St Andrew's, Little Steeping

 

Just two highlights from a hugely rewarding trip yesterday  to Little Steeping Church on the edge of a village near Spilsby not far from where Wold meets Fen.  The pictures seem to have gone up in the reverse order I intended; the memorial is just about readable if you click on it to bring it up bigger.

The Fourteeth Century effigy is of Thomas of Reading, the Rector who had the present church built.  It is in such good condition because at some point it was turned upside down and used as the chancel step.  A Victorian restoration discovered it free from the wear and vandalism it might otherwise have suffered in previous centuries.

Thomas is at the bottom right in the 1913 east window, a memorial to Edward Steere, the Rector who was initiator of that restoration, and later the Bishop of Zanzibar who personally supervised the building of the Anglican Cathedral there omn the site of the disused Slave Market.  It was his memorial I had gone to see.  His linguistic and printing skills in particular brought Swahili scripture into being.   

The detail at the bottom centre of the window is his ordaining John Swedi deacon (it says the first such Anglican ordination in Africa, but I think west Africa got in there first).  The striking choice is to have the Seventh Century Abbot Hadrian of Canterbury, an African scholar, pictured on the left as if watching the ordination.