Finchingfield - the story of the blanket
Finchingfield is the final blanket in my Quintet, and perhaps the most esoteric one. It takes its name from the North Essex village of Finchingfield which appears in the Doomsday book in 1086 as Fincingefelda - 'the field of Finc or his people’. I naively assumed the name had something to do with finches… I stand corrected now, but I like to imagine great flocks of the beautiful little birds alighting on the village green.
My blanket follows a regular structured pattern of interlocking stepped forms. Within the defined structure, colours are applied more randomly - giving the blanket a slightly anarchic quality. The exact composition and placement of colours varies from blanket to blanket - each one contains all of the colours, but the design allows for many variations - all equally lovely but with a suggestion of uniqueness which nods to vernacular patchwork.
Finchingfield feels an apt name as it strikes me as an ethereal place – more an idea (or an ideal) of a place… an abstraction of a village. We first came across it by foot some years ago – exploring the area around Great Bardfield. The village has been long celebrated as ‘the most beautiful village of England’ – an accolade which brings mixed blessings with each tide of visitors. On our last visit a large flock of bikers had gathered on the village green in place of my imaginary finches - summer Sunday visitors.
My second encounter with Finchingfield was on celluloid, via the BFI archive. The village features in a pair of films about rural life. The films are made two decades apart – one in 1937 and one in 1957. Both explore the rapidly changing face of village life – the sense of a disappearing way of life is something of a paradoxical constant. The first film Around the Village Green has a jaunty score by Benjamin Britten and features choreographed scenes of village life and characters – rehearsed but none-the-less with much period charm.
The second film Essex Village includes sequences of a thatcher and a blacksmith at work – then already disappearing trades. Even more-so the corn dolly maker – considered something of an antique curiosity. The keen-eyed will surely identify him by his distinctive eye-patch as Fred Mizen, the celebrated local corn dolly-maker and creator of the life-size Lion and Unicorn for the Festival of Britain. See here for my earlier post on Fred Mizen and his corn dollies.
The church at Finchingfield still boasts a pair of beautiful corn decorations – perhaps these were Fred’s too?
The celebrated wooden windmill of Finchingfield has long stool still, it’s sails stopped, and wings clipped many decades ago. In the image below, which looks Edwardian to my eye you see it in its full splendour. Perhaps if you narrow your eyes and squint you might just see the sails turning in the rotated forms of my blanket.
For full details of the Finchingfield blanket please see here.
