you can see in this chapel, that we know much of our knowledge about the original condition of the church.

From the Martyn Chapel go outside and turn left to the Lady Chapel, which is in effect a separate building and dates from 1496. Lady Chapels at the east end were quite a common feature of cathedrals and abbey churches at this period, but Long Melford is almost the only parish church in the country that was never an abbey to have one; it shows what an ambitious project this church is. A distinctive feature is the indoor cloister, or walk, round the worship area in the centre of the chapel. Note Mary's monogram on the entrance to this central part. The curtains behind the altar are part of the material woven and hung in Westminster Abbey for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II; the design on the blue background includes the crown, rose, thistle, leek and shamrock. The Chinese-style clock at the back of the chapel is supposed to be a 'Parliamentary clock', so called because in 1797 Parliament put a tax on watches which resulted in people relying more on public clocks; but this foolish law was repealed after only one year and there are far more alleged Parliamentary clocks about than can possibly have been made in a single year. The Chinese style reflects the craze for things Chinese which swept the country during the eighteenth century and which is reflected in the contents of many a stately home. Set into the east wall you will see a multiplication table which dates from the latter part of the period (beginning in 1570 and ending in the early 1800s) when this chapel was used as a village school. Nowadays the Sunday School meets in here at the same time as the morning service in the main church, and no doubt you can see various signs of its activities.

We suggest that you now go back into the main church via the Martyn Chapel, and as you do so think of the church both past and present. Think of it past because we suggest that you now sit in one of the pews in the central part of the nave, where you can read the next section of this guide on the history of the church and there imagine the scenes described; but you are also following the route taken by the modern Sunday School child on the way to the refreshments served at the back of the church after the Sunday morning service. On the way note the pulpit, which has carved on it the patron saints of six altars formerly in the church: St Anne, St James, the Virgin and Child (representing the altar in the Lady Chapel and the Jesus altar in the Martyn Chapel), St John the Evangelist and St Edmund - this last being the Edmund in the name Bury St Edmunds. St Edmund is the saint of East Anglia. As king of the East Saxons he refused to compromise his Christian faith during the invasions by the then heathen Danes, and was martyred by being used for archery practice - hence the arrow as his symbol. discovered in the sad year AD 1914, the late Rector, the Rev. F. S. W. Simpson, F.S.A. (Rector 1955-60) was inclined to proceed: "A Roman temple once existed here at which sacrifices were offered." Such a temple must have been a landmark and its ritual performed for its own five centuries. A Christian church appears next, and there are documents to prove its presence before the year 1050.' To say that there definitely was a Roman temple on this site is going beyond the evidence, but it was a very common policy of the Church in the early Middle Ages to build churches on the site of an old heathen shrine, and this was often a more important consideration in siting a church than placing it in the middle of the community. No part of this older church survives in the present one apart from the Adoration of the Magi and the nave arcading mentioned earlier, though foundations of a flint wall were found during the restoration in 1867. This suggests that the porch may be also a survivor from an earlier period, for the main beam in the ceiling of the porch is halfway between the entrance and this foundation. It may be that during the rebuilding the nave was widened and part of the porch lopped off accordingly, but that otherwise the porch was kept as it had been. All this can remind us that our medieval forefathers did not think of churches as ancient monuments to be preserved, and very often replaced them with the latest in modern architecture as and when funds were available. To them the church was no mere survival from the past.

It may be helpful to think of the history of this church building and comparing its condition at four periods:

(1) In its original condition c. 1500: In his History of Long Melford (1873) Sir William Parker writes: 'Not only the walls and roofs were bright with paint and gilding, and the great carved reredos representing the Crucifixion was resplendent with gold and colours; the high altar glittering with a profusion of plate, jewels, embroidery and precious hangings; when also, before the great rood, the several minor altars, and the many images of the saints, there hung brilliant costly draperies; and the officiating priests shone in rich vestments of silk, satin, velvet and cloth of gold. . . . We may well imagine how grand must have been the effect, and how dazzling the brilliancy of colour lighting up this noble church when in the sunshine, combined with the gorgeous reflected hues of the stained glass with which its seventy-two windows were filled.' From an artistic point of view Sir William can only lament that within a century of the church being built so much of this had been destroyed by the Reformation, though he has to admit that a great deal of this magnificence went with a faith with which we as Anglicans can hardly agree, and that even from a purely aesthetic point of view the church was by modern English standards somewhat gaudy. But it certainly reflected a society which believed that nothing but the best is good enough for Cod, and which gave its best to God rather than to itself.

