Church of St Peter and St Paul

St Peter and St Paul is the Grade I listed Church of England parish church of East Harling in Norfolk, part of the Harling United Benefice of five churches with St Andrew at Brettenham, St Mary at Bridgham, St Ethelbert at Larling and St John the Evangelist at Rushford. A church is recorded here in the Domesday Book, suggesting continuous worship on the site for a millennium — and the building that stands today is one of Norfolk's treasure-houses, famous above all for its medieval east window and its dynastic tombs.

The core of the building — various windows and doorways, and the brickwork of the spire — dates from between 1300 and 1340, but the church owes its glory to one family. Sir Robert Herling, whose tomb lies in the Lady Chapel, made the initial donation, and his daughter Lady Anne Herling, with her two husbands Sir William Chamberlain and Sir Robert Wingfield, carried the transformation of the church through the fifteenth century. Most of the building work was complete by mid-century, the east window arrived in the latter half, and the tower's parapet and spire toward the end — a flèche spire, supported by eight flying buttresses, so admired that it inspired G. E. Street's spire for St Peter Mancroft in Norwich in 1882. The Herling emblems — unicorns, birds, baskets and a quiver of feathers — appear throughout the church. The buttressed walls are flint with ashlar dressings under lead roofs, the porch decorated with knapped flint and stone flushwork panelling, and the western tower has arched two-light belfry windows on each side. A major restoration in 1871, costing £1,500, replaced the box pews with the present pine benches — their ends finely carved to reproduce the earlier designs — gave the chancel roof its simple scissorbeam design, and restored the main roof and spire.

The interior rises to a fine single hammerbeam nave roof, steeply pitched to forty-five feet, supported on twenty angel corbels, the spandrels between hammerbeams and wallposts delicately carved with varied designs; a collar beam at the east end once carried the pulley for the rowell light. Tall arcades on quatrefoil piers form five bays on each side, dividing the nave from unequal aisles — the north, at 20½ feet, far wider than the 12-foot south. At the west end stands the large medieval octagonal stone font with fine carvings and a dark wood cover of the 1600s, near a stone holy water stoup and a wall medallion of Sir Thomas Lovell (died 1524), Chancellor of the Exchequer to Henry VII and Henry VIII and builder of East Harling Manor — a plaster replica of Pietro Torrigiano's bronze bust in Westminster Abbey. Two sections of medieval screenwork, moved here in 1973 from the lower wall and gates of a rood screen, glow green, red and gold with carved Biblical scenes and the Herling unicorn. The eagle lectern was given in 1879 by Elizabeth Norton, replacing a rare medieval lectern lost in the Victorian restoration, and the nineteenth-century pulpit came from another church around 1982. The tower's spiral staircase of seventy-three steps climbs to the ringers' gallery and the clock mechanism, made in 1826 for West Harling Hall, brought here in 1933 and restored in 2004.

The Lady Chapel at the south-east of the nave is enclosed by a remarkable parclose screen: its north-facing section is fourteenth-century, with three-light openings and faded red and green; its west-facing canopied section, once part of a rood screen, is red, green and gold beneath a dark blue sky scattered with gold stars, carved with the Herling unicorn, human faces, dragons and owls — and along the very top, a row of twenty-five small lion heads with their tongues out. The chancel holds two sets of fifteenth-century misericord stalls, restored in the nineteenth century: tipped up, the seats reveal the ledges on which clergy could partially support themselves through long prayers, their faces bearing coats of arms, and each armrest carries a carved clinging beast — on the south a hairy bearded man with sword and shield, a wyvern, an old lioness, an eagle and a unicorn; on the north a griffin, a pelican in her piety, and a lion.

The church contains five great tombs of the Herling and Lovell families. The oldest is that of Sir Robert Herling (died 1435) and Lady Joan, recessed in the south wall of the Lady Chapel: a Purbeck marble slab bears two alabaster figures of a knight and lady — thought to be late fourteenth-century, possibly from an earlier tomb of parents or grandparents — beneath an elaborately carved stone canopy. The Easter Sepulchre, forming a hagioscope or squint between the chancel and St Anne's Chapel, doubles as the tomb of Lady Anne Herling (died 1498) and her first husband Sir William Chamberlain (died 1462), who also appears in the bottom right of the east window; his arms top the chancel side, hers the chapel side. At the north of the chancel lies Sir Francis Lovell (died 1550) and Dame Ann (died 1551) — Sir Francis was nephew and heir of the great Sir Thomas Lovell — with a morion helmet hanging above; matching it on the south is the tomb of his son Sir Thomas Lovell (died 1557) and Dame Elizabeth (died 1591), with a bascinet above. Grandest of all, in the Lady Chapel, is the tomb of yet another Sir Thomas Lovell (died 1604) and Dame Alice (died 1602): painted and gilded effigies lie with hands clasped in prayer, his head on his helmet — identical to one hanging above — with peacock's feathers at his feet, her head on a cushion with a Saracen's scalp held up by a pair of arms at hers, all beneath a canopy on three Corinthian columns topped by three black obelisks.

The east window is among the most precious medieval glass in England. Dating largely from the mid-fifteenth century — the top lights hold nineteenth-century foliage — its twenty main panels include sixteen scenes from the Joyful, Sorrowful and Glorious Mysteries of Mary, two of fragments, and two of donors. The panels have twice been removed for safety: first to East Harling Hall in the 1640s, possibly to save them from destruction by the Puritans, and again for protection during the Second World War. Among the incorporated elements are two angels in the upper centre and, in the very top left, a red squirrel from the arms of the Lovell family — the same squirrel that appears throughout the church, and in Holbein's portrait of Anne Lovell, "A Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling".

The tower carries a ring of eight bells, six until 1992: the treble and second cast by Mears & Stainbank of Whitechapel in 1908 for St John de Sepulchre, Norwich and rehung here in 1992; the third and fourth by Thomas Gardiner of Norwich in 1746; the fifth by Christopher Grave of Haddenham; the sixth by John Darbie of Ipswich in 1677 and the seventh by John Draper of Thetford in 1616, both recast by Taylor's of Loughborough in 1912; and the tenor, weighing nine hundredweight, cast in Norwich around 1520. The organ, built by J. W. Walker & Sons in 1854 for St James' Church, Hatcham in London, was moved here and rebuilt in 1982 when that church closed — the small organ it replaced going to Binham Priory — and was refurbished and extended in 2012, with thirty-five speaking stops across two manuals and pedals. Outside, the churchyard was walled in flint in 1829 and extended north in 1928, its headstones mostly eighteenth-century and later, with a lychgate brought in 1977 from West Harling Church to form a new entrance — the latest small migration in a church whose treasures have been gathered, hidden, rescued and restored across seven centuries.