The wrestling baronet of Nottinghamshire
The life-size stone effigy of Sir Thomas Parkyns stands in the attitude of a wrestler at the beginning of a bout, his sturdy legs set apart, toes out, and his hands posed as though showing the length of a fish.
The design is the baronet’s own, a copy of the figure in the frontispiece of The Cornish-hug Wrestler, which he published in 1713.
He was also a collector of stone coffins and a keen architect too, building estate houses and leaving a weirdly bulky tower at Bunny Hall in Nottinghamshire.
In St Mary’s church at Bunny, Parkyns’s sculptor has depicted, next to the figure of him as wrestler, Father Time or Death triumphant in a bout, with the Latin tag Tempus edax rerum, “Time devourer of all things”, from Ovid.
Under it, a couplet reads: “That time at length did throw him it is plain / Who liv’d in hopes that he should rise again.”
The memorial was once said to have been knocked out in marble by his chaplain in a barn, but the sculptor, Edward Poynton, was in fact the chaplain’s brother, as I learn from the new edition of Pevsner’s architectural guide to Nottinghamshire, revised by Clare Hartwell
It’s 30 years and more since I set eyes on Sir Thomas’s work at Bunny and I wanted to go back this year, Pevsner in hand, to see its treats. But lockdowns grounded me.
Nottinghamshire is full of under-appreciated marvels in stone and brick, the foremost of which is Southwell Minster. Since it is not called a cathedral, people forget it is there, despite the fame of the Leaves of Southwell, cut so naturalistically in the 13thcentury chapter house.
Close examination shows them more idealised, less literal, than at first sight. Pevsner wrote a King Penguin about them in 1945.
But the new Pevsner volume throws up dozens of whole buildings and surprising details that I yearn to see in reality. The two big medieval parish churches are St Mary, Nottingham, and St Mary Magdalene, Newark, the 232ft spire of which I pair mentally with the 282ft spire of St Wulfram, Grantham, also visible from the train going north.
Add to those the stupendous bulk of Worksop Priory, in what Pevsner called “a ‘Baroque’ late form of Norman”, which establishes a mesmerising rhythm of pillars and openings in the nave, with two storeys of triforium and clerestory above.
For sculpture there are contrary currents. One is to be seen at the Holy Rood, Ossington. As the name suggests, this was a medieval church but it was rebuilt in 1782 according to the designs of John Carr of York, best known for his country houses.
The neoclassical church was a memorial to William Denison by his brother Robert, and it has statues of both, by Joseph Nollekens, a sculptor interesting for
his life as recounted in that minor classic by John Thomas Smith, Nollekens and his Times.
As the Pevsner entry says, the monuments to the brothers are “wholly worldly, with no religious connotations whatever in their attitudes, features or paraphernalia”. William, though, holds a big sheet of paper inscribed with Alexander Pope’s Universal Prayer, which is fairly deist in attitude.
How different from the monument at All Saints, Strelley, to John de Strelley, who died in 1501. He lies with a lion at his feet, almost hidden by which are two little figures of a man and a woman telling their beads – bedesmen praying for his soul.