Studies in the Art and Imagery of the Middle Ages 1904597386, 9781904597384

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Studies in the Art and Imagery of the Middle Ages

Studies in the Art and Imagery of the Middle Ages Richard Marks

The Pindar Press London 2012

Published by The Pindar Press 40 Narcissus Road London NW6 1TH · UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 904597 38 4

Printed by De Montfort Publishing Ltd. (trading as De Montfort Print) 18 Slater Street, Leicester LE3 5AY This book is printed on acid-free paper

Contents Introductioni Overviews And Taxonomies I The Englishness of English Gothic Art?

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II Medieval Stained Glass: Recent and Future Trends in Scholarship

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III Coventry: a Regional Centre of Glass-painting in the 14th Century? The Glazing of Stanford on Avon Church, Northamptonshire c. 1324–50 and the Taxonomy of English Medieval Stained Glass Studies

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IV

An Age of Consumption: Art for England c. 1400–1547

85

V

Yorkist and Lancastrian Political and Genealogical Propaganda in the Visual Arts 

VI

Picturing Word and Text in the Late Medieval Parish Church

106 123

Windowes Wel-Y-Glased VII

Window Glass 

163

VIII

Wills and Windows: Documentary Evidence for the Commissioning of Stained Glass Windows in Late Medieval England

200

ii IX

Sir William Horne and his ‘scowred’ Window at Snailwell, Cambridgeshire

216

X

Glazing in the Romanesque Parish Church

230

XI

Cistercian Window Glass in England and Wales

248

XII

The Thirteenth-Century Glazing of Salisbury Cathedral

280

XIII

The Mediaeval Stained Glass of Wells Cathedral

303

XIV

The Glazing of Fotheringhay Church and College

322

XV

The Glazing of Henry VII’s Chapel, Westminster Abbey

370

XVI

Medieval Stained Glass in Bedfordshire

402

XVII

Archives and the Visual Arts: Potsgrove Church, its Fourteenth-century Glazing and Other Fittings 

415

XVIII

A Late Mediaeval Glass-painting Workshop in the Region of Stamford and Peterborough

430

XIX

The Reception and Display of Northern European Roundels in England

453

Seable R ememor atijf Signes XX

Two Early Sixteenth-century Boxwood Carvings Associated with the Glymes family of Bergen-op-Zoom

473

XXI

Altarpiece, Image and Devotion: Fourteenth-century Sculpture at Cobham Church, Kent

490

XXII The Ymago Sancti Loci in the English Medieval Parish Church. Its Status and Function in the Liturgy and Private Devotion

525

XXIII

Viewing Our Lady of Pity

557

XXIV

A Late Medieval English Pilgrimage Cult: Master John Schorn of North Marston and Windsor

583

contents

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XXV

Images of Henry VI

607

XXVI

The Dean and the Bearded Lady: Aspects of the Cult of St Wilgefortis/Uncumber in England

632

Monuments and Memorialization XXVII Sir Geoffrey Luttrell and Some Companions: Images of Chivalry c. 1320–50

657

XXVIII Entumbid right princly: The Beauchamp Chapel at Warwick and the Politics of Interment

682

XXIX

The Howard Tombs at Thetford and Framlingham: New Discoveries

724

XXX

Two Illuminated Guild Registers from Bedfordshire 

765

XXXI

To the Honor and Pleasure of Almighty God, and to the Comfort of the Parishioners: The Rood and Remembrance

798

Publications by Richard Marks

815

Acknowledgements825 Index 

829

Introduction

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he papers gathered together in this volume represent a selection of works published between 1975/77 and the current year.1 Few items are included from the years between 1983 and 1992, principally because my attention in that period was focussed on museum duties and on completing two books, firstly a biography of Sir William Burrell and subsequently Stained Glass in England during the Middle Ages. Also excluded are virtually all the shorter contributions, plus several more extensive pieces which subsequently were incorporated into monographs. Into the latter category fall ‘The glazing of the Collegiate Church of the Holy Trinity, Tattershall (Lincs.): A study of late medieval glass-painting workshops’, Archaeologia, 106 (1979), a much expanded version of which appeared in 1984 in The Stained Glass of the Collegiate Church of the Holy Trinity, Tattershall (Lincs.). Likewise omitted is the essay ‘Stained Glass c. 1200–c.1 400’ in the Age of Chivalry. Art in Plantagenet England 1200–1400 exhibition catalogue (1987) as it was subsumed into Stained Glass in England during the Middle Ages (1993). Although it is one of the longer papers, also absent is ‘A mediaeval gittern’, British Museum Quarterly, 4 (1980), as the major part was contributed by my co-author Mary Remnant. Omitted too is an article on the icons associated with the monastery of Solovetski in north Russia, on the grounds that, apart from book reviews, it is to date my solitary published venture into the art of the Orthodox world. The thematic grouping of the papers under four headings hopefully requires little explanation, although in several cases the pack could be re-shuffled. The first three in Overviews and Taxonomies are concerned with historiography; the fourth, ‘An Age of Consumption’, is also partly historiographical but in addition attempts to survey art and architecture between c. 1400 and the Reformation, a period which does not lend itself 1

See the list of publications, p. 815 below.

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easily to categorisation. The subject of the fifth essay is rooted in the dynastic struggles of the second half of the fifteenth century. The last article surveys the presence and role of the inscribed word in parish churches; although by no means an insular phenomenon, it does have specifically English aspects. The sequence of stained glass papers under Windows wely-glased begins with making and commissioning, followed by surveys of Romanesque parish church and Cistercian glazing and then four studies of individual ‘great church’ schemes. A common factor for three of them is that very little glass has survived (Wells Cathedral is the exception), so these articles are largely exercises in reconstructing the programmes from antiquarian and other sources. The little-known glass of Bedfordshire is studied in XVI and XVII; a previously unidentified workshop is the subject of XVIII and roundels imported into England from the eighteenth century are examined by means of three case-studies in XIX. Seable Rememoratijf Signes is concerned with later medieval devotional imagery. Sculpture forms the principal subject of the first four essays. The first of these attempts to establish a date-range for the exquisitely crafted miniature boxwood rosary beads and altarpieces produced in the Netherlands through the few pieces for which there is evidence for original ownership. ‘Altarpiece, Image and Devotion’, ‘The Ymago Sancti Loci’ and ‘Viewing Our Lady of Pity’ examine how images straddled the communal and personal devotional spheres primarily within parish churches. The character and dissemination of three cults which emerged in late medieval England are traced by means of their visual representations in various media in the last three papers in this section. Whilst the cults of Henry VI and John Schorn were confined to England, that of St Wilgefortis/Uncumber was an import whose dubious origins were used by the mid-sixteenth-century reformers to ridicule the established Church. Manuscript illumination, panel painting, stained glass, sculpture and metalwork all feature in the essays which comprise Monuments and Memorialization; the common factor was their function in commemorating their commissioners. In the first the famous image of Sir Geoffrey Luttrell in his eponymously-named psalter is located within fourteenth-century knightly representational discourses beyond as well as within the British Isles; Entumbid right princly and ‘The Howard Tombs’ focus on the funerary monuments of leading nobles of their day. In the first it is argued that the chapel with its lavish and spectacular furnishings and fittings which was erected to house the mortal remains of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, is of considerable

introduction

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complexity in terms of its making and meaning. The second paper discusses a hitherto unpublished drawing of the tomb of the second Howard Duke of Norfolk and proposes a relationship between the sixteenth-century family monuments in Framlingham parish church which differs in some respects from that put forward previously. The neighbouring Bedfordshire towns of Luton and Dunstable both had late medieval guilds whose copiously illuminated registers have survived; paper XXX argues that the differences in their imagery are to be sought in the respective social structures of the two centres. The final article seeks to recover the significance of burial below the Rood in the late medieval parish church through a study of wills, inscriptions and the screen in Woodbridge church, Suffolk. The temptation to update or revise most of these pieces, apart from minor corrections, has been resisted. The following notes in respect of several to which changes have been made, or on which more recent studies have shed light, may be helpful. IX ‘Sir William Horne and His ‘Scowred’ Window at Snailwell, Cambridgeshire’ The statement that the word ‘scowring’ in Sir William Horne’s will is unique needs qualification. It is a term used in pre-Reformation churchwardens’ accounts for cleaning plate (see for example, J. C. Cox, Churchwardens’ Accounts (London, 1913), p. 162). X ‘Glazing in the Romanesque Parish Church’ This was originally published without illustrations; these are now included. XI ‘Cistercian Window Glass in England and Wales’ Since this was published in 1986, the later medieval figurative and historiated glazing of German Cistercian houses has attracted considerable scholarly attention. A very useful bibliography is in the recent study by Daniel Parello, ‘Neue Lösungen zur Bildprogrammatik Zisterziensicher Prachtfenster im 14. Jahrhundert,’ in H. Scholz, I. Rauch and D. Hess (eds), Glas. Malerei. Forschung. Internationale Studien zu Ehren von Rüdiger Becksmann (Berlin, 2004), pp. 165–180. XIII ‘The Mediaeval Stained Glass of Wells Cathedral’ Although this paper has been superseded by Tim Ayers’ magisterial study, it is retained as an état de question at the time and also because it completes a

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quartet of ‘great church’ glazing studies.2 The only alteration that has been made is the replacement, thanks to the generosity of Tim Ayers, of most of the illustrations. XIV ‘The glazing of Fotheringhay Church and College’ Excavation of a charnel house below the north porch in 1992 revealed numerous fragments of painted window glass which add considerably to our knowledge of this scheme. They have since been incorporated into the room over that porch. The article text has not been amended to include these finds as they are discussed and illustrated in the entry on Fotheringhay in my The Medieval Stained Glass of the County of Northamptonshire (Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi Great Britain Summary Catalogue 4) (Oxford, 1998), pp. 72–75. XVII ‘Archives and the Visual Arts: Potsgrove Church, its fourteenth-century glazing and other fittings’ Since this article was published, I have become better acquainted with Thomas Fisher’s watercolours. As a result it is now possible to attribute more of the representations of Potsgrove to him than was the case in 1993; the text has been amended accordingly. XVIII ‘A Late Mediaeval Glass-painting Workshop in the region of Stamford and Peterborough’ When this article was written the significance of the vesting of the figures in the Christ and St Peter cycle at Peterborough in what was clearly meant to refer to the habit of the Benedictine Order was overlooked. Post-conservation photographs of the Stockerston glass have replaced those used originally. XX ‘Two Early Sixteenth-century Boxwood Carvings Associated with the Glymes family of Bergen-op-Zoom’ The principal objective of this article was to establish the market for and date of these masterpieces in miniature; it did not address their devotional function, which has now been done in the exhibition and catalogue, A Sense of Heaven. 16th-Century Boxwood Carvings for Private Devotion (Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 1999).

T. Ayers, The Medieval Stained Glass of Wells Cathedral (Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi Great Britain Vol. IV) (Oxford, 2004). 2

introduction

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XXI ‘Altarpiece, Image and Devotion: Fourteenth-Century sculpture at Cobham church, Kent’ Two amendments have been made to the original version. The first represents a reconsideration regarding the spiral staircase at the south-east angle of the chancel. On reflection, I now think that Waller was correct in arguing that the staircase gave access to a gallery or loft above the altarpiece from the vestry. The other alteration allows for the possibility that, although devotional images in their own right, the chancel statues of the Virgin and St Mary Magdalene might have been incorporated into the altarpiece. XXV ‘Images of Henry VI’ The transposition of the illustrations (but not the captions) for the images in Toft church and the Rijksmuseum in the article is corrected; also the additional information that the Durham image of Henry VI was in the glazing, but not that it was located in a Galilee window and that its occurrence at Durham may have been related to the pilgrimage here undertaken by the king in 1448 (J. T. Fowler (ed.), Rites of Durham, Surtees Society, CVII (1902), pp. 49, 122). Not included too in the revised text are other images of the king which have since come to my attention: Dorset: Wimborne Minster, an image of ‘King Harry’ (J. C. Cox, Churchwardens’ Accounts (London, 1913), p. 145). Norfolk: references to a light in Horstead parish church and the secondary dedication of a guild at King’s Lynn must indicate the presence of images of Henry VI (K. Kamerick, Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages (New York & Basingstoke, 2002), p. 126). Yorkshire: Thirsk parish church, an image of Henry VI is mentioned in the 1499 will of Thomas Nosterfield (York, Borthwick Institute Prob. Reg. v.3, f. 342); I am indebted to Antony Masinton for bringing this reference to my attention. The will also refers to an image of St Erasmus, which may be of significance in respect of a miracle performed by a vision of the two together. York Minster: Contrary to my statement that the York Minster image which attracted devotion was probably not the representation formerly at the south end of the choirscreen, I am now inclined to think that it was. The reasons for this change of mind are firstly, the proximity of the chantry founded by Dean Andrew and secondly, the fact that the statue of Henry

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VI is the only one of the series of English kings on the choirscreen to have been removed. Professor Richard Saunders, Director of the Middlebury College Museum of Art, has drawn to my attention two shutters from a triptych possibly by the Master of the St Ursula Legend of c. 1490, which the Museum has recently acquired. On the right shutter are the images of a kneeling male owner/donor and, behind him, his patron or name saint; the latter is a youthful king, crowned and holding a sceptre and clad in a mantle wearing the quartered arms of England and France. While the usual range of attributes included with Henry’s VI’s representation are absent and I am unaware of any with him wearing a heraldic mantle, the fact that the panels are by a Netherlandish artist who probably did not have had access to the iconographical models used in England, leaves open the possibility that the king is indeed Henry VI. Looking back over the output of nearly four decades, the recurrence of two strands which have often converged is striking. Both arose out of my PhD topic. One is an interest in the dynamics of patronage and commissioning across the gamut of the pictorial arts. The second is a focus on the imagery of the parish church, which has not attracted that much attention from art historians. Methodologically an initial concern with patrons/donors as agents has widened to embrace wider issues of making and reception, function and meaning. The social context of art continues to interest me, and the role of materials and makers of images in shaping (or not shaping) responses has emerged as a particular line of enquiry; this I am glad to say, involves the handling and close study of works of art.3 I have been very fortunate to have benefitted from the encouragement, example and generosity of numerous individuals, both scholars and friends (happily, often one and the same). My interest in medieval art dates back to schooldays (and the influence of my mother), when bicycle rides were made to the churches of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire, but was decisively shaped and focussed by my tutors at the Courtauld Institute.4 George This applies to my current projects on the icon of the Vladimir Mother of God and the Rood in medieval England and Wales. 4 If it is of any conceivable interest, there is an account of the circumstances which nurtured my interest in medieval art in ‘Memories of the Moat House — and Charles Freeman’, Bedfordshire Magazine, 25 (1995-97), pp. 313-317. 3

introduction

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Zarnecki instilled in me an enduring taste for sculpture and taught me how to look, describe and analyse. George was also responsible for pointing me in the direction of stained glass and doctoral supervision by Christopher Hohler. As all who encountered Christopher will recall (sometimes ruefully), his enormous breadth of knowledge which transcended disciplinary boundaries, intellectual rigour and insistence on accuracy made him the hardest, but best, of taskmasters. I have endeavoured, not always successfully, to follow the precepts of these inspiring teachers, both of whom alas are no longer with us. Nor would I wish to overlook the influence of Peter Kidson, the third member of the Courtauld triumvirate of medievalists in my time there; although I was never an ‘architecture man’, he has made me aware of the importance of the architectural frame and spaces in which imagery were located. Other formative influences include my time spent as a museum curator, particularly at the British Museum, which brought with it the opportunity to examine and interrogate a wide range of objects. Also the University of York, where teaching in the History of Art Department and across the disciplines in the Centre for Medieval Studies has been so enriching. I have learnt so much from my former colleagues here, especially John Bossy, Jeremy Goldberg, Amanda Lillie, Alistair Minnis, Jeanne Nuechterlein, Christopher Norton (who was instrumental in my coming to York), Mark Ormrod, Sarah Rees-Jones and Felicity Riddy. It is alas impossible to mention every other individual to whom I am indebted and apologies are due to anyone who inadvertently has been omitted from the following list. Professor S. T. Bindoff directed me to the Courtauld Institute for postgraduate study and Professor A. G. Dickens and his fellowteachers on the Reformation Special Subject at King’s College London aroused an enduring interest in this period of such catastrophe for medieval art. The late Michael Baxandall showed how late medieval sculpture could be seen in new and exciting ways and Michael Camille blew a breath (or rather gust) of fresh air through medieval studies. My indebtedness to the late Peter Northeast is apparent in several of the more recent essays; a model of the schoolmaster-scholar, he generously brought to my notice material he had come across in his own researches in the testamentary records of medieval Suffolk. Others who have been a source of information and inspiration (not to mention criticism) include Jonathan Alexander, Margaret Aston, Alexandrina Buchanan, Bridget and John Cherry, Paul Crossley, Eamon Duffy, Sandy Heslop, Charles Little, Nigel Morgan, Annie Payne, David

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Park, Sophie Plender, Lucy Freeman Sandler, Romie Scott and Christopher Wilson. Membership of the stained glass fraternity home and abroad has forged friendships and brought knowledge; included in this rollcall are the late Ernst Bacher, Eva Frodl-Kraft and Peter Newton, Tim Ayers, Anna Eavis, David King, Peter and Brigitte Kurmann-Schwarz, Hartmut Scholz and Claudine Lautier. Latterly the resources and intellectual environment of the University of Cambridge, my colleagues at Fitzwilliam College (notably Rosemary Horrox and John Leigh) and in the History of Art Department have been invigorating. Of all the debts incurred, the largest is to my wife Rita, who over more than three decades has witnessed (endured might be a more appropriate verb) and usually participated in the germination of these studies. I am indebted to the publishers of the books and journals in which these papers originally saw the light of day and those institutions and individuals who supplied the photographs. Finally, thanks are due to Liam Gallagher and Tom Symonds of the Pindar Press for considering these papers worthy of collecting together. Richard Marks Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge September 2011

Overviews and Taxonomies

I The Englishness of English Gothic Art? his paper does not seek to identify (or re-discover) traits by which English Gothic art and architecture may be defined. Rather, it is concerned with historiography: the role played by concepts of national mode and identity in narratives of the buildings and visual arts of England between the late twelfth and early sixteenth centuries. Behind the title, which is structured as an interrogative, lies a wider question: is it possible, even desirable, to write meaningfully about a ‘national’ art? The issue of an English ‘national’ art is a field that has been well-tilled in a number of recent studies, notably in the papers of two conferences: The Geographies of English: Landscape and the National Past 1880–1940, published in 2002; and Reassessing Nikolaus Pevsner, which appeared two years later.1 As their titles suggest, both collections range further than the middle ages (indeed, the former makes only passing reference to this period), but both contain much of relevance to medievalists. The locus classicus of the identification of art as a ‘national’ style and linked with the ‘spirit of an age’ is of course Pevsner’s The Englishness of English Art (Fig. 1).2 He was not breaking new ground. There had been

T

1 D. Peters Corbett, Y. Holt and F. Russell (eds), The Geographies of Englishness: Landscape and the National Past 1880-1940 (Studies in British Art 10) (New Haven and London, 2002); P. Draper (ed.), Reassessing Nikolaus Pevsner (Aldershot, 2004). For a recent wide-ranging survey of the historiography of medieval art see Conrad Rudolph, ‘Introduction: A Sense of Loss: An Overview of the Historiography of Romanesque and Gothic Art’, in C. Rudolph (ed.), A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe (Oxford, 2006), pp. 1–43. 2 N. Pevsner, The Englishness of English Art (London, 1956). This has been re-published by Penguin Books in several editions; the page references in this article are taken from the Penguin edition of 1993.

2

a renewed interest in ‘Englishness’ and English medieval art from the nineteenth century (especially in the context of the Gothic Revival) and further stimulated by a series of exhibitions of ‘English primitives’ at regular intervals from 1890, as Alexandrina Buchanan and Andrew Causey have discussed.3 Nationalism arising from the First World War added to this, as did the concept of ‘national character’ rooted in a pastoral England which emerged in the 1930s and found proponents in the likes of the historian Sir Arthur Bryant.4 This vision notably found expression in a series of books published between the 1930s and 1950s by Batsford under the heading of The Face of Britain, enfolded in seductively evocative dust-jackets designed by Brian Cook (Fig. 2). This veneration of the ‘traditional’ values of English landscape and rural crafts then perceived to be under threat of extinction through urbanization and industrialization has been studied by historical geographers, especially David Matless, who has applied Foucaultian notions of contestation and instability to claims to authority over rural spaces and activities.5 Less attention has been paid to the related (and sometimes overlapping) series of monographs published by Batsford between the First World War and the 1970s under such headings as British Art and Buildings, which brought medieval architecture and ancillary arts to both the general public and the scholarly world. Although the word ‘British’ recurs in the titles of the various Batsford series, the overwhelming majority of the books themselves are Anglocentric. The writings of John Harvey (of whom more anon) and other Batsford authors like the prolific J. C. Cox (parish churches and fittings), Aymer Vallance (on screens) and F. H. Crossley 3 A. Buchanan, ‘Perspectives of the Past: Perceptions of Late Gothic Art in England’, in R. Marks and P. Williamson (eds), Gothic. Art for England 1400–1547 (exhibition catalogue, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2003), pp. 128–139; idem, ‘Show and Tell: Late Medieval Art and the Cultures of Display’, in R. Marks (ed.), Late Gothic England: Art and Display (Donington, 2007), pp. 124–137; idem, ‘Perceptions of British Medieval Art’, in T. Ayers (ed.), The History of British Art 600–1600 (Tate Britain, Yale Center for British Art, Tate Publishing, London, 2008), pp. 247–259; A. Causey, ‘English Art and ‘The National Character’, 1933–34’, in Peters Corbett, Holt and Russell, Geographies of Englishness (as in note 1), pp. 275–302. 4 The idealization of English rural life dates back to the middle of the nineteenth century; for a summary of recent scholarship on the subject see P. Crossley, ‘Between Spectacle and History: Art History and the Medieval Exhibitions’, in Marks, Late Gothic England (as in note 3), p. 144; this article (pp. 138–153) is a very valuable contribution to the historiography of English medieval art. For Bryant, see Causey, ‘English Art’ (as in note 3), esp. pp. 278–280. 5 D. Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London, 1998).

the englishness of english gothic art

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1. Cover of N. Pevsner, The Englishness of English Art (Penguin edition, 1993.)

2. Dust-jacket designed by Brian Cook for H. Pakington, English Villages and Hamlets (Batsford, 4th ed revised 1945).

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and Katharine Esdaile (funerary monuments) meshed with the publishing house’s extolling of ancient craft skills such as stonemasonry and carpentry.6 To inject a personal note, my own adolescent interests in medieval art and architecture were nurtured by Batsford’s cheap paperback editions of Cox and Ford on English parish churches and Crossley on English abbeys. If the books emit a gentlemanly tweedy or clerical flavour this is not to undervalue the scholarship and contribution to knowledge of their authors. They were rooted in the antiquarian tradition, because at this time there was no other academic structure available for their ilk. Pevsner’s grounding was very different. No only did he bring to English art the perspectives of a non-Englishman, but also the vast knowledge of European art and architecture as well as intellectual grounding in the discipline of art history (as propounded by his doctoral supervisor Wilhelm Pinder). This formation was of course one he shared with other refugees from Nazism that have so enriched medieval art history in England (Saxl, Pächt and Zarnecki are names that immediately spring to mind). For these reasons — plus the fact that, as far as I am aware, Pevsner’s book still remains the only authoritative monograph on English artistic identity over the longue durée — it provides a convenient starting-point.7 The Englishness of English Art originated in the Reith Lectures broadcast on the wireless in 1955, and first appeared in the following year under this title (Fig. 1). However, the concept was already germinating in his mind over a decade earlier, in 1941–2, while he was giving lectures on English art at Birkbeck College in the University of London.8 The lectures more or less J. C. Cox, The English Parish Church (London, 1914); idem, The Parish Churches of England (edited with additional material by C. B. Ford, London, 1935, 1950); idem, English Church Fittings (London, 1923); A. Vallance, English Church Screens (London, 1936); idem, Greater English Church Screens (London, New York & Toronto, 1947); F. H. Crossley, English Church Monuments AD 1150–1550 (London, 1921); K. A. Esdaile, English Church Monuments 1510–1840 (London, 1946). This list is exemplary, not exhaustive. For Batsford and its eponymous proprietor, see Matless, Landscape (as in note 5), pp. 64, 68, 75, 129–133, 180; also P. Crossley, ‘Anglia Perdita. English Medieval Architecture and Neo-Romanticism’, in S. L’Engle and G. B. Guest (eds), Tributes to Jonathan J. G. Alexander. The Making and Meaning of Illuminated Medieval & Renaissance Manuscripts, Art & Architecture (London/ Turnhout, 2007), pp. 471–481, esp. 472–473. 7 Another seminal study by Paul Crossley is his ‘Introduction’ to Draper, Reassessing Nikolaus Pevsner, pp. 1–25 (as in note 1). 8 Pevsner, Englishness (as in note 2), pp. 9–10. I am indebted to Paul Crossley for clarifying the role played by the 1941–2 lecture series. 6

the englishness of english gothic art

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coincided with the publication by the Viennese art historian Dagobert Frey of his Englisches Wesen in der Bildenden Kunst (English Character in the Visual Arts), which made the same link between art and national psyche.9 Whereas Frey took a chronological approach, Pevsner used a series of diachronic casestudies as a means of categorization. The philosophical underpinnings of The Englishness of English Art are spelt out succinctly: ‘There is the spirit of an age, and there is national character. The existence of neither can be denied…’. Soon after a caveat is applied: ‘National character does not at all moments and in all situations appear equally distinct. The spirit of a moment may reinforce national character or repel it.’10 Determinants of the national character, amongst which meteorology features, are articulated: ‘A decent home, a temperate climate, and a moderate nation’, which finds expression in conservatism.11 This notion of a distinctive ‘geography of art’ (Kunstgeographie), the title of the first chapter in the book, was conceived by neither Pevsner nor Frey, but was inherited from Pinder, as Ute Engel has pointed out.12 Perpendicular architecture is the subject of the one chapter dedicated to the medieval period, but sprinkled throughout the book are observations about English medieval art in ways which demonstrate Pevsner’s enormous breadth of knowledge. For example, he sees Hogarth’s powers of observation and flair for portraying quotidian life as a characteristic of English art from Romanesque times via the marginalia and bas-de-page vignettes of Gothic illumination: ‘No continental country has anything like these riches of observed life in medieval art’ (Fig. 8).13 9 D. Frey, Englisches Wesen in der Bildenden Kunst (Stuttgart & Berlin, 1942). For an analysis of this and Pevsner’s Englishness of English Art see W. Vaughan, ‘Behind Pevsner: Englishness as an Art Historical Category’, in Peters Corbett, Holt and Russell, Geographies of Englishness, pp. 347–368. Also A. Causey, ‘Pevsner and Englishness’, in Draper, Reassessing Pevsner, pp. 161–174 (as in note 1). 10 Pevsner, Englishness (as in note 2), pp. 21, 23. 11 Pevsner, Englishness (as in note 2), p. 80. 12 U. Engel, ‘The formation of Pevsner’s art history: Nikolaus Pevsner in Germany 1902–1935’, in Draper, Reassessing Pevsner, pp. 29–55, esp. pp. 33–4 (as in note 1); idem, ‘British Art and the Continent’ in Ayers, History of British Art (as in note 3), pp. 53–80, esp. pp. 54–55. On the concept of Kunstgeographie see also T. Da Costa Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art (Chicago and London, 2004) and B. Kurmann-Schwarz, ‘Zur Geschichte der Begriffe “Kunstlandschaft” und “Oberrrhein” in der Kunstgeschichte’, in P. Kurmann and T. Zotz (eds), Historische Landschaft — Kunstlandschaft? Der Oberrhein im späten Mittelalter (Vorträge und Forschungen LXVIII. Herausgegeben vom Konstanzer Arbeitskreis für mittelalterliche Geschichte, Ostfildern, 2008), pp. 65–90. 13 Pevsner, Englishness (as in note 2), p. 45.

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The opening sentence of the chapter on Perpendicular firmly associates it with national identity: ‘There is little that is in every respect so completely and so profoundly English as are the big parish churches of the Late Middle Ages…’ (Fig. 3). As the chapter unfolds Pevsner links the ‘matter-of-factness of Perpendicular space and tracery’ with phonetics (‘the clipped sound of the English monosyllable’).14 Recently the relationship between language and architecture in medieval England has been revisited by Peter Draper.15 Pevsner also cites illogicality as an English quality: ‘The distaste of the English for carrying a thought or a system of thought to its logical extreme is too familiar to need comment’. Subsequently he appears to contradict this by citing rationalism/reasonableness as a feature of much English Gothic architecture and ventures into social causality, associating the architecture of this period with the growing influence of a mercantile class in late medieval England.16 Linearity as a distinctively English trait is the subject of the chapter appropriately entitled ‘Blake and the Flaming Line’. Pevsner has some difficulties with this signifier of English ethnic identity as he is forced to cite Irish manuscript illumination and even hesitantly the Iron Age Celts in tracing its origins. Indeed, for Pevsner as for many Batsford authors, English was synonymous with British.17 Decorated and Perpendicular Pevsner argues, are two sides of the same coin and hence both are reconcilably English traits, unified by ‘line’ — as we shall see, a familiar topos: ‘Decorated is the flowing line, Perpendicular is the straight line, but both are line and not body’. This he justifies through asserting that ‘The history of styles…can only be successful…if it is conducted in terms of polarities, that is in pairs of apparently contradictory qualities’.18 Pevsner, Englishness (as in note 2), pp. 90, 95. P. Draper, ‘English with a French Accent. Architectural Franglais in Late-TwelfthCentury England?’, in G. Clarke and P. Crossley (eds), Architecture and Language. Constructing Identity in European Architecture c.1000–c.1650 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 21–35; idem, The Formation of English Gothic. Architecture and Identity (New Haven and London, 2006), p. 53. 16 Pevsner, Englishness (as in note 2), pp. 101, 122–123. Paul Crossley believes that Pevsner’s emphasis on the significance of a burgeoning mercantile class was taken from Wilhelm Pinder’s Die Kunst der ersten Bürgerzeit bis zur Mitte des 15. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1937) (personal communication). 17 Pevsner, Englishness (as in note 2), pp. 136–137; see also Causey, ‘Pevsner and Englishness’ (as in note 9), p. 165. 18 Pevsner, Englishness (as in note 2), p. 24; also p. 132. 14 15

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3. Long Melford church (Suffolk) (photograph: National Monuments Record).

4. Wells Cathedral: Annunciation group (photograph: Victoria & Albert Museum).

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If one strand linked Pevsner with Frey and the Viennese school, a second found an echo in the theoretical standpoint of a number of contemporary scholars whose first language was English. Pevsner was editor of the Pelican History of Art series and the fact that it was to a very considerable extent structured around current national boundaries was determined by the concept of a geography of art. A number of volumes (arguably disproportionately large) were devoted to British art and architecture and it is instructive to look at the observations made by the authors of the three covering the Middle Ages.19 Geoffrey Webb’s Architecture in Britain. The Middle Ages (Harmondsworth, 1956; 2nd ed., 1965) eschewed any attempt to invoke a ‘national style’, but this is not the case with both Margaret Rickert and Lawrence Stone in their highly important monographs on painting and sculpture which first appeared respectively in 1954 and 1955. Margaret Rickert, an American art historian, invoked national character as a determinant of insular traits in English Gothic painting: ‘In the end, it was not the Channel that saved English art [from the ‘French Gothic flame’], but the sturdiness of the English temperament, which refused to surrender to fads but insisted on taking time to weigh the new elements and consider what, if anything, it wanted of them’.20 Rickert was far from alone amongst contemporary scholars in evoking national character, but those who followed this line were by no means in agreement as to what peculiarly English qualities shaped its Gothic art. For Joan Evans, author of the period 1307–1461 in the Oxford History of English Art series, they were ethereal: ‘The most shining beauties of its architecture depend, as English beauties should, on fortuitous changes of light and shadow’. We are in Constable or Turner country here. Evans again: ‘English art has the qualities of the art of a small country — it is more often decorative and pretty than monumental or noble’. Rickert attempted to identify consistent features of English medieval art: ‘love of nature, of the whimsical, and of rich decorative pattern’.21. This characterization was not new; over twenty-five years previously, Eric Millar I owe this observation to Paul Crossley. In the 1955 series plan, no fewer than seven volumes out of the total of about 50 were devoted to the British Isles. See S. Slive, ‘Nikolaus Pevsner’s contribution as editor of The Pelican History of Art Series’, in Draper, Reassessing Pevsner, pp. 73–86 (as in note 1). 20 M. Rickert, Painting in Britain. The Middle Ages (Harmondsworth, 1954), p. 7. A second edition was published in 1965. 21 J. Evans, English Art 1307–1461 (Oxford, 1949), pp. 223, 224; Rickert, Painting (as in note 20), p. 8. 19

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had identified lavish and robust ornament as a distinctive feature of English fourteenth-century illumination.22 In her concluding remarks, Rickert like Pevsner invoked line as a distinguishing trait: ‘On the technique of outline drawing…rests the continuity of English painting in the Middle Ages, and this is true not only of figural compositions but of the decorative work as well’.23 Significantly Francis Wormald, in his English Drawings of the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries (1952), conspicuously omitted any attempt to identify consistent ‘English’ traits in a medium which by its nature would appear to be prime evidence for ‘line’.24 Stone, primarily a renowned socio-economic historian, considered that English medieval sculpture was permeated by ‘a strong sense of dynamism and of movement’. Another passage is very reminiscent of Rickert: ‘the tendency to linear abstraction and rhythmic pattern, which again and again triumphed over more naturalistic styles imported from the Continent’. Stone concluded his Introduction with eloquent advocacy of the qualities of the insular carver: ‘His was an art circumscribed by somewhat narrow limits; but within these limits his resource and genius, inventiveness and power were certainly equal to those of his fellow-craftsmen in other countries. Though hemmed in by steep banks, the stream ran deep and fast’.25 There is more than an echo here of observations made by Arthur Gardner, the pre-eminent scholar of English medieval sculpture of a previous generation, which had appeared in print only four years earlier; Gardner cited a certain conservatism and of ‘a loving attention to craftsmanship of detail’ as distinctive traits of English sculpture.26 Pevsner was somewhat less impressed by the qualities of carving in England: ‘The English are not a sculptural nation’.27 He was however ignoring the sculptural treatment of surfaces in Early English and Decorated architecture and also overlooking the vast scale of losses. Stone

22 E. G. Millar, English Illuminated Manuscripts of the XIVth and XVth Centuries (Paris, 1928), p. ix. This passage was noted in Lucy Freeman Sandler, ‘Illuminated in the British Isles: French Influence and/or the Englishness of English Art 1285–1345’, Gesta, 45 no. 2 (2006), pp. 177–188 (p. 177). 23 Rickert, Painting (as in note 20), p. 218. 24 F. Wormald, English Drawings of the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries (London, 1952). 25 L. Stone, Sculpture in Britain. The Middle Ages (Harmondsworth, 1955), pp. 5–6. A second edition appeared in 1972. 26 A. Gardner, English Medieval Sculpture (Cambridge, revised and enlarged ed.1951), p. 1. 27 Pevsner, Englishness (as in note 2), p. 137.

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estimated that more than 90% of English medieval religious sculpture has been lost; I would put the scale of destruction even higher and almost total in the case of wood carving: the Annunciation group at Wells Cathedral is an all-too-rare survivor (Fig. 4).28 Unlike Rickert and Evans, absent from Stone is any attempt to link medieval sculpture with national character. As with Pevsner, the focus in both Stone and Rickert is on English art, but with less excuse as the word ‘Britain’, not ‘England’ is used in their titles. Works of art originating in Celtic cultures (and in some instances still located in Scotland and Ireland) are discussed solely in their respective chapters on the pre-Viking period, and neither book addresses the question of what is ‘British’ and what is ‘English’. English ethnicity looms large in the ideology of John Hooper Harvey (1911–1997), much of whose work appeared under the Batsford imprint, including his pioneering study of English late medieval architecture and its creators, the architects/masons. In common with Pevsner, Harvey (an architect by training) was the progeny of Hegelian Zeitgeist and also in common with Pevsner he considered Perpendicular architecture to be a (or the) quintessential national style; indeed he used this label as a chapter title in both Gothic England (1947) and in The Perpendicular Style, published three decades later (Fig. 5).29 Harvey pushed more explicitly the idea of Perpendicular as a manifestation of national character, for which his terms of reference were both vague and diverse. In Gothic England he speaks of ‘a fundamental mysticism which lies beneath the surface rawness of the English temperament; ideas hardly to be spoken in words or drawn in clear outline, but which reflect an inner world…’.30 The Perpendicular Style invokes the more quotidian virtues of practical commonsense and an aptitude for organization and improvization. To these ingredients Harvey added that of the ruler’s personality and character (and particularly Edward III) as both arbiter and imparter of taste. Some quotations from The Perpendicular Style give the flavour: ‘The reaction away from Curvilinear and the artistic licence which was its logical outcome lay in fundamental traits of English character, full of practical commonsense. Our deeply imbedded love of the line, especially

Stone, Sculpture (as in note 25), p. 2. J. Harvey, Gothic England. A Survey of National Culture 1300–1550 (London, 1947); idem, The Perpendicular Style 1330–1485 (London, 1978). 30 Harvey, Gothic England (as in note 29), p. 8. 28 29

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the clear outline, was offended by convolutions…England was ready to turn away in dislike, and for once found itself behind the personal taste of a great sovereign. Edward III was no ascetic…he was a soldier…[who] assured the creation of an English national style of architecture’. Again: ‘Perpendicular was the artistic style of the later Plantagenets and reflected their personalities and their manner of exercising a national sovereignty…The style…was an aesthetic as well as a structural and technical reflection of the political purpose which in the same period engaged in fighting the Hundred Years War’.31 In other passages Harvey equates the emergence of Perpendicular with the development of English as a literary language (an analogy shared with Pevsner) and of music as practised by composers like John Dunstable. In Harvey’s writings a celebration of distinctive English qualities is seasoned with a hint of superiority over the island’s Continental neighbours: ‘The greater part of England was, by the opening of Edward III’s reign, a highly civilised country. Embroidered hangings, clothes and accoutrements …illuminated books, were produced to a standard of exquisite quality hardly ever equalled, and in western Europe, never excelled.’32 And more in the same vein. It is not the least ironic of situations that similar theories of Zeitgeist and a synergy between art and national character were propounded on the one hand by a German-speaking art historian (Pevsner) opposed to the racial theories of fascism (Frey’s book was part of a Nazi research programme) and on the other by an English right-wing authoritarian, whose own fascist leanings have recently been exposed by Graham Macklin.33 Despite an occasional whiff from Harvey — more pronounced in his historical writings than in his architectural studies — the issue of art as a signifier of national identity this side of the Channel never developed the toxicity that it did in Germany firstly under Bismarck and then the Nazis.34 Nonetheless, it was perhaps sufficiently in evidence to account for the absence of any reference

Harvey, Perpendicular (as in note 29), pp. 159, 234. Harvey, Perpendicular (as in note 29), p. 42. 33 G. Macklin, ‘The two lives of John Hooper Harvey’, Patterns of Prejudice, 42, no. 2 (2008), pp. 167–190. 34 Crossley, ‘Between Spectacle and History’ (as in note 4), pp. 143–4; for the appropriation of German medieval art to fit the ideology of National Socialism see M. H. Caviness, ‘The Politics of Taste. An Historiography of ‘Romanesque’ Art in the Twentieth Century’, in C. Hourihane (ed.), Romanesque. Art and Thought in the Twelfth Century. Essays in Honor of Walter Cahn (Princeton, 2008), pp. 57–81, esp. pp. 75–6 31 32

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to Harvey’ s writings by Pevsner in The Englishness of English Art. It is also worth observing that some of Harvey’s pre-World War II contemporaries who were advocates of traditional rural life also admired aspects of Nazi Germany, notably Arthur Bryant.35 From the outset the association of style with transmitted national genetics did not go unchallenged. Jonathan Alexander has pointed out that as long ago as 1936 Meyer Schapiro attacked the premiss that art was an expression of national character. Not surprisingly it was the first aspect of these headings to disappear.36 Even before the publication of The Englishness of English Art, Tom Boase had rejected the nexus in his English Art 1100– 1216: ‘It is…seldom true to talk of the arts in terms of nationalism’. The concept is also absent from Peter Brieger’s volume on the period 1216–1307 in the same Oxford History of English Art series, published in 1957, where the traces of ‘spirit of the age’ which infiltrate into the Conclusion look strangely alien to the tenor of the book as a whole.37 Like Lawrence Stone, my own tutor George Zarnecki, in the two seminal monographs on English Romanesque sculpture he published in the early 1950s, remained mute on the subject — unsurprisingly considering his personal experiences of virulent nationalism.38 Curiously, absent from both the proponents and opponents of the concept of a national style in the middle ages was any appeal to contemporary sources. Had they done so, the critics of the construct would have rejoiced in the fact that there is little sign that medieval Englishmen and women had any perception of a ‘national’ architecture, as Jane Geddes has recently observed.39

35

Matless, Landscape (as in note 5), pp. 199–123; Macklin, ‘Harvey’ (as in note 33), p.

185. J. J. G. Alexander, ‘Medieval art and modern nationalism’, in G. R. Owen-Crocker and T. Graham (eds), Medieval Art: Recent Perspectives. A Memorial Tribute to C. R. Dodwell (Manchester and New York, 1998), p. 218. 37 T. S. R. Boase, English Art 1100–1216 (Oxford, 1953), p. 297; P. Brieger, English Art 1216–1307 (Oxford, 1957), pp. 271–4. 38 G. Zarnecki, English Romanesque Sculpture 1066–1140 (London, 1951); idem, Later English Romanesque Sculpture 1140–1210 (London, 1953). See also Peter Kidson’s obituary of George Zarnecki in The Burlington Magazine, 150 (2008), pp. 830–1. 39 J. Geddes, ‘Ideas and Images of Britain, 600–1600’, in Ayers, History of British Art, 19–52 (as in note 3), p. 38. 36

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5. Dust-jacket of J. Harvey, The Perpendicular Style 1330–1485 (Batsford, 1978).

6. Exeter Cathedral, nave (photograph: Christopher Wilson).

7. Windsor St George’s Chapel, nave (photograph: Christopher Wilson).

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8. Packham Clifford Hours (Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum MS 242, fol.55v) (photograph: Fitzwilliam Museum). 10. Dust-jacket of N. J. Morgan, Early Gothic Manuscripts (I) 1190–1250 (London, 1982).

9. Bedford Hours and Psalter (London, British Library MS Add. 42131, fol. 73r) (photograph: British Library Board). 11. Dust-jacket of P. Hebgin-Barnes, The Medieval Stained Glass of the County of Lincolnshire (Oxford, 1996).

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The Age of The Age of Chivalry In his Foreword to the Penguin edition of The Englishness of English Art, Pevsner wrote: ‘It has been gratifying to see that no changes worth mentioning had to be made between 1955 and 1963’.40 The second edition of Rickert’s Painting in Britain. The Middle Ages, published in 1965, also retained the passages about national character and consistent identifiable traits. But by the late 60s and 70s issues of ‘national style’ as well as Zeitgeist had disappeared from the scholarly radar screen. Despite the occasional late echo from historians rather than art historians, it would be a brave scholar who would argue today that English art and architecture between the late twelfth and early sixteenth centuries exhibits recognizable stylistic continuity, let alone seek to identify ethnic characteristics underpinning it.41 Only the most blinkered I suspect would maintain that the naves of Exeter Cathedral and St George’s Chapel Windsor (Figs 6, 7) are both manifestations of one and the same national character, or that a consistent interest in linearity unites the Packham Clifford Hours and the Bedford Hours and Psalter (Figs 8, 9). From the 1960s, in the place of ‘grand narrative’, three distinct trends have emerged, trends which coincided with, and were fuelled by the spread of art history as an academic discipline in British and American universities. The first was the systematic and scholarly cataloguing of medieval manuscript and glass painting through The Survey of Illuminated Manuscripts in the British Isles (Fig. 10), published by Harvey Miller under the general editorship of Jonathan Alexander; and the English volumes in the international Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi project (Fig. 11); the first publications of both appeared in the 1970s. The two series differ in that whereas the Illuminated Manuscripts are selective, the Corpus Vitrearum leaves no stone (or more accurately no sliver of glass) unturned. All three of the Illuminated Manuscripts series for the Gothic period eschew the concept of continuity, although to varying extents argue for consistent stylistic traits in their respective periods. All of them have made available far more material than had hitherto been the case, dressed with the necessary bibliographical paraphernalia and copious illustrations, etc. Pevsner, Englishness (as in note 2), p. 11. Notably C. Richmond, ‘The Visual Culture of Fifteenth-Century England’, in A. J. Pollard (ed.), The Wars of the Roses (Basingstoke, 1995), pp. 186–209. 40 41

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Secondly, there have been more detailed and better-informed explorations of individual and groups of buildings and artefacts. An important vehicle here is the annual British Archaeological Association Conference, the proceedings of which first appeared in 1978. These have tended to be focussed around cathedrals and great churches and thus have supplemented a series of scholarly monographs on English cathedrals which began with York Minster (1977).42 Through all these and many other studies, England’s medieval art has become better known and interpreted. While the underlying assumption remains that there was an English Gothic, its diversity has been made more apparent: there is more than one English Gothic. At the same time, a more nuanced and refined exploration of its relationship with the Continent has emerged. Doctrinally England was part of Western (Catholic) Christendom and the religious orders established here were important agents for the movement of art and architecture: Christopher Wilson has highlighted the role of the Cistercians in introducing Gothic architecture into northern England.43 Tom Boase and later Walter Cahn demonstrated the inseparability of manuscript illumination in southern England and northern France during the late twelfth century, coining the label ‘Channel Style’.44 Madeline Caviness extended the ‘Channel Style’ concept to embrace stained glass by showing that the glazing of the eastern parts of Canterbury Cathedral in the same period not only shared the same design features as northern French schemes but that some of the glaziers moved between the principal programmes.45 As long ago as 1949 Jean Bony placed Canterbury Cathedral within a group of north-eastern French buildings which he saw as ‘resistant to the Chartres model’, a concept revisited and glossed recently by Christopher Wilson.46 All

G. E Aylmer and R. Cant (eds), A History of York Minster (Oxford, 1977). C. Wilson, ‘The Cistercians as “Missionaries of Gothic” in Northern England’, in C. Norton and D. Park (eds), Cistercian Art and Architecture in the British Isles (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 86–116. 44 Boase, English Art 1100–1216 (as in note 37), pp. 181–184; W. Cahn, ‘St Albans and the Channel Style in England’, in The Year 1200: A Symposium (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1975), pp. 187–230. 45 M. H. Caviness, The Early Stained Glass of Canterbury Cathedral c.1175–1220 (Princeton, 1977), esp. pp. 49–58, 77–100; idem, The Windows of Christ Church Cathedral Canterbury (Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi Great Britain vol. II, London, 1981), passim. 46 J. Bony, ‘The Resistance to Chartres in Early Thirteenth-Century Architecture’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 3rd series, 20/21 (1957–8), pp. 35–52; C. 42 43

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of this, to varying degrees, problematizes the notion of a ‘national’ English Gothic. In some instances, recognizably foreign influences were assimilated into English visual idioms. The French ‘band window’ formula was applied within the context of English Decorated window design (Fig.12). Christopher Wilson has put into perspective the notion of Perpendicular as the ‘national style’ by identifying much of its origins in French Rayonnant architecture (‘There is a very real sense in which Perpendicular is Rayonnant taken to its ultimate conclusion’).47 Lucy Sandler and others have drawn attention to the reception (and re-working) of Italianate modelling and spatial settings in English fourteenth-century painting in various media, largely but not exclusively filtered through Parisian art of the 1320s and 30s (Fig. 13).48 The focus has not been entirely on either style or dependency on foreign models. George Henderson followed by Peter Klein, Nigel Morgan and Suzanne Lewis have underlined the indigenous predilection for highstatus illuminated Apocalypse manuscripts in the thirteenth century.49 These two strands, which might loosely be categorized as discovery and recovery, were rooted in the discourse of empiricsm. The third began to make its impact in the 1980s with the adoption by some medievalists of what was then the ‘New Art History’ with its social readings of art (or

Wilson, ‘Lausanne and Canterbury: A ‘Special Relationship’ Re-considered’, in P. Kurmann and Martin Rohde (eds), Die Kathedrale von Lausanne und ihr Marienportal im Kontext der europäisichen Gotik, Scrinium Friburgense, 13 (Berlin and New York, 2004), pp. 89–124. 47 C. Wilson, ‘The English Response to French Gothic Architecture, c.1200–1350’, in J. Alexander and P. Binski (eds), Age of Chivalry. Art in Plantagenet England 1200–1400 (exhibition catalogue, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1987), p. 82; idem, ‘ “ Excellent, New and Uniforme”: Perpendicular Architecture c.1400–1547’, in Marks and Williamson, Gothic. Art for England (as in note 3), pp. 99, 103. 48 L. F. Sandler, ‘A Follower of Jean Pucelle in England’, Art Bulletin, 52 (1970), pp. 363–372; idem, The Psalter of Robert de Lisle in the British Library (London, 1999); see also her discussion of French and English illumination of the same period in ‘Illuminated in the British Isles’ (as in note 22); P. Binski and D. Park, ‘A Ducciesque Episode at Ely: The Mural Decorations of Prior Crauden’s Chapel’, in M. Ormrod (ed.), England in the Fourteenth Century. Proceedings of the 1985 Harlaxton Symposium (Woodbridge, 1986), pp. 28–41; C. Norton, ‘Klosterneuburg and York: Artistic Cross-Currents at an English Cathedral, c. 1330’, Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, 46/47(1993/94), pp. 519–532. 49 See the bibliographies and discussion of individual manuscripts in N. J. Morgan, Early Gothic Manuscripts (II) 1250–1285 (A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles Volume Four, London, 1988), pp. 16–19 and catalogue entries. Also S. Lewis, Reading Images. Narrative Discourse and Reception in the Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Apocalypse (Cambridge, 1995).

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‘visual culture’ — a label abhorred by traditionalists), which challenged the discipline’s historic monolithic focus on style, aesthetic value-judgements and attribution in favour of alternative narratives embracing deconstruction, Rezeptiontheorie, function, audience and meaning, the challenging of the notion of the great artist/work of art and introducing feminism and latterly gender. Michael Camille and others contested the use of images in the likes of the Luttrell Psalter as mirrors of life as it was lived in the fourteenth century, arguing that on the contrary they were active as opposed to reflective agents in the construction of history and self-identity; he also applied Bakhtinian theories of carnival as controlled subversion to marginalia and misericords, etc.(Fig. 8)50 In this environment the writing of ‘national’ meta-narratives did not sit comfortably. In the midst of this intellectual transformation of the discipline of Art History occurred the Age of Chivalry. Art in Plantagenet England 1200–1400 exhibition, held at the Royal Academy in 1987 (Fig. 14). Curated by Jonathan Alexander, the exhibition and its catalogue, co-edited with Jonathan by Paul Binski, was a seminal event in the historiography of English Gothic art: a Summa in which the varying fruits of past and recent research were harvested and where the New Art History rubbed shoulders with the old.51 On reflection — and indeed I think at the time, the inclusion of such a wide spectrum of intellectual enquiry came across as complementary rather than adversarial. Unsurprisingly the exhibition made no attempt to define an overarching national Gothic style. It did however chime with a reaction against the notions of a hegemonic culture — in the case of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, that of Paris and the Ile de France. As Jonathan Alexander wrote in the catalogue: ‘It is no longer the case that scholars see English Gothic art as some sort of provincial offshoot under the shadow of French Gothic art…’.52 Hegemony depends of course on where you are and who is exercising it.

50 M. Camille, ‘Labouring for the Lord: The Ploughman and the Social Order in the Luttrell Psalter’, Art History, 10 (1987), pp. 423–454; subsequently incorporated into Mirror in Parchment. The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of England (London, 1998); idem, Image on the Edge. The Margins of Medieval Art (London, 1992). 51 Alexander and Binski, Age of Chivalry (as in note 47), p. 82. See also the perceptive observations on the exhibition in Crossley, ‘Between Spectacle and History’(as in note 4), esp. pp. 144–147. 52 Alexander and Binski, Age of Chivalry (as in note 47), p. 13.

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13. York Minster nave west window: head of St John the Evangelist (photograph: Richard Marks). 12. Stanford on Avon church (Northants.), chancel window (photograph: Richard Marks).

14. Cover of Age of Chivalry. Art in Plantagenet England 1200–1400 catalogue (London, Royal Academy of Arts, 1987).

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16. Tapestry of John Lord Dynham (New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, 1960 (60.127.1)) (photograph: The Metropolitan Museum of Art).

15. Westminster Abbey: Westminster Retable (detail) (photograph: Conway Library, Courtauld Institute of Art).

17. Wilton Diptych (London, National Gallery) (photograph: National Gallery).

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From the Irish nationalist perspective, as Colum Hourihane reminds us, the Gothic style was perceived not in terms of a dominant French cultural form but as a manifestation of an alien (English) occupying power.53 Only one essay in the Age of Chivalry catalogue (by Christopher Wilson) explicitly explored the relationship between France and England and that in respect of architecture. As he observed, the major English early thirteenth-century cathedrals were the equals of their French contemporaries in ‘aesthetic sophistication’ and were more costly — unsurprisingly perhaps as at the time a dozen of Catholic Europe’s richest 40 sees were in England. 54 Significantly too the concept of a ‘Court Style’ rooted in the Paris of Louis IX and his successors, already under attack by Paul Binski amongst others, only attracted fleeting mention (Fig. 15).55 Gothic. Art for England The Age of Chivalry took 1400 as its terminus ante. It is a curious paradox that while Harvey and Pevsner predicated much of their case for the ‘Englishness of English art’ on Perpendicular architecture, they were far more reticent about the pictorial arts of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Indeed, in the welter of publications on English Gothic art that have appeared since Pevsner’s time, the emphasis very decidedly has been on the late twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. This bias is epitomized by the joint acquisition in 1929 of the Luttrell Psalter and Bedford Hours and Psalter by the British Museum. Whereas the former was published in a lavish part-facsimile by Eric Millar only three years later, it was not until 1962 that even a brief article was dedicated to the latter (by Derek Turner)(Fig. 9).56 Even leaving aside the obvious appeal of the Luttrell Psalter, this is a remarkable longeur. The same picture emerges on the larger canvas of the general surveys of English Gothic art. Rickert only devoted one chapter (out of 8) and 22 pages (out of 226 text pages) to English painting from c. 1425. Stone was slightly C. Hourihane, Gothic Art in Ireland, 1169–1550: Enduring Vitality (New Haven, 2003), pp. 19–34. 54 Wilson, ‘The English Response to French Gothic Architecture’ (as in note 47), p. 74. 55 P. Binski, The Painted Chamber at Westminster (Society of Antiquaries of London Occasional Paper 9, London, 1986); idem, Westminster Abbey and the Plantagenets. Kingship and the Representation of Power 1200–1400 (New Haven and London, 1995), pp. 8–9, 44–46, 112,175. 56 E. G. Millar, The Luttrell Psalter (London, 1932); D. H. Turner, ‘The Bedford Hours and Psalter’, Apollo, 76 (1962), pp. 265–270. 53

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more generous: two chapters for the period c.1410–1540 and 39 pages (from 233).57 With regard to wall-painting, Tristram’s monumental volumes on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were followed solely by a more modest monograph on the fourteenth century.58 Quantitative analysis of course is not the only measure that can be applied and the balance has begun to be redressed in recent decades, especially in one particular field, as we will see shortly. A factor in this relative neglect of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries has been an underlying assumption that the history of art and architecture at this time was determined by, and hence mirrored, political history: i.e. just as England descended into internecine strife and chaos from which it was rescued only by the Tudor monarchy, so in the visual arts it was very much downhill all the way from the glories of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries until the Renaissance crossed the Channel in the sixteenth century. As a result, there has been a perception that the Late Gothic period at best was an ‘ Age of Transition’ sandwiched between peaks of creativity.59 I suspect that another barrier is that, with the exception of Perpendicular architecture, whose salient technical and design features had been established before1400, the diversity exhibited by English art after this date does not lend itself to being moulded into a neat linear formalist narrative. The picture is not merely one of stylistic heterogeneity, but also of much greater (or more apparent) regional, variation than hitherto. For the first time too the scale of imported works of art and of numbers of immigrant craftsmen become significant. Uncertainty over the parameters of Late Gothic art in England extends into chronology: when does ‘Gothic’ England come to an end? This depends on which of the alternative determinants (style, patronage, religion etc) is adopted. Thus the terminus ante in the Pelican History of Art and Oxford History of Art has varied between 1461 (Evans) and 1540 (Stone).60 The Corpus Vitrearum county survey volumes have opted for the 1550s and in placing its endpoint as late as 1600, the recent medieval volume in

Rickert, Painting (as in note 20); Stone, Sculpture (as in note 25). E. W. Tristram, English Medieval Wall Painting: The Twelfth Century (London, 1944); idem, English Medieval Wall Painting: The Thirteenth Century (London, 1950); idem, English Medieval Wall Painting: The Fourteenth Century (London, 1954). 59 As in D. Gaimster and P. Stamper (eds), The Age of Transition. The Archaeology of English Culture.1400–1600 (Oxford, 1997). 60 Evans, English Art 1307–1461 (as in note 21); Stone, Sculpture (as in note 25). 57 58

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the History of British Art series has emphasized continuities in the secular sphere.61 The study of this period therefore raises once again the defining of a ‘national’ art — or rather, a period-specific ‘national art’: What should be included and what excluded under the label of English Late Gothic art: is it ‘art of England’, limited either to what was made by indigenous craftsmen, or also encompassing the output of foreign-born artists resident in England? Is it ‘art for England’ — i.e. taking into consideration works of art created abroad — primarily in France (especially Paris) and increasingly the southern Netherlands — which were commissioned or purchased by English patrons (Figs 16, 19). The response depends on the kind of Art History that is being written. Seen from the perspectives of patronage, consumption, function and reception, to confine the history of art in England to what is deemed to be the work of indigenous craftsmen would be to present a very confused and distorted picture, especially at the highest levels. It is often difficult, sometimes even pointless, to characterize a work as ‘English’ or ‘foreign’. Judgement is still out as to the nationalities of the painter of the Wilton Diptych, owing to lack of any comparable extant works, and also of the carvers of the ranks of saints in Henry VII’s Chapel, Westminster Abbey (Figs 17, 18).62 The Donne Triptych is self-evidently the work of Hans Memling and was executed in Bruges (Fig. 19), but what label should be applied to the tomb of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick (d.1439) a collaborative exercise involving several craftsmen, including the ‘Dutchman’ Bartholomew Lambespringe, who chased and gilded the earl’s bronze effigy (Fig. 20)? It is unhelpful to distinguish between the Donne Triptych and the glazing of Fairford (Fig. 21), on the basis that one was painted in Flanders and the other was made by immigrant craftsmen from the same region. The Donne Triptych and a Fairford window were displayed alongside indigenous artefacts in the Gothic. Art for England 1400–1547 exhibition held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2003/4 because, more

Ayers, History of British Art (as in note 3). For a summary of conflicting opinions on the nationalities of the carvers of the Henry VII Chapel stone figures see P. Lindley, ‘ “The singuler mediacions and praiers of al the holie companie of Heven”: Sculptural Functions and Forms in Henry VII’s Chapel’, in T. TattonBrown and R. Mortimer (eds), Westminster Abbey The Lady Chapel of Henry VII (Woodbridge, 2004), 275–293, esp. pp. 287–293. 61 62

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unequivocally than the Age of Chivalry exhibition, its guiding principle was the desire to embed the art of the period within wider cultural contexts (Fig. 22).63 As a consequence the Gothic Art for England exhibition was more interdisciplinary than its predecessor, a methodology which did not meet with universal approval amongst art historians, some of whom (including Willibald Sauerländer), lamented what they perceived to be its subordination of style and attribution to historical criteria.64 Prominent too in Gothic. Art for England was a new focus which has blossomed since the 1980s, one in which the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries have figured prominently. Intention, meaning and function have retained their place in the cultural agenda, but reception theory has morphed into religion. Instigated by the work of Hans Belting, David Freedberg, Henk Van Os and others and inter alia drawing on the anthropological models (especially ritual theory) of the likes of Clifford Geertz, the Turners and William Christian Jr, the emphasis has been on imagery and buildings as part of the frame of religious practices, both collective (i.e. liturgical) and personal — and hence whose purposes first and foremost were devotional (although the role of aesthetics in devotion remains problematic. This in turn has led to a broadening of the canon beyond what is predicated on aesthetic ‘quality’ to encompass parish churches and their fittings and furnishings and imagery in manuscripts hitherto considered unworthy of attention. In this process what is socially, visually and iconographically distinctive about English late medieval religious imagery and what is normative in respect of western Catholicism is emerging. For example, the Pietà, an image known in Italy by the middle of the fourteenth century, had reached northern Europe, including England, by the late 1380s. There were a number of variations on the theme and surviving representations suggest that one in which the Virgin touches her veil was much favoured in England (Fig. 23).65 This aspect of scholarship is one where the increasing cross-fertilization of disciplines is well to the fore, inter alia fostered by the growth of interdisciplinary Centres of Medieval Studies in universities and the popularity of the annual Kalamazoo, Harlaxton and

Marks and Williamson, Gothic. Art for England (as in note 3). W. Sauerländer, review of Gothic. Art for England in Apollo, 159 (2004), pp. 59–60. The review by N. Coldstream took much the same line (Burlington Magazine, 145 (2003), pp. 869–871); see also Crossley, ‘Between Spectacle and History’ (as in note 4), pp. 147–153. 65 R. Marks, Image and Devotion in Late Medieval England (Stroud, 2004), pp. 123– 143. 63 64

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18. Westminster Abbey, Henry VII’s Chapel interior sculpture (photograph: Richard Marks).

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19. Hans Memling: Donne Triptych centre panel (London, National Gallery) (photograph: National Gallery).

20. Warwick, Beauchamp Chapel, tomb of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick (d. 1439) (photograph: R. Marks).

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21. Fairford church (Glos.), east window of chancel south chapel (photograph: Keith Barley).

22. Dust-jacket of Gothic. Art for England 1400–1547 catalogue.

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23. Breadsall church (Derbyshire), alabaster Pietà (photograph: Richard Marks).

24. John Thornton: panel from York Minster east window (photograph: Dean and Chapter of York Minster).

25. Glatton (Cambs.), St Nicholas’s church (photograph: Richard Marks).

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26. St Neot church (Cornwall), north aisle (Borlase) window (photograph: Richard Marks).

27. St Neot church (Cornwall), north aisle window (detail) (photograph: Richard Marks).

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Leeds conferences. As regards England, in the van of revisionist scholarship on late medieval religion and its imagery have been historians, above all Margaret Aston and Eamon Duffy, and literary specialists such as Gail McMurray Gibson and Kathleen Kamerick, all of whom have roamed freely over territory previously the preserve of art historians.66 Amongst the latter, Paul Binski has added a new dimension to the understanding of English thirteenth- and fourteenth-century architecture and art by embedding it within contemporary political, intellectual and spiritual developments and pastoral concerns.67 In a real sense, it is cultural history rather than art history that is making the intellectual running today. Whither Now? The titles in the Oxford History of Art series and Phaidon’s Art and Ideas volumes suggest that the current flow is against monographs on ‘national’ art, at least within the western hemisphere. As art historians we are creatures of our own time. England is a different country from that of Pevsner’s era — less ethnically homogenous and more culturally diverse, factors which consciously or otherwise have impacted on the discipline of Art History: difference, not uniformity, is today’s mantra. No longer too is it acceptable to relegate wider cultural perspectives to a chapter or section labelled ‘Historical Background’ or towards crude equating of artistic developments with political events: art history does not dance to the same tune as history in its various manifestations, but has its own autonomy.68 I have no intention of assuming the powers of clairvoyancy in predicting future directions of research on English medieval art, but will close by highlighting one potentially rewarding approach, which might be turned 66 Notably M. Aston, England’s Iconoclasts. Volume 1 Laws Against Images (Oxford, 1988); and E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars. Traditional Religion in England c.1400–c.1580 (New Haven and London, 1992); G.M. Gibson, The Theater of Devotion. East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago and London, 1989); K. Kamerick, Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages. Image Worship and Idolatry in England 1350–1500 (New York, 2002). 67 Binski, Westminster Abbey (as in note 55); idem, Becket’s Crown. Art and Imagination in Gothic England 1170–1300 (New Haven and London, 2004). 68 As pointed out by Willibald Sauerländer, ‘From Stilus to Style: Reflections on the Fate of a Nation’, Art History, 6 (1983), pp. 253–270; idem, review of the Age of Chivalry in The Burlington Magazine 130 (1988), pp. 149–151. See also Crossley, ‘Between Spectacle and History’ (as in note 4), pp. 150–151.

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geocultural. Just as there is more than one history of English Gothic art, so there are several Gothic Englands, whose physical, artistic, social and devotional boundaries could be elucidated by applying the kinds of overlaying and overlapping human and natural considerations (and complexities) identified in a recent essay by the urban historian Derek Keene. These embrace geography, topography, communications, demography, occupational and familial networks, prosperity (or its absence), trade, manufacture, markets, ecclesiastical institutions and jurisdictions and local administrative structures and patronage.69 There is the England which culturally forms part of the Continent (especially northern Europe) and with which it is linked rather than separated by the Channel and North Sea. Here a key issue is that of geographical parameters: are they defined by the borders of the modern national state or by those of medieval realms? The former of course do not equate with the latter, which in addition fluctuated during the course of the Middle Ages. Does it make sense, for example, to ignore those parts of present-day France which formed part of the Angevin Empire in the twelfth century when considering English Romanesque art? And then there is the England composed of regions. In respect of architecture, a pioneering study was T. D. Atkinson’s Local Style in English Architecture, a Batsford publication of 1947; subsequently Pevsner’s magisterial Buildings of England series has been an indispensable research tool; both amongst other studies have underlined the diversity of design in parish churches throughout the country, especially in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries (Figs 3, 25).70 Here too wider cultural considerations have enormous potential. In respect of certain media, for example stained glass, London may well emerge as of less significance in the fifteenth century than Coventry and York, where John Thornton, evidently a leading practitioner of the craft, was employed (Fig. 24). The historiographical concentration on East Anglia (which itself comprised more than one region) needs redressing as it can give the impression that nowhere else was of any artistic importance, especially in the later Middle Ages. To comprehend why architecture, screens

69 D. Keene, ‘National and Regional Identities’ in Marks and Williamson, Gothic. Art for England (as in note 3), pp. 46–55. 70 T. D. Atkinson, Local Style in English Architecture. An Enquiry into its Origin and Development (London, New York and Toronto, 1947); For the Buildings of England see P. Crossley, ‘Introduction’ in Draper, Reassessing Pevsner (as in note 1), pp. 19–21.

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and stained glass are so different in eastern England from, say, the West Country it is necessary to consider the respective landholding patterns and social structures as well as devotional concerns: the early sixteenth-century windows of the parish church of St Neot in Cornwall are instructive in this respect (Figs 26, 27).71 Nevertheless it remains a sine qua non to date, locate stylistically and even attribute works of art like the St Neot’s windows — also to distinguish between what is original and what is restored (particularly an issue with stained glass and textiles). To do so means the application of the subject-specific skills of the art historian. I hope that Willibald Sauerländer would approve of this affirmation of ‘traditional’ values. Acknowledgements I am indebted to Colum Hourihane for the invitation to participate in this conference, which turned out to be so stimulating. Also to Paul Crossley for reading this paper; it has been improved immeasurably by his comments, suggestions and references. A fortuitous meeting with Timothy Auger at a school reunion dinner shed invaluable light on the history of Batsford and its founders as well as on the personality of John Harvey. The following illustrations are reproduced by permission of: 21 (Keith Barley), 9 (British Library Board), 15 (Conway Library, Courtauld Institute of Art), 8 (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge), 16 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), 17, 19 (National Gallery, London), 3 (National Monuments Record), 4 (Victoria and Albert Museum, London), 6, 7 (Professor Christopher Wilson), 24 (York Minster, Dean and Chapter).

71 See J. Mattingly, ‘Stories in the Glass — Reconstructing the St Neot Pre-Reformation Glazing Scheme’, Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, new series 2, vol. 3 (2000), pp. 9–55.

II Medieval Stained Glass: Recent and Future Trends in Scholarship *

I

n 1904, Montague Rhodes James, Provost successively of King’s College Cambridge and Eton College, wrote one of his celebrated ghost stories, entitled The Treasure of Abbot Thomas.1 In this tale, an antiquary named Somerton de-coded some clues hidden within the texts and lettering depicted on three panels of stained glass from Steinfeld Abbey in Germany which had found their way to England. What they revealed led Somerton to seek in the former monastery the ten thousand pieces of gold which Abbot Thomas had hidden there in the early sixteenth century. This ‘ripping yarn’ ends badly for Somerton: he fails to recover the treasure because he neglected to heed the warning that it was protected by a guardian, who induced in him a complete mental breakdown by endeavouring to press ‘its cold kind of face…against my own’ and with ‘several…legs or arms or tentacles or something’ which clung to Somerton’s body. The story could be seen as a solemn warning against using scholarly enquiry for material gain; more specifically, it might be interpreted as a deterrent against studying medieval stained glass. This was not the author’s intention; on the contrary, James,

* This paper is a revised version of a lecture given to the British Archaeological Association at the Society of Antiquaries of London on 4 April 2001 as part of its Millenium Review Lecture series. I am grateful to the Association for the invitation to deliver this lecture and to the Society of Master Glass-Painters for the opportunity to publish it in the Journal. 1 The Ghost Stories of M. R. James (1932, 2nd ed., London, 1974), pp. 151–179. For the Steinfeld glass, see W. Neuss (ed.), Die Glasmalereien aus dem Steinfelder Kreuzgang (Mönchen Gladbach, 1955); D. G. King, ‘The Steinfeld Cloister Glazing’, Gesta, XXXVII/2 (1998), pp. 201–210.

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whose academic fame was as a cataloguer of medieval manuscripts, retained a keen interest in the medium all his life. In The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, James raised a number of aspects of the medium which in respect of recent art-historical scholarship, have proved quite prescient, notably those of function, intention and interpretation, audiences and continued life of windows and individual panels. James, one suspects, would be surprised, if not horrified, to find himself categorised as a postmodernist semioticist and the same is true of that generation of international scholars who, in the two decades or so after the end of the Second World War established medieval stained glass as a field worthy of serious art-historical enquiry. And it is this group which is the point of departure for this paper. Reviewing the scholarship of the past fifty years might be said to be a generous interpretation of the word ‘recent’, but it is defensible in the longue durée of medieval writings on window glass which go back to the seventh century. I will not be conducting a historiographical excavation, systematically tunnelling down through successive strata of scholarship — given the size and diversity of the subject and the sheer volume of publications on stained glass, this would not be particularly helpful. Despite the title of the paper, nor am I going to be so rash as to forecast the future by making any sweeping predictions: the only safe bet is that the directions intellectual enquiry will take are bound to be quite different from any that can be anticipated. To know where we are, we have to know where we came from. The seminal event in modern studies of medieval stained glass was the foundation of the Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi project in 1952.2 The driving force was Hans Hahnloser, professor of the History of Art at Berne University, in association with his colleague Ellen Beer, Hans Wentzel in Germany, a quartet from France (Louis Grodecki and three Jeans — Lafond, Taralon and Verrier) and Eva Frodl-Kraft from Austria. They had been scarred by the experience of the two world wars, which had seen the destruction of inadequately recorded important ensembles which had not been deemed

2 Articles on the history of the Corpus Vitrearum include L. Grodecki, ‘Introduction’, in Corpus Vitrearum, Histoire et Etat actuel de l’enterprise internationale (Vienna, 1982), pp. 15–19; F. Perrot, ‘Chronologie des activités’, in ibid, pp. 21–23; E. J. Beer, ‘Von Bern nach Bern – Fast ein Jübilaum, Gedanken zum 16. Internationalem Kolloquium des Corpus Vitrearum in Bern 1991’, in idem (ed.), Corpus Vitrearum, Tagung für Glasmalereiforschung, Akten des 16. Kolloquiums in Bern 1991 (Berne/Stuttgart, 1991), pp. 17–22.

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worthy of removal and safe storage. A major casualty of the 1914–18 conflict were the windows of Rheims Cathedral and if more care was taken during the Second World War, it still witnessed the loss of glazing of the calibre of the Frauenkirche in Lübeck. Nor could the English claim the moral high ground. The windows of major monuments like Canterbury and King’s College Chapel Cambridge were removed, yet the same measures were not taken inter alia in respect of fragmentary yet nonetheless historically significant remains at Coventry and in Henry VII’s Chapel, Westminster Abbey (Fig. 1). Hahnloser and the others were not only determined to safeguard the European glass heritage, they were also dedicated to ensuring that what survived should be properly studied and recorded. After 1945, the opportunity was there to carry out extensive photographic campaigns on the major monuments in France and Germany as they were removed from storage and re-installed; indeed Grodecki’s first task after the war was the establishment of a national stained glass photographic archive.3 The Corpus Vitrearum would allow for the publication of photographs, together with a detailed inventory, not only of every medieval stained glass window, but every panel, in Europe, whether in a church, domestic building, or museum. The methodology was rooted in nineteenth-century taxonomy, with the model for the catalogue provided by the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum, which like the Corpus Vitrearum, remains in progress to this day. Most of the founder-members came from within the discipline of art history as it had evolved within the various countries — Grodecki for example, with the architectural historian Jean Bony had been a student of Henri Focillon — and intellectually they remained, to a greater or lesser extent, within the current art-historical discourse of empiricism, stylistic analysis and iconographical identification and description.4 This outlook determined the format of the Corpus Vitrearum. The Guidelines for publication as agreed by the member-countries in 1958 are still in force, although they have been revised on several occasions.5 As an international venture, the principle of uniformity extends to page size (although this has been modified as the range of publications has diversified) and blue binding

3 M. H. Caviness, ‘Louis Grodecki (1910–1982)’, in H. Damico (ed.), Medieval Scholarship. Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline Volume 3: Philosophy and the Arts (New York and London, 2000), pp. 307–321 (p. 308). 4 Caviness, ‘Grodecki’, p. 307. 5 Corpus Vitrearum/Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi Guidelines (3rd ed., 2001).

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with gold lettering. Under each building and where appropriate under each window and even individual panel, there are headings for Documentation, Donors and Heraldry, Iconography, Condition, Colour and Technique, Style and Design and Date. The emphasis is on accurate and detailed description and on assembling all the available documentation. Window and panel numbering systems were devised, although the variety of church plans and window design has meant that uniformity across the member countries has never been achievable. Documentation includes not only relevant archives like building accounts and wills relating to the glazing, but also restoration history and antiquarian sources.6 The inclusion of the restoration documentation is vital, because the study of stained glass has been bedevilled by problems of authenticity, as anyone familiar with Canterbury Cathedral will be aware.7 Hahnloser and his collaborators insisted that the catalogue should include diagrams or photographs hatched or otherwise coded to show all identifiable restorations. Their inclusion necessitated the involvement of conservators; indeed one of the most fruitful aspects of the project has been the mutual interdependence and collaboration of academic, conservator and scientist in campaigns to preserve this fragile medium. Nor has scholarship been confined to art historians. The study of ancient glass in England has long been enriched by antiquaries and enthusiasts — one only has to recall the work of Charles Winston, G. McNeil Rushforth and, more recently, that of Hilary Wayment and the late William Cole.8 In the 1950s the leading expert was the Revd. Christopher Woodforde, whose studies on medieval glass in Somerset and East Anglia were founded on the notion

The distortions caused by the inclusion of antiquarian material only for sites where glass survives have been pointed out by Christopher Norton in a review of P. Hebgin-Barnes, The Medieval Stained Glass of the County of Lincolnshire, CVMA Great Britain Summary Catalogue vol. 3 (London, 1996), in Medieval Life (1998), p. 41. 7 See M. H. Caviness, The Early Stained Glass of Canterbury Cathedral c.1175–1220 (Princeton, 1977), pp. 12–22; idem, The Windows of Christ Church Cathedral Canterbury, CVMA Great Britain vol. II (London, 1981), pp. 10–12, 64–5, 82, 160–1, 229, 230. 8 Both Wayment and Cole have published extensively. For the former, see especially, The Windows of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, CVMA Great Britain supplementary vol. I (London, 1972) and The Stained Glass of the Church of St Mary, Fairford, Gloucestershire (Society of Antiquaries of London Occasional Paper, new series, vol. V, 1984). William Cole’s major opus is A Catalogue of Netherlandish and North European Roundels in Britain, CVMA Great Britain Summary Catalogue vol.1 (London, 1993). 6

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of regional schools and informed by his knowledge of iconography.9 With the advent on the scene of Peter Newton, stained glass studies in England entered the European methodological mainstream. Peter was a Courtauld Institute graduate and his doctorate on Midlands glass between c. 1275 and 1430 was supervised by Francis Wormald. As a result, he broadened approaches to the medium through his knowledge of north European painting, interpretation of heraldry and use of hagiographical texts, as well as more traditional exploration of antiquarian sources. Not least, Peter taught and inspired younger generations to take up the study of medieval stained glass, including Sarah Brown, Jill Kerr and David O’Connor. The first Corpus Vitrearum volume appeared in 1956; since then nearly seventy volumes have appeared under the Corpus imprimatur.10 There is little doubt that the sheer quantity and location of surviving medieval glass would have surprised Hahnloser and his fellow-pioneers. In this time, the Corpus Vitrearum has become a global enterprise. If the cognoscenti were aware from the outset of at least some of the riches in American museums, the extent of their holdings and in private collections and churches as revealed by the published Checklists has been revelatory. Also totally unknown to the world of stained glass scholarship were the panels in Canada and the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. Within the Old World, the perception of stained glass as a northern European cultural phenomenon has been challenged by the glories of Catalonia and Italy. In both countries too the archival sources are proving amongst the most detailed to survive from anywhere, notably those for the cathedrals of Gerona Cathedral (fourteenth century) and Pisa (1453–99).11 Whilst some countries have completed the project (for example, the Scandinavian group and former Czechoslavakia), particularly in England and France the programme is a long way from completion. This is also one reason why the Corpus has diversified. The full catalogues as envisaged originally have been joined by special studies and a series of Summary Catalogues/Checklists/Recensement volumes in order to quicken the pace of production. 9 C. Woodforde, Stained Glass in Somerset 1250–1830 (Oxford, 1946) and The Norwich School of Glass-Painting in the Fifteenth Century (Oxford, 1950). 10 E. J. Beer, Die Glasmalereien der Schweiz vom 12. bis zum Beginn des 14.Jahrhunderts, CVMA Switzerland vol. I (Basle, 1956). 11 J. Vila-Grau, El Vitrall Gôtic a Catalunya. Descoberta de la taula de vitraller de Girona, Real Acadèmia Catalana de Belles Arts de Sant Jordi (Barcelona, 1985); the Pisan documents will be published by Renée Burnam in a forthcoming Corpus Vitrearum volume.

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The foregoing is not to claim that the Corpus Vitrearum has been, or is, the alpha and omega of medieval stained glass research. A great strength of the project is its internationalism and it has brought together a group of medieval art historians and conservators which convenes at biennial colloquia and discusses and exchanges expertise and information on these occasions and also informally. The topographical basis of the catalogues, ie, a single monument or all the glass in a given geographical area, focus on the one medium and emphasis on listing and documenting make them a resource, a rich quarry to be mined.12 Although some may not subscribe to this view, the Corpus’s function is not to say the last word about a glazing scheme, window or panel. The format has always allowed for and indeed encouraged interpretation, albeit one largely focussed on formal and stylistic analysis. Moreover, France was the first of several countries to adopt a more flexible kind of publication alongside the catalogues, which permitted a sustained analysis of particular monuments.13 Without doubt, the Corpus publications have played an important part in raising stained glass from the category of Kleinkunst and a mere adjunct to the great achievements in Gothic architecture, sculpture and painting, into the mainstream of medieval visual culture and therefore worthy of serious intellectual enquiry. ‘Raising’ is perhaps the wrong word: ‘restoring’ is more appropriate because this was a medium which in the middle ages was accessible to all ranks of society in the public space of the church as well as in the relatively private domestic residences of the elites and of closed communities. The sheer quantity of window glass produced for these locations was prodigious. Difficult though it might be to comprehend from the fragmentary remains, we have to imagine a world in which prior to the Reformation, virtually every one of the more than ten thousand parish churches in England was filled with stained glass. The realisation that windows addressed a wide range of audiences and are rich sources to be mined are major reasons why they have attracted lines of enquiry which have broadened a perhaps overly narrow formalist focus and traversed

The problems that can be created through organising the volumes by present-day national boundaries are discussed in B. Kurmann-Schwarz, ‘La recherche suisse sur le vitrail et son cadre international: avantages, handicaps et contraintes’, Zeitschrift für Schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte, 53 (1996), pp. 345–354 (p. 349). 13  The first of these was L. Grodecki, Les vitraux de Saint-Denis. Etude sur le vitrail au XIIe siècle, I, CVMA France, Etudes I (Paris, 1976). 12

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the traditional disciplinary boundaries. In recent years, understanding of medieval glass has been enriched by the work of scientists, conservators, archaeologists, theologians, literary theorists, social and local historians as well as scholars working both in traditional and the new art histories. And it is to some of these approaches that this paper will now turn, grouped under the headings of chronology, methodology and typology. These labels, which of course are not hermetically sealed compartments, enable us to examine at how the subject has evolved in the past half-century together with some current trends; also they can be used to indicate one or two aspects and indeed challenges which are surfacing or may do so before long.14 Chronology During the 1950s there appeared macrohistories on the stained glass of France and Germany, plus a smaller volume on English glass.15 In all three cases, the narrative began in the twelfth century, with a few glances backwards to some documentary references and chance survivals. Since the 1960s, archaeological discoveries have transformed knowledge of pre-Romanesque window glass. The material has proved so rich that it in 1999 it was possible to devote an entire conference to the subject of window glass between the fourth and the eleventh centuries.16 Excavations at Rouen Cathedral and on the monastic site of San Vincenzo al Volturno in Italy have revealed that glazing was widely distributed in the Carolingian period, including fired and painted glass. A well-preserved head at Schwarzach in Germany has shown that Ottonian glass-painters worked in a style very similar to that adopted by contemporary manuscript illuminators. Some of the most exciting discoveries of all have been made in England, where Rosemary Cramp’s excavations at Jarrow and Monkwearmouth have confirmed Bede’s statement that in the late seventh century, these monasteries were the sites of 14 For a recent Uberblick, see M. H. Caviness, ‘Beyond the Corpus Vitrearum: Stained Glass at the Crossroads’, Union Académique Internationale, Compte Rendu du Soixante-douzième session annuelle du Comité Bruxelles, du 21 au 27 juin 1998 (Brussels), pp. 15–39. 15 M. Aubert, et al, Le vitrail français (Paris, 1958); H. Wentzel, Meisterwerke der Glasmalerei (Berlin, 2nd ed., 1954); C. Woodforde, English Stained and Painted Glass (Oxford, 1954). 16  F. Dell’Acqua and R. Silva (eds), Il Colore nel Medioevo. Arte Simbolo Tecnica. La Vetrata in Occidente dal IV all’XI Secolo. Atti delle Giornate di Studi Lucca 23–24–25 Settembre 1999 (Lucca, 2001).

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medieval window glass production. Window glass has also appeared at other pre-Viking Saxon ecclesiastical sites and at several locations in Winchester, including the New and Old Minsters, Martin Biddle recovered examples of painted window glass dating between the tenth and early twelfth centuries Glastonbury Abbey has also produced some important painted glass from the twelfth century.17 The archaeologists have not exercised a monopoly over new finds. In England it is still possible to find fragments or even entire panels of remarkably early date in church windows. The most extensive discoveries have been the extensive grisaille and figural and historiated panels in the nave clerestory of York Minster, dating from c. 1170–90 (Fig. 2).18 These reveal the existence of a distinctive northern artistic idiom, exhibiting close affinities with contemporary York illuminated manuscripts, sculpture and metalwork. Humbler buildings have also contained some surprises. Such is the case with the angel (probably St Michael) discovered by Peter Newton at Dalbury in Derbyshire and the figural pieces identified by Keith Barley at Fledborough in the neighouring county of Nottinghamshire, the former probably of c. 1100–35, the latter less certain but still not likely to be after the late twelfth century (Figs 3, 4). Such finds may not be as spectacular as the mural imagery revealed under plaster in so many parish churches, but nonetheless they are of importance. How common was painted window glass in the parish church before 1200 is still an open question, if one that may never be resolved.19 Rebates, ferramenta and other and fixings around windows might repay more study than they have received; similarly the traces of wooden shutters like that at Poling in Sussex and the wooden frames discovered in Denmark. Both ends of the chronological spectrum have proved to be elastic. If the boundaries have been pushed back to the seventh century, so they have advanced into more recent times. When does ‘medieval’ end? Closure might be signalled in varied ways — for example, by fundamental changes  Recent discussions of the Continental finds are in Dell’Aqua and Silva, Il Colore; apart from Glastonbury, the early English material is summarised in R. Marks, Stained Glass in England during the Middle Ages (London and Toronto, 1993), Chapter 5. The Glastonbury finds are displayed in the Glastonbury Abbey Museum. 18 D. O’Connor and J. Haselock, ‘The stained and painted glass’, in G. E. Aylmer and R. Cant (eds), A History of York Minster (Oxford, 1977), pp. 313–393. 19 R. Marks, ‘Glazing in the Romanesque Parish Church’, in Dell’Acqua and Silva, Il Colore, pp. 173–181. 17

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1. Westminster Abbey, Henry VII’s Chapel: tracery angels, c. 1510–20 (National Monuments Record).

2. York Minster, St Nicholas legend scene, c. 1170–90 (National Monuments Record).

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3. Dalbury (Derbyshire): angel (St Michael?), c. 1100–35? (Richard Marks).

4. Fledborough (Notts.): head, 12th century? (Keith Barley).

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5. York Minster: St William window panel 3d (St William and Henry of Bois in vigil prior to the latter’s election as Archbishop) before restoration, c. 1414 (York Glaziers Trust).

6. York Minster, St William window panel 3d after conservation (York Glaziers Trust).

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7. Cologne Cathedral choir clerestory: the three Magi (Newton Collection, York University). 8. Chartres Cathedral: bakers, c. 1200–1220 (Newton Collection, York University).

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in style and design, by technique, by intellectual shifts associated with the Renaissance and by events like the Reformation. The problem is that these historical watersheds are by no means co-terminous, nor bear universal meanings. This is not to deny the validity of these factors and their impact on stained glass, but changes did not happen in the same time-frame throughout Europe, nor should elements of continuity be obscured. Even in countries like Holland and Switzerland, where the Reformation had a major impact, the faithful continued to give windows to their churches and their motives were at least in part the same as their predecessors: glass was always a material sign of the donor’s charity towards the church and the medium remained a favoured means of immortalising his or her munificence. Hence the richness of the seventeenth-century glazing of St John’s church, Gouda in the Netherlands (Fig. 9).20 Methodologies As was indicated earlier, approaches to the subject have diversified enormously within the last quarter of a century or so. The monograph on a single window or monument and the localised study have continued to be invaluable. Taking England alone, knowledge of York Minster has been transformed by the studies of the late Tom French on the west windows (with David O’Connor), the great east window and very recently, the St William window (Figs 5, 6).21 Similarly the studies of the Exeter choir east window by Chris Brooks and David Evans and that of Gloucester by Jill Kerr.22 Tim Ayers’ monograph on Wells Cathedral is eagerly awaited, as is Anna Eavis’s on New College, Oxford. Peter Newton, Penny HebginBarnes and the present writer have revealed the riches of respectively Oxfordshire, Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire; currently Allan Barton 20 S. Van Ruyven-Zeman, H. Van Harten-Boers, et al, The Stained Glass Windows in the Sint Janskerk at Gouda, CVMA Netherlands, vols I–III (Amsterdam, 1997ff.). 21 T. W. French and D. O’Connor, York Minster: A Catalogue of the Medieval Stained Glass I: The West Windows of the Nave, CVMA Great Britain vol.III/I ((London, 1987); T. W. French, York Minster: The Great East Window, CVMA Great Britain Summary Catalogue vol. 2 (London, 1995); idem, York Minster: The St William Window, CVMA Great Britain Summary Catalogue vol. 5 (London, 1999). 22 C. Brooks and D. Evans, The Great East Window of Exeter Cathedral: A Glazing History (Exeter, 1988); J. Kerr, ‘The east window of Gloucester Cathedral’, Medieval Art and Architecture at Gloucester and Tewkesbury, British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions vol. VII (1985), pp. 116–129.

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(Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire) and Brian Sprakes (South Yorkshire) are following in their footsteps. This list is not exhaustive.23 Studies of workshop organisation and the processes of glazing have been informed by already mentioned Pisan accounts and the Gerona documents. The publication of the Exeter Cathedral Fabric Rolls show that glass-painters were working alongside masons and other craftsmen as the eastern parts of the Cathedral were built in the early fourteenth century.24 No doubt the need to maximise use of the scaffolding was a factor. Current examination of the choir clerestory windows of Cologne Cathedral is revealing glaziers’ marks which enable the sequence of installation to be plotted (Fig. 7).25 The documents for St-Vincent at Rouen demonstrate that windows were installed before the fabric had been completed, for in 1528–9 there were payments to the glaziers to remove the choir clerestory windows during the construction of the vaults and replace them afterwards.26 Technical aspects of glass-painting in the middle ages have continued to attract scholarly attention. Amongst the most notable of recent studies has been Claudine Lautier’s re-examination of silver stain, which combines the insights of the art historian with the technical contributions of the scientist.27 An intriguing insight into the attitudes of medieval craftsmen (or their paymasters) to the past is provided by the discovery that when the Infancy and Jesse windows in the west front of Chartres Cathedral were restored in the fifteenth century, new heads were executed in a style replicating that of the twelfth-century originals; the thirteenth-century windows here also show evidence of restoration in the fifteenth century, some of which can be associated with the glazier Jehan Perier, whose activities are documented in 1415–16.28 Janice Smith 23 P. A. Newton, The County of Oxford: A Catalogue of Medieval Stained Glass, CVMA Great Britain vol.I (London, 1979); Hebgin-Barnes, Lincolnshire; R. Marks, The Medieval Stained Glass of Northamptonshire, CVMA Great Britain Summary Catalogue vol. 4 (London, 1998). 24 A. M. Erskine (ed.), The Accounts of the Fabric of Exeter Cathedral, 1279–1353, Devon & Cornwall Record Society, new series, XXIV, XXVI (1981–3). 25 I am grateful to Dr Ulrike Brinckmann for this information, which she will publish shortly. 26 F. Perrot, ‘L’Eglise Saint-Vincent’, Le Vieux Marché, Bulletin des Amis des Monuments rouennais Numéro Spécial (Rouen, 1978–9), p. 57. 27 C. Lautier, ‘Les débuts du jaune d’argent dans l’art du vitrail ou le jaune d’argent à la manière d’Antoine de Pise’, Bulletin Monumental, 158–II (2000), pp. 89–107. 28 C. Lautier, ‘Les vitraux de la cathédrale de Chartres à la lumière des restaurations anciennes’, Künstlerischer Austausch/Artistic Exchange. Akten des XXVIII Kongresses für Kunst-

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is applying theories of authorship to her study of the St William window in questioning the privileging of the ‘master craftsman’ in what was a collective enterprise, involving patron and donor, designer, glass-painters, smiths and not forgetting the masons. Hartmut Scholz has connected the clustering of painters, sculptors and glass-painters in one quarter of Strasbourg with the close style and design affinities exhibited by all three media in late fifteenthcentury south Germany; the relationship between the graphic arts and the explosion of stained glass creativity in southern Germany during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries has recently been explored through the exhibition, Painting on Light, at the J. Paul Getty and the Saint Louis museums.29 This serves to introduce the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, a term used in the nineteenth century to describe Wagner’s efforts to produce operatic spectacles that would unite drama, music, poetry, history and the visual arts and which has been borrowed by art historians as a means of describing similar confluences in a single monument. The relationship between stained glass, the architectural frame and other fittings and furnishings in the past has not attracted the attention it has deserved. This may have stemmed as much from the perception of stained glass either as a decorative art or as a branch of painting, rather than as medium which fits both categories and also forms part of an architectural frame. A welcome feature of some recent scholarship has been to see glass in relation to its built environment, wallpaintings, altars and altarpieces, monumental sculpture, tombs, choirstalls — and to the liturgical functions of different parts of a building. This is not to say that all these elements were necessarily planned to form a cohesive programme — such issues depend on the circumstances (and means) of each individual monument — but a holistic treatment avoids the kinds of distortion caused by isolating individual media. A pioneering example of a more integrated approach is Madeline Caviness’s 1991 study of the

geschichte, Berlin, 15–20 Juli 1992 (Berlin, 1993), III, pp. 413–424. For an important article on medieval restoration, see M. H. Caviness, ‘ “De convenientia et cohaerentia antiqui et novi operis”: Medieval conservation, restoration, pastiche and forgery’, Intuition und Kunstwissenschaft. Festschrift für Hanns Swarzenski (Berlin, 1973), pp. 205–221. 29 H. Scholz, ‘Hans Wild und Hans Kamensetzer – Hypotheken der Ulmer und Strassburger Kunstgeschichte des Spätmittelalters’, Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen, neue folge, 36 (1994), pp. 93–140; B. Butts, L. Hendrix, et al, Painting on Light. Drawings and Stained Glass in the Age of Dürer and Holbein (Getty Publications, Los Angeles, 2000).

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late twelfth-century abbeys at St-Rémi, Rheims and St-Yved at Braine.30 The collection of essays edited by Virginia Raguin, Kathryn Brush and Peter Draper is a particularly important contribution, with a plurality of conclusions. This includes a paper by Peter Kurmann and Brigitte KurmannSchwarz on Chartres Cathedral.31 If any building provides a model for coherence it is Chartres, built and furnished between 1194 and its dedication in 1260. Yet the authors argue that although there are iconographical points of contact between the portal sculpture and the stained glass, these elements and the fabric evolved largely independently as the building progressed. The explanation is put down to the fact that whilst the planning of the structure and sculpture were exclusively under the control of the chapter, there was a multiplicity of stakeholders in the glass, including royalty, nobles and guilds as well as the canons (Fig. 8). A broad iconographical programme seems to have been conceived from the outset, which took into account altar dedications and liturgical practices, but it was impossible to implement in detail as the wishes of the individual donors had to be taken into account. Chartres suggests therefore that the concept of unity and integration might exist more in the tidy mind of the scholar than reflect historical realities. Some of the most illuminating approaches have been those concerned with function, meaning and reception, aspects of the subject which were scarcely considered in the 1950s and 60s. What were the functions of windows? They were of course multifarious. On one level they might be symbolic. David O’Connor has argued that the great east window of York Minster (1406–8), through its medium, colour and apocalyptic subjectmatter made the building a metaphor for the heavenly Jerusalem built of shimmering gold and precious stones as described by St John in the Book of Revelation.32 The colour and translucency of stained glass windows enhanced the house of God, they acted as signifiers of sacred space and played a key role in making churches theatres of memory through the representations of donors and bidding prayers exhorting the viewer to pray for his or her soul.33 30

M. H. Caviness, Sumptuous Arts at the Royal Abbeys in Reims and Braine (Princeton,

1990). V. C. Raguin, K. Brush and P. Draper (eds), Artistic Integration in Gothic Buildings (Toronto, Buffalo and London, 1995); the essay by the Kurmanns is entitled ‘Chartres Cathedral as a Work of Artistic Integration: Methodological Reflections’ (pp. 131–152). 32 D. O’Connor, ‘York and the Heavenly Jerusalem: Symbolism in the East Window of York Minster’, Medieval Europe. Pre-Printed Papers VII, Art and Symbolism (York Archaeological Trust, 1992), pp. 67–72. 33 Marks, Northamptonshire, p. xlix. 31

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The retention of a mid twelfth-century panel like Notre-Dame de la Belle Verrière at Chartres when the cathedral was rebuilt after 1194 was a signal of continuity between the past and the present. The panel originally was in the most sacred position above the high altar in the former building and its continued significance is reflected in the way in which it was reframed in the early thirteenth century in the manner of a sacred relic. In general it seems that windows were not foci for individual affective piety: the images depicted in them were not devotional aids in the same manner as statues and panel paintings. This was not universally so, as several English late medieval wills refer to lights before specified images in a window. At Lyminge in Kent, for example, a testator in 1511 bequeathed 4d. for a taper to burn before the image of St Christopher in the glass window.34 Certainly imagery in glass was not considered offensive by the sixteenth-century reformers to the same extent that devotional images were. Even in Calvin’s Geneva, the apsidal windows of the cathedral retain to this day their pre-Reformation figural glass. At Gouda, some the figures of apostles with Creed scrolls were repaired or replaced in the choir clerestory after a fire in 1552, but a companion set of carved apostles on the piers below was not restored (Fig. 9).35 Although under Edward VI, imagery in English stained glass was marked out for destruction like all other media, this was rescinded by Elizabeth and it is increasingly becoming apparent that enormous quantities of medieval glass survived into the eighteenth and even the nineteenth centuries — far more than has come down to us. Margaret Aston’s eagerly awaited sequel to her magisterial England’s Iconoclasts (Oxford, 1988) will examine attitudes to stained glass in the postReformation period; on the microscale of an individual monument, Louise Hampson’s study of the York Minster archives is revealing the considerable sums spent by the Dean and Chapter on repairing the windows in the late sixteenth century. Does this mean that windows had no role in disseminating the message of the Gospels and promoting the saints? The didactic value of windows as the poor man’s bible, following Gregory the Great’s oft-repeated (throughout the middle ages) formulation, has come under scrutiny in recent years. Madeline 34 L. L. Duncan and A. Hussey, Testamenta Cantiana: A Series of Extracts from Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century Wills, Kent Archaeological Society, Kent Records (1906, 1907), p. 203 (East Kent). 35 Van Ruyven-Zeman, Van Harten-Boers, et al, Gouda.

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Caviness has demonstrated that the late twelfth and early thirteenth-century narrative windows of the likes of Canterbury, Chartres and Bourges did not merely replicate in pictorial form biblical and hagiographical texts, but comprised a kind of independent text in their own right (Fig. 10).36 The relationship between word and image was explored in relation to Chartres in two important studies which appeared almost concurrently: Wolfgang Kemp’s Sermo corporeus. Die Erzählung der mittelalterlichen Glasfenster (1987 and since translated into English) and Jean-Paul Deremble and Colette Manhes’s Les vitraux légendaires de Chartres. Des récits en images (1988), the latter followed in 1993 by Colette Manhes-Deremble’s Les vitraux narratifs de la cathédrale de Chartres. Étude iconographique.37 The intellectual training of the French authors was in medieval theology and literary theory and both they and Kemp were interested in the ways in which narrative was ordered in the windows. Deremble and Manhes looked in particular at every aspect of window composition, including the armatures, borders, movements and gestures of figures, as part of a narrative language. Kemp invoked other examples of medieval pictorial narrative to argue the privileging of the central composition. In spite of their different emphases, the methodology of these authors was similar and they came to much the same conclusions, namely that the organisation of these narrative windows had a structure and internal logic which was independent of the geometrical subdivisions of the windows. This structure was analogous to those in contemporary literary works, but they agreed with Caviness that the narrative expounded in these windows was not a replication of literary texts, but occupied its own independent place. In 1982, John Gage glossed the argument that the dramatic shift in the design of windows from the all-colour, multi-historiated schemes of

36 M. H. Caviness, ‘Biblical stories in windows: were they Bibles for the poor?’, in B. S. Levy (ed.), The Bible in the Middle Ages: its Influence on Literature and Art, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 89 (Binghamton, New York, 1992), pp. 103–147. 37 W. Kemp, Sermo corporeus. Die Erzählung der mittelalterlichen Glasfenster (Munich, 1987); English translation by C. D. Saltzwedel, The Narratives of Gothic Stained Glass (Cambridge, 1997); J.-P. Deremble and Colette Manhes, Les vitraux légendaires de Chartres. Des récits en images (Paris,1988); C. Manhes-Deremble, Les vitraux narratifs de la cathédrale de Chartres. Étude iconographique, CVMA France, Etudes 2 (Paris, 1993). For a very balanced review of these and other recent studies of Chartres, see B. Kurmann-Schwarz, ‘Récits, programme, commanditeurs, concepteurs, donateurs: publications récentes sur l’iconographie des vitraux de la cathédrale de Chartres’, Bulletin Monumental, 154–1 (1996), pp. 55–71.

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the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries to the light and airiness of the band window design of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries was a manifestation of the medieval architect’s growing control over every aspect of construction and embellishment and from his desire to highlight the fabric itself.38 Gage drew attention to technical developments in glassmaking which permitted greater luminosity and also stressed the relevance of contemporary writings on the nature of beauty by Albertus Magnus and others. One aspect of the shift towards greater emphasis on light was a reduction in the historiated element. A question we might pose is whether this change towards compressed narrative and translucency was related in some measure to the desire to engage the laity directly with the sacred. Is it purely coincidental that Jacques de Voragine’s Golden Legend, with its similarly brief recital of the lives and martyrdoms of the saints, should have been compiled only a few years before the appearance of the band window? This of course assumes that windows were ‘read’ like books. The extent to which scenes in windows like those of Chartres could be seen, let alone comprehended, without a deep understanding of theology and biblical exegesis, has long been debated. In the Tale of Beryn, an early fifteenthcentury coda to the Canterbury Tales, a distinction is drawn between the hoi-polloi amongst the pilgrims in the shape of the miller and the pardoner who are left to their own devices in the Cathedral nave and display their complete ignorance of the subjects in the windows; and the smart, educated pilgrims who are escorted up to the choir and Trinity Chapel. It was perhaps for the erudition of pilgrims of similar social standing that a still surviving fourteenth-century roll (Canterbury Cathedral Library, MS C 246), with inscriptions from the choir aisle typological windows, was devised.39 The point about this droll tale is that stained glass windows had to cater for diverse audiences and for whom they could have different meanings. In any church there was a variety of stakeholders who might even have competing agendas. As we have seen, at Chartres, all ranks of society appear to have made some kind of investment in the windows, which may have affected any preconceived plan to impose an overall scheme. The consensus is that the canons in chapter were the patrons, but did not act as individual 38 J. Gage, ‘Gothic Glass; Two aspects of a Dionysian Aesthetic’, Art History, 5 (1982), pp. 36–58. 39 F. J. Furnivall and W. G. Stone (eds), The Tale of Beryn, Early English Text Society, extra series, CV, 1909, p. 6. This and the Canterbury Roll are discussed briefly in Marks, Stained Glass, p. 61.

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donors. While Deremble and Manhes argued that only the canons had the intellectual equipment to provide the glass-painters with the necessary iconography, Kemp held that the presence of so many different donors, especially the craft and trade guilds, negated any possibility of there being a master plan: the finished product was the result of negotiation between the various interest groups. The late Jane Welch Williams went so far as to deny any agency to the artisans at Chartres.40 For her, their images in the windows did not represent donors, but were an attempt by the chapter to attract tradesmen and craftsmen to set up in the cathedral cloister. Her hypothesis was rooted in contemporary socio-political conflicts in Chartres, which included tensions between the chapter and the Count of Chartres as overlord. Williams’s reading has not found universal acceptance, not least because the spiritual imperatives and benefits to be derived from gifts to the fabric of what was a major Marian shrine are ignored, but her approach gives cause for reflection about such seemingly unproblematic images as donor figures and the need to consider the particular historical circumstances in which windows were given, wherever these are reconstructable. Windows commissioned in the middle ages have never ceased to bear meanings for later generations, but those meanings were never static. A fifteenth-century pilgrim to Chartres would have looked at the thirteenthcentury windows with a different set of referents than his counterpart of that time. As the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (and soon the twentieth century) recede ever more into the distant and remote past, the engagement of past ages with medieval artefacts increasingly have become the subject of scholarly enquiry.41 Several recent studies have examined the collection, display and preservation of medieval stained glass in different countries. Horace Walpole’s inclusion of ancient glass in his collection at Strawberry Hill set the pattern for more than half a century. For him, it was not the subject-matter that counted, rather old glass was part of the paraphernalia of Gothic, disregarding the fact that most of his ancient pieces consisted of north European sixteenth and seventeenth-century roundels which had J. W. Williams, Bread, Wine and Money. The Windows of the Trades at Chartres Cathedral (Chicago and London, 1993). 41 See, for example, L. L. Brownrigg and M. M. Smith (eds), Interpreting and Collecting. Fragments of Medieval Books, Proceedings of the Seminar in the History of the Book to 1500, Oxford, 1998 (The Red Gull Press, 2000); S. Hindman and N. Rowe (eds), Manuscript Illumination in the Modern Age. Recovery and Reconstruction (Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, 2001). 40

Medieval stained glass: recent scholarship

9. Gouda (Holland), Sint Janskerk: St Andrew, c. 1555–60, by Dirck Crabeth (Sint Janskerk, Gouda).

10. Bourges Cathedral: Dives and Lazarus window, early 13th century (Newton Collection, York University).

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11. Fawsley (Northants.): Netherlandish roundels, 16th and 17th century ((National Monuments Record).

12. Salisbury Cathedral: grisaille, 1220–58; watercolour by Charles Winston, mid 19th century (London, British Library MS Add. 35211) (British Library Board).

Medieval stained glass: recent scholarship

13. Salisbury Cathedral: grisaille, 1220–58; watercolour by Charles Winston, mid 19th century (London, British Library MS Add. 35211) (British Library Board).

14. Leicester Museums: Works of Mercy roundel in a domestic light, c. 1500 (Newton Collection, York University).

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15. Ockwells (Berks.): heraldic glass in Great Hall windows, c. 1460 (Richard Marks).

16. St Neot (Cornwall): donors, c. 1520s (National Monuments Record)

17. Stanford on Avon (Northants.): Warning against Idle Gossip (Keith Barley)

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to be made to impart the desired ‘Gothic gloom’ by being set in coloured glass.42 Walpole’s disinterest in archaeological accuracy and subject-matter prevailed into the nineteenth century. For example, roundels of the same kind as those embellishing Strawberry Hill were installed in the ecclesiastical setting of Fawsley church (Northants.) by the Knightley family during the early nineteenth centuries, although they included several saints.43 They are however disposed in random fashion, indicating that their primary function was to promote the Knightleys as enlightened connoisseurs and benefactors. That this was not a purely English phenomenon at the time has been shown by the glass of c. 1290–1350 from the monastic church of Altenberg an der Lahn, which in 1803 was removed and reinstalled in the main hall of Erbach Castle by the Duke of Erbach in much the same fashion as Strawberry Hill.44 By about this time, however, the subject matter and antiquity of glass was beginning to be of account in its own right. Mary Shepard has argued that the significance of the arrangement of the ancient French and German glass in the chapel at Costessey Hall in Norfolk in 1809 was not just that it was partly determined by liturgical considerations; more importantly, it was an assertion of Roman Catholic continuity with a medieval past and a visual landmark in the struggle for Catholic emancipation.45 Nineteenth-century restorations too are proving a fruitful field for enquiry. Sarah Brown’s study of the 1847 restoration of the Lady Chapel east window of Bristol Cathedral and Alyce Jordan’s investigation of the 1848 campaign in the SteChapelle, Paris, offer the opportunity of comparing contemporary attitudes to medieval glass in England and France.46 Winston advised on Bristol and

42 A. Eavis and M. Peover, ‘Horace Walpole’s Painted Glass at Strawberry Hill’, Journal of Stained Glass, XIX (1994–5), pp. 280–314. 43 R. Marks, ‘The Reception and Display of Northern European Roundels in England’, Gesta, XXXVII/2 (1998), pp. 217–224. 44 D. Hess, ‘ “Modespiel” der Neugotik oder Denkmal der Vergangenheit? Die Glasmalereisammlung in Erbach und ihr Context’, Zeitschrift des Deutschen Vereins für Kunstwissenschaft, 49/50 (1995–6), pp. 227–248. 45 M. B. Shepard, ‘ “Our Fine Gothic Magnificence”: The Nineteenth-Century Chapel at Costessey Hall (Norfolk) and its Medieval Glazing’, Journal for the Study of Architectural History, 54 (1995), pp. 186–207. 46 S. Brown, ‘The Stained Glass of the Lady Chapel of Bristol Cathedral; Charles Winston (1814–64) and Stained Glass Restoration in the 19th Century’, in L. Keen (ed.), “Almost the Richest City’ Bristol in the Middle Ages, British Archaeological Association Conference Transac-

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the Ste-Chapelle bears the mark of Viollet-le-Duc’s emerging ideas which were to be codified in his Dictionnaire. Both schemes were motivated by a desire to make the conjunction of ancient and new as seamless as possible, but there are also differences of attitude and in the case of the Ste-Chapelle, differences between precept and practice. As Jordan remarked, ‘The SainteChapelle windows are…as much a visual document of nineteenth-century habits of thought as they are a monument of the middle ages’. No longer is it appropriate to dismiss nineteenth-century restorations of medieval windows as crude misunderstandings of the past; instead they have to be treated as a cultural (and even aesthetic) phenomenon in their own right. This aspect of medieval stained glass studies will surely be a growth area. Particularly welcome would be a comparative study (or studies) of practices spanning northern Europe, locating them in the context of debates over restoration ethics led by Viollet-le-Duc and Ruskin. Typologies The application of new and older methodologies to types of windows has made it possible to explore continuity and change, similarities and differences. Non-figurative glazing was a major component, at least in the nave, of the English and French great church in the first half of the thirteenth century; the full-colour, historiated scheme of Chartres is the exception, not the rule. Economics of course were an important factor (white glass was cheaper than coloured glass), nevertheless that more than twenty different designs, each one requiring a separate cartoon, were employed at Salisbury, indicates that considerable thought and effort went into the ornamental windows (Figs 12, 13).47 English chapter-houses have been shown to have exhibited in the imagery of their windows and other elements of pictorial decoration a common concern with history and commemoration.48 The diktats of a tions vol. XIX (1997), pp. 107–117; A. A. Jordan, ‘Rationalizing the Narrative: Theory and Practice in the Nineteenth-Century Restoration of the Windows of the Sainte-Chapelle’, Gesta, XXXXVII/2 (1998), pp. 192–200. 47 R. Marks, ‘The Thirteenth-Century Glazing of Salisbury Cathedral’, in L. Keen and T. Cocke (eds), Medieval Art and Architecture at Salisbury, British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions vol. XVII (1996), pp. 106–120. 48 Tim Ayers, in his unpublished Courtauld Institute PhD thesis on Wells Cathedral; S. Brown, ‘The Thirteenth-Century Stained Glass of the Salisbury Cathedral Chapter House’, Wiltshire Archaeological & Natural History Magazine, 94 (2001), pp. 119–138.

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centralised organisation like that of the Cistercian Order and how they were interpreted and modified at local level has been examined by Eva FrodlKraft, Meredith Lillich, Helen Zakin and the present writer.49 Similarly the work on mendicant glass by Brigitte Kurmann-Schwarz and Rüdiger Becksmann. The former’s forthcoming study of the Hapsburg mausoleum of Königsfelden will reveal the interface between patronal demands and Franciscan ideas and Becksmann has argued for the importance of early fourteenth-century Dominican glazing in south Germany for the dissemination for new modes.50 The windows of this period in the naves of Dominican houses appear to be surprisingly devoid of the kinds of imagery invoked by the Order’s preachers in sermons, but this is an area which would repay further detailed investigation. So too would domestic glass. William Cole published a very important volume on Netherlandish roundels which had found their way into English churches, private houses and collections.51 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries these were often made for the residences of the burgher class. Professor Hermann Pleij has shown that common subjects like the Good Samaritan and Prodigal Son reflected the values of this class in providing models of good conduct and extolling the virtues of thrift, not overlooking the titillation masquerading under the guise of morality in depictions of Susannah and the Elders.52 Kerry Ayre’s forthcoming study of the less familiar English fifteenth and sixteenth-century roundels should offer

See especially H. Zakin, French Cistercian Grisaille Glass (New York and London, 1979); M. P. Lillich, ‘Recent Scholarship concerning Cistercian Windows’, in F. R. Swietek and J. R Sommerfeldt (eds), Studiosorum Speculum: Studies in Honor of Louis J. Lekai, O. Cist. (Cistercian Studies Series, 149, 1993), pp. 233–262; R. Marks, ‘Cistercian window glass in England and Wales’, in C. Norton and D. Park (eds), Cistercian Art and Architecture in the British Isles (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 211–227. 50 R. Becksmann, ‘Die Bettelordern an Rhein, Main und Neckar und der höfische Stil der Pariser Kunst um 1300’, in idem, et al, Deutsche Glasmalerei des Mittelalters II Bildprogramme, Auftraggeber, Werkstätten (Berlin, 1992), pp. 53–75. Brigitte Kurmann-Schwarz has published her interim findings in ‘Les vitraux du choeur de l’ancienne abbatiale de Königsfelden: Bild- und Texttradition’ in F. Joubert and D. Sandron (eds), Pierre, lumière, couleur. Etudes d’histoire de l’art du Moyen Age en l’honneur d’Anne Prache (Paris, 1999), pp. 297–307. 51 Cole, Netherlandish and North European Roundels. 52 In a paper delivered at the colloquium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in May 1995. This colloquium was associated with a major exhibition of roundels and accompanying catalogue: The Luminous Image: Painted Glass Roundels in the Lowlands 1480– 1560 (New York, 1995). 48

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opportunities for similar contextualisation (Fig. 14). The social frame is equally in evidence in another major aspect of domestic glazing. From the fourteenth century, heraldry was an important element in the domestic glazing of the seigneurial classes, with the public space of the great hall forming the principal site for armorial display. Here the lord could trumpet the illustriousness of his lineage and his familial and political affiliations (Fig. 15).53 Recently sixteenth-century civic heraldic glazing in Germany and Switzerland has received attention. So too have the subjects decorating the windows of libraries belonging to churches and colleges.54 Inevitably, attention has largely been focussed on the great ensembles of glass in the cathedrals and major monastic churches (also in England on the colleges of Cambridge and Oxford). Parish churches too provide a fertile field. The remarkably well-preserved early sixteenth-century glass at Fairford (Glos.) has been treated in a comprehensive volume.55 Within an urban context, David King’s forthcoming monograph will show that the glazing of St Peter Mancroft, Norwich is a key document for comprehending the activities of this city’s glass-painters in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Parish churches can also offer models for exploring the parameters of belief and social structures within which their visual imagery was located. Models, moreover, in which the imagery is not merely a reflection of the society that commissioned and used it, but an integral part of that society and its history (or histories). Or to put it another way, stained glass can be used a prime historical document. Thus a recent study of the early sixteenthcentury windows at St Neot (Cornwall) has examined the remarkable series of donor groups within the context of the parish’s social structure (Fig. 16).56 The glazing of Stanford on Avon (Northants.), in conjunction with The paucity of research on medieval domestic glass is reflected in the brevity of the chapter on the subject in Marks, Stained Glass, pp. 92–102. 54 B. Giesicke and M. Ruoss, ‘In Honor of Friendship: Function, Meaning, and Iconography in Civic Stained-Glass Decoration in Switzerland and Southern Germany’, in Butts and Hendrix, Painting on Light, pp. 43–55; see also Die gute Regierung. Vorbilder der Politik im Mittelalter (Cologne, Schnütgen-Museum exhibition catalogue, 2000). For library glazing, see Marks, Stained Glass, pp. 99–101; R. Gameson and A. Coates, The Old Library: Trinity College, Oxford (Oxford, 1998), pp. 15–34; C. Lautier, ‘Les Arts libéraux de la “librairie” capitulaire de Chartres’, Gesta, XXXVII/2 (1998), pp. 211–216. 55 S. Brown and L. MacDonald (eds), Life, Death and Art. The Medieval Stained Glass of Fairford Parish Church (Stroud, 1997). 56 J. Mattingly, ‘Stories in the Glass – Reconstructing the St Neot Pre-Reformation Glazing Scheme’, Journal of the Royal Institute of Cornwall, new series II, vol.III Parts 3 & 4 (2000), pp. 9–55. 53

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its sepulchral monuments and seating, is an instance where the fabric and furnishings furnish almost the only clues to the dramatic socio-economic changes within this village community which occurred between the fourteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries.57 The manor was owned by Selby Abbey, which used it as a residence when the abbot attended meetings of the Benedictine General Chapter in Oxford and when he was en route to and from London. Throughout the fourteenth century, a series of highly influential rectors, including several royal clerks, held the living; it is doubtful whether they showed their faces very much in the parish, but at least two of them were heavily involved in the rebuilding of Stanford church and its lavish glazing, which was used by a large and prosperous community. The repeated representations of prelates and sainted bishops or abbots in the glazing was entirely appropriate for a parish where power lay in the hands of the clergy. That the spiritual welfare of the parish at large was catered for is suggested by the presence of female saints like Anne and Margaret, who had particular resonances (albeit not exclusive) for women as saintly helpers; also by misogynistic, moralising images like the warning against gossiping (Fig. 17). Is it merely coincidental that a Stanford manorial rental of the period reveals a considerable number of property-holding women? Two hundred years later, the community had dwindled, the land was being converted from arable to pasture and the demesne had been leased out to a Yorkshire family with close ties with Selby Abbey. Although it remained parochial, the Caves proceeded to turn the church, de facto if not de jure, into a private family memorial chapel through the imagery they introduced into the windows and their prominent sepulchral monuments, a process which went on unhindered (indeed it was facilitated) by the Reformation and regardless of the diametrically opposed religious views of the key players. Conclusion It has only been possible to highlight certain aspects in this canter through the rich field of post-war stained glass studies. Especially within the last three decades, there has been a plurality of approaches and the subject is all the better for that. Glass is a fragile medium and needs to be safe-guarded, so it is in the interests of everyone to inform the general public as much if not 57 Marks, Northamptonshire, pp. 179–185.This account is a summary of what will be a much more extensive study of the Stanford glazing.

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more than the scholar. This is a challenge, but people enjoy looking at stained glass, as was demonstrated by the popularity of the Himmelslicht exhibition in Cologne in 1999.58 Sarah Brown’s recent book on York Minster shows that it is possible to make the fruits of specialist research available to that public through a very readable text and the use of good colour illustrations.59 Publications accessible to a wide social spectrum will remain essential, but so will the need for detailed, weighty academic scrutinies of every aspect of the subject, from a window or panel’s physical condition, chemical composition, documentation and restoration history, to its iconography and social and artistic contexts. The study of medieval stained glass inevitably is slow, painstaking and demands a wide range of skills. Recently the Corpus Vitrearum has revised its international guidelines in order to allow for more interpretation and the application of recent methodologies; also in the interests of costs and access, to introduce more flexibility in publication, including the use of electronic publishing. The CD-ROM included with the Fairford book has shown the possibilities opened up by new technology and the current programme of digitising the stained glass photographic holdings of the Conway Library at the Courtauld Institute and National Monuments Record (Swindon) will make them much more readily available. None of this, however, obviates the need for exact scholarship and the close examination and description of the physical object. Currently the St William window is undergoing conservation in York Glaziers Trust workshop. (Figs 5, 6). The project is managed with the aid of an advisory group involving conservators, art historians, the consultant architect for the Minster and a representative of the client (the Dean and Chapter). The window is being treated in the same manner as an archaeological excavation (with the costs of the work provided through the generosity of the Provincial Masonic Grand Lodge of Yorkshire), and encompassing archival research and documenting and recording in very precise detail. As a result, it has been possible to re-assess and contextualise the work of past writers on this window, notably James Fowler, whose proposed reconstruction of the original narrative sequence was the basis of the great restoration of 1895. Close scrutiny of the individual panels and a re-examination of the written sources have resulted in the correction of several of Fowler’s readings and for 58 See the accompanying catalogue, Himmelslicht – Europäische Glasmalerei im Jahrhundert des Kölner Dombaus (1248–1349) (Schnütgen-Museum, Cologne, 1999). 59 S. Brown, Stained Glass at York Minster (London, 1999).

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the first time, a convincing re-interpretation of the original ordering of the entire window.60 Here the wheel comes full circle, for it is testament to the foresight and vision of Hahnloser’s pioneering generation that it envisaged this kind of pooling of expertise. To date, inventories of only three English counties have been covered by the Corpus Vitrearum, although more are in the pipeline. Much remains to be discovered and researched. Prior to the Corpus, medieval glass was recorded at thirty locations in Northamptonshire, yet the final total was more than ninety. Whilst the vast majority turned out to be no more than fragments, they all are of importance in one way or another, for the identification of workshops, for the cults of the saints, for patronage and not least, for the history of the church and parish in which it is located. It is still possible too to open a church door and see something as remarkable as the late twelfthcentury Virgin and St John at Easby (Yorks.).61

60 The reconstruction of the original order has been the work principally of my colleague Christopher Norton, with invaluable input from Janice Smith. 61 D. O’Connor, ‘Twelfth-century stained glass in Easby parish church, North Yorkshire’, in G. R. Owen-Crocker and T. Graham (eds), Medieval art: recent perspectives. A memorial tribute to C. R. Dodwell (Manchester and New York, 1998), pp. 104–127.

III Coventry: A Regional Centre of Glass-Painting in the Fourteenth Century? The Glazing of Stanford on Avon Church, Northamptonshire, and the Taxonomy of English Medieval Stained Glass Studies

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hrough a combination of surviving (and recorded) monuments and artefacts and extensive civic records, the importance of Coventry as a centre for artistic activity in the fifteenth century has long been established, notably for glass-painting. Less clear, however, is its rôle during the preceding century. The extensive surviving glazing of this period in the parish church of St Nicholas at Stanford on Avon (Northamptonshire) is one of the principal ensembles on which the claim that Coventry was a major centre of glass-painting from the early fourteenth century has been based. To re-visit this claim means embarking on a journey through the historiography of English medieval stained glass. In the process, methodological issues are raised which range further than whether or not the glass of one particular church can be assigned to a workshop — or workshops — in Coventry. Stanford on Avon is a parish with a tiny community lying about five and a half miles south-east of Lutterworth and straddling the Northamptonshire and Leicestershire border; in terms of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, until the Reformation it was in the diocese of Lincoln. Outside the circle of stained glass scholarship, its church is still a relatively unknown gem. Much of a piece architecturally, it has escaped heavy-handed intrusive restoration. It houses a fine series of tombs and monuments and an historically important organ-case. Every window contains ancient glass, ranging in date from the first half of the fourteenth to the middle of the sixteenth centuries; not a great deal is in situ, but the quantity, date-span, iconography and quality make Stanford one of the most rewarding places for the study of medieval

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glass-painting in English parish churches. The various phases and changes tell us much about the community which used this church; in turn, the history of this community explains much about the glazing. As a result of the conservation by Barley Studio between 1987 and 1997, it has been possible to fully comprehend the significance of the glazing.1 The church is a well-proportioned and spacious building entirely rebuilt in the early fourteenth century (Fig. 1). It comprises a chancel of three bays, a five-bay nave with north and south aisles, a south porch and a tower. The nave arcades are carried down by piers with a continuous moulding without capitals, a feature of a number of churches in the locality (e.g. Charwelton) and showing that Stanford was the work of local masons.2 The only subsequent alterations are the fifteenth or early sixteenth-century clerestory and the handsome timber roofs to nave and aisles. Apart from the nave clerestory windows, the fenestration is entirely original, consisting of two simple tracery patterns: intersecting throughout the chancel and in four nave windows, reticulated in the remaining nave windows. All windows are of three lights except for the five-light east window, the east windows to the aisles, both of four lights, and the two-light tower window. Four windows are now blocked: the chancel easternmost pair and the west windows of the nave aisles. The indications are that the church was completely glazed during the second quarter of the fourteenth century in two phases.3 The first comprises the canopywork and grisaille filling the upper part of the main lights in the chancel east window, together with the seated Maria lactans at the apex of the centre light. Fragments suggest that a Christological (perhaps a Passion) cycle was placed under the band of canopies. Most of the grisaille above the heraldic glass, and the shields of arms and the crowned male bust in the tracery, are in situ. To the same phase belongs the band of apostles, grisaille and evangelist symbols now distributed over the four unblocked chancel windows but originally in the blocked easternmost pair and the next pair. 1 The most detailed accounts of the Stanford glazing are: P. A. Newton, ‘Schools of glass-painting in the Midlands 1275–1430’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1961), vol. 1, pp.2–3, 29–45; 2, 358–91; R. Marks, The Medieval Stained Glass of the County of Northamptonshire (Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi Great Britain Summary Catalogue 4) (Oxford, 1998), pp. 177–271. 2 This motif was noted by N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England Northamptonshire (Harmondsworth, 2nd ed. 1973), p. 407. 3 Newton, ‘Schools’ and Marks, Northamptonshire differ slightly in the dating and precise content of the two phases.

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1. Stanford on Avon: parish church of St Nicholas from the south–east.

2. Stanford on Avon: St Peter in the chancel glazing, c. 1324–40.

3. Stanford on Avon: female saint in the nave south aisle east window, c. 1341–52.

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4. Stanford on Avon: bishop or mitred abbot now in the east window, c. 1341–52.

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5. Stanford on Avon: abbot now in a chancel window, c. 1341–52.

6. Stanford on Avon: Warning against Idle Gossip, now in a chancel window, c. 1341–52.

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The apostle panels are very carefully designed and executed (Figs 2, 12). In each window, a figure in pink and green garments set on a blue ground is flanked by companions in pot yellow and blue against ruby grounds. One basic canopy design is employed for the apostles and a slightly larger one in the east window. Changes are rung between covered cups, oak leaves and vine leaves in border designs, the last two counterchanged with the reserved patterns on the grounds. Yellow stain is applied sparingly and judiciously to add variety, especially on alternate covered cups and vine leaves in the borders. The grisaille which survives in some of the side window lights has oak and vine leaves springing from central stems and with yellow-stained beaded trelliswork (Fig. 7). The shields in the east window indicate that these five windows were glazed towards the end of Edward II’s reign or, more probably, shortly after the accession of Edward III. A likely post quem is 1324 and a terminus ante is provided by the use of the pre-1340 royal arms. The guiding force behind the rebuilding of the church and its glazing almost certainly was Alan of Aslackby, rector between 1308 and his death in 1337. It is very probably his body that was buried below the canopied tomb with the effigy of a priest in the nave south aisle.4 The second phase also seems to have conformed to a coherent iconographical programme, complementary to that in the eastern parts of the chancel. The new campaign seems to have encompassed not only the nave aisle windows, but also the westernmost pair of chancel windows. The reason why the first phase did not include the latter may have been because building work was still in progress on the eastern parts of the nave, including the chancel arch area, and it was too hazardous to risk glazing the westernmost chancel bay at this time. Of the main light glazing of Phase 2 there survive a prelate, St Margaret, St Anne teaching the Virgin to read, St Agnes and two more female saints (Fig. 3). Fragments and antiquarian sources provide evidence for a second prelate, SS Katherine of Alexandria, Elizabeth and Mary Magdalene, the last three from north aisle windows, and at least one and probably several scenes from the life of St John the Baptist. Most of the tracery glazing survives, some of it in situ. The principal remains include a Coronation of the Virgin (Fig. 13), possibly St George, two abbots, two prelates and traces of two more, and a fifth prelate holding a tonsured head (Figs 4, 5). Christ in Majesty occurs twice, above angels 4

For Aslackby see Marks, Northamptonshire, pp. 180–1.

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and Christ on the Cross flanked by the Virgin and St John in both the aisle east windows. These are above former nave altars and appropriately the subject-matter emphasizes the sacrament of the Mass. In the north aisle window the angels summon the dead from their graves. Angels appear in another the tracery of another window and evangelist symbols in two more. There is also a Veronica and a Warning against Idle Gossip (Fig. 6), plus a fragment of the fable of the fox preaching to geese. Neither shields of arms nor donor figures exist which might help identify the date and patron (or patrons) of the second phase, and none is recorded in the antiquarian sources. Although the Stanford parishioners themselves may have been involved, it is likely that the rector once again played a prominent role in completing the task begun by Alan of Aslackby. Of the three incumbents between the latter’s death in 1337 and the middle of the century, only one occupied the position for a substantial period: John of Winwick, rector between 1341 and 1352. Like his two immediate predecessors, Winwick was a holder of high royal offices, eventually rising to be Keeper of the Privy Seal. For him, the Stanford rectory was a sinecure and although his administrative duties meant that he can have spent little time there, he did not neglect his church. In his will of 1359, Winwick bequeathed 100s. to the fraternity of the Virgin here and a chasuble to its altar. In addition, both the will and his seal indicate his devotion to his name-saint, John the Baptist, in the light of which the evidence for the representation of this saint in the nave glazing may be significant.5 Another relevant player, however, may well have been the Benedictine abbey of Selby in east Yorkshire, which held the advowson of Stanford; the parish was the monastery’s principal estate in the south of England. Inter alia, its location made it a convenient stopover for the monks and their officials en route to London and Oxford and attending the triennial General Chapter of the Order in England at Northampton.6 The range and type of coloured glasses, the canopy and border designs and figure styles of the two phases are very different. The coloured glass in the first phase is very deep, the second phase is much more translucent (Figs 2, 3, 12, 13). Absent from the second phase are the triangular-shaped 5 For John of Winwick see ibid., p. 182. A. B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to A.D. 1500, 3 (Oxford, 1959), pp. 2063–4. 6 See J. H. Tillotson, (ed. & trans.), Monastery and Society in the Late Middle Ages. Selected account rolls from Selby Abbey, Yorkshire, 1398–1537 (Woodbridge, 1988), pp. 16, 68, 69, 70.

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heads of the chancel apostles and there are fewer and less calligraphic drapery folds (Figs 3–6, 13). The nave figures are heavily shaded with oilbased paints, which impart a much more volumetric impression and this is enhanced by the extensive use of back-painting, even in the tracery eyelets. This monumentality goes hand in hand with a three-dimensional treatment of the canopied niches. Those in the aisle east windows exhibit rudimentary perspective through the off-setting and shading of the inner faces of the sideshafts; these may be contrasted with the flatness of the niches framing the chancel apostles (Figs 2, 3, 12); in addition, St Anne and the Virgin in the nave appear to be emerging from their niche. Two principal hands are recognizable in the second phase, both evidently working side-by-side and of great inventiveness (or at least the designer of the cartoons was). There are at least eight variants of canopy design, a dozen sideshaft patterns and an attractive display of minor motifs, with fish and birds all based on natural species in the south aisle eyelets, as well as hybrids and other denizens of borders and grisaille (Figs 8, 9, 11). The above summarizes what can be deduced primarily from a study of the surviving Stanford glazing of the period. How has it been treated historiographically? The stained glass has attracted very considerable attention from the late sixteenth century to the present day, the differing approaches and interests placed on it reflecting the scholarly concerns of each writer’s respective era. Apart from passing mention in pretty well all the standard surveys of English medieval stained glass, those who have published on it in more detail have their place in the pantheon of stained glass scholarship, notably Charles Winston, Eden, Rushforth and Peter Newton.7 Winston was the first to take Stanford beyond the confines of antiquarianism by dating and classifying the glass and identifying the iconography.8 The earliest published accounts of the Stanford glazing to move beyond description were those of A. H. Dyson and F. S. Eden, which appeared almost simultaneously. The former was a local historian, whose monograph on the church was published at Rugby in 1929. Eden, See Marks, Northamptonshire, pp. 177–9 for a complete bibliography on Stanford; a critical survey of the Northamptonshire glass historiography is on pp. xliii–xlix. 8 Winston’s account of the glass is in G. A. Poole, Architectural Notices of the Churches of the Archdeaconry of Northampton (London, 1849), pp. 218–28. This was based on his extensive notes and exquisite watercolours made in 1834, 1835 and 1848 (London, British Library, Add. MSS 35211, iii, pp. 10–33; 33846, fols 7–8r; 33847, fols 27r–35r, 36r–39r, 40r; 33851, fol. 72). 7

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by contrast, was a student of English medieval glass and his article on the Stanford glazing appeared in the Journal of the British Society of Master GlassPainters for 1929–30.9 Although they do not seem to have collaborated, their methodology was basically the same: they both looked to the parish’s history for its glazing affiliations and as a result Selby Abbey came into the picture, albeit in different ways. Eden suggested that the tracery prelates in the east window may have represented Selby abbots (Figs 4, 5); Dyson on the other hand considered that the east window as a whole was a memento of Edward II’s visit to Selby Abbey in 1327. Neither author proposed stylistic links between Selby and Stanford, but Dyson, quoting some visitors from Yorkshire, also stated that the chancel glazing ‘exactly resembles York Minster glass’. He may have invoked York because of the proximity of Selby; alternatively he might have seen the Minster as the obvious place to seek comparisons for early fourteenth-century glass. Next to try his hand was none other than the patrician figure of G. McNeil Rushforth, author in the 1920’s and 30’s of a series of important articles and books on English medieval glass, above all Medieval Christian Imagery. Rushforth contributed a short section on the glass to Hamilton Thompson’s article on Stanford church in the Archaeological Journal for 1933;10 evidently he was familiar with both Dyson’s and Eden’s publications because he repeated the former’s link with York Minster, albeit specifying the nave glazing and also suggested rather vaguely that Selby Abbey may have had something to do with the Stanford glazing. It is no criticism of these studies of the Stanford glazing that the comparisons with the Minster nave glazing do not stand up to scrutiny — neither for that matter does the fragment that is left of the Selby east window fourteenth-century glazing. At the time of writing, good photographs of the York glass were not readily available (their poor preservation still presents problems of legibility) and little attention had been paid to Selby.11 9 A. H. Dyson, The Story of S. Nicholas’ Church Stanford-on-Avon and its Associations (Rugby, 1929); F. S. Eden, ‘Ancient Painted Glass at Stanford-on-Avon and its Associations’, Journal of the British Society of Master Glass-Painters, 3 (1929–30), pp. 156–65. 10 G. McN. Rushforth in A. Hamilton Thompson, ‘Stanford-on-Avon’, Archaeological Journal, 90 (1933), pp. 378–9. 11 For Selby see D. O’Connor and H. R. Harris, ‘The East Window of Selby Abbey, Yorkshire’, in L. R. Hoey (ed.), Yorkshire Monasticism: Archaeology, Art and Architecture from the 7th to the 16th Centuries, British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions, 16 (1995), pp. 117–44.

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7. Stanford on Avon: grisaille and borderwork in the chancel glazing, c. 1324–40.

8. Stanford on Avon: canopy top, borderwork and figure playing a dulcimer, now in a chancel window, c. 1341–52.

9. Stanford on Avon: canopy top, borderwork and quarries in the nave south aisle east window c. 1341–52.

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10. Belton (Leics.): canopy top and borderwork, c. 1325–50 (London, Victoria & Albert Museum, Dept. of Prints, Drawings & Design, acc. no. B. 4. a: watercolour presented by the Revd. J. H. Cardew. 11. Stanford on Avon: bird and fish from nave south aisle eyelets, c. 1341–52.

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12. Stanford on Avon: SS Peter, Paul and Philip in the chancel glazing, c. 1324–40. 13. Stanford on Avon: The Virgin from the Coronation of the Virgin, now in a chancel window, c. 1341–52.

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However, an alternative methodology was nascent at the same time as Dyson, Eden and Rushforth were publishing on Stanford. This emerged from two strands in stained glass research. The first was the discovery of documented (primarily urban-based) medieval glass-painters, notably by L. F. Salzman and Christopher Woodforde.12 The second was an increasing awareness of parish church glazing, which manifested itself in the publication of surveys in county archaeological journals as well as studies of individual monuments. In the 1920’s and 30’s these included Gloucestershire and Surrey.13 As we shall see, the county model has its drawbacks, but has continued to flourish since the Second World War, including S. A. Jeavons’ article on medieval glass in Staffordshire, which appeared in the Transactions & Proceedings of the Birmingham Archaeological Society for 1952.14 In common with most of these studies, Jeavons was more of a survey than an analysis, but his noting of similarities in the glazing of several churches (outside Staffordshire as well as within it) led him to argue that they were the work of one ‘school’ (as he put it) which was initially peripatetic and then found a centre in Coventry. Jeavons knew the Stanford glass and considered that it was the work of this ‘school’ because (in his opinion) it shared certain design features with this group, including the use of the same cartoons for the tracery prelates there and in the east window main lights at Checkley in Staffordshire. He was not the first to suggest that Coventry was a centre of a ‘school’ of glass-painting. Westlake had included the city amongst several urban-based ‘schools’ as early as the 1880’s and in 1930–31 Bernard Rackham associated a series of fourteenth and fifteenth-century windows in midlands churches with Coventry and also cited a reference in the city archives to a named glass-painter from the

L. F. Salzman, ‘Medieval glazing accounts’, Journal of the British Society of Master Glass-Painters, 2 (1927–8), pp. 116–20, 188–92; 3 (1929–30), pp. 25–30; C. Woodforde, ‘Glass-painters in England before the Reformation’, idem, 6 (1935–37), pp. 62–7, 121–28. 13 S. Pitcher, ‘Ancient stained glass in Gloucestershire churches’, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, 47 (1925), pp. 287–345; F. C. Eeles and A. V. Peatling, Ancient Stained and Painted Glass in the Churches of Surrey, Surrey Archaeological Collections (1930). 14 S. A. Jeavons, ‘Medieval Painted Glass in Staffordshire Churches’, Transactions & Proceedings of the Birmingham Archaeological Society, 68 (1952), pp. 25–73 (the term ‘school’ is used on p. 26). 12

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beginning of the fourteenth century in addition to the already-known John Thornton.15 The ‘school’ label however is inappropriate when applied to any kind of medieval artistic production; in respect of glass-painting, it evokes an image of an Athenian academy with rows of glaziers and their apprentices sitting at their benches faithfully following the diktats of an Überglasmaler. Notwithstanding its anachronistic resonances, the ‘school’ terminology has enjoyed remarkable longevity amongst historians of medieval art. While Rackham cited only some fourteenth-century Warwickshire glass, Jeavons looked further afield and thus implicitly rather than explicitly was thinking in regional rather than county terms in respect of centres of production. So too was Peter Newton when he formulated his ground-breaking and alas never published 3-volume doctoral thesis entitled ‘Schools of glass-painting in the Midlands 1275–1430’, examined in 1961.16 With Peter Newton, stained glass studies in England entered the European methodological mainstream of art history. Supervised by Francis Wormald, he broadened approaches to the medium through his knowledge of manuscript illumination and iconography, interpretations of heraldic meaning and use of hagiographical texts as well as systematic exploration and analysis of antiquarian sources. Newton’s midlands comprised the counties of Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire, Rutland, Shropshire, Staffordshire and Warwickshire and he was the first to draw attention to the riches of parish church glazing within their boundaries. He identified several different workshops, locating one in Derbyshire and also argued for the existence of a ‘school’ based in Coventry in the early fifteenth century, of which he singled out John Thornton as the leading light. Stanford features prominently in the thesis. Newton recognized that there were two phases to the fourteenth century, although he and I differ slightly in their dating and precise content. He compared the diaper patterns behind the chancel apostles (Figs 2, 12) with those at Noseley in Leicestershire (before 1306); as they are now more or less completely opaque this is impossible to verify. He

N. H. J. Westlake, A History of Design in Painted Glass, 2 (London and Oxford, 1882), p. 41; B. Rackham, ‘The Glass-Paintings of Coventry and its Neighbourhood’, Walpole Society, 19 (1930–31), pp. 89–110. 16 Newton, ‘Schools’ (see above, n.1). For an assessment of his contribution, see R. Marks, ‘Medieval stained glass: recent and future trends in scholarship’, Journal of Stained Glass, 24 (2000), pp. 62–79 (p. 64). 15

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also followed Jeavons in relating the tracery prelates (Figs 4, 5), which he assigned to the first phase, to Checkley, although he noted that they could not be from the same cartoons as the Checkley figures are twice the size of those at Stanford; indeed, a recent side-by-side comparison of the two schemes in a conservation workshop has confirmed that they are not by the same workshop. Newton also cautiously suggested that the glazing of the south aisle east window at Thornton (Leics.) may have been by the same workshop as the Stanford Phase I glass. Thornton is under twenty miles north of Stanford; the restoration of its medieval glass has validated his judgement. In addition, he identified glass in another Leicestershire church, at Broughton Astley, as by the workshop responsible for the Stanford Phase II glazing; this church is less than ten miles distant. Notwithstanding the fact that both Stanford and Broughton Astley are within fifteen miles of Coventry, ie within a day’s ride, Newton did not attempt to associate any of the fourteenth-century workshops with this city or any other urban centre in the midlands. Two questions arise from these studies. Firstly, what are the criteria by which individual workshops are identified? Secondly, what factors might affect the establishment and location of such workshops? Regarding the first it has been traditional to focus on figure style, particularly delineation of heads and drapery folds. Also relevant are the kinds of ornamental patterns used on backgrounds, garments, haloes, crowns, border and other motifs and canopy variants; also the epigraphy of inscriptions could be instructive (although less attention has been paid to glass than to other media — notably monumental brasses). Another — and one which has been rather overlooked — is the extent to which the range and kind of coloured glass used might be the distinguishing trait of a workshop. The last is indeed perhaps the most obvious hallmark of the Stanford Phase II and Broughton Astley workshop. But the whole question remains fraught with difficulties, even leaving aside the obvious one created by massive losses, accident of survival and the poor condition and fragmentary nature of so much that has come down to us. Perhaps as a result there has been a tendency to pick and mix in this exercise. Other complicatory factors include the degree of exchange and interaction between workshops and the extent to which motifs like border designs were copied when they entered the public domain by being placed in church windows. This may apply to recorded glass in the adjacent Leicestershire churches of Osgathorpe and Belton, which in aspects of design is closely comparable with the Stanford Phase II borders

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(Fig. 10).17 Again, the widespread use of stock tracery patterns like Y-tracery and cusped quatrefoils in midlands parish church architecture should inject a note of caution into attempts to identify specific cartoon designs as a mark of a workshop. The introduction of architectural features brings us to the second question regarding the setting up and location of stained glass workshops. A key requisite must have been demand. There can be little doubt that fenestration, in both size and complexity, became a primary architectural focus from the late thirteenth century; with it stained glass became the principal medium for monumental painting. Which was the chicken and which the egg is impossible to answer, but it is at least certain that the midland counties witnessed a massive programme of parish church building (or rather rebuilding) during the first half of the fourteenth century. Glass-painting by its nature lends itself to an urban manufacturing environment, although we need to be aware that evidence may be distorted by the comparative abundance of relevant civic archives compared with village and manorial records. It requires easy accessibility, both to potential patrons and for importing of materials, and for that a centre with good road and/or river communications is highly desirable. As for materials, while white glass could be obtained locally from the glass-making workshops of Staffordshire, the much more expensive coloured glass was imported from the Continent via ports like London, Hull, and King’s Lynn — and probably Boston and Bristol.18 In addition, it was advantageous for glass-painters to be in proximity to related crafts like stonemasons and blacksmiths. Does fourteenth-century Coventry fit these criteria? During the previous century the city developed as an important regional centre, initially with a large and diverse manufacturing base which in the fourteenth century shifted towards trade; in the third decade Coventry’s economy expanded noticeably and for one hundred years or so it was one of the most prosperous cities in the kingdom and by far the most important urban centre in the midlands. While none of the conduits by which glass was imported was close to Coventry, the same applies to other urban centres in the region. Besides, it was a centre of communications with a network of roads connecting it with other major cities and towns and it lay within a triangle London, Victoria & Albert Museum, Dept. of Prints, Drawings & Design, acc. no. B. 4. a (watercolours presented by the Revd. J. H. Cardew). 18 R. Marks, Stained Glass in England during the Middle Ages (London, 1993), pp. 30–1. 17

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formed by the ancient Fosse Way, Watling Street and Rychnield Street. Its prosperity was reflected in the large amount and scale of church building undertaken by monastic, mendicant, secular clerical and lay patrons within its boundaries from the late thirteenth century, although much seems to have been done from the 1340’s.19 Its hinterland too, which extended into Northamptonshire and Leicestershire as well as Warwickshire, experienced much church-building activity in the fourteenth century. The names of no fewer than thirteen masons and nine carpenters are documented as resident in Coventry in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.20 Glaziers are recorded in the city from the early fourteenth century, albeit only two names are known, both from property transactions: William le Glasewryrthe/ Glaswrughte (occs. 1310 and 1316) and John Glasewryghte (occs. 1340, 1349). The latter possibly is identical with John Coventre who in 1351–2 was one of the glass-painters employed by the crown on the windows of the royal chapels of St Stephen’s Westminster and Windsor.21 This dearth may however reflect the selective and incomplete nature of the records. There has also been a tendency to underestimate the capacities of medieval glasspainting workshops, even when the indications are that for the most part they comprised no more than one or two master glaziers plus an assistant and an apprentice.22 While it remains plausible that one or both the Stanford workshops operated from Coventry, the evidence (if that is what the above amounts to) remains no more than circumstantial. Essentially the problem lies in the dearth of glass of the period that has survived from Coventry itself. Apart from some fragments in Holy Trinity church, some of whose decorative features have affinities with the Stanford Phase II glazing, recourse has to be had to excavated scraps. The most extensive of these are from the Whitefriars church, especially its east window, but the finds date from the end of the fourteenth century and therefore are irrelevant to the present

19 For medieval Coventry, see R. Goddard, Communal Contraction and Urban Decline in Fifteenth-Century Coventry, Dugdale Society Occasional Papers, 46 (2006). 20 Victoria County History, Warwickshire, VIII (London, 1969), p. 154, Table 2. 21 I am indebted to Dr Nat Alcock for providing me with transcripts of the relevant references. For the chapels at Westminster and Windsor see Salzman, ‘Accounts’, 2 (1927– 8), pp. 120, 188; idem, ‘ The glazing of St. Stephen’s Chapel Westminster, 1351–2’, Journal of the British Society of Master Glass-Painters, 1 (1924–6), p. 35; 2 (1927–8), pp. 38–41. 22 Marks, Stained Glass, p. 44.

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context.23 As far as I am aware, the only excavated glass so far studied of the same period as the Stanford glazing are the 1,500 recognizable fragments from the Benedictine cathedral priory chapter house published by Peter Newton.24 He cautiously dated them to c. 1310–30 and found general parallels with glazing in Oxford and the midlands, including Stanford. The facial features (undulating eyebrows and curving nose profile) of the one relatively complete head are not so close to either of the Stanford phases to justify assigning them to their respective workshops and the rest of the finds are too fragmentary for any conclusive comparisons to be made. It is equally important to bear in mind that claims could be made for the smaller and less significant county towns of Leicester and even Northampton. Stanford is more or less equidistant from all three. Thornton (by the Stanford Phase I workshop) lies just north-west of Leicester and Broughton Astley, plus Osgathorpe and Belton (if they are by the Stanford Phase II workshop) are also in closer proximity to Leicester than to Coventry. Through the historical connections of Stanford, it would be legitimate also to look to Northampton (through the holding of the Benedictine Order Chapters there) or even London (because of the employment in royal service of several rectors of Stanford, especially John de Winwick). But Leicester and Northampton suffer even more than Coventry from a dearth of extant fourteenth-century glass and also their civic records of the period are less copious. And then there are places like Lichfield, with which two of the St Stephen’s Chapel craftsmen are associated through their names, one of them (Hugh) being designated as one of the master glass-painters, responsible for designing the windows, whereas John Coventre was an executant.25 Regrettably no relevant glass survives from Lichfield Cathedral, the east end of which was rebuilt and extended in the second quarter of the fourteenth century. Ultimately therefore, pending the discovery of glass closely comparable with that at Stanford on Avon, attempts to locate either or both the workshops responsible for the two early fourteenth-century phases in Coventry (or any 23 C. Woodfield et al., The Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and Some Conventual Buildings of the Whitefriars, Coventry, British Archaeological Reports, British Series 389 (Oxford, 2005), pp. 185–244. 24 P. A. Newton, ‘Report on the stained and painted glass found on the site of the chapter-house of Coventry Cathedral’, in B. Hobley and M. W. Lambert, ‘Excavations at the Cathedral and Benedictine Priory of St Mary, Coventry’, Birmingham and Warwickshire Archaeological Society Transactions for 1967–70, 84 (1971), pp. 102–11, Figs 9–12. 25 Salzman, ‘St Stephen’s’, 1 (1924–6), pp. 14–16, 31, 32, 35; idem, 2 (1927–8), p. 39.

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other midlands urban centre) are no more than hypothetical. Nevertheless, Stanford and the glazing of other churches have much to tell us about glasspainting in the first half of the fourteenth century. Firstly, notwithstanding the absence of quantities of extant glass from Coventry and other urban centres, that there was an enormous demand for glazing at this time in the region. Secondly, that in richness, quality of design and execution (or ‘artifice’, to use the medieval terminology), the only distinction between the glazing of a parish church and a monastic, collegiate or even a cathedral church might be one of scale. In this respect, the band window chancel glazing scheme of Stanford is comparable with the glazing of Merton College chapel, Oxford (c. 1294). Thirdly, that in Stanford’s case, the relatively high proportion of surviving glazing of the period, together with evidence of what has been lost, demonstrates the kinds of imagery (devotional, liturgical and moralistic) considered appropriate for a parish community which at the time was both populous (it included two hamlets as well as the village proper) and not as remote as it might appear, lying as it does just off the Watling Street, still a major road in the middle ages.26 Stanford also raises wider methodological issues. Peter Newton eschewed any attempt to define a distinctive ‘midlands’ regional mode of glass-painting. It may well be that within Coventry and other centres workshops existed side by side, producing windows of different style, as was the case with the York Minster nave aisle glazing in the early fourteenth century. Viewed in this way, Coventry et al may be seen as centres of glazing activity rather than purveyors of a distinctive style which spread into their respective hinterlands. Individual workshops may have dominated glazing in their locality, but the physical and social boundaries of their commissions could be more fully tested and explored by broadening the lines of enquiry beyond strictly art-historical methodologies of stylistic analysis to include the kinds of human and natural considerations (and complexities) identified in Derek Keene’s recent brilliant essay on ‘National and Regional Identities’: geography, topography, communications, demography, occupational and familial networks, prosperity (or its absence), trade, manufacture, markets, ecclesiastical institutions and jurisdictions and local administrative 26 Marks, Northamptonshire, pp. 179–82; idem, ‘Medieval stained glass’, pp. 73–4. Evidence for the fourteenth-century population of Stanford can be found in manorial records and traces of the deserted village and its hamlets; for the latter see Royal Commission on Historical Monuments England, County of Northampton Volume III Archaeological Sites in North-West Northamptonshire (London, 1981), pp. 175–78, esp. Figs 133, 134.

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structures and patronage.27 The last, as Tim Ayers has suggested for Wells Cathedral, can transcend regional parameters.28 In this respect too, Dyson’s and Eden’s interest in the links between Stanford and Selby was prescient and might explain the inclusion of abbots in the former’s glazing (Figs 4, 5); nor should the involvement of successive rectors in royal administration be overlooked. In the process there is a need to define more precisely terms like ‘local’ and ‘regional’. The county is a convenient common organizational unit for the study of medieval stained glass (and other media), as it has been since the 1920’s, but the kinds of headings just outlined do not fit neatly within county boundaries. Nor does there seem to have been a distinct awareness of county identity in the later middle ages, as is evident from William of Worcester’s peregrinations in the 1470’s.29 The subject-headings suggested by Derek Keene give rise to reflections regarding the principal centres of glass-painting in fourteenth-century England. The period witnessed major building projects at the great monastic and secular cathedrals of Bristol, Chester, Ely, Exeter, Gloucester, Lichfield, St Paul’s Cathedral London, Tewkesbury, Wells, Worcester and York; the reconstruction of their fabric brought in their train extensive painted glass. Of these buildings, only Gloucester, Tewkesbury, Wells and, above all, York have preserved substantial quantities of their glazing; at Chester, Lichfield and St Paul’s, none has survived. Their ambitious and individual programmes demanded careful management in execution, in some cases extending over several decades. The extent to which the workforces charged with these projects also undertook other commissions awaits further 27 D. Keene, ‘National and Regional Identities’, in R. Marks and P. Williamson (eds), Gothic. Art for England 1400–1547 (Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition catalogue, London, 2003), pp. 46–55. A pioneering study along these lines was T. D. Atkinson, Local Style in English Architecture: an enquiry into its origins and development (London, 1947). 28 T. Ayers, The Medieval Stained Glass of Wells Cathedral (Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi Great Britain Volume IV) (Oxford, 2004), esp. pp. 35, 454, 500; for Stanford see above. Patronal networks in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries link some of the glazing of Tattershall College (Lincs.) with Great and Little Malvern priories and Westminster Abbey: R. Marks, The Stained Glass of the Collegiate Church of the Holy Trinity, Tattershall (Lincs.) (London and New York, 1984). 29 For William of Worcester see Keene, ‘National and Regional Identities’, p. 52. Similar limitations apply to the study of stained glass within modern national boundaries; see B. Kurmann-Schwarz, ‘La recherche suisse sur le vitrail et son cadre international: avantages, handicaps et contraintes’, Zeitschrift für Schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte, 53 (1996), pp. 345–54 (p. 349).

