Church of St Michael the Archangel

Church of St Michael the Archangel

Parish church dating from the 15th and 16th centuries, with fragments of 12th-century work. The building comprises a nave and chancel, north and south aisles, north and south chapels, a south porch, and a west tower. Construction is in flint and freestone with lead-covered roofs.

The large square tower dominates the west end and displays late Perpendicular style in three stages divided by string-courses. The base and the faces of the diagonal buttresses feature flushwork panelling. The buttresses are stepped in six stages (two to each main stage of the tower) and are surmounted by heraldic lions. The top stage contains a four-light window with panel tracery on each face. The tower is crowned with a battlemented top featuring pinnacles at the angles and two bands of flushwork below. The tower contains eight bells, the earliest dated 1583.

The nave roof is decorated with ornamental eaves cresting and bears inscriptions below the eaves copied from a Parisian church, both additions from a late 19th-century restoration. The clerestorey has five three-light windows with panel tracery, with flushwork panels set between them. The walling above is a mixture of stone blocks and flint. The aisle roofs are parapeted, and the south aisle has two-light traceried windows with square heads.

The chancel was lengthened and the two chapels were built by the 3rd Duke of Norfolk around 1550, resulting in a chancel almost as long as the nave and an east end wider than the rest of the building. The chapels contain four three-light windows with bar tracery; a six-light east window with a row of shields below dates from 1743. The south porch is battlemented.

The interior is impressive and contains many important features. Most outstanding is the nave roof of single hammer-beam construction, where the hammers are concealed behind ornamental ribbed coving with a decorated horizontal band above. The collars are embattled and supported by solid arched braces. At the rear of the nave stands an organ built by Thamar of Peterborough in 1674 for Pembroke College, Cambridge and presented to Framlingham church in 1708; it was replaced on its gallery in 1970. The organ case and complete set of painted pipes date from 1630.

The high 12th-century chancel arch survives from the earlier church, and a row of corbel-heads below the level of the present corbels supporting the aisle roofs indicates the presence of earlier aisles. In the chancel, the reredos behind the high altar features a mystical painting of the Glory dating from around 1700.

The north and south chapels contain a significant group of monuments to the Howards, described as one of the best series of mid-16th-century Early Renaissance monuments in England. The tomb-chest of Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, is particularly fine and is said to rival the best French work of the period.