Forward thinkers

Aug 3

Today we visited the beautiful medieval town of Thaxted. Gustav Holst was music director here ( I forgot to take a pic of his house :-() Percy Dearmer and Ralph Vaughn Williams also worked together here on the English Hymnal. One of the neat things about Percy Dearmer working at the beginning of the 1900s was that he was quite ahead of his time. He began advocating for birth control and the ordination of women amongst other things. He was also big into harnessing the skill of artists from the community for good worship. He didn’t mind expressing his opinions and for that, not surprisingly, he had difficulty being appointed to a church.


I enjoyed roaming about the church. There were several medieval artifacts; tapetries, stained glass, that were very interesting. The gargoyles around the outside of the church were fascinating. I hadn’t known that the word gargoyle comes from the same root as gargle, which fits quite nicely since they are used for water spouts, spitting out the water collected from the roof. There were also little gargoyle figures inside the church like where walls and roof met. Someone commented on how they were like clouds of witnesses. I loved that image. The bell ringing mechanism was also extremely cool.

We had lunch in a lovely little tea shop in the middle of town and later spent the day in Cambridge walking about.