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research. Tim Ayers has detected little sign that the Wells glaziers worked anywhere but the cathedral, whereas at York, some of the Minster nave craftsmen were active in parish churches in and beyond the city.30 A west midlands workshop contemporary with the Stanford Phase II workshop and which seems to have been particularly peripatetic, was responsible for glass not only at Worcester Cathedral and Hadzor and Kempsey in the same county, but also roamed further afield to execute windows for the Cistercian Abbey at Merevale at the north-east edge of Warwickshire and the Latin Chapel in the Augustinian cathedral priory of St Frideswide, Oxford.31 The existence of so many great church and parochial glazing projects distributed across central England from Exeter in the west to East Anglia and Yorkshire in the north during the first half of the fourteenth century renders redundant any equation of labels like ‘local’ or ‘regional’ with ‘provincial’ or ‘inferior’. It also suggests that in this period there was no single dominant centre. The unknown quantity of course is the capital. Although the London Glaziers’ Company existed from at least 1328 and the east end of St Paul’s Cathedral was remodelled and the Franciscan church constructed in this period, it is questionable whether London generated the level of continuous demand which could support glazing as a major activity.32 Seen in this light it may be significant that for the glazing of the royal chapel of St Stephen’s Westminster (1349–c. 1352), it was necessary to recruit glaziers from all over the country. While Black Death mortality has to be taken into account, St Stephen’s may also have reflected a dearth of sufficiently skilled glass-painters available in the capital. Is it coincidental that one of the leading lights at St Stephen’s was Simon of Lenne (King’s Lynn), who was probably brought fresh from glazing the windows of the Lady Chapel of Ely Cathedral? The few recorded fragments of the St Stephen’s windows are remarkably similar to the Ely glazing, which at the

Ayers, Wells, p. ci; Marks, Stained Glass, pp. 153, 159. Marks, Stained Glass, pp. 161–2. 32 Ibid., p. 41; Ayers, Wells, pp. 35, 454, 500. For St Paul’s in this period see C. Davidson, ‘Fabric, Tombs and Precincts, 1087–1540’ in D. Keene, A. Burns and A. Saint (eds), St Paul’s. The Cathedral Church of London 604–2004 (New Haven and London, 2004), pp. 127–42 (esp. 136–9). For the building and glazing of the very important London Greyfriars church see C. L. Kingsford, The Grey Friars of London (British Society of Franciscan Studies, 6, 1915), pp. 18, 35–42 (a list of donors of the stained glass windows is transcribed on 165–9); also E. B. S. Shepherd, ‘The Church of the Friars Minor in London’, Archaeological Journal, 59 (1902), pp. 238–87. 30 31

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very least suggests that Ely was at least as rich and lavish as St Stephen’s and may indeed have provided the model for the royal chapel.33. Simon’s fellow master glaziers numbered men whose toponyms included Chester, Lincoln, Lichfield and Lenton (Notts.).34 This non-metropolitan diversity might serve to explain why it was two glass-painters from central England, Thomas Glazier of Oxford and John Thornton of Coventry, and not London craftsmen, who are associated with leading developments in glazing at the end of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Acknowledgements The author is grateful to the following for permission to reproduce material in their collections: National Monuments Record (Figs 2–9, 11) and the Trustees of the Victoria & Albert Museum (Fig. 10). Figs. 1, 12 and 13 were taken by the author.

Marks, Stained Glass, pp. 159–61. Salzman, ‘St Stephen’s’, 1 (1924–6), pp. 15–16, 31–5; 2 (1927–8), pp. 38–41; idem, ‘Medieval Glazing Accounts’, 2 (1927–8), 120. 33

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IV An Age of Consumption: Art for England c. 1400–1547

T

he last phase of the Middle Ages is all around us. Some of England’s most familiar and cherished man-made landmarks date from this time, several still performing the functions for which they were designed. St George’s Chapel, Windsor, remains closely associated with the monarchy and is the headquarters of the Knights of the Garter (Gothic. Art for England 1400-1547, exhibition cat. no. 25). King’s College Chapel is the jewel of Cambridge and the college itself is a seat of learning, as its founder Henry VI intended (Gothic cat. no. 19). Henry VII’s great chapel projects from the east end of Westminster Abbey into what is still the heart of government (Fig. 1; Gothic cat. no.28). All of these, and royal palaces like Hampton Court, are amongst England’s leading tourist attractions — not just because of their historic associations, but also (and probably more importantly) through their beauty and magnificence. Outside London and its environs, visitors flock to Lavenham in Suffolk, a town retaining its late medieval layout and much of its housing stock (Gothic cat. no. 123). Its church and that of nearby Long Melford are amongst the glories of East Anglian ecclesiastical architecture. It is impossible to travel far without encountering visible traces of the England of Henry V, of the Wars of the Roses, of Henry VIII. Numerous towns and cities preserve their medieval street-pattern and many of their medieval buildings, even if concealed behind later façades and accretions. Castles and manor houses pepper the landscape. Parish churches are the most characteristic features of both the English urban and rural topography. Although they are often aggregates of different periods, it is hard to find any without some element, be it a window, bench or a tomb, dating from the period 1400–1547. Especially in East Anglia, the Cotswolds, Devon and Somerset, it is common to find entire churches which were built or rebuilt in

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these years. Even outside these areas, most counties contain several churches whose fabric entirely dates from this time. Quantities of artefacts of secular and domestic origin survive in national and local museums, the Oxford and Cambridge colleges and the City of London livery companies. Many have been brought together for the first time in this exhibition. In addition to the numerous buildings, books, stained-glass windows, carvings and other works of art, there is a mass of documentation. There is more for this period, and it is of a more heterogeneous character, than for previous centuries and it increases in volume from the second half of the fifteenth century: alongside records of expenditure and inventories are contracts, churchwardens’ accounts, wills, commonplace books and correspondence.1 There are also the observations of scholars and overseas visitors and even a few constructed ‘biographies’.2 By 1400, English had become the everyday speech of the highest in the land and many of the written records, including the collections of letters, are in the vernacular. Through these, however distorted and diluted, the voices of those who commissioned and used what today we classify as art-objects, are heard. And these voices represent a wider social spectrum than just the Crown, the nobility, the gentry and the upper clergy: for the first time, we have numerous details of the collective and individual possessions of townspeople and villagers, of artisans, traders and tillers of the soil. Cumulatively, the multivocality of the period offers insights into the art and architecture English men and women owned, shared and enjoyed.

The most important published inventories are those of John Duke of Bedford and Henry VIII; also those of Sir John Fastolf. Extensive correspondence survives from gentry (the Pastons, the Stonors and the Plumptons) and wool-merchants (the Cely family); from the end of the period are the letters of one of the highest in the land, Arthur Plantagenet Lord Lisle, the bastard son of Edward IV. All of these are available in published editions. 2 The observations made by John Leland during his extensive travels are the best known. The papers of William Worcester, secretary to Sir John Fastolf, are particularly valuable for architectural historians (J. H. Harvey (ed.), William Worcestre Itineraries (Oxford, 1969)). The Beauchamp Pageants is a highly selective pictorial narrative of the life of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick; see A. Sinclair, The Beauchamp Pageants (Donington, 2003). Very different and more complex is the Book of Margery Kempe, an account of an extremely, even excessively, devout member of the mercantile elite of King’s Lynn, Norfolk (S. B. Meech and H. E. Allen (eds), The Book of Margery Kempe, Early English Text Society, original series 212, 1940). 1

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Late medieval art in England might be plentiful and ubiquitous, but it is neither readily comprehended nor easily defined.3 Its principal characteristic is its variety. Qualitatively it encompasses the good, the bad and the downright ugly. It was simultaneously international and insular, progressive and provincial, diverse and diffuse, conservative yet receptive to new modes and technologies, inventive in form, vibrant in colour and rich in iconography. Above all, it was in demand. The absence from this exhibition (with a few exceptions) of artefacts made in or for Wales and that area of Ireland which formed ‘the Pale’, is not to subordinate these other constituent parts of the British Isles, which at the time came under the rule of one sovereign, to an ethnically English cultural hegemony; on the contrary, it is to acknowledge that these other nations, like the Scots, trod their own paths in matters artistic.4 The elusiveness and complexity of the art produced in and for England between 1400 and 1547 stems partly from the inescapable fact that so many of its products had functions and meanings utterly removed from those of the twenty-first century. The pattern of survival has also been uneven and therefore distorting. A lethal combination of war, changing religious ideologies, financial imperatives, cupidity and fragility, fashion and taste has dealt severely with the products of the middle ages — pre- as much as post-1400. Of royal possessions, almost nothing remains for our period apart from ecclesiastical buildings funded by various monarchs. Even the last resting places of Henry VI, Edward IV and Henry VIII are no longer marked by their original or intended monuments; Richard III’s grave at Leicester has disappeared without trace. As a result, examples of the best and most innovative commissions are absent. The Reformation was responsible for the almost wholesale destruction of artefacts made for the Church or private devotion. The jewel-bedecked shrines and gold and silver altarpieces have vanished entirely. The total surviving church plate from the years 1400– Unsurprisingly, few scholars have attempted an overview. See J. Evans, English Art 1307–1461, Oxford History of English Art vol. V (Oxford, 1949); as the title shows, this only covers the first part of the period. C. Richmond, ‘The Visual Culture of FifteenthCentury England’, in A. J. Pollard (ed), The Wars of the Roses (Basingstoke, 1995), pp. 186– 250, offers a historian’s perspective; D. Gaimster and P. Stamper (eds), The Age of Transition. The Archaeology of English Culture 1400–1600 (Society for Medieval Archaeology Monograph 15, 1997) provides an inter-disciplinary approach. 4 See for example Nobles and Unicorns, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Antiquities of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1982). 3

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1547 would not suffice to have serviced even a large parish church like Long Melford, let alone a cathedral or monastic establishment. Long Melford is fortunate in preserving considerable quantities of stained glass and traces of its mural and ceiling decoration, but it has lost its rood and rood-screen, its huge high altar reredos and other altarpieces, all of its vestments and banners, almost all of its brasses and, with one exception, its large stock of devotional images. That the dominant sculptural medium was wood is barely apparent from the handful of survivors — and even these (and statuary in stone) have been stripped of their rich polychromy.5 Once-common categories of objects, such as painted cloths, have almost completely disappeared (Gothic cat. nos 155, 301). The number of extant illuminated books is not matched by the survival rate of wall- and glass-painting. Personal attire, that potent messenger of status and wealth, has perished, apart from jewellery. Those artefacts which have come down to us are often displaced and rarely fulfil their original function. A second confusing factor is historiographical. The fate of the visual arts is frequently perceived to have been determined largely by political events, themselves seen in the light of the strife-torn and blood-drenched England evoked in Shakespeare’s history plays. Following this reading, as English military triumphs turned to defeat in France and the country descended into internecine dynastic strife, England declined artistically into a backwater. This interpretation has been compounded by the fact that the period straddles the traditional historical divide between the medieval and early modern eras: the triumph of Henry Tudor at the battle of Bosworth in 1485 has often been seen as a cultural turning-point, when a new dawn was ushered in by a polyglot group of foreign artists charging to the rescue, introducing Renaissance modes of representation and ornamentation and restoring England to the mainstream of European visual culture. The later Middle Ages thus have been viewed as an age of transition, sandwiched between the glories of English High Gothic art and architecture of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and the emergence of new artistic models based on the reception of Renaissance ideals under a ‘new’ Tudor monarchy. The persistence of nineteenth-century notions of what is canonical Gothic and a qualitative view of art history, which measures the artistic For polychromed sculpture, see S. Boldrick, D. Park, P. Williamson, et al, Wonder: Painted Sculpture from Medieval England, exhibition catalogue, Henry Moore Institute (Leeds, 2002). 5

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production of the period by the yardstick of Renaissance Italy, have contributed to this caricature. To an extent, this perception has found echoes in attitudes to northern European art as a whole in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The great Dutch historian Johan Huizinga saw in the Franco-Burgundian culture of the time both the end of the Middle Ages and the first flowering of the northern Renaissance, hence the title of his classic book, Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen.6 Attempts to define the visual arts in England are also complicated by the receptivity of leading English patrons to continental products and craftsmen. This was as true in 1400 as it was in 1547, although the influence of nonindigenous production was more pervasive in Henry VIII’s reign than it had been in Henry IV’s. The well-to-do, both lay and clerical, had no qualms about acquiring or commissioning works of art from abroad or from foreign artists. Major patrons, led by the Crown, went to the best available, irrespective of nationality. Archbishop Chichele’s pair of silver wine flagons was made by Parisian goldsmiths (Gothic cat. no. 101). Among John, Duke of Bedford’s possessions could be found luxurious illuminated manuscripts of both French and English craftsmanship (Gothic cat. nos 72, 73). The French illuminator known as the Fastolf Master had made enough of a mark on the English captains serving in France for him move to England (Gothic cat. nos 92, 224). Notwithstanding the presence of a handful of Italians like Torrigiano (Fig. 2; Gothic cat. nos 7, 8, 9, 29, 117) in Henry VII’s and Henry VIII’s reigns, the dominant cultural influence throughout the period remained that of northwest Europe. England’s nearest neighbours, France (principally Paris) and increasingly the southern Netherlands were the most important sources for materials, products and craftsmen. In addition to its own artistic activity, Flanders formed a conduit for goods from other regions. Works of art were imported throughout the period; but by the early sixteenth century, books, altarpieces, devotional images, painted cloths, textiles, ceramics, plate and armour were flooding into England on an unprecedented scale. Not all the

J. Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages (trans. R. J. Payton and U. Mammitzsch) (Chicago, 1996), esp. pp. xix–xx. The book was first published in 1919. The first English edition (1924) was entitled The Waning of the Middle Ages. See M. Aston, ‘Huizinga’s Harvest: England and The Waning of the Middle Ages’, Medievalia et Humanistica, new series, 9 (1979), pp. 1–24; E. Peters and W. P. Simons, ‘The New Huizinga and the Old Middle Ages’, Speculum, 74 (1999), pp. 587–620; F. Haskell, History and Its Images. Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven and London, 1995), Chapter 15. 6

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imports were expensive items. Devotional images in the form of pipeclay statuettes were intended for the cheapest end of the market (Gothic cat. no. 221). The products and skills offered by alien artists and craftsmen were also sufficiently in demand for more and more of them to settle in England. This should not come as a surprise. In matters religious, England shared the same ideology and used much the same imagery as the rest of western Christendom. The English nobility and knighthood subscribed to the same chivalric ideals and caste values as their French opponents. Mythology, valorous deeds in battle and tournament, hunting, Romance, genealogy and heraldry predominated in the Flemish tapestries which they displayed in their residences, as Sir John Fastolf ’s inventory shows (Gothic cat. nos 6, 153, 154).7 English men and women encountered continental products through war, diplomacy, trade and commerce, and pilgrimage. To limit the history of art in England to what is deemed to be the work of indigenous craftsmen would thus present a very confused and distorted picture, especially at the highest levels. It is often difficult — even pointless — to characterize a work as ‘English’ or ‘foreign’. The Donne Triptych (Gothic cat. no. 213) is self-evidently the work of Hans Memling and was executed in Bruges, but what label should be applied to the Bedford Psalter and Hours (Gothic cat. no. 73), a manuscript with illumination by several artists, including the foreign-born but domiciled Hermann Scheerre? How is a cope, whose material was manufactured in Italy but with English needlework, to be classified (Gothic cat. nos 31, 248)? It is unhelpful to distinguish between the Donne Triptych and the Fairford glass (Gothic cat. no.294), on the basis that one was painted in Flanders and the other was made by immigrant craftsmen from the same region. As at Fairford, the reception of foreign artists and craftsmen, designs and products usually involved some degree of translation into English idioms. The Fairford glazing programme had to be adapted to fit Perpendicular windows. Scheerre painted his initials and miniatures in manuscripts with traditional English decorative elements. The hybrid nature of the late Winchester and Westminster stone sculpture makes it difficult to determine the country or countries of origin of the carvers (Gothic cat. nos 234, 235, 356, 239). Broadly speaking, the formal vocabulary of English art remained what we would define as Gothic throughout the period. Henry Bolingbroke’s seizure

7

J. Gairdner (ed.), The Paston Letters (reprinted Gloucester, 1986), no.389.

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of the throne in 1399 did not mark the emergence of a new style. By that date, the brilliance and luxurious refinement of International Gothic had already been assimilated at the highest level; indeed, Richard II’s exquisite Wilton Diptych (Fig. 3), is one of the finest creations of its time anywhere in Europe. The salient technical and design innovations of Perpendicular architecture had been framed before 1400; thereafter it was a matter of variations on a theme. This is not to suggest that nothing changed between 1400 and 1547. Much did, but more in some fields than others. Painting (especially portraiture) was of greater significance in the early sixteenth century than it had been a century earlier. Figuratively, the illusionism propagated in Flanders supplanted the more ethereal illusionism of International Gothic in vogue in the early fifteenth century. The architecture of war too became transformed in respect of the defences of the realm. All’antica ornamentation was an increasingly common element in the repertoire of early sixteenthcentury masons, sculptors, goldsmiths, painters and glaziers. In the dissemination of such motifs, printing (introduced into England in the later fifteenth century) came to play an important role, as well as opening up a new and socially more diverse field for artistic endeavour. It is possible to identify a large number of artists in the period and quite a number of their products survive. Helpful though this can be, names may mislead by privileging centres where records are preserved; and they obscure what was for the most part the collaborative nature of artistic activity in the middle ages. The St William window in York Minster was principally the work of glass-painters, but also involved at one remove or another were glassmakers, masons and blacksmiths (Gothic cat. nos 232, 317). A woodcarver, a painter and a leatherworker as well as an armourer (the last possibly the donor, William Vynard) participated in the making of the St George belonging to the Armourers and Brasiers’ Company (Gothic cat. no.58). Craftsmen went wherever their patrons demanded. The sculptor John Massingham was associated with Westminster Abbey, All Souls College, Oxford, and the Beauchamp Chapel in Warwick. John Prudde, who held the office of king’s glazier under Henry VI, worked at Winchester, Oxford and Warwick (Gothic cat. no. 89), as well as in the royal residences and in foundations like Eton. Even a provincial workshop such as the Malvernbased glass-painting firm of Richard Twygge and Thomas Wodshawe, through patronage networks, was able to attract important commissions at Westminster Abbey and Tattershall College (Gothic cat. nos 37, 292). The likes of Massingham and Prudde were located in London (or Westminster)

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and inevitably the capital was, as always, the most important centre for much artistic production and the purchase of artefacts, notably monumental brasses, goldsmiths’ work and the crafts associated with book-making, firstly illumination and later also printing. Across the Thames, Southwark was the principal residence of the alien craftsmen from the late fifteenth century. Demand stimulated output. The building trades had long been established close to stone quarries and timber, but it is in this period that regional production in other fields of activity can be assessed, on documentation as well as extant work. The pattern was diverse. The alabaster carvers seem to have remained centralized in the vicinity of the alabaster quarries in the Midlands, but with retail outlets in centres like Bristol and London and a chain of agents perambulating the country, taking orders for tombs, images and altarpieces. Their stock products were offered already painted and must have presented a serious challenge to the work of locally-based stone- and woodcarvers and painters and gilders. In prosperous eastern England, there was sufficient demand to support craftsmen in several urban centres, hence the range of styles exhibited by screen-paintings and glazing in Norfolk and Suffolk. Bury St Edmunds housed manuscript and monumental painters, bell-founders, brass-engravers, masons and carvers who serviced the town and its hinterland. The sparser population in the north meant that York craftsmen cast their nets more widely. William Brownfleet carved choir-stalls for Bridlington Priory and also worked in Ripon Minster, where he was probably responsible for the magnificent misericords (Gothic cat. no. 240). In York, like London, there was a sufficient concentration of masons, glasspainters and other crafts to support craft guilds, but in smaller towns and even centres like Bury, there is no evidence that the individual guild writ ever ran. Much regional production was distinctive and was shaped in varying degrees by tradition, the availability of materials and craftsmen, changing patterns in worship and devotion, and wealth. The parish churches of Devon, the Cotswolds and Norfolk and Suffolk all display their own regional architectural traits. The wagon roofs favoured by the carvers, carpenters and joiners in the West Country contrast with the elaborate hammerbeam constructions of East Anglia. Roodscreens in Devon are notable for their carving, whereas better-quality figurative painting on the dado is a feature of East Anglian screenwork (Gothic cat. nos 264, 265, 266, 277). In some cases, it is a matter of individual workshops, rather than a regional mode. Brownfleet was probably associated with a group of Yorkshire woodcarvers

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1. Henry VII’s Chapel, Westminster Abbey, interior (photograph: Christopher Wilson).

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2. Pietro Torrigiano, bust of Henry VII (photograph: Victoria & Albert Museum). 3. Wilton Diptych (photograph: National Gallery, London).

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4. John Siferwas, The Lovel Lectionary (London, British Library Harley MS 7026) (photograph: British Library Board).

7. The Clare Cross, British Museum, on loan from Her Majesty the Queen (photograph: The Royal Collection).

5. York Minster east window, by John Thornton and workshop, 1405-8 (photograph: The Dean and Chapter, York Minster).

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6. Hengrave Hall, Suffolk (photograph: Richard Marks).

8. Tomb of Ralph Greene and his wife Katherine, St Peter’s church, Lowick (Northamptonshire), by Thomas Prentys and Robert Sutton (photograph: Conway Library, Courtauld Institute of Art).

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who during the early sixteenth century executed a number of roofs, stalls, screens and tombs. Stained-glass workshops in various parts of the country are identifiable by their own distinctive traits. ‘Provincial’ was not invariably synonymous with inferior. In the West Country, the Dominican friar John Siferwas (presumably a trained painter before he became a mendicant) in c.1400 produced masterpieces of manuscript illumination like the Sherborne Missal and Lovel Lectionary (Fig. 4; Gothic cat. no. 254) which were the match of anything by his London-based contemporaries. There are good grounds for believing that the innovators in glass-painting during the early fifteenth century were Thomas Glazier of Oxford and John Thornton of Coventry (and later York). Thus English art was far from being entirely dominated by alien products and artists. This was particularly true of architecture, where masons continued to design and build in the Perpendicular idiom, whether a cathedral or a parish church, a college or a castle. There is nothing second-rate about the spatial articulation, the technical mastery and the visual complexities of the fan-vaults and architectural design of the great royal chapels at St George’s Windsor, King’s College and Henry VII’s mausoleum at Westminster. Without parallel on the continent are the walls of glass in the east end of York Minster, combining kaleidoscopic translucency and iconographic ingenuity (Fig. 5). At their best, the alabastermen were capable of carving tailor-made tombs (Fig. 8; Gothic cat. nos 330, 337), images and altarpieces (Gothic cat. nos 84, 224, 282, 344) of a quality that attracted the patronage of the highest in the land.8 Their products also found ready markets from Scandinavia to Spain. Nor should English music be overlooked. The polyphony sung in the great ecclesiastical establishments and choral foundations is one of the cultural achievements of the age and the ‘English manner’ was both admired and emulated on the continent The scale of expenditure by the likes of Edward IV and the first two Tudor monarchs is astounding. They called upon the best available craftsmen in their particular fields. With diplomatic hyperbole, John Leland dubbed Henry VII’s Chapel the wonder of the entire world. When it was conceived, the king and his advisors employed Netherlandish glass-painters for the windows, the Florentine sculptor Torrigiano for the altar and royal tombs, and unidentified carvers for the stalls and for the multitude of saints that

8

Most notably, the tomb of Henry IV and Queen Joan in Canterbury Cathedral.

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adorn the triforium and eastern chapels. The incomparable architectural frame, however, was designed by Robert Janyns, an English master mason, who also worked on St George’s Chapel, Windsor.9 Both Henry VII and his successor built a chain of royal residences which were filled with the prodigious quantities of tapestries (Gothic cat. no. 6) and plate listed in the royal inventories. Truly they were players on the international scene when it came to artistic patronage. Outlay on this scale was not so much an exercise of individual taste as what was expected of rulers. In reminding monarchs that expenditure on buildings, furnishings and all forms of display was an essential aspect of effective kingship, the fifteenth-century writer Sir John Fortescue was merely expressing what had been normative princely behaviour for centuries.10 His dictum was applied in varying degrees, according to means and status, personal whim and circumstances. Henry VII was acutely conscious of the potency of regal display: the phrase ‘As to a Kings werk apperteigneth’ recurs in his will.11 For him and for Henry VIII, costly buildings and furnishings projected a (much-needed) impression of permanence and stability, festooned as they were with their badges and devices. Such precepts did not just apply to the monarchy, but were adopted by the ruling caste, both secular and ecclesiastical. Late medieval English society was one in which individuals were bound to each other by ties of lineage, marriage, allegiance and clientage. It was a small world, as the Paston correspondence shows. Through its pages occur the names of monarchs, prelates, nobles and gentry, lawyers and merchants, even parochial clergy and ordinary renters of property. Within the Church, it was possible for talented individuals like Henry Chichele and Richard Fox to rise from humble origins to hold respectively the highest ecclesiastical office in the realm and one of the richest sees in Christendom. In general, however, English men and women knew their place in the order of things and behaved accordingly. Bishop Waynflete, one of Sir John Fastolf ’s executors, was expressing a universally-held value when he stipulated that the old warhorse should be

C. Wilson, ‘The Designer of Henry VII’s Chapel, Westminster Abbey’, in B. Thompson (ed.), The Reign of Henry VII, Harlaxton Medieval Studies, Vol. 5 (Stamford, 1995), pp. 133–156. 10 C. Plummer (ed.), The Governance of England: Otherwise Called The Difference Between an Absolute and a Limited Monarchy, by Sir John Fortescue, knight (Oxford, 1885), p. 125. 11 T. Astle (ed.), The Will of King Henry VII (London, 1775), passim. 9

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buried ‘accordyng to hys degree’.12 By acquiring possessions according to their ‘degree’, status and rank were attained or confirmed. Lords and knights accumulated and built in the same way that they fought (when necessary), managed their estates and businesses, and pursued their leisure pastimes. Fastolf and Ralph, Lord Cromwell constructed status-conscious castles and manor houses, and planned elaborate collegiate foundations for the wellbeing of their souls (Gothic cat. nos 50, 145, 67, 291, 292). The Pastons discharged their familial and social obligations in erecting tombs and chantries and in embellishing their local parish church or monastery. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, those engaged in trade and commerce were major consumers of luxury goods and artefacts. Merchants, especially those who made their living from the wool and cloth trades, aimed to beautify and enrich the cities and towns where they were domiciled. The brasses covering the floors of Cotswold churches like Northleach testify to the contribution made by the wool trade to the grandeur of late medieval ecclesiastical architecture in this region. The same applies to East Anglia. The profits of the cloth industry enabled John Baret to amass the staggering quantity of goods and possessions which, meticulously disposed of in his will, imprinted his personal stamp on St Mary’s church in Bury St Edmunds (Gothic cat. nos 261, 331).13 Hengrave Hall, one of the most impressive country houses of its day, was built for a London merchant (Fig. 6; Gothic cat. no.149). Their overseas peregrinations and contacts meant that merchants were no less receptive to new fashions and ideas than their social superiors. Robert Tate, a London alderman and member of the Staple of Calais, commissioned a Netherlandish altarpiece for a pilgrimage chapel adjacent to All-Hallows-by-the-Tower (Gothic cat. no. 136). Thomas Pownder of Ipswich and his wife Emme even forsook the long-established monumental brass industry in favour of the products of the Flemish founders (Gothic cat. no. 334). The aforementioned windows of Fairford were a by-product of the Tame family’s success as wool-merchants (Gothic cat. no. 294). Merchants were not just consumers and commissioners; they also imported foreign goods. The Calais-based Celys frequented the great fairs at Antwerp and Bruges and shipped home their purchases. They also acted as agents for Gairdner, Paston Letters, no.393. For Baret’s will, see S. Tymms (ed.), Wills and Inventories from the Registers of the Commissary of Bury St Edmunds and the Archdeaconry of Sudbury, Camden Society, 49, 1850, pp. 15–44. This document also names several Bury craftsmen. 12 13

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wealthy clients like Sir John Weston, Prior of the Knights of St John in England.14 As we move down the social scale, the wealthier peasants and artisans had surplus cash and goods in kind to spend on themselves and their parish churches. Urban archaeological sites have revealed pottery, base-metal and wooden plate and utensils; also items of personal adornment such as rings and rosary beads. These were pale reflections — and even, in some cases, imitations — of the silver and gold plate and jewellery owned by the wealthier echelons of society, but they show that private ownership in this period was not the exclusive preserve of the latter. Inventories and wills reveal that the rural dwellings of the more prosperous yeomen and husbandmen and their wives sometimes contained surprising quantities of ‘household stuff ’. Amongst the possessions of Alice Cooke (d.1521), a comfortably-off widow of Eaton Bray in Bedfordshire, were brass pots, pans, cauldrons, five platters, a basin, a chafing-dish (Gothic cat. no.198), four saucers, candlesticks, two coffers and much bedding. And through belonging to a parish community, Alice also had a stake in more major artefacts, such as the images in her parish church; she made small bequests to the lights of several, including the rood (Gothic cat. no. 268), the Sepulchre (Gothic cat. no. 273), the Trinity and St Nicholas.15 As a member of the Dunstable Fraternity of St John the Baptist, Alice would have been entitled to have her body covered by the guild’s magnificent pall during her funerary rites (Gothic cat. no. 349). For owners and users, every artefact had a function and a meaning. Possessions and commissions were used by arrivistes like the Pastons and Ralph Cromwell to assert their worldly success. Selfhood, status, affinity and patronage were expressed through the burgeoning popularity of personal and familial insignia. The Tudor palaces and religious foundations were quite literally dressed in the king’s livery. The Beauchamp Chapel is permeated by the heraldry, badges and mottoes of the founder — on tomb, vault, stall, window (Gothic cat. nos 86, 87, 89). By donating a votive crown replete with initials and personal devices to the image of Our Lady at Aachen, Margaret of York was privileging her relationship with this famous cult-image (Gothic cat. no. 11). John Baret’s motto, Grace me gouerne, adorned many of his possessions and can still be seen on the painted roof over his tomb and on the 14 A. Hanham (ed.), The Cely Letters 1472–1488, Early English Text Society, original series 273, 1975. 15 P. Bell (ed.), Bedfordshire Wills 1484–1533, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, 76, 1997, no.95, pp. 59–60.

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tomb itself (Gothic cat. no. 331). Vanitas and self-promotion were sometimes concealed by a thin veil of self-denial, epitomised by John Clopton’s inscription on the exterior of the exquisite Lady Chapel at Long Melford: ‘Let Christ be my witness that I have not exhibited these things in order that I may win praise, but in order that the Spirit may be remembered’. Display, even in spiritual matters, might be motivated as much by competition and material betterment as by the desire for personal salvation. The ‘monthly mind’ of Richard Cely (1482) was used by the family to attract suitable spouses for his unmarried sons by an exhibition of their plate.16 To our eyes, such flaunting of wealth and status might seem vulgar and ostentatious. Yet to contemporaries, it was entirely proper. Possessions not only defined personal status, their manufacture and sale also provided employment, and in the religious sphere they served God. People were also aware of the ephemeral nature of worldy goods and success. John Baret is represented on his grave as a naked decaying corpse, with texts admonishing viewers to heed their own fate and to pray for his soul. Outward display was accompanied by a desire for privacy or exclusivity among the upper echelons of society. In the parish churches, as more and more individuals, as well as groups like fraternities, claimed space both for the living and the dead, so the gentry and urban elites created separate chapels as family pews and burial sites, usually in the most prestigious parts of the building. This was not new to the period, but the process accelerated during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. These chapels — and their equivalents in private residences — were lavishly equipped and the family identity stamped on them by heraldry and the other common signifiers of rank and status. The Ashwellthorpe Triptych was of a size to fit the altar of an oratory either in the Knyvett house or the chapel which still stands on the north side of the chancel of Ashwellthorpe church (Gothic cat. no. 276). In the secular sphere, the same desire for privacy (and comfort) manifested itself in the supplanting of the great hall by the parlour or great chamber as the main focus of family life. This trend too had been in train since the middle of the fourteenth century.17

16 A. Hanham, The Celys and their World. An English merchant family of the fifteenth century (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 260–3.The ‘monthly mind’ was a celebration in memory of a deceased individual, when prayers and alms were offered for the good of their soul. 17 M. Girouard, Life in the English Country House (London, 1978), Chapter 3; N. Cooper, Houses of the Gentry 1480–1680 (London, 1999), Chapter 8.

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An increased emphasis on affective piety fuelled demand for portable devotional artefacts like books of hours (a demand vastly enhanced by the advent of printed books) and rosaries. A Venetian visitor in about 1500 remarked on the prevalence of private devotional practices in England, ‘the women carrying long rosaries in their hands and any who can read taking the office of Our Lady with them and with some companion reciting it in the church, verse by verse, in a low voice…’.18 Agnes Browne or her husband can be imagined walking through the streets of Stamford to All Saints church bearing her Flemish-made Book of Hours with its embossed cover and minute images on the clasps (Gothic cat. no. 140). Agnes’s book may have functioned as a devotional aid, but even when closed it acted as a discrete indicator of status. It is little wonder that rosaries made from precious materials feature so much in wills and inventories (Gothic cat. no. 222). Personal items of adornment, like the Clare Cross and the Middleham Jewel, were simultaneously status symbols, financial assets, fashion accessories, apotropaic reliquaries and devotional aids (Fig. 7; Gothic cat. nos 209, 98). Even an iconographical ring might have romantic as well as religious connotations. The newly wedded Margery Paston gave her husband a ring engraved with her name-saint as a love token. Margery Cely dispatched to her spouse in Calais a gold fetterlock and a heart of gold as keepsakes that must have resembled those in the Fishpool hoard (Gothic cat. no. 206).19 In this period, many crafts offered a wide range of products to suit the needs and purses of a socially-diverse clientele. Much of the output of the monumental brass engravers was affordable by the more prosperous artisans and peasantry. The alabaster carvers too produced work for the cheaper end of the market. Even items of personal devotion, like alabaster St John’s heads, which might cost as little as one shilling, were not beyond the means of the likes of Alice Cooke of Eaton Bray (Gothic cat. no. 219).20 For some crafts, a sliding scale of charges existed. John Prudde charged from 7d. to 2s. a square foot, dependent on the amount of coloured glass used and the complexity of the imagery. His price of 1s. 2d. for ‘vitri historiales’, (that is, narrative subjects) at Eton College in 1450 was still the rate at Tattershall more than thirty years later (Gothic cat. nos 89, 291, 292). 18 C. A. Sneyd (trans.), A Relation, or rather a true account, of the Island of England… about the year 1500, Camden Society, 37, 1847, p. 23. 19 Gairdner, Paston Letters, no.923; Hanham, Cely Letters, no.222. 20 F. Cheetham, English Medieval Alabasters (Oxford, 1984), p. 31.

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There was a vast difference between the cost of artefacts commissioned at the highest level and those made more or less off the shelf for the lower end of the market. The tomb of Ralph Greene at Lowick (Fig. 8; Gothic cat. no. 330) was one of the more expensive products of the alabaster carvers, yet its cost of £40 pales into insignificance when compared with the £720 or so expended on the monument of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick (Gothic cat. no. 87). The latter’s materials included Purbeck marble, enamel and copper-gilt and its manufacture demanded the combined skills of a draughtsman or painter (for the design), a marbler, a carver, a goldsmith, a barber-surgeon and founders. Textiles were extremely expensive. Throughout the period, Netherlandish tapestries were highly prized status symbols for anyone who was anybody. Edward IV paid Pasquier Grenier, the leading tapestry merchant, the enormous sum of nearly £2500 for a series of hangings depicting the History of Nebuchadnezzar, the History of Alexander, a Judgment, the Passion, several verdure hangings and three valances for a bed. This was over eight times the amount contracted with the mason for building the nave of Fotheringhay church (Northants.) in 1434 (Gothic cat. no. 327).21 Crimson velvet clothof-gold imported from Italy cost anywhere between £2 and £11 per yard (Gothic cat. no. 201). The set of vestments left by Agnes Cely to her parish church of St Olave’s Hart Street in London at her death in 1483 cost her executors £39 8s. 11½d, of which 17¾ yards of ‘blue cloth of gold’ were priced at 26s. 8d. per yard; the vestment maker’s charge for making up the set came to a mere 10s. This sum far exceeded the £8 3s. 4d. disbursed to Roger Egge, a freemason and marbler, for the tomb of Agnes’s late husband.22 Price was one of several considerations when it came to acquiring an artefact. Patrons also concerned themselves with subject-matter. Sir Thomas Stathum was very precise about what he wanted on his brass in Morley church (Derbyshire), even if the finished article did not conform exactly to his instructions (Gothic cat. no. 332). The annotations to the imagery depicted in the vidimus for a window of one of Cardinal Wolsey’s projects were presumably made at the patron’s behest (Gothic cat. no. 295). ‘Workmanlike’ is a common adjective in contracts, because patrons wanted value for their

S. McKendrick, ‘Edward IV: An English royal collector of Netherlandish tapestry’, Burlington Magazine, CXXIX (1987), pp. 521–2; L. F. Salzman, Building in England down to 1540 (Oxford, reprinted 1967), pp. 505–9. The Fotheringhay price excluded materials. 22 Hanham, The Celys and their World, pp. 255, 269–70. 21

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outlay. A constant refrain in the Beauchamp Chapel accounts is that not only must the materials be of the highest quality but that they should be worked ‘in the most finest wise’, or words to that effect.23 The more discerning (or more hard-nosed) patrons recognized inferior work when they saw it. John Paston I expressed his dissatisfaction with a tombmaker in St Bride’s parish, London: he was ‘no klenly portrayer’ and John proposed finding someone else to design and ‘grave’ his brother Edmond’s brass.24 Artistic skill was evidently valued and it would be useful to know by what criteria John Paston was judging the unfortunate tombmaker. Johan Huizinga sought to comprehend what late medieval people admired in the artistic products of their day and how they valued their aesthetic qualities. Unfortunately a meaningful vocabulary for critical evaluation is lacking throughout the period. What qualities did Oxnead church (Norfolk) possess, to be labelled as ‘resonable plesaunt’? What criteria was John Leland applying to St Mary’s church in Nottingham for it to be lauded as ‘excellent’? What led Margery Kempe to characterize an image of a Pietà as ‘fair’ (the most widely used epithet)? Was it because, within her experience, this Pietà was aesthetically superior to others she had seen? Or was it because it was larger or more elaborately painted and gilded?25 Indicators of the aesthetic sensibilities of late medieval patrons and owners are elusive, even in the most sophisticated circles. It is impossible to say whether the magnificent manuscripts, jewels and plate listed in John, Duke of Bedford’s inventories reflected his personal connoisseurship or what was expected of him by his princely status. Ultimately, there is a clear distinction between patronal desires and perspectives and the act of creation. Richard Beauchamp ‘devised’ his mortuary chapel, but by this he meant ordered: he or his heirs and executors specified the chapel’s iconography, but they did not design the building and its contents, any more than Archbishop Chichele was responsible for the appearance of All Souls College, Oxford. It is about those who commissioned

W. Dugdale, The Antiquities of Warwickshire (2nd ed. by W. Thomas, London, 1730), pp. 445–447. 24 N. Davis (ed.), Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, I (London, 1971), no. 37, p. 54. 25 Gairdner, Paston Letters, no.934; L. Toulmin Smith (ed.), The Itinerary of John Leland in or about the years 1535–1543, 1 (Carbondale, 1964), p. 94; Meech and Allen, Margery Kempe, p. 148. 23

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that we know most — often their fame (or reputation) has been determined by their possessions. Those who articulated the wishes of patrons, and translated them into the works of art we still admire, have left far fewer traces in the written records. Their memorials are the wonderfully diverse buildings and artefacts they conceived and fashioned. And behind the known artists and craftsmen are hosts of anonymous masons, carvers, painters, goldsmiths, weavers and needleworkers. It is these — as much as Scheerre, Thornton, Prudde, Holbein and Torrigiano — whom we have cause to celebrate.

V Yorkist and Lancastrian Political and Genealogical Propaganda in the Visual Arts

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his article is not a definitive study of the highly complex subject of Yorkist-Lancastrian propaganda, but merely brings together a body of material, which if some of it is known to art historians, has not been considered within the context of the dynastic struggles in fifteenth-century England. Attention will be concentrated on monumental art as opposed to manuscript illumination, mainly because my concern is with propaganda; a book or roll was inevitably restricted to the eyes of few people, and was therefore not likely to influence opinion to the extent that could large-scale works. From the moment Henry Bolingbroke seized the throne in 1399, the Lancastrian dynasty was acutely conscious of the vulnerability of its right to the English Crown.1 It is not surprising that it should have endeavoured to influence the minds of the populace by visual imagery designed to show that its kings were the natural successors to past English monarchs. During the second half of the fourteenth century, a series of cycles of kings had appeared in English monumental sculpture, on the west fronts of Exeter and Lincoln Cathedrals and at Westminster Hall,2 and, around the turn of the century, in the glazing of the west window of Canterbury Cathedral.3 The iconography of the carved cycles is uncertain; one view 1 See J.R. Lander, Conflict and Stability in Fifteenth-Century England (London, 2nd ed., 1974), pp. 50–1. 2 See E.S. Prior and A. Gardner, An Account of Medieval Figure Sculpture in England (Cambridge, 1912), pp. 350–1, 395, and L. Stone, Sculpture in Britain in the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth, 1955), pp. 174–5, 181, 194. 3 See B. Rackham, The Ancient Glass of Canterbury Cathedral (London, 1949), pp. 118– 121, 128–9, 132.

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is that they represent the Kings of Judah, another that they are English monarchs.4 The latter theory gains credence from the Canterbury glass, for it is known from inscriptions formerly in the window that the figures included Canute, Edward the Confessor, Harold, William I, William II, Henry I and Stephen.5 It seems that the Lancastrians seized on the evident popularity of the theme and exploited it for their own dynastic ends. The earliest extant work of monumental art which can lay claim to have been designed as Lancastrian genealogical propaganda is the pulpitum of Canterbury Cathedral (Fig. 1). The structure was erected by Prior Thomas Chillenden (1390–1411), evidently towards the end of his term of office.6 The upper row of figures and those around the door were destroyed in 1642 by the Puritans, but the six main statues of kings are intact, apart from minor restorations.7 Those of Ethelbert and Edward the Confessor apparently were paid for out of a benefaction during the time of Chillenden’s successor, Prior Woodnesborough (1411–27).8 Ethelbert ought to be the figure holding the model of a church next to the door on the left, for he was the royal founder of the church in Kent; the first statue to the right of the door is presumably Edward. The other four kings are very close, if not identical, in style with these and cannot be far removed in date. They may have been executed a few years later, for as has been remarked, the statue of Henry VI at All Souls College, Oxford, bears a marked resemblance to the Canterbury pulpitum figures.9 The All Souls Henry VI statue and the figure of Archbishop Chichele there were carved after 1438 and probably before 1442. They

Stone, op.cit., p. 175, Prior and Gardner, op. cit., p. 395. See W. Gostling, A Walk in and about the City of Canterbury (Canterbury, 2nd ed., 1777), p. 366. I am most grateful to Mrs. Madeline Caviness for the use of the manuscript of her Corpus Vitrearum volume on Canterbury Cathedral. 6 For the screen see C. Cotton, ed., ‘The Screen of the Six Kings in Canterbury Cathedral’, Canterbury Cathedral Chronicle, No. 20 (April 1935), pp. 12–20 and Stone, op. cit., p.204. 7 This is Cotton’s opinion (op. cit., p. 16), from a drawing made by Carter in 1785, but I suspect that more has been done, especially on the head of the so-called Henry VI. The restoration began in 1822. 8 Ibid., p. 18, citing the chronicle of John Stone (1415–71). The entry reads: ‘Item in ij ymaginibus in navi ecclesie in honorem sanctorum Ethelberti et Edwardi: .... liijs. iiijd Although there is no mention of the pulpitum, the date and the iconography of the figures holding the church make it almost certain that these are indeed two of the statues on the screen. 9 Stone, op. cit., p. 208, and J. Sherwood and N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England, Oxfordshire (Harmondsworth, 1974), p. 24. 4 5

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and the four pulpitum kings may possibly be the work of the sculptor John Massingham, who was working at All Souls between these years, and at Canterbury in 1436.10 The four kings have been taken to represent Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, and Henry VI.11 The Lancastrian kings are thus not only associated with two Anglo-Saxon monarchs noted for their piety, but also with Richard II, thereby implying they were his rightful successors. The evidence on which the identifications have been made is open to doubt. As the statues lack labels, it is largely based on their resemblances to portraits of the kings in question, in paintings and tomb sculpture. With regard to the former, it cannot be proved that the portraits cited are contemporary likenesses, with the exception of the Westminster Abbey painting of Richard II, and that bears very little affinity with the Canterbury figure which is supposed to represent him. The figure on the extreme right has been identified as Henry VI, by means of the crosses adorning its crown, an apparent reference to this king’s choice of signs of the Holy Cross to be set in it, rather than the usual representations of flowers and leaves.12 This is not conclusive, for the crown of the presumed Henry V also has a row of crosses, albeit only half as many. On the other hand, the middle statue on the right side of the screen does bear an affinity with the effigy of Henry IV on his tomb, situated nearby. Moreover, the supposed Henry VI at Canterbury closely resembles in facial features the All Souls statue of the same king. Thus although a doubt remains, it mainly centres on the presumed figures of Richard II and Henry V. For our present purpose this is crucial; if the Canterbury statues are not of these kings, then the iconography of the pulpitum cannot be seen as Lancastrian propaganda. There is one piece of circumstantial evidence to support the traditional identification. Both Archbishop Arundel and his successor Chichele were closely connected with the dynasty. Arundel was re-instated by Henry IV and Chichele throughout his tenure of the See (1414–43) remained a firm supporter of the House of Lancaster.13 It is conceivable that the latter was concerned in the choice of iconography for the screen. Moreover, there are Stone, op. cit., p. 206. Cotton, op. cit., pp. 17–18. 12 Ibid., p. 18. 13 See E. F. Jacob, Archbishop Henry Chichele (London, 1967), especially Chapter 8. 10 11

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clear Lancastrian connotations at All Souls College, of which Chichele was co-founder with Henry VI. The ‘Royal’ window in the ante-chapel of the College (Fig. 2) was originally in the Old Library and dates from c. 1441.14 It has been heavily restored, but it is known that the kings originally included Constantine, Arthur,15 Ethelbert, Oswald, Alfred, Edmund, Athelstan, Edgar, Edward the Martyr (d. 979), Edward the Confessor, Edward II, John of Gaunt (described as ‘Rex Hispaniae’), Henry IV, Henry V, and Henry VI.16 As has been pointed out,17 here is a justification of the Lancastrian claim to the throne from the Edwards via John of Gaunt. Moreover, the window visually associated the Lancastrian kings with previous famed (and fabled) rulers. Almost certainly Chichele was largely responsible for the iconographical programme of the All Souls glass.18 Much the same philosophy appears to lie behind another work in the same medium. The main lights of the north window of St. Mary’s Hall at Coventry (Warwicks.) (Fig. 3) contain a series of heavily restored royal figures, not in their original order. They read, from left to right, Arthur, William I, Richard I, Henry III, Henry VI, Edward III, Henry IV, Henry V and Constantine. The earlier monarchs were clearly chosen for their illustriousness, and Henry III as he was the direct ancestor of the House of Lancaster; also possibly because of his piety, or because he (and Edward III) confirmed earlier charters and granted new ones to the townspeople.19 As at All Souls, the last three Henries, all of the Lancastrian dynasty, were obviously put in to appear to those who saw the window as the successors of distinguished English rulers of the past. Coventry had good reason to be grateful to the dynasty, for in 1451 the mayor and council obtained

14 See F. E. Hutchinson, Medieval Glass at All Souls College (London, 1949), pp. 13, 38–9, 51–4. 15 The ultimate source for the inclusion of Constantine and Arthur appears to have been Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae. 16 Hutchinson, op. cit., pp. 38–40, citing Richard Symonds’ notes of 1644 and later sources. The series was not quite complete when Symonds recorded it. 17 E. F. Jacob, ‘Founders and Foundations in the Later Middle Ages’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, XXXV (1962), p.37. 18 This also was observed by Jacob. It should be noted that Roger Keyes, the supervisor of the buildings, had some say, for his connections with the diocese of Exeter explain the presence of the Devonshire St. Sativola in the glass (Hutchinson, op. cit., pp. 34–6). 19 Victoria County History, Warwickshire, 8 (London, 1969), pp 257–8.

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1. Canterbury Cathedral: the pulpitum (photograph reproduced by permission of B. T. Batsford Ltd.).

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2. All Souls College, Oxford: part of the ‘Royal’ window — the head of Henry V is modern (photograph reproduced by courtesy of the Courtauld Institute of Art).

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5. York Minster: south transept east clerestory window: Archbishop Scrope (photograph: Crown copyright).

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3. Coventry, St. Mary’s Hall: north window (photograph: Crown copyright).

4. York Minster: the pulpitum (photograph: Crown copyright).

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6. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Lat. liturg. f. 2, f. 146v: the execution of Archbishop Scrope (photograph reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library).

7. York Minster Library, MS. Add.2, f. 202v: Archbishop Scrope (photograph reproduced by permission of the Dean and Chapter, York Minster).

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8. London, British Library, Add. MS. 48976: The Rous Roll (English version), showing Queen Anne, P.ichard III and Edward, Prince of Wales (photograph reproduced by permission of the British Library Board). 9. London, College of Arms: The Rous Roll (Latin version), showing Henry VI’s son Edward between Queen Anne and Richard III (photograph reproduced by permission of the College of Arms and the British Library Board).

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an important charter from Henry VI, greatly enlarging the franchises and liberties.20 The window probably dates from c. 1451–61.21 Returning once more to sculpture, the pulpitum in York Minster appears to be yet another example of Lancastrian dynastic propaganda along the same lines (Fig. 4). 22 Unlike the Canterbury figures, there can be no doubt of the identity of the fifteen large statues, for their bases bear labels. They depict the English kings from William the Conqueror to Henry VI. All except the last are original, although possibly restored in 1814–18;23 the statue of Henry VI was carved in 1810 by a sculptor named Taylor.24 There is no reason to doubt the authenticity of its label, so there was such a statue originally. In 1479 Archbishop Booth forbade the veneration of a statue or image of Henry VI which stood in the Minster.25 This is probably the image referred to in 1473 and 1515–16.26 It is tempting to connect it with the screen, but more probably it was an independent image, associated with the religious cult that grew up and around this unfortunate monarch.27 Ibid., p. 263. The dating of this window has been disputed. Nelson (Ancient Painted Glass in England 1170–1500, London 1913, pp. 200–1) implied that it was of the early fifteenth century in assigning it to John Thornton, the well-known glass-painter of York and Coventry. Bernard Rackham, on the other hand, dated it from after the accession of Henry VII in 1485, possibly resulting from the meeting of the royal council at Coventry in 1487 (‘The Glass-Paintings of Coventry and its Neighbourhood’, The Walpole Society, XIX (1930–1931), p. 110). To complete the range, R. S. and L. H. Loomis (Arthurian Legends in Medieval Art (London, 1938), p. 40) considered that the window was painted before Henry VI’s deposition in 1461, and probably soon after his state visit to Coventry in 1451. Of all these views the last is the most plausible. Stylistically the heads appear to be too early for an end of century dating, and in any case the presence of Henry VI amongst the kings means that the glass cannot have been executed before his accession in 1422. 22 For a discussion of this screen see Stone, op.cit., p. 220, Prior and Gardner, op.cit., p. 415, N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England Yorkshire: York and the East Riding (Harmondsworth, 1972), p. 95, and J. Raine, ‘Fabric Rolls of York Minster’, Surtees Society, XXXV (1858), pp. 79–82. I am most grateful to Mr. Tom French of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments for some valuable observations on the dating problems. 23 Stone, op. cit. 24 Pevsner, op. cit. 25 Raine, op. cit., pp. 208–9. 26 Ibid., pp. 82, 97. 27 L. Smith (‘The Canonization of Henry VI’, The Dublin Review, 168 (Jan–June 1921), pp. 42–3), E. W. Kemp (Canonization and Authority in the Western Church, Oxford, 1968, pp. 134–5) and Raine (op. cit., pp. 82, 208–9) all associated this image with the screen. It may well have formed part of the fittings of an altar dedicated to Henry VI, which stood in the Minster (Raine, op. cit., p. 227). 20 21

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The precise dates of the screen are by no means certain. Work on the screen and its statues may have begun when Richard Andrew was Dean (1452–77). He had been secretary to Henry VI, and this, plus the presence of a powerful Lancastrian faction in the city, would explain the existence of Lancastrian propagandist sculpture in the Minster.28 Three of the capitals to the bases of the kings bear animals, which could be hinds. If so, then they may be seen as a reference to William Hyndeley, master mason between 1475 and 1505.29 There are no specific references to the screen in the Minster Fabric Rolls, although a payment in 1478–79 of 14s. 7d. to James Dam for making 175 crockets has been taken to mean that work was in progress.30 This is flimsy evidence, and it is not very likely that an entire Lancastrian genealogical cycle would have been erected under Edward IV and Richard III. Therefore it may well date from Andrew’s early years in office (1452–61). These genealogical cycles in sculpture and glass are closely related to the considerable numbers of manuscript pedigrees, genealogies and chronicles which seek to trace the royal ancestry of the House of Lancaster back even to pre-Saxon times. Several are illustrated, but with one exception, which will be considered later, they are omitted from this paper partly for the reason stated at the beginning, and also because they have already been listed.31 Although Yorkist (and Tudor) manuscript versions of these royal pedigrees exist, the main propagandist efforts of the adherents of the White Rose appear to have been directed, at least in art, on quasi-religious lines. In fact, there do not appear to be any extant genealogical cycles with a Yorkist bias in monumental art. On 8 June, 1405, Richard Scrope, Archbishop of York, was beheaded outside the walls of his metropolitan city for his part in leading a rebellion with the Percies against Henry IV.32 His body was buried in York Minster 28 Andrew’s previous post was recorded by all the authors cited in the last note. An earlier supporter of the Lancastrians in the city was Thomas Langley (d. 1437), Canon and Dean of York, and later Bishop of Durham. He was the donor of the St. Cuthbert window in the Minster, and as he owed his early advancement to John of Gaunt his figure, and those of Henry IV, Henry V and Henry VI, were depicted in it (see F. Harrison, The Painted Glass of York, London, 1927, pp. 110–8). 29 Raine, op. cit., p. 79. 39 Ibid., p. 83. 31 See S. Anglo, ‘The British History in Early Tudor Propaganda’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 44 No. 1 (September 1961), pp. 41–3. 32 The details of Scrope’s cult are taken mainly from an excellent article by J. W. McKenna, ‘Popular Canonization as Political Propaganda; the Cult of Archbishop Scrope’, Speculum,

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and quickly attracted pilgrims. His cult almost immediately became an important weapon in the armoury of those opposed to the claims and authority of the House of Lancaster. Thus a rumour was soon spread that the King had contracted leprosy on the execution day, a damaging story which publicized the seriousness of the Archbishop’s summary condemnation. Henry IV and Henry V attempted to defuse the political nature of devotion to Scrope, either by forbidding his veneration or by making concessions, such as permitting the appointment of a keeper of his tomb.33 During the first half of the century his cult continued to flourish locally. What transformed Scrope into an object of veneration of much wider significance was the loss of the English possessions in France and consequent disenchantment with the Crown. These factors, plus the rise of Richard Duke of York as a claimant to the throne, revived the memory of Scrope as martyr to Lancastrian rule. In 1462 a Yorkist poem described the Archbishop’s death as ‘.... a very trew evidence To all Ingeland for the iust title & lyne Which for the trewthe by tyranny & violence was put doun ....’34 In the same poem Scrope is identified as one who opposed the Lancastrian tyranny and defended the lineage of Richard II. The same stance was taken in Edward IV’s proclamation of 1471 against Margaret of Anjou: ‘.... Richard Scrope, sometime archbishop of York, which for the right of our ancestry whose estates we now have, died and suffered death and martyrdom ....’35 It is not surprising that in this atmosphere Scrope’s cult should prosper. A chapel was built on his place of execution, and there were numerous bequests of money and jewels to his tomb. In 1462, York Convocation discussed the

XLV (1970), pp. 608–23. The pioneer work of J.H. Wylie, History of England under Henry the Fourth II (London, 1894), pp. 339–367, has also been consulted. For a general discussion of ‘political’ saints see Kemp, op. cit., especially pp. 122–4, 134–5. 33 McKenna, op. cit., pp. 612–8. 34 Ibid., p. 619, citing Historical Poems of the XIV and XV Centuries, ed. R.H. Robbins (New York, 1959), pp. 222–6. 35 Ibid., p. 620, citing Calendar Close Rolls Edward IV, 1468–1476, p. 189.

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possibility of his formal canonisation and in 1467 a canon of Ripon left a large sum of money for a new shrine.36 There are at least two known representations of Scrope in monumental art. In the east clerestory window of the choir south transept of York Minster he is shown nimbed and standing full-length in archiepiscopal vestments (Fig. 5). On a label below is / DNE RICARDE SCROPE / Underneath is the kneeling donor figure of his kinsman, Stephen Scrope, Archdeacon of Richmond. On a scroll issuing from his mouth is / O RICARDE PASTOR BONE HIC FAMULI MISERERE STEPH [ ANI ] This window is said to date probably from between 1426 and 1432.37 The presence of a Scrope window given by one of his relatives in the centre of his cult is scarcely to be wondered at. The other example was in the collegiate church of Fotheringhay (Northants.), the dynastic mausoleum of the House of York. The College was first founded in the castle some time before 1398 by Edmund of Langley and his son Edward. In 1412 a papal bull authorised its transfer to the parish church, which was subsequently rebuilt. Only the nave exists today, the contract for which is dated 1434.38 Its stained glass survived virtually intact until some time between 1790 and 1821,39 and all that remain are some angels and a number of quarries with Yorkist devices from tracery lights distributed over several windows Wylie, op. cit., p. 357. Harrison, op. cit., pp. 97–8, pl. opp. p. 98. A figure in the east window of Bolton Percy (Yorkshire, West Riding) is usually identified as Archbishop Scrope (Nelson, op.cit., p. 224). However, there is no label, just the Scrope arms, so it could be the figure of a canonised archbishop donated by a member of the Scrope family. Furthermore, it forms part of a series of what Nelson calls canonised Archbishops of York. This cannot be correct, for not all of them bear the archiepiscopal cross. 38 For the history of Fotheringhay see A. Hamilton Thompson, ‘The Statutes of the College of St. Mary and All Saints, Fotheringhay’, The Archaeological Journal, LXXV (1918), pp. 241–309. The contract is printed in L. F. Salzman, Building in England down to 1540 (Oxford, reprinted with corrections and additions 1967), pp. 505–9. 39 ‘The History and Antiquities of Fotheringhay’, Bibliotheca Topographica Britannica, IV (London, 1790), pp. 31–2, records the glass, but by the time H. K. Bonney wrote his 36 37

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in the nearby parish church at Kingscliffe (there are also a few quarries in the Victoria and Albert Museum which are possible from Fotheringhay). The style of the surviving angels suggest a date for the nave glass of 1434–c. l450. Although all the panels from the main lights of the aisle and clerestory windows are now lost, their subjects were recorded by John Bridges in 1719.40 Amongst a series of such common saints as Ursula, Agatha, George,Blaise, etc. and the more local saints Guthlac and Alban was a representation of Archbishop Scrope. It was placed in the second window from the west in the south aisle. On a label below was: [Sanc] tus Ricard’ Scrope Eboracec 41 Although manuscripts are peripheral to this study, it is worth noting that Scrope appears in several. Apart from a depiction of him baptizing Richard Beauchamp on f.lv in the Beauchamp Pageants (British Library, Cotton MS Julius E. iv art. 6), he occurs in two Books of Hours. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Lat. liturg. f.2 has on f. 146v a full-page miniature of the execution of the Archbishop (Fig. 6). The manuscript dates from the first two decades of the fifteenth century and is of the Use of Sarum.42 The second book is in York Minster Library (MS Add. 2) and is of the York Use. It was written before 1445, and is much inferior in illumination.43 On f. 100v is a picture of Scrope in full pontificals, but without a nimbus. Kneeling before him is a lady with a scroll held in her hands: / SCE RICARDE SCROPE ORA PRO NOBIS / Historic Notices in Reference to Fotheringhay in 1821 it was all gone except for some fragments preserved in the Rectory; these are the ones now at Kingscliffe. 40 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Topographical Northants. MSS e. 5 (pp. 325–333), f. l (pp. 121–4). 41 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Topographical Northants. MS f. l, p. 121. A sketch of the head occurs on the plate opposite p. 453 in J. Bridges, The History and Antiquities of Northamptonshire, II (Oxford, 1791). 42 See O. Pächt and J. J. G. Alexander, Illuminated Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library Oxford, 3, British, Irish and Icelandic Schools (Oxford, 1973), No. 795, pp. 70–1, Pl. LXXVII. The most recent discussion of this manuscript is in D. H. Turner, ‘The Wyndham Payne Crucifixion’, The British Library Journal, 2 No. 1 (Spring 1976), pp. 8–26. 43 See ‘A Medieval “Hours” of the York Use’, The Friends of York Minster Sixteenth Annual Report, pp. 14–18, and ‘A Medieval “Hours” of the York Use’, The Friends ... Seventeenth Annual Report, pp. 27–8.

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On f. 202v there is an illustration (Fig. 7) of the Archbishop with this inscription below: / S. RICARDUS / In Scrope’s right hand is a windmill, which evidently refers to the story that the field in which he was beheaded produced an extraordinarily heavy crop that year.44 The attempts to have Scrope canonised failed, for beginning in the late 1460s and continuing through the next decade there was a vigorous counter-attack by opponents of the Yorkists, with a cult developing around the figure of King Henry VI and a revival of that associated with Thomas of Lancaster. In fact, the main Lancastrian propagandist effort seems to have shifted in this period from genealogical justifications to the fostering of devotion to this king. The extent to which this campaign succeeded can be judged from the number of images of Henry VI recorded, and, in a few cases, surviving.45 Nevertheless, there is one important manuscript which shows that the former ground was not forgotten. This is the well-known Rous Roll compiled, and possibly illustrated, by John Rous, chantry priest of Guy’s Cliffe (Warwicks.), between 1483 and 1485.46 It was executed to celebrate the exploits of Rous’s patrons, the Neville Earls of Warwick, and is an interesting case of a scribe and an artist catering for both Yorkist and Lancastrian sentiments. It contains more than sixty pen and ink drawings of Kings of Britain, royal and other benefactors of Warwick and of the holders of the Warwick earldom. The Roll exists in two versions, one with the text in English (London, British Library, Add. MS 48976), the other in Latin (London, College of Arms). Wylie, op. cit., pp. 340–1. See Kemp op. cit., pp. 134–5, R. Knox and S. Leslie, The Miracles of King Henry VI (Cambridge, 1923), and P. Grosjean, Henrici VI Angliae Regis Miracula Postuma ex codice Musei Britannici Regis 13 cviii (Brussels, 1935). 46 The Rous Roll has been discussed frequently. See especially W. Courthope [The Rows Roll] (there is no proper title on the title-page) (London, 1845), A. G. B. Russell, ‘The Rous Roll’, Burlington Magazine, XXX (1917), pp. 23–31, A. R. Wagner, Aspilogia I A Catalogue of English Mediaeval Rolls of Arms (London, 1950), pp. 116–120 (additions and corrections in Aspilogia II Rolls of Arms Henry III (London, 1967), pp. 277–8), C. E. Wright, ‘The Rous Roll: The English Version’, British Museum Quarterly, XX (1956), pp. 77–81, and M. Rickert, Painting in Britain in the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth, 2nd ed., 1965), pp. 185, 249 n. 11 and 11a. 44 45

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Although both were originally ‘Yorkist’ (the Nevilles at this period were firm adherents of the White Rose, for Anne, younger daughter of Warwick the Kingmaker, was married to Richard III), the Latin version was amended by Rous between 1485 and his death in 1491 to provide a Lancastrian flavour more acceptable to the new monarch, Henry VII. The chief differences in the illustrations between the English and the amended Latin versions are as follows:47 in the series of mythical, royal and historical persons with which the Roll begins, the figures of Edward IV and Richard III (nos. 16 and 17) are replaced in the Latin version by the figure of Edward III, on a separate membrane; the representation of Edward III is the same as that of Edward IV in the English one. The Roll then traces the descent of the Earls of Warwick, terminating in the English version in the figures of Queen Anne (Neville), Richard III and their son Edward, who is crowned and holds a sceptre, all on the same membrane (Fig. 8); in the Latin Roll, Rous has inserted a new membrane between Anne and Richard, on which is depicted Henry VI’s son Edward, crowned and holding a sceptre. He is a more prominent figure than Richard III and his Queen; the latter is shown without royal insignia except for a coronet, and Richard has a tabard and sceptre instead of full armour. On this tabard and on the shields of arms over both Richard and Anne, there are distinct traces of a label of 3 points over the Royal Arms, thus reducing their status to that of a royal prince and his wife (Fig. 9). In the Yorkist version the Royal Arms occur with no label over both figures. Finally, Richard’s son is depicted on the Latin Roll without the crown and sceptre; instead he has a ducal coronet. The doctored version of John Rous’s Roll takes us into the Tudor age. Whether the Lancastrian genealogical cycles in monumental art did influence public opinion it is impossible to gauge. In an era when democracy as we know it today simply did not exist, and when the dynastic struggles directly affected only a tiny proportion of the population it may well be asked whether public opinion mattered at all. Apparently it did, or else the works discussed in this paper would not have been commissioned. It is also worth noting that both Henry VII and Henry VIII were very much aware of the value of art and architecture, not to mention heraldry, popular displays and pageantry, as vehicles for dynastic and political propaganda. But the Tudor manifestations of this phenomenon are a subject

47

Most of the alterations to both text and illustrations are given in Courthope (op. cit.).

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in themselves. This reason, and the fact that most of the ground has already been covered in exemplary fashion, prevents further discussion here.48 Acknowledgements I would like to thank the College of Arms, and in particular Mr. Rodney Dennys, Somerset Herald, for kindly permitting me to study the Latin version of the Rous Roll. I am also indebted to my colleagues John Cherry and Mrs. Ann Payne for advice and suggestions.

48 See especially S. Anglo, Spectacle Pageantry and Early Tudor Policy (Oxford, 1969), R. Strong, Holbein and Henry VIII (London, 1967), and ibid., Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford, 1963).

VI Picturing Word and Text in the Late Medieval Parish Church

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visitor entering the modest flint church of St Mary at Radnage, located in a peaceful and beautiful valley in the Buckinghamshire Chilterns, is confronted immediately by the traces of a monumental fifteenth-century mural of St Christopher in its commonplace position opposite the entrance to the nave. More prominent than the image are the framed texts with which it is overpainted, texts which expound the Ten Commandments, Lord’s Prayer and Creed, the first beginning with the well-known words from Exodus XX, vv.4–6: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments. These verses were painted during the eighteenth century and between them and the St Christopher mural are several layers of other texts executed variously between the mid-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and which, with their whitewash surround, once entirely concealed the image. Nor is this all. Over the chancel arch, where the Rood formerly stood, are fragments of another set of Commandments and amongst others in the earliest layer, probably dating from either Edward VI’s reign or the first years of the Elizabethan settlement, are Biblical texts justifying the reformed religion:

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I exhort, therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men; For kings and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peacable life in all godliness and honesty. For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour; Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus (I Timothy 2:1–5). Here at Radnage, the saintly intercessors were not just denied, they were erased by the words of the Bible. The logocentric and imageless new order was spelled out further by the verses of Habbakuk 2:18–20: What profiteth the graven image that the maker thereof hath graven it; the molten image, and a teacher of lies, that the maker of his work trusteth therein, to make dumb idols? Woe unto him that saith to the wood, Awake; to the dumb stone: Arise, it shall teach! Behold it is laid over with gold and silver, and there is no breath at all in the midst of it. But the Lord is in his holy temple: let all the earth keep silence before him. Radnage is a rare instance where the archaeology of the Reformation survives in extenso. Apart from the Annunciation and other wall-paintings on the chancel east wall, executed shortly after the building of the church in the early thirteenth century, the major emphasis of the surviving mural decoration is textual. The nave walls here bear witness to the supplanting of medieval image by reformist word. For the illiterate parishioners, the texts could be committed to memory from the words of the parson and underlined by the Homilies (re-issued with additions, including a new text on Idolatry, in Elizabeth’s reign) and admonitions in the Book of Common Prayer. Cursed is the ma[n] that maketh any carued or molten image, an abominacion to the Lorde, the woorke of the handes of the craftesmanne, and putteth it in a secrete place, to wurship it.1 The 1549 Book of Common Prayer: The First and Second Prayer Books of King Edward the Sixth, (London, 1910), p. 280. For Radnage, see E. C. Rouse, ‘Wall Paintings in Radnage 1

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Nonetheless, it would be wrong to assume that representations of the Word — in both Latin and the vernacular — were unfamiliar in parish churches during the 150 or so years preceding the Reformation. And it is the kinds of texts which could be found in the late medieval parish church which is the subject of this paper. What follows does not amount to any more than scratching the surface of an aspect of late medieval parochial culture which merits more profound investigation. Tables In 1480–1, an inventory of the moveable contents of the parish church of St Stephen Walbrook in the City of London was drawn up. Included was the following: Also, vp on Þe same fvnte [font], stante a table, and Þ’ is wretyn Þ’ Inne Matyns of oure holy aungil and vij psalmys, xv and letony, and a wyre, and a Clothe Þ’on to kou’ yt with. Also, vpon Þe piler ou’ Þe seyde fonte hangiÞe a table peynted Þ’In a Crusifix, Mary and John. Also, vp on Þe stepil is a noÞ’ table, and Þ’ is portraied Þ’In xij Apostolys and iiij doctors of holy Chyrche, and diu’se resons wret Þ’in of owre feyÞe and of Þe Sac’ment. Also, vp on Þe same stepil is a noÞ’ table, and an hande is portraied Þ’on, and diu’se v’se wretyn vpon Þe thombe and on Þe fyngris, and v’se vndir neÞe, and it is called manus meditatac’o’is. AnoÞ’ table, wt Þe x Com’an’dem’tes made like moises table. AnoÞ’ table, of Þe x Com’an’dem’tes, and of Þe vij dedly synnys, and of vij remedies a yens hem, and of Þe vij dedis of m’cy, bodyly. Also, Þ’ is a noÞ’ long narugh table of holy wryte.2 Seven years later, the churchwardens of another City of London church, that of the now-destroyed St Christopher-le-Stocks, also compiled an inventory of goods, amongst which was this entry:

Church, Bucks.’, Records of Bucks, 15 (1947–1952), pp. 134–138; R. Marks, Image and Devotion in Late Medieval England (Stroud, 2004), pp. 271–274, Pl.175. 2  T. Milbourn, ‘Church of St Stephen Walbrook’, Transactions of the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society, V (1876–80), pp. 327–402 at 343.

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Ther be xii Tables in the Churche…, of the whiche is oon of the x comanndements, a nother hanging undre Oure Lady of Pitie with dyvers good prayers of Oure Lady and the sauter of charite, and a nother of Seynt Gregorie’s Pitie of James Wellis gifte, a nother of Seynt Crasynns [Erasmus], a nother of Seynt Kateryne of dyvers good prayers, a nother of Seynt Anne, a nother of Seynt Jamys, and iij of Seynt Cristofre, and ij of Seynt Sebestian.3 These tables probably consisted of a parchment pasted on to a board with a frame, like that with the pasted-on text of the indulgence granted by the Bishop of Constance following the foundation in 1592 of Wyher chapel near to Ettiswill Castle: this resembles an illuminated charter complete with borderwork and representations of the bishop’s shield of arms flanked by SS Elizabeth of Hungary and Louis (Fig. 1). Alternatively the texts may have been painted directly on to the boards, as in the example of another surviving table which will be discussed later (Fig.15).4 To us such artefacts might seem ephemeral; undoubtedly their portable nature as well as their content made them immediate targets for destruction during the Reformation and they can have had no great value in terms of either materials or artistic quality. Yet, the ‘tables’ in these two churches are of considerable interest and form a corpus of material until quite recently largely overlooked by students of late medieval religion. Characteristically, Margaret Aston is numbered amongst those scholars who have recognized their importance.5 E. Freshfield, ‘On the Parish Books of St Margaret-Lothbury, St Christopher-le-Stocks, and St Bartholomew-by-the-Exchange, in the City of London’, Archaeologia, 45 (1880), pp. 57–123 at 119; Clive Burgess’s rendering of ‘Crasynns’ as Erasmus from the original St Christopher’s manuscript (London, Guildhall Library, MS 4424) should be trusted: see his ‘Educated Parishioners in London and Bristol on the Eve of the Reformation’, in C. M. Barron and J. Stratford (eds), The Church and Learning in Later Medieval Society: Essays in Honour of R. B. Dobson, Harlaxton Medieval Studies, XI (Donington, 2002), pp. 286–304, at 296. 4 The Wyher chapel indulgence table is in the Schweizerisches Landesmuseum, Zürich, inv. no. LM 21219. A finer and more elaborate panel with an image of the Vernicle accompanied by the text of the Salva Sancta Facies hymn is pictured in Petrus Christus’s Portrait of a Young Man (London, National Gallery); see E. Duffy, Marking the Hours. English People and their Prayers 1240–1570 (New Haven and London, 2006), Pl. 40. 5 For these tables see M. Aston, Lollards and Reformers. Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London, 1984), pp. 105, 107, 112 and Burgess, ‘Educated Parishioners’, p. 298. For other discussions of tables, principally in monastic and cathedral churches, see 3

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The ‘tables’ at St Stephen Walbrook were clustered around the font and in the tower, although the last three appear not to have had a designated space. One of the dozen at St Christopher’s was located below an image of Our Lady of Pity (the Pietà), although as we shall see shortly, it is likely that the other eleven were also associated with devotional images of various kinds; all probably comprised the written (painted) word. The St Stephen Walbrook series seem to have divided between those of text only, those solely of imagery and those combining image and text. In terms of content, the ‘tables’ at St Stephen Walbrook and St Christopher-le-Stocks complement rather than overlap each other. The identifiable exception is the Ten Commandments (interestingly, one of the two at St Stephen Walbrook was written on a diptych as a simulacrum of Moses’ tablets of the Holy Law). In addition to the Decalogue, other subjects in this church were catechistical: the Creed (with depictions of the apostles, plus the Four Doctors of the Church), the Seven Deadly Sins, the Seven Virtues and the Seven Works of Mercy. The ‘vij remedies’ against the Seven Deadly Sins may refer either directly to the Seven Virtues or to them via the seven petitions of the Pater Noster.6 Two tables amongst those mentioned in the inventory featured elements which comprised parts of the formal liturgy and/or the cycle of daily prayer. The St Christopher’s inventory merely refers to a ‘sauter [psalter] of charite’; in common with all the other tables here, apart from the Ten Commandments board, this was associated with a specific image (Our Lady of Pity). Its counterpart at St Stephen Walbrook is more detailed. This table comprised the Matins of the holy angel, seven psalms (probably the Seven Penitential Psalms), followed by the number fifteen (probably the Gradual Psalms) and the Litany (of the Saints). The last three items replicate in sequential order the standard lay late medieval devotional text, the Book of Hours.7 J. Krochalis, ‘Magna Tabula: The Glastonbury Tablets (Part I)’, in J. P. Carley and F. Riddy (eds), Arthurian Literature, XV (1997), pp. 93–186, esp. pp. 95–101; idem, ‘(Part 2)’, in Carley and Riddy (eds), Arthurian Literature, XVI (1998), pp. 41–82; V. Gillespie, ‘Medieval Hypertext: Image and Text from York Minster’, in P. R. Robinson and R. Zim (eds), Of the Making of Books; Medieval Manuscripts, their Scribes and Readers. Essays Presented to M. B. Parkes (Aldershot, 1997), pp. 206–229. 6 E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars. Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven and London, 1992), p. 61. For the kinds of texts associated with images of the Four Doctors, see J. Alexander, ‘The Pulpit with the Four Doctors at St James’s , Castle Acre, Norfolk’, in N. Rogers (ed.), England in the Fifteenth Century, Harlaxton Medieval Studies, IV (Stamford, 1994), pp. 198–206. 7 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, pp. 218–9, 249–56; idem, Marking the Hours, pp. 5–7.

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Text tabulae were a feature of cathedrals and major monastic churches and shrine locations. For example, surviving from Glastonbury Abbey is a large late fourteenth-century Latin manuscript of six leaves mounted on boards within a box recounting the monastery’s history from the (mythical) time of Joseph of Arimathea and an impressive list of indulgences which could be earned by pilgrimage to the Abbey.8 A summary also existed on a brass plate fixed to a pillar in the church. Another set of board-mounted parchment ‘tables’, misleadingly described as the Tables of the Vicars Choral, also survives at York Minster and are of much the same date as the Glastonbury example; other tables are also known from York Minster, including one listing various miracles and indulgences involving St William of York. These might be described as information panels intended for the more erudite visitors/pilgrims. The same applies to a fourteenth-century roll with inscriptions from the earlier typological windows in the choir aisles of Canterbury Cathedral, which it has been suggested was suspended in this part of the church as an interpretative aid.9 The audience for this kind of text would have been different from the Canterbury pilgrims in The Tale of Beryn, who revealed their ignorance of the subjects in the glazing.10 Biographical information in the form of lengthy epitaphs also occurred in association with some high-status tombs from the fifteenth century.11 More extensive research is needed to establish how common these kinds of ‘tables’ were in the English late medieval parish church.12 One problem (also applicable to those in monasteries and cathedrals) is terminology: the label ‘tables’ was also used for altarpieces and retables with imagery rather than text. That primarily text tables were quite a regular feature of

Oxford, Bodleian Library Ms. Lat. Hist. a. 2. Canterbury Cathedral Library, MS C246. 10 Glastonbury: Krochalis, ‘Magna Tabula (Part I)’, pp. 93–183; P. Rahtz, English Heritage Book of Glastonbury (London, 1993), p. 37. York: Krochalis, ‘Magna Tabula (Part 1)’, pp. 98–99; C. Norton, St William of York (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 150–151; Gillespie, ‘Medieval Hypertext’, pp. 206–229. Canterbury: R. Marks, Stained Glass in England during the Middle Ages (London and Toronto, 1993), p. 61. Occurrences elsewhere are also noted in Krochalis, Gillespie and in D. Webb, Pilgrimage in Medieval England (London and New York, 2000), pp. 85–7, where a possibly late eleventh-century narrative of the translation of the relics of St Edmund at Bury St Edmunds is mentioned. 11 R. Rex, ‘Monumental Brasses and the Reformation’, Transactions of the Monumental Brass Society, 14 (1986–91), pp. 377, 380, 383. 12 See above, n.5. 8 9

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northern European church interiors in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries is evident from their presence in depictions of church interiors on Netherlandish and German panel paintings (Fig. 2). Text boards could be found in English parish churches much earlier. A document of 1270 records amongst the items given to the church of All Saints Bristol by its vicar were ‘three Gospel texts in unpainted frames, and another three texts in roundels not painted either’. At the time of the Reformation, the Guild of the Blessed Holy Trinity at Boston (Lincs.) possessed no fewer than seven tables with scriptures to hang over altars.13 How long the two London sets had been in existence prior to their recording in the inventories is unknown, although the mentions of the Mass of St Gregory and Our Lady of Pity indicate that they could not have dated from before the late fourteenth century. While obviously incorporating a pious function, most if not all of the ‘great church’ tables were concerned with prompting remembrance of the histories (or mythologies) of institutions and the exemplary lives of illustrious individuals as well as commemorating benefactors. By contrast, the tables in the two London churches were more directly instructional, focussing on the everyday devotional and moral lives of their parishioners and hence in theory at least demanding a more actively participatory role by the viewer. The nave location of some of the St Stephen Walbrook tables is specified and the association of those at St Christopher’s with devotional images (including that of the patronal saint) indicates that they were readily accessible to the laity. The catechistical nature of most of the St Stephen Walbrook tables is in line with continuing emphasis by the hierarchy of the English Church that the laity should understand the fundamental tenets of the Christian faith. The Ignorantia Sacerdotum decree of Archbishop Pecham at the 1281 Council of Lambeth laid down that parish priests were to instruct their

13  C. Burgess (ed.), The Pre-Reformation Records of All Saints’ Church, Bristol: Part 3; Wills, The Halleway Chantry Records and Deeds, Bristol Record Society Publications, 56 (2004), p. 11; for Boston see Aston, Lollards and Reformers, p. 112. 14 F. M. Powicke and C. R. Cheney (eds), Councils and Synods with Other Documents Relating to the English Church II AD 1205–1313 (Oxford, 1964), pp. 900–905; D. L. Douie, Archbishop Pecham (Oxford, 1952), p. 39; W. A. Pantin, The English Church in the Fourteenth Century (Cambridge, 1955), pp. 193–194, 211–212; H. L. Spencer, English Preaching in the later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1993), pp. 201–207; T. F. Kirby (ed.), Wykeham’s Register, Hampshire Record Society, II (1899), p. 371; M. Aston, England’s Iconoclasts Volume I. Laws Against Images (Oxford, 1988), p. 368, n.71; J. Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries: Religion and Secular Life in Late Medieval Yorkshire (Woodbridge, 1988), esp. pp. 146–157; N. Watson,

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flocks in the Creed, the Ten Commandments, the Seven Works of Mercy, the Seven Deadly Sins, the Seven Principal Virtues and the Seven Sacraments. Subsequently this decree became the standard manual for the instruction of the laity. Its lasting importance is attested by William of Wykeham’s ordering a rector to memorize it and stipulating that the clergy in his Winchester diocese were to preach the catechism four times a year in the vernacular. John Thoresby, Archbishop of York (1353–73), composed a Latin catechism based on the decree and had a version prepared in rhyming English known as the Lay Folk’s Catechism. A major re-affirmation of catechistical teaching was Archbishop Thomas Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409. A response to Lollardy, these laid down that parish priests …shall simply preach…only those things which are expressly contained in the provincial constitution set forth by John [Pecham], our predecessor…which beginneth, Ignorantia Sacerdotum. The Constitutions almost certainly prompted the despatch of a vernacular translation by John Stafford, Bishop of Bath and Wells (1425–43) to his archdeacon with instructions that every parish priest in his diocese was to obtain a copy and expound it to his congregation as Pecham had prescribed.14 Acknowledgement by late medieval commentators that in practice the limits of such instruction often did not go beyond the Pater Noster and Ave Maria is largely borne out by inscriptions on brasses, although sometimes the Creed and De Profundis (appropriately) occur; recitation of these four earned purgatorial remission for the deceased. Nonetheless, the inclusion of other catechistical themes on the St Stephen Walbrook tables is indicative of the fact that there were at least aspirations to instruct the laity more thoroughly than merely the ability to memorize these two prayers.15

‘Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409’, Speculum, 70 (1995), pp. 822–864 at 825–8, n.12; Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, chap. 2; R. N. Swanson, Church and Society in Late Medieval England (Oxford, 1989), pp. 277, 299–301. 15 Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, p. 345; S. Badham, ‘Status and Salvation; The Design of Medieval English Brasses and Incised Slabs’, Transactions of the Monumental Brass Society, 15 Pt 5 (1997), pp. 413–465 at 440; Rex, ‘Monumental Brasses and the Reformation’, pp. 376–394 at 387; see also Spencer, English Preaching, pp. 201–7.

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As we have seen, the St Christopher-le-Stocks ‘tables’ were primarily focussed on saints. Those identified (Our Lady of Pity, SS Gregory, Erasmus, Katherine, Anne, James, Christopher and Sebastian) represent a good cross-section of the kinds of specialist helpers found in late medieval parish churches. The saints were friends of God and their advocacy was to be enlisted ‘for the augmentation of our surety’, to alleviate the pains of Purgatory and plead for eternal salvation. The edition of the Golden Legend printed by Caxton justifies the veneration of the saints in order: to have aid in our infirmity, for by ourselves we may have none health, therefore have we need of the prayers of saints, and therefore we ought to honour them, that we may deserve that they aid and help us.16 The table with ‘prayers of Oure Lady and the sauter of charite’ at St Christopher-le-Stocks was located below the image of the Pietà and it can be assumed that the other tables were similarly placed in close proximity with the saintly image in question. We can only speculate about the content of these ‘dyvers good prayers’. The most certain is that of James Wells’ gift to ‘Seynt Gregorie’s Pitie’, i.e. to a representation of the Mass of St Gregory. This image was very popular throughout northern Europe in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and carried with it an indulgence of a varied number of years’ remission from Purgatory in return for saying designated prayers before it — or more precisely, to Christ as the Man of Sorrows as seen by Gregory on the altar. The well-known brass of Roger Legh (d.1506) and his wife Elizabeth (d.1489) at Macclesfield (Cheshire) when complete showed them both kneeling with their progeny below an image of the Mass of St Gregory, together with a scroll reading ‘the p[ar]don for saying of v pater nost[er] & v aues and a cred is xxv thousand yeres and xxvj dayes of pardon’ (Fig. 3).17 The nexus between the image and remission from  F. S. Ellis (ed.), The Golden Legend or Lives of the Saints, as Englished by William Caxton (London, Everyman Edition, 1900), vol. 6, p. 97; for the proliferation of images of the saints see Marks, Image and Devotion, chaps 5, 6. 17 For this and other indulgence inscriptions see J. Bertram, ‘Inscriptions on Late Medieval Brasses and Monuments’ in J. Higgitt, K. Forsyth and D. N. Parsons (eds), Roman, Runes and Ogham. Medieval Inscriptions in the Insular World and on the Continent (Donington, 2001), pp. 190–197 at 197; Badham, ‘Status and Salvation’, p. 442. For a recent study of the Mass of St Gregory (with bibliography), see C. W. Bynum, ‘Seeing and Beyond; The Mass of St. Gregory in the Fifteenth Century’, in J. F. Hamburger and A-M. Bouché (eds), The Mind’s Eye. Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 2006), pp. 208–249. 16

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Purgatory is made explicit with the dead rising from their graves through Christ’s sacrifice on an altarpiece wing dated 1473 in the church of St Maria zur Wiese at Soest, Germany; here too the indulgence is depicted on a ‘table’ hanging on the wall (Fig. 2).18 It is not there for purely decorative purposes, but exemplifies the late medieval delight in the interplay between real and fictive: the ‘table’ in the altarpiece is both a depiction of an indulgence and an actual indulgence — a reminder that the viewer could benefit by behaving in a particular way before, or even away from the image. It is possible, even likely, that some of the other prayers before the other named images also carried indulgences. An initial depicting the Pietà (an immensely popular image in late medieval England) in a Book of Hours dating from the end of the fourteenth century (Oxford, Keble College MS 47, fol. 10v.) accompanies the text for the Hours of the Compassion of the Virgin, the saying of which carried an indulgence of three hundred years (Fig. 4).19 In many Books of Hours, Our Lady of Pity is associated with the bidding prayer which begins with Obsecro te domina sancta maria mater dei. This moving prayer, which combines supplication with meditation, extols the Virgin’s multiple virtues, recites her role in the Incarnation and grief during Christ’s Passion and asks for her intercession and help. The ending of the prayer assigns to the Virgin a special importance at the death of the suppliant: And at the end of my life show me your face, and reveal to me the day and hour of my death. Please hear and receive this humble prayer and grant me eternal life. Listen and hear me, Mary, sweetest virgin, Mother of God and of mercy. Amen.20 In some texts of the Hours, a rubric is added, promising that the Virgin will indeed appear and bestowing spiritual benefits on the dying:

Bynum, ‘Seeing and Beyond’, pp. 210, 216, Fig. 3. Oxford, Keble College MS 47, fol. 10v. 20 For devotion to the Pietà in late medieval England, see Marks, Image and Devotion, pp. 123–143. The prayer is discussed in R. S. Wieck, Painted Prayers. The Book of Hours in Medieval and Renaissance Art (New York, 1997), pp. 6–90; Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, pp. 262–4, 318. 18 19

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To all them that be in the state of grace that daily say deuoutly this prayer before our blessyd lady of pitie, she wyll shewe them her blessyd vysage and warne them the daye et the owre of dethe, et in theyr laste ende the aungelles of God shall yelde theyr sowles to heuen, & he shall obteyne .v. hundred yeres & soo many lentes of pardon graunted by .v. holy fathers popes of Rome.21 Alternatively, the inventory may merely have referred to the Salve regina antiphon said or sung before images of Our Lady and sometimes accompanied by a representation of the Pietà in Books of Hours; or again, as in the case of the Mass of St Gregory, even the Pater Noster or Ave are known to have been prayers recited as penance before this image.22 The presence of texts on these tables replicating those found in Books of Hours underscores the significance of the latter as a spiritual tool spanning public worship and private devotion. In this respect the ‘dyvers good prayers’ on the tables associated with images in St Christopher-le-Stocks would have fulfilled the same function as the primer given by a parishioner to be placed below the image of St Christopher in All Saints church, Bristol. As Eamon Duffy has underlined, already by the early fifteenth century Books of Hours were being mass-produced for the English market and during the course of that century became affordable by urban artisans and merchants and rural yeomen. The advent of printed primers widened the social net still further. By the 1530s as many as 57,000 printed primers may have been in circulation, primers which were used for prayer in the parish church as well as at home.23

21 C. Wordsworth (ed.), Horae Eboracenses, Surtees Society, 132 (1920), p. 66, n.3 (citing the Sarum Hours); see also K. Kamerick, Popular Piety and Art in the late Middle Ages. Image Worship and Idolatry in England 1350–1500 (New York and Basingstoke, 2002), p. 181. For examples of this indulgence in Continental Books of Hours, see V. Reinburg, ‘Hearing Lay People’s Prayer’, in B. B. Diefendorf and C. Hesse (eds), Culture and Identity in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800). Essays in Honor of Natalie Zemon Davis (Ann Arbor, 1993), pp. 27–9, esp. n.31. 22 Marks, Image and Devotion, p. 171. 23 C. Burgess (ed.), The Pre-Reformation Records of All Saints’ Bristol Part 1, Bristol Record Society, 46 (1995), p. 14; Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, p. 117–121, chaps 6 – 8; idem, Marking the Hours, pp. 4, 21, 25, 28, 58–64.

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Ymagerye And Peynture Some (and probably all) of the ‘tables’ in these two London churches were suspended and not fixed; only on the Creed and Four Doctors table at St Stephen Walbrook was word integrated with image. Nonetheless, the prayer tables at St Christopher-le-Stocks were associated with images; they also shared the same visual field and thus functioned in the same way as tituli and other inscriptions accompanying pictorial imagery in various monumental media and moveable liturgical artefacts such as vestments and plate.This was a manifestation of what Margaret Aston has aptly termed ‘devotional literacy’.24 In such contexts word and image act as a mutual gloss.25 For example, the word ‘Vestio’ on the speech scroll on a stained glass panel depicting Clothing the Naked at Tattershall (Lincs.) identifies the act that is being carried out, but the social frame is provided by the representation (Fig. 5). The Corporal Work is being undertaken by a richly clad man whose purse signifies his wealth; behind him another well-dressed individual waits to clothe a second pauper. The pictorial representation underlines not just the redemptive nature of the Work, but also the societal obligation of the wealthy to succour the less fortunate. The imagery thus creates an exemplary model. In a number of instances too, women rather than men are performing the Works.26 This is of course no different from the interaction of text and image in books. Yet the migration of text from the page to a fixed location within a monumental pictorial frame presented its own communicative discourse, one that was collective as well as individual. It also occurred within a space where other imagery could be encompassed simultaneously by the viewer’s gaze and in which meaning was affected by the performative rituals of the liturgy and Aston, Lollards and Reformers, chap. 4. For a stimulating discussion of the relationship between text and image in the Middle Ages see M. Schapiro, Words and Pictures. On the Literal and the Symbolic in the Illustration of a Text (The Hague and Paris, 1973). For some of the problems posed by the presence of texts in medieval buildings see L. James, ‘ “And shall these mute stones speak?” Text as Art’, in L. James (ed.), Art and Text in Byzantine Culture (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 188–206. 26 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, pp. 63–87; Marks, Stained Glass, pp. 78–80; R. Marks and P. Williamson (eds), Gothic. Art for England 1400–1547 (exhib. cat., London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 2003), no. 292. 24 25

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1. Table with indulgence issued by Bishop Balthasar of Constance following the foundation of Wyher chapel, Switzerland, in 1592. Parchment on wood (Zürich, Schweizerisches Landesmusem, Inv. No. LM 21219) (photograph: Landesmuseum, Zürich).

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2. Soest (Germany), Evangelical parish church of St Maria zur Wiese: The Mass of St Gregory on the exterior of outer left wing of the altarpiece of St Anne and the Holy Kinship, dated 1473 (photograph: Denkmalpflege Münster).

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3. Macclesfield (Cheshire), parish church of St Michael: brass of Roger Legh (d.1506) with the Mass of St Gregory and an indulgence (photograph: Sally Badham).

4. Pietà with indulgence in a book of hours, end of 14th century (Oxford, Keble College MS 47, f.10v) (photograph: the Warden and Fellows of Keble College, Oxford).

138 5. Tattershall (Lincolnshire), former collegiate church of the Holy Trinity: stained glass panel of Clothing the Naked from a Corporal Works of Mercy cycle, c. 1480–82 (photograph: National Monuments Record).

7. Warwick, collegiate church of St Mary: tracery glazing in the Beauchamp Chapel of angels with antiphons and musical notation, c. 1447–9 (photograph: G. King & Son, Norwich).

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6. Drayton Beauchamp (Buckinghamshire), parish church of St Mary: stained glass panel of St Peter from a cycle of apostles holding Creed scrolls, c. 1430–50 (photograph: Richard Marks).

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8. Waterperry (Oxfordshire), parish church of St Mary: stained glass panel of Walter Curson (d. 1527) and his sons (photograph: National Monuments Record).

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9. Morley (Derbyshire): parish church of St Matthew: brass of Sir Thomas Stathum (d.1470) and his wives (photograph: Sally Badham).

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10. Shipton-under-Wychwood (Oxfordshire), parish church of St Mary: brass recording John and Alice Stone’s obit foundation in St Mary’s church, Aylesbury, 1494 (photograph: Sally Badham).

11. Long Melford (Suffolk), parish church of the Holy Trinity: Lady Chapel exterior with inscription, c. 1495–8 (photograph: National Monuments Record).

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12. Swanbourne (Buckinghamshire), parish church of St Swithin: detail of wallpainting depicting Purgatory (?), 15th century (photograph: Richard Marks). 13. Stratford on Avon (Warwickshire), Chapel of the Guild of the Holy Cross, Blessed Mary the Virgin and St John the Baptist: part of allegorical wall-painting of the Erth oute of Erth poem, c. 1500 (photograph: Roger Rosewell).

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14. Long Melford (Suffolk), parish church of the Holy Trinity: interior of Clopton Chantry, c. 1490–4 (photograph: Country Life).

15. Bishops Cannings (Wiltshire), parish church of St Mary: Manus Meditacionis painted panel, 15th or early 16th century (photograph: Victoria County History).

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festivals as well as the aural narratives of sermon and recitations of prayers. Word and image were thus not perceived solely in relationship to each other, but participated in the interface between means of communication (visual, spoken, aural and sensual). Tracking the multiple uses of images and texts is fraught with problems. Replacement, rebuilding and (above all) iconoclasm and neglect have accounted for the loss of the vast majority of the pictorial imagery in parish churches and thus rules out any comprehensive investigation. On top of this is the dearth of reliable dating evidence for much that has come down to us. On the other hand surviving representations can at least be plotted geographically and with some degree of chronological accuracy. It is evident that although texts-cum-imagery had occurred from the eleventh century, from the fourteenth century they multiplied, expanded and diversified within the parish church. Secondly, the nature of parochial imagery expanded. Supplementing and sometimes replacing the narratives of Christ’s life and Passion in window and on wall, themes concerned with the daily life and conduct of the laity and also a proliferation of images of saintly helpers were introduced; with them came explanatory texts of various kinds. Catechistical themes like the Tattershall panel are widely distributed. With the sole instance of the c. 1326 glazing of Chinnor (Oxon.), all the monumental Corporal Works pictorial cycles I am aware of date from the second half of the fourteenth century and particularly from after 1400. A similar picture emerges (based on more extensive evidence including Continental as well as insular material) for the Seven Sacraments. This subject first took pictorial form in Parisian manuscript illumination in the 1320s and had reached England prior to 1434 (in the glazing of All Saints’ church, Bristol). Throughout Europe the Seven Sacraments seems to have widely disseminated from the second half of the fifteenth century until the Reformation; in England it was a popular theme on East Anglian fonts. Similarly representations of the Creed in the form of the apostles bearing scrolls with the clauses to each of them assigned by tradition occur during the first half of the fourteenth century but seem to have been particularly popular (or have left more traces) in stained glass and on painted Roodscreens of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries; this presumably was what was depicted on the St Stephen Walbrook table (Fig. 6).27. 27 For summaries of pictorial catechistical themes see Marks, Stained Glass, pp. 78–80; R. Rosewell, Medieval Wall Paintings in English and Welsh Churches (Woodbridge, 2008), pp. 85–87, 347. For the Seven Sacraments see A. E. Nichols, Seeable Signs. The Iconography of the

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Direct liturgical quotations occur in parochial pictorial art. As we have seen, Marian antiphons may have featured on one of the St Christopherle-Stocks tables. Pictorial renderings of antiphonal verses are widespread in window and on wall and woodwork from the fifteenth century. In c. 1425– 50 a Te Deum window was commissioned for the church of St Martin-leGrand Coney Street in York. Now in York Minster, the surviving panels show figures of God the Father surrounded by clerics and accompanied by verses of the Te Deum. A scaled-down version with angels holding scrolls with the verses can be seen in several East Anglian churches; also the Nunc Dimittis. Antiphons praising Our Lady taken from the Sarum Processional and Breviary appear quite often in East Anglian glass and in neighbouring counties. In the Beauchamp Chapel attached to St Mary’s Warwick the verses are accompanied by musical notation (Fig. 7). At Taverham (Norfolk), the angels bear scrolls with the words of an antiphon in honour of St Edmund, King and Martyr, to whom the church is dedicated. A priest in a window at Newington (Oxon.) has a scroll with the final verse of a hymn sung at Compline on Easter Sunday; the verse invokes the Trinity, which is depicted in the panel above. Sometimes the imagery is quite up to date in respect of liturgical innovations. The Chudleigh manorial chapel in Ashton church (Devon) contains a series of painted screen images holding scrolls relating to the newly established Feast of the Transfiguration (and possibly also that of the Visitation).28 Embedded as these texts are in the fabric of their parish churches, they invite the viewer to participate in perpetual liturgical performance. An almost universal kind of text associated with pictorial imagery falls into the commemorative or memorializing category. Indeed, it is highly likely that the Mass of St Gregory prayer table at St Christopher-le-Stocks included the name of its donor, James Wells and hence came under this heading. The purpose was salvatory, in that gifts of such embellishments counted as Good Works and thus alleviated the donor’s time spent in Purgatory, aided by the prayers of the living and the intercession of favoured saintly helpers. Thus the table at St Christopher-le-Stocks was, in the words of Sally Badham, ‘both Seven Sacraments 1350–1544 (Woodbridge, 1994), pp. 20–29; the Creed is studied in M. H. Caviness, ‘Fifteenth century stained glass from the Chapel of Hampton Court, Herefordshire: the Apostles’ Creed and other subjects’, Walpole Society, XLII (1968–70), pp. 35–60. 28 Marks, Stained Glass, pp. 84–5, with further bibliography; M. Glasscoe, ‘Late Medieval Paintings in Ashton Church, Devon’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 140 (1987), pp. 182–190.

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a prayer and an exhortation to prayer’. For any individual who prayed for the souls of Mr and Mrs Legh at Macclesfield (Fig. 3), the recitation of the specified catechistical prayers before the Mass of St Gregory was rewarded by thousands of years of purgatorial remission.29 Such texts were by no means exclusive to the later middle ages, but in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, participation in the enhancement of the fabric of the parish church was becoming both more numerous and more socially diverse than hitherto and included those outside the ranks of the nobility, gentry, and clergy. It was to service this growing clientele that, especially after 1400, a greater range of permanent sepulchral monument (above all the brass set in a grave-slab), became available. Exhortations to prayer have survived in the greatest number on funerary monuments (especially brasses), but the same kinds of text can be found in stained glass, mural and screen painting and on plate and vestments. The precise ‘Good Work’ might be identified, as in the inscription accompanying the images of Walter Curson and his wife Isabel with their children in a window at Waterperry (Oxon.) (Fig. 8): Pray: ye for the soule of Walter Cursson: and Isabeil: his wife whose goodys as well the roofe of this churche and the: rooffe of this the lordye Ile and the covering of leede of all the same as also this wyndow were made whose bodies rest yn the: augustyne freers churche yn Oxforde: whiche Walter died the VII day of Apryle yn: the yere of our lord god M.CCCCCXXVIIti on whos: soules god have Mercy.30 Admonitions to viewers to pray for the souls of benefactors, whether living or dead, might be combined with prayers by individuals to their favoured saints. In November 1494 Sir William Horne, a wealthy London merchant and in his time Lord Mayor of London, made his will. Amongst his bequests to the parish church of Snailwell (Cambs.), almost certainly his birthplace, was one for the re-glazing of the south aisle east window: …in the one side of the same window to be made the images of my father & mother & his 24 children, & in the other side of the same window the image of me, my wife and our 12 children, with scripture Badham, ‘Status and Salvation’, p. 440. P. A. Newton, The County of Oxford. A Catalogue of Medieval Stained Glass, Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi Great Britain 1, (London, 1979), p. 205. 29 30

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remembering the same and with rolls of prayers running up unto an image of the Coronation of Our Lady in the same window. And the arms of me & my wife to be set in the same window in places there most convenient. The purpose of this and other pious endowments was spelt out: …praying that the souls of my father…& of my mother & of their children, the souls also of me, my wife & our children, for my bequests aforesaid thereto made, the more specially by the parishioners there be recommended in their prayers to almighty God 31. Horne’s window has not survived, but the constituent elements of it and the terms of his will are echoed in the will and brass of Sir Thomas Stathum with his wives (c. 1470) at Morley (Derbys.), with their ‘rolls of prayers’ to their patronal saints and commemorative inscription (Fig. 9).32 The Curson and Horne windows together with the Stathum brass bear witness to the increasing specificity and individualization of inscriptions and speech-scrolls (also to the frequency of representation of wives and children). In respect of brasses, Jerome Bertram has shown that the prayer- scrolls texts were often taken from the Book of Hours, especially antiphons used in the Office of the Dead. This close interdependence between the language of the primers and of parish church memorials is not surprising. Commemorations on tomb, mural, in window or any other fitting or furnishing that an individual was associated with, were in essence no different from the kinds of additions made in the calendars of primers to record deaths of family members. They shared the same function, of ensuring that the soul of the individual commemorated was prayed for, especially on the anniversary of his death, hence the significance of recording the date of death. In the teatrum sacrum of the parish church, the call to prayer extended

The language of the will has been modernised. See R. Marks, ‘Sir William Horne and his ‘scowred’ window at Snailwell, Cambridgeshire’, in E. S. Lane, E. C. Pastan, and E. M. Shortell (eds), The Four Modes of Seeing. Approaches to Medieval Imagery in Honor of Madeline Harrison Caviness (Aldershot, 2009), pp. 99–110; also idem, ‘Wills and Windows: Documentary Evidence for the Commissioning of Stained Glass Windows in Late Medieval England’, in H. Scholz, I. Rauch and D. Hess (eds), Glas. Malerei. Forschung. Internationale Studien zu Ehren von Rüdiger Becksmann (Berlin, 2004), pp. 245–252. 32 Marks and Williamson, Gothic, cat. no.332. 31

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beyond the family of the deceased to the parishioners as a whole and, indeed to any passer-by.33 At the other end of the spectrum, there are memorials consisting solely of an inscription without a representation of the deceased. Although often cursory, on occasions these could be quite lengthy, as in the case of two palimpsest brasses now at Waddesdon (Bucks.) and Shiptonunder-Wychwood (Oxon.) detailing (in English) personal endowments to the fraternity of Our Lady at Aylesbury (Bucks.) (Fig. 10).34 It is impossible to disentangle motives of personal vanity from piety in memorialization. Nowhere perhaps are the two so intertwined as on the frieze inscription to John Clopton on the exterior of the Lady Chapel at the east end of the glorious church at Long Melford (Suffolk), despite his disingenuous disclaimer: ‘Christ’ sit testis hec me no’exhibuisse ut merear laudes, sed ut spiritus memoretur’ (‘let Christ be my witness that I have not exhibited these things in order that I may win praise, but in order that the Spirit may be remembered’ Revealingly, unlike the rest of the text, this section is in Latin (Fig. 11). Admonitory imagery relating to personal conduct occurs. Two of the three known fifteenth-century depictions of what has been identified as the Warning to Blasphemers plus a related theme at Walsham-le-Willows (Suffolk) are accompanied by texts. At Corby Glen (Lincs.), Our Lady of Pity is depicted surrounded by fashionably attired young men, who by swearing by parts of Christ’s body in effect had caused his Passion and symbolically had dismembered him, thereby condemning themselves to Hell. Each youth, with a speech scroll in English (now almost entirely obliterated), is attended by a devil, an allusion to the Seven Deadly Sins. Each of the young men in the lost window at Heydon (Norfolk) had vernacular rhyming couplets and associated with the central figure were at least eighteen lines of verse related to a poem called The Complaint of Christ. The texts at Walsham-le-Willows (c. 1470) were also in English. The Warning to Blasphemers theme occurs from the early fourteenth century.35 33 Bertram, ‘Inscriptions’, pp. 195–7. See also Duffy, Marking the Hours, pp. 44–45; Badham, ‘Status and Salvation’, pp. 436–452; Rex, ‘Monumental Brasses and the Reformation’, pp. 377–383. 34 Badham, ‘Status and Salvation’, p. 436; Rex, ‘Monumental Brasses and the Reformation’, pp. 377–6, fig. 1. 35 E. C. Rouse, ‘Wall Paintings in the Church of St John the Evangelist, Corby, Lincolnshire’, Archaeological Journal, 100 (1943), pp. 150–176; Rosewell, Medieval Wall Paintings, pp. 89–90; C. Woodforde, The Norwich School of Glass-Painting in the Fifteenth

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Representations of Death, Judgment and/or the Moralities were also present in the late medieval parish church, sometimes with quite extensive texts. The remains of a wall-painting at Swanbourne (Bucks.), probably dating from around the middle of the fifteenth century, has been interpreted as depicting an Allegory of the Soul. The best-preserved section, portraying the contest of angels with demons and death for souls, is accompanied by prominent text and speech-scrolls in Latin, one of which is a supplication for the prayers of the living from the dead (Fig. 12). The fates of the souls are determined by their conduct in life. So far as I am aware, the source of the texts and iconography of this mural has not yet been traced.36 Although not a parish church, the verses accompanying some of the extensive mural imagery of c. 1500 in the Holy Cross Guild Chapel at Stratford on Avon (Warwicks.) demand comment. One set is taken from the fourteenth-century poem Erth oute of Erth (based on the liturgy for Ash Wednesday) and the second, Whoo so hym be thought, is of thirteenth-century origin (Fig. 13). More familiar perhaps is the window in All Saints’ North Street, York, depicting the Last Days with tituli taken from the northern English fourteenth-century poem, the Pricke of Conscience.37. Not all religious verse derived from long-established models. The nave north wall of the Stratford Guild Chapel has the now-concealed and fragmentary remains of an extensive cycle of paintings of the Dance of Death together with representations of the Seven Deadly Sins; the accompanying vernacular stanzas are by John Lydgate, the most famous English poet of his day. His verses were originally composed for the Dance of Death paintings

Century (London, New York and Toronto, 1950), chap. 7; M. Gill, ‘Preaching and Image: Sermons and Wall Paintings in Later Medieval England’, in C. Muessig (ed.), Preacher, Sermon and Audience in the Middle Ages (Leiden, Boston and Cologne, 2002), pp. 155–180 at 169–171. 36 Rosewell, Medieval Wall Paintings, pp. 73, 233, ill. 89; E. C. Rouse, Medieval Wall Paintings, 4th ed. (Princes Risborough, 1991), pp. 68–9; J. Slatter, ‘On the frescos in Swanbourne church’, Records of Buckinghamshire, 3 (1870), pp. 136–140; M. R. James, ‘The Iconography of Bucks.’, Records of Buckinghamshire, 12 (1927–33), pp. 281–298 at 290–1. 37 C. Davidson, The Guild Chapel Wall Paintings at Stratford-upon-Avon (New York, 1988), pp. 9, 30, 48–9, Pls 13, 14; Rosewell, Medieval Wall Paintings, p. 84, ill.100; Gill, ‘Preaching and Image’, p. 167; E. A. Gee, ‘The Painted Glass of All Saints’ Church, North Street, York’, Archaeologia, CII (1969), pp. 152–202; J. Hughes, ‘The administration of confession in diocese of York in the fourteenth century’, in D. M. Smith (ed.), Studies in Clergy and Ministry in Medieval England, Borthwick Studies in History 1 (York, 1991), pp. 87–163, esp. 106–8.

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in the Pardon cloister of St Paul’s Cathedral, London which were based on a cycle in the Cemetery of the Innocents in Paris. Other examples exist or are recorded, including a cycle probably on a cloth or scroll in All Saints Bristol, dating from about the middle of the fifteenth century. The three cloths hanging before the Roodloft painted with the Dawnce of Powlis recorded in a list of church goods compiled in 1529 for Long Melford presumably included some at least of Lydgate’s verses, who was a monk of nearby Bury St Edmunds.38 Nor was this his sole contribution to the enhancement of Long Melford. The series of scrolls on the cornice of the chantry chapel constructed here by John Clopton are painted with vernacular verses from two Lydgate poems, Testament and Quis Dabit Meo Capiti Fontem Lacrimarum? (Fig. 14). The penitential theme of the verses is entirely appropriate for the chapel’s purpose and they also dwell on the salvatory nature of Christ’s wounds. Unusually, the verses are not directly associated with pictorial imagery, although they are arranged so that the words of Christ exhorting the viewer to behold his Passion wounds occur directly above the altar on which would have stood a crucifix. Similarly they add meaning through the presence of Clopton’s altar tomb-cum-Easter Sepulchre below with its mural of the Resurrected Christ with banner bearing the text ‘Omni qui vivit et credit in me non morietur in aeternum’ (‘All who live and believe in me will not die eternally’).39 Are there any hints that the imagery, with and without text, of the English late medieval parish church reflected the preoccupation of the church hierarchy with the perceived threat of Lollardy and the consequent attempts to control and limit what was taught to the laity? It has been argued that the representation of the Seven Sacraments on almost forty East Anglian fonts was a response to the anti-sacramentalism of local Lollards, but how far 38 S. Oosterwijk, ‘Of Corpses, Constables and Kings: The Danse Macabre in LateMedieval and Renaissance Culture’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 157 (2004), pp. 61–90, at 68–71; Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, pp. 303–310, Pl.111; D. Dymond and C. Paine, The Spoil of Melford Church. The Reformation in a Suffolk Parish (Ipswich, 1992), p. 24; Burgess, Pre-Reformation Records, All Saints’ Bristol, Part 1, p. 14; idem, ‘Educated Parishioners’, pp. 288–289; Davidson, Guild Chapel, pp. 6–9, 33–34, 50–55, pls 19–20. 39 J. B. Trapp, ‘Verses by Lydgate at Long Melford’, Review of English Studies, ns 6 (1955), pp. 1–11; G. M. Gibson, The Theater of Devotion. East Anglian Drama and Society in the late Middle Ages (Chicago and London, 1994), pp. 86–93 (n.83 points out that the Quis Dabit poem was not The Lamentatio of Mary Magdalene, as Trapp thought). One might speculate as to whether Lydgate’s Marian verse also adorned the cornice with the same scroll design in the more public space of the Lady Chapel.

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such concerns can be discerned in parish church imagery nationally is I think impossible to establish owing to the scale of losses and the random nature of survival and documentation.40 As we have seen, many of the iconographical themes found in fifteenth and early sixteenth-century parish churches had appeared prior to the emergence of Lollardy as a perceived threat. In this respect, the imagery parallels what Watson argues is the derivative nature of fifteenth-century vernacular theological writing.41 On the other hand, catechistical themes survive in much greater quantities after 1400 than before. Besides, the tenor of the vast majority of parish church imagery — the saints and their intercessionary powers, Purgatory and the Last Judgment - was anathema to Lollard thinking. The Vulgar Tongue Quite a number of the images we have cited are accompanied by texts in English. The use of the vernacular prior to the Reformation in this context is an underdeveloped area of research, although the Revd Christopher Woodforde nearly half a century ago devoted a useful chapter to vernacular texts in East Anglian glass in his Norwich School of Glass-Painting in the Fifteenth Century.42 Recently however valuable work has been carried out on epitaphs on funerary monuments by Sally Badham, Jerome Bertram and Richard Rex. Currently David Griffith is compiling a corpus of extant and lost medieval inscriptions across the media and in all languages; the publication next year of the first fruits of his research is eagerly awaited. What follows therefore should be regarded as no more than a preliminary sketch.43 Anglo-Norman is present in early fourteenth-century glazing in several locations, by which time English had appeared on sepulchral monuments (Stow, Lincs. and Wellington, Somerset) and wall paintings (Wensley, Yorks.). The first-known use of the vernacular in stained glass appears to

Nichols, Seeable Signs. Watson, ‘Censorship and cultural change’, pp. 832–835. 42 Woodforde, Norwich School, chap. 8 and also 7. 43 Badham, ‘Status and Salvation’; Bertram, ‘Inscriptions’; Rex, ‘Monumental Brasses and the Reformation’; D. Griffith, The Material Word (forthcoming). Dr Griffith’s researches indicate that English occurs much more extensively on funerary monuments before 1500 than has hitherto been thought (personal communication). 40 41

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be the memorial inscription to Sir Hugh Hastings (d.1347) and his wife Margorie formerly in the east window of Elsing church (Norfolk).44 During the fifteenth century English occurs more frequently in stained glass and wall painting. English verse is pictured at the beginning of the century, as in the window illustrating The Pricke of Conscience in All Saints North Street, York. The Dance of Death panels with Lydgate’s verses at St Paul’s Cathedral dated from c. 1430. Despite the uncertainties surrounding the dating of so much parish church imagery, the vernacular in monumental contexts seems to have become widespread from the middle of the century. It may be telling that English is used as well as Latin from the beginning of the fashion for commemorative inscriptions in the flint flushwork of East Anglian churches during the 1440s and 50s. The most extensive series is at Long Melford (1481–96), of which the Clopton inscription running around the Lady Chapel is but one (Fig.11).45 The Works of Mercy panels at Combs in the same county and the Seven Sacraments at Bledington may well date from the same period; David King informs me that the tracery design of the Heydon window in which the Warning to Blasphemers was located points to a date in the last quarter of the century. The related mural theme at Walsham-leWillows is considered to have been executed around 1470. We are however on firmer ground in ascribing the Stratford on Avon series of murals to c. 1500. This (apparent) surge in the use of English in the second half of the fifteenth century coincides with an increase in the copying of vernacular prayers into primers; together it is an indication of growing literacy amongst the laity, especially the wealthier elements.46 Interestingly the growing presence of English in parish church imagery pre-dates the reappearance of vernacular sermon collections, notably Mirk’s Festial, from the 1470s and 80s; also Caxton’s translation of the Golden Legend, first published in c. 1483.47

Marks, Stained Glass, pp. 17, 19; Woodforde, Norwich School, pp. 6–7; I am indebted to Sally Badham for knowledge of the Wellington tomb. 45 J. Blatchly and P. Northeast, Decoding Flint Flushwork on Suffolk and Norfolk Churches (Ipswich, 2005), pp. 2–3, 70, 84–5, 98; C. Paine, ‘The Building of Long Melford Church’, in C. Sansbury (ed.), A Sermon in Stone. The 500th anniversary book of Long Melford Church (Lavenham, 1983), pp. 9–18. 46 Duffy, Marking the Hours, p. 144. 47 Spencer, English Preaching, pp. 182–3. 44

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Is it possible to identify categories of imagery for which either Latin or the vernacular were deemed appropriate? Liturgically-based texts, such as Marian and other antiphons and verses from the Te Deum, Nunc Dimittis, and Magnificat (the last in the great north transept window of Great Malvern Priory) invariably are in Latin (Fig. 7). Similarly the Pater Noster, Ave and Creed, the last as represented on scrolls held by the apostles (probably how it was shown on the relevant table at St Stephen Walbrook) (Fig. 6). The treatment of other catechistical themes was not quite so clearcut. All texts which feature in Seven Sacraments imagery are in Latin, with the sole exception of the late fifteenth-century window at Bledington, where the tituli are in English.48 With the Corporal Works of Mercy, the opposite is the case. The speech scrolls held by the protagonists at Tattershall, taken from the Form of Confession section of the Sarum Hours, are the only known occurrence of Latin (Fig. 5). Woodforde cites extant examples and antiquarian records of English texts from Works of Mercy windows in East Anglia at Brandeston, Combs, Guestwick, Lammas, and Quidenham; also at Glastonbury (Somerset). For example, the scrolls in the Combs scene illustrating the giving of drink to the thirsty reads:

I am thrysty ful drye y wyste Haue her’ dryke p’y for hy yt doth

A likely explanation for the preponderant employment of the vernacular for this theme is that, unlike the Seven Sacraments, the Corporal Works of Mercy could be performed by the laity.49 It was not however until the turn of the century that printed pastoral manuals for clergy and catechistical treatises in English for lay use began to circulate; from the 1520s printed primers expounded the catechism in English in the Form of Confession.50 One category in which English appears to have been widely used was religious verse and prose, on the principle of that what was composed in the vernacular could unproblematically stay in the vernacular. An early example is the Pricke of Conscience window at York. Lydgate’s religious poetry, as we have seen, had a wide-ranging impact on monumental art, notably at Long Melford (and also the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds) and in the form of the Nichols, Seeable Signs, pp. 91, 260, 274. Marks, Stained Glass, p. 80; Woodforde, Norwich School, pp. 193–196, Pl. XLII. 50 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, chap. 2, esp. pp. 56, 61–2, 80–7, Pls 37, 39. 48 49

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verses accompanying the Dance of Death pictorial cycles at Old St Paul’s Cathedral, Bristol, and the Holy Cross Guild Chapel at Stratford on Avon (Fig. 14). At the last, the Dance was accompanied by imagery with the verses of the two vernacular allegorical poems, Erth oute of Erth and Whoo so hym be thought (Fig. 13). English was also employed for most of the text scrolls in the ‘Legend of the True Cross’ cycle here.51 Is it coincidental, or merely accident of survival, that lengthy texts in both Latin and the vernacular — especially the latter — occur in contexts where patronage amongst the wealthy urban mercantile classes was concentrated? The Henryson and Hessle families, donors of the Pricke of Conscience window in All Saints North Street in York were, like those of other windows in this church, members of the civic elite. The clothier John Clopton of Long Melford was familiar with Lydgate’s works. Sir Hugh Clopton (no relation), the rebuilder of the Holy Cross Guild Chapel at Stratford on Avon, where the pictorial has in places to share equal bidding with the (vernacular) word, was a former Lord Mayor of London.52 Then again there is the evidence of the ‘tables’ in the two City of London churches. As both our Cloptons show, in the fifteenth century the boundaries between the mercantile elites and the gentry were fluid. The images with scrolls on the screen paintings at Ashton are within the Chudleigh manorial chapel and the location of the ‘Allegory of the Soul’ mural at Swanbourne (Bucks.), adjacent to what was formerly an altar at the east end of the nave north aisle, also perhaps suggests that this served as a chantry chapel of a gentry family (Fig.12). Watson has argued that in the fifteenth century vernacular (and by extension, Latin) theological texts were aimed at an aristocratic as well as clerical readership; the imagerycum-text of parish churches of the period indicates that the lay audience for such works, while still elite, was somewhat wider.53

Rosewell, Medieval Wall Paintings, p. 84, ill.100; Davidson, Guild Chapel, pp. 4, 9, 35–47, 48–9, Pls 13–14, 19–20; Gill, ‘Preaching and Image’, p. 167. 52 Gee, ‘All Saints’ Church’, pp. 161–2, 198; Davidson, Guild Chapel, pp. 1, 3; Gibson, Theater of Devotion, p. 79–96. 53 Watson, ‘Censorship and Cultural Change’, 835, 856–7. The erudition of some members of the mercantile class is also indicated by some of the c.1475 glazing of the chapel of Browne’s Hospital at Stamford (Lincs.), in which metaphors for the Incarnation are expressed not by text but through architectural features like windows (the fenestra caeli) and doors (the porta clausa) – an instance of the fabric itself being made to speak: see Marks, Stained Glass, pp. 85, 201, Fig. 170. 51

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The Hool Profite of Remembring Both communal and private prayer was recited, either silently or spoken, an exercise which Eamon Duffy has described as ‘ventriloquial’; this involved memorizing and repeating the Latin of the liturgy and the catechism ‘after the manner of churchmen’, as an Italian visitor of the late fifteenth century observed.54 The rise and dissemination of the primer played a major role in the promotion of active lay devotion and participation in parochial worship, especially in the association of prayers with images. Yet those without access to a primer — and even owners of these books — had to learn texts in what for the vast majority was an unfamiliar language. As is evident from Ignorantia Sacerdotum onwards, such instruction was a clerical task and involved the employment of mnemotechniques. The most obvious was recitation through personal instruction of the kind specified by William Milett of Dartford (Kent), who in 1500 stipulated that admission of five poor men or women into an almshouse at Dartford was contingent on their knowing …their Pater Noster, Ave Maria, & Credo. And if they can it not, they to be refused, lesse than the said Priorez and Vicar….assigne them a day reasonable that they might lerne hit. And if he can not lerne hit, he fully to be refused, wt. out he be a fole, a deffe, or a donce, and alwey of them have pitie. Milett evidently had reservations as to whether the recipients of his charity could learn these elements of the catechism after one sole day of instruction. More ad hominem was the use of confession for spiritual direction.55 Madeline Caviness has underlined the problems of treating the great late twelfth and thirteenth-century narrative glazing cycles of the English and French cathedrals and greater monastic churches according to the ancient ‘Bibles of the Poor’ formulation of St Gregory the Great (restricted access and portrayal of ‘high theology’ in complex sequences). That does not however exclude the possibility of their use in preaching; nor, as

Duffy, Marking the Hours, pp. 58–64,104. C. E. Woodruff (ed.), Sede Vacante Wills, Kent Archaeological Society, Records Branch, 3 (1914), p. 124; Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, pp. 57–63. 54 55

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was suggested above, their comprehension with the aid of texts.56 I have suggested elsewhere that the dramatic shift away from the complex narrative structures and multi-historiated windows of these centuries to the ‘band’ window design with its compressed narratives may have been at least in part a response to the Lateran Council’s desire to engage the laity directly with the sacred; it may be more than fortuitous that Jacques de Voragine’s Golden Legend, with its analogous summaries of the lives and martyrdoms of the saints should have been compiled only a few years prior to the appearance of the band window.57 In the same way, commemorative inscriptions on funerary monuments and texts accompanying imagery on wall and in glass and on liturgical artefacts which were commissioned for parish churches in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were, in theory at least, accessible in easily comprehensible narrative sequences and in language either used in everyday speech or familiar from prayer and the liturgy. The extent to which parish priests used the imagery of their churches as visual aids in preaching and teaching the precepts of the Faith is not however a simple matter to establish. Miriam Gill has highlighted the problems in positing a sustained and direct relationship between mural imagery and preaching, notably in the absence of pictorial sets of the complete Catechism and the dearth of (extant) pictorial exempla of the kinds found in sermons. There are some themes, however, notably the Warning to Blasphemers and the Warning to Gossips, found in both wall and glass-painting. Gill has also noted that the Erth oute of Erth poem illustrated at Stratford on Avon appears in a late fourteenth-century sermon collection (Fig. 13).58 Scale and location are of relevance here. Gill has observed that most of the extant combinations of Seven Deadly Sins and Seven Works of Mercy murals are on the north side of the church, where the pulpit was usually located.59 On the other hand, the fourteenth-century Warning to Gossips stained glass panel at Stanford on Avon (Northants.), whilst it was originally placed in a window at the west end of the nave, i.e. furthest from the altars and thus considered the appropriate space for women during church services, M. Caviness, ‘Biblical Stories in Windows: Were They Bibles for the Poor?’ in B. S. Levy (ed.), The Bible in the Middle Ages: its Influence on Literature and Art, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 89 (Binghamton, 1992), pp. 103–147. 57 R. Marks, ‘Medieval Stained Glass: Recent and Future Trends in Scholarship’, Journal of Stained Glass, 24 (2000), pp. 62–79 at 70. 58 Gill, ‘Preaching and Image’, pp. 160–1, 166–172, 175. 59 Ibid., p. 175. 56

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is both small in scale and hard to see at the apex of this tall window. In other instances, the location of imagery on wall and in window within chancels or chantry chapels, like those of John Clopton at Long Melford and the Chudleighs at Ashton, may also have affected their accessibility to the laity, although they were rarely if ever exclusive spaces.60 That imagery was intended for more than a decorative enhancement of the parish church is indicated by the inclusion of the kinds of associated texts we have looked at. Much of it is exhortatory, in the form of indulgence and intercessory prayers, or inviting silent or aural participation in catechistical and liturgical recitation (Figs 1, 3, 4, 8, 9, 11). The existence of much text in verse may be relevant, in that its mnemonic values chimed with the taste of the laity for medieval rhymes.61 This is evident in both vernacular and Latin verse, as in the Pricke of Conscience window and the Corporal Works of Mercy texts from East Anglia. The texts on the dados of two screens both refer in verse to the Rood figure above. One is at Guilden Morden (Cambs.): Ad mortem duram Jhesu de me cape curam; Vitam venturam post mortem redde securam; Fac me confessum rogo Te Deus ante secessum; Et post decessum coelo michi dirige gressum. (‘In death’s hard hour, Jesu, have care of me, and bring me safely to eternal life. Grant me to make confession ere I die, and when I die, direct my steps to heaven.’) Its vernacular counterpart is at Campsall, near Doncaster (Yorkshire): Let fal downe thyn ne, & lift up thy hart: Behold thy Maker on yond cross al to to[rn]; Remember his Wondis that for the did smart, Gotyn withowut syn, and on a Virgin bor[n], All His hed percid with a crown of thorne.

60 E. Duffy, ‘Late Medieval Religion’ in Marks and Williamson, Gothic, pp. 56–67, at 60; idem, Marking the Hours, pp. 53–64, 102–4; Marks, Image and Devotion, pp. 77–85, 159–185. 61 Aston, Lollards and Reformers, p. 126.

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Alas! man, thy hart oght to brast in too. Bewar of the Deuyl whan he blawis his hor[n]. And prai thi gode aungels conne the.62 At this point the ‘tables’ recorded in the two City of London churches re-enter the discussion. The didactic purpose of such devices was made clear by Jean Gerson and Nicholas of Cusa during the fifteenth century. The former considered that it would be helpful for tables bearing the Ten Commandments and related matter to be displayed in churches and other public spaces for the purposes of instruction of their flocks by the less educated clergy. Indeed, Nicholas of Cusa suspended in a church at Hildesheim (Germany) a large table with the texts of the Decalogue, Lord’s Prayer and Creed. The inclusion of such tables in panel paintings like the Soest altarpiece suggests the practice was quite widespread in northern Europe in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries (Fig. 2). As Aston has observed, although on the Continent such tables might bear texts translated into the vernacular, this is less likely in England as a result of Archbishop Arundel’s early fifteenth-century proscriptions.63 If the ‘liturgical’ table at St Stephen Walbrook showed people what to learn, a second table in this church was a practical demonstration of how to learn. This is the one described as the manus meditacionis. By good fortune, a hand diagram with the same label survives in the parish church at Bishops Cannings (Wilts.) (Fig. 15). Incorporated into a seat, it has been tentatively dated to the seventeenth century. Mnemotechnical devices of this kind occur as late as that century, but content and script both indicate that it is of pre-Reformation date, an attribution supported by the St Stephen Walbrook reference; the most likely date-range is the fifteenth or early sixteenth centuries, although diagrammatic hands with similar texts occur in early fourteenth-century manuscripts. Professor Jean Michel Massing has translated and analysed the Latin texts on the Bishops Cannings ‘table’ and has shown that they are a moralising homily, partly in verse, around the themes of sin, the transitory nature of life, the worthlessness of possessions, and 62 F. Bond, Screens and Galleries in English Churches (London, New York and Toronto, 1908), p. 42; J. E. Morris, The West Riding of Yorkshire (The Little Guides) (London, 2nd ed. rev., 1923), p. 147; D. Gray, Themes and Images in the Medieval English Religious Lyric (London and Boston, 1972), p. 47. 63 Aston, Lollards and Reformers, pp. 212, 216–7; idem, England’s Iconoclasts, pp. 347–8.

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the inevitability and unpredictability of death. The contents are summarised in two lines on the left scroll below the hand: Memorare novissima tua et in eternum non peccabis (‘Remember these last things of yours and you will not eternally sin’).64 Similar diagrams of hands with various texts on thumb and fingers enjoyed wide circulation in devotional tracts and school books, especially in the medium of print, where they served as mnemonic aids.65 The use of Latin and the quantity of text on the Bishops Canning manus (and presumably on the St Stephen Walbrook example) must have demanded considerable powers of comprehension by its readers; yet their presence in parish churches suggests that this was not beyond the abilities of some at least of the laity. Conclusion To focus on word and text as this paper does is by its nature a distortion and one that is as dangerous as it is to emphasize image while ignoring text. All the same, it is apparent that despite the insistence by the hierarchy of the English Church on the use of Latin for liturgical and sacred texts, the presence of the vernacular within the parish church was becoming increasingly commonplace in the course of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. This should not be interpreted as either a harbinger of the events of the 1540s or a proto-Reformation already current in the preceding 150 years. To the reformers of the middle years of the sixteenth century, the kinds of texts found on the tables of the two London churches which were our starting point were as offensive as the images of the saints with which some of them were associated. With their removal and destruction went the salvatory raison d’être of so many medieval texts: indulgences through image veneration and intercessory prayers. Obliterated were the physical manifestations of traditional faith — the expositions in word and/or image of the Seven Sacraments, the Corporal Works of Mercy and the Seven

64 Jean Michel Massing, review of C. R. Sherman and P. M. Lukehart (eds), Writing on Hands: Memory and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (exhib. cat., Dickinson College (Carlisle PA) and The Folger Shakespeare Library (Washington DC), 2000–1: Seattle, 2000) in Print Quarterly, XX no. 4 (2003), pp. 415–418; N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England. Wiltshire, rev. ed. B. Cherry (Harmondsworth, 1975), p. 114. 65 For example, in a school book by John Holt printed in London in 1508 (Marks and Williamson, Gothic, no. 175).

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Deadly Sins — and the pictorial testaments to the existence of Purgatory. Deprived of their former meaning through selective defacement, some were permitted to remain in the windows (for reasons of the cost of replacement) or concealed under whitewash.66 The Word continued, but no longer integrated with image. All that survived was the exposition of the Decalogue, but even this was not the Decalogue of the pre-Reformation Church. Not only was it now invariably in the vernacular, but also — and crucially — the prohibition of idolatry is spelt out.67 With the Reformation, texts efface the images and stand free of any associations with them — indeed, actively deny their validity, as Radnage bears witness. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Acknowledgements I am indebted to numerous individuals for very helpful discussions and bibliographical references in connection with this paper. These include Sally Badham, Alexandrina Buchanan, Anna Eavis, David Griffith, Bridget Heal, David King, Jean Michel Massing, Nigel Morgan, Peter Northeast, Christopher Norton and Sophie Oosterwijk. Roger Rosewell kindly loaned me the illustration of the Stratford mural and Dr Ulf-Dietrich Korn was instrumental in my obtaining the photograph of the St Maria zur Wiese altarpiece wing.

In Lutheran Europe, images and imagery continued both to exist and to be created. See Bob Scribner, ‘Popular Piety and Modes of Visual Perception in Late-Medieval and Reformation Germany’, Journal of Religious History, 15 no. 4 (1989), pp. 448–469 (with useful further bibliography); also some of the essays in Iconoclasme. Vie et mort de l’image médiévale (exhib. cat., Berne and Strasbourg: Somogy Editions d’Art, 2001). 67 Marks, Image and Devotion, p. 271; Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, pp. 361–3, 367–8, ill. 16. Aston also observes that although there are some pre-Reformation texts which address the issue of idolatry, these may reflect current concerns among reformers within the Church (ibid., pp. 408–413, Ill. 20). 66

Windowes wel-y-glased

VII Window Glass

T

he practices of contemporary glass-painters working in a traditional manner have not changed substantially from those described in the various medieval technical treatises: those of Theophilus (early 12th century), Eraclius (late 12th–early 13th century), Anthony of Pisa and Cennino Cennini (late 14th century).1 The glazier obtained his raw material in sheets from the glass-makers. The techniques of glass-making as opposed to glass-painting are discussed elsewhere and are only considered here in so far as they appertain to windows. The major centres in England for the manufacture of glass were the Weald, and in particular the locality of Chiddingfold on the SurreySussex border, and Staffordshire. In 1351 and 1355 John Alemayne of Chiddingfold supplied considerable quantities of white glass for the glazing of St. Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster, and for the new chapel in Windsor Castle.2 Other supplies of glass for St. Stephen’s were obtained in 1349 from Shropshire and Staffordshire. Glass from the latter county was purchased for York Minster in 1418 and Tattershall (Lincs.) in 1480.3 1 Theophilus, On Divers Arts, trs. J. G. Hawthorne and O. S. Smith (New York, 1979), pp. 45–74; for Eraclius, De Coloribus et Artibus Romanorum, see Mrs. M. P. Merrifield, Original Treatises ... on the Arts of Painting (London, 1849), i, pp. 166–252: Anthony of Pisa’s treatise is published by R. Bruck, ‘Die Tractat des Meisters Antonio von Pisa über die Glasmalerei’, Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft, xxv (1902), pp. 240–69. For Cennini’s II Libro dell’Arte see The Craftsman’s Handbook, trans. D. V. Thompson (New York, 1960), pp. 111–212. The best modern account is E. Frodl-Kraft, Die Glasmalerei: Entwicklung, Technik, Eigenart (Vienna & Zurich, 1970). 2 G. H. Kenyon, The Glass Industry of the Weald (Leicester, 1967), pp. 27–9. 3 R. Marks, The Stained Glass of the Collegiate Church of the Holy Trinity, Tattershall (Lines.) (New York and London, 1984), pp. 23, 31.

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There has been considerable debate as to whether coloured as well as white glass was made in English medieval glass-houses.4 In 1449 a monopoly was granted to a Fleming, John Utynam, to make coloured glass for the windows of Eton and King’s College, Cambridge, and to instruct others in the process ‘because the said art has never been used in England’.5 No coloured window glass has so far been found on any medieval kiln-sites and there is no documentary evidence that coloured glass was ever purchased in England, so it must be doubted whether Utynam’s efforts met with success. Even English white glass was considered inferior to that produced on the Continent. The contract of 1447 for the glazing of the Beauchamp Chapel at Warwick went so far as to stipulate that the glazier, John Prudde, was to use ‘... Glasse beyond the Seas, and with no Glasse of England’.6 The principal sources of this ‘glasse beyond the seas’ were those parts of Burgundy and Lorraine which border the Rhine (known as ‘Rhenish’ glass), Flanders and Normandy. The earliest reference known to me for the purchase of foreign glass is in 1318, when 628 weys of white and 203 weys of coloured glass were obtained for Exeter Cathedral at Rouen.7 Coloured glass for the windows of St. Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster, and for Windsor was bought in 1351–2 from the London warehouses of the Hanse merchants in the Steelyard at the bottom of Thames Street.8 East coast ports such as Hull and King’s Lynn tended to be the entrypoints for glass from the Rhineland and Flanders, but in the 15th and early 16th centuries glaziers throughout the country used the products of glasshouses from all the areas mentioned above. The York glass-painters, who through the proximity of Hull availed themselves of glass from Flanders and the Rhineland, are also known to have purchased glass from Burgundy (in 1535–6) and Normandy (1537).9 In 1508 the York glazier John Petty bequeathed to the Minster six tables of Normandy glass as well as ten sheaves of Rhenish glass.10 For the windows of Coldharbour in London in Ibid., pp. 31–2 for bibliography on this controversy. Calendar Patent Rolls, 1446–1452, p. 255. 6 W. Dugdale, Antiquities of Warwickshire, i (London, 2nd edn., 1730), pp. 446–7. 7 The Accounts of the Fabric of Exeter Cathedral, 1279–1353, ed. A.M. Erskine (Devon & Cornwall Record Society, n.s. xxiv, 1981), p. 98. 8 J. T. Smith, Antiquities of Westminster (London, 1807). 9 The Fabric Rolls of York Minster, ed. J. Raine (Surtees Soc. xxxv, 1858), pp. 108, 109. 10 Testamenta Eboracensia, ed. J. Raine (Surtees Soc. iv, 1836), iv, p. 334. 4 5

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1485 glass was used from Normandy, England, dusche (i.e. the Rhineland) and Venice; the last appears to be the first reference to the use in the British Isles of glass from this famous centre.11 Frequently in the early 16th century a combination of glass from the Rhineland and Normandy was used in glazing schemes.12 The sheets of glass supplied to the glass-painting workshops were usually priced by weight. In the 14th and 15th centuries this was expressed in terms of a wey or ponder which weighed 5 lbs; 24 weys comprised a seam or hundred, i.e. 120 lbs. In October 1351 John Alemayne of Chiddingfold received 37s. 6d. for ‘303 weys of white glass, each hundred of 24 weys, and each wey of 5 lbs’; these were destined for the windows of St. Stephen’s Chapel.13 During the 15th and early 16th centuries some new terms appeared, the wawe, sheaf, wisp, case and cradle. The wisp appears to have corresponded with the wey and weighed 5 lbs., and the case and cradle were the same as the seam. The sheaf seems to have weighed 6 lbs. and the wawe comprised 60 sheaves. At Collyweston (Northants.) a wawe of white glass cost 30s., exclusive of carriage, in the early 16th century. In 1537 the costs of glass bought for Sheriff Hutton Castle (N. Yorks.) were as follows: Payed to Robert Hall, merchant of Yorke, for iiij cradyll of Normandye glasse, at xviijs. a cradyll—lxxijs. Item payed to Robert May of Yorke, merchant, for a chest of wyspe glasse, xvijs. vjd. Item to the said Robert for x wyspses glasse, at ixd. a wyspe – vijs vjd.14 Normandy glass was generally considered to be superior to both Rhenish and English glass and this is reflected in the price. For the glazing of Croydon Manor in 1505 the King’s Glazier Barnard Flower supplied 16 square feet of Rhenish glass at 4d. per square foot; the same amount of glass from Normandy cost 5d. per square foot. This price included the glasspainters’ labour.15 11 L. F. Salzman, ‘Medieval Glazing Accounts’, Journal of the British Society of Master Glass-Painters (henceforward J.B.S.M.G.P.), iii (1929–30), p. 29. 12 A. Oswald, ‘Barnard Flower, the King’s Glazier’, J.B.S.M.G.P., xi ( 1951–5), p. 12. 13 L. F. Salzman, ‘The Glazing of St. Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster’ J.B.S.M.G.P., i (1926–7), p. 38. 14 Idem, Building in England (rev. ed., Oxford, 1967), p. 184. 15 A. Oswald, ‘The Glazing of the Savoy Hospital’, J.B.S.M.G.P., xi ( 1951–5), p. 227 n. 1.

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The costs quoted above all refer to white glass; coloured glass was always more expensive. In 1253 glass purchased for Westminster Abbey cost 3d. per wey for white and 6d. for coloured glass.16 A century later the accounts for St. Stephen’s Chapel and Windsor reveal the disparity in price between white and coloured glass. For both chapels white glass purchased from Chiddingfold was priced at 6d. per wey and foreign white glass cost between 8d. and 9d. per wey. Coloured glass was very much more expensive. At St. Stephen’s red (ruby) glass cost 2s. 2d. per wey, azure (blue) and sapphire 3s.17 These are the prices of the raw materials and do not include the cost of painting the glass and installing it in windows. Methods of Working The first stage in the making of a window was the preparation of a fullsize drawing, or cartoon, of the design. The cartoon itself would usually be based on a preliminary drawing, known in the 16th century as a vidimus, supplied by the patron of the window or made for his approval (see below pp. 190–192 for a fuller discussion of the vidimus). The vidimus could be supplemented by stock design features such as canopies taken from the glasspainters’ own working sketchbooks. The will of the York glazier William Thompson (d. 1539) makes reference to a ‘book of portitour’ which he left to his partner or apprentice; this is presumably such a sketchbook.18 The wellknown book of drawings in the Pepysian Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge (MS 1916) seems to have incorporated part of a glass-painter’s sketchbook, at least towards the end of the Middle Ages.19 Most of the drawings, which are by various hands and were probably originally loose sheets, date from c. 1390–1400. They depict animals, birds, ornamental motifs and human figures, including angels, the Virgin and what appear to be apostles and prophets. Further drawings were added later (probably in the late 15th century), including a section of an architectural canopy of a design H. M. Colvin (ed.). The Building Accounts of King Henry III (Oxford, 1971), pp. 286–7. Salzman, op. cit. note 11, 35, 38, 41; for Windsor see idem, J.B.S.M.G.P., ii (1927–8) p. 120. 18 J.A. Knowles, Essays in the History of the York School of Glass-Painting (London & New York, 1936), p. 36. 19 M.R. James, ‘An English Medieval Sketchbook, No. 1916 in the Pepysian Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge’, Walpole Soc., xiii (1924–5), pp. 1–17. Some of my remarks are based on a paper given by Professor Robert Scheller at a symposium on the Age of Chivalry exhibition. 16 17

window glass

1. Virgin and Child, canopy-work and sacred monograms in the Pepysian Sketch-Book, late 15th century (Cambridge, Magdalene College, Pepysian Library MS 1916, f. 22).

2. Monkey’s funeral, from the Pilgrimage window in the nave north aisle of York Minster, early 14th century.

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3. Funeral of the Virgin (Luttrell Psalter, c. 1330–40, B.L. MS Add. 42130, f. 99). 4. Part of a glass-painter’s table with design for a canopy, Gerona, Spain, early 14th century.

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confined almost exclusively to stained glass; the sacred monograms IHC and the crowned M on the same folio also occur frequently in this medium (Fig. 1). Although it is unlikely that the book was originally formed for use by a glazier, the original drawings of birds are closely comparable with the exquisite bird drawings in the nave south windows at Salehurst (E. Sussex). It was by means of such artisan sketchbooks that designs and motifs must have been disseminated between different crafts. They explain the similar, sometimes identical, ornamental repertoire common to tile-makers, wallpainters, glaziers and the limners of illuminated manuscripts. Presumably it must have been via a working model-book that the famous border scene of the monkey funeral at York Minster was adapted from the iconographical ‘type’ of the funeral procession of the Virgin as depicted in contemporary illuminated manuscripts (Figs 2, 3).20 The preliminary design, or vidimus, having been agreed by glazier and patron, the full-size cartoon was now prepared. This guided the work at all subsequent stages and so was precisely set out and included all subject-matter and the lead-lines, and had the required colours indicated by a letter or even by a sample of the colour itself. From the time of Theophilus (and probably before) down to at least the late 14th century, cartoons were drawn on boards or trestle tables prepared with chalk or whitewash and sized with water or ale. None of these boards has yet been discovered in England, although a pair of whitewashed tables bearing designs for stained glass panels and dating from the early 14th century exists at Gerona in Spain (Fig. 4).21 Cartoons were still being prepared on such tables in 1351–2 at St. Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster: For ale bought to wash the drawing tables for the glaziers’ work 3d. ...Masters John de Chestre, John Athelard, John Lincoln, Hugh Licheffeld, Simon de Lenne, and John de Lenton, 6 master glaziers, designing and painting on white tables various designs for the glass windows of the Chapel...22 Cartoons on tables were unwieldy and, as the Gerona boards show, had to be erased when new designs were required; notwithstanding this, such cartoons were sometimes used for commissions in separate locations, for D. O’Connor and J. Haselock, ‘The Stained and Painted Glass’, in G. E. Aylmer and R. Cant (eds.), A History of York Minster (Oxford, 1977), Plate 113. 21 J. Vila-Grau, ‘El Vitrail Gotic a Catalunya descoberta de la Taula de Vitraller de Girona’, Reial Acadèmia Catalana de Belles Arts de Sant Jordi (Barcelona, 1985), pp. 5–27. 22 Salzman, op. cit. note 13, p. 35. 20

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example the early 14th-century panels depicting the Virgin and Child at Fladbury and Warndon (Herefs. and Worcs.).23 By the time Cennini compiled his treatise, Italian glaziers had replaced cartoons drawn on wooden tables by those on parchment. Probably their English counterparts had adopted the same practice in the same period, although there is no documentary evidence until the 15th century for the use of parchment cartoons here.24 The introduction of cartoons traced on parchment greatly facilitated the glazier’s work, for they could be rolled up, stored and reused, if necessary with slight alterations dictated by iconographical changes. Several instances of the adaptation and reuse of cartoons in York glass have been identified by Knowles, and many others are known (Fig. 5, a, b).25 The passing-down of cartoons from one generation of glass-painters to another in York is well documented. William Inglish (d. 1480) bequeathed to his son Thomas ‘all the cartoons belonging to my work’, and Robert Petty (d. 1528) obtained his ‘scroes’ from his elder brother John.26 No doubt this practice was quite common. The cartoon having been laid out on a flat work-top, pieces of glass of the required colours were laid over it and cut to the approximate shape by splitting with a hot iron and then trimmed with a grozing-iron. In 1351–2 groisours from St. Stephen’s Chapel cost 1¼d. each.27 The glass having been cut and shaped, it was painted by means of a pigment formed by a mixture of ground copper or iron oxide, powdered glass and wine, urine or vinegar, and gum arabic: the last makes the pigment adhere to the glass. Purchases of arnement (iron oxide) and gumme arabik are recorded in the St. Stephen’s accounts.28 The pigment was applied with brushes made of the hair of various animals, including hog, squirrel, badger and cat. Painting was usually done in several layers: a light overall wash, a second wash over selected areas with a heavily-charged brush, and then the outlines of facial features and draperies. Fully translucent highlights were created by picking out with the tip of the 23 J. Alexander and P. Binski (eds.), Age of Chivalry (Exhibition Catalogue, Royal Academy of Arts, 1987), Nos. 472, 473. 24 The Craftsman’s Handbook, op. cit. note 1, p. 111; for Exeter see C. Brooks and D. Evans, The Great East Window of Exeter Cathedral: a Glazing History (Exeter, 1988), p. 36. 25 Knowles, op. cit. note 18, Plate xlv. 26 Ibid., p. 38. 27 Salzman, op. cit. note 13, pp. 32, 40. 28 Ibid., pp. 14, 33, 35, 39, 41.

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5a and 5b. Angels from the same cartoon, originally in the chancel of Tattershall church (Lincs.), now St. Martin’s church, Stamford (Lincs.).

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6. Shield of arms of the Somery family, c. 1330–50 (Burrell Collection, Glasgow).

7. St. Anne teaching the Virgin Mary to read,Thenford (Northants.).

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brush-handle letters of inscriptions, background ornamental patterns and other details. This process is usually termed stickwork (Fig. 6). From at least the 12th century the external surface of the glass was painted to reinforce shadows and give a three-dimensional effect to the medium. Back-painting at its most sensitive can be observed in early 15th-century glass, when the trace-lines of a veil or headdress might be painted on the outside and the principal facial shading applied to the inner surface (Fig. 7). After the pieces of glass making up the panel or window had been painted, the pigment was fired on to them in an annealing furnace. Several references to such furnaces exist in documents. The accounts of 1469 for the glazing of the nave of Westminster Abbey include a payment ‘for brike and other necessaries for making the anelyng herth’.29 After the glass pieces with the pigment fired into them were removed from the furnace they were laid out again for leading. The individual pieces were held together by closing or cloring nails. On 1 August 1351, 250 ‘clozngnaill’ costing 18d. were purchased for St. Stephen’s Chapel.30 The lead was cast with an I-shape in cross-section and was supplied in strips known as calmes (from the Latin calamus, reed). The lead was soldered at all joins and the gaps between it and the glass were made waterproof by a filling (Fig. 8). At St. Stephen’s Chapel tallow was used for this purpose, but nearly 200 years later some kind of cement was employed.31 Soldering irons are mentioned occasionally, as in the 1474 inventory of the glazing stores at Shene (Surrey).32 The final stage was the insertion of the glass panels into the window openings. Whilst the glass was still being prepared and painted the openings were sometimes temporarily filled. In 1253 canvas was purchased for this purpose for Westminster Abbey.33 A century later 350 yards of the same material were bought for the St. Stephen’s Chapel windows.34 The glass panels were set into the frames and held in place by armatures, stanchions and saddle-bars, to which they were secured either by strips soldered to the leading, or by clips. The armatures, stanchions and saddle-bars were usually of iron and were supplied by smiths, although evidence has been found in Idem, Building in England, p. 179. Idem, op. cit. note 13, p. 33. 31 Idem, Building in England, p. 181. 32 Idem, op. cit. note 11, p. 29. For a recent study of medieval leading see B. Knight, ‘Researches in Medieval Window Lead’, Jnl. Stained Glass, xviii. 1 ( 1983–4), pp. 49–51. 33 Colvin, op. cit. note 16, pp. 228–9. 34 Salzman, op. cit. note 13, p. 14. 29

30

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France of wooden armatures dating from as early as the 12th century.35 During this and the following century the elaborate historiated windows of Canterbury, Chartres, Sens, Laon, Bourges and elsewhere in France had armatures echoing the quatrefoils, circles and other geometrical shapes found in the composition of the glazing itself. Stanchions and saddle-bars also exist from these centuries in association with single figure, non-figured and ornamental or heraldic panels, but as these geometrical shapes were discarded in window design during the late 13th century armatures fell into disuse and stanchions and saddle-bars were employed for all types of window. Stanchions are vertical members and sometimes are found on both the exterior and interior of the window. They were not always required, but the horizontal support, the saddle-bar, is invariably present. In the St. Stephen’s accounts saddle-bars are termed soudeletts: 12 Dec. 1351 ‘To Master Andrew the Smith for 120 soudelett for the glass of the said windows, weighing 190 lbs. at 1½d. a pound, 23s. 9d.’ 36 This could mark the final stage in the installation of a window, but sometimes a thin iron protective grille or screen, such as are common in 19th-century windows, was placed on the exterior. In 1445 lattices were set in the King’s Chapel at Clarendon (Wilts.), to protect three glazed windows.37 The above is a general account of the making and installation of a stained glass window in medieval times. Space does not allow for discussion of detailed points of technique such as silver staining, jewelling and the use of unfired pigments.38

J. Lafond, Le Vitrail (Paris, 1966), p. 49. For late 12th- and early 13th-century armatures see M. Caviness, The Early Stained Glass of Canterbury Cathedral, c. 1175–1220 (Princeton, 1977), pp. 42–3. 36 Salzman, op. cit. note 13, p. 39. 37 Salzman, op. cit. note 11, p. 28. 38 For these and other techniques see C. Winston, An Inquiry into the Difference of Style Observable in Ancient Glass Paintings (2nd edn., London, 1867); idem, Memoirs Illustrative of the Art of Glass Painting (1865); J. D. Le Couteur, English Mediaeval Painted Glass (London, 1926); Salzman, Building in England. 35

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8 Early 14th-century leading from a panel at Helmdon (Northants.).

9. Shield of arms of the York Glaziers in St. Helen’s church, Stonegate, York. Early 16th century with later repairs.

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10. Entertaining the Stranger, from a Works of Mercy window in All Saints’ church, North Street, York. Early 15th century.