(2) During the Civil War c. 1644: Apart from what is
described by Roger Martyn, we do not know how much of the medieval finery which hasn't survived was destroyed at the Reformation and how much during the Civil War. William Dowsing, the Puritan who in 1643 destroyed so much in several nearby churches, makes no mention of Melford in his diary. We do know, however, that in 1642 a Puritan mob (described by Sir William Parker as '3,000 of the scum of Colchester') had plundered Melford Hall for its alleged Royalist and Roman Catholic sympathies; perhaps they had also attacked the church and William Dowsing felt that his attentions would not be needed. At any rate, during the Civil War this part of the country stood solidly behind Parliament, and Puritanism had long flourished here. One might ask, why was it that this area which had produced so many glorious wool churches in the 1400s seemed in the following two centuries to be the heartland of a faith so different that it wanted to destroy all that beauty? The historians seem to have no standard answer to that one, though it is true that East Anglia by its geographical position is perhaps especially open to influences from Calvinist Holland. A more local reason is perhaps that the Puritans often seemed more genuinely religious. Both at Melford and at Lavenham the outstanding preachers and teachers among the clergy (like Claudius Gilbert here and Ambrose Copinger there) were men of distinctly Puritan views. What a pity that one almost had to make the choice between earnest preaching and architectural beauty - as if it wasn't possible to have both.

(3) The Church as in Neale's engraving c. 1825: Here we see the church with a seventeenth-century reredos behind the altar (described as 'incongruous' by Lauriston Conder) and box pews higher than a man's full height. The oddest feature of the picture is undoubtedly the way it shows the light as coming in from the north, but more significant is that there is no trace in the picture of Melford's now famous stained glass, for there is no reason to suppose that it had been taken out of the church and stored. To quote Sir William Parker again:
'It will hardly be credited that even towards the middle of the present century (i.e. until about 1850) these treasures of art were not merely taken out and thrown away as rubbish, but that during repairs scaffold poles were actually pushed through in order that what was called the dirty old glass might be replaced with new, white, common glazing.'
That's a comment we can all understand, but why was stained glass so unappreciated only a generation or so before Sir William's time? The answer is surely that it represented the whole mysterious aspect of religion which had caused so much trouble in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; now men wanted to hear a Christianity preached which was safe, simple, nonmysterious, all sweetness and light - and having heard it preached thus, you could retreat into your box pew and think your own thoughts about it, confident that in this age of Enlightenment you could expect toleration.

(4) The church as restored by the Victorians c. 1875: The restoration of 1867-73 had left the church in substantially its present form apart from the reredos (dating from 1877), the pulpit (added in 1884) and the stained glass (which the Victorians concentrated in the eastern part of the church and which received its present arrangement only since the Second World War). Sir William Parker was writing his History while this restoration was taking place, and there he expresses the hope that 'a new and brighter era has dawned for Melford Church.' He hopes that his own and future generations will 'restore to the grand old edifice some of its long lost beauties,' and this reflects the way the Victorians had a feel for the history of a church and for the religiousness of its tradition which their predecessors often lacked. But they were not simply backward looking, and in Ernest Ambrose's book Melford Memories (covering the generation before the First World War) Melford Church is undoubtedly a place where people meet, things happen, horizons are raised, and the needy are cared for. The Victorians used as well as loved their churches. Nevertheless, there is a problem in that word 'restoration', so often used to describe what the Victorians did to their churches. There's always the temptation to be inspired as much by a vision of a golden past than by any plans for the future. A more recent version of that is seen in the nave roof. Robert Potter of Salisbury, architect of the nave roof restoration in the 1950s, liked the new work to be seen (as if the most important consideration was to demonstrate the history). His successor, Donovan Purcell, had the new wood stained to match the old. This difference of opinion over the nave roof highlights a difficulty all of us have when faced with a historic church or any other traditional aspect of the Christian faith. It's so easy to think of the Church as an unchanging survival from an idealised past; some of us can even assume that the Church was always much the same until the radicals and trendies moved in the other day! A church like ours is so obviously blessed with a long and glorious tradition that it's sometimes hard to realise that there has been jerkiness and discontinuity as well. Perhaps the most important lesson we can learn from that history is that, if we've got a real grip on the essentials of the Christian faith, we need not be bound by our tradition, nor on the other hand will we want to make a clean break from it; instead, we can use our tradition to help us go forward.
While you are sitting in a nave pew thinking about our history, note on the north wall to your left the memorial to that distinguished Melfordian antiquary Richard Almack, and if you go back down the church by the south aisle you will see among the memorial slabs on the floor one to John Leroo (Rector 1790-1819) 'and his wives (actually he had them one after the other!) and one to Nathaniel Bisbie (Rector 1660-89). It is to Bisbie's Book that we owe a great deal of our knowledge of the early history of the church.

We've seen one version of that hope in the theory behind the Clopton Chantry Chapel, and another in these hatchments. There's another in what was very possibly the first feature of the church you noticed as you entered the churchyard from Church Walk: the writing round the walls. This much may serve to illustrate the rest:
'Pray for ye sowlis of William Clopton, Margy and Margy his wifis, and for ye sowle of Alice Clopton and for John Clopton, and for alle thoo sowlis ye seyd John is bo'nde to pray for.' Please pray for us, and may God bless you on your way.