This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

The closest I have ever come to meeting a Cromwellian soldier was not at some Civil War reenactment by the Sealed Knot, but at a Church of England’s “Vision and Strategy Day”. To be sure, the person in question was sporting some nondescript Boden country casuals rather than the customary Roundhead leather cuirass and lobsterpot helmet, but her puritanical outpourings would easily have won her a place in the New Model Army. Had she travelled in time to the mid-17th century, nothing would have held her back from hewing down altar rails with a halberd or taking potshots at stained glass with an arquebus.

“What’s the point of all these expensive old church buildings?” she complained. “They’re nothing special. They don’t mean anything. They’ve got nothing to do with worship. And they cost far too much to run. We should sell them all off and have prayer meetings at home in our living rooms instead.”

Would that I had then had Andrew Ziminski’s new book, Church Going, to hand. This work, a wonderful paean and vademecum to the medieval parish churches of the British Isles, might have done something to quell the iconoclastic ardour of my Cromwellian colleague and gone some way to persuading her that these buildings are not a burden but a blessing we should all cherish. 

However, this is a book for a far wider audience than just those Praise-God Barebones ecclesiastical administrators who are itching to hang “for sale” signs off every gothic pinnacle and crocket. Ziminski, who has worked as a stonemason restoring churches for over three decades, tells us that in his experience, increasing numbers of people are becoming interested in visiting churches, but they are unfamiliar with what they are seeing — the parts of the church, the meaning and symbolism of the architecture, artwork, furnishings and the like. He himself, having visited over 5,000 of Britain’s medieval churches for both work and pleasure, noted that there seemed to be a lack of a handbook which would explain such matters. Church Going is his attempt to remedy this lack. 

Whilst it is not the case, as Ziminsky suggests, that there are no such handbooks in existence, it would be difficult to find one as readable, genial and well seasoned by long practical experience. Ziminsky does not offer a dry or academic history of the development of church architecture, but rather takes us on a tour of the features of a church — from the lychgate and the porch, to the windows, pews, chancel, altar and monuments and up to the tower or pinnacle of its spire. He not only explains their origins and their symbolic and liturgical significance, but also fills in his discussion with descriptions and stories taken from his considerable hands-on knowledge as a restorer of ancient buildings. 

It is all too easy to forget the astonishing cultural wealth that lies close to hand in our medieval parish churches. We do not need to queue up for the National Gallery or hunt around Tuscany to glimpse awe-inspiring pieces of early art. They are sitting on our doorsteps, often little-regarded, scattered liberally throughout our towns and villages. Our medieval churches, as Ziminski says, preserve “the most extraordinary explosion of creativity our islands have ever seen”. 

Ziminski brings to our attention a stream of such treasures that might easily be passed by. There is the ensemble of 14th— and 15th-century stained glass in All Saints North Street in York made by some of the best glass-makers in Europe. These include the “Pricke of Conscience” window which illustrates from a near-contemporary poem the signs of the Apocalypse: the sea catching fire, fish jumping out of the water roaring, rocks and stones consumed in the flames. An hour’s contemplation of these windows to a Bach organ recital, comments Ziminski, was “as vivid an experience as any I’ve had in a church”.

Or there is also the Thornham Parva Retable, England’s largest surviving medieval painted altarpiece, alive with gilding, foliage, roses and portraits of saints. Whilst this masterpiece sits in the peaceful church of St Mary’s, Thornham Parva, in the Suffolk countryside — Ziminski recommends that you borrow the organist’s stool so that you can sit and contemplate it at ease — to see the other, smaller part of the ensemble you have to travel to the Museé de Cluny in Paris.

The book does not confine itself to the high artistic treasures. Ziminski is also careful to cover how “the history and evolution of churches … and the lives of the people who used them are interlinked”. Ordinary parishioners, and not just journeyman painters and stonemasons, were prone to leave their traces. 

He takes us to one piece of graffiti, scratched into the stone by a slit window inside a church tower, which sketches out a hunting scene probably observed from there around the beginning of the 15th century, with hounds baying, bugles sounding and an apparent lord of the manor strutting with sword, carrot-shaped shoes and a fashionable turban-shaped chaperon hat.

Other graffiti, more modest but nonetheless poignant, memorialise the hopes and prayers of nameless generations of parishioners — the apotropaic daisy-wheels often scratched by fonts to beguile evil spirits from harming unbaptised infants or the ubiquitous interlocking VV mark, standing for Virgo Virginum (Virgin of Virgins), meant to invoke the protection of the Blessed Virgin Mary. 

Ziminski perfectly captures how, in our medieval churches, the quotidian and even the bawdy are richly woven with the sublime. This may be in the scarcely visible carvings of misericords preserving fantastical monsters or scenes of medieval life — a wife thrashing her husband with a ladle, a fox stealing a goose, an archer shooting at a horseman — or the puzzling Sheela-na-gig gargoyles proudly displaying their genitalia high on some church walls. 

This is reflected by a comic trend in Ziminski’s own experience. He falls into dispute with a fellow restorer on the question of whether a giant 18th-century phallus graffito should be restored to its previous prominent place on a lead roof and falls to the temptation of trying on an ancient knight’s helmet which had been preserved over a tomb, only for it to get stuck on his head and cause him to blunder into a funeral. 

Whilst there is much to amuse in Ziminski’s writing, much is also quietly moving. He doesn’t recount meeting any Cromwellian soldiers or Reformation iconoclasts directly, but their legacy is always present. Ziminski describes how fragments of beautiful stonework, statues and shattered glasswork holed up in forgotten recesses of churches are frequently discovered. 

There is a haunting moment where he is shown what is apparently just a piece of copper discovered by a boy near one rural church — this turns out to be a fragment of an opulent enamel saint’s reliquary made in Limoges around 1180, which once would have sat in the church. A similar reliquary sits in the V&A. 

Ziminski’s book is nonetheless a testament to how much has survived and how great its abiding value is — not just in material terms, but also spiritual. He articulates this from an agnostic standpoint: how a church might express a sense of place, its numinous “atmosphere” fusing “with some other unexplained agency to bend the doubts of this particular faith fence-sitter”, “the embodied emotion and devotion left by many generations of parishioners”. 

This work should certainly encourage more people to visit, understand and cherish their local churches, but it is also a sign to the modish movement in the Anglican establishment that its ancient churches have a power of witness to the Christian faith and a worth to society that you can’t find in someone’s living room.