11. Sir Robert Wingfield (d. 1480) at East Harling (Norfolk).

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Organisation of the Craft Throughout the late Middle Ages glass-painting seems to have been a highly organised craft. From the 13th century onwards, when the documentary evidence becomes plentiful, a large number of glaziers are recorded in association with many different centres. In the 13th century a large proportion came from the major towns and cities, such as Bath, Canterbury, Chester, Colchester, Coventry, Lincoln, London, Norwich and Oxford.39 No names of York glass-painters have been discovered for this century, but the craft took swift root there in the following centuries, with the result that more is known about the York glaziers than about those associated with any other centre. Walter le Verrour is the first recorded, in 1313; thirteen others are named before 1363, 21 names occur between 1363 and 1413, 23 between 1413 and 1463 and 27 between 1463 and 1513.40 The York glaziers were concentrated in Stonegate, particularly around St. Helen’s church, where many of them were buried (Fig. 9). Recently more than 2,000 window glass fragments, apparently rejects from one of the workshops, were found in a medieval pit in Blake Street, a few yards from Stonegate.41 From the early 14th century the York glass-painters seem to have obtained most of the important glazing commissions in the North (Fig. 10). In similar fashion, Norwich seems to have been the dominant centre in East Anglia in the second half of the 15th century (Fig. 11). At least 70 glaziers are known from this city between 1280 and 1570.42 East Anglia in general was well-supplied with glass-painters: the names of nearly 100 craftsmen are recorded prior to the Reformation in the counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Essex. There is surprisingly little evidence until the 16th century that the London area was a major centre for glass-painting. From the late 13th century the glaziers responsible for the making and repair of the windows

39 C. Woodforde, ‘Glass-Painters in England before the Reformation’, J.B.S.M.G.P., vi (1935–7), pp. 62–9, 121–8. 40 Knowles, op. cit. note 18, pp. 11–12. 41 D. O’Connor, ‘Débris from a Medieval Glazier’s Workshop’, Bull, of the York Archaeological Trust, iii, No. 1 (August 1975), pp. 11–17. 42 Information from Mr. David King. See also C. Woodforde, The Norwich School of Glass-Painting in the Fifteenth Century (London, 1950), pp. 9–15.

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for the royal residences were based at Westminster.43 At about the same time glass-painters occur across the river in Southwark: Nicholas de Creping, who in 1292 made windows for Guildford Castle (Surrey), was a resident of Southwark.44 It was also in Southwark that the foreign glaziers settled from the late 15th century in order to escape from the control of the Glaziers Company of the City of London. Little can be said about the City glasspainters except that the Company existed by 1328, and that by 1364–5 it had a set of craft ordinances. In c. 1523 there were seven glaziers practising within the boundaries of the City of London, although it was claimed that until recently there had been at least twenty-two.45 The documentary evidence suggests that even in the 14th century most major towns south of the Trent had a resident glazier. Exeter provides a series of names from the beginning of the 14th century to the Reformation, several Salisbury craftsmen are also recorded and Chester was a centre of some importance. The wide distribution of glaziers by the middle of the 14th century is demonstrated by the writ for the collection of craftsmen for the glazing of St. Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster, and by the names of those who worked here and at the royal chapel in Windsor Castle. The writ covers 27 counties and the glaziers recruited from them bear the names of King’s Lynn, Bury St. Edmunds, Norwich, Halstead, Dunmow, Waltham, Sibton and Haddiscoe (all in East Anglia), Lincoln, Lichfield, Coventry, Bramley, Chester, Thame and Hereford.46 By the 15th and early 16th centuries even minor towns and villages sometimes had a glazier. Probably many of these were capable of little more than cutting and leading clear glass, or at best painting simple figures or ornamental patterns for local churches. John Glasier of Coningsby (Lincs.) falls into this category. In 1457–8 he glazed the windows in a chamber in the nearby collegiate establishment at Tattershall, but the glazing of the collegiate church itself with rich coloured glass and complex iconography was beyond his capabilities. Glass-painters from much further afield were brought in for this task. In 1482 these included John Glasier of Stamford, John Wymondeswalde of Peterborough, Robert Power of Burton-onThe History of the King’s Works: The Middle Ages, gen. ed. H. M. Colvin, i (London, 1963), p. 226. 44 L. F. Salzman, ‘Medieval Glazing Accounts’, J.B.S.M.G.P. ii (1927–8), p. 118. 45 D. R. Ransome, ‘The Struggle of the Glaziers’ Company with the Foreign Glaziers, 1500–1550’, Guildhall Miscellany, ii No. 1 (Sept. 1960), p. 13. 46 Cal. Pat. R., 1348–50, p. 481; Cal. Pat. R., 1350–4, p. 308. 43

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12. Cherubim, from St. Michael’s church, Coventry. Early 15th century.

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13. St. John of Bridlington in the Beauchamp Chapel, St. Mary’s church, Warwick, 1447–64.

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14. Signature of John Thornton in the east window of York Minster, 1408 (After J. A. Knowles).

15. Drawing of a donor and his wife, c. 1484–98 (B.L., MS Lansdowne 874, f. 191).

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16. Vidimus probably for a window in the chapel of Hampton Court Palace, early 16th century (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Brussels).

17. Panel in the east window of York Minster by John Thornton, 1405–8.

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18. Head of St. Edward the Confessor in the east window of Exeter Cathedral, c. 1391. 20. Detail of Sacrament of Confirmation by Richard Twygge and Thomas Wodshawe, Tattershall (Lincs.), c. 1482.

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19. St. John the Evangelist in the great west window of York Minster, c. 1339.

21. Two apostles and a prophet from the side windows of Winchester College Chapel, c. 1393.

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Trent and Richard Twygge and Thomas Wodshawe from the Malvern area (Fig. 20).47 More highly-regarded glaziers could travel considerable distances to undertake commissions. Richard Twygge also worked on the nave of Westminster Abbey, whilst Thomas Glazier of Oxford painted glass for Winchester College. John Thornton seems to have run workshops concurrently in Coventry and York in the early 15th century; not surprisingly, there are strong stylistic affinities between the glass of both centres in this period (Figs 10, 12, 17).48 As was mentioned earlier, in some large cities the glaziers were sufficiently numerous to form a craft gild. In London and York they had a gild of their own (Fig. 9); the Chester glass-painters in 1534 were incorporated into a gild which included the painters, embroiderers and stationers (this charter ratified an existing practice as these trades had long before combined to perform one of the mystery plays). Similarly the Norwich glass-painters formed part of the gild of St. Luke with the bell-founders, brasiers, painters, pewterers and plumbers.49 At Shrewsbury the glass-painters combined with the saddlers.50 In common with other craft gilds, the glaziers were concerned with the regulation of commercial practices in their field, and their rules were equally self-protective. When a city had a craft trade that could meet all demands on it (and take on outside commissions) it had an interest in protecting the indigenous masters. The York regulations of 1463–4 are particularly restrictive: Item, that no maister of the said craft supporte any maner of foreyner within this citee or without ayeinst any other maister in any poynt concerning the wele, worship and proffecte of the same craft, on payne of leisyng of xiijs. iiijd. to be payed as is aforewriten, and that noo foreyne sett up a shop as a master in the said crafte unto suche tyme he aggre with the serchours of the said craft for a certain some.51 It is significant that this ‘some’ is not specified, making it possible, if the assessors so decided, to demand a prohibitive payment. At this time the York glaziers consisted of a small number of inter-related family firms, Marks, op. cit. note 3, pp. 32–4. O’Connor and Haselock, op. cit. note 20, p. 367. 49 Woodforde, op. cit. note 42, p. 14. 50 Knowles, op. cit. note 18, p. 214 note 2. 51 York Memorandum Book, ed. M. Sellers, pt. ii (Surtees Soc., cxxv, 1915), p. 209. 47

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the Chambers, Pettys, Shirleys and Inglishes, and this clause shows how concerned they were to preserve their oligarchy.52 The London rules of 1364–5 also laid down precise selection procedures for the admission of outsiders: ... if any stranger come to the City and desires to use the said mistery as a master, the good folk elected and sworn to the said mistery shall come to the Mayor and Aldermen and inform them of the name of such person, and the Mayor and Aldermen shall cause him to appear before them, and he shall be examined by good folk of the mistery to see if he be fit and sufficiently informed to use the mistery and of character to remain in the City.53 To avoid subjection to these rules was one of the principal reasons why the Flemish and German glaziers who came to England in steadily increasing numbers from the late 15th century took up residence in Southwark. So successful were the foreign glaziers that after 1500 they monopolised the major glazing contracts, a situation which led to a bitter dispute with the Glaziers Company. The master glass-painter was also protected from unfair competition from his fellow-craftsmen. A York ordinance of 1463–4 stated that a glasspainter could not take a second apprentice until his first apprentice had completed four of his seven years’ service.54 This regulation was designed to prevent the formation of large workshops based on the cheap semi-skilled labour of apprentices. During the late Middle Ages most urban glazing firms probably consisted of no more than the master glass-painter, one or two servants and perhaps an apprentice. In 1337 John de Walworth was employed at Westminster at the rate of 5d. per day and his ‘garcio’ had 3d. a day.55 Master Walter le verrator had two boys assisting him in setting in place two clerestory windows in the choir of Exeter Cathedral in 1310–11, whereas his successor Robert Lyen at Exeter had only one servant towards the end of

Knowles, op. cit. note 18, pp. 246–9. « C.H. Ashdown, History of the Worshipful Company of Glaziers (London, 1919), p. 17. 54 York Memorandum Book, p. 209. 55 Salzman, op. cit. note 44, p. 119. 52

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the same century.56 The wills of York glaziers provide further information.57 John Chamber the younger (d. 1450) had three ‘servants’, a term which may include apprentices, and a son in his practice. The will of Thomas Shirley (d. 1458) names two servants and mentions other men and women servants who may, however, be domestic. His son Robert was also in the firm, and his father left him ‘all my drawings, appliances and necessaries, also the tables and trestles belonging in any way to my craft’.58 No apprentices are mentioned in the will of John Petty (d. 1508), only two servants and his ‘scribe’ or book-keeper. Even John Prudde, the King’s Glazier, seems to have employed no more than two servants: in 1443–4 his employees Richard and William were paid for work at Fromond’s Chantry, Winchester College.39 When a large quantity of glazing was required, the work was sometimes entrusted to several glaziers or their firms. This occurred, as we have seen, at Tattershall in 1482, and again with King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, in 1526. At St. Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster, there were 20 to 30 glaziers at work in addition to the five or six master glass-painters. The entry in the accounts for 3 October 1351 is typical: ... Masters John de Chestre, John Athelard, John Lincoln, Hugh Licheffeld, Simon de Lenne, and John de Lenton, 6 master glaziers, designing and painting on white tables various designs for the glass windows of the chapel, for 6 days, at 12d. each, 36s. William Watton, John Waltham, John Carleton, John Lord, William Lichesfeld, John Alsted, Edward de Bury, William Dodyngton, Thomas Yong, Robert Norwic and John Geddyng, 11 glaziers painting glass for the said windows, each at 7d., 28s 6d. John Couentr’, William Hamme, William Hereford, John Parson, William Nafreton, John Cosyn, Andrew Horkesle, W. Depyng, Geoffrey Starley, William Popelwic, John Brampton, Thomas Dunmowe, John atte Wode and William Bromley, 14 glaziers breaking and fitting glass upon the painted tables, for the same time, at 6d. a day, 42s. Thomas Dadyngton and Robert Yerdesle, 2 glaziers’ mates (garcionibus vitriariis) working with the others at breaking glass, each of them at 4½d. a day, 4s. 6d.60 Erskine, op. cit. note 7, pp. 56–7; Brooks and Evans, op. cit. note 24, pp. 13, 37, 167. For the following remarks see Knowles, op. cit. note 18, pp. 38, 249–251. 58 Ibid., p. 38. 59 J. D. Le Couteur, Ancient Glass in Winchester (Winchester, 1920), pp. 103, 120. 60 Salzman, op. cit. note 13, p. 35. 56 57

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The role of the master-glaziers is worth noting. The restriction of their labour to the cartoons was almost certainly dictated by the desire to finish the glazing speedily and the availability of a large work-force to paint and lead the glass. A similar situation applied to John Thornton, when in 1405 he undertook to glaze the great east window of York Minster. It was laid down that Thornton should ‘pourtray the said window with his own hand, and the histories, images and other things to be painted on the same’; but he was only to ‘paint the same necessary’. As the contract refers to workmen provided by Thornton it is clear that it was not envisaged that he would personally execute all the glass (Fig. 17).61 Given the size of the average workshop such a degree of specialisation was, one suspects, exceptional. The contract of 1447 for the Beauchamp Chapel, Warwick (Fig. 13) states that the cartoons for the windows were not to be done by the main glazier, John Prudde, but by another painter. Prudde himself was to paint and lead the glass, ‘to fine, glaze, enelyn it, and finely and strongly set it in lead and souder as well as any Glasse in England’.62 Prudde worked at Westminster and Shene Palaces in 1442 and c. 1445, and an inventory of stores in both places compiled in 1443 provides useful information on the contents of the medieval glazier’s workshop: ... 1 iron compace for the use of the glaziers ... 25 shields painted on paper with various arms of the King for patterns for the use of glaziers working there, 6 crestis with various arms for the same works ... 12 payntyng dyssches of lead ... 12 patterns made in the likeness of windows, 8 iron grosyeres [grozing irons] ... 42 glosyng nayle used up in glosyng work ... a leaden wasschbolle used to make leads for glazing windows ... 2 portreyying tables of waynescote, 2 tables of popeler [poplar], 11 trestles, used for glazing work.63 At the other end of the spectrum, some local glaziers were evidently incapable of making their own cartoons and had them supplied by others. In the early 16th century Sir Thomas Lucas paid one Wright 10s. ‘for

G. Benson, The Ancient Painted Glass Windows in the Minster and Churches of the City of York (York, 1915), pp. 86–7. 62 Dugdale, op. cit. note 6, p. 446. 63 Salzman, op. cit. note 11, p. 27. 61

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portraying of my chapel windowe and settyng out the coloures of the same unto my glazier’.64 It was in his capacity of King’s Glazier that Prudde was employed at Westminster and Shene. The existence of such a post can be traced back at least to the late 13th century. In 1297 William of Kent, glazier: took office in place of Robert the glazier, to mend defects where necessary in many places and to receive the same wages that Robert received, namely 4d. a day. And he found as security for his faithful service to the King, Henry le Plomer.65 The daily wage or retainer varied in amount. John Brampton, when he was appointed in 1378, received 12d. per day only whilst he was engaged on the King’s Works. His successor, Richard Savage, did not receive a set wage, but only ‘whatever shall be agreed between the Clerk of the King’s Works and the said Richard’. Savage was followed in 1412 by Roger Gloucester, for whom the 12d. fee was reinstated. It remained at this rate (except between 1461 and 1472 when it was reduced to 8d.) until the early 16th century.66 The Fleming, Barnard Flower, who was King’s Glazier from at least the end of March 1505 until 1517, received slightly more, for he had £24 per annum.67 From at least the 15th century the King’s Glazier had a shed or lodge in the western part of Westminster Palace; the dimensions of this are given as 60 feet by 20 feet.68 The office of King’s Glazier was prestigious and worth more than the daily fee, for it did not preclude the holder from undertaking work outside the royal palaces and castles; indeed, it attracted important and lucrative commissions.This certainly happened to John Prudde with the Beauchamp Chapel glazing (Fig. 13). He also worked in 1441 at All Souls College, Oxford, and, as referred to above, at Fromonds Chantry, Winchester College, in 1443–4.69

Idem, Building in England, p. 178. Idem, op. cit. note 44, p. 118. 66 For these figures and dates see King’s Works, i, p. 226. 67 Oswald, ‘Barnard Flower’, op. cit. note 12, p. 13. 68 King’s Works, i, p. 226. 69 H. C[hitty], ‘John Prudde, “King’s Glazier’”, Notes and Queries, 12th ser. iii ( 1917), pp. 419–21. 64 65

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Although almost all the named English medieval English glass-painters are known to us from contracts and accounts, a few ‘signed’ their works. The east window of York Minster bears John Thornton’s initials together with the year of completion (1408) (Fig. 14).70 There are several examples of glaziers’ signatures in Continental glass, ranging in date from the mid-13th century ‘Frater Lupuldus’ at Haina, Germany, down to the 16th-century windows signed by Arnoult de Nijmuegen at Rouen and Tournai.71 A few North European glaziers are also depicted in their windows (Gerlachus in a German panel of c. 1150–60 and Clement of Chartres in a window dating from c. 1220–30 at Rouen Cathedral).72 None survives in England, but a copy made in 1822 of the original figure of Thomas Glazier of Oxford is in Winchester College Chapel; the original dates from the 1390s.73 A south transept window in York Minster also once contained a figure of John Petty (d. 1508).74 The Commissioning of Windows As in other fields of medieval artistic activity, the choice of subjects and type of glazing were not matters left to the discretion of the glass-painters; nor was it their normal practice to make windows for stock and sell them to chance customers. Instead everything was executed to the specific commissions of those paying for the work, be they monarch, prelate, noble, merchant or churchwarden. The wishes expressed by a donor or testator had to be incorporated into a binding agreement. The normal form that this took, as for other Knowles, op. cit. note 18, p. 217. For Haina see H. Wentzel, ‘Die Glasmalerei der Zisterzienser in Deutschland’, Die Klosterbaukunst (Arbeitsbericht der Deutsch-Französischen Kunsthistoriker-Tagung, Mainz, 1951); the De Nijmuegen references are taken from J. Lafond, La Résurrection d’un Maître d’autrefois (Rouen, 1942), pp. 5–6, 7, 9. For a general survey see M. P. Lillich, ‘Gothic Glaziers: Monks, Jews, Taxpayers, Bretons, Women’, Jnl. Glass Studies, xxvii (1985), pp. 72–92. 72 For Gerlachus see R. Becksmann and H. Waetzoldt, ‘Glasmalerei des Mittelalters’; in Vitrea Dedicata. Das Stifterbild in der deutschen Glasmalerei des Mìttelaters (Berlin, 1975), p. 66, text Fig. 1, and for Clement of Chartres see G. Ritter, Les Vitraux de la Cathédrale de Rouen (Cognac, 1926), Plate xiv. 73 J. H. Harvey and D. King, ‘Winchester College Stained Glass’, Archaeologia, ciii (1971), Plate lxvii b. 74 F. Harrison, The Painted Glass of York (London, 1927), p. 16, citing Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Top. Yorks. c.14, f. 74 (notes by Henry Johnston, 1669–70). 70 71

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commercial transactions, was a written contract. The earliest reference to such an agreement is in 1237, when Peter the Painter received 5s. 6d. as agreed by contract for making a glass window for Marlborough Castle (Wilts.),75 Very few of these contracts survive; for the most part they are only abstracts giving very little more than the name of the glazier, the patron and the price. Some contracts are known from later copies which should be treated with caution. Nonetheless there are certain features common to most of these documents. Glazing contracts do not differ in essence from other medieval European commercial agreements, such as those between patrons and the limewood retable sculptors of South Germany;76 they combine the deposit or earnest by the patron to the craftsman which bound the latter to complete within an agreed period, a bond or surety by the glazier to fulfil the contract, and the obligation of the patron in turn to pay the balance as necessary. They also frequently include instructions to the glazier regarding subject-matter and (sometimes) they detail the type of glass to be used. Several of the documents give detailed instructions to the glazier or mention that these will be supplied. The St. John’s College, Cambridge, contract of 1513 mentions a figure of St. John the Evangelist to be placed in the hall windows, with detailed instructions to follow for the chapel.77 We do not know what form these instructions were to take, but in several other instances it is made clear. The 1447 contract with John Prudde, the King’s Glazier, for the windows of the Beauchamp Chapel, Warwick, states that ‘the matters Images, and stories ... shall be delivered and appointed by the said Executors in patterns in paper’.78 Another reference to a drawing, or vidimus (see above, p. 166), is in Henry VII’s will: the iconographical scheme for the windows of his chapel at Westminster Abbey was to be delivered ‘in picture’ to the Master of the Works.79 There survive several 14th-century German examples of vidimuses,80 but none is known from England prior to the end of the 15th century. The Salzman, op. cit. note 44, p. 116. M. Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven, 1980), pp. 102–6. 77 R. Willis and J. W. Clark, Architectural History of the University of Cambridge and of the Colleges of Cambridge and Eton (Cambridge, 1886), ii, pp. 347–8. 78 Dugdale, op. cit. note 6, pp. 446–7. 79 Le Couteur, op. cit. note 38, p. 11. 80 H. Wentzel, ‘Un Projet du Vitrail au XIVe Siècle’, Revue de l’Art, x (1970), pp. 7–14. 75 76

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first is extremely interesting in that it seems to have been the work of the prospective donor himself. On f. 191 of London, British Library, Lansdowne MS 874 is a very rough drawing of a kneeling man and his wife (Fig. 15). The drawing can be dated to between c. 1484 and 1498 and the heraldry on the man’s tabard identifies him as Thomas Froxmere. The sketch is accompanied by detailed instructions relating to the heraldic charges to be depicted.81 In most instances these drawings were probably prepared for the patrons by professional limnours or draughtsmen. In 1505, 7s. were paid to John Delyon, the glazier of Lady Margaret Beaufort’s manor at Collyweston (Northants.), ‘for the changyng of the Antelope into an Ivell in the bay wyndowe in the grett chambre, wt xxd. yevyn to William Hollmer for the draght of the said Ivell at London’.82 A number of vidimuses exist for glazing schemes in English churches of the early 16th century. The most elaborate, for a thirteen-light window containing the Crucifixion, Last Judgement, Passion scenes and four saints, is in the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh. As the four saints include St. William of York (as well as St. Thomas of Canterbury), the vidimus can perhaps be connected with Cardinal Wolsey, who was Archbishop of York between 1515 and 1529. From the size of the composition it was almost certainly for the east or west windows of a large ecclesiastical edifice, perhaps one of the Cardinal’s grandiose unfinished schemes at York Place (later Whitehall Palace) or Cardinal College (Christ Church), Oxford. The vidimus is also interesting in that the inscriptions do not tally with the subjects depicted; for instance ‘Ecce homo’ is written over the St. Thomas of Canterbury and the Entombment; presumably these were corrections or alterations to the subjects requested by the patron. From the occasional Dutch word in the inscriptions and the figure style it is likely that this vidimus was prepared by a Netherlandish artist, possibly James Nicholson, who was employed by Wolsey at Cardinal College. He may also have been the artist of a similar series of 24 vidimuses in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, which are probably for another Wolsey project, the glazing of Hampton Court Chapel (Fig. 16).83 81

L(b).

J. A. Goodall, ‘Two Medieval Drawings’, Antiq. Jnl., lviii (1978), pp. 160–2, Plate

Salzman, Building in England, p. 178. For the Edinburgh and Brussels vidimuses see H. Wayment, ‘Twenty-four Vidimuses for Cardinal Wolsey’, Master Drawings, xxiii–xxiv No. 4 (1988), pp. 505–17. 82 83

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Three vidimuses for surviving windows in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, were discovered twenty years ago in the library of Bowdoin College, Maine, in the United States. The drawings can be associated in general terms with the four indentures signed in 1526 with Galyon Hone, Richard Bond, Thomas Reve and James Nicholson (for eighteen windows) and with Francis Williamson and Simon Symondes (for four windows). One of these indentures stipulates that the representatives of the King and of the College must deliver to Williamson and Symondes ‘patrons otherwyse called a vidimus ... for to form glass and make by the foresaid four windows of the said church’. The main indenture signed by Hone and his three fellow-glaziers states that they themselves had to hand over the vidimuses in question to Williamson and Symondes. As Wayment has pointed out, the presence of grid-lines representing the ferramenta suggests that these drawings are not the original vidimuses but copies made as guides for the maker of the cartoon.84 As an alternative to ‘patrons’, written instructions were supplied to glaziers. Two rolls concerning the glazing of the Observant Friars’ church at Greenwich in c. 1493–4 show how detailed such instructions could be. A section is transcribed here: Lowes kyng of Fraunce of whos body kyng Henry the vijth kyng of Englond is lynyally dyscended and sonne to hym in the ixth degree. Make hym armyd wyth a man till over his harnes an opyn crowne and a berde a septure in his lefte hande and a ball wyth a crosse in his ryght hande. His armes the felde asure flourte golde. Ethelbert kyng of Kent shryned at Seint Austynes at Caunterbury. Make hym in the abytte of a peasible kyng with a berde & a ball wyth a crosse theron in the ryght honde & a cepture in the lefte hande & an opyn crowne. His armes the feld golde iij roundells gowles in the fyrst roundell hallf an ymage of a kynge crowned in the roobis of astate in the iide a lyon sylver in the iijde a dragon golde. In the left margin the arms so described are blazoned.85

Idem, ‘The Great Windows of King’s College Chapel and the Meaning of the Word “Vidimus”’, Proc. Cambridge Antiquarian Soc., lxix (1979), pp. 53–69. 85 London, British Library, Egerton MS 2341. See Hasted’s History of Kent, ed, H.H. Drake, Pt. 1, The Hundred of Blackheath (London, 1886), pp. 86–7, No. 6. 84

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Such detailed heraldic instructions were no doubt considered necessary as glaziers could not be expected to be expert in the blazoning of arms. In 1540 at St. Margaret’s, Westminster, a herald was consulted: ‘To Symon Symones glasier for making and setting up of divers armes in the Trinity chapell by the advice and commandement of Mr. Lancaster Herrold at armes Xs.’86 Time limits are specified in some of the more complete contracts. In 1405 John Thornton of Coventry was allowed three years by the Dean and Chapter of York to complete the great east window of the Minster (Fig. 17).87 The contracts of 1526 for the glazing of King’s College Chapel stipulate that Hone, Bond, Reve and Nicholson had to finish six windows within one year and twelve in the following four years; the first indenture for Williamson and Symondes gave them two years for two windows and another three years for two more; this was amended to give them five years for all four windows.88 To ensure that glass-painters kept to the agreed dates ‘bonds’ or penalty clauses were included in contracts. John Thornton merely swore an oath, but later agreements specify a financial penalty payable by the glazier to the patron for failure to complete the contract on time. Richard Wright at St. John’s College, Cambridge, was bound in £50 and the two teams of King’s College Chapel glaziers in 500 marks and £200 respectively. By the same token it was recognised that it was unreasonable for glaziers to have to wait for payment until the work was completed. In 1391, for the great east window of Exeter Cathedral, Robert Lyen received a weekly rate of 3s. 4d. for adapting the old glass, with a further 2s. for his assistant. For the new glass Lyen was paid 20d. per square foot, but it is not clear whether he received this on a weekly basis (Fig. 18).89 John Thornton had 4s. per week during his work on the York Minster east window, in addition to a lump sum of £5 per year and £10 on completion of the contract. By the early 16th century at least it had become customary to pay a ‘prest’ or advance. In 1511 Barnard Flower received £20 as an advance for work at the Chapel of

J. C. Cox, Churchwardens’ Accounts (London, 1913), p. 87. Benson, op. cit. note 61, pp. 86–7. 88 H. Wayment, The Windows of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge (Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi: Great Britain, Supplementary Vol. 1, London, 1972), pp. 124–5. 89 Brooks and Evans, op. cit. note 24, pp. 37–8, 167. 86 87

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Our Lady, at Walsingham (Norfolk),90 and four years later he had a down payment of £100 on his glazing at King’s College Chapel. Hone, Bond, Reve and Nicholson were to receive £60 as an advance as well as further sums at half-yearly intervals.91 It was necessary for the patron to make such payments on account in order to enable glaziers undertaking major projects to fulfil the contract, particularly in those instances when the glass-painter, not the patron, had to supply the glass, lead and so forth, as well as meet transportation costs. These were taken into consideration in pricing the work, but nonetheless the glaziers had to expend considerable sums during the course of the contract. Turning to prices and payments, evidence from contracts is greatly augmented by a number of sources, especially building accounts. The majority of new glazing schemes were priced per square foot. Costs fluctuated considerably between the early 13th and early 16th centuries and it is impossible to quantify what this meant in real terms as so many of the accounts are too imprecise regarding the glass, and only a small and unrepresentative proportion of the glass mentioned in documents survives. There is no means of knowing, for example, whether the white glass which, at a rate of 12d. per square foot, was purchased from Henry Staverne and John Brampton in 1364 for Hadleigh Castle (Essex), was the same in quality and decoration (or plainness) as that for which William Burgh in 1400 received only 10d. per square foot for a window in the Exchequer at Westminster.92 On the other hand, the survival of some glass associated with accounts gives an indication of the types of glazing purchased by the various rates. In August 1253 the windows of Westminster Abbey cost 8d. per square foot for painting and working coloured glass and 4d. for white glass.93 The few panels of coloured glass which survive from Henry Ill’s glazing take the form of small but detailed narrative scenes, and it is known that the white glass depicted geometrical designs of stylised stems and leaves in conventional 13th-century fashion.94 In the Exeter Cathedral accounts for the new presbytery windows in the period 1301–7, no distinction is made between white and coloured glass and the cost is merely given as 5 ½d. per square foot; in the years 1309–11 the rate rose to 6 ½d. per foot. These Oswald, art. cit. note 12, p. 15. Wayment, op. cit. note 88, pp. 123–4. 92 Salzman, op. cit. note 44, 189; op. cit. note 11, p. 25. 93 Colvin, op. cit. note 16, pp. 286–7. 94 Age of Chivalry, op. cit. note 23, Nos. 735–6. 90 91

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prices were for already painted glass.95 Of the glass referred to in the 1301–7 accounts only parts of the east window and a north clerestory window survive; they contain figures under canopies in coloured glass which in the latter window are set on white (grisaille) grounds within a border. The prices quoted in the accounts do not include the expense of setting the glass in the windows, which is costed separately.96 In 1338–9 the Dean and Chapter of York Minster agreed with a glass-painter named Robert a rate of 6d. per square foot for white and 12d. per foot for coloured glass for the great west window in the Minster (Fig. 19).97 This window exists and contains figures and scenes under canopies. In 1363–4 glass with royal arms in the borders placed in the royal apartments at Windsor Castle cost 13d. per square foot.98 This rate remained fairly constant for the next three decades. Thus at Windsor in 1383 John Brampton received 13d. per square foot for 160 feet of coloured glass decorated with falcons and the royal arms.99 For the glazing which William Burgh carried out around 1400 in the royal palaces at Westminster and Eltham, prices rose very sharply. In 1399 he was paid 12d. a foot for glass decorated with birds and 1s. 8d. for glass with the royal arms and those of St. Edward in Westminster Palace. In the following year glass embellished with birds was priced at 16d. per square foot; plain white glass cost the King 10d. per square foot. In 1401 Burgh charged 2s. a square foot for a four-light window at Eltham which contained ‘Escuchons, garters and colers of the Bagez of our Lord the King’. This was surpassed by the 3s. 4d. per foot which Burgh received for another window containing the figures of SS. John the Baptist, Thomas, George, the Annunciation, the Holy Trinity, and St. John the Evangelist.100 In the following year Eltham was glazed with more very expensive glass: For 91 square feet of new glass, diapered and worked with broomflowers, eagles and rolls inscribd Soueraigne, bought of William Burgh, glasier, for the said 3 Baywyndowes and costres, each of 2 lights, at 3s. Accounts of Exeter, op. cit. note 7, pp. 24, 28, 30, 32, 35, 42, 49, 50, 56, 57. Age of Chivalry, No. 739; Brooks and Evans, op. cit. note 24, pp. 11–13, 15. 97 T. French and D. O’Connor, York Minster: A Catalogue of Medieval Stained Glass 1: The West Windows of the Nave (Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi Great Britain, iii.l, London, 1987), p. 85. 98 Salzman, op. cit. note 44, p. 189. 99 Ibid., p. 192. 100 Idem, op. cit. note 11, pp. 25–6. 95

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4d. a foot, 15li. 3s. 4d. And for 54 square feet of new glass worked with figures and canopies, the field made in the likeness of cloth of gold, bought of the same William for 3 windows each of 2 lights in the new oratory, at 3s. 4d. a foot, 9li – 24li 3s. 4d.101 The Eltham glazing was evidently very sumptuous, and the rate of 3s. 4d. per square foot is never repeated in any surviving accounts. The most expensive glazing scheme subsequently was the Beauchamp Chapel at Warwick, the 1447 contract for which stated that John Prudde was to receive 2s. per square foot (Fig. 13).102 During the 15th century, glazing ranged from plain white glass to complex iconographical schemes. From the accounts concerned with John Prudde quite an accurate picture can be obtained of what the various piecework rates purchased, inclusive of the cost of materials.103 For Shene Palace in c. 1445 he made a window of white glass for 7d. per foot. The costs of his figural glass here and at Eton College (the latter in 1445–6) varied between 8d. and 12d.104 The differences in price can be explained in terms of the respective amounts of coloured glass used and additional elements such as canopies and borders. Prudde also glazed windows at Eton College with vitri historiales, that is, scenes rather than single figures. The rate was ls. 2d.105 Nearly forty years later, in 1482, vitri historiales made for Tattershall (Lincs.) still cost the same. Several panels from these windows survive (Fig. 20). Even as late as 1526 the rate for the historiated windows in King’s College Chapel had only risen by 2d. to ls. 4d. from Prudde’s prices of 1445–6.106 The price of unpainted white glass declined in the early 16th century. In 1513 Richard Wright received 4d. per square foot for installing white glass at St. John’s College.107 By c. 1517–20 the price of white glass had fallen still further, for at the Savoy Hospital Chapel Richard Bond was only paid 2d.108 The same rate occurs in 1533.109 Ibid., p. 27. Dugdale, op. cit. note 6, pp. 446–7. 103 Knowles, Essays, p.48, Fig. 5. 104 Salzman, op. cit. note 11, p. 28; Willis and Clark, op. cit. note 77, i, pp. 393–4. 105 Willis and Clark, op cit. note 77. 106 Wayment, op. cit. note 88, pp. 123–5. 107 Willis and Clark, ii, pp. 347–8. 108 Oswald, op. cit. note 15, p. 228. 109 Salzman, Building in England, p. 177. 101

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The Savoy accounts are particularly informative with regard to precisely what the various prices purchased, as this entry reveals: Paid ffor the Glasyng off the South Wyndowe . . . with the Cruciffyxe Mary and John the Kyngis Armes And the Orate cont’ in colored glasse xlvj ffote price le ffote xijd. .. £2 6s. 0d. Paid ffor the glasyng off the seid wyndowe with whyte glass cont’ clxviij ffote price le ffote ijd. . . £1 8s. 0d.110 So far only payment by piecework has been discussed. Some glazing contracts named a fixed price for the work, as in the contract of 1338–9 for the two windows at the west end of York Minster nave aisles, which each cost 11 marks (£7 6s 8d). In certain circumstances glass-painters were paid on a day-work basis and not by fixed price/piecework. This seems to have been the case with certain very large royal contracts, such as the glazing of St. Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster. As was mentioned above, a large team of glaziers was employed here and payment was by a daily wage. The extract from the accounts cited above (p. 186) reveals that master glaziers received 1s. per day, ‘working’ glaziers (for want of a better term) 6d. or 7d. and their assistants 4d. or 4½d. Similar rates applied at Windsor in c. 1351–2.112 As there were so many compulsory feast and saints’ days, it was arranged at St. Stephen’s that the men would be paid for every alternate holiday. At both St. Stephen’s and Windsor, although the glass was obtained by the glaziers direct from manufacturers at Chiddingfold (Surrey) and other centres, their wages did not include the purchase of the material. The most frequent occurrence of payments by wage as opposed to piecework is in connection with glazing repairs. This system was already in operation in 1240 at Chichester Cathedral, where John the glazier undertook to keep the windows in repair in return for a daily allowance of bread and an annual fee of 13s. 4d,113 At Eltham Palace in 1406 a team of four men were each paid 6d. a day for making a panel for a window in the King’s Chamber and for mending various defective windows.114 Included in this account Oswald, op. cit. note 15, pp. 228–9. French and O’Connor, op. cit. note 97, p. 85. 112 Salzman, op. cit. note 13; idem, op. cit. note 44, pp. 120, 188. 113 Idem, Building in England, p. 175. 114 Idem, op. cit. note 11, p. 27. 110 111

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is a payment of 4½d. for 3 lbs. of candles bought and used by the four glaziers for working at night. Evidently it was considered unreasonable that the workmen should have to meet such expenses out of their own pockets. There are occasional references to incidental expenses paid to glaziers, chiefly for travel, board and lodging when they were working away from home. In 1443–4, Richard and William, two assistants of John Prudde, King’s Glazier, were given 3s. 4d. by the Warden of Winchester College for their expenses.115 Winchester is one example of glaziers undertaking commissions at considerable distances from their workshops. The expense involved in transporting the finished glass from the latter to the places for which they were destined could be considerable. The cost of the careful packing required was an important element, as the accounts for the carriage of the Windsor windows from Westminster in 1352 demonstrate: For 18 boards to make cases for carrying glass panels from Westminster to Windsor, 3s. For 38 elm-boards for the same, at 4d. a piece, 13s 8d. For carriage of the same from London to Westminster, 5d. For hay and straw to put in the said cases for safe-keeping of the glass panels, 14d. For a ‘palet’ with 1 soldur [soldering-iron] bought for the glazing, 12d. For 300 nails for making the said cases, 12d. To John Wodewyk for freight of the said cases with the glass panels for the chapel windows from Westminster to Windsor, 4s.116 The cost of carriage was much higher for the windows made in 1393 by Thomas Glazier of Oxford for Winchester College Chapel. 19s. 3d. was paid for two waggons going from Esher (the residence of the patron, Bishop William of Wykeham) to pick up the glass at Oxford and take it via Highclere to Winchester (Fig. 21). The task took nine days and involved twelve horses and six waggoners.117 Whenever it was convenient, water transport was used. In 1332 John de Walworth took some windows from Candlewick Street (now Cannon Street) to Westminster via the River Thames.118

LeCouteur, op. cit. note 59, p. 120. Salzman, op. cit. note 44, p. 188. 117 C. Woodforde, The Stained Glass of New College, Oxford (Oxford, 1951), p. 5. 118 Salzman, op. cit. note 44, p. 119. 115

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From the foregoing it can be seen that there is a considerable body of contemporary information on the craft of glass-painting in the Middle Ages, largely because glazing is included in building accounts. As a result, far more is known concerning this branch of painting than about manuscript illumination. Furthermore, the large amount of medieval glass of high quality that survives in cathedrals and parish churches the length and breadth of the country reveals that the English glass-painter was well capable of matching the achievements of his continental counterparts.

Further Reading For a comprehensive bibliography on English medieval stained glass see M. Caviness and E. R. Staudinger, Stained Glass before 1540: an Annotated Bibliography (Boston, 1983), and D. Evans, A Bibliography of Stained Glass (Cambridge, 1982). The following works contain useful information: S. Crewe, Stained Glass in England c. 1180–1540 (London, 1987). E. Frodl-Kraft, Die Glasmalerei: Entwicklung, Technik, Eigenart (Vienna & Zurich, 1970). R. Marks, Stained Glass in England during the Middle Ages (London & Toronto, 1993). L. F. Salzman, Building in England down to 1540 (reprinted with additions Oxford, 1967). N. H. J. Westlake, A History of Design in Painted Glass (i–iv, London, [1879]–94). C. Winston, An Inquiry into the Difference of Style Observable in Ancient Glass Paintings (i-ii, 2nd edn. London, 1867). C. Winston, Memoirs Illustrative of the Art of Glass-Painting (London, 1865).

VIII Wills and Windows: Documentary Evidence for the Commissioning of Stained Glass Windows in Late Medieval England

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hurches which retain a complete set of medieval stained glass windows are rare. Usually, and especially in rural parish churches, just a few preReformation windows or parts of windows survive. To establish what has been lost, the student of medieval stained glass has to rely on the chance survival of documentation. In England, this usually consists of antiquarian notes, contracts with glass-painters, records of income and expenditure and wills. It is this last category which forms the subject of this paper. Wills are the most common surviving medieval written sources, which from the late fifteenth century began to be made by artisans, yeomen and husbandmen and their widows as well as by the upper echelons of society.1 The parishioners of late medieval England were framed by their own temporal parameters and mentalités as well as by our own perceptions. Peasants, even the will-making yeomen and husbandmen, did not articulate their own thoughts in their wills any more than in any other document. To borrow Andrew Brown’s nice turn of phrase, wills are ‘less windows on to the soul than mirrors of social convention’.2 By their nature wills are positive documents, in that they record an action either which is desired or

1 The quantity of late medieval testamentary material is exemplified by Suffolk, for which in excess of 23000 pre-1550 wills survive; see P. Northeast, ‘Suffolk Churches in the Later Middle Ages: The Evidence of Wills’, in C. Harper-Bill, C. Rawcliffe and R. Wilson (eds), East Anglia’s History: Studies in Honour of Norman Scarfe (Woodbridge, 2002), pp. 93–106 (p. 93]. 2 A. D. Brown, Popular Piety in Late Medieval England. The Diocese of Salisbury 1250– 1550 (Oxford, 1995), p. 21.

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has occurred. They are rhetorical in that they are official statements of record or intent; they are also constrained by custom and practice.3 Wills can tell the art historian much about the fittings and furnishings of late medieval parish churches. Nonetheless, they have their limitations. They give no indications of the scale of lifetime benefactions, so they cannot be relied on to provide a complete picture of the embellishments carried out to churches in the late middle ages. Where it is possible to compare wills with churchwardens’ accounts, a very different story can emerge.4 This is particularly applicable to stained glass, because references in wills are relatively uncommon. Many merely record the gift of a small sum of money towards the cost of a window. Some wills, however, are informative about the priorities of testators and the functions of stained glass imagery. The will made in 1395 by Thomas Grey, rector of Wethersfield in Essex, is a useful starting point. He made his will at Haddenham in Cambridgeshire and it was in front of the altar in the Lady Chapel of the parish church there that he desired to be buried.5 Grey also requested that the Lady Chapel should be paved at his expense with painted tiles and that a new and good window with as many lights and as wide and high as the wall would bear be built on the north side, ie in the north wall. It was to be glazed with the Tree of Jesse (historia de Jesse) - an appropriate subject for a chapel dedicated to the Virgin - and with an image of Thomas Grey kneeling in prayer above his shield of arms and holding a scroll or roll (rotulum) in his hands. Grey was a member of a knightly family which held land in Haddenham. His father was Sir Thomas Grey and he was educated at Cambridge University.6 In addition to his window, he endowed two priests to say masses in the chapel on the anniversary of his death.7 The window itself must have been constructed and glazed after probate was On wills, see especially Brown, Popular Piety, pp. 21–25; C. Burgess, ‘ “By Quick and by Dead”: wills and pious provision in late medieval Bristol’, English Historical Review, 305 (1987), pp. 837–858; idem, ‘Late Medieval Wills and Pious Convention: Testamentary Evidence Reconsidered’, in M. Hicks (ed.), Profit, Piety and the Professions in Later Medieval England (Gloucester, 1990), pp. 14–33; E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars. Traditional Religion in England c.1400–c.1580 (New Haven and London, 1992), pp. 355–357, 504–523. 4 A point made by Burgess, ‘ “By Quick and by Dead” ’, pp. 837–858. 5 Register of Bishop Braybrooke (London, Guildhall MS 9531/3, f. 447r and v). I am indebted to Dr Christopher Wilson for drawing this will to my attention. 6 For details of Thomas Grey’s career, see A. B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Cambridge to 1500 (Cambridge, 1963), p. 271. 7 London, Guildhall MS 9531/3, f. 447r and v. 3

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granted on Grey’s will in April 1396. Its glazing has not survived, but at least some of it was still intact in the early seventeenth century, when it was recorded by the antiquary John Layer of Shepreth (1586-1640).8 Layer was typical of antiquaries of his time in that he was only interested in heraldry and genealogy, so he ignored any of the Jesse Tree imagery which may have remained. His notes reveal that the window did not just commemorate Thomas Grey, but was a family memorial. In accordance with his will, the window was of five lights. In the first was a kneeling knight wearing a surcoat with the Grey arms and shield and a label bearing the name Alanus Grey. In the second light was another knight with a variant of the Grey arms and identified by a label as Fulk Grey. Rector Thomas Grey’s image was placed in the third light. He was depicted kneeling and vested as a Doctor of Canon Law with the label Magister Thomas Grey Doct. and a shield of his family arms below. The fourth light contained the figure of a Grey knight identified as Thomas Grey miles. In the final light was another Grey knight, whose first name had been lost by Layer’s day. All of these figures had disappeared by1743, when William Cole made his notes on the church, although two of the Grey shields were still there.9 Grey’s will demonstrates that donors might pay for the stonework as well as the glazing of windows. His window lit the north transept of Haddenham church, which is principally a thirteenth-century building. Hitherto, it has been thought that the transepts were reconstructed during the fifteenth century, but the will shows that this occurred at the end of the previous century and indeed seems to have formed part of a campaign which was under way in the 1380’s to re-fenestrate some of the more important windows in the church.10 Grey’s window was replaced during the restoration

8 W. M. Palmer, Monumental Inscriptions and Coats of Arms from Cambridgeshire (Cambridge, 1932), pp. 70, 227–228 (in 1765 Cole noted that one of the two shields he had seen in 1743 was either broken or removed; ibid., p. 268). 9 Palmer, Monumental Inscriptions, pp. 70, 268; London, British Library, MS Additional 5803, f. 91r (William Cole’s notes). 10 For the architecture and history of Haddenham church, see Victoria County History, A History of Cambridge and the Isle of Ely, IV (Oxford, 1953), pp. 146–147. In 1382 rector Henry de Snaith left 100 marks for the construction of a new five-light chancel east window, which shows that changes to the fabric of Haddenham church had already been underway some years before Thomas Grey’s will; see A. Gibbons, Ely Episcopal Records, (Lincoln, 1891), p. 194.

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of 1876, but an indication of its probable appearance is provided by Cole’s sketch of the church which shows the companion window in the south transept, which also had five lights and with tracery above.11 That at least the main lights of Grey’s window at Haddenham were to contain the Tree of Jesse would explain the large size of the window; the figures of Thomas Grey and his relatives probably were placed in the traditional donor position at the base of the window; above rector Thomas in the centre light would have been the recumbent figure of Jesse surmounted by David and Solomon and with the Virgin and Child at the apex. The flanking four lights would have contained the prophets and other Old Testament kings. For a Remembraunce Although Grey was a cleric, the stipulation that his representation should include his shield of arms demonstrates that his social status as a member of a seigneurial family was important to him (this is even more evident in the instruction for his tomb, which was to have his image wearing a heraldic tabard or surcoat rather than clerical robes). By Layer’s time the north transept was not described as the Lady Chapel, but as Greyes chappell. The former appellation was redundant after the Reformation, but the seventeenth-century label as well as the former glazing may also indicate that the chapel was already associated with the family in the later middle ages. The Greys were already established in Haddenham by the late fourteenth century and continued to hold land there until the middle of the sixteenth century. The figures accompanying rector Thomas Grey in his window included his brother Fulk (d.1384), who left Thomas a substantial legacy. The image of Sir Thomas Grey in the fourth light must have represented their father Sir Thomas; the other two Grey knights have not been identified.12 The window thus functioned not merely as rector Thomas’s own memorial, but as a commemoration of the Grey male line. That he had the same Christian name as his father suggests that he was the first-born son and thus would have inherited the title and property had he not been a priest. This may explain his concern that his social status should be portrayed in the window

William Cole’s drawing of the church is in British Library MS Add. 5803, f. 86v. Palmer, Monumental Inscriptions, p. 227; for Fulk Grey’s will see Gibbons, Ely Episcopal Records, pp. 198–199. 11 12

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as well as his clerical rank. Rector Thomas is the only one of the family figures in the window who is the donor. His will and the descriptions of the lost glass underline the danger of labelling all non-sacred figures who are present in glazing as donors. Grey’s concern that he should be immortalised by his image in his window is echoed in a number of wills. Richard Halley, vicar of Stowe in Buckinghamshire, in 1524 requested that he be depicted in the porch window of his parish church with the Holy Trinity and hawyng a chales in his hande with my name wryte under ye fote for a remembraunce.13 A remembraunce did not merely mean a record of achievement and status, but was designed to solicit prayers for the salvation of the testator’s soul, just as the bequest of a window ranked as a ‘good work’ and therefore alleviated the time spent in Purgatory by the donor’s soul. Sometimes testators dictated precisely the commemorative text to be used. In 1522 Sir Edmund Jenney wanted a window next to the nave south door in his parish church of Knodishall in Suffolk to contain images of SS George and Paul and this inscription: Orate pro anima Johannis Perse de Eston de cuius bonis Edmundus Jenney miles et Katerina uxor eius fecereunt istam fenestram et de eisdem bonis donaverunt vestimentum albi damasci ad istam ecclesiam quorum animabus propicietur deus. No doubt Sir Edmund set out the exact wording because the text did not conform to a standard formulation.14 Like Thomas Grey, John Aylewyn also wished to ensure that his kith and kin should be correctly commemorated in the new window in St John’s Chapel in Lydd parish church (Kent), for which purpose he bequeathed £10 in 1494: …in the middle of the same window shall be – Dom. Andrew Aylewyn; and on the right part of the same window the names of James Aylewyn with Christiane and Juliane his wives; and in the left part the names of Thomas

Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire Record Office, Archdeaconry of Buckingham Probate Records D/A/We 2 25. 14 Norwich, Norfolk Record Office, Norwich Consistory Court 108 Briggs; I owe this transcript to the kindness of Peter Northeast. 13

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Aylewyn and Agnes his wife; and in another part the names of John Aylewyn and Juliane his wife.15 Wills like that of John Aylewyn which make no mention of the sacred imagery to be placed in windows suggest that selfhood was a primary consideration. As at Haddenham, representations in image, heraldry and text permitted donors and their families to be identified with particular spaces in churches. Sir John Spencer made this explicit in his will of 1522, in which he bequeathed the large sum of £60 to his parish church at Great Brington (Northamptonshire), […] to the making of the chauncell roffe [roof] with the ledde, wall, and wyndowes, and my armes to be sett in the same wyndowes.16 When in 1498/9 William Mynot bequeathed the wherewithal for representations of his parents and his grandfather to be placed in the east window and himself and his two wives in the west window of the chapel at Ipswich (Suffolk) housing the cult image of Our Lady of Grace, he was associating his family with this famous late medieval pilgrimage site as well as securing (he hoped) enhanced spiritual benefits.17 The importance of genealogical veracity was emphasised by some testators. Sir John Pympe in 1496 stressed that a knowledge be sought how the alliaunce of Sellinges [St Leger], Cheyne and Pympe first came in by marriage, and the best knowledge to be found to be shewed in the sd [said] wyndowes [of Nettlestead church, Kent] by armes.18 Image/Story Thomas Grey, Richard Halley and Sir Edmund Jenney were not the only testators to specify the sacred imagery of their windows. In general Suffolk wills give more details about this than their counterparts in Cambridgeshire and Buckinghamshire. Unusually informative is the will of James Grotene, rector of Great Waldingfield; in 1406/7 he provided for the repair (probably C. R. Councer, Lost Glass from Kent Churches, Kent Archaeological Society (Kent Records), 22, 1980, p. 80. 16 R. Marks, The Medieval Stained Glass of Northamptonshire (Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi Great Britain Summary Catalogue 4) (Oxford, 1998), p. 83. 17 Norwich, Norfolk Record Office, Norwich Consistory Court 10 Sayve; I owe this reference to Peter Northeast. 18 W. E. Ball, ‘The Stained-Glass Windows of Nettlestead Church’, Archaeologia Cantiana, 28 (1909), pp. 157–249 (pp. 176–177). 15

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re-glazing) of three windows, one with the Tree of Jesse, the second with the Holy Trinity and the third with Our Lady. Another Suffolk testator, Robert Pynne, in 1458 tells us that a window of St John the Baptist existed next to the new window his executors were to make with the life of St Anthony in the north aisle of Blythburgh church.19 Like non-standard inscriptions, unusual imagery demanded precise description. In 1500 Henry Williams, vicar of Stanford on Avon in Northamptonshire, set out a very detailed specification for his commemorative stained glass: I wyll that the glasse windowes in the chancell wth ymagery that was thereyn before allso wth my ymage knelying in ytt and the ymage of deth shotyng at me, another wyndowe before Saynt John with ymagery in ytt now wth my Image knelyng in ytt and deth shoting at me theys [this] to be done in smalle quarells of as gude glasse as can be goten. Henry Williams wished to be buried in the churchyard of Stanford, so his glass panels acted as a surrogate sepulchral monument. One of these compositions with his ymage knelying in ytt and the ymage of deth shotyng at me survives in window nII (Fig.1). The ‘ymagery that was thereyn before’ refers to the rich fourteenth-century chancel glazing, much of which also still exists.20 Wills like that of Henry Williams which specify the subject-matter are very much the exception, which raises the question as to how the imagery was chosen when it is not identified by testators. The process adopted in 1464 at Folkestone (Kent) is hinted at in John Baker’s will. He left the proceeds of the sale of his lands and property so that his executors make a new work called an Isle [aisle], with a window in it, with the advice of the parishioners.21 The inclusion of phrases in wills to the effect that the imagery of church furnishings like roodscreens was to be agreed with the ‘worshipful’ or ‘the most honest’ of the parish underlines the fact that donors might not be 19 London, The National Archives, Prerogative Court of Canterbury 13 Marche; Ipswich, Suffolk County Record Office, Archdeaconry of Suffolk Wills, vol. II, f. 14. I owe these references to Peter Northeast. 20 R. Marks, ‘Henry Williams and his Ymage of Deth roundel at Stanford on Avon, Northamptonshire’, The Antiquaries Journal, 54 (1974), pp. 272–274; idem, Northamptonshire, pp. 183, 203. 21 N. H. Nicolas (ed.), Testamenta Vetusta (London, 1826), p. 306.

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entirely free agents in such matters and negotiation was the norm. For Thomas Grey, his stipulation of the Tree of Jesse theme perhaps indicates prior consultation with the Haddenham parish authorities over the appropriate imagery for their Lady Chapel. In such cases, the ‘worshipful’ or ‘most honest’ would have included the parish priest and churchwardens.22 The wording of inscriptions shows that the intended function of glazing was not merely passively commemorative or decorative, but might demand a response from viewers, in the same way as tomb monuments and brasses with their Orate inscriptions. What roles did the sacred imagery itself play? In the first place, the specification of individual saints sometimes would have indicated the personal devotional allegiances of testators and hence underpinned their selfhood. We do not know what motivated Sir Edmund Jenney to include an image of St George in his Knodishall window, but England’s patron saint was especially associated with the military caste in the later middle ages. On the whole it does not seem that images in stained glass acted as foci for individual devotion to anything like the same extent as carved figures of saints or even some wall-paintings. There were exceptions, however. In 1511 a testator left 4d. for a taper to burn before the image of St Christopher in a glass window in Lyminge church (Kent) and a will of 1461 endowed the light of St Mary Magdalene in a window of Westwell church in the same county; other instances are known. The presence of a light signifies that the image in question attracted individual and/or collective devotion. 23 When in 1528 Thomas Rygge expressed the wish to be buried ageynes [against] the wyndowe of seynt Gregorye pyte of Combs church in Suffolk, he was not only placing his mortal remains in a location where they had more than the usual potential to attract prayers for his soul, but also offer enhanced spiritual benefits to those saying these prayers.24 Seynt Gregorye pyte was the representation of the vision of Christ as the Man of Sorrows 22 For consultations over roodscreens and other furnishings, see E. Duffy, ‘The parish, piety and patronage in late medieval East Anglia: the evidence of rood screens’, in K. L. French, G. G. Gibbs and B. A. Kumin (eds), The Parish in English Life 1400–1600 (Manchester, 1997), pp. 133–162 (pp. 141–142). 23 L. L. Duncan and A. Hussey, Testamenta Cantiana: A Series of Extracts from Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century Wills relating to Church Building and Topography, Kent Archaeological Society (Kent Records), 1907, (East Kent), pp. 203, 356. 24 Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk County Record Office, Archdeaconry of Sudbury Wills, Brydon 276 (Peter Northeast transcript).

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allegedly vouchsafed to St Gregory the Great during Mass. This was a popular late medieval pictorial theme because it offered those who viewed and prayed before it many thousands of years of indulgence.25 Another ‘indulgence’ window formerly existed at Fishlake in South Yorkshire. Here the image in the glazing which earned remission of sins was more likely to have been Marian, judging from the wording of the accompanying text: Hac non vade via, nisi dixeris Ave Maria. Semper sit sine ve [sic], qui mihi dicat Ave. Adde Jhesu fine quotiens tu dixeris Ave. Bis triginta dies veniae fiet tibi merces. Pretereundo cave, ne silieatur [sic] Ave. (‘Do not come this way unless you say Ave Maria. May he who says Ave to me, always be without woe. Add Jesu at the end as often as you say Ave. Up to thirty days’ pardon may be your reward. In passing, beware lest your Ave be silent’).26 The thirty days’ remission offered by the Fishlake window is far less generous than the normal rate as exemplified by the memorial brass with the Mass of St Gregory at Macclesfield in Cheshire, which in return for the recitation of five Pater nosters, five Aves and one Creed offered 26000 years and 26 days. Thomas Rygge of Combs’s request for burial near to a window with specified imagery is echoed in other wills. William Rigdon (1518) wished to be buried within Littlebourne church (Kent) in front of the window of St Dunstan, to the making of which and the purchase of a missal he left 40 shillings. Eleven years later, his co-parishioner Thomas Durrant’s body was to be laid in the churchyard next to the Trinity window; he also requested

25 For the Mass of St Gregory and the Man of Sorrows, see H. van Os, The Art of Devotion in the Late Middle Ages in Europe 1300–1500 (Amsterdam and London, 1994), pp. 106–113. 26 B. Sprakes, The Medieval Stained Glass of South Yorkshire (Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi Great Britain Summary Catalogue 7) (Oxford, 2003), p. 42, n.6; for indulgences associated with the image of Our Lady of Pity, see R. Marks, Image and Devotion in Late Medieval England ( Stroud, 2004), p. 139.

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that two wax tapers were to burn in perpetuity in that window.27 In the former case, there was a direct association between Rigdon as benefactor and the ‘good work’ he caused to be made; also his mortal remains lay under what may be presumed to be the representation of his personal saintly protector and advocate. The placing of lights in the window next to Durrant’s grave meant that the glazing became part of the structure of his memorialization, as in a different way occurred at Monckton, also in Kent, where John Crypps (1558) requested his executors to place my arms in the next window to where I may lie.28 Sometimes the window itself and its imagery were incorporated visually with the sepulchral monument. Although the glazing is lost, the external enrichment of the wall below and the buttresses flanking the north chancel window at Yelvertoft in Northamptonshire shows that it was to be read as a whole with the elaborate internal tomb of a rector (probably John Dyeson, 1445-79) (Fig. 2).29 Process When William Rigdon made his bequest for a window of St Dunstan in Littlebourne church no doubt he hoped that it would have been actioned soon after his death. Seven years later, however, nothing had been done, for in 1525 his son Thomas left 6s. 8d. (a much smaller sum than William had) To the making of the window that my father willed to be made in the Church.30 That executors and heirs might be dilatory in fulfilling the terms of their wills was a common concern of testators. In 1527 John Roper included a clause to try and ensure that no undue delay occurred. His executors were to make in the church of St John the Baptist’s Hospital, Canterbury, as large a window at Our Lady Altar…as now is at the high altar of the same Hospital, to be glazed with such images or pictures as I shall shew unto my ex’ors, [executors] and that to be done within two years after my decease’. Duncan and Hussey, Testamenta Cantiana (East Kent), p. 197. Nicolas, Testamenta Vetusta , p. 750. An early example of this is provided by the accounts for the lost tomb of Bishop Walter de Merton (d.1277) in Rochester Cathedral, Kent, which included payment for the glazing of the adjacent windows; see J. Blair, ‘The Limoges Enamel Tomb of Bishop Walter de Merton’, Church Monuments, 10 (1995), pp. 3–6. 29 Marks, Northamptonshire, p. xlix. 30 Duncan and Hussey, Testamenta Cantiana (East Kent), p. 198. 27 28

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1. Stanford on Avon (Northamptonshire), window nII: rector Henry Williams and his ‘image of deth’ roundel (photo: K. Barley).

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2a and 2b. Yelvertoft (Northamptonshire): exterior of window and interior showing the tomb of a rector below this window (photos (a) Alex Buchanan, (b) R. Marks).

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3. Drawings and instructions for a monumental representation of Thomas Froxmere and his wife (London, British Library, MS Lansdowne 874, f. 191; photo: British Library Board).

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Roper’s wishes were granted in this case, because an antiquarian source records an inscription in this window with the date 1529, but the fortuitous survival of the two Rigdon wills serves as a warning against dating windows too closely by such documents.31 The wishes of testators were not always fulfilled. Sir John Pympe’s concern that his family history should be set out accurately in heraldic glass in Nettlestead church (Kent) has already been mentioned. He also directed that the already existing blank shields of arms in the tracery of the window of St Thomas Becket at the west end of the nave north aisle in the church were be replaced by the heraldic devices of himself and his wife and various named relatives. These shields are still there today, but as they remain blank it is evident that Pympe’s will was never actioned.32 Apart from the dilatoriness of testators, the time taken to fill a window with glazed imagery might be affected by the number of individuals who contributed to the cost. The collective nature of some glazing patronage is evident in the bequests of relatively small sums of money by testators, such as the 3s. 4d. bequeathed in 1515 by John Langton the elder toward a window of St George in Knodishall church, Suffolk; the word ‘toward’ underlines the fact others had to contribute to the cost of this window before it could be made. This is made explicit by Bennet Colyar, a widow of Cranbrook in Kent, who in 1526 left 3s. 4d. for the glazing of a clerestory window in her parish church, and if the widows of the parish take upon them to make a hole [complete] window, then my said portion to be with them.33 Bennet Colyar’s will also highlights the involvement of women in stained glass patronage, an activity which has led few traces in either documentation or surviving glazing, particularly of women like Bennet, who were not of elite status. Wills of women of high social standing sometimes reveal that they, rather than their spouses, were responsible for stained glass commissions. In her will of 1483, Dame Margaret Choke instructed: I will that my executors lete make a window in Aisheton Chirch of iij dayes [lights] and glace yt as the thodir wyndowes beth wt my husbandis armys 31

Duncan and Hussey, Testamenta Cantiana (East Kent), p. 68; Councer, Lost Glass, p.

22. Ball, ‘Nettlestead Church’, pp. 174–175. Ipswich, Suffolk County Record Office, Archdeaconry of Suffolk Wills, vol. VII, folio 89 (I owe this reference to Peter Northeast); Duncan and Hussey, Testamenta Cantiana (East Kent), pp. 90–91. 32 33

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and myn undirneth the ymages. And saynt Sonday be the tōn of the ymagis and saynt Gregory is the tother.34 The piecemeal and therefore protracted process of glazing English late medieval parish churches indicated by a number of wills might explain an interesting testament from Barnburgh in South Yorkshire. This sheds light on what might happen in the interval between the construction of windows and their filling with figural coloured glass. Humphrey Gascoigne, the rector, in 1540 instructed his executors to take down the white glass on the south side next to his stall and set up a picture like to his image, and set on his right side his father’s arms, and on his left his mother’s.35 How common it was to fill windows with plain uncoloured glass in the hope that eventually it would be replaced is unknown. The presence of clear quarries evidently of medieval date in parish churches suggests, however, that the practice was widespread. It offered the advantage of making the building weathertight and without the loss of clarity caused by the use of temporary canvas filling or wooden boarding. A few wills shed light as to how the testator’s wishes were conveyed to the craftsman charged with executing the commission. Henry Williams’ description of the imagery he wanted at Stanford on Avon would have been precise enough for a glass-painter to make a design. John Roper, on the other hand, was going to provide a drawing of what he wanted. If this was a finished vidimus, it would have been done for him by a draughtsman; alternatively it may have been a crude sketch like that which survives of Thomas Froxmere and his wife; significantly the most detailed feature is the heraldry worn by the two figures (Fig. 3).36 The relatively rare mention of glazing in medieval wills begs the question of how the vast majority of windows in parish church were funded. Some may have been paid for by unspecific bequests like that of Katherine Fen, F. W. Weaver (ed.), Somerset Medieval Wills (1383–1500), Somerset Record Society, 16, 1901, p. 245; C. Woodforde, Stained Glass in Somerset 1250–1830 (Oxford, 1946), p. 193. Dame Margaret and her husband are commemorated by a lavish tomb in the north chancel chapel of Long Ashton church (Somerset). 35 Sprakes, South Yorkshire, pp. 12–13. 36 R. Marks, Stained Glass in England during the Middle Ages (London, 1993), pp. 24–25; J. A. Goodall, ‘Two medieval drawings’, The Antiquaries Journal, 58 (1978), pp. 160–162. 34

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who in 1457 left 3s. 4d. to the fabric of her parish church of Glemsford in Suffolk where greatest need is.37 Most, however, must have been financed from general parish funds (although there are not many references in churchwardens’ accounts to such activities), or lifetime gifts. A glimpse of the latter is provided by the late fifteenth-century record of benefactors to the parish church of All Saints in Bristol, which include references to windows of the Works of Mercy and Seven Sacraments and Te Deum given by named clergy associated with the parish.38 Dependency on the willingness of clerics and laity to contribute to the embellishment of their parish church explains the spasmodic and protracted nature of glazing and the difficulty of devising coherent iconographical schemes. In this, Fairford in Gloucestershire and St Neot, Cornwall are exceptional. In the former case, this may be accounted for by having a single patron (the Thame family); St Neot evidently benefited from a fund-raising campaign to which many (if not all) elements in the community contributed in a relatively short space of time.39 Rare indeed are the instances where a will can be linked with surviving glazing. Of the contents of the windows of the great chapel commissioned by Henry VII as his mausoleum at the east end of Westminster Abbey, a few remnants of the armes, bagies and cognoisaunts mentioned in his will survived the Reformation and are only known today from photographs.40 In parish churches, the extraordinary composition specified by Henry Williams at Stanford on Avon is the most complete instance which has been noted to date. It is to be hoped that more cases where wills can be matched to surviving glass come to the notice of historians of stained glass. The wills of Henry Williams, Thomas Grey and others discussed in this paper indicate the extent to which seemingly unproblematic images in glass can conceal complexities of patronage and shed light on the multiple functions and meanings associated with glazing. 37 P. Northeast (ed.), Wills of the Archdeaconry of Sudbury 1439–1474. Wills from the Register ‘Baldwyne’ Part I: 1439–1461, Suffolk Records Society, 44, 2001, p. 370. 38 C. Burgess (ed.), The Pre-Reformation Records of All Saints’ Bristol: Part I, Bristol Record Society, 46, 1995, pp. 8, 9. 39 S. Brown and L. MacDonald (eds), Life, Death and Art. The Medieval Stained Glass of Fairford Parish Church (Stroud, 1997); J. Mattingly, ‘Stories in the Glass – Reconstructing the St Neot Pre-Reformation Glazing Scheme’, Journal of the Royal Institute of Cornwall, new series, II, vol. 3 Parts 3 & 4 (2000), pp. 9–55. 40 R. Marks, ‘The glazing of Henry VII’s Chapel, Westminster Abbey’, in B. Thompson (ed.), The Reign of Henry VII (Harlaxton Medieval Studies V) (Stamford, 1995), pp. 157– 174.

IX Sir William Horne and His ‘Scowred’ Window at Snailwell, Cambridgeshire

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he small Cambridgeshire village of Snailwell is a beacon of calm and preservation amid the tumult of the main Newmarket–Norwich road and the spread of Newmarket itself; ironically, it is the principal business and identity of this town which has protected the rural community — quite literally by its enclosure within the white posts and rails of horse-racing establishments. The modest flint and pebble parish church of St Peter (Fig. 1) consists of a Norman round west tower and thirteenth-century nave south aisle; the nave arcades and north aisle were reconstrcted together with the chancel in the fourteenth century. Further alterations and additions took place during the fifteenth or early sixteenth centuries, when the nave clerestory was added, together with a new and handsome timber roof. Parclose screens were also erected around the east ends of both aisles, of which the north one still exists and its southern counterpart is shown on a lithograph published in 1848 of the interior of the church.1 A bequest of barley in 1462 ‘to the reparation of the nave’ is likely to have been connected with these alterations, although whether it pre-dated their commencement is unknown.2 As is so often the case in English village churches, all that remains of its medieval glazing are a few fragments, collected in the two south porch windows. These mainly comprise architectural fragments from canopies dating variously from the second half of the fourteenth and the fifteenth The lithograph hangs in the church. N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England Cambridgeshire (Harmondsworth, 2nd ed. 1970), pp. 456-7; for the history of the church, see A. F. Wareham and A. M. Wright (eds), A History of the County of Cambridge and the Isle of Ely vol. X. North-Eastern Cambridgeshire (Victoria County History, Oxford, 2002), pp. 485–488. 1 2

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centuries as well as a piece of a black-letter inscription. These tiny survivals at least suggest that by the end of the Middle Ages, Snailwell church possessed some figurative windows. Evidently nothing of sufficient genealogical or heraldic interest survived into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to attract the attention of local antiquaries like John Layer and William Cole.3 However, there is compensation for this dearth in the survival of a late medieval will which is remarkably informative both about the commissioning of one window here and the concerns of its patron. On 27 November 1494, Sir William Horne made his last will and testament in the vernacular. The section relevant to Snailwell (transcribed into modern English spelling and punctuation) reads as follows: ‘My executors, with £20 of my goods & more if more need & require, to do make in & for the parish church of Sneylwell in Cambridge[shire] the works following: that is to say that they do new paint well & conveniently the image of Our Lady in the S. chapel of Snelwell aforesaid & do make for her a convenient tabernacle there to be set & painted. Also that they do make & set on the south side of the same chapel a like tabernacle with an image of Saint Clement therein, both to be conveniently painted. Also that they make & cause all the glass now in the east window of the said south window [sic – chapel] to be taken down & to be scoured [‘scowred’] & of new to be set up there & whereas glass lacketh, it to be fulfilled with new glass. And in the one side of the same window to be made the images of my father & mother & his 24 children, & in the other side of the same window the image of me, my wife and our 12 children, with scripture remembering the same and with rolls of prayers running [‘rennyng’] up unto an image of the Coronation of Our Lady in the same window. And the arms of me & my wife to be set in the same window in places there most convenient. Also to ordain for the altar there in the same chapel convenient altarcloths stained’.4

3 Layer evidently did not visit Snailwell and Cole made no mention of glass in his account of the church (for which admittedly he relied on the rector’s descriptions): W. M. Palmer (ed.), Monumental Inscriptions and Coats of Arms from Cambridgeshire (Cambridge, 1932), pp. 150–151. 4 London, The National Archives, Prerogative Court of Canterbury Probate Records, PCC1 Horne.

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For the historian of stained glass Sir William Horne’s will is of considerable interest. The reference to ‘scowring’ , meaning to polish or scour, is unique as far as this writer is aware.5 In preserving the existing glazing of the east window of the nave south aisle Sir William was not motivated by conservation concerns; instead, he showed the instincts of a prudent and cost-conscious individual by re-using an expensive commodity through erasing the old painting by means of rubbing with a substance like sand.6 Whether the original glass was coloured and figurative is uncertain, although perhaps it is more likely to have consisted of white glass. Almost as rare in English wills is the specification of the desired subject-matter to be placed in the new window, re-using both the old glass and new where necessary.7 The glazing was principally to be devoted to commemorative familial imagery, with the designated religious element confined to a representation of the Coronation of the Virgin. The window itself was rebuilt along with the entire south aisle during the 1878–9 restoration of the church, but its late medieval Perpendicular design can be partly discerned in the 1848 lithograph. It comprised three main lights with cinquefoil cusped heads, separated from the tracery lights by small cusped oculi over the outer lights and quatrefoils above the central light; the only visible details of the tracery are the two openings over the latter. At the time the lithograph was made, the window was filled with clear diamond quarries. Some idea of its design can be obtained from a church window, albeit lacking the small oculi, less than 30 miles away at Sudbury (Suffolk); like Snailwell, this is the work of East Anglian masons (Fig. 2). The Perpendicular form suggests that that the window was reconstructed as part of the renovation of the nave, which, as we have seen, may have been in progress in the 1460’s. Horne indeed may have been familiar with the design, for the Coronation of the Virgin is a subject which would fit neatly into the two central tracery 5 R. E. Lewis (editor in chief), Middle English Dictionary vol. S–SL (Ann Arbor, USA), p. 233. 6 The word ‘scowred’, has been transcribed as ‘stored’; whilst this is plausible, it is an unusual Middle English rendering of the word and the letter ‘c’ is unmistakeable (C. Richmond, The Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century. Endings (Manchester, 2000), p. 80, n.94). 7 For other examples of the specification of glazing imagery by testators see R. Marks, ‘Wills and Windows: Documentary Evidence for the Commissioning of Stained Glass Windows in Late Medieval England’, in H. Scholz, I. Rauch and D. Hess (eds), Glas. Malerei. Forschung. Internationale Studien zu Ehren von Rüdiger Becksmann (Berlin, 2004), pp. 245–252.

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lights and he envisaged their location in the upper part of the window. The representations of his parents and his brothers and sisters and of himself and his wife and their dozen children (elsewhere in his will they are described as five sons and seven daughters) were to occupy respectively the left and right main lights. Where the shields of arms of Horne and his wife were to be placed was left to the glass-painter to work out. Indeed, the entire design as well as the ‘scowring’ differs from existing examples of late medieval glazing schemes, in which religious imagery forms the principal element in the main lights and the donors are placed at the base. At Snailwell, the required familial imagery, heraldry, scrolls and inscriptions were intended to occupy the main lights, an unusual arrangement in late medieval England, but not intrinsically problematic for the Church authorities. The generous sum of £20 or more which Horne left to Snailwell included several bequests which memorialised him and his family in this church. As the extract from the will shows, this money was to be applied to the devotional images in the south chapel. Judging by the fourteenthcentury niches flanking the chancel east window (which would have been occupied by the patronal image of St Peter and that of the Virgin) and the pair of corbels in the nave north aisle east wall and another in the north wall, Snailwell was already quite well-equipped with images by 1494.8 Now the existing image of Our Lady which presumably stood on the north side of Horne’s window at the east end of the south aisle was to be painted and a new tabernacle made and painted for it. A new companion image of St Clement within a tabernacle was to be commissioned for the south side of the window. Nor was this all. Over and above the designated expenditure of £20, the sum of five marks was assigned to the purchase of a copper-gilt cross-staff and a green altarcloth embellished with beaten gold, on which St Clement featured again together with St Andrew. In addition to the stained altarcloths for the altar below the window in this south chapel, Horne bequeathed to Snailwell his cope and another unspecified vestment of white damask embroidered with golden flowers, presumably from the private chapel in one of his residences. The purpose of these material endowments is spelt out:

8 For patronal and Marian images in chancels, see R. Marks, Image and Devotion in Late Medieval England (Stroud, 2004), chapter 4.

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‘…praying that the souls of my father which lieth buried in Sneylwell church & of my mother & of their children, the souls also of me, my wife & our children, for my bequests aforesaid thereto made, the more specially by the parishioners there be recommended in their prayers to almighty God’.9 Who was Sir William Horne and what was his connection with Snailwell? He was prominent in the commercial and corporate life of the City of London. Resident in London by 1467 (and probably earlier), he was a member of the Staple of Calais from at least 1472 and of the Salters’ Company from 1476–7. In 1478–9 Horne was one of the largest exporters of wool and, like other Staplers, traded in various commodities. Between 1480 and his death Sir William served as an alderman and was Lord Mayor of London in 1486. A year later he received his knighthood from Henry VII. He died on 16 April 1496.10 That Sir William came from a Snailwell family is confirmed by a reference to his father’s grave in the parish church and explains his bequest to the maintenance of the highway between Cambridge and London. His father was named Thomas and his grandfather (also named William) possessed lands in several Cambridgeshire parishes. The Thomas Horn of Snailwell who made his will in 1440 must have pre-dated Sir William’s father, but his occurrence shows that the family was resident in the parish by the early fifteenth century. This Thomas had male and female issue, but it has not been possible to establish their precise kinship to Sir William and his father.11 London, The National Archives, Prerogative Court of Canterbury Probate Records, PCC1 Horne. 10 Details of Horne’s career are taken variously from A. B. Beaven, The Aldermen of the City of London, vol. 1 (London, 1908), pp. 154, 175, 233; ibid., vol. 2 (London, 1913), pp. 16, 166; S. L. Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London (Chicago, 1948), p. 350; A. Hanham, The Celys and their World. An English merchant family of the fifteenth century (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 242, 245, 246. The day and month of his decease are mentioned in the will of his fellow-Salter Sir Richard Chawry; see H. Barty-King, The Salters’ Company 1394–1994 (London, 1994), pp. 19–20. 11 P. Northeast (ed.), Wills of the Archdeaconry of Sudbury 1439–1474. Wills from the Register ‘Baldwyne’ Part 1: 1439–1461, Suffolk Record Society, XLIV, 2001, p. 69, no.183. These family links give the lie to John Stow’s assertion that Sir William’s real name was Littlesbery which was changed to Horne by Edward IV because of his prowess as a hornblower: C. L. Kingsford, A Survey of London by John Stow reprinted from the text of 1603 (Oxford, 1908), 1, p. 246. 9

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1. Snailwell church (Cambridgeshire) from the south-east (photograph: Richard Marks).

2. Sudbury (Suffolk): church window (photograph: Eleanor Townsend).

222 3. York, All Saints’ North Street church: Visiting Prisoners from a Corporal Works of Mercy window (photograph: National Monuments Record).

4. Barnwell All Saints’ church (Northamptonshire): St Clement (photograph: National Monuments Record).

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Sir William Horne was a wealthy man and at the time he made his will he possessed very extensive assets. The will is not explicit about these, merely stipulating that an inventory of all his goods, chattels, jewels and debts (presumably owed to him) be made by his executors after his decease, but they are evident in the scale of his bequests.12 Sir William’s legacies to Snailwell were far from being his only pious endowments; to understand the functions of the imagery in his window and his other gifts here it is necessary to locate them within his commemorative strategies as a whole. His pious legacies were extensive and accounted for half of his estate. His widow Joan (née Somes) was to receive the other moiety and after her death this too was to be disposed of by his executors on works of charity and the provision of masses for his and his family’s souls, so he must have been predeceased by all of his dozen children (none is named in the will).13 Sir William’s non-Snailwell bequests reflected his City of London connections and mercantile interests. As is evident in his directions for his window, the precision of his specifications and allowance for all eventualities reflect the habits of a successful man of commerce with an eye for detail. Typically, he states that the use of income from some of his property was to be safeguarded by his executors ‘with such & as many clauses therein to be had as they shall seem most best & necessary for the surety & performing of my intent aforesaid’.14 His and his wife’s bodies were to be buried in the City of London church of St Thomas the Apostle in Knightrider Street in a ‘comely’ marble tombchest with his arms, those of his wife and of the Staple of Calais and of the Salters’ Company carved on the sides; these four shields were to be repeated in brass on the tomb-slab, together with the images of Sir William, Joan and their children and ‘scripture’, that is, inscriptions. Horne was a parishioner of St Thomas’s church and the tomb was to be placed in front of the image of

In addition to the named properties, he may have owned a house at Cuxton on the river Medway near Rochester, known today as Whorne’s Place (Richmond, Paston Family…. Endings, p. 80, n.94), although other late medieval Hornes had Kent connections. 13 His eldest son John is mentioned in 1467 and Thomas, another son, is recorded in the same year and in 1472 and possibly in 1485–6. 14 London, The National Archives, Prerogative Court of Canterbury Probate Records, PCC1 Horne. 12

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the Holy Trinity ‘where my sitting-place is’.15 He left the sum of £20 or more to St Thomas’s church for a replacement set of four new bells. Such bequests of material objects, like those to Snailwell, ranked as Good Works and helped alleviate the time spent in Purgatory. Horne, as a man of commerce, was aware that charity could be applied to the benefit of trade; in addition to his afore-mentioned bequest to the highway between Cambridge and London, he also left sums for other (unspecified) London roads and to the repair of London Bridge. Good Works (a term which Horne uses in his will) might also include charitable endowments, of which Horne made several relating to his position as a leading citizen of London and a prominent figure in the Salters’ Company. Bequests were made to the poor in twenty-five wards and the twenty-eight most needy householders in five named parishes who were to carry the torches and wax tapers at his funeral and ‘month’s mind’ (commemorative mass) and pray for his soul were each to receive a black gown. One of these parishes was Horne’s own of St Thomas the Apostle, the seven poorest men of which were also to receive 3s. 4d. at the discretion of the warden of the Salters’ Company. Further bequests to the poor and dowries for poor maidens of good reputation were to be made after his widow Joan’s death — also to the redemption of poor prisoners. Relief for prisoners is quite common in wills of late medieval urban elites and Horne stipulated that at Easter and on the feast of St Erasmus, those incarcerated in the prisons of Newgate, Ludgate, the Marshalsea and the King’s Bench (the last in Southwark) were to receive food to the value of £4 in total. With chararacteristic precision he directed that the moneys were to be disbursed evenly, ie 10 shillings per prison on each of the feasts. Charitable bequests to the poor and to prisoners were included in the Works of Mercy (or ‘deeds of charity’, to use Horne’s own words), which were represented monumentally in late medieval parish church glazing and wall-painting as exemplars of moral conduct and duty (Fig. 3).16

15 Burial before images and/or on the site of their seats was a privilege accorded to elite parishioners (Marks, Image and Devotion, pp. 173–4). Only one brass to a Salter still exists, that of Andrew Evyngar (d.1533) and his wife Ellen in All Hallows-by-the-Tower church, London. For the church of St Thomas the Apostle (destroyed in the Great Fire), see B. Weinreb and C. Hibbert (eds), The London Encyclopedia (London, 1983), pp. 76–77. 16 R. Marks, Stained Glass in England during the Middle Ages (London, 1993), pp. 79–80.

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The Salters’ Company features prominently in Horne’s will. The four liverymen acting as pallbearers at his funeral were each to receive 1s. 8d. and the wardens and seven Company almsmen were to share 4s. 8d. between them for attending his annual obit on 16 April in St Thomas’s church and praying for his soul. In order to maintain this obit, the cost of which also included wax for lights, bread and ale and payments to the clergy and to the parish clerk, the inn called the George on the Hoop on Bread Street was to be given to the Salters’ Company. Horne also stipulated that ownership of the tenement known as the Red Lion which stood in the same street along with associated properties was to pass to the Company after the death of Elizabeth, widow of George Nevill, Lord Abergavenny and of a fellowSalter, Sir Robert Bassett. The George on the Hoop, which stood to the south of Salters’ Hall, was a substantial property with thirty-two pairs of bedboards, stables and a cellar. Horne had purchased it in 1477 in partnership with Sir Richard Chawry, another Salter; subsequently the pair acquired a block of storehouses and drapery shops, including the Red Lion, which stood behind the George.17 Following the death of Horne’s wife Joan, the rental income from some of these properties was to be divided between the afore-mentioned poor prisoners and the preacher at the popular location of St Paul’s Cross, the latter for including prayers for Horne’s soul during his sermon every Sunday; also to the priest who preached for three days during Easter week in the church of St Mary Spitall for doing the same. Sir William Horne’s voice as heard through his will is that of a conventionally pious individual. The scale of his benefactions is generous, although the absence of surviving issue is likely to have increased them. The stipulation that to qualify for financial assistance, the maidens had to be of unsullied reputation reveals Horne’s adherence to the concept of the morally worthy. That at least some of his devotional interests were related to his livelihood is suggested by the disbursement of food to prisoners on St Erasmus’s day (2 June). Although one of the attractions of this saint’s cult, which underwent a revival in late medieval England, was that those who performed an act of charity in his name were promised a comprehensive range of corporeal and spiritual boons, his attribute of a windlass (with Barty-King, Salters’ Company, pp. 19–20. For the Salters’ Hall and the George on the Hoop (also the location of St Thomas the Apostle’s church), see J. Schofield, Medieval London Houses (New Haven and London, 1994), p. 166, Map 1. 17

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which he was disembowelled) gave him special significance for mariners and those who depended on the sea. He was also particularly favoured by those engaged in spinning and weaving and thus on both counts may well have appealed as a special helper to Horne as a member of the Staple. Likewise St Clement, to be represented at Snailwell by new images in carving and fabric, was considered to offer protective powers over sailors and voyagers and hence was of relevance to Horne’s trading interests (Fig. 4).18 Horne’s overriding concern was to make provision for the well-being of his soul and secondarily those of his kith and kin. Repeatedly, the purpose of his material commissions, endowments and payments is stated to be the saying of commemorative prayers and masses. The ‘scripture’ in his Snailwell window and on the tomb in St Thomas the Apostle’s church was intended to invite prayers: ‘for these bequests…I trust and heartily pray that my soul may be more tenderly remembered among the parishioners there in their prayers unto almighty God’.19 In the inclusion of personal prayers with the sermons of the two preachers, Horne linked a collective, public act with private commemoration. The overlapping of the public and private spheres is equally apparent in his enrichment of Snailwell church. By providing new images in glass, sculpture and fabric, Horne was both contributing to the common good and expressing veneration for favoured saints in the hope of securing their intercession. This would have been most evident in his window, in which representations of Horne and his family were to be linked visually with the image of the Coronation of the Virgin by prayer scrolls. Horne’s window and its flanking images and altarcloth would not have been a privatization of space in Snailwell church; apart from his widow, his family were all dead, so the east end of the south aisle was not their own chapel, but could function in collective worship and provide foci for individual devotion by the parishioners. Horne’s bequests to Snailwell instead would have represented what Eamon Duffy has characterised as a personalisation of parish church space in late medieval England.20 In this process, the social

18 For St Erasmus’s popularity in late medieval England, see Marks, Image and Devotion, pp. 117–113. 19 London, The National Archives, Prerogative Court of Canterbury Probate Records, PCC1 Horne. 20 E. Duffy, ‘Late Medieval Religion’, in R. Marks and P. Williamson (eds), Gothic. Art for England 1400–1547 (exhib. cat., London, Victoria and Albert Museum 2003), p. 60.

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status of the donor was made manifest. The observation that in fifteenthcentury Florence it was not possible to ‘worship God without worshipping man’ is equally applicable to fifteenth-century England.21 In his Snailwell window, the figures of Sir William and his wife were to be accompanied by their shields of arms and no doubt they would have been portrayed in clothing appropriate to their ‘degre’. The presence of their images meant that, when the viewer prayed to the Virgin (as represented in the window or within the adjacent tabernacle), he or she was also invited to include Sir William and Lady Horne in their supplications. In making such careful provision for the well-being of his soul, Sir William revealed not only his preoccupation with selfhood and status, but also with familial identity and locus. Although his parents were included in the chantry prayers to be said in St Thomas the Apostle’s church, in general the Snailwell bequests are more concerned with family, ancestry and place than the London bequests. In the latter, Horne’s commercial interests are to the fore, exemplified by the stipulation that his tomb should include the arms of the Staple of Calais and of the Salters’ Company. In contrast, his endowment of the window and associated imagery at Snailwell is the most personalised and inclusive, reflecting his family’s role in the parish community. Alone of all his bequests, the individual saintly images and representations of his deceased parents, brothers and sisters as well as himself, his wife and their dead children were specified. Wealth and the attainment of the highest civic office may have taken Sir William Horne far from his presumed birthplace, but to the last, Snailwell and his family origins mattered to him. Sadly for Horne, there was a wide gap between aspiration and realization. Often enough, in medieval times as in any other age, the road to hell may not only be paved with good intentions, but also with the negligence and even venality of executors.22 From the outset, trouble arose in fulfilling the terms of the will, despite Horne’s stipulation that the inventory of his goods, etc. was to be drawn up quickly (by the first Michaelmas after his death) and all his efforts to ensure that his testamentary intentions were carried out. His trust was betrayed by the overseers of his will. These were two clerics, Master 21 The phrase was used by R. C. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (Ithaca and London, 1980), p. 94; for a discussion of the social context of imagery in the English parish church, see Marks, Image and Devotion, pp. 171–181. 22 Marks, ‘Wills and Windows’, p. 250.

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Thomas Horne, BD and John Horne of London, chaplain, presumably Sir William’s kinsmen, although their precise relationship to him has not been established. Not long after Sir William’s death, his old business partner Sir Richard Chawry had the two Hornes imprisoned on a charge of stealing £200 in gold and pearls and £700 in cash from the estate; also for refusing to carry out some of the bequests (unspecified). However, even incarceration of the perpetrators did not result in the swift enactment of Sir William’s will. Chawry’s own will of 1505 reveals that the properties behind the aforementioned George inn, which had been bought by him and Sir William, must have been amongst the denied bequests, for ownership had still not passed to the Salters’ Company in accordance with his and Horne’s wishes in return for charitable services for the latter’s soul. Stow was therefore probably correct in stating that the proceeds from the sale of the George were never applied to their specified purposes, nor were the new bells ever cast for St Thomas the Apostle’s church.23 Were Horne’s executors equally negligent with his Snailwell bequests? Stow may have been better-informed about the London provisions of the will, but there remains the possibility that Sir William’s window too was never ‘scowred’ and glazed with imagery commemorating his family and that of his parents. Unfortunately, there is no way of knowing if any of the fragments of Perpendicular glass reset in the Snailwell church porch came from this window. If they did, they were perhaps amongst the remnants of the ‘superstitious pict[ures]’ which were ordered to be destroyed by the notorious Puritan iconoclast William Dowsing when he descended on Snailwell in 1644.24 Indeed, despite all his extensive and costly efforts to ensure that he and his family were not forgotten, not a trace remains of any Sir William Horne’s memorials. His tomb in St Thomas the Apostle’s church has vanished and his chantry provisions were swept away during Edward VI’s reign, under the legislation which abolished all such institutions. Even if his window was glazed as he desired, after the Reformation no-one in Snailwell would have been prompted by its inscriptions to offer prayers of intercession for the souls of Sir William and his family. All that survives is his will, which at least informs us about a highly individual glazing bequest.

Barty-King, Salters’ Company, pp. 19–20; Kingsford, A Survey of London, 1, p. 246. T. Cooper (ed.), The Journal of William Dowsing. Iconoclasm in East Anglia during the English Civil War (Woodbridge, 2001), p. 282. 23 24

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Author’s Note As so often, I am indebted to the late Peter Northeast for bringing this will to my attention and providing a transcription. Thanks are also due to Katie George, the archivist of the Salters’ Company, for drawing publications to my notice and for putting me in touch with Geoffrey Horne, who generously provided many details on Sir William Horne and his family.

X Glazing in the Romanesque Parish Church

T

he history of the introduction and diffusion of painted glass win­dows in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries is written in the great cathedrals, monasteries and foundations of canons: Augsburg, St-Patroklus at Soest, St-Denis, Chartres, Le Mans, Châlons-sur-Marne, Canterbury and York; in terms of ornamental grisaille glazing, the Cistercian Order has provided the chief focus.1 The design, colour and style of the figural glazing of the great churches is as diverse as their architectural setting and are the products of local traditions and icono­graphies. The purpose of this paper is not to challenge this canon, but rather to supplement it by examining the role of window imagery in the northern European parish church between the late eleventh and mid- thirteenth centuries. Glazing beyond the great church in this period has not attracted much scholarly attention, for obvious reasons. Very few village churches preserve any glass before the middle of the thirteenth century, through destruction caused variously by decay, iconoclasm, rebuilding and the replacement of earlier glazing. The visual paucity is matched by the dearth of contemporary documentation, with the result that dating is predicated solely on the imprecise methodology of stylistic comparison and next to nothing is known about the patronage and circumstances in which parish church windows came to be created. Moreover, as the cut­ting edge in terms of artistic virtuosity and iconographical complexity is to be found in the great church, its humble country cousin appears to have little to offer. Finally, the early glass found in some parish churches is not in situ and was made for larger churches. All of this does not mean that parish church glazing is of no interest. On the contrary, it can be viewed in both architectural and social con­texts 1

H. J. Zakin, French Cistercian Grisaille Glass (New York & London, 1979).

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which differ markedly from cathedrals and monasteries. Whilst stained glass is seen as synonymous with Gothic architecture, parish churches of this period often present the medium in a Romanesque built environment. Secondly, in contrast with the great cathedrals and mona­steries, with their educated secular clergy and monks, the audience for parish church glazing overwhelmingly was lay and drawn from the third estate in medieval society: those who worked, ie, the rural peasantry. This contribution is no more than an initial venture into a field which I hope can be transformed by future discoveries. There is a risk of homogenising the material, a danger compounded by the fragmentary and scattered nature of surviving glass. We are dealing with an even more varied phenomenon than great church glazing, reflecting widely differing social and economic structures, within as well as beyond the boundaries of each kingdom. Any attempt to impose some sort of holistic morphology is bound to suppress and distort nuances of individuality and locality. How common was window glass in parish churches before the midd­le of the thirteenth century? What are its distinguishing characteristics? What were the factors behind the choice of iconic and historiated ima­gery? By the time churches built to serve a rural population, as opposed to privately-owned seigneurial chapels, emerge in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, painted and coloured window glass was quite widespread. Written testament and surviving remains from Strasbourg, Schwarzach and Winchester show that before the year 1100, figural glazing in coloured glass could be found in monasteries throughout northern Europe. It is very doubtful if ordinary parish churches of this time fol­lowed suit — unless they had been exceptionally enriched by a wealthy patron. As far as I am aware, no glass has been found from this category of church before the twelfth century. The window openings of late Anglo-Saxon churches like Wing in Buckinghamshire and Worth in Sussex show traces neither of iron ferramenta nor internal rebates for glazing frames. Probably the remarkable survival at Poling in West Sussex (England) represents the norm (Fig. 1).2 Oak shutters were found in a blocked window here in 1917, which were likely to have had a hinged flap or pierced opening to admit light, perhaps by means of a piece of horn or oiled canvas. The arrangements is reminiscent

R. Marks, Stained Glass in England during the Middle Ages (London, 1993), p. 112, fig. 87. 2

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of the stone filling enclosing the small oculus in the late seventh-century monastic church at Jarrow, in the north of England. The Poling window itself falls into the category known as Anglo-Saxon overlap and might date from just before the Norman Conquest in 1066, or more likely, post-dates it by several decades. It may well be that the Poling arrangement remained a com­mon window filling for much of the twelfth century, especially outside the apse or chancel. One way to test this might be to examine windows of this period for any traces of rebates or original ferramenta. It is, howe­ver, in this era that glazing began to appear in north European parish churches. Recent discoveries of an archangel (St Michael?) at Dalbury in Derbyshire and of a head at Fledborough in Nottinghamshire show that figural glass was appearing in Midlands parish churches in the first third of the century (Figs. 2, 3).3 More evidence exists for the last two-thirds of the twelfth century, when window openings tended to increase in size. In western France, figural glass survives from churches at Essards (Indre-et-Loire), Chemillé-surIndrois (Indre-et-Loire) and Chenu (Sarthe), all near Tours (Figs 4, 5).4 A Crucifixion of c. 1160–88 was re-used when the church of Ste-Ségolène at Metz was reconstructed in the middle of the following century (Fig. 6). The same subject also occurs at Easby in Yorkshire, of c. 1180–90 (Fig. 7).5 A head of an Old Testament king dating from c. 1170 survives from the village church of St Vitus at Wunschendorf (Germany). Of about the same date is the figure of the titular saint from St Nicholas’s church at Oberndorf bei Arnstadt (now in the museum at Eisenach, also in Germany). Fragments of coloured and painted window glass dating from the middle of the twelfth century have been found in Denmark, as well as wooden frames inserted into the rebates of Romanesque windows to hold glazing (Fig. 8).6 Even then, it is not until the first half of the thirteenth century that figural glazing begins to survive in some quantities, especial­ly in England, France and the island of Gotland in Sweden. Iconic ima­ges and scenes from the lives and martyrdoms of saints (including the Virgin) join established subjects like the Crucifixion. Passion scenes and the Tree of Jesse also occur. This is a meagre harvest, For Dalbury, see ibid., pp. 111–12, fig. 86; Fledborough is unpublished. A. Granboulan, ‘De la paroisse à la cathédrale; une approche renouvelée du vitrail roman dan l’ouest’, Revue de l’Art, CIII (1994), pp. 42–52. The Chenu glass is now at Rivenhall in Essex, England. 5 Marks, Stained Glass, pp. 139–40, Pl. VIII (b). 6 B. A. Hansen, ‘Medieval Painted Window Glass from Denmark’, Medieval Europe (Section 7: Art and Symbolism), Papers of the York Conference (York, 1992), pp. 73–78. 3 4

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but it is one which can be supplemented by the evidence of ornamental glazing in the form of coloured and grisaille windows with designs formed by leading and paint. Although a number of examples were destroyed in France and England in the nineteenth century, ornamental windows from the last quarter or so of the twelfth century survive in Germany (Starup church, in Flensburg Museum, Schleswig-Holstein) (Fig. 9), France (the pilgrimage church at Cudot in Burgundy) and England (Brabourne in Kent) (Figs 10, 11). The parish churches of Kent and Oxfordshire are quite rich in thirteenth-century grisaille (Hastingleigh and Badlesmere in Kent, the latter known only from a copy of a lost window from Westwell) (Fig. 12). Both the ornamental and painted grisaille designs make extensive use of coloured glass (nota­bly Brabourne), but the designs of the former bear many affinities with contemporary Cistercian grisaille windows (Fig. 13). Did the white monks adap­t window designs which were already in current usage, or were they the inventors of these patterns which subsequently were copied in nonCistercian churches? There is insufficient evidence to resolve this que­stion, but it is worth noting that grisaille played a much larger role in great church glazing in this period than has been recognised.7 Grisaille, especially with coloured glass, was less costly than figurati­ve coloured glass, but it was still expensive and enhanced the House of God. It also served the practical function of lighting the imagery in other media of late eleventh and early twelfth-century churches. How do the sparse traces of parochial figural windows relate to the Gesamtkunstwerk of contemporary parish church imagery? The twelfth century witnessed an explosion of pictorial imagery in churches. The most costly and extensive schemes were of course in the great churches, the cathedrals and monasteries of the Benedictines and Cluniacs. Pictorial decoration was widespread in parish churches too, as is evidenced by the wall-pain­tings of the Sussex group in the south of England (c. 1080–1120) and elsewhere.8 In the Sussex group, the iconography of the nave focusses on the Last Judgement and the life of Christ, with one of the group also including Adam and Eve. The apostles are depicted in the chancel (and also in the extensive murals at Copford in Essex (Fig. 14) and Kempley in Gloucestershire), as is appropriate for As argued in Marks, Stained Glass, pp. 127–8. The members of the group are Clayton, Coombes, Hardham. Plumpton and Westmeston: see D. Park, ‘The “Lewes Group” of Wall Paintings in Sussex’, in Anglo-Norman Studies. Proceedings of the Battle Conference, VI (1983), pp. 200–35. 7 8

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the participants at the first eucharist and precursors of the parochial clergy. The saints play a comparati­vely minor role in church decoration, both in narratives of their lives and miracles and as iconic images. A few English twelfth-century churches include wall-paintings of the saint to whom the church is dedicated.9 From the second quarter of the same century it became the practice in England, France and the Holy Roman Empire to place a carved repre­sentation of the titular saint or other important holy figure on the exte­rior of the church, often on the tympanum or trumeau of the principal entrance (Fig. 15).10 It is in this guise that the Virgin sometimes occurs and she is also represented in Christological narratives. Iconic images of Our Lady are however rare in glass and murals before the late thirteenth century, probably because during the course of the preceding century even parish churches posses­sed an enthroned Virgin and Child (the sedes sapientiae), located on the principal altar (Fig. 5).11 In contrast with the typological intricacies and complex narratives of the great churches, the imagery found in the murals and sculpture of pari­ sh churches is simple and direct, designed to communicate the message of the gospels and Christ’s redemptive power to an illiterate lay audience. The condensed subject-matter of parish church imagery in glass is of course partly dictated by the smaller size and number of windows, but we should not assume that it was a simple précis, without thought being given to the location of the glazing and the kinds of meaning it was inten­ded to convey. This message should not necessarity be seen as purely didactic, it might also evoke an emotional response which could stimulate an inner spiritual life.12 In a text known as the Vita et Visio et Finis Simplicis Orm, written in about 1126 by a priest from East Yorkshire, the vivid descriptions of Christ, the Virgin, the apostles and St Michael as well as the mouth of Hell suggest a familiarity with the kinds of pictorial imagery to be seen in parish churches

For example, St George at Hardham in Sussex. W. Sauerländer, ‘Von der Glykophilousa zur “Amie Gracieuse” Überlegun­gen und Fragen zur “Virgen Blanca” in der Kathedrale von Toledo’, in De la création à la restauration Travaux d’histoire de l’art offerts à Marcel Durliat pour son 75e anniversaire (Toulouse, 1992), p. 453. 11 See i. h. forsyth, The Thone of Wisdom. Wood Sculptures of the Madonna in Romanesque France (Princeton, 1972). 12 a. vauchez, La spiritualité du Moyen Age occidental VlIIe-XIIIe siècle, 2nd ed. (Editions du Seuil), 1994, p. 175. 9

10

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of the period.13 The occurrence of such depictions should be connected with the desire of the laity in western Christendom for direct contact with the sacred. It is in the twelfth century that the Church began to emphasise the Real Presence in the Eucharist and, at the end of this and the beginning of the following century, introduced the elevation of the consecrated Host so that God’s body could be seen by the laity.14 This was a world in which the corpo­ reality of the sacred through pictorial representation was commonplace. The archangel St Michael plays a prominent role in the Orm text and is the one saintly figure to occur quite frequently in twelfth-century church decoration, carved on tympana and in wallpainting. The archan­gel in the Dalbury glass is probably to be identified as Michael, albeit in a different guise from the normal one of guardian of paradise and inter­cessor for mankind at the Last Judgement. The cult of St Michael was already of long standing by the twelfth century and a large number of churches were dedicated to him.15 The extent to which the imagery of painted window glass was inte­ grated iconographically with mural decoration and sculpture cannot be established, owing to the absence of any examples where all media survi­ve in one Romanesque parish church. In western France, at least, glass-painters and mural-painters drew on a similar stock of images.16 The symbolic or didactic roles played by window imagery has not always been erased by displacement from its original location. The gla­zing of the apse window at Chemillé-sur-Indrois is in situ, comprising the Entombment, Crucifixion and Christ in Majesty — entirely appropria­te subjects for the enactment of Christ’s sacrifice performed at the altar below and its redemptive powers. At Lojsta in Gotland (Sweden), the sacrifice of the Mass is underlined pictorially by the placing of mid thir­teenth-century Passion scenes in the central lancet over the chancel altar, together with Christ’s infancy in the flanking windows. The late twelfth- century Crucifixion panels at Easby in Yorkshire have been re-set in the later east windows, but almost certainly the location reflects their origi­nal position (Fig. 7). That the Crucifixion or Passion scenes were not de rigueur for the chancel east wall is shown by the enthroned twelfth-century Virgin and Child from Chenu (Fig. 5). It is not in situ, but as a Maria lactans it is likely to have been closely associated H. farmer, ‘The Vision of Orm’, Analecta Bollandiana, LXXV (1957), pp. 72–82. vauchez, Spiritualité, p. 171; M. Rubin, Corpus Christi. The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 54–63. 15 Vauchez, Spiritualité, p. 26. 16 Granboulan, p. 44. 13 14

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1. Poling parish church (West Sussex, England): remains of oak window shutter, 11th–12th century. From Sussex Archaeological Collections, 60 (1919).

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2. Dalbury parish church (Derbyshire, England): St Michael, c. 1100–35 (?) (photograph: Richard Marks).

3. Fledborough parish church (Nottinghamshire, England): head, 12th century (?) (photograph: Keith Barley).

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4. Chenu parish church (Sarthe, France); Christ in Majesty, c. 1170–1200 (now in Rivenhall church, Essex, England) (photograph: Richard Marks). 5. Chenu parish church (Sarthe, France); Virgin and Child enthroned, c. 1170–1200 (now in Rivenhall church, Essex, England) (photograph: Richard Marks).

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6. Metz (France): church of Ste Ségolène: Crucifixion, c. 1160.

7. Easby parish church (Yorkshire, England): St John the Evangelist from a Crucifixion, c. 1180–90 (photograph: Richard Marks).

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8. Denmark: wooden frame with a rebate for glazing (from Birgit Als Hansen, ‘Medieval Painted Window Glass from Denmark’ [see n.6]).

9. Starup parish church (Schleswig-Holstein, Germany): unpainted grisaille window, c. 1200 (now in Flensburg Museum, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany).

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10. Cudot pilgrimage church (Yonne, France): unpainted grisaille window, c. 1170–1200 (photograph: Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi (France)).

11. Brabourne parish church (Kent, England): unpainted grisaille and coloured glass window, c. 1175 (photograph: Richard Marks).

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12. Painted grisaille lancet formerly in Westwell parish church (Kent, England), early 13th century. After Charles Winston.

13. Unpainted grisaille and coloured glass window, England, c. 1200–50 (Ely Stained Glass Museum, on loan from Alfred Fisher).

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14. Copford parish church (Essex, England): mural paintings of Christ in Majesty and the apostles in the apse, c. 1140–50 (heavily restored).

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15. Church Hanborough parish church (Oxfordshire, England): tympanum with St Peter, early 12th century (photograph: National Monuments Record).

18. Fide parish church (Gotland, Sweden): interior, 12th century and later.

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16. Civray-de-Touraine parish church (Indre-et-Loire, France): St Germain scenes in chevet windows, early 13th century (photograph: Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi (France)).

17. Upper Hardres parish church (Kent, England): enthroned Virgin and donors, c. 1250 (photograph: National Monuments Record).

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with an altar.17 The choice of the Tree of Jesse for the central lancet of the early thirteenth-century church at Westwell in Kent probably reflects the church’s dedication to the Virgin. Of about the same date are the episodes from the life of St Germain, the founder and patronal saint of Civray-deTouraine (Indre-et-Loire, France) in the east lancets here, together with Christ’s Passion and St Nicholas (Fig. 16). Other patronal imagery occurs at Eisenach (St Nicholas) and St Georges-de-Poisieux (Cher, France). The Virgin is as rare in glass as in wall-painting before the thirteenth century, except where she is the titular saint. Accident of survival must distort the pictu­re. Marian devotion was emphasised by the Cistercians in the twelfth century, when (as we have noted), carved images of the Virgin and Child were introduced in parish churches. In the following century, the cult of the Virgin was promoted amongst the laity by the mendicant orders.18 The enthroned image from Upper Hardres in Kent (unfortunately rui­ned by fire) is comparable with contemporary mural representations and is chiefly remarkable for the presence of two named lay donor figures (Fig. 17). In England iconic images of Our Lady are extant in parish church glazing from the thirteenth century, when they are joined by both iconic and narrative representations of saints other than the dedicatee of the chur­ch. Examples are the martyrdom scenes of St Catherine and St Edmund of East Anglia respectively at West Horsley (Surrey) and Saxlingham Nethergate (Norfolk). It is in this period that the saints, as it were, emerged from the cathe­drals and monasteries and marched into parish churches, in sculpture (chiefly wood) and wall-painting as well as window glass. This process, which was an important aspect of the post-Fourth Lateran Council cam­paign to make the faith more accessible and meaningful to the people, occurred at varying speeds throughout western Europe between the thir­teenth and the middle of the fourteenth centuries. It marked a profound transfer, whereby the efficacy of a saint was diffused far from his or her cult centre and relics by means of representations of that saint in the form of images. Vauchez argues that the process was fostered by the Church authori­ties as a means of separating the cult of saints from that of relics and to provide a series of imitable models for the laity, as well as intercessors. The saints across the media were represented as single images to be addressed and venerated by the individual; also by abbreviated narrati­ves of their lives which could be memorised and used as exemplars in sermons — the pictorial equivalents 17 18

Ibid., 51, fig. 25. Vauchez, Spiritualité, p. 141.

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of Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea, of c. 1261–65. Scholastic theology was deployed to assert that the sign as manifested in the material object represented the signified, whilst affirming that veneration of an image was not addressed to it per se, but to its sacred prototype.19 The introduction of bar tracery into parish churches during the second half of the thirteenth century provided enlarged and more flexi­ble fields for imagery: as a result, glazing gained new importance in the pictorial embellishment of the parish church. Nevertheless, the contents of windows were but one visual element amongst many. Moreover, the vast majority of glass images were not the focus of individual devotion in the same way as the Roods and carved images of the saints, nor were they a sine qua non for the performance of the liturgy. Yet through their colour and translucency they enriched the House of God, rendering honour simultaneously to the saints and to the individuals and commu­nities which commissioned them. At the beginning of this paper, a warning was issued against ignoring local patterns in parish church glazing. Only occasionally is there suffi­cient glass to define the nature of regional diversity. The three western French parish churches with extant glass have a distinctively local cha­racter in iconography. This regional flavour also extends to style, for they have been attributed variously to a workshop working in Le Mans Cathedral and related to manuscript illumination of the area (Figs 4, 5). The Crucifixion at Easby was also executed by the glaziers who were working at York Minster in the late twelfth century (Fig. 7).20 Both instances not only demonstrate the fine quality of glass to be found in rural parish churches of the period, they also show that the study of this kind of gla­zing has as much to offer as the great churches in identifying the extent and nature of local production. Very few village churches permit us to visualise their medieval appearance. The one exception is the island of Gotland, where nume­rous churches still retain the great Roods, carved images, altarpieces, wall-paintings and stained glass with which they were embellished incre­mentally between the twelfth and the sixteenth centuries (Fig. 18). Even here, however, the principal surviving material is from the thirteenth century onwards.21 19 a. Vauchez, Saints, prophètes et visionnaires. Le pouvoir surnaturel au Moyen Age (Paris, 1999), pp. 79–91. 20 Granboulan; Marks, Stained Glass, p. 140. 21 The best studies on the Gotland churches are the still incomplete Sveriges Kyrkor series; a useful popular guide is B.G. Söderberg, Kyrkorna på Gotland (Visby, n.d.).

XI Cistercian Window Glass in England and Wales *

I

t can be stated with confidence that a definitive account of the glazing of the medieval English and Welsh (and the Scottish and Irish) Cistercian houses will never be written. Of all the major religious orders the Cistercians suffered the most severe losses in buildings and furnishings during the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Situated as their houses for the most part were far from centres of population, there was seldom any demand for the retention of the monastic churches for parochial or cathedral use, as happened with a number of churches belonging to the Benedictines and other orders; in these instances considerable quantities of the glazing were sometimes preserved, as at Gloucester, Tewkesbury and elsewhere. The Cistercian monasteries were ruthlessly stripped of all the materials which could be re-used, including the lead from roofs and windows. The glass itself was either deliberately destroyed or allowed to decay; occasionally it was removed for incorporation in other buildings. A series of depositions taken on 14 January 1541 at Winchcombe in Gloucestershire revealed that amongst the items removed from Hailes Abbey were six horse-loads of glass, 932 panels of stained glass, and complete windows from the dormitory, the prior’s cell and chamber, the cellarer’s chamber and the north aisle of the church, in addition to another chamber.1 The churchwardens of Wing in Buckinghamshire in 1538–9 purchased a window for 3s 4d from Woburn * I would like to record my gratitude to all those who have assisted in my researches on Cistercian glass, both in providing access to material and in making suggestions. I am particularly grateful to the following: Evelyn Baker, Dr Rüdiger Becksmann, Dr Glyn Coppack, Professor Eva Frodl-Kraft, Sandy Heslop, Dr Karl-Joachim Maercker, Nigel Morgan, A. E. S. Musty, Dr Christopher Norton, David O’Connor, David Park, Françoise Perrot, Christine Sullivan and Neil Stratford. 1 Taken from a display in the Museum at Hailes.

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Abbey in the neighbouring county of Bedfordshire.2 In neither of these instances has the glass survived. The end result is that of more than one hundred Cistercian houses for men and women in England and Wales only one, Abbey Dore, retains any medieval glazing in its windows. For the rest, we have to rely on fragments found in excavations on a few sites. Most of this glass is very small and opaque through de-vitrification whilst in the soil. The usefulness of this material is reduced further by the fact that until recently it has tended to be ignored by archaeologists and much of it is unstratified; in some cases even the precise find locations are unrecorded. The situation is thus far worse in England and Wales than on the Continent, where Cistercian glass is sufficiently plentiful in France, Germany, Austria and Switzerland to have generated some important studies.3 The position, however, is not entirely hopeless, and some observations can be made from the very limited material available, with the rider that further excavations may bring to light information which could alter the picture fundamentally. At an early stage in the history of the Cistercian Order regulations were laid down as to what was and what was not permitted in window glazing: Vitree albe fiant, et sine crucibus et picturis. The date of this statute, as with all early Cistercian legislation, is disputed: latest research suggests that it belongs in the period c. 1145–51.4 That the White Monks had coloured glass in the windows of their monasteries prior to this ban is revealed by a ruling A. Vere Woodman, ‘The Accounts of the Churchwardens of Wing’, Records of Buckinghamshire, 16 pt.5 (1960), p. 316. 3 See C. Brisac, ‘Romanesque grisailles from the former abbey churches of Obazine and Bonlieu’, in M. P. Lillich (ed.), Studies in Cistercian Art and Architecture, I [Cistercian Studies Series, 66] (Kalamazoo, 1982), pp. 130–9; E. Frodl-Kraft, ‘Das “Flechtwerk” der frühen Zisterzienserfenster: Versuch einer Abteilung’, Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, 20 (1965), pp. 7–20; J. Hayward, ‘Glazed cloisters and their development in the houses of the Cistercian Order’, Gesta, 12 (1973), pp. 93–109; B. Lymant, ‘Die Glasmalerei bei den Zisterziensern’, in Zisterzienser 1980, pp. 345–56; H. Wentzel, ‘Die Glasmalerei der Zisterzienser in Deutschland’, Bulletin des Relations Artistiques France-Allemagne (Mainz, 1951), unpaginated; H. Zakin, French Cistercian Grisaille Glass (New York and London, 1979); idem, ‘Cistercian glass at La Chalade (Meuse)’, in Lillich, Studies (1982), pp. 140–151. The Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi volumes for Austria, Germany and Switzerland should also be consulted. 4 Statute  ? c. 1145–51, see Table in C. Norton and D. Park (eds), Cistercian Art and Architecture in the British Isles (Cambridge, 1986), p. 325; also C. Holdsworth, ‘The chronology and character of early Cistercian legislation on art and architecture’, in ibid., p. 54. 2

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of the 1159 General Chapter: Vitreae diversorum colorum ante prohibitionem factae, infra triennium amoveantur.5 No glazing exists in any Cistercian house which antedates these rulings, but there are two very important indications of the attitude of the White Monks in England to glazing just before the first statute. Fragments of window glass were found in 1980 during excavations carried out by the Department of the Environment at Fountains Abbey. They were all discovered below the primary floor of the existing church and must be earlier than the fire of 1147 as they came from burned deposits.6 There are more than thirty pieces, each measuring no more than a few millimetres and all opaque through de-vitrification. Several have grozed edges for leading and almost all are plain, with no paint. A few do have traces of painted decoration, one of which consists of a pattern of repeated circles with central bosses. These painted pieces may, however, not be as early as the undecorated fragments, for there is at least one other later piece (of a fifteenth-century clear quarry) from the same location. Moreover, only scientific examination will reveal whether any of the unpainted finds are of coloured glass. It is doubtful whether there is any prospect of reconstructing the original design of the early Fountains windows as the fragments are so few in number and small in size; also no leading was found. More secure evidence of the nature of the first Cistercian window glass in England is provided by a document in the cartulary of Rievaulx Abbey.7 It is a draft agreement between the monks of Rievaulx and the canons of the Augustinian priory at Kirkham and it originated in the decision by Waltheof, the latter’s prior and stepson of the Scottish king David I, to join the Cistercian Order. For a time it seemed likely that a considerable number of the canons would follow him and a struggle took place for the possession of the priory. This agreement was a compromise, by which those who chose to remain Augustinians were to surrender the monastic buildings at Kirkham to the Rievaulx monks; in return Waltheof and his followers Statute 1159.9; ibid., p. 328. Letter from Dr Glyn Coppack 10/10/1983. At the time of writing the glass is in the Ancient Monuments Laboratory at Fortress House, Ref. Site 402, Box 9467, FAC 80, Nos 801277–801302. The excavations are to be published in R. Gilyard-Beer and G. Coppack, ‘Excavations at Fountains Abbey: the early developments of the monastery’, Archaeologia, 108. 7 J. C. Atkinson (ed.), Cartularium Abbathiae de Rievalle, Surtees Society, 83 (1887), pp. 108–109. 5 6

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would construct a new house for the Augustinians at Linton. The latter were to be allowed to remove there from Kirkham their sacred vessels, books, vestments and the fenestras vitreas coloratas . . . pro cjuibus Ulis albas faciemus. In the event this agreement was never implemented and only Waltheof left to join the Cistercians. The date of the document is not certain. It must have been drawn up in 1143 at the latest, in which year Waltheof began his noviciate at Warden Abbey in Bedfordshire, and it may even be as early as c. 1139.8 Whichever of these dates is correct, it is still the earliest firm evidence of Cistercian espousal of white glass in preference to coloured glass. That it should occur in connection with Rievaulx is not surprising in view of the close ties that existed at the time between this house and St Bernard.9 The General Chapter held in 1182 instructed that coloured and painted glass was to be removed within two years, and the Codifications of Cistercian legislation that took place in 1202, c. 1220, 1237 and 1257 repeated the prohibitions on coloured and painted glass, with the exception of those houses which joined the Cistercian Order subsequent to the installation of their coloured.windows.10 This concession may well have stemmed from resistance to the ban from newly-affiliated houses. There is evidence that from very soon after 1182, the instructions were not easily enforced: a nave window at La Bénisson-Dieu (Loire) has ruby bosses in the centre of the grisaille interlacing patterns. The window has been dated as late as c. 1200, although it could be from any time within the last quarter of the century.11 As neither English nor Welsh Cistercian late twelfth-century glass has been found there is no evidence of the attitude of the Cistercians on this side of the Channel to the prohibitions of 1182 and later. We are equally in the dark as to whether the grisaille windows which must have existed in the English and Welsh abbeys were of the same repertoire of vegetal and geometrical designs formed by the leading as those at Bonlieu, Obazine, La Bénisson-Dieu, Noirlac, Eberbach and Santas Creus.12 It is perhaps worth noting that the Victoria County History, Yorkshire, III (London, 1913), pp. 219–20; F. M. Powicke (ed. and trans.), The Life of Ailred of Rievaulx by Walter Daniel (Nelson’s Medieval Texts) (London, 1950, reprinted Oxford Medieval Texts, 1978), pp. lxxii–lxxiii. 9 D. Knowles, The Monastic Order in England From the Times of St Dunstan to the Fourth Lateran Council 940–1216 (2nd ed. Cambridge, 1963), pp. 228, 705–6. 10 Statute 1182.11, compare the statute of ?1182–3; Codifications of 1202, c. 1220, 1237, and 1257, see Norton and Park, Cistercian Art, pp. 330, 344, 358, 368 and 378. 11 Zakin, French Cistercian Grisaille Glass, pp. 29–32, 82–4, Pl.17. 12 All except Santas Creus are illustrated in ibid. It should be noted that the dating of much of this glass is uncertain and this has led to considerable differences of opinion; eg on the 8

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range of designs in these windows is very similar to those found on Cistercian tiles of the period c. 1190–1220, including examples from Cistercian sites in England.13 Furthermore, foliate designs similar to those found in continental Cistercian houses were known to English glaziers around the turn of the twelfth century. One window in the parish church at Brabourne in Kent retains its original glazing which from the architectural setting can be dated before the end of the twelfth century. The window consists of demi-rosettes enclosed in loops which are linked by straps. Although coloured glass appears at Brabourne and rosettes rather than palmettes, there is an affinity with one of the windows at Obazine, of c. 1176–1190.14 The Brabourne window also raises the question of whether the White Monks adapted window designs which were already in existence or whether they were the inventors of these patterns, which were subsequently copied in non- Cistercian churches. With but a handful of surviving monuments for the whole of Europe, this question must remain unanswered. Until very recently one rather problematic example of early English Cistercian grisaille glass could be seen. Up to about ten years ago there were in the westernmost window (sVII) in the south aisle of the presbytery at Abbey Dore two rows of white glass with a scale-like pattern formed by overlapping concentric semi-circles (Fig. 1).15 This is a unique design in early Cistercian glass, although very similar ‘fish-scale’ patterns occur on French Cistercian tiles, notably at La Bénisson-Dieu. The same motif, albeit lacking the concentric element, occurs as a masonry pattern on the southwest cloister doorway at Fountains and, in a non-Cistercian monument, in a clerestory window at Notre Dame de Valére bei Sitten (Sion) in Switzerland. The Fountains door is dated to the 1170s and 80s, whilst the Sitten window is of the early thirteenth century.16 Bonlieu panel not only do Zakin (French Cistercian Grisaille Glass) and Brisac (‘Romanesque grisailles’) disagree as to its authenticity but the former dates the original to c.1200 and the latter to c. 1160–70. The extensive grisaille glazing of Santas Creus in Catalonia, Spain, is unpublished, but will shortly be studied by Mr Joan Vila-Grau. 13 See C. Norton, ‘Early Cistercian tile pavements’, in Norton and Park, Cistercian Art, pp. 228–255; idem, ‘A Study of 12th- and 13th-century Decorated Tile Pavements in France and Related Material in England’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1983), passim. 14 Zakin, French Cistercian Grisaille Glass, Pl.8; Brisac,‘Romanesque grisailles’, Fig. 4. 15 The window numbering used in this paper follows the Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi system. 16 E. C. Norton, ‘Varietates pavimentorum: contribution à l’étude de l’art cistercien en France’, Cahiers Archéologiques, 31 (1983), p. 78, Figs 21–22; for Fountains, see D. Park,

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There are several problems with the Abbey Dore grisaille glass. It was not in situ, for the pieces revealed clear signs of de-vitrification through contact with the soil. The glass was amongst the finds made during the excavation and restoration of the church at the beginning of this century, and was placed in this window around 1904.17 As the leading was carried out at this time even the ornamental arrangement is open to doubt. Furthermore the de-vitrification was so far advanced as to make it impossible to establish from an on-site examination whether there was originally any painted decoration . The date is equally uncertain. The monastic church was rebuilt from c. 1180 onwards with the east end reconstructed early in the thirteenth century. Although the glass was probably not as late as the consecration of the church, which was undertaken by Bishop Thomas Cantelupe (1275–1282), it could still have been made at any time between c. 1180 and the middle of the thirteenth century. Unfortunately, all of the uncertainties over the Abbey Dore grisaille glass must remain unresolved, for it has now disappeared, a loss which is much to be regretted.18 After Abbey Dore the student of English Cistercian glass at last comes on to firm, if still rather stony, ground. Excavations at a number of sites have revealed a considerable number of window glass finds which are of thirteenth-century date. Those at Bordesley, Newminster and Warden came from the east end and transepts of the respective abbey churches; glass has also been recovered from the west end of the nave of Newminster Abbey.19 Traces of glazing have also been found in the refectories at Hailes and ‘Cistercian wall painting and panel painting ‘, in Norton and Park, Cistercian Art, p. 187; Sitten is published in Zakin, French Cistercian Grisaille Glass, pp. 188–90, Pl.187. 17 R. W. Paul, ‘The church and monastery of Abbey Dore, Herefordshire’, Trans. Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, 27 (1904), p. 123. 18 The two rows of semi-circles had disappeared and the window re-leaded with new clear glass, incorporating three made-up roundels of ancient glass, by the time the present writer re-visited the church on 30 September 1983. 19 P. A. Rahtz and S. M. Hirst, Bordesley Abbey, Redditch, Hereford – Worcesteshire, First Report on Excavations 1969–73 (British Archaeological Reports, British Series, 23) (Oxford, 1976), pp. 210–11, Fig. 40; S. M. Hirst, D. A. Walsh and S. M. Wright, Bordesley Abbey II, Second Report on Excavations at Bordesley Abbey, Redditch, Hereford – Worcestershire 1969–73 (British Archaeological Reports, British Series, 111) (Oxford, 1983), pp. 173–5, Fig. 66; B. Harbottle and P. Salway, Excavations at Newminster Abbey, Northumberland, 1961–1963’, Archaeologia Aeliana, 4th ser., 42 (1964), pp. 166, 168; the 1974 Warden excavations are as yet unpublished. For the earlier excavations see G. T. Rudd and B. B. West, ‘Excavations at Warden Abbey in 1960 and 1961: a preliminary report’, Bedfordshire Archaeological Jnl, 2 (1964), pp. 58–68.

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Kirkstall. The former can be dated to the middle of the thirteenth century (Fig. 17), the latter appears from coin finds to have been rebuilt in c. 1225– 50.20 A few fragments were found on the floor of the room over the chapter house at Calder and there are some in the museum at Melrose in Scotland.21 The find locations of the latter are unrecorded, as also are the pieces from Rievaulx which are currently stored in the Ancient Monuments Laboratory at Fortress House. The lack of precision for the Rievaulx glass is particularly unfortunate as this monastery has produced a large quantity of window glass. Finally, there are some remains of excavated glass of this period leaded up as part of the roundels in window sVII at Abbey Dore. All this glass is painted and of similar character, consisting of stylised foliage designs, frequently ending in a trefoil, on long curling stems and set against cross-hatched grounds. Additional motifs include quatrefoils and cinquefoils on hatched grounds, originally forming borders, quarries and eyelet fillings (Hailes and Rievaulx) and a continuous beaded pattern on a narrow dark ground, from an edging or border (Bordesley and Rievaulx). Several points emerge from an examination of thirteenth-century glass from English and Welsh Cistercian sites. Firstly, no geometrical and foliage patterns formed not by painting but by the leading have yet been discovered, although they were still used on the Continent in this period, at Pontigny, Haina, Marienstatt and Namedy;22 they also occur in England, in a nonCistercian context, at Salisbury Cathedral (1220–1258) and Hastingleigh in Kent.23 Secondly, neither coloured nor figural glass dating from this century has been identified to date. This situation may well be modified as a result of excavations, although by analogy with continental Cistercian glass it is unlikely that coloured or figural glazing played much of a part before the end of the century.24 One factor is clear from an analysis of the glass from these sites: by the second quarter of the thirteenth century the Cistercians in England L. Alcock and D. E. Owen, Kirkstall Abbey Excavations. 4th Report 1953, Thoresby Society Publications, 43 (1955), pp. 56–9, 62, Fig. 17. Hailes is unpublished. 21 M. C. Fair, ‘Calder Abbey’, Trans. Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, new series 53 (1953), p. 94, Pl. facing p. 96. Melrose in unpublished. 22 Zakin, French Cistercian Grisaille Glass, pp. 37–43, 173–5, Pls 32–49, 165–70. 23 For Salisbury see C. Winston, Memoirs Illustrative of the Art of Glass-Painting (London, 1865), Pl. IV. 24 See below, pp. 256–58. 20

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and Wales were not only using painted decoration in their grisaille, but the designs were indistinguishable from those found elsewhere on this side of the Channel. All the motifs can be found in windows at Lincoln Cathedral, Salisbury Cathedral and (formerly) at nearby Clarendon Palace (1236– 1267), Westminster Abbey (1245–1272) and the Minster and St Denys’ Church at York, to name but a few.25 The same picture emerges from Europe as a whole in this period: everywhere the Cistercians were conforming to indigenous glazing designs and had moved away from a repertoire which was peculiar to their Order, if indeed there ever had been a distinctively Cistercian glazing style. It may be noticed in passing that towards the end of the thirteenth century one English Cistercian house became involved in the manufacture of glass. This was Vale Royal, conveniently situated by a royal forest which had the necessary raw materials. Glass- making is first mentioned in connection with Vale Royal in 1284, and references occur again in 1309, 1348 and 1357.26 This must have been a commercial venture, and so presumably was the glass-house at Hailes, which was in existence at the Dissolution.27 The English Cistercians also numbered amongst them a glass-painter in this century. In 1278 a conversus at Pipewell Abbey in Northamptonshire made windows for the royal castle at Rockingham. As Professor Salzman pointed out, this was almost certainly an instance of a glazier by profession who subsequently found a vocation and entered the Order.28 The same probably applied to the Frater Lupuldus who in about 1300 painted his name in the west window of Haina Abbey in Germany.29 For Lincoln see N. J. Morgan, The Medieval Painted Glass of Lincoln Cathedral (Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi, Great Britain, Occasional Paper, 3) (London, 1983), Fig. C, pp. 38–41; for Salisbury and St Denys’ church, see J. A. Knowles, Essays in the History of the York School of Glass-Painting (London, 1936), Figs 64, 65; York Minster is illustrated in D. E. O’Connor and J. Haselock, ‘The Stained and Painted Glass’, in G. E. Aylmer and R. Cant (eds), A History of York Minster (Oxford, 1977), Pls 91, 92, and Westminster in W. R. Lethaby, Westminster Abbey and the King’s Craftsmen (London, 1906), Figs 100, 101. The Clarendon fragments will appear in the forthcoming publication on the palace by T. B. James and A. M. Robinson. 26 J. Brownbill (ed.), The Ledger-Book of Vale Royal Abbey, The Record Society for the Publication of Original Documents relating to Lancashire and Cheshire, 68 (1914), pp. 24, 44, 131, 138–40. 27 See above, n.1. 28 L. F. Salzman, ‘Medieval Glazing Accounts’, Jnl British Society of Master Glass-Painters, 2 (1928), p. 117. 25

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By this date the prohibitions on coloured and figural glass were being ignored everywhere, a state of affairs which seems to have received tacit recognition in the wording of the Codifications of 1289 and 1316, which merely forbade superfluae novitates et notabiles curiositates in stained glass and other artistic media.30 During the last third of the thirteenth century figures started to appear in Cistercian windows in the German-speaking lands, although they still may have been the exception rather than the rule. At first their appearance was somewhat tentative, being small in scale and set in windows which were mainly filled with ornamental grisaille. This arrangement occurs in the choir of Schulpforta, of c. 1268 (now destroyed), and the former nunnery at Kirchheim am Ries, of c. 1275–1300, both in Germany.31 Small figures also occur in the tracery lights of the cloister north windows at Wettingen in Switzerland, datable to c. 1270–8032 and around 1280 small panels depicting St Michael, the Annunciation, Crucifixion and Resurrection were placed in a small chapel on the east side of the nuns’ cloister at Wienhausen, Germany.33 Even earlier than these examples are the large-scale figures of saints in the nave of Neukloster in Germany, dating from c. 1240–45. These appear to be exceptional in this period in that Neukloster was originally a Benedictine house which only became Cistercian in 1245.34 Almost certainly the glass was installed prior to this change; and, as we have seen, from 1202 abbeys of other orders which like Neukloster adopted the Cistercian rule were permitted to retain their coloured and figurai windows.35 From the turn of the century windows filled entirely with large figures on coloured grounds are found in a number of

Wentzel, ‘Die Glasmalerei’; Lymant, ‘Die Glasmalerei’, p. 353, Pl.12. Codifications of 1289 and 1316; see Norton and Park, Cistercian Art, pp. 384, 388. 31 For Schulpforta see Wentzel, ‘Die Glasmalerei’. The choir was re-dedicated in 1268 and Dr Karl-Joachim Maercker considers that the glass dates from the 1250s and 60s (letter to the present writer dated 3/2/1972). Dr Hayward on the other hand, suggests that the choir windows were not glazed until after 1300 (Hayward, ‘Glazed cloisters’, p. 95). 32 H. Wentzel, Die Glasmalereien in Schwaben von 1200–1350 (Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi, Deutschland, I) (Berlin, 1958), pp. 221–2, Pls 522, 523. 33 E. Beer, Die Glasmalereien der Schweiz von 12. bis zum Beginn des 14. Jahrhunderts (Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi, Schweiz, I) (Basel, 1956), pp. 77–89, Pls 44–8; Hayward, ‘Glazed cloisters’, pp. 99–100. 34 Frodl-Kraft, ‘Das “Flechtwerk”’, p. 8, n.6; Hayward, ‘Glazed cloisters’, p. 95. 35 Codifications of 1202, c. 1220, 1237 and 1257; see Norton and Park, Cistercian Art, pp. 344, 358, 368 and 378; Hayward, ‘Glazed cloisters’, p. 100. 29 30

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Cistercian houses, at Heiligenkreuz in Austria, of c. 1290–1300,36 Lichtental and Heiligenkreuztal in Germany37 and Kappel in Switzerland,38 the last two dating from c. 1310–20, and Wienhausen, Hauterive and Santas Creus (Spain) of a decade later.39 After these come the apostles at Hauterive and the cycles at Bebenhausen and Amelungsborn, all of the period 1330–40.40 The evidence for the French and Netherlandish Cistercian houses is much sparser. Figures of Louis IX and his family have been cited as formerly appearing in the windows of the royal foundation and mausoleum at Royaumont, but no evidence to substantiate this statement has yet appeared.41 The remains of the grisaille glass at La Chalade (Meuse) show that by the early fourteenth century coloured glass and grotesques were present in French Cistercian windows.42 If the canopies in coloured glass now in the Musée de l’Abbaye des Dunes at Coxyde in Belgium came from that monastery, then the Belgian houses had figural as well as coloured glass by the middle of the fourteenth century.43 A similar picture emerges from the available evidence for the English and Welsh houses. As early as the middle of the thirteenth century figural subjects appeared on vaulting bosses at Hailes, and in the early fourteenth century they occur in profusion on the bosses at Abbey Dore, which may indicate that the Cistercians on this side of the Channel at quite an early stage were moving away from the Order’s strict precepts. Be that as it may, 36 E. Frodl-Kraft, Die Mittelalterliche Glasgemälde in Niederösterreich. 1. Teil: Albrechtsburg bis Klosterneuburg (Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi, Osterreich, II) (Vienna, 1972), pp. 95–145, Pls 349–429, 478–481; Hayward, ‘Glazed cloisters’, pp. 100–3. 37 Wentzel, Die Glasmalereien in Schwaben, pp. 190–6, Pls 431–69; Hayward, ‘Glazed cloisters’, p. 103. 38 R. Becksmann, Mittelalterliche Glasgemälde in Baden und der Pfalz (Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi, Deutschland, II, 1) (Berlin, 1979), pp. 3–13, text Pl.1; E. Beer, Die Glasmalereien der Schweiz aus dem 14. und 15. Jahrhundert (Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi, Schweiz, III) (Basel, 1965), pp. 13–40, Pls 1–27; Hayward, ‘Glazed cloisters’, p. 103. 39 Beer, Glasmalereien der Schweiz aus dem 14. und 15. Jahrhundert, pp. 77–99, Pls. 60–70; Hayward, ‘Glazed cloisters’, p. 103. The nave west window of Santas Creus in Catalonia is unpublished. 40 Beer, Glasmalereien der Schweiz aus dem 14. und 15. Jahrhundert, pp. 77–99, Pls 71–81; Wentzel, Die Glasmalereien in Schwaben, pp. 177–189, Pls 402–30; Wentzel, ‘Die Glasmalerei’. 41 Hayward, ‘Glazed cloisters’, p. 95. 42 Zakin, ‘La Chalade’. 43 J. Helbig, Les Vitraux Médiévaux Conservés en Belgique 1200–1500 (Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi, Belgique, I) (Brussels, 1961), pp. 283–6.

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the first evidence of coloured glass is at Tintern, where William of Worcester saw the arms of Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk (1270–1306), in the east window. The high altar was dedicated in 1288.44 Finds at Cistercian sites suggest that, as on the Continent, coloured and figural window glass may have become widespread from the first quarter of the fourteenth century, although fragments of grisaille with naturalistic foliage and trellis-work from Bordesley, Louth Park (in Louth Museum) and Rievaulx indicate that white glass still played a large part.45 Little direct evidence of fourteenth-century figural glazing has so far come to light from excavations, but the remains of canopies at Cleeve, Louth Park and Rievaulx reveal that their windows must have included figures and/or scenes. The Rievaulx pieces also include a number with very delicate foliate diapering on blue, green and ruby glass, originally forming backgrounds. Border patterns of castles, fleurs-de-lys, window tracery, climbing foliage and birds on stems are known variously from Bordesley, Rievaulx and Valle Crucis(?);46 coloured glass and yellow stain are employed and all the motifs, in common with the grisaille foliage and the canopy details, belong to the general repertoire of decorative forms found in English window glass of the first half of the fourteenth century. Apart from the excavated material, more substantial glazing of this period is to be seen at Merevale and Abbey Dore. The east window of the former capella ante portas of Merevale contains in the main and tracery lights part of a fine Tree of Jesse in coloured glass (Figs. 2 and 3). Woodforde indicated that it was the work of a glass-painter who between 1330 and 1350 executed a group of Jesses in the Midlands, consisting of Lowick, Mancetter, Shrewsbury, Ludlow, Madley, Bristol and Tewkesbury.47 Subsequent research has established that this group is not homogeneous and is the work of several different hands. Dr Peter Newton has suggested that the Merevale Jesse is probably by the same workshop as that at Ludlow and should be dated J. H. Harvey (ed.), William Worcestre, Itineraries (Oxford, 1969), pp. 60–1. The Bordesley glass was found near the west end of the nave (J. M. Woodward, The History of Bordesley Abbey (London and Oxford, 1866), p. 103, Pl.111, Fig. 8). Louth and Rievaulx are unpublished. 46 Rahtz and Hirst, Bordesley Abbey…First Report, Fig. 40 (Ref. GLW 10). The Valle Crucis glass was found outside the nave north aisle windows, but is known only from a brief description which also mentions a foot and many pieces of coloured glass, mainly blue. The fleur-de-lys motif suggests this glass dates from the early fourteenth century (H. Hughes, ‘Valle Crucis Abbey’, Archaeologia Cambrensis, 5th series, 2 (1894), p. 271). 47 C. Woodforde, ‘A group of fourteenth-century windows showing the Tree of Jesse’, Jnl British Society of Master Glass-Painters, 6 (1937), pp. 184–90. 44 45

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c. 1320–40. Other glass by the same hand is to be seen at Fillongley in Warwickshire.48 The Merevale Jesse is not in situ. The remains are set in a fifteenthcentury window and the subject is too large for any of the fourteenthcentury windows in the church. Taking into account the fact that there are fifteen full-length figures in the main lights (the lowest now all have heads of nineteenth-century date) with a further ten heads in the tracery, and that the figures of Jesse and the Virgin and Child are missing, the subject when complete must have filled a very large window. That this window was originally in the abbey church of Merevale is, however, only supposition, for there is no reference to this Jesse before modern times. No such question-mark hangs over the glass at Abbey Dore, which is in the south transept chapel (windows sVIII and sIX). There are only a handful of fragments, of various dates, and none is in situ (Figs. 4 and 5).49 The fourteenth-century glass includes pieces of green and blue foliate backgrounds, yellow cups with lids and naturalistic foliage from borders. The most important remains are those of three large white heads with yellow stain beards. Only one is complete and it is surmounted by a mitre which may not originally have belonged with it. There are also fragments of yellow drapery. The style of the heads suggests a date of c. 1340–50. Traces of Cistercian glass from the mid fourteenth century to the Dissolution remain as scarce as in the previous period. Some fragments of border-work from the windows of the east end chapels at Vale Royal, the contract for which is dated August 1359, were excavated in 1958.50 Bordesley, Kirkstall and Rievaulx have produced fragments of fifteenthcentury canopies in white and yellow stain; diamond-shaped quarries have been discovered at Bordesley, Cleeve and Rievaulx, the first with formalised motifs, while amongst the Rievaulx quarries is a very fine example of a bird quarry.51 A considerable number of figural pieces, including drapery and P. A. Newton, ‘Schools of Glass Painting in the Midlands 1275–1430’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of London, 1961), I, pp. 62–71. 49 Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (England), An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in Herefordshire, I, South-West (London, 1931), p. 7. 50 F. H. Thompson, ‘Excavations at the Cistercian Abbey of Vale Royal, Cheshire, 1958’, Antiquaries Jnl, 42 (1962), pp. 190, 199, 204, Figs 1–7. 51 Rahtz and Hirst, Bordesley Abbey…First Report, Fig. 40 (Ref. GLW 20, 22); Hirst, Walsh and Wright, Bordesley Abbey II, Second Report, Fig. 66 (Ref. GLW 23.1, 23.15, 49.12); Alcock and Owen, Kirkstall Abbey, p. 63, Fig.17. 48

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small hands and heads, appear amongst the Rievaulx material; a tiny head of either Christ or God the Father has also been found on the presumed site of the abbot’s lodging at Warden. To this bare landscape can merely be added some in situ pieces in the tracery spandrels of the refectory at Cleeve; also the remains of small figures, including angels and the heads of a woman and the dead Christ crowned with thorns, canopy-work, quarries and two eyelet fillings depicting the evangelist symbols of St Mark and St Matthew which are to be seen in windows sVIII and sIX and in the east clerestory windows at Abbey Dore. The set of apostles holding Creed scrolls in the east window of the parish church at Hailes is often considered to have been brought from the abbey, but in fact it comes from the old church at Toddington.52 The landscape is equally bleak for the sixteenth century. Not a trace survives of the glazing which the well-known York glass-painter, Sir John Petty (d. 1508), carried out at Furness: in his will he left 3s 4d to the abbey, ‘besechyng thame of clere absolucion be cause I have wroght mych work there’.53 The sum total of Cistercian glass from the last forty years of the Order’s existence in England and Wales is four in situ tracery fillings in a window in the former refectory (now the library) at Forde Abbey. They are in white glass with yellow stain and depict a mitre and crozier, a doctor’s cap and sceptre, and the initials TC for Thomas Chard, abbot of Forde between 1521 and 1539. For further traces of Cistercian glass one has to look beyond the monastic precincts. The capellae ante portas at Hailes and Merevale retain some of their original glazing, in addition to the panels which have already been discussed. The fourteenth-century east window of the former has tracery eyelet fillings consisting of a yellow stain rosette on a ruby ground within a white border. The trefoil heads of three other fourteenth-century windows in the chancel contain their original glass (Figs. 6 and 7). The easternmost on the north side (nII) has in the centre a white flower on a black ground with a yellow stain rim and white glass filling the trefoils. The next window on the same side (nIII) also has white glass in the trefoils with as the central boss a white fleur-de-lys on a green ground. The opposite window (sIII) has the same arrangement, but with a pot yellow quatrefoil in the centre. The dimensions of each trefoil light are 0.28 x 0.44 m. The glass probably dates from between c. 1320 and 1350. 52 53

Lord Sudeley, A Guide to Hailes Church (Gloucester, n.d.). Knowles, Essays, p. 149.

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These four windows also have some miscellaneous fragments of medieval glass, including (in the tracery of the east window) pieces of fifteenthcentury canopy-work and quarries, some quarries and fleurs-de-lys borders of the fourteenth century, and a shield bearing the arms of Richard, Earl of Cornwall, the founder of Hailes Abbey (Argent a lion rampant gules within a bordure sable bezantée or); this shield dates from the late fourteenth or fifteenth centuries. Window sIII also has part of a robe in white and yellow stain from a fifteenth-century figure and two fragments of fourteenthcentury quatrefoils. It is not known whether any of these pieces originally belonged to the church. The Merevale glazing is much more extensive than that of Hailes.54 The earliest glass is in the chancel south aisle, which dates from the middle of the fourteenth century. The central window (sIV) has in the tracery opaque and fragmentary remains of the original glass, consisting of coloured bosses on white grounds with white and yellow stain bordering, but much patched with fifteenth-century insertions. The heads of two of the three main lights retain fragments of quarries bearing yellow-stained rosettes within borders of pot yellow fleurs-de-lys alternating with plain red and blue pieces; the centre light also has a fourteenth-century grotesque head. The tracery of the next window to the west (sV) has the same coloured bosses on clear grounds as window sIV. In addition the quatrefoil opening at the apex of the window contains the in situ figure of St John the Baptist with a blue nimbus and placed on a ruby ground. The head of the centre main light has a shield bearing Argent a chevron sable between 9 martlets (Hardreshull) set in a blue trefoil surround. This is not in situ, but the roundels containing white figures playing organs on ruby and blue foliate diapered grounds, which are placed amongst yellow-stained rosette quarries with curling stems and within fleursde-lys and blue and red borders, are probably in their original locations. The width of each main light in these two windows is 0.52 m. The Warwickshire antiquary Sir William Dugdale illustrated a panel in the east window of the chancel south aisle depicting two knights in heraldic surcoats and carrying shields of arms of the Ferrers family, the founders of Merevale Abbey.55 This has now disappeared, but a second panel illustrated

54 A comprehensive catalogue of the Merevale glass is in Newton, ‘Schools’, 3, pp. 902–35. 55 W. Dugdale, The Antiquities of Warwickshire (London, 1656), p. 783.

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1. Abbey Dore, window sVIII, remains of grisaille glass, c. 1180–1250.

2. Merevale, capella ante portas, east window, Tree of Jesse, c. 1320–40.

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3. Merevale, capella ante portas, detail of King Solomon in Tree of Jesse.

4. Abbey Dore, window sVIII, remains of medieval glazing.

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6. Hailes, capella ante portas, in situ glass chancel window, c. 1320–50.

5. Abbey Dore, window sIX, remains of medieval glazing.

7. Hailes, capella ante portas, in situ glass chancel window, c. 1320–50.

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8. Merevale, capella ante portas, Sir John de Hardreshull and his wife Margaret, c. 1350 (now Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria, Felton Bequest, 1921).

9. Merevale, capella ante portas, east window, tracery light glazing, c. 1450–75.

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10. Merevale, capella ante portas, chancel north aisle window nIII, apostles, c. 1520–35. 11. Merevale, capella ante portas, chancel north aisle window nIII, Assumption of the Virgin and canopies, c. 1520–35.

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12. Merevale, capella ante portas, chancel north aisle window nIV, tracery light scenes and canopies, c. 1520–35.

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13. Merevale, capella ante portas, chancel north aisle window nIV, tracery light scenes and canopies, c. 1520–35. 14. Yarnton, two Cistercian monks, c. 1400–20.

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15. Old Warden parish church, window nIV, Abbot Walter de Clifton and St Martha, 1365–97.

16. Old Warden parish church, Abbot Walter de Clifton.

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in Dugdale, which was originally in one of the chancel south windows, can be identified as that now in the National Gallery of Victoria at Melbourne, Australia (Fig. 8). It shows the kneeling figures of a knight and his lady with their respective surcoat and gown bearing the Hardreshull arms and holding a shield with the same arms. The panel has a quatrefoil shape exactly matching the tracery of the three south aisle windows, and the blue ground on which the figures are set has the same foliate diaper patterns as the roundels in sV. The knight and the lady have been identified as Sir John de Hardreshull (1293/4–c. l365) and his wife Margaret.56 He was the last male descendant of a family which had owned the nearby manor of Hartshill in Warwickshire since at least the beginning of the twelfth century. Sir John spent much of his life in the king’s service and in 1329/30 was appointed commissioner of the peace in his native county. His tomb is at Ashton in Northamptonshire. He and his wife must have been the donors of the window in which they were depicted, and the figure style and details of the armour suggest that the glass dates from about the middle of the fourteenth century; possibly the building and glazing of the chancel south aisle is connected with the foundation in 1345 of a chantry in the Merevale capella ante portas, although it was not established for members of either the Ferrers or Hardreshull families.57 The remainder of the in situ Merevale glass is of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.58 The tracery lights of the chancel east window retain, amongst the many inserts from the Jesse Tree, some of their original glazing (Fig. 9). This includes in lights A5 and A6 an Annunciation in white and yellow stain, of indifferent quality; A2, 3, 8, 9, and 10 each contains a shield of arms. In A2 and 8 the shield bears Argent a crozier or over a bend checky: an adaptation of the arms of the Cistercian Order. The shield in A10 has Argent a sword or between a crescent and a pierced molet, probably for Merevale Abbey, the seal of which has the Virgin and Child between a crescent and star or molet.59 The remaining shields are Vairy or and gules (Ferrers) and Gules 3 fishes naiant argent (de la Roche): Ellen de la Roche married Edmund

56 S. H. Steinberg, ‘Two portraits of Sir John Hartshill’, Antiquaries Jnl, 19 (1939), pp. 438–9. 57 Victoria County History, Warwickshire, IV (London, 1947), p. 147. 58 Ibid., p. 146 for a full description. 59 This was pointed out in Newton, ‘Schools’, 3, p. 925.

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Ferrers of Chartley (c. 1386–1435).60 The window was connected with the Ferrers family, for lights B2 and 5 also contain quarries with their horseshoe device. There is in addition part of a ‘black-letter’ inscription set amongst other fragments in C5:

This may refer to Robert, Lord Ferrers of Chartley (d.1412), and his wife Margaret whose brasses are set in the chancel floor. The date of the in situ glass in the east window from the style appears to be not earlier than the third quarter of the fifteenth century. The chancel north chapel seems to have been rebuilt in the early sixteenth century. The second window from the east (nIII) has in the lower tracery lights the remains of a set of six apostles in white and yellow stain under canopies and standing on tiled floors (Fig. 10). The heads of the three main lights contain canopies, the central one set on a ruby ground, the flanking pair on blue grounds (Fig. 11). In addition the centre light has a panel depicting the Assumption of the Virgin. The width of each main light is 0.48 m. The tracery lights of the next window to the west (nIV) have figures and scenes under similar canopies to those in nIII. Included are the Annunciation, Noli me tangere, St Margaret, and St Anne teaching the Virgin to read (Fig. 12). The canopies in the heads of the main lights are somewhat fragmented and made up with parts of figures, including St John the Baptist (Fig. 13). The tracery light glazing in both windows is of a similar character, but there are differences between some of the canopies in the heads of the main lights. Nonetheless, the tracery designs of the windows in the chancel north chapel are uniform, which suggests that the rebuilding and glazing were all carried out in one campaign. This is supported by antiquarian evidence of lost glass.61 Dugdale and Burton recorded in the north windows the arms of the See of Bangor impaling On a chevron between 3 doves and in chief 3 gillyflowers with 3 amulets surmounted by a mitre and with this inscription below:

60 G. E. Cokayne, The Complete Peerage, rev. ed. V. Gibbs and H. A. Doubleday, V (London, 1926), p. 318. 61 Newton, ‘Schools’, 3, pp. 919–29.

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D ns Tho:Skevēton epūs de Bangarēsis hanc fenestrā fieri fecit. Thomas Consecratus 1509 1:H:8 obiit [piece of page missing] 1533:25:H:8 62 Thomas Skevington was the son of John Pace and was probably born at Skeffington in Leicestershire. He was a monk at Merevale and by 1509 was appointed abbot of Beaulieu in Hampshire; in the same year he became bishop of Bangor and he held both posts until his death. Skevington’s body was buried at Beaulieu and his heart at Bangor; tiles with his arms are known from Beaulieu.63 To his old home at Merevale he gave (or bequeathed) this window as his memorial. Although the antiquarian sources do not give the exact location of this window, it can be assumed with confidence that it was one of those in the chancel north chapel. It must have been near that commemorating John Handewell, a former reeve of Coventry, and his wife, which contained this inscription: Orate pro animabus Johis Handewell quondam pretoris Coventrie et Alicie uxoris eius, qui istam fenestram unacum opere amato ubi tumulatur tumulo de alabastro, in partibus borealibus et sumptibus suis proprius fieri fecit, quorum animabus miseretur deus amen. On his tomb was a largely illegible inscription which ended with the date 1524.64 There are four windows in the chancel north chapel north wall and the Skevington and Handewell inscriptions may have come from the two which retain some of their glazing. They at least provide evidence that the north chapel was glazed in the 1520s and 1530s.

Transcribed in ibid., 3, p. 919. Ibid., 3, pp. 920, 923, 929; for the Beaulieu tiles, see B. W. Greenfield, ‘Encaustic tiles of the Middle Ages found in the South of Hampshire’, Proc. Hampshire Field Club and Archaeological Society, 2 (1892), no. F16. 64 Newton, ‘Schools’, 3, pp. 920, 929. 62 63

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The in situ glass at Merevale is the most substantial and informative of all surviving Cistercian window decoration. It provides firm evidence that at least from the middle of the fourteenth century lay people were giving stained glass to Cistercian houses. Stained glass with Cistercian associations can occasionally be found beyond the capella ante portas. Apart from the White Monks depicted at the deathbed of Henry Murdac, the former abbot of Fountains and archbishop of York (d. 1153), in the great St William window of c. 1423 in York Minster,65 the instances are confined to parish churches. The church of St George at Dunster in Somerset was until the Dissolution divided between Benedictine monastic and parochial use, the latter in the nave. A window in the north aisle of this part of the church retains some fifteenth-century border-work and figural fragments; also modern copies of a quarry design formerly here which depicts a crozier and a scroll bearing the ‘black-letter’ legend: w donsterre abbas de cliva William Dunster was Abbot of Cleeve between 1419 and 1421. Although Cleeve had no direct associations with this parish church, the abbot’s surname indicates that he came from here and presumably gave a window or windows as a private benefaction.66 The manor of Yarnton in Oxfordshire was held by Rewley Abbey and in the tracery lights of a window in the parish church are two in situ figures of monks in white habits dating from c. 1400–20 (Fig. 14). From their praying postures they were almost certainly the donors of the window.67 In the other two instances of Cistercian glazing in parish churches known to the present writer both were owned by a neighbouring abbey. Although the drawing of revenue from ecclesiastical sources like parish churches had been expressly forbidden by the founders of the Order, in practice it soon became very difficult to prevent; in c. 1170 Pope Alexander III wrote The panel is illustrated in Knowles, Essays, Pl. XXXV. For a recent discussion of the window see O’Connor and Haselock, ‘Stained and Painted Glass’, pp. 374–7. 66 C. Woodforde, Stained Glass in Somerset 1250–1830 (Oxford, 1946), p. 271, Pl. XLVII. 67 P. A. Newton, The County of Oxford. A Catalogue of Medieval Stained Glass (Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi, Great Britain, I) (London, 1979), pp. 224–5. 65

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a circular letter to the English Cistercians ordering them not to transgress on this point and a similar decree was passed at about the same time by a council at Westminster. There are a number of instances even before the thirteenth century of English and Welsh houses owning parish churches and a rigorous banning policy was soon abandoned.68 It is unlikely that the Cistercian prohibition on figural and coloured glass ever extended to the parish churches in the Order’s possession. Even if it did apply, it had been abandoned by the middle of the thirteenth century when an apse window of the church at Lindena in Germany was glazed with the half-length figure of the donor, Valmarus, a knight of Livenwerde, and foliage; Lindena was owned by Dobrilugk Abbey.69 In 1412 Pope John XXIII, in an effort to restore the economic fortunes of Hailes Abbey, permitted the abbot to appoint members of his community in the place of parish priests in the churches of Longbarrow, Pinnock and Didbrook.70 The last was served for a time by a monk named William Whytchurch, who is commemorated in the east window by this fragmentary ‘black-letter’ inscription: /orate p aia/will: whtchyr/ Subsequently, in 1464, Whytchurch became abbot of Hailes, a position he held until 1479. Above this text is a head of Christ and two angels, all dating from the fifteenth century. The angels appear to have been placed originally in tracery lights, although no windows in the church today correspond with the shape of these two panels. The east window formerly contained the arms of Richard, Earl of Cornwall, and King of the Romans, the founder of Hailes.71 The most interesting remains of Cistercian parochial glazing are to be found at Old Warden in Bedfordshire and they merit a detailed description.72 Knowles, Monastic Order, p. 355. H. Oidtmann, Die Rheinsischen Glasmalereien vom 12. bis zum 16. Jahrhundert, I (Düsseldorf, 1912), p. 144, Pl. 240. I am grateful to Dr Karl-Joachim Maercker for the dating of this window. 70 J. G. Coad, Hailes Abbey (London, 1970), p. 7. 71 S. A. Pitcher, ‘Ancient stained glass in Gloucestershire churches’, Trans. Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, 47 (1925), p. 309, Pl. XVI, Fig.34. 72 The window is described briefly in D. and S. Lysons, Magna Britannia, I (London, 1806), pp. 31–48. A coloured lithograph of the abbot was included by Bradford Rudge, a 68 69

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17. Hailes, excavated glass from the refectory, c. 1250 (after A. E. Musty).

