Norfolk: Heydon, Parish Church of St Peter and St Paul

The tall west tower received substantial legacies to its building between 1460 and 1488. There is a two-storeyed vaulted Perpendicular south porch and a fourteenth-century north porch. The arcade is of fourteenth-century date, but the roof and aisle windows to north and south are Perpendicular. The original fourteenth-century clerestory, on the pattern of Cley, has been altered. The chancel has Perpendicular windows, and on north side is the Bulwer mausoleum of 1864. ¹ The principal interest of this church, apart from the extensive late fourteenth-century wall-paintings in both aisles, is the lost north window (nV) recorded by Martin and Blomefield. ² This had a representation of Christ, almost certainly as part of a Pietà, surrounded by young men blaspheming, their words given on texts in rhyming Middle English couplets, with a lamentation said by the Virgin Mary written below. Each young man swears by a different part of Christ’s body. This was extensively studied and published by Woodforde in 1950, who compared it with wall-paintings at Broughton (Bucks.), Walsham-le-Willows (Suffolk) and Corby (Lincs.). ³ Nelson described the Blasphemy Window in 1913 as though it were still extant, but this was probably a misunderstanding. ⁴

Blomefield and Parkin also describe other glass in the church, saying that the windows were formerly adorned with many saints, confessors and martyrs. They give details of a life of St Margaret in a south window, including speech texts and tituli. ⁵ In the north windows, probably in the tracery lights, they saw five Apostles and a prophet. The arms of Morley were in several windows. ⁶ Woodforde’s notes mentions quarry work of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in sII; this has since gone. ⁷ The surviving fragments of fifteenth-century glass have been gathered together in the tracery lights of sIII in the chancel.