Church of St John Maddermarket, Norwich

St John Maddermarket is a redundant Anglican church in the centre of Norwich, Norfolk — a Grade I listed building in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust, dedicated to St John the Baptist and bearing one of the most evocative names among Norwich's famous "fifty churches". The suffix is usually said to come from the sale of madder flowers for red dye — the dyers' trade of the medieval weaving city — though there is no actual evidence that such a market existed nearby.

There may have been a church on the site in the eleventh century — possibly the church called Holy Trinity in the Domesday Book — and the thick-walled two-storey north porch is likely all that remains of the original Anglo-Saxon building, its doorway arch decorated with a band of shields beneath a statue niche, its relative ornateness perhaps owed to its position near the main entrance to the Duke's Palace, the Norfolk dukes' city seat that stood where a multi-storey car park now rises. The earliest fabric of the present church dates from the fourteenth century, but most belongs to a major rebuilding between about 1445 and 1510 — a rebuilding carried out without a structural chancel at the east end, giving the church its curiously truncated effect: it is almost as wide as it is long. A tradition long held that the shortening happened in 1578, when the street was supposedly widened for a visit by Elizabeth I to the Duke's Palace, but this is considered untrue. The medieval chancel screen was removed at some point — though not without leaving a trace: two panels of painted oak from the rood screen commissioned by Ralph Segram (died 1472), merchant, MP and Mayor of Norwich, are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, one depicting William of Norwich (holding a hammer, with three nails in his head) alongside Agatha of Sicily, the other St Leonard of Noblac with his manacles and St Catherine of Alexandria with sword and book.

The church owns a singular footnote in theatrical history: in 1600 the famous comic actor William Kempe — Shakespeare's original clown — ended his "Nine Daies Wonder", in which he morris-danced all the way from London to Norwich, by jumping the wall of St John Maddermarket's churchyard.

The church is built mainly of flint with stone and brick dressings, the clerestory faced with ashlar, the aisles roofed in lead and the rest slated. The plan comprises a four-bay nave and chancel in one unit, north and south aisles running the full length, two-storey north and south porches, a north vestry and a west tower whose bottom stage is open to north and south — providing a passage for processions beneath a rib vault decorated with twelve carved bosses. The tower rises four stages with diagonal buttresses to a crenellated parapet with corner pinnacles and statues. The east ends of the aisles form chapels — the Lady Chapel on the south, the Jesus Chapel on the north — and the chancel's east end holds a large five-light window with Decorated tracery. A sundial of the seventeenth or eighteenth century marks the south wall.

The Victorian era brought waves of change: a west gallery in 1849, the tower rebuilt in 1822, the roof refurbished and walls rebuilt in 1863 when the interior was reordered — and a gas explosion in 1876 that damaged much of the stained glass and the nave roof. At the start of the twentieth century the vicar, the Reverend William Busby, filled the church with furniture collected from other churches, creating the richly furnished interior seen today; work on the Lady Chapel followed in 1914–15. The altar stands within a massive wooden baldachin thought to have been made for St Miles Coslany in 1741 and moved here in 1917, behind which hangs a painting of the Last Supper attributed to the Renaissance painter Livio Agresti. The font and pulpit date from 1864 — the font inlaid with coloured marble, the pulpit beneath a seventeenth-century sounding board — and the revolving lectern is eighteenth-century, probably Italian. The church houses one of the largest collections of monumental brasses in England, the oldest from the mid-fifteenth century, along with memorials to Norwich worthies: Thomas Rawlins; Joseph Stannard, the Norwich School marine painter; Walter Nugent Monck, founder of the neighbouring Maddermarket Theatre; Margaret Howard, Duchess of Norfolk (died 1564); and mayors across the centuries including the Southertons, Bubbin and Segram.

Half-hidden on the west wall of the south aisle is the Layer Monument — a marble polychrome mural monument of about 1600 to the merchant, lawyer and mayor Christopher Layer, whose four pilaster figurines of Pax, Gloria, Vanitas and Labor are sculpted in the Northern Mannerist style, the "Layer Quaternity" employing esoteric symbolism that has long intrigued scholars. The church also has identifiable associations with early British Freemasonry, including a nineteenth-century headstone in the graveyard depicting Masonic compasses with the ancient Greek gnostic symbol of the Ouroboros. Most of the stained glass is nineteenth- and twentieth-century — the east window of 1870 depicting the healing of the Centurion's servant, an Annunciation by James Powell and Sons in the north chapel, and a Tree of Jesse of 1916, probably by King of Norwich, in the south — though fragments of fifteenth-century glass survive in the centre window of the north aisle. The two-manual organ was made in 1888 by Norman and Beard for St Peter's Church, Lowestoft, moved to Norwich in 1904, and rebuilt and placed in the west gallery in 1913.

St John Maddermarket closed for Anglican worship on 31 December 1981, served a Greek Orthodox community from 1982 until 1990, and was then vested in the Churches Conservation Trust — preserved now as one of the treasure-houses of Norwich's unrivalled collection of medieval churches: the dyers' church where Shakespeare's clown ended his dance, and the mayors of Norwich keep their brasses.