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18. Old Warden parish church, restoration diagram of window nIV.

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The easternmost window in the nave north wall (nIV) consists of two main lights with two tracery lights and two eyelets above; at the apex is a quatrefoil tracery light (Fig. 15). The lower parts of both main lights are filled with imitation medieval glass. Most of the left light is occupied by a Cistercian abbot (Fig. 17). He is represented kneeling and facing right. He wears the Order’s white habit and over his left shoulder is a long pastoral staff executed in yellow stain. His hands are clasped in prayer and from them unfurls a white scroll. This bears fragments of two incomplete ‘black-letter’ inscriptions:

The abbot is set on a blue ground diapered with foliage picked out on a light wash, and is framed by white stepped shafts with yellow stain inner faces. Above is a three-sided battlemented white canopy. Each face is pierced by two square-framed delicately traceried windows set in yellow stain embrasures. Between the windows and the battlements is a broad blue cornice, and over the battlements is a small white triple-faced domed turret connected with the side-shafts by white flying buttresses. The ground enclosing the turret is ruby. The border to the light consists of the repeated letter W in white under a yellow stain cresting in the form of a crown, alternating with plain ruby and blue pieces. The outlines and folds of the abbot’s habit are delicately stippled and back-painted. The canopy and side-shafts are also stippled. The panel (medieval glass only) measures 1.15 x 0.46m. The full-length figure in the right-hand light represents St Martha. She faces towards the left and has the Tarasque secured by her girdle, following the story recounted in The Golden Legend.73 In her (misplaced) right hand is a brown scourge, she wears a green mantle over a ruby robe, and has a green nimbus. The ground, side-shafts, canopy, border and dimensions are identical with the left light, except that the cornice of the canopy is ruby. local schoolmaster who excavated on the abbey site, in his Drawings of  Warden Abbey (privately printed, 1839). Since then the window has been summarily treated in P. Nelson, Ancient Painted Glass in England 1170–1500 (London, 1913), p. 52 and N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England Bedfordshire and the County of Huntingdon and Peterborough (Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 131. The abbot is also mentioned and illustrated in R. Marks, ‘Medieval Stained Glass in Bedfordshire’, Bedfordshire Magazine, 15 (1975–77), pp. 180–1. 73 F. S. Ellis (ed.), The Golden Legend or Lives of the Saints as Englished by William Caxton, 4 (London, 1900), p. 136.

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The eyelets contain large white oak leaves and acorns with yellow stain touches reserved on a dark brown painted ground. In each of the two tracery lights is a half-length angel swinging a censer. They wear white albs with yellow stained amices and apparels. The censers are white with yellow stained bands and chains. The borders consist of white quatrefoils alternating with cross-hatched yellow stain pieces. The quatrefoil contains modern glass. The abbot and St Martha have suffered considerably from restoration (Fig. 18). It is particularly regrettable that both of the original heads are missing. The condition of the medieval glass is quite good, although for a time much of it was placed inside out.74 There is quite heavy external decay but the leading is firm. Contrary to the statements — based on no documentary evidence — that the glass came from Warden Abbey, the panels were designed for their present position.75 To find a Cistercian abbot donor figure depicted in this parish church is not altogether surprising, as it formed part of the original endowment of Warden Abbey, which in 1376 obtained a licence for its appropriation.76 The inscription provides the abbot’s name, Walter [de] Clifton. Walter does not occur in any of the published lists of abbots of Warden, but he is identified in two entries in the Calendar of Close Rolls for 1377.77 The precise dates of his tenure of the abbacy are unknown, but it must have been after 1365 and before 1397, when his predecessor and successor occur.78 If can be interpreted as originally reading: iiij anno regis ricardi secundi then the inscription appears to give the date when the glass was donated, i.e. 1380–1. This dating is plausible on stylistic grounds. Such is the fragmentary state of this inscription that it is not clear whether the glass was made during Abbot Walter’s lifetime or posthumously. The former is more likely as the inscription does not begin with a bidding prayer for the soul of the donor. Nothing is known of Walter’s career, but he probably came from the nearby village of Clifton, where Warden Abbey

It was reset in 1935. See D. Shuttleworth, St Leonard’s Church, Old Warden, 14th ed. (Biggleswade, 1971), p. 8. 75 This supposition was made in ibid., p. 8 and Pevsner, Bedfordshire, p. 131. 76 Victoria County History, Bedfordshire, III (London, 1912), p. 255. 77 Calendar of Close Rolls. Edward III, XIV, 1374–1377 (London, 1913), pp. 513, 531. 78 Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous. III, 22–51 Edward III (London, 1937), p. 20; Calendar of Patent Rolls. Richard II, VI, 1396–1399 (London, 1909), p. 139. 74

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owned land.79 His chief claim to fame is that his representation at Old Warden is the only surviving one of a Cistercian abbot so far recorded in English medieval glass.

See G. H. Fowler (ed.), Cartulary of the Abbey of Old Wardon, Beds. Historical Record Society, 13 (1930). 79

XII The Thirteenth-Century Glazing of Salisbury Cathedral

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n contrast with Canterbury, York, Lincoln and Beverley, the 13thcentury glazing of Salisbury Cathedral for the most part has been ignored by art historians. Only a fraction of the original glass survives and none can be proved to be in situ. Almost all the extant panels are in a poor state of preservation and have been re-leaded and early documentation is thin. However, as Salisbury possesses more grisaille designs from the period than any other church in Europe, it is a key monument for examining the relationship between glazing and architecture in the 13th century. This essay is confined to the original glazing of the cathedral proper. Sources There is an almost complete lack of documentation for the original glazing, apart from Matthew Paris’s attribution of the windows to Bishop Robert Bingham (1229–46): ‘. . . quosdam in dicta ecclesia Sarisbiriensi, juvante annuatim praedicto episcopo Ricardo II, ornatus decenter perfecit, scilicet fenestras vitreas, chorum stallatum, frontem ecclesiae cum culmine plumbato’.1 This statement should not be taken at face value and needs to be considered with other documentation associated with the construction of the cathedral. The ‘Richard II’ referred to by Matthew Paris is Bishop Richard Poore, who laid the foundation stones in 1220. On Michaelmas Day 1225 he consecrated the altars of the Holy Trinity and All Saints, St Stephen and St Peter. By the following year sufficient of the building was

1

M. Paris, Historia Anglorum, iii, ed. F. Madden (Rolls Series, xliv, 1869), p. 260.

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completed to accept the interment of William Longespée, earl of Salisbury, and the translation of the bodies of three bishops from Old Sarum. In 1244 an indulgence was granted to those who contributed to the construction of the cathedral and the consecration took place in 1258. The building was completed in 1266.2 The cathedral glazing almost entirely escaped the attention of the late 16th- and early 17th-century antiquaries with the exception of Nicholas Charles, Lancaster Herald, who in c. 1610 recorded eight shields in the chapter-house windows. Richard Symonds, a Royalist officer, also noted these shields on his visit in 1644, but apart from registering that the lower sections of the windows in the ‘body of the church’, i.e. the nave, had been reglazed with the name of Bishop Jewel and the date 1569, his observations were confined to some late medieval glass and the sepulchral monuments.3 The comments of two other visitors, a Spaniard who came to Salisbury in 1544, and the redoubtable Celia Fiennes, who included the city in her wide-ranging itineraries between c. 1685 and 1696, will be discussed later. Except for an unpublished description made in October 1767 by the poet Thomas Gray, no detailed accounts of the medieval glass exist before the 19th century. Apart from brief captions and a few illustrations in John Carter’s Ancient Architecture and in Cahier and Martin’s study of Bourges Cathedral, the first — and still the best — critical analysis of the glass is a paper by Charles Winston published after the Archaeological Institute’s visit to Salisbury in 1849 and later included in a posthumous volume of his essays.4 Westlake made use of some of Winston’s Salisbury material and The most detailed account of the construction phases is P. Z. Blum, ‘The Sequence of Building Campaigns at Salisbury’, Art Bulletin, 73 (1991), pp. 6–38. She suggests (p. 14) that the entire cathedral east of the nave was completed by 1246. See also T. Cocke and P. Kidson, Salisbury Cathedral: Perspectives on the Architectural History, RCHME (London, 1993); R. Spring, Salisbury Cathedral, New Bell’s Cathedral Guides (London, 1987), pp. 10–14; K. Edwards in VCH Wiltshire, iii (London, 1956), pp. 164–65; S. Brown, ‘The Thirteenth-Century Stained Glass of Salisbury Cathedral’, CBA Wessex, Newsletter (Nov. 1992), pp. 4–8. 3 See BL Lansdowne MS 874, fol. 32 for Charles’s drawings; Diary of the Marches of the Royal Army during the Great Civil War, kept by Richard Symonds, ed. C. E. Long, Camden Soc., OS, 74 (1859), pp. 129–30, 137, 140. A brief account of glazing repairs in the late 16th and early 17th centuries is given in Cocke and Kidson, p. 17. 4 J. Carter, The Ancient Architecture of England, pt. I (London, 1795), p. 54 (caption), pl. LXXIX (figs O, P, Q, R — details from the chapter-house are given in S, T, U, V & W); C. Cahier and A. Martin, Monographie de la Cathédrale de Bourges (Paris, 1841–4), pl. étude II, Grisailles D, E; C. Winston, Memoirs Illustrative of the Art of Glass-Painting (London, 1865), pp. 106–29. 2

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both Nelson and Lethaby briefly discussed the Salisbury glazing. In 1930–2 Canon Fletcher published the first comprehensive catalogue of the glass, including the 19th-century windows.5 This has been supplemented by Roy Spring’s works and the account in the Buildings of England series. Some recent studies have attempted to place the glass in a wider context.6 The published material on Salisbury can be supplemented by extensive unpublished drawings and notes. Carter’s pencil sketches were made in 1802 and in July 1836 C. E. Gwilt, working from tracings made in the previous year by C. Nash, produced a series of watercolours; neither surveyed all of the extant glass. Winston’s own meticulous watercolours date from between 1843 and 1858, mostly of glass accessible to him whilst it was on the glazier’s bench.7 Other illustrations were made inter alia by Octavius Hudson in 1843, C. A. Buckler between 1857 and 1900 and the glass-painters Clayton & Bell.8 A series of late 19th-century copies of some of the grisaille and figural glass are in the cathedral muniments.9 Collectively these sources are valuable supplements to the surviving glass; comparison with the existing glazing shows that most of the illustrations are quite accurate copies. N. H. J. Westlake, A History of Design in Painted Glass, I (London, 1881), pp. 117–18, 136–43, pls LXIX, LXXXIV–LXXXVI (he also may have known C. E. Gwilt’s works, for which see below n. 7); P. Nelson, Ancient Painted Glass in England 1170–1500 (London, 1913), pp. 208–09; W. R Lethaby, ‘Early Thirteenth Century Glass at Salisbury Cathedral’, Jnl. British Society of Master Glass-Painters, 1, no. 4 (1924–6), pp. 17–18; J. M. J. Fletcher, ‘The Stained Glass in Salisbury Cathedral’, Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society Magazine, 45 (1930–2), pp. 235–53. 6 Spring, Salisbury, pp. 104-11; idem., The Stained Glass of Salisbury Cathedral (Salisbury, rev. edn 1987); N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England Wiltshire (Harmondsworth, 2nd ed. rev. by B. Cherry, 1975) pp. 407–10; R. Marks in The Age of Chivalry, ed. J. Alexander and P. Binski (London, 1987), pp. 140–42; idem., Stained Glass in England during the Middle Ages (London, 1993), pp. 125–33. 7 Carter’s sketches comprise the Jesse Tree, the Angel appearing to Zacharias, grisaille and borders (BL Add. MS 29939, fol. 57; fols 81–83 are concerned with the chapter-house glazing). Gwilt’s watercolours are in the possession of Chapel Studio of Kings Langley, Herts.; photographs are in the National Monuments Record. Winston’s illustrations are in BL Add. MS 35211, vols III, IV (a list of panels is given in Winston, Memoirs, pp. 345, 355, 357–58) and Add. MS 33851, fol. 74 (pencil sketches copied from Carter’s drawings). 8 Buckler’s drawings are BL Add. MS 37138, nos 32–37. The Hudson, Clayton & Bell and other material on Salisbury (including part of an album collected by the Revd J. H. Cardew) is in the Dept. of Prints, Drawings and Paintings, the Victoria and Albert Museum. 9 Salisbury Cathedral Muniments, nos 192–95. These consist of large and detailed watercolours of grisaille and the Jesse Tree with a label stating that they date from the time of Gilbert Scott’s restorations at Salisbury (1860–75). 5

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All of the detailed records date from after Wyatt’s restoration of the cathedral, which had disastrous consequences for the medieval glazing. Winston noted that ‘whole cartloads of glass, lead, and other rubbish were removed from the nave and transepts, and shot into the town-ditch . . . whilst a good deal of similar rubbish was used to level the ground near the chapter-house’.10 The motive behind the removal of the medieval glass was no doubt a desire for a clear and uniform transmitted light throughout the building. The only element considered worth making use of was the leading, as is revealed in a letter written in 1788 by a Salisbury glazier named John Berry to a Mr Lloyd in London: ‘But I expect to Beate to Peceais a great deal [of glass] very sune, as it his of now use to me, and we do it for the lead’.11 The Surviving Medieval Glass (see Fig. 1)12 The existing figural 13th-century glass belonging to the cathedral proper consists of part of a Tree of Jesse in a nave south aisle lancet (s33) and, in the adjoining light, polylobed medallions depicting the Angel appearing to Zacharias in the Temple and the Adoration of the Magi. The vast majority of the surviving panels are grisaille, most of which were in 1896 placed in the three lancets in the ground storey of the south-east transept façade (s13); the grisaille in the triforium and clerestory windows above (STs, 3, 4, S8) was almost certainly inserted at this time.13 More grisaille exists in a few other windows including the great west window (W1), the west windows of the nave aisles (s36, n35), a triforium window in the west wall of the great south-west transept (ST12) and a small section at the base of window s33.14 Salisbury glass has also found its way to other churches. For the most part these are only fragments of grisaille, as at Winchester Cathedral (south choir aisle), Holme-by-Newark (Notts.), and Boyton and Laverstock in Wiltshire. More substantial but still composite panels of grisaille have 10 Winston, Memoirs, p. 106. In a footnote to this page Winston reported that fragments of glass had been dug up near the chapter-house. 11 Fletcher, p. 237. The reason for the removal of the remaining medieval glass is suggested in Cocke and Kidson, p. 28. 12 The numbering of the windows, which follows the Corpus Vitrearum system, is the work of Mrs Sarah Brown. The windows are shown on the ground plan of the cathedral (Fig. 1). 13 Fletcher, p. 250; he only mentions the grisaille in the three main lancets. 14 See Spring, Stained Glass, passim, for the locations of the other medieval glass.

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come to rest in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio.15 The most rewarding pieces of the Salisbury diaspora are to be found in Grateley church, Hampshire. They comprise a complete medallion depicting the Stoning of St Stephen (with a label bearing STEPHS ORANS EXPIRAT) and a fragment of an Annunciation (with GABRIEL on a scroll) together with various sections of border-work. These panels were rescued from Salisbury at the time of Wyatt’s restorations.16 The cathedral glazing can be considered under two categories: the historiated coloured glass with its associated borders and the grisaille. As we shall see, there may have been a third category, comprising historiated medallions in coloured glass on a grisaille ground; such hybrid windows are known elsewhere in England in the period c. 1200–50.17 It is likely that all of the glass, both historiated and grisaille, was set in wooden frames; all of the 13th-century windows have large external rebates for such frames, some of which may survive. This was probably a standard method of fixing in the 12th and 13th centuries. In the Ely sacrist accounts for 1291–92 is a reference to the purchase of ‘cassis ligneis’ for sixteen clerestory windows of a kind which still existed in Robert Willis’s day; he believed that they were replacements for the original Norman frames.18 15 Most of these have merited brief attention, usually in the relevant Buildings of England volume: e.g. Wiltshire, pp. 126-27, 294 (Boyton and Laverstock); Hampshire, p. 677 (Winchester); Nottinghamshire, p. 146 (Holme-by-Newark). The Laverstock glass is also recorded in RCHME, Churches of South-East Wiltshire (London, 1987), p. 157. For the panels in Toledo see Stained Glass before 1700 in American Collections: Mid-western and Western States, Corpus Vitrearum, Checklist III, Studies in the History of Art, 28 (Nat. Gallery of Art, Washington 1989), p. 218. It has been suggested that a made-up roundel with foliage in the Metropolitan Museum is from Salisbury, but it does not resemble any of the glass of certain Salisbury provenance; see Stained Glass before 1700 in American Collections: New England and New York, Corpus Vitrearum, Checklist I, Studies in the History of Art, 15 (Nat. Gallery of Art, Washington, 1985), p. 97. The Pitcairn Collection has a section of grisaille from the chapter-house; see Stained Glass before 1700 in American Collections: Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern Seaboard States, Corpus Vitrearum, Checklist II, Studies in the History of Art, 23 (Nat. Gallery of Art, Washington, 1987), p. 136 — with further bibliography. All of these, together with the grisaille panel of fragments in the Victoria and Albert Museum, were acquired through Roy Grosvenor Thomas, a leading dealer in stained glass. For his career see the obituary in the Jnl. British Society of Master Glass-Painters, 1, no. 1 (1924–6), pp. 29–31. 16 Winston, Memoirs, p. 107, n. 1. 17 e.g. at Petham (Kent) and West Horsley (Surrey); see Marks, Stained Glass, pp. 137– 40, 148, fig. 109. 18 I owe information on the Salisbury frames to Tim Tatton-Brown, who kindly allowed me to use the results of his examination of nine clerestory windows in the south choir aisle.

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The Historiated Glass and the Borders The iconography, composition and style of the historiated glass provide clues as to the date and possible original location of a few of the panels. Altogether there are the remains of three subjects, or groups of subjects: the Tree of Jesse, scenes from the life of the Virgin or Infancy of Christ (the Angel appearing to Zacharias in the Temple, the Adoration of the Magi and the Annunciation fragment at Grateley), and finally the Grateley martyrdom of St Stephen (Fig. 8). In the last, ruby glass is used for the head of the saint in order to indicate his wounds, which is not unusual in medieval glass-painting. Windows depicting the life and martyrdom of a particular saint are often associated with an altar or chapel dedicated to him or her. 9 If this were the case at Salisbury the St Stephen panel is likely to have been in the window (s5) above the altar dedicated to him which stood at the east end of the south choir aisle; this was one of the three altars consecrated by Bishop Poore in 1225. The second, that of the Holy Trinity and All Saints, was located in the projecting axial chapel at the east end (the Trinity Chapel); this chapel was used for the important daily Mass of the Virgin and the Tree of Jesse would have been an appropriate subject for its windows.20 Part of the Jesse is known to have been in the nave at the beginning of the 19th century, but given the usual location of the Tree of Jesse in the eastern windows in 12th- and early 13th-century great church glazing (as at Saint-Denis, Canterbury and Freiburg-im-Breisgau), it would be surprising if this were not the original position for the Salisbury Jesse.21 It is slightly wider than the central lancet

For Ely see The Sacrist Rolls of Ely, II, ed. F. R. Chapman (Cambridge, 1907), p. 9. I am grateful to Alexandrina Buchanan for the Ely reference and for Willis’s remarks. 19 e.g. the St Martin scene in the chapel dedicated to this saint in the north-east transept of Canterbury Cathedral; see M. H. Caviness, The Windows of Christ Church Cathedral Canterbury, Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi, Great Britain, II (London, 1981), pp. 127–28, figs 208–09. 20 The liturgical use of the Trinity Chapel is mentioned in The Register of S. Osmund, ed. W. H. Rich Jones (Rolls Series, lxxviii, 1884), II, pp. 38–39. 21 A section of the Jesse is described by Carter as being in the nave (Ancient Architecture, pt 1, p. 54, pl. LXXIX (Fig. Q) ). This plate was published in 1806, but the original drawings for it were made in 1802 (see above, p. 282). Between 1819 and 1824 the Jesse was moved to the great west window of the nave, where it remained until 1924 when it was re-located in its present position (Fletcher, p. 240). For Saint-Denis see L. Grodecki, Les Vitraux de

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1. Plan of Salisbury Cathedral with window numbers.

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2. Unpainted grisaille designs, 1220–58. (A), (B), (D) and (E) after C. Winston, (C) and (F) after R. Marks. Not to scale.

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3. Painted grisaille designs, 1220–58. (A), (B), (C), (D), (F) and (H) after C. Winston, (C) and (F) after drawings in Salisbury Cathedral Library, (E) after C. Winston, (G) after N. H. J. Westlake. Not to scale.

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4. Painted grisaille and border designs, 1220–58. (A) and (B) after drawings in Salisbury Cathedral Library, (C) and (E) after C. E. Gwilt, (D), (H) and (J) after N. H. J. Westlake, (F) after Clayton and Bell drawings in the Victoria & Albert Museum, (G) after C. Winston, (I) after a photograph of section at Grately. Not to scale.

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opening in the east wall and shows traces of having been slightly cut down; however the borders now framing the extant sections may not have formed part of the original composition, which would explain the discrepancy.22 Iconographically the Salisbury Jesse conforms to the type which was established in the 12th century, with the Virgin and Christ seated frontally against the vertical stem of the tree and flanked by prophets standing in the branches (Fig. 7); both the lower section, with seated Old Testament kings and the reclining figure of Jesse, and the apex which would have depicted the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove, are missing.23 The first glass examples are at Saint-Denis and Chartres and other early English Jesses are known at York, Canterbury, Westwell, Kent and Kidlington, Oxfordshire. In the last two the tree, as at Salisbury, is recognisably a vine, albeit with stylised leaves. At Salisbury Christ is flanked by angels instead of prophets, a feature not found in any of the other English examples cited above (except possibly Westwell); in the Jesse window in the Sainte-Chapelle, Paris (c. 1243–8) angels flank the doves of the Holy Spirit.24 The Angel appearing to Zacharias scene (Luke I. 5–22) is unique in English 13th-century glass (Fig. 6); it might have belonged to a window depicting the life of St John the Baptist (there was an altar in the main transept dedicated to this saint), but as the shape of the panel is identical with the Adoration of the Magi medallion (Fig. 5) it almost certainly came from a Marian Infancy of Christ cycle. In the 12th-century wall-paintings in the apse of St Gabriel’s Chapel in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral the Appearance of the Angel to Zacharias occurs in Saint-Denis. Etude sur le vitrail au Xlle siècle, Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi, France Série Etudes, i (Paris, 1976), p. 71; for Canterbury see Caviness, pp. 172–74, figs 232–37, col. pl. X; for a recent discussion of the Freiburg Jesse see R. Becksmann, Deutsche Glasmalerei des Mittelalters (Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt, 1988), pp. 100–01, pl. 5. 22 The width of the Jesse is 61 in./1.55 m, which is 5 in./130 mm larger than the central lancet in the east wall; the flanking lancets are narrower. 61 in./1.55 m is also the standard width of the nave aisle lancets openings. The present borders were already associated with the Jesse in Carter’s day; Winston was uncertain as to whether they were coeval with the Jesse originally but eventually considered they did belong with it (see above, n. 7). 23 A. Watson, The Early Iconography of the Tree of Jesse (Oxford and London, 1934). 24 For the English examples (with further bibliography) see Marks, Stained Glass, pp. 113–15, 117, 120, 123, 137, 139_40, pl. VII, figs 88, 108; Kidlington is published in P. A. Newton, The County of Oxford: A Catalogue of Medieval Stained Glass, Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi, Great Britain, I (London, 1979), p. 129, pl. 37. Westwell is very heavily restored. For the Sainte-Chapelle Jesse see M. Aubert, L. Grodecki, J. Lafond, J. Verrier, Les Vitraux de Notre-Dame et de la Sainte-Chapelle de Paris, Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi, France, I (Paris, 1959), pp. 172–83, pls 42–44.

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association with the Annunciation and the Nativity; the same scene is in a late 13th-century window in the chapter-house of York Minster containing episodes from the life of the Virgin, including the Infancy of Christ.25 Celia Fiennes described the Salisbury windows ‘especially the Quoire’ as ‘very finely painted and large of the history of the Bible’; her testimony is unreliable, but finds some corroboration in Thomas Gray’s description of glass (which by implication can be interpreted as historiated and coloured) remaining at the east ends of the aisles.26 It is likely that the historiated glass was concentrated in the liturgically most important part of the building, east of the pulpitum which stood between the eastern piers of the crossing. There is no evidence to show whether figural glazing extended into the upper elevation of the east end, or if the clerestory windows were filled by the grisaille described later. Contemporary large-scale glazing schemes fail to provide any indications on this point which might be conclusive. For the most part (e.g. Canterbury, Chartres and Bourges), the upper lancets were filled with monumental standing figures, but in Châlons-sur-Marne Cathedral all the clerestory windows apart from the three in the apse seem to have contained grisaille.27 The style and design of some of the figural glass could be as early as c. 1220–5, i.e. from before Bishop Bingham’s period of office.28 The shape of the

25 For the Canterbury paintings see E. W. Tristram, English Medieval Wall Painting: The Twelfth Century (Oxford, 1944), pp. 15–19, 103, pl. 12; a dating of c. 1155–60 has been suggested by Deborah Kahn, ‘The structural evidence for the dating of the St Gabriel chapel wall-paintings at Christ Church Cathedral Canterbury’, Burlington Mag., 126 (1984), pp. 225–29. For the York window see J. Toy, A Guide and Index to the Windows of York Minster (York, 1985), p. 41. The Angel appearing to Zacharias also occurs in the initial to Luke in a mid-12th-century English Gospels (Oxford, Bodleian Lib. MS Auct. D. 2. 15); see C. M. Kauffmann, A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles. Vol. 3 Romanesque Manuscripts 1066–1190 (London, 1975), p. 107, ill. 214. In the 13th-century apse clerestory glazing of Chartres Cathedral this scene occurs as part of a Christological cycle. 26 The Journeys of Celia Fiennes (intro. by John Hillaby) (London 1983), p. 25; Fiennes’s description is questionable as she also stated that the chapter-house windows depicted ‘the history of the Bible’ (p. 24). Gray’s account was communicated by Professor Marion Roberts at the British Archaeological Association Conference in Salisbury. For her assessment of Gray as an observer of ancient buildings see ‘Thomas Gray’s contribution to the study of medieval architecture’, Archit. Hist., 36 (1993), pp. 49–68. 27 Chartres has a vast literature. For Canterbury and Bourges see Caviness, Cahier and Martin and n. 55 below. For Châlons see Les Vitraux de Champagne-Ardenne, Corpus Vitrearum, Recensement des vitraux anciens de la France, iv (Paris, 1992), p. 333, fig. 322. 28 The suggestion that the Zacharias and Adoration panels originally may have come from Old Sarum Cathedral can be dismissed (Spring, Stained Glass, p. 25).

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St Stephen panel (Fig. 8) is identical with the medallions in the Charlemagne window in one of the ambulatory chapels at Chartres Cathedral, dating from the early 13th century, and there is the same filling of the spandrels by foliage sprays.29 The lively, slender figures with their fluttering draperies and rhythmical folds outlined against the blue ground together with the reduction of landscape conventions to a mere suggestion are characteristic features of the Becket miracle windows at Canterbury, probably completed by the date of the translation of the relics on 7 July 1220. Although such features are still present in the Westminster Abbey glazing of 1246–59, it is likely that the eastern sections of the cathedral were glazed in time for Bishop Poore’s consecrations in 1225.30 What little can be made out of the figure style in the surviving Annunciation and Tree of Jesse suggests that they were similar to the St Stephen panel. The draperies and elongated proportions of the angel in the Zacharias scene are also comparable with the other historiated glass. That being said, the possibility has to be entertained that the Zacharias and Adoration panels may be of later date than the St Stephen, Annunciation and Jesse. The configurations of their medallions, which are found in French glass of c. 1207–35 and in the grisaille of the Five Sisters window in York Minster (c. 1250), occur in some painted grisaille from Salisbury which as it has clear grounds must date from the second half of the 13th century (Fig. 4f ).31 The historiated panels and this grisaille were in the same lancet when drawn by Carter, so, if they were originally associated, then the later stages of the glazing, ie the nave, must have contained some figural as well as grisaille glass; moreover there would have been a second Marian/Infancy 29 For the Charlemagne panel see Y. Delaporte and E. Houvet, Les Vitraux de la Cathédrale de Chartres, II (Chartres, 1926), pls CVI, CVII, CVIII. The dating of the Chartres glass is disputed. A summary of current conflicting views is given in J. W. Williams, Bread, Wine, & Money. The Windows of the Trades at Chartres Cathedral (Chicago, 1993), pp. 15–17. 30 For Canterbury see Caviness, pp. 177–214, esp. figs 301, 305; the Westminster glass is published in Marks, Stained Glass, pp. 134–36, pl. IX, fig. 106. Blum (p. 14, n.44) accepts a date of c. 1220–5 for the St Stephen medallion. 31 The French parallels for the Zacharias and Adoration medallions are at Sens Cathedral (Prodigal Son window of c. 1207), Lyons Cathedral (1215–20) and the St Peter window in Notre-Dame, Dijon (mid-1230s); see Les Vitraux de Bourgogne, Franche-Comté et Rhône-Alpes, Corpus Vitrearum, Recensement des vitraux anciens de la France, III (Paris, 1986), figs 157, 260, 21. For York see J. Browne, The History of the Metropolitan Church of St Peter, York (London, 1847), II, pl. LXVII. For the Salisbury clear grisaille see below, pp. 297–8. Winston (Memoirs, p. 110) believed that the Zacharias and Adoration medallions were of the same date as the Tree of Jesse.

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5. Salisbury Cathedral, Adoration of the Magi, 1220–58. 6. Salisbury Cathedral, Angel appearing to Zacharias in the Temple, 1220–58.

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7. Salisbury Cathedral, Tree of Jesse, 1220–58.

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8. Grately, Hampshire, Stoning of Stephen. From Salisbury Cathedral, c. 1220–58.

9. Salisbury Cathedral. Unpainted grisaille design, 1220–58. Watercolour by Charles Winston, 1849 [BL Add. MS 35211, fol. 191]. British Library

10. Salisbury Cathedral. Painted grisaille design, 1220–58. Watercolour by Charles Winston, 1849 [BL Add. MS 35211, fol. 177]. British Library

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cycle.32 Given the poor state of preservation and frequency of re-location of the glazing all this is highly speculative. Nor has it proved possible to identify glass elsewhere which can be attributed to the same glaziers, which might have clarified some of the Salisbury issues.33 The border designs are to be associated with the historiated glass. The symmetrical double spray design with enframing stems now enclosing the Tree of Jesse (Figs 4h, 7) occurs in the Canterbury clerestory and typological windows, in the Prodigal Son window at Bourges Cathedral of c. 1210–15 and in the Musée Municipal at Sens (mid-13th century).34 A similar motif (Fig. 4g) lacking the enframing stems and depicted by Carter with the Angel appearing to Zacharias panel is comparable to designs at Lincoln of c. 1200–35 and at Beverley (probably 1230s).35 A variant of the fretwork/zigzag pattern at Grateley (Fig. 4j) is present in the Canterbury clerestory and in the cathedrals at Rouen (early 13th century) and Le Mans (mid-13th century).36 The Grateley design of repeated circles appears to be two borders placed side-by-side and has no close parallels (Fig. 4i);37 in common with the other Salisbury borders it conforms to the trend in French and English glass towards more simplified borders compared with the late 12th century.38 Some of the chapter-house border designs follow very closely the patterns from the cathedral proper.39 In addition to the choir cycle represented by the Grateley panels. There are some affinities between the chapter-house glazing and mid-century manuscripts associated with an illuminator identified as the Sarum Master (see Marks, Stained Glass, p. 143, fig. 113). 34 Caviness, figs. 40, 142, 378 (Canterbury); Westlake, vol. I, p. 129, pl. LXXVII (Bourges); Vitraux de France, exhib. cat. (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 1973–74), no. 9 (Sens). 35 BL Add. MS 29939, fol. 57 (Carter’s drawing); Winston, Memoirs, pl. I, fig. 3 (opp. p. 109); N. J. Morgan, The Medieval Painted Glass of Lincoln Cathedral, Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi, Great Britain Occasional Paper, III (London 1983), fig. B (Type J); D. O’Connor, ‘The Medieval Stained Glass of Beverley Minster’, British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions (1989), pl. XIVe (Type 1). 36 Caviness, fig. 92 (Canterbury); Westlake, I, p. 125, pl. LXXVb (Rouen); V. C. Raguin, Stained Glass in Thirteenth-Century Burgundy (Princeton, 1982), fig. 134 (Le Mans). 37 The original border design on which the illustration to this paper is based is in Westlake, I, p. 117, pl. LXIXb. 38 The grisaille in the west windows of the aisles (n35, s36) is enclosed within narrow borders comprising yellow fleurs-de-lis on blue grounds alternating with plain ruby glass. Winston (Memoirs, p. 120) states that these are of 14th-century date and were taken from another window in the cathedral. As they were already associated with the grisaille when Winston saw them his assertion would be questionable but for his observation that the fleurs-de-lis are yellow-stained. 39 Chapter-house borders can be found in W1 (heavily restored) and s33 (enclosing the Adoration and Zacharias medallions). 32 33

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The Grisaille Glass Perhaps of greater importance than the coloured and historiated glass is Salisbury’s contribution to our knowledge of grisaille glazing. In spite of the losses it has the largest assemblage of unpainted and painted 13th-century grisaille designs in Europe. Excluding the later chapter-house windows, there are at least twenty different designs amongst the existing panels and others survived into the 19th century. Grisaille must have played a major role in the Salisbury glazing and much thought given to its impact on the overall decorative scheme of the building as well as on the clarity of transmitted light. The Spanish visitor in 1544 remarked that the cathedral ‘was very well lighted’, although he may of course have been referring to the windows themselves rather than the glass; it may be more than coincidental that Thomas Gray also commented upon the plain white glass.40 The Salisbury grisaille designs fall into two groups: those of plain white glass, with the designs formed not by paint but by the leading, and those painted with foliage and stems. Although both types are classified under the title of grisaille many of the original designs are far from monochromatic, for they are enriched with bosses, interlacing straps and carefully located pieces of coloured glass (Figs. 2–4, 7, 9 and 10). At Salisbury there are at least six designs of unpainted grisaille. Three consist of single and double strapwork motifs forming a lattice pattern and another two are variants of strapwork frets interlacing with circles (Fig. 2a, b, d, e, f ). The fifth is a fish-scale pattern of which only a few sections remain (Fig. 2c). Grisaille with the designs formed by the leading is a standard feature of Cistercian glazing in the late 12th and early 13th centuries and the Salisbury examples are comparable with Cistercian grisaille designs such as those at Obazine, France (c. 1170–90), Eberbach, Germany (late 12th century), Santes Creus, Spain (1174–1211) and Pontigny, France (late 12th or early 13th century).41

40 ‘Narrative of the Visit of the Duke de Najéra to England, in the year 1543–4: written by his Secretary, Pedro de Gante: Communicated in a Letter to Hudson Gurney, Esq MP, Vice-President SA by Frederic Madden, Esq FSA’, Archaeologia, 23 (1831), p. 356. For Gray see above n. 26. 41 R. Marks, ‘Cistercian window glass in England and Wales’, Cistercian Art and Architecture in the British Isles, ed. C. Norton and D. Park (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 213– 14; idem., Stained Glass, pp. 128–29. For the Cistercian parallels see H. Zakin, French

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The almost total loss of early window glass from English Cistercian houses precludes indigenous comparisons, with the exception of a problematic piece from Abbey Dore (Hereford & Worcester) which had a similar fish-scale pattern to Salisbury.42 It should not be assumed from these comparisons that the Salisbury unpainted grisaille glazing was based on Cistercian prototypes. Windows with designs formed by the leading occur in numerous churches which have no connection with the Order and it is likely that the white monks adopted a form of plain glazing which was already in current usage. In England there are several windows of this type in non-Cistercian contexts, of which the earliest may be Brabourne in Kent (late 12th century). Others dating from the 13th century are at Hastingleigh, also in Kent, and in the Stained Glass Museum at Ely.43 Some of the Salisbury designs are close to those in the nave clerestory of York Minster; the latter are usually considered to date from c. 1300, although it is more likely that along with the historiated panels they were re-used from Archbishop Roger’s church (1154–81) or its 13th-century accretions.44 On the Continent the most similar of the nonCistercian designs are those from the former Benedictine abbey at Orbais, the Augustinian foundation of Saint-Jean at Sens, the church at Cudot (all in France, the last two in Burgundy) and Notre-Dame de Valére bei Sitten in Switzerland.45 A minimum of fourteen painted grisaille designs remain from the cathedral (Figs 3, 4).46 This type of grisaille, with trefoil and cinquefoilheaded ‘stiff-leaf ’ foliage placed (with one exception) on cross-hatched

Cistercian Grisaille Glass (New York and London, 1979), pls 9, 40, 44, 164. Similar designs appear on tiles and in the Reuner Musterbuch (Vienna, Osterreich. Nationalbibliothek, cod. 507; Zakin, pls 125–27,131–33, 153–57). 42 Marks, Stained Glass, pp. 128–29, fig. 100. 43 ibid., pls VIII(a, c), fig. 108. 44 ibid., fig. 101(c, d). As grisaille is found in non-Cistercian churches no significance should be attached to the fact that Bishop Poore had been a pupil of Archbishop Langton, who had stayed at Pontigny during the Interdict. The possibility of Cistercian architectural influences on Salisbury and other contemporary buildings through such a connection is suggested in V. Jansen, ‘Lambeth Palace Chapel, the Temple Choir, and Southern English Gothic Architecture of c. 1215–1240’, England in the Thirteenth Century (Proceedings of the 1984 Harlaxton Symposium), ed. W. M. Ormrod (Woodbridge, 1985), p. 99. 45 Zakin, pls 187–88; for Cudot see Vitraux de Bourgogne, p. 139, fig. 119. 46 Westlake, vol. I, pl. LXXXVI, illustrates eleven excluding the design with a clear ground (Fig. 4f); Winston (Memoirs, p. 115) mentions that there were between 20 and 30 painted grisaille designs, including the chapter-house glazing.

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grounds, is a common form of glazing found in England in the 13th century. English painted grisaille differs from its French counterparts principally because, for the most part, it is laid out in geometrical forms such as circles, quatrefoils and diamonds which are usually superimposed on one another so as to suggest several planes which overlap and partly conceal the ‘layer’ below.47 These geometrical forms occur on the Continent, but they tend to be interrupted by interlacing straps or bands similar to those found in unpainted grisaille windows. Amongst English examples the Salisbury designs are comparable to grisaille surviving or recorded at Lincoln Cathedral (c.  1200–35), Westminster Abbey (1246–59), the transepts of York Minster (c. 1241–50) and some parish churches, notably in Kent (Petham, Preston, Stockbury, Stodmarsh and Westwell).48 Some of the painted grisaille fragments excavated at Henry Ill’s nearby residences at Clarendon and Ludgershall are similar to those found at Salisbury.49 No two designs in any of the above are exactly alike, which testifies to the ingenuity of the glaziers responsible for setting them out. As was mentioned above, one of the Salisbury designs has a ground which is not painted with a crosshatched design, therefore increasing the translucency of the glass (Fig. 4f ). The grisaille from the Salisbury chapter-house also has clear grounds, but these panels are of a different design and presumably formed part of the cathedral glazing, perhaps in association with the Angel’s appearance to Zacharias and Adoration of the Magi medallions (Figs 5, 6). They cannot be far removed in date from the chapter-house windows, which were probably glazed in the late 1260s.50 A desire for improved transmission of light is evident in both England and France from the 1260s and 70s.51 The difficulty in dating the Salisbury grisaille, because of the lack of reliable documentation, is compounded by the dearth of evidence for the original disposition of the painted and unpainted grisaille. Glass is a medium which frequently was subject to re-location, but it is worth calling upon the 47 Winston, Memoirs, pp. 116–17, was the first to describe the differences. See also Marks, Stained Glass, p. 129, fig. 103. 48 Morgan, Lincoln, fig. C (Lincoln); Browne, York, pl. LXVII (York); Marks, Stained Glass, figs 102–05 (Lincoln, Westminster, Westwell, Stockbury). 49 R. Marks, ‘Window glass’, in T. B. James and A. M. Robinson, Clarendon Palace, Society of Antiquaries Research Reports, 45 (London, 1988), pp. 229–33, fig. 87. I am grateful to David O’Connor for the information on Ludgershall. 50 See Marks, Stained Glass, p. 141 for a discussion of the chapter-house and its likely date. 51 Ibid., pp. 142–43.

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evidence of the early 19th-century observers, even if they post-date Wyatt’s restoration. One triforium window in the main south transept is filled with an unpainted latticework design (Fig. 2f ), but as the leading is entirely modern it is doubtful whether it is in situ. Winston considered that two unpainted designs in the east clerestory of the main north transept were in their original positions (they are no longer there). He also noted that four other sections of unpainted grisaille had been removed from the clerestory and placed at the base of the ground storey lancets in the façade of the south-east transept; probably they are amongst those still there today. Fig. 2e was in the clerestory.52 Almost certainly the simpler, more translucent unpainted grisaille was confined to the windows in the upper levels of the cathedral, with the painted patterns mostly reserved for the ground storey lancets. A section of painted grisaille appears amongst post-medieval quarries in the ground storey lancet to the east of Bishop Bridport’s tomb (s10) in an engraving dated 1815 in Britton’s Cathedral Antiquities; the design includes a repeated diamond strapwork pattern which is possibly identifiable with one of the extant panels (Fig. 4a).53 The grisaille located at the west end of the nave aisles (n35, s36; Fig. 3 e, b) was in the nave when Carter drew it.54 We have already speculated as to whether the choir clerestory windows were filled with ornamental glass. If the grisaille recorded in s10 in 1815 was in situ, some of the lower windows in the eastern parts of the cathedral contained non-figurative glazing; however, even discounting Celia Fiennes’s vague evidence, Canterbury and northern French precedents would suggest that, at the very least, it would have played second fiddle to the historiated coloured glass. Conversely grisaille would have been the dominant, if not the universal, form of window embellishment in the nave. The quantity and range of the Salisbury grisaille glazing, taken together with the scantier remnants from Lincoln and Westminster and the large in situ expanse in the north transept of York Minster, indicate that nonfigurative glass was a major component in the glazing of great churches in the later 12th and 13th centuries. The same seems also to have been true in France and the survival of so much coloured glass at Chartres may give a distorted picture. Suger’s Saint-Denis and Saint-Rémi at Rheims had purely ornamental windows as well as historiated glazing. Bourges cathedral Winston, Memoirs, p. 121; BL Add. MS 35211, vol. iv. J. Britton, Cathedral Antiquities, II (London, 1814), pl. XXVI. 54 Carter, Ancient Architecture, pt. 1, p. 54, caption to pl. LXXIX, (figs O, P).

52

53

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retains a large number of painted grisaille windows in the nave clerestory and inner aisles, with figural glass in the tracery oculi: the eastern part of the building was reserved for the principal display of coloured figurai glass. Rheims cathedral also possessed painted grisaille glazing.55 Moreover the close affinities of the designs at Salisbury and Westminster transcend the architectural distinctions between the two buildings. In this respect they are responding to a similar aesthetic and their arrays of ornamental windows must have helped to disguise the new features of Westminster to all but the most informed of 13th-century viewers. Grisaille windows have been considered of lesser importance than coloured and consequently their rate of destruction has been higher. Economics may have been a factor in the choice of this kind of glazing: as the Westminster Abbey fabric accounts show, white glass cost less both to purchase and to work than coloured glass. In 1253 the respective prices for painting and leading per square foot were 4d and 8d.56 None the less it is hard to avoid the conclusion that there were other issues at play. It is by no means certain that elaborate, historiated coloured glass was intrinsically more desirable than grisaille and ornamental glazing, unless there was a demand for imagery in windows; indeed in the early 14th century grisaille predominates in the chancel windows of some important parish churches.57 The occurrence of numerous different grisaille designs at Salisbury indicates that economy was not the only consideration as each one required a separate cartoon which must have increased the cost of the glazing, as would the intricacy of the leading patterns. It has been suggested that the nave was intended to be a monumental backdrop to the great liturgical processions used by the cathedral clergy to impress the laity; if this was so, the sobriety of the grisaille windows would have contrasted with the splendour of the clerical vestments and ornaments even if some figural glazing did occur in this part See Grodecki, Saint-Denis, pp. 122–26, pls IV, XV, ills 183–92; M. H. Caviness, Sumptuous Arts at the Royal Abbeys in Reims and Braine (Princeton, 1990), pp. 357–58, 360–63 (with ills.); grisaille from Rheims Cathedral and also Coutances is illustrated in L. F. Day, Windows. A Book about Stained and Painted Glass, 3rd edn (London, 1909), figs 107, 117, 118; for Bourges see Les Vitraux du Centre et des Pays de la Loire, Corpus Vitrearum, Recensement des vitraux anciens de la France, II (Paris, 1981), pp. 168–80, esp. pp. 176–80. 56 See Building Accounts of King Henry III, ed. H. M. Colvin (Oxford, 1971), pp. 286– 87. For a general discussion of glazing costs see Marks, Stained Glass, pp. 48–51. 57 e.g. Chartham (Kent) and Norbury (Derbyshire); see Marks, Stained Glass, p. 153, figs 121, 123. 55

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of the church.58 Matthew Paris’s account of the works carried out at St Albans by Abbot William de Trumpington (1214–35) refers to the re-designing of some windows in the nave aisles and transepts in order to provide a new and favourable light; these must have contained grisaille glass. The use of light as a neo-Platonic theological symbol by St Bernard as well as Abbot Suger has led some scholars to invest grisaille with metaphysical significance. Light as a religious metaphor was such a medieval convention that beyond the specific circumstances of the 12th-century Cistercians such an elevated reading of grisaille glazing is questionable.59 There can at least be no doubt that the Salisbury grisaille windows were intended to make a major contribution to the internal decoration of the building. The architecture of Salisbury is more of a unity than any other English cathedral;60 the uniformity of its elevation may account for the number and diversity of the grisaille designs which contrast with the regularity of the architectural framework. It is for these designs and for the vestiges of the historiated glass that Salisbury should be restored to the canon of 13th-century great church glazing schemes. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Mr Roy Spring, Clerk of the Works at Salisbury, for kindly conducting me over the upper regions of the cathedral in order to study the glass and for answering my questions; also Suzanne Eward, Librarian and Keeper of the Muniments, for access to relevant material. I am grateful to Mrs Sarah Brown for providing the photographs and for valuable discussions of the glazing. The drawings are the work of Trevor Pearson and Charlotte Bentley.

This suggestion is made in Cocke and Kidson, p. 56. Even the interpretation of Cistercian grisaille is disputed. For opposing views see Norton and Park, p. 10 and M. P. Lillich, ‘Recent scholarship concerning Cistercian windows’, Studiosorum Speculum: Studies in Honor of Louis J. Lekai, O. Cist., ed. F. R. Swietek and J. R. Sommerfeldt, Cistercian Studies Series, 141 (1993), pp. 233–62. St Albans is discussed in P. Binski, ‘The murals in the nave of St Albans Abbey’, Church and City 1000–1500. Essays in Honour of Christopher Brooke, ed. D. Abulafia, M. Franklin and M. Rubin (Cambridge, 1992), p. 256. See also J. Gage, ‘Gothic glass: two aspects of a Dionysian aesthetic’, Art History, 5, no. I (1982) pp. 36–58. 60 See Pevsner, Wiltshire, pp. 394, 401; C. Wilson, The Gothic Cathedral (London, 1990), p. 176. 58 59

XIII The Mediaeval Stained Glass of Wells Cathedral

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ells Cathedral contains some of the most important English glass of the first half of the fourteenth century. In quantity it is surpassed by York Minster, but qualitatively it loses nothing by comparison. The later mediaeval glazing, with the exception of the ‘imported’ French panels, is of lesser interest and is largely confined to buildings within the precincts; because of space restrictions this can only be given passing mention. The glass will be discussed in chronological sequence. As this entails considerable darting about, reference will be made to the window numbering used in Mr. Colchester’s excellent guide.1 (See Fig. 1. Numbers in brackets refer to this plan.) My chronology differs in certain respects from that proposed in previous studies of the Wells glass;2 I will attempt to justify it from stylistic analysis and comparison, together with what can be gleaned from the architectural history and the evidence of donor inscriptions and heraldry. The Chapter-house and its staircase The earliest surviving glass at Wells is in the tracery of the two west windows lighting the steps to the chapter-house (52). It consists of coloured bosses with flower motifs set in grisaille painted with ivy leaves. The most recent discussions of the building sequence date the staircase to around 1286;3 L. S. Colchester, Stained Glass in Wells Cathedral (Friends of Wells Cathedral, 1952, 5 ed. 1977). 2 J. Armitage Robinson, ‘The Fourteenth-Century Glass at Wells’, Archaeologia, 81 (1931), pp. 85–118; C. Woodforde, Stained Glass in Somerset 1250–1830 (London, 1946). 3 L. S. Colchester and J. H. Harvey, ‘Wells Cathedral’, Archaeological Journal, 131 (1974), p. 205; P. Draper, ‘The Sequence and Dating of the Decorated Work at Wells’, Medieval 1

th

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1. Plan of Wells Cathedral showing numbering of stained glass windows.

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if the glazing is contemporary it is of interest as it contains some of the earliest examples of naturalistic foliage (as opposed to stylised leaves) so far discovered in English stained glass. Turning to the chapter-house itself (54-56), nothing survives of the Bible scenes which, according to seventeenth-century sources, filled the main lights of the windows.4 The trefoils and eyelets of the tracery still contain vine-leaves and crockets springing more or less symmetrically from central stems on ruby grounds. The two smaller oculi in each window have scenes of the resurrection of the dead — a theme which is repeated in the quire clerestory (Fig. 2). In two windows are fifteenth-century shields of arms. Although for long it was thought that the chapter-house was completed in 1319, it now seems that it was designed in the 1290s and was finished by 1307.5 There is nothing in the technique and style of the surviving glass inconsistent with a dating of c. 1300–07 for the glazing. There is a total absence of silver stain, a technique which was first used around 1310 and soon became widespread.6 The rather formal arrangement of the leaves within the eyelets is also a possible pointer to a date of c. 1300. The style of the figures of the dead in the oculi is accomplished and bears a superficial resemblance to the glazing of the westernmost windows in the south quire aisle (see below.) The Westernmost windows in the south aisle of the quire The remaining mediaeval glass in these two windows, once again is almost entirely confined to the tracery. In the eastern of the two (24) is the Crucifixion, with the donor on the left (Fig. 4).7 The tracery of its companion (23) contains the Coronation of the Virgin, with a clerical donor in the right

Art and Architecture at Wells & Glastonbury, British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions IV, 1975 (1981), pp. 18–29; J. H. Harvey, ‘The Building of Wells Cathedral, I: 1175–1307’, in L. S. Colchester (ed.), Wells Cathedral A History (Shepton Mallet, 1982), p. 72. 4 Colchester, Stained Glass, p. 29. 5 Colchester and Harvey, ‘Wells Cathedral’, p. 205; Draper, ‘Sequence’, pp. 19ff. 6 J. Lafond, Trois Etudes sur la Technique du Vitrail (Rouen, 1943), pp. 43–57; idem, ‘Un vitrail du Mesnil-Villeman (1313) et les origines du jaune d’argent’, Bulletin de la Société Nationale des Antiquares de France (1954), pp. 94–5. 7 Dom Ethelbert Horne, ‘A Crucifixion Panel in Wells Cathedral’, Journal of the British Society of Master Glass-Painters, 3 (1929–30), p. 12.

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cusp and censing angels below. A main light of this window still retains a large quantity of grisaille glass decorated with naturalistic foliage and set within a border of lions; traces of the borders also survive in the other two lights. Mr. Colchester has suggested convincingly that the presence of this grisaille and the relegation of the donors to the tracery is evidence that the main lights in both windows originally contained non-figural glass.8 To the same glazing campaign belongs the in situ eyelet glazing of the third window from the west in this aisle (25). There is some architectural evidence that these windows, together with those in the eastern chapels of the south transept, were built before the main campaign began on the reconstruction of the east end of the cathedral.9 Unfortunately, neither of the donors in these windows can be identified, but the absence of silver stain and the similarities to the chapter-house glass suggest that they may have been glazed during the decade 1310–20. The Lady Chapel, retroquire, and quire eastern windows The five windows in the Lady Chapel all contain mediaeval glass. The main lights of the east window (40) were extensively restored by Thomas Willement in 1845, but the tracery lights retain their original glass depicting angels holding censers and Passion emblems (Fig. 3), though the head of Christ is by Willement. The other four windows also apparently had two tiers of figures or scenes set under canopies (Fig. 5). The most complete is the southeast window (43), and even here the figures are made up of fragments put together by Dean Armitage Robinson. The north-east window (42) retains the canopies in the heads of the main lights and amongst the fragments filling the rest of the lights are labels bearing the names of various saints: Augustine, Ambrose, Bernard, Margaret, Christina, Anastasia and Cecilia. The tracery glazing of these two windows is virtually complete. The southeast contains the heads of canonised prelates (Leo, Urban, Leonard, Dunstan, Cuthbert, German, Brice, Julian and Wulstan), and the northeast the heads of Old Testament patriarchs (Ysachar, Asar, Gad, Neptalim, Zàbulon, Symeon, Ruben), together with the symbols of two of the Evangelists (Fig. 6). The other two symbols are in the north and south windows (41, 44). The remaining tracery lights in these windows contain foliate glass. The 8 9

Colchester, Stained Glass, p. 15. Draper, ‘Sequence’, pp. 22ff.

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main lights contain numerous fragments, including grisaille, canopies, the Adoration of the Magi and inscriptions giving the names of canons and saints. I will return to these shortly. The glazing of the retroquire and eastern quire aisles was carried out by the workshop responsible for the Lady Chapel windows. The east windows of the chapels of St. Stephen and St. John the Baptist (45, 39) contain canopies which are slightly more complicated versions of those in the Lady Chapel (42). The heads in the tracery of the north window in St. Stephen’s chapel (46) are closely related to the Lady Chapel ones (Fig. 7). Those in 38 are almost entirely Willement’s work, being copied from 46. Other glass belonging to this campaign comprises two figures of St. Michael (48, 34), the Crucifixion (49), St. John the Baptist (50) and the Virgin and Child (33). The heads of the two St. Michaels are virtually identical with those in the Two Magi scene in the Lady Chapel north window (41). The quality of this glazing — particularly that in the Lady Chapel — is high, with the glass itself of a vivid brilliance and translucency. The tracery heads are very striking, the eyes often leaded in separately and different colours used for faces and hair and beards. Shading is heavy in places, applied by thick washes of smear. This expressive, even exaggerated, treatment of these heads had the purpose of making the glazing of the upper parts of the windows more easily legible from the ground. A similar treatment of facial features can be found elsewhere, e.g. in the thirteenth-century glass at Strasbourg and Chartres.10 Heads in tracery lights also occur in St. Denys’ church, York, from which Knowles assumed that the York glaziers were influenced by Wells.11 This is, however, an isolated motif in York glazing and there are no real similarities in figure style between the fourteenth-century glass in the two cities. Moreover, as Knowles himself pointed out, the glazing of tracery lights with heads can be found elsewhere in England, e.g. at places as widely distributed as Tredington (Gloucestershire), Whichford (Warwickshire) and Mileham (Norfolk). What is the date of the Lady Chapel and retroquire glass? Earlier writers considered the Lady Chapel glazing to have been executed in c. 1300–1305, 10 F. Zschokke, Die Romanische Glasgemälde des Strassburger Münsters (Basle, 1942), Pls 9, 11, 12; Y. Delaporte and E. Houvet, Les Vitraux de la Cathédrale de Chartres (Paris, 1926), vol. 3, Pls CC, CCI, CCII, CCLV, CCLVI, CCLVII. 11 J. A. Knowles, Essays in the History of the York School of Glass-Painting (London, 1936), pp. 112–4.

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i.e. it is the earliest surviving glass in the cathedral, except for the chapterhouse staircase windows.12 In the light of recent research on the fabric this early dating must be discarded. All we know for certain is that the Lady Chapel is described as ‘newly built’ in 1326.13 The style and technique of the glass also support this dating. The rather tentative use of silver stain (it does not appear in the tracery lights but does appear in the main light canopies) suggests that the glass was executed not long after the technique first became used by glaziers around 1310.14 The canopies themselves are quite elaborate, but perspectival devices giving a sense of depth, such as those which appear in the quire clerestory glazing, are absent. The figures and heads also lack the modelling observable in the slightly later glass at Wells. There is rather more use of silver stain in the retroquire chapels and eastern windows of the quire aisles, which indicates a date slightly later than the Lady Chapel for their glazing. A terminus ante quem for the ground storey of the east end is given by the foundation in 1329 of the chantries in St. Katherine’s chapel, followed in February 1331 by that of another chantry at the altar of Corpus Christi. In the last document this altar is described as ‘built but yet to be dedicated’.15 The glazing of the four quire aisle windows west of these chapels (33, 34, 48, 49) should date from about the same time. We thus have a glazing campaign which commenced in the Lady Chapel c. 1325 and was completed in the retroquire and eastern quire aisles around 1331. Before leaving this part of the Wells glazing a word should be said on the names of canons and saints in Lombardie script in two of the Lady Chapel windows (41, 44). At least eleven clerics have been identified, all of whom were in office by c. 1300. As most died before 1320 it has been argued that these inscriptions could not originally have been in the Lady Chapel windows, but must have belonged to an earlier scheme.16 It should be noted, however, that three were still alive in the 1320s: William of Yatton (d. 1324), Richard of Plumstoke (d. 1323) and William of Charlton (d. 1329),17 i.e. when the Lady Chapel was glazed, and it seems more likely Robinson, ‘Fourteenth-Century Glass’, pp. 90–102; Woodforde, Somerset, pp. 5ff. Wells Cathedral Muniments, Register I (Liber Albus I), f.175 (Cal. I, 214f.); R. E. Hobhouse (ed.), Calendar of Register of John de Drokensford, Somerset Record Society, I (1887), p. 262. 14 Lafond, ‘Un vitrail’. 15 Colchester and Harvey, ‘Wells Cathedral’, p. 208; Draper, ‘Sequence’, p. 23. 16 Colchester, Stained Glass, pp. 34ff. 17 Robinson, ‘Fourteenth-Century Glass’, pp. 97ff. 12 13

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that these inscriptions were always in its windows. The windows may have commemorated all those canons, whether living or deceased, who had contributed to the large scale building work at Wells which had been in hand since c. 1270. The north window of the Lady Chapel (41) also contains inscriptions to Archdeacon Roger Mortimer (d. 1348) and Precentor William of Littleton (d. c. 1355), which in 1686 were observed in a north transept window,18 but these are in ‘black-letter’, not Lombardie lettering, and do not belong to the same series as the other eleven. The Glazing of the quire clerestory The five easternmost windows in the quire clerestory retain, apart from minor restorations, all their original glazing. In the main lights of the east window (26) is a magnificent Tree of Jesse, with the Crucified Christ flanked by the Virgin and St. John at the top (Fig. 8). The tracery lights contain the Last Judgment with Christ in Majesty and trumpeting angels summoning the dead. The Last Judgment theme continues into the tracery of the easternmost pair of side windows (29, 30). Their main lights contain a Pope, St. George and St. Blaise (29) (Fig. 9); St. Clement, Edward the Confessor (?) and St. Ethelbert (30). The following pair of windows also have saints in their main lights: in 31 are SS Brice, Ambrose and Wulstan (?); and 28 contains SS Gregory, Giles and Richard of Chichester. All the figures in the side windows are set in niches under towering canopies. Although Armitage Robinson dated these windows to the years c. 1325– 34,19 it is now accepted that the demolition of the old twelfth-century east wall of the quire did not take place until just before 1333,20 and it is extremely unlikely that the stained glass would have been started until the later stages of the reconstruction. Building was still in progress in 1336, and recently it has been suggested that work may have been protracted for some time after the damage reported in May 1338.21 The style of the glass points to a date around 1340–45. Not only is silver stain used in much greater quantities than in the Lady Chapel and retroquire, but there are

Colchester, Stained Glass, p. 25. Robinson, ‘Fourteenth-Century Glass’, p. 115. 20 Colchester and Harvey, ‘Wells Cathedral’, p. 208; Draper, ‘Sequence’, pp. 23ff. 21 Draper, ‘Sequence’, p. 24. 18 19

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2. Tracery light in south window of chapter-house. 3. Angel holding passion emblem in tracery, c. 1325 (No. 40).

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4. Crucifixion with donor, c. 1310–20 (No. 24 in diagram).

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5. Canopy in main lights, c. 1325–31 (No. 42).

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6. St. Dunstan in the tracery, c. 1325 (No. 43). 7. Heads in tracery, c. 1325–31 (No. 46)

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8. Descendants of Jesse linked by vine tendrils, c. 1340–45 (No. 26).

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9. SS Blaise, George and a Pope (No. 29).

10. Quire clerestory middle window, north side, canopies, c. 1340–45 (No. 28).

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11. SS John the Baptist and John the Evangelist in the tracery, c. 1390–1400 (No. 18). 12. Two knights in the tracery, c. 1415–25 (No. 7).

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13. Three scenes in the legendary life of St. John the Divine; right hand light from another window illustrating the Revelation of St. John. Probably all by a pupil of Arnoult de Nimègue for the church of St. John, Rouen. Brought to Wells in 1813 (No. 36).

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new elements present here, of three-dimensionality and modelling. The canopies and bases in the quire clerestory windows are partly tipped forward in ‘bird’s-eye’ perspective to give an illusion of spatial depth (Fig. 10). This is further enhanced in the Jesse window by the vines which run behind the canopy side-shafts but in front of the figures. In the side windows the saints are made to appear to project from their architectural framework by overlapping the side-shafts. There is pronounced modelling on faces and deeply shadowed drapery folds. This sculptural effect is stressed further by reinforcing folds and facial features by heavy back-painting. During the second quarter of the fourteenth century an interest in modelling and the creation of space becomes apparent in English manuscript illumination (e.g. the Gorleston, St. Omer, Douai and De Lisle Psalters) and in monumental painting (e.g. the west window and related panels in York Minster). The Majesty Master in the De Lisle Psalter appears to have been working in the 1330s, and the York glass was executed around 1339, so the Wells quire clerestory glazing fits comfortably into this development.22 It is unlikely that the Wells glazing dates from much later than the early 1340s, for, as the Tewkesbury quire clerestory and the Gloucester Cathedral east window show, an element of near-caricature manifested itself in English glass from about the middle of the decade. There is an over-emphasis on modelling and the swaying postures of the figures become exaggerated.23 These features are absent from the Wells quire clerestory glass. There are certain similarities in the block-like heads, the colour range, tracery and border motifs, and in the superstructure of the canopies between the glazing of the quire clerestory side windows and of the Lady Chapel and retroquire, so that in spite of the differences in modelling and threedimensionality, it is conceivable that the same glass-painters were involved. It is also possible that the Jesse Tree was executed by a different workshop

22 R. Marks and N. Morgan, The Golden Age of English Manuscript Painting, 1200– 1500 (London, 1981), pp. 78–83; T. French, ‘Observations on some mediaeval glass in York Minster’, Antiquaries Journal, 51 (1971), pp. 86–93; D. E. O’Connor and J. Haselock, ‘The Stained and Painted Glass’, in G. E. Aylmer and R. Cant (eds), A History of York Minster (Oxford, 1977), pp. 358–63, 378–83. 23 G. McN. Rushforth, ‘The Glass in the Quire Clerestory of Tewkesbury Abbey’, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, 46 (1924), pp. 289–324; C. Winston, Memoirs Illustrative of the Art of Glass-Painting (London, 1865), pp. 258–311; G. McN. Rushforth, ’The Great East Window of Gloucester Cathedral’, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, 44 (1922), pp. 293–304.

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from that responsible for the clerestory side windows, for although they share the same general characteristics, the canopies, border motifs and heads in the Jesse are quite distinct. The Glazing of the transepts and nave The quire clerestory windows mark the zenith of the Wells glazing. The surviving later glass in the cathedral is of lesser interest. The south transept seems to have been re-glazed in the late fourteenth century. The borders, quarry design and foliate diapering on a shield with the arms of Daubeney in situ in St. Calixtus’s chapel (22) point to a date between c. 1350 and 1380, and the glazing of three of the south transept façade window (18, 20) probably followed soon after. These windows retain only fragments of their mediaeval glass, including a head and figures of SS John the Baptist and the Evangelist (Fig. 11) and two shields with the arms of Thomas Holland, Earl of Kent (d. 1397); on one shield his arms are impaled with those of his wife Alice Fitzalan, whom he married soon after 1364. Alice made several gifts to the cathedral and was buried in the south transept in 1415.24 Originally she was represented in a south transept window together with an inscription (the latter is now in window 23). The figures, which are poor relations of those found in the Lytlington Missal of 1383–4, suggest that these windows were erected during Countess Alice’s lifetime, perhaps in the 1390s. This is consistent with the insertion of the Perpendicular tracery in the lancets by William Wynford.25 The westernmost window in the south transept façade belongs to the same campaign as the nave south aisle windows. Several of these windows have mediaeval glass in the tracery: St. Dunstan and a canonised bishop or abbot (19), the Coronation of the Virgin (9) and two figures in armour holding spears (perhaps Hospitallers) (7) (Fig. 12). Judging from the figure style and the type of armour these seem to belong to the decade 1415–25. The last surviving mediaeval figural glass in the cathedral is in the nave and transept clerestory and probably dates from the second quarter of the fifteenth century. Three of the windows (15, 11, 3) each contain a pair of angels standing on wheels, and in window 10 is the Coronation of the Woodforde, Somerset, pp. 127ff. J. H. Harvey, ‘The Building of Wells Cathedral, II: 1307–1508’, in Colchester, Wells Cathedral, pp. 92–3. 24 25

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Virgin. The style appears to be a rather coarsened version of that found in the nave south aisle windows. The Sixteenth-century glass at Wells Apart from a fifteenth-century figure of St. Mary Magdalene in the tracery of a window lighting the steps to the Chain Gate (53), the only other in situ early glass in the Cathedral is in two north quire aisle windows (49, 50). One has the date 1537 and the name of Dean Woolman (1529–37), together with his arms, the Royal Arms within a Garter, and those of Bishop Knight (1541–47). Knight’s arms are repeated in the second window, together with those of Bishop Clerk (1523–41). This glass is of interest on two counts. The years between 1537 and 1547 were marked by growing iconoclasm and it is unusual to find any cathedral glazing, even heraldic, executed in this period. Secondly, the shields and the inscriptions are placed within fourteenthcentury borders, and it seems that the original contents of these windows were removed to accommodate the new glazing, a well-documented practice, but of which not many instances have survived.26 Although these two windows complete the survey of the early glass in Wells Cathedral, mention must also be made of the splendid sixteenthcentury Renaissance windows in the north transept clerestory (12) and in St. Katherine’s chapel (36, 37). The first is dated 1507 and depicts the beheading of John the Baptist and his head on a plate before Herod and Herodias. In the St. Katherine chapel windows are six scenes from the life of St. John the Evangelist, dating from c. 1520 (Fig. 13). All the panels in these three windows are considered to have come from the destroyed church of St. John at Rouen. Most of them were purchased by the dean and chapter in 1812–13 for the great west window of the cathedral, where they remained until removed to their present location in 1926. Two more were obtained in 1953. Other panels from the Evangelist cycle are in the Burrell Collection, Glasgow. The Baptist panels are attributed to Arnoult de Nimègue (1470– 1540), a glass-painter from Tournai who moved to Rouen and became one

26 e.g., at Stanford on Avon (Northants.); see R. Marks, ‘Henry Williams and his “ymage of deth” roundel at Stanford on Avon, Northamptonshire’, Antiquaries Journal, 54 pt II(1974), pp. 272–274.

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of the leading exponents of the Renaissance style in France. The Evangelist scenes appear to be the work of a close follower of Arnoult.27 Conclusion Regrettably, limitations on space preclude a discussion of the extremely interesting glass in the vicars’ hall, dating from the early fourteenth century and the times of Bishop Bekynton (1443–65) and of Richard Pomeroy, Keeper of the Cathedral Fabric between 1488 and 1503; also of the heraldic glass with the arms of Bishop Bubwith (1407–24) in the library built out of a bequest in his will. Likewise, Dean Gunthorpe’s work in the old deanery between 1473 and 1483, as well as sundry glazing elsewhere in the precincts, has to be excluded.28 It will be readily apparent that more questions are posed than answers given. If I have concentrated on refuting some rather uncritical statements as to date and stylistic affiliations of the Wells glass, I can only plead that nothing more positive is possible given our present state of knowledge. If it achieves nothing else it is to be hoped that this survey will stimulate someone to undertake a detailed study of the Wells glazing, which not only includes some of the most beautiful fourteenth-century glass in England, but is also of major importance in the history of English mediaeval painting. Acknowledgments I would like to record my gratitude to the dean, the Very Revd. Patrick Mitchell, for very generously permitting me access to all corners of the cathedral: without such access this chapter would not have been possible. I am especially grateful to Mr. Colchester for giving me the fruits of his unrivalled knowledge of the records and fabric of the cathedral.

27 Colchester, Stained Glass, pp. 10–12, 19–22; J. Lafond, ‘Le Peintre-Verrier Arnoult de Nimègue (Aert van Oort) et les Débuts de la Renaissance à Rouen et à Anvers’, Actes du XVIIIe Congrès internationale d’Histoire de l’Art, Amsterdam 1952 (The Hague, 1955), p. 337; idem, ‘La Résurrection d’un Maître d’Autrefois’, Précis analytique des Sciences Belles Lettres et Arts de Rouen pendant les années 1940 et 1941 (Rouen, 1942), pp. 28–31; F. Perrot, ‘Des vitraux rouennais retrouvés en Angleterre’, Bulletin des Amis des Monuments Rouennais (1976–7), pp. 40–41. 28 Woodforde, Somerset, pp. 128–148.

XIV The Glazing of Fotheringhay Church and College

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mongst the most important of the numerous colleges established in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were two foundations which formed the dynastic mausoleums of noble houses destined to become mortal rivals: the College of the Annunciation in the Newarke at Leicester, founded in 1353–4 by Henry, Duke of Lancaster,1 and the College of the Annunciation and All Saints at Fotheringhay, Northamptonshire, endowed and built by successive dukes of York. Apart from fragments of the hospital, the Newarke is destroyed, including its tombs and fittings. Of the Fotheringhay buildings only the magnificent nave survives (Fig. 5), and the choir stalls and a few fragments of the glazing are dispersed amongst neighbouring churches. Fortunately much information on the former contents of the windows is contained in several antiquarian accounts. These reveal that the glass at Fotheringhay included some unusual iconography which in part reflected the pious interests of the College’s Yorkist benefactors. The History of the Church and College In 1377 Edward III granted his son Edmund of Langley, later first Duke of York, the manor and castle of Fotheringhay.2 The castle was rebuilt by Edmund and it was destined to become a favourite residence of the House of York as well as being the focus of the family’s extensive estates in the East Midlands.3 Hamilton Thompson suggests that when Edmund obtained the

For the Newarke see A. Hamilton Thompson, The History of the Hospital and the New College of the Annunciation of St Mary in the Newarke, Leicester (Leicester, 1937). 2 Victoria County Histories, Northamptonshire, II (1906), p. 571. 3 Ross, p. 5. 1

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castle there already existed within its walls a chapel of a collegiate nature.4 Edmund must have considered this inadequate, and some time prior to his death in 1402 (probably shortly before 1398) he and his son Edward petitioned Pope Boniface IX to authorise the foundation within the castle of a college dedicated to the Annunciation of the Virgin and St Edward the Confessor, to be staffed by a Master or Dean, twelve chaplains and four clerks (later expanded to eight clerks and thirteen choristers). The project does not appear to have been particularly dear to Edmund’s heart as the College is not mentioned in his will. Moreover, he was not buried there but in the Dominican Priory at King’s Langley (Herts.). His son Edward had more grandiose plans. In 1410 he peti­tioned the Pope for the dedication to be changed to the Annunciation and All Saints, for Henry IV to be named as principal founder, and for the College to come within the jurisdiction of the bishop of Lincoln.5 From the alteration in the dedication and the imposi­ tion of episcopal control it is evident that Duke Edward wished to move the College from the castle to the parish church. This was finally authorised by a papal bull in 1412.6 The existing parish church was unsuitable for such an important foundation and construction of the newly-sited College began soon afterwards, for in February 1414 a commission was issued to take stonecutters, carpenters and labourers for this purpose.7 We know from the wording of the nave contract that the choir and cloister (and presumably sufficient of the domestic quarters to house the staff) were built first.8 It is doubtful if much progress had been made by the time of the Duke’s death at Agincourt in October 1415. Although his tomb, which was still unfinished at the beginning of 1418,9 was eventually placed in the new choir Edward, in his will made in August 1415, desired his body to be buried 4 See Hamilton Thompson, pp. 243–4. His account of the College’s early history largely supersedes that of Cox, pp. 241–75. 5 Hamilton Thompson, p. 245. 6 Ibid. 7 Cal. Pat. Rolls, 1413–16, p. 180. 8 For the nave contract of 1434 see L. F. Salzman, Building in England down to 1540 (Oxford, reprinted with cor­rections and additions, 1967), pp. 506–9. The contract refers to the existing choir and cloister. At Tattershall College (Lincs.), the domestic quarters were erected before the church was begun (Marks, pp. 19–25). 9 Stephen Lote, mason, in his will proved on 10 February 1418 left Thomas Mapilton, mason, the sum of 13s. 4d. a year for four years ‘so that he be friendly and well disposed in the making of the tomb of the Duke of York’. See J. Harvey, English Mediaeval Architects: a Biographical Dictionary down to 1550 (London, 1954), p. 172. As Lote was involved in the

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en l’esglise parochiele deins mon collegge de Fodrynghay, en mye le quer soubz une plat pere de marble, c’est assavoir ad gradum chori.10 It is significant that he refers to the parish church; presumably its chancel remained in use during the construction of the new choir. There formerly existed this inscription by the door leading to the cloister at the east end of the nave south aisle: In festo Martirij processo Martiniani Ecclesi prima fuit huius Petri locata A0 xpi C quater ac M cum deca quinto Henrici Quinti tunc iminent’ secundo.11 This is obviously a foundation stone, but 1415 is an impossibly early date for work on the nave. One can only put forward the hypothesis that the inscription was removed from the choir during its demolition in the sixteenth century. The completion date for the eastern limb of the new church and the cloister is not known. Work may have made slow progress, for Duke Edward incurred heavy debts over the endowment and construction of the College.12 At any rate, the choir and cloister, although evidently not the chapter-house,13 were finished by September 1434, when the contract for the building of the nave was drawn up between the commissioners of Edward’s nephew and successor, Richard, Duke of York, and William Horwood, freemason.14 It stated that the nave was to be of the same height and width as the choir, and threatened Horwood with imprisonment if he did not finish the work within a reasonable time (to be stipulated by the Duke of

making of the tomb Harvey suggests that he also designed the Fotheringhay choir. There is no evidence to substantiate this attribution. 10 J. Nichols, A Collection of all the Wills . . . of the Kings and Queens of England. . . (London, 1780), p. 217. Leland saw Duke Edward’s tomb slab in the choir of the collegiate church ‘with an image flatt yn brasse’ (Leland, 5). 11 Dugdale, f. 134v. A slightly different version of this inscription is given in Bibliotheca Topographica, p. 33, and it is recorded on a wooden panel, probably of nineteenth-century date, in the church. 12 Hamilton Thompson, p. 247. 13 The College statutes mention a chapter-house, but the enquiries at the episcopal visitations of 1438 and 1442 were held in the Lady Chapel (ibid., p. 258) ; normally chapterhouses were used for this purpose. 14 See fn. 8 above.

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York or his advisers). However, in common with the choir, the completion date is unrecorded. The nave as it exists (Fig. 5) does not entirely conform with the specifications of the contract15 and the fan-vault under the tower bears the date 1529, indicating that alterations and additions were made subsequently.16 As we shall see later, there is strong evidence in the surviving nave glass to show that the glazing was not started before 1461. Thus work on the construction of the nave may well have been prolonged into the second half of the fifteenth century. At this time England was in political turmoil. The weakness displayed by Henry VI gave Duke Richard the chance to pursue his own claim to the throne. In October 1460 he was recognised as Henry’s heir, thereby excluding the latter’s own son, Prince Edward. By the end of the year Richard was dead, slain at the battle of Wakefield, as also was his son Edmund, Earl of Rutland. Within a few months yet another reversal of fortune saw the replacement of Henry VI on the throne by Richard’s eldest son, Edward. This had important consequences for Fotheringhay. Edward IV almost immediately granted the manor and castle, where several of his brothers and sisters had been born, to his mother Cecily.17 She appears to have lived there for most of the next eight years, until in 1469 she exchanged the estate with Edward for Berkhamsted and King’s Langley. She divided the remaining twenty-six years of her life between these residences and Kennington (Surrey), which Edward had granted to her in 1466 or 1467.18 As will be shown below, Duchess Cecily’s period of residence at Fotheringhay between 1461 and 1469 is significant for the interpretation of the iconography of the nave glazing. Edward IV was himself fond of Fotheringhay, and he visited it quite often during his reign.19 It is therefore hardly surprising that he should have taken a keen interest in the College. In February 1462, ‘desiring from pious 15 e.g. the north aisle easternmost window and the easternmost pair of clerestory windows are each of three lights; the contract states that all the windows were to have four main lights. 16 There has been some disagreement over the reading of this date, and 1457 has also been suggested (H. K. Bonney, Historic Notices in Reference to Fotheringhay (Oundle, 1821), p. 49). Dr Walter Leedy of Cleveland State University, who has made a special study of fanvaults, assures the present writer that 1529 is the correct date. 17 VCH, Northants., II, p. 571. 18 King’s Works, II, pp. 563, 650, 969, 977. 19 Leland mentions the love that Edward ‘bare to Foderingey’ (Leland, p. 4).

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motives to complete this foundation’, Edward issued a new foundation charter in which the names of himself, his mother and father (‘true heir of the realms of England and France’), brother Edmund, Earl of Rutland, grandfather Richard, Earl of Cambridge, and grandmother were added to the list of those for whom prayers were to be said in the College.20 The charter also contained endowments and various liberties and privileges; further endowments came from the king in 1465.21 It is not known whether Edward had originally planned to be buried at Fotheringhay. In any case, by 1475 he had decided that his body was to rest amongst the Knights of the Garter in St George’s Chapel, Windsor. Soon afterwards the lavish reconstruction of the Chapel began, but despite the expenditure of large sums by the king it remained un­finished at the end of the reign.22 Nevertheless Edward did not neglect Fotheringhay. In July 1476 he was responsible for the exhumation of his father and brother from the modest tomb at Pontefract in which they had lain since the battle of Wakefield and their solemn re-interment in a vault below the Fotheringhay choir.23 Edward may have had in mind the precedent set by the Nevills thirteen years earlier, when they reburied in the family mausoleum at Bisham Priory (Berks.) Richard Nevill, Earl of Salisbury, and his son Sir Thomas, who had been killed fighting for the Yorkist cause in the same battle; in this context the fact that they were Edward’s uncle and cousin may be significant.24 One can only speculate as to why the king chose this particular moment. Perhaps Duchess Cecily had already decided that her own mortal remains should be interred at Fotheringhay and it may well have been her wish to see her husband and son decently laid to rest there that prompted Edward into carrying out this act of family piety. What­ever the motive, the king used the occasion to affirm his right to the throne Cal. Charter Rolls, vi, pp. 167–71. Cox, p. 243. 22 For Edward’s work at Windsor see King’s Works, II, pp. 884–8. There are also interesting essays by J. R. Lander and P. Kidson in The St George’s Chapel Quincentenary Handbook, ed. M. Bond (Windsor, 1975). 23 See C. L. Scofield, The Life and Reign of Edward the Fourth, II (London, 1923), pp. 167–8. The original source is London, British Library, Harl. MS 48, ff. 78–81. 24 Richard Nevill was a brother of Edward IV’s mother Cecily. For the re-interment of Earl Richard and Sir Thomas Nevill at Bisham see Ross, p. 53. It is possible that the Salisbury Roll, the original copy of which is bound up in Writhe’s Garter Book in the possession of the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry, was executed in connection with this event. See the British Heraldry Exhibition Catalogue, comp, and ed. R. Marks and A. Payne (British Museum, 1978), nos 34, 46. 20 21

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through his father. The obsequies included the use of the Royal Arms on the trappings of the horses drawing the funeral chariot and of the image of an angel bearing a crown of gold, stressing that by right Duke Richard had been a king.25 The sepulchral monument was not com­pleted for several years, for in 1482–3 Edward ordered £100 to be paid to make a tomb over Duke Richard’s body.26 Leland, who visited Fotheringhay between 1535 and 1543, states that Edward IV also built part of the College.27 This must have included the rebuilding of the cloister, for Leland goes on to say that it was constructed during Edward’s reign, when Feild was Master. Feild was not Master before late October 1480, and had been replaced by 1507.28 If Leland is correct, this gives a date of 1480–3 for the cloister. Edward IV and/or his brother Richard III may also have given the pulpit which still stands in the nave, as it bears the Royal Arms and supporters used during their reigns.29 Richard almost certainly donated the splendid set of choir stalls from Fotheringhay which are now in Hemington church (Northants.): his boar device occurs twice on them.30 The last major event in the history of the College prior to its dissolution was the death in 1495 of the aged Duchess Cecily. In fulfilment of the terms of her will she was buried in the tomb of her husband.31 Scofield, Life and Reign . . . , p. 167. King’s Works, III, pt 1, p. 251, n. 2, citing London, Public Record Office, SC 6/1088/24. Duke Richard’s tomb lay on the north side of the high altar. Over it was raised ‘a pratie chapelle’ (Leland, p. 5). 27 Leland, p. 5. 28 Thomas Buxhale was still Master on 21 October 1480, and Feild first occurs on 24 November in the same year (Cal. Pat. Rolls, 1476–85, pp. 186, 224). The name of his successor, Robert Bernard, occurs in 1507 (A. B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Cambridge to 1500 (Cambridge, 1963), p. 57). Possibly the visit made to Cambridge in 1478 by a royal purveyor to find masons for royal works at Fotheringhay was in connection with these collegiate buildings and not, as has been thought, the castle (King’s Works, ii, p. 650). 29 The supporters are a lion rampant guardant and a bull (dexter), a hart and boar (sinister). The bull was used by Edward IV and the boar (before and after his accession) by Richard III. See W. J. Petchey, Armorial Bearings of the Sovereigns of England, 2nd edn, revised (Standing Conference for Local History, 1977), p. 17, and H. Stanford London, Royal Beasts (The Heraldry Society, 1956), pp. 25–7. 30 Other stalls from Fotheringhay are at Tansor and Benefield in the same county. See G. L. Remnant, A Catalogue of Misericords in Great Britain (Oxford, 1969), pp. 113, 115–16, 120. 31 Wills, I. 25

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The College was dissolved in 1549, and the work of destruction began almost immediately. The site was granted to the Duke of Northumberland, who is said to have demolished the choir and stripped the roofs off all the buildings;32 the latter action is extremely plausible, the former demonstrably untrue. On Northumberland’s execution Fotheringhay reverted to the Crown. In July 1558 it was sold to James Cruys. A survey made prior to the sale revealed that the ‘payntyd stoories’ in the cloister windows were already very broken.33 In 1566 Queen Elizabeth visited Fotheringhay and was distressed at the ruination of the choir and the neglected condition of the tombs of her Yorkist ancestors. The choir was thus still standing then, but in 1573 it was demolished — evidently against the parishioners’ wishes — and new tombs constructed in the nave.34 A considerable amount of the glazing of the domestic quarters survived into the 1640s, as Dugdale’s notes attest.35 Probably the remains perished during the Civil War and Common­ wealth.36 The nave glass survived even the iconoclasm of the middle years of the seventeenth century. According to Stukeley, this was because the incumbent bribed the Parliamentary soldiers who came to destroy it.37 Tragically, at some time between 1787 and 1821 the glass was almost entirely lost.38 However, much still remained in the early eighteenth century, and it is the notes made at this time by the Northamptonshire antiquary John Bridges which provide the most complete record of the contents of the nave windows.

Cox, p. 274. London, British Library, Harl. MS 608, f. 62v. 34 King’s Works, iii, pt 1, p. 251. 35 Dugdale, ff. 133–134v. See below, pp. 358–66. 36 Parliamentary forces are known to have come to Fotheringhay to destroy the glass (see fn. 37); this probably happened shortly before or after 18 April 1643, when they wreaked havoc in Peterborough Cathedral (see S. Gunton, The History of the Church of Peterburgh [London, 1686], p. 92). The present writer has been unable to trace the current whereabouts of the glass fragments found on the site of the cloister in 1926 by members of Oundle School. 37 W. Stukeley, Itinerarium Curiosum, 2nd edn (London, 1776), p. 35. 38 The glass is described in Bibliotheca Topographica, pp. 31–2 (the Northamptonshire section was published in 1787), but by 1821, when the Revd H. K. Bonney published his Historic Notices in Reference to Fotheringhay, it had disappeared. 32 33

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1. Schematic diagram showing the original nave glazing at Fotheringhay (not to scale).

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2. Engraving of figures formerly in the Fotheringhay nave glazing. Copyright British Library Board.

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3. Quarry designs from Fotheringhay in Kingscliffe Church.

4. The Houses of York and Nevill (as illustrated in the Fotheringhay heraldic glass).

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5. Fotheringhay Church, exterior. Copyright A. F. Kersting.

6. Angel from the Fotheringhay nave glazing at Kingscliffe.

7. Angel from the Fotheringhay nave glazing at Kingscliffe.

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8. Shields of arms formerly in the glazing of the hall and cloister of Fotheringhay (BL Add. MS 71474). Copyright British Library Board with permission of the Trustees of the Winchelsea Settled Estates.

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The Nave Glazing Antiquarian Descriptions Bridges recorded the nave windows in August 1719.39 The printed version does not indicate the full extent of his notes on the glass.40 Bridges is unusual amongst English seventeenth and eighteenth-century antiquarians in that he did not confine himself to transcribing inscriptions and shields of arms on tombs and in glass, but also systematically described the religious imagery in Northamptonshire churches. As the notes have never been published, a transcript of the sections concerned with the Fotheringhay glazing is given here. Some of the punctuation has been modernised and in parentheses is the window notation (which follows the Corpus Vitrearum system) given in Fig. 1. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Topographical Northants. MS f1 (the notes on Fotheringhay made on 13 August 1719) [p. 121] In ye 1st Window of ye S. Ile reckoning from ye E [sIII]. 1st panell — a Body of a Saint wth out a Head, no inscription. 2d — fig. pretty entire, inscribd in old Characters Sancts Dyonisis. d 3 — entire figure, inscrib’d Scs Blasius. 4th — no fig. left. In ye upper small Pannels figures of Angels w th harps, Falcons and Fetterlocks. 2d Wind. [sIV] 1st pann. — St George wth his Spear in ye Dragons mouth wch he treads upon, no Inscription. 2 a Head and lower parts, ye middle wanting, inscribd Sanctus Johēs Baptista. 3 legs of a fig. w th a ship between, ye rest wanting, no inscription. 4 wants a head, ye rest entire, inscribd, Sanctus Albanus. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Topographical Northants. MSS f1, pp. 121–4; e5, pp. 325–33. 40 J. Bridges, The History and Antiquities of Northamptonshire (Oxford, 1791), ii, p. 453. 39

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Upper Pannels as ye 1st Wind.

3d Wind. [sV] 1st Pannell. Figure wanting, inscribd Sanctus Vincētius. 2 midd. peice of a fig., no inscr. 3d Half length upwds, rest want., no inscr. 4 wants a Head, inscribd San. Guthlace. Upper Pannels as before. [p. 122] 4th S. Wind. [sVI] 1st Pannell — entire mitred fig. inscr. Sanctus Erasmius. 2 —a head mitred, rest wan., no inscr. 3 — lower part onely remaining, inscr. Scs Clemēt. 4 — a Head mitred and lower parts, midd. wanting, inscr . . . tus Ricard’ Scrope Eboracēc. Smaller pannels, above as in ye formr Winds. 5th and last S. Wind. [sVII] 1 a Head cū cappa, and Crozier, and lower parts, mid. want., inscr. Sanctus Avatus. 2 Head onely cū Cappa and lower parts, inscr. Scs . . . 3 nothing. 4 — peice of a Crozier and vestments rem., no inscr. Smaller pannels as before. W. Wind, of S. Ile [sVIII] Nothing but upper small Pannels w th as before. Midd. W. Wind. — taken by Slyfd  41 3d W. Wind [nVII]. Scarce any thing but ye upper small Pannels as before. [p. 123] In ye 1st Window frō ye E. of ye N. Ile [nII]. Some peices of Broken fig. in 3 pannels. Upper small Pannels as before. 2d N. Wind, [nIII] This is a Mr Slyford who took the notes for Bridges on the clerestory windows and the west window. For an account of Slyford see J. G. Jenkins, The Lion of Whaddon (High Wycombe, 1953), pp. 131–2. 41

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1 Pannell. Half length of a Cardinall cū galero, ye rest want., no inscr. 2d a Head onely. 3 Remains of ye upper parts of a fig. 4 Head and part of ye upper and lower parts of a fig. cū gloria and galero, ye mid. want., inscr. Scs Ambrosi . . . Doct. 3d Wind. [nIV] 1st and 3d half mitred figs with Crosiers, no inscr. 3d has a Cross on his Crosier, no inscr. 2 and 4 — nothing but a peice of ye midd. part. 4th Wind. [nV] 1st, 2d and 4th imperfect figures and inscriptions, ye 3d nothing. The fig. in ye upper pannels pretty entire in these 3 Wind. [p. 124] 5th N. Wind. [nVI] Nothing rem. but ye upper pannels. In all ye Windows little figures of Bucks, Lyons, Roses, etc., hunc inde inter vacua spatia fenestrar’. Mr Telleman has drawn sevll of ye Figures in ye N. and S. Windows and one in ye high Wind, of ye midd. Ile. Slyf. has taken Accot of all ye High Windows. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Topographical Northants. MS e5. This contains the description of the clerestory windows and the nave west window. [p. 325] In the lower S. Window in y Church from the W [scV], In the upper Pannel to the E. is the broken Portrait of St Edmund. Very little of him remains except his feet and the lower part of his Garment, and under him is this Sanctus . . . mūdus In the lower Pannel the broken Portrait of a Person in a red Robe broken. Wt remains is the lower pt and under it this imperfect Word bet In the upper Pannel but one to the East is a defacd Portrait of a Person Mitred tho’ nothing perfect. In the lower Pannel but one to the East, nothing to be discoverd but some broken Peices of painted Glass.

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[p. 326] In the 2. Window from the W [scIV], in the lower Pannel the broken Portrait of a Person in a black and white Robe, the under Garmt blew and at his feet ... a . de...hat In the next Pannel above him is a defacd Picture of King Robt and under him Robtus rex In the next Pannel above this is another broken Portraiture, viz. the lower part of a Person in a red Robe. In the next Pannel above this, the broken Picture of a Person. Wt now remains is only his Miter and the lower part of his Robe from his Waste. His Robe is red and blew embroiderd w th Gold. Under him are Words wch I cant read. In the next Window [scIII] in the lower Pannel to the W. the broken Portrait of a King in armor, viz. the lower part much defacd and under him these Words Richardi rex In the next part the defacd lower pt of a Person in a green Robe lind w t Ermyne and red. Imperfect Letters under him. In the next Pannel the Portrait of a Bishop or Mitred Abbat in a blew short Garmt to his Knees. He seems by his Legs to be in Armor. And in the next Pannel above him is the Portrait of a King clothd in blew and w th White. In his left hand a Scepter. [p. 327] In the next Window [scII] in the 2 lower Pannels to the W. nothing to be made, the painted Glass being entirely Gone. In the next Pannel to the E. the Portraiture of a Preist, viz. ye pt from the Waste richly clad in Cloth of Gold and over him appears a Mantle and under him this Imperfect Word sedec In the next Window [scI] the lower part of an Abbat in his Pontificalia. In the other 2 Pannels nothing but some Painted Glass disorderly placd. In the lower Pannel of the I. N. Window of the Church from the W [ncV]. The Portrait of a Virgin richly attird w th Glory abt her head and a pastoral Staff in her hand, her Robe Blew. In the next Pannel of this Window some Peices of painted Glass confusedly set together. Only part of a face to be distinguishd and

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this Word Scolastic In the next Pannel. The Portraiture of a Virgin w th a blew Veil on her head and glory abt her, holding in her right hand a book, in her left a crosier. Garments are blew and Cloth of Gold. [p. 328] In the next Pannel the lower part of a Person in a Robe much defacd and under him this Imperfect Word . . . Fri In the next Window [ncIV], in ye lower Pannel to the West remains the Head and shoulders of a Virgin crownd w th glory about her head, and by her this imperfect Word . . . papp . . . In the next Pannel the defacd Portraiture of a Person and under her this Word Ursula In the 2 next Pannels nothing of Note remains. In the next Window [ncIII] in the lower Pannel. The Portrait of a Virgin, her Garments Cloth of Gold and Blew, the Index of her left hand pointing and under her these Impfect Words ca . . . tia In the next Pannel of this Window. The Portrait of a Person wth Glory abt her head, her Robe of blew spotted in Gold. At her feet this Imperfect Word lia In the next Pannel the Portrait of a Person much mangld and defacd, the Robe blew and Embroiderd w th Gold. In the next Pannel the Portrait of St Agatha [p. 329] richly clothd. Remains the Glory abt the head, the Head lost and at her feet this Agatha Her Robe Blew and Gold. In the next Window [ncII] the Portrait of a Virgin w th Glory abt her head Clothd in Cloth of Gold and blue and under her this Inscription Sitha and near it this broken word Bri. In the next Pannel the lower pt of the Picture of St Margaret and

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under her Margaret In the next Pannel the Portrait of a Virgin w th Glory abt her head richly attird in Clothd of Gold and blew. The Words at her feet lost. In the next Pannel the Portrait of a Virgin in fine attire of Gold Tissue and blew w th a Crown w th Glory abt her head as have the other Virgins on this side the Church. At her feet these Imperfect Words Sca . . . nea In the next Window [neI] in the lower Pannel. The Portrait of a Virgin w th a Crown and Glory abt her head, richly Clothd in Blew and other Colours and by her this : bndicta [p. 330] In the next Pannel nothing of Note remains but some peices of Painted Glass confusedly set together. In the next Pannel the Portraiture of y[e] Virgin Mary crownd w th Glory abt her head, her Robes blew and Cloth of Gold. Near her face these Imperfect Words frat . . micha. lid and on her side a Book. On her Robe these Lres in sev11 places M In the W. Window of the Church in ye Pannel next to the S., viz. in the lower Division near the Top, the head of our Saviour w th a Crown of Thorns and near it is thise Imperfect Words Et rege and under the head in larger Letters m t rex In the next Pannel, at y[e] Top of the lower Division, the Pope sitting on a Throne. In his left hand a Monde and upon it a Crucifix. Below him is our Saviour standing Crownd w th Thorns shewing his Wounds. At his feet the V. Mary, Mary Magdalen and others. Near the Top are these Words near the Monde on Labels maiestat. gl. tue In the next Pannel, at the Top of the lower Division, the heads of two Angels and under them on a Label Scs Gregorius

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[p. 331] In another part of the Pannel this Word Scm In the next Pannel, at the Top of all, are the Heads of 3 Sts w th Glory about them. Lower are some broken Heads of Angels and on Labels between them these Words Sanctus. Sanctus, die ist . . . Below this is our Saviour on the Cross and abt him on Labels these Imperfect Words redemi ergoqz in a mnd below him trē i mēfe sca cōfitet ... er orbē totū Below this are the Pictures of 2 Persons mitred. That on the right side has a monde in his left hand and by him on a Label are these Imperfect Words ad modū spanim’ In the next Pannel nothing but the heads of 3 Angels at Top. In the next Pannel at Top the Heads of three Angels and by them this Word dns Below this is some painted Glass confusedly put together, consisting of Heads of Men, Sheep, Lions, Woods, Groves, etc. [p. 332] In the next Pannel at the Top of the lower division are the heads of three Angels and below this the Pope sitting on his Throne w th a Triple Crown on his head. In his left hand a Monde, in his right a Scepter and abt him Abbats and Bishops mitred and Monks. At his feet a King crownd and an Abbat or Bishop mitred praying. Abt the Popes head on 2 Labels these Words Te eternū patrem. Omis terra venerat Below him is the Portraiture of our Saviour w th a Crown of Thorns on his head. In his right hand a Scep., in his left a Monde and at his feet a King and Abbat or Bp. on y[e] Knees. Abt him stand Abbats, Bishops, Priests and Monks and below him on 2 Labels between the 2 Praying Te mrm candid laudat ex erit Below this is the Portraiture of our Saviour w th a Crown of Thorns on his head, his right hand lifted up. Below him is a person w th

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Glory abt his Head and some Abbats, and on a Label These Words En deū. te span . . . Below these is the broken Portrait of a Person w th Glory abt his head having in one [p. 333] hand a Monde. About him are many Persons, viz. Bps, Sts, Martyrs, Abbats, Priests, Monks, etc., and on a label between them these Words laudam’ nn tuū in scla In the next Pannel at the Top. The Heads of 2 Angels and these Lrs pa. Below these are 2 Persons Praying, richly Clothd. Between on 2 Labels these Words Te prophetār laudabil. numer. Below this is the Portraiture of our Saviour w th a Crown of Thorns on his head and opposite to him is the V. Mary w th a Crown on her head and her right hand on her Breast. Our Saviour Holds out his left hand to her and between them on a Label these Imperfect Words Tu ad li. adum susceptur hoīem u In 4 Parts of this W. Window at ye Top is an Eagle and over her head these Words Sum ie puus. A number of the figures described by Bridges are depicted in an engraving dated 1718 in his history of Northamptonshire (Fig. 2).42 They are as follows: No. 1 Window sIV : St George slaying the dragon (given wrongly as St Michael in the text). No. 2 Window sIV: the head only of St John the Baptist. No. 3 Window sV: upper half of male saint in third light. No. 4 West Window: head from one of the middle lights. No. 5 Window sVI : St Erasmus. No. 6 Window sVI : bearded head of a saint wearing a mitre. No. 7 Window sVI : head of St Richard Scrope. Bridges, History . . . of Northants., ii, pl. opp. p. 453, description on p. 672. The engraving must have been based on the drawing made by Peter Tillemans to which Bridges refers in his notes (see above p. 336). 42

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No. 8 Window sIII: St Denis. No. 9 Window sIII: St Blaise. No. 10 Window nV: upper half of a bishop or abbot with a crozier. No. 11 Window nV : full-length bishop or abbot with a crozier. No. 12 Window nIV: upper part of a sainted archbishop with pallium and cross-staff. No. 13 Window nIV: upper part of a sainted bishop or abbot with a crozier. No. 14 Window nIII: upper part of a figure in Cardinal’s robes and hat. No. 15 Window ncV: full-length crowned and nimbed abbess. Further information can be obtained from the account of Fotheringhay made by Nichols.43 He refers to most of the figures recorded by Bridges, but in the clerestory his evidence somewhat contradicts that of Bridges (or Slyford). In these windows he mentions: In a south upper window under a half figure, alde Ebor . . . In another seems Rich’s fund. As for the aisle windows, Nichols describes a figure in sIV as ‘an armed trunk between naked legs asleep, supposed St Paul, or rather our Lord’s resurrection’. In the same window was ‘a feather past through a crown’. The Iconographical Programme The general scheme of the Fotheringhay nave glazing can be reconstructed from the above notes (Fig. 1). All the windows except the west contained standing figures, one to each light. The aisle windows seem to have consisted exclusively of male saints, with angels and falcons and fetterlocks in the tracery lights. The clerestory north side con­tained female saints, and the south included royal saints, clerics and princes. Only in the west window was there ‘historiated’ glass, i.e. scenes as opposed to single figures. To take the west window first, the fragments of the inscriptions provide the key to the iconography. They are all taken from verses of the Te Deum. Once armed with this knowledge the very incomplete and confused scenes described by Bridges can be recog­nised as illustrations to the verses. Several Te Deum windows are known in glass in the British Isles, all apparently 43

Bibliotheca Topographica, pp. 31–2.

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dating from the fifteenth or early sixteenth centuries.44 Almost every one has been entirely or largely destroyed. The one exception is the series of scenes from the Te Deum in the west windows of the south transept of York Minster.45 Formerly in the church of St Martin-le-Grand, Coney Street, York, they appear to date from the second quarter of the fifteenth century. When Bridges’s descriptions are matched with the Minster panels, one can obtain a general impression of the lost Fotheringhay Te Deum, although there are differences in details and, in some cases, considerable variations in composition46. The description (at the beginning of p. 333) of the Fotheringhay panel illustrating verse 29 corresponds particularly closely with its counterpart at York; both depict various ranks of the clergy gathered below God the Father. Turning to the glass of the aisles and clerestory, it is evident from Bridges’s notes that the north aisle glazing was far less complete than that of the south aisle. There was nothing left in the main lights of the easternmost window in the north wall (nII) and in nIII. Bridges only mentions St Ambrose by name, in the westernmost light. In this context, however, his description and illustration of a cardinal holding a book in the easternmost light (Fig. 2, no. 14) can only fit St Jerome; the figures in the two middle lights would almost certainly have been SS Augustine of Hippo and Gregory. The window would thus have depicted the Four Doctors of the Church, quite a well-known theme in English medieval glass.47 The only recognisable figures 44 A list is given in C. Woodforde, The Norwich School of Glass-Painting in the Fifteenth Century (Oxford, 1950), pp. 49–50. He includes Morley (Derbyshire), but although three of the panels in the east window of the chancel north chapel are closely related iconographically to the Te Deum, the verses are not taken from it. The Fotheringhay Te Deum was unknown to Woodforde, and so too was that formerly in the south window of the south transept of Durham. See Rites of Durham (Surtees Society, cvii, 1902), p. 32. There are Te Deum inscriptions at Hope (Flintshire) and a doubtful fragment from a Te Deum window at Gresford (Denbighshire). See M. Lewis, Stained Glass in North Wales (Altrincham, 1970), pp. 8, 10, 39, 50–1. 45 For a brief description see F. Harrison, The Painted Glass of York (London, 1927), pp. 16–17, 197. There are also two more panels from a Te Deum of approximately the same date in the westernmost window of the south choir aisle in the Minster. 46 Unlike York, the Fotheringhay panels do not seem to have been enclosed within canopies and side-shafts. The York figures of God the Father, on the other hand, lack the triple tiara of their Fotheringhay counterparts, a feature which led Bridges to believe they represented the Pope. 47 Surviving sets in English fifteenth and early sixteenth-century glass can be seen at All Souls College, Oxford, Torbryan (Devon), Great Malvern Priory (Worcs.), Winteringham

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in nIV were the canonised bishop or mitred abbot in the easternmost light and the canonised archbishop in the third light (Fig. 2, nos 13 and 12). Bridges has even less to say about nV, but illustrates a pair of bishops or mitred abbots from the two middle main lights (Fig. 2, nos 10, 11). Nothing at all existed at that time in the main lights of the westernmost window in the north wall and west window of the aisle (nVI, nVII). As for the south aisle glazing, in the two middle lights of sIII were St Denis, dressed in a chasuble embroidered with the fleurs-de-lis of France and carrying his severed head in one hand, and St Blaise, holding his wool-comb emblem of martyrdom (Fig. 2, nos 8, 9). sIV contained, from east to west, St George shown on foot slaying the dragon, St John the Baptist (Fig. 2, nos 1, 2), an incomplete figure with a ship between his legs (possibly St Jude, although it is very unusual to find one apostle on his own), and St Alban. In the easternmost light of sV was St Vincent, and in the westernmost St Guthlac. Bridges illustrates the upper half of a bare-headed, tonsured and beardless saint in rich robes in the third light from the east (Fig. 2, no. 3). As St Vincent is in this window it is tempting to identify this figure as his fellow-deacon, St Lawrence, but with neither inscription nor attribute this is only speculation. In the following window (sVI) were, from east to west, St Erasmus (or Elmo), a bishop or mitred abbot, St Clement, and St Richard Scrope (Fig. 2, nos 5, 6, 7). Finally, the westernmost window in the aisle, sVII, had in the eastern­most light a saint labelled Avatus carrying a crozier; the head of a male saint was in the next light, and in the westernmost light was a male saint in pontificalian vestments and carrying a crozier. Nothing remained in the main lights of the west window of the south aisle (sVIII). The glazing of the clerestory was already very confused when Bridges made his notes. The north side consisted of a series of female saints, but only a handful were identifiable. In the easternmost light of ncI was the Virgin, but the inscriptions for the other two figures were lost. In the two westernmost lights of ncII were SS Sitha and Margaret. The only recognisable saint in ncIII was Agatha (easternmost light). Similarly, ncIV and ncV only produced St Ursula and St Scholastica (in the second light from the west in each case). Incomplete inscriptions recorded by Bridges suggest the identities of two more of the figures: the fragment Bri in the same light (Yorks.) and Fairford (Glos.). Others occur (or are recorded) in several places in East Anglia (Woodforde, Norwich School. . . , pp. 51, 82, 175–7) and Somerset (C. Woodforde, Stained Glass in Somerset 1250–1830 [Oxford, 1946], pp. 78, 193–4). A lost series is also known at Durham (Rites of Durham, p. 31).

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as St Sitha in ncII may well have strayed from a light in which St Bridget of Sweden was depicted,48 and the incomplete word Fri in ncV is probably from a representation of St Frideswide. Furthermore, Bridges’s description and the illustration (Fig. 2, no. 15) of the figure in the second easternmost light in ncV, crowned and nimbed, in a nun’s habit and holding a crozier and open book, fits the traditional representation of St Etheldreda of Ely. She is depicted in this manner, for example, on a late fifteenth-century roundel in the east window of St Dunstan’s chapel in Ely Cathedral.49 Ely is not many miles from Fotheringhay, and St Etheldreda can be classified as a local saint. She was singled out in the College statutes to be commemorated annually by a solemn mass.50 If the general scheme of the north clerestory is known, this is more than can be said for the south clerestory. The windows included princes, kings and prelates, but the only figure that can be identified for certain is St Edmund in scV. Even here there is a choice between St Edmund of Abingdon (d. 1240, canonised 1246) and St Edmund, king and martyr (d. 869). The balance of probability lies with the latter as his feast-day was celebrated as a double in the College.51 In scIII the cleric wearing leg-armour is possibly St Armel or Armagilus, an abbot who was born in England and died in Brittany in 552.52 Bridges gives an incomplete inscription, sedec, under a priest in sell; possibly this is Melchisedec, in which case the south clerestory included Old Testament figures. Bridges also records a Richardi rex below a figure in armour (scIII) and a Robtus rex (scIV), but his (or rather Slyford’s) reading of the inscriptions is thrown into doubt by Nichols’s mention of a figure labelled Rich’s fund ; this is possibly the same inscription that Bridges interpreted in scIII. Both are equally plausible. Richard I is known in English 48 St Brice is another possibility, but as he was male and the inscription fragment was on the ‘female’ side of the clerestory, St Bridget is more likely. See also below, p. 349. 49 The roundel is illustrated opposite p. 1 and described on p. 2 in P. Moore, The Stained Glass of Ely Cathedral (Ely Cathedral Monographs, 1973). In this work it is dated to the early sixteenth century. 50 Hamilton Thompson, p. 296, statute xlv. 51 Ibid. 52 F. G. Holweck, A Biographical Dictionary of the Saints (London, 1924), p. 105. He is shown wearing a chasuble and leg-armour in the Coverham Abbey prayer-roll of c. 1500 (New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, Glazier MS G 39), on the painted reredos of c. 1525– 30 in Romsey Abbey, and on an alabaster in Stonyhurst College (for the latter see Illustrated Catalogue of the Exhibition of English Medieval Alabaster Work (Society of Antiquaries of London, 1913), no. 66, pl. xxiv). I owe the identification of this saint, and these references, to the kindness of Dr Peter Newton.

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glass53 and Richard II was included in the daily special prayers and requiem masses laid down in the College statutes.54 Richard, Duke of York, is also represented elsewhere in stained glass,55 and, as the builder of the nave, he is possibly an even stronger candidate. That at least one of the figures on this side of the clerestory was connected with the House or city of York is shown by Nichols’s record of an incomplete inscription . . . alde Ebor . . . This could be one of the early archbishops of York, such as Eanbald I (780–6), Eanbald II (796–after 808), Ethelbald (900–904/28), Edwaldus (971), or Oswald (972–92). Of these the last-named is by far the most familiar. In addition, he has a local connection as the founder of Ramsey Abbey (Hunts.). From the sparse evidence, it is impossible to recognise any single unifying theme in the glazing of the south clerestory, and the identities of almost all the figures remain elusive, even that of the King Robert recorded by Bridges.56 53 In the north window of St Mary’s Hall, Coventry, amongst a series of illustrious English monarchs. See B. Rackham, ‘The Glass-Paintings of Coventry and its Neighbourhood’, The Walpole Society, xix (1930–1), pp. 103–10. Rackham’s dating of the window to after the accession of Henry VII appears to the present writer to be far too late; c.1450 is more probable. 54 Hamilton Thompson, pp. 294, 296, 299, statutes xl, xlvi, li. 55 The head from a figure of Duke Richard survives in the glazing of Cirencester (Glos.); see W. T. Beeby, ‘Ancient Stained Glass in the Parish Church of St John, Cirencester, and its Associations’, Trans Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, xxxix (1916), pl. ix. Window sVI in Penrith church (Cumberland) contains two heads with modern labels identifying them as Duke Richard and his wife Cecily. However, notes made by Dugdale in 1665 show that they originally belonged to figures of Ralph Nevill, Earl of Westmorland, and his wife Joan Beaufort, who married in 1396. See F. and C. R. Hudleston, ‘Medieval Glass in Penrith Church’, Trans Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, New Series li (1951), pp. 96–102. I am most grateful to Mr Jeremy Haselock for providing this reference. 56 Assuming that the inscription was read correctly (which is not necessarily the case), Robert Bruce, King of Scotland (1306–29), appears to be the only candidate. Yet it is extremely unlikely that the victor of Bannockburn would be represented in the glass of an English collegiate church. On the other hand seven Scottish knights were held at Fotheringhay in 1424 as sureties for the performance of the treaty with the king of Scotland, and the manor of Fotheringhay in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had been in the hands of the Scottish king (VCH, Northants., II, pp. 573, 570–1). In the light of these associations, a figure of Robert Bruce in the glazing is just conceivable. It is also possible that the inscription may have been composite, with the Robtus part having come from another light. If so, then St Robert, a hermit of Knaresborough (Yorks.), is a possibility. There is a late fifteenth-century window devoted to him in the glazing of Morley (Derbyshire). See Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie, viii (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1976), p. 274. The entry for St Robert in this work is by Dr Peter Newton, to whom I owe this suggestion.

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Most of the saints represented in the nave windows are found in the Calendar of the Sarum rite, which was the liturgical Use adopted by the College.57 Several call for special comment. Alban and Guthlac (and Etheldreda, if she was represented in ncV) must have been depicted because they are local saints. This is particularly true of Guthlac, whose shrine was only a few miles distant at Crowland Abbey (Lincs.).58 He was not included in the Sarum Calendar, and by the late fourteenth century his cult seems to have been confined to the area round Crowland. There was a guild dating from this period at Crowland dedicated to Christ, the Virgin, All Saints and St Guthlac.59 A hermitage of St Guthlac existed at Marholm in the Soke of Peterborough from at least 1391 until the sixteenth century, and there is a reference to St Guthlac’s chapel at Oundle (Northants.) in a will dated 1537.60 Fifteenth-century stained glass elsewhere than Fotheringhay provides evidence that the saint was still popular enough locally to be represented in monumental art. The nave of the great collegiate church of Tattershall (Lincs.) had two windows concerned with St Guthlac, one of which illustrated a cycle of his life.61 The glazing here was in progress in 1480–2.62 Moreover, the parish church at Market Deeping (Lincs.), which was dedicated to St Guthlac, had in its east window the following inscription : Orate pro aia Johis Swarby, quondam Rectoris hujis loci, qui hanc fenestram fieri fecit, ad laudem Dei et Sci Guthlaci. A° Dni 1438.63 St Blaise, whose body had been in Canterbury Cathedral since the beginning of the tenth century,64 was popular in England, and a considerable number

Hamilton Thompson, p. 296, statutes xlv, xlvi. The non-Sarum saints are Guthlac, Erasmus, Richard Scrope, Arator/Avitus (?) and Sitha. 58 The following details are taken from Marks, pp. 221–6. 59 H. F. Westlake, The Parish Gilds of Mediaeval England (London, 1919), p. 159. 60 R. M. Serjeantson and H. Isham Longden, ‘The Parish Churches and Religious Houses of Northamptonshire: Their Dedications, Altars, Images and Lights’, Archaeol. J., lxx (1913), pp. 361, 385. 61 Marks, pp. 39, 221. 62 Ibid., pp. 31–3. 63 Ibid., p. 224, citing London, British Library, Harl. MS 6829, 263 (Lincolnshire church notes by Gervase Holles, 1634–42). 64 See The Historical Works of Gervase of Canterbury, ed. W. Stubbs (Rolls Series, II, London, 1880), pp. 350–1. 57

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of representations of him are recorded in stained glass. St Blaise’s symbol of a wool-comb (he was said to have been torn with iron combs during his martyrdom) caused him to be adopted as the patron saint of the wool trade. This explains the presence of the saint in the nave glass, for Fotheringhay was in a region devoted almost exclusively to sheep-rearing.65 St Clement also seems to have been of some popularity in the locality. Representations of him still exist in the fifteenth-century glass of the nearby church of St Andrew at Barnwell (Northants.) and at Stockerston, on the Leicestershire-Rutland border. The most puzzling of the saints identified by inscriptions is Avatus. There is no saint with this name in the Western Church, so Bridges must have mis-read the inscription. The closest approximations are one of the three saints named Arator (a priest martyred in Alexandria, a saint martyred in Syria, and a bishop of Verdun c. 421–54) and one of the four saints who take the name Avitus (bishop of Vienne, d. 525, bishop of Clermont, d. 549, another bishop of Clermont, d. 689, and an abbot of Châteaudun, d. 527).66 Any of these is very unlikely. SS George and John the Baptist are commonly represented in English medieval art, and it is perhaps unnecessary to seek a particular reason for their appearance in the Fotheringhay glazing. Nevertheless it is worth noting that Cecily, Duchess of York, had a strong devotion to both these saints. In her will she commended her soul to the Virgin and St John the Baptist.67 In the same document mention is made of a tapestry with the life of St John the Baptist and a painted cloth with his representation. Cecily also possessed a tapestry with ‘. . the passion of our Lord and Saint George’.68 As is evidenced by his generosity towards St George’s Chapel and the collegiate foundation at Windsor, Edward IV shared his mother’s devotion to the cult of this saint; whenever possible he spent his feast-day at Windsor.69 Moreover, in 1449 Cecily’s son George, later Duke of Clarence, became the first child of 65 The nearby town of Stamford acted as the collecting-place for the wool of several Midland counties, from where it was sent abroad through Boston and King’s Lynn (The Making of Stamford, ed. A. Rogers (Leicester, 1965), pp. 43–4). Little wonder, then, that St Blaise was depicted twice in the windows of St John’s church at Stamford (one figure still survives). 66 See Holweck, Biographical Dictionary . . . , pp. 99, 125–6. 67 Wills, I. 68 Ibid., p. 2 69 Ross, p. 274.

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royal descent to be christened with the name of England’s patron saint,70 and it may be rather more than coincidence that a number of figures in the Fotheringhay nave glazing were the name-saints of Cecily’s children. Apart from George there were Edmund, Margaret and Ursula. The four children with these names had all been born prior to their brother Edward’s accession in 1461.71 A figure of St Erasmus was represented on a great Agnus Dei of gold belonging to Cecily.72 This admittedly slight evidence of her interest in this saint is a possible explana­tion of his presence in the Fotheringhay glazing, although it could also have been due to Edward’s queen, Elizabeth Woodville. Her devotion to St Erasmus is attested by her foundation, shortly before 1479, of a chapel dedicated to him attached to the Lady Chapel of Westminster Abbey.73 It was suggested above that the inscription fragment Bri in ncII may have come from a light depicting St Bridget of Sweden. Positive proof may be lacking, but it can at least be said that there was a good reason for this saint to appear in the Fotheringhay glass: Cecily had a special devotion to her. It was due to this devotion that Edward IV’s seventh daughter was christened Bridget in 1480; Cecily acted as godmother at this ceremony.74 During the last years of her life the Revelations of St Bridget was one of the works Cecily was accustomed to have read to her at dinner.75 She also bequeathed a copy of this book to her granddaughter Anne de la Pole, prioress of the Bridgettine house at Syon.76 To Syon itself Cecily left two copes, and she and her husband Duke Richard were singled out as special patrons in the obits performed there.77 If saints such as George, John the Baptist, Erasmus and Bridget possibly represent the personal piety of a member of the House of York, the presence of Richard Scrope in the Fotheringhay glazing has explicit political connotations. On 8 June 1405, Richard Scrope, Archbishop of York, was Armstrong, p. 76. Edmund was born in 1443, Margaret in 1446 and Ursula in 1455 (see Ross, p. 6, table 2). 72 Wills, p. 6. 73 Cal. Pat. Rolls, 1476–85, pp. 133–4. 74 Armstrong, p. 89. 75 A Collection of Ordinances and Regulations for the Government of the Royal Household (Society of Antiquaries of London, 1790), iv, p. 37. 76 Wills, p. 3. 77 Armstrong, p. 88, n. 35. 70 71

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beheaded outside the walls of his metropolitan city for his part in leading a rebellion with the Percies against Henry IV.78 His body was buried in York Minster and quickly attracted pilgrims. His cult almost immediately became an important weapon in the armoury of those opposed to the claims and authority of the House of Lancaster. Thus a rumour was soon spread that the king had contracted leprosy on the execution day, a damaging story which publicised the seriousness of the Archbishop’s summary condemnation. Henry IV and Henry V attempted to defuse the political nature of devotion to Scrope, either by forbidding his veneration or by making concessions, such as permitting the appointment of a keeper of his tomb.79 During the first half of the century his cult continued to flourish locally. It appears, however, that it was the loss of the English possessions in France and consequent disenchantment with the Lancastrian dynasty which transformed Scrope into an object of veneration of much wider significance. A chapel was built on his place of execution and there were numerous bequests of money and jewels to his tomb. In 1462 York Convocation discussed the possibility of his formal canonisation and five years later a canon of Ripon left a large sum of money for a new shrine.80 The attempt to have Scrope canonised failed for, beginning in the late 1460s and continuing through the next decade, there was a vigorous counter-attack by opponents of the Yorkists, with a cult developing around the figure of Henry VI and a revival of that associated with Thomas of Lancaster. The devotion to Archbishop Scrope was thus short-lived, and he never appeared in the Calendars of the Church. His representation at Fotheringhay, however, is not unique in art. There is another in York Minster, the centre of his cult. In the east clerestory window of the choir south transept he is shown nimbed and standing full-length in archiepiscopal vestments. A label below reads

78 The details of Scrope’s cult are taken mainly from an excellent article by J. W. McKenna, ‘Popular Canonization as Political Propaganda; the Cult of Archbishop Scrope’, Speculum, xlv (1970), pp. 608–23. The pioneer work of J. H. Wylie, History of England under Henry the Fourth, II (London, 1894), pp. 339—67, has also been consulted. For a general discussion of ‘political’ saints see E. W. Kemp, Canonization and Authority in the Western Church (Oxford, 1968), especially pp. 122–4, 134–5, and for Yorkist-Lancastrian propaganda in the visual arts, Marks, pp. 180–90. 79 McKenna, op. cit., pp. 612–18. 80 Wylie, op. cit., p. 357.

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DNS RICARD SCROPE Underneath is the kneeling donor figure of his kinsman, Stephen Scrope, archdeacon of Richmond (1402–18). On a scroll coming from his mouth is the text: O RICARDE PASTOR BONE TUI FAMULI MISERERE STEPH[ANI] This window is said to date from between 1426 and 1432, when Robert Wolveden was treasurer of the Minster.81 Scrope also appears in at least two Books of Hours.82 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Lat. liturg. f.2 has on f. 146v. a full-page miniature of the Archbishop’s execution. The manu­script dates from c. 1405–13 and is of the Use of Sarum.83 The second book is in York Minster Library (MS Add. 2) and is of the York Use. It was written before 1445, and is much inferior in illumination to the Bodleian Hours.84 On f. 100v. is a picture of Scrope in full pontificals, but without a nimbus. Kneeling before him is a lady with a scroll held in her hands: SCE RICARDE SCROPE ORA PRO NOBIS On f. 202v. there is an illustration of the Archbishop with this inscription below : 81 See A History of York Minster, ed. G. E. Aylmer and R. Cant (Oxford, 1977), pp. 377–8, and Harrison, Glass of York, pp. 97–8, pl. opp. p. 98. A figure in the east window of Bolton Percy (Yorkshire, West Riding) is usually identified as Archbishop Scrope (P. Nelson, Ancient Painted Glass in England 1170–1500 (London, 1913), 224). However, there is no label, just the Scrope arms, so it could be the figure of a canonised archbishop donated by a member of the Scrope family. Furthermore, although Nelson says it forms part of a series of canonised archbishops of York this is incorrect, for not all of them hold the archiepiscopal cross. 82 He is also shown in a historical, and not hagiographical, context baptising Richard Beauchamp on f. 1 of the Beauchamp Pageants (London, British Library, Cotton MS Julius E.iv art 6). 83 See O. Pächt and J. J. G. Alexander, Illuminated Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library Oxford, III, British, Irish and Icelandic Schools (Oxford, 1973), no. 795, pp. 70–1, pl. lxxvii. The most recent discussion of this manuscript is in D. H. Turner, ‘The Wyndham Payne Crucifixion’, The British Library Journal, II, no. 1 (Spring 1976), pp. 8–26. 84 See ‘A Medieval “Hours” of the York Use’, The Friends of York Minster Sixteenth Annual Report, pp. 14–18, and The Friends . . . Seventeenth Annual Report, pp. 27–8.

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S. RICARDUS In Scrope’s right hand is a windmill, which evidently refers to the story that the field in which he was beheaded produced an extraordinarily heavy crop that year.85 The figure of Scrope at Fotheringhay was nimbed (Fig. 2, no. 7) and on the label he was given the status of a saint. His representation in this Yorkist foundation, many miles from the centre of his cult, must have been a deliberate piece of anti-Lancastrian propaganda, in a medium which was perhaps the best suited of all for putting across political as well as religious ideas. The Heraldic Glass86 In addition to the figural glass, there were also some shields of arms in the nave windows. Coloured illustrations of them were made by William Sedgwick for Sir William Dugdale in 1641.87 Except where stated all the shields are heater-shaped. For an explanation of the family relationships see Figure 4. [f. 134v.] East Window (1) Quarterly, 1 and 4, Gules a lion rampant or; 2 and 3, Checky or and azure (Fitzalan, Earls of Arundel). The second wife of Edmund of Langley, first Duke of York (d. 1402), was Joan, daughter of Thomas Holland, Earl of Kent, by Alice, daughter of Richard Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel; the Fitzalan lion also occurs on a shield on Edmund’s tomb at King’s Langley (Herts.).88 (2) Quarterly England and France modern (Sedgwick has mistakenly reversed the quartering) within a bordure gobony argent and azure (Beaufort) impaling Gules a saltire argent (Nevill). In 1396 Ralph Nevill, first Earl of Westmorland, married Joan Beaufort, daughter of John of Gaunt. Their Wylie, Henry the Fourth, pp. 340–1. The main sources used for the explanation of the heraldic glass at Fotheringhay are G. E. Cokayne, The Com­plete Peerage, 12 vols., new edn (London, 1910–59), and C. R. Humphery-Smith and M. G. Heenan, ‘The Royal Heraldry of England’, The Coat of Arms, vi (1960–1), pp. 224–8, 308–9; vii (1962–3), pp. 18–24, 80–4, 122–7, 164–9, 213. Additional sources are cited where appropriate. 87 Dugdale, f. 134v. 88 VCH, Hertfordshire, II (1908), pl iv. 85

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daughter Cecily married Richard, Duke of York (d. 1460) in 1424, when she was aged nine. (3) Gules a lion rampant argent (Mowbray) impaling Quarterly, 1 and 4, Gules a lion rampant or; 2 and 3, Checky or and azure (Fitzalan). Thomas Mowbray, first Duke of Norfolk, in 1384 took as his second wife Elizabeth Fitzalan, daughter and co-heiress of Richard, Earl of Arundel. Their son John, second Duke (d. 1432), married Catherine Nevill, sister of Cecily. (4) Quarterly France modern and England impaling Gules three lions passant guardant or with a label of three points argent within a bordure gobony argent and azure. The label appears to have been added subsequently, but even then the identity of this shield is puzzling. The undifferenced Royal Arms of England imply that the impaled coat is that of a Queen-consort, but none of the English queens is known to have borne these arms. North Window (1) A jousting-shield bearing Quarterly France modern and England impaling Quarterly, 1, Azure three fleurs-de-lis or between two flaunches ermine each charged with a rose or; 2, Gules three lions passant guardant or; 3, Gules on a bend between six cross crosslets fitchy argent an escutcheon or in chief; 4, Azure two lions passant guardant or between four demifleurs-de-lis or, one issuing from each side of the shield. These arms are those of Henry VIII and his fifth wife Catherine Howard, daughter of Lord Edmund Howard and granddaughter of the second Duke of Norfolk. The manor and castle of Fotheringhay formed part of Catherine’s dower, as they had for all the other wives of Henry VIII, except Anne Boleyn.89 Catherine Howard was also patroness of the College.90 (2) Quarterly France modern and England with a label of three points argent (the Prince of Wales). South Window (prope Altare) (1) Quarterly France modern and England with a label of three points argent all within a bordure argent charged with lions rampant purpure impaling Checky or and azure a fess gules. These are the arms of Richard of Conisborough (1376–1415), Earl of Cambridge and brother of Edward, second Duke of York, and his second wife Maud, daughter of Thomas, Lord 89 90

VCH, Northants., II, p. 571. Hamilton Thompson, p. 256.

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Clifford, whom he married after the death of his first wife in 1411. (2) Quarterly, 1 and 4, Gules a lion rampant or; 2 and 3, Checky or and azure (Fitzalan) impaling Argent five escutcheons in cross sable each charged with as many roundels argent, within a bordure gules charged with castles or. This shield represents the marriage in 1405 of Thomas Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel (d. 1415), and Beatrice, daughter of Ferdinand, King of Portugal. Previously she had been married to Edward, second Duke of York (d. 1415). The shields of arms in these three windows appear to be of three periods, but only one can be precisely dated. These are the armorial bearings of Henry VIII and Queen Catherine Howard, which could only have been placed in the north window after their marriage in 1540 and before Queen Catherine’s execution in 1542. There are much less secure grounds for dating all the other shields. If by the east window Dugdale is referring to that in the present east wall, above the altar, the four shields contained in it must have been re-used from another part of the College, for this wall was not constructed until after the demolition of the choir in 1573;91 possibly they came from the choir windows and therefore date from between 1414 and 1434. The shields in the south window are pre­sumably contemporary with the figural glazing. The same may also be true of the Prince of Wales’s arms in the north window. As this shield accompanied the arms of Henry VIII and Queen Catherine Howard one might at first sight assume that it represented Henry’s son Edward (b. 1537, succeeded as Edward VI in 1547), but the shield is not of the same shape. If not Edward Tudor which Prince of Wales did these arms represent? From the 1434 contract for the nave construction, it would appear that Henry VI’s son Edward (1453–71) is the most probable candidate. On the other hand there is evidence in the surviving nave glass that the glazing was not commenced before Edward IV’s accession in 1461, so it is more likely that the arms are those of his eldest son Edward, born in 1470. The evidence for the dating of the nave glazing will now be examined.

91

King’s Works, iii, pt I, p. 251.

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The Surviving Nave Glass and the Date of the Glazing At Fotheringhay itself no medieval glass remains, apart from a few blue and ruby pieces filling some of the eyelets in the aisle windows. But the nearby parish church at Kingscliffe contains a number of fragments of fifteenthcentury glass which can be shown to have come from Fotheringhay.92 In the west window of the nave north aisle (nVIII) are two angels playing musical instruments (Figs 6 and 7). They are in white glass with yellow stain touches and are set on blue grounds in front of incomplete battlemented bases. The lower half of the alb of the angel in the left light is restored, its companion in the right light is a composite piece, with the head and wings taken from different angels. There are also various other pieces in this window, including a complete falcon and fragments of several others, in addition to two quarries decorated with birds. The tracery of the nave west window is filled with miscellaneous fragments. The majority comprise quarries decorated with lions of March (representing the builder of the nave, Richard, Duke of York, in his title of Earl of March), hinds (the device of Joan Holland, second wife of Edmund of Langley), white roses, fetterlocks containing white roses (the House of York), a white rose en soleil (the badge of Edward IV) and sprigs of oak leaves and acorns (Fig. 3). There are also pieces of at least two, and possibly three, angels playing musical instruments, and the ostrich feathers device of the Prince of Wales. In the tracery of windows sV and sVI (east and south walls of the south transept) are a few more fragments, including part of a figure clad in a white and yellow stain robe with an ermine lining and holding what appears to be a yellow stain orb, and several quarries with lions, roses en soleil and roses within fetterlocks. In 1821 the rector of Kingscliffe, the Revd H. K. Bonney, mentioned that a falcon enclosed by a fetterlock and two angels playing musical instruments

92 Windows nVI and nVII at Kingscliffe contain in the tracery a number of pieces of an early sixteenth-century panel, including a castle set amongst foliage. They were probably taken from the manor house at Barnack, for Bridges describes a window there which included this motif (Bridges, History ... of Northants., II, p. 489). The panel symbolised the union of the Houses of York and Lancaster in the marriage of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York.

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were preserved in Fotheringhay rectory.93 Taking into account his keen interest in Fotheringhay, it was presumably Bonney who had the fragments removed and placed in his own parish church. The pieces there must all have come from the nave of Fotheringhay. Not only do the badges on the quarries associate them with the Yorkist mausoleum, but the dimensions (40 x 18 cm.) and shape of both the angel panels in window nVIII at Kingscliffe correspond with those of the tracery lights in the Fotheringhay aisle windows.94 If any doubts still linger, they can be dispelled by reference to Bridges’s notes, where we are told that in the ‘upper panels’ (i.e. the tracery lights) were angels with harps, falcons and fetterlocks, and that in all empty spaces in the main lights were ‘bucks’ (i.e. hinds), lions and roses. The Kingscliffe fragments are the only survivors of the Fotheringhay glazing which have been certainly identified.95 The heads of the angels in nVIII appear to be by different painters and the hand responsible for the angel in the right light executed a head fragment in the west window. The two hands are basically in the same style, which is not especially accomplished. The linearity of the drapery, with the summary treatment of folds, and lack of delicate modell­ing on the heads place the figures in a lower class, in terms of quality, than glass in the soft International Gothic style, which proliferated throughout much of England in the period c. 1390–1430.96 The remains of the glazing of St John’s and St George’s churches in the nearby town of Stamford show that the International Style lingered on in this region until the middle of the century.97 Thus the somewhat indifferent quality of the Fotheringhay angels points to a date in

Bonney, Historic Notices . . . , pp. 46–7, esp. n. a. The height of the Fotheringhay tracery lights is in fact 60 cm., but the difference is explained by the loss of the angel bases. 95 Two panels of miscellaneous quarries in the Victoria and Albert Museum (Reg. no. 930–1900) and Burrell Collection, Glasgow (Reg. no. 45.219) include hinds and lions of March; they are very similar to those from Fothering­hay, but their provenance is unknown. For the Burrell Collection quarries see Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum, Stained and Painted Heraldic Glass, Burrell Collection (1962), no. 205. 96 The best discussion of the International Gothic style in English glass is to be found in P. A. Newton, ‘Schools of Glass Painting in the Midlands, 1275–1430’, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of London (1961), I, chap. 6. 97 The glass in St John’s can be dated 1451, and the Garter windows in St George’s (including the one surviving head of a Garter knight) were commissioned in 1449. See F. Peck, Academia tertia Anglicana (London, 1727), Lib. xi, pp. 38–9; Lib. xiv, pp. 23–7, 35–8. 93

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the third quarter of the fifteenth century for the nave glazing.98 This dating is confirmed by the rose en soleil device found on some of the quarries, for this was only adopted as a Yorkist badge by Edward IV after his accession in 1461.99 Moreover, if one is correct in detecting the hand of Duchess Cecily in the planning of the iconography of the nave glazing, this is most likely to have occurred during her residence at Fotheringhay between 1461 and 1469. Finally, the Prince of Wales’s arms recorded by Dugdale in a north cloister window suggest that the work was still in progress after the birth of Edward’s eldest son Prince Edward in 1470.100 The nave glazing was pre­ sumably finished before the cloister was built and glazed between 1480 and 1483, and a dating of c. 1461–75 seems the most likely. The present writer has not seen glass anywhere else which can be attributed to the workshop responsible for the Fotheringhay nave glazing. The Glazing of the Collegiate Buildings The Iconographical Programme The College statutes and inventories show that the domestic quarters were extensive, and included cloister, chapter-house, hall, library and parlour, in addition to various offices associated with the kitchen.101 Their glazing, in company with the buildings themselves, has been destroyed. Of the contents of the windows we have the brief summary made by Leland between 1535 and 1543, and the Sedgwick-Dugdale illustrations of the shields of arms. Leland’s record of the glazing is confined to the cloister: The faire cloistre of the college was made in King Edwarde the 4.dayes, one Felde beyng Master of the College at that tyme. This Felde sette [the] versis of the [book] caullid Aethiopum terras in the glass windowes with figures very seatly.102 For glass of the second half of the fifteenth century, see Marks, chaps 3–6. For Edward IV’s use of the rose en soleil see J. R. Planché, ‘On the Badges of the House of York’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association (1864), pp. 29–30, and Stanford London, Royal Beasts, pp. 30–1. The badge is also assigned to Edward in the Garter Armorial compiled by John Writhe (d. 1504), now in the possession of the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry. 100 See above, p. 353. 101 See Cox, especially pp. 265–73. 102 Leland, p. 5. 98

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As was said earlier, this dates the cloister to 1480–3, for Feild did not become Master before late October 1480 and Edward IV died in 1483. In his account of the glazing Leland is referring to a moralising treatise by an unknown author, possibly of the ninth century, who wrote under the pseudonym Theodulus. The work is an eclogue beginning with the words Aethiopium terras. It is in the form of a dialogue in hexameters between two characters. Alithia, citing the Old Testament, represents Truth, and Pseustis, with exempla drawn from classical deities, Falsehood.103 It was in the genre of those didactic and moralistic works, drawing upon history and legend, which were so liked by royal and aristocratic patrons during the Middle Ages.104 The loss of the claustral glazing at Fotheringhay is a cause for regret, since it is the only known illustrated version of this eclogue. The Heraldic Glass105 William Sedgwick’s splendid illustrations of the heraldic glass in Dugdale’s Book of Monuments cover the hall as well as the cloister. All the shields are heater-shaped. For the family relationships see Figure 4. [f. 133] Hall Window (Fig. 8) (1) Quarterly France modern and England with a label of three points argent each charged with three roundels gules impaling Gules a saltire argent. The arms of Richard, Duke of York (d. 1460), and his wife Cecily (d. 1495), daughter of Ralph Nevill, Earl of Westmorland. The marriage took place before 18 October 1424, when Cecily was nine years old. (2) Quarterly France modern and England with a label of three points argent impaling Or a cross engrailed sable. The arms of Edward, second Duke of York (d. 1415), and his second wife Philippa, daughter of John, Lord Mohun of Dunster. See Theoduli. eclogam, ed. J. Osternacher (no place of pub., 1902). Ross, p. 265. Theodulus’s eclogues occur in two medieval manuscripts in the Royal collections in the British Library (Royal MS 15 A vii and Royal MS 15 A xxxi). It is not known whether they entered the Royal Library before the end of the Middle Ages. The work was popular enough to appear in several printed editions in the early sixteenth century, published by Wynkyn de Worde and Richard Pynson. See A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland 1475–1640, comp. A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave (London, 1926), p. 557. 105 For the sources used in the explanation of the heraldry see above, fn. 86. 103

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(3) Quarterly France modern and England. The date of the hall is not known, so the Royal Arms could represent either Henry VI or Edward IV. Cloister, West Side (Fig. 8) First Window (1) Gules a saltire argent and a label of three points or (Nevill) impaling Gules three lions passant guardant or in a bordure argent (Holland). In 1394 John Nevill (d. 1420), eldest son of the Earl of Westmorland and halfbrother to Cecily, wife of Richard, Duke of York, married Elizabeth, sister and co-heiress of Edmund Holland, fourth Earl of Kent. (2) Quarterly France modern and England with a label of three points argent each charged with three roundels gules impaling Quarterly, 1 and 4, Barry or and azure, a chief paly corners gyronny or and azure, overall an escutcheon argent (Mortimer); 2 and 3, Gules a cross or (Burgh). In 1406 Richard, Earl of Cambridge (d. 1415), married Anne, sister and co-heiress of Edmund Mortimer, fifth Earl of March. However, the label is that of the Dukes of York and the arms must therefore represent their son Richard (d. 1460). In 1425, on the death of his mother’s brother, he succeeded to the titles of Earl of March, Lord Mortimer and Earl of Ulster. Second Window (1) Blank (i.e. destroyed or illegible by the time Dugdale and Sedgwick visited Fothering­hay) impaling Quarterly, 1 and 4, Gules a lion rampant or; 2 and 3, Checky or and azure (Fitzalan, Earls of Arundel). (2) Quarterly France modern and England with a label of three points argent impaling Gules three lions passant guardant or in a bordure argent (Holland). There are two possible interpretations for this shield, both implying an error either by the glazier or by Dugdale and Sedgwick. Edward, the Black Prince (d. 1376), in 1361 married Joan (d. 1385), daughter of Edward of Woodstock, Earl of Kent, and widow of Thomas Holland, Earl of Kent. But France modern did not replace France ancient in the English Royal Arms until the early years of the fifteenth century, so the other, more likely, interpretation is that the arms represent the marriage of Edmund of Langley, first Duke of York, and Joan, daughter of Thomas Holland, second Earl of Kent; if this is correct, the nine roundels gules on the label for the Dukedom of York have been omitted. (3) Quarterly, 1 and 4, France modern; 2 and 3, Navarre, with a baston

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gobony argent and gules overall. Joan (1370–1437), daughter of Charles II, King of Navarre, in 1403 became the second wife of Henry IV of England. Third Window (1) Quarterly, 1 and 4, Gules a mullet in the first quarter; 2 and 3, Or (Vere). John de Vere, thirteenth Earl of Oxford (1442–1513), took as his first wife Margaret, sister of Richard Nevill, Earl of Warwick (the King-maker’). She died between 1506 and 1509. (2) Quarterly, 1 and 4, Argent; 2 and 3, Gules a fret or, with a baston sable overall (Despencer). There are two explanations for the presence of this shield. Eleanor Nevill, sister of Cecily, wife of Richard Duke of York, was married to Richard Despencer, de jure Lord Burghersh. Because of (3) in this window, however, it is more likely to represent Thomas le Despencer, Earl of Gloucester (d. 1399/1400), husband of Edmund of Langley’s daughter Constance. Their daughter and heiress Isabel married Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick (d. 1439). (3) Quarterly, 1 and 4, Gules a fess between six cross crosslets or; 2 and 3, Checky or and azure a chevron ermine impaling Quarterly, 1 and 4, Or three chevrons gules; 2 and 3, Gules a fret or, with a baston sable overall. The arms of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick (d. 1439), and his wife Isabel, daughter of Thomas le Despencer (see no. 2 in this window). (4) Azure three fleurs-de-lis or (France modern). These arms probably represent either Isabel, daughter of Charles VI of France and second wife of Richard II, or her sister Catherine, who married Henry V in 1420. Fourth Window (1) Quarterly of 6: 1, Argent a lion rampant gules crowned or; 2, Quarterly, 1 and 4, Gules a sun rayonnant argent; 2 and 3, Azure semé with fleursde-lis or; 3, Barry of ten argent and azure overall a lion rampant gules; 4, Argent three bends gules and on a chief party fessways argent and or a rose gules; 5, Gules three pales vair and on a chief gules a label of five points or; 6, Argent a fess and a canton gules. The arms of Elizabeth Woodville, who married Edward IV in 1464 and died in 1492. (2) Quarterly France modern and England with a label of three points argent (the Prince of Wales). Taking into account the other arms in this window, this shield must represent Edward, eldest son of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville, who became Prince of Wales in 1471 and succeeded his father as King Edward V in 1483.

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(3) Quarterly France modern and England with a label of three points argent each charged with a canton gules. These are the arms of George, Duke of Clarence (1449–78), son of Richard, Duke of York, and brother of Edward IV. He was married to Isabel, elder daughter and co-heiress of Richard Nevill, the ‘King-maker’. (4) Quarterly France modern and England with a label of three points ermine each charged with a canton gules. The arms of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, brother of Edward IV and George, Duke of Clarence, who became king as Richard III in 1483. His wife was Anne Nevill, the ‘Kingmaker’s’ younger daughter. [f. 133v.] Cloister, South Side First Window (1) Quarterly France modern and England within a bordure gobony argent and azure. The arms of the Beaufort family, Earls of Somerset. The last was Henry, who succeeded in 1455 and died in 1463. The shield could equally represent Joan Beaufort, who was married to Ralph Nevill, Earl of Westmorland (d. 1425); through her daughter Cecily she was grandmother to Edward IV. (2) Quarterly France modern and England within a bordure argent. These are the arms of the renowned humanist Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (1390–1447), the youngest brother of Henry V. (3) Quarterly France modern and England within a bordure argent charged with nine lions rampant purpure. These appear to be the arms of Richard of Conisborough, Earl of Cambridge (see no. 1 in the nave south window), but the argent label has been omitted. (4) Sable three ostrich feathers with scrolls argent. These are Edward the Black Prince’s arms for peace and occur on the side of his tomb in Canterbury Cathedral. They also appear to have been used by later monarchs.106 As the mottoes on the scrolls are omitted it is impossible to be certain whom these arms represented.

In London, British Library, Harl. MSS 2169, f.12v, and 6163, f. 3 these arms are called the king’s badges (see Two Tudor Books of Arms, ed. J. Foster (De Walden Library, 1904), pp. 15, 132). 106

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Second Window (1) Gules a lion rampant argent armed and langued azure (Mowbray). There are several connections of this family with the House of York. Anne, daughter and heiress of John Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, as a child married in 1478 the even younger Richard, Duke of York (d. 1483?), Edward IV’s youngest son. Catherine, sister of Cecily Nevill, wife of Richard, Duke of York, was the wife of John Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk (d. 1432). Finally, Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk (d. 1399), in 1384 married Elizabeth Fitzalan, daughter of Richard, Earl of Arundel. Richard’s granddaughter, Joan, was the second wife of Edmund of Langley. (2) Gules a lion rampant or armed and langued azure (Fitzalan). See no. 1 in this window. (3) Or a lion rampant azure armed and langued gules (Percy). The second husband of Eleanor Nevill, one of Cecily’s sisters, was Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland (d. 1455). (4) Azure three garbs or (Earls of Chester). In 1471 Edward IV’s eldest son Edward (king as Edward V in 1483) was created Earl of Chester. Third Window (1) Checky or and azure within a bordure gules charged with ten lions passant or. It is not entirely certain whom this shield represents. The most probable candidate is the Dreux family, Earls of Brittany and Richmond down to 1341, who bore these arms with the addition of a canton ermine for Brittany. John of Brittany, Earl of Richmond, held Fotheringhay manor from his uncle Edward I for a few years.107 (2) Blank shield. (3) Checky or and azure a chevron ermine. The arms of the holders of the Warwick earldom down to 1242; this family is often called Newburgh, but contemporary evidence is lacking.108 This family was no doubt represented at Fotheringhay as ancestors of the Beauchamp and Nevill Earls of Warwick (see also no. 3 in the third window on the west side and no. 2 in the fifth window on the south side).

VCH, Northants., ii p. 571. See Aspilogia II. Rolls of Arms Henry III, eds T. D. Tremlett, H. Stanford London, A. Wagner (Society of Antiquaries of London, 1967), p. 28. 107

108

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(4) Azure a bend argent cotised or between six lions rampant or armed and langued gules (Bohun, Earls of Hereford). Mary de Bohun (1369–94), younger daughter and co-heiress of Humphrey, Earl of Hereford, Essex and Northampton, was Henry IV’s first wife. Fourth Window (1) France modern within a bordure gobony gules and argent. The present writer has been unable to identify these arms. (2) Blank shield. (3) Argent a lion rampant purpure armed and langued azure. These arms were adopted in 1258 by Henry de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, and were used by him until his death in 1311.109 (4) Gules three lucies hauriant 2 and 1 argent. The arms of the Lucy family. The second wife of Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland (d. 1408), was Maud, daughter of Thomas, Lord Lucy of Egremont. Henry’s grandson, also named Henry (d. 1455), was married to Eleanor Nevill (see no. 3 in the second window on the south side). Fifth Window (1) Argent a bend sable. The arms appear to be those used from the early fourteenth century by the prominent Yorkshire family of Mauley, although they are usually given as Or a bend sable.110 (2) Gules a fess between six cross crosslets or. The arms of the Beauchamps, Earls of Warwick. Richard Nevill (the ‘King-maker’, d. 1471) inherited this earldom through his marriage with Anne Beauchamp, sister of Henry, Duke and Earl of Warwick. (3) Argent five escutcheons in cross sable each charged with as many roundels argent, within a bordure gules charged with castles or (Portugal), for Beatrice, daughter of King Ferdinand of Portugal. She was the first wife of Edward, second Duke of York, and later married Thomas Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel (d. 1415). See no. 2 in the nave south window. (4) Or three roundels gules and a label of three points azure (Courtenay, Earls of Devon). In 1495 William Courtenay, later Earl of Devon (d. 1511), married Catherine, sixth daughter of Edward IV. If these arms represent this particular earl, the shield must have been added some time after the building 109 110

Ibid., p. 116. Ibid., p. 139, and Two Tudor Books . . . , p. 140.

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and glazing of the cloister, which seems unlikely. The senior branches of the Courtenay family were consistently hostile to the House of York, but several of the Powderham Courtenays, a junior line, served Edward IV in various administrative capacities. The most important was Peter Courtenay, who in 1477 was rewarded with the deanery of Windsor, and, a year later, with the bishopric of Exeter.111 [f. 134] Sixth Window (1) Barry of six argent and azure. The arms of Grey of Codnor. (2) Argent three bends gules and on a chief party fessways argent and or a rose gules. The arms of the Orsini family, numbered amongst the ancestors of Elizabeth Woodville, queen of Edward IV (see no. 1 in the fourth window on the west side). (3) Argent a maunche sable. These are the arms of Edward IV’s chamberlain and trusted adviser William, Lord Hastings.112 In 1483 he was executed by Richard III. William was married to Catherine Nevill, sister of Warwick the ‘King-maker’. (4) Blank shield. Cloister, East side Second Window (1) Argent a cross gules (St George). Mention has already been made of the devotion to this saint shown by Edward IV and his mother Duchess Cecily.113 (2) Azure a cross patonce between four martlets or (St Edward the Confessor). The first two Dukes of York evidently had a particular devotion to this saint. The arms occur on Edmund of Langley’s tomb at King’s Langley (Herts.),114 and his son Edward left all his chapel plate (except those items pledged to finance his trip to France) to the Master and clerks of Fotheringhay for the honour of God, the Virgin, St Thomas of Canterbury, St Edward the Confessor and All Saints.115 111 See J. A. F. Thomson, ‘The Courtenay Family in the Yorkist Period’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, xlv (1972), especially pp. 236–41. 112 In London, British Library, Harl. MS 6163 these arms are described as those of the ‘Lord Chambrelayne’ (Two Tudor Books . . . , p. 137). 113 See above, pp. 348–9. 114 VCH, Herts., II, pl. 1. 115 Nichols, A Collection of all the Wills . . . , pp. 220–1.

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(3) Azure three crowns or (St Edmund, King and martyr). These arms are also found on Edmund of Langley’s tomb116 and the saint’s feast was celebrated as a double in the College.117 (4) Blank shield. Third Window (1) Quarterly France modern and England. The Royal Arms, presumably for Edward IV. (2) Quarterly France modern and England with a label of three points argent each charged with three roundels gules. The arms of the Dukes of York. Taking into account the other shields in this window these arms appear to represent Duke Richard (d. 1460), the builder of the nave and father of Edward IV (see also no. 1 in the hall window and no. 2 in the first window on the west side of the cloister). (3) Barry or and azure, a chief paly corners gyronny or and azure, overall an escutcheon argent (Mortimer, Earl of March). Richard, Duke of York, on the death of his maternal uncle became Earl of March, Lord Mortimer and Earl of Ulster (see no. 2 in the first window on the west side). (4) Gules a cross or (Burgh, Earl of Ulster). See no. 3 above. Fourth Window (1) Gules three lions passant guardant or in a bordure argent. The arms of the Holland family, Earls of Kent. Edmund of Langley’s second wife Joan was daughter of Thomas Holland, Earl of Kent, by Alice Fitzalan. The Holland arms occur on Edmund’s tomb.118 (2) Azure three horsebits or on a chief ermine a demi-lion issuant gules. These are the arms of the barony of Geneville. The line came to an end with the death in 1356 of Jean de Geneville, wife of Roger, Lord Mortimer and Earl of March. Henceforward the Geneville barony was united with that of Mortimer. For the connections of the Mortimers with the House of York see no. 2 in the first window on the west side. Fifth Window (1) Checky or and azure (Warenne, Earls of Surrey). The family had been extinct in the male line since 1347. Alice, heiress to her brother John, last VCH, Herts., ii, pl. I. Hamilton Thompson, p. 296, statute xlv. 118 VCH, Herts., ii, pl. iv. 116 117

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Warenne Earl of Surrey, was married to Richard Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel (d. 1376). He quartered the Warenne coat with his own arms and in 1361 assumed the title of Earl of Surrey.119 Richard’s granddaughter Joan was Edmund of Langley’s second wife (see no. 1 in the fourth window on this side of the cloister). In February 1477 Richard, Duke of York (1473–83?), youngest son of Edward IV, was created Earl Warenne. The hall and cloister of Fotheringhay thus contained an extensive set of shields of arms. Even allowing for the number of shields destroyed or illegible when Dugdale and Sedgwick visited Fotheringhay, it is difficult to interpret the heraldry in terms of a coherent unified programme. In most cases, however, it has been possible to suggest at least one reason for the presence of each shield of arms. Moreover, several general observations can be made. Most obvious of all is that a considerable number of the shields bear the arms of various members of the House of York. Indeed the heraldry in the fourth window on the west side was devoted to the arms of Edward IV’s wife, eldest son, and two younger brothers. Hardly less surprising is the presence of many shields of arms of families from which the House of York was descended and/or related to by marriage (Fig. 4). Here there is one interesting trend: quite a high proportion of the arms represent families related to the Nevills and none (apart from the arms of the Queen herself) the various Woodville alliances. Had the cloister been built earlier in the reign this would have been little cause for comment, but by 1480–3, as a result of the treason and death in 1471 of the ‘King­maker’, the Nevills had long been eclipsed in power and influence by the Queen’s family.120 Moreover, Elizabeth Woodville had local interests. It was at her Northamptonshire home of Grafton Regis that Edward had married her in 1464. It seems likely that the pre­ponderance of the Nevill family’s connections in the Fotheringhay heraldry was due to the King’s mother, Cecily Nevill, who was still alive at the time. As was suggested above, there are indications that she may have had a considerable say in the choice of iconography for the glazing of the nave. The dominance of Nevill alliances in the heraldic glass 119 See W. de G. Birch, Catalogue of Seals in the Department of Manuscripts in the British Museum, II (London, 1892), no. 9715, p. 797. 120 For a very useful article on the Nevill and Woodville family alliances see J. R. Lander, ‘Marriage and Politics in the Fifteenth Century: The Nevilles and the Wydevilles’, Bull. Inst. Historical Research, xxxvi (1963), pp. 119–52.

