touching place
SS PETER AND PAUL, MAUTBY, NORFOLK
M
The aisle is gone now — it was ruined by the eighteenth century — but the rest of this round-towered and thatched church is in a good state. There is a ledger slab to Edward Boys, a seventeenth-century rector who was chaplain to King Charles I, and it is salutary to recall that this little village had a rector to itself just within living memory. John Norris Dredge, the last Rector of Mautby as an individual benefice (1897-1933), had three services here every Sunday; Holy Communion at 8am, Mattins at 11am and Evensong at 7pm, as well as Holy Communion every Holy Day. He introduced Stations of the Cross, which do not survive, and a rood (1906), which does. But it is the stained glass window on the South side of the chancel, given in his memory, which testifies to this Rector's views; there cannot be many CofE parishes with glass depicting St Thomas Aquinas elevating the Host at
Mass and St Clare holding a monstrance.As Margaret Paston would have known, St Thomas Aquinas wrote:
'Dogma datur
Christianis,
Quod in carnem transit panis,
Et vinum in sanguinem.'
Map reference: TG 479123