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reveals that it was family connections and ancestry, not political allegiances, which were the determining factors in the programme. Although the ‘Kingmaker’s’ arms are not present on any of the shields recorded by Dugdale and Sedgwick, those of such a consistent arch-enemy of the House of York as the Vere family were depicted, evidently through their kinship with the Nevills. If political loyalties were a consideration, it may even be questioned whether the arms of George, Duke of Clarence, would have been displayed. In 1478 he had been put to death after a lengthy period of disloyalty and plotting against his own brother, Edward IV. Conclusion The windows of Fotheringhay College originally contained some remarkable iconography which in part reflected its role as the dynastic mausoleum of the House of York. In the nave this was most obviously shown by the representation of Archbishop Scrope, an open display of anti-Lancastrian political propaganda. It is also demonstrated in a more personal fashion: a number of saints in the nave glazing were particularly revered by Cecily Nevill, Duchess of York. It is very probable that she played a large part in planning the glazing programme for this part of the church, especially as she was resident at Fotheringhay from 1461 to 1469, when the work was in progress. By the time the cloister was constructed between 1480 and 1483 Cecily was no longer living there. Nevertheless, the presence of a number of shields representing Nevill family alliances in the heraldic glass of the cloister and hall suggests that she continued to exercise some control over the embellishment of the College. Cecily’s close interest in Fotheringhay is not surprising, considering that it housed the bodies of her husband and one of her sons, and that she chose it as the last resting-place of her own mortal remains. When the cloister of Fotheringhay was built, the future of the Yorkist dynasty seemed assured. Edward IV had two surviving, albeit youthful, heirs, and he had the full support of his able brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester. With the obscure exception of Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, languishing in exile in Brittany, all dangerous domestic enemies had been vanquished and rival claimants to the throne eliminated. There seemed no reason why the Master, chaplains, and clerks of Fotheringhay should not have con­tinued to pray in perpetuity for the souls of Edmund of Langley, Duke Edward, and their successors. The premature death, on 9 April 1483,

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of Edward IV and the subsequent factional fighting which quickly resulted in the replacement of the House of York on the English throne by the Tudor dynasty, was to have fatal consequences for Fotheringhay College. It is not the least of history’s ironies that it was Edward IV’s grandson, Henry VIII, who started the process of dissolution and attack upon the Church which led, under Edward VI, to the ruination of Fotheringhay and many other sister institutions, great and small, devoted to prayers for the souls of the departed. Acknowledgements The author is most grateful to Mr Eric Eden for drawing Figures 1 and 3, and Mr David Goodger for Figure 4.

Bibliography Armstrong

Bibliotheca Topographica Cox Dugdale Hamilton Thompson

King’s Works, II King’s Works, III, Part I

C. A. J. Armstrong, ‘The Piety of Cicely, Duchess of York: A Study in Late Mediaeval Culture’, For Hilaire Belloc, ed. D. Woodruff (London, 1942), pp. 73–94. Bibliotheca Topographica Britannica, ed. J. Nichols, iv (London, 1790). J. C. Cox, ‘The College of Fotheringhay’, Archaeological Journal, lxi (1904), pp. 241–75. W. Dugdale, The Book of Monuments (London, British Library, Add. MS 71474). A. Hamilton Thompson, ‘The Statutes of the College of St Mary and All Saints, Fotheringhay’, Archaeological Journal, lxxv (1918), pp. 241–309. R. A. Brown, H. M. Colvin, A. J. Taylor, The History of the King’s Works, II, The Middle Ages (London, 1963). H. M. Colvin, D. R. Ransome, J. Summerson,

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Ross Wills

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The History of the King’s Works, III, 1485– 1660, pt I (London, 1975). The Itinerary of John Leland in or about the Years 1535–1543, ed. L. Toulmin Smith, 1 (London, 1964). R. C. Marks, ‘The Stained Glass of the Collegiate Church of the Holy Trinity, Tattershall (Lincs.)’, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of London (1975). C. Ross, Edward IV (London, 1974). Wills from Doctors’ Commons, ed. J. G. Nichols and J. Bruce (Camden Society, lxxxiii, 1862).

XV The Glazing of Henry VII’s Chapel, Westminster Abbey

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n his funeral oration for Henry VII John Fisher eulogised the buildings erected by the late king as ‘mooste goodly and after the newest cast all of pleasure’.1 Whether the bishop of Rochester had in mind the new lady chapel at the east end of Westminster Abbey as well as the royal palaces is debatable, given that it was unfinished at the king’s death on 21 April 1509. On its completion it quickly elicited the admiration of contemporaries. Leland with diplomatic hyperbole described it as ‘the wounder of the worlde’ and Norden noted ‘...the walls, windows and the rest so exquisitely performed’.2 As is the way of such descriptions these accounts are too rhetorical to be of value, apart from providing evidence of the chapel’s prestige. Today we find ourselves in much the same position as Fisher: we see the chapel devoid of the polychromatic translucency which was its principal pictorial embellishment. What has been lost can perhaps be gauged by imagining that other great Tudor royal monument, King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, stripped of its stained glass.3 This paper will attempt to reconstruct the disposition and iconography of the glazing and examine its relationship to the architecture and the other fittings and furnishings.4 The English Works of John Fisher, ed. J. E. B. Meyer, Early English Text Society, extra ser. 27 (1876), I, p. 270. 2 Both are quoted in W. R. Lethaby, Westminster Abbey Re-examined (London, 1925), pp. 155-6. 3 The glazing would still have been the main element of colour even if the stone sculpture had been painted, as the king intended. 4 It would be doing an injustice to other scholars to give the impression that the subject has passed unnoticed. Apart from attracting the attention of antiquaries the glazing has been discussed in most detail in W. R Lethaby, Westminster Abbey and the King’s Craftsmen 1

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‘Henry VII’s Chapel ... is one of the most inadequately documented buildings in the whole history of the King’s Works’.5 No building accounts survive, only some records of payments by the king, and his will. The foundation stone of the successor to the thirteenth-century Lady Chapel was laid on 24 January 1503. By the time of the king’s death nearly £15,000 had been spent on the building.6 Just prior to his decease Henry gave a further £5,000 to be used ‘...about and upon the finisshing and p’fourmyng of the premisses...’ Provision was made in the royal will for even more money: ‘And in case the said VMli. shall not suffice for the hool perfourmance and accomplisshment of the said werks ... and that thei be not p’fitely finisshed by us in our life daies; we then wol that our Executours from tyme to tyme as necessitie shall require, deliver to the said Abbot [John Islip] ... as moch money above the said VMli, as shall suffice for the p’fte finisshing and perfourmyng of the said werks...’ The outstanding works are identified: ‘... the said Chapell be desked, and the windowes ... be glased ... and that the Walles, Doores, Windows, Archies and Vaults, and Ymages of the same our Chapell, within and without, be painted, garnisshed and adorned, with our Armes, Bagies, Cognissaunts, and other convenient painteng, in as goodly and riche maner as suche a work requireth, and as to a Kings werk apperteigneth’.7 Modern scholarship has followed Lethaby in assuming that the glazing and other decoration were finished by the time Skelton’s eulogy of the late king was placed on the bronze enclosure of his tomb in 1512.8 Although no documentation directly links the foreign-born Barnard Flower with the chapel, he must have led the team of craftsmen engaged upon the windows. His post of king’s glazier alone makes him the obvious candidate; (London, 1906), pp. 237–9; idem, Re-examined, pp. 174–83; J. D. Le Couteur, ‘Further Notes on the Glazing of Henry VII’s Chapel’, The Builder (13 June 1924), pp. 940–1; F. C. Eeles, The Ancient Stained Glass of Westminster Abbey, from a Manuscript Dated 1938’, Journal of the British Society of Master Glass-Painters, 17 (sic) (ii) (1978–9), pp. 17–29. See also N. H. J. Westlake, A History of Design in Painted Glass, IV (London, 1894), pp. 27–8; Royal Commission on Historical Monuments of England, An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in London, vol. 1: Westminster Abbey (London, 1924), p. 63, pls. 118–19; The History of the King’s Works, III, ed. H. M. Colvin (London, 1975), hereafter HKW, pp. 210–17; C. Wilson et al., Westminster Abbey, New Bell’s Cathedral Guides (London, 1986), pp. 139–40; R. Marks, Stained Glass in England during the Middle Ages (London, 1993), pp. 213–17, figs. 182–3. 5 HKW, III, p. 210. 6 Ibid., p. 213. 7 The Will of King Henry VII, ed. T. Astle (London, 1775), pp. 4, 6, 7. 8 Lethaby, Re-examined, p. 180.

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there is also the evidence of his involvement in the first windows to be glazed in King’s College Chapel. It is likely that the glass was installed by the summer of 1511, by which time Flower was engaged on large-scale glazing projects for the pilgrimage chapel at Walsingham and Lady Margaret Beaufort’s former manor at Woking.9 A two-year glazing campaign for a project of this scale is rapid but by no means extraordinary; Flower usually worked with assistants or subcontractors and at King’s he glazed four of the very large windows between 1515 and 1517 and contracted to complete another six within a year.10 The glazing may not have remained intact for long. Westminster Abbey was dissolved in 1540 and in 1547 the imperial ambassador to the regent of the Netherlands reported that ‘For the last two days these [ecclesiastical] images have begun to be taken down and cast away at Westminster, and they will not even leave room for them in the glass’.11 Nevertheless, it is doubtful whether serious attacks on the mausoleum of the king’s grandfather would have been tolerated and it seems that the glazing in this part of the church survived until 1643–4, when a parliamentary committee ordered that pictorial material in the abbey should be destroyed. Torrigiano’s high altar was removed and in the summer and autumn of 1645 the chapel was glazed with white glass.12

9 A. Oswald, ‘Barnard Flower, the King’s Glazier’, Journal of the British Society of Master Glass-Painters, 11 (1951–5), 8–21, p. 15; H. Wayment, The Windows of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi, Great Britain Supplementary vol. I (London, 1972), p. 12. 10 In Stained Glass (p. 213) I was more circumspect in my dating of the Westminster glazing (c. 1510–15). Late medieval glass-painting workshops were small establishments usually comprising a master and one or two assistants and a project of the magnitude of Westminster was probably farmed out to a number of craftsmen under Flower’s overall direction; for workshops see Marks, Stained Glass, p. 44; Flower’s use of assistants is documented in Oswald, ‘Flower’, p. 12; for the King’s College contracts see Wayment, King’s, pp. 124–5. Wayment ascribes windows 2, 6, 9, 10 and 12 in all or in part to the period 1515–17; in ‘The Quest for Barnard Flower, King’s Glazier to Henry VII and VIII’, Journal of Stained Glass, 19 (i) (1989–90), 24–45, p. 27, Wayment replaces window 12 by 11 and omits 9. Flower died in the summer of 1517 before he had embarked on the second phase of the work. 11 Quoted in M. Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, I: Laws Against Images (Oxford, 1988), p. 258. 12 Historical Manuscripts Commission 14th Report, The Manuscripts of His Grace the Duke of Portland Preserved at Welbeck Abbey, III (London, 1894), Appendix, 2, pp. 133–4.

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The last vestiges of the original glazing were not removed for safekeeping on the outbreak of the World War II and were lost in an air raid on 27 September 1940, when a bomb fell outside the House of Lords and blew out the windows.13 Apart from a few eyelet fillings in the clerestory, the only surviving glass from the chapel are some quarries now in the west windows of the aisles and in the Victoria and Albert Museum (Fig. 9).14 Fortunately some antiquarian drawings and detailed photographs exist, taken by the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England and whilst the axial chapel glass was undergoing restoration in the Victoria and Albert Museum.15 The bare bones of the glazing scheme can be established from a combination of documentary sources, antiquarian records and observation of the existing fabric. In his will Henry stipulated that the windows should contain ‘... Stores, Ymagies, Armes, Bagies and Cognoissaunts, as is by us redily divised, and in picture delivered to the Priour of Saunt Bartilmews besid Smythfeld [William Bolton] maistre of the works of our said Chappell’.16 That the king’s wishes were honoured in respect of his ‘Armes, Bagies and Cognoissaunts’ is shown by the elements of the ground storey glazing which survived until the last war (Figs 3–9). In the window of the axial chapel (the intended location of Henry VII’s tomb) was a series of royal badges and shields enclosed in cartouches and set in quarries, some of which bore the crowned letters h and r (for henricus rex) in yellow stain; Lethaby also saw quarries with daisies and a crown in a thornbush.17 The shields and badges were in rich coloured glass and finely executed with delicate stickwork and careful application 13 The date is given in a pencilled note in a copy of The Illustrated London News (20 October 1940) in the Westminster Abbey Muniments (WAM) file on the glazing of Henry VII’s Chapel. I am most grateful to the staff of the Muniments and of the custodians of the fabric for their assistance in the preparation of this paper. 14 In 1960–1 some fragments recovered after the air raid were placed in the tracery of two windows in the cloister east walk (WAM file). 15 The most useful antiquarian illustrations are the drawings and watercolours of the heraldic glass made in the early 19th century by the Revd D. T. Powell (BL, Add. MS 17694, fol. 28r); see also George Rowe’s watercolours of two quarries executed a few years later (BL, Add. MS 39917, fols 132r–133r). 16 Will of Henry VII, p. 6. 17 Lethaby, Re-examined, p. 183, figs. 100–1. For the thornbush and crown badge see S. Anglo, The Foundation of the Tudor Dynasty: the Coronation and Marriage of Henry VII’, Guildhall Miscellany, 2 (1960), pp. 3–9, n. 3 and S. Chrimes, Henry VII (London, 1977), p. 49.

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1. Henry VII’s Chapel: elevation. Cottingham, Henry VII’s Chapel, II, pl. 8.

2a (opposite, left). Henry VII’s Chapel: detail of elevation. Cottingham, ibid. 2b (opposite, right). King’s College Chapel, Cambridge: detail of elevation. Britton, Architectural Antiquities, I, pl. opp. p. 26.

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3. Axial chapel window, Henry VII’s Chapel, in 1924.

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4. Crowned portcullis: axial chapel window, Henry VII’s Chapel, in 1924.

5. Crowned hawthorn bush flanked by the letters h and r: axial chapel window, Henry VII’s Chapel, in 1924.

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6. Fleur-de-lys device: axial chapel window, Henry VII’s Chapel, in 1924.

7. Arms of France modern quartering England: axial chapel window, Henry VII’s Chapel, in 1924.

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8. Quarries in a north aisle window, Henry VII’s Chapel, in 1937. 9. Quarries from Henry VII’s Chapel.

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10. Prophet and angel: east window, Henry VII’s Chapel, in 1942

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11. Offering of a golden table in the Temple of Apollo and the Marriage of Tobias and Sara: upper register of window 2 (nXIII), King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, 1515–17.

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12. West window, Henry VII’s Chapel, in 1942.

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13. Tracery glazing in the clerestory hemicycle windows, Henry VII’s Chapel, before World War II.

14. Detail of tracery glazing in the apex of the west window, Henry VII’s Chapel, in 1942.

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15. Royal badges in the tracery of the west window, Henry VII’s Chapel, in 1923.

16. Angel in the tracery of the west window, Henry VII’s Chapel, in 1923..

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17. Angels and canopy top, west window, Henry VII’s Chapel, in 1934.

18. Tracery glazing in the west window, Henry VII’s Chapel, in 1934.

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19. Crucifixion, east window, Fairford Church (Gloucs.), c. 1500–15(?).

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20. Crowned Portcullis: Jericho Kitchen, Westminster Abbey, early 16th century.

21. Detail of canonized bishop or abbott: apse clerestory, Westminster Abbey, c. 1507–1510.

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of paint. They included the royal arms of England, England impaled with Burgh and Mortimer (for Henry’s queen, Elizabeth of York) and St Edward the Confessor/Westminster Abbey; also the red rose of Lancaster, the Tudor rose, the rose dimidiated white and red, the hawthorn bush flanked by h and r, the fleur-de-lys on a blue ground (probably representing Katherine of Valois, Henry V’s widow and grandmother to Henry VII, who in 1438 had been buried in the former Lady Chapel) and the portcullis device of the Beauforts, for the king’s mother.18 There is little reason to doubt that even if the precise disposition of the heraldic glass and badges in this window may not correspond exactly with the original scheme the arrangement is broadly similar.19 Lethaby, noting that the small pieces of red and blue glass in the tracery openings were repeated in the other four radiating chapels, deduced that their main lights would also have contained heraldry in coloured glass. He also cites Malcolm’s 1803 description of one of the north chapels as displaying ‘painted glass of the arms of Edward the Confessor, Henry VII his initials, a crown on a tree, with the red rose and fleur-de-lys’. By 1856 only h and r quarries could be seen in the chapels (other than the axial) and side aisles.20 The aisle windows are smaller, with the principal main lights less than two quarries wide, and the side and tracery openings only span the width of a single quarry. Both for this reason and because of the need for adequate lighting, they can only have contained quarries. A 1937 photograph shows some crowned h and r quarries in a north aisle window (Fig. 8); writers of the late seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries also recorded quarries bearing fleurs-de-lys, port-cullises, roses and daisy plants in these windows.21 The lights of the aisle west windows are wider and could have contained imagery, but as their translucency is almost completely negated by the mass of the abbey church proper presumably they also contained quarries — as their central lights still do. Eeles, ‘Stained Glass of Westminster Abbey’, pp. 26–8, gives a complete catalogue. For the badges see S. Anglo, Images of Tudor Kingship (London, 1972), pp. 34–7, 74–97, and for the arms of Elizabeth of York see C. R. Humphrey-Smith & M. G. Heenan, ‘The Royal Heraldry of England, Part One’, The Coat of Arms, 6 (1960–1), 224–8, p. 228. 19 The glazing of these windows was largely renewed during Wren’s surveyorship (one of the red rose badges had the scratched date 1703), but by the end of the century it had fallen into disrepair (Lethaby, Re-examined, pp. 174–5). 20 Ibid., p. 182; J. P. Neale, The History and Antiquities of Westminster Abbey (London, 1856), p. 106. 21 Lethaby, Re-examined, pp. 182–3 citing accounts by Keepe (1683), Hatton (1708) and Malcolm (1803). 18

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The ‘Stores’, i.e. histories or historiated glass mentioned in the king’s will, were concentrated in the upper windows of the chapel (Fig. 1). Their subject-matter is provided by the 1526 agreement for completing the glazing of King’s College Chapel, which was to depict ‘...Imagery of the Story of the olde lawe and of the new lawe after the fourme maner goodnes curyousytie and clenlynes in euery poynt of the glasse wyndowes of the kynges newe Chapell at Westmynster’.22 Most of the King’s College windows are arranged typologically, i.e. with each New Testament event and apocryphal legend (‘anti-type’) juxtaposed with an Old Testament episode which appeared to prefigure it (‘type’) (Fig. 11). The scheme was based on the Biblia Pauperum and the Speculum Humanae Salvationis, blockbook editions of which were produced in the Netherlands in the late fifteenth century and disseminated throughout northern Europe; as was often the case, these models were not copied slavishly but quarried and adapted.23 The clerestory windows of Henry VII’s Chapel therefore contained a typological cycle; but are the King’s College windows a sufficient basis on which to reconstruct the arrangement, iconography and appearance of the Westminster glazing? Only to a point. First, the King’s glazing was executed over a long period of time and with interruptions. The first windows were glazed between 1515 and 1517 and there was a prolonged pause until work was resumed in 1526 by new teams of glaziers using a fresh set of designs. Consequently there are very considerable differences between the earlier and the later glass, although the organisation of each window remains the same.24 Second, the two buildings differ widely in the number and design of their windows. King’s College Chapel has twenty-six windows, compared with a total of thirteen in the clerestory of Henry VII’s Chapel. The latter are much smaller in size, although this is partly compensated for by the double transom design which gives fifteen lights compared with ten at Cambridge; the tracery designs also differ (Fig. 2). There must, therefore, have been considerable divergence in scope and disposition between the two schemes. At King’s College the east window is devoted to the Passion, with the crucifixion in the centre of the upper register. Almost certainly the crucifixion formed the centre-piece of the axial clerestory window of Henry Wayment, King’s, p. 125. Ibid, passim. For the blockbooks see Biblia Pauperum: a Facsimile of the Forty-Page Blockbook Edition, ed. A. Henry (London, 1987); Speculum Humanae Salvationis, ed. J. Lutz & P. Perdrizet, 3 vols (Leipzig, 1907–9). 24 See Wayment, King’s for the most detailed account of this glass. 22 23

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VII’s Chapel, directly above the high altar and the stone figure of Christ in majesty at triforium level, which is flanked not only by the Virgin and Gabriel but by the apostles, witnesses to the passion.25 As the crucifixion is unlikely to have traversed the transoms it would have been accompanied by other Passion scenes, as at King’s College and Fairford parish church, Gloucestershire.26 If this hypothesis is correct, then it is very probable that the entire clerestory programme was organised in the same way as King’s, so that the narrative read clockwise from the westernmost window on the north side, terminating in the opposite window on the south side. The cycle could not have been as extensive as its Cambridge counterpart and we can only guess as to what was omitted. King’s Chapel includes three windows depicting the Acts of the Apostles and four at the west end devoted to the Virgin.27 That Henry VII’s Chapel did not include Marian imagery in its glazing is inconceivable. It was dedicated to the Virgin and functioned as a Lady Chapel; within its walls, as in those of its predecessor, was heard a daily Mass of the Virgin as well as a weekly commemoration on Saturdays.28 In the Virgin the king placed his ‘moost syngulier trust and confidence, to whom in al my necessites I have made my continuel refuge, and by whom I have hiderto in all myne adversities, ever had my spe’ial comforte and relief...’. To the high altar of the chapel (which was of course dedicated to her) he gave the ‘grettest ymage of our Lady that we nowe have in our Juellhouse’.29 His devotion to the Virgin was shared by his mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort; she obtained for her chantry in the chapel the same spiritual privileges as those attached to the chapel of the Scala Coeli in Rome.30

Lethaby, Re-examined, p. 179 suggested that the crucifixion would have been in the east window. For the sculpture see J. T. Micklethwaite, ‘Notes on the Imagery of Henry the Seventh’s Chapel, Westminster’, Archaeologia, 47 (2) (1883), 361–80, pp. 371–2, pl. x. 26 Wayment, King’s, frontispiece, pls 96–107; idem, The Stained Glass of the Church of St Mary, Fairford, Gloucestershire, Society of Antiquaries of London Occasional Paper, n.s. 5 (London, 1984), pl. vii. 27 Wayment, King’s, pp. 101–9, nos 21–3, pls 134–45; pp. 45–51, 107–12, nos 1, 2, 24,25, pls. 48–55, 146–53. 28 For the liturgy of the Virgin as performed at Westminster see H. F. Westlake, Westminster Abbey (London, 1933), I, pp. 344–6, 364–5; E. Carpenter et al., A House of Kings (London, 1966); pp. 51–4, 72–3. 29 Will of Henry VII, pp. 2, 34. 30 Jones & Underwood, King’s Mother, p. 193; for devotion to the Scala Coeli see N. Morgan’s contribution to this volume. 25

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Probably the layout of the typological windows at Westminster and Cambridge was broadly similar. In the latter the four ‘types’ and ‘antitypes’ traverse two lights and are separated by a vertical band of messengers, or witnesses to the events portrayed, in the central light (Fig. 11); it is difficult to conceive of a different composition in the Henry VII’s Chapel windows, which have the same five-light division (Figs 1, 2).31 The presence of the second transom in the Westminster window design would have enabled the glaziers to include two additional scenes and another messenger — unless one of the subdivisions was devoted to figures or even quarry glazing. We can at least be certain of the schema adopted for the tracery of these windows as some of it remained intact until the Second World War. A photograph of two of the hemicycle windows shows the central lights filled with the four quarterings of the royal arms and in the small quatrefoil openings were unpainted ruby bosses enclosed in blue glass (Fig. 13).32 At King’s College the greater number of tracery lights permitted a more extensive display of royal badges and devices.33 If the clerestory windows were indeed organised on the same lines as King’s College Chapel they may well have been the first manifestation in England of the Netherlandish ‘pictorial’ mode of glass-painting. At Cambridge and Fairford the landscape settings and interiors of the historiated scenes which ignore the mullion divisions show that glaziers were responding to new imperatives. The craft was ceasing to be one which was both distinctive and intimately related to its architectural setting; instead it was becoming a derivative of panel painting and its practitioners were striving to translate the achievements of Van Eyck, Memling and their contemporaries and followers into a translucent and monumental medium. Innovation is to be expected from a royal undertaking, but if Henry VII’s Chapel is to claim this in respect of the clerestory glazing, it has to be established that it was executed before the Fairford windows (Fig. 19). The chronology of the latter is not as firm as it seems. The long-accepted dating of 1495–1505 has been revised by Hilary Wayment, who argues that the glazing extended from c. 1500 to 1515 or 1517 with the ‘pictorial’ glass executed in the first

The selection of only one Old Testament ‘type’ at King’s is an instance of the free adaptation of the blockbooks: the Biblia Pauperum and the Speculum Humanae Salvationis have two and three Old Testament scenes respectively to each ‘anti-type’; see n. 23. 32 A few of the latter still exist. 33 Wayment, King’s, pls 36–7. 31

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phase of the work.34 Apart from stylistic analysis and comparison the only evidence is provided by Leland’s statement that John Tame began the new church and it was completed by his son Sir Edmund. The former died in 1500 but as Edmund was alive until 1534 a terminus ante of 1515/17 is far from secure; the starting date is equally hypothetical.35 Ultimately one cannot be certain of the respective chronologies, but it seems improbable that the first known appearance of this new kind of glazing should be in a Gloucestershire parish church rather than in a building commissioned by a monarch who is known to have had foreign glass-painters in his employ at this time.36 The double transom design of the clerestory windows of Henry VII’s Chapel must have posed issues of legibility by compressing the typological scenes. If the primary purpose of these windows was to be ‘read’, the Westminster clerestory glazing must have been less successful than its Cambridge counterpart (Figs 2, 11). However, it is more likely that their function was to portray a theme which was considered an appropriate adornment for a great church. The typological cycle did not extend into the great west window (Fig. 12); the pre-Second World War photographs reveal the remains of canopies on alternating red and blue grounds in the main lights, so it must have consisted of tiers of figures as Lethaby deduced.37 In a sense the typological cycle did find an echo in this window. Until 1940 a three-quarter-length bearded figure in a ruby robe with an inscribed scroll and enclosed in a canopied niche on a green ground existed in the central light of the axial clerestory window; apart from the opening word patre[m] the scroll bearing the text laudate nomen domini is an alien insertion. Underneath was an angel with a scroll bearing the label Ieromias p[ro]ph[et]a (Fig. 10). These figures are not in their original location and the lower section of the bearded figure is missing. Contrary to Lethaby’s qualified assertion, they belong together.38 34 Wayment, Fairford, p. 96; his revised dating is accepted in Marks, Stained Glass, pp. 209–12. 35 Wayment, Fairford, p. 2. 36 Wayment’s attempts to establish a case for royal patronage at Fairford are not convincing (Fairford, esp. pp. 95–7). I have excluded the west window of St George’s Chapel Windsor and Fox’s work at Winchester from this discussion as there is no evidence of ‘pictorial’ glazing there (see Marks, Stained Glass, pp. 209, 212–13). 37 Lethaby, Re-examined, pp. 180–1. Oswald, ‘Flower’, p. 14 and HKW, III, p. 217 suggest that the typological cycle encompassed the west window. 38 Lethaby, Re-examined, p. 180; he also misread the angel inscription (p. 179 and fig. 99).

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Patrem is the opening word of the text Patrem invocabitis qui terram fecit et condidit celum (Jeremiah, 3:19, 32:17) made up from and used as the Old Testament counterpart of the section of the creed associated with St Peter. The figure of Jeremiah is thus the sole survivor from a set of twelve prophets accompanying the apostles bearing creed scrolls, a common subject in medieval glazing.39 In the series at Fairford the figures stand on bases with scrolls identifying each prophet and apostle; some scrolls are held by angels, like that at Westminster.40 The prophet when complete and the angel could only have fitted into a main light in the west window of the chapel. The creed series accounts for twenty-four of these lights; the only indication of the contents of the remaining eighteen openings is possibly provided by the inserted section of Jeremiah’s scroll, which, as Micklethwaite suggested, may have been associated with Dominations, one of the nine orders of angels.41 Angels also featured in the tracery openings of the west window, some holding a fleur-de-lys and shields with the linked initials of Henry and Elizabeth. In other lights were crowns surmounting Tudor roses, the Beaufort portcullis and the fleur-de-lys; also a cross paty (probably a reference to the arms of Westminster Abbey/St Edward the Confessor) and the ostrich feather of the Prince of Wales with the motto Ich dyn (Figs 14–18). The broad outline of the glazing programme must have been discussed at the time that the architect — almost certainly Robert Janyns — designed the building.42 The king would not have had to look far for a model for the typological cycle, since a manuscript copy of the Speculum Humanae Salvationis was to hand either in his own library or that of his mother.43 The Lady Margaret must have had a hand in the selection of the imagery. Her chaplain was present at the laying of the foundation stone, the chapel was her chosen burial place and chantry and her family device is distributed

See Marks, Stained Glass, pp. 78–9 for some examples and further bibliography on this subject. 40 Wayment, Fairford, pp. 42–71, pls. xv–xvii, xxvii–xxx; for the Fairford Jeremiah see pp. 70–1, pl. xxx. 41 Micklethwaite, ‘Imagery of Henry the Seventh’s Chapel’, p. 377. Although he misread the text it could still apply to Dominations. 42 Wilson, Westminster Abbey, p. 70, and ch. 8 of this volume. 43 BL, Harley MS 2838. The manuscript was illuminated by a Dutch artist and must have been made for the kneeling bishop on fol. 51r; the royal arms shows that subsequently it came into royal possession (see Janet Backhouse, ch. 10 of this volume). 39

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liberally over the stonework and glass.44 Abbot Islip, who not only enjoyed the royal trust but shared Henry’s devotion to the Virgin, would also have been involved from the outset.45 Of the king’s executors charged with ensuring that the royal wishes were carried out Bishop Fox may have taken a particular interest in the windows. A notable patron of the arts in his own right, it was Fox who in 1515 had to ‘devise and commande to be doon’ the first phase of the King’s College Chapel glazing.46 The programme reflected the chapel’s two complementary functions. It formed part of a great Benedictine church and was fully integrated into its liturgical observances; it was also the chantry chapel and mausoleum of Henry VII, his queen and his mother with elaborate provision for Masses and obits for their souls, those of their ancestors and relatives; the two interests coincided in the chapel’s dedication to the Virgin.47 The glazing was thus appropriate for both a great church and a family chapel. The concordance of the New and Old Testaments was a long-established theme for windows in England, for instance in Canterbury and Lincoln cathedrals, and enjoyed a vogue in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The cloisters of the abbeys of Peterborough and St Albans had typological cycles installed in the middle decades of the fifteenth century. These were followed by the series in the chancel windows of the collegiate church at Tattershall in Lincolnshire (c. 1466–80) and Lambeth Palace chapel (1486–1500). The former was based very closely on the blockbook edition of the Biblia Pauperum, which together with the Speculum Humanae Salvationis was

44 One of her books (Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS 261), which has invocations to saints who were particularly efficacious in protecting against pestilence, may also be a pointer to her involvement. They include St Sebastian, who occurs twice in the internal statuary of the chapel, as does St Roch. See Jones & Underwood, King’s Mother, p. 261; Micklethwaite, ‘Imagery’, pp. 364–5, 368, 374, pl. x. 45 The text and illuminations of Manchester, John Rylands Library, MS 165, a small book of devotions made for Islip, are mainly concerned with the Virgin; two of the three depictions of the abbot also portray the Virgin and in the third (fol. 66r) he appears in the miniature of Joachim and Anna at the Golden Gate. See M. R James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Latin Manuscripts in the John Rylands Library at Manchester, 2 vols (Manchester, 1921), pp. 287–9, pl. 175. For Islip, see H. F. Westlake, Westminster Abbey: the Last Days of the Monastery (London, 1921) and D. Knowles, The Religious Orders in England, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1948–59), III, pp. 96–9. 46 Wayment, King’s, p. 123 for the reference to Fox. 47 A summary of the indentures detailing the Masses etc. made with Westminster and other establishments is given in Will of Henry VII, pp. 49–69.

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also used for individual Old and New Testament scenes at Great Malvern Priory and Fairford as well as the typological windows of King’s College Chapel. The Westminster monks and the royal family would have been fully acquainted with this type of monumental imagery.48 There must always have been the intention of associating the clerestory windows with the external and internal figure sculpture. The outer faces of the turrets at clerestory level originally contained forty-eight statues of the apostles and the evangelists with their Old Testament counterparts, the prophets and kings, thereby echoing the more elaborate typology of the adjacent windows. Inside, the imagery of these windows took precedence in the celestial hierarchy over the ranks of philosophers, apostles and saints gathered in the triforium and the chapels, a heavenly host which would have been augmented by the forty-two figures in the west window, some of which repeated the external imagery.49 The king’s mortal remains were indeed surrounded by ‘al the holie companie of Heven; that is to saye, Aungels, Archaungeles, Patriarches, Prophets, Apostels, Evangelists, Martirs, Confessours, and Virgyns’ in whose ‘singuler mediacion and praiers’ Henry declared his trust.50 The contrast between the lavish display of imagery in the king’s chapel at Westminster and the more conventional interior elevation of Edward IV’s St George’s Chapel, Windsor would not have been lost on contemporaries, as was no doubt the intention.51 For the upper levels to be the primary focus of religious imagery in Henry VII’s Chapel is exceptional. Equally remarkably, the entire ground storey glazing was given up to family and dynastic display — remarkable not 48 For these cycles see Marks, Stained Glass, p. 67 (with further bibliography). Lady Margaret Beaufort had possession of Tattershall and took a very close interest in the college (Jones & Underwood, King’s Mother, pp. 132–3) and, as we have seen, a copy of the Speculum Humanae Salvationis was in royal possession. Janet Backhouse has pointed out that typological cycles are not unusual in fifteenth-century devotional manuscripts: ‘A Reappraisal of the Bedford Hours’, British Library Journal, 7 (1981), pp. 47–69. See E. Mâle, L’Art Religieux de la Fin du Moyen Age en France, 5th edn (Paris, 1949), pp. 229–46 for a general discussion of late medieval typology. 49 This duplication of imagery suggests that the programme was not planned in detail from the outset. For the sculpture see Micklethwaite, ‘Imagery’, and L. Stone, Sculpture in Britain: the  Middle Ages (Harmondsworth, 1972), pp. 227–30 and H. J. Dow, The Sculptural Decoration of the Henry VII Chapel (Edinburgh, 1992). 50 Will of Henry VII, pp. 2–3. 51 A point made by Wilson, Westminster Abbey, p. 75, in respect of the architecture as well as the sculpture.

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because of the presence of these elements in an ecclesiastical building but by their quantity and prominence. ‘The idea that churches might be places in which one celebrated and ... exhibited one’s family and associates had a long history’, Andrew Martindale reminds us.52 The depiction of heraldry in windows by donors and patrons was commonplace long before the early sixteenth century, particularly in those foundations which functioned as family mausolea. The Beauchamp chapel attached to St Mary’s at Warwick and the collegiate church at Tattershall will suffice as two English fifteenthcentury examples in which the extensive array of heraldry and badges in the glass both informed viewers of the munificence of their founders and, through the juxtaposition of personal emblem and sacred imagery, indicates that their souls reposed in Heaven.53 However, neither Warwick nor Tattershall devotes a sequence of windows in their entirety to personal devices. I know of no other ecclesiastical building in which the ground storey glazing bears so strongly the personal imprint of the founder. This is true not just of the glass, for Tudor roses and Beaufort portcullises occur on virtually every surface and medium in the chapel, on the exterior as well as the interior and from the fan vaults to the bronze gates at the entrance. Christopher Wilson has shown how indebted the architecture of the chapel is to Henry’s secular buildings at Windsor and Richmond.54 Likewise the ground storey glazing seems to have been modelled on the domestic glazing recently installed in the royal palaces and residences. Nothing is known of the work at Richmond Palace for which in 1503 Barnard Flower received the substantial payment of £63 19s. 11½d., but it must have included roundels painted with red roses and portcullises like those which he provided for windows at Eltham and the Tower of London between Easter 1500 and Easter 1502 at a cost of one shilling each.55 More extensive glazing was undertaken in these years within the Palace of Westminster itself. No fewer than seventeen glaziers were employed here apart from Flower, several of

A. Martindale, ‘Patrons and Minders: the Intrusion of the Secular into Sacred Spaces in the Late Middle Ages’, in The Church and the Arts, ed. D. Wood, Studies in Church History, 28 (Oxford, 1992), 143–78, p. 165. 53 R. Marks, The Stained Glass of the Collegiate Church of the Holy Trinity, Tattershall (Lines.) (New York & London, 1984); the Beauchamp chapel awaits a comprehensive study. 54 Wilson, above, ch. 8. 55 HKW, III, p. 34 (Richmond); BL, Egerton MS 2358, ff. 19r, 51r (Eltham and the Tower); English trans. in Oswald, ‘Flower’, pp. 11–12. 52

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whom had foreign names. The great windows at both ends of the hall were glazed with armorial glass and Flower himself was responsible for filling two windows on the west side with Normandy glass and four royal badges.56 The survival of these accounts provides merely a snapshot of the type of glazing carried out under Henry VII; nevertheless it reveals the king’s determination to dress his residences and the buildings of state in his own livery. Such an assertion of proprietorial rights was hardly a new phenomenon in early sixteenth-century England, but under Henry — and his successor — it was carried out on a massive scale and extended into virtually every kind of artistic medium. It provides clear evidence of the Tudor monarchy’s attempt to project a sense of continuity and of permanence.57 Authority is not expressed merely through the depiction of symbols but also by the scale and superiority of the workmanship involved. As befitted his exalted status the king and his executors sought to obtain the services of the best craftsmen available. For his architect and masons Henry had no need to look beyond his native shores. When it came to the stone sculpture and the stalls he imported carvers from Flanders and Germany.58 Similarly he had recourse to Netherlandish glass-painters for the windows of the chapel, as did so many other patrons in Spain and France in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. As has been said, the individual entrusted

Oswald, ‘Flower’, p. 12. See Anglo, Images, pp. 34–6; an earlier instance of this practice is the introduction of new royal symbols into windows at Eltham by Henry IV (L. F. Salzman, ‘Medieval Glazing Accounts’, Journal of the British Society of Master Glass-Painters, 3 (1929–30), pp. 26–7). 58 For the stalls see HKW, III, p. 214. Stone, Sculpture in Britain (p. 229) has observed that although the closest parallels for the figure sculpture are with German art nothing quite like it has yet been recognised on the continent; similarly the immigrant glass-painters seem to have adapted their native traditions for an English idiom. The international nature of the chapel embraced the royal tombs; the bronze grate enclosing Henry VII’s tomb was the work of a Dutch smith and the design of the monument itself was entrusted initially to the Italian sculptor Guido Mazzoni before the commission passed to Torrigiano. The last was also responsible for Lady Margaret Beaufort’s tomb and the high altar of the chapel. the most recent discussion of the royal tombs is P. Lindley, ‘ “Una grande opera al mio re”: Gilt-Bronze Effigies in England from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 143 (1990), pp. 112–30; now revised under the title ‘Collaboration and Competition: Torrigiano and Royal Tomb Commissions’, in P. Lindley, Gothic to Renaissance. Essays on Sculpture in England (Stamford, 1995), pp. 47–72 and pls 19–28. 56 57

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with overseeing the glazing must have been Barnard Flower, a native of this region.59 Apart from the circumstantial documentary evidence, there are also the closely related designs for the angels in base niches at Westminster and King’s College Chapel (Figs. 10, 11). The figural glass in Henry VII’s Chapel also can be compared with other glazing commissions, including the west window of St George’s Chapel, Windsor, of c. 1500–6, and the east window and choir aisles of Winchester Cathedral, glazed by Bishop Fox some time between 1501 and c. 1515.60 The affinities between their surviving glass, the early windows of King’s College Chapel and the upper storey glazing of Henry VII’s Chapel lead to the conclusion that the same guiding hand was involved. Flower also seems to have participated in the glazing of Fairford, judging by the similarities in the design of the base niches in one of the historiated windows and some of the tracery angels holding shields to their counterparts at Westminster.61 Together with the first glazing of King’s College the Fairford narrative windows, which include the crucifixion and some typology of the Virgin, probably provide a reasonably accurate impression of the colour and design of the original clerestory glazing of Henry VII’s Chapel (Fig. 19). The glass is in a typical Netherlandish pictorial idiom using late Gothic rather than Italianate architectural forms.62 None of the heraldic glazing carried out by Flower in the royal residences and other buildings has survived, at least in situ; however some royal badges in the For Flower’s career see Oswald, ‘Flower’, pp. 8–21, Wayment, ‘Quest’, pp. 24–45; Marks, Stained Glass, p. 207 (with further bibliography). 60 See above, n. 36. 61 Wayment, Fairford, pls. x, liii (d). 62 Hilary Wayment has identified a number of individual hands in the glass of King’s College and Fairford and has noted, as others have done, affinities between the two monuments (King’s, p. 23 and Fairford, pp. 84–94). In ‘Quest’, p. 28 the same author has suggested that 98% of the painting of the early windows at Cambridge was sub-contracted; links between Westminster, Windsor, Winchester and Fairford are made in this article (pp. 24–5, 28–32). Westlake, Design, III (London, 1886), pp. 62–3 compared Fox’s work at Winchester with Fairford, and Herbert Read, English Stained Glass (London, 1926), pp. 235–6 saw similarities between the tracery angels at Fairford and Westminster, see also Marks, Stained Glass, pp. 209–17, figs 177–83. As we are dealing with a craft in which the role of the designer is critical and yet may be undetectable in the actual painting of the glass I suspect it will never be possible to establish Flower’s precise degree of involvement in any of these projects — unless of course some documentation emerges which clarifies the matter. For what it is worth, my own hypothesis is that he was probably responsible for translating the king’s will as expressed ‘in picture’ (i.e. vidimuses made by a painter) into glazier’s cartoons and for overall supervision of the respective craftsmen. 59

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Jericho Parlour of Westminster Abbey, the Victoria and Albert Museum and St John’s Chapel in the Tower of London (the last from Horace Walpole’s collection at Strawberry Hill) are very similar to those formerly in Henry VII’s Chapel. The Jericho Parlour was built by Abbot Islip and evidently for its glazing he turned to the craftsmen responsible for the windows of Henry VII’s Chapel (Fig. 20).63 The accounts for Flower’s other royal commissions mentioned above give some idea of the likely costs of the chapel glazing. The roundels with roses and portcullises in the axial chapel were probably supplied for the same rate as those in the Tower of London, Eltham and Westminster Hall; the quarries into which they were set must have cost in the region of 6d. per square foot, which was the price Flower received for glass decorated with hawthorns at Eltham.64 An indication of the costs of the figural and historiated glass in the clerestory is perhaps provided by the work carried out by Flower for the Savoy Hospital in London. In 1514 and 1516 he received 16d. per square foot for the Last Judgement window at the west end and for the east window.65 The crown and those most closely associated with it tended to monopolise the output of the immigrant glaziers until well into Henry VIII’s reign and their work must have been thought superior to that of the indigenous craftsmen. The comparison could be made within the walls of the abbey church. At the same time as the king’s new chapel was rising at the east end a glazier named Richard Twygge was employed on windows in the main body of the church. Twygge came from Malvern and in a career spanning more than twenty-five years had worked on a number of major glazing schemes for important patrons, including Great and Little Malvern priories and Tattershall. It is reasonable to assume that Twygge was considered to be in the first rank of English practitioners of his craft. Yet the glazing of Henry VII’s Chapel was not entrusted to him but to craftsmen from overseas who evidently were thought to be more capable of producing the kind of work required for a prince’s commission. The contrast between Twygge’s glass and the richness and virtuosity of the windows in the new building would not J. Armitage Robinson, The Abbot’s House at Westminster (Cambridge, 1911); F. S. Eden, ‘Ancient Painted Glass in the Conventual Buildings, other than the Church, of Westminster Abbey’, The Connoisseur, 77, no. 306 (February 1927), pp. 81–3. 64 BL Egerton MS 2358, ff. 19r, 51r (Oswald, ‘Flower’, pp. 11–12). 65 Idem, The Glazing of the Savoy Hospital’, Journal of the British Society of Master Glass-Painters, 11 (1951–5), 224–32, p. 227. 63

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have been lost on the monks and anyone else who had the opportunity of viewing them (Fig. 21).66 The building works initiated by Henry VII and completed by his successor were the most substantial undertaken by an English monarch at Westminster Abbey since the time of Henry III. This emulation of his thirteenth-century predecessor was hardly coincidental. Indeed the personal imprint of the Tudors was even more in evidence. When Henry III began the reconstruction of the abbey church, monumental heraldry was still in its infancy; before the sixteenth century this form of pictorial recognition had expanded to embrace badges and other personal devices, all of which proliferate over the stonework, monuments and glass of the new chapel. And not just here; the portcullis and Lancastrian rose in the glass of the west windows of the nave aisles, which although not in situ almost certainly belonged to the last stages of the nave glazing, are no doubt an acknowledgement of Henry’s bequest of 500 marks towards the completion of the abbey church.67 Perhaps an even more potent symbol of the dynasty’s association with the ancient coronation church is provided by the ‘hoole sute of Vestiments and Coopies of clothe of gold tissue, wrought with our badgies of rede Roses and Poortcoleys’ which the king bequeathed to the convent of Westminster. These twentynine copes together with the vestments of the officiating priest, deacon and sub-deacon were intended for use in the abbey church as a whole; reserved for his chapel was a set of altarcloths, vestments and other ornaments to ‘bee soo embrowdred and wrought with our armes and cognisaunts, that thei may by the same bee knowen of our gifte and bequeste’.68 The royal imagery of the fabric, the glass, the tombs and the vestments is repeated in the illumination of the foundation indentures for the chapel. All of these artefacts were part of the same strategy: to signal that the new dynasty was the legitimate successor to the English throne. Fifteenth-century writers had reminded princes that expenditure on buildings, furnishings and all forms of display was an essential aspect of effective kingship. Henry VII was very conscious of the wisdom of this precept; as Polydore Vergil observed, ‘he For Twygge see Marks, Tattershall, passim, and idem, Stained Glass, pp. 203–4. Although he is only documented in connection with the nave glazing, some of the figures in the apse clerestory windows can be attributed to him on stylistic grounds. 67 Will of Henry VII, p. 29. 68 Ibid., pp. 37, 35; L. Monnas, ‘New Documents for the Vestments of Henry VII at Stonyhurst College’, Burlington Magazine, 131, no. 1034 (May 1989), pp. 345–9. 66

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knew well how to maintain his royal majesty and all which appertains to kingship at every time and in every place’.69 The chapel is of course a work of piety and as such would have been intended to smooth the king’s path to salvation. Nonetheless the strength of Henry’s religious convictions has to be assessed within the context of a world in which the performance of good works was a social obligation incumbent on a ruler and whose prestige partly rested on the projection of an image of a pious prince.70 The new Lady Chapel placed the king in the forefront of monarchs for whom lavish expenditure on buildings, works of piety, memorials and objets d’art was a tangible expression of power and status. For Henry VII and his successor, costly buildings projected an impression of permanence and stability, festooned as they were with their badges and devices. The most potent symbol of this dynastic promotion must have been the new chapel located at the heart of the royal administration and forming a spectacular addition to the edifice which was both the coronation church and the ‘commen Sepulture of the Kings of this Reame’ of whom the Tudors proclaimed themselves the legitimate heirs and successors.71 Henry VII’s Chapel was truly of a magnificence and scale as ‘to a King’s werk apperteigneth’.

Chrimes, p. 299, quoting Vergil, Anglica Historia, p. 145. Sir John Fortescue and the Black Book of the Household both emphasise the desirability of princely magnificence, as Anglo has pointed out (Images, pp. 6–8); see above, ch. 2, n. 53. 70 For the intermingling of social duty with private belief within the upper strata of society at the time see Jones & Underwood, King’s Mother, pp. 174–5. Opinion has been divided on both the nature and the sincerity of Henry VII’s piety. R. L Storey, The Reign of Henry VII (London, 1968), p. 3, believed that his devotion was exceptional, whereas Chrimes, Henry VII (p. 304) inclined to the view that Henry’s religion was no more than conventional and questioned whether it had any real spiritual basis; see also Beckett in ch. 7 of this volume. 71 The words are Henry’s (Will of Henry VII, p. 3). 69

XVI Medieval Stained Glass in Bedfordshire

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n terms of quantity Bedfordshire is poor in medieval stained glass. Of the vast amount that formerly existed in its churches only a few scattered fragments remain, mainly from tracery lights. In the entire county there is only one complete window, at Old Warden. Taking England as a whole, most of the destruction took place in two periods: the Reformation, and the Civil War and Commonwealth. The number of repairs to and re-glazing of windows recorded in the Elizabethan churchwardens’ accounts for Clifton, Northill and Shillington, and in the post-Restoration accounts of Harlington suggest that Bedfordshire conformed to this pattern.1 It is less generally recognised that the nineteenth century also witnessed losses of ancient glass, usually through excessive zeal on the part of church restorers. From the amount of glass recorded in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries which no longer survives it is clear that the county suffered heavily in this period.2 One example is Wymington, where the medieval glass in the east window was sold in 1844 to pay for the church restoration. Nevertheless, despite the losses, Bedfordshire does possess glass of excellent quality and considerable iconographical interest. It has much to offer heraldists and genealogists, and social as well as art historians. Donors Who were the people who paid for medieval stained glass windows in Bedfordshire? As might be expected, the more well-to-do members of 1 J. Hight Blundell, ‘Harlington Churchwardens’ Accounts’, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, 8 (1923), pp. 93, 95, 98, 101, 103, 104, 107, 108; J. E. Farmiloe & R. Nixseaman (eds), Elizabethan Churchwardens’ Accounts, idem, passim. 2 Victoria County History, Bedfordshire (hereafter VCH), II (London, 1912), p. 121.

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society, both lay and ecclesiastical, were the main patrons. Of the laity, the largest category consisted of the local landholders and manorial tenants. To give only two examples, at Renhold at least one window was given by the Pigott family who held the manor of Hoobury from the early fourteenth century until 1351. The donation was probably connected with the foundation in 1333 of a chantry in the church by John Pigott.3 In the fifteenth century, Thomas Pever (d. 1429) of Toddington Manor gave a window in his parish church.4 Both the Pigott and Pever families are of no more than local significance, but some gifts of glass to parish churches were made by great magnates of national importance. Millbrook and Ampthill benefited from the generosity of Sir John Cornwall, Lord Fanhope (d. 1443), who held the two manors. His protégé Sir John Wenlock (killed at the Battle of Tewkesbury in 1471) built and glazed in 1461 the magnificent chapel bearing his family name in Luton parish church.5 Of patronage by merchants and the humbler ranks of society (who frequently as members of religious or craft guilds clubbed together to pay for windows) there is no surviving evidence for Bedfordshire. No doubt there were such windows; churches in other counties have glass given by these categories, particularly in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. In general, parish priests formed the largest class of ecclesiastical donors. One of the few known Bedfordshire instances was at Sandy, where rector Thomas Burgoyne had a window made and glazed in 1524.6 No windows are known to have been commissioned by the more exalted ranks of the secular clergy, but glass at Old Warden was given, apparently in 1381–82, by a Cistercian abbot, an extremely rare class of patron in England; the donor was Walter de Clifton, abbot of Warden from some time after 1365 and before 1397 (Fig. 2). Whatever their status in society, patrons expected their gifts to be suitably commemorated. The usual forms of recognition were inscriptions, shields of arms and representations of the donor, either singly or combined. The inscriptions almost invariably took the form of an exhortation to pray

Ibid. , p. 216. Bedfordshire Notes and Queries, 1 (1886), pp. 63–4; this is a transcript of notes made by Francis Thynne in 1582–3. 5 H. Cobbe, Luton Church (London, 1899), pp. 344–6. 6 Bedfordshire Notes and Queries, 1 (1886), p. 69. 3 4

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for the donor and his relatives. That formerly existing at Cople is typical: Orate pro Thoma Grey et Bennet uxore eius qui istam capellam fieri fecerunt.7 In his will dated 1506 Thomas Grey left £20 for the building of St Mary’s aisle; his tomb still survives in the church.8 The heraldry portrayed in windows was often extensive. Simplest of all were the arms of the donor. At Eyeworth is a fine shield of Adam Francis, holder of the manor from at least 1371 (Fig. 1); another example is at Flitwick (arms of the Flitwick family). A more involved programme is found at Houghton Conquest, where in one window are the arms of Mowbray, Moretaine and St Amand, all local landholding families. Quite often the heraldry of the donor’s wife is included, as at Luton, where the arms of Sir John Wenlock are quartered with Drayton, his first wife’s family. This shield was once enclosed by the emblem and motto of the Order of the Garter, to which Wenlock belonged. Sir John Cornwall was also a member of this Order, and the two garters enclosing his arms in a clerestory window at Millbrook appear to be the earliest to survive in stained glass.9 One form of recognition given to donors in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries where suitable was the rebus. The only Bedfordshire example is in the Rectory at Barton, where there is a barrel or tun on a bar, for ‘Bartun’. Donors were usually represented kneeling in prayer at the base of windows. If they bore arms they often wore heraldic surcoats or tabards (lost examples at Podington and Luton), and/or held shields, as did the destroyed figures of Sir Reginald Trailly (d. 1402), and his wife at Northill.10 In fifteenth-century glass, donors were often shown kneeling before a prie-dieu with a prayer book open on it. The figure of a priest at Dean is known to have been portrayed in this manner, although the prie-dieu no longer exists. Donors could be represented not only singly, but also accompanied by their spouses and children. In addition to the Traillys at Northill, a magnificent example was in a window at Ampthill. It showed Sir John Cornwall and London, British Library, Lansdowne Ms 863, f. 156r. A. F. Cirket (ed.), English Wills, 1498–1526, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, 37 (1957), p. 35. 9 R. Marks, ‘Some Early Representations of the Garter in Stained Glass’, Report of the Society of the Friends of St George’s and the Descendants of the Knights of the Garter, V, no. 4 (1972–3), pp. 154–6. 10 London, British Library, Lansdowne Ms 863, f. 156v. 7 8

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1. Arms of Adam Francis, c. 1370, in Eyeworth church. (Photo: Dr P. A. Newton)

2. Figure of Abbot Walter de Clifton, c. 1381–82: the head is modern. Old Warden church. (Photo: School of Fine Arts and Music, University of East Anglia)

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3. Angel, c. 1430–50, in Cockayne Hatley church. (Photo: School of Fine Arts and Music, University of East Anglia)

6. Lower Gravenhurst: head of Christ, c. 1350–60. (Photo: Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London)

7. Odell: head of Christ, c. 1400–30. (Photo: Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London)

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4. Cockayne Hatley: St Sebaldus, early fourteenth century. (Photo: School of Fine Arts and Music, University of East Anglia)

5. Edworth: figure (with modern head) under a canopy, c. 1330–50. (Photo: Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London)

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8. Edworth: St James the Lesser, 1430–50. (Photo: Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London)

9. Wilden, SS James the Greater and Lawrence, c. 1390–1400. (Photo: Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London)

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his wife Elizabeth, daughter of John of Gaunt and sister of King Henry IV, dressed respectively in a tabard and mantle bearing their arms.11 It is clear from the above that the losses of donor figures in Bedfordshire glass have been very heavy. In fact, apart from the priest at Dean, the only one to have survived is Abbot Walter de Clifton at Old Warden (Fig. 2). Iconography The subjects found in medieval stained glass naturally centre on the lives of Christ and the Virgin, the saints, and the teaching of the Church. Each of these categories is represented in the county. Fine heads of Christ survive in tracery lights at Lower Gravenhurst and Odell (Figs 6, 7), and amongst many fragments at Bushmead Priory. There is no complete Crucifixion in Bedfordshire glass, but Christ’s head from one is in Barton Rectory. At Potsgrove, Eyeworth, Bolnhurst and the Wenlock Chapel, Luton, are the remains of the Coronation of the Virgin by Christ or its variant, the Triumph of the Virgin (in the County Record Office there is a coloured illustration of the Potsgrove example showing it complete). The Mother of Christ was a very common subject, but apart from her appearance in these scenes the only other known representation in the county, an Annunciation in the Wenlock Chapel, is now destroyed. At Cockayne Hatley is an angel holding a scroll bearing a verse praising the Virgin : REGINA CELI LETARE ALL[ELUI]A This is taken from an antiphon in the Sarum Processional, and is rarely found in glass (another example is at Buckden, Cambridgeshire) (Fig. 3). It demonstrates that the service books of the medieval Church provided texts for the glaziers and their patrons. Angels in their own right occur frequently in English medieval glass. In Bedfordshire they can be found either wearing albs (Old Warden and Stotfold) or with their limbs and bodies covered with feathers (Cockayne Hatley, Odell and Luton). All these are from tracery lights; at Colmworth is a large feathered angel from a main light. It carries a scroll inscribed ARCANGELUS and appears to have belonged to a window depicting the Nine Orders of Angels, or the Celestial Hierarchy (two quite complete sets can be seen at Great Malvern Priory, Worcestershire). J. Godber, History of Bedfordshire 1066–1888 (Bedfordshire County Council, 1969), Pl. 19b. 11

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Saints probably formed the largest category of subjects found in church windows, depicted either as single figures, usually with an emblem or attribute, or in scenes of their lives and martyrdoms. There are no windows containing such cycles left in the county, although Eaton Socon (now in Cambridgeshire) did have several dedicated to SS Nicholas and Etheldreda.12 The saints found in Bedfordshire can be grouped under three headings: those common throughout western Christendom, those of particular popularity in England, and those of local significance. To the first category belong the Apostles, quite often holding scrolls inscribed with clauses from the Creed. As early as the fourth or fifth centuries the legend was current that each of the Apostles after Pentecost had contributed an article of the Creed; as it formed part of the Catechism, in which the clergy were supposed to instruct the laity, it was quite a popular theme in glass. The only Bedfordshire example of an Apostle with a Creed scroll is the figure of St James the Lesser in the clerestory at Edworth (Fig. 8). Presumably there was a full set of Apostles here as there are twelve lights distributed over six windows (more complete sets can be seen at Drayton Beauchamp and Haddenham, in Buckinghamshire). The figures of St James the Greater at Barton and Wilden are without Creed scrolls (Fig. 9). He was the object of great devotion and many pilgrimages to his shrine at Compostella in Spain were made from England in the Middle Ages. Possibly the scallop shell quarries at Dean were given by a pilgrim, for this is the badge of St James. Other saints in this category found in Bedfordshire are SS Mary Magdalene (Cockayne Hatley), Catherine of Alexandria (Dean), Lawrence (Wilden) and Margaret of Antioch (Bedford Museum). St Martha was also of universal popularity, but her representation at Old Warden is one of the few still to be seen in English monumental art. Of the saints particularly venerated in England, there are no surviving Bedfordshire representations of the most popular, St Thomas à Becket. There is a fragmentary St George at Edworth and another is known to have been in the Wenlock Chapel, Luton. St Edward the Confessor occurs at Cockayne Hatley, and so does St Dunstan, the reforming Anglo-Saxon archbishop of Canterbury. Cockayne Hatley also includes in the same set St Oswald, king of Northumbria between 633 and 641. He has no Bedfordshire connections, 12

R. Gough, Sepulchral Monuments of Great Britain, I pt. 2 (London, 1786), pp. 213–4.

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but as the entire group of figures (including a mysterious king labelled St Sebaldus) was brought from a church in Yorkshire he can be included under our third category (Fig. 4). There are no indigenous Bedfordshire saints, but of those from nearby regions who must have been popular in the county, St Edmund, king of East Anglia (his shrine was at Bury St Edmunds), is depicted at Edworth and a small figure of St Alban at Chicksands Priory. The former holds his arrows of martyrdom, the latter a cross terminating in a circular dish which was said to have been given to Alban by Amphibalus, the priest he sheltered.13 Amongst miscellaneous subjects are two roundels of the Pelican pecking at her breast to feed her young, a symbol of the Crucifixion (both now in Bedford Museum, from a house in Bedford High Street and Bromham church), and remains of three sets of Evangelist symbols (Potsgrove, Odell and Barton Rectory). There is also a diagrammatic shield with inscriptions referring to the Holy Trinity in the east window of Shelton. Chronological and stylistic survey Broadly speaking, glass throughout England from the twelfth until the middle of the fifteenth century developed along fairly uniform lines with similar stylistic phases (closely related to the phases in manuscript illumination), although individual workshops do have their own recognisable traits. The story does not really begin in Bedfordshire until after 1300. There is no twelfth-century glass in the county, and all that we have from the thirteenth century are some fragments of grisaille (white) glass with stylised trefoil leaf decoration at Barton and in Bedford Museum, the latter excavated at Warden Abbey. But some excellent work survives from the following century. In the first third of the fourteenth century the colour range broadened greatly from the reds, blues, and purples predominant earlier. Figures frequently have swaying S-shaped postures with drapery falling in broad folds, and are often placed against coloured backgrounds diapered with naturalistic foliage under elaborate crocketed canopies in the Decorated Style. The borders too are commonly given a climbing trail of naturalistic flowers. Very fine examples of this phase are the four figures St. J. O. John Gamlen, Ancient Window Glass at Chicksands Priory (privately printed, 1974), p. 16, Pl. 5. 13

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in the main lights of the east window of the nave north aisle at Cockayne Hatley (Fig. 4). They are probably to be dated between c. 1300 and c. 1320. To the same period can be assigned the fragmentary Coronation of the Virgin and Evangelist symbols at Potsgrove and the heads of Christ at Bushmead Priory and Barton Rectory. In all of these, facial features and drapery are represented by thickly drawn lines, with very little trace of modelling. The canopies are flat, with no attempt at rendering spatial perspective. The chancel glass at Edworth illustrates the efforts made by glaziers from the 1330s into the second half of the century to produce these effects. The figures have lost much of the elegance of those at Cockayne Hatley, and are heavily modelled with smear-shading on the drapery folds (the heads are modern). One is set under a canopy with a cusped arch, crocketed gable and pinnacled side-shafts like those at Cockayne Hatley, but what distinguishes the Edworth canopy is the large structure behind the gable, tipped forward in ‘bird’s-eye’ perspective to give an illusion of spatial depth (Fig. 5). This feature is in white glass, making the entire panel lighter than Cockayne Hatley, another trend which began in the period c. 1330–50. The Edworth chancel glass probably dates from about the middle of the century, and almost certainly contemporary (there is a ‘terminus ante quem’ of 1361), is the beautifully drawn and modelled head of Christ surrounded by an elaborately foliated ground at Lower Gravenhurst (Fig. 6).14The composition is entirely in white glass with a few touches in yellow stain (a derivative of silver sulphide which turns yellow when painted on glass and fired in an oven; the technique was re-discovered in the early years of the fourteenth century). The tracery glazing of a nave window at Houghton Conquest (c. 1350) is also light in tone with colour confined to the shields of arms. The extent to which white glass with yellow stain touches could predominate over coloured glass by the latter years of the fourteenth century is shown by the window at Old Warden depicting Abbot Walter de Clifton and St Martha; it appears to date from 1381–82 (Fig. 2). In the main lights, white and yellow stain is used entirely for the canopies and side-shafts except for a narrow coloured cornice, and there is no coloured glass at all in the tracery. The canopies also show a complete transformation from those of Cockayne Hatley and Edworth. The perspective is convincing, the size 14

VCH, Bedfordshire, II (London, 1908), p. 337.

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is such that it does not overwhelm the figure beneath and the individual motifs used in the design are different, with battlements and straightheaded traceried windows instead of crocketed gables and pinnacles. The origins of this type of canopy can be traced back to the middle years of the century, but the closest parallels to those at Old Warden are to be found in the glass executed in 1380–86 by Thomas Glazier of Oxford for the chapel at New College, Oxford. The Old Warden canopies are less elaborate than those at New College, lacking their multiple turrets and heavy mouldings. Very similar turrets can be found elsewhere in Bedfordshire, in the churches of Barton, Oakley and Wilden (Fig. 9). These probably all date from c. 1390–1400. The figures of SS James the Greater and Lawrence under the Wilden canopies are comparable in their delicate modelling with the surviving figures from the New College Tree of Jesse, now in York Minster. This was also the work of Thomas Glazier, who thereby appears to have been amongst the first in England to have adopted the ‘International Gothic’ style. This is the name given to a phase when much of Western European art exhibited a high degree of uniformity. The style is very refined: delicately modelled drapery conceals figures with heavy but soft swathes, the figures themselves often appear to sway elegantly, heads are small, facial features are carefully delineated and are frequently given smiling expressions. Apart from Wilden, the archangel at Colmworth is possibly another early example of this style in Bedfordshire, but its poor state of preservation makes a precise dating difficult. The ‘International’ style was at its peak in the first three decades of the fifteenth century. The glass at Odell is almost certainly to be dated within this period. Executed entirely in white glass and yellow stain and with the most delicate modelling, the angels, bishop, Evangelist symbols and heads of Christ are of the highest quality (Fig. 7). In some areas the style lingered on into the 1450s. The lack of any dating criteria other than stylistic comparison for so much of the Bedfordshire glass makes it impossible to be too definite, but the angel holding the scroll at Cockayne Hatley, the Stotfold angels, the tracery light saints at Dean and the Edworth St James the Lesser could well be of c. 1430–50 (Fig. 3). The compositions at Dean and Edworth are characteristic of the fifteenth century, with the figures set on patterned and tiled bases against a background of quarries decorated with yellow stain motifs. Although white glass predominates, coloured glass is used for drapery here, and this puts this glazing into the middle price range; it probably cost the donors about

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1s per square foot (the most expensive figural glass in the fifteenth century cost 2s per square foot, the cheapest — without any coloured glass — 8d). The period between 1350 and 1450 is the most rewarding for surviving glass in the county. The only glazing of any interest after 1450 is in the Wenlock Chapel, Luton, and this is only because it can be securely dated to 1461. The delineation of the angels and Virgin shows a marked drop in standard from that of the first half of the century. This decline is true of English glass as a whole in the period 1450–75. In some areas the quality improved during the last quarter of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, but there is no evidence to show whether Bedfordshire participated in this revival (some figural glass of this period from Chicksands Priory now in Bedford Museum may have been collected from outside the county). In any case this revival was of short duration, cut short initially by the popularity of foreign glaziers with major patrons and finally by the Reformation. This survey of Bedfordshire’s ancient glass is only an introduction to the subject, although hopefully none of the major monuments has been omitted. All the surviving works will eventually be catalogued and fully published in the international Corpus Vitrearum series, presently in progress for several other counties. There is, however, a grave danger that before Bedfordshire’s turn comes it will have lost even more of its sparse heritage. The worst enemy today is decay, and although Cockayne Hatley has recently been excellently conserved, at the time of writing Colmworth and Odell are in need of attention. It would be tragic if the glass in these two places and elsewhere were to disappear now, having survived the vicissitudes of so many centuries. The writer wishes to thank the incumbents of churches and owners of private houses who have generously allowed him to study the medieval glass discussed in these articles.

XVII Archives and the Visual Arts: Potsgrove Church, Its Fourteenth-century Glazing and Other Fittings

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he collections of documents deposited in national records and county archives have always provided historians with their primary source material; it has perhaps been less well recognised that the holdings of notes, drawings, watercolours and engravings made by antiquaries are a rich quarry for the art historian. In particular, the material gathered in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and prior to the vogue for church restoration from the 1840s frequently are our only source of knowledge of buildings, monuments and inscriptions subsequently destroyed or totally transformed.1 A good Bedfordshire example is the former parish church of St. Mary at Potsgrove. The visual material held in the County Record Office and other repositories enables us to reevaluate the building and its furnishings. Today Potsgrove is a remote parish consisting for the most part of isolated farmsteads and a few cottages. Its decline is reflected in the status of the parish church. Unable any longer to be supported by its congregation, in 1972 it was saved from demolition and vested in the Redundant Churches Fund (now the Churches Conservation Trust), which retains responsibility for its repair and maintenance. The church in its present form has attracted little attention, apart from admirers of the work of the architect J. D. Sedding (1838–1891), who carried out the restoration of the building in 1880.2 At first The material is surveyed in J. Bertram, Lost Brasses (Newton Abbot, 1976) pp. 76–115, and in R. Marks, Stained Glass in England during the Middle Ages (London, 1993) Chapter 11. 2 The principal printed sources are Victoria County History, Bedfordshire III (London, 1912) (afterwards VCH), p. 423; N. Pevsner, Bedfordshire and the County of Huntingdon and Peterborough in The Buildings of England series, (Harmondsworth, 1974), p. 135; C. Dalton, St. Mary’s Church, Pottesgrave (Redundant Churches Fund, 1982). For the glass see R. Marks, ‘Medieval Stained Glass in Bedfordshire,’ in this volume, pp. 402–414. 1

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sight it could quite easily be taken for a wholly Victorian building. Sedding however incorporated elements of the original fabric and furnishings, some of which are of considerable richness and sophistication. These provide the primary indications that we are not dealing here with a run-of-the mill parish church but an ensemble of some interest; this impression is confirmed by the antiquarian material, which also enables an assessment to be made of the extent to which Sedding reproduced original features. From the outside the church as exists today consists of an aisleless chancel and nave, south porch and bell-turret capped by a spirelet at the north-west angle. The walls are constructed of local ironstone and cobble and incorporate on the north side a few late twelfth-century and other carved fragments from various architectural features probably belonging to an earlier church on the site.3 The steeply pitched roofs are tiled. Originally Totternhoe limestone was used for the nave north and south doorways and the windows; limestone is still the principal material for all the dressed stone on the building, including the stringcourses, buttresses and coping. The east window is Perpendicular, of five main and twelve tracery lights. The other windows are all in the Decorated style, four in the chancel and six in the nave. All are of two lights and their tracery comprises five different patterns, four of which are arranged in north-south pairs. Two designs provide variations of mouchettes (nIII, sIII, sVI; nIV, sIV).4 The others have a central opening with various combinations of sexfoils (nIII, sIII; nV, sV; west window). Inside, there is no structural division between chancel and nave, but the liturgical separation is marked by a wooden screen of fourteenth-century style, the painting of which was carried out during the 1880 restoration by Messrs. Purser of Leighton Buzzard.5 The low-pitched nave roof has tie-beams resting on wall-posts of Perpendicular style; the arched braces of the chancel roof are exposed and spring from a lower level than the nave. In the chancel side walls are sedilia (south) and an arched and cusped recess (north); there are piscinae in the nave walls adjacent to the screen and holy water stoups by the doors. The nave seating and font are all of Sedding’s time. Medieval glass is collected in the west window and two sixteenth-century brasses to the Saunders family are set in the chancel floor to the south of the altar. This was mentioned in Henry II’s reign, VCH, III, p. 423. The window numbering used in this article adopts the Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi system. 5 Dalton, op. cit. 3

4

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The extent of Sedding’s restoration can be gauged from the series of sketches made in the early nineteenth century. They comprise a series of watercolours and a pencil drawing by George Shepherd (1784–1862), an artist who married a Stanbridge woman and between c. 1812 and c.1825 made a number of illustrations in the Woburn–Battlesden area, particularly for the Page-Turner family.6 Thomas Fisher (1772–1836), author of Collections Historical, Genealogical and Topographical for Bedfordshire, also did illustrations of Potsgrove church.7 Shepherd’s pencil sketch, which is dated 30 July 1812, depicts the church from the south-west and one of the watercolours appears to have been made from this drawing. The building is viewed from the south-east in a second watercolour (Fig. 1);8 a third (by Fisher) shows the south side (Fig. 2).9 It is not clear whether these and other watercolours were all executed in 1812; Shepherd returned to Potsgrove on at least one more occasion, in 1824, when he dated an illustration of the interior and some of the exteriors may have been made at this time. The precise date is not important for our present purposes as all the views pre-date the restoration. Collectively they reveal that the basic structure was retained by Sedding, but that he also either removed or altered a number of features. The most prominent of these in the illustrations was the attractive wooden bell-turret over the west end of the building. The nave roof had a shallow pitch, echoing the interior arrangement, but the chancel roof was steeply pitched and sprang from a lower level than the nave, much as it still does. There were no dressed gables to these roofs and only buttresses at the angles of the east and west walls. The walls themselves were largely concealed by a plaster render and the chancel side walls were pierced by a pair of windows towards the west end, the upper sections of which were blocked with brick and plaster.10 The same arrangement applied to the tracery and the outer pair of main lights of the east window, which nevertheless was still recognisably I am most grateful to Martin Lawrence for allowing me to benefit from his researches on George Shepherd. 7 For Fisher see M. Greenshields, ‘A Bedfordshire Topographer,’ in Bedfordshire Magazine, vol.5 (1955–57), pp. 135–39. 8 The pencil sketch is at Bedfordshire County Record Office, Z 50/90/8; the two watercolours belong to Bedford Town Hall collection (BCRO slide copies, nos. 2058, 2059). 9 In a privately owned interleaved copy of D. and S. Lysons, Magna Britannia vol.1 Pt.l, Bedfordshire (1813) (BCRO slide copy, no. 829). 10 The north-west window is not shown in any of the illustrations, but is marked on a rough plan in the notes and drawings collected in c. 1810 by the Revd. Thomas Powell (British Library, MS Add. 17456, fol. 9). 6

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Perpendicular. The brick filling of the east and side windows is mentioned in Archdeacon Bonney’s visitation of 1823, when he required a number of improvements to be made to the fabric and furnishings.11 The visual material is complemented by the description made in 1845 by John Martin, Librarian to the Duke of Bedford. Writing under the nom-de-plume “W.A.”, Martin contributed a number of articles on Bedfordshire churches to local newspapers. He drew attention to the poor state of many and the lack of seemliness and order in their furnishings; like many of his contemporaries he was particularly concerned about the perceived evils of private pews. Martin was not, however, an uncritical advocate of restoration. On Potsgrove he wrote: This church is a very melancholy spectacle of injury and neglect. It has been so sadly used that it is almost difficult to point out the abuses. The external condition is very deplorable, and unless means are soon taken to arrest the decay actively going on, it will soon be numbered among the things that were. The effect of the progress the weather is making externally, is strikingly evinced by the internal state of the building. The interior is of a very bad character: it is true a wooden roof remains, but from an inspection we had time to make, it seemed to be a substitute some years ago for one of higher quality. Four select square pews, painted and varnished, were happily all that had yet found a habitation here. The rest were all open seats, not very good, but excellent compared to some recently erected, in miserable taste. No traces were perceptible of the western entrance, which years ago, it would appear, had been effectually swept away. The font remained in its right position, although the approach to it in the proper way had been done away. Some bricks were carefully piled up, with a besom and broom, under the western window; a disgusting abuse. The chancel was a very paltry affair; a ceiled roof — miserable altar-rails — two side-windows blocked up, which, in addition to disfiguring the interior, made the external appearance of the church more offensive. The churchyard was in a neglected state, rendered more so by the admission of sheep. A miserable building adjoining was said to be the Parsonage-house: it is almost superfluous to add it was unoccupied.12 11 12

Archdeacon Bonney’s visitation notebook 1823–39 (BCRO: ABV 28). Northampton Mercury, dated 24 June 1845.

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1. Watercolour by George Shepherd of Potsgrove Church from the south-east, c. 1824. 2. Watercolour by Thomas Fisher of the south side of Potsgrove Church, early 1820s.

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3. Watercolour by George Shepherd of the rood screen of Potsgrove Church from the chancel, 1824.

4. Watercolour by Thomas Fisher of the nave of Potsgrove Church from the chancel, c. 1824–30.

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5. Pencil and wash sketch of the fourteenth-century glass at Potsgrove Church by the Revd. Thomas Powell, c. 1810.

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6. Lithograph after Thomas Fisher of the fourteenthcentury glass in a south window of Potsgrove Church, 1828.

7. Lithograph after Thomas Fisher of the fourteenth-century glazing in the west window of Potsgrove Church, 1828.

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8. The medieval glass in the west window of Potsgrove Church as it exists today.

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No major repairs to the fabric appear to have been carried out between 1845 and 1880, so Sedding was obviously faced with a building in a poor state of repair; how much did he alter the structure? An examination of the fabric together with the illustrations shows that although he removed the wooden turret and render he retained most of the original ironstone and cobble fabric, including the narrow coursing marking the heightening of the nave walls in the fifteenth century. A new steeply pitched nave roof with dressed gables replaced the existing one, buttresses were inserted between the nave windows and at the junction of the nave and chancel and a moulded stringcourse run below the windows. The north door jambs retain some original dressed Totternhoe limestone, but the carved label stops were replaced. The medieval label stops to the south door, which are in the form of human heads, survive in a very worn state, but most of the doorway itself and almost all of the porch were replaced in the 1880 restoration. The windows retain little original stonework and Sedding inserted a completely new pair at the east end of the chancel (nII, sII). There is no evidence for the prior existence of these windows and therefore it can be assumed that the design of their matching tracery was entirely Sedding’s creation. What of the other windows? Shepherd’s and Fisher’s illustrations show that windows sIV, sV, sVI and the west window are reproductions of their original designs and sufficient original stone remains in nIV and nV to make the same judgement about these windows. The east window likewise is a reasonable copy of the original, but given the fact that the upper sections of nIII and sIII were blocked it is an open question whether Sedding found any evidence on which to base his tracery design for these two windows; neither retains any original stonework. We will return to this question shortly when we consider the glazing. Two pre-restoration watercolours reveal the extent of Sedding’s work inside the church. One, by Shepherd and dated 1824, shows the screen and nave from the chancel (Fig. 3). The other (by Fisher) is undated, but must have been executed subsequent to Bonney’s 1823 visitation as the screen has been given its stone colour paint in accordance with the Archdeacon’s instructions. It is a much more precise and comprehensive view into the nave from the screen (Fig. 4).13 The pictures show that Sedding kept the form of the fifteenth-century nave roof, although replacing much of its timber. None of the chancel roof is original and the internal fittings and furnishings 13

BCRO slide copy nos. 830, 2060.

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he treated with a heavy hand. He replaced the old stone-flagged floor with tiles and lifted the two slabs with the Saunders brasses, which are clearly depicted set in their original slabs in the floor in front of the screen. The slabs themselves, one of which had indents for children, have disappeared.14 The sedilia are entirely Sedding’s work and so are almost all of the tomb recess and the nave stoups and piscinae. The octagonal medieval font in front of the west window was replaced and the eighteenth or early nineteenth-century pulpit and box-pew, together with the open seating and nave south door, were also all swept away. The screen remained, albeit very heavily restored. As it is one of the only two surviving fourteenth-century church screens in the county (the second is at Campton) and must have been part of the original fittings of Potsgrove, its pre-restoration state is of interest. Shepherd’s watercolour depicts the screen unpainted and with all the openings above the dado boarded up except for the first on the north side. Tracery and shafts (without rings) to the openings are only visible on this side, but in 1824 the screen had a wooden superstructure which if it was contemporary with the screen below would have been a rare example of a rood loft. As it has now disappeared this cannot be verified. The second illustration shows less of the screen, but is more detailed, especially the design of the tracery. The light to the south of the entrance is still blocked and its opposite number open. There are differences between the shafts or columns separating the openings above the dado; on the south side they are continuous with a vertical moulding, whereas on the other side the tracery springs from a corbel and attached shaft set against the entrance post and its companion is rectangular and offset. Little of this screen is recognisable today, apart from its basic outline and the tracery design, which is only original on the south side; the turned shafts, the pierced tracery in the entrance spandrels, the cresting and the cross above the screen are all Sedding’s creation. The Fisher watercolour (Fig. 4) shows coloured glass in window sV and in the tracery and heads of the two main lights of the west window; the rest of the lights were filled with clear quarry glass. Much more precise records enable the original medieval scheme to be reconstructed and at the same time permit sense to be made of the present confusion of fragments in the west window. The evidence consists of the Revd. Thomas Powell’s sketches 14 Presumably the indents were on the slab of William Saunders (d. 1563) and his wife as their inscription mentions children; for the brasses see H. K. St. J. Sanderson ‘The Saunders’ Brasses at Pottesgrove, Beds., and Wavendon, Bucks.,’ Trans. Monumental Brass Soc., 2 (1892– 6), pp. 6–9.

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and two coloured lithographs by Fisher. Shepherd sketched some of the glass.15 In the upper parts of the main lights in sV (Figs. 5, 6) are two fulllength figures in pontifical vestments each set under a canopy comprising a flat crocketed gable and terminating in a finial; the ground behind the figures and the canopies is blue and embellished with foliate patterns; they are enclosed within a trelliswork of grisaille with leaf designs picked out on a heavy wash and a ruby border with leaves set at regular intervals. The figures are described by Powell as bishops, which is correct for the right-hand light; however the pallium and cross-staff of the prelate in the left light show that he is an archbishop. Their hands are raised in benediction and although neither is nimbed, the remains of a label in Lombardie script below the bishop (.../ CTVS..../IR/) demonstrates that they must represent saints. Both faces and the lower half of the bishop are missing. This arrangement of coloured glass figures set in a grisaille ground was known in England from the thirteenth century and survived into the fourteenth; well-preserved examples of the latter period are at Bredon in Hereford and Worcester.16 In the tracery of this window was an incomplete medallion containing the winged lion symbol of St. Mark; by amalgamating the versions of the remaining edging inscription given by Powell and in the lithograph it can be reconstructed to include the following: / SA[NC]TVS MARCVS EWAN/. The medieval glass which survived in the west window (Figs. 5, 7) consisted of the Coronation of the Virgin (wrongly identified on the lithograph caption as “Edward the Confessor in conversation with the Saviour”) in a tracery medallion and borders enclosing foliate grisaille and canopy finials in the heads of the two main lights. A considerable portion of the original west window glass can still be recognised amongst the mass of fragments (Fig. 8). The heads of the lights are more or less in place, with the border design consisting of birds in pot yellow alternating with plain ruby glass; the grisaille has foliate patterns picked out on a heavy matt wash and a ruby cinquefoil boss; no trace of the canopy finials exists. Parts of the Coronation panel survive in the tracery, principally a section of the Virgin in her pot yellow mantle and, to her right, the pink head, ruby and white cross-nimbus and ruby sleeve of Christ; 15 T. Fisher, Drawings of Monumental Remains and Antiquities in the county of Bedford (London, 1828). A watercolour of the west window signed by Shepherd and dated 1812 is in the interleaved copy of Lysons (op. cit.). BCRO slide copy no. 833. 16 Illustrated in C. Woodforde, English Stained and Painted Glass (Oxford, 1954), Pl. 12.

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some of the cusps retain their white foliate filling (much more delicately delineated than in their portrayal in the lithograph) and some fragments of the blue ground to the panel also remain. In addition, a fragment of green drapery with arms in a praying gesture at the base of the right light can be identified from the lithograph as belonging to the figure of the Virgin. Some other sections in these lights come from window sV: the heads of the two main lights with their ruby and white flower borders enclosing blue diapered grounds and pot yellow canopy finials; also in the upper section of the left light are the remains of the winged lion Evangelist symbol of St. Mark on its ruby ground and sections of the edging with its inscription and repeated quatrefoil pattern, of the same design as the original edging to the Coronation of the Virgin panel. There are also traces of medallions containing symbols of the other three Evangelists, none of which is recorded in the antiquarian sources. In the upper section of the right light is part of the angel of St. Matthew in a white robe and with a yellow stain wing on a blue ground; the edging motif is the same as for St. Mark and the remains of the inscription read / S M / EWS/ C / E(?)/. Below is St. Luke’s winged ox (white body with yellow stain wing) on a ruby ground and the letters / TV / L / V / CAS / from the label. The set is completed by the fragments of the eagle of St. John the Evangelist (white body and yellow stain) in the left light, together with its blue ground and the letters / T / V / S/. So what we have is both more and less than is indicated by the antiquarian sources. These permit us to reconstruct the Coronation of the Virgin medallion in the west window tracery; in addition the no longer extant finials from canopies visible in the lithograph reveal that there were figures in the main lights of this window like those in sV. The prelates in sV have gone, but instead there are three Evangelists’ symbols unrecorded in the old descriptions which are from the same set as the St. Mark in the tracery of sV. The tracery of the opposite window (nV) is identical, so we can assume that one of the symbols was originally located here. Presumably the remaining two also came from the tracery. Here a difficulty arises. The tracery patterns of the remaining nave windows (nIV, sIV, sVI) are too small to accommodate the symbols, which leaves nlll and sill in the chancel as the only possible candidates. The glass would fit into the present tracery, but the upper sections of these windows were blocked at the time of Sedding’s restoration and we do not know whether he based his design on evidence of the original stonework. In addition to the fourteenth-century glazing something can be said about the contents of the Perpendicular east window.

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Oliver St John Cooper (1741–1801) noted that there were at one time five shields of arms in it (probably one in each of the main lights), of which only one complete and one incomplete remained. The first bore Azure a cross patonce between four martlets or and the second Quarterly France and England.17 The first are the arms of Westminster Abbey or, more accurately, those ascribed to its founder St. Edward the Confessor, so probably he was depicted in the window. The design of the tracery of the window suggests that the second shield almost certainly must have borne the version of the royal arms adopted in the opening years of the fifteenth century and certainly in use by November 1406, rather than that employed previously.18 In conclusion, only by examining the fabric and fittings in conjunction with the antiquarian pictorial and written sources is it possible to extract the medieval church of Potsgrove from the heavily restored building we see today. Although of modest dimensions and simple plan, the elaborate and varied window tracery, the rood screen and the coloured glass show that, as rebuilt in the fourteenth century, this church was an edifice of some richness and sophistication. Its true worth prior to the restoration has not escaped everyone’s attention; an anonymous Leighton Buzzard correspondent in the Northampton Mercury included these observations in some comments on Martin’s article: And with respect to Potsgrove church, I think your correspondent was rather severe in his criticisms; nothing can be said in favour of the chancel, which has been lately put into its present state, and is truly hideous; but the church itself, I believe, remains very much in its ancient state, and has suffered less from the hand of improvement than most churches: the stone mullions remain in the windows, which are very beautiful, although the painted glass, for which this church was once celebrated, has long since mostly disappeared.19 The tracery and the glass indicate a probable date for the rebuilding of c. 1325–50.20 The paired mouchettes in nIV and sIV are comparable with window tracery in the Octagon, the Lady Chapel and Prior Crauden’s Chapel British Library, MS Add. 34376, f. 34r. Quarterly France Modern and England. See M. G. Heenan, ‘The French Quartering in the Arms of King Henry IV,’ The Coat of Arms, 10 (1968–9), pp. 215–21. 19 Northampton Mercury, 12 July 1845. 20 VCH, III, p. 423 suggests c. 1320–40. 17 18

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at Ely Cathedral, all dating from the 1320s. Nearer home, the Potsgrove windows are the country cousins of the tracery in the east window of the Lady Chapel of St. Albans Cathedral; during the Middle Ages this abbey owned the advowson to Potsgrove. Sparing use is made in the glazing of yellow stain, a technique introduced in the first decade of the fourteenth century, and the canopies formerly in sV are flat and show no suggestion of the third dimension by means of perspectival devices, a feature of English painting in the 1320s and 1330s. For these reasons, I am inclined to date Potsgrove to early in the second quarter of the century, but we cannot be certain about this. The reconstruction was carried out to a single design and in one campaign. Who paid for it remains a mystery. No heraldic glass from this period is recorded which might have provided a clue; likewise the recess in the chancel north wall, often the favoured location for the founder’s tomb, is devoid of an effigy. There are a number of possible candidates: the abbey of St. Albans as holder of the advowson, or perhaps one of the leading local landowners in the parish who, in the early fourteenth century included the Lucy, Blancfront, Savage and Lovel families; but there are no indications pointing to any of these.21 Similarly the person(s) responsible for the new chancel east window, nave roof and font added in the fifteenth century is unknown. That the true merits of Potsgrove have lain concealed for so long cannot be blamed on Sedding. The early nineteenth-century illustrations and John Martin’s account reveal a building in a poor state of repair. Sedding was a distinguished architect and designer of the Arts and Crafts Movement and if Potsgrove does not rank among his masterpieces, it does display features (notably the ironwork) which are to be admired in their own right.22 Moreover, although some aspects of his restoration at Potsgrove appear heavy-handed, nonetheless he did preserve the essential structure of the building and was at pains to ensure that the original window tracery was reproduced.

Ibid., pp. 422–3. Amongst Sedding’s most important churches are St. Clement’s in Bournemouth and Holy Trinity, Sloane Square in London. For a summary of his career and examples of his work as a designer of ecclesiastical furnishings see Victorian Church Art (Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition catalogue 1971), pp. 120–25. 21 22

XVIII A Late Medieval Glass-Painting Workshop in the Region of Stamford and Peterborough1

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t is particularly appropriate that the subject of this acknowledgement of Dennis King’s major contribution to English medieval stained glass should be an important workshop, the existence of which only began to be suspected when Dennis restored its chief surviving monument in 1966–67. This is the glazing of Browne’s Hospital at Stamford in Lincolnshire. William Browne was, in Leland’s words, ‘a marchant of a very wonderful richenesse’.2 His business was the wool trade, and he was a member of the Calais Staple. The family had been established in Stamford as early as 1374, and enjoyed a tradition of active participation in civic life.3 William’s brother and father (both named John) served as Aldermen of Stamford on several occasions, and William did so himself six times. The family also patronised the arts. It was responsible for the rebuilding of the church of All Saints, in which a number of its members’ sepulchral monuments survive, after the sack of the town by the Lancastrians in 1461. But the major architectural project with which the Brownes were associated was the Hospital. The history 1 A summary of this paper can be found in R. Marks, ‘The Glazing of the Collegiate Church of the Holy Trinity, Tattershall (Lincs.): A Study of Late Fifteenth Century GlassPainting Workshops’, Archaeologia, CVI (1979), pp. 149–52. The window numbering follows the Corpus Vitrearum system. 2 L. Toulmin Smith (ed.), The Itinerary of John Leland in or about the years 1535–1543, 4 (London, 1964), p. 89. 3 For the history of the Browne family see H. P. Wright, The Story of the ‘Domus Dei’, at Stamford (Hospital of William Browne) (London, 1890), pp. 1–13. This is also the most detailed account of the Hospital. See also J. Brakard, The History of Stamford (Stamford, 1922), pp. 337–40, and the very useful guidebook by J. P. Hoskins, P. A. Newton and D. King, The Hospital of William Browne, Merchant, Stamford, Lincolnshire (Stamford, n.d.).

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of its foundation has been clarified by Peter Newton.4 It is now known that the construction of the chapel and associated buildings was completed in 1475: ‘. . . a fundamento erexerunt [William Browne and his wife Margaret] edificaverunt et alia egregia ... et compleverunt et perfecerunt Anno domini M°CCCC° LXXV°’.5 It was not, however, until January 1485 that William Browne was authorised to make over the endowment for his almshouse.6 William and Margaret both died in 1489, and the management of the foundation passed to the latter’s brother, Thomas Stokke. In 1493 he obtained fresh letters patent from Henry VII to found the Hospital, and these state that although William Browne had built the chapel and various buildings he had been prevented by death from carrying out his intention to establish the Hospital.7 The chapel was not consecrated until 22 December 1494,8 and in the following year Thomas Stokke issued statutes for the regulation of the Hospital.9 The Hospital has retained much of its medieval glass.10 It is distributed over the two large windows in the south wall of the chapel, the two-light windows in the audit room, and the window in the entrance passage. As the buildings were finished in 1475 it seems likely that the chapel glazing was also completed by then. The audit room glass has several shields of arms of the Stokke/Elmes family, which suggests a date after Thomas Stokke took over the foundation in 1489. It was certainly done after about 1485 as the arms include those of William Elmes (1465–1504) and his wife Elizabeth Iwardby, who were married at this time.11 Apart from its stylistic importance, the glass is of the highest iconographical interest. The most magnificent glass is in the easternmost of the two chapel windows (sI) (Figs 1–4). In the lights below the transom are the head of a 4 P. A. Newton, ‘William Brown’s Hospital at Stamford. A Note on its Early History and the Date of the Buildings’, The Antiquaries Journal, XLVI (1966), pp. 283–6. The evidence is an account book of the Hospital (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson B.352). 5 Ibid., p. 284. 6 Wright, op. cit., p. 17. 7 Ibid., pp. 23–4. 8 Ibid., p. 64. 9 Ibid., p. 28. 10 The glass was cleaned and partly rearranged by Dennis King in 1966–67. 11 The Stokke/Elmes question is very complicated, but they were evidently the same family, or else very closely related. See Wright, op. cit., pp. 6–13, and J. S. Reynolds, ‘Master Stokke of Easton-on-the-Hill, a Fifteenth Century Northamptonshire Parson,’ Northamptonshire Past and Present, II, no. 3 (1956), pp. 147–53.

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prophet (not part of the original glazing), two angels and five incomplete nimbed female figures. Their identification is not certain, but at least two, if not all of them, represent the Virgin. One appears to be unique in English art and shows her holding a window to represent the fenestra caeli, symbolising the Incarnation.12 In the heads of each light is canopywork, and the two middle lights also contain sideshafts. At the base of the window and running through all the lights is a fragmentary inscription which when complete may have read: /ORA/[TE] /P/[RO ANIMABUS] /WILLMI/ BROUNE/ [MERCATORIS STAPULE CALICIE] /[E]T /M/[AR]/GARE/[TE CON]/SORTIS/ EIUS/. In the main lights above the transom are, reading from left to right, fulllength figures of St James the Great (2a), St John the Baptist (2b), the Holy Trinity (2c) and a royal saint (2d). Each figure is framed by a canopy and sideshafts, and some retain their coloured grounds em­bellished with scrolls, trellis-work or squares. In the two centre tracery lights are miscellaneous fragments, including the spiked wheel of St Catherine and a door.13 The left outer tracery has small fragments leaded into a boss, the right one a small elaborately traceried roundel. Each main light below the transom is 1.50 m high, each one above the transom approximately 2.70 m. The width of each light is between 0.50 and 0.54 m. In the other large window in the south wall (sII) the only ancient glass is in the tracery lights. It includes a figure of St Michael slaying the dragon, six stars in roundels, part of a Marian monogram and some in situ foliage. Apart from a shield of arms of the Stokke or Elmes family in the tracery of the easternmost window in the north wall of the audit room (nII), all 12 This identification has been made by Hoskins, Newton and King (op. cit., p. 9). As they point out, this symbolism is found in a hymn for the Feast of the Annunciation in the Sarum Breviary (F. Proctor and C. Wordsworth (eds.), Breviarum ad Usum Insignis Ecclesiae Sarum, III (Cambridge, 1886), col. 245). This hymn dates from the late sixth century; see G. G. Meersseman, Der Hymnos Akathistos im Abendland, I (Freiburg, 1958), pp. 135–6. Another example is recorded in French sixteenth-century glass at La Ferté-Bernard (E. Mâle, L’Art Religieux de la Fin du Moyen Age en France (Paris, 1908), p. 225). Similarly, the lilies and flowers with the figure in the adjoining light at Browne’s Hospital also symbolise the Incarnation (Hoskins, Newton and King, op. cit.; see also Meersseman, op. cit., pp. 165, 180, 187). 13 The door probably represents the porta clausa, another metaphor for the Incarnation (Hoskins, Newton and King, op. cit., p. 13). See Meersseman, op. cit., pp. 133, 138, 187 for examples in hymns.

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the medieval glass here is in the lights above the transom of the three south windows (Fig. 5). In the easternmost (sIV), the main lights contain fulllength figures of King David and St Paul (the latter’s head replaced by that of a king) holding scrolls and set on quarry grounds. In the tracery light is a shield of arms of the Browne family. In the next window (sV) are figures of King David and St Paul which are identical with the first pair, except that they have different texts; the head of King David dates from the restoration of 1871. In the tracery light is a shield of arms of Stokke/Elmes impaling Iwardby. The westernmost window (sVI) contains King Solomon and a figure made up of fragments including the head of a Doctor of the Church, and an inscription referring to the philosopher Seneca.14 Above Solomon is a roundel with the stork device of William Browne, and in the tracery light is an incomplete shield of the Stokke or Elmes arms. The dimensions of each main light are 1.16 x 0.56 m. Finally, the window in the entrance passage contains shields of arms of Browne and Browne impaling Stokke, and roundels with Browne’s merchant mark and stork device set on a quarry ground with a border of leaves twisted round a vertical stem. The same figure style, motifs and canopy and side-shaft designs can be seen in a number of buildings in and around Stamford and Peterborough, and distributed over the counties of Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire and the Soke of Peterborough, Leicestershire and Lincolnshire (see Fig. A on p. 451). After Browne’s Hospital the most important glass is in Peterborough Cathedral. In the six triforium and clerestory windows of the apse are numerous fragments of medieval stained glass. The great majority were taken from the great west window of the nave, which escaped the destruction wrought in the building by the Parliamentary Army in 1643.15 The original arrangement of the window can be reconstructed from the antiquarian sources.16 The five main lights above and below the transom consisted primarily of panels illustrating scenes of Christ and St Peter, chiefly taken from the Gospel of During the Middle Ages it was believed that Seneca and St Paul had corresponded (Hoskins, Newton and King, op. cit., p. 15). The general iconography of the audit room glass is difficult to understand. A manuscript once belonging to the Hospital (London, British Library, Harley MS 2372) contains advice to recluses following the examples of a number of Biblical figures, among whom King David, King Solomon and St Paul figure prominently. However, their texts do not correspond exactly with those in the glass. 15 The glass was put in its present position by Dean Tarrant (1764–91). See W. D. Sweeting, ‘Stained Glass in Peterborough Cathedral, c. 1720’, Fenland Notes and Queries, V (1901–03), p. 145. 14

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St Matthew (Fig. 6). In the tracery lights were, in the apex, Christ in Glory, and immediately below, two angels. Then came six saints, and in the lowest row were angels holding shields of arms. Some of the latter corresponded with the saints above, but at least three apparently supplied the names of the donors.17 Two consisted of the arms of Sir Reginald Bray and of the Beaufort family, and the third, which survives in part, bore the Hussey arms in two of its four quarters. In this context, the Beaufort arms must be those of Lady Margaret Beaufort (1443–1509), Countess of Richmond and mother of King Henry VII. From early in the fifteenth century this family had held the nearby Manors of Torpel and Maxey.18 Bray was Receiver-General and Steward of the household to her second husband, Sir Henry Stafford, and is first recorded in her service in 1467.19 The Hussey arms are those of his wife Catherine. She was aged ten in 1471 and the marriage had taken place by 1478, probably shortly before then.20 The presence of the Hussey arms, therefore, gives a terminus post quem of about 1478.21 The parish church of St Peter at Stockerston in Leicestershire contains glass by the Browne’s Hospital workshop in the westernmost window on the north side (nlX), next to the tower. Reading from top to bottom, the centre light contains a tonsured head with the crook of a pastoral staff below a shield of arms of the Cockayne family (3b), two kneeling male and female donors (the former wearing a surcoat emblazoned with the Restwold arms of Argent three bends sable (2b), and St Christopher carrying the Christ Child (lb). All are set among incomplete canopies and sideshafts (Figs 7, 8). The dimensions of the ancient glass are approxi­mately 2.47 x 0.42 m.

Ibid., pp. 146–8. This is a transcription of notes made by John Bridges (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Topographical Northants. MS e6. pp. 81–4). The other major source is Sir William Dugdale, The Book of Draughts, f. 120 (London, British Library, Additional MS 71474). 17 The shields were recorded by both Dugdale and Bridges, but their accounts scarcely match. The former is in this case likely to be the more reliable as he saw the glass eighty years before Bridges made his notes, and it seems that in the intervening years a number of additional shields were put in the window. 18 Victoria County History, Northamptonshire, 2 (London, 1906), pp. 503, 534. 19 I am grateful to Miss Margaret Condon for this information. 20 Again, I owe this to Miss Condon. 21 A brief account of this window is to be found in R. Marks, ‘The Stained Glass Patronage of Sir Reginald Bray’, Report of the Society of the Friends of St George’s and the Descendants of the Knights of the Garter, V, no. 5 (1973–74), pp. 199–200. 16

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1. Stamford, Browne’s Hospital, the south window of the chapel.

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2. Stamford, Browne’s Hospital: figures of the Virgin in the south window of the chapel.

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3. Stamford. Browne’s Hospital: St John the Baptist and the Holy Trinity in the south window of the chapel.

4. Stamford, Browne’s Hospital: two heads in the south window of the chapel.

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5. Stamford, Browne’s Hospital: King Solomon in the audit room.

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6. Peterborough Cathedral: Christ and St Peter from the west window glazing (now in the apse triforium).

7. Stockerston ( Leics.), Church of St Peter: donors, saint, canopies and shield of arms.

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8. Stockerston (Leics.), Church of St Peter: St Christopher.

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9. Barnack (Soke of Peterborough): head of the Virgin.

10. Coventry (Warwicks.), St Mary’s Hall: English kings in the north window.

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11. Warwick, Beauchamp Chapel: St Winifred in the east window.

12. Warwick, Beauchamp Chapel: St John of Beverley in the east window.

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With the aid of antiquarian sources it is possible to arrive at a probable date for the glazing of this window.22 The Restwold figures were recorded in a more complete state in 1747 and underneath them was written: ‘Thorns Restwold, armig., & Margaret’ ux’ ei’ ’.23 There were also two more pairs of donors with inscriptions. Below one set was: ‘Henric’s Sotehill, armig., & Anna ux’ ei’ ’. The man wore a surcoat bearing the Southill arms — Gules an eagle displayed argent. The second couple was not illustrated in Nichols, but the inscription below reads: ‘Jo’hes Cokyn. armig., et Elizab’ ’. These six figures represented the three daughters of John Boyville and their husbands. The Boyville family had held the manor of Stockerston from the late thirteenth century.24 John (d. 1467) had a first wife named Elizabeth and was survived by Eleanor, his second. It was Elizabeth who bore him the three daughters: Elizabeth (apparently dead by 1477),25 who married John Cockayne (d. 1490),26 Margaret, wife of Thomas Restwold, and Anne whose husband was Henry Southill (d. 1485).27 The church and its glazing appear to have been the work of this family. John and Elizabeth Boyville built the tower, for this inscription is recorded: ‘Orate pro animabus Johannis Boivile Armig. & Eliz. uxoris ejus, qui hoc campanile cum campanis fieri fecerunt, 1467’.28 On his death in that year his property was divided between his three daughters and their husbands. It seems reasonable to assume that their representations in nIX were commissioned after the date of their inheritance. There is no firm terminus ante, but the lack of bidding prayers for souls in the recorded inscriptions 22 The main sources are: London, British Library, Egerton MS 3510 (notes by William Wyrley), f.45v; W. Burton, The Description of Leicestershire (2nd ed., London, 1777), pp. 254–5; J. Nichols, The History and Antiquities of the County of Leicester, II, pt. 2 (London, 1798), pp. 821–2, Pls CXXXII–CXXXIII; Victoria County History, Leicestershire, 5 (London, 1964), pp. 307–8. Charles Winston also made a valuable record of the glass in 1844 (London, British Library, Additional MS 33846, ff. 185r–186v). 23 Nichols, op. cit., p. 821 (citing Smyth’s notes of 1747), Pl. CXXXIII. 24 VCH, Leicestershire, 5, p. 304. For the family pedigree see G. F. Farnham, Leicestershire Medieval Pedigrees (Leicester, 1925), p. 102. 25 That she was dead by 1477 is suggested by the fact that her son Edmund had inherited the manor of Slawston (Leics.) by then (VCH, Leicestershire, 5, p. 298). 26 The date of John’s death is given in the pedigree of Cockayne of Ickleford in A. E. Cockayne (ed. ), Cockayne Memoranda (2nd ed., privately printed, 1873). 27 The date of his death is given as 1485 on a lost tomb inscription recorded by Wyrley, op. cit. 28 Burton, op. cit., p. 255. It is not clear whether this inscription was in the stonework, on a tomb, or in the glass. The wording suggests that it was somewhere on the tower itself.

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suggests that the window was executed whilst all six were still alive. Thus if Elizabeth Cockayne was dead by 1477 then the glass in question may well date to the decade 1467–77. But as Stockerston manor came to Anne and Henry Southill, it would perhaps be safer to assign it to before the latter’s death in 1485.29 A head of the Virgin, crowned with a triple tiara as Queen of Heaven in the east window of the vestry (nlll: 2b) at Barnack in the Soke of Peterborough, can also be attributed to the workshop (Fig. 9). Its dimensions are 0.31 x 0.26 m. There are no indications of its date. All that remains of the nave glazing of the magnificent collegiate church of the Holy Trinity at Tattershall in Lincolnshire is now gathered in the east window. A number of different workshops were responsible for the glazing, which was in progress in 1481–82, but the only pieces attributable to the Browne’s Hospital glaziers are a few male and female heads from a historiated window distributed over lights 1b, 1d, 1f, 2b, 2f, 2g, 3b, 3f, and 4d. Unfortunately the fragments are too widely dispersed and in too poor a condition to be reproduced, but as will be seen later, taken together with the documentary evidence they are of great importance.30 Browne’s Hospital, Peterborough, Stockerston, Bar­nack and Tattershall are the only places where figures by the workshop still survive, even if only partially; the others merely contain fragments of sideshafts, borders, quarries and ornamental motifs. Among the remains of the original glazing of St Neots in Huntingdonshire, now lying loose in the Dove Chamber above the south porch, are a number of fragments bearing the hallmarks of the workshop. There are few pieces of sideshafts with the characteristic boxlike niches; the largest one, which has the lower half of a yellow-stain lion rampant on a perch, is identical with the sideshafts of Browne’s Hospital and Peterborough Cathedral. There are also several complete and damaged star bosses of the same type as those in these two places, and a few fragments of the Browne’s Hospital border pattern of leaves entwined round a vertical stem. The evidence of local wills suggests that the church was rebuilt from

29 For the devolution of Stockerston see VCH, Leicestershire, 5, p. 304. The in situ female donor figure in nVI is evidently another representation of Anne Southill, although no inscription is recorded. She wears a robe bearing Boyville quartering Murdak under a mantle charged with Southill She was originally accompanied by her husband, clad in a surcoat of Southill (see Nichols, op. cit., p. 821, Pl. CXXXIII). 30 Marks, ‘The Glazing of... Tattershall...,’ op.cit., pp. 149–50.

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1485 onwards (if not earlier) and that the major part of the structure was complete by 1489; the glazing was certainly in progress before 1504.31 A few sideshaft fragments with the same box-like niches, both with and without lions and eagles on perches, are distributed between Bushmead Priory (Beds.), Thorney Abbey (Soke of Peterborough), the Department of Ceramics and Glass in the Victoria and Albert Museum (Vaughan Bequest, reg. no. 931–1900), the east window of Holywell church (Lincs.) and the churches of St John the Baptist and St Martin at Stamford. In addition, the churches of All Saints, St Mary and St George at Stamford contain traceried bosses very similar to those in the glazing of Browne’s Hospital and Peterborough Cathedral. Finally the centre light of the easternmost window in the south wall of the south chapel (sIV) at Diddington in Huntingdonshire contains in the apex a border of leaves entwined round a stem, enclosing the remains of three quarries. This glass is very similar to that in the entrance passage window at Browne’s Hospital. The large figures of St Catherine and St Margaret in the other window in the chapel are in a different style, so the workshop was only partly responsible for the glazing here. The chapel was built by 1505.32 With the exception of the Diddington glass and the bosses at All Saints, and possibly the St Martin’s pieces, it is very doubtful if any of the pieces just described formed part of the original glazing of the building. At Bushmead, Thorney and Holywell they are mingled with numerous other fragments of various dates. As regards the Stamford churches, the dispersal of the fragments no doubt took place as a result of the destruction during the late 1730s of so much of the ancient glass of Stamford, an event chronicled sadly by Stukeley.33

The wills are quoted in two of the most important sources for the history of the glass here: G. C. Gorham, The History and Antiquities of Eynesbury and St. Neots in Huntingdonshire and of St. Neots in the County of Cornwall (London, 1820), pp. clxi–clxvi, VCH, Huntingdonshire, 2 (Lon­don, 1932), pp. 342–3. The glass is listed in Gorham, op. cit., pp. 152–8. 32 The most detailed account of the glass here is E. H. Vigers, ‘Ancient Glass in Diddington Church, Hunts.’, Transactions of the Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire Archaeological Society, VII (1952), pp. 37–40. See also Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, Huntingdonshire (London, 1926), pp. 68–9, Pl. 43. 33 See W. C. Lukis (éd.), ‘The Family Memoirs of the Rev. William Stukeley, M.D. and the Antiquarian and other Correspondence of William Stukeley, Roger and Samuel Gale etc.’, II, The Surtees Society, 76 (1883), pp. 324–6, 328–9. 31

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Analysis Thus glass survives in no fewer than fifteen ecclesiastical buildings within a small geographical area which can be attributed to one workshop. It is distinguishable by its sideshaft design and distinctive figure style. Much of its glass is now fragmentary and not all belongs to the buildings for which it was intended. The quality and range of its output were dependent, of course, on the amount patrons were prepared to pay. Here the workshop was fortunate in obtaining commis­sions from wealthy men — in this case Ralph, Lord Crom­well (through his executors) at Tattershall, William Browne and Sir Reginald Bray. Browne’s Hospital chapel and Peterborough Cathedral west window are in the most expensive categories of glazing. Both are rich in coloured glass, Peterborough more so than Browne’s Hospital. The latter, however, uses many drilled inserts, a skilled operation. Other works are on a more modest scale. At Stockerston the figures are on plain coloured grounds, and in the audit room of Browne’s Hospital they are set against a trellis-work of quarries. The window in the entrance passage here is in a still cheaper category, with shields of arms set among quarries. Even in the richest glass the same sideshaft, border, and traceried roundel motifs recur continuously, with only very slight variations. At Browne’s Hospital a single cartoon is used for a number of separate figures; the same is true of Peterborough Cathedral, where all the small angels originally below the transom are taken from the same cartoon. Several of the figures of Christ and St Peter are also each taken from one basic pattern, slightly adapted to suit the particular iconography of each scene. This stereotyping is more than compensated for by the richness of colouring, standard of design, and quality of the tracing and modelling displayed by the workshop. The figures are rather unattractive, but the modelling of faces and drapery gives them a solidity often lacking in glass of the second half of the fifteenth century. The stylistic sources of the workshop are eclectic. As is to be expected from the geographical distribution of its works, it has close affinities with earlier glass in the Midlands. Thus the use of birds and animals, particularly eagles and lions, in sideshafts seems to be quite popular in the region; for example, the east window of the nave north aisle at Wrangle in Lincolnshire of about 1420–30, and the chapel windows at All Souls, Oxford, of about

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1440–41.34 The greatest single influence, either direct or indirect, appears to be John Prudde’s glass in the Beauchamp Chapel at Warwick, which dates from between 1447 and 1464.35 The affinities are not in figure style, for the Browne’s Hospital workshop has neither Prudde’s linearity nor his facial types. Clearly what impressed these glass-painters, and what they tried to imitate in Browne’s Hospital, was the richness of colouring and generally lavish effect, especially with the trellis-work backgrounds and in the employment of ‘jewelled’ inserts. The use of the latter is very close in these two places, with the ‘jewels’ applied to crowns as well as robes (Figs 1–5). The design of the trellis-work backgrounds behind Prudde’s figures of St John of Beverley, St Alban, St Elizabeth and several Prophets, with diamondshaped frets enclosing heraldic badges, is also very similar to the grounds behind St James the Great and the Trinity in Browne’s Hospital (Figs 1, 3, 12). One compositional feature found in the Browne’s Hospital chapel glass is not derived from the Beauchamp Chapel: the hanging dorsers behind the nimbed king and the female saints. They occur in English screen-paintings of the second quarter of the fifteenth century and later,36 and also back the row of kings in the north window of St Mary’s Hall at Coventry in Warwickshire. The design of the dorsers here is not the same as those at Browne’s Hospital, but the manner in which the coloured glass vault springers appear between the backcloths and the canopies over the figures at both places suggests that the workshop knew the work of the school responsible for the Coventry window (Figs 1, 2, 10). This window appears to date between 1451 and 1461.37 Like the Browne’s Hospital glass it appears to have been strongly influenced by the Beauchamp Chapel in the rich colouring and ‘jewelling’. See F. E. Hutchinson, Medieval Glass at All Souls College (London,1949). For a discussion of Prudde’s work see Marks, ‘The Glazing of , . . Tattershall . . .’, op. cit,, pp. 140, 151. 36 The screen from the Church of St Michael-at-Plea, Norwich, now in the cathedral, and the Ranworth screen (Norfolk). 37 The dating of this window has been disputed. Philip Nelson in Ancient Painted Glass in England, 1170–1500 (London, 1913), pp. 200–1, implied that it was of the early fifteenth century in assigning it to John Thornton, the famous glass-painter of York and Coventry. Bernard Rackham, on the other hand, dated it from after the accession of King Henry VII in 1485, possibly resulting from the meeting of the Royal Council at Coventry in 1487 (‘The Glass-Paintings of Coventry and its Neighbourhood,’ The Walpole Society, XIX (1930–31), p. 110). To complete the range R. S. Loomis ( Arthurian Legends in Medieval Art (London, 1938), p. 40) considered that the window was painted before King Henry VI’s deposition in 1461, and probably soon after his State visit to Coventry in 1451. Of all these views the last is 34 35

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The similarities with glass at Warwick and Coventry point to a Midlands origin for the workshop. More pre­cisely, certain features suggest that the chief glazier at least learned his trade around Stamford and Peter­borough — that is, in the area in which the workshop was to operate. Thus the use of scrolls bearing inscriptions on the coloured backgrounds of the Browne’s Hospital chapel glass (Fig. 3) can be found in this region in two works, one contemporary, the other almost certainly of earlier date. The latter is the east window of the nave south aisle at Ayston in Rutland, where the Virgin and St John flanking the Crucifixion have their names on scrolls behind them. The glass is undated, but stylistically appears to be of about 1440– 50.38 The other example of the use of this motif is at Stockerston, in nVI. Around the female donor figure are scrolls with the inscription: /GOD BE GYDE/. This is one of the panels painted by the firm working alongside the Stamford/Peterborough workshop here. The ‘jewelled’ hem of another figure by this second school at Stockerston, that of St Clement in nIV, and St Oswald’s ‘jewelled’ mitre in nIII (originally in nVI) in the church of St John at Stamford show that this technique was known to other glaziers in the region, and at a date prior to the first known works by the atelier under consideration (the St John’s church glazing dates from the 1450s). Further evidence that the workshop had its origin in the Stamford/ Peterborough area is provided by the border pattern of leaves entwined round vertical stems. This is common in English manuscripts from the beginning of the fifteenth century, for example the Sherborne Missal (1396–1407),39 and these are no doubt the source from which the motif is ultimately derived. However, it also occurs frequently in East Anglian stained glass, and as Stamford and Peterborough are on the fringes of this region the workshop

the most plausible. Stylistically the heads appear to be too early for an end of century dating, and in any case the presence of Henry VI among the kings means that the glass cannot have been executed before his accession in 1422. 38 Woodforde said that the Ayston window was painted by the same hand as the Browne‘s Hospital glass (English Stained and Painted Glass (Oxford, 1954), pp. 22–3). The two works are, however, of very different character in every feature except the use of these scrolls. The dating of about 1440–50 is suggested by the similarities of the large flower backgrounds with those in the glass of All Souls College chapel, Oxford, of about 1440. See Hutchinson, op. cit., Pl. XII. 39 See R. Marks and N. Morgan, The Golden Age of English Manuscript Painting 1200– 1500 (London, 1981), Pls. 28, 40. According to Dr Newton the motif also occurs in the glass at Tong (Shropshire), of about 1410.

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probably borrowed the design from their fellow craftsmen there.40 The same source may well have been responsible for the ground pattern at Peterborough and Browne’s Hospital chapel of plant sprays outlined against a heavily shaded ground. This, too, has its origins in manuscript illumination,41 but also occurs in the fragmentary panels of the Life of St John the Evangelist in the glass of the church of St Peter Mancroft in Norwich.42 The geographical distribution of the surviving works and documentary evidence even permit one to narrow down the identity of the chief glazier to a choice of two names, one of which is more likely than the other. In the accounts for the glazing of the nave of Tattershall between 31 May and 1 November 1482 two glass-painters from the Stamford/Peterborough area are mentioned: Et Johanni Glasier de Stamiford pro vitriacione fenestrae de cix s. viij d. prophetis et apostolis vocate credo continentis xx iiij xiiij pedes dando pro singulo pede xiiij d. et aliarum iiij lxiiij s. xx fenestrarum de clara historia continentium inter se iiij xvj pedes dando pro pede viij d.____________________ viiij li. xiijs. vi[ij d.] Et Johanni Wymondeswalde de burgo Sancti Petri in parte solucione cxix s. xj li ix s. viij d. sibi debitorum pro vitriacione de historia magnificat continentis cij pedes dando pro pede xiiij d. xlviijs. iij fenestrarum de clara historia pecia (?) ad xvj s. et altissimae fenestrae de 40 See C. Woodforde, The Norwich School of Glass-Painting in the Fifteenth Century (Oxford, 1950), p. 163, Pl. XXXVI. Examples of this border by East Anglian glaziers can be seen not far from Stamford and Peterborough, in the nave north aisle tracery lights at Emneth (Norfolk) and the chancel south clerestory of Wisbech (Cambs.). Influence from this region had already penetrated the Stamford area by the middle of the fifteenth century: the ‘ears of barley’ pattern is found in the glass of Buckden (Hunts.), of about 1436–1449 (ibid., Pl. XXX), and Stamford St John’s. 41 For example, the manuscripts attributed to William Abell. See J. J. G. Alexander, ‘William Abell ‘lymnour’ and 15th century English Illumination’, Kunsthistorische Forschungen Otto Pächt zu Seinem 70 Geburtstag (Salzburg, 1972), p. 171, Pl. 4. 42 Woodforde, The Norwich School..., op. cit., Pl. XXXVII. The date of the St John panels is, however, uncertain.

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xx ymaginibus in occidentali parte ecclesiae continentis iiij xiiij pedes dando pro pede viij d. ultra xl s. inde solutis et allocatis in precendenti declaracione et xl s. inde adhuc debitis __________ vij li ix s. vii[j d].43 Unfortunately the pieces in the east window of Tat­tershall which are in the same style as the Browne’s Hos­pital glazing are too fragmentary to be identified with the windows associated in the accounts with John Glasier of Stamford and John Wymondeswalde of Peterborough. Nevertheless it seems beyond doubt that one of these was the chief glazier of the workshop under consideration. It is not possible to be more precise, but although no references have been found elsewhere to John Wymon­deswalde of Peterborough, it may be significant that John Glasier was a person of some importance in Stamford, and his name occurs in several documents. His full name was John Browne and he may have adopted the alias Glasier to distinguish himself from John Browne, draper, the brother of the founder of Browne’s Hospital. The first reference to him is in the churchwardens’ accounts for the church of St John the Baptist at Peterborough: January 1, 1472 Item receyved for the hyre of iiij garments of John Glasier of Staunford .... xij d.44 1472–3 Item payd to the Glaseyer of Staunford for mendying of the glasswyndowse of the chyrch vj s.45 He is not mentioned again in relation to this church for thirty years, but there are several references in connection with Stamford in the period 1474–82/3.46 In 1474 John Browne ‘glasyer’ sold, or paid rent of, herrings to the nuns of St Michael, Stamford.47 He was perhaps married to one Agnes, for an Agnes Browne and an Agnes Glasyer appear in this rental. In the same year, as John Glasyer, he paid taxes in the parish of St Michael.48 Two years later, in 1476, 43 See Marks, ‘The Glazing of . . . Tattershall . . .’, op. cit., p. 139, quoting Kent County Archives, No. U.1475, Q17/5 (Tattershall documents deposited on loan by Lord De L’Isle and Dudley). 44 W. T. Mellows (ed.), ‘Peterborough Local Administration,’ Northamptonshire Record Society, IX (1939), p. 9. 45 Ibid., p. 12. 46 I owe the following references to the kindness of Dr Alan Rogers. 47 London, Public Record Office, SC6/914/1. 48 Stamford Municipal Offices, Hall Book 1, f. 19.

A GLASS-PAINTING WORKSHOP IN STAMFORD

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Figure A. Map showing the distribution of glass by the Stamford-Peterborough workshop (excluding Tattershall).

he was appointed to the Second Twelve of the Town Council,49 and there is a reference in 1479 to John Broun, ‘glasier’, of Stamford.50 In 1482 John Browne ‘glasier’ stood pledge in Stamford for a chandler,51 and in the same or following year he gave a receipt to the nuns of St Michael.52 In 1484 he ceased to serve on the Second Twelve. According to Dr Rogers this implies death as resignation and deposition were very rare and always mentioned. But in the Peterborough St John the Baptist accounts there are regular payments to a John Glasier for mending — and in one case making — the church windows, from March 1502/March 1503 until 1517.53 Moreover, there is evidence that at least one of the above works (Browne’s Hospital audit room) dates from after about 1485. Several of the dated works fall within the period 1474–1500, and it may be more than coincidence that they were executed in the decades when no payments were recorded to John Ibid., f. 22. Calendar Patent Rolls Edward IV, Edward V and Richard I I I , 1476–1485, p. 148. The document describes him as late of Stamford, but in the context this must be a mistake. 51 Stamford Municipal Offices, Hall Book 1, f. 53. 52 London, Public Record Office, E210/1529. 53 Mellows, op. cit., pp. 71, 74, 84. 105, 107, 109, 112. 49 50

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Glasier at St John the Baptist’s.54 It is tempting to assume that the reason for his inactivity there was his concern with more important commissions at Stamford, Peterborough Cathedral and Tattershall. Whichever of John Glasier and John Wymondeswalde was the head of this workshop there can be little doubt of its importance. This workshop is important for two reasons. The study of English fifteenth-century glass is in its infancy, and this school is one of the most clearly defined yet to have been identified. Secondly, it is a workshop of the first rank, a precious survival when so much has been destroyed. Dennis King has always stressed the importance of conserving medieval glass, however fragmentary, in parish churches and the lesser ecclesiastical buildings, for it is from these that it is possible to identify workshops such as this. Future generations of lovers of stained glass will have cause to thank him for doing so much to rescue and safeguard what remains of English medieval glass-painting.

It is interesting to note that in 1479 ‘Pers Glasyer’ supplied a stone of lead, so it appears that other glass-painters were employed in the absence of John Glasier (ibid., p. 25). 54

XIX The Reception and Display of Northern European Roundels in England * Strawberry Hill

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n June 1764 Horace Walpole had a dream, which later he related in a letter to an antiquary: ‘I had thought myself in an ancient castle . . . and that on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour’.1 In this apparent reverie lies the inspiration for his ‘horrid’ tale, The Castle of Otranto, which is itself at the origin of the Gothic novel genre. In it Walpole describes the elaborate and gloomy fortress where the action takes place. This extract gives the flavor of the setting: ‘The lower part of the castle was hol­lowed into several intricate cloisters; and it was not easy for one under so much anxiety to find the door that opened into the cavern. An awful silence reigned throughout those sub­terraneous regions, except now and then some blasts of wind that shook the doors she had passed, and which grating on the rusty hinges were re-echoed through that long labyrinth of darkness’.2

* This paper first saw the light of day as a contribution to the colloquium to which reference is made in n. 28. As the colloquium and the im­portant exhibition with which it was associated took place in the insti­tution which Jane Hayward served so well for so long, I hope this contribution will be considered particularly appropriate to this volume in her memory. I am deeply grateful to Michael Cothren and Mary Shepard for the opportunity to present a revised version, which has had the benefit of the help, expertise and advice of Dr. Alexandrina Buchanan and Anna Eavis. 1 Horace Walpole’s Correspondence with the Rev. William Cole, I, ed. W. S. Lewis and A. Dayle Wallace (The Yale Edition of Horace Wal­pole’s Correspondence, I) (New Haven, 1937), p. 88. 2 H. Walpole, ‘The Castle of Otranto’, in Three Gothic Novels, ed. P. Fairclough (Harmondsworth, 1986), p. 61.

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As is well known, the mood of his novel found visual expression in the architecture and fittings of the author’s house at Strawberry Hill. Among the new and ancient trap­pings with which Walpole surrounded himself, stained glass had an important place. Indeed, he was in the van of those antiquariancollectors who developed an appreciation for the medium, which is more closely associated with Gothic archi­tecture (both medieval and its revivalist manifestations) than any other form of artistic production. Among the late medi­eval heraldic and figural glass in the windows of Strawberry Hill, however, was a large number of northern European roundels, which for the most part are neither medieval nor ecclesiastical. My purpose in this paper is to establish their place within the aesthetic parameters of Walpole and other English collectors. Taste is never an immutable phenomenon; during the principal period for the acquisition of roundels in England, which lasted roughly from 1750 to 1850, the attitudes and in­deed the social class of collectors changed; at the same time the appreciation of stained glass also underwent transforma­ tions. These shifts can be traced in the architectural contexts and the manner in which roundels were displayed. I will exam­ine here how the vogue for collecting roundels developed and the factors which might account for their falling out of fashion. I am aware that this subject is an uncharted sea; it is also a very large one. The late Dr. William Cole, the leading British expert on Netherlandish and northern European roun­dels, listed more than 2500 dating between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries in the United Kingdom and Ireland.3 A comprehensive overview of the material would not only be tedious; it would not, I suspect, be particularly helpful. In­stead, three major ensembles of roundels will be examined, one collected in the middle of the eighteenth century, another in the early nineteenth century, and the last during the 1850s. In no sense should they be taken as paradigms; rather, each was a product of a complex interaction between fashions in taste, the ideologies of the period, the availability of artefacts, the whims, vagaries, and personalities of individuals, and par­ ticular circumstances. From the outset of Horace Walpole’s transformation of his villa at Twickenham into the ‘little gothic castle’ of Strawberry Hill, ancient window W. Cole, A Catalogue of Netherlandish and North European Roundels in Britain (Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi, Great Britain) Summary Catalogue I (Oxford, 1993). The subject is surveyed briefly in C. Wainwright. The Romantic Interior: The British Collector at Home 1750– 1850 (New Haven, 1989), pp. 65–68. 3

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glass was an important fea­ture of the house and its glazing programme.4 In 1750 he wrote to his friend, Sir Horace Mann, in Italy, asking him to send ‘any fragments of old painted glass, arms or anything’. At the same time he paid 36 guineas to an Italian named Asciotti, who had a Flemish wife, for ‘an immense cargo of painted glass from Flanders’ of over 450 pieces.5 These purchases com­prise the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century roundels which, along with other glass, were set in the windows of the prin­cipal rooms by various glaziers, including William Price the Younger and William Peckitt. Although many were dispersed in the great Strawberry Hill sale of 1842, more than 200 still remain in the house.6 There has been considerable reordering, but some are still in situ, and the watercolours of John Carter (made in 1788) and others give an idea of the eighteenth-century arrangement (Figs 1, 2). What compelled Walpole to acquire these roundels? For some years a few antiquaries had taken an interest in old glass for reasons other than its heraldic and genealogical content. In 1739–1741 William Stukeley preserved fifteenth-century figural glass from St. George’s church at Stamford (Lincoln­ shire), and in 1747 medieval panels (including heraldic glass) from Warwick were placed in settings for Lord Cobham at Stowe, In both cases the ancient glass was located in garden buildings (Stukeley’s summer house and the Gothic Temple of Liberty at Stowe); apparently, at this time ecclesiastical glass was not felt to be appropriate for the living and recep­tion rooms of the residence proper.7 However, Lord Radnor, Walpole’s neighbor at Twickenham, as early as 1734–1735 had acquired some Netherlandish seventeenth-century panels, which by reason of their small scale and domestic origin evidently did not pose the same problem, and he had them Walpole’s acquisition and installation of ‘ancient glass’, which fol­lowed closely the major building phases, can be traced in his letters. See J. A. Knowles, ‘Horace Walpole and his Collection of Stained Glass at Strawberry Hill’, Journal of the British Society of Master GlassPainters, VII (1937–1939), pp. 45–49, 100–101, 131–133, 192; A. Eavis and M. Peover, ‘Horace Walpole’s Painted Glass at Strawberry Hill’, Journal of Stained Glass, XIX (1994–1995), pp. 280–314. General studies of Strawberry Hill include J. Mordaunt Crook, ‘Strawberry Hill Revisited’, Country Life, CLIV (June 1973), pp. 1598–1602, 1726–1730; M. McCarthy, The Origins of the Gothic Revival (New Haven, 1987), chap. 3; Wainwright, Romantic Interior. 5 Walpole’s Correspondence, XX, pp. 111, 199; idem. Anecdotes of Painting in England (London, 1786; rpt. London, 1871), p. 121 n. 3. 6 Eavis and Peover, ‘Walpole’s Painted Glass’, pp. 295–310; M. Archer, ‘Stained Glass at Erdigg and the Work of William Price’, Apollo, CXXII (1985), pp. 252–263, esp. pp. 260–261. 7 The Family Memoirs of the Rev. William Stukeley, M.D., II (Surtees Society, LXXVI) (1883), pp. 328–329, 331; Walpole, Anecdotes of Paint­ing, p. 120 n. 3. 4

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set in the windows of Radnor House.8 Walpole must have been aware of Radnor’s pieces, but the scale of his collection and the fame and accessibility of Strawberry Hill were of much greater significance in establishing roundels as respectable items for Men of Taste to display alongside other objets d’art. In common with other collectors of his day, he was profoundly uninterested in the iconography of his roundels, which ran the usual gamut of Old and New Testament episodes, saints, secular scenes and classical themes, and they were not ar­ranged in the windows in any coherent order. With the ex­ception of some of the heraldic glass, Walpole’s comments on subject matter are usually vague and are precise only when some peculiarity catches his attention, as in the Great Parlour, where he described a ‘ridiculous Dutch piece representing the Triumph of Fame, who is accompanied by Cato, Cicero, and other great men in square caps and gowns of masters of arts’. 9 His account of another piece, showing the lawgiver giving up one of his own eyes to save his son from being completely blinded as a punishment for adultery, is also re­vealing: ‘The drawing is fine, and the figures of the legislator and of the young soldier who contemplates him, are evidently taken from some picture or design which gave the hint to Vandyck for his Belisarius, now at Chiswick’.10 The glass he singles out in the bow window of the Round Drawing Room is described in a similar vein: ‘. . . and six fine pieces, by a scholar of Price, from Raphael’s bible’.11 Walpole ignored the religious roundels and his connoisseurship conformed to the accepted canons of contemporary taste, favouring high renais­sance and mannerist painting and certain seventeenth-century masters, a span of time which matches precisely the period covered by the roundels.12 Walpole did not see these artefacts as medieval. More­over, as for the most part they are executed in opaque outline paint and silver stain (or light enamels), they are hardly con­ducive to evoking the atmosphere of The Castle of Otranto to ‘imprinting the gloomth of abbeys and cathedrals on The same observation can be applied to the east window of the parish church of St. Mary, Preston-on-Stour (Warwickshire), designed and glazed in 1754 with Netherlandish roundels by Price for James West. See Archer, ‘Stained Glass at Erdigg’, pp. 258, 260. 9 H. Walpole, A Description of the Villa of Mr Horace Walpole, Young­est Son of Sir Robert Walpole Earl of Orford, at Strawberry-Hill near Twickenham, Middlesex. With an Inventory of the Furniture, Pictures, Curiosities, etc. (Strawberry Hill, 1774), p. 5 (p. 4 in the 1784 edition). 10 Ibid., pp. 27–28 (p. 23 in the 1784 edition). 11 Ibid., p. 74 (p. 53 in the 1784 edition). 12 For the taste of the period see F. Herrmann, The English as Collectors (London, 1972), pp. 69–73. 8

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1. Strawberry Hill, Twickenham. Library, watercolour by J. Carter, 1788 (photo: Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT). 2. Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, Great Parlour, watercolour by J. Carter, 1788 (photo: Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT).

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3. Fawsley (Northamptonshire), parish church of St. Mary, window sIV (photo: Royal Commission on Historical Monuments).

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4. Addington (Buckinghamshire), parish church of St. Mary, window sV (photo: author).

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one’s house’, as Walpole wrote to Mann.13 To Walpole, the roun­dels were painting on glass of a period which was both famil­iar and acceptable to an English gentleman. The same attitude is apparent in respect of illuminated manuscripts, a medium by which, like his contemporaries, he set little store. Typi­cally, of those he owned, the two he prized most highly were a Roman missal of 1532, which he considered to be by Raphael and his followers, and an equally elaborate psalter attributed (without foundation) to the illuminator Giulio Clovio, dating from five years later.14 This may seem paradoxi­cal, in that the design of Strawberry Hill is self-consciously Gothic. The key to understanding the discrepancy lies in the nature of the house. It was not so much a great country seat in miniature as a monumental cabinet of curiosities, full of objets d’art and curios of all types and periods. Walpole’s choice of Gothic as the style for his building was influenced both by its small scale and its function. In England, the Gothic was admired for its ornamentation rather than its structure. In his Anecdotes of Painting, Walpole contrasted ‘the rational beauties of regular architecture and the unrestrained licen­tiousness of that which is called Gothic’, which depended on unregulated multiplicity of ornament and varieties of effect.15 Classical architecture had to be understood; Gothic could simply be felt and the more features a Gothic building contained to strike the imagination, the better. The battery of objects displayed in Strawberry Hill would have been out of place in the austere interiors of a Palladian house, but they were vital to a Gothic sensibility for the associations they could inspire. The northern European (principally Netherlandish) roun­dels collected by Walpole therefore operated at two levels. They were part of the collection of a connoisseur with tastes largely determined by the canons of the time and to be appre­ciated as objects for their own sake; and they were part of the Gothic apparatus of the building. Just as Walpole had no qualms about mixing Gothic furnishings with contemporary paintings and china, his Gothic furnishings themselves jum­bled their sources with eclectic abandon, using a tomb and altars for the designs of fireplaces and wallpaper, for exam­ ple, with no concern for the dates, materials, or scale of the originals. It is hardly surprising that he had no intellectual or moral difficulties in installing Walpole’s Correspondence, XX, p. 372. A. N. L. Munby, Connoisseurs and Medieval Miniatures 1750–1850 (Oxford, 1972), pp. 23–24. 15 Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting, p. 71. 13

14

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glass of various periods.16 For Walpole, Gothic was merely architecture and did not extend to embrace furnishings and decoration; only the architecture had to be archaeologically accurate.17 The passages quoted above make it clear that Walpole appreciated the roundels as works of art. Nevertheless, in his Description of Strawberry Hill, published in 1774, the windows are mentioned not with the pictures in each room, but as part of the fittings and furnishings, in other words, as part of the paraphernalia of Gothic.18 As such, the northern European roundels did pre­sent some problems. Not because, as Walpole recognized, they were not Gothic — he was not enough of a purist for such details to matter — but because even if they belonged to a medium associated intimately with Gothic architecture and as such added authenticity to the ensemble, they lacked the essential ingredient of Gothic glass, that is to say colour.19 Window glass had been seen as a vital accoutrement to Gothic gloom since the pale nun of Milton’s Il Penseroso (1631) wandered through the ‘studious cloisters pale,’ with their . . . storied Windows richly dight, Casting a dimm religious light.20 It was the light cast by ancient windows, rather than their subject matter, which most commended them to roman­tic aesthetics. As Anthony à Wood wrote at the end of the seventeenth century, the diminishment of light ‘did impose a more awfull reverence upon the adorer’.21 The limited palette of the northern European roundels imparted a monochrome tone at odds with the desired impact of Gothic windows and so at Strawberry Hill they were framed in coloured ‘mosaic’ settings, initially by Palmer, a glazier in St. Martin’s Lane, London. Palmer was responsible for the settings of the roun­dels and other old pieces in most of the principal rooms in 1753–1754, including the Great Parlour and Library (Figs 1, 2). Between 1759 and 1761, for the Tribune and Holbein Chamber, Walpole employed William Price

McCarthy, Origins of the Gothic Revival, ch. 3; Wainwright, Romantic Interior, ch. 4. Crook, ‘Strawberry Hill Revisited’, p. 1726. 18 Walpole, Description. 19 Walpole described the windows of the Gothic temple at Stowe as ‘throughout consecrated with painted glass’. Walpole’s Correspondence, XXXV, pp. 7 (letter to Chute dated 4 August 1753). 20 The Poetical Works of John Milton, ed. H. Darbishire (Oxford, 1958), p. 428. 21 Quoted in B. S. Allen, Tides in English Taste 1619–1800, II (New York, 1969), p. 50. 16 17

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the Younger, who had already incorporated old glass in windows for some of his patron’s associates, including Richard Bateman (Shobdon church, Herefordshire), as well as Lord Cobham (the Gothic Temple at Stowe). Subsequently more glass was made for the Tribune and for other rooms by William Peckitt.22 The result of their labours was the desired Gothic effect: the northern European roundels were enshrined within a mosaic of coloured glass (some were even recoloured by Price), which together with new and ancient panels permitted Walpole to proclaim ‘. . . my house is so monastic that I have a little hall decked with long saints in lean arched windows’.23 The importance to Walpole of the settings is signified in the Description, where more notice is taken of the coloured settings than of the heraldic glass: ‘. . . the ground is a beautiful mosaic of crim­son, blue, and pearls, designed and painted by Price’. Simi­larly, in the Tribune, which in the roof had a star of yellow glass ‘that throws a golden gloom all over the room’, the panels in the windows were ‘surrounded with most beautiful mosaics of the purest taste’.24 An impression of the original appearance of the roundels in their polychromatic settings — ‘the windows chequered like Harlequin’s coat, with all the colours of the rainbow,’ as they were described in 1810 — can be gained from John Carter’s watercolours of 1788 (Figs 1, 2).25 To late twentieth-century eyes, these monochrome, post-medieval northern European roundels seem at odds with the aesthetic requirements of those interested in Gothic. Their size, translucency and period, however, made them wholly appropriate for the residences of Men of Taste, and they became much in vogue in the late eighteenth century. The prevailing fashion demanded the same richly coloured settings as were employed at Strawberry Hill. According to Walpole, Palmer purchased roundels direct from Asciotti’s wife and ‘immediately rose the price to one, two, five guineas for a single piece, and fitted up entire windows with them, and with mosaics of plain glass of different colours’.26 Within a few years the market was sufficiently established for an auc­tioneer named Paterson to open an exhibition of

22 Eavis and Peover, ‘Walpole’s Painted Glass’, pp. 281–284 (they also draw attention to the importance of the settings); Archer, ‘Stained Glass at Erdigg’, p. 261. 23 Walepole’s Correspondence, XX, p. 372 (letter to Horace Mann dated 27 April 1753). 24 Walpole, Description, pp. 58, 76 (pp. 43, 55 in the 1784 edition). 25 L. Simond, Journal of a Tour and Residence in Great Britain During the Years 1810 and 1811, I (Edinburgh, 1815), p. 149. 26 Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting, p. 121 n. 3.

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roundels in the Strand; after his death in 1773 his own collection of nearly 300 pieces was displayed in ‘Nine Large and Superb Gothic Frames’.27 The roundels exhibited in Strawberry Hill and other aris­tocratic houses of this period were curiosities and were part of the geegaws by which their patrons constructed themselves as Men of Taste. Their subject matter was of passing interest, displacing what are arguably among the original purposes of many of the products of this genre, namely to act as aids to private devotion and to provide visual exemplars of moral conduct in convents and domestic residences.28 Did those roundels which found their way into the windows of churches and chapels around this time conform to the same set of val­ues? Or did their ecclesiastical context mean that they were intended to approximate to their original pious function vis-à-vis the viewer? My second example may help us to formulate a response to these questions. Fawsley The parish church of St. Mary at Fawsley in Northamp­tonshire stands isolated in the picturesque parkland setting of Fawsley Hall, the ancient seat of the Knightley family, and served as its mausoleum. Like Shobdon (Herefordshire) and Preston-on-Stour (Warwickshire), it was an estate church. Reglazing was a major feature of the refurbishment of the church which took place during the early years of the nine­teenth century, prior to 1822 (possibly when Henry Knightley was vicar, 1810–1813). This involved the resetting in clear glass of medieval and sixteenth-century heraldic shields asso­ciated with the Knightley family, some belonging to the church, others brought from Fawsley Hall and also from Sulgrave Manor (Fig. 3). To these were added twenty Netherlandish roundels from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In short, the mélange was much the same as at Strawberry Hill.29 27 Ibid., J. Lafond, ‘The Traffic in Old Stained Glass from Abroad Dur­ing the 18th and 19th Centuries in England’, Journal of the British Society of Master Glass-Painters, XIV (1964), pp. 63–65. 28 New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Luminous Image: Painted Glass Roundels in the Lowlands, 1480–1560 (New York, 1995), T. B. Husband and I. M. Veldman, pp. 15–31. The didactic and moralizing nature of these roundels was also demonstrated by Professor Hermann Pleij of Amsterdam University in a paper to the colloquium held in May 1995 in association with this exhibition. 29 For Fawsley see R. Marks, The Medieval Stained Glass of Northamptonshire (Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi, Great Britain), Summary Catalogue IV (Oxford, 1998), pp. 65–71; Cole, Roundels, pp. 80–82.

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The inclusion of figural and historiated roundels, princi­pally of New Testament subjects but also including several saints, Old Testament scenes and allegorical themes, might have been considered problematic within the context of Prot­estant parochial worship. Although religious imagery was not totally absent from ecclesiastical buildings of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, particularly in college chapels and great churches, it functioned within prescribed limits. In general, clear glass predominated, as it was considered both appropriate and practicable for what were in essence preach­ing boxes. This preference was antithetical to the desire for Gothic dimness propounded by Walpole and others, and al­though as early as the 1750s Netherlandish roundels were incorporated (in the familiar coloured glass settings) by Price in the church at Preston-on-Stour, it should be born in mind that this was an age which could still countenance the replace­ment of medieval figural glass in churches by clear glazing.30 The Fawsley east window was aniconic, consisting sim­ply of a roundel bearing the sacred monogram IHC enclosed within a mosaic of coloured enamel glass.31 This window pro­vides an indication of how the Netherlandish roundels here were viewed in the early nineteenth century. Other clues lie in their random disposition within the church. There is no iconographical logic apparent in the juxtaposition of roun­dels, such as we might expect to find if a didactic or pious significance was intended to be imparted to them. For example, in the south window of the chancel the Crucifixion rubs shoulders 30 Archer, ‘Stained Glass at Erdigg’, p. 260. Perhaps the most notorious instance was the destruction of most of the medieval glazing of Salis­bury Cathedral during Wyatt’s restoration of the 1780s. Similarly, the fifteenth-century nave glazing of Fotheringhay (Northamptonshire), which had survived in large quantities, was removed between 1787 and 1821 (probably in 1807). In both cases the medieval glass was almost entirely destroyed. For Salisbury, see R. Marks, ‘The Thirteenth-Century Glazing of Salisbury Cathedral’, Medieval Art and Architecture at Salisbury Cathedral, ed. L. Keen and T. Cocke, British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions, XVII (1996), p. 107, and P. Z. Blum, ‘Thirteenth-Century Glass of the Salisbury Chapter House’, Gesta, 37/2, 1998, pp. 142–49. For Fotheringhay, Marks, Northamptonshire, p. 73. A few of the Fotheringhay fragments were installed in the nearby church at King’s Cliffe (Marks, Northamptonshire, pp. 114–119). Some of the late fifteenth-century typological panels removed in 1757 from the chancel of Tattershall (Lincolnshire) were distributed among the chapel of Warwick Castle, the great hall of Burghley House, and St. Martin’s church at Stamford (Lord Exeter, the owner of Burghley, had the advowson of this church). See Marks, Stained Glass in England during the Middle Ages (Lon­don, 1993), pp. 241–242. 31 The window is visible in an early nineteenth-century oil painting in Fawsley church showing the interior.

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with the Allegory of Death, Charlemagne, and Moses and the Serpent. It is hard to comprehend what spiritual bene­fits an early nineteenth-century rural parishioner could have derived from contemplating these roundels. One is drawn to conclude that the motive behind the inclusion of the roundels in the Fawsley windows amounted to little more than a desire to embellish the church and by implication to promote the image of the Knightley patrons as enlightened connoisseurs and benefactors. That the overall scheme was intended to be Gothic may be inferred from the contemporary furnishings, which are of the spindly pre-Puginian variety. The roundels are framed in coloured glass, some forming trefoil arches (a favorite motif of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Gothic), but unlike the elaborate kaleidoscope of Strawberry Hill, the settings are subordi­ nated to the clear glass in the windows. Also different from the earlier schemes is the careful arrangement of the serried ranks of roundels and shields of arms within standard Geor­gian rectangular leaded panels, in a manner resembling the classified pages of specimens found in contemporary botani­ cal and palaeontological studies (Fig. 3). The Fawsley format did not meet with universal approval from contemporaries; the county historian George Baker was of the opinion that the ‘defective and erroneously marshalled coats, and mis­placed inscriptions bear ample testimony to the ignorant innovations of modern glaziers’. Significantly, he did not find the roundels worthy of comment.32 Addington By the time the Fawsley windows were set up, the fash­ion among the aristocracy and gentry for collecting northern European roundels was already waning. The destruction and secularization of continental churches during and after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars made available vast quantities of large figurative panels which found their way through agents, chiefly John Christopher Hampp, into the eager hands of English collectors.33 Here they formed appropriate and impressive accessories to the medieval ances­tral pile or the new Gothic mansion with its hall and chapel. G. Baker, The History and Antiquities of the County of Northampton, I (London, 1822), p. 389. 33 Lafond, ‘Traffic in Old Stained Glass’; B. Rackham, ‘English Impor­tations of Foreign Stained Glass in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Jour­nal of the British Society of Master GlassPainters, II (1927), pp. 86–94. 32

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James Wyatt’s Ashridge (Hertfordshire), built for the Earl of Bridgwater, with its spectacular chapel originally glazed with numerous panels from Mariawald, Steinfeld, and elsewhere is a good example.34 Glass of the twelfth and thirteenth cen­turies also now became available and was set up in parish churches through the agencies of the local lord or parish priest; the best known sites include Rivenhall (Essex), Twycross (Leicestershire), and Wilton (Wiltshire).35 European roundels continued to circulate, however, which brings us to the third example of their display, this time in a Victorian context. The parish church of St. Mary at Addington in Bucking­ hamshire contains nearly seventy roundels of the standard date and range of subjects, the largest single collection in any English church.36 Their interest resides in their presence in what in all other respects is a church which conforms to the principles of Pugin and the Ecclesiologists. In 1857–1858 a London businessman named John Gellibrand Hubbard (later MP for Buckingham and then for the City of London, ulti­mately created Baron Addington), the owner of the village and holder of the advowson, paid for the rebuilding of the chancel and the aisles.37 The architect was G. E. Street, one of the favoured sons of the Cambridge Camden Society, and the window tracery is in the canonical Middle Pointed, or Deco­rated style. The setting of the roundels was carried out by James Powell of Whitefriars, but there is little doubt that Street took the crucial design decisions on the glazing (Fig. 4).38 At this stage of his career he was advocating a more extensive use of white glass than was the norm for his day, consider­ing that Middle Pointed glass was ‘transparent, whilst the superiority of the draughtmanship, and the conventional im­itation

B. Rackham, ‘The Ashridge Stained Glass’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, X (1945–1947), pp. 1–22. For Steinfeld, see also D. King, ‘The Steinfeld Cloister Glazing’, Gesta, 37/2, 1998, pp. 201–10. 35 For bibliography on Rivenhall and Twycross see Marks, Stained Glass in England, pp. 279 n. 66; also the important contribution by M. B. Shepard, ‘ “Our Fine Gothic Magnificence”: The Nineteenth-Century Chapel at Costessey Hall (Norfolk) and its Medieval Glazing’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, LIV (1995), pp. 186–207. Wilton is discussed by J. Kerr in Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (England), Churches of South-East Wiltshire (London, 1987), pp. 238–243. 36 Cole, Roundels, pp. 2–9; idem, ‘The Netherland­ish Glass in St. Mary’s Church. Addington’, Records of Buckingham­shire, XXII (1980), pp. 73–91. 37 For Hubbard, see Dictionary of National Biography, X (1921–1922), pp. 135–136. 38 See Cole, ‘Netherlandish Glass in St. Mary’s’, p. 74, for Powell’s involvement. 34

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and use of natural forms, gave it a great advantage over its predecessor’.39 At Addington, Street practised what he preached and every window save the chancel east window and the clerestory was filled with grisaille quarries embel­ lished with what approximates to naturalistic foliage, some with coloured bosses. But practice followed precept only to a point, for the quarries provide the setting for the roundels, which represent precisely the kind of pictorial glass derived from large-scale oils or frescoes that was anathema to Street. That it was his idea to incorporate them into the windows is unlikely, and it must be assumed that they were in Hubbard’s possession and he donated them. In contrast with the other two examples, some of the roundels were grouped with re­gard to iconographical coherence (such as the pair of evan­ gelists in a chancel south window), but on the whole, as at Fawsley, the principal determinant seems to have been shape and size. Street considered that window glass was an archi­tectural embellishment ‘and not primarily for the introduc­tion of religious pictures into churches’.40 The setting of these roundels is far removed from the brilliant translucency of Fawsley; Street’s grisaille is of an opacity consistent with his belief that windows should only admit sufficient light for the viewing of devotional paintings or frescoes (Fig. 4). The roun­dels, however fine, were completely alien to the dictates of the Ecclesiologists; they are a feature which by no stretch of the imagination could meet Pugin’s yardstick for true ‘Christian architecture,’ namely that all aspects of a church be necessary for ‘convenience, construction, or propriety’ (my emphasis).41 As Street himself put it, ‘it is absolutely necessary, that the design of the glass should never interfere with or oppose the design of the stonework, but that it should be treated in all cases as subordinate to it’.42 It is perhaps for this reason that The Ecclesiologist, the organ of the Cambridge Camden So­ciety, made no reference to the glazing in its account of the rebuilding of the church.43 The Addington roundels demon­strate how the absolutist principles of a movement can be modified by local factors, in this case, presumably, the wishes and possessions of the patron.

G. E. Street, ‘ “On Glass Painting.” A paper read at the Thirteenth Anniversary Meeting of the Ecclesiological late Cambridge Camden Society, June 9, 1852’, The Ecclesiologist, XIII (1852), p. 238. 40 Ibid., p. 241. 41 A. W. Pugin, The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (London, 1853), p. 1. 42 Street, ‘On Glass Painting’, p. 239. 43 ‘Church Restorations: S. Mary, Addington, Bucks’, The Ecclesiolo­gist, XIX (1858), p. 279. 39

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The three collections of roundels examined here differ considerably in terms of their display, affected as they were by changes in taste and individual circumstances. But I think we should not view them as neutral, self-contained ensem­bles, unconnected with each other. Of course, they share a common origin and genre; but more than this, they all occupy public spaces, whether exhibited in a residence which at­tracted visitors or a parish church. As such they were agents in the construction of their owners as Men of Taste or pious benefactors (or both). At Strawberry Hill we saw how roun­dels came to be used as part of the apparatus of taste. How­ever, their ideological significance can also be read in more overtly political terms. At the reconsecration of Addington, Samuel Wilberforce, the characterful bishop of Oxford, ex­tolled the virtues of Hubbard to his villagers: ‘... a good man, one who in God’s providence has come to reside amongst you, and who would not build up his own house without providing for the worship of God and for the souls of his people by building and restoring your parish church’.44 Whatever the veracity of this paean, it seems indubitable that the fabric and the glazing were intended as much as his memorial tablet (which, perhaps more revealingly, links his ‘fervent piety’ with ‘great business ability’) to immortalize Hubbard as an individual possessed of high moral values. His munificence was framed by the ideology of the Gothic Revival of the 1830s and 1840s, which propagated a mythology of the middle ages as a period of stability and harmony, in contrast with the social divisions of nineteenthcentury capitalism. In Pugin’s True Principles lies a vision of the restoration in rural En­gland of this ancient alliance, whose outward signs were a resident and benevolent squire, a happy tenantry which knew its place, and a parson (also resident), all worshipping together in an appropriately Gothic church. This ideal, like all dreams of perfection, was by no means recognized by everyone, but Hubbard’s patronage at Addington would, I am sure, have met with Pugin’s approval, even if the roundels would have seemed utterly incongruous to him. Alterations to Fawsley church a few years after the completion of the work at Addington would have gladdened Pugin’s heart even more. In 1866 the glass in the east win­dow was replaced by a Gothic design which conformed in every way to the sentiments of the day. The inscription reads: ‘Erected in memory of Sir Charles and Lady Knightley by a grateful Tenantry’; at the

44

Quoted in Cole, ‘Netherlandish Glass in St. Mary’s’, p. 73.

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base of the window are the arms of the Knightleys, flanked by the kneeling figures of Sir Charles and his wife in conscious imitation of medieval donor com­positions. Thankful the parishioners may indeed have been to their paternalistic landlords, but their feelings would not have been shared by their early sixteenth-century forebears, whose village was erased by the same family in order to create an enclosed estate dedicated to sheep-rearing.45 We are accus­tomed to viewing the parish church as much as the country house through the rose-tinted spectacles (or blinkers) of the heritage industry, and it is easy to overlook that it was (and for some still is) the site of ideological battlegrounds, both re­ligious and social. The very fabric, the monuments, windows, and other furnishings (their absence as well as their presence) are the visible signs of the exercise of hegemony.

45 For the enclosing activities of the Knightleys, see K. J. Allison, M. W. Beresford, and J. G. Hurst, The Deserted Villages of Northamptonshire (Leicester University Department of English, Local History Occasional Papers, No. 18) (Leicester, 1966), pp. 11, 39; M. Beresford, History on the Ground (2nd ed., Gloucester, 1984), pp. 110–113.

Seable Rememoratijf Signes

XX Two Early 16th Century Boxwood Carvings Associated with the Glymes Family of Bergen op Zoom

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uring the closing years of the fifteenth and first third of the sixteenth centuries, a large number of boxwood miniature sculptures was produced in the Southern Netherlands. The majority of the surviving pieces are ‘paternoster’ beads from rosaries, but there are also complete rosaries, miniature triptyches, tabernacles, ‘memento mori’ in the form of coffins, and knives with boxwood handles delicately carved with figures and scenes.1 Several of these exquisite objects bear shields of arms, some of which have been identified. It has now proved possible to distinguish the owners of two more, which are in two of the largest collections of these miniature carvings. These owners are of considerable interest, not only because they provide further evidence of the popularity of this kind of sculpture with people of high station, but also because they were related. The first of the pieces is a flat circular devotional carving forming part of the Waddesdon Bequest left to the British Museum by Baron Ferdinand Rothschild in 1898 (Fig. 1).2 It is hinged and has a suspension loop. On the exterior are two scenes in low relief. One depicts the marriage of the Virgin 1 For a general discussion of these carvings see E. Molinier, Histoire générale des arts appliqués à l’industrie, II Les Meubles du Moyen Age et de la Renaissance Les Sculptures Microscopiques — Les Cires (Paris, 1897), pp. 193–198; G. C. Williamson, Catalogue of the Collection of Jewels and Precious Works of Art. The Property of J. Pierpont Morgan (London, 1910), pp. 57–63; K. Dingelstedt, ‘Betnuss’, Reallexikon zur Deutschen Kunstgeschichte, 2 (Stuttgart, 1949), cols. 371–377, and J. Leeuwenberg, ‘De Gebedsnoot van Eewert Jansz van Bleiswick en andere Werken van Adam Dirksz’, Miscellanea JozeJ Duverger (Ghent, 1968), pp. 614–624. 2 See C. H. Read, The Waddesdon Bequest, Catalogue of the Works of Art Bequeathed to the British Museum by Baron Ferdinand Rothschild MP, 1898 (London, 1902), No. 239, p. 115, Pl. XLIX. Its length when open is 11.1 cm.

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and Joseph; the other is of the Virgin holding the Child Christ and seated with St. Anne on a bench. Inside are two scenes in much deeper relief. One shows St. Jerome in the forest, praying before the Crucifix with the lion behind him; the rim inscription, in Renaissance capitals except for the ‘black letter’ last word, reads LEO RVGIET QVIS NON TIMEBIT amos 3° (Amos iii, 8). The other scene is the Crucifixion, with Christ between the two thieves and the Virgin swooning into the arms of St. John. The inscription is in ‘black letter’: DNĒ MEMENTO MEI DŪ VENERIS IN REGNŪ TUŪ HODIE MECŪ ERITIS Ī PARADISO (Luke xxiii, 42–3). At the base of this scene and above it are shields of arms. The upper bears party fessewise, in chief a lion rampant and paly of 7, and in base 3 mascles, with a bendlet sinister overall. The same arms occur on the other, lozenge-shaped, shield, impaling a bend wavy between in chief a mullet of 5 points and a crescent, in base a fleur-de-lis. The first arms also occur on the mantle worn by a male figure in armour kneeling in prayer with his wife before a draped lectern on the left. The second object belongs to the bequest made in 1900 to the Louvre by Baron Adolphe de Rothschild (Figs 2–4).3 It is a complete rosary, consisting of ten ‘aves’ and a ‘paternoster’ suspended from a Crucifix and a ring. On the back of the Crucifix is a low relief of St. Anne, the Virgin and the Child Christ. The hoop of the ring bears the motto SANS FAVLTE in Renaissance capitals. On the bezel (Fig. 3) are these arms: Quarterly, 1 and 4 chevronny, 2 and 3 a fesse embattled and counter-embattled, overall an escutcheon charged with a saltire, impaling the same arms as appear on the upper shield on the Waddesdon carving, less the bendlet. The ‘aves’ are numbered B to L (excluding J) from the Crucifix, and each has five lozengeshaped compartments and ten half-lozenges containing scenes, figures and scrolls; the scrolls have Biblical texts and are held by figures of prophets and apostles. The New Testament texts are in Renaissance capitals, those from the Old Testament in ‘black letter’. The arrangement is as follows:

See E. Molinier, Musée National du Louvre Donation de M. le Baron Adolphe de Rothschild Catalogue (Paris, 1902), No. 60, pp. 24–25, Pl. XXVIII. It has a length of 47 cm. 3

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B. Simon holds a jagged saw and a scroll inscribed SCAM ECCLESIA’ CATHOLICĀ SĀCTORV’ Co’ 10. Jeremiah has a scroll bearing CONSVMMABO TESTAMENTV NOVVM jhe 31 (Hebrews viii, 8). The scenes are of the Church (a Pope, Doctors, Cardinals and Archbishops), the Good Samaritan (?) and a female figure, probably a sibyl, holding an indecipherable text. C. St. James the Lesser + scroll: CREDO IN SPIRITV SANCTVM. The prophet Joel + scroll: EFFVNDAM DE SPIRITV MEO SR’ OMN CARNE (Joel ii, 28). The scenes are of Pentecost and the Baptism of Christ. A female figure, probably a sibyl, holds a text which appears to read ... HEC FIERI AUT YCODEI. D. St. Matthew + scroll: INDE VERITVR’ F IVDICARE VIVOS ET MOR. The prophet Hosea + scroll: IPSE INTER FRATRES DIVIDET ozee 13 (Hosea xiii, 15). The scroll held by the sibyl (?) appears to read SECRETA AT RELERABIT PACTORA... The scenes depict the Last Judgement and the Judgement of Solomon. E. St. Bartholomew + scroll: ASCENDIT Ī CELOS SEDET AD DEXTRĀ DEI PTĪS OMĪ Amos + scroll: EDIFICAT IN CELO ASCENSIONĒ SVĀ am. 9 (Amos ix, 6). The scenes are of the Ascension, the Transfiguration and the murder of Amos by Amaziah, priest of Bethel. F. St. Thomas + scroll: TERCIA DIE RESVRREXIT A MORTVIS. Jonah (emerging from the whale) + scroll: EPOMVIT IONAM Ī ARIDAM jone 2 (Jonah ii, 11). The scenes represent Death with a spear, Elijah raising the widow’s son, and the Resurrection. G. St. Philip + scroll: DESCENDIT AD INFERNA. Zacharias + scroll: EDVXIT VINCTOS DE LACV zacha 9 (Zacharias ix, 11). The scenes are of the Descent into Hell, the Harrowing of Hell and the death of Zacharias. H. St. Andrew holding a cross + scroll: PASS’ SB PONCIO CRVCIFIXVS MORTV SEP’.

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David + scroll: EGO SVM VERMIS Z NON HOMO ps.21 (Psalm xxi, 7). The scenes show the Crucifixion, Entombment and David dancing in front of the Ark. I. St. James the Greater + scroll: QVI CEPTVS EST SPTV’ SANCTO NAT’ EX MARIA VIRGINE. Isaiah + scroll: ECCO VIRGO CŌCEPIET PARIET FI esae (Isaiah vii, 14). The scenes are of the Annunciation, Nativity and death of Isaiah. K. St. John + scroll: ET IN IHM SV’ XPM FILIV’ EI’ VNICV’ DNM NRM’. Habakkuk + scroll: EXVLTABO IN DEO IHESV MEO abac 3 (Habakkuk iii, 18). The scenes depict Habakkuk feeding Daniel in the lions‘ den, God in Majesty and the Child Christ in a glory holding a Tau cross. L. St. Peter + scroll: CREDO IN DEVM PATRE’ OMNIPOTETEM CREATORE CELI ET TERRE. Moses + scroll: AVDI YSRAEL DNS DEVS SICVT POLLVS EST deuter VI (Deuteronomy vi, 5). The scenes show the Creation of the Heavens, the Child Christ in a sun crossed by a scroll bearing DE’ LVX E’ and Moses receiving the tablets of the Law. The ‘paternoster’ bead is of spherical shape and is hinged. The exterior has Gothic openwork-tracery, the letter A, and these two texts around the rim: (upper) SANCTI PER FIDĒ VICERVT’ REGNA heb’ II (Hebrews xi, 33). (lower) OMNE QVOD NON EST EX FIDE PECCATV’ EST rö (Romans xiv, 23). Inside the bead (Fig. 4) are two scenes in relief. The upper represents the Celestial Jerusalem, with Christ presiding over the Last Judgement. On the left is St. Barnabus holding a scroll which curls around the rim; it has this text in Renaissance capitals: CARNIS RESVRREXIONEM ET VITAM ETERNA’. On the right is the naked figure of Job, who holds a scroll bearing this inscription in ‘black letter’: IN CARNE MEA VIDEBO DEVM/JO/ (Job xix, 26). The lower half of the bead shows St. Jude seated by the river Jordan. A nude figure is in the river and there is a group of men in the background. On the right is a building with a figure standing in the doorway. Adjacent is a ‘black letter’ label, HELIZE’, and a ‘black letter’ inscription is on a scroll issuing from the side of the building: SEPTIES LAVARE IN IORDANE (4 Kings iv, 35).

two boxwood carvings

1. Interior of devotional carving. British Museum.

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2. Rosary. Louvre. 3. Detail of rosary showing the shield of arms on the ring bezel. Louvre.

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4. Interior of the ‘paternoster’ on the rosary. Louvre.

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5. Portrait of Florent d’Egmont by Gossaert. Mauritshuis.

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6. Triptych. British Museum.

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7. Triptych. Victoria and Albert Museum.

8. Rosary. Duke of Devonshire Collection.

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St. Jude is identified by a ‘black letter’ label, JUDAS THE. He holds a scroll with this text in Renaissance capitals: REMISSIONEM PECCATORVM. The coat of arms common to both the British Museum carving and the Louvre rosary shows that their original owners belonged to the same family, that of Glymes, lords of Bergen op Zoom.4 On the devotional carving the arms impaled with those of Glymes are of Laurin. The praying figures can thus be identified as Dismas de Berghes and his wife Marie Laurin. He was one of the illegitimate children of Jean II de Glymes, lord of Bergen op Zoom (1417–1494), who carried out several foreign missions for the Burgundian dukes Philippe the Good and Charles the Bold. 5 Dismas also held high office, for he was a member of the Privy Council at Malines. He married Marie Laurin on 22 April 1510 and died in Barcelona on a diplomatic mission in 1514. 6 The piece can therefore be dated between 1510 and 1514. Dismas and his wife had three children: Jean (d. 1583), burghermaster of Bergen op Zoom in 1545, president of the Great Council at Malines in 1560 and finally president of the Council of Holland; Maximilian, Archbishop of Cambrai (1556–1570); and Cécile (d. 1548). 7 Of Dismas’ (legitimate) half-brothers, two were particularly renowned: Jean III de Glymes (1452– 1531/2), Knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece and first chamberlain of Philippe the Fair, and Henri (d. 1502), Bishop of Cambrai and Chancellor of the Order of the Golden Fleece; he was a patron of Erasmus. 8 A third halfbrother, Corneille (1458–1508), is the link between the British Museum devotional carving and the Louvre rosary. 4 For several illustrations of the Glymes arms on seals and in paintings see W. A. Van Ham, ‘Het Doorluchtig Huis van Bergen op Zoom’, Spiegel der Historie, 4 (1969), pp. 137– 188. More extensive biographical information on the family and its various branches can be obtained from F. V. Goethals, Dictionnaire Généalogique et Héraldique des Familles Nobles du Royaume de Belgique, 2 (Brussels, 1849), pp. 435–468. There are slight differences in the pedigrees and dates between the two works. 5 For a portrait of Jean and his seal showing his arms see Van Ham, op.cit., pp. 138 (ill. 1), 165 (ill. 25). An outline of his career is given in Goethals, op.cit., pp. 443–445. 6 Goethals, op. cit., pp. 446–447. I am most grateful to Mme. Van den Bergen-Pantens of the Centre National de Recherches ‘Primitifs Flamands’ for providing me with valuable information on this marriage alliance. 7 Ibid, p. 447. 8 Ibid., pp. 445, 448–451. Goethals gives the date of Jean III’s death as 20 January, 1531, whereas Van Ham (op. cit., p. 171) has 20 January, 1532. The latter also illustrates the left wing of a painted diptych or triptych (the other sections are lost) showing Jean III and Henri with their patron saints in the Markiezenhof, the former Glymes palace at Bergen op Zoom (ibid., p. 148, ill. 5). Jean wears a tabard of the Glymes arms, and over both figures are their

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In 1523, Corneille’s daughter Marguerite de Glymes married Florent d’Egmont, Count of Bueren and Leerdam (1469–1539). It is his arms which impale those of Glymes on the bezel of the ring on the Louvre rosary. Florent d’Egmont was a Knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece, governor of Frisia in 1515 and captain-general of Charles V’s army.9 There is a portrait of him attributed to Gossaert in the Mauritshuis (Fig. 5).10 The heraldic and genealogical evidence thus demonstrates that the rosary dates from between 1523 and 1539. From the size of the ring hoop the rosary appears to have been used by Florent rather than his Glymes wife. The identification of the owners of these pieces adds significantly to our knowledge of the patronage of miniature boxwood carvings. Apart from the two just discussed, the original ownership of the following has been established: Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, ‘paternoster’ bead: this bears the arms of and an inscription referring to Everard jansz de Bleiswick (1460–1531) and his wife Erkenraad de Groenewegen (d. 1544). They both belonged to ancient Delft families and were married in 1483.11 The bead can thus be dated 1483–1531. coats of arms, evidently added later. There is a copy of a lost original portrait of Jean III in the town hall at Bergen (ibid., p. 142, ill. 2). 9 For his career see Goethals, op. cit., p. 447. 10 Inv. No. 841. It was shown in the exhibition La Toison d’Or. Cinq Siècles d’Art et d’Histoire, held in the Musée Communal at Bruges in 1962 (Catalogue No. 80, p. 154). See also H. Pauwels, H. R. Hoetinck and S. Herzog, Jan Gossaert genaamd Mabuse Exhibition Catalogue (Rotterdam and Bruges, 1965), No. 17, pp. 129–130 (incl. bibliography). 11 See Leeuwenberg, op. cit., pp. 616–617 and ibid., Beeldhouwkunst in het Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam, 1973), No. 131, pp. 126–127.

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Chatsworth, Collection of the Duke of Devonshire, rosary (Fig. 8): this belonged to King Henry VIII, for on the ‘paternoster’ bead are the Royal Arms of England and the letters he 8 and k.a. (for Queen Catherine of Aragon). The rosary must date from after their marriage in 1509 and almost certainly before the start of divorce proceedings in 1527; the latest possible date is 1533, in May of which year the marriage was declared null and void and Catherine was deprived of her title of Queen.12 London, British Museum, Waddesdon Bequest No. 238, ‘paternoster’ bead: the shields of arms show that it was made for Jacques de Borsele, lord of Gouda, and his wife Ursula de Foreest. No dates have been discovered for this couple; Ursula‘s father was registered as a knight in 1483 and her eldest sister died in 1540.13 These comprise all that have so far been identified for certain; one other piece may possibly be taken into account: Paris, Cluny Museum, miniature letter M, carved with scenes in low relief of St. Margaret’s passion and miracles. Although there is no conclusive proof, it is tempting to identify this piece with that listed in the 1524 inventory of the possessions of Marguerite of Austria, Regent of the Netherlands (1507– 1530): ‘Une belle M de bois, bien taillee a une petite chayne de bois, pendant aux lettres du nom de Jhesus’.14 12 For a full description see Burlington Fine Arts Club, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Gothic Art in Europe (London, 1936), No. 94, pp. 43–46. It was shown most recently (in 1976) at Manchester, Whitworth Art Gallery, Medieval and Early Renaissance Treasures in the North West (Catalogue No. 131, p. 56). The history of its subsequent ownership is set out in a third exhibition catalogue, Catalogue of Works of Ancient and Medieval Art, Exhibited at the House of the Society of Arts (London, 1850), No. 199, p. 27. The rosary was given by a Bishop of Aachen to Père La Chaise who bequeathed it to the Jesuits at Paris. When their property was sold it was purchased by Abbé Brotier. It was obtained by the Dukes of Devonshire from the Abbé’s nephew. Unfortunately there is no information as to how and where the Bishop of Aachen obtained it. 13 The bead is described in Read, op. cit., p. 115, Pl. XLIX. I owe the identification of the arms and the biographical information to Mme. Van den Bergen-Pantens, citing Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale Albert Ier, MS.II 1170, f.242v. 14 Paris, Cluny Museum No. Cl. 21327. See A. Sauzay, Musée de la Renaissance Série B Notice des Bois Sculptés, Terres Cuites, . . . , etc. (Paris, 1864), No. B. 272, pp. 99–101. For the inventory see M. L. de Laborde, ‘Inventaire des Tableaux, Livres, Joyaux, Meubles, etc., de Marguerite d’Autriche’, Revue Archéologique, VII (1850–1851), No. 243, p. 88. The suggestion that it once belonged to Marguerite was first made by Molinier, Histoire générale ..., op. cit., pp. 196–197. He also postulated that a boxwood letter F in the Cluny Museum (Cl. 21326) was made for Marguerite’s husband, Philibert of Savoy. This is extremely unlikely, for in the sculpture at Brou, where Marguerite and Philibert are buried, the latter’s initial is

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Rosaries and ‘paternosters’ are frequently shown in representations of donors and portraits in Netherlandish fifteenth and sixteenth century painting, but only very rarely do they appear to be of boxwood.15 Although this list is not extensive, the exalted social status of the owners demonstrates how highly regarded were these miniature carvings. The list also reveals that the early decades of the sixteenth century were the main period of production for these objects. All the known owners with the exception of Henry VIII come from the Netherlands, and as Destrée and others have pointed out, the Flemish inscriptions found on several of the boxwood carvings confirm that they were made in this region, although the precise centre of manufacture has not been established.16 The comparison of a splendid triptych dated 1511 in the British Museum Waddesdon Bequest (Fig. 6) 17 and other miniature triptyches with the contemporary retables turned out by sculptors at Antwerp, Brussels and Malines suggests that one or more of these cities in Brabant is the most likely candidate.18 Not only is the architectural form of the Waddesdon triptych based on that of monumental altarpieces, but so close is the crowded Crucifixion scene on this and many other boxwood carvings, with its horsemen and groups of people built up in layers and set in a vaulted interior with traceried windows, to those on the large retables, always given as P. The magnificent tabernacle in the British Museum Waddesdon Bequest (No. 233) may have been commissioned by the Emperor Charles V, but his arms only occur on the ‘cuir bouilli’ case, the antiquity of which is open to doubt. 15 One almost certain case of a boxwood ‘paternoster’ in painting is in the portrait of Dirck Ottens, burghermaster of Leiden, by Engelbrechtsz (Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts). The ‘paternoster’ is brown, hinged, and the exterior is perforated. It has a gilded mount and is suspended from a ring and chain. Usually artists painted the ‘paternosters’ yellow or silver, and there is a distinct possibility that these represent boxwood beads, for one in the Waddesdon Bequest (No. 235) has traces of exterior gilding. Alternatively they may depict metal outer cases; a ‘paternoster’ in the Metropolitan Museum, Pierpont Morgan Collection, retains just such a silver-gilt mount (Williamson, op. cit., No. 48, p. 72, Pl. XXV1II), and this is not the only example. A number of paintings show rosaries with the ‘aves’ made of coral (e.g. Mostaert’s portrait of Abel van der Coulster in the Musées Royaux, Brussels) and jet (e.g. G. van der Weyden’s portrait of Francis Colibrant and his wife, also in the Musées Royaux). 16 J. Destrée, ‘Noix de chapelet’, Bulletin des Musées Royaux d’Art et d’Histoire, 3rd series, 2nd year (1930), p. 21. 17 See Read, op. cit., No. 232, p. 111, Pl. XLV. 18 Malines was suggested by Ad. Jansen, in the Catalogue of the exhibition Art Chrétien jusqu’à la Fin du Moyen Age (Brussels, 1964), p. 61. Ghent or Bruges was put forward as a possibility by Destrée, op. cit., p. 22, on the grounds of affinities with marginal illustrations in the Grimani Breviary (Venice, Bibliotheca Marciana), but both appear to be unlikely centres of production in this period.

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that their respective carvers must have been using similar designs. A more detailed examination of the boxwood and monumental scenes reveals that many have the same small iconographical details, such as the bugler in the Carrying of the Cross, and the Crucifixion group of the Virgin swooning into the arms of St. John, the latter a composition echoing still the art of Roger van der Weyden.19 The Waddesdon triptych is one of the few boxwood carvings to display any Italianate Renaissance influence, and even this is confined to the wrestling ‘putti’ and baluster shafts on the base, and the pilasters on which stand the prophets flanking the Crucifixion. In this the triptych is comparable with two Antwerp retables, one at La Flamengrie (similar but much more prominent baluster shafts) and the other from Oplinter and now in the Musées Royaux d’Art et d’Histoire, Brussels. Both are considered to be later than the boxwood triptych — La Flamengrie c. 1535–9, Oplinter c. 1530 — but the date of the Waddesdon piece suggests that they could be contemporary with it.20 Leeuwenberg has suggested that all the boxwood pieces were made by one workshop, which he associates with Adam Theodrici, who signed a bead now in Copenhagen.21 In support of this claim he adduces the stylistic homogeneity and very close compositional and iconographical similarities. The bugler occurs on ‘paternosters’ in the Waddesdon Bequest (Read, op. cit., No. 236, p. 114, Pl. XLVIII), in the Pierpoint Morgan Collection (Williamson, op. cit., No. 39, pp. 63–64, Pl. XXIII), and on a miniature altarpiece formerly in the Spitzer Collection (La Collection Spitzer, III (Paris and London, 1891), No. 2, p. 255, Pl. II). In monumental sculpture he is found on the retable in St. Michael’s church at Schwäbisch Hall (see M. Voegelen, ‘Die Gruppenaltäre in Schwäbisch Hall und Ihre Beziehungen zur Niederländischen Kunst’, Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst, XIII (1923), pp. 138–139, Pl. 13). For examples of the swooning Virgin group on retables — derived ultimately from Van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross in the Prado, sometimes with adaptations from his Vienna Crucifixion — see ibid., pp. 133–135, Pls. 14–17. Boxwood ‘paternosters’ in the Rijksmuseum, Waddesdon Bequest (No. 236) and in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (Inv. No. 4206) have this group. For further discussions of Roger’s influence on sculpture see J. Destrée, ‘A propos de l’influence de Roger van der Weyden (Roger de la Pasture) sur la sculpture Brabançonne’, Annales de la Société Royale d’Archéologie de Bruxelles, XXVIII (1918), pp. 1–11, and R. A. Koch, ‘Two Sculpture Groups after Rogier’s ‘Descent from the Cross’ in the Escorial’, The Journal of the Walters Art Gallery, XI (1948), pp. 39–43, 85. 20 See J. de Borchgrave d’Altena, ‘Notes pour servir à l’étude des retables anversois’, Bulletin des Musées Royaux d’Art et d’Histoire, 4th series, 29th year (1957), pp. 84–85, 108– 110, figs. 76–77, 108–110. 21 Leeuwenberg, ‘De Gebedsnoot ...’, op. cit., pp. 618–622. 19

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Nevertheless it should be pointed out that the pieces are not all of the same high quality. For example, a triptych (Fig. 7) and ‘kernel’ of a bead depicting the Holy Kindred and Man of Sorrows in the Victoria and Albert Museum are markedly inferior to the British Museum triptych and ‘paternosters’.22 Moreover, we know from documents that the production of retables was carried out by a number of carvers, but so similar are the surviving works to each other that it is only rarely that they can be assigned with any confidence to individual craftsmen or workshops; equally there may well have been several sculptors making the miniature carvings.23 Although not all of the boxwood sculptures are of the same quality, there can be no doubt that the Waddesdon devotional carving and the Louvre rosary belong in the first class. The rosary, in particular, is a work of immense skill. There are two others with which it is closely comparable: that (lacking the Crucifix and ring) formerly in the Demidoff-Donato, Ruhl, Felix and Bourgeois collections, and the Chatsworth rosary originally belonging to Henry VIII (Fig. 8).24 Iconographically the ‘aves’ (but not the ‘paternoster’) of the Louvre rosary are identical with those of the Chatsworth piece. The ex-Bourgeois rosary only has the apostles and the Creed clauses are abbreviated, but in design the ‘aves’ are closer to those on the Louvre piece than are the Chatsworth ones. The identification of the original owners of the devotional carving in the British Museum Waddesdon Bequest and of the rosary which forms part of the bequest made by Baron Adolphe de Rothschild to the Louvre has added considerably to our knowledge of the patronage of Flemish miniature wood sculpture; furthermore, it has provided valuable information on its dating. It is a remarkable and indeed fitting coincidence that these two objects, made for people who were related, should eventually have passed into the hands of two branches of one family.

Dept. of Furniture, Inv. Nos. 264–1874 and 125–1864. Extracts from relevant documents are printed in Borchgrave d’Altena, op. cit., pp. 2–4. For a long list of sculptors entered in the Antwerp guild between 1453 and 1540 see J. de Bosschère, La Sculpture Anversoise aux XVe et XVIe Siècles (Brussels, 1909), pp. 179–183. 24 Collection Bourgeois Frères Katalog der Kunstsachen und Antiquitäten des VI bis XIX Jahrhunderts (Cologne, 1904), No. 1100, p. 218 and ill. I have been unable to trace its present whereabouts. 22 23

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Acknowledgements I would like to record my gratitude to the Trustees of the British Museum for generously giving me the opportunity to study boxwood carvings in European museums. I am indebted to the curators of these museums, and in particular to M. Daniel Alcouffe, conservateur in the Département des Objets d’Art at the Louvre, for permission to examine these fragile objects. The illustrations are reproduced by courtesy of the Louvre (2, 3, 4), the Mauritshuis (5), the Victoria and Albert Museum (7), the Trustees of the British Museum (1, 6), and of the Trustees of the Chatsworth Settlement (8).

XXI Altarpiece, Image and Devotion: Fourteenth-century Sculpture at Cobham, Kent1

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obham church is famous principally for the remarkable collection of monumental brasses of the Cobham and Brooke families, carpeting the middle floor zone of the chancel (Fig. 3).2 The chancel itself is a handsome and spacious structure of the thirteenth century; the aisled nave was probably built shortly after the chancel. It was transformed by new fenestration and the addition of a tower, west bays and north porch after the foundation in 1362 by Sir John de Cobham of a college attached to the church; possibly the north aisle was widened at this time to compensate for the loss of the I am most grateful to the Revd Steve Davie, vicar of Cobham, for facilitating my study of the sculptures. I hope that his enthusiasm and interest will result in their being exhibited to the public in an appropriate setting. I have benefitted from the comments made by Dr Margaret Aston and Dr Alexandrina Buchanan on drafts of this paper. Professor Nigel Saul has generously shared with me the fruits of his researches on Cobham church and the Cobham family, which will shortly be published by Oxford University Press under the title Lineage and Commemoration: The Cobham Family and Their Monuments. I am also indebted to Ken MacGowan for sending me his report on the archaeological watching brief he carried out south of the chancel in 1998. 1 This paper forms part of a monograph I have been preparing for some years which will be published by Sutton Publishing under the title Image and Devotion in Late Medieval England. My pretext for offering it to George Henderson is that among his many distinguished publications are three papers on English Gothic sculpture: ‘The Imagery of St Guthlac of Crowland’, in W. M. Ormrod (ed.), England in the Thirteenth Century, Proceedings of the 1984 Harlaxton Symposium (Stamford, 1985), pp. 76–94; ‘The West Portal in the Porch at Higham Ferrers: A Problem of Interpretation’, Antiquaries Journal 68 (1988), pp. 218–47; ‘The Musician in the Stocks at Higham Ferrers, Northamptonshire’, in W. M. Ormrod (ed.), England in the Thirteenth Century, Proceedings of the 1989 Harlaxton Symposium, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 1 (Stamford, 1991), pp. 135–47. 2 The most recent and best discussion is W. Lack, N. Saul and P. Whittemore, The Monumental Brasses in St Mary Magdalene, Cobham, Kent (Monumental Brass Society, 1998).

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parochial chancel to the college (Figs 1, 2).3 The church was restored in 1860–1 by Sir George Gilbert Scott, at which time the remains of a spiral staircase were discovered in the south-east corner of the chancel wall. The space had been filled with rubble, which yielded a series of carved fragments. The account of their discovery is brief, the writer being more interested in the staircase.4 The fragments fall into three groups. The first comprises three limestone female heads, of high quality, which for convenience are labelled A, B and C (Figs 9–11). All are crowned, with B and C wearing their crowns over a veil. Below the crowns, the reverse is roughly finished and flat. The colouring of all three is similar. Although the treatment of the facial features indicates that they are the work of the same carver, Head C is distinguished from its companions by its less rounded, more oval shape. This head also retains the most polychromy. Her face is white, with a pink tinge and cheeks and lips in a more pronounced pink. The eyes are blue, with black pupils, and her eyebrows and lashes arc delicately outlined. Her veil is also blue with a red lining, and gilding is used for its edge and her hair and crown. All three heads have a width of between 0.21 and 0.24m, and a depth of 0.16 to 0.18m; the height of A and C is 0.31m, and that of B, which has been severed higher up the neck, 0.23m. On the assumption that the heads come from standing rather than seated figures, the probable overall height would have been about 1 to 1.20m; Head C belonged to a slightly smaller figure than the other two. The second group of carvings matches the excellence of the heads and consists of a series of fragments of seven slender standing figures, all lacking heads; two are represented solely by a small section of drapery. Four retain their original angled bases, which are carved from the same piece of stone as the figures. The backs are flat. Like the heads, they are carved from limestone and there are extensive traces of polychromy and gilding (Figs 4, 5). Five of the figures are dressed more or less identically, with a knee-length mantle over a robe falling to the feet. Another (third from right in Fig. 4), which is somewhat broader than the others, is clad in a short cloak over a tunic which 3 For the architecture see J. Newman, The Buildings of England: West Kent and the Weald (Harmondsworth, 2nd edn, 1976), pp. 225–6; J. J. G. Alexander and P. Binski (eds), Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England 1200–1400 (Royal Academy, London, 1987), no. 136 (entry by C. Wilson). 4 R. P. Coates, ‘A Discovery in Cobham Church, Kent’, The Ecclesiologist 22 (1861), pp. 110–11.

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falls in vertical folds. The statuette immediately to its right wears a plain full-length tunic, with what appear to be traces of a purse suspended from a buckled strap falling diagonally from the right shoulder to the left hip (the left hand in Fig. 5). The left hands of several of the figures seem to be raised in benediction and three retain the remains of attributes in their right hands. The dimensions of the best-preserved figures are: height 0.56m, width (of base) 0.17m, and depth 0.12m. The final group comprises several fragments of crocketed pinnacles and a piece of a vaulted canopy (Fig. 6). The few attempts to study the Cobham sculpture have been far from consensual. In the account of their discovery, the heads are described as being either female or of angels. Waller, in his study of the church, opined that the female heads as well as the smaller figures (which he thought represented the apostles) all belonged to a reredos which traversed the chancel from the east end of the piscina; he speculated that the heads are of the Virgin, St Katherine and, possibly, St Ursula and considered the fragments to be of the same date and to be connected with the founder of the college, Sir John de Cobham. Vallance broadly shared Waller’s view of the date. He offered no opinion as to the function and context of the imagery, but considered that the smaller figures may have been female saints, one of which he identified tentatively as St Apollonia.5 Prior and Gardner went no further than to speculate that the headless figures represented either saints or apostles and dated them by stylistie comparison to between c. 1300 and c. 1350. Gardner subsequently offered a more precise dating of c. 1320 and suggested that all the carvings belonged either to a screen or altarpiece. Lindley considered that the smaller figures might have come from an altarpiece or retable. He did not suggest a context for the heads, but introduced the possibility that the two sets of carvings might be of different dates, with the heads conceivably associated with a 1327 episcopal injunction to repair the chancel and the smaller figures connected with the foundation of the college.6 The differences between the 5 Coates, ‘A Discovery in Cobham Church, Kent’; J. G. Waller, ‘The Lords of Cobham, their Monuments, and the Church’, Archaeologia Cantiana 11 (1877), pp. 49–112, at pp. 50–1; A. Vallance, ‘Cobham Collegiate Church’, Archaeologia Cantiana 43 (1931), pp. 133– 60, at pp. 142–3. 6 E. S. Prior and A. Gardner, An Account of Medieval Figure-Sculpture in England, (Cambridge, 1912), p. 360; A. Gardner, English Medieval Sculpture, new and enlarged edn, (Cambridge, 1951), p. 185, fig. 354; Alexander and Binski (eds), Age of Chivalry, no. 508 (Head C); Newman, The Buildings of England: West Kent and the Weald, p. 227, follows the c. 1370 dating of Waller and Vallance.

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various arguments suggest that questions of identity, context, form and function merit more detailed examination. The Smaller Figures Let us begin with the seven smaller figures (Figs 4, 5). The loss of the heads and most of the hands makes their identity uncertain. The robes rule out cither clerics or rulers. The gestures of benediction still recognisable on several of the figures indicate that we are dealing with representations of sacred personages. None of the remains of the attributes is identifiable, although the tunic and strap of one figure recall depictions of St James the Greater. Two of the figures hold squared slender stems and a third the lower half of an object which might be a tapering cross saltire. If so, this figure represents St Andrew, although saltires of this form would be unusual and Vallance’s suggestion that they represent St Apollonia’s pincers is plausible. Ultimately, there are insufficient clues to the identity of the figures and the question remains unresolved. What was the physical context of these carvings? Where did they originally stand? Their flat backs indicate that they were not free-standing, but were placed against a surface. The lack of any weathering and the good preservation of the polychromy mean that their original location was internal. If their size, detachment and three-dimensionality eliminate a sepulchral monument, the other possibilities are a screen or an altarpiece, as Gardner suggested.7 The former can be discounted by the survival of sections of the fourteenthcentury oak chancel, north aisle parclose and tower screens at Cobham (Fig. 12). That leaves an altarpiece — and a substantial one at that — as the most plausible candidate. Comparison with other altarpieces composed of single figures, as opposed to narrative scenes (see below), points to the figures being disposed in equal numbers on either side of a taller and wider centrepiece, most probably depicting the Crucifixion, the Holy Trinity, or the Virgin and Child. The analogous altarpieces and the elongated proportions of each of the figures suggest that each one was enclosed within a deep niche, providing an architectural framework to the ensemble. No certain trace remains of the latter, which is more likely to have been of freestone than wood. Conceivably, the vaulted canopy fragment and pinnacles belonged to the altarpiece frame. The screens are described and shown in their original locations in Vallance, ‘Cobham Collegiate Church’, pp. 140, 142 (his plan is reproduced as Fig. 1). 7

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If so, the width of the retable would have been in the region of 3.50 or 3.75m; the unknown factor in estimating the height of the flanking sections is their architectural framework, but it cannot have been lower than 1m. These dimensions are comparable with the painted retables at Westminster and Thornham Parva.8 From the scale of the ensemble (and incidentally, its find location), I think we can be reasonably certain that these are the remains of the high altar retable, rather than a subsidiary altarpiece. The width of the former high altar mensa is 2.77m, so the retable would have overlapped it. The post-Reformation history of Cobham church has erased all evidence of how the structure might have been supported.9 Waller claimed to have observed evidence for a return at the cornice level of the piscina and suggested that this marked the location of the retable or reredos. He considered that the spiral staircase at the south-east angle gave access from the vestry to a gallery or loft behind the top of the reredos. This hypothesis is dismissed by Vallance, who argues that the staircase was inserted when Cobham became collegiate and functioned as a night stair, providing access to the chancel for the chaplains from their dormitory. This however is incorrect as the staircase does not connect with the collegiate buildings.10 The construction of this staircase is probably connected with the payment of 57s 8d made in 1381 to Nicholas Typerton by Sir John de Cobham for making a chemyn behind the reredos and altar. This at least establishes that the altarpiece and high altar stood proud of the east wall and lends credence to Waller’s suggestion that the former was linked to the piscina.11 The fragments are therefore an example of a genre of artefact which had established itself as a standard feature in church furnishings throughout Europe in the course of the thirteenth century.12 It has been suggested that 8 The Westminster retable measures 3.335 x 0.958m and the Thornham Parva retable 3.81 x 0.94m. The dimensions are taken from Alexander and Binski (eds), Age of Chivalry, nos 329, 564. 9 The dimensions of the altar slab are given in Vallance, ‘Cobham Collegiate Church’, p. 138. 10 Waller, ‘The Lords of Cobham’, pp. 50–1; Vallance, ‘Cobham Collegiate Church’, p. 136. 11 London, British Library, Harley Charter 57 B. 8. 12 Important recent revisions to the older literature on the subject of the origins of the altarpiece are P. Binski, ‘The murals in the nave of St Albans Abbey’, in D. Abulafia, M. Franklin and M. Rubin (eds), Church and City 1000–1500: Essays in Honour of Christopher Brooke (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 249–78; idem, ‘The 13th-century English altarpiece’, in Norwegian Medieval Altar Frontals and Related Material Papers from the Conference in Oslo

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1. Cobham church. Plan showing the position of the font, screens and altar stone as they were until 1860. (Photo: from Archaeologia Cantiana 43, 1931) 2. Cobham church exterior, early nineteenth-century watercolour by Thomas Fisher. (Photo: Society of Antiquaries of London)

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3. Cobham church: chancel interior looking east. (Photo: National Monuments Record)

4. Cobham church: altarpiece figures. (Photo: R. Marks)

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5. Cobham church: altarpiece figures. (Photo: R. Marks) 6. Cobham church: fragment of vaulted canopy. (Photo: R. Marks)

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7. Victoria & Albert Museum: altarpiece from Sutton Valence. (Photo: Trustees of the Victoria & Albert Museum)

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8. Vamlingbo (Gotland, Sweden): altarpiece. (Photo: R. Marks)

9. Cobham church: three heads (left to right: B, A, C). (Photo: R. Marks)

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10. Cobham church: three heads (left to right: C, A, B). (Photo: R. Marks)

11. Cobham church: three heads (left to right: C, A, B). (Photo: R. Marks)

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12. Cobham church: former chancel screen (now vestry screen). (Photo: R. Marks)

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in England elaborate altarpieces scarcely featured.13 This may be so, but the thoroughgoing destruction of such artefacts means that this assertion can never be tested. The English Gothic altarpiece has only recently attracted serious attention and even then its taxonomy has been based on material, not form. The Cobham remains indicate that accomplished and sizeable carved stone altarpieces coexisted in England with painted wooden retables like the famous Westminster and Thornham Parva examples.14 The combustible nature of wooden examples has meant that the latter are rare survivals. Very little attention has been paid to later painted retables made for English clients, although a number survive, made both in this country and imported from the continent from Flanders and Italy; still more are documented.15 Excluded from the historiography have been carved altarpieces, with the exception of the numerous products of the alabaster carvers, which were introduced in the fourteenth century and which by the Reformation could be found in churches the length and breadth of the land.16 A number of fourteenth-century freestone altarpieces occur at various sites, and are of varying quality and complexity. The simplest comprise a single oblong slab with a moulded frame, sometimes with carved niches, which provided a field for painted images of Christ on the Cross flanked by the Virgin and St John, such as those which survive at Brent Eleigh (Suffolk), Dorchester Abbey (Oxfordshire) and in St Faith’s Chapel, Westminster Abbey. At Geddington (Northamptonshire) the niches on either side of the Crucifixion contain modern paintings of the apostles. More elaborate are those designed for carved imagery, for example the retables at Harlton (Cambridgeshire), 16th to 19th December 1989, Acta ad Archaeologiam et Artium Historiam Pertinentia, 11 (Rome, 1995), pp. 47–57; J. Gardner, ‘Altars, Altarpieces, and Art History: Legislation and Usage’, in E. Borsook and F. S. Gioffredi (eds), Italian Altarpieces 1250–1550: Function and Design (Oxford, 1994), pp. 5–19. 13 Gardner, ‘Altars, Altarpieces, and Art History’, p. 12. 14 The recently discovered row of painted figures under canopies at Kingston Lacy, of early fourteenth-century date, may also have come from a retable, rather than a screen. See C. Tracy, ‘An English painted screen at Kingston Lacy’, Apollo 425, new series (July 1997), pp. 20–8. 15 A selection of fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century altarpieces will be displayed in an exhibition on English Late Gothic art, to be held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2003. 16 There is a brief but useful discussion of the altarpieces in F. Cheetham, English Medieval Alabasters (Oxford, 1984), pp. 20–6. Early, i.e. pre-1400, alabaster centrepieces from retables are two Coronation of the Virgin panels, one in the Barber Institute, Birmingham, the other in East Rudham church (Norfolk). The former is a particularly impressive and monumental work of sculpture.

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North Wingfield (Derbyshire), Hammoon (Dorset), Sutton Valence (Kent) (Fig. 7) and Bampton (Oxfordshire); the sequence of saints in niches at Waltham Abbey (Essex) also probably belongs to the same category, although the possibility cannot be ruled out that they formed part of a tomb-chest. The surviving imagery of these retables is varied. Sutton Valence has the enthroned image of the Virgin in the centre and therefore would appear to have belonged to an altar dedicated to Our Lady rather than the high altar; the same probably applies to the Coronation of the Virgin with censing angels at North Wingfield. Bampton, Harlton and Hammoon all have apostles flanking a central image. At the top of the range come the monumental superstructure of the Neville screen at Durham and the great reredoses of Ottery St Mary (Devon) and Christchurch Priory (Hampshire). Cobham is unlikely to have matched the architectural elaboration of these three, but in terms of quality of figural carving, it may be compared with the Waltham fragments.17 These lists are not intended to be exhaustive, but they serve to demonstrate that the carved stone altarpiece was by no means an unusual phenomenon in England. The sad fact remains, however, that for well-preserved analogous material, recourse has to be had to northern Europe rather than England. Examples of carved wooden altarpieces of fourteenth-century date proliferate in Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia. Some, like the large winged retables at Oberwesel and Varlar (the latter now in the Westfälischen Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Münster), are much more elaborate affairs than that at Cobham, with rows of apostles and saints under canopies flanking a central image. The Cobham altarpiece finds its closest relations in the series of retables from the parish churches of the island of Gotland, Sweden. Like (apparently) Cobham, these consist of a single tier of figures (apostles) arranged around the Crucifixion, the Holy Trinity, or the

The remains of what may have been a similar limestone retable, painted and gilded, were discovered during the 1862 restoration of Great Yarmouth church, Norfolk; see A. W. Morant, ‘Notices of the Church of St Nicholas, Great Yarmouth’, Norfolk Archaeology 7 (1872), pp. 215–48, at p. 221. Almost nothing has been published on the carved altarpieces mentioned above, with the exception of C. Wilson, ‘The Neville Screen’, Medieval Art and Architecture at Durham Cathedral, British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions, 3, 1977 (London, 1980), pp. 90–104. Some are mentioned in the relevant Buildings of England and Royal Commission on Historical Monuments volumes. The Hammoon altarpiece was only obtained for the church in 1945. It and Bampton are likely to have been executed at the end of the period, possibly even the beginning of the fifteenth century. 17

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Virgin and Child. Well-preserved examples are the altarpieces from Anga, Gammelgarn, Lärbro, Tofta and Vamlingbo (Fig. 8).18 I will not devote much space to the date of the Cobham ‘retable’, as there is nothing more substantial to go on than stylistic analysis and comparison. There is little reason to doubt that, like most of the examples cited above, it was made during the fourteenth century. Prior’s and Gardner’s comparisons are with the Crouchback tomb weepers at Westminster, with more local figural stone carving at Rochester Cathedral, and also with some figures excavated on the site of St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury.1’’ Lindley’s caution reflects the uncharted nature of the seas on which sail those trying to establish a chronology of English late medieval sculpture. The figure-style of the altarpieces at Gammelgarn, Tofta, Lärbro, Vamlingbo and other Gotland sites suggests that Waller’s and Vallance’s dating in the third quarter of the fourteenth century is equally plausible. As the assigning of these Swedish altarpieces to this period is also predicated on style, the argument can be dismissed as circular. The same applies to a monument less than 20 miles from Cobham, the stone Marian altarpiece from Sutton Valence, which has been dated stylistically to the mid-fourteenth century (Fig. 7).20 There are historical factors which, however, may have some relevance to the issue. The first is the 1327 document cited by Waller and Lindley. The latter was referring to the heads rather than the smaller figures, but given the uncertainty surrounding all the Cobham imagery, it is worth consideration in connection with the altarpiece. The document is an injunction from the Bishop of Rochester to the Prior of Lewisham as impropriator of Cobham. The relevant passage reads: . . . dominus [Bishop Hanum de Hethe] injunxit priori de Leuesham . . . quamquam absenti in presencia domini Johannis de Cobeham militis et quorundam parochianorum dicte ecclesie, quod idem prior defectus cancelli predicti librorum et vestimentorum in ecclesia predicta ad ipsum pertinencium citra festum Pasche proximo The most recent discussion of the Gotland altarpieces is in C. Jacobsson, Höggotisk träskulptur i gamla Linköpings stift (Visby, 1995), pp. 186–221, 282–302. 19 Prior and Gardner, Medieval Figure-Sculpture in England, p. 360, figs 412, 414. The pair of fine polychromed statuettes at St Augustine’s Abbey also probably come from an altarpiece. They are now considered to date from the late fourteenth century and in any event differ in style from the Cobham figures. 20 Alexander and Binski (eds), Age of Chivalry, no. 698. The altarpiece was acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1921. 18

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futurum reparet sub pena .xl. solidorum sterlingorum. Et sedens pro tribunali ipsum . . . priorem in .xl. solidis multavit nisi predicti defectus essent sufficienter reparati citra festum memoratum.21 We should guard against reading too much into this text. The document is couched in the typical imprecise phraseology used for such injunctions and in what way the chancel was defective is not specified. Moreover Professor Nigel Saul has pointed out that Henry, the head of the Cobham family at this time, showed no great interest in Cobham and on his death in 1339 elected to be interred in Somerset.22 John, his son and heir, evidently was concerned with parochial affairs at Cobham, as he attended the bishop’s inquiry. However, the balance of probability is that the altarpiece formed part of the ‘makeover’ of the chancel undertaken when John founded the college. He is said to have carried out many repairs to the church, although the language is as usual hyperbolic and vague.23 If the vaulted canopy and even the pinnacle fragments did indeed belong to the altarpiece, the argument would be more conclusive (Fig. 6). As Waller observed, there are affinities between these architectural fragments and the elaborate sedilia and piscina which date from the foundation.24 The reference to the reredos in the payment to Nicholas Typerton mentioned above provides a reasonably secure terminus ante quem of 1381. This mason’s involvement, together with that of the glass-painter John de Brampton, confirms the metropolitan nature of John de Cobham’s work at his new foundation.25 This would also explain the very high quality of the figural sculpture, both the torsos and the heads, to which we will now turn. 21 C. Johnson (ed. and trans.), Registrum Hemonis Hethe Diocesis Roffensis A.D. 1319– 1352, 1, Canterbury and York Society, 48 (1948), p. 172. The text is translated in Waller, ‘The Lords of Cobham’, p. 50. 22 Personal communication to the author. 23 Reparaciones multiplies quas dictus Johannes in eadem ecclesia fieri fecerit opere non modicum sumptuose et nonnulla alia bona, libros, vestimenta, et ornamenta per ipsum Johannem in eadem ecclesia liberaliter data, quoted in Waller, ‘The Lords of Cobham’, p. 51. 24 Dr Christopher Wilson has dated the sedilia and piscina to c. 1370 and linked them to London production (Alexander and Binski (eds), Age of Chivalry, no. 136). 25 In 1381 Typerton built the south aisle and porch of the church of St Dunstan in the East, London, to the designs of Henry Yevele (J. Harvey, English Mediaeval Architects: A Biographical Dictionary Down to 1550, revised edn (Gloucester, 1987), p. 304). John de Cobham paid for at least part of the work (London, British Library, Harley Charter 48 E. 43). John de Brampton was employed here in 1383 (London, British Library, Harley Charter 48 E. 47). Brampton held the office of king’s glazier and worked on the major royal works, including St Stephen’s Chapel, Windsor Castle and Shene Palace.

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The Heads Similar questions arise with the three crowned female heads (Figs 9–11): where were they located, whom did they represent and what was their function? I will devote more attention to the heads as they raise more fundamental conceptual issues than do the torsos. The fabric of the church prov ides no clues as to their original situation. There is no obvious position for the statues to which the heads belonged in any of the entrance doorways and in any case, like the altarpiece figures, their unweathered condition precludes an external location. Internally too, there are no brackets or niches in which they might have stood. Light can be shed on both location and iconography with the aid of surviving pre-Reformation Cobham wills, the earliest of which dates from 1402 (discussed further below). These refer to lights which inter alia burned before the images of five female saints: three of the Virgin, one of St Mary Magdalene and one of St Katherine. One of the images of the Virgin was named after an image linked with the hamlet of Sole Street within the parish and possibly was located there and not in the church.26 It can I think be assumed that the heads belonged to three of these images, but can their exact identities be pinpointed? The two heads of the same size (A and B) are not identical. The unveiled flowing hair of A distinguishes it from its companions and is most likely to feature on images of either St Mary Magdalene or St Katherine, both of whom are depicted with crowns as befitting their regal lineage.27 The affinities in shape, size and facial features with Head B indicate that they were a pair, displayed together. The Magdalene is the titular saint of Cobham and from the thirteenth century bishops strove to ensure that every church had an image of the patronal saint placed in the position of honour, usually on the north side of the high altar. Two Cobham wills indeed refer to

L. L. Duncan, ‘The Parish Churches of West Kent, Their Dedications, Altars, Images, and Lights’, Transactions of the St Paul’s Ecclesiological Society 3 (1895), pp. 241–98, at p. 261. 27 Crowns are the rule with St Katherine, less so with St Mary Magdalene, but see for example an English fifteenth-century alabaster image in the Victoria and Albert Museum (Chectham, English Medieval Alabasters, p. 129, no. 58). The Magdalene’s parents were considered to be of royal descent (F. S. Ellis (ed.), The Golden Legend or Lives of the Saints as Englished by William Caxton, 4 (London, 1900), p. 73). 26

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her light at the high altar.28 As it was also a requirement that the titular saint should be accompanied by an image of Our Lady on the south side of the high altar, I suggest that Heads A and B are those of St Mary Magdalene and the chancel Virgin. The hypothesis finds circumstantial support from the discovery of the pair of heads adjacent to the high altar, although Head C was also found here. By the early fourteenth century provision for the patronal image and principal image of the Virgin had become de rigueur, as the canopied niches, brackets and corbels flanking the chancel east windows of churches the length and breadth of England testify. Restoration has removed all traces of any alterations to the thirteenth-century Cobham east wall to accommodate the new images. In any case, it is probable that the two statues stood free of the east wall, in the same plane as the altarpiece; they might indeed have been incorporated into it as end-pieces. Head C could have belonged to the image of the Virgin adorning the Lady Chapel in the nave’s north aisle, which we can assume was in its screened-off east end; if Fisher’s pre-restoration watercolour represents the medieval state of the church, the unfenestrated east wall of this aisle provided an appropriate blank backdrop above the Lady altar for this image (Figs 1, 2).29 As with the smaller figures, the dating of the heads remains uncertain. While a connection with the 1362 collegiate foundation remains the more likely option, the possibility of an early fourteenth-century date cannot be discounted, as Gardner and Lindley suggested. Setting aside dating by stylistic comparison, it is a reasonable assumption that by this time Cobham would have been furnished with the obligatory patronal image and image of Our Lady. Heads A and B are either these original images or they arc late fourteenth-century replacements. Head C was executed at the same date as these two. 28 See Duncan, ‘The Parish Churches of West Kent’, p. 261.The wills refer to the light of St Mary Magdalene at the high altar and burning about (circa) the Sacrament. Although the first specific reference to the patronal image and accompanying image of Our Lady is not until 1287 (Bishop Quinel of Exeter), this was a reiteration of widespread existing practice rather than an innovation. For Quinel’s text, sec F. M. Powicke and C. R. Cheney (eds), Councils and Synods with other documents relating to the English Church. II. A.D. 1205–1313 (Oxford, 1964), p. 1006. Quinel does not spccify where the images are to be placed, but the place of honour flanking the high altar was the norm, as is apparent from documentary sources and extant traces. The introduction of images at the high altar will be examined in my Image and Devotion. 29 Duncan, ‘The Parish Churches of West Kent’, p. 261, for the location of the Lady Chapel. A comparable extant setting is the Perpendicular image niche for St Katherine in the nave north aisle east wall at Aldsworth church, Gloucestershire.

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The references to lights in the Cobham wills provide the clue to the function of these images. The lights expressed veneration for, and invoked the intercessory aid of, the saint represented by the image. Each of the Cobham images acted as a devotional image, an artefact which is defined by its relationship with its viewers. Chartier’s notion of cultural use is applicable: the devotional image does not enjoy an autonomous existence, but only derives meaning from the process of its cultural use by the consumer.30 Actions took place before these images which were prompted by their presence; without the images as their focus, the actions would be meaningless. This interaction with the viewer distinguishes this kind of representation from the vast majority of English images on screen-paintings, murals and stained glass. A contemporary analogy might be the distinction made in an Orthodox church between the historiated scenes and saints in fresco which cover the walls and form a pictorial representation of heaven, and the icons which are venerated by the individual through externalised gestures (bowing or kneeling, kissing and illumination). Of course, images in media other than wood and stone can function as devotional images. Mural painting quite often did so and there are instances in Kent where images in stained glass were venerated; but in England it was the three-dimensional representation that was the principal vehicle — and was perceived to be so by the Lollards and sixteenth-century reformers.31 The suggestion that the Cobham heads should be included within the category of devotional images marks the introduction of English monumental material into a debate which has hitherto been conducted in terms of continental visual production. What do the Cobham images contribute to the European perspective? Scholarship has concentrated either on cult images or on the Andachtsbild.32 The latter term has been seen as the equivalent of the English ‘devotional image’, but as Ringbom observed, this equation can be 30 R. Chartier (trans. L. G. Cochrane), Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations (Cambridge, 1988), p. 41. 31 Two wills refer to images in stained glass in terms which make clear that they were a focus of devotion; see L. L. Duncan and A. Hussey (eds), Testamenta Cantiana: A Series of Extracts from Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century Wills relating to Church Building and ‘Topography, West Kent and East Kent, Kent Archaeological Society, Kent Records, Extra Volume (1906–7), pp. 184, 203 (East Kent). Neither image survives. 32 Much of David Freedberg’s book, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago and London, 1989), is concerned with cult images.

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misleading.33 The label Andachtsbild was coined by German scholars as a means of categorising several new specific kinds of carved images, including Our Lady of Pity and the Man of Sorrows, which first manifested themselves in fourteenth-century Germany. To qualify as Andachtsbilder, they had to be ‘certain sculptural representations which did not suit the liturgical conditions of the altar service’.34 In his discussion of the Man of Sorrows, Panofsky broadened the definition, first by including painting as well as sculpture and secondly by separating it from narrative images; he also distinguished it from the iconic image, as it provided an opportunity for contemplation or interiorised religious experience.35 Ringbom argued that a distinction can be made between Andachtsbilder and the category of religious images as a whole: ‘Devotional images are simply distinguished from the liturgical and didactical compositions of ecclesiastical decoration by their intended function in connection with private edification, prayer and meditation. ‘Devotional image’ is thus a functional term, while the ‘Andachtsbild’ . . . should be defined by formal and iconographical criteria alone’.36 His reasoning was based on the premise that the differences between the devotional image and ‘public art’ were those of function and scale. Ringbom, however, accepted that a devotional image might be located in the chapels of a church as well as in a house, and that subjects used in ‘official church decoration’ could easily serve as devotional images.37 Ringbom’s stance has found wide acceptance; for example, Belting sees the ‘private’ cult image, as opposed to the ‘public’ version controlled by the Church, as the site where, from the thirteenth century, innovation and development took place: ‘As soon as the portable image spread to all the property-owning classes of society, whether lay or clerical, the church authorities were driven to keep things under control. The old [i.e. the public image] now took on the appearance of a deliberate archaism, which was meant to counterbalance the continuous disintegration of what previously

S. Ringbom, Icon to Narrative: The Rise of the Dramatic Close-Up in Fifteenth-Century Devotional Painting (Abo, 1965), pp. 52–8. 34 Dehio, quoted in Ringbom, Icon to Narrative, p. 53. 35 E. Panofsky, ‘Imago Pietatis: Ein Beitrag zur Typengeschichte des “Schmerzensmanns” und der “Maria Mediatrix” ’, Festschrift für Max J. Friedländer zum 60. Geburtstag (Leipzig, 1927), pp. 261–308. 36 Ringbom, Icon to Narrative, p. 57. 37 Ibid., p. 53. 33

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had been the norm of images’.38 The concept of meaning residing in use is adopted by Belting, and both he and Ringbom construct the dialectic as between cult images, i.e. images with miraculous powers, and a kind of personal image which ‘forsook its traditional aloofness and was ready to address the beholder in a way that produced a private dialogue . . . The old cult image, in contrast, steadfastly refused to allow its content to be manipulated by the wishes of the beholder’.39 Despite a few woodcuts and engravings of the kind which eventually were accessible to a wide audience, in the 1994 Amsterdam exhibition, The Art of Devotion in the Late Middle Ages, the majority of the exhibits were small-scale artefacts of very high quality and expensive materials, made for consumption by the elite levels of society.40 In short, the usual perception is that the devotional image was the preserve of the wealthy and powerful; the only images accessible to the masses were the narrative pictorial cycles which had a didactic function and were controlled by the church authorities. Belting voices this openly (‘property-owning classes’) and it is implicit in Ringbom’s distinction between one aspect of the ‘public art of ecclesiastical decoration’, which (he argued contentiously) takes the form of the retable standing on the high altar and has a liturgical function, and narrative imagery on walls and windows ‘which are the “letters of the unlettered” ’.41 Here of course he was repeating Gregory the Great’s dictum about the didactic function of images. The conduct of the debate solely in terms of lay and clerical elites is problematic. It brings an assumption that the masses were incapable of formulating an interiorised spiritual response, either in the presence of, or without, images — in other words, that the religion of the common folk was not reflective but reflexive.42 A second criticism centres on the distinction 38 H. Belting (trans. E. Jephcott), Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art (Chicago and London, 1994), p. 409. 39 Belting, Likeness and Presence, pp. xxii, 410. 40 H. van Os, The Art of Devotion in the Late Middle Ages in Europe 1300–1500 (London, 1994). 41 Ringbom, Icon to Narrative, p. 53. 42 Historians of the Renaissance and Reformation have paid more attention to the responses of the populus to images than have medieval art historians. R. C. Trexler, ‘Florentine Religious Experience: The Sacred Image’, Studies in the Renaissance 19 (1972), pp. 7–41, considers this question in the context of miraculous images and the city’s mercantile class; see also R. W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Oxford, 1994), chapter 5.

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drawn between the private and the public spheres in terms of devotional images. Ringbom accepted their presence in the church, but only considered their role in private devotion and not in collective ritual acts.43 Equally suspect is the narrative/iconic binary. There is nothing to prevent either a figure in a narrative or the narrative as a whole serving as a focus for devotion. A wall-painting of c. 1260–80 at Shelfanger in Norfolk depicts an enthroned Virgin and Child flanked by diminutive figures of the Magi and the Annunciation to the Shepherds. This works both as a narrative and as an iconic devotional image. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries saints like Eligius and Erasmus were commonly defined visually in terms of their presence in a narrative.44 The Cobham heads add a new dimension to the conception of the devotional image. The argument advanced here is that the English devotional image in the parish church was principally three-dimensional, was often on a monumental scale and occupied a physical situation not envisaged by Belting and Ringbom; far from being passé, and relegated to ancillary chapels, the carved image retained its affective powers until the Reformation and played a central role in the visual schema of the church.45 Secondly, the uses to which these images were put straddled the private and public spheres, which in any case overlap. In providing a focus for the individual’s own interiorised spiritual experience, they traversed distinctions of rank and status; finally, they participated in collective worship within the teatrum sacrum of the parish church.

43 Belting acknowledges that images could have a dual function as foci for both internalised devotion and what he terms ‘institutionalized prayer for salvation’; it is not clear whether he includes the liturgy in the latter (H. Belting (trans. M. Bartusis and R. Meyer), The Image and Its Public in the Middle Ages: Form and Function of Early Paintings of the Passion (New York, 1990), p. 15). 44 See Cheetham, English Medieval Alabasters, pp. 99–100, nos 28, 29, for alabaster images of Eligius and Erasmus. Images of the Annunciation and Our Lady in Childbed (Gesine) occur from the thirteenth century. Ringbom, Icon to Narrative, p. 53, recognised that narrative images could also serve devotional needs. 45 Hamburger criticises Belting for not distinguishing sufficiently between Italian panel paintings and northern devotional images (‘The Visual and the Visionary: The Image in Late Medieval Monastic Devotions’, in J. F. Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York, 1998), pp. 111–48, n. 3 on p. 502). Scribner over­emphasises the extent to which painting superseded sculpture in fifteenth-century northern altarpieces (Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk, pp. xxvi–xxvii).

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These are broad statements, which equally apply throughout northern Europe from the late thirteenth century, but this is not an attempt to write macrohistory from a church in rural Kent. The meaning of images in any community will depend on its traditions, social dynamics and power structures. The remainder of this paper will examine these factors and how they might have framed the use of images at Cobham. Dukes and Leaders: Controlling the Gaze The fourteenth-century theologian Thomas Bradwardine stressed that for images, whether pictorial or in words, to be memorable, they had to leave a heightened impression: ‘For a thing entirely abstract, of the sort as God, an angel, infinite space, and such matters are, place an image as the painters make it’.46 To distinguish between form and function in discussing the devotional image is impossible, because the dialectic between the two is both fundamental and unstable.47 Cobham is extremely unusual among English churches in that it preserves at least the membra disjecta of a few of its devotional images, permitting some observations to be made about their appearance. During the Middle Ages, of all the senses engaged in acts of devotion, sight was accorded primacy over touch, smell, taste and sound.48 In a modern world in which we are assailed constantly by visual imagery, it is hard to comprehend the impact of the introduction of representations of the saints in fourteenth-century Cobham. This must have been partly due to their very existence (only recently becoming the norm in English parish churches), but also to their form — standing, regal figures. To the saints all must pledge obeisance, the high and mighty as well as the most humble, cleric and layman alike. In the words of the Golden Legend, the saints are our ‘dukes and leaders’.49 Although their ‘aray’ was held to signify their heavenly and not their worldly state, images were distanced from the vast

M. J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 281–8, esp. 284. 47 Belting, Image and Its Public, p. 50. 48 These externalised devotional practices of course are still current. Their use in the Middle Ages is attested in contemporary documentation; see extracts quoted in M. Aston, England’s Iconoclasts I. Laws Against Images (Oxford, 1988), pp. 152, 191, 226–7, 232. 49 Ellis (ed.), The Golden Legend, 6, p. 98. 46

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majority of their viewers by their rich garments and the delicate refinement of their facial features.50 The polychromy and gilding on the Cobham heads translated the work of the carver into elegant personifications of the saints. The affective power of painting was acknowledged by the Lollard opponents to images: ‘Ye peyntour makith an ymage forgid with diuerse colours til it seme in foolis iyen as a lyueli creature. This is sett in ye chirche in a solempne place . . .’.51 At Cobham the ‘solempne place’ was the public area of the church and the application of  ‘diuerse colours’ resulted in the regal, powdered and rouged visages of the three images (Figs 10, 11). From their original locations at the east end of the chancel and the end of the nave north aisle, they faced their audiences, both clerical and lay, and cast ‘arcs of address’, to use Michael Baxandall’s term.52 Their gaze might be directed above the heads of the congregation and into the middle distance, but the careful delineation of the eyes permitted the individual the possibility of direct engagement. The Cobham saints might be distant, but they were attainable. They provided a visual focus for interiorised and externalised devotion and through their agency they offered both the faithful assembled for the liturgy, and the individual, the promise of salvation through their intercession. Here images trod a delicate line. Direct ocular contact between image and viewer ran the danger of eliding with idolatria. Bernard of Angers, writing in the early eleventh century, remarked that the peasants who engaged in eye-contact with the image of St Gerald of Avillon believed that it was the saint himself who was communicating with them and would favour them. This might be unproblematic as the image was also a reliquary of St Gerald and in that period three-dimensional images were few and far between.53 Scholastic theology addressed the issue by asserting that the sign as manifested in the material object represented the signified, while affirming that veneration of an image was not addressed to it per se, but to its sacred prototype —

50 P. H. Barnum (ed.), Dives and Pauper, vol. i, Pt. I, Early English Text Society, original series 275 (1976), p. 94. 51 L. M. Swinburne (ed.), The Lanterne of Light, Early English Text Society, original series 151 (for 1915), 1917, p. 84. In 1516 the Florentine synod banned any representation of the sacred from being sited where it could be trodden on (Trexler, ‘Florentine Religious Experience’, p. 20). 52 M. Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven and London, 1980), pp. 166–8. 53 Quoted and discussed in Aston, England’s Iconoclasts I, p. 25.

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a parallel simulacrum to the Real Presence in the Eucharist.54 In practice, during the act of veneration or supplication, the image and the saint represented might become synonymous.55 The ubiquitous antiphon to the Virgin, Salve Regina, which featured both in Books of Hours and in church services from the thirteenth century, beseeches Our Lady to ‘turne to vsward thy mercyful even & schewe to us ihesu, ye blessid fruyt of thi wombe’.56 The accessibility of the images to personal projection is encouraged by the empathetic expressions on the Cobham faces. They are not impassive: if only the ghost of a smile is evident on Heads A and B, it is a marked feature of Head C. Thomas More’s comment that some women he had seen adoring an image of the Virgin imagined that it smiled at them is comprehensible.57 An obvious question arises from these observations: why is the smile on Head C more pronounced than on the other two when all three are by the same hand? To what extent is form being governed by use here? In order to attempt a response, it is necessary to explore the social constituencies at Cobham and the structure of devotion and worship in their church. The images addressed an audience comprising three distinct elements: the Cobham family as patrons and feudal overlords, the collegiate community and the denizens of the village. Each of these groups might be framed by its own mentalités, or might constitute an interpretive community. An individual does not have to be exclusively a member of one interpretive community; he or she can derive different meanings according to which community they belong. However, we should be wary of shoe-horning people into social categories in terms of their beliefs; increasingly it is accepted by historians that medieval society is comprehensible not so much in terms of differences 54 A. Vauchez, Saints, prophètes et visionnaires. Le pouvoir surnaturel au Moyen Age (Paris, 1999), pp. 81–91. 55 Trexler, ‘Florentine Religious Experience’, pp. 18–21 makes the point in respect of miracle-working images, but it also applies to images like those at Cobham; see M. Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-making in Medieval Art (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 203–11 for a stimulating discussion of this question. 56 English version of the Latin prayer in H. Littlehales (ed.), The Prymer or Lay Folks‘ Prayer Book, Early English Text Society, original series 105, 1895, reprinted 1996, p. 34. For a discussion of this, see N. Morgan, ‘Texts and Images of Marian Devotion in ThirteenthCentury England’, in W. M. Ormrod (ed.), England in the Thirteenth Century, Proceedings of the 1984 Harlaxton Symposium (Stamford, 1985), pp. 69–103, at pp. 73–4, 79–80. 57 Aston, England’s Iconoclasts I, p. 107. For a recent discussion of Gothic facial expression in sculpture, see P. Binski, ‘The Angel Choir at Lincoln and the Poetics of the Gothic Smile’, Art History 20, no. 3 (1997), pp. 350–74.

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or tensions between clearly defined social groups, but rather through social relationships between individuals and groups.58 The official clerical view was that, like the ritual of the Mass, the use of images in churches was common to every element in the community: ‘Also here with al into the open siʒt of ymagis in open chirchis alle peple (men and wommen and children) mowe come whanne euere thei wolen in ech tyme of the day.’ Bishop Pecock was explicit about social inclusivity: ‘alle peple’ included those who studied as much as those who laboured with their hands, those who were ill and those who were in their dotage.59 His stance therefore supports Durckheimian notions of ritual (both collective and individual) as promoting social harmony, or (in glosses added by Durckheim’s followers) that it was a means of exercising control by dominant groups. However, as has been pointed out, ritual theorists have been guilty of ignoring the importance of historical contexts in understanding the complexities of ritual.60 If the empirical evidence is too insubstantial to shed light on the patterns of belief of the constituent elements of the Cobham community, the very existence of these elements suggests that at the microlevel of the parish, the situation might be more fluid and complex than Pecock portrayed it. The differences in expression observable between the Cobham heads mirror the spiritual and secular hierarchies of the community. The images might all cast ‘arcs of address’, but they operated within distinctive social spheres. In Amos Rapoport’s terminology, Heads A and B counted among the ‘semi-fixed feature elements’ in their chancel.61 As the patronal image and the companion figure of Our Lady, they were the most important saints and their primacy of place was underlined by their prominence in 58 S. Fish, Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge (Mass.) and London, 1980); R. F. E. Weissmann, ‘Reconstructing Renaissance Sociology: The “Chicago School” and the Study of Renaissance Society’, in R. C. Trexler (ed.), Persons in Groups: Social Behavior as Identity Formation in Medieval und Renaissance Europe, Papers of the Sixteenth Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies (Binghamton, New York, 1985), pp. 39–46, at p. 40. 59 C. Babington (ed.), The Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy by Reginald Pecock D.D., Rolls Series 19 (London, 1860), vol. 1, pp. 213–14. 60 C. Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford, 1992); see also J. Bossy, ‘The Mass as a Social Institution 1200–1700’, Past and Present 100 (1983), pp. 29–61, at pp. 34, 38, 41, 54–5, 59. 61 A. Rapoport, ‘Systems of activities and systems of settings’, in S. Kent (ed.), Domestic Architecture and the Use of Space: An Interdisciplinary Cross-cultural Study (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 9–20, at pp. 13, 18.

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the performance of the Mass. Their feasts ranked among the highest in the liturgical calendar. On these occasions the celebrant wore white vestments, as prescribed in the Sarum rite. The college plate included a small silver-gilt image of St Mary Magdalene and a copper-gilt head of the same saint.62 The patronal saint in Mirk’s Festial was equated with secular authority: For ryght as a temporall lord helpyth and defendyth all that byn parechons or tenantys, ryght soo ye saynt that ys patron of ye chyrche helpyth and defendyth all that byn paryschons to hym, and don hym worschyp halowyng his day, and offyrne to hym.63 The apparent absence of any gesture of tenderness by the Child such as touching His mother’s face on Head B shows that such Byzantine-derived themes of humanity were absent from Cobham.64 The regal status and gravitas of the chancel Virgin and of St Mary Magdalene at Cobham are entirely appropriate for their position as the senior communal images. The Cobham chancel images did not function solely as corporate objects, accessible on equal terms to the community of Cobham at large. The chancel was always the domain of the dominant groups in the community, both sacred and secular, reserved during the performance of the liturgy for the clergy and the patron or overlord of the community (Fig. 3).65 The chancel/ nave division was yet another way of manifesting hierarchy, in the same manner as the secular binary of seigneurial residence/village. At Cobham this distinction was emphasised both legally and visually. The chancel was the mausoleum of the Cobhams as well as the sacred space of their collegiate foundation, a space appropriated as their chantry. The family, its living representatives as well as the dead, thus enjoyed a privileged relationship 62 A. H. Pearson (trans.). The Sarum Missal, 2nd revised and enlarged edn (London, 1884), p. liv; the vestments are listed in a 1479 inventory of the College (Vallance, ‘Cobham Collegiate Church’, p. 150); the plate is listed in other inventories of 1479 and 1487 (London, British Library, Harley Charters 44 C. 41 and 44 C. 43). 63 T. Erbe (ed.), Mirk’s Festial: A Collection of Homilies, hy Johannes Mirkus (John Mirk), Pt. 1, Early English Text Society, extra series 96 (1905), pp. 241–2. 64 See W. Sauerländer, ‘Von der Glykophilousa zur “Amie Graciouse”. Überlegungen und Fragen zur “Virgen Bianca” in der Kathedrale von Toledo’, in De la creation à la restauration: Travaux d’histoire de l’art offerts à Marcel Durliat pour son 75e anniversaire (Toulouse, 1992), pp. 449–61. 65 In 1240 the Worcester diocesan authorities decreed that laymen were not to sit in chancels except for patrons and ‘sublime persons’ (Powicke and Cheney (eds), Councils and Synods II, p. 297).

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with the two most important (in terms of institutional status) images in the church, a relationship grounded in the discourse of feudalism. In addition to the monumental brasses, constant reminders that this was the family space existed in the form of vestments bearing the Cobham arms worn by the clergy during the major feasts and by the prayers offered up for the souls of the family.66 During the liturgical hours the gaze of the ordinary parishioner was thus restricted and controlled. The two images, placed at the far end of the chancel, could only be glimpsed through the dense tracery of the fourteenthcentury screen spanning the chancel arch and separating the two parts of the building; prior to the restoration the arch was narrower than it is now. The screen too bears shields, which when painted were likely to have proclaimed the Cobham family’s appropriation of the chancel (Figs 1, 12).67 The image of Our Lady in her chapel at the end of the north aisle was also screened off, but would have been more accessible to the parishioners than her companions in the chancel. The half-smile of Head C would have facilitated interactive devotional gazing, with or without actual eye-contact (Figs 9, 10, 11). In the Lady Chapel she watched over the community and was present at the Masses said or sung at her altar. Although the precise liturgical practices in both parts of the church are not known, the occupation of the chancel by the college suggests that the nave altars of the Virgin and the Holy Trinity would have been used for parochial Masses, even perhaps on Sundays and major feast-days. In 1527 there was a bequest towards the purchase of a book for the Lady Mass at the altar of the Virgin.68 The feasts of Our Lady would have been celebrated for the parishioners in the north aisle. The arrangements may not have been far removed from those Vallance, ‘Cobham Collegiate Church’, p. 150; for lay burial in churches see A. Martindale, ‘Patrons and Minders: The Intrusion of the Secular into Sacred Spaces in the Late Middle Ages’, in D. Wood (ed.), The Church and the Arts, Studies in Church History 28 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 143–78. Trexler has observed the same heraldic use of vestments in fifteenth-century Florence (R.C. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (Ithaca and London, 1980), p. 92). 67 The screen is shown in situ in old plans of the church and in an engraving published in 1843 (Vallance, ‘Cobham Collegiate Church’, illustration opposite p. 140); parts of the screen have been used to enclose the vestry. Probably it was erected when the chancel became collegiate. 68 There was an altar and image of the Holy Trinity, probably at the east end of the south aisle. A missal for the Lady Altar is listed in 1479 (Vallance, ‘Cobham Collegiate Church’, pp. 148, 152; Duncan, ‘The Parish Churches of West Kent’, p. 261). 66

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at Cotterstock in Northamptonshire, another parish church whose chancel became collegiate in the fourteenth century. The chaplains of this foundation said and sang Mass, Matins and all the canonical hours until Vespers in the chancel; the daily sung Lady Mass was, however, performed outside the chancel, presumably at an altar of the Virgin.69 As at Chartham in Kent, the kind and gracious visage of Head C would have been an appropriate recipient of the candles offered to her by every parishioner and blessed on 2 February, the feast of the Purification of the Virgin (Candlemas), which marked the important moment in the agricultural year when winter turned to spring.70 To a point this analysis supports the chancel/nave binary of Pamela Graves in her examination of space in the parish church through social practice. She sees the chancel as the preserve of the clergy and the nave as ‘the locale of most lay participation, including non-liturgical activities’.71 The argument, however, does not take sufficient account either of the scale of non-liturgical activities, nor of the social complexities that can exist in both parts of the church. The chancel images were not the exclusive preserve of the dominant groups in the community. In the course of the thirteenth century a series of episcopal regulations was issued, aspects of which, inter alia, concerned images. A collection of memoranda for the diocese of Salisbury and dating from between 1228 and (?) 1256 included a reference to parochial responsibilities: ‘Parochiani . . . debent invenire campanas et cordas campanarum, crucifixum, cruces, et ymagines, et calicem argenteum, missale er casulam de sericio . . .’.72 The so-called statutes of Pecham and Winchelsey, successive Archbishops of Canterbury at the end of the century, covered similar ground.73 Winchelsey’s instructions included unequivocally the chancel furnishings as well as the nave structure, charging parishioners with ‘reparationem navis ecclesie interius et exterius tarn de iure quam de consuetudine tarn in ymaginibus et precipue ymagine principale in cancello

Victoria County History, Northamptonshire, 2 (London, 1906), p. 168. E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400–c. 1580 (New Haven and London, 1992), at pp. 15–22, 435, writes eloquently about Candlemas and also mentions the Chartham image of the Virgin. 71 C. P. Graves, ‘Social Space in the English Parish Church’, Economy and Society 18, no. 3 (1989), pp. 297–322; see esp. p. 301. 72 Powicke and Cheney (eds), Councils and Synods II, p. 513. 73 Ibid., pp. 1123, 1387. 69 70

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quam in altaribus et fenestris vitreis’.74 These edicts firmly embedded the images in the communal and social fabric. Although Cobham had become collegiate, the testamentary bequests of parishioners to the light of the titular saint demonstrate that a relationship with her image was maintained, whether social or based on personal devotion (or both). Unlike the mensa of the altar, the presence of the chancel images was not a prerequisite for the performance of the Mass; on the other hand, their participation in the liturgy was signalled by censing and the lighting of candles before them. The Use of Sarum laid down that on Principal Feasts and Greater Doubles the high altar of Salisbury Cathedral should have eight candles and two more before the image of the Virgin; on all Lesser Feasts and Inferior Doubles, there had to be four candles and ten before Our Lady’s image. Even in village churches, the more important images had lights burning permanently before them and many wills refer to the lighting of candles or tapers for images other than the patronal or chancel Virgin at service times. The shrouding and uncovering of the images during Lent and Easter provided a solemn ritual spectacle.75 At the same time they remained an essential focus for private devotion. On the patronal feast-day and at other important occasions, lay access to the chancel would have been permitted in order for the image to be adorned and venerated. As genius loci, the image of the Magdalene would have had great significance for the communities at Cobham, lay as well as clerical. The presence of the laity at her feast was encouraged by the promise of plenary indulgences for penitents visiting Cobham church on this day; the Magdalene as a holy figure who achieved salvation through repenting of her sins was a model for all penitents.76

74 Ibid., p. 1387. Notwithstanding, arguments over responsibility for the chancel images still occurred in the Canterbury archdiocese in the early sixteenth century; see K. L. WoodLegh (ed.), Kentish Visitations of Archbishop William Warham and His Deputies, 1511–1512, Kent Archaeological Society, Kent Records 24 (1984), p. 274. For the establishment of lay responsibilities, see E. Mason, ‘The Role of the English Parishioner, 1100–1500’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 21 (1976), pp. 17–29, esp. 19–25. 75 W. H. Frere (ed.), The Use of Sarum I. The Sarum Customs as set forth in the Consuetudinary and Customary (Cambridge, 1898), pp. 44, 114, 183; Pearson, The Sarum Missal, passim. 76 Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers relating to Great Britain and Ireland. Papal Letters vol. 4, A.D. 1362–1404 (London, 1902), pp. 42, 61, 62, 396; and Vol. 6, A.D. 1404– 1415 (London, 1904), p. 27. St Mary Magdalene’s penitential role is stressed in vernacular literature addressed to the laity, e.g., The Golden Legend and Mirk’s Festial.

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Outside the liturgical hours, there was no reason to deny access to her image for anyone who wished to seek her counsel or intercession. Margery Kempe regularly entered the choir of St Margaret’s church in King’s Lynn to pray and engage in spiritual dialogue with Christ and the Virgin.77 The use of images for private devotion was not, of course, exclusive to members of any of the constituent social groups at Cobham, whether the founder’s family, the collegiate community, or the parishioners. The individual parishioner could enjoy a special relationship with his or her patron saint through an image, but it was one which could never stand free of collective obligations of one kind or another. This is not to claim that ‘public’ and ‘private’ are invariably indivisible, rather that they might be seen as overlapping concepts. Just as space is given meaning by the use to which it is put, and therefore meaning changes as use changes, so devotional images take on different meanings according to the circumstances of usage.78 When an image is censed or a collect is said before it during Mass on the saint’s feast-day, it is sharing in a communal act. If an individual addresses personal prayers to the saint, either during congregational worship or during solitary devotion, he or she has a direct, personal relationship with that saint which is mediated by the representation. By making bequests to the maintenance of the light of St Mary Magdalene at Cobham, Richard Sprever and Richard Gerdeler were simultaneously contributing to the common good and expressing their veneration for the titular saint in the hope of securing her intercession.79 In the same way it should not be assumed that the presence of different social groupings created a situation of inevitable conflict. Devotion, both liturgical and private, can act as a mechanism of control by dominant groups or individuals, but it can also function as an agency of social integration.80 Attitudes to Images Cobham preserves rare fourteenth-century survivals of the kinds of artefact ubiquitous in English pre-Reformation churches, if not, one suspects, always

S. B. Meech and H. E. Allen (eds), The Book of Margery Kempe, vol. 1, Early English Text Society, original series 212, reprinted 1997, pp. 53, 207–8. 78 See for example, Rapoport, ‘Systems of activities’, pp. 13, 18. 79 Duncan, ‘The Parish Churches of West Kent’, p. 261. 80 Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, p. 125. 77

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of matching quality. Neither the altarpiece nor the images were essential for the performance of the liturgy, but their presence added lustre to the services and must have been a source of pride to the Cobham family as patrons and perhaps to the parish as a whole. The images gave identity to the community and were available for its members to enhance their devotional life. Images were multivalent and responses varied from community to community, indeed within each community and from individual to individual. Because the meanings of images do not reside in the inanimate object, but in the actions, both internal and externally expressed, of the viewer/devotee, devotional images are polysemous; how they are viewed and used depends on variables such as the life-experience, gender, age, occupation, social relationships and physical environment of the viewer. Meaning was neither stable nor static. As was observed in some northern Spanish villages during the 1960s, devotions waxed and waned and might be supplanted by newer, more efficacious cults.81 The three heads shared the sacred space of the parish church and college with other images. In addition to the aforementioned St Katherine and Holy Trinity, there were representations of St Nicholas, St Christopher, St Michael and St George, no doubt added incrementally between the fourteenth and early sixteenth centuries.82 The Cobham parishioners therefore had a wide choice of accessible specialist saintly helpers, in addition to the general ones like the Virgin and the Trinity. The proliferation of images may have affected the way in which the institutional images were perceived. One individual’s devotion was another’s social convention; an individual who paid for an image may have had a sense of propriety which was not shared by the next. This is not to claim that provision and sustenance of images was solely socially determined; that spiritual factors were important imperatives must be acknowledged, even if by their very interiorised nature they were rarely made explicit. The principal written evidence for the identification and uses of the Cobham heads are the wills of the Cobham family and the parishioners. By and large, wills (and churchwardens’ accounts) give an impression of homogeneity. In considering them en bloc there is a high risk of picking and mixing, resulting in an W. A. Christian Jr, Person and God in a Spanish Valley, new revised edn (Princeton, 1989), pp. 82–3. Duffy’s assertion (The Stripping of the Altars, p. 162) that the patronal image had ceased to attract much individual devotion in the later Middle Ages will be examined in my Image and Devotion. 82 Duncan, ‘The Parish Churches of West Kent’, p. 261; the image of St George was to be purchased by the executors of Peter Horney’s will (1512). 81

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insensitivity to the inner histories of regions and individual communities, let alone individuals. Apart from the fact that such empirical evidence is only widespread (and even then uneven) and plentiful from the late fifteenth century, interrogation of the texts reveals that they were framed by local practice and were the products of particular circumstances. Wills might demonstrate consensus (or conformity, whether to the practices of the pre-Reformation church or the Church of England which emerged from the upheavals of the mid-sixteenth century), but their function was not to illuminate the innermost views of testators. By their nature such documents are positive documents, in that they record an action which either is desired or has occurred. They are rhetorical in that they are official statements of record or intent. They were discursive and the product of structures of power, in that the format of the vast majority was dictated by scribes, often the local parson.83 If the contemporary written sources are problematic, what about the artefacts themselves? The Cobham images are by no means the only ones to have emerged during the great Victorian vogue for church restoration. Indeed, apart from the exported works adorning various museums in western Europe and Scandinavia, these finds furnish our principal examples of the English devotional image. That efforts were made to preserve images by concealing them during the Reformation is documented from widely scattered areas of the country. At Morebath (Devon) various parishioners ‘lyke good catholyke men’ hid the Rood figures and appendages of the patronal image of St George from Edward VI’s commissioners, only to return them to the church after Mary’s accession. Concealment also recurred well into the reign of her successor. At Scaldwell, a Northamptonshire parish, in 1581 ‘were founde sartayne images and other monuments of poperye, that ys to say ye pycture of Chryst callyd ye roode, ye picture of Saynt Peter [joint patron saint with St Paul], both of wood undefaced, the pycture of ye Trinitye and ye pycture of Saynt Mudwyn [Modwen] wt hyr cowe standyng by her both of alabaster undefaced’. Resistance to the new order in the diocese of Chichester led the commissioners of Archbishop Parker to complain that ‘They have yet in this diocese in many places images hidden up and other popish ornaments,

83 Wills are ‘less windows on to the soul than mirrors of social convention’, to quote Andrew Brown’s nice turn of phrase (A. D. Brown, Popular Piety in Late Medieval England: The Diocese of Salisbury 1250–1550 (Oxford, 1995), p. 21).

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ready to be sett up for mass again within 24 hours’ warning; as in the town of Battell and in the parish of Lindfield’. 84 The more or less intact state of images like the alabaster Virgin and St James the Greater discovered in Stewkley church (Buckinghamshire), also suggest deliberate preservation for more sympathetic times, although the precise circumstances of such actions are irrecoverable. Elsewhere images have survived because they lent themselves to utilitarian functions. The stone Assumption relief which was pressed into use as paving for the porch at Sandford-on-Thames (Oxfordshire) recalls the carving of the same subject which served as the base for the bailiff’s bread oven at Halberton, Devon.85 It is in this category that the Cobham heads and torsos seem to belong. Occupying the uncertain middle ground are those defaced images which have been preserved. Is the remarkable concentration of damaged alabaster images in a number of Cambridgeshire churches purely fortuitous, or is it an example of a concerted attempt across several parishes at deliberate concealment and preservation?86 These may represent both ends of the mid-sixteenth-century religious spectrum, signifying simultaneously the ruthlessness of the Tudor state in ensuring that images were deprived of their meaning (by displacement and mutilation) and, through their preservation, resistance to the ideology of that state. For those who preserved the images, even if their animate features had been destroyed, the representations retained their virtu. They may have had no other function than the utilitarian one of rubble filling, but perhaps awaited re-empowerment through renovation, reinstatement, reconsecration and veneration; if so, the call never came and they remained hidden until, ironically, they were revealed during church restorations, a process stemming directly from the move to emphasise the Catholic nature of the Church of England.

84 J. E. Binney (ed.), The Accounts of the Wardens of the Parish of Morebath, Devon 1520– 1573, Devon Notes and Queries (1903–4), p. 185; R. M. Serjeantson and H. Isham Longden, ‘The Parish Churches and Religious Houses of Northamptonshire: Their Dedications, Altars, Images and Lights’, Archaeological Journal, 70 (1913), pp. 217–452, at p. 403, n. 3; the extract from the 1571 visitation in the Chichester diocese is taken from D. Beevers, R. Marks and J. Roles, Sussex Churches and Chapels (Brighton, 1989), p. 19. 85 R. Whiting, The Blind Devotion of the People: Popular Religion and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 1991), p. 78. 86 At Little Shelford, Milton (St Leonard image now in the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology), Toft, Whittlesford and Wood Ditton.

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Within the boundaries of state control, and operating on the principles of cuius regio, eius religio, the argument should be couched in terms of the particular histories of each parish and its power structures. The total numbers of devotional images, whether intact or damaged, which have been discovered amount to no more than the complement of half a dozen late medieval parish churches. Ultimately the dearth of devotional images stands as testament to the efficiency and strength of governmental control under Henry VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth. With the removal and destruction of images, centuries of social practice were obliterated together with the private and public devotional activities which centred on them. The Cobham heads and torsos are rare (and exquisite) examples of a genre which has been entirely erased from the landscape of the English medieval church. Historians of art venture at their peril into the stormy waters of religious belief, orthodoxy and heresy. The barometer of faith cannot be read from the Cobham visual remains and written records. This essay attempts no more than to reconstitute the visual aids which facilitated the expression (or rejection) of interiorised belief in a locus where the public and private met.

XXII The Ymago Sancti Loci in the English Medieval Parish Church: Its Status and Function in the Liturgy and Private Devotion

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wing to the severity of the English sixteenth-century Reformation, this paper is about images, but largely without images. Nothing survives which is comparable with churches like St Lorenz and St Sebaldus in Nürnberg, with their numerous images and altarpieces.1 However, I hope that this paper will not only offer some material perhaps unfamiliar to German colleagues, but also touch on issues which are of general interest to scholars concerned with the function and meaning of late medieval images.2 Broadly speaking, the kinds of images found in the English parish church between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries did not differ from those used in northern European places of worship in the same period. I am here talking purely about devotional images, not narrative wall-paintings, altarpieces, or decorative sculpture, although this is not to deny that imagery in murals and on altarpieces could have a devotional function. English churches were as rich in devotional images as their Continental counterparts. For example, the modest parish church at Eaton Bray in Bedfordshire retains supports or frames for eight images (Figs 1, 2); documentary evidence in the form of wills reveals that, in the early sixteenth century, this church possessed at least eleven images, excluding the Easter Sepulchre and the great Crucifixion group (known as the Rood) between the nave and the chancel. Apart from a representation of Christ known For the fate of images during the English Reformation, see M. Aston, England’s Iconoclasts. Vol. I Laws Against Images (Oxford, 1988). 2 This paper will form part of a larger study entitled Image and Devotion in Late Medieval England, to be published later this year. 1

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as the Sunday Christ, the images at Eaton Bray were of the Trinity, Our Lady, the Pietà and saints Anthony, Christopher, Eligius, Erasmus, George, Nicholas and Thomas Becket.3 Eaton Bray was not exceptional for a village church in the number of its images. The image supports and frames here reveal that most of the images would have been carved. Documents and surviving examples show that in England, the most common material for devotional images was wood (especially oak) and also stone and alabaster (Figs 13–15). Images were also painted onto the fabric, as can be seen by the Virgin and Child mural on the chancel east wall of Great Canfield church in Essex (Fig. 9). The uses to which the images at Eaton Bray were put straddled the private and public and the social and spiritual spheres. Each of them had a dual function. For the individual villager, they acted as devotional images. In providing a focus for the individual’s own interiorised religious experience, these images traversed distinctions of rank and status and everyone might share in their patronage and use. Secondly, they participated in collective worship within the teatrum sacrum of the parish church. The saints’ days and other festivals within the annual cycle created, in the words of the late Robert Scribner, ‘an ordered structure of relationships with the sacred, encompassing persons, places, times and things’.4 This was a world which was regulated by the Church Calendar. Liturgical celebration ordered human relations with the divine. There is no shortage of surviving English medieval service books (principally Missals), but these present problems in respect of parish churches and images. By the Reformation, the liturgical forms used almost exclusively throughout England were those associated with the cathedral churches of Salisbury (or Sarum) (in the southern metropolitan province) and York (in the northern province).5 Most of the liturgical books had been drawn up by For St ‘Sunday’, see A. Reiss, The Sunday Christ: sabbatarianism in English medieval wallpainting, British Archaeological Reports, British Series, 292 (Oxford, 2000). For wills mentioning the Eaton Bray images, see A. F. Cirket (ed. ), English Wills, 1498–1526, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, XXXVII, 1957, pp. 53–4, nos. 170, 195, pp. 77–8, no. 246; another version of the last is in P. Bell (ed. ), Bedfordshire Wills 1484–1533, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, LXXVI, 1997, pp. 64–5, no. 104. 4 R. W. Scribner, Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London and Ronceverte, 1987), p. 1. 5 C. Wordsworth and H. Littlehales, The Old Service-Books of the English Church (London, 1904), pp. 5–15; for the diffusion of the Sarum Rite, see N. Morgan, ‘The Introduction of the 3

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the early thirteenth century, before devotional images began to proliferate in parish churches and their texts remained substantially unchanged until the Reformation. Thus ritual involving images does not feature prominently in the rubrics of medieval service-books. The printed Missals of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries include diagrams showing the positions of the clergy and attendants during liturgical celebrations, but no images are shown (Fig. 3). Another problem is that the liturgical texts were designed for use in cathedral churches, not parish churches; it is unclear from the few surviving service books from parish churches precisely how the rituals (and personnel) appropriate to a great church were interpreted in its humbler urban and rural counterpart.6 Technically, of course, like altarpieces, images were not a pre-requisite for liturgical performance. Nevertheless, once images had been introduced into churches, they constituted a presence during collective worship. The process of image use involved several factors. In the first place were the participants, be they individuals or social groups, for whom images were objects of veneration. A second element was the structure of the parish church, the ritual site where the public relationship between image and venerator was enacted. The architectural environment itself was formed from distinct spatial compartments: chancel, nave, burial chapel or fraternity chapel, down to the seat or space occupied by an individual, each possessing its own notional function, which might therefore shape the ways in which images placed there were viewed and used. The concern of this paper is not with the formal, stylistic evolution of devotional images (which by their nature only derive their meaning from their cultural use), but on the social frame surrounding them. It will examine how one image in particular functioned in the parish church for its various audiences. This is the image of the patronal saint — the ymago sancti loci, the saint to whom the church was dedicated. The starting point is a parish church in Buckinghamshire. Although its images are lost, some valuable evidence survives in its fabric.

Sarum Calendar into the Dioceses of England in the Thirteenth Century’, in M. Prestwich, R. Britnell and R. Frame (eds), Thirteenth Century England VIII. Proceedings of the Durham Conference 1999 (Woodbridge, 2001), pp. 179–206. 6 See R. W. Pfaff, ‘Prescription and Reality in the Rubrics of Sarum Rite Service Books’, in L. Smith and B. Ward (eds), Intellectual Life in the Middle Age. Essays Presented to Margaret Gibson (London and Rio Grande, 1992), pp. 197–205.

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About 750 years ago, the decision was taken to undertake a wholesale rebuilding of North Crawley church on a handsome scale (Figs 4, 5). Below the exterior of the chancel east window runs a Latin inscription: PETRUS CANCELLUM TIBI DAT FIRMINE NOVELLUM UT CUM LAUDERIS DEO PETRI MEMORERIS (‘Peter gives you, O Firmin, a new chancel, so that, when you praise God, you may remember Peter’). 7 Peter was Peter de Wintonia, rector of North Crawley between 1249 and 1289. As well as being the builder of the chancel, he was probably the prime mover behind the reconstruction of the entire church. Peter de Wintonia was an important royal official and his involvement with Henry III’s rebuilding of Westminster Abbey accounts for royal patronage towards the church. In 1253 and 1256, oak trees from a royal forest were granted to Wintonia, no doubt for the roof of North Crawley church; the design of its windows was also derived from Westminster Abbey. Peter de Wintonia was far from unusual in this period in rebuilding the chancel of his parish church and invoking the patronal saint. During the course of the thirteenth century, a series of edicts were issued by the English ecclesiastical hierarchy, aspects of which, inter alia, were concerned with parish churches and their images. Many churches remained undedicated in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and a legatine council held in London in 1237 decreed that all such buildings had to be hallowed within two years.8 This edict seems to have marked a point in a campaign which was already up and running, rather than its beginning. Already in 1231–2 the Bishop of Exeter had issued an indulgence associated with the dedication of St Mary Arches in Exeter. The Council of London spurred Bishop Robert Grosseteste into action; in 1238–40 he is chronicled as dedicating numerous churches in his Lincoln diocese.9 One of these may have been Bradwell, not far from North Crawley; its thirteenth-century chancel arch refers to the day of its dedication to St Lawrence and associated indulgences. R. P. Hagerty, ‘Peter de Wintonia, Parson of Crawley’, Records of Buckinghamshire, 31 (1989), pp. 93–104. 8 F. M. Powicke and C. R. Cheney (eds), Councils and Synods with other documents relating to the English Church. II. AD 1205–1313 (Oxford, 1964), p. 246; N. Orme, Church Dedications with a Survey of Cornwall and Devon (Exeter, 1996), pp. 5–6. 9 Orme, English Church Dedications, p. 8; Powicke and Cheney, Councils II, pp. 263–4. 7

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The wording of Peter de Wintonia’s patronal inscription suggests that his construction of the new North Crawley chancel also was connected with this programme. The absence of a formal dedication did not mean that a church lacked a patronal saint. By the twelfth century, patronal saints were being invoked as protectors of Italian cities, usually those where the principal relics were held.10 Sometimes a carved representation of that saint might be placed on the exterior of their church, as at S. Zeno in Verona. From at least the second quarter of the century, titular images appeared on the tympanum or trumeau of the principal entrance in northern Europe.11 Romanesque tympana with the image of the patronal saint occur in England, as at Fordington, Dorset (St George) (Fig. 8). Titular imagery could feature more prominently on major churches, such as the trumeau Virgin from St. Mary’s Abbey, York, of c. 1160–70. Towers were used to proclaim the dedication until the end of the Middle Ages, as at Holme-by-Spalding Moor, East Yorkshire (dedicated to All Saints). Not all of these may have represented the patronal saint at the time of their creation, for quite a number of tympana depict a saint other than the titular. An example is St Michael on the tympanum of SS Peter and Paul’s church at Dinton (Buckinghamshire). The possibility has also to be entertained that an external Romanesque carved figure might not be evidence for the longevity of a titular saint, but instead have furnished a convenient, ready-made identity when it became necessary to dedicate the church. External location might signal identity, but does it indicate that the patronal saint was central to the spiritual and social life of the parish? The key development was the appearance of the image inside the church. Apart from the late tenth-century relic-statues of patronal saints in the Auvergne, there is little or no record of titular images as objects of internal significance before the twelfth century.12 In Catalonia, the patronal saint is the central D. Webb, Patrons and Defenders. The Saints in the Italian City-States (London and New York, 1996), pp. 3, 4, 6 and passim. 11 W. Sauerländer, ‘Von der Glykophilousa zur “Amie Graciouse” Uberlegungen und Fragen zur “Virgen Blanca” in der Kathedrale von Toledo’, in De la création à la restauration. Travaux d’histoire de l’art offerts à Marcel Durliat pour son 75e anniversaire (Toulouse, 1992), p. 453. This may have been done even earlier, if the 11th-century relief of St Michael formerly on the tower of Stinsford (Dorset) was in situ. 12 For the Auvergne relic-images, of which Ste-Foy at Conques is the ne plus ultra, see Aston, Iconoclasts, p. 25 and I. H. Forsyth, The Throne of Wisdom. Wood Sculptures of the Madonna in Romanesque France (Princeton, 1992), pp. 67–86. 10

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focus on one of the seven earliest painted altar frontals, dating from the first half of the twelfth century (Durro). An attached stone statue of St Martin is placed on the left side of the apse entrance in the church of St Martin at Fuentidueña, near Segovia; this dates from c. 1175–1200.13 The inclusion of the patronal saint on frontals or antependia was not confined to northern Spain in the twelfth century: St Walpurgis is depicted to the left of Christ in Majesty on the frontal of c. 1170–80 from the church dedicated to her at Soest, Westphalia.14 The titular saint sometimes appears on choir wall-paintings in Romanesque churches in France, but is overshadowed by Christological narratives.15 No comparable English furnishings survive from this period, so establishing precisely when the patronal image began to appear inside the parish church is impossible. A few Romanesque fonts in Yorkshire include figures of what may have been the patronal saint in their imagery, but a serendipitous sampling over a wide area of well-preserved Norman chancels has produced no examples of provision in the forms of corbels or niches for carved images; their absence cannot be entirely placed at the door of overzealous church restorers.16 In the Romanesque wall-paintings at Kempley (Gloucestershire), a pair of bishops without haloes and with hands raised in benediction occupy the chancel east wall and the patronal image of St Peter is placed on the ceiling. At Hardham (Sussex), the murals which cover the east wall are devoted to Christ’s Passion, the apostles, elders of the Apocalypse and Christ in Majesty; St Botolph, the titular saint, is not represented. In the Barfreston (Kent) chancel scheme (1170s), primacy is accorded to the Virgin. In the light of subsequent developments, it may be significant that Nicholas, the patronal saint, was depicted on the chancel north wall, performing one of his miracles. If there was any image inside the English parish church prior to 1200, it was the sedes sapiaentiae, located on or above the chancel altar. Images of the Virgin and Child were still placed in this position well into the thirN. Morgan, ‘Devotional Aspects of the Catalan Altar Frontals c. 1100–1350’, in R. Archer and E. Martinell (eds), Proceedings of the First Symposium on Catalonia in Australia, La Trobe University, Melbourne, 27–29 September 1996 (Barcelona, 1998), pp. 101–122. The Fuentidueña apse is now in the Cloisters Collection, New York. 14 In the Westfälisches Landesmuseum, Münster. 15 M. Kupfer, Romanesque Wall Painting in Central France. The Politics of Narrative (New Haven and London, 1993). 16 Fonts at Cowlam, Hutton Cranswick and North Grimston. 13

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teenth century, as is shown by the mural at Great Canfield (Essex) (Fig. 9). A projecting bracket above the altar in the early thirteenth-century chancel at Upper Winchendon (Buckinghamshire) looks as if it was designed to support the carved equivalent of the Great Canfield painting (Fig. 10). What impact did the thirteenth-century campaign to consecrate English churches have on the setting up of patronal images, as well as the representations of the Virgin and Child, at the high altar? Every church was dedicated to God, as is made explicit in the Order for Church Dedications, but the Order also addressed the patronal saint.17 No mention was made of an image, nor was there in Bishop William of Blois’ instructions of 1229 for his Worcester diocese: ‘. . . the year and the date of consecration, the names of the dedicator, and the name of the saint to which the church is dedicated, should be clearly set out in a suitable place near the high altar. The same should be done for the minor altars’.18 This rubric merely referred to the name of the patronal saint, yet by this date, its image could already be found in parish churches: in c. 1224 a figure of St Paul was present in the Bedford church dedicated to him.19 The first reference to what became the standard arrangement, with the patronal saint to the left of the high altar and the Virgin on the right (if she was not the patronal saint), was in 1240, when new images of St Peter and Our Lady were to be made and set up by royal order in these positions in St Peter’s chapel in the Tower of London. There were existing images of the titular saint and the Virgin at this time; unlike their replacements, their location is not stated, suggesting that the positioning of the new images was innovatory.20 Placing the patronus loci in close proximity to the high altar no doubt was borrowed from the great church. By c. 1179 an image of the Virgin was in existence

17 W. G. Henderson (ed. ), Liber Pontificalis Chr. Bainbridge, Surtees Society, 61, 1855, pp. 76–7; for earlier monastic dedication ceremonies, see A. Binns, Dedications of Monastic Houses in England and Wales 1066–1216 (Woodbridge, 1989), pp. 11–18. 18 Powicke and Cheney, Councils II, p. 172: ‘Item, in ecclesiis dedicatis annus et dies dedicationis et nomen dedicantis et nomen sancti in cuius honore dedicata est ecclesia distincte et aperte scribantur circa maius altare, in loco ad hoc ydoneo’. 19 O. Lehmann-Brockhaus, Lateinische Schriftquellen zur Kunst in England, Wales und Schottland vom Jahre 901 bis zum Jahre 1307, I (Munich 1955), p. 77, no. 292. 20 Calendar Liberate Rolls Henry III. Vol. II A.D. 1240–1245 (London, 1930), p. 14.

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at the high altar of Old Sarum Cathedral.21 The mid thirteenth-century wall-painting of St James the Greater at Bramley (Hampshire) appears to be the first surviving example of a patronal image in the position of honour to the north of the chancel altar, accompanied by Our Lady on the south side. The murals of c. 1260–70 at Checkendon (Oxfordshire) show a variant of the disposition, with the apse window flanked by SS Peter and Paul leading processions of the apostles. The two senior apostles are the titular saints and they are marked out and honoured by canopies (Fig. 11).22 In contrast with Bramley and Checkendon, the two North Crawley images in Peter de Wintonia’s chancel were statues, as the pair of corbels shows (Fig. 5). Elsewhere at this time provision for carved images was more rough and ready. The remarkably complete Early English parish church of St Giles at Skelton, near York, was built around 1240; subsequently, a late twelfthcentury capital was inserted into the east wall on the north side, presumably for the patronal image; an identical capital served the same purpose in the same position in the church at Alne, also near York.23 If Our Lady was the patronal saint, she still occupied pride of place on the north side, as can be observed from the traces in the church dedicated to her at Brent Eleigh (Suffolk) (Fig. 12). There does not appear to have been any hard and fast rule for the occupant of the south side in these circumstances. At Little Brickhill (Buckinghamshire), the Trinity was placed on the south side. The high altar of Burnham Abbey in the same county was flanked by two Marian images.24 Bishop Quinel’s injunctions of 1287 that every church in his Exeter diocese had to have images of the patronal saint and the Virgin (‘ymago beate virginis et sancti loci’) thus appear less innovatory than a reflection of well-established practice.25 The early fourteenth-century visitations in this

Lehmann-Brockhaus, Schriftquellen, II (Munich, 1956), p. 483, no. 4064. The very heavily restored paintings are based on original traces; see E. G. Bruton, ‘The Recent Discovery of Wall-paintings on the Apse of Checkendon Church’, Oxfordshire Architectural and History Society Proceedings, new series II (1864–71), pp. 75–8. The Bramley paintings are in too poor a condition to reproduce. 23 C. Wilson, D. E. O’Connor and M. A. J. Thompson, St Giles Skelton. A Brief Guide (1978). It may be more than coincidental that both Alne and Skelton were manors held by the Treasurer of York Minster. 24 E. M. Elvey (ed.), The Courts of the Archdeaconry of Buckingham 1483–1525, Buckinghamshire Record Society, 19, 1975, p. 44; Buckinghamshire Record Office, D/A/ We3, 50, 51. 25 Powicke and Cheney, Councils II, p. 1006. 21 22

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diocese reveal that Quinel’s efforts appear to have been generally successful.26 Whilst the patronal images at Stoke Canon and Salcombe Regis in 1301 evidently had been in place for some time (they are both described as old), Staverton (1314) and Axminster (1315) lacked their equivalents. Neither the Stoke Canon nor the Salcombe Regis patronal images was in good condition; that of St Gregory at Dawlish was poorly painted and lacked a hand. A visitation of the archdeaconry of Totnes (within the Exeter diocese) in 1342 also revealed defects in patronal and Virgin images in a number of churches.27 The various deficiencies indicated wear and tear on images which had been in place for some time. By the early fourteenth century, the presence of patronal image and principal image of the Virgin had become the norm, as the supports or tabernacles flanking the chancel east windows of churches the length and breadth of England testify (Fig. 16).28 The two images functioned in tandem, with complementary roles. In the post-Fourth Lateran Council campaign to bring the Church to the people, Our Lady may be seen as personifying the Church Universal as well as providing an affective model for the individual. By contrast, the patronal image represented the Local Church, the genius loci of the community. During the thirteenth century, the titular image and its associated feast took on the role played by a saint’s relics in Early Christian times, when ‘the festival of a saint was conceived of as a moment of ideal consensus on a deeper level. It made plain God’s acceptance of the community as a whole: his mercy embraced all its disparate members, and could reintegrate all who had stood outside in the previous year’.29 The patronal and Marian images both enhanced and were enhanced by their locations. The former, as well as personifying communal identity, linked the chancel to a particular saintly personality. The two images occupied the

H. Michell Whitley, ‘Visitations of Devonshire Churches’, Reports and Transactions of the Devonshire Association, 42 (1910), pp. 446–474 (passim). 27 G. G. Coulton, ‘A Visitation of the Archdeaconry of Totnes in 1342’, English Historical Review, XXVI (1911), pp. 108–24. These visitations may have had a pecuniary as much as a pastoral motivation. 28 e.g. Embleton (Northumberland) and St Ives (Cornwall). A variant at Stanton (Gloucestershire) has the brackets located in the jambs of the chancel east window. 29 P. Brown, The Cult of the Saints. Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago, 1982), p. 100; see also idem, Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (London, 1982), pp. 329–330 for the Virgin’s significance for the individual from the 12th century. 26

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most exclusive space in the chancel and participated in the rites celebrated at the high altar. Through the installation and veneration of monumental images of the titular saint and of the Virgin, the presence of the sacred was made manifest in every community, whether large or small, urban or rural. Vauchez argues that the Church encouraged the replacement of relics by images as a means of dissociating the cult of the saints from that of relics. The intention was to de-localise the cult of the saints and thus to make it an integral part of pastoral mission throughout Europe.30 Whilst in a general sense this may have been so, the new emphasis on the patronal saint was not about de-localisation, but the opposite: it was concerned with giving a sacred identity to every church and by extension to the community which worshipped in it, hence Bishop Quinel’s ‘ymago sancti loci’ label. Instead of one locus exclusively associated with a saint through possession of his or her relics, there were multiple microlocalities; for example, the thirteen Buckinghamshire parishes whose patron was St Nicholas and who could all claim a special relationship with that saint. Here and there the chancel images — or parts of them — have survived. In addition to Bramley and Checkendon, there are the splendid early fourteenth-century murals of the Virgin and three saints (representing All Saints?) at Little Wenham (Suffolk) and the traces of cruder murals of the patronal St Andrew and Virgin at Stoke Dry (Leicestershire), of similar date.31 Of the carved images, none in wood has survived, with the possible exception of a St Michael at Stoke Charity (Hampshire). All the others are of polychromed stone or alabaster. In the former medium are the matching heads of St Mary Magdalen and Our Lady from the collegiate church at Cobham (Kent) (Fig. 13). The best-preserved and most accomplished, albeit lacking almost all their pigmentation, are the alabaster statues of St Peter and the Virgin from Flawford (Nottinghamshire) (Fig. 14).32 30 A. Vauchez, Sainthood in the later Middle Ages (trans. J. Birrell) (Cambridge, 1997) p. 453; idem, Saints, prophètes et visionnaires. Le pouvoir surnaturel au Moyen Age (Paris,1999), p. 81. 31 Little Wenham is dedicated to All Saints and the disposition of the murals suggests that it was originally dedicated to the Virgin; alternatively, the prescribed arrangement was not yet in force everywhere. 32 R. Marks, ‘Altarpiece, Image and Devotion: Fourteenth-century Sculpture at Cobham, Kent’, in P. Binski and W. Noel (eds), New Offerings, Ancient Treasures. Studies in Medieval Art for George Henderson (Stroud, 2001), pp. 417–444; for Flawford, see J. Alexander and P.

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1. Eaton Bray (Bedfordshire), St Mary’s church: image niches and supports in the south chapel (photograph: R. Marks).

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2. Eaton Bray (Bedfordshire), St Mary’s church: image niches in the nave (photograph: R. Marks). 4. North Crawley (Buckinghamshire), St Firmin’s church: chancel exterior from the south-east (photograph: R. Marks).

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3. Woodcut of a procession in a printed Sarum processional of c. 1519 (from C. Wordsworth and H. Littlehales, The Old Service Books of the English Church, London, 1904).

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5. North Crawley (Buckinghamshire), St Firmin’s church: chancel interior (photograph: R. Marks).

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6. North Crawley (Buckinghamshire), St Firmin’s church: the chancel seen through the roodscreen (photograph: R. Marks).

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7. Amiens Cathedral: St Firmin statue on the west portal (photograph: Peter Kurmann).

8. Fordington (Dorset), St George’s church; tympanum over nave south door depicting St George (photograph R. Marks).

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9. Great Canfield (Essex), St Mary’s church: chancel east wall with mural of the Virgin and Child (photograph: R. Marks).

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10. Upper Winchendon (Buckinghamshire), St Mary Magdalen’s church: image bracket in chancel east wall above the altar (photograph: R. Marks).

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11. Checkendon (Oxfordshire), St Peter and St Paul’s church: murals of the apostles in the chancel (watercolour by E. W. Tristram, Victoria & Albert Museum).

12. Brent Eleigh (Suffolk), St Mary’s church: mural surrounding the site of the patronal image in the chancel east wall (photograph: National Monuments Record).

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13. Cobham (Kent), St Mary Magdalen’s church: limestone heads of (probably) St Mary Magdalen (left) and the Virgin (right) (photograph: R. Marks). 15. Stewkley (Buckinghamshire), St Michael’s (originally St Mary’s) church: alabaster relief of the Virgin (photograph: R. Marks).

14. Nottingham Castle Museum: alabaster statue of St Peter from the destroyed church of St Peter, Flawford (Nottinghamshire) (photograph: Victoria & Albert Museum).

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16. Harlington (Bedfordshire), St Mary’s church: image tabernacles in the chancel east wall (photograph: National Monuments Record).

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17. Upper Hardres (Kent), St Peter and St Paul’s church: brass of rector John Strete (1405) kneeling below the patronal saints (illustration provided by Martin Stuchfield).

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These and other surviving patronal images are of varying dimensions. The Flawford St Peter is 82.5 cm high and the Magdalen at Cobham must have been of comparable size. An image of St Nicholas commissioned for Thanington (Kent) in 1532 was to be one and a half metres in height (five feet).33 Monumentality, however, was not a pre-requisite attribute of the patronal image. The alabaster relief of the Virgin and Child at Stewkley (Buckinghamshire), is no more than 51.5 cm in height and yet almost certainly was the patronal image (Fig. 15).34 More important than scale was the degree of elaboration with which patronal images were displayed. Most seem to have been framed in richly gilded wooden tabernacles, all of which have vanished. Some stone versions survive, like the splendid niches at Harlington (Bedfordshire), carved when its chancel was erected in the early fourteenth century, and notable for their lavish detail (Fig. 16). The greater honour due to the patronal image is underlined here by the degree of elaboration accorded to its canopied niche compared with its companion; both retain traces of polychromed and gilded decoration. The primacy of the patronal saint was also emphasised by the number of lights burning before it; in 1520, 6s. 8d was bequeathed by Alice Wilde, a parishioner of Iver (Buckinghamshire), to buy a laten candlestick of five lights for the patronal image of St Peter.35 Peter de Wintonia’s inscription at North Crawley epitomises the special relationship which existed between the medieval parish clergy and their patronal saints. The wording associates the chancel with St Firmin (Fig. 7); by rebuilding it so sumptuously, Peter de Wintonia signalled the saint’s importance. In 1530, the vicar of St Mary’s at Stowting (Kent) referred to the image of Our Lady as ‘my patroness’.36 The chancel was the preserve of the earthly individuals who had the right to occupy and use it. The campaign for patronal images occurred in a century when the institutional authority

Binski (eds), Age of Chivalry. Art in Plantagenet England 1200–1400 (Royal Academy exhibition catalogue, London, 1987), nos 699–700. 33 L. L. Duncan and A. Hussey, Testamenta Cantiana: A Series of Extracts from Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century Wills relating to Church Building and Topography, Kent Archaeological Society, Kent Records, 1906–7, ‘East Kent’, p. 340. 34 Bequests to the light of Our Lady at Stewkley do not specify whether it was in the nave or chancel, indicating that there was only one Marian image here (Elvey, Courts, p. 36; Buckinghamshire Record Office D/A/We2, 57, We3, 63). 35 Elvey, Courts, p. 343. 36 Duncan and Hussey, Testamenta Cantiana, ‘East Kent’, p. 328.

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of the Church was promoted more vigorously than at any other time. It was also a period which saw many of Peter de Wintonia’s fellow-rectors rebuild their chancels on a grand scale.37 Endowment by parish priests of patronal images took a variety of forms. Sometimes they were the providers of the images, as is indicated by the (now headless) clerical figure kneeling at the feet of St Peter at Flawford (Fig. 14). Often clerical largesse was directed towards embellishment of an existing patronal image. In 1415/16, one of Peter de Wintonia’s successors at North Crawley, William Hunden, Archdeacon of Totnes and canon of Exeter and Lincoln cathedrals, left £5 for a tabernacle to be painted, or some other ornament, for St Firmin’s image.38 Maurice Hardwicke, vicar of All Saints’ Bristol from 1455, gave a velvet cloth embroidered with fleurs-de-lis, the inscription ‘Hymnus omnibus sanctis’ and his initials. This was to be hung behind the image of All Saints on every principal feast-day, together with a cloth of gold for the image’s head; Hardwicke also paid for the gilding of the image.39 The special relationship between priest and patron extended beyond death. On the day of the burial of Christopher Conyers, rector of Rudby in Yorkshire, five candles were to be burned above his tomb between the high altar and the patronal image of All Saints; thereafter, three candles were to be lit before the image of All Saints and two before the Virgin on the other side.40 Peter de Wintonia’s inscription was an unusual manifestation of postmortem commemoration. The fine brass of an early fifteenth-century parish priest at Upper Hardres (Kent) shows him kneeling with a scroll bearing a bidding prayer to Peter and Paul, the patronal saints, who are depicted above on a bracket (Fig. 17). The Latin text on the scroll may be translated as ‘Keybearer of heaven and Paul, the teacher of the people, intercede for me to the king of angels that I may be worthy’.41 In the Buckingham archdeaconry, five late medieval clergy as opposed to four members of the laity desired burial before the patronal image; in the P. Draper, ‘Architecture and Liturgy’, in Alexander and Binski, Age of Chivalry, p. 88. F. C. Hingeston-Randolph, The Register of Edmund Stafford (A. D. 1395–1419), Bishop of Exeter (London, 1886), p. 409. For Hunden’s career, see A. B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Cambridge to 1500 (Cambridge, 1963), pp. 320–32. 39 C. Burgess (ed. ), Pre-Reformation Records of All Saints’ Bristol: Part 1, Bristol Record Society Publications, XLVI, 1995, pp. 10–11. 40 The will is dated 1483; J. Raine (ed. ), Testamenta Eboracensia. A Selection of Wills from the Registry at York, vol. III, Surtees Society, XLV, 1865, p. 288, no. CXVII. 41 ‘Clavng’ celor’ & paule doctor populae interceder’ p’ me dignei’ ad regem angelor’. 37 38

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Bedford archdeaconry, the figures are four and one. Wills stipulating chancel burial, together with the evidence of brasses and tombs in the chancel, show that it was the clerical estate which dominated in both archdeaconries; there is no reason to suppose that this pattern is unusual. The chancel however was not the exclusive domain of the clergy. From at least the thirteenth century, the ecclesiastical authorities in England conceded that patrons and other ‘sublime persons’ could have access to this part of the church during service times; subsequently, the gentry increasingly were granted burial there, sometimes in front of the patronal image.42 One Buckinghamshire example is Thomas Hampden: in 1482 he wished to be interred before the image of St Mary Magdalen in the chancel of Great Hampden church.43 The lay elites may not always have been free agents in matters of burial. Thomas Hanchich, gentleman (d. 1509), was one of a handful of Bedfordshire laity who secured burial in the chancel, in his case in St Paul’s church, Bedford and ‘under the keeping and protection of St Paul the holy apostle’. He was only accorded this honour with the permission of the prior of Newnham Priory, the holder of the advowson.44 Those who governed the community shared the clergy’s affinity with the patronal saint. The discursive language of feudalism described the saints as ‘our dukes and leaders’ and their images were robed in the garments and trappings of power. The patronal saint was equated by John Mirk with secular authority: ‘For ryght as a temporall lord helpyth and defendyth all that byn parechons or tenantys, ryght soo ye saynt that ys patron of ye chyrche helpyth and defendyth all that byn paryschons to hym, and don hym worschyp halowyng his day, and offyrne to hym’.45 42 In c. 1229 the synodal statutes for the diocese of Worcester excluded laity from the chancel; in 1240, exemptions were made for patrons and ‘sublime persons’ during services (Powicke and Cheney,Councils II, pp. 174, 297). The 1292 Statutes of Chichester decreed that only lords of the village, patrons of the church and their wives and rectors and vicars could be buried within either church or chancel (ibid., p. 1117). Sepulchral monuments to gentry began to appear in chancels from at least the early 14th century; see N. Saul, Death, Art and Memory in Medieval England. The Cobham family and their Monuments 1300–1500 (Oxford, 2001), pp. 75–6. 43 N. H. Nicholas (ed. ), Testamenta Vetusta, II (London, 1826), p. 305. 44 M. McGregor, Bedfordshire Wills proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury 1383– 1548, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, LVIII, 1979, pp. 86–7, no. 69. 45 T. Erbe (ed. ), Mirk’s Festial: A Collection of Homilies by Johannes Mirkus (John Mirk), Pt. 1, Early English Text Society, 1905, pp. 241–242; for ‘our dukes and leaders’, see F. S. Ellis

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(‘For just as a temporal lord helps and defends all his parishioners or tenants, so the saint who is the patron of the church helps and defends all his parishioners who do him worship, hallowing his day and offering to him’). At North Crawley, the image of St Firmin and accompanying figure of the Queen of Heaven would have been identifiable instantly as the sacred equivalents of the twin arms of earthly lordship (Fig. 7). Other Buckinghamshire parochial patrons included the Trinity, a king, an archbishop, an abbot and a cavalryman; in their images they too would have been portrayed in garments reflecting their high status.46 Authority and rank are stressed in the surviving patronal images at Cobham and Flawford. The head of St Mary Magdalen at the former is crowned, a reference to her allegedly royal ancestry as recounted in the Golden Legend and an aspect of her life rarely portrayed in English representations. At Cobham, her social rank may have been considered appropriate for the patronal saint and matched the image of the Virgin as Queen of Heaven on the other side of the high altar (Fig. 13).47 St Peter at Flawford wears the papal tiara and other trappings of spiritual supremacy (Fig. 14). The emphasis placed on provision of the patronal image occurred in a period which witnessed, at least in the south of England and the Midlands, the burgeoning of a sense of locus, or local identity, among the knightly class; the two developments can be assumed to have been related.48 This suggests that there were at this time shared attitudes between the secular and ecclesiastical spheres concerning land and title and a sensed need for overlordship and protection over place and building. Heraldry in the east window glazing or painted on the east wall of fourteenth-century churches underlined the association of the chancel with lay as well as clerical lordship.49

(ed. ), The Golden Legend or Lives of the Saints as Englished by William Caxton, VI (London, 1900), p. 98. The original Latin text is translated as ‘our leaders and guides’ in the most modern edition: Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend. Readings of the Saints, trans. M. G. Ryan (Princeton, 1993), II, p. 274. 46 The saints are Edmund (Maids’ Moreton), Dunstan (Monks Risborough), Botolph (Bradenham) and Martin (Fenny Stratford, Dunton). 47 Ellis, Golden Legend, IV, p. 73. An alabaster Magdalen statue in the Victoria and Albert Museum also has a crown; F. Cheetham, English Medieval Alabasters (Oxford, 1984), no. 58, p. 129. 48 P. Coss, The Knight in Medieval England 1000–1400 (Stroud, 1993), pp. 72, 89–91. 49 eg. the glass of Stanford on Avon (Northamptonshire) and the heraldic murals at Bedale (Yorkshire).

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The relationship of patronal image and ordinary parishioners was framed by the structures of feudal society. They were the vassals of the patronal saint, to whom obligations were due in return for his or her protection and intercession.50 A collection of memoranda for the diocese of Salisbury (1228–1256?) stipulated that parishioners should provide the images.51 That maintenance of chancel as well as nave images was a parochial responsibility was laid down by Archbishop Winchelsey: ‘…the repair of the interior and exterior of the church nave inside and outside established by law and custom, both of images (especially the chief image in the chancel) and also of altars and window glazing’.52 This did not apply universally and in the fifteenth century, there was still wide diversity of custom regarding the respective obligations of laity and clergy in respect of the church fabric and its fittings and furnishings; as a result, disputes were not unknown.53 The patronal image was firmly embedded in the communal and social fabric of the parish. It was used both as ‘social glue’ and as a means of enabling each member of a community to engage directly with the supernatural. Enshrined in the most sacred place in the church, the patronal image embodied community identity and bound together all social groups. As a result it is impossible to separate the secular from the spiritual in the relationship between parishioners and their titular image. Thomas Crypps’ A. Vauchez, La spiritualité du Moyen Age occidental VIIIe–XIIIe siècle (Paris, revised ed., 1994), p. 192. Christian observed that in his Spanish villages, devotion to the patronal saint (often Our Lady) was a compound of affection, pride, respect and obligation (W. A. Christian Jr. , Person and God in a Spanish Valley (Princeton, revised ed. 1989), pp. 117, 175). 51 ‘Parochiani…debent invenire campanas et corda campanarum, cruxifixum, cruces, et ymagines, et calicem argenteum, missale, et casulam de sericio. . . ’ (Powicke and Cheney, Councils II, p. 513). For the establishment of lay responsibilities, see E. Mason, ‘The Role of the English Parishioner, 1100–1500’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 27 (1976), pp. 17–29, esp. 19–25. 52 ‘…reparationem navis ecclesie interius et exterius tam de iure quam de consuetudine tam in ymaginibus et precipue ymagine principale in cancello quam in altaribus et fenestris vitreis’(Powicke and Cheney, Councils II, p. 1387). 53 This is apparent from William Lyndwood’s Provinciale (early 16th-c. printed copy in the Society of Antiquaries of London Library), f. clxxxiii(r), note q, on the responsibilities of rectors and vicars. For an early 16th-century disagreement over responsibility for maintaining the chancel images, see K. L. Wood-Leigh (ed. ), Kentish Visitations of Archbishop William Warham and his Deputies, 1511–1512, Kent Archaeological Society, Kent Records, XXIV, 1984, p. 274. 50

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bequest of a bushel of malt to the image of Our Lady in Stewkley church may be seen as a social act as much as a pious gesture of redemption, in that by endowing the image he was alleviating the obligation of the parish as a whole to maintain it (Fig. 15).54 The festivals of the three most popular patronal dedications (apart from the Virgin) all marked major moments in the farming year. All Saints (1 November) signified the start of winter, when cattle were brought in from the fields. The feast of St Peter ad Vincula (1 August) signified the beginning of harvest, the completion of which ideally coincided with St Michael’s day, or Michaelmas (29 September); the latter also saw the commencement of autumn tasks in the fields, thus simultaneously linking the beginning and the end of the agricultural cycle.55 On the patronal festival and other important occasions, lay access to the chancel must have been permitted for adornment and veneration of the titular image. Outside service times, there was no reason to deny access to laity wishing to use the patronal image or Virgin as a vehicle for counsel or intercession. Margery Kempe regularly entered the choir of St Margaret’s, King’s Lynn, to pray and engage in spiritual dialogue with Christ and Our Lady, although this may have been a privilege extended to her because of her exceptional religiosity, rather than represent the norm.56 In 1408–9, only one church visited by Dean Chandler in the Salisbury diocese lacked a patronal image and in another six it needed repainting. Of the 260 churches inspected by Archbishop Warham and his deputies in 1511–12, only Lydd was without an image of the patronal saint whilst that at Staplehurst was in poor condition.57 A similar picture emerges from the visitations of the Bedford archdeaconry in 1518 and 1530, where no patronal images were identified as lacking or needing repair.58 Provision of 54 Buckinghamshire Record Office D/A/We2, 57 (1525). Stewkley was dedicated to the Virgin in the later middle ages, not St Michael as it is today. 55 E. Miller and J. Hatcher, Medieval England. Rural Society and Economic Change 1086– 1348 (London and New York, 1978), p. 109. 56 S. B. Meech and H. E. Allen (eds), The Book of Margery Kempe, I, Early English Text Society, original series 212 (reprinted 1997), pp. 53, 207–8. Whether access to everyone was granted is questionable. Margaret Aston has drawn my attention to a complaint of the 1540’s over church books being placed in the chancel ‘where poor men durst not presume to come’. 57 T. C. B. Timmins (ed. ), The Register of John Chandler, Dean of Salisbury 1404–17, Wiltshire Record Society, XXXIX, 1984, pp. 79, 90, 92, 100, 104, 124, 128; Wood-Legh, Kentish Visitations, pp. 147, 273. 58 A. Hamilton Thompson (ed.), Visitations in the Diocese of Lincoln 1517–1531, Lincoln Record Society, Vol. 1, XXXXIII, 1940, pp. 102–109, 113–117; Vol. 2, XXXV, 1944, pp. 1–8.

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new patronal images during late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in the Bedford and Buckingham archdeaconries is absent from wills. Even the much larger area of Kent only yields eight testamentary commissions. Two totally opposite interpretations can be put on this data: the dearth of new images and the paucity of references in the visitations suggest either that the titular images were in place and were well-maintained, or that they had ceased to be of prime importance. It has been observed that, in the towns and villages of late sixteenth-century Central Spain, ‘titular saints. . . were no more actively used for practical devotion than they are today’.59 Similarly, it has been suggested that in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the patronal image was of no great concern to the ordinary laity in England.60 One of the arguments in support of this view is that there were not many bequests to patronal images in the late Middle Ages. None of the North Crawley parishioners whose wills survive from 1488 mentioned St Firmin; instead, their bequests were directed towards the altars of Our Lady and the Holy Trinity, presumably in the nave aisles and with associated imagery.61 This absence, however, is not typical for Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire and Kent in this period and may reflect the fact that Firmin was not a popular saint in England. Nearly twice as many parish churches in the Buckingham archdeaconry received bequests to the patronal image in the form of lights (the vast majority) and embellishments than those which did not. In Kent the figure is about 50% and there is a slightly lower proportion in the Bedfordshire churches. If, like rector Hunden at North Crawley, most of the individual bequests for the embellishment of images of titular saints came from incumbents and lay elites, there are examples of individual and collective endowment by parishioners. The making, painting and gilding of the tabernacle for the titular image of All Saints at Houghton Regis (Bedfordshire), was partly financed by bequests from three laymen and two women between 1521 and 1537. Women also featured amongst the benefactors of the patronal light of Our Lady in the neighbouring town of

W. A. Christian Jr. , Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, 1981), p. 65. ‘. . . there is little sign in the later Middle Ages of strong individual devotion to the parish patron’ (E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars. Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven and London, 1992), p. 162); ‘The patronal sculptures do not seem previously [before Mary I’s reign]…to have attracted much attention’ (Aston, Iconoclasts, p. 287). 61 Elvey, Courts, pp. 63, 267–8; Buckinghamshire Record Office D/A/We2, 118, We3, 132, 220. 59 60

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Luton, as well as a lord of the manor and a husbandman.62 Identification with the titular saint, therefore, was not the exclusive preserve of the lay and clerical elites. Nicholas John of Hythe (Kent) evidently believed in the protective powers of the titular saint of his place of worship as his fishing boat was not named after his name-saint and patron of sailors, but as the ‘Leonard of Hythe’.63 Patronal feast-days remained highpoints in the ritual year to the Reformation. They were classified as Principal Doubles, one of eight feasts in the highest category of liturgical commemoration.64 They may not have enjoyed the centrality to communal life of patronal festivals in Sicily during the 1950s, when preparations for the next one began as soon as the present celebration had finished, but late medieval patronal feasts could be elaborate affairs which, as in earlier times, offered opportunities for the exercise of commensality.65 On such occasions, garlands of real or imitation flowers might be placed on the patronal image. That of St Stephen at St Stephen’s Walbrook in London was honoured with ‘a garlande of flowris for his hed of wyre and silke of ye p’sons yifte’ (a garland of flowers for his head of wire and silk of the parson’s [rector’s] gift); in 1534–5, 14d. was spent on the St Stephen’s day garland. Some years later, an ex-religious came to the attention of the Henrician authorities because he went to the church of Milton by Canterbury on the patronal feast of St Margaret, placed a garland of flowers on her image (which seems to have attracted considerable veneration) and celebrated Mass.66 Processions might involve taking the patronal image or 62 Houghton Regis: Bell, Bedfordshire Wills 1484–1533, pp. 58, 69, nos 93, 113; P. Bell (ed.), Bedfordshire Wills 1531–1539 (Bedfordshire Family History Society, Occasional Paper 3, 2005) pp. 42, 67, 140, nos 74, 121, 256. Luton: McGregor, Bedfordshire Wills, p. 37, no. 25; Cirket, English Wills, p. 68, no. 214; Bell, Bedfordshire Wills 1531–1539, p. 100, no. 184. The length of time it took to complete the Houghton Regis tabernacle might equally be taken as evidence of a lack of enthusiasm by the parishioners. 63 A. Hussey, ‘Hythe Wills’, Archaeologia Cantiana, L (1938), pp. 106–7; for a study of medieval ship-names in France, see G. and H. Brese, ‘Les saints protecteurs de bateaux 1200–1460’, Ethnologie française, 9 (1979), pp. 161–178. 64 W. H. Frere (ed. ), The Use of Sarum, vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1898), pp. 29, 111, 213; E. Procter and C. Wordsworth (eds), Breviarium ad Usum Insignis Ecclesiae Sarum Fasc. 1. Kalendarium et Ordo Temporalis (Cambridge, 1882), cols. ix, lxvii. 65 G. Maxwell, The Ten Pains of Death (London, 1959), Chapter Nine; Brown, Cult, pp. 98–102. 66 T. Milbourn, ‘Church of St Stephen Walbrook’, Transactions of the London and Middlesex Architectural Society, V (1876–80), pp. 340, 363; Letters & Papers Foreign and Domestic of the Reign of Henry VIII, XVIII Pt. 2 (London, 1902), p. 297.

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its replica outside the church, as at St George’s Canterbury, where the former was accompanied by civic dignitaries, their wives and the common folk, marshalled according to the social pecking-order.67 St Andrew’s, another Canterbury parish, used the patronal festival for fund-raising by the sale of badges or ‘scuchons’, probably in the shape of the saltire cross attribute of the saint. In 1519–20, four leaves of gold paper for the badges cost 4d. and a painter was paid 13d. for making them; receipts totalled 3s. 5d. In other years the profit-margin was even higher.68 The patronal festivities of the wealthy and well-connected parish of St Margaret’s Westminster are described in some detail in the churchwardens’ accounts. As a preliminary, the high altar was embellished with rich Arras cloths and silk hangings. The patronal image was adorned with a coral rosary on a silver chain with a pearl clasp, a gift to be used on such occasions. On 19 July, the eve of St Margaret’s day, bonfires were lit in front of the church door and a vigil was observed by the parishioners until dawn. The feastday proper began with a solemn Mass, followed by a procession around the parish of maidens dressed specially for the occasion. Afterwards there was a performance of a St Margaret play.69 In image-rich parishes like Wing in Buckinghamshire, the esteem in which the patronal saint was held might have been affected by the presence of specialist saintly helpers.70 The multiplication of devotional images in parish churches was already under way by the middle of the thirteenth century and gathered pace thereafter. A related change in the internal topography of parish churches which had an impact on the patronal image was the erection of roodscreens. The introduction in the early sixteenth century of the screen at North Crawley meant that St Firmin’s image quite literally was not viewed at the end of the middle ages in the same way that it had been in Peter de Wintonia’s time. The screen distanced the image (as well as the clergy and lay elites) from the parishioners and interrupted the main sightlines from the nave into the chancel (Fig. 6). The construction of screens between chancel and nave appears only to have become widespread

Letters & Papers, XVIII Pt. 2, p. 309. C. Cotton, ‘Churchwardens’ Accounts of the Parish of St Andrew, Canterbury from A. D. 1485 to A. D. 1625’, Archaeologia Cantiana, XXXII (1917), pp. 181–246, passim. 69 G. Rosser, Medieval Westminster 1200–1540 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 271–3. 70 A. Vere Woodman, ‘The Accounts of the Churchwardens of Wing’, Records of Buckinghamshire, XVI (1953–60), pp. 307–329. 67 68

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in the fourteenth century; many churches did not have them until the end of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. How the patronal saint was perceived by parishioners ultimately defies generalisation. If the formal system of provision and maintenance guaranteed a degree of primacy, this does not mean that it inspired the same level of personal and collective devotion everywhere. The late-medieval patronal festivals just described are all from urban parishes; it may be that in cities and large towns with several churches, the patronal image remained a primary focus of parish identity. The silver shoes belonging to the patronal image in the London church of St Christopher-le-Stocks reveal both the extent to which it was venerated and its institutional primacy over the numerous other images here.71 In Devon and Cornwall especially, the Celtic patron saints seems to have retained their popularity until the Reformation.72 Very occasionally, laypeople addressed the titular saint using the same possessive epithet as the clergy. The one-and-a half-metre high new alabaster image of St Nicholas at Thanington, mentioned above, was described by John Marten as ‘my patron’.73 The number of bequests to the patronal light by individuals like Thomas Crypps of Stewkley suggest that in some parishes, the titular image was a focus of individual lay affective piety. Stewkley seems to have possessed only one other image (of St George), so there was much less choice available to Crypps and his fellow-parishioners than to their counterparts in the neighbouring parish of Wing, with its nine images. Attitudes to the parochial image are likely to have varied from community to community and depended on a range of factors. Each parish has its own history in this as in so much else concerning images.

E. Freshfield, ‘On the Parish Books of St. Margaret-Lothbury, St. Christopher-leStocks, and St. Bartholomew-by-the-Exchange, in the City of London’, Archaeologia, XLV (1880), p. 112. There were also sacred vessels here with representations of St Christopher and a reliquary. 72 I am grateful to Joanna Mattingley for drawing my attention to this West Country pattern; a manifestation is the commissioning in the early 16th century of St Neot’s window in the Cornish church dedicated to him. 73 Duncan and Hussey, Testamenta Cantiana, East Kent’, p. 340. 71

XXIII Viewing Our Lady of Pity

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he great south portal of the former abbey church of Moissac (Tarn-etGaronne, France) is one of the defining monuments of Romanesque art. On the tympanum, the awesome figure of Christ in Majesty addresses the world beyond the cloister, at­tended by the symbols of the evangelists and the elders of the Apocalypse. Passers-by and entrants to the church were reminded of the confrontation with their maker on the Day of Judgement; those who through sin were in danger of the denial of salvation could contemplate their fate in the graphic eye-level portrayal of the damned in the parable of Dives and Lazarus with two of the vices.1 In the eschatology of the twelfth century, men and women faced their maker without a heavenly mediator to plead their cause. Though eclipsed in historiographical terms by the glories of the portal and cloister carvings, Moissac also boasts an image of the Pietà, or Our Lady of Pity, which is no less characteristic of late medieval religious representation than the portal is of the twelfth century (Fig. 1). Carved in stone, the polychromed tableau depicts the Virgin supporting the body of her crucified son across her knees, flanked by ancillary images of St John the Evangelist and St Mary Magdalene. Kneeling at the feet of the Virgin and addressing their prayers to her are the diminutive figures of the donors, the broth­ers Jean and Goussen de la Garrigue, accompanied by an inscription recording their gift and its date (1476).2 In its small scale, subject-matter The seminal study is still M. Schapiro, The Sculpture of Moissac (London, 1985) (a reprint with revisions and photographs by David Finn of an article published in The Art Bulletin in 1931). 2 The height of the group is one metre; see W. H. Forsyth, The Pietà in French Late Gothic Sculpture. Re­gional Variations (New York, 1995), pp. 132, 175, Figs. 180–182. There is another carved Our Lady of Pity there (ibid., p. 175). The De la Garrigues were local worthies; see M. Durliat, L’Abbaye de Moissac (Rennes, 1983–1995), p. 15. 1

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contemporaneity of costume and presence of lay donors, the Moissac Pietà epitomises the late medieval shift away from the impersonal aloofness of the portal tympanum towards a more self-focussed and affective piety. Our Lady of Pity first entered the pictorial vocabulary of medieval art in South Germany around 1300, emerging from the cultural ambience of mystics like Henry Suso (c. 1295–1366). The image combined the narrative of the Lamentation at the foot of the Cross with the symbolic promise of salvation for humanity through Christ’s sacrifice. Simultaneously it fused the belief in Our Lady as grieving mother, who nevertheless remained steadfast in her conviction of the coming Resurrection, with her role as mediatrix for mankind. The result was a potent emotive cocktail.3 The image was known in Italy by the middle of the fourteenth century; by the late 1380s it was circulating in the highest circles in France and had found its way to the Netherlands. Despite the enormous scale of destruction, it is reasonably certain that the Pietà be­came a familiar item in the repertoire of painters and carvers in England at about the same time as in France and the Netherlands.4 The Pietà appears in at least one English late fourteenthcentury Book of Hours, on some folios added towards the end of the century (Oxford, Keble College MS 47, f.10v) (Fig. 3). The manuscript may have be­longed to the high-status Bohun family.5 Imagery in Books of Hours may only have reached an elite audience, but by the same date, the Pietà in monumental form had made its way into the public space of the church. A chapel and altar of the Pity existed in Cromer church (Norfolk) by 1388 and three years later an image of the Pietà in Norwich Cathedral was attracting substantial oblations. Thame and Hornton churches in Oxfordshire both preserve wall-paintings of Our Summaries of the history of the Pietà are in G. Schiller, The Iconography of Christian Art 2, (London, 1972), pp. 179–181 and E. Kirschbaum (ed.), Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie, IV, (Rome, Freiburg, Basle and Vienna, 1975), cols. 450–456. More detailed studies include W. Passarge, Das deutsche Vesperbild im Mittelalter (Köln, 1924) and E. Reiners-Ernst, Das freudvolle Vesperbild und die Anfänge der Pietà-Vorstellung (Munich, 1939). 4 The only detailed study of the English image in literature and art is M. J. Power, The Pietà in Medieval Eng­land, University of York unpublished MA dissertation, 1980/1. 5 M. Parkes (comp.), The Medieval Manuscripts of Keble College, Oxford (London, 1979), pp. 216–218, Pl. 122. Nigel Morgan cites an isolated earlier English occurrence in the Taymouth Hours, London, British Library MS Yates Thompson 13. f. 123v, of c. 1330–1340, where it appears below the Deposition in a sequence of Passion miniatures; see N. Morgan, ‘ Texts and Images of Marian Devotion in Fourteenth-Century England’ in N. Rogers (ed.), England in the Fourteenth Century Proceedings of the 1991 Harlaxton Symposium (Stamford, 1993), p. 54. 3

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Lady of Pity (Fig. 4).6 The former has a canopy which is closely comparable with the glazing of New College Chapel in Oxford, of c. 1380–1386, and is unlikely to be far removed in date; stylistically, the same applies to the Hornton figure.7 That the image was present in a rural church like Hornton suggests that it was widely known in England well before 1400. Documentary evidence shows that by the early fifteenth century, the Pietà could be found in churches from Devon to Yorkshire and was as ubiquitous as anywhere in Europe. Within a century of its introduction, it had become second only in popularity to the Rood in terms of church images and was the principal focus of lay affective piety. For example, pre-Reformation wills mention twenty-one Bedfordshire churches with this image; this represents a lower total than must have existed, for neither of the two surviving images at Blunham and Tilsworth is docu­mented. The figures for Kent are sixtytwo in East and twenty-seven in West Kent. In other words, between one in four and one in six of the parish churches and parish chap­els in Bedfordshire and Kent is known to have had an image of Our Lady of Pity. De­votion to the Virgin was very strong in England, so the true figure is likely to have been considerably higher; Waterton’s assessment that there was no church in England without a Pietà may not have been too wide of the mark.8 We also know the power of the image to move its viewers. A Pietà in a Norwich church is the only instance of a specific image in England to which a response is sing­led out in the well-known spiritual ‘autobiography’ of Margery Kempe, who was a member of the urban patrician class of the port of King’s Lynn (Norfolk) in the first half of the fifteenth century. The sight of the image reduced Margery to her usual lachrymose state: she was impelled to ‘cryyn ful lowde & wepyn ful sor’.9 Moreover, the image is unique amongst devotional images (apart from the Rood) in spawning

6 An English origin has also been suggested for a small walnut Pietà of c. 1370–1400; see P. Williamson, Northern Gothic Sculpture (Victoria and Albert Museum) (London, 1988), pp.142–50, no. 40. 7 The Hornton Pietà and an accompanying mural of St George both have the Prince of Wales’s feathers and scroll for a motto which associate them with Edward the Black Prince (d. 1376); the figure-style and armour of St George, however, suggest the date a few years later. The poor condition of the Hornton Pity rules out repro­duction. 8 E. Waterton, Pietas Mariana Britannica. A History of English Devotion to the Most Blessed Virgin Marye Mother of God (London, 1879), Book One, p. 127. 9 S. B. Meech and H. E. Allen (eds), The Book of Margery Kempe, Early English Text Society, original series, CCXII (reprinted 1997), p. 148.

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vernacular poetry. For example, one poet claimed to have been inspired by a Pietà which spoke to him: In a chirche as I gan knele. This enders daye to here a masse, I saw a sight me liked wele, I shal tell you what it was. I saw a pite in a place, Owre lady and her sone in feere; ofte she wepte and sayde, ‘Alas, Now lith here dede my dere sone dere!’ 10 A score or so monumental Pietàs of English workmanship have survived, mostly carved from alabaster. Several found their way to the Continent, exported either before or after the Reformation. Although it is possible that the iconography of some of those now outside England may have been dictated by foreign clients, as alabaster production was virtually massproduced they are treated here as an insular cultural phenomenon. Other images of Our Lady of Pity, like those at Blunham and Tilsworth, were discovered during nineteenth-century church restorations. The Oxfordshire mural Pietàs were concealed by whitewash. The representations are as diverse as their Continental coun­terparts. Apart from the range of materials (freestone, alabaster, wood, textile, painted panel, mural and miniature painting), the sizes range from the monumental to the di­minutive; some of the alabasters are in the form of relief panels, others are free­standing. The largest of the extant carved images are just over one metre high (Battle­field in Shropshire, the Musée national du Moyen Âge in Paris and St Andréde-Cubzac, Gironde, France) (Fig. 5). If, as seems likely, a bracket in the Bauchun Chapel of Norwich Cathedral was made for a Pietà, its width indicates that the height of the image must have been at least two and a half metres, rivalling the size of some of the more substantial Continental examples. The complete Thame mural would have been of similar height and that at Hornton is just over one and a half metres. At the other end of the spectrum is the miniscule alabaster at Wood Ditton (Cambridgeshire), which cannot have been much taller than 30 cm, a size more appropriate to a personal image associated with a tomb, or even the designated seat R. Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1968), p. 257. See also H.N. MacCracken (ed.), The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, Part I, Early English Text Society, extra series CVII (1911 for 1910), pp. 268–279. 10

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of a parishioner. Alabasters at Blunham, Breadsall (Derbyshire) and in the Victoria and Albert Museum probably represent the norm of between 70 and 80 cm in height. The all-over polychromy and gilding with which the Battlefield Pietà was formerly covered must have conveyed an impression far removed from the mood of emotional restraint evoked by the majority of alabasters, which have lost their original poly­chrome. The Blunham Pity has one of the bestpreserved surfaces of the alabasters. Most of it is left unpainted, against which the splashes of Christ’s bleeding wounds stand out dramatically and match the red lining of the Virgin’s robe. The fine Cluny Museum alabaster has iconographical features found on many of the English Pietàs (Fig. 5).11 The image is not a simple compression of the Lamentation scene. The Virgin is enthroned and the body of her Son is turned outwards, displaying His wounds to the spectator. Despite the wounds, His body does not reflect the agony of the Passion, but lies in repose. Nor is it clasped in an expression of lamentation by His mother. The Virgin, whose size is magnified, does not look at Christ but gazes into the distance with an expression of contemplation. Her pensiveness lacks the joyfulness of some of the German images, which emphasise belief in redemption through Christ’s sacrifice rather than her maternal grief. Our Lady’s participation in both the Incarnation and the Redemption is underlined by holding her veil in her left hand. As expounded in the Meditationes Vitae Christi, at His birth the Virgin took Christ in Her arms and ‘so wrapped hym in the keuerchiefes of hir heued and leide hym in the cracche’. The action is repeated at the Passion: the Virgin, distressed by her Son’s nakedness before He was nailed to the Cross, ‘wente in haste to her dere sone and clipped hym and girt hym aboute the lendes with the keuerchief of her heued’. 12 The interweaving of Bibli­cal episodes is continued on the hillock representing Golgotha, on which Our Lady is enthroned. Among the scattered bones and skulls presumably is that of Adam. C. Prigent, Les sculptures anglaises d’albâtre au Musée national du Moyen Âge Thermes de Cluny (Paris, 1998), p. 59, no. 1. 12 The quotations are from Nicholas Love’s popular translation; see J. Hogg and L. F. Powell (eds), N. Love, The Mirrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ, Analecta Cartusiana, 91 (Salzburg, 1989), 1, p. 47, 2, p. 237. On a Pietà from the Cistercian convent at Himmelspforta near Würzburg, the Virgin’s veil and Christ‘s loincloth are both white and have identical fringes; see W. D. Wixom, Medieval Sculpture at the Cloisters (Metropolitan Mu­seum of Art, New York, 1999), p. 35. 11

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The veil-touching gesture evidently was much-favoured in England; it is a feature of the majority of the surviving carved images, including the wooden Pietà at Battle­field and not only those, like the Cluny image, which date from the early fifteenth century. It appears on a late fifteenth-century Pietà in Lisbon and on a drawing of similar date prefacing a poem by the monk John Lydgate (Fig. 2). The Cluny Museum image is not a model followed by all English representations of Our Lady of Pity. The veil gesture was widespread, but not universal. It is not depicted in the Keble College Hours and is also absent from examples in other media, including some of the carved and mural versions and the embroidered image on the London Vintners’ Company funerary pall (Figs 3, 7, 10, 12). In some versions, Christ’s body is closer in scale to the Virgin than in others. In the Keble miniature, Christ is depicted with His head supported by the Virgin’s left arm, rather than her right, a feature shared with the battered remains of the freestone image at Tilsworth and the stained glass panel at Long Melford (Suffolk); in the latter, Christ is depicted as living (Figs 3, 7). Several alabasters have a cast of supporting characters. On a panel at Thorning in Denmark the Pietà is placed between God the Father in Heaven and the descent into Hell. The temporal context within the scriptural account sometimes is underlined by the presence of Joseph of Arimathea and St Mary Magdalene and/or the cross in the background (Figs 3, 4, 6). Our Lady is represented as an elderly woman on an image in Lisbon. In a rare case where the support for a carved Our Lady of Pity can be identi­fied, the iconographic enrichment is continued. The bracket at the south-east angle of the nave south aisle at Dunton (Bedfordshire), adjacent to an altar, is embellished with carved roses (Figs 8, 9). The rose had been connected allegorically with the Virgin since at least the twelfth century in hymns and prayers and became the subject of English vernacular poetry: There is no rose of swych vertu As is the rose that bar Jesu.13

D. Gray, Themes and Images in the Medieval English Religious Lyric (London and Boston, 1972), pp. 88–90. John Caryngton requested burial before Our Lady of Pity at Dunton and bequeathed 26s 8d to the painting of the image; see A. F. Cirket (ed.), English Wills, 1498–1526, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, XXXVII, (1957), p. 78. 13

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During the fourteenth century, roses began to be linked pictorially with Our Lady and not just on the Pietà. Several German Pities also have roses on their base.14 The foregoing indicates that the English Pietà was developed with considerable variation. One application of the image of Pity seems to have been peculiar to England. This was a moralising tale about personal conduct. Early fifteenth-century murals at Broughton (Buckinghamshire) and Corby Glen (Lincolnshire) depict Our Lady of Pity surrounded by fashionably attired young men, who by swearing by parts of Christ’s body in effect had caused His Passion and symbolically had dismembered him, thereby condemning themselves to hell. The Broughton version shows this literally, with the men holding various bodily parts and Christ’s body lacking a foot (Fig. 10). At Corby there are seven youths, each attended by a devil, an allusion to the Seven Deadly Sins.15 Conversely, there are Continental versions which do not occur this side of the Channel. For example, no English image of Our Lady of Pity exhibits the graphic hor­ror of the earliest German images, although this may be attributable to lack of survival. Neither has any image survived which is absorbed into the patron’s familiar landscape in the manner of the panel at Grand-Vabre (Rodez, France), where the locally- venerated St Foy is one of the ancillary figures.16 The tiny fraction of the former vast numbers of English Pietàs to have come down to us makes it impossible to construct a formalist taxonomy of the image. Whether or not there was a pattern of distinctive regional types, as has been argued for the Rhineland and France by W. Krönig and Forsyth, the majority of extant examples are products of the Midlands alabaster trade which by the early fifteenth century at least operated through itinerant agents and a diffused series of urban retail outlets.17 Morgan, ‘Text and Images’, pp. 41–42, 47, discusses the rose symbolism. German examples are examined in W. Krönig, ‘ Ein Vesperbild im Schnütgen-Museum zu Köln mit einem Exkurs über die Bedeutung der Rosetten’, Wallraf-Richartz Jahrbuch, XXXI (1969), pp. 7–24. 15 The subjects with their verse equivalents are discussed in Woolf, English Religious Lyric, pp. 395-397; see also C. Woodforde, The Norwich School of Glass-Painting in the Fifteenth Century (Oxford, 1950), Chapter VII; N. Morgan, ‘ Text and Images’, pp. 55–56. 16 Forsyth, The Pietà, pp. 123–124, 167, Fig. 169. 17 W. Krönig, Rheinische Vesperbild (Mönchengladbach, 1967); Forsyth, The Pietà. For a critique of Forsyth’s methodology, see the review by Phillip Lindley in The Burlington Magazine, CXL, no. 1149 (December 1998), pp. 834–835. For the organisation of the alabaster trade, see F. Cheetham, English Medieval Alabasters (Oxford, 1984), pp. 11–17, 41–49; N. Ramsay, ‘Alabaster’ in J. Blair and N. Ramsay (eds), English Medieval Industries Craftsmen, Techniques, Products (London, 1991), Chapter 2. 14

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1. Moissac (Tarn-et-Garonne, France), former abbey church: polychromed stone Pietà with donors, dated 1476.

2. Drawing of Pietà prefacing a poem by John Lydgate, later 15th century (Cambridge, Trinity College MS R. 3 21, fol. 238r).

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3. Pietà initial in a Book of Hours, end of 14th century (Oxford, Keble College MS 47, fol. 10v).

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4. Thame (Oxfordshire): mural painting of the Pietà, c. 1380–90.

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5. Alabaster Pietà, early 15th century (Musée national du Moyen Âge, Paris).

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6. Alabaster Pietà, early 15th century (Victoria and Albert Museum, London).

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7. Long Melford (Suffolk): stained glass image of the Pietà and donor, late 15th century.

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8. Dunton (Bedfordshire): east end of nave south aisle with stone image bracket for Pietà in the right angle, late 14th or 15th century.

9. Dunton (Bedfordshire): stone image bracket for Pietà.

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10. Broughton (Buckinghamshire): mural painting of the Pietà surrounded by blasphemers, early 15th century.

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11. Cranbrook (Kent): monumental brass of Thomas Sheffe (d. 1520).

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12. Norwich Cathedral, Bauchun Chapel (Norfolk): stone corbels depicting (right) the Pietà, (below) William Sekyngton, mid-15th century.

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It is perhaps more profitable to investigate in what ways an image like the Cluny Museum Pietà functioned and how it was viewed and received. Unlike the images in illustrated Books of Hours, whose audience before the advent of printing was confined to the wealthy few, most of the carved images were in the public domain and therefore were socially inclusive. Of course, this line of enquiry too has obvious limitations. The Cluny and the other English Pities are not only separated temporally from their medie­val devotional contexts; with the exception of the mural images they have also been divorced from their original locations. Only in a few instances are the precise em­placements known. The bulk of the evidence relating to Our Lady of Pity is documen­tary, being mentioned frequently in late medieval wills. But collectively, the various kinds of evidence, including the artefacts themselves, shed considerable light on the polysemic meanings attached to the image. The wall-paintings at Thame and Hornton are a useful starting-point (Fig. 4). Both images are substantial in size and are placed in very similar locations. Our Lady of Pity at Thame is painted on the south-east crossing pier, facing the congregation. The Hornton mural also faces west, in this case from the north side of the chancel arch. Both are adjacent to the site of the chancel screen, above which was the Rood, the im­a ge of Christ on the Cross, flanked by the Virgin and St John. At Hornton, a mural of the Doom, with Christ enthroned in Heaven as judge and attended by Our Lady and St John as intercessors, still survives on the wall above the chancel arch and site of the Rood. The Pietà may be an iconic image, but its proximity at Thame and Hornton to the Rood permitted the viewer to construct a narrative of the Passion. In describing the image as depicting the Virgin at her Son’s passion and burial, a Kent vicar seems to have been accustomed to performing that very act of building a narrative around it.18 The Thame image certainly stood above an altar and its position suggests that the same was true of Hornton. The physical association of the Pietà with an altar underlined its role as a Eucharistic image, especially during Mass, when the symbolic Real Presence could be echoed graphically by Christ’s broken body in the arms of His grieving yet meditative mother.

L. L. Duncan and A. Hussey, Testamenta Cantiana: A Series of Extracts from Fifteenth and Sixteenth Cen­tury Wills Relating to Church Building and Topography, Kent Archaeological Society Records Series, 1906–1907, p. 72 (East Kent). 18

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The lower section of the Thame mural is lost and the Hornton im­a ge is severely damaged, but both are likely to have followed the usual pattern of showing Christ’s body turned towards the viewer, exhibiting the wounds of His sacri­fice for humanity and offering the promise of redemption through that sacrifice. At Thame, the Virgin’s role goes beyond that of mediatrix. The tears of blood she sheds manifests her share in Christ’s redeeming Passion, demonstrating the interchangeability of their blood, and thereby presenting her as co-Redemptrix. The centrality of the Virgin in the process of salvation is also made explicit by her position in the mural, between her Son’s body and the Cross, and by the scale of her representation: she is the dominant element.19 Altars dedicated to the Pietà, like other altars of Our Lady, were used for Masses of the Virgin, especially on her major festivals. At Thame, Our Lady Mass was celebrated every morning either at this or the high altar. The image would have had particular resonance at the performance of the Lady Mass every Saturday, a day dedicated to the Virgin in commemoration of her steadfastness between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.20 A fifteenthcentury incised slab at Corfe (Dorset) invites prayers for the souls of a husband and wife who also are recorded as having given a lamp to burn before the altar of the Pietà and a cow for five masses for their brothers and sisters on the vigils before five feasts of the Virgin (i.e. in the order of the festive year, the Purification, Annunciation, Assumption, Nativity and Conception).21

For the Virgin as co-Redemptrix, see B. Williamson, ‘The Virgin ‘Lactans’ as Second Eve: Image of the Salvatrix’, Studies in Iconography, 19 (1998), pp. 105–137. 20 Morgan, ‘Text and Images’, p. 52. The Thame reference is taken from F. G. Lee, History and Antiquities of the Prebendal Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Thame (London, 1883), col. 26. Lee had examined the church­wardens’ accounts and asserted that the altar of Our Lady of Pity stood on the north side of the Rood screen, rather than the south side where the mural is located (ibid., col. 21). However, only an altar of Our Lady or Our Lady in Gesyn is mentioned in Julia Carnwath’s study, ‘The Churchwardens’ Accounts of Thame, Oxfordshire, c. 1443–1524’ in D. J. Clayton, R. G. Davies and P. McNiven (eds), Trade, Devotion and Governance Papers in Later Medieval History (Stroud, 1994), p. 187. At the time of writing this article, the churchwardens’ accounts were unavailable owing to the move of Oxfordshire Record Office to new premises. 21 S. Badham, ‘ Status and Salvation: The Design of Medieval English Brasses and Incised Slabs’, Monumental Brass Society Transactions, 15 Pt. 5 (1997), p. 437, Fig. 13. 19

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Images of Our Lady of Pity did not have to have a dedicated altar to be in receipt of special honour during liturgical celebrations. Indeed, the majority of references to the image do not mention an altar. A parishioner of Sutton-at-Hone (Kent) bequeathed five substantial wax tapers to burn before the image, which were to be renewed on the feasts of the Nativity of Our Lord, Resurrection and the Assumption of the Virgin. Our Lady of Pity was also much honoured on feast-days of the Virgin. The fraternity of St Peter at Bardwell (Suffolk) was charged with providing five lights for the image at every principal feast of Our Lady, which were also to be lit at every antiphon sung in her honour.22 The laity was encouraged to use antiphons and other familiar prayers in their private devotional exercises. The text of the Salve regina in Books of Hours sometimes is accompanied by an image of the Pietà. Readers of the afore-mentioned Lydgate poem, which opens with a description of an image seen by the narrator in a manuscript, were invited to recite the Paternoster and Ave Maria, prayers commonly said before images.23 In the early fifteenth century, a South Creake (Norfolk) man or­dered to recite these prayers as penance before Our Lady of Pity refused, saying that he would only do so before God at the high altar; this is an early instance of Lollard hos­tility to the image, a hostility grounded in its lack of scriptural authority and which was to be echoed by sixteenthcentury reformers.24 Although Our Lady of Pity was venerated by both sexes, it had obvious appeal for women, as the reaction of Margery Kempe makes clear. The first of the two verses quoted above comes from a poem which is addressed specifically to women: Therfore, wemen, by town and strete, Youre childer handes when ye beholde, Ther breste, ther body, and ther fete, God were on my sone to thinke, and ye wolde, How care hath made my hert full colde, To see my sone with naile and spere, 22 L. L. Duncan, ‘ The Parish Churches of West Kent, Their Dedications, Altars, Images, and Lights’, Transac­tions of the St Paul’s Ecclesiological Society, III (1895), p. 292; F. E. Warren, ‘A Pre-Reformation Village Gild’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Art and Archaeology & Natural History, XI (1901), pp. 142–143. 23 MacCracken, Lydgate, pp. 268–269. 24 N. P. Tanner (ed.), ‘Heresy Trials in the Diocese of Norwich, 1428–1431’, Camden Society, Fourth Series, 20 (1977), pp. 89–90.

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With scourge and thornes manifolde, Wounded and dedd my dere sone, dere.25 Quite a number of bequests to the image were made by female testators, usually widows. Women frequently gave items of apparel and adornment to images. In 1484 Margaret Lemans bequeathed her best girdle to Our Lady of Pity in her parish church at Bromley (Kent).26 Often such artefacts were intended for sale, the proceedes going to the lights or other enhancement of the image. Wills sometimes stipulate that the items were to be attached to the image itself either permanently, or on feast-days, or on anniversaries of the donor’s death when her obit were celebrated. Girdles were decora­tive items of considerable value. If her intention was for her gift to adorn the Virgin, Margaret Lemans was enhancing the image for the benefit of the parish as a whole as well as honouring the prototype. Through the same act, she was providing a posthu­mous mnemonic souvenir of her personal devotion to that image. Gifts of valued per­sonal effects enabled women to demonstrate a more intimate relationship with the sa­cred than was available to men, whose bequests tended to be in cash, livestock or pro­duce.27 The Pietà was placed in the chancel or a chancel chapel of some churches, but more often the nave was the generally-favoured location. As foci of devotion, images of Pity needed to be accessible to large numbers of people. The south aisle, as at Dunton, was chosen in a number of churches from different localities (Fig. 8). It was not merely for the purposes of veneration that space was required by the ima­ge, but also because it was a favoured burial site. The image of the Pity was closely associated with Our Lady’s power as mediatrix. The initial in the Keble manuscript containing the Pietà image accompanies the text for the Hours of the Compassion of the Virgin, the saying of which carried an indulgence of three hundred years (Fig. 3). In many Books of Hours, Our Lady of Pity is associated with the bidding prayer which begins with Obsecro te domina mater dei. This moving prayer, which combines sup­ R. T. Davies (ed.), Medieval English Lyrics. A Critical Anthology (Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 211. 26. Duncan and Hussey, Testamenta Cantiana, (West Kent) p. 7. 27 An excellent study of women and devotion is C. Peters, ‘Women and the Reformation: Social Relations and Attitudes in Rural England c. 1470–1570’, University of Oxford unpublished D. Phil. thesis 1992; this topic is discussed on pp. 246–252. 25.

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plication with meditation, extols the Virgin’s multiple virtues, recites her role in the Incarnation and grief during Christ’s Passion and asks for her intercession and help. The ending of the prayer assigns to the Virgin a special importance at the death of the suppliant: And at the end of my life show me your face, and reveal to me the day and hour of my death. Please hear and receive this humble prayer and grant me eternal life. Listen and hear me, Mary, sweetest virgin. Mother of God and mercy. Amen. 28 In some Continental and insular texts of the Hours, a rubric is attached promising that the Virgin will indeed appear and bestowing spiritual benefits on the dying: To all that be in the state of grace that daily say deoutly this prayer before our blessyd lady of pitie, she wyll shewe them her blessyd vysage and warne them the daye et the oure of dethe, et in theyr lacte ende the aungelles of God shall yelde theyr sowles to heuen, & he shall obteyne v. hundred yeres soo many lentes of pardon graunted by v. holy fathers popes of Rome. 29 In the London church of St-Christopher-le-Stocks, the ‘dyvers good prayers of Oure Lady and the sauter of charite’ inscribed on a tablet below the Pietà presumably in­cluded this or similar texts.30 As on the Continent, the image often occurs in a sepul­chral context, as a tomb relief and on the exterior of churches, facing into or placed in burial grounds. We find the image depicted on funerary palls, monumental brasses and in at least

28 The prayer is discussed in R. S. Wieck, Painted Prayers The Book of Hours in Medieval and Renaissance Art (New York, 1997), pp. 86–90; E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars Traditional Religion in England c. 1400–c. 1580, (New Haven and London, 1992), pp. 262– 264, 318. 29 C. Wordsworth (ed.), Horae Eboracensia, Surtees Society, CXXXII (1920), p. 66. For examples of this indulgence in Continental Hours, see V. Reinburg, Hearing Lay People‘s Prayer, in B. B. Diefendorf and C. Hesse (eds). Culture and Identity in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800) Essays in Honor of Natalie Zemon Davis (University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1993), pp. 27–29, esp. n. 31. 30 E. Freshfield, ‘On the Parish Books of St Margaret-Lothbury, St Christopher-leStocks, and St Bartholomew-by-the-Exchange, in the City of London’, Archaeologia, XLV (1880), p. 119.

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one instance it was set up in the cemetery.31 Burial before images of the Pity inside churches became desirable from at least the beginning of the fifteenth century amongst all classes of society who were of sufficient means and status to be accorded internal interment. These, of course, were the monority and a grave before an image was a mark of privilege. Wills from priests, gentry, widows, craftsmen, merchants, yeomen and husbandmen all express the wish that their bodies should be interred be­fore the Pietà. In Kent, Our Lady of Pity was more in demand for this purpose than any other image. At Faversham church in this county, the Pietà was placed against the south aisle wall and was the site of several graves. The first recorded request for burial here was by Henry Sayer, Mayor of Faversham and a Yeoman of the Crown (1502). Subsequently his mortal remains were joined by those of Thomas Malpas and his wife. Edmund Andrewe had to make do with a grave in the churchyard, but was anxious to ensure that it was in proximity to the image, stipulating that his body was interred ‘on the back side of Our Lady of Pity.’32 A rare instance of a sepulchral monument which survives almost certainly in situ is that of a cloth merchant named Thomas Sheffe (d. 1520) at Cranbrook in Kent. In his will, he requested burial before Our Lady of Pity in St Thomas’s aisle, identifiable as the chancel south chapel, where his brass remains in its original slab; there is however no trace of the image’s emplacement (Fig. 11).33 The existing structure and documented history of the Bauchun Chapel in Norwich Cathedral reveals how the Pietà could bear several layers of meaning.34 The Chapel takes its name from William Bauchun, who made a major contribution to its erection in the late 1320s on the south side of the cathedral presbytery. Bauchun was a lay official of the cathedral priory

31 For example, a monumental brass at Morley (Derbyshire) (Badham, ‘Status and Salvation’, p. 444, Fig. 16); a graveyard image was at Erith (Kent) (Duncan, West Kent, p. 267). 32 Duncan and Hussey, Testamenta Cantiana (East Kent), p. 120. 33 For the will and brass, see L. L. Duncan, ‘Notes on the Topography of Cranbrook Church’, Archaeologia Cantiana, XXXVII (1925), p. 25. 34. M. R. James and W.  T. Bensly, The Sculptured Bosses in the Roof of the Bauchun Chapel of Our Lady of Pity in Norwich Cathedral (Norwich, 1908); B. Dodwell, ‘William Bauchun and his Connection with the Cathedral Priory at Norwich’, Norfolk Archaeology, XXXVI (1974–1977), pp. 111–118; J.R. Shinners, ‘The Veneration of Saints at Norwich Cathedral in the Fourteenth Century’, idem, XL (1987–1989), pp. 133–144, esp. p. 138. My interpretation differs in some details from that of the last two authors.

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and his tomb formerly existed in the chapel, which seems to have served as his chantry. Although today it is known as the Chapel of Our Lady of Pity, a lost inscription on the exterior wall recorded the original dedication as the Vir­gin and All Saints. The elaborate Perpendicular tabernacle in the position of honour on the north side of the former altar would have housed the titular image. It is unlikely at this early date that this image would have been a Pietà. In 1391 an image described as ‘sancta maria de compassione’, attracted offerings of more than £5; in the remaining years of the century, offerings to this image exceeded two pounds annually. Its location within the cathedral is not mentioned. The first unequivocal reference to a Pietà in the Bauchun Chapel is in 1460/1, when William Sekyngton requested his executors to bury his body in the Chapel of the Blessed Mary of Pity in Norwich Cathedral. There can be no doubt that this chapel is the Bauchun Chapel. By the early sixteenth century, there were two Pietas in the Cathedral, one in the nave and the other in the Bauchun Chapel, where it probably stood on the long bracket on the east wall. In 1516 the former at­tracted much larger receipts than the latter (6s 7d compared with 4d), perhaps suggest­ing that the image mentioned in 1391 was that in the nave. William Sekyngton left his mark on the Bauchun Chapel. If no trace of his tomb remains, his transformations of the upper sections of the building are intact. Sekyngton raised the walls and added a stone-vaulted ceiling richly embellished with numerous carved bosses. Two of the corbels from which the vaults spring have angels bearing his arms. A third corbel, located in the east wall above the altar, has Our Lady of Pity. On the opposite corbel is a half-length male figure, a mimetic representation of Sekyng­ton, clad in legal costume, in prayer and facing towards the image (Fig. 12). Sekyngton was a lawyer or Proctor who served the Consistory Court which sat in this chapel and also held the office of Corrector of Crimes in the diocese of Norwich.35 The Marian theme is explored further on the roof bosses, which include the Coronation and As­sumption of Our Lady. The principal subject-matter is the legend of the Empress wrongfully accused firstly of

The Consistory Court was the bishop’s court and its jurisdiction encompassed cases which had to be tried according to canon law. These included probate matters, marriage disputes, cases against those claiming clerical privilege and those who had transgressed against church discipline and religion (except in matters of doctrine and liturgy). I am indebted to the staff of Lambeth Palace Library for information on Consistory Courts. 35.

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seeking an adulterous relationship and then of infanticide, who was saved by the miraculous intervention of the Virgin. The bosses feature a number of scenes apposite to the business of the Consistory Court transacted under Sekyngton’s stone canopy, including the marriage of the Emperor and Empress per­formed by a bishop, the Empress’s trial and her reconciliation with her husband. Only one other pictorial rendering of this particular legend has been noted in England, in the slightly later wall-paintings of Eton College Chapel. However, it occurs frequently in medieval literature, including Chaucer’s Man of Lawe’s Tale. There can be no doubt, therefore, of its relevance for the legal profession. Sekyngton did not appropriate Bauchun’s chapel, but amplified its imagery to provide a reference to its legal function. The carvings combined Biblical and present time, personal piety and commemoration. To those summoned to appear before the Consistory Court, the bosses provided a moral exemplar and evocation of the powers of Our Lady, in whose dedicated space the Court was held. The presence of a large image of the Pietà, or Our Lady of Com­passion, at the side of the altar was a potent reminder to the judge and lawyers that justice should be tempered with mercy. The mortal remains of both Bauchun and Sekyngton were watched over by representations of Our Lady, through whose interces­ sion their eternal salvation could be secured and to whom the prayers of those entering the chapel were offered. The corbel carvings both memorialised Sekyngton’s ‘good works’ in enriching the fabric and his personal devotion to the Pietà as well as ac­k nowledging his earthly status. The Pietà was a subject whose primary appeal lay in the emotional response evoked by sight. The capacity of this particular image to embody a subtle range of meanings could be conveyed with greater effect visually than by means of the written word. It is not surprising therefore, that literary texts like the first poem quoted in this paper should claim to have found their inspiration in the viewing of a pictorial representation. The second verse of Lydgate’s poem also refers to an image: Tofor which was sett out in picture Of Marie an ymage ful notable, Lyke a pyte depeynt was the figure With weepyng eyen, and cheer most lamentable: Thouh the proporcioun by crafft was agreable, Hir look doun cast with teerys al bereyned, – Of hertly sorwe so soore she was constreyned.

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One copy of the poem has a pen drawing of Our Lady of Pity with a man kneeling before it (Fig. 2).36 Particularly with the Pietà, form and function elided. The emotive power of an image might depend as much on the painter or carver’s ‘crafft’ (presuma­bly a reference to the way the image was fashioned) as on the subject-matter. The carvers of the English alabasters did not produce a standard image of Our Lady of Pity, but offered variations on the theme. The displacement of almost all of the insular Pie­tàs makes it impossible to establish whether there was any correlation between par­ ticular variants and function or context. Only the bloody tears of the Thame mural can be linked to its function as an altar image. Agency belonged to the craftsmen in focus­ing the viewer’s response, but it also belonged to viewers like Sekyngton. The con­junction of a contemporary document and the survival of a favoured image (if not the principal one) still in its original space is unique in England. Even this gives no insight into the factors which led Sekyngton to elect for burial in and enhancement of the Bauchun Chapel. It is only the poetry and Margery Kempe’s narrative which provide glimpses of the emotional intensity generated by images of Our Lady of Pity in the urban centres and villages of late medieval England. Acknowledgements I am indebted to Malcolm Baker for kindly reading a draft of this paper and for his constructive comments. The illustrations are reproduced from photographs taken by the author, except for those used with the kind permission of the following: 2, the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge; 3, the Master and Fellows of Keble Colle­ge, Oxford; 5, Musée national du Moyen Âge (Thermes et hôtel de Cluny, Paris); 6, the Board of Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; 7, 12, the National Monuments Record, Swindon; 10, the Conway Library, Courtauld Institute of Art, London.

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MacCracken, Lydgate, p. 268.

XXIV A Late Medieval Pilgrimage Cult: Master John Schorn of North Marston and Windsor

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ust over one hundred and thirty years ago, the Revd W. Sparrow Simpson published in the Journal of the British Archaeological Association an account of a journey he had recently made into the Vale of Aylesbury to visit the village of North Marston. The narrative contains the following passage: From Winslow North Marston is distant some four miles in a southerly direction. The road lies through a small village bearing the euphonious, though scarcely correct, name of Grandborough, named evidently on the locus a non lucendo principle. North Marston itself has few buildings of interest save the church and well, unless an inn, whose sign is ‘the Armed Yeoman’, may for that unusual title be thought worthy of notice. The church is pleasantly situated on a gently rising ground of sufficient height to give those who are willing to ascend the tower a very charming view of fertile pasture land, studded with villages and churches: and though, perhaps, without any very striking features, yet full of that calm pastoral beauty which adds so great a charm to many an English landscape.1 Sparrow Simpson’s purpose in undertaking this journey was not principally to extol the attractions of rural north Buckinghamshire. He was an antiquarian W. Sparrow Simpson, ‘Master John Schorn: His Church and Well at North Marston, Buckinghamshire‘, ]ournal of the British Archaeological Association (afterwards JBAA), 23 (1867), pp. 370–71 (the full article appears on 370–78). He preceded this article by another in the same issue of the Journal, entitled ‘On Master John Schorn’, pp. 256–68. A third followed two years later: ‘Master John Schorn: His Effigy in Painted Glass’, ibid., 25 (1869), pp. 334–44. 1

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scholar whose interest had been aroused by an artefact he had seen at one of the Association’s meetings. The object in question was a pilgrim badge of Master John Schorn, a medieval rector of North Marston. Although his cult had been suppressed at the Reformation, his memory was preserved in village folklore and he was known to the county antiquaries. Several pilgrim badges like the one which aroused Sparrow Simpson’s curiosity were by his day in the collections of fellow antiquaries, but it was Sparrow Simpson who explored the subject more fully than anyone else had done. His researches were meticulous and have stood the test of time. Since then, a number of scholars have taken an interest in this cult, notably Brian Spencer on the large numbers of pilgrim badges which have come to light in recent years.2 What is known about Schorn in documentary sources and visual representations is therefore already in the public domain. Accordingly, this paper concentrates on three particular aspects. First, the remarkably plentiful visual evidence for his cult in the 14th century; secondly, the impact of the translation of his relics to Windsor. Finally, an attempt will be made to place the cult within the context of the history of English late medieval pilgrimage. Like so many pre-Reformation objects of devotion, Schorn is a shadowy figure. No written vita is extant and his fame is predicated as much, if not more, on his visual representations as on texts. The bare outlines of his career have been clarified by A. B. Emden. By 1273 he had come into the purview of the Augustinian priory of Dunstable. In that year he was admitted as rector of its parish church at Steppingley, Bedfordshire. The living was vacant by May 1282, presumably because of his presentation as rector of North Marston, which was also one of Dunstable’s churches. Here Schorn remained until his death in March 1314.3 A copy of what purports to be his will, dated 9 May 1313, was made in the early 16th century. The Latin is not formulaic and is couched in rhetorical phrases: he leaves what is God’s to God (i.e. his soul); what is earth’s to the earth (his body) and divides his worldly goods between his ‘orators’ (his chantry priests?) in the world and the poor who will bear them to heaven, that he might find them there again. He instructed his body to be buried before the high altar of North Marston,

B. Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs and Secular Badges Medieval Finds from Excavations in London: 7 (London, 1998); the Schorn material is described on pp. 8–10, 192–95. 3 A. B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to a.d. 1500 (Oxford 1959), iii, p. 1697; Victoria County History, Buckinghamshire, I (afterwards VCH), ed. W. Page, (London, 1905), pp. 288–89, citing Bishop Dalderby’s Register. 2

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a prime sepulchral site often reserved for incumbents.4 In 1478–80 Schorn’s body was transferred to St George’s Chapel, Windsor. What else is known about the ‘real’ as opposed to the constructed Schorn? William of Worcester said that he was at Oxford, and in 15thand 16th-century representations he is usually labelled as ‘Magister’ and depicted sometimes with a book (a signifier of learning), or pulpit and vested in an academic hood or cap of a Doctor of Divinity (Figs 4–6). He might appear, therefore, as a model learned cleric who spurned the opportunities offered by his education for advancement and remained in his parish serving his flock for more than three decades. As such, Schorn was no different from several other saintly parish clergy around whom cults grew and who, like him, were never officially canonized. The tomb of Richard of Caister, vicar of St Stephen’s Norwich, attracted pilgrims (including Margery Kempe) from his death in 1420 and was sufficiently popular to warrant the production of pilgrim badges.5 Around Schorn there developed a thaumaturgical cult. In August 1538 Dr John Stokesley, bishop of London, one of the royal commissioners for the rooting-out of superstitious practices, mentioned that Schorn was much sought after for the ague.6 That this was not an invention by reformers to discredit veneration of the Schorn cult is shown by the existence of two copies of a set of verses, one written on the flyleaf of a 15th-century Book of Hours, purchased in 1949 by the dean and canons of Windsor and the other in a manuscript principally of medical receipts and prescriptions. In addition to extolling Schorn’s virtues as a priest (‘gem of pastors, flower of teachers, light of preachers’, etc.), his qualities as a miraculous healer are catalogued:

4 London, British Library, Lansdowne MS 762, fol. 2. The verses are transcribed in Sparrow Simpson, ‘On Master John Schorn’, pp. 267–68 and partly translated in VCH, Bucks., i, p. 289 n.1. 5 For Richard of Caister, see B. Spencer, Medieval Pilgrim Badges from Norfolk (Norfolk Museums Service, 1980), p. 25; idem, Salisbury Museum Medieval Catalogue Part 2: Pilgrim Souvenirs and Secular Badges (Salisbury, 1990), pp. 46–47. Schorn and Richard of Caister were not an insular phenomenon. André Vauchez has noted that saint-priests began to occur from the second half of the 13th century in Western France and Tuscany. Like Schorn, these were highly educated men who chose to live amongst and minister to humble rural flocks (A. Vauchez, Sainthood in the later Middle Ages, trans. J. Birrell (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 310–15). 6 Calendar of Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, XIII, pt ii (London, 1893) (afterwards Letters and Papers), p. 92, no. 235.

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Hail, help of the sick, medicine of those harassed by the pain of fevers [i.e. the ague] Hail, light of the eyes, liberator of the weak from the toothache Hail, thou who art the rescuer of all the drowned by thy prayers.7 Schorn seemingly had some medical knowledge. He was closely associated with a well at North Marston whose waters were both abundant and said to possess curative properties, particularly in connection with colds and fevers. According to the legend, the rector discovered this well in a time of great drought by striking the ground with a staff, upon which there gushed forth a perennial spring. The abundance of this well was still apparent in the middle of the 19th century during the height of summer.8 Another of the verses quoted above referred to Schorn as a conqueror of demons; more specifically, Stokesley stated that ‘at Merston Mr. Johan Schorn stands blessing a boot, whereunto they say he conveyed the Devil’; this is likely to be a reference to rheumatic fever or gout, in which case the reading of the image is inverted: the devil ought to be escaping from the boot, that is, Schorn is exorcizing the source of the pain.9 7 The Windsor manuscript is discussed in M. F. Bond, ‘The John Schorn Book of Hours‘, Report of the Friends of St. George’s and the Descendants of the Knights of the Garter (afterwards Friends Report) (1949), pp. 19–26; the Latin verses are translated on pp. 21–22. The article also appears in the Records of Buckinghamshire, 15 (1947–52), pp. 301–07, with a supplementary note recording the discovery of a parchment pocket which may have held a relic associated with John Schorn. The medical manuscript is BL Sloane MS 389, fol. 92r. The meaning of another stanza following those quoted above is more opaque: Hail, heavenly consoler of wretched boys who are in sadness. 8 W. H. Kelke, ‘Master John Shorne, the Marston Saint’, Records of Bucks, 2 (1863), p. 72; Letters and Papers, XIII, pt ii, 92, no. 235; Sparrow Simpson, ‘Master John Schorn: His Church and Well’, p. 373. 9 Kelke, ‘Master John Schorne’, p. 73.

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North Marston The pre-Reformation verses in the two sources date to well over a century after Schorn’s death. The text in British Library, Sloane MS 389 was written in the late 15th or the early 16th century and the insertion of the same verses in the Windsor Book of Hours post-dates the production of the manuscript in c. 1430 to 1450. There are no documentary sources concerning the origins and early history of the cult. Fortunately, the cult has left extensive physical traces. The east end of the south aisle of North Marston church is distinguished by its lavish embellishment (Fig. 1). The east window with quite elaborate tracery has two image niches recessed into the jambs and has four-leaf flower carvings in the arch; the same pattern occurs on the capitals of the pier and east respond, which have elaborate mouldings. At one time this area was screened-off to form a separate space. The squint aligned on the high altar (blocked when the original chancel was replaced by a larger structure in the 15th century) and piscina confirm that an altar stood underneath the east window. In 1947–48 the removal of a wooden dado revealed in the north-east corner a small recess with a gabled head and the same four-leaved decoration found elsewhere in the chapel; its floor is made up of two-colour glazed tiles (Fig. 3). The height of the recess is 24 in., the width 17 in. and the depth 13 in.10 In the north wall is a larger opening, which on the nave side has a cusped head and is framed by carved flowers including some of the familiar design. There is a narrow frieze of the same flowers on the string-course linking the opening with the east wall of the chapel. On the chapel side are the stumps of two iron bars originally forming a grille across the opening (Fig. 2). The dating of these features to the middle of the 14th century is unlikely to be very wide of the mark.11 The small recess and the large opening and the elaborate treatment of this space, points to this being the locus of John Schorn’s cult, as E. C. Rouse suggested.12 The space is constricted and there is no trace of any structure resembling the elaborate Decorated shrine-bases in the vicinity at Dorchester,

Notes by E. C. Rouse in Records of Bucks, 15 (1947–52), pp. 79, 145. Royal Commission on Historical Monuments England (afterwards RCHME), An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in Buckinghamshire, 2 (London, 1913), pp. 224–25. 12 Rouse in Records of Bucks, p. 143. 10 11

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St Albans and Stanton Harcourt.13 The shape of the opening between the nave and this aisle is ill-suited to contain a shrine; what, therefore, was the function of this opening and the low recess? I suggest that the former housed his relic of the boot from which the devil was miraculously conjured; the site and shape of the recess have every appearance of being designed for the insertion of the pilgrim’s foot with the hope of effecting a cure for gout. In order for this to occur, Schorn’s bodily remains must have been in close proximity to the recess, most probably in the south-west corner of the chancel. This hypothesis gains support from the presence of a small opening in the first floor of the two-storey structure attached to the north wall of the chancel, which is not aligned on the high altar but permits the occupant to view the middle of the chancel; the room, which is equipped with a fireplace, could have functioned, like the wooden structure at St Albans, as a watching-chamber over Schorn’s remains. What do these features tell us about Schorn’s cult? First, that those aspects of the cult which appealed in the late 15th and the early 16th century reflected the character of the cult from the beginning. Secondly, that within a few decades of Schorn’s death, the cult was sufficiently flourishing to warrant investment in the construction of a permanent setting for veneration. Thirdly, in order for this to happen, the cult must have found a measure of official sanction, which was not always the case. In the late 14th century, the bishop of Exeter expressed his disapproval of the veneration which had arisen for Richard Boyle, incumbent of Whitestone.14 Indeed, only a few years before Schorn’s death, his bishop, Oliver Sutton, showed himself to be a stickler over unauthorized pilgrimages in the archdeaconry of Buckingham. He took vigorous action against sites where miraculous healings were reported, one of which was a well at Linslade, exploited by the vicar for financial advantage. It was not, therefore, an easy matter for a site in this part of the Lincoln diocese to win episcopal approval.15 For these and others, see N. Coldstream, ‘English Decorated Shrine Bases’, JBAA, 129 (1976), pp. 15–54. 14 J. Sumption, Pilgrimage An image of Mediaeval Religion (London, 1975), p. 269. Parish clergy were also enjoined to warn their flocks against venerating or making pilgrimages to relics which were not approved by the church. See G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1933), p. 148, citing Cilium Oculis Sacerdotis, BL Harleian MS 4968, fol. 43v. 15 R. M. T. Hill ed., The Rolls and Register of Bishop Oliver Sutton 1280–1299 Volume V, Lincoln Record Society, LX (1965), pp. 143–44, 212; eadem, Volume VI, Lincoln Record Society, LXIV (1969), pp. 186–87. 13

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1. North Marston, Bucks.: east end of the nave south aisle.

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2. North Marston, Bucks.: opening between the nave proper and the east end of the nave south aisle.

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3. North Marston, Bucks.: recess in the east wall of the nave south aisle.

4. Totternhoe stone mould for Schorn pilgrim badges (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford).

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5. Schorn pilgrim badge (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford).

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6. Gateley, Norfolk: figure of Schorn (detail) painted on the chancel screen.

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The traces at North Marston shed light on the culture of pilgrimage in 14th-century England. They illuminate a ‘popular’ devotion as opposed to a cult which achieved official recognition by an entry in liturgical calendars; Schorn also failed to be included in Caxton’s anglicized editions of The Golden Legend. North Marston was but one landmark in a spiritual landscape which from at least the 14th century covered England (and Wales) in a network of pilgrimage sites. Often these comprised a miracle-working image of the Virgin (images of Our Lady at Caversham, Doncaster, Ipswich, Lincoln, Walsingham and Willesden were amongst the most famous), or (like Schorn) a saintly figure about whose body and/or associated features miracles occurred. Two well-known episcopal examples of the latter are Thomas Cantelupe (d. 1282) at Hereford and Edmund Lacy (d. 1455) at Exeter.16 Many such cults have left few, if any, traces in the records, but it seems that no Englishman or woman was far from a cult centre of one kind or another. This was a topography whose contours were constantly changing as cults waxed and waned and their clientele might alter even within a few years. Most were short-lived and some were principally confined to the locality of the cult centre, as for example that of Cantelupe.17 In his anthropological study of religion and society in Spain during the 1960s, William Christian, jun., described the geographical boundaries within which cults were efficacious as ‘territories of grace’.18 During the later Middle Ages, the archdeaconry of Buckingham contained several territories of grace. Apart from North Marston, the only other one to have left any traces is the chapel originally attached to the west end of Bradwell Abbey church (now in Milton Keynes), erected probably in the second quarter of the 14th century to house a cult image of the Virgin; the wall-paintings, which appear to have been added a few decades later, include pilgrims holding ex-votos of the afflicted parts of their bodies which had U. M. Radford, ‘The Wax Images found in Exeter Cathedral’, Antiquaries ]ournal, 29 (1949), pp. 164–68. 17 On Cantelupe, see R. C. Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (London, 1995), chapter 10. The brief popularity of two Norwich bishops at whose tombs miracles were reported can be measured by the records of oblations; see J. R. Shinners, jun., ‘The Veneration of Saints at Norwich Cathedral in the Fourteenth Century’, Norfolk Archaeology, 40 (1987–89), pp. 137–38. 18 W. A. Christian, jun., Person and God in a Spanish Valley, new revised edn (Princeton, 1989), p. 44: the territory of grace is ‘an area over which its [the cult or cult image] benevolent power seems especially manifest’. 16

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been cured. The Bradwell Virgin evidently was of purely local appeal: only one will, from Buckinghamshire and dated 1521/2, refers to the image.19 St Rumbold, the short-lived child (he lasted three days) of a Northumbrian king and his Mercian wife, whose relics were in Buckingham church, endured more lasting fame. In 1477 provision for a new shrine was made by a testator. On the eve of the Reformation, pilgrimages (at least some undertaken as punishment for heresy) were still taking place to St Rumbold as well as to North Marston and to other cult sites in the archdeaconry, namely Missenden (an image of Our Lady) and Wendover (a Rood). The image of the Assumption of the Virgin in the collegiate chapel at Eton was another popular late-medieval focus of devotion in the area.20 Buckingham, Wendover and Great Missenden were all settlements on major routes. Their miracle-working images and relics, therefore, were accessible not only to their denizens, for whom they could act as a symbol of local identity, but also to folk from the vicinity who attended the markets and to travellers. The presence of such images could be beneficial to the local economy: at Buckingham a hostelry known as ‘The Pilgrim’s Inn’ formerly stood at the west end of the church.21 Probably most of these cults served a predominantly local clientele. As such, they performed a valuable function for those who could not afford, or were too elderly or infirm, to undertake arduous pilgrimages to distant shrines. Recourse could readily be had to them for cures and in times of personal difficulties. As local holy figures, they were attuned to the needs and supplications of the residents of their territory of grace, to whom the miracle-working images and relics were special friends, neighbours and protectors.22 19 E. C. Rouse, ‘Bradwell Abbey and the Chapel of St. Mary’, Milton Keynes Journal of Archaeology and History, 2 (1973), pp. 34–38; D. C. Mynard, ‘Excavations at Bradwell Priory’, ibid., 3 (1974), pp. 31–66. 20 D. J. Elliott, Buckingham The Loyal and Ancient Borough (Chichester, 1975), pp. 2–3, 121–24. The bequest for the new shrine was made by Sir Richard Fowler, chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster under Edward IV and a local estate owner. Sparrow Simpson, ‘Master John Schorn: His Effigy’, p. 339 quotes Foxe on penitential pilgrimage to John Schorn, St Rumbold and the images at Missenden and Wendover. For Eton, see Spencer, Salisbury Museum, pp. 29–30. 21 Elliott, Buckingham, p. 186; the existence of a fraternity, of which St Rumbold was co-patron, would also have helped reinforce communal identity (ibid., pp. 163–65). 22 Sumption, Pilgrimage, p. 279; Spencer, Salisbury Museum, p. 24; Christian, Person and God, pp. 61–78. The subject of pilgrimage has attracted attention across the disciplinary

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Of these Buckinghamshire cults, the only ones to have enjoyed a wider domain were Our Lady of Eton and John Schorn. From the 15th century, many established pilgrimage sites, apart from those associated with the Virgin, were in decline, albeit without ceasing to be a significant cultural phenomenon.23 Schorn’s cult is the exception that proves the rule, in that far from falling into obscurity after a brief fame, it was of long duration. In the early 16th century, Schorn’s territory of grace embraced the southern half of England and, if the polemics of the reformist literature are to be believed, his popularity approached that of the famous image of Our Lady at Walsingham.24 Precisely when and how this came about is not as certain as has been assumed. The records are silent as to the extent of Schorn’s spiritual domain in the 14th and most of the 15th century. Moreover, much of the evidence for the strength and dissemination of the cult is in the form of wills and screen-paintings, which only survive in quantity from the 1480s onwards. The only notice between the construction of the apparatus of the cult at North Marston and the translation of Schorn’s mortal remains to Windsor in 1478–80 is open to conflicting interpretations. In 1448 an entrepreneurial incumbent of North Marston was arraigned before the bishop of Lincoln’s court on a charge of blasphemy. Walter Bird or Budde, no doubt in an attempt to augment income, had added to the attractions of the site by exhuming a head from the churchyard, sprinkling it with blood and claiming it as the head of John Schorn.25 This episode could be seen as an effort to refresh a moribund cult (literally) by an infusion of boundaries. Apart from Christian, see V. and E. Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. Anthropological Perspectives (Oxford, 1978). There is a useful summary of current debates between anthropologists and historians in S. Coleman and J. Elsner, Pilgrimage Past and Present in the World Religions (London, 1995), pp. 196–213, see also idem, ‘Pilgrimage to Walsingham and the Re-Invention of the Middle Ages’, in Pilgrimage Explored, ed. J. Stopford (Woodbridge, 1999), pp. 189–214, esp. pp. 191–93. P. Brown, The Cult of the Saints. Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago, 1981) remains a seminal text. 23 Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims, pp. 193–96; Sumption, Pilgrimage, pp. 279–80. 24 Bishop Latimer, in preaching against pilgrimage, links Schorn and the image of the Virgin at Walsingham; see Sparrow Simpson, ‘On Master John Schorn’, pp. 259–63 for this and other derogatory comments. 25 A. Hamilton Thompson, The English Clergy and their Organization in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1947), p. 238. This entry in Bishop Alnwick’s Court Book is discussed in B. Spencer, ‘King Henry of Windsor and the London Pilgrim’, Collectanea Londinensia, London and Middlesex Archaeological Society Special Paper 2 (1978), pp. 239–40.

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fresh blood; alternatively, it could signify that the cult was still flourishing at this date and Bird was merely attempting to increase the value of his church’s principal asset. The handsome Perpendicular chancel might seem at first sight to contribute something to the debate. It has been suggested that it was constructed at the expense of the dean and canons of Windsor as compensation for the loss of Schorn’s relics. No documentary evidence has emerged on the building history. The design and architectural features are equally inconclusive, as they do not permit a more precise dating than between c. 1460 and 1490. A figure of John Schorn holding his boot and the devil was in the east window glazing.26 The only fabric clue might be the opening from the vestry into the chancel, mentioned above; if this was indeed designed to keep an eye on Schorn’s body, it would only have served its purpose if the relics were still present. If the exploitation of Schorn’s relics as a source of income was a major consideration, it is improbable (to say the least) that the dean and canons would willingly underwrite the costs of such a handsome rebuilding of the chancel. Their appropriation in 1501 of the vicarage of North Marston in compensation for the loss of income from a grant of land made by Edward IV, which had been withheld, does not suggest that Windsor intended anything but asset-stripping at Schorn’s old parish.27 The last piece of evidence is the stone mould for casting Schorn pilgrim badges found within a few miles of North Marston at Edlesborough; this has been dated to the middle of the 15th century. However, it is notoriously difficult to establish a chronology for the later badges and, as we shall see, it is conceivable that the mould post-dates the translation (Fig. 4).28

26 Bond, ‘The John Schorn Book of Hours’, p. 307, suggests that the chancel was donated by Windsor after the translation of the relics; also E. C. Rouse, ‘John Schorne’s Well at North Marston’, Records of Bucks, 18 (1966–70), p. 434. In VCH, Bucks, 4, p. 78 and RCHME, Bucks., 2, p. 223, the chancel is merely ascribed to the 15th century; this is qualified on p. 224 in RCHME by dating the east window to the late 15th century. I am indebted to Dr Christopher Wilson for his views on the dating of the chancel. Browne Willis noted the glass figure (quoted in Sparrow Simpson, ‘Master John Schorn: His Effigy’, p. 343). 27 Windsor, St George’s Chapel Archives, Denton Cartulary, IV. B. 3, fol. 186. I owe this reference to Dr Eileen Scarff. 28 Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs. . .London, p. 9 (caption to fig. 6B); the mould is also published in S. John, ‘The Blessed John Schorne Pilgrim badges from medieval Buckinghamshire’, The Ashmolean, 34 (Spring/Summer 1998), pp. 8–9.

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North Marston and Windsor A definitive answer to the question of the strength and geographical extent of Schorn’s veneration prior to 1478 in the present state of knowledge is impossible; nonetheless, it is unlikely that Windsor would have attempted to revive a moribund cult.29 Whatever the strength of devotion to Schorn at North Marston in the 15th century, it must have been transformed by the translation of his relics to St George’s Chapel, Windsor.30 Why the canons of Dunstable, who owned the advowson of North Marston, and the parishioners consented to the loss of their saintly rector and most valuable asset is another question which cannot be answered. Bishop Richard Beauchamp, dean and master of the works at Windsor, was a powerful figure. There are some indications that the initiative could have emanated from Edward IV, who might have suffered from the ague.31 Even if he did not, he had compelling reasons to enhance the attractions of his new chapel. The royal patent by which Dunstable exchanged North Marston for another church states that this exchange was at the king’s request. Moreover, the justification for the appropriation by the dean and canons of North Marston vicarage was that it was in compensation for the withholding ‘by great men’ of lands worth 400 marks per year, which Edward IV had granted to St George’s. Derek Eastman has suggested that the transaction was an attempt to draw away pilgrims from Henry VI’s tomb at Chertsey Abbey to Windsor.32 Whatever the spiritual benefits that might have been intended to reach a wider audience through Schorn’s relocation to a royal chapel, there seems

29 For Norwich examples of abortive attempts to revive cults, see Shinners, ‘Veneration’, pp. 133–44. 30 For the sequence of events (which contains some gaps), see W. H. St. John Hope, Windsor Castle: An Architectural History, ii, (London, 1913) pp. 411–12. 31 Pamela Lady Wedgwood drew my attention to the possibility that Edward IV suffered from the ague. No contemporary sources mention this, the only reference being by the Tudor chronicler Edward Hall, which Professor Ross discounted. C. Ross, Edward IV (London, 1974), pp. 414–15. 32 Calendar of the Patent Rolls: Edward IV, Edward V, Richard III a.d. 1476–85 (London, 1901), p. 181; St George’s Chapel Archives, Denton Cartulary (IV. B. 3, fol. 186). This text also refers to ‘the great offerings at the tomb of Sir John Shorne’. I am grateful to Dr Eileen Scarff for this reference. D. Eastman, ‘John Schorn’, Friends Report (1979–80), p. 19.

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little doubt that immediate pecuniary advantages loomed large in the minds of Beauchamp and the Windsor chapter: pilgrims could be a useful source of income for the ongoing building campaign. Windsor’s outlay on its new purveyor of grace was pretty minimal. Apart from an entreclose screen and a collecting box for oblations, a new container for the relics was provided at some stage. This was a modest affair. The accounts for its construction are incomplete, but it seems to have been a painted wooden chest rather than the elaborate metalwork structure usually provided for important saintly bodies. The painting of the chest cost no more than £5 and the ironwork £3. Contrary to what has been written, this is a paltry sum to devote to the housing of holy relics. The expenditure pales into insignificance compared with the more than £60 lavished in 1418 on workmanship and silver-gilt for the refurbishment of the image of Our Lady at the high altar in the former chapel.33 The closest extant approximations to Schorn’s reliquary would appear to be the south German container for the relics of St Boniface in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the reliquary chest of St Ursula painted by Hans Memling for St John’s Hospital in Bruges; both have scenes from the lives of the respective saints, although the possibility that the Schorn pictorial embellishment matched the quality of Memling’s work may be considered remote. The absence of any visual signifiers of Schorn in the fabric of the chapel may also indicate a certain degree of circumspection about the cult on the part of Beauchamp and his colleagues. Whilst the Cross Gneth and Henry VI’s arms were represented on the vault bosses of the south quire aisle, where the relics were displayed, no such recognition was afforded to John Schorn. Perhaps the boot with the devil poking out of it lacked sufficient gravitas for inclusion in such recherché company. The chapter also made no attempt to obtain Schorn’s official canonization at Rome, always an expensive and uncertain exercise and one which, because of the longstanding status of the cult, was unnecessary. The enterprise was not without risk of failure for Windsor as well as North Marston. Removal of relics by sale or theft could rupture the cultural nexus which gave them their peculiar significance. The virtues and apotropaic 33 St. John Hope, Windsor Castle, ii, pp. 411, 459; the bill of 1418 is mentioned on pp. 374, 395 n. 6. The year of the bills for the shrine and box is lacking, but the work seems likely to have been done some time after the translation of the bones. The individuals named in the bills occur in the period c. 1518 to 1532 and certainly not before 1515. The painter was one Thomas Turnar. Again, I owe this information to Dr Scarff.

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qualities of the relics might not be transferred to the new destination; for its part, the original locus could lose its association with the sacred.34 If such misgivings nestled in the bosoms of the dean and canons, they would have been dispelled by the popularity of their new acquisition. Tidings of the new resting-place of Schorn’s bones were circulated very quickly through clerical and other networks. In November 1483, John Tyzard of Cratfield in Suffolk bequeathed 13s. 4d. for a man to go on pilgrimage to Canterbury, Woolpit, Walsingham and to Master John Schorn.35 Soon afterwards, the body of this long-dead Buckingham­shire cleric found itself sharing space with the most illustrious of bones. In 1484 the remains of Henry VI were transferred from Chertsey to Windsor and attracted devotion, especially after the accession of Henry VII. Schorn’s cult basked in the reflected glory of the martyred monarch. There in the recently completed east end of the south quire aisle, the bones of the king and the rector shared a small relics zone with the Cross Gneth. Brian Spencer has argued persuasively that there was a degree of conflation between the two cults, drawing out parallels between their exemplary lives. On one side there is Henry VI, endowed with all the moral qualities of the model priest and on the other there is Schorn, the model priest himself. The king was possessed of the devil in his bouts of insanity and the priest exorcized the devil. Both possessed healing powers, including resuscitation after drowning. According to William Lambarde, Henry’s old velvet hat was placed on the heads of Windsor pilgrims as a cure for headache and John Schorn’s famous curative boot evidently accompanied his bones to Windsor.36 Possibly these two items were placed in the pair of facing niches in the aisle, where they were once protected by iron bars. With the bones of a saintly English king and a saintly English priest, plus the heart of England’s patron saint and numerous other relics, Windsor had much to offer pilgrims. To expect items of apparel associated with Henry and Schorn to be treated with the reverence and solemnity due to the authenticated 34 On this subject, see P. J. Geary, Furta Sacra Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages, rev. edn (Princeton, 1990), pp. 7–9. 35 I am indebted to Peter Northeast for permitting me to cite his transcript of this will. 36 Spencer, ‘King Henry’, pp. 243, 249. He suggests that the mutual interdependence of the two cults was expressed visually in those pilgrim souvenirs of Henry VI bearing flowerspikes, which may represent transpositions of the flowering rod on some of the Schorn badges; Lambarde is quoted in J. L. Nevinson and J. A. Hudson, ‘Sir John Schorne and his Boot’, Country Life, 131 (Jan–June 1962), p. 468; for Schorn’s boot there is Foxe’s testimony in Sparrow Simpson, ‘Master John Schorn: His Effigy’, p. 340.

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relics displayed in St George’s Chapel was, however, a step too far.37 What was the fate of Shorn’s cult at North Marston after the transfer of his relics to Windsor? The dean and canons, of course, retained an interest in Marston through possession of the advowson. Adjustments to the structure of veneration must have been necessitated by the loss of the body and boot. The village still possessed one feature associated with the good rector which was not removable, the well and its curative waters. Kelke reproduced a ground plan of the well as it existed in his day, before subsequent alterations. It was 5 ft 4 in. square, with a shelf around three sides and an entrance slip. E.C. Rouse suggested that these features were all of 15th-century date; if he was correct, the well might have been refurbished to provide a fitting focus for miraculous healing after 1478–80.38 The church would have remained a place of sanctity through being linked intimately with a holy man and the site where his relics once reposed. The act of placing one’s foot in the recess in proximity (Fig. 3), would still retain its potency. In addition, an image (almost certainly of wood) of the good rector evidently formed an effective surrogate for the corporeal relics. In the eyes of reformers like Dr Stokesley, devotees were unable to distinguish between image and saint and therefore perceived that the former had absorbed the virtues of the original body and become a source of miraculous cures in its own right: ‘At Merston Mr. Johan Schorn stands blessing a boot, whereunto they say he conveyed the Devil. He is much sought for the ague’. The image, therefore, counted as a superstitious one and was marked out for destruction.39 This image would have been installed soon after 1478–80, if it was not already in existence. It is mentioned first in 1519, when a villager bequeathed 1lb of wax to the light which burned before it.40 A likely location for the image is the niche on the north side of the south aisle east window, which would permit a suppliant simultaneously to place their foot in the recess and touch the image (Fig. 1). The elaborate canopied niche framing the half-length figure of Schorn on 37 St George’s heart was given by the Emperor Sigismund on his investiture with the Garter in 1416; M. F. Bond ed., The Inventories of St. George’s Chapel Windsor Castle 1384– 1667 (Windsor, 1947), p. 56 n. 2. 38 Kelke, ‘Master John Schorne’, pp. 70–71 and Rouse, ‘John Schorne’s Well’, p. 433. 39 Letters and Papers, XIII pt ii, p. 92, no. 235. It was pulled down by James Mallett, steward (Windsor, St George’s Chapel Archives, Frith’s New Register, IV. B. 5, 128). I owe this reference to Dr Scarff. 40 E. M. Elvey ed., The Courts of the Archdeaconry of Buckingham, 1483–1523, Buckinghamshire Record Society, XIX (1975), pp. 254–55.

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the Edlesborough mould might even refer to the thaumaturgical image at North Marston, rather than the bones at Windsor; important images were often placed in canopied settings (Fig. 4). If the image hypothesis is correct, the mould is more likely to date from after, rather than prior to, 1478–80.41 This canopy is considered to be the most prominent of several features by which the North Marston pilgrim badges are distinguishable from those linked with the Windsor relics. The differences override minor design variations. In the ‘North Marston’ type, the half-length figure of Schorn is in a pulpit; in one hand he holds the boot containing the devil, in the other the flowering staff which he used as a diviner to locate the spring. The ‘Windsor’ version also has the devil in the boot, but Schorn stands full-length and holds either a book or a rosary (Fig. 5).42 Both types share a common sign (the boot and the devil), but two more or less distinct identities are constructed. One emphasizes his role as a preacher and healer, as is appropriate for the locus of his ministry and site of his cures. In the second, the stress is on Schorn’s body, entirely appropriate for a potent keepsake from the site of his corporeal remains. The presence of these relics in a royal showcase and easily accessible by water must have boosted the cult. The majority of the more than seventy Schorn badges of both kinds which have been discovered so far probably date from after the Windsor relocation. An example of the ‘Marston’ type has been discovered at Shenley in Buckinghamshire, but otherwise both kinds have appeared at several sites in London, Salisbury and Canterbury.43 At Faversham in Kent an image of John Schorn was in existence in 1515, which may lend credence to the notion that he had some connection with the village of Shorne in the same county.44 On the other hand, Faversham lay on one of the major pilgrimage routes to Canterbury and Schorn’s representation here may reflect a certain interdependence between the two cults. No souvenirs have been recovered in the north of England, nor are any listed in the published catalogues of pilgrim badges found on the Continent.

See above, p. 597. The distinction between the basic designs is made by Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs. . . London, p. 193. 43 Idem, ‘King Henry’, pp. 257–59; Salisbury Museum, pp. 56–57. 44 L. L. Duncan and A. Hussey eds., Testamenta Cantiana, Kent Archaeological Society Kent Records (1906–07), p. 127 (East Kent); Sparrow Simpson, ‘Master John Schorn: His Effigy’, p. 341. 41 42

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However, Schorn’s territory of grace in the early 16th century extended west of Salisbury and east of London. The geographical spread of his cult is confirmed by his presence on screen-paintings in Devon (Alphington, Hennock and Wolborough) and Norfolk and Suffolk (Cawston, Gateley, Suffield and Sudbury) and in glass (a lost figure which in 1838 belonged to a resident of Bury St Edmunds). The dating evidence for the Cawston and Gateley screen-paintings indicates that they were executed after 1485 and the same appears likely on stylistic grounds for all of the others.45 The iconography is of the ‘Windsor’ type, with Schorn shown standing with the devil in the boot (Fig. 6). He is vested as a Doctor of Divinity on all of them, except for Hennock and Wolborough, where he is represented as a deacon. Schorn enjoyed a particular vogue in East Anglia. Apart from the paintings, in 1508 a Northamptonshire man desired burial before his image in Binham Priory. Moreover, the Suffolk testator mentioned above who wanted a posthumous pilgrimage was not alone; in 1498/9 a Norfolk man made the same request.46 The presence of both Schorn and Henry VI on the Gateley screen may indicate an attempt to promote the Windsor pilgrimage; alternatively the images might have been donated by a parishioner who had already accomplished it. Other screens suggest an attempt to promote Schorn’s saintly credentials by association. On the Cawston screen he appears at the end of a sequence of the Apostles and with the four Evangelists on the doors. At Suffield, Schorn’s companions are the four Doctors of the Church and two Evangelists. He is placed next to St John, whose attributes of a winged serpent emerging from a chalice must have been the model for Schorn’s devil and boot.47 Such juxtapositions can only have served to enhance the rector’s credence as a figure worthy of veneration. The Devon 45 S. Cotton, ‘Mediaeval Roodscreens in Norfolk — their Construction and Painting Dates’, Norfolk Archaeology, 40 (1987–89), pp. 47, 48. For the Devon screens, see F. B. Bond and Dom Bede Camm, Roodscreens and Roodlofts, ii (London, 1909), pp. 288, 364; also Nevinson and Hudson, ‘Sir John Schorne’, pp. 467–68; Rouse, ‘John Schorne’s Well’, pls XI, XIIa. The glass is discussed and illustrated by Sparrow Simpson, ‘Master John Schorn: His Effigy’. A curious mural, which apparently depicts Bishop Beauchamp with Schorn’s attributes of the devil and the boot, was found in a house in Long Street, Sherborne, Dorset (and is now in Sherborne Museum), see Eastman, ‘John Schorn’, pp. 21–22, pl. I. 46 R. M. Serjeantson and H. Isham Longden, ‘The Parish Churches and Religious Houses of Northampton­shire: Their Dedications, Altars, Images and Lights’, Archaeological ]ournal, 70 (1913), p. 264; the Norfolk will reference was supplied by Peter Northeast. 47 The link was made by Sparrow Simpson, ‘Master John Schorn: His Effigy’ p. 344. Schorn’s East Anglian screen companions have been identified partly from personal inspection

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screens correspond more closely to Gateley, with Schorn accompanied by cult figures of less exalted status. Although Schorn’s cult had enjoyed remarkable longevity, the modest offerings at the Windsor shrine in 1533–34 indicate that by then it had run its course.48 The varied and ever-growing list of artefacts associated with him form an instructive corrective to the dearth of contemporary written records. There is not a single will of the several hundred which survive for the neighbouring county of Bedfordshire from 1383 until 1537 (the majority from after 1500) which mentions either Schorn or his well. Even in North Marston itself, only one of the thirteen extant pre-Suppression wills extant for the parish refers to the visual signs of his cult and this is the sole reference in the pre-1537 Buckinghamshire wills. As a result, even his local constituency remains anonym­ous. No aristocratic wills mention him and it can be assumed that his appeal was to the populus. The screens and the will references at least show that, in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, his power to attract was not confined to the very poor. It is these widely dispersed screen-paintings, the pilgrim badges and especially the structures at North Marston, which provide a rare glimpse of a system of belief which has been erased almost entirely. Postscript: The Afterlife of a Cult Ironically, the fame of Schorn’s original cult site was destined to outlast that of Windsor. When the Revd Sparrow Simpson made his pilgrimage to North Marston in 1867, Schorn’s name had long been preserved by two very different social groups. References occur in Elizabethan times, in reformist literature and drama. The first scholar to show awareness of the tale was Elias Ashmole, who writing after the Restoration, took a more sympathetic view. He described Schorn as ‘a very devout man, of great veneration with the people’ and stated that the pilgrimage to the North Marston shrine brought in offerings of more than £500 per annum.49 The persistence of folk-memories of Schorn amongst the denizens of North Marston and the neighbouring and partly from W. W. Williamson, ‘Saints on Norfolk Rood-Screens and Pulpits’, Norfolk Archaeology, 31 (1953–57), pp. 323–24, 327–28, 339. 48 St. John Hope, Windsor Castle, ii, p. 411. 49 E. Ashmole, The Institutions, Laws and Ceremonies of the Most Noble Order of the Garter (London, 1672), p. 172.

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villages seems to have been due to the perceived continuing efficacy of the water in the well to soothe their aches and pains. Interestingly, in the absence of any known written vehicle of transmission, the legend must have been passed down orally through the generations. Browne Willis (d. 1760) took an interest in this local lore, recording that ‘within in memory of Persons of decrepid Ages’ a signpost stood a mile to the east on Oving Hill with one of its arms labelled ‘This leads to Sr John Schorn’. He also observed that the story of the devil and the boot remained alive.50 In 1810 the incumbent of North Marston wrote: ‘The common people in this neighbourhood, and more particularly some ancient people of this my own parish, still keep up the memory of this circumstance by many traditionary stories’. 51 This was published in Magna Britannia, thereby bringing the Schorn legend to the attention of the antiquarian world beyond Buckinghamshire. A few years later, Schorn featured in the pages of the Gentleman’s Magazine and again in Notes and Queries during the 1850s and 60s.52 In the 1830s the well was said to be slightly chalybeate (i.e. it contained iron salts) and according to Lipscomb, the county historian, ‘even now it is occasionally resorted to, for the relief of scorbutic and cutaneous diseases’. Kelke, writing in 1863, stated that the North Marston waters were then still used for promoting perspiration in colds, which accords neatly with Schorn’s association with cures for the ague. Sparrow Simpson sought to establish whether local belief had any scientific basis by having the contents of the well analysed by a chemistry professor at St Thomas’s Hospital. He noted that the water was clear, bright and sparkling; after boiling, it was found to contain lime carbonate and traces of magnesia and iron carbonate.53 Perhaps all that can be said is that, at a time when the purity of the water supply in many rural settlements was far from guaranteed, the North Marston villagers were particularly blessed. Whether or not this was due to the

Quoted in Sparrow Simpson, ‘Master John Schorn: His Effigy’, p. 343. St Winifred’s well at Holywell is a remarkable case of pilgrimage continuing long after the Reformation; see D. J. Hall, English Mediaeval Pilgrimage (London, 1965), chapter II. 51 Entry in the parish register transcribed by Kelke, ‘Master John Shorne’, p. 72. 52 D. and S. Lysons, Magna Britannia, i (London, 1806), pp. 603–04; The Gentleman’s Magazine, 90, pt ii (1820), pp. 490, 580–83; Notes and Queries, 1st series, ii (1850), pp. 387–88, 450, 520; 3rd series, vii (1865), pp. 413–14. 53 G. Lipscomb, The History and Antiquities of the County of Buckingham, i (London, 1831), p. 339; Kelke, ‘Master John Shorne’, p. 73; Sparrow Simpson, ‘Master John Schorn: His Church and Well’, pp. 373–74. 50

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miraculous assistance of Master John Schorn lies beyond the competence of the present writer to judge. Today, John Schorn’s well and pump are no longer in use and display all the characteristic decorum of the National Trust, complete with accompanying commem­orative label. The current church guide is very conscious of the ‘Schorn’ heritage, but beyond the village, the echoes of the North Marston rector gradually are becoming fainter. Until recently, a public house named the ‘Devil in the Boot’ stood on the outskirts of the nearby town of Winslow, but this has recently closed. Yet the pilgrim souvenirs continue to turn up, still fulfilling at least one of their intended functions by ensuring that Schorn’s memory is not lost. Acknowledgements I am most grateful for the comments and assistance of Bridget and John Cherry, Peter Northeast, Brian Spencer, Pamela Lady Wedgwood, Dr Eileen Scarff and Dr Christopher Wilson. I am also indebted to Aidan Hart for his expertise on relics and pilgrimage sites. Arthur MacGregor supplied the photographs of the Schorn mould and badge, which are reproduced by kind permission of the Visitors of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. The other illustrations are from my photographs.

XXV Images of Henry VI1

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n March 1502, payments were made to two individuals for undertaking proxy pilgrimages on behalf of Henry VII’s queen, Elizabeth of York. Amongst the host of sites to be visited was King Henry VI’s grave in St George’s Chapel, Windsor.2 Whether Elizabeth’s inclusion of the resting place of the body of a sovereign murdered by her own father’s order was in some measure an expression of contrition is a matter for speculation; the fact that the Windsor pilgrimage was specified alongside long-established medieval Marian cult sites like Walsingham, Caversham and Ipswich, as well as Becket’s shrine and the Holy Blood of Hailes, shows the prominence attached to the cult of Henry VI during the late Middle Ages.3 An important manifestation of the popularity of this cult, its socially diverse nature affirmed by the alleged miracles and wills, was the occurrence of images of the king in parish churches. This article focuses both on those which survive and those attested through contemporary documentation; through them, a series of questions will be addressed.4 What do they tell us about the geographical diffusion of the cult? What do they reveal about the longevity of the devotional pull of the saintly king? What do the representations say about the cult itself? 1 I am indebted to Simon Cotton, Eamon Duffy, Louise Hampson, Nigel Morgan, Peter Northeast, Carole Rawcliffe and Nicholas Rogers for information and helpful comments on this paper. 2 N. H. Nicolas (ed.), Privy Purse Expenses of Elizabeth of York (London, 1830), p. 3. 3 There is no doubt amongst historians that Edward IV was responsible for Henry VI’s death; cf. R. A. Griffiths, The Reign of King Henry VI (London, 1981), p. 892; B. Wolffe, Henry VI (London, 1981), p. 347. 4 Illustrations of Henry VI in illuminated manuscripts and printed books lie outside the scope of this study as they are in the private as opposed to the public sphere. I have seen all the known existing monumental images, apart from the doubtful example at Alton (Hants.).

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The history of Henry VI’s posthumous veneration has been wellrehearsed, so it is necessary here only to provide a resumé of the principal events.5 After the king’s death in May 1471, his body was interred in Chertsey Abbey (Surrey), a far cry from the splendour (and centrality) of the burial sites of his father and grandfather in Canterbury Cathedral and Westminster Abbey respectively. Already in the 1470’s there is evidence that he was being venerated as a saint and thus was a cause of concern to Edward IV. In 1479 Archbishop Booth of York enjoined his officials to ensure that veneration of an image of Henry VI in York Minster and offerings to it were to cease. In the following year, the Mercers’ Company of London advised its members that pilgrimage to the tomb at Chertsey had been forbidden. Rather than attempting to suppress the cult, Richard III made the most of the situation. In August 1484, in a gesture of expiation and reconciliation, he had Henry’s body exhumed and transported the short distance to Windsor, where it was reinterred in St George’s Chapel, on the opposite side of the choir from the tomb of his slayer and rebuilder of the sumptuous Chapel. Unsurprisingly, the cult was promoted by the Tudor dynasty. Henry VII, son of Henry VI’s half-brother Edmund Tudor and cousin Margaret Beaufort, petitioned the papacy to have his uncle canonised. In 1503 work began on the new Lady Chapel at the east end of Westminster Abbey, to which Henry VI’s corporeal relics were intended to be transferred as well as eventually Henry VII’s own bones. In the event, nothing came of either the attempts to secure papal recognition by Henry VII and in token fashion by his son, or of the translation of the body and associated relics from Windsor. The Territory of Grace of Henry VI’s Cult The geographical boundaries within which a miracle-working cult was efficacious have been described as a territory of grace, ‘an area over which its In addition to the accounts by Griffiths and Wolffe, there are a series of articles: J. W. McKenna, ‘Piety and Propaganda: the Cult of King Henry VI’, in B. Rowland (ed.), Chaucer and Middle English Studies in Honour of R. H. Robbins (London, 1974), pp. 72–88; B. Spencer, ‘King Henry of Windsor and the London Pilgrim’, Collectanea Londinensia, London & Middlesex Architectural Society Special Paper 2 (London, 1978), pp. 235–264; S. Walker, ‘Political Saints in Late Medieval England’, in R. H. Britnell and A. J. Pollard (eds), The McFarlane Legacy Studies in Late Medieval Politics and Society (Stroud, 1995), pp. 77–106. See also the perceptive observations by S. Anglo, Images of Tudor Kingship (London, 1992), Chapter III. 5

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benevolent power seems especially manifest’.6 The boundaries of cults were not necessarily contiguous and might overlap and overlay each other; nor were they immutable, but expanded and contracted according to the popularity of (or indifference to) a cult.7 One yardstick for measuring the boundaries of the territory of grace of Henry VI’s cult is by means of pilgrim badges. Nearly four hundred badges associated with Henry VI have been found in widely scattered locations, mainly from the south (Fig. 3).8 Inevitably, waterfront sites in London, Bristol, Southampton and King’s Lynn have been particularly rich in finds; badges associated with Henry VI have also been recovered in Ludlow, Oxford, Coventry, Northampton, Salisbury and, near Windsor, at Colnbrook (Buckinghamshire). The northernmost find spots are Horncastle and Marsh Chapel, both in Lincolnshire. An example from Rouen as well as a miracle recorded at Calais, then in English hands, show that the cult was known on the other side of the Channel. Deposit levels have provided a date-range of c. 1490 to 1500 for finds at Southampton and London. Pilgrim badges are useful as evidence of the dissemination of the cult, but they provide a very incomplete picture. Their occurrence is largely determined by favourable environmental conditions; many potential sites have not been excavated and the find-sites are heavily biased towards inland ports and harbours, which do not reveal the places from where the pilgrims came. Occasionally, this information is documented. Queen Elizabeth was not alone in undertaking pilgrimage by proxy to Henry VI’s shrine. Margaret Est, a citizen of Norwich, in 1484 willed that her executor should go after her death to Chertsey, where ‘Kyng Harry lyeth’, and at least three other proxy

6 W. A. Christian, Jr., Person and God in a Spanish Valley (Princeton, rev. ed., 1989), p. 44. This model was applied to English cults in R. C. Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims. Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (London, 1995), Chapters 9 and 10. 7 See for example the changed fortunes of the Schorn cult after the transfer of his relics to Windsor in 1478–80 (R. Marks, ‘A Late Medieval Pilgrimage Cult: Master John Schorn of North Marston and Windsor’, in L. Keen and E. Scarff (eds), Windsor. Medieval Archaeology, Art and Architecture of the Thames Valley, British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions, XXV (2002), pp. 192–207). 8 Brian Spencer has published the Henry VI pilgrim badges: Medieval Pilgrim Badges from Norfolk (Norfolk Museums Service, 1980), p. 22; Salisbury Museum Medieval Catalogue Part 2. Pilgrim Souvenirs and Secular Badges (Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum, 1990), pp. 52–4; Pilgrim Souvenirs and Secular Badges. Museum of London Medieval Finds from Excavations in London: 7 (London, 1998), pp. 189–192.

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pilgrimages are mentioned in Norfolk wills, as well as five from Suffolk.9 Amongst the embellishments attached to the mantle of the much-venerated image of Our Lady at Pilton (Somerset) were ‘iij brochys of kyng henry and one lytyll broche’. As late as 1543, pilgrims mainly from the West Country were observed travelling to Windsor with their candles and wax ex-votos.10 Pilgrim badges are not the only touchstone for determining the boundaries of the cult. Carved devotional images of the king were set up in parish churches and they also appeared in painted form on screens, walls and in windows. A number survive and more are documented, chiefly through wills and churchwardens’ accounts, although the vast majority of these sources only date from after 1500 and their national coverage is unneven. In these cases too, they only refer to images in existence at the time, not the date at which they were commissioned and set up. Similarly, very few of the monumental representations can be accurately dated. What follows makes no pretensions to being a catalogue raisonée, as no doubt other occurrences have escaped my attention or will emerge. Images of Henry VI could be found the length and breadth of England, from the north-east to the West Country. As we will see shortly, a statue of the king stands in Alnwick parish church (Northumberland); its sandstone material betrays the hand of a local carver (the head is modern) (Fig. 8). There was another in a window in Durham Cathedral.11 The 1479 proscription of the image in York Minster has already been mentioned. Elsewhere in Yorkshire, images could be seen in Ripon Minster and churches at Bradford (1502) and Terrington (1509).12 The north-west is a blank, apart from a representation in the glass of Ashton-under-Lyne in the Greater Manchester area.13 Moving southwards into Lincolnshire, images of Henry could be

Est’s will was brought to my attention by Dr Simon Cotton; I owe the others to the kindness of Peter Northeast. 10 Bishop Hobhouse (ed.), Churchwardens’ Accounts, Somerset Record Society, IV (1890), p. 64; Spencer, ‘King Henry’, p. 244. 11 For Durham, see R. Knox and S. Leslie (eds), The Miracles of King Henry VI (Cambridge, 1923), p. 5. 12 Knox and Leslie, Miracles, p. 5 (Ripon); J. Raine (ed.), Testamenta Eboracensia. A Selection of Wills from the Registry of York, IV, Surtees Soc., 53 (1868), no.CVI, p. 204 (Bradford): J. Raine (ed.), Testamenta Eboracensia A Selection of Wills from the Registry of York, V, Surtees Soc., 79 (1884), no.X, p. 10 (Terrington). 13 Knox and Leslie, Miracles, p. 6. 9

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encountered at Alford and Pinchbeck in the early 1530’s.14 The Midlands so far has not proved to be a happy hunting-ground, possibly because many of the late medieval wills from this area remain unpublished. There was an image in Towcester church (Northamptonshire) in 1534 and another in the glazing of Oddingley church (Worcestershire). The bridge chapel at Bridgnorth (Shropshire) claimed to possess the king’s coat as a relic; during the 1490’s, offerings were made to Henry VI at Hereford Cathedral.15 East Anglia, particularly Norfolk, provides evidence for the greatest numbers of images of Henry VI, including several screen-paintings. This was an area from which, as we have seen, nine testators stipulated proxy pilgrimage to his shrine as well as other pilgrimage sites. St Nicholas’s Hospital in the county town of Norwich possessed a much-venerated image of Henry VI. The same is true of the image of the king which stood in Great Yarmouth church; in the year 1484/5 it attracted offerings totalling the large sum of £15 12s. 9¼d, plus 300 herrings; in the same year it was painted and gilded.16 Further north, the port of Wells-next-Sea possessed an image of Henry VI in 1495. The king was invoked by sailors and on two occasions his intervention was believed to have prevented shipwrecks.17 In Suffolk, the money collected in 1497 by the maidens of Walberswick was put to the painting of ‘kyng herry tabyll’.18 The only representation in Essex seems to be on the rood-screen at Stambourne (Fig. 7).19 Of the counties adjoining to 14 C. W. Foster (ed.), Early Lincoln Wills, II AD 1505 to May, 1530, Lincoln Record Soc., 10 (1918), p. 205 (Alford); idem (ed.), Early Lincoln Wills, III AD 1530 to May, 1532, Lincoln Record Soc., 24 (1930), pp. 66 (Pinchbeck), 213 (Alford). 15 R. M. Serjeantson and H. Isham Longden, ‘The Parish Churches and Religious Houses of Northamptonshire: Their Dedications, Altars, Images and Lights’, The Archaeological Journal, 70 (1913), 217–452, p. 419 (Towcester); J. Amphlett (ed.), A Survey of Worcestershire by Thomas Habington, Worcestershire Historical Soc., I Pt. 3 (Oxford, 1895), p. 456 (Oddingley); Spencer, ‘King Henry’, p. 248 (Bridgnorth); D. Webb, Pilgrimage in Medieval England (Hambledon and London, 2000), p. 177 (Hereford). 16 I owe the Norwich reference to Dr Carole Rawcliffe; A. W. Morant, ‘Notices of the Church of St Nicholas, Great Yarmouth’, Norfolk Archaeology, VII (1872), 215–248, pp. 234, 238; a hermit attached to King Henry’s chapel here is mentioned in 1506 (p. 222). 17 Knox and Leslie, Miracles, nos. 124, 139, pp. 177, 191–92; for Wells see also H. Harrod, ‘Extracts from Early Norfolk Wills’, Norfolk Archaeology, I (1847), 111–128, p. 119. 18 R. W. M. Lewis (ed.), Walberswick Churchwardens’ Accounts, AD 1450–1499 (Ashford, 1947), p. 261. 19 W. W. Lillie, ‘Medieval Paintings on the Screens of the Parish Churches of Mid and Southern England’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 3rd series, IX (1944), 33–47, p. 44.

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the west, there is an alabaster image at Toft (Cambridgeshire) (Fig. 9); there was also an image in St Peter’s church in St Albans (Hertfordshire).20 Records exist of devotional images in two Bedfordshire churches, at Eversholt in 1533 and at Houghton Regis, the latter attracting several bequests between 1506 and 1528. In addition representations of Henry VI occurred in the glazing of the principal Bedford church of St Paul’s and at the west end of the nave north aisle at Harlington.21 The extensive surviving wills from Buckinghamshire have proved unrewarding, probably because the proximity of the shrine meant that that little spiritual benefit would accrue from posthumous, proxy pilgrimage. In Berkshire, the famous cult site of Our Lady at Caversham included amongst its ancillary relic-attractions the dagger with which Henry had been murdered. St George’s Chapel itself had a representation in a window adjacent to the king’s tomb.22 Sele Priory (Sussex) had a chapel dedicated to Henry VI and Knox and Leslie cited a doubtful mural at Alton.23 Nothing has emerged from points west until Devon, where the image at Ashburton was repaired in 1522/3 and a painted representation survives on the screen at Whimple.24 In London, an image of Henry VI in the royal foundation of the Savoy Hospital was painted and gilded in 1514; a few years later, Henry was included amongst other examples of British sainthood in the more ephemeral, but no less significant, form of a 20 S. Flood (ed.), St Albans Wills 1471–1500, Hertfordshire Record Publications, 9 (1993), no. 229, p. 110 (St Peter’s church). There is no trace of the screen-painting of Henry VI noted by Knox and Leslie (Miracles, p. 6) in St Michael’s church, St Albans. 21 Bedfordshire and Luton Archives and Record Service, ABP/R3, 103d (will of William Barnewell of Eversholt); A. F. Cirket (ed.), English Wills, 1498–1526, Bedfordshire Historical Record Soc., 37 (1957), no. 81d, p. 31; P. Bell (ed.), Bedfordshire Wills 1484– 1533, idem, 76 (1997), nos 59, 62, pp. 37, 39; Bedfordshire and Luton Archives and Record Service, ABP/R3, 82d (Houghton Regis); London, College of Arms MS c.31, f. 2v (Bedford St Paul’s); J. H. Blundell, ‘Wingate of Streatley and Harlington’, Bedfordshire Historical Record Soc., 8 (1923), 171–173, p. 173, n. 6 (Harlington). 22 Spencer, ‘King Henry’, p. 247 (Caversham); W. Lambarde, Dictionarium Angliae Topographicum et Historicum (London, 1730), p. 422 (Windsor): I am indebted to Nicholas Rogers for the last reference. Knox and Leslie (Miracles, p. 6) listed a painting of Henry VI on the screen of Warfield (Berks.), but there is no trace of this today. 23 W. H. Godfrey (ed.), Sussex Wills, I, Sussex Record Soc., 41 (1931), pp. 113–14 (Sele Priory); Knox and Leslie, Miracles, p. 6 (Alton). 24 A. Hanham (ed.), Churchwardens’ Accounts of Ashburton, 1479–1580, Devon & Cornwall Record Soc., new ser., 15 (1970), p. 68; F. B. Bond and Dom Bede Camm, Roodscreens and Roodlofts, II (London, 1909), pp. 248, 263, 360; the identification of a screenpainting at Widdecombe as Henry VI is incorrect.

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pageant celebrating the entry of Henry VIII and the Emperor Charles V into London.25 Apart from Norfolk, the greatest recorded number of images is in Kent, where the churches at Boughton Monchelsea, Burmarsh, Lewisham and Smarden each possessed a representation of ‘King Harry’ in the early sixteenth century.26 Like pilgrim badges, the survival of written records of images and of the images themselves is too open to chance to enable the boundaries of the cult to be plotted accurately. More helpful are the miracles which occurred through Henry VI’s invocation and sometimes his miraculous apparition; in either case, the miracle presupposed knowledge of the saintly king by the recipient of God’s grace. More than 368 miracles were ascribed to Henry VI’s agency between 1481 and c. 1500, when a record of them was compiled. Around 140 were linked to named locations in almost every English county, but with a marked numerical bias to the south.27 Kent led the way with seventeen miracles, followed by London (15) and Sussex (11); then came Essex (9), Hampshire (7) and Northamptonshire (6). Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Surrey, and Wiltshire each witnessed four miracles and Berkshire, Cambridgeshire, Devon, Dorset, Hertfordshire, Leicestershire and Somerset three. The remainder numbered one or two, with notable omissions like Yorkshire, Northumberland and Cumberland, where no miracles were recorded.28 These figures suggest that Henry’s territory of grace embraced most parts of England, but was particularly efficacious in the south-east, with its northern frontier encompassing Northamptonshire and Oxfordshire. The miracle statistics too have their deficiencies, as they The Savoy and pageant references are taken from Anglo, Images, p. 72. L. L. Duncan, ‘The Parish Churches of West Kent, Their Dedications, Altars, Images, and Lights’, Transactions of the St Paul’s Ecclesiological Soc., III (1895), 241–297, p. 277 (Lewisham); L. L. Duncan and A. Hussey, Testamenta Cantiana: A Series of Extracts from Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century Wills relating to Church Building and Topography, Kent Archaeological Soc. Record Series (1907), pp. 30, 41, 312 (Boughton Monchelsea, Burmarsh, Smarden, all in East Kent). 27 BL, Royal MS 13 C. VIII. See Knox and Leslie, Miracles; only 174 miracles are listed in the manuscript, but Knox and Leslie notice that the figure 368 had been erased (p. 19).P. Grosjean, Henrici VI Angliae Regis miracula postuma (Brussels, 1935). For an account of the king’s life, see M. R. James (trs.), Henry the Sixth A Reprint of John Blacman’s Memoir (Cambridge, 1919). 28 The figures, slightly amended, are taken from the table in Knox and Leslie, Miracles, p. 23. Their totals differ slightly in some cases from those given in Grosjean, Henrici VI, pp. 76*–95*. 25

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only cover the years 1481 to1500. They are also sometimes at odds with other forms of evidence for the cult. In Norfolk, for example, the paucity of miracles fits ill with the relative profusion of imagery revealed by the screens and documentary evidence. Cumulatively, the visual and textual evidence reveals that the cult enjoyed widespread popularity until the Reformation. The shrine itself was drawing pilgrims as late as 1543 and references to image lights demonstrate that, at local level, Henry VI was still attracting devotion in the 1520s and 1530s. It has to be said, however, that in no county are either the references to parochial images or surviving images numerous; in respect of bequests to newly popular saints in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Henry VI comes a poor second to St Erasmus (one of the miracles was performed by means of a vision of the two together).29 One reason for this may be that, although relics of Erasmus were in the possession of Canterbury Cathedral, they did not provide a prime focus of pilgrimage to anything like the same extent as Henry VI and hence the former’s images assumed added significance. The Royal Image An early sixteenth-century woodcut inserted at the end of an English Bible provides a convenient starting point for an examination of the extant posthumous Henry VI images (Fig. 1).30 This woodcut, which presumably served as a devotional image for dissemination amongst pilgrims to the Windsor shrine, shows the king surrounded by ex-votos and male and female suppliants representing some of the miracles performed through his agency. The king holds an orb and sceptre, with a shield of the royal arms by his head. At his feet lies a fierce-looking antelope with serrated horns — a creation of the bestiaries rather than the natural world. This was one of the badges used by both Henry V and Henry VI, sometimes gorged with a coronet; on occasions Henry VI used it in conjunction with a lion as supporters for the royal arms (Fig. 2). The latten lectern in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, has a small figure of the founder with an antelope at his feet. Knox and Leslie, Miracles, no. 37. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 277, f. 376v. The iconography is interpreted in exemplary fashion in Campbell Dodgson, ‘English Devotional Woodcuts of the Late Fifteenth Century, with special reference to those in the Bodleian Library’, The Walpole Soc., XVII (1928–9), 95–108, pp. 104–108, Pl. 37. 29

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1. Woodcut showing an image or representation of Henry VI with suppliants and ex votos (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 277, f. 376v). Reproduced with permission of the Bodleain Library, University of Oxford.

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2. Royal standard and antelope badge of Henry VI (right side of page) (BL, Royal MS 15 E. VI, f. 3). Reproduced with the permission of the British Library Board.

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3. Pilgrim badge of Henry VI. Reproduced with the permission of Brian Spencer.

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4. Barton Turf (Norfolk): chancel south chapel screen painting of Henry VI. Photograph: Richard Marks.

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5. Ludham (Norfolk): rood-screen paintings of St Edmund of East Anglia and Henry VI. Photograph: Richard Marks.

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6. Gateley (Norfolk): rood-screen painting of Henry VI. Photograph: Richard Marks.

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7. Stambourne (Essex): rood-screen paintings of St Edmund of East Anglia and Henry VI. Photograph: Richard Marks.

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9. Toft (Cambridgeshire): polychromed alabaster statuette of Henry VI. Photograph: Richard Marks. 8. Alnwick (Northumberland): stone carving of Henry VI (head modern). Reproduced with the permission of the Revd Murray Haig.

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10. Polychromed alabaster statuette of Henry VI (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum). Reproduced with the permission of the Rijksmmuseum.

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Considerable variety is exhibited by the pilgrim badges, including versions showing Henry VI mounted, rising above the Tower of London and on a ship (the last based on the old noble coin), which refer to episodes from his life. By far the most common was an image which related closely to the woodcut, depicting the king with orb and sceptre and with or without the antelope and other accessories (Fig. 3). It is to this type that the carved representations and paintings belong. Almost all of these are undated, although on stylistic grounds most, if not all, were executed towards the end of the fifteenth and in the early sixteenth centuries. In Norfolk, Henry VI is represented on screens at Barton Turf and Ludham (north-west of Norwich), Gateley (north-east of Dereham) and Binham, near Wells.31 At Barton Turf and Ludham, the king’s image is labelled ‘Rex Henricus Sextus’; Ludham can also be dated to 1493 by a donor inscription (Figs 4, 5). The Ludham painting, which is on the dado of the rood-screen, is the work of a much more accomplished craftsman than the Barton Turf image, situated on the dado of the south chancel chapel screen. Both the Barton Turf and Ludham figures are crowned and bear orbs and sceptres. The Gateley screen figure is also labelled and bears an orb and sceptre (Fig. 6). One of its companion figures is John Schorn, the good pastor of North Marston (Buckinghamshire), whose relics were acquired by Windsor earlier than those of Henry VI. At Gateley, there was a bequest to paint the roodloft in 1485 and the lettering of the labels suggests a post-1500 date.32 The other screen paintings do not have inscriptions. The regal image on the Binham screen is accompanied by a horned antelope, so there can be no doubt that it represents Henry VI. The rood-screen representations at Stambourne (Essex) (Fig. 7) and Whimple (Devon) also have the antelope at their feet and the figures have the full regalia of crown, orb and sceptre. Heraldic beasts feature on three carved images. None can be dated by anything more substantial than style, but it would be very surprising if any of the trio pre-dates 1485. On the base of the Alnwick (Northumberland) figure are the addorsed figures of a lion and an antelope passant guardant (Fig. 8); the same creatures occur at the feet of 31 W. W. Williamson, ‘Saints on Norfolk rood-screens and pulpits’, Norfolk Archaeology, XXXI (1955–57), pp. 299–346, p. 308; S. Cotton, ‘Medieval roodscreens in Norfolk – their construction and painting dates’, idem, XL (1987), pp. 44–54. Williamson rejects the identification of figures on the screens at North Elmham and Litcham as Henry VI (Williamson, ‘Saints’, pp. 326, 332). Kings on other screens in East Anglia have also been identified as Henry VI, although lacking labels. 32 Cotton, ‘Medieval roodscreens’, p. 48; Marks,‘John Schorn’, pp. 202–3, Fig. 6.

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the fine alabaster images at Toft (Cambridgeshire) and in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; in both cases the antelope is gorged with a coronet (Figs 9, 10). Lions sometimes appear on the pilgrim badges associated with Henry VI. There can be no reason to doubt that these three carvings represent the saintly king. There are differences in their various accoutrements. All hold sceptres and the Alnwick and Amsterdam figures have orbs. In addition, suspended from the belt of the former and from the image at Toft is a rosary and a purse; the Toft alabaster also holds a book in place of an orb, as did the figure formerly in the window at Oddingley.33 The traditional identifications of the Suffolk screen paintings at Eye and Nayland remain less certain, although likely. The kings on these screens lack both heraldic beasts and labels, but with their crowns and sceptres they correspond with several circular and lozenge-shaped Henrician badges.34 Within his portrayal with the trappings of royalty there is, therefore, some variation in the iconography of Henry VI.35 The standard regal depiction contrasts with how, during his life, Henry’s humility found expression in his modest attire: ‘from his youth up he always wore round-toed shoes and boots like a farmer’s. He also customarily wore a long gown with a rolled hood like a townsman, and a full coat reaching below his knees…rejecting expressly all curious fashion of clothing’.36 This image of a humbly-dressed king persisted after his death. During Richard III’s reign, Henry twice appeared miraculously to individuals whose lives were saved by his intervention. A mariner described the king as ‘a pilgrim by his dress – he seemed to have gown of blue velvet, and had a yellow cap on his head’. He was also clad in a blue velvet coat in the second appearance. Soon after Henry VII’s accession, however, the humble appearance was supplanted by a regal image which approximated to the monumental representations. Henry VI was described in a vision which occurred in February 1486 as ‘dressed in dark silk, and with a gold crown’.37 Henry VI is shown with an open book in a Sarum primer printed by Regnault in 1526 (copy in the Victoria and Albert Museum). 34 Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs…Museum of London, nos 208, 208a. 35 Variations also occur in the book representations. For example, in the Regnault primer cited in n. 33 the king has a sceptre as well as a book and in an illuminated Hours with a Norwich diocesan calendar he only has a sceptre; heraldic beasts are absent from both. 36 James, Henry the Sixth, pp. 35–6. 37 Knox and Leslie, Miracles, pp. 79–80, 152–3, 180. 33

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With the exception of Stambourne, wherever the heads survive, the king is portrayed as a youngish man. In depicting him as a bearded, grey-haired and oldish man, the Stambourne image recalls the king’s miraculous apparition in 1484, in which ‘his head [was] covered with venerable grey hairs’.38 The Barton Turf, Gateley and Ludham labels accompanying the images (also the lost glass at Bedford, Harlington and Oddingley) use the prefix ‘rex’, not ‘sanctus’, whereas the latter accolade is often accorded to Edmund of East Anglia and Edward the Confessor. The regal address is standard for all extant images of Henry VI which have labels, for pilgrim badges and in wills, whether in Latin or in the vernacular. Slight changes were rung in documents describing his light or image, including commonly ‘King Harry’, ‘our lord king Henry VI’ (Ashburton) and ‘good king Herrey’ (Boughton Monchelsea and two Suffolk wills).39 In the royal form of address, as well as the regalia worn or carried by the extant images, Henry VI’s true kingship is asserted. Rarer are the references at St Peter’s church in St Albans and at Wells-nextSea (Norfolk) to the ‘beatus henricus sextus’ light.40 Perhaps the avoidance of the saintly label was dictated by the powers that be, on the grounds that its use would be presumptuous in the absence of official canonisation; or did it represent some ambiguity or even unease in the face of this widespread manifestation of popular devotion? The heraldic beasts, especially the antelope, acted as Henry VI’s hagiographical sign. How and why might this have come to pass? During his lifetime, Henry was portrayed as a young man, vested in the trappings of kingship, with no individual attributes. The images include the east window of St Mary’s Hall Coventry, the former library glass in All Souls College Oxford and (possibly) the pulpitum of Canterbury Cathedral. In all three of these Henry appears in a series of British rulers. A large stone statue forming a pair with that of the founder, Archbishop Chichele, formerly on the gate tower of All Souls College is now displayed within the College. Single images of the king occur on the foundation charters for his colleges at Eton and Cambridge as well as in illuminated manuscripts.41 In none is Ibid., pp. 152–3. The Suffolk wills are of John More of Gislingham and Joan Percey of Wetheringsett (information from Peter Northeast). 40 H. Harrod, ‘Extracts from Early Norfolk Wills’, Norfolk Archaeology, I (1847), 111–128, p. 119. 41 The authenticity of the All Souls images is queried (erroneously) in L. Stone, Sculpture in Britain the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth, 1955), p. 206. 38 39

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the king depicted with heraldic beasts, although some royal seals show him enthroned and accompanied by a pair of lions couchant.42 The association of Lancastrian dynastic badges with images of the victim of the House of York underlined the political element to the cult. They also served to highlight the Tudor blood relationship with Henry VI, an affinity which Henry VII was at pains to emphasise. In the royal form of address, as well as the regalia worn or carried by the extant images, Henry VI’s true kingship was asserted. The non-regal accoutrementss can be associated with exemplary aspects of the king’s personal life. The rosaries at Alnwick and Toft refer to his piety, as the Toft book may do, although it could also be an allusion to Henry’s support of learning at Eton and King’s College, Cambridge. The purse, which also occurs as a pilgrim badge, may be linked with the king’s philanthropy. The differing combinations of additional features show that there was not a standard ‘identikit’ iconography for Henry VI. The images could be tailor-made to suit the needs of the particular clientele and reflect the functions they performed in the public space of the parish church. When William Fossey and his (presumed) widow Emma bequeathed wax to the light of the ‘Immage of Kyng Henr’. the vjth’ in Houghton Regis church, they were endowing an image which was a focus for personal devotion in the form of prayers and supplications.43 By this action, they honoured the saintly prototype and hoped for his intercession for the well-being of their souls. It is almost certain that the Fosseys were referring to a single image like those at Alnwick, Toft and Amsterdam, rather than a representation in a row of screen-paintings. That the three carved representations have more pious attributes than the Norfolk screens is probably dictated by their role as devotional foci. Like other images, they would have stood in their own designated space in the church and would have been raised on pedestals or brackets. The backs of all three are flat, indicating that they were placed against a pillar or framed by a niche or wooden tabernacle. Pilgrim badges and ampullae were deemed to have absorbed elements of the grace of the holy site itself if they had been in physical contact with

W. de Gray Birch, Catalogue of Seals in the Department of Manuscripts in the British Museum, I (London, 1887), nos. 293–94, 296–97. 43 Bell, Bedfordshire Wills 1484–1533, no. 62, p. 39; Bedfordshire and Luton Archives and Record Service, ABP/R3, 82d. 42

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the relics and they could act as agents of apotropaic transfer.44 There is no evidence that the parochial representations of Henry VI were endowed with any of the miraculous powers of the king’s relics. Although the king was frequently invoked in the alleged miracles performed through his king’s agency, no mention is made of the involvement of images. Their existence may have signalled the presence of Henry’s grace in the places where they were set up. The saintly king was accessible through his image, whose function may also have been both mnemonic and exhortatory in promoting pilgrimage to the locus of the shrine at Windsor. The same end might also have been achieved by the painted representations on screens and in stained glass, but their emplacement on dados and high in windows by and large precluded their use as devotional images. No unequivocal references to lights before images on screens or in windows have been found to date. Nor are they isolated images, but they are surrounded by representations of the ‘holie company of heven’, which served the important function of giving the new cult validity. As in the tableau of British saints in the 1522 London pageant, on a number of the East Anglian screens Henry VI rubs shoulders with an ancient English monarch whose sanctity had been long-established and uncontested. Placed next to Henry VI on the screens at Barton Turf, Ludham and Stambourne is St Edmund (also at Eye) (Figs 5, 7). He was not only a martyred local sainted king whose relics were at Bury St Edmunds, but also a regal prototype for whom Henry VI had special devotion.45 The promotion of Henry as belonging within the lineage of saintly kings is especially marked at Barton Turf, where his other companions are Edward the Confessor and St Olave, king of Denmark, whose ancient Norse links with East Anglia were long-remembered. Edward the Confessor is also present on the Ludham screen. Apart from St Edmund, at Stambourne, Henry is accompanied by St George and St Denis. Contemporary documentary sources are unrevealing about the circumstances in which these images of Henry VI came to be commissioned. They are equally silent about the innermost thoughts and beliefs of their

44 This issue of apotropaic transfer is discussed in Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs…Museum of London, pp. 16–18 and D. Freedberg, The Power of Images. Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago and London, 1989), pp. 128–135. 45 As exemplified by the imagery of BL, Harley MS 2278, with Henry VI at St Edmund’s shrine. See K. L. Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts 1390–1490, II. A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles vol.6 (London, 1996), no. 78, pp. 225–229.

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donors. Wills, which are the most common documentary source, are ‘less windows on the soul than mirrors of social convention’ and hence do not provide insights into the personal motives of testators.46 Here and there are hints of particular histories which provided a social frame for the images. One surrounds the carved representation in Alnwick parish church. The townspeople had good reason to be grateful to Henry. In 1464 he had granted £20 per annum for 30 years out of export tolls from the port of Alnmouth and the right to hold a fair and market in order ‘to make and repair their church’, which they did on a scale exceptional for this part of the country in this period.47 Possibly the image of Henry VI in St Peter’s church at St Albans represented enduring memories of the battles fought in and around the city in 1455 and 1461. Events associated with the image in York Minster were of more than local significance. Archbishop Booth’s 1479 proscription was aimed ostensibly at the practice of venerating an image rather than the relics themselves. Some people were expressing devotion (‘in contempt of the Church Universal’) to the place where the Henry VI’s image stood in the Minster, ‘although the body itself was not there but was buried somewhere else’. At one level, therefore, the attack was founded on the orthodox disavowal of idolatry, that is, the elision of the sign with the signified: that the affair had a political edge is revealed by the description of Henry VI as ‘formerly de facto king of England’, as well as by the fact that the veneration of the image also resulted in the ‘vilification of our lord Edward IV, king of the English’.48 It is hard to disassociate the York image, which was already in existence in 1473, a very early date in the history of the cult, from the divided political allegiances of long standing within the Chapter; more specifically, it offered a rival focus of veneration to the tomb of Archbishop Richard Scrope, martyred, as some saw it, by Henry’s grandfather. Richard Andrew, dean between 1452 and 1477, had been Henry VI’s private secretary

The quotation is taken from A. D. Brown, Popular Piety in Late Medieval England. The Diocese of Salisbury 1250–1550 (Oxford, 1995), p. 21. 47 St Michael’s Church, Alnwick. A Brief Guide; N. Pevsner and I. Richmond, The Buildings of England Northumberland, 2nd ed. revised by J. Grundy, G. McCombie, P. Ryder and H. Welfare (Harmondsworth, 1992), p. 131. 48 J. Raine (ed.), The Fabric Rolls of York Minster, Surtees Soc., 35 (1858), pp. 208–10. The original Latin wording of these phrases is: ‘quamquam ipsius corpus non ibidem sed aliunde sit humatum, in contemptum ecclesiae universalis,…’; ‘quondam de facto Regis Anglie’; ‘vilipendium domini nostri Edwardi, Anglorum Regis quarti’. 46

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and as such a member of the king’s inner circle.49 In 1475/6 Andrew founded a chantry at the altar of St Saviour in a loft at the west end of the choir south aisle; amongst those whose souls were to be prayed for were Henry, his queen (Margaret of Anjou) and notable former Lancastrian servants like Archbishop Chichele, of whose foundation of All Souls College, Oxford, he had been the first warden.50 It seems hardly coincidental that Archbishop Booth’s attack on the image followed soon after Dean Andrew’s death in 1477. The image mentioned in 1473 is often identified as that formerly belonging with the series of English kings on the choir screen. It is more likely, however, to have been an independent devotional image, perhaps the one (or its replacement) for which John Payntor was paid 20 shillings in 1515/16; presumably it was associated with the Minster altar dedicated to King Henry which was in existence from at least c. 1500.51 Occasionally there is circumstantial evidence of congruence between alleged miracles and the presence of images. The parish church of Towcester housed Henry VI’s image and a miracle involved the conveyance of a wine tun to this town; another miracle was performed a few miles down Watling Street at Stony Stratford, where a blind man’s sight was restored after he had vowed pilgrimage to the shrine.52 Usually, however, the evidence is inconclusive. Whilst the occurrence of an undated miracle at Luton (Bedfordshire) might explain the presence of the king’s image in the nearby churches of Harlington and Houghton Regis, it is less likely to account for the image at more distant Bedford and Eversholt.53

49 For Andrew’s career, see A. B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to A.D. 1500, I (Oxford, 1957), pp. 34–35. 50 Raine, Fabric Rolls, pp. 82, 301. The location of St Saviour’s altar is given in E. Gee, ‘The Topography of Altars, Chantries and Shrines in York Minster’, The Antiquaries Journal, 64 (1984), 337–350, p. 343. For the political allegiances within the York chapter (and the Minster’s benefactors), see C. Norton, ‘Richard II and York Minster’, in S. Rees Jones (ed.), The Governance of Medieval York. Essays in commemoration of the 1396 Royal Charter, Borthwick Studies in History, 3 (York, 1997), pp. 56–87. 51 Raine, Fabric Rolls, pp. 82n, 97n, 227; the 1515/16 accounts are in York Minster Archives, E3/36. I am indebted to Louise Hampson for the last reference. The present image of Henry VI on the York screen is of early 19th-century date. 52 Knox and Leslie, Miracles, nos 32, 44; Serjeantson and Isham Longden, ‘Parish Churches’, p. 419. 53 Knox and Leslie, Miracles, no. 48.

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To summarise: the cult of Henry VI was the last of the indigenous cults to manifest itself in pre-Reformation England. The various written sources and the extant material artefacts representing the murdered king indicate that his cult enjoyed a national constituency and one which in the 1520s and 1530s showed no signs of having run its course. It is not the least of the ironies associated with Henry VIII that the very monarch whose father had made a sustained effort to secure the canonisation of his unfortunate predecessor and whose fate made possible the accession to power of the Tudor dynasty, should be responsible for bringing the entire edifice of pilgrimage to irreversible ruin. Today, all that testifies to the former pulling-power of Henry VI’s cult at Windsor is the impressive collecting-box and some of the roof-bosses near the site of his tomb at the end of the south choir aisle. Of the tomb itself and the assorted relics associated with the murdered king, no trace was permitted to survive.

XXVI The Dean and the Bearded Lady: Aspects of the Cult of St Wilgefortis/Uncumber in England*

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n 22 August 1519 John Colet, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, made his last will and testament. He requested: ‘my Body to the Church of Seint Paule aforesaid tobe buryed nyghe unto the Image of Seint Wilgeforte where I made a lytull monyment’.1 This paper will examine the cult of St Wilgefortis in late medieval England and also consider why a noted humanist and church reformer like Colet might have erected his tomb in proximity to such a controversial focus of devotion: it is a prime case where one might expect the elite religion of Colet and his circle to part company from popular devotion. The first reference to the image of St Wilgefortis in St Paul’s Cathedral known to me is in the will dated 26 July 1498 of Walter Oudeby, canon of St Paul’s. Like Colet, he too wished to be buried in proximity to the image ‘in the sowthe ile of Paules a fore the ymage of Saynte Wilgefort other wise callid seynte uncumber’.2 Oudeby’s graveslab with brass effigy is no. * I am indebted to the Master and Fellows of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, for kindly electing me to a Visiting Fellowship which enabled me to research and write this contribution to Nigel Morgan’s Festschrift. I am also grateful for the comments of my ‘Baroque’ colleague at York, Dr Helen Hills. 1 Colet’s will is in London, The National Archives, Prerogative Court of Canterbury Probate Records PROB 11/19, ff. 174v–176r; it is published in abbreviated form and modernised English in N. H. Nicolas, Testamenta Vetusta, 2 (London, 1826), pp. 568–573. 2 Oudeby’s will is in The National Archives, Prerogative Court of Canterbury Probate Records PROB 11/11, f. 233; an extract is published in R. M. Serjeantson and H. Isham Longden, ‘The Parish Churches and Religious Houses of Northamptonshire: Their Dedications, Altars, Images and Lights’, Archaeological Journal, 70 (1913), pp. 217–452 (p. 302). These authors say that the will is dated 1485, but this is erroneous. For details of Oudeby’s career, see A. B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to AD

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21 on Dugdale’s ground plan of the pre-fire St Paul’s, in the south choir aisle bay adjacent to the high altar (Fig.1).3 It can be assumed, therefore, that St Wilgefortis’s image was just to the east of Oudeby’s monument. And so presumably, was John Colet’s original ‘lytull monyment’, which was subsequently relocated and replaced in the early 1520s by a more prominent memorial with a skeleton and bust of Colet probably by Torrigiano (Fig.2).4 By the late fifteenth century St Wilgefortis’s cult was quite widespread in Europe north of the Alps and also in Spain. It seems to have originated in about 1350. According to her vita, which has no basis in veracity whatsoever, Wilgefortis was the daughter of a pagan Portuguese king; having become a Christian and taken a vow of celibacy, she resisted her father’s intention to marry her to a pagan king of Sicily. Her prayers that she should become unattractive were answered and she grew a moustache and beard which caused her suitor to withdraw. As a consequence her father had her crucified. While on the cross Wilgefortis prayed that all who remembered her martyrdom should be freed from all difficulties and burdens, hence the sobriquets Helper, Liberator, Ontcommer (Uncumber in English). The label arose from the belief that anyone invoking St Wilgefortis in the hour of their death would indeed die without anxiety or suffering, hence the appeals to her against sudden death without having received the last sacraments. Her feast day is 20 July. Scholars for the most part have traced the origin of the cult to a misreading of Romanesque crucifixes with an upright, fully clothed, triumphant rather than an almost naked, suffering Christ, as represented by the famous miracle-working Volto Santo of Lucca. According to this reading, the denizens of a town in north-eastern Europe mistook an image of the Volto Santo type for a crucified woman, hence the derivation of 1500, 2 (Oxford, 1957), p. 1410; idem, A Biographical Register of the University of Cambridge to 1500 (Cambridge, 1963), pp. 437–8. 3 W. Dugdale, The History of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, from its Foundation...to the year 1658 (with continuations and additions by H. Ellis) (London, 1818), plan between pp. 108 and 109; Oudeby’s brass is engraved on p. 53. His Christian name is transcribed as Brabazon, but it is Walter’s monument as the date of death is correct. 4 For the Colet tombs, see F. Grossman, ‘Holbein, Torrigiano and Some Portraits of Dean Colet’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 13 (1950), pp. 202–236 (pp. 205–11); K. Cohen, Metamorphosis of a Death Symbol (Berkeley, 1973), pp. 125–128; J. W. Hurtig, ‘Seventeenth-Century Shroud Tombs: Classical Revival and Anglican Context’, Art Bulletin, 64 (1982), pp. 217–228 (pp. 219–220); B. Cherry, ‘Some New Types of Late Medieval Tombs in the London Area’, in L. Grant (ed.), Medieval Art, Architecture and Archaeology in London, British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions 10, 1990, pp. 140–154 (pp. 150–1).

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the name Wilgefortis from the appellation virgo fortis applied to this image. However, an explanation of the origins of St Wilgefortis does not explain the appearance and diffusion of her cult from the second half of the fourteenth century, nor of the meanings it bore in the late Middle Ages.5 A suffrage giving a brief account of St Wilgefortis’s martyrdom in the Sarum Hours of the Virgin printed in Paris in 1530 suggests that her cult was quite widely known in the early sixteenth century, at least in the south of England.6 At parish level, evidence of devotion to her is thinly spread and primarily confined to the south-east. An image of St Uncumber existed at Cowden (West Kent) by 1510; by 1524 a replacement was envisaged here, to which Joan Wikenden left 4s. ‘To bie an Image of Saynt Vncomber of alebaster’. In 1533 William Swanne, Esq., of Northfleet, also in West Kent, bequeathed four shillings to his parish church to purchase ‘a stremer of stayned cloth wt an image of Sainte Vncomber and my consyaunce of my armes’.7 Wadhurst church in the neighbouring county of East Sussex also possessed an image of the same saint, to the light of which bequests were made in 1527 and 1536. A mural of the saint has also been identified in the parish church There is an extensive literature on St Wilgefortis. This includes G. Schnürer and J. Ritz, Sankt Kümmernis und Volto Santo. Studien und Bilder (Düsseldorf, 1934); I. E. Friesen, The Female Crucifix. Images of St. Wilgefortis since the Middle Ages (Waterloo, Ontario, 2001) (see also the review by Samantha Riches in Religion and the Arts, 8, no.4, (2005), pp. 503–05); A. Jasper, ‘Theology at the Freak Show: St Uncumber and the Discourse of Liberation’, Theology and Sexuality, 11, no. 2 (2005), pp. 43–54. Summary accounts are in D. H. Farmer, The Oxford Dictionary of Saints (Oxford, 1980), p. 404; E. Kirschbaum (ed.), Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie, 7 (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1974), cols 353–355; M. Ott (who described her as a ‘a fabulous female saint’) in the Catholic Encyclopedia, 15 (New York, 1912), pp. 622–623. There has also been discussion of medical aspects of the cult: J. H. Lacey, ‘Anorexia Nervosa and a bearded female saint’, British Medical Journal, 285 (18–25 December 1982), pp. 1816–17; R. M. Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago, 1985); and the more extensive and sophisticated treatment of the subject in C. W. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast. The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1987), chaps 6 and 7. Dirk de Vos, Hans Memling, exhib. cat. Bruges, Groeningenmuseum (Antwerp, 1994), p. 91 mentions her efficacy against sudden death. 6 The suffrage page in Thomas More’s copy of the Sarum Hours is illustrated opposite p. 235 in T. M. C. Lawler, G. Marc’hadour and R. C. Marius (eds), The Complete Works of St Thomas More. A Dialogue concerning Heresies, 6(1) (New Haven and London, 1981). The text is given in Friesen, Female Crucifix, p. 59. 7 L. L. Duncan, ‘The parish churches of West Kent, their dedications, altars, images, and lights’, Transactions of the St Paul’s Ecclesiological Society, 3 (1895), pp. 241–298 (p. 262); idem, ‘Ecclesiological Notes respecting the Deanery of Shoreham, Kent’, Archaeologica Cantiana, 23 (1898), pp. 134–149 (p. 145). 5

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at Bury, in West Sussex.8 More references to St Wilgefortis/Uncumber are known in East Anglia. The image at Mendlesham, Suffolk, may have been more than an ordinary parochial devotional image, for it was bracketed with Our Lady of Grace (at Ipswich?) by Rose Folcard of Earl Stonham in her will of 1520/21 as the goal of a posthumous proxy pilgrimage.9 The churchwardens’ accounts of Boxford in the same county record a payment in 1533 for ironwork (possibly for light stands) in front of the images of SS Uncumber and Sitha.10 In Norwich there were images of her in the churches of St Giles and St James, the latter mentioned in 1528 (or 1538). The image in a third church, that of St Peter Parmentergate, evidently was particularly revered, judging from the garments in which she was dressed which are listed in an inventory taken in Edward VI’s reign: ‘two of maide Uncumbres best Cotes...a Cote of Maide Uncumber of redde silk’.11 Elsewhere in the county there was a bequest to a light of St Uncumber at Bunwell in 1504 and she appears on the roodscreen dated 1512 at Worstead, of which more later (Figs 6, 7).12 Another surviving representation is amongst the serried ranks of stone saints occupying the triforium and some of the chapels of Henry VII’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey, begun in 1503 and possibly in existence by the time of the king’s death in 1509 (Fig. 3).13 The only other reference known to me in a monumental context in England is the chapel W. H. Godfrey (ed.), Sussex Wills Vol. 4, Sussex Record Society, 45, 1940–1, p. 274. I am indebted to David Park for knowledge of the Bury image, which I have not seen. 9 Ipswich, Suffolk County Record Office, Ipswich Probate Records vol.8, f. 133 (I owe this reference to the late Peter Northeast). 10 P. Northeast (ed.), Boxford Churchwardens’ Accounts 1530–1561, Suffolk Records Society, 23, 1982, p. 11. 11 F. Blomefield with contributions by C. Parkin et al, An Essay towards a Topographical History of the County of Norfolk, 4 (London, 1806) pp. 239, 425; J. Hooper, ‘Curious Church Dedications in Norfolk and Some Rood Screen Figures’, in H. J. D. Astley (ed.), Memorials of Old Norfolk (London, 1908), pp. 253–273 (p. 270). Neither author gives a date for the St Giles reference and whereas in Blomefield the image in St James is cited as 1528, in Hooper it is 1538. For St Peter Parmentergate see H. Harrod, ‘Goods and Ornaments of Norfolk Churches in the Fourteenth Century’, Norfolk Archaeology, 5 (1859), pp. 89–121 (p. 118). See also A. E. Nichols, The Early Art of Norfolk. A Subject List of Extant and Lost Art including items relevant to early drama (Kalamazoo, Michigan, 2002), p. 233. I am indebted to David King for several of these references. 12 Norwich, Norfolk Record Office, NCC, Ryxe 77 (I owe the Bunwell reference to Dr Simon Cotton). 13 J. T. Micklethwaite, ‘Notes on the Imagery of Henry the Seventh’s Chapel, Westminster’, Archaeologia, 47 (1883), pp. 361–80; P. Lindley, ‘ “The singulier mediacions 8

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of St Wilgefortis in the parish church of St Mary le Port, Bristol, which was described as recently built in 1513; this must have housed an image of the patronal saint.14 The distribution pattern may of course be distorted by the accident of survival of contemporary documents, especially wills, of which many exist for Norfolk and Suffolk, and are our chief sources of information on devotional images in the parish churches of late medieval England: other occurrences can be expected to come to light. Nonetheless, it is perhaps significant that no references to St Wilgefortis/Uncumber occur in the quite numerous probate records for Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire and it is possible that the eastern/south-eastern bias indicated above reflects the reality of the situation. London, Norwich (and Bristol) were important ports in late medieval England and East Anglia and the Weald of Kent were centres of the wool/cloth trade; indeed, Worstead gave its name to a kind of cloth which was produced there. Given the popularity of St Wilgefortis/Uncumber in Flanders, which provided the principal market for English wool and cloth, it is perhaps not surprising that her image should be concentrated in these cities and counties. The presence of her chapel in a Bristol port church may even indicate that the initial impetus behind the creation of the chapel came from foreign merchants who wanted a familiar saintly figure to venerate. Notwithstanding the fact that the vast majority of surviving probate records date from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, there is little reason to doubt that St Wilgefortis/Uncumber was one of the last of the continental saints to be imported into England before the Reformation. From the fourteenth century a succession of new or re-heated cults of saints, especially those considered to be specialist helpers (Sitha, Anthony, Roche, Erasmus, Eligius, Sebastian, Brigitte, Ursula), found their way from the continent to England, where they joined the company of long-established favourites like Katherine, Margaret, Christopher, John the Baptist and Lawrence as well as home-grown saints like Edmund of East Anglia, Edward

and praiers of al the holie companie of Heven”: Sculptural Functions and Forms in Henry VII’s Chapel’, in T. Tatton-Brown and R. Mortimer, (eds), Westminster Abbey The Lady Chapel of Henry VII (Woodbridge, 2004), pp. 275–93 (on p. 280 the author expresses the view that the images were installed before Henry’s death). 14 C. Burgess, ‘Late Medieval Wills and Pious Convention: Testamentary Evidence Reconsidered’, in M. Hicks (ed.), Profit, Piety and the Professions in Later Medieval England (Gloucester, 1990), pp. 14–33 (p. 28).

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the Confessor, Becket and the revived and reinvented Alban.15 All the examples of St Wilgefortis’s images listed above occur in the early sixteenth century, including new images at Henry VII’s Chapel (after 1503), Worstead (1512) and Bristol (c. 1513). Existing images are recorded at Bunwell (1504), Cowden (1510, with a replacement envisaged in 1524), St James’s church, Norwich (1528 or 1538) and Boxford (1533). All this makes the reference to burial in front of the image of St Wilgefortis/Uncumber in St Paul’s Cathedral in Canon Oudeby’s 1498 will the earliest known. It is conceivable that this image was the first to be set up in England and as far as we can tell from the admittedly sparse and fragmentary evidence, the St Paul’s image attracted more devotion than any other. In July 1538, when the removal and destruction of relics and miracle-working images was already under way, a London mercer noted with disgust that he had seen the image of St Uncumber, with its gay gown and silver shoes, still in place in St Paul’s and a woman venerating it.16 Some later Continental images have a fiddler kneeling at the foot of the crucified St Wilgefortis, an iconography derived again from the Volto Santo cult, which included a miracle of a silver shoe which dropped from the Christ image as a divine gift for a poor pilgrim. In German folk tales, the story became one of a fiddler who was the lover of a beautiful princess; when she was crucified his music alleviated her suffering. In the case of the silver shoes on the St Paul’s image, a more prosaic explanation is likely: that they represented votive offerings which also served to prevent damage from the physical devotions of the faithful.17 Perhaps the woman observed by the mercer in St Paul’s was praying to be rid of her husband, for which purpose in the 1520s and 30s at least the saint (and the St Paul’s image in particular) was perceived to be efficacious: ‘In so moch that women hath therfore chaunged her name/ and in stede of saynt wylgeforte call her saynt Vncumber/ bycause they reken that for a pecke of otys she wyll not fayle to vncomber theym of theyr housbondys’.18 The interpretation of the sobriquet ‘Uncumber’ as unencumbering wives of unwanted or disagreeable spouses is a misunderstanding of the derivation of the German ‘ohne Kummer’ (without anxiety), but it enjoyed a long life R. Marks, Image and Devotion in Late Medieval England (Stroud, 2004), pp. 91–113. S. Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford, 1989); p. 291; J. Gairdner, (ed.), Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, 13(1) (London, 1892), no.1393, p. 515. 17 Friesen, Female Crucifix, chap. 3. 18 Works of St Thomas More, 6(1), p. 227. 15 16

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in reformed circles as a means of ridiculing image devotion. Michael Nodde in 1554 repeated the claim quoted above that if wives wished to be rid of their husbands they offered oats to this image. That oats were a common form of offering to St Wilgefortis/Uncumber is also evident from John Bale, another reformer, whose satirical poem on saintly helpers includes the lines If ye cannot slepe but slumber, Geve otes unto saynt Uncumber.19 The offering of oats to elicit the shedding of unwanted husbands was one of a number of practices associated with pilgrimage and images which aroused the scorn of reformers like Nodde and Bale. At the request of Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of London, Thomas More set out explicitly to refute such attacks, in which St Wilgefortis’s cult attracted particular opprobrium. In the first edition of his Dialogue Concerning Heresies, published in 1529, More argued that people were capable of distinguishing the saint from the image, ‘even an ignorant woman’: ‘...take the simplest foole that ye can chose/ & she wyll tell you that our lady her selfe is in heuyn. She wyll also call an ymage an ymage...’ He justified the principle of venerating images and going on pilgrimage, but was more uncertain in his defence of St Wilgefortis’s cult, arguing that the inner intentions of venerators were not necessarily apparent and in any case the offering of oats was not so common a practice: And we wyll come home here to Poules and put one ensample of both/ that is to say the superstycyous maner and unlefull petycyons/ yf women there offer otys vnto saynt wylgefort/ in trust yt she shall vncomber them of theyr housbondys. Yet can neyther the prestes perceyue tyll they fynde it there yt the folysh women brynge otys thither/ nor is it not I thynke so often done nor so moche brought at ones/ yt the chyrche may make moche money of it... Well quod I then the prestes mayntayne not ye matter for any great couetyse/ & also what the peuyshe women pray they can not here. How be it if they pray but to be vncombred/ me semeth no great harme/ nor vnlefulnes therin. For yt may they by mo wayes than one. They may be vncombred yf theyr housbondys chaunge theyr comberous condycyons. Or yf them selfe peraduenture chaunge theyr comberous tongues/ whiche is happely the cause of all theyr J. Bale, Comedy concerning thre lawes, quoted in E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars. Traditional Religion in England c.1400–c.1580 (New Haven and London, 2001) p. 179. 19

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combraunce. And finally yf they can not be vncombred but by deth/ yet it may be by theyr owne/ and so theyr housbondys saufe ynough. Nay nay quod he ye fynd them not such foles I warant you. They make theyr couenauntes in theyr bytter prayers as surely as they were pennyd/ and wyll not cast away their otys for nought. Well quod I to all these matters is one euydent easy answere/ yt they nothyng touche ye effecte of our matter/ whiche standeth in this/ whether ye thyng yt we speke of as prayeng to sayntes/ goyng in pylgrymage/ & worshypyng relykes & ymages may be done well. Not whether it may be done euyll. For it may be well done/ then though many wold mysse vse it/ yet doth all that nothynge mynyshe ye goodnes of the thynge selfe.20 More’s misogynistic language is revealing as to why women could feel marginalized by the Church — and why they might identify with a Christ-figure of their own gender and look to her for help in matters which affected their daily lives and for which there was little or no redress: enforced marriages, violent and abusive husbands and sexual assault. These aspects of her cult have received attention in recent scholarship.21 As has already been indicated, St Wilgefortis was perceived to possess general powers of alleviating suffering and anxiety and the documentary evidence and one of the surviving representations suggest that in late medieval England at least her cult was more multivalent than merely disposing of unwanted husbands. If reformist polemics, More’s defence and most of the existing testamentary evidence intimate that women formed the major clientele for St Wilgefortis in England, her cult was never gender-specific.22 In 1510 Richard Wikenden had made a bequest to St Uncumber at Cowden and Joan Wikenden, who bequeathed money for a new image here, presumably was his widow: here we have a married couple sharing devotion to St Uncumber, which may seem a little surprising as she could be perceived to be threatening to husbands. 20 Works of St Thomas More, 6(1), pp. 231, 234–235. This text is discussed in M. Aston, England’s Iconoclasts Volume 1. Laws Against Images (Oxford, 1988), pp. 173–188. 21 eg Friesen, Female Crucifix, chap. 5; Jasper, ‘Theology’. 22 Trexler, ranging widely in time-span, sees the cult as very much the province of women (R. C. Trexler, ‘Habiller et déshabiller les images; esquisse d’une analyse’, in F. Dunand, J-M. Speiser and J. Wirth (eds), L’Image et le production du Sacré, Actes du colloque de Strasbourg (20–21 janvier 1988) organisé par le Centre d’Histoire des Religions de l’Université de Strasbourg II Groupe ‘Théorie et pratique de l’image cultuelle’ (Paris, 1991), pp. 195–231 (pp. 203–206).

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Conversely the saint could have been seen as supporting matrimony if it was a good and harmonious union in which the husband behaved properly towards his wife. A married couple also paid for the Worstead screen and must have had a large say in the choice of its imagery, even if the parish community as a whole would have had to approve it.23 John Hyrnyng made a bequest to the light before St Uncumber’s image at Bunwell; a male also requested burial before her image in St James’s church, Norwich and two men, one of whom was the vicar, bequeathed money to the light of St Wilgefortis/ Uncumber at Wadhurst. On top of this there were the St Paul’s clerics Walter Oudeby and John Colet. Oudeby was as far removed from the ranks of illiterate or semi-literate hedge-priests as Colet: educated at both Cambridge and Oxford, he made bequests to the very devout London Charterhouse and Observant Friars at Greenwich; like Colet, his burial location contests any assumption that the cult of St Wilgefortis can be placed exclusively under the label of ‘popular religion’; further than this, it underlines the problematic nature of self-contained categories like ‘popular’ and ‘elite’ when it comes to late medieval devotion.24 Nothing is known of the appearance of the St Paul’s image, apart from its possessing clothing and shoes. The surviving representations in Westminster Abbey and at Worstead conform to different iconographical types, both of which occur on the Continent. The statuette in Henry VII’s Chapel shows St Wilgefortis as a fully clad woman with a Christ-like prominent beard and flowing hair, holding an open book and a tau-cross (Fig. 3).25 Iconographically, it is quite similar to a north German oak statuette of the same saint dating from the late fifteenth century in the Schnütgen Museum, Cologne (Fig. 4), which has a larger Latin cross. A tau-cross is also held by St Wilgefortis on the reverse of the left wing of the altarpiece commissioned in 1480 by Adriann Reins for St John’s Hospital in Bruges and attributed to Memling.26

23 E. Duffy, ‘The parish, piety and patronage in late medieval East Anglia: the evidence of rood screens’, in K. French, G. Gibbs and B. Kumin (eds), The Parish in English Life 1400–1600 (Manchester, 1997), pp. 133–162 (pp. 139–140, 150–151). 24 For a discussion of the ‘popular’/‘elite’ religious binary see Marks, Image and Devotion, pp. 25–37. 25 There is a brief discussion of the Westminster and Worstead images in Friesen, Female Crucifix, pp. 58–61. 26 De Vos, Memling, cat.no.17.

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1. Plan of the choir of Old St Paul’s Cathedral: Canon Oudeby’s slab is no.21 and Dean Colet’s second monument is no.14 (from W. Dugdale, A History of Old St Paul’s Cathedral in London, from its Foundation...to the year 1658, with continuations and additions by H. Ellis (London, 1818)).

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2. Dean Colet’s former tomb in Old St Paul’s Cathedral, early 1520s; from Sir William Dugdale’s Book of Monuments, 1640–41 (London, British Library MS Add. 71474, f.165r). Reproduced by permission of the British Library Board.

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3. Westminster Abbey, Henry VII’s Chapel triforium: image of St Wilgefortis, c. 1503–09. Reproduced by permission of Dr Phillip Lindley.

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4. Oak image of St Wilgefortis, north German, late 15th century (Schnütgen Museum, Cologne, inv. no. A928). Reproduced by permission of the Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Cologne.

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5. Beauvais, church of St-Etienne: wooden image of St Wilgefortis, 16th century. Reproduced by permission of the Conway Library, Courtauld Institute of Art.

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6. Worstead (Norfolk), parish church of St Mary: screen paintings of St William of Norwich and St Wilgefortis, dated 1512. Photograph: Richard Marks.

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7. Watercolour dated c. 1833 by Mrs Gunn of St William and St Wilgefortis on the Worstead screen (London, British Library MS Add. 23049, f.60r). Reproduced by permission of the British Library

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The image of St Wilgefortis at Worstead is suggestive of subtle layers of intended and subliminal meanings and therefore is worth detailed examination. The history of the screen and its imagery is complicated by repaintings in 1838 and, more drastically, in c. 1870, which has led to uncertainty as to the identification of the figure as St Wilgefortis.27 Sufficient of the inscription remained in c. 1833 to confirm the 1512 date for the screen and its gift by a married couple; however, the husband’s Christian and surname were indistinct and his wife’s Christian name appears to read something like Hilda. In the restored inscription the donors are named as John and Agnes Albastyr, who died respectively in 1520 and 1524. His graveslab with brass is in the floor in front of the central part of the screen and Agnes’ is nearby. This location, in a position of honour below the Rood, was often accorded to benefactors of this image and/or the roodscreen. It is safe, therefore, to assume that the Alblastyrs were indeed the donors of the latter (or at least its painting).28 Although the current label for St Wilgefortis was not present before 1838, close scrutiny and the evidence of the watercolours made prior to the restoration, shows that it can only be this particular saint (Figs. 6, 7). The image of St Wilgefortis currently shares the last bay of the dado on the south side of the roodscreen with St William of Norwich. She is depicted Nichols, Early Art of Norfolk, p. 233. The most detailed study of the image, in which the identification is not doubted, is Dom Bede Camm, ‘Some Norfolk Rood-Screens’, in C. Ingleby (ed.), A Supplement to Blomefield’s Norfolk (London, 1929), pp. 237–95 (pp. 278–81). The watercolour of SS William and Wilgefortis on the Roodscreen is in London, British Library MS Add. 23049, f. 60r. This is one of a series of studies of the screen paintings in this manuscript by Mrs Gunn, daughter of Dawson-Turner, whose 29 volumes of notes and illustrations of Norfolk antiquities were used for Blomefield’s county history. Another watercolour of the two saints painted in 1847 by Esther Reeve is reproduced in Dom Bede Camm’s article; he suggested that Mrs Reeve may have copied Mrs Gunn’s version. See also M. R. James, Suffolk and Norfolk: a Perambulation of the Two Counties with Notices of their History and Ancient Buildings (London, 1930), p. 152; S. Cotton, ‘Medieval roodscreens in Norfolk: their construction and painting dates’, Norfolk Archaeology, 40 (1987), pp. 44–54 (p. 52); W. W. Williamson, ‘Saints on Norfolk roodscreens and pulpits’, Norfolk Archaeology, 31 (1955–57), pp. 299–346 (pp. 313, 345). Surprisingly, the Worstead screen is not mentioned in E. Duffy, ‘Holy maydens, holy wyfes: the cult of women saints in fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury England’, in W. J. Sheils and D. Webb (eds), Women and the Church, Studies in Church History, 27, 1990, pp. 175–96. 28 John Alblastyr’s wish to be buried in the southwest part of the church (yard?) next to his father’s grave was thus ignored by his widow and executors (Norfolk Record Office, NCC will Alblaster 6). 27

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as crowned and bound by cords at the wrists and ankles to a cross. The cross is emphasized as her iconographical symbol by being placed in front of her halo. She is bearded and is clad in a green mantle lined with white material over a close-fitting coral gown covering her body except for her hands and feet; there is a girdle at her waist. The question of the degree of repainting is crucial. The nineteenth-century watercolours appear to show a naked figure, apart from the strategically placed girdle and mantle folds over her breasts, with no differentiation in tinctures between torso and limbs and hands and feet. If these are an accurate representation of the original panel, early sixteenth-century viewers were presented with an almost nude figure which approximates more precisely than the other known representations of St Wilgefortis to the conventional late-medieval image of the crucified Christ. The image cannot be mistaken for that of Christ as she is tied, not nailed to the cross and her halo is behind it. Above all, it is unmistakeably a female body, as is apparent from the broad hips and heavy thighs — a representation far removed from the anoxeric image invoked by some writers.29 The prerestoration pictorial evidence cannot be lightly dismissed; however, if the gown is an addition and the original figure was almost nude, it would represent a departure from the Volto Santo prototype and indeed other late medieval representations of the saint showing her being crucified, such as a wooden sculpture in the church of St-Etienne, Beauvais, where she is fully clad (Fig. 5). The images in Henry VII’s Chapel and the Schnütgen Museum are also clothed (Figs. 3, 4). The gold chain and pomander suspended from the girdle are not present on the watercolours and must have been added in c. 1870. The girdle itself is present in the watercolours, but if the figure was substantially naked, a more concealing covering of the nether regions might be expected than this accessory, which is no more substantial than the currently fashionable thong. As far as I am aware, such undergarments were unknown in the late middle ages. The indications, therefore, are that the coral garment is part of the original composition. The issue of female form will be returned to presently, but first there are other aspects of the Worstead image which merit discussion. Prior to the restoration of 1838, St Wilgefortis’s companions on the screen dado comprised at least eight of the apostles, including St John the Evangelist, and St Dorothy; at that time Wilgefortis and St William of

29

Lacey, ‘Anorexia Nervosa’; Bell, Holy Anorexia.

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Norwich occupied the first bay to the north of the central entrance to the chancel.30 The northernmost screen bay was blank, presumably because its paintings no longer existed. Through her pairing with St William, St Wilgefortis was assimilated into the spiritual and temporal landscape of Worstead.31 This is not the only place where this occurred in East Anglia. St William was, for obvious reasons, popular in late medieval Norfolk and as we have seen, images of St Wilgefortis existed in at least three Norwich churches; in one of these, St James, St William was on the screen. John Alblastyr’s will reveals that he had strong connections with the county town, which may account for the same combination at Worstead.32 The role of St William on the Worstead screen is more than that of a local valorizer. The two saints shared death by crucifixion and they were perceived to be of approximately the same age when martyred (St William was 12, St Wilgefortis is often shown as aged 10–12).33 On the screen he has the attributes of Christ’s Passion: he wears the crown of thorns, his breast is pierced by a dagger in parallel with Christ’s side wound and he holds two nails, which he offers to St Wilgefortis (the stigmata on his feet are not present on the watercolour and have been added; Figs 6, 7). The association between St William’s Passion emblems and St Wilgefortis’s crucifixion is explicit: both are therefore linked with Christ’s Passion. Moreover, if the emplacement of the screen paintings as recorded in c. 1833 was the medieval one, the location of St William and St Wilgefortis immediately to the north of the screen entrance would have placed them below the great Rood image of Christ on the cross, emphasizing for viewers that their passion was linked with that of Christ. Friesen and other scholars have explored the way in which representations of Christ crucified in late medieval literature and art either transcended gender distinctions or portrayed him as a non-sexual ‘angelic’ figure. Trexler argues, largely from Mexican instances, that the predominant role in transmuting images of Christ into a more feminised figure by replacing or covering the loincloth by petticoats was taken by women; he interprets this as signifying that in this culture, Jesus was perceived as a suffering figure For St William see M. R. James and A. Jessopp (eds), The Life and Miracles of St William of Norwich (Cambridge, 1896). 31 For the ‘localization’ of saints in late medieval England, see Marks, Image and Devotion, chap. 5. 32 Camm, ‘Rood-Screens’, p. 277; Norfolk Record Office, NCC will Alblaster 6. 33 Catholic Encyclopedia, 15 (New York, 1912), pp. 623, 635. 30

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with whom women could identify, hence the presence of blood on some of these garments which it is suggested is a reference to menstruation.34 Trexler’s (somewhat thin) evidence is drawn from a period and culture far removed from late medieval England, so does the Worstead screen image shed any light on how St Wilgefortis might have been perceived at the time? If the almost naked display of her body as seen on the watercolour is original (Fig. 7), the masculine attributes (the beard) are less evident than the feminine and thus the image is more suggestive of a feminised Christ than of a sexually neutral or ambiguous representation. Even if it remains uncertain that the torso and limbs were exposed originally, the unmistakeably female contours of the Worstead image and the way in which the mantle emphasizes her breasts by concealing them, endows the image both with the attributes of the Christ that redeems humanity by his suffering on the Cross and with the feminized intercessory attributes of the Virgin. The image of St Wilgefortis at Worstead could not be mistaken for the real thing, for Christ was of course both present and dominant in the form of the Rood. Yet the location of the former immediately to the north of the entrance to the chancel would have situated it not only below the Rood but also under the image of the grieving Mary; she was also physically closer than both these images were to the laity. St Wilgefortis’s proximity thus simultaneously associated her visually with the Rood Christ and the Virgin and served to differentiate her from them. Revelation by concealment is also suggested by the garments worn by the images in St Paul’s Cathedral and St Peter Parmentergate in Norwich. When divested of their robes was an almost naked female form exposed to view? Interpreted in this fashion, the image of St Wilgefortis in the choir south aisle of St Paul’s, like its more humble counterparts at Worstead and even St Peter Parmentergate, might have been perceived by some to offer a feminised and perhaps even more empathetic surrogate or alternative focus of devotion to the famous and much revered image of Christ known as the Rood at the North Door.35 One can only speculate as to whether any such consideration motivated Dean Colet to erect his ‘lytull monument’ near to St Wilgefortis’s image in St Friesen, Female Crucifix, chap. 2; Trexler, ‘Habiller et déshabiller’, pp. 203–206. For the Rood at the North Door see C. M. Barron and M. H. Rousseau, ‘Cathedral, City and State, 1300–1540’, in D. Keene, A. Burns and A. Saint (eds), St Paul’s. The Cathedral Church of London 604–2004 (New Haven and London, 2004), pp. 33–44 (p. 40); A. Thacker, ‘The Cult of Saints and the Liturgy’ in idem, pp. 113–122 (pp. 118, 121). 34 35

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Paul’s Cathedral. I have no idea why Colet, a noted humanist, wished to be buried in proximity to what was, in the eyes of some contemporaries, a cultimage of questionable veracity and efficacy. Interment in front of or near to a favoured image is common in late-medieval England and marks not only the particular devotion of the deceased to the saint so represented, but also hopes for their special favour as intercessor.36 Colet was following Canon Oudeby’s precedent in making this request in respect of St Wilgefortis, but it still comes as a surprise. As early as 1505 Colet was advocating a policy of humanist reform of the Church in his St Paul’s sermons. According to Erasmus, he ran into trouble for voicing his scorn for the less edifying aspects of pilgrimage and was also accused of preaching against image-veneration: on both grounds he might be expected to have (literally) distanced himself from the cult of St Wilgefortis in his own cathedral. However, neither charge was substantiated — Colet’s targets were the excesses of what were doctrinallysanctioned practices. Indeed, he had ‘paynted Images upon the walles; of his lodgings in Sheen Charterhouse and it is conceivable that the Dean was looking to St Wilgefortis as an intercessor for the redemption of his soul in impeccably orthodox fashion.37 Or was he motivated by the conventions of office? Like Oudeby, the possibility has to be entertained that Colet’s choice of interment was more a case of clerical endorsement of a popular image in his cathedral church than a sign of his own particular devotion to her. Perhaps significance should be attached to the choice of words in his will: ‘nyghe unto’ rather than Oudeby’s ‘a fore’, which is the usual one in such testamentary requests.38 Nevertheless it is worth noting that he still uses a sacred, rather than architectural, topographical marker, in St Paul’s. Equally significant perhaps, is that the Mercers’ Company, when they came to replace the Dean’s ‘lytull monyment’ by the early 1520s, not only erected a grander memorial, but also relocated it between the pillars of the second bay from the west of the choir south arcade, i.e. further away from the site of Oudeby’s grave and therefore from the presumed emplacement of St Wilgefortis’s

Marks, Image and Devotion, pp. 172–76. J. B. Gleason, John Colet (Los Angeles and London, 1989), p. 10; A Hope, ‘Conformed and Reformed: John Colet and his Reformation Reputation’, in L. Clark, M. Jurkowski and C. Richmond (eds.), Image, Text and Church, 1380–1600. Essays for Margaret Aston (Toronto, 2009), pp. 214–238 (pp. 220–23). For the reference to Colet’s images, see The National Archives, Prerogative Court of Canterbury Probate Records, PROB 11/19, f. 175r. 38 Marks, Image and Devotion, pp. 79, 167. 36 37

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image.39 Was this merely because the new site was more prestigious and visible — or were the Mercers (and/or his executors) also motivated by a desire to distance Colet’s earthly remains from association with such a dubious cult? Whatever the answer and whatever Colet’s real feelings about St Wilgefortis, it is an ironic thought that, in approaching her representation, her devotees would have passed his mortal remains and famous bust, although the latter’s gaze, fortuitously or not, was averted from the image. Fortunately perhaps for the repose of the good Dean’s soul, the propinquity was relatively shortlived: on the night of 23 August 1538, St Wilgefortis’s image ‘standing in her old place and state, with her gay gown and silver shoes’, was removed, together with the famous Rood at the cathedral north door. Such was the strength of devotion they engendered that it was necessary for the operation to be carried out under cover of darkness to avoid protests, even resistance.40 Although erased from the spiritual topography of England at the Reformation, St Wilgefortis’s cult survived in Catholic Europe into the twentieth century. Coulton noted that in his day her image in the small church adjacent to St-Wandrille Abbey in Normandy still attracted offerings, not of oats, but of wheaten bread; her devotees looked for her help, not to remove unsatisfactory husbands, but for dyspepsia and for alleviating the burden of quotidian living.41 By this time the cult was in decline and in an age of more rigorous scrutiny of ancient sainthood, it is unlikely to undergo a revival. Whilst St Wilgefortis could still warrant a place in the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1912, she is omitted from the latest edition (2003) of the American New Catholic Encyclopedia, although St William of Norwich, her companion on the Worstead screen, is still deemed worthy of an entry. Some might regret that the Catholic Church of today is unwilling to number the androgynous, hirsute St Wilgefortis amongst the holy company of heaven. The Calendar is certainly duller, if not poorer, without her presence.

Grossman, ‘Holbein, Torrigiano and Some Portraits of Dean Colet’, pp. 205–11. Barron and Rousseau, ‘Cathedral, City and State’, p. 44; Thacker, ‘Cult of Saints’, p. 121; Brigden, London and The Reformation, p. 291; Letters and Papers 13(2), London, 1893, no.209, p. 81. Neither the St Wilgefortis image nor the Rood at the North Door is specified, merely the ‘images at Powlles’; both however must have been included in the removal. 41 G. G. Coulton, Art and the Reformation (Oxford, 1928), pp. 288–289. 39 40

Monuments and Memorialization

XXVII Sir Geoffrey Luttrell and Some Companions: Images of Chivalry c. 1320–50

T

he miniature of Sir Geoffrey Luttrell mounted on his warhorse resplendent in the panoply of heraldic display is often taken as a paradigm of medieval knighthood and chivalry (Fig. 3); it is one of the most frequently reproduced images from English art, adorning coffee-table books and scholarly publications alike and used as an exemplar for a range ot disciplines encompassing everything from social history, women’s studies, heraldry and costume to warfare — even the history of art.1 Without denying the value of this image to subjects other than my own, I harbour a suspicion that the immense visual appeal of the illumination has with very few exceptions seduced scholars away from looking behind the glittering surface and elucidating its meaning and context. This paper will attempt to address these issues. The first point that needs to be made is that the image of Sir Geoffrey Luttrell is not an isolated one in English medieval art, even if it is unique amongst ‘ownership’ pictures in illuminated books. It belongs to a group of four closely related compositions which includes tombs and stained glass as well as the Luttrell Psalter.2 Each of them can be described as a tableau 1 London, British Library MS Add. 42130, fol. 202v. The principal studies are: E. G. Millar, The Luttrell Psalter (London, 1932); L. F. Sandler, Gothic Manuscripts 1285–1385 (A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles, V) (Oxford, 1986), no. 107, pp. 118–121, ills. 274–278, 280, 282; M. Camille, ‘Labouring for the Lord: the ploughman and the social order in the Luttrell Psalter’, in Art History, X, no. 4 (1987), p. 423 ff.; J. Backhouse, The Luttrell Psalter (London, 1989). 2 There may of course be others. The early 14th-century Pilgrimage window in the nave north aisle of York Minster has been excluded as the figures with their horses seem to represent pilgrims. Also a 14th-century misericord in Brampton church, Cambridgeshire, which has a

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vivant. The dramatis personae always comprise a knight and his warhorse (destrier) and attended by several men and/or women.3 The cast is not the same in each case and neither is the drama, but the lead role is always taken by the knight who represents a real-life individual. The first of the two sepulchral monuments is at Minster-in-Sheppey, Kent (Fig. 1). Set in a canopied recess in the south wall of the parish church is the limestone cross-legged effigy of a knight in a quilted surcoat and chainmail lying on his side grasping his shield in his left hand and with his right (the forearm is missing) resting on the pommel of his sheathed sword. Under the shield is a lance with the partly visible pennon of a knight banneret.4 At his feet is the small figure of an attendant in armour holding the reins of a horse’s head carved completely in the round. The knight has always been identified as Sir Robert de Shurland, Warden of the Cinque Ports, who is said to have been present at the siege of Caerlaverock in 1300.5 The monument is traditionally considered to refer to a local legend that Shurland, in order to nullify a prophecy, killed his horse; subsequently he kicked the animal’s skull only to die from a bone splinter entering his foot. Regrettably this colourful tale appears to have no basis in fact.6 There is even doubt as to the correct identity of the occupant of the tomb. When Stothard drew the effigy it still retained traces of lions rampant on an azure ground painted on the surcoat. Although he noted that these were the arms borne by the Leybourne family of Kent he still accepted Weever’s statement that

knight and a woman holding a large shield; there is no evidence that these represent donors. See G. L. Remnant, A Catalogue of Misericords in Great Britain (Oxford, 1969), p. 67. 3 The term destrier came into use in the 12th century, probably because when not being ridden by the knight his horse was led by a groom with his right hand; see R. H. C. Davis, The Medieval Warhorse (London, 1989). 4 For the significance of the shape of banners see M. Keen, Chivalry (New Haven, 1984), p. 168. 5 See C. A. Stothard, The Monumental Effigies of Great Britain, rev. ed. A. J. Kempe (London, 1876), pp. 71–73; F. H. Crossley, English Church Monuments A.D. 1150–1550 (London, 1921), pp. 239–240; L. Stone, Sculpture in Britain. The Middle Ages (Harmondsworth, 1972), p. 167; J. Weever (Ancient Funeral Monuments, rev. ed. (London, 1767), p. 80) was the first to connect this tomb with the Shurland family. For a general survey of early knightly effigies see H. Tummers, Early Secular Effigies in England. The Thirteenth Century (Leiden, 1980). 6 Stothard, Monumental Effigies (cit. n. 5), pp. 71–2, relates the story and although he discounts it ‘as a wild legend, only worthy of notice as such’ it has been repeated subsequently, e. g. in J. Newman, The Buildings of England. North East and East Kent (Harmondsworth, 1976), pp. 388–389.

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the effigy represented Sir Robert de Shurland. Shurland is supposed to have been in the Leybourne family’s service at Caerlaverock and assumed its arms differenced by a canton.7 However his arms are not recorded in the Roll of those present at the siege and the similarity of the heraldry leaves open the possibility that the tomb could have been intended for a Leybourne, who like the Shurlands were a Kentish family. The most likely candidate is Sir William de Leybourne, who saw extensive military service under Edward I in Wales, Scotland and on the Continent. He died in 1309, having been predeceased by his son and heir; his place of burial is not recorded, although it has been assumed to be in the parish church at Preston, some twenty miles distant from Minster-in-Sheppey. William had two brothers who also took part in the Caerlaverock siege, but as Stothard recorded no heraldic differencing on the surcoat they can be ruled out.8 Only a few minute segments of blue pigment remain on the surcoat today and no paint at all on the section where a canton would have been located, which would have decided the issue. We have to rest content with the two possible candidates, Sir Robert de Shurland (date of death unknown) and Sir William de Leybourne. Whichever one was interred there, the architectural features of the tomb recess suggest that it was probably not erected before the 1320s. The ogee cinquefoil cusps to the arch derive, like those over the effigies in the north and south aisles at Winchelsea, Sussex, from the tomb of Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke (d. 1324), in Westminster Abbey.9 The absence of plate armour on the Minster figures may point to a terminus ante in the mid-1330’s. The pose of the effigy is without precise parallel elsewhere in England and Prior and Gardner seem to have based their attribution of the monument to London carvers solely on the grounds of geographical proximity.10 Some uncertainties regarding identification exist in regard to the second tomb, which is located in the north choir aisle of Exeter Cathedral in Devon For the Shurland arms see H. Chesshyre and T. Woodcock (eds.), Dictionary of British Arms Medieval Ordinary Vol. One (London, 1992), pp. 312, 316–317. Arms derived from a lordship usually included a distinguishing feature (Keen, Chivalry, cit. n. 4, p. 128). 8 For the Leybourne family see L. B. Larking, ‘On the heart-shrine in Leybourne Church’, in Archaeologia Cantiana, V (1862–1863), p. 133 ff. Also B. Burke, Dormant, Abeyant, Forfeited and Extinct Peerages of the British Empire (London, 1866), p. 321. William was succeeded by his grand-daughter Juliana (d. 1367). 9 L. L. Gee, ‘Ciborium Tombs in England 1290–1330,’ in Journal of the British Archaeological Association, CXXXIII (1979), esp. pp. 38–40, Pls. VI (A), VIII (A, B). 10 E. S. Prior and A. Gardner, An Account of Medieval Figure-Sculpture in England (Cambridge, 1912), p. 554. 7

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(Fig. 2). Like Minster-in-Sheppey the monument is recessed and framed by a cusped arch and pinnacles. The effigy, which is carved from local freestone, is also cross-legged and depicts a knight in chainmail and surcoat with his shield on his left arm. Here however he is in the act of drawing his sword from its scabbard. At his head stands a small figure, now headless, clad in the same manner as the recumbent effigy; from the angle of the existing part of his arm he seems to have held a sword. At the right edge of the recess is the even more diminutive figure of a groom or page clad in tunic and hose and holding the reins of the knight’s warhorse; both are badly defaced. No trace remains of any painted heraldic decoration on the monument, but traditionally it has been believed to be that of Sir Richard Stapledon. The source of this identification is John Leland, who described the tomb: In boreali insula chori . . . Stapletun miles e regione sepulchri Stapletun Epi Exon. fratris eius.11 Leland presumably observed the Stapledon arms on the monument, as Sir William Pole (d. 1635), who was the first source to name the knight as Sir Richard, recorded his arms on the shield: Argent two bends wavy sable.12 As Leland noted, the tomb is in close proximity to that of Sir Richard’s brother, Bishop Walter Stapledon (d. 1326) and in the absence of any alternatives we must accept the identification. Although Richard’s date of death has been given as 1320, he survived into Edward III’s reign and died in 1332.13 Little is known about him, apart from references to his lands and livings in Devon. His chief claim to fame is his association with his illustrious brother in the foundation of Exeter College, Oxford. The local material and the affinities with other knightly effigies in the area indicate that the Stapledon tomb was the work of a Devon atelier of stone-carving, a craft that flourished in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, most notably at the cathedral itself.14 The design of the arch enframing the recess with its ogee cusping in the centre and the lack of plate armour suggest L. Toulmin-Smith (ed.), The Itinerary of John Leland in or about the Years 1535–1543 (London, 1964), vol. I, p. 227. 12 Sir John De La Pole, Collections towards a Description of the County of Devon by Sir William Pole (London, 1791), p. 110. 13 The 1320 date is given in a number of secondary sources, including K. Bauch, Das mittelalterliche Grabbild (Berlin, 1976), pp. 131–132, and B. Cherry, ‘Some Cathedral Tombs,’ in: M. Swanton (ed.), Exeter Cathedral. A Celebration (Exeter, 1991), p. 160, fig. 231. For the date of his death see M. Buck, Politics, Finance and the Church in the Reign of Edward II. Walter Stapledon Treasurer of England (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 11, 26. 14 Prior and Gardner, Medieval Figure-Sculpture (cit. n. 10), p. 624, Fig. 697. 11

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that the Stapledon monument is of about the same date as the Minster-inSheppey tomb. As Stone pointed out, both belong to a phase in English sculpture characterised by lively postures and movement.15 The other two artefacts appear to be later in date than the tombs. The lower part of the east window of the parish church of St. Peter at Drayton Bassett, Staffordshire, formerly contained stained glass depicting a kneeling lady presenting a crested helm to a standing knight holding a banner; on the extreme left a youthful groom or page holds the reins of a destrier, only the forequarters of which are visible (Fig. 4 a, b). The church was demolished except for its tower and re-built in 1793; the glass probably perished at this time. Fortunately its unusual composition had already attracted the attention of several antiquaries. The most detailed record is the coloured illustration made by William Sedgwick in 1640 for Sir William Dugdale’s Book of Monuments.16 The principal characters can be identified by the heraldic surcoat and gown worn by the knight and lady respectively. The former has the arms of the Basset family of Drayton (Or three piles gules and a canton ermine), which also adorn the banner and the trapper covering the horse; the woman impales the Basset arms with those of Grey of Wilton (Barry argent and azure and a label of three points gules). Ralph, Lord Basset of Drayton, succeeded his father Ralph in 1299 when still a minor. In 1304 he married Joan, daughter of John, Lord Grey of Wilton. Ralph died in 1342/3 and Joan in 1353; they were buried at Drayton Bassett in separate tombs, both of which have been lost.17 The date of the glass can be

15 Stone, Sculpture in Britain (cit. n. 5), p. 167, associated the Exeter and Minster-inSheppey tombs. 16 British Library MS Add. 71474, fols. 60v, 61r. For an account of this manuscript see R. Marks and A. Payne, British Heraldry from its Origins to c. 1800, exhib. cat., British Museum (London, 1978), no. 87. Other antiquarian descriptions are in British Library MSS Harley 2129, p. 158 and Egerton 3510, fol. 73r; also London, Society of Antiquaries MS 99, fols. 84v, 85r. For transcriptions of these see P. A. Newton, ‘Schools of glass-painting in the Midlands 1275–1430’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of London 1961), vol. III, pp. 687–688. The only published account of the church and its monuments is S. Shaw, The History and Antiquities of Staffordshire, vol. II (London, 1801), pp. 2–10, Pls. II, III. 17 See G. E. C., Complete Peerage, vol. II (London, 1912), pp. 2–3 for an outline of Ralph Basset’s career. Joan occupied a wall-tomb illustrated in Dugdale, MS Add. 71474, fol. 59v. He also depicts the indent of the brass of a knight with the square banner of a knight banneret which probably represents Ralph. This slab is discussed and illustrated in J. Coales (ed.), The Earliest English Brasses. Patronage, Style and Workshops 1270–1350 (London, 1987), pp. 128, 208, fig. 136, where it is associated with Ralph’s father (d. 1299).

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established fairly precisely. The old church evidently was of one period (some of the elaborate window tracery seems to have resembled the one surviving Decorated clerestory window in the choir of Lichfield Cathedral, less than ten miles distant) and may be connected with the chantry endowed in it by Ralph in 1339. The banner shown in the east window is square, signifying a knight banneret, i.e. someone who could muster a force of fifty lances to serve under him. Ralph attained this rank in 1341, which provides us with a terminus post. The window could have been commissioned in the last years of his life or glazed by his widow; either way a date in the early 1340s is likely.18 Finally there is the Luttrell Psalter (Fig. 3).19 The picture of Sir Geoffrey Luttrell occupies almost one-third of fol. 202v, immediately below the words Gloria patri Dns Galfridus louterell me fieri fecit in script of the same size as the text of Psalm 108 above. The miniature shows Sir Geoffrey mounted on his destrier with his wife Agnes (née Sutton) handing him his helm and triangular pennon of a knight bachelor; his daughter-in-law Beatrice (née Scrope) waits to pass Agnes his shield. The Luttrell arms (Azure a bend between six martlets argent) are repeated on the knight’s surcoat and ailettes, on the crest of his helm, on the shield and pennon and on the horse-trapper, saddle and fan-crest. The same arms are also impaled with those of Sutton (Or a lion rampant vert) and Scrope of Masham (Azure a bend or and a label of five points argent — only three of the points are visible) on the gowns worn by Agnes and Beatrice. The splendour of the Luttrell heraldry is enhanced by changing the metal tinctures of the martlets from argent to or. The Luttrell Psalter must have been executed after 1320, when Geoffrey’s son Andrew married Beatrice Scrope. Agnes died in 1340 and Sir Geoffrey in 1345. The wording of the text above the miniature shows that the book was commissioned during his lifetime, but the traditional dating of 1335– 40 has been challenged by Camille and Sandler; the latter, on the basis of stylistic comparison with manuscripts like the Douai Psalter and the

For the church see Shaw, Staffordshire (cit. n. 16), Pl. III. The Lichfield choir tracery is illustrated in N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England. Staffordshire (Harmondsworth, 1974), text ill. on p. 178. For the chantry endowment see Shaw, op. cit., p. 10. For Ralph’s elevation as a knight banneret see G. E. C. (cit. n. 17). The qualification for this rank is described in Keen, Chivalry (cit. n. 4), p. 168. 19 See n. 1 for bibliography on the Luttrell Psalter. 18

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Stowe Breviary, argues that the Luttrell Psalter was executed in c. 1325– 35.20 However she also connects it with Oxford, Bodleian MS Douce 131 which has been dated by Dennison on heraldic grounds to after 1339/40; Dennison convincingly relates other manuscripts of the 1340s to the Luttrell Psalter.21 The decoration of the last eight quires and the calendar is inferior to the rest of the book, which may be an indication that it was completed hastily — possibly because of Sir Geoffrey’s impending death; alternatively the book could have been unfinished at his death and completed for its subsequent owner. The presence of Agnes does not prove that the principal decoration was executed before her death. As we shall see, the picture should be read symbolically and not as depicting an actual event; even if that were the case the scene could have been commemorative, post-dating her decease. Backhouse suggests that a suitable occasion for commissioning the manuscript would have been provided by the legal coming of age of Andrew in 1334. The same scholar compares the fashionable hanging sleeves worn by Beatrice in the miniature of the Luttrell family at table (fol. 208) with those displayed by the weepers on the tomb-chest of John of Eltham in Westminster Abbey, observing that this mode seems more established on the monument.22 The latter appears to have been erected in 1339 at the earliest and therefore is further support for a date in the 1340s for the main decoration of the Psalter. Finally, Sir Geoffrey has plate armour in the form of greaves like those worn by Ralph, Lord Basset; both have bascinets over their mail coifs, which is an innovation of the 1340s.23 Sir Geoffrey Luttrell was possessed of a widely dispersed estate in the Midlands, comprising lands in south Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and Lincolnshire. His principal residence was at Irnham near Corby in the last county; here he was born in 1276 and here in the parish

20 Sandler, Gothic Manuscripts (cit. n. 1), pp. 118–121. See also her entry in J. Alexander and P. Binski (eds.), Age of Chivalry. Art in Plantagenet England 1200–1400, exhib. cat., Royal Academy (London, 1987), no. 575. Camille, ‘Labouring’ (cit. n. 1), p. 441. 21 L. Dennison, ‘The Fitzwarin Psalter and its Allies: a Reappraisal,’ in W. M. Ormrod (ed.), England in the Fourteenth Century (Proceedings of the 1985 Harlaxton Conference) (Woodbridge, 1986), p. 42 ff., esp. pp. 50–51, 58–59,65. 22 Backhouse, Luttrell Psalter (cit. n. 1), pp. 49, 58, 60. 23 For the date of the John of Eltham tomb see Stone, Sculpture (cit. n. 5), p. 162. Innovations in armour in this period are discussed by Claude Blair in Alexander and Binski, Age of Chivalry (cit. n. 20), p. 169.

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church his body was laid to rest in 1345 after a sumptuous funeral.24 The calendar and litany of the Luttrell Psalter exhibit a Lincolnshire bias and the stylistic comparisons point to eastern England.25 We have, therefore, four works of art made for members of the same estate but of vastly differing materials and scale and widely distributed over the country. In addition the tombs are separated from the glass and the manuscript by at least several years. The diverse media show they cannot have been the product of one craft, let alone a single workshop. Even the two sepulchral monuments are the work of different marblers. Nor is there a common model; each one is individual in the way in which the characters are disposed. Collectively they diverge so much from standard contemporary sepulchral and patronal imagery that they must express the personal wishes of the individual (or his executors) to be commemorated. What was the significance of this distinctive imagery for patrons and posterity? The knight may be the central focus, but what distinguishes each group are the ancillary characters — the destrier, the retainers and the women. They are secondary in importance to the knight and are shown as such For the Luttrell estates and details of Sir Geoffrey’s birth and burial instructions see Backhouse, Luttrell Psalter (cit. n. 1), pp. 17, 36–41. At the east end of the north chancel chapel at Irnham are the remains of an elaborate limestone monument with nodding ogees and crocketed gables over niches and a battlemented cornice. On it are carved the arms of Luttrell and Sutton. Originally it was free-standing and placed between the chancel and the north chapel. It has been identified both as an Easter Sepulchre because of its affinities with a series of Sepulchres (or Tombs of Christ) in the region and as Sir Geoffrey’s tomb. For a good summary of the arguments see V. Sekules, ‘The Tomb of Christ at Lincoln and the Development of the Sacrament Shrine: Easter Sepulchres Reconsidered’, in T. A. Heslop and V. Sekules (eds), Medieval Art and Architecture at Lincoln Cathedral (British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions VIII, 1982 [1986]), p. 126, n. 3. If it was the Luttrell tomb it is quite difficult to envisage its original design. The existing structure bears some resemblance to English 14th-century shrine-bases; also to the base of Edward II’s tomb in Gloucester Cathedral and the monument to Bishop Burghersh (d. 1356) in Lincoln Cathedral, although the latter is a wall-tomb. But assuming there was a brass or carved effigy, where was it — within the structure or on top? The latter is unlikely as the effigy would not have been visible and there does not seem to have been enough space for an effigy or brass within the niches, unlike the monument to Bishop Stapledon at Exeter. The indents of two shields from a brass in the floor of the north chapel are perhaps of relevance to the debate. For the Lincoln and Gloucester tombs see Crossley, Monuments (cit. n. 5), Pls. 67–8. Exeter is published in Cherry, ‘Some Cathedral Tombs’ (cit. n. 13), Fig. 223. For the shrines see N. Coldstream, ‘English Decorated Shrine Bases’, in Jnl. British Archaeological Association, CXXIX (1976), p. 15 ff. 25 Sandler, Gothic Manuscripts (cit. n. 1), p. 119. Dennison, ‘Fitzwarin’ (cit. n. 21), pp. 58–61. 24

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either by their smaller size or by their position in relation to him. All are present because they symbolise the power and status of the patron. The destrier, as opposed to the ordinary palfrey, was an extremely valuable possession. It is estimated that in 1297 the value of the seven principal horses owned by Gerard le Moor, Lord of Wessegem, equalled the yearly income of a prosperous English knight. Similarly the presence of retainers, whether knight, squire, groom or page, emphasised the knight’s status amongst his class by signifying that he could put together a retinue to accompany him in battle or at the tournament. Ralph, Lord Basset, in 1319 retained Philip Chetwynd for peace and war (i.e. for tourneys and military campaigns) in the capacity of an esquire.26 The horse has a long history as a symbol of power and prestige, stretching back far beyond the Middle Ages. As such they have often been associated with funerary rites and memorials. They appear inter alia on humble stelea to Roman cavalrymen and on pagan warrior grave-markers from the Dark Ages.27 Horses were buried with their masters not merely as food-offerings or to bear them to the next world, but as evidence of the exalted status of the deceased.28 Given these associations it is perhaps surprising that there are so few medieval knightly tombs which include the horse in their imagery. The largest concentration is in north Italy, particularly the series to the Scaligeri overlords of Verona. The colossal size of most of them and their location in public places reveal their debt to monuments of Antiquity like the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius on the Capitol; they are in effect a combination of sepulchre and civic memorial. The famous thirteenth-century Magdeburg and Bamberg riders also seem to be deliberate evocations of an imperial past within the boundaries of the Holy Roman Empire. Equestrian monuments continued to find favour into the fifteenth century in Italy, but elsewhere they are few and far between.29 In France some equestrian figures are 26 Keen, Chivalry (cit. n. 4), p. 225. T. R. V. Barker, The Tournament in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 1986), p. 121. 27 See M. Schleiermacher, Römische Grabsteine: die kaiserzeitlichen Reliefs des triumphierenden Reiters (Bonn, 1984); M. Mackintosh, ‘The Sources of the Horseman and the Fallen Enemy Motif in the Tombstones of the Western Roman Empire’, Jnl. British Archaeological Association, CXXXIX (1986), p. 1 ff. 28 For the significance of horse-burials see H. S’Jacob, Idealism and Realism. A Study of Sepulchral Symbolism (Leiden, 1954), pp. 182–183; J. Richards, ‘Anglo-Saxon Symbolism’, M. O. H. Carver (ed.), The Age of Sutton Hoo (Woodbridge, 1992), p. 131 ff. 29 For a general discussion of equestrian monuments see S’Jacob, op. cit., pp. 182–185; E. Panofsky, Tomb Sculpture (London, 1992), pp. 83–84; Bauch, Grabbild (cit. n. 13), pp.

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recorded from the fourteenth century, of which the best-known is a painted wooden votive image in Notre-Dame Paris, which was a thank-offering of either Philippe IV or Philippe VI.30 There are two English equestrian monuments of this period, apart from Minster-in-Sheppey and Exeter, of which one was modelled on the other. The elaborate tombs of Edmund Crouchback, Earl of Lancaster (d. 1296) and Aymer de Valence (d. 1324) in Westminster Abbey have in their gables a small equestrian figure in relief whose prancing gesture closely resembles that found on European seals of knights in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.31 Neither of these tombs is similar to Minster-in-Sheppey and Exeter, whose tableaux appear to be more closely bound up with funerary rites and customs. The connection between medieval sepulchral imagery and burial has long been recognised; the prominence given to the equine sculpture on the Minster-in-Sheppey and Exeter tombs are good evidence of carvers (or rather their patrons) taking their cue from obsequies. From at least the thirteenth century it was customary for the body of a knight to be preceded by his horses with their heraldic trappers, either led or ridden by a man clad in the armour of the deceased; subsequently one or more of the steeds and the armour was given to the burial church as a mortuary offering. A well-known example is the funeral procession of Edward the Black Prince at Canterbury in 1376 which included two destriers and two men bearing the Prince’s arms for peace and for war. Sir Geoffrey Luttrell bequeathed his best horse together with the appropriate martial equipment to the church where he was to be buried and there are references to the same practice in other wills from 1296 onwards. That it was almost de rigueur for the high-born is indicated by the clause in the will of Sir Otho de Grandisson (1358) expressly forbidding the ritual at his funeral.32 On one level the Minster-in-Sheppey and Exeter monuments are a visual reference to the funerary rites of the deceased; on another they are a permanent record of his worldly status. They also show him poised to 186–197. For a recent discussion of the German riders see E. Badstübner, ‘Justinianssäule und Magdeburger Reiter’, in F. Möbius and E. Schubert (eds.), Skulptur des Mittelalters. Funktion und Gestalt (Weimar, 1987), p. 184 ff. 30 F. Baron, ‘Le cavalier royal de Notre-Dame de Paris et le problème de la statue équestre au moyen âge’, Bulletin Monumental, 126 (1968), p. 141 ff. 31 Bauch, Grabbild (cit. n. 13), p. 187, Pl. 292; Stone, Sculpture (cit. n. 5), pp. 159–160, Pl. 120 (A, B). 32 Examples are cited in Stothard, Monumental Effigies (cit. n. 5), p. 73; Barker, Tournament (cit. n. 26), p. 174; J. and M. Vale, ‘Knightly Codes and Piety’, in N. Saul

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rise from the grave, draw his sword and ride into battle when summoned on the Day of Judgment. The images at Drayton Bassett and in the Luttrell Psalter differ from the tombs in that women are introduced and they participate in a specific action: the arming of the knight, a scene which is described in the late fourteenthcentury poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.33 The activity portrayed would have had profound symbolic significance for the medieval observer as in it are encapsulated the basic tenets of chivalry and the values of the knightly class, which were subscribed to throughout western Christendom. For convenience the Luttrell Psalter will be used as the model. Like the two tombs, the miniature bears witness to the status of Sir Geoffrey Luttrell through his portrayal as a knight. But an additional element here is the parading of his important marriage alliances by means of the heraldry prominently displayed on the gowns worn by his wife and daughter-inlaw. The former was a daughter of Sir Richard Sutton, a Nottinghamshire landowner and great-nephew of Oliver Sutton, Bishop of Lincoln (1280 –99).34 There is nothing particularly remarkable about her presence here — wives are quite frequently shown with their husbands in donor “portraits” in English fourteenth-century art; what appears to be unique is the appearance of their son Andrew’s wife Beatrice Scrope. It must have been a considerable coup on Sir Geoffrey’s part to arrange a marriage between his heir and a daughter of the powerful and influential Sir Geoffrey le Scrope; in fact he secured a double bond as Geoffrey, a younger son, was married to another Scrope daughter. As was not uncommon in medieval times these alliances were made whilst the couples were still infants. Geoffrey le Scrope (d. 1340) was king’s serjeant-at-law and eventually Chief Justice of the King’s Bench. He was much employed by successive monarchs on diplomatic missions and steered an adroit path through the political storms of the period. He amassed great estates in north Yorkshire and laid the foundations for the (ed.), Age of Chivalry. Art and Society in Late Medieval England (London, 1992), p. 27; M. G. A. Vale, Piety, Charity and Literacy among the Yorkshire Gentry 1370–1480 (Borthwick Institute Papers No. 50) (York, 1976), pp. 11–12. Canterbury Cathedral still possesses the Black Prince’s armour. For Luttrell see Backhouse, Luttrell Psalter (cit. n. 1), p. 41. Saddled horses still form part of state funeral processions. 33 A. C. Cawley and J. J. Anderson (eds.), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Cleanness, Patience (London, 1991), pp. 180–182, verses 566–622. 34 See Backhouse, Luttrell Psalter (cit. n. 1), p. 20 for the Sutton family.

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emergence of the dynasty of the Scropes of Masham.35 In this respect the presence of Scrope’s daughter in the miniature would have been of greater significance than that of Luttrell’s son. It has been assumed that this scene represents the arming of Sir Geoffrey for a tournament. There are two arguments against this. Firstly his lance is not tipped with a coronal à plaisance.36 Secondly there was a long history of ecclesiastical prohibition of tourneying which had only been lifted in 1316; although in practice the ban had largely been ignored it is hard to see how an image depicting preparation for the lists would have sat comfortably in a devotional book, even one made for private use.37 In any case the miniature has a more profound significance. As Camille has shown, some of the keys to unlocking these deeper levels of meaning lie in the juxtaposition of the image with the text of the manuscript.38 The miniature is placed at the end of Psalm 108, in a space left for this purpose by the scribe; on the facing page is most of Psalm 109, which is linked with the scene not just by position but through the presence of border patterns of repeated martlets (for Luttrell) and lions (for Sutton). This border design is not found elsewhere in the manuscript and must have been designed to emphasise the text and connect it with the Luttrell group. The emphasis on lordship in the imagery of the initial to Psalm 109 and the text of the psalm itself are particularly apposite for a medieval estate-owner. Geoffrey is termed dominus and the same word occurs twice in the opening verse of the psalm (Dixit dominus domino meo). The pictorial interchange can be extended further. The psalm contains martial imagery as well as stressing lordship: Dominus a dextris tuis, confregit in die ire sue reges. Judicabit in nacionibus, implebit ruinas: conquassabit capita in terra multorum. In the last verse of Psalm 108, immediately above the patron inscription, is the verse Qui astitit a dextris pauperis: ut salvam faceret a persequentibus animam meam. Other verses of this psalm list the punishments that will befall the ungodly man — his wife to be a widow, his children orphans and cast out as vagabonds; and probably the worst threat of all for Sir Geoffrey: Fiant nati eius in interitum: in generacione

E. L. G. Stones, ‘Sir Geoffrey le Scrope (c. 1285–1340), Chief Justice of the King’s Bench’, English Historical Review, 69 (1954), p. 1 ff. 36 For blunting of tournament weapons see Keen, Chivalry (cit. n. 4), p. 205. 37 Barker, Tournament (cit. n. 26), Chapter Four (The Tournament and the Church). 38 Camille, ‘Labouring’ (cit. n. 1), pp. 443–444. 35

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una deleatur nomen eius. The placing of the miniature (which includes his daughter-in-law, on whose fertility hopes rested for the continuation of the Luttrell line) amongst graphic enumerations of the fate of the family of the unrighteous can hardly be coincidental.39 The duties of knighthood are also underlined by the verses of the two psalms. As defined in Raymond Lull’s widely disseminated Libre del ordre de cavayleria (1263–70) these included the defence of the faith against unbelievers and protection of the weak, widows and orphans and women.40 In the society to which Sir Geoffrey Luttrell belonged the distinction between the fantasy world of the Arthurian legends and courtly literature on the one hand and the real-life obligations of knighthood was an artificial one. If in practice many may have failed to live up to the ideals of chivalrous behaviour, there are well-recorded examples of knights who conducted themselves in the manner of the heroes of romance.41 The blurring of reality and myth is shown in treatises on chivalry, which emphasise service to a lady par amour in very much the same manner as do medieval romances. Geoffrey de Charny in his Livre de chevalerie asserted that it was desirable for a warrior to be in love as ‘he will seek even higher renown for the honour that it will do to his lady . . . love is a human passion which, rightly regulated, sharpens and refines the honourable ambitions of martial men.’ 42 Instances of deeds of valour on the battlefield and at the tournament undertaken for the love of a lady are not uncommon.43 The world of chivalry and courtly love finds frequent visual expression in manuscripts and prized secular objects like painted and ivory caskets. They illustrate the Lancelot stories, Alexander legends and relevant texts like the Old Testament hero Judas Maccabeus whom Geoffrey de Charny saw as the perfect model of knighthood.44 Just as the values and beliefs 39 In the event his hopes of founding a dynasty were dashed: the direct male line of the Luttrells came to an end in 1419. 40 Keen, Chivalry (cit. n. 4), p. 9 citing Ramon Lull, Libre del ordre de cavayleria. 41 Ibid., Chapters One and Two. 42 Ibid., pp. 13, 14. 43 Ibid., p. 19 for the example of an Italian knight named Galeas of Mantua. 44 For useful surveys of the material see A. Stones, ‘Secular Manuscript Illumination in France’, in Medieval Manuscripts and Textual Criticism, 1976, p. 83 ff. Idem, ‘Arthurian Art since Loomis’, in W. Van Hoecke, G. Tournoy, W. Verbeke (eds.), Arturus Rex, vol. II (Acta Conventus Lovaniensis 1987) (Leuven, 1991), p. 21 ff. See Keen, Chivalry (cit. n. 4), p. 14 for De Charny and Judas Maccabeus.

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transcended the bounds of nationality, so these images were a lingua franca of chivalry. The arming of a knight by his lady is a common image in this genre, often associated with tourneying scenes. It occurs on French ivory caskets and in French and Flemish secular and devotional manuscripts of the late thirteenth and first half of the fourteenth centuries; in the books the arming of the knight forms part of the marginal decoration and never features an identifiable individual such as the owner.45 In Germany the scene is repeated several times in the Codex Manesse, of the end of the thirteenth century. Here are the lauded poets and minnesingers vested in the panoply of knighthood: Schenk von Limburg kneels before his mistress who places his helm on his head, observed by his horse tethered to a tree (Fig. 9); Otto von Turme is handed his helm and shield by two damsels; Sire Winki is also attended by two ladies, one of whom gives him a gold ring as a love-token as well as his shield; a groom holds his horse as he does in the miniature of Wolfram von Eschenbach (Fig. 8).46 These scenes are all strikingly similar to the Luttrell Psalter, Drayton Bassett and the tombs at Minster-in-Sheppey and Exeter. Images of ladies arming knights also occur in a contemporary manuscript of Wilhelm von Orlens, a poem by Rudolf von Ems, and on a painted Minnekästchen in the Maximilianmuseum at Augsburg.47 The earliest examples of this scene appear to be English. Amongst the tinted drawings added in c. 1250 to the Westminster Psalter (London, British Library MS 2. A.xxii) is a knight kneeling before a king with his squire placing his helm on his head; below are the forequarters of his destrier (Fig. 6).48 The image engraved on the central medallion of a silver parcel-gilt 45 See L. M. C. Randall, Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts (Baltimore, 1966), pp. 139–140; M. R. James, The Romance of Alexander MS Bodley 264 (Oxford, 1933), fols. 67r, 101v (ill. in colour). The relevant images from the late 13th-century ‘Roman de la Poire’ (Paris, Bibl. Nat. fr. 2186) are illustrated in R. Barber, The Knight and Chivalry (London, 1970), ill. 21 (I am grateful to Alison Stones for drawing my attention to this manuscript). D. J. A. Ross, ‘Allegory and Romance on a Mediaeval French Marriage Casket’, Jnl. Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XI (1943), p. 111 ff. 46 Heidelberg, Universitätsbibliothek MS cpg 848, fols. 82v, 131r, l49v, 194r. See Minnesänger, vol. I (Baden-Baden, 1960); I. F. Walther (ed.), Codex Manesse (Frankfurt am Main, 1988); E. M. Mittler and W. Werner (eds.), Codex Manesse, exhib. cat. (Heidelberg, 1988). 47 Mittler and Werner, op. cit., Cats. H3 (colour ill. on p. 597), H 18/2 (colour ill. on p. 613). I am indebted to Julia Walworth for knowledge of this manuscript. 48 N. J. Morgan, Early Gothic Manuscripts 1250–1285 (A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles IV, vol. 2) (London, 1987), no. 95, pp. 49–50, ills. 2, 4. The drawing is something of a mystery. Given its Westminster associations the king could be

luttrell and some companions

1. Minster-in-Sheppey (Kent). Effigy of knight, c. 1320–1335.

2. Exeter Cathedral (Devon). Tomb of Sir Richard Stapledon, c. 1332.

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3. The Luttrell Psalter, London, British Library MS Add. 42130, fol. 202v: Sir Geoffrey Luttrell, his wife and daughter-in-law, c. 1335–1345.

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4a, b. Sir William Dugdale’s Book of Monuments, London, British Library MS Add. 71474, fols. 60v, 61r: Ralph Lord Basset and his wife (formerly in the east window of Drayton Bassett church, Staffordshire, c. 1340– 1345).

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5. London, Bermondsey, parish church of St Mary Magdalen. Silver parcel-gilt dish, c. 1340–1350 (on loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum).

6. The Westminster Psalter, British Libr. MS Royal 2.A.xxii, fol. 220r: arming of a knight, c. 1250.

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7. Oxford, Christ Church College MS 92, fol. 5r: the arming of a royal knight (Edward III[?]) by angels, 1326/27.

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8. Manesse Codex, Heidelberg, UB, MS cpg 848, fol. 149v: Wolfram von Eschenbach.

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8. Manesse Codex, Heidelberg, UB, MS cpg 848, fol. 82v: Schenk von Limburg.

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dish belonging to Bermondsey parish church in the east end of London is very similar, although there is no king and the knight receives his helm from a lady (Fig. 5). The medallion is only a shadow of its former glory as only vestiges remain of its translucent enamel covering. The design and the subject-matter suggest that the dish was made for display on the sideboard of a noble, or even royal household. The garments and hairstyle of the lady and the armour of the knight point to a date in the 1340s.49 In all of the above examples the scenes appear to be without any religious connotations. In England several depictions of knights have a sacred flavour. A treatise on the vices written in c. 1236 by Gulielmus Peraldus is preceded by a mounted knight with the diagrammatic version of the Holy Trinity blazoned on his shield; the weapons and horse accoutrements bear the names of the virtues and he is crowned by an angel. In addition seven doves representing the gifts of the Holy Spirit confront an array of devils and dragons.50 Here, unmistakably, is the knight of Christ. A few years later, in the Lambeth Apocalypse (London, Lambeth Palace MS 209), St. Mercurius is handed his mailcoat and armour as he rises from the tomb; angels present him with his sword, shield and pennon.51 An illustrated copy of a treatise composed in 1326–7 by Walter de Milemete, De nobilitatibus, sapientiis, et prudentiis regum, was intended as a presentation copy for the new king, Edward III. Amongst its rich decoration is a large miniature depicting a knight, wearing a surcoat with the royal arms of England, kneeling before the Holy Trinity and being armed by angels with helm, lance, sword and shield; in the left border a groom holds the reins of a saddled horse with a trapper (Fig. 7).52 Edward the Confessor; although the knight’s surcoat and pennon are tricked distinctly they have not been identified. The arms do not, for instance, occur on the shields carved on the arcades of Westminster Abbey. 49 C. Oman, ‘The Bermondsey Dish’, Burlington Magazine, XCIV (1952), p. 23 ff.; Alexander and Binski, Age of Chivalry (cit. n. 20), no. 156; M. Campbell, ‘Gold, Silver and Precious Stones,’ in J. Blair and N. Ramsay (eds.), English Medieval Industries (London, 1991), pp. 143, 156, Fig. 78. The dish has been on loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum since 1951. 50 BL MS Harl. 3244. This copy dates from c. 1240–1255. N. J. Morgan, Early Gothic Manuscripts 1190–1250 (A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles IV, vol. 1) (Oxford, 1982), no. 80, pp. 127–128, ills. 269–270. 51 N. J. Morgan, The Lambeth Apocalypse MS 209 in Lambeth Palace Library. A Critical Study (London, 1990), p. 251 and ill. Morgan dates the manuscript to between 1252 and 1267. 52 Oxford, Christ Church Coll. MS 92. See M. R. James, The Treatise of Walter de Milemete (Oxford, 1913). Sandler, Gothic Manuscripts (cit. n. 1), no. 84, pp. 91–93.

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The arming of Sir Geoffrey Luttrell is not invested with such overt sacramental connotations, but nevertheless an implied sacerdotal meaning to the scene is given by its prominence in a devotional book. It is worth repeating that no other owner of an elaborate illuminated manuscript of the period had himself portrayed in this way. Superficially the Luttrell Psalter scene looks very much like any of the others showing arming of knights by ladies, apart from the importance accorded to it and the fact that the characters portrayed represent real people. These differences are, however, crucial. In this miniature the recurrent theme in chivalric literature of the motivating power of courtly love is present, but within the accepted conventions of marriage and kinship. Sir Geoffrey surely intended this picture to convey to his descendants the image of himself as the epitome of the perfect Christian knight, defending the Faith, protecting the weak and humble and winning honour for himself, his family and womenfolk by his deeds of valour on the field of battle and the tournament. The arming of Sir Geoffrey encapsulates all of the ideals to which the worthy knight aspired. The miniature may be symbolic, but its message would have been understood all the more clearly by the Luttrell family in the light of an event in the locality of Irnham which once again reveals how the real and the make-believe worlds of chivalry are inextricably bound. In the 1320s a feast took place in Lincolnshire at which Sir William Marmion received a golden helm sent by a lady commanding him to win renown with it. This episode may have been sufficiently unusual to be worthy of record and Sir Geoffrey must have been aware of it.53 The imagery of Ralph, Lord Basset’s window is fundamentally the same. It shows him displaying his recently acquired pennon of the knight banneret and, like Sir Geoffrey’s picture, it commemorates an important dynastic alliance which too was secured by more than one link. Ralph’s wife Joan was not only a daughter of John, Lord Grey of Wilton, by his first wife, but her father’s second marriage was to Maud Basset. Both families were important Marcher lords as well as holding large estates elsewhere. The Basset influence seems to been responsible for the disinheritance of John’s son by his first wife in favour of his second son by Maud.54

Barker, Tournament (cit. n. 26), p. 153. R. I. Jack (ed.), ‘The Grey of Ruthin Valor’, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, XLVI (1967), pp. 1–3. 53 54

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The location of the Basset group had even more obvious sacerdotal overtones than the Luttrell Psalter scene. It was in the most sanctified part of the church in close proximity to the high altar, at which prayers were said for Ralph’s soul.55 To an even greater degree than the Psalter the glass affirms that the profession of arms in righteous causes was the duty of a Christian knight. Ralph, Lord Basset and Sir Geoffrey Luttrell were of the same generation; they were men of the Midlands and were both estate owners and warriors who fought in the same campaigns in Scotland and overseas; no doubt they participated in the same tournaments.56 Sir Richard Stapledon and whichever of Sir Robert de Shurland and Sir William de Leybourne occupied the Minster-in-Sheppey tomb belonged to an older generation, but in this closely interwoven society all four must have been acquainted. Indeed in 1300 Luttrell, Leybourne and Shurland served in Edward I’s army in Scotland and Ralph Basset and Richard Stapledon were also there a few years later.57 Given the factors of class and opportunities for encountering each other the occurrence of four very distinctive and related images widely dispersed over the country is not so remarkable. Rather more surprising is that such evocative symbols of power and status enjoyed so limited a vogue. By commissioning one of the most lavishly illustrated and attractive of all English medieval manuscripts Sir Geoffrey Luttrell has succeeded in preserving his name for posterity. His three fellow-knights looked to memorials in churches as their guarantees of immortality. In the elegant words of Maurice Keen, churches were ‘the mausolea of chivalry, the final resting place of its insignia and mementos of honour. There, in stone and glass and hatchment, they had their final lesson to teach, that the man who is born to the profession of arms may save his soul in the honourable discharge of his office in it: indeed that that is his duty, not only to his ancestors and descendants, but to his God as well, that he should seek to do so.’ 58 Whether or not Sir Geoffrey and his companions lived up to the 55 The aisleless structure rules out any other location for the chantry altar; also the family tombs were in the chancel. 56 See Barker, Tournament (cit. n. 26), pp. 124–125 for Basset. For Luttrell see Backhouse, Luttrell Psalter (cit. n. 1), p. 17 and G. E. C., Complete Peerage, VIII (London, 1932), p. 286. 57 Barker, op. cit. G. E. C., op. cit. Leybourne’s arms are recorded in the Roll of those present at the siege of Caerlaverock in 1300; see Chesshyre and Woodcock, Dictionary of British Arms (cit. n. 7), p. 314; for Stapledon see Buck, Stapledon (cit. n. 13), p. 20. 58 Keen, Chivalry (cit. n. 4), p. 178.

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precepts of chivalry and were, like Sir Gawain, Voyded of uche vylany, wyth vertues ennoured in mote is quite another matter; on that judgment has been given many centuries past by a far more omniscient authority than a student of the Middle Ages. There can at least be no doubt that our knights would have understood the offering of this contribution en hommage to Gerhard Schmidt. Acknowledgments I would like to thank Claude Blair, Marian Campbell, Angela Doughty, Julian Richards, Felicity Riddy, Kay Staniland, Alison Stones, Julia Walworth and David Whiteley for their invaluable assistance in the preparation of this paper; errors and misinterpretations are, of course, my responsibility. Photographic credits: Fig. 1: after C. A. Stothard, The Monumental Effigies of Great Britain, rev. ed. (London, 1876). Fig. 2: The Conway Library, Courtauld Institute of Art, reproduced by permission of Canon M. H. Ridgway. Figs 3, 4, 6: The British Library. Fig. 5: The Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Fig. 7: The Governing Body of Christ Church, Oxford. Figs 8, 9: Kunsthistorisches Institut, Universität Wien.

XXVIII Entumbid Right Princly: The Beauchamp Chapel at Warwick and the Politics of Interment ‘The dead have no existence other than that which the living imagine for them’ (Jean-Claude Schmitt).1

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he Beauchamp Chapel attached to St Mary’s church, Warwick, was the most spectacular funerary ensemble of its day — indeed, it can stand comparison with the finest mortuary chapels in Europe — and for which copious documentation is available.2 Just as its constituent elements can be read in an integrated fashion, so the key to comprehending the building in other than a formalist manner lies in locating it within its politico-prosopographical contexts. This paper will argue that the Chapel is a structure whose creation and significance are of considerable complexity, encompassing patronal identities and intentions, the function and reception of sepulchral imagery and the shaping of visual representation by political events and dynastic fortunes. The Chapel’s founder, Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick (d.1439), was an individual at the centre of affairs of state in England for four decades and who was renowned throughout Europe (Fig. 1).3 Richard’s wealth was equalled only by that of Richard duke of York amongst his noble contemporaries and he enjoyed high office under the three Lancastrian 1 J-C. Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead (Chicago and London, 1998), p. 1. 2 The bibliography on the Chapel is extensive. The publications most relevant for the purposes of this paper are cited where appropriate in the following footnotes. 3 D. Brindley, Richard Beauchamp: Medieval England’s Greatest Knight (Stroud, 2001); C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity. A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society 1401–1499 (Cambridge, 1992), passim; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), iv,

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kings.4 In his time he was lauded as the paragon of Christian chivalric virtues: in the Beauchamp Pageant, the illustrated life of Richard Beauchamp composed in the 1480s, the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund tells Henry V that ‘no prince cristyn for wisdom, nortur and manhode, hadde suche a nother knyght as he hadde of therle of Warrewyk…And so ever after, by the Emperors auctorite, was called the ‘fadre of curteisy’ ’.5 Richard’s wealth and ‘degree’ were expressed in the reconstruction of and addition to his residences and in the amassing of silver plate and textiles as well as in lavish hospitality.6 The outward manifestations of the earl’s piety followed the same pattern — conventional and on a grand scale. He went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land and he shared the predilection of his peers for consulting female recluses. Again like his contemporaries Richard was very conscious of family status and lineage — the Beauchamps had held the Warwick earldom since 1268.7 At a tournament in Guines in 1415, he participated on successive days wearing the heraldic devices of different holders of the earldom, simulating a passage found in a knightly romance (Fig. 2).8 In 1437, on the eve of what was to be his last tour of duty in France, Beauchamp made a lengthy will. Inter alia it stipulated that a chapel dedicated to Our Lady and containing his tomb was to be constructed in the pp. 592–5 (entry by Christine Carpenter); a succinct account is A. Payne, ‘The Beauchamps and the Nevilles’, in R. Marks and P. Williamson (eds), Gothic. Art for England 1400–1547, Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition catalogue (London, 2003), pp. 219–221. 4 For Richard’s wealth, see M. A. Hicks, ‘The Beauchamp Trust, 1439–87’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 54 (1980), pp. 135–149; K. B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England (Oxford, 1973), Chap. 4. 5 A. Sinclair (ed. ), The Beauchamp Pageant (Donington, 2003), pp. 120–1, Pl. XXXV. 6 For the buildings see J. H. Harvey (ed. ), William of Worcestre Itineraries (Oxford, 1969), pp. 218–220. Some of the Earl’s plate is mentioned in his will: The National Archives, Prerogative Court of Canterbury, Prob 11/1, ff. 147–148v (new foliation), ff. 146r–147v (old); the fullest published edition is T. Hearne (ed. ), Historia Vitae et Regni Ricardi II, (Oxford, 1729), pp. 240–49. There is a brief mention of expenditure on clothing and textiles in C. Ross, The Estates and Finances of Richard Beauchamp Earl of Warwick (Dugdale Society Occasional Papers no. 12) (Oxford, 1956), p. 17. 7 G. E. Cokayne, The Complete Peerage, 13 vols (rev. edn, London, 1959), xii, pt. 2, pp. 357–93. 8 M. K. Jones, ‘The Relief of Avranches (1439): An English Feat of Arms at the End of the Hundred Years’ War’, in N. Rogers (ed. ), England in the Fifteenth Century. Proceedings of the 1992 Harlaxton Symposium (Donington, 1994), p. 43; Sinclair, Beauchamp Pageant, pp. 106–113, Pls XXVIII–XXX.

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collegiate church of St Mary at Warwick, the ancestral seat of the earldom.9 The raison d’être of the edifice was to act as a perpetual chantry for the founder’s soul, for which the collegiate establishment was to be augmented by the endowment of four additional priests and two clerks at a cost of £40 per annum from lands alienated for this purpose. The Chapel — aptly described by Leland as ‘right fayre, large, and somptuus’ — is a rectangular single-storeyed structure projecting from the east side of the south transept of St Mary’s and parallel with the chancel (Figs 3–6).10 In addition to the earl’s will, the main sources for the construction, fittings and furnishings are the accounts of his executors and the contracts drawn up with the craftsmen involved.11 Preparations began in 1441, when a commission was issued by royal patent to engage craftsmen. Work on site commenced in the following year. During 1447 the glazing contract was drawn up, indicating that the building proper had reached an advanced stage. Once the structural envelope was complete, attention turned to the fittings and furnishings. In 1449/50 John Brentwood of London undertook to paint the Doom on the west wall and in the same year contracts for parts of the earl’s tomb were issued to various craftsmen, the chest for which had already been ordered in May 1447.12 Just over a decade later, the entire ensemble was complete, although

9 The National Archives, Prerogative Court of Canterbury, Prob 11/1, ff. 147–148v (new foliation), 146r–147v (old). 10 L. Toulmin-Smith, (ed. ), The Itinerary of John Leland in or about the Years 1535– 1543, 5 vols (London, 1964), ii, p. 41; for an analysis of the building, see L. Monckton, ‘Fit for a King? The Architecture of the Beauchamp Chapel’, Architectural History, 47 (2004), pp. 25–52. 11 The accounts are only known from copies. W. Dugdale, Antiquities of Warwickshire, 2 vols (London, 1730), i, pp. 445–47; J. G. Nichols, Description of the Church of St Mary, Warwick and of the Beauchamp Chapel, and Monuments of the Beauchamps and Dudleys (London, 1838); M. Hicks, ‘Beauchamp Trust’ pp. 135–149; P. Lindley, ‘ “Una Grande Opera al mio Re”: Gilt-Bronze Effigies in England from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 143 (1990), pp. 112–130, esp. pp. 120–123. The last has shown that Nichols’ transcript (of a copy, not the original) is not entirely accurate. Another transcript of a copy is in R. Wheler’s notes (BL, Add. MS 28564, ff. 252v–268r). 12 For the tomb see especially Lindley, ‘ “Una Grande Opera” ’, pp. 120–3; A. M. Morganstern, Gothic Tombs of Kinship in France, the Low Countries, and England (Pennsylvania, 2000), pp. 131–141, 192–4. The latter, following Lawrence Stone’s initial suggestion, has shown that the contract for the chest is misdated 1457 by the copyists of the documents (ibid., p. 135).

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the work of enlarging the deanery and college in order to accommodate the additional clergy continued until 1463.13 The Chapel does not retain its precise appearance of 1459 owing to losses resulting chiefly from iconoclasm and the 1694 great fire of Warwick; also through various additions, notably of more tombs and the reredos behind the altar.14 Notwithstanding these changes, the Chapel seems to bear the hallmarks of a carefully conceived scheme in which all the elements — the architectural frame, sculpture, metalwork, enamels, glass, murals and woodwork — are integrated so as to form a coherent whole, both visually and iconographically. In short, it appears to be an unproblematic example of a Gesamtkunstwerk.15 The total cost of the buildings and its fittings came to at least £2400; this included approximately £720 for the tomb monument (Figs 7–9).16 In their day these were very large sums for a funerary ensemble. By way of comparison, the estimated expenditure required in the 1460s for the large collegiate church and almshouse at Tattershall, Lincolnshire, founded by Ralph Lord Cromwell, was half the cost of the Beauchamp Chapel.17 As for the tomb, the alabaster monument at Lowick in Northamptonshire with effigies of Ralph Greene and his wife was priced at £40 in 1419; at the top

Dugdale, Warwickshire, i, p. 447; P. B. Chatwin, ‘Documents of ‘Warwick the Kingmaker’ in possession of St. Mary’s Church, Warwick’, Transactions of the Birmingham Archaeological Society, 59 (1935), pp. 1–8. 14 See W. F. S. Dugdale, The Restorations of the Beauchamp Chapel at St Mary’s Collegiate Church, Warwick, 1674–1742 (Roxburghe Club, 1956). 15 For a valuable examination of the Gesamtkunstwerk concept see V. C. Raguin, K. Brush and P. Draper (eds), Artistic Integration in Gothic Buildings (Toronto, Buffalo and London, 1995). 16 The precise figures are not easily extractable from the accounts. Dugdale, Warwickshire, i, pp. 445, 447; Nichols, Description, p. 36 and Wheler (BL, Add. MS 28564, ff. 257r –258r) give a total of £2481 4s. 7½d. for Chapel and tomb, excluding the enlarged deanery and college which came to a further £1468 19s. 9d. Hicks, ‘Beauchamp Trust’, p. 140 gives £3634 by 1463 (including the enlarged deanery and college); he estimates the tomb at £713. Apparently omitted from all versions of the original accounts are the costs of carving the four images to be painted by Colborne, the stone angels and saints around the east window and the organ (unless they are not specified). In addition, Dugdale overlooked the sum of £16 4s. 4d. for the Chapel flooring. There are also some double entries in the two accounts, as noted by Nichols (Description, p. 36). 17 £1200; the collegiate buildings were already complete by the time of the estimate: R. Marks, The Stained Glass of the Collegiate Church of the Holy Trinity, Tattershall (Lincs. ) (New York and London, 1984), p. 22. 13

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end of the spectrum, the tomb of Richard II and Anne, of 1395–98/99, eventually cost £933 6s. 8d.18 The ostensible theme of the Chapel is Beauchamp’s personal salvation. The imagery of the interior fuses the earthly and the heavenly worlds. The earthly world, represented by the earl’s corpse, is laid in the vault below the tombchest and ‘set on the bare rooch’ in the words of the inscription on the monument (Fig. 10). The floor of the vault is indeed hewn from rock, but the reference in the inscription may be more than literal and could be interpreted as a topos of humility; alternatively it might have been intended to refer to Christ’s tomb and therefore the expectation of resurrection.19 This sombre tone was echoed by the original paving of the Chapel in Purbeck marble, which like the tombchest, was supplied by John Bourde from Corfe Castle, Dorset. Displayed around the chest are fourteen mourners or weepers, as specified in the contracts, each identified by the enamelled shields of arms below (Figs 7, 9).20 The central focus of the ensemble is Beauchamp’s effigy (Figs 7, 8). It depicts him in his armour as ‘miles Christi’, placed with his feet to the east in anticipation of his resurrection and attainment of eternal salvation on the day of judgement, painted behind him on the upper part of the Chapel west wall (Fig. 5). In the glazing and sculpture is the celestial host: the prophets with texts foretelling events from the life of the Virgin, Marian imagery (including the lost principal images of the Annunciation — probably located in the two elaborate niches flanking the east window — and ‘lesse Images’ of SS Anne and George, all of polychromed and gilded stone), saints, the Nine Orders of Angels and music-making angels.21 The effigy 18 H. M. Colvin (ed. ), The History of the King’s Works. The Middle Ages, 2 vols (London, 1963), i, p. 488. 19 The vault is described and illustrated in P. B. Chatwin, ‘The Grave of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, and other Burials in the Beauchamp Chapel’, Transactions of the Birmingham Archaeological Society, 61 (1937), pp. 1–10. Andrew Martindale suggested that three knightly tombs in East Anglia with the effigies resting on stones originated in antique statuary of Mars, God of War; his hypothesis is plausible, but unlikely to apply to the Beauchamp tomb. See A. Martindale, ‘The Knight and the Bed of Stones: A Learned Confusion of the Fourteenth Century’, ‘ Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 142 (1989), pp. 66–74. A wooden [!] tomb at Thornhill, Yorkshire West Riding, bears the inscription ‘Bonys emonge stonys lys. . . ’(Marks and Williamson, Gothic, cat. no. 335). 20 Lindley, ‘ “Una Grande Opera” ’, pp. 120–3; Morganstern, Gothic Tombs, pp. 133– 141, 192–14; idem, ‘The Tomb as Prompter for the Chantry’, in E. Valdez del Alamo and C. M. Prendergast (eds), Memory and the Medieval Tomb (Aldershot, 2000), pp. 81–9. 21 G. M. White, ‘The Iconography of the Stained Glass of the Beauchamp Chapel, St Mary’s Warwick’, Journal of Stained Glass, 19 (1991–93), pp. 133–157.

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gazes up, with hands open in a gesture of either adoration or silent prayer, at the figure of the Queen of Heaven carved on the easternmost roof boss. (Fig. 8).22 Beauchamp featured again in the east window, kneeling under a canopy of estate and in the company of his two wives, daughters and son below the Virgin in some guise (the original iconography has been obscured by losses and rearrangement) and four saints (Figs 11, 14–16, 21–22). The Heavenly Jerusalem is evoked not merely by the iconography but by the materials. In the very medium itself, in the rich and diverse colours, above all perhaps in the imitation jewelled inserts, the Chapel windows seem to translate into pictorial form the language of the Book of Revelation: ‘And the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass. And the foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with all manner of precious stones...’ (Revelation, xxi, vv.18–19, 23). The pains and time Earl Richard were to suffer in purgatory would be alleviated by his good works in founding and building his Chapel and by the prayers for his soul exhorted by the tomb inscription (interestingly in English, not Latin). Also by his liturgical provisions: ‘... there be saide euery day during the worlde…iij masses whereof one euery day of our Lady goddess moder with note after and as the ordinal of Salisbury doth assigne the secunde masse to be euery day withoute note of Requiem the thirde masse also withoute note to be the Sondaye of the Trinitye the Monday of the Angles the Twysday of sanct Thomas of Caunterbury the Wednesday of the holy gost the Thursday of Corpus xpi the ffriday of the holy crosse And the Saturday of the Audoracon of our lady…’.23 In the west gallery was an organ and underneath the clergy stalls towards the west end of the Chapel are large sounding spaces designed to enhance the acoustics.24 Finally the aural was made visual. In the tracery of the windows are angels holding not only musical instruments and the words of various antiphons but also the musical notation. Just as the imagery in 22 For this prayer gesture see M. Baxandall, Painting and Experience in FifteenthCentury Italy (Oxford, 2nd edn, 1988), pp. 64–66, Pl. 31; H. Van Os, The Art of Devotion in the Late Middle Ages in Europe 1300–1500 (London, 1994), pp. 63–4, Figs 19–21. 23 The National Archives, Prerogative Court of Canterbury, Prob 11/1, ff. 147–148v, new foliation) (146r–147v, old). 24 P. B. Chatwin, ‘Recent Discoveries in the Beauchamp Chapel, Warwick’, Transactions of the Birmingham Archaeological Society, 53 (1928), p. 155, ill. on p. 156.

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the various media is integrated, so what is heard is combined with what is seen (Figs 12, 13).25 The Beauchamp Chapel is on one level an introspective monument of concern solely to its founder, an interpretation to which the design of the building lends itself, notwithstanding the blind tracery ‘panelling’ and richly decorated parapets articulating the external masonry surfaces.26 Virtually all the imagery is internal and the rich and deeply coloured glazing serves to define the boundaries of the building. With its self-contained, almost detached structure, restricted west entrance, limited space for anyone apart from the chantry priests, it is a sanctum sanctorum, resembling the kind of smallscale, intimate sacred space represented by the famous chapel enclosing the Holy House and cult image of Our Lady at Walsingham, Norfolk. In this instance, it is the mortal remains of Richard Beauchamp which comprise the (quasi-) sacred relics.27 Finally, it is a space identified as Beauchamp’s by the iconography, heraldry and devices which proliferate on the tomb, the vaults, the stalls and the glazing. Originally Beauchamp’s earthly trappings were made even more explicit by the numerous banners bearing the family device of the ragged staff on a black background (for mourning) which were set in the sills of the middle side windows and probably also at the west end of the Chapel.28 What ideological signals did the Chapel convey to those who created it and those who used or viewed it? In order to try and comprehend the significance of the Chapel for contemporaries, it is necessary to distinguish between those features which can be located within the conventions of aristocratic behaviour and those which are peculiar to the building and might reflect the particular historical circumstances of its creation and creator. The Chapel and its imagery belong to a standard late medieval commemorative discourse amongst the upper echelons of society. To have an elaborate tomb, often with a richly-endowed chantry attached, within a secular or monastic church serving as the family mausoleum and located 25 C. F. Hardy, ‘On the music in the painted glass of the windows in the Beauchamp Chapel at Warwick’, Archaeologia, 61 (1909), pp. 583–614. 26 For these features see Monckton, ‘Fit for a King?’, pp. 32–36. 27 For Walsingham, see R. Marks, Image and Devotion in Late Medieval England (Stroud, 2004), pp. 193–7, 204, 215, 216, 218. 28 Chatwin, ‘Recent Discoveries’, pp. 151–2.

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1. The Rous Roll: Richard Beauchamp holding Henry VI as a child and a representation of the Beauchamp Chapel (BL MS Add. 48976) (photograph: British Library Board).

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2. The Beauchamp Pageant: Richard Beauchamp jousting in a tournament at Guines (BL, MS Cotton Julius E. IV, f.15v) (photograph: British Library Board).

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3. Warwick, St Mary’s church: the Beauchamp Chapel exterior (south side) (photograph: author).

4. Warwick, St Mary’s church: the Beauchamp Chapel interior looking east, from an old postcard.

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5. Warwick, St Mary’s church: the Beauchamp Chapel interior looking towards the repainted Doom on the west wall (photograph: author).

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6. Warwick, St Mary’s church: ground plan of the Beauchamp Chapel with the graves of the earl’s descendants (from P. B. Chatwin, ‘The Grave of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, and other Burials in the Beauchamp Chapel’, Trans. Birmingham Archaeological Society, 61 (1937), p.3).

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7. Warwick, St Mary’s church: tomb of Richard Beauchamp in the Beauchamp Chapel (photograph: author). 8. Warwick, St Mary’s church: head of effigy of Richard Beauchamp on his tomb in the Beauchamp Chapel (photograph: author).

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9(a) and (b). Warwick, St Mary’s church: (a) west end of tombchest of Richard Beauchamp in the Beauchamp Chapel with ‘weepers’ of Henry Beauchamp and his wife Cecily; (b) ‘weeper’ of Richard Neville (the ‘kingmaker’) (photographs: author).

696 10. Warwick, St Mary’s church: section through tombchest and vault of Richard Beauchamp in the Beauchamp Chapel (from P. B. Chatwin, ‘The Grave of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, and other Burials in the Beauchamp Chapel’, Trans. Birmingham Archaeological Society, 61 (1937), p.8).

11. Warwick, St Mary’s church: east window of the Beauchamp Chapel (photograph: author).

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12. Warwick, St Mary’s church: tracery light angels with musical instruments in the Beauchamp Chapel (photograph: author). 13. Warwick, St Mary’s church: tracery light angels with antiphons and musical notation in the Beauchamp Chapel (photograph: G. King and Son, Norwich).

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14. Warwick, St Mary’s church: St Alban in the east window of the Beauchamp Chapel (photograph: author).

15. Warwick, St Mary’s church: St John of Bridlington in the east window of the Beauchamp Chapel (photograph: author).

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16. Warwick, St Mary’s church: St Thomas Becket in the east window of the Beauchamp Chapel (photograph: author).

17. Warwick, St Mary’s church: Prophet Isaiah in the east window of the Beauchamp Chapel (not in situ) (photograph: G. King and Son, Norwich).

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18. Oxford, All Souls College chapel: St Sativola (photograph: National Monuments Record).

19. Warwick, St Mary’s church: composite figure of the Virgin in the east window of the Beauchamp Chapel (not in situ) (photograph: author).

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20. Westminster Abbey: detail of reredos in Henry V’s chantry (photograph: author).

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21. Richard Beauchamp and his family as originally portrayed in the Beauchamp Chapel east window and easternmost south side window (Sir William Dugdale, Book of Monuments, BL, MS Add. 71474, ff. 34v, 36) (photographs: British Library Board).

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22. Warwick, St Mary’s church: Richard Beauchamp in the east window of the Beauchamp Chapel (head replaced by either that of his first wife Elizabeth Berkeley or of one of her daughters) Photograph: G. King and Son, Norwich).

23. Warwick, St Mary’s church: Despencer scrolls in the tracery of the Beauchamp Chapel east window (photograph: author).

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within its regional power-base, was de rigueur for the elite.29 For longestablished families, tombs promoted ancestor-worship and celebrated lineage; for new inheritors of ancient titles the colonization of the buildings containing the tombs of their predecessors enabled them to demonstrate continuity with the past. St Mary’s at Warwick itself had been erected by the Newburgh holders of the earldom in the twelfth century; the Beauchamp Chapel marked what proved to be the last phase in the rebuilding and enlargement of the church which had been undertaken by Earl Richard’s father and grandfather.30 If there is nothing specific to the Beauchamp family in the visual emphasis on the Virgin, which is entirely appropriate for a chapel dedicated to her, the four principal (and in situ) saints in the east window (SS Thomas Becket, Alban, Winifred of Shrewsbury and John of Bridlington) had a particular resonance for the earl (Figs 14–16). In his will he requested that his executors were to have made gold images of himself weighing 20lbs and holding an anchor to be donated to each of their shrines.31 The four saints are surrounded by the Beauchamp device of the bear and ragged staff, a badge which proliferates throughout the Chapel. If they do not quite wear his livery, nonetheless for viewers they have been pressed into the earl’s service as his own personal intercessors. Whatever Richard Beauchamp’s personal motivation and pious interests, the saintly quartet do not stand free from contemporary politics. The cults of all four were either new or had been revived in the early fifteenth century by the ruling dynasty and its Archbishop, Henry Chichele; in effect they were the hagiographical signs of Lancastrian allegiance. Henry IV’s accession in the eyes of his supporters was legitimised by his anointing with an oil claimed to have been given to Becket by the Virgin and the king chose to be buried at Canterbury in close proximity to the saint’s shrine.32 Winifred was significant to Henry IV because of his success at Shrewsbury (where Beauchamp fought on his side and the future Henry V was cured of J. T. Rosenthal, The Purchase of Paradise. The Social Function of Aristocratic Benevolence, 1307–1485 (London and Toronto, 1972), especially Chapter 5. 30 For a succinct summary of the Beauchamp family see Cokayne, Complete Peerage, xii, pt. 2, pp. 357–93. 31 The National Archives, Prerogative Court of Canterbury, Prob 11/1, ff. 147–148v (new foliation), 146r–147v (old). 32 C. Wilson, ‘The Tomb of Henry IV and the Holy Oil of St Thomas of Canterbury’, in E. Fernie and P. Crossley (eds), Medieval Architecture in Its Intellectual Context: Essays in 29

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a head wound through her intercession) and along with SS Chad and David was elevated to national status by Chichele; her cult was also particularly favoured by the earl’s second wife Isabel Despencer.33 John of Bridlington (canonised in 1401) appealed to Henry V as the victory at Agincourt was attributed to his intercession, together with that of John of Beverley; in 1408 Henry and Richard Beauchamp went on pilgrimage to the shrine at Bridlington.34 Perhaps it was through Beauchamp’s influence when his tutor that Henry VI developed an attachment to John of Bridlington. St Alban, another model for the Christian knight, was popular in Lancastrian circles: Henry V’s brother Humphrey duke of Gloucester depicted himself in prayer to the saint in one of his manuscripts and was buried in close proximity to his shrine. Abbot Whetehamstede, who moved in royal circles, commissioned lives of St Alban and his companion Amphibalus from Lydgate. Earl Richard would have become acquainted with the cult during the two months he spent in 1427 at St Albans.35 All four were home-grown and bear witness to an awareness of national identity amongst the ruling elite at the time. Through these images Beauchamp is associated with the dynasty to which he owed so much and to which in return he rendered such faithful service. Nor should the significance of the lost image of St George be overlooked. He represented the archetypical Christian soldier-saint who since Edward III’s reign had been the holy patron of England and whose banner was borne by the English armies in France, making him an ideal model and intercessor for an English warrior, especially one who, like Beauchamp, belonged to the Order of the Garter. Chichele promoted his liturgical celebration to that of a double feast in November 1415, apparently at the wish of Henry V himself. Beauchamp also had a personal link with the cult. In 1416 he accompanied the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund on his visit to England; Sigismund

Honour of Peter Kidson (London, 1999), pp. 181–190; idem, ‘The Medieval Monuments’, in P. Collinson, N. Ramsay and M. Sparks (eds), A History of Canterbury Cathedral (Oxford, 1995), pp. 498–9. 33 A. F. Sutton, ‘Caxton, the Cult of St Winifred and Shrewsbury’, in L. Clark (ed. ), The Fifteenth Century V. Of Mice and Men: Image, Belief and Regulation in Late Medieval England, (Woodbridge, 2005), pp. 109–127. esp. pp. 114–5; White, ‘Iconography’, p. 141. 34 Brindley, Richard Beauchamp, p. 36. 35 G. F. Reinicke, St Albon and St Amphibalus by John Lydgate, Garland Medieval Texts 11 (New York and London, 1985). The Tractatus de nobilitate, uita et mortirio Sanctorum Albani et Amphibali and two sermons, all written between 1396 and c. 1430, emphasize St

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brought with him the precious relic of St George’s heart, which he first offered to Earl Richard, who diplomatically deflected the gift to the king.36 The messages conveyed by the images in the windows do not merely reside in their identities, they also encompass the manner in which they are represented. The apparel worn by the main light figures signifies them as the social equals of Beauchamp and his circle. The richly brocaded garments and accoutrements of the prophets would have gained them admittance to any court in Europe (Fig. 17). St Alban looks as if he is about to step into the lists or do battle in France (Fig. 14). The saints are princely, distant and splendid figures — the visual equivalents of Lydgate’s Marian verse, notably where he uses precious stones as metaphors for the Virgin, stones which embellish the girdle, garments and halo of the composite figure now in the east window (Fig. 19): ‘The charboncle of charite and grene emerawd ston, Hool & unbroken by virgnal clennesse, O Saphir loup and and swelling to represse…’.37 The images in the windows are indeed ‘our dukes and leaders’, as Caxton’s edition of the Golden Legend expressed it.38 The Heavenly Kingdom as represented by the bejewelled saints in the Beauchamp Chapel is rather like the Royal Enclosure at Ascot used to be: an exclusive milieu in which Earl Alban’s high-born origins and knightly virtues: see J. G. Clark, ‘The St Albans Monks and the Cult of St Alban: the Late Medieval Texts’ in M. Henig and P. Lindley (eds), Alban and St Albans. Roman and Medieval Architecture, Art and Archaeology (British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions, 24 for 1999), 2001, pp. 221, 225–6. The saint is shown wearing a similar tabard to the Beauchamp Chapel image in a psalter owned by Humphrey Duke of Gloucester (BL, Royal MS 2 B. i, f. 8r); Brindley, Richard Beauchamp, p. 109. 36 J. Catto, ‘Religious Change under Henry V’, in G. L. Harriss (ed. ), Henry V. The Practice of Kingship (Oxford, 1985), pp. 107–8; Brindley, Richard Beauchamp, p. 78. 37 H. MacCracken (ed. ), The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, Part I, Religious Poems, Early English Text Society, extra series 107 (1911), p. 285. Tempting though it is to see a direct connection between Lydgate and the Beauchamp Chapel, not least because the family patronised him, Professor Derek Pearsall tells me that Lydgate’s type of polychromatic elaboration was much in vogue at the time. For a stimulating discussion of Lydgate’s use of pictorial language see C. Reynolds,’ “In ryche colours delytethe the peyntour”: Painting and the Visual Arts in the Poems of John Lydgate’, in R. Marks (ed. ), Late Medieval England: Art and Display (Stamford, 2007), pp. 1–15. 38 F. S. Ellis (ed. ), The Golden Legend or Lives of the Saints, as Englished by William Caxton, 7 vols (London, 1900), vi, p. 98.

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Richard would have felt at home. The sumptuousness of these figures is one of the reasons for the high cost of the Chapel and its fittings and furnishings. The glazing was priced at two shillings per square foot, with one exception (and that a royal one) the most expensive rate known for any glazing scheme carried out in England.39 The slightly earlier figures under canopies in All Souls College chapel Oxford were half the price of those in the Beauchamp Chapel; possibly these were also by Prudde, who is known to have worked there (Fig. 18). A comparison between the two shows why: the Beauchamp Chapel is much more extravagant in its use of coloured glass and the workmanship involved demanded exceptional skill, especially in the profusion of imitation jewelled inserts into robes and haloes (Figs 14–17, 19).40 The degree of elaboration is spelt out in the glazing contract: the windows were to be made with ‘… Glasse beyond the Seas, and with noe Glasse of England; and that in the finest wise, with the best, cleanest, and strongest glasse of beyond the Sea that may be had in England, and of the finest colours of blew, yellow, red, purpure, sanguine, and violet, and of all other colours that shall be most necessary, and best to make rich and embellish the matters, Images and stories…’.41 All coloured glass used in medieval England seems to have been imported, but the range and quality of coloured glass specified for the Beauchamp Chapel is extraordinary in surviving contracts.42 Splendour of materials and excellence of craftsmanship are common to every element of the Chapel’s decoration and are stressed in the hyperbolic language of the contracts: the Doom was to be painted ‘with the finest colours, and fine gold’; the stone images were to be depicted ‘…with the finest oyle colours, in the richest, finest and freshest clothings that may be made of fine Gold, Azure, of fine purpure, of fine white and other finest colours necessary, garnished, bordered and poudered in the finest and curiousest wise’; even the floor was to be of ‘good and well coloured [Purbeck] Marble’.43 Matching the magnificence of the glazing is that of the tomb monument. The earl’s three-dimensional effigy, the hearse enclosing it, the The most costly is that for Eltham Palace in 1401–02, at a rate of 3s. 4d. per square foot. Even the most elaborate windows (also made by Prudde) of Henry VI’s foundation at Eton were less expensive: between 1s. 2d. and 1s. 4d. per square foot in 1445–6 and 1450 (R. Marks, Stained Glass in England during the Middle Ages (London, 1993), pp. 48–9). 40 Ibid. , p. 49. 41 Dugdale, Warwickshire, i, p. 446. 42 For an analysis of materials and glazing contracts see Marks, Stained Glass, pp. 20–31. 43 Dugdale, Warwickshire, i, p. 447. 39

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inscription, the weepers and angels are cast copper-gilt, enamel is used for the heraldic escutcheons and the tombchest is of Purbeck marble (Figs 7–9). The material constituents of the glass and tombchest and effigy, the latter’s design, and the high level of skill demanded of the craftsmen and their own exalted standing operate as discrete indices of status. As mediated by them, Richard Beauchamp is not just represented ‘according to his degree’, to use contemporary parlance, he is elevated above his peers, to the level of the highest in the land, i.e. the monarchy.44 The tomb design is based on the monuments of Edward III and Richard II in Westminster Abbey. The similarities extend to the use of materials, but stylistically up-dated by reference (particularly in respect of the representation of the weepers) to Burgundian ducal tombs.45 The most significant feature is the use of gilt-bronze for the effigy and attendant figures which represents an annexation of an artefact which since the late thirteenth century had been an instrument by which English kings, if they so desired, could distance themselves from the nobility. Henry IV and Joan of Navarre’s alabaster monument is the only royal tomb between Edward III and Henry V’s reigns not to use metal for the effigies; in addition there are the copper-gilt effigies of Edward the Black Prince and Mary Bohun, the latter (at Leicester, now lost) commissioned by her son Henry V. As Christopher Wilson has pointed out, the employment of gilt-metal for royal effigies was intended to underline their semi-divine authority and power; the significance of its use for the monument of a magnate at the centre of his estates would not have been lost on contemporaries.46 Earl Richard’s tomb is the only aristocratic monument which uses cast-metal outside the royal family before the early sixteenth century; indeed, the first tomb to do so since Richard II’s (Henry V’s was silver-plated). As Paul Binski has observed in a different context, ‘in cases of this type the medium is partly the message’; 47 that this message was 44 For this phrase see R. Marks, ‘An Age of Consumption: Art for England c. 1400– 1547’, in Marks and Williamson, Gothic, p. 20; it is also used in the will of Richard Beauchamp’s daughter Elizabeth, Lady Latimer (N. H. Nicolas, (ed. ), Testamenta Vetusta, 2 vols (London, 1826), i, p. 358). For the tomb’s design see Morganstern, Gothic Tombs, pp. 137, 140. 45 L. Stone, Sculpture in England. The Middle Ages (Harmondsworth, 1955), p. 209; Morganstern, Gothic Tombs, pp. 137, 140. 46 Wilson, ‘Medieval Monuments’, pp. 495 (esp. n. 195), 500. Another possible candidate is the lost tomb effigy of Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster (d. 1369) at Stamford (Lincs. ) (Lindley, ‘ “Una Grande Opera” ’, p. 129, n. 87). 47 P. Binski, Westminster Abbey and the Plantagenets. Kingship and the Representation of Power 1200–1400 (New Haven and London, 1995), p. 110. Archbishop Simon Sudbury

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read and understood within a century (and probably by contemporaries) is apparent from John Leland’s characterization of the tomb as ‘right princly’.48 To aspire to such august status even for a Beauchamp might have been considered presumptuous. One might speculate whether its occurrence on a tomb made for an individual not of the blood royal would have been countenanced by a stronger monarch than Henry VI. Nonetheless it accords with his (or his heirs’) exalted view of his place in the aristocratic pecking order, not just because of the high offices he held but through his lineage. In 1425 he had challenged unsuccessfully the Duke of Norfolk’s right to take precedence over him in Parliament; in this society such niceties mattered.49 The Beauchamp Chapel does not tell us what kind of person the founder was: historically that is irrecoverable. What it can do is to tell us about the kind of image that was constructed for him. But who was doing the constructing and what were their agenda(s)? Or to put it more colloquially, whose memorial is it anyway? At face value the evidence is unequivocal (and egotistic). Beauchamp’s will refers to the interment of his body ‘in such place as I have deuysed (which is knowin wel) there to be maad a Chapell of our Lady wel faire and goodly bilt’. The message is repeated in the inscription on the earl’s tomb: ‘...til this Chapel by him devised i[n] his lief were made’. The inscription formerly accompanying the earl’s image in the east window glazing also refers to ‘..hanc fecit capellam totaliter fabricari’ (Fig. 21).50 Some of the subject-matter is likely to have been settled and approved by the earl before his death. Indeed, the choice of the Marian imagery for the glazing and, more personally, the four ‘Lancastrian’ saints in the east window, suggests that the executors were carrying out the founder’s intentions. However, as we have seen, the construction of the Chapel was a protracted affair, not commenced until three years after the earl’s death and only completed by 1459.51 The Chapel and its fittings and furnishings were thus a creation of the 1440s and 50s and not of Earl Richard’s day. In ( murdered in 1381) was also accorded a bronze-gilt effigy for particular reasons (Wilson, ‘Medieval Monuments’, pp. 471–2). 48 Toulmin-Smith, Leland Itinerary, ii, p. 41. 49 Carpenter, Locality and Polity, p. 380; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, iv, p. 593. 50 The National Archives, Prerogative Court of Canterbury, Prob 11/1, f. 147; Nichols, Description, p. 17; BL, Add. MS 71474 (Dugdale, Book of Monuments), f. 36r. 51 Hicks, ‘Beauchamp Trust’, p. 140.

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this context ‘deuysed’ might be read in its ancient legal sense as meaning conceived, rather than designed. As an aside, the phrase used by Richard Beauchamp in his will (‘which is knowin wel’) is intriguing. Was it a rather heavy-handed exhortation to his executors to discharge their obligations; or was he expressing a desire to ensure that, although the Chapel would be erected posthumously, credit for its conception should be acknowledged as resting with him? Whatever the answer to this question, the design of the building, much of its iconography and the wording of the contracts all indicate that significant elements were planned, designed and executed after the earl’s death. Conceptually, the disposition of the images in and surrounding the Chapel east window, with the large saints separated by tiers of smaller figures, resembles the walls of carved imagery at the east ends of Henry V’s chantry in Westminster Abbey and All Souls College chapel, Oxford, both of which postdated the earl’s death; it may be more than coincidental that the carver John Massingham was involved with both the Beauchamp Chapel and All Souls College projects and has also been associated with Henry V’s chantry (Fig. 20).52 Who were the prime movers in the realisation of the project? At first sight, the answer appears to be those responsible for the execution of his will. In this Earl Richard established a trust, the purpose of which, after the payment of his debts, was to finance the building of the Chapel as well as work at the chantry he had established at Guy’s Cliffe; only when these projects were completed could his lands pass to his heirs.53 His executors included the notable figures of Ralph Lord Cromwell and John Lord Tiptoft, both of whom held high office under the Lancastrian kings, but who died in 1456 and 1443 respectively. The others — much lesser mortals in terms of social status — were members of Beauchamp’ s retinue, three of whom were granted administration at probate and were feoffees of the earl’s

Stone, Sculpture in Britain, pp. 205–210. For Massingham’s career, see J. H. Harvey, English Mediaeval Architects. A Biographical Dictionary down to 1550 (Gloucester, rev. edn, 1984), pp. 199–200; Marks and Williamson, Gothic, cat. nos 36, 87, 88, 99. For Henry V’s chantry see J. Goodall and L. Monckton, ‘The Chantry of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester’, in Henig and Lindley, Alban and St Albans, pp. 238–241, 244–5. 53 Hicks, ‘Beauchamp Trust’, p. 139. 54 Ibid., pp. 139–140. Berkeswell was dead by 11 March 1470 (Monckton, ‘Fit for a King?’, p. 50 n. 27). For a sketch of the some of the executors see Ross, Estates, pp. 8, 11; C. Carpenter, ‘The Beauchamp affinity: a study of bastard feudalism at work’, English Historical Review, 95 (1980), pp. 515–6, 517, 519, 522, 523. 52

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trust: Nicholas Rody (d.1458), John Throckmorton (d.1445) and Thomas Hugford (d.1469). After Throckmorton’s death they were joined in 1447 by William Berkeswell, treasurer and, from 1454, dean of St Mary’s College, Warwick until his decease in the same year as Hugford, who was succeeded by his son John (d.1485).54 If the Chapel’s concept was Beauchamp’s, its realisation was the work of these men. All the contracts with the craftsmen were drawn up by Berkeswell, Hugford and Rody. Secondly, the documents refer repeatedly to the role of this trio in specifying the quality of the materials to be used and either supplying themselves or approving designs submitted by the various crafts. In short, they executed very tight control over every stage of the design and execution of every component of the Chapel. Thus the ‘matters, Images, and stories’ for the windows were ‘…delivered and appointed by the said Executors by patterns in paper afterwards to be newly traced and pictured by another Painter in rich colour’. The tombchest was to be made ‘according to a portraicture’ delivered to the designated maker and its heraldic escutcheons and inscriptions were to be ‘…as the Executors will devise’.55 The tomb epitaph combines acknowledgement of Richard Beauchamp’s role with the statement that his executors had discharged their obligations in erecting the Chapel and translating the earl’s body from its temporary grave in the south transept: ‘…And alle the membres therof his Executours dede fully make And Aparaille By the Auctorite of his Seide last Wille and Testament...’ As we will see shortly, in respect of the reinterment of the earl’s earthly remains in their intended place, the executors were jumping the gun. Dugdale, Warwickshire, i, pp. 445, 446; Nichols, Description, pp. 29–33); BL, Add. MS 28564, ff. 262r, 264r, 265r (there are slight differences in spelling between these sources). The initial stained glass designs would have been vidimuses (drawings representing an agreement between patron and glass-painter), commonly used for nonstandard commissions in late medieval times. The executor would have had to supply details of the family heraldry to ensure that it was blazoned accurately in both glass and on the tomb. Interestingly, however, the assessment of the value of the worth of the gilder of Richard Beauchamp’s effigy, the Flemish goldsmith Bartholomew Lambespring, was entrusted to two practitioners of his craft. Michael Baxandall has shown that in late medieval South German contracts a range of patron-craftsman relationships was possible, with the mercantile patriciate exerting as much control as they could, including in one instance the appointment of assessors closely connected or dependent on the patron. In the case of Lambespring’s work, as the assessors are unnamed goldsmiths it may be that the Beauchamp executors were content to accept an independent valuation (M. Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven and London, 1980), pp. 102–6; Marks, Image and Devotion, p. 237). 55

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Notwithstanding the furnishing of some of the design drawings (‘portraicture and ‘patterns’) by the executors, does oversight mean that the executors had an input into the imagery and design of the Chapel? However able they may have been, they were no more than family servants, so the question arises as to the roles played by the earl’s son and daughters and their spouses (his second wife Isabel died within a year of his death) (see Appendix). These are mute players, because there is nothing in the surviving documents to testify to their involvement — as indeed one would expect, given that none was included among the personnel designated to administer the earl’s trust. It is nonetheless inconceivable that Hugford, Rody and Berkeswell did not consult with the family about the undertaking, indeed seek its advice and approval, even instructions as to content. Consultation/ instruction is also very likely to have extended to the choice of craftsmen, who were leading figures in their respective activities and were entrusted with prestigious projects by figures in the Lancastrian court. As we have seen, these included the carver John Massingham (fl. 1409–50), who provided the wooden models for Richard Beauchamp’s effigy, and John Prudde, who held the office of King’s Glazier and carried out work in the royal palaces. Richard Beauchamp’s family would have been familiar with their fruits of their labours. Does the ensemble offer any indications of intervention by Richard Beauchamp’s progeny, who feature prominently in the imagery of the Chapel? And if so, which ones? The fates that befell Beauchamp’s heirs affected the subject-matter of some important features. On 5 April 1445 Richard’s sole male heir Henry was raised to the Dukedom of Warwick, the first, and as it transpired, the only Beauchamp to be so styled.56 This title is accorded him in the inscription which accompanied his image which, together with those of his father and his mother and his father’s first wife, his sister and two of his three half-sisters, occupied the base of each of the seven main lights in the Chapel east window; the third half-sister was also represented, according to the accompanying text, set in the easternmost light of the nearest south window (Fig. 21).57 Only the figure of Earl Richard Cokayne, Complete Peerage, xii, pt 2, p. 383. Only three of the sisters are illustrated in Dugdale’s Book of Monuments (BL, Add. MS 71474, ff. 34v, 36r), although space was provided for the fourth. All are engraved in his Warwickshire, i, p. 412; Leland recorded texts relating to all of them in the ‘glase wyndowes’ (Toulmin-Smith, Leland Itinerary, v, pp. 152–3). See White, ‘Iconography’, p. 142. 56 57

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survives, with his head replaced by either that of his first wife Elizabeth or of one of their daughters (Fig. 22). The tabard worn by Henry in the window also bears the Beauchamp arms undifferenced and he wears a ducal coronet. The Chapel glazing contract with Prudde was signed on 23 June 1447 and stipulates that (like the tomb), the subject-matter was to be supplied by the executors in the form of drawn designs. The representation of Henry in the east window shows that the contents of the windows cannot have been finalised before his elevation to the dukedom at the beginning of April, 1445. Dugdale however says that subsequent to the completion of the glazing as set out in the contract, the executors had some changes made, comprising the addition of the Marian liturgical scrolls (‘goudes’, for ‘gaudes’) and ‘Scripture of the marriage of the Earle’. White suggests that the amendments included the scrolls invoking praise for the Despencers (‘Louez Spencer, Tout que vyvray’ and ‘Tout que porray loue Spencer’) in the upper tracery lights of the east window (Fig. 23). Isabel Despencer was the earl’s second wife.58 Dugdale also mentions that the changes involved ‘Glasse in most fine and curious colours’ and cost a total of £13 6s. 4d.59 This is a considerable sum and the question arises as to whether by ‘Scripture of the marriage of the Earle’ Dugdale was referring not just to the inscriptions, but to the family images themselves in the east window. The rendering of heraldry on the figures demanded great skill and the use of many different pieces of coloured glass; the figure of Earl Richard is enhanced further by elaborate trappings such as the canopy of estate and heraldic grounds which are omitted from the coloured drawing; the accompanying figures may not have been quite so elaborately rendered, but must at least have had just as intricate backgrounds (Figs 21, 22). A detail of Earl Richard’s tabard overlooked by Dugdale (and/or his limner Sedgwick) may be telling. Charles Winston was the first to observe that on the earl’s left arm was an inescutcheon of pretence with the Despencer arms.60 There was nothing heraldically improper about the inclusion of this inescutcheon, but together Dugdale, Warwickshire, i, pp. 446–7; Dugdale omitted the word ‘goudes’, but it is included in Wheler’s transcript (BL, Add. MS 28564, f. 265r); see also White, ‘Iconography’, pp. 135, 139–140. Some of the mottoes have been restored with ‘Tout’ instead of ‘Tant’. 59 Dugdale, Warwickshire, i, p. 447; Nichols, Description, p. 29 has the total as £12 6s. 8d. ; Wheler gives the total as £13 6s. 8d. (BL, MS Add. 28564, f. 265r). 60 C. Winston, Memoirs Illustrative of the Art of Glass-Painting (London, 1865), pp. 334–5; P. B. Chatwin, ‘Some Notes on the Painted Windows of the Beauchamp Chapel, Warwick’, Transactions of the Birmingham Archaeological Society, 53 (1928), pp. 158–159. 58

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with the repeated use of the Despencer motto in the tracery and the disposition of the figures it meant that the family of the earl’s second wife took primacy of place in the east window over that of his first wife Elizabeth Berkeley (see Appendix). The representations of the earl, both wives and their children were arranged in an appropriate sequence across the base of this window. The earl occupied the central light, flanked by Isabel on the left and Elizabeth on the right, with their respective children behind them. The earl and Isabel faced each other, relegating Elizabeth and by extension her three daughters to a subordinate position, more so as Elizabeth, the youngest, had to be assigned to the adjacent window. By contrast, Henry and his sister Anne, the fruits of the Despencer marriage, were prominent through their occupation of the first two lights reading from the left and facing their father. Henry and the earl, moreover, by dint of their elaborate heraldic tabards formed a subgroup with Isabel Despencer. The arrangement of all of the family figures in the east window is genealogically proper and the Despencer inescutcheon and mottoes are hardly prominent; it is also unthinkable that a representation of the earl in the east window was not envisaged from the outset. Nevertheless in this society distinctions of status mattered, however small, and it may be that the Despencer presence and the problem of having to accommodate eight figures into seven lights resulted from some disagreement amongst the earl’s siblings. Elizabeth Berkeley was buried in Kingswood Abbey (Glos.), presumably her own choice of interment; although she died in 1422, it was not until fifteen years later that provision was made in Earl Richard’s will for ‘a goodly tombe of marbyll’ to be erected over her grave. One wonders why it was not done sooner: does it hint at a less than harmonious marriage?61 The Despencer ancestry is present too with the feet of the earl’s tomb effigy resting on this family’s griffin emblem as well as the Beauchamp muzzled bear; the beasts are mentioned in the February 1449/50 contract for the effigy.62 Two of the banners flanking the tomb monument also bore the Despencer arms; none

61 The Berkeleys had a fairly dispersed burial pattern (Cokayne, Complete Peerage, ii (London, 1912), pp. 130–34). The delay does not appear to have been connected with the dispute over the Berkeley inheritance which was resolved as it affected Richard Beauchamp in 1425 (A. Sinclair, ‘The Great Berkeley Law-Suit Revisited 1417–39’, Southern History, 9 (1987), pp. 34–50). For Elizabeth Berkeley see the entry by Jennifer Ward in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, v (Oxford, 2004), pp. 588–9. 62 Dugdale, Warwickshire, i, p. 446; Nichols, Description, p. 31.

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bore those of Berkeley.63 The Despencer nexus may even have made itself felt in the design of the Chapel structure itself, for Linda Monckton has argued that the eclectic sources drawn on for its design included the monument in Tewkesbury Abbey for Isabel’s first husband Richard Beauchamp, earl of Worcester and other structures there.64 All this points to the likelihood that Henry and his sister Anne played decisive roles in the initial stages of the implementation of their father’s will in regard to his chapel.65 If so, Henry’s involvement was very short-lived and already over before the Chapel was even glazed. Harold Macmillan’s response to the question as to what he feared most in politics was ‘Events, dear boy. Events’. As in affairs of state, so in family history. When Henry was born, Richard must have thought that his foundation in 1423 of a chantry at Guy’s Cliffe so ‘that God wold send him Eyres male’ had at last born fruit. 66 Subsequently he took further steps to secure the future of the male Beauchamp line by arranging a marriage for the boy to Cecily, second daughter of Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury.67 The earl’s hopes were to be dashed. On 11 June 1446, Henry died, aged only 21. Less than three years later Anne, his only child and heir under the entail of the Beauchamp estates established by Richard’s grandfather Thomas (d. 1369), also expired at the tender age of four.68 With Henry’s demise the tenure of the Warwick earldom by the male Beauchamps came to an end. These deaths had consequences for Richard’s executors and for his chapel. Rody, Hugford and Berkeswell found themselves in a new, more uncertain and delicate situation than that of 1439. Initially it looked as if it had been clarified with the confirmation in July 1449 of the youthful Richard Neville, son of the earl of Salisbury, as earl of Warwick in right of his wife Anne,

Chatwin, ‘Recent Discoveries’, p. 152. Monckton, ‘Fit for a King?’, pp. 38–41. 65 Although Christine Carpenter considers that Henry was too young and inexperienced to cope with his father’s estate and political affinities (Locality and Polity, p. 420), nonetheless he was of a sufficient age to address concerns of inheritance and representation. 66 Hicks, ‘Beauchamp Trust’, p. 137, citing W. H. Courthope (ed.), J. Rows, Rol (London,1845), no. 50; C. D. Ross, The Rous Roll, with an historical introduction (Gloucester, 1980). 67 Earl Richard drove a hard bargain for this marriage. McFarlane observed that Richard Neville Earl of Salisbury had to pay the largest known portion in the country prior to the sixteenth century (Nobility of Later Medieval England, p. 201). 68 Cokayne, Complete Peerage, xii, pt 2, pp. 383–5. 63

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Henry’s sister, as sole heir.69 This was not, however, the end of the matter. Anne’s three half-sisters challenged her right to inherit the title and lands; although their claim was denied in 1454, the dispute rumbled on. In 1466, a settlement was agreed, but legal challenges continued into the 1470s, with the added complication of Edward IV’s deprivation of Anne’s inheritance after her husband’s death.70 Hicks suggests that one consequence of these wrangles was the postponement until December 1475 of the consecration of the Chapel and the translation into it of Earl Richard’s body, for reasons of prolonging his trust in the interests of Anne Neville’s half-sisters.71 Did the fact that the three executors acknowledged Richard Neville and his wife Anne as the rightful heirs to the Beauchamp estate and took account of their interests in its administration have any impact on the imagery of Earl Richard’s foundation?72 Once again, it is necessary to turn to the respective chronologies of the family history and the campaign on the Chapel. The major unfinished artefact at the time of Richard Neville’s accession to the title in 1449 was Richard Beauchamp’s tomb, the principal focus of the entire edifice (Figs. 7–9). The tombchest was already in progress and was ready in 1449–50. The earl’s effigy too had been designed by this date, although the monument was not completed until 1454.73 The 1447 contract for the tombchest included ‘...xiv. principall housings, and under every principall housing a goodly quarter for a Scutcheon of copper and gilt, to be set in’. These ‘housings’ were for the weepers around the sides of the tombchest and were executed as specified.74 But were the identities of these weepers and their escutcheons decided at this time? A definite answer cannot be given to this question, but, fortuitously or not, the contract for the weepers themselves, described as ‘Images embossed, of Lords and

Ibid., pp. 384–5; Hicks, ‘Beauchamp Trust’, p. 138. Hicks, ‘Beauchamp Trust’, pp. 138, 141–2. 71 Ibid., pp. 141–2. However, as Hicks acknowledges, Anne and her half-sisters appear on the same side in the relevant legal petitions. 72 Ibid., pp. 143–4. 73 Dugdale, Warwickshire, i, p. 446; Nichols, Description, pp. 30–32, 35–6; Marks and Williamson, Gothic, cat. no. 87 (entry by Phillip Lindley); Morganstern, Gothic Tombs, pp. 134–5 (who confirms Lawrence Stone’s suggestion that the date of the contract for the effigy should be 1447, not 1457, as given in Dugdale and Nichols). 74 Dugdale, Warwickshire, i, p. 446; Nichols, Description, p. 33. 69 70

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Ladyes in divers vestures, called Weepers’, was only drawn up on 14 March 1451/2.75 In the light of the Warwick earldom’s fate between 1446 and 1449, the identities of the fourteen figurines are significant.76 The males arranged on the south side (Fig. 7) are paired with their spouses on the north (see Appendix). At the west end, i.e. below Earl Richard’s head, are his son and heir Henry, duke of Warwick and his wife Cecily Neville (Fig. 9). Then follow her father Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury (d. 1460) and Alice, his countess (d. 1462); Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset (d. 1455) and his wife Eleanor, daughter of Richard Beauchamp (d. 1467); Humphrey Stafford, duke of Buckingham (d. 1460) and his duchess Anne Neville (Richard Neville’s sister); John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury (d. 1453) and his second wife, Margaret, another daughter of Richard Beauchamp (d. 1467); Richard Neville (the ‘kingmaker’), earl of Warwick (Fig. 9), brother to Cecily, wife of Henry duke of Warwick (d. 1471), with Countess Anne (d. 1492), youngest daughter of Richard Beauchamp and sister to Henry, duke of Warwick; at the east end are George Neville, Lord Latimer (d. 1469) and his wife Elizabeth (d. 1480), the fourth daughter of Richard Beauchamp. As one would expect, the weepers include all of Beauchamp’s offspring and their spouses; primacy of position (immediately visible to anyone entering the Chapel) is accorded to Henry as successor and his heraldic escutcheon bears his arms as earl/duke, not as heir. Richard Neville’s presence is justified by his marriage to Anne Beauchamp, but why are his father and mother represented? An obvious response is that they were parents to the spouses of Henry Beauchamp and his sister Anne, the successive heirs to the Beauchamp line. More surprising on what ostensibly is the memorial to a Beauchamp is the presence of the Kingmaker’s aunt Anne and her husband Humphrey Stafford. Morganstern hints that they were represented because of friendship with the earl, but a more likely explanation of their presence was that they were relatives of the successor to the Warwick earldom.77 A practical explanation is conceivable: the five Beauchamp offspring were not only an uneven number, they and their spouses were also too few to fill 75 Dugdale, Warwickshire, i, p. 446; Nichols, p. 31. Morganstern (Gothic Tombs, p. 135) is careful to note that we are dependent on the accuracy of the extent of restoration of a number of the shields for the identification of the weepers. Comparison with the illustration in Dugdale’s Book of Monuments enabled her to establish that those on the south and east sides are accurate. 76 Morganstern, Gothic Tombs, pp. 136–7, 141, 192–3. 77 Ibid., p. 193.

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all the pre-existing ‘housings’. Alternatives to two of these ‘supernumerary’ images existed in the form of Richard Beauchamp’s two wives, both of whom accompanied him and their children in the east window, although reduction to the status of diminutive weepers may have been considered infra dig. However, we have seen that the tombchest was not commissioned until over a year after Duke Henry’s death and the weepers only in 1451/2, i.e. when Richard Neville was earl. His succession is not made explicit as his ‘weeper’ is not placed immediately after the images of Duke Henry and his wife, nor does his heraldic escutcheon include any reference to the Warwick earldom; the sides however are balanced by Neville pairings at both ends. Morganstern suggests that the arrangement may be more of a familial recognition of Beauchamp kinship than of the Nevilles’ right to the earldom.78 Indeed, the tombchest imagery can, and could, have been read as a straightforward visualization of the way in which the Beauchamp/Neville genealogical line had faltered. In any event, Neville heraldry is the largest single presence on this part of the monument and it is stretching credulity to believe that this does not represent the wishes of Richard and Anne Neville (possibly with the involvement of the former’s father, the earl of Salisbury), especially as the monument was completed while their succession and inheritance were still being contested by the three daughters of Richard Beauchamp’s first marriage; nonetheless, the latter must have been at the very least consulted about the identities and disposition of the weepers. What does all this amount to? This paper is concerned with the Beauchamp Chapel as within a conventional genre of funerary visual expression, but one capable of conveying layers of meaning through its imagery. If the Chapel is not ‘political’ in the narrow sense of the word, it is an explicit statement about lineage, status, authority and affinity, expressed visually through lavishness of material, content and excellence of craftsmanship. It is a locus where the sacred and the secular are inseparable. First and foremost, the tomb and the building in which it stands remain the earl’s personal memorial and one not even shared with his wives and principal heirs, whose mortal remains lie elsewhere.79 The Beauchamp Chapel, together with the Beauchamp Pageant Ibid., p. 137. As we have seen, Elizabeth Berkeley was buried at Kingswood Abbey (Glos. ). Isabel chose to be interred in the Despencer ancestral mausoleum of Tewkesbury Abbey; her monument as she envisaged it was devoid of the trappings of rank and status of her late 78

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and Rous Roll (Figs 1, 2) provided stages on which Richard Beauchamp was presented posthumously in a variety of guises: pious warrior, diplomat, aristocrat, loyal Lancastrian servant and royal guardian, patriot and paterfamilias, patron and pilgrim. Anne Neville is likely to have been the prime mover behind the Pageant and the Roll, both commissioned in the 1480s; here I have argued that her role in the memorialization of her father began much earlier, with the Beauchamp Chapel.80 Through the imagery of this building and the two manuscripts his reputation was moulded and constructed. It is for his ‘good works’ that Beauchamp is remembered today, not his self-interested, sometimes ruthless rule in his native county, nor for his inability to do more than hold his own in France during his last years; unsurprisingly these are passed over in the narrative of the Beauchamp Pageant.81 The Chapel, however, is more than a commemoration of one individual. It is a complex monument which honours its founder, but also one whose form (and even significant elements of its content) was not determined by him. Richard Beauchamp was the donor, but not the patron. Far from being a Gesamtkunstwerk which was conceived from the start, it evolved during its formation as a result of changing historical circumstances. When initially conceived by Earl Richard he could not have foreseen that the Beauchamp male line would become extinct within a few years and that the royal dynasty he served so loyally would also terminate bloodily. The Chapel is a product of collective enterprise, both in oversight and execution, and long in realization. It is an ensemble whose imagery was affected by the political and the dynastic fortunes (or misfortunes) of the Beauchamp family and its Neville successor. The earl’s first wife Elizabeth Berkeley, and more prominently, his second, Isabel Despencer, were represented in the east window glazing; so too was Henry, the sole and short-lived holder of the dukedom of Warwick. The earl’s tomb monument tells a different story — or more accurately, stories. At one level it is a testament, even legal document, recording in its inscription husband’s tomb: ‘…my Image to be made all naked, and no thyng on my hede but myn here cast bakwardys’ (Cokayne, Complete Peerage, xii, pt 2, p. 382, n. i). More surprisingly — and perhaps more significantly — her son Henry was also buried in Tewkesbury Abbey, not St Mary’s Warwick (ibid., p. 384). 80 For Anne’s probable connection with the Beauchamp Pageants and Rous Roll, see Payne, ‘The Beauchamps and the Nevilles’, p. 220. 81 Carpenter, Locality and Polity, p. 397; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, iv, p. 594.

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the discharge by his executors of their onerous and fraught office. It is also a pictorial genealogy of the Warwick earldom, spanning three of its holders; and one in which the Nevilles are to the fore. Intention and reception, however, are not necessarily two sides of the same coin. As events transpired, the Chapel took on more complex layers of meaning. Earl Richard was the last of the Beauchamp holders of the Warwick earldom to be interred in St Mary’s church. The last, but in the eyes of contemporaries, the most illustrious. The erection of a monument which surpassed in splendour of materials and excellence of workmanship the tombs of his forebears in St Mary’s thus was transformed into a climatic epitaph to the end of the glorious Beauchamp line. For the Nevilles too, what perhaps was envisaged as a testament to the success of their marital alliances became a monument to their ruination: the tombchest was their surrogate pantheon as much as that of Richard Beauchamp, especially after the destruction of the family mausoleum of Bisham Priory during the Reformation. Whatever the intentions of the founder, his family and his executors, the ways in which contemporaries viewed the Chapel to a greater or lesser extent would have been determined by awareness of the fates of the individuals concerned with its creation and represented in it. ‘Sit deo laus et Gloria defunctis misericordia’ (‘Let there be glory and honour to God, and mercy to the deceased’) is the message of the scrolls held by the angels accompanying the weepers on Richard Beauchamp’s tomb. Sepulchral monuments like this have a role in the rituals of collective and personal commemoration and remembrance. It is however all too easy to treat tombs merely as artefacts of aesthetic and historical value and overlook how their existence and imagery might evoke feelings of bitterness and despair. Henry, Earl Richard’s heir, died a non-violent death, but the same cannot be said of five of the other six men whose images are arrayed around the chest. Richard Neville, successor to Henry, and his father, Humphrey Stafford and Edmund Beaufort all perished in the Wars of the Roses and John Talbot was killed on campaign in France; only the insane George Neville, Lord Latimer, died peacefully. George Neville’s son and heir Henry, who was killed at Edgcote in 1469, and his son-in-law Oliver Dudley were buried in the Chapel alongside Henry’s mother Elizabeth Beauchamp and below the head of her father’s effigy (Fig. 6).82 For viewers familiar with

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Chatwin, ‘The Grave of Richard Beauchamp’.

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these individuals the earl’s tomb thus took on a role not envisaged when it was conceived. It became a war memorial to some of the most elite of elites of fifteenth-century England. By 1471 all the men represented by the weepers had gone, each one of whom had been outlived by their wives. A decade later, only Anne, widow of the ‘Kingmaker’ Richard Neville, who had fought so tenaciously firstly to preserve, then restore her father’s memory and her husband’s rights, was left to contemplate a mortality rate through violence which had deprived her of her spouse and two sons-in-law (and after 1485, of another son-in-law in the form of Richard III). One can only speculate on her emotions when (if ever) she entered the Chapel in whose completion she seems to have played a leading role, to pray for the souls of those she had lost; in contemplating her father’s monument she had cause enough to reflect on the transience of life and the folly of human ambition which had cost her so dearly. Fittingly perhaps the last words should be left to another and more famous son of Warwickshire: ‘All that glisters is not gold; Often have you heard that told: Many a man his life hath sold But my outside to behold: Gilded tombs do worms infold’. Acknowledgements I am grateful to the numerous individuals who have commented on this paper at the various conferences and other occasions at which it has been read since it first saw the light of day as an inaugural professorial lecture in 1996. A particular debt is owed to Susan Reynolds for her perceptive observations and to John Watts, who kindly read the entire text and raised some important points. Above all, to Alexandrina Buchanan to whom this is dedicated with deep gratitude, etc.

the beauchamp chapel at warwick

Appendix Pedigree of the Beauchamp and Neville Families

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XXIX The Howard Tombs at Thetford and Framlingham: New Discoveries The Howard Family

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mong the most important groups of English sixteenth-century tombs are those of the Howard family in the parish church of St Michael at Framlingham, Suffolk, Their history is extremely complicated and their dating controversial. In 1965 Howard Colvin and Professor Lawrence Stone published an article on the tombs in this journal which, based on exemplary documentary research, remains the most detailed (and best) study of the subject.1 Since then, some new material has been discovered which throws fresh light on the problems surrounding the tombs. Discussion will be confined mainly to the tombs of the second and third Howard dukes of Norfolk and that of the first two wives of the fourth Duke. The monument to the third Duke’s son, the poet Earl of Surrey, who was beheaded in 1547, is excluded as it was not set up until 1614. Although several accounts of the Howards exist, it may be useful to give a short summary of the main protagonists.2 The Howards (Fig. 1) were an East Anglian family which became one of the most important in the land through the marriage of Sir Robert Howard with Margaret, daughter and co-heiress of Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk. They had a son John, who on the death in 1483 of Edward IV’s younger son Richard, the tenyear-old widower of Anne, the last representative of the Mowbrays, became L. Stone and H. Colvin, ‘The Howard Tombs at Framlingham, Suffolk’, Archaeological Journal, 122 (1965), pp. 159–171. 2 Ibid., pp. 159–60; G. E. Cokayne, The Complete Peerage, 9 (London, 1936), pp. 610– 24. 1

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1. The Genealogy of the Howard Family.

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the first Howard Duke of Norfolk. He served Richard III loyally and died in his cause at Bosworth. Duke John had two wives. The first was Catherine, daughter and heiress of William, Lord Moleyns. The lost inscription on her tomb-slab gave her date of death as 1452, not 1465 as it is usually stated in Howard genealogies (Fig. 2). John’s second wife was Margaret, daughter of Sir John Chedworth. She survived her husband by nine years, dying in 1494. By his first wife Duke John had a son Thomas, who also fought on King Richard’s side at Bosworth. His father’s estates were confiscated by Henry VII and although he was pardoned in 1486, Thomas was not created Duke of Norfolk until 1514. His restoration to favour was a reward for his loyalty and service to the Tudor dynasty, which had been finally proved by his inflicting on the Scots the crushing defeat at Flodden in 1513.3 Thomas Howard was one of the most powerful magnates in the realm, a position also enjoyed by his son Thomas, who succeeded his father as third Duke in 1524. The new Duke’s conservatism in matters religious did not restrain him from profiting from the Dissolution of the Monasteries, nor from suppressing with severity the Pilgrimage of Grace. For many years Duke Thomas was one of Henry VIII’s leading councillors, but in the last days of 1546 the King suddenly turned against him, and he and his eldest son Henry, Earl of Surrey, were imprisoned in the Tower of London. Henry was executed for treason (he had boasted of his royal blood, and had dared to quarter his own arms with those of Edward the Confessor) and his father, who was sentenced to die on 28 January 1547, only survived because the King passed away in the early hours of that same morning. Duke Thomas’s religious beliefs were not in sympathy with those of the Protestant councils of the Duke of Somerset and the Earl of Northumberland and he remained in the Tower under sentence of death throughout Edward VI’s reign. He was released on Mary’s accession in 1553, and died the following year.4 He was succeeded by his grandson, also named Thomas. This Thomas had an equally volatile career, but was not so fortunate as his grandfather and after becoming involved in the Northern Rising of 1569 he was found guilty of treason and executed in 1572.5 He had three wives. The first was Mary,

M. J. Tucher, The Life of Thomas Howard Earl of Surrey and Second Duke of Norfolk 1443–1524 (The Hague, 1964). 4 F. R. Grace, ‘The Life and Career of Thomas Howard, Third Duke of Norfolk’, University of Nottingham unpublished MA thesis, 1961. 5 N. Williams, Thomas Howard 4th Duke of Norfolk (London, 1964). 3

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daughter of Henry Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel; she died in 1557. Thomas took as his second wife Margaret, daughter of Thomas, Lord Dudley. She died in 1564. His third wife was Elizabeth, widow of Thomas, Lord Dacre, and daughter of Sir John Leyburne; she died in 1567. The Burial Places of the Howard Family For most of the fifteenth century the principal residence of the Howards was Tendring Hall, in the parish of Stoke-by-Nayland, Suffolk, and the parish church there was used as the family mausoleum. The south chapel contains the brass of John Duke of Norfolk’s first wife Catherine Moleyns (Fig. 2). Although she died in 1452 it is generally agreed by students of brasses that the monument was only made in the 1530s.6 The indents of the brasses to Duke John’s grandparents, John Howard and Alice (née Tendring) exist nearby; this couple were also depicted in the east window of the south chapel. The glass and the two monuments were illustrated before their destruction and mutilation in a magnificent genealogy of the Howard family at Arundel Castle (see Appendix I). This was compiled in 1638 by Henry Lilly, Rougedragon Pursuivant; the artist was almost certainly William Sedgwick, who is known to have worked for Lilly.7 When the Howards obtained the dukedom of Norfolk they adopted the Cluniac priory of Thetford, Norfolk, which had been the burial place of the Mowbray dukes. John, the first Howard holder of the dukedom, was buried here in 1485 on the south side of the high altar, and he was followed in 1524 by his son Thomas.8 The third Duke also intended to be buried here and made preparations for his tomb and that of his son-in-law Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, the bastard son of Henry VIII, who had died in 1536. At this point, the plans of the early Howard dukes to turn Thetford Priory into a dynastic mausoleum were shattered by the dissolution of the monasteries. Thomas, third Duke of Norfolk, made strenuous efforts to save Thetford. In 1539 he petitioned the King either to convert the Priory into a college of secular priests, or to grant him the site in order to create a parish church. The argument which the Duke put forward most strongly H. Druitt, Costume on Brasses (London, 1906), p. 280. R. Marks and A. Payne (eds), British Heraldry from its origins to c. 1800 (exhibition catalogue, British Museum, London, 1978), no. 84. 8 The National Archives, SP1/227, f. 128. 6 7

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was that the Priory not only contained his ancestors’ tombs, but also that of Henry Fitzroy. Henry VIII remained unmoved by this appeal to secure a peaceful resting-place for his illegitimate offspring and in February 1540 the Priory was dissolved. Although the Duke was allowed to purchase the site and estates, that was the end of Thetford as a Howard mausoleum, and the tombs of the Mowbrays and early Howard dukes were destroyed. As Stone and Colvin point out, from 1540 into the 1550s the Howards had no settled family burial-place. For a time Lambeth parish church, Surrey, enjoyed favour with some of the family.9 In 1522 the second Duke had built a chapel in the north aisle, in which his widow Agnes was interred in 1545; and it was to Lambeth that her husband’s body was brought for reburial after the dissolution of Thetford Priory. Other members of the family were also buried at Lambeth, including the dowager Duchess Elizabeth, the widow of the third Duke, who died in 1558. The third Duke himself, however, who had intended to lie at Thetford, did not choose Lambeth, but Framlingham; and it is at Framlingham that his tomb, that of Henry Fitzroy and that of the first two wives of the fourth Duke are placed today. The Tomb of Thomas, Second Howard Duke of Norfolk (d. 1524) It was mentioned above that Thomas, second Howard Duke of Norfolk, was buried at Thetford in 1524. His funeral was on a scale befitting that of a peer of the highest rank and power. The body was escorted from Framlingham to Thetford by a procession of knights, gentlemen and friars in company with four hundred men in hooded gowns. The obsequies terminated with the officers of the late Duke’s household breaking their insignia and throwing them into the grave.10 Some years previously the Duke had made provision for his tomb. In his will of 31 May 1520, he refers to an indenture whereby his executors were empowered to raise £133 6s. 8d. for the making of the tomb from the revenues of various lands. John Harvey gives a date of 31 August 1516 for this indenture.11 Duke Thomas’s will also provides some information on the monument itself: Stone and Colvin, ‘Howard Tombs’, p. 161. T. Martin, The History of the Town of Thetford in the Counties of Norfolk and Suffolk (London, 1779), pp. 38–42; Tucher, Thomas Howard, p. 142. 11 J. Harvey, English Mediaeval Architects. A Biographical Dictionary down to 1500 (London, 1954), p. 286. 9

10

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We woll that our said Executors cause our tombe to be made and sett in the said Church of the priory of Thetford directly before the high awter where it was devised by us, Maister Clerk (sic Thomas Larke), maister of the King’s workis at Cambridge and Wastell fremason of Bury in the Countie of Norffolk. And the pictours of us and Agnes our wife to be sett togider thereuppon.12 The document uses the past tense for the design or location of the monument, (the ‘tombe . . . was devised’) although it had not yet been constructed. It must have been planned in or before 1515 at the latest, for ‘Wastell fremason’ is John Wastell of Bury St Edmunds, who appears to have died in that year. He was the mason responsible for the Bell Harry tower of Canterbury Cathedral, the reconstruction of Saffron Walden church, Essex, and from 1508 until 1515 was master mason at King’s College, Cambridge.13 The will also tells us that the images of Duke Thomas and his wife Agnes were to be placed on the tomb. A little more information can be gleaned from Weever.14 He gives a transcript of a tablet containing a lengthy biography of the Duke which was placed on or near the tomb. Weever says it was fixed to the tomb, but Nicholas Charles, writing in 1611, describes it as hanging up by the tomb; neither had seen the original.15 The text on the tablet began by stating that an epitaph around the tomb gave the Duke’s ancestry, ‚ Wyche is also set out in armes about the same tombe’.16 Duke Thomas’s monument thus had shields of arms on it and was intended to have the images of the Duke and Duchess. The large brick vault to contain their bodies still exists before the high altar at Thetford, but the tomb itself has been destroyed, presumably soon after the dissolution of the Priory. Until recently, this was all the information known on the second Duke of Norfolk’s tomb. Late in 1977, when the present writer and Mrs Ann Payne were selecting material for inclusion in the British Heraldry exhibition, we came across in British Library Additional MS 45131 a series of illustrations,

Stone and Colvin, ‘Howard Tombs’, p. 160. Harvey, English Mediaeval Architects, pp. 283–4. 14 J. Weever, Antient Funerall Monuments (London, 1631), pp. 833–4. 15 London, British Library Cotton MS Julius C. VII, f.245. 16 Weever, Antient Funerall Monuments, p. 834. 12 13

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some ink drawings, some coloured, of tombs and stained glass windows.17 The manuscript forms part of the collections made by Thomas Wriothesley, Garter King of Arms from 1505 to 1534. The earliest tomb depicted in the manuscript is of Richard Beauchamp, Lord St Amand, who died in 1508; the latest securely dated one is of Edward Sutton, Lord Dudley (d. 1531). On f. 85 is the tomb of a Howard Duke of Norfolk. The monument (Fig. 4) consists of a rectangular tomb chest with on the top the recumbent effigy of the Duke. He wears plate armour and a red mantle with ermine tippet over a heraldic surcoat bearing Quarterly, 1 and 4 Gules 3 lions passant guardant or; 2 and 3 Gules a bend between 6 cross crosslets, fitchy argent. In the crook of his arm is his Earl Marshal’s baton. His head rests on a helmet with an elaborate crest comprising a lion standing on a cap of maintenance; both this lion and that at the foot of the effigy have white collars with three points. The ends and sides of the tomb chest bear shields of arms set in trefoil cusped niches. The shield encircled in a garter at the upper end bears Quarterly, 1 and 4 Gules 3 lions passant guardant or and a label of 5 points argent; 2 and 3 Gules a bend between 6 cross crosslets fitchy argent. The corresponding shield at the foot has Quarterly, 1 Gules a bend between 6 cross crosslets argent; 2 Gules 3 lions passant guardant or and a label of 3 points argent; 3 Checky or and azure; 4 Gules a lion rampant argent. On the left side the shields are (from top to bottom) (a) Gules 3 lions passant guardant or and a label of 5 points argent; (b) As (a) impaling Azure semé of fleurs-de-lis or; (c) Azure semé of fleurs-de-lis or impaling Sable a lion rampant or ((a), (b), (c) are surmounted by crowns); (d) As (a) impaling a blank shield; (e) Sable a lion rampant argent impaling (a). The shields on the right face, from bottom to top, are: (f ) Gules a lion rampant argent impaling (a); (g) Quarterly, 1 and 4 (a), 2 and 3 (f ), impaling Quarterly, 1 and 4 Gules a lion rampant or, 2 and 3 Checky or and azure; (h) Gules a bend between 6 cross crosslets fitchy argent impaling Quarterly, 1 and 4 as (a), 2 Gules a lion rampant argent, 3 Checky or and azure; (i) Quarterly 1 Gules a bend between 6 cross crosslets fitchy argent, 2 as (a), 3 Checky or and azure, 4 Gules a lion rampant argent, impaling a blank shield; (j) as (i), impaling Argent a chevron between 3 wolves’ heads gules. The date-range of the tombs in the manuscript of 1508-1531 points to this one being that of Thomas, second Howard Duke of Norfolk. This 17 A. Payne and R. Marks, ‘Pageantry and Early Antiquarianism’, The Connoisseur, 198 (1978), pp. 310–315 (pp. 314–5).

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is confirmed by the last shield on the right side (j), which shows Howard impaling Tylney, representing his wife Agnes, daughter of Hugh Tylney. How trustworthy is Wriothesley’s illustration? He was primarily interested in matters heraldic (which did not prevent either him or the painter from omitting the augmentation on the bend of the Howard arms which had been granted to the Duke after his victory at Flodden), but there are good grounds for believing that it may give us a reasonably accurate representation. Unfortunately none of the tombs depicted in Add. MS 45131 survives today, but they belong to several well-known types. This can be demonstrated by the illustration of the monument to Sir William Parr (d. 1517) and his family, formerly in the Dominican church in London. It consists of a tomb-chest in an arched recess with the family set on the back wall, kneeling before the Holy Trinity (Fig. 5). This was a popular design in the first half of the sixteenth century, and the Parr tomb may be compared with those of Richard Sackville at Westhampnett, Sussex, and of Richard Norton at East Tisted in Hampshire.18 In these examples the figures are of stone and flank a Pietà. Sometimes the figures are in brass, as on the Thomas Pigott (d. 1519) monument at Whaddon, Bucks. It is uncertain in which medium the Parr family was portrayed, but there can be little doubt that the drawing was copied from the tomb itself. The same should apply to all the tombs depicted in Add. MS 45131, including that of Thomas, Duke of Norfolk. The closest existing monument to Thomas Howard’s appears to be the tomb-chest of Bishop Mayhew (d. 1516) in Hereford Cathedral.19 If this is a fairly accurate representation of the lost tomb, then it could not have been made entirely in accordance with the Duke’s wishes. It does have shields of arms portraying his ancestry, as Weever recorded on the tablet, but it will be recalled that in his will the Duke says that the images of both himself and his wife were to be placed on the tomb, and she is not represented on the tomb in the Wriothesley manuscript. Nor, contrary to some statements, does Weever ever say that she was. The only plausible explanation is that at some time prior to the construction of her husband’s tomb Duchess Agnes had decided not to be interred at Thetford. Certainly,

J. Mann, ‘English Church Monuments 1536–1625’, The Walpole Society, 21 (1932– 33), pp. 1–22 (Pl. IIa). 19 E. S. Prior and A. Gardner, An Account of Medieval Figure-Sculpture in England (Cambridge, 1912), Fig. 815. 18

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by the time she drew up her will on 12 March 1542, she had made other arrangements: My bodye to be buried wthin the parishe churche of Lambithe Co. Surrey in suche place whereas I have prepared my Tombe.20 Her tomb was thus in existence by March 1542, and she was buried in it on 13 October 1545.21 The monument is destroyed, but an illustration of it is to be found in Henry Lilly’s Howard Genealogy (Fig. 6). This shows a marble tomb-chest with the brass of Duchess Agnes under a triple canopy and shields of arms on the side-shafts. Although the details of her dress do not exclude the possibility that the tomb was executed after the dissolution of Thetford Priory in 1540, so similar is the effigy to that of her daughterin-law Catherine Howard (née Broughton), who died in 1535, that on the style of the monument and the costume it is conceivable that both date from the 1530s.22 Catherine’s brass still exists at Lambeth and is also depicted in the Howard Genealogy (Fig. 7). If Duchess Agnes’s tomb at Lambeth was constructed before Thetford was suppressed in 1540, it would explain why she did not have a double monument made for herself and her husband when his body was removed from Thetford after the dissolution and re-interred at Lambeth. Instead a separate tomb for Duke Thomas’s new resting-place was erected with a brass depicting him in armour. For a record of this monument we must once again turn to the Howard Genealogy (Fig. 3). It has been suggested that the Lambeth brass of Duke Thomas was brought with his body from Thetford.23 A comparison of the Thetford tomb as shown in Wriothesley’s manuscript with the Lambeth monument depicted in the Howard Genealogy demonstrates that this cannot have happened (Figs 3, 4). The Duke’s first tomb, erected after 1520, must have been completely destroyed in or soon after 1540. When his body was re-buried at Lambeth a new memorial was made.

C. Leveson-Gower, ‘The Howards of Effingham’, Surrey Archaeological Collections, 9 (1888), pp. 395–436 (p. 427). 21 Ibid., p. 398. 22 G. E. Cokayne, The Complete Peerage, 5 (London, 1932), p. 9. 23 Stone and Colvin, ‘Howard Tombs’, p. 162. 20

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The Howard Tombs at Framlingham When we turn to consider the Howard tombs at Framlingham, at least there are the monuments with which to work. That of Thomas Howard, third Duke of Norfolk (d. 1554), is placed to the south of the high altar (Figs 8, 13, 14, 16, 24). It consists of a rectangular limestone tomb-chest with the figures of the twelve apostles and two others within scallopshell niches separated from each other by fluted baluster shafts topped by capitals. At each corner is a lion holding a shield of the Howard arms and a group of clustered shafts, one of which has small statuettes arranged around it. On the chest are the recumbent effigies of the third Duke and his wife Elizabeth. Opposite the third Duke’s tomb, on the north side of the high altar, is that of Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond (Figs 9, 17, 19). This also consists of a limestone rectangular tomb-chest, but without a recumbent effigy. On the sides are shields of arms separated by fluted pilasters with caryatid term figures above. Between the terms are rectangular panels depicting Old Testament scenes in relief. On the north side are the Creation of Eve, God giving the Garden into Adam and Eve’s care, the Fall and the Expulsion. On the west are the nursing of Cain and Abel and Adam delving, Cain and Abel sacrificing and the murder of Abel. The south side has Noah’s Ark, the drunkenness of Noah, Abraham and the Angels, and Lot fleeing from Sodom and Gomorrah. The series is completed on the east by the sacrifice of Isaac and Moses with the Tablet of Law. At the corners are four angels with blank shields and emblems of the Passion. There are two more limestone tombs at Framlingham which must also be consi­dered. That of the first two wives of the fourth Duke of Norfolk is situated at the east end of the chancel north aisle (Figs 10, 12). It comprises a rectangular tomb-chest with shields of arms on the sides separated by detached fluted columns. On the slab are the recumbent effigies of the Duke’s wives with a space left between for the Duke’s effigy (which was never made); at the corners are lions holding shields of arms. The occupant of the last tomb (Fig. 11) is not known for certain, although Elizabeth, daughter of the fourth Duke, has been suggested. It is set against the chancel north aisle wall and is in the form of a tomb-chest with blank shields separated by fluted pilasters. Above is a crocketed ogee arch.

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These tombs form one of the most important groups of Renaissance monuments in England. Their history is even more complicated than that of the tombs of the second Duke, and there has been considerable controversy over their dating and stylistic affiliations. James Mann dated the entire group to c. 1560 by relating them to the alabaster tomb of the second Earl of Huntingdon (d. 1561) at Ashby-dela-Zouche, Leicestershire, and to the monument to Lord Brooke (who also died in 1561) at Cobham, Kent. The Brooke tomb is also cited as a comparison by Mrs Esdaile.24 She was undecided about the date because she also connects the Framlingham tombs with that of Henry, Lord Marney (d. 1523), at Layer Marney, Essex. Further­more, she compared the apostles on the third Duke of Norfolk’s monument with the saints in the triforium of Henry VII’s Chapel, Westminster Abbey, dating from c. 1502–12 and concluded that an Englishman who worked under the Florentine sculptor Torrigiano was responsible for the Framlingham tombs.25 Margaret Whinney believed that the tombs of Henry Fitzroy and the third Duke of Norfolk were planned in the late 1530s and completed in the 1560s by the fourth Duke. She pointed to France as the design source for the two tomb-chests, but suggested that the apostles on the third Duke‘s tomb were inspired by Flemish or German models. Dr Whinney also claimed that the effigies on the third Duke’s tomb are identical with those of the fourth Duke’s wives, and shared James Mann’s opinion that they should be connected with the Huntingdon tomb at Ashby-de-la-Zouche.26 The most careful examination of the subject is in Stone and Colvin’s article.27 They noticed that the Fitzroy and third Duke’s tombs bear small, unobtrusive incised dates, the former of 1555, the latter 1559. From this they concluded that both monuments were executed in their entirety in these years. They drew attention to a series of masons’ marks on the monuments to the third Duke, Fitzroy and the wives of the fourth Duke and suggested firstly that the entire group of Howard tombs at Framlingham (except that of the Earl of Surrey) was all by one workshop and secondly that a twenty24 Mann, ‘English Church Monuments’, p. 3; K. A. Esdaile, English Church Monuments 1510–1840 (London, 1946), pp. 15, 56. 25 H. M. Colvin, et al, The History of the King’s Works III 1485–1660, pt. 1 (London, 1975), p. 213. 26 M. Whinney, Sculpture in Britain 1530–1830 (Harmondsworth, 1964), pp. 7, 232 nn 17–19. 27 Stone and Colvin, ‘Howard Tombs’.

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year gap between the Fitzroy and third Duke’s monuments and the other two is inconceivable. They dated the tombs of the fourth Duke’s wives and his daughter to between 1558 and 1567. Anthony Blunt followed the view of Stone and Colvin, at least as regards the third Duke’s tomb, and dated it between 1555 and 1560.28 Both Stone and Colvin, and Professor Blunt, look to France for the stylistic source of the tombs. Faced with this divergence of opinion, one can only revert to the known facts. Working backwards, there can be no doubt that the monument to the first two wives of the fourth Duke dates from after 1558 and before 1567, as Stone and Colvin demons­trate. In the former year the Duke married his second wife Margaret, and in 1567, three years after her death, he married Elizabeth, widow of Thomas, Lord Dacre. Elizabeth is not represented on the tomb, so it must have been completed before 1567. As Stone and Colvin point out, the fourth Duke’s political difficulties from 1569 would account for the absence of his effigy from this tomb, although space was left for it between those of his first two wives.29 As for the small tomb under the crocketed ogee arch, if it is of the fourth Duke’s daughter Elizabeth, then it is likely to have been made soon after her death in 1565. The dating of these two tombs to the late 1550s and 1560s is confirmed by stylistic comparisons with known works of this period. The classicizing restraint and harmo­nious proportions of the tomb-chests are typical of a group of monuments dating from the middle years of the century. The fluted pilasters on the so-called Elizabeth Howard monument are similar to those on the tomb of Sir Thomas Moyle (d. 1560) and his wife Catherine, formerly in Eastwell church, Kent, and now in the Victoria and Albert Museum and on a lost tomb of similar date formerly in Haslingfield church, Cambridgeshire.30 The columns and egg-and-dart mouldings on the tomb of the two wives of the fourth Duke are found on the tomb-chests of Frances, Duchess of Suffolk, in Westminster Abbey (Figs 10, 30) and of the Hoby brothers at Bisham, Berks.; these two are almost certainly by the same workshop.31 The tomb of Duchess Frances was erected in 1563, the Hoby monument probably dates 28 A. Blunt, ‘L’influence française sur l’architecture et la sculpture decorative en Angleterre pendant la première moitié du XVIe siècle’, Revue de l’Art, 4 (1969), pp. 17–29. 29 Stone and Colvin, ‘Howard Tombs’, p. 166. 30 J. Physick, Five Monuments from Eastwell (Victoria and Albert Museum Brochure 3, 1973), Pls 4, 5; W. M. Palmer (ed.), Monumental inscriptions and Coats of Arms from Cambridgeshire (Cambridge, 1932), p. 75, Pl. XIII. 31 Mann, ‘English Church Monuments’, P. XX(b).

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from c. 1566.32 Moreover, the effigies of the fourth Duke of Norfolk’s wives are similar to those of Margaret, Countess of Bath (d. 1561), and her second husband Sir Thomas Kytson (d. 1552) at Hengrave, Suffolk, although not by the same workshop. It may be suggested in passing that the affinities between the Framlingham and Hengrave effigies are closer than those which have been noted by Sir James Mann and Margaret Whinney between the former and the figures of the Earl and Countess of Huntingdon at Ashby-de-la-Zouch. The real problems occur with the tombs of the third Duke of Norfolk and Henry Fitzroy. It seems to the present writer indisputable that the effigies of the third Duke and his wife are the work of the sculptors responsible for the figures of the fourth Duke’s two wives. The facial features are very close, especially with the women, although the heads of the fourth Duke’s wives lack the detailed finishing of the third Duke and his wife (Figs 13–15). The caryatid term figures on the Fitzroy monument also show a treatment of facial features similar to the effigies (Fig. 17). Furthermore, the lions on the third Duke’s tomb are very similar to those on the monument to the fourth Duke’s wives (Figs 12, 16). Again, so close is the chest of the Fitzroy tomb with its fluted pilasters to the so-called Elizabeth Howard monument that there can be little difference in their dates (Figs 9, 11). The design of the coronets over the arms on the tombs of Henry Fitzroy and of the fourth Duke’s wives should also be compared (Figs 9, 10). As Stone and Colvin say, a twenty-year gap is unthinkable between works so similar, and there can be little doubt that these components of the Fitzroy and third Duke’s tombs do indeed date from the years incised on them (1555 and 1559). Indeed, confirmation is found in the same masons’ marks which occur on the top slab of the third Duke’s tomb, on the slab, mouldings and shield panels of the Fitzroy monument, and on the chest of the tomb to the fourth Duke’s wives.33 The present writer, however, shares the view expressed by Margaret Whinney that this dating does not apply to both monuments in their entirety. Neither tomb is as homogeneous as at first sight it appears to be. Firstly, one of the two lions at the east end of the third Duke’s tomb is not set over the baluster shafts at the corners, as is the pair at the west end (Figs 8, 16); this suggests that this lion is not part of the monument’s original design. Secondly, the angels and Old Testament panels on the Fitzroy tomb and the apostles on the third Duke’s monument are in a Gothic style quite distinct from the Renaissance caryatid terms and the effigies on the tombs; this is 32 33

Blunt, ‘L’influence française’, p. 29. Two of the marks are illustrated in Colvin and Stone, ‘Howard Tombs’, p. 165.

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shown by comparing a term with its adjacent Old Testament scene (Fig. 17). It is also significant that no masons’ marks are to be found on the angels, on the Old Testament panels and on the sides of the third Duke’s tombchest. Thirdly, as will be demonstrated below, features such as the baluster shafts and scallop-shell niches find their best parallels in works of the 1520s and 1530s rather than the 1550s and 1560s. Finally, the documentary and archaeological evidence supports a date of the late 1530s for the third Duke’s tomb-chest and the angels and Old Testament scenes on the Fitzroy monument. The key to the problem is the petition to save Thetford Priory which Thomas, third Duke of Norfolk, addressed to the King in 1539: It. thentent of the saide Duke is . . . to make a parisshe Churche of the same [i.e. Thetford Priory] wher nowe doth lye buryed the bodie of the late Duke of Richemond the kings naturall sonn, and also . . . the bodie of the late Duke of Norff father to the saide Duke, . . . and also dothe entende to lye their hymself, havyng alrady made twoo Tombes, one for the saide Duke of Richemond and an other for hymself which have alredy and woll cost hym, or they can be fully set uppe & fynisshed, iiij c li at the least.34 [Author’s italics] Confirmation that this petition was not special pleading by the Duke, and that work was in progress before 1539, is provided by some accounts for Thetford Priory which although published by John Harvey as long ago as 1941 appear to have escaped the attention of previous students of the tombs.35 Amongst the entries for 1537–38 is a payment of 6d. to John Swhett for the laying of a gravestone for Duke Thomas. The most likely terminus post quem for the commencement of the two tombs is Henry Fitzroy’s death on 22 July 1536. How are the sections distinguished above on the Fitzroy and third Duke’s monu­ment at Framlingham to be connected with these documents? During excavations at Thetford Priory in 1935 a number of fragments from a tomb were discovered in a building to the north of the transept. They are of limestone and include moulded bases and entablatures, fluted baluster shafts (including one with three small prophets holding scrolls), two kneeling angels with Passion emblems on shields, and a small scene depicting the Journey of the Magi (Figs 18, 20–23). The best of these pieces are in the St Peter The National Archives, SP1/156, f. 115. J. Harvey, ‘The last Years of Thetford Cluniac Priory’, Norfolk Archaeology, 27 (1941), pp. 1–27 (p. 17). 34 35

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2. Brass of Catherine Moleyns, first wife of John, Duke of Norfolk, at Stoke-by-Nayland, Suffolk (Lilly, Howard Genealogy, p. 102).

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3. Brass of Thomas Howard, 2nd Duke of Norfolk, formerly in Lambeth church (Lilly, Howard Genealogy, p. 120).

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4. Tomb of Thomas Howard, 2nd Duke of Norfolk, formerly at Thetford Priory, Norfolk (British Library, Add. MS 45131, fol. 85).

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5. Monument to Sir William Parr and his family formerly in the Dominican church, London (British Library, Add. MS 45131, fol. 109v).

6. Brass of Agnes, Duchess of Norfolk, formerly in Lambeth church (Lilly, Howard Genealogy, p. 122).

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7. Brass of Catherine Broughton in Lambeth church (Lilly, Howard Genealogy, p. 124).

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8. Tomb of Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, in Framlingham church, Suffolk. 9. Tomb of Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, at Framlingham.

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10. Tomb of the first two wives of Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk, at Framlingham.

11. Tomb said to be of Elizabeth, daughter of the 4th Duke of Norfolk, at Framlingham.

the howard tombs: new discoveries

12. Lion at the south-west corner of the tomb of the 4th Duke’s wives at Framlingham.

14. The head of the effigy of the 3rd Duke’s wife at Framlingham.

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13. The head of the 3rd Duke’s effigy at Framlingham.

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15. The head of one of the effigies of the 4th Duke’s wives at Framlingham.

16. Lion at the south-east angle of the 3rd Duke’s tomb at Framlingham.

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17. Detail from the Fitzroy tomb at Framlingham, showing a caryatid term and part of the Drunkenness of Noah. 18. Detail of the Journey of the Magi panel from Thetford Priory (Department of the Environment, on loan to St Peter Hungate Museum, Norwich).

748 19 (left). Angel holding Passion emblem at north-west corner of the Fitzroy tomb at Framlingham.

20 (right). Angel holding Passion shield from Thetford Priory (Department of the Environment, on loan to St Peter Hungate Museum, Norwich).

21–22. Shafts from Thetford Priory (Department of the Environment, on loan to St Peter Hungate Museum, Norwich).

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23. Capital from Thetford Priory (Department of the Environment, on loan to St Peter Hungate Museum, Norwich).

24. St James the Greater on the 3rd Duke’s tomb at Framlingham.

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25. Bust of a prophet from Thetford Priory (British Museum, Department of Medieval and Later Antiquities).

26. Bust of a king from Thetford Priory (British Museum, Department of Medieval and Later Antiquities).

27. Bust fragment (Thetford Priory, Department of the Environment Stores).

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28. Holbein’s cartoon for a mural at Whitehall Palace showing Henry VII and Henry VIII (London, National Portrait Gallery).

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29. Tomb of the 1st Lord Marney in Layer Marney church, Essex.

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30. Tomb of Frances, Duchess of Suffolk, in Westminster Abbey.

31. Tomb of Philippe de Montmorency in Oiron collegiate church (Deux-Sèvres, France).

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Hungate Museum, Norwich. Still at Thetford is a fragmentary bust of a figure holding a scroll. With it belong two complete panels depicting the busts of a prophet and a king holding scrolls set in scallop-shell niches (Figs 25–27). These have been in the Department of Medieval and Later Antiquities, the British Museum, since 1866 (Reg. Nos 66, 9–8, 1 & 2). They were presented by a Mr John Evans of Hemel Hempstead with the information that they were found in the ruins of Thetford Priory. The British Museum panels and the fragment with the figure holding the scroll at Thetford have not previously attracted attention, but it has been recognized for some time that the other pieces are from a tomb closely resembling that of the third Duke at Framlingham — a tomb which was never erected as none of the pieces has any traces of mortar, although several have position marks. The fluted baluster shafts, the capitals and the base moulding at Thetford are very close to those on the third Duke’s tomb (Figs 9, 21–23, 24). The British Museum prophet and king are the counter­parts of the apostles on the latter monument, although not quite matching their quality of carving (Figs 24–26). They have, moreover, the same elongated faces and heavy-lidded eyes as the angels holding Passion emblems and the Old Testament scenes on the Fitzroy tomb at Framlingham (Figs 17, 19, 25, 26). With these scenes belongs the Journey of the Magi panel from Thetford (Fig. 18). Finally, the two kneeling angels can be grouped on drapery style with the Fitzroy tomb angels (Figs 19–20). To summarize, we are faced with a stylistically homogeneous group comprising the more-or-less complete tomb-chest of the third Duke at Framlingham, the angels and Old Testament panels on the Fitzroy tomb also at Framlingham, and the various fragments found at Thetford Priory. The pieces now in the British Museum are particularly important as they confirm the stylistic link between the Thetford finds and Framlingham. It seems clear that we have the remains of two tombs conceived originally as a pair and that these tombs are those mentioned in the third Duke’s petition of 1539 as under construction for his body and that of Henry Fitzroy. One of these monuments must have been almost complete at the dissolution of Thetford Priory in 1540 and was subsequently re-erected at Framlingham; eventually the third Duke was buried in it. The second tomb could not have been very advanced by 1540 and only four of the angels and the Old Testament scenes could be incorporated into the new Fitzroy monument at Framlingham; other sections were left at Thetford.

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It is impossible to reconstruct entirely the second tomb as it was originally designed. The sides must have had a series of busts of prophets and kings in scallop-shell niches with Old Testament panels over them; at the angles would have been baluster shafts and angels holding instruments of the Passion would have been placed on the top. As for the isolated New Testament scene found at Thetford, one can only assume that it was part of a series to be placed over the apostles on the third Duke’s monument and was omitted when the tomb was eventually erected at Framlingham, perhaps because none of its companions had been carved. The two tombs would together have presented the Old Law and the New, one with Old Testament prophets, kings and scenes, the other with the apostles and episodes from the New Testament. Further support for a dating of the features under discussion to the late 1530s is provided by stylistic comparison. As was said above, the effigies, the caryatid figures and the other tomb-chests at Framlingham have close affinities with monuments dating from the 1550s and 1560s. By contrast with these, the Old Testament scenes, the angels, the Thetford scallop-shell niches and the third Duke’s tomb-chest appear distinctly old-fashioned. Firstly, the angels and the historiated scenes are still entirely Gothic in style, without any trace of Renaissance feeling for anatomy and proportion. Secondly, the tapering baluster shafts and scallop-shell niches of the third Duke’s tomb and the Thetford fragments were established elements in English painting, sculpture and architecture of the 1520s and 30s. Scallop-shell niches enjoyed a particular vogue in these decades. They decorate the alabaster tombs of Sir Thomas Unton (d. 1533) at Faringdon, Berks., of Sir Thomas Fitzwilliam at Tickhill, Yorks., dating from c. 1534, and of Sir Anthony Browne at Battle, Sussex, made between 1540 and 1548.36 Similar niches are found in stained glass at Great Brington, Northants., dating from 1526, and the east window of St Margaret’s Westminster and both monumental and miniature painting, e.g. a triptych at Knole made for Winchester Cathedral in 1526, a patent for Cardinal College, Oxford, dating from the same year, and Holbein’s cartoon for a mural in Whitehall Palace, executed in 1536–37 (Fig. 28).37 Tapering

36 P. Biver, ‘The Tickhill and Battle Monuments’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, 10 (1909), pp. 279–83; P. E. Routh, Medieval Effigial Alabaster Tombs in Yorkshire (Ipswich, 1976), pp. 123–7. 37 Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (England), London vol. 2 West London (London, 1925), Pl.153; E. Croft-Murray, Decorative Painting in England 1537–1837, vol. 1

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baluster shafts appear to have been particularly common in East Anglia at this time. They occur on the screen and choir stalls of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, made between 1531 and 1535; one of the columns supporting the canopy over the Provost’s stall even has a small satyr (originally there were three) set in similar fashion to the statuettes around a shaft found at Thetford.38 Tapering baluster shafts and capitals like those on the third Duke of Norfolk’s tomb are also to be found on a group of terracotta monuments in Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk.39 They occur on the tombs of the two Lords Marney at Layer Marney, Essex, dating probably from the late 1520s (Fig. 29), Braconash, Norfolk, and the tomb of Robert Jannys in St George’s Colegate, Norwich; the Jannys monument was probably made soon after 1532. The date range for the entire group of terracotta monuments is c. 1525–40. The third Duke’s and Henry Fitzroy’s monuments as originally conceived are not by the same craftsmen as the King’s College screen and the terracotta tombs, but there is one common factor shared between all of them: they are of French inspiration. Professor Blunt has shown that English art was in the 1520s and 30s deeply influenced by France. The tombs of the third Duke and Henry Fitzroy are amongst the most French of all, as previous students have pointed out. Stone and Colvin have drawn attention to the affinities between the baluster shafts on these tombs and those at the Hôtel Jubert, Rouen, and on the altar screen at Arques-la- Bataille, Normandy.40 Although these two may post-date the Framlingham-Thetford tombs, earlier examples can be found in France, as on the choir chapel screens at La Trinité, Fécamp, Normandy, which were completed by the death in 1519 of Abbot Antoine Bohier.41 Bohier also commissioned a marble sarcophagus for the high altar from the Genoese sculptor, Girolamo Viscardi. This has figures of apostles in scallop-shell niches, as also does the tomb of the Dukes of Orleans (now in St-Denis Abbey church), made in 1502 by the same sculptor.42 These (London, 1962), p. 23, Pls 30, 31; E. Auerbach, Tudor Artists (London, 1954), P1. 12a: R. Strong, Holbein and Henry VIII (London, 1967), Pl. XVIIIc. 38 C. Hussey, ‘The Colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. King’s College Chapel, Cambridge – 11. The Screen’, Country Life (22 May 1926), pp. 710–717. 39 A. Baggs, ‘Sixteenth-century Terra-cotta Tombs in East Anglia’, Archaeological Journal, 125 (1968), pp. 296–301. 40 Stone and Colvin, ‘Howard Tombs’, p. 169, Pl. XXXVb. 41 A. Blunt, Art and Architecture in France 1500–1700 (2nd ed., Harmondsworth, 1973), p. 19. 42 P. Vitry and G. Brière, Documents de sculpture française (Paris, 1911), Pl. III, 2.

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two monuments are the ultimate source for the third Duke of Norfolk and Fitzroy tombs as originally designed, but it is more likely that their creator had direct knowledge of the French versions dating from the 1520s and 1530s which are found mainly in the Loire valley area. Two late examples, dating from c. 1539, are the tombs of Philippe de Montmorency (Fig. 31) and Artus Gouffier at Oiron.43 Similarly, the best parallels for the historiated scenes on the Fitzroy tomb (an extremely rare feature) are also to be found in France. The monument to Pons de Gontaut (d. 1524) in the chapel of Biron château has scenes of Christ’s miracles on the sides.44 The historiated panels on this tomb occupy a much larger place in the decoration than do the Old Testament episodes on the Fitzroy monument (Fig. 9). We should not be surprised if the Duke of Norfolk in the late 1530s commissioned two tombs based on near-contemporary French monuments; indeed, so closely do they resemble works such as Oiron that the Duke may have had a Frenchman design them, even if the figure style does not look French. There was every reason for Thomas Howard to be up-to-date with recent artistic developments across the Channel. From at least 1530 the Duke had close ties with the French court.45 In October 1532 he was invested at Calais with the Order of St Michael by Francis I; after this his son Henry, Earl of Surrey, and Henry Fitzroy remained in France in attendance on the French king. From May to August of the following year the Duke of Norfolk led an embassy to Francis I, in the course of which he visited Lyons, the Auvergne and Montpellier. Subsequently he was in receipt of an annual pension of £333 6s. 8d. from the French monarch. Duke Thomas went on further diplomatic missions to France in July 1535 and February 1540. His dealings with the French court ceased in 1542 with the outbreak of hostilities between England and France, but it can hardly be coincidental that he commissioned two very French-looking tombs during the years when his connections with France were at their closest. Two questions remain to be considered; why did work cease on the tombs in c. 1540 and why were they only completed at Framlingham in the 1550s? The answers appear to lie in a combination of political and religious circumstances, and in the Duke of Norfolk’s personal fortunes. Although it is conceivable that some work may have continued on the tombs at Thetford Ibid., Pl. XIV, 1–3. Ibid., Pl. VI, 2–3. 45 Grace, ‘Life and Career’, pp. 151–3,161, 207, 248–50. 43 44

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for a while after the Priory’s suppression, it is more likely that the project was shelved whilst a new mausoleum was found. By 1547 at the latest the Duke had settled on Framlingham as the family burial-place. As a certificate from the churchwardens dated 11 November in that year reveals, he had already demolished part of the church (in fact, the chancel) preparatory to enlarging it. The churchwardens state that they had sold church plate to the value of £50 which they intended to use for the rebuilding.46 Since December 1546, however, the Duke had been languishing in the Tower, and was to remain there until 1553.47 Apart from the Duke’s own uncertain future, the Protestant sympathies of the royal council and the scale of iconoclasm in the country at the time made it unwise, to say the least, even to contemplate the creation of monuments displaying religious imagery which were associated with someone holding such strong Catholic beliefs as Thomas Howard.48 The reconstruction of Framlingham church must have been delayed for the same reason. It was not ready by the Duke’s death in 1554, for he makes no mention in his will of burial there, merely directing his executors to bury his body where they thought most convenient.49 Even as late as 1557 the churchwardens were asking for a royal warrant to finish the church.50 Shortly before then a new workshop was employed to make a tomb-chest for Henry Fitzroy’s monument, incorporating what they could of the parts which had already been made in 1536–40 (i.e. the Old Testament Panels and the angels) and leaving the remainder at Thetford. The year 1555 incised on the tomb probably marks the date of its erection at Framlingham. Four years later the same carvers completed the third Duke of Norfolk’s monument by adding the lion, the top slab and the recumbent effigies to the pre-1540 tomb-chest. Subsequently they went on to execute the tombs of the fourth Duke’s wives and (supposedly) of Elizabeth Howard. The tombs of the third Duke and Henry Fitzroy as originally conceived are important documents in the history of the infiltration of Renaissance forms into English art. Similarly, those parts of these tombs which were

Stone and Colvin, ‘Howard Tombs’, p. 161, Grace, ‘Life and Career’, p. 221. 48 J. Phillips, The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England 1535–1660 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1973), pp. 82–100. 49 Stone and Colvin, ‘Howard Tombs’, p. 161. 50 Ibid., p. 166. 46 47

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added in the 1550s and the two dating from between 1558 and 1567 rank amongst the finest English monuments of their time. Collectively the Framlingham tombs display a splendour and excellence of craftsmanship entirely appropriate to the prestige and power enjoyed by those members of the great Howard family who lie in them.

Appendix 1 The Howard Family Monuments Illustrated in Lilly’s Howard Genealogy (Collection of His Grace the Duke of Norfolk, Arundel Castle) p. 90

p. 92

p. 94 p. 96 p. 98

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Kneeling figure of Sir John Howard (d. late 14th century?) in a heraldic surcoat and holding a church. In the east window of Howard’s Chapel in the parish church of St Mary Magdalene, Wiggenhall (Norfolk). Figure and shields of arms of Robert, Baron Scales (d. 1324/5 or 1369), father of Margaret (d. 1389?), wife of Sir Robert Howard; these were in a window in Middleton church (Norfolk). Wall-tomb on the south side of Howard’s Chapel, East Winch (Norfolk), of Sir Robert Howard (d. 1389) and his wife Margaret. The font in East Winch church bearing the arms of Sir Robert Howard (d. 1389) and his wife. Kneeling figure in a heraldic tabard over plate-armour of Sir John Howard, son of Sir John Howard (d. 1438) and father of Elizabeth de Vere, Countess of Oxford (d. 1475 or later). He is enclosed by seven shields of arms. In the east window of the south aisle of Fairfield church (Norfolk). Kneeling figure in a heraldic tabard over plate-armour of John, first Howard Duke of Norfolk (d. 1485), with a shield bearing

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p. 104 p. 106

p. 107

p. 109

p. 110

p. 112

Howard quartering Tendring. In the glass of the private chapel in the family home of Tendring Hall in the parish of Stoke-byNayland (Suffolk). Brass to Catherine (née Moleyns), first wife of John, first Howard Duke of Norfolk, in the south chancel chapel of the parish church at Stoke-by-Nayland (Fig. 2). She died in 1452. The brass still exists. Brass to Sir John Howard (d. after 1426) and his wife Alice (née Tendring), who died in 1426, in Stoke-by-Nayland church. The slab and indents for the figures survive. Kneeling figures of Sir John Howard and his wife Alice flanking a shield bearing Howard impaling Tendring. In the east window of the south chancel chapel in Stoke-by-Nayland church. Kneeling figure of Sir John Howard (d. 1438) wearing a heraldic mantle in a south window of Weeting parish church (Norfolk). The text states that this was made during his marriage to his first wife Margaret de Plaiz (d. 1391). The figure of Elizabeth (d. 1425), second wife of Thomas Mowbray, first Duke of Norfolk (d. 1399), kneeling before a prie-dieu in the north window of the Clopton chantry chapel in Long Melford church (Suffolk) . She wears a gown with the arms of Talbot and a fur-trimmed mantle with the Brotherton arms. This and the following Long Melford illustrations were made in 1637, according to the text. The figure of Elizabeth is now placed in the west window of the north aisle (C. Woodforde, The Norwich School of Glass-Painting in the Fifteenth Century (Oxford, 1950), pp. 113, 125). A similar figure in the same window at Long Melford representing Margaret Chedworth (d. 1494), second wife of John, first Howard Duke of Norfolk (d. 1485). Her paternal arms are emblazoned on her gown. This figure also survives in the north aisle west window (Woodforde, op. cit., pp. 113, 125). Kneeling figure of Elizabeth Howard (d. 1475 or later), wife of John de Vere, Earl of Oxford (d. 1462), in a window in the nave north clerestory at Long Melford. She wears the De Vere arms on her mantle, and her gown has the Howard arms. The

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figure still exists in the east window of the church (Woodforde, op. cit., pp. 97, 117). The text states that there was another representation of her in the Clopton Chapel. pp. 113–14 Kneeling figures of Sir John Howard (d. after 1426) and his wife Alice (née Tendring) d. 1426) in the north window of the Clopton Chapel. The Howard arms are emblazoned on his tabard and on his wife’s mantle; she bears her paternal arms on her gown. Two similar figures were in a nave north clerestory window. pp. 115–16 Kneeling figures of Catherine (née Moleyns) (d. 1452) and her husband John, first Howard Duke of Norfolk (d. 1485). The Moleyns arms are on her gown, and those of Howard on her mantle and his tabard. The couple were placed in a nave north clerestory window. The text states that John Howard was a benefactor of the structure and glazing of Long Melford church. The incomplete inscription beneath the figures, as recorded in 1637, uses the phrase ‘Orate pro bono statu’. p. 117 Kneeling figures of Sir Richard Pygot (created Sergeant-at-Law in 1464) and John Haugh (his label was mis-read by Lilly as Howard). Haugh was appointed one of the Puisne Judges of the Common Pleas in 1487. These figures were in the seventh window from the east in the nave north clerestory at Long Melford. Both are shown in legal costume. The figures survive, Pygot in the east window of the church, Haugh in the south aisle west window (Woodforde, op. cit., pp. 100, 101, 119, Plate XXII). p. 118 Kneeling figure of Sir William Howard (d. 1308), Chief Justice of the Common Pleas. This was in the same window as the representations of Pygot and Haugh and likewise still exists in the east window (Woodforde, op. cit., pp. 100, 101, 116, 117). p. 120 Brass to Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk (d. 1524), in the family chapel on the north side of Lambeth parish church (Surrey) (Fig. 3). p. 122 Tomb-chest with brass of Agnes (née Tylney) d. 1545), second wife of Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk (d. 1524), in the middle of the family chapel in Lambeth church (Fig. 6). p. 123 Brass inscriptions to members of the Howard family on grave slabs in the family chapel at Lambeth:

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p. 124 p. 128

Richard (d. 1517), son of Duke Thomas (d. 1524) and Agnes (d. 1545). (2) Henry (d. 1513), son of Duke Thomas. (3) Thomas (d. 1508), son of Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk (d. 1554), and his first wife Anne, daughter of Edward IV. (4) Charles (d. 1520), son of Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk. (5) Sir John (d. 1503), son of Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, (d. 1524) and Agnes (d. 1545). (6) Henry (d. 1501), son of Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk (d. 1524). (7) Lady Elizabeth Fitzwater (d. 1534), daughter of Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk (d. 1524) and Agnes. Brass (Fig. 7) in the chancel of Lambeth church to Catherine (née Broughton), who died in 1535. She was the wife of William, Lord Howard of Effingham. The brass exists. Elaborate monument in Framlingham church (Suffolk) to Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (d. 1547), and his wife Frances, daughter of John de Vere, Earl of Oxford. This tomb, which survives, was erected in 1614. (1)

Appendix 2 Apart from the fragments at Thetford of tombs of the Howard Dukes of Norfolk, a large number of other pieces of sculpture have been found on the Priory site, some of which are of considerable interest. Unless stated, all are in the Department of the Environment stores at Thetford. Group i Fragments of polychromed shields of arms. (i) TP L/M 397/1 and 377/ (illegible) Sable a crowned lion rampant (Segrave) impaling Gules 3 lions rampant or and a label or. (ii) TP L/M 397/4 Gules 2 lions passant guardant or impaling a lion passant guardant. (iii) TP L/M 397/5 Azure a fleur-de-lis or (France).

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(iv) TP L/M 397/6 a lion rampant gules. (v) TP L/M 397/8 and 397/9 Gules a lion rampant or passant (Mowbray). (vi) TP L/M 397/11, 397/13 and 397/3 Gules 3 lions passant guardant or and a label of at least 3 points (Brotherton). (vii) TP L/M 398 Gules [a bend between)] 2 cross crosslets fitchy (Howard). (viii) TP L/M 399 Gules a lion rampant (Mowbray). (ix) TP L/M 401 Gules a lion rampant or (Mowbray). This is part of an effigy. Although most of these fragments are to be associated with sepulchral monuments it is impossible to identify them precisely. They probably comprise the remains of both Mowbray and Howard tombs. Group 2 Polychromed Apostles and a Virgin and Child. Of this set the remaining pieces show that the statues must have been quite large. They appear to date from the late 15th or early 16th century. (i) TP S3 . Pink hand holding the stems of a pair of keys. L. 8.7 cm. (ii) TP S4 . The top of two yellow keys. L. 9.5 cm. These two fragments belong to a statue of St Peter. (iii) TP S2 . Pink hand holding a closed book with blue cover and red clasps. L. 16 cm. (iv) TP S18 A/B. Two pieces of blue drapery with yellow floral embroidery and two small hands clutching it. Part of a Virgin and Child. Group 3 A series of small polychromed angels. These were referred to by Colvin and Stone (p. 164), who dated them to the late 14th or early 15th century. The present writer is inclined to place them in the early 16th century, but shares Colvin and Stone’s opinion that they are difficult to fit into a tomb design. Possibly they may have formed part of an architectural structure such as a screen. (i) 3 headless angels seated on a long bench. The latter is red and the tippets with puffed sleeves have traces of blue paint. L. 44.4 cm. This fragment is in St Peter Hungate Museum, Norwich. (ii) TP S7, S9, S11. Fragments of busts of headless angels. Traces of ochre and red colour on S7 and S9. The length of the largest piece is 4.7 cm. (iii) TP S10, S12, S13, SI4, S15. Fragments of angels’ arms, some with traces of blue colouring.

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(iv) TP S6 and S8. A pair of arms in blue sleeves decorated with yellow and red cinquefoils terminating in yellow brocaded cuffs. Group 4

TP S1 Free-standing seated figure of a Doctor of the Church or a priest in a

red tippet holding an open book bearing a very faint ‘black-letter’ inscription. The head is missing. H. 22.3 cm. Late 15th or early 16th century. Group 5 A considerable number of pieces carved to represent branches. Possibly from a Tree of Jesse.

Acknowledgements The author is most grateful to His Grace the Duke of Norfolk for permission to study and photograph the Howard Genealogy, to David Sherlock and the Department of the Environment staff at Thetford, and to the Reverend David Pitcher, the rector of Framlingham. David Goodyer drew Figure 1. I also wish to thank Mr Howard Colvin for a number of fruitful discussions and suggestions. My only regret is that Francis Steer, who provided constant interest and help, did not live to see this article The plates are reproduced by kind permission of the following: 2, 3, 6, 7, 25, 26 (Trustees of the British Museum), 4, 5 (British Library Board), 10, 11 (The Courtauld Institute of Art and Canon Ridgeway), 28 (the National Portrait Gallery, London), 29, 30 (National Monuments Record), 31 (Caisse nationale des Monuments Historiques et des Sites). The remainder are from photographs by the author and Miss M. O. Miller.

XXX Two Illuminated Guild Registers from Bedfordshire

J

anet Backhouse’s contribution to the 1993 Harlaxton Symposium The Reign of Henry VII includes one of her characteristically challenging statements: ‘Manuscripts identifiably illuminated in England during the final decade of the fifteenth century and the first ten years of the sixteenth await serious study, preferably by someone prepared to enjoy rather than to despise their splendid vulgarity’. In a footnote to the following sentence reference is made to the illuminated register of the Fraternity of Corpus Christi belonging to the Skinners’ Company of London as an example of the kind of material requiring investigation.1 Is there a more appropriate way of acknowledging Janet’s enthusiastic and fruitful exploration of what, until recently, might have been considered a backwater of medieval illumination than to pick up the gauntlet she has thrown down and discuss two more manuscripts belonging to the same genre and containing decoration of ‘splendid vulgarity’ from roughly the same period? The two books in question are the membership register of the Fraternity of the Holy and Undivided Trinity and Blessed Virgin Mary at Luton and that of the Fraternity of St John the Baptist at Dunstable (now both in the possession of Luton Museum).2 These manuscripts are rare survivors of their kind; they were produced for an urban clientele in the two principal towns of south Bedfordshire in the Middle Ages. Both have attracted attention 1 J. M. Backhouse, ‘Illuminated Manuscripts Associated with Henry VII and Members of his Immediate Family’, in The Reign of Henry VII. Proceedings of the 1993 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. B. Thompson, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 5 (Stamford, 1995), pp. 175–87. The sentence and note quoted are on p. 177. 2 I am most grateful to the staff of Luton Museum, especially Dr Elizabeth Adey, for kindly removing both manuscripts from display so that they could be studied together. I have also benefitted from the helpful comments and suggestions of Caroline Barron, Rita Marks and Sarah Rees Jones, all of whom read a draft of this paper.

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in the past, chiefly from local historians, and their decoration has been described. However, they have never been compared and analysed from any other point of view than style.3 Not that this is an unprofitable approach; as the exact circumstances of their creation are known and they are firmly dated, changing tastes in book decoration can be plotted in them. But they also have much to offer art historians interested in social context and audience and it is with these aspects that this paper is principally concerned. The earlier of the two is the Luton Register, which begins in 1475, the year following the fraternity’s foundation, and contains entries and decoration until 1546, the year before its dissolution. The provenance is well-recorded and as the text has been transcribed in an elegant edition only the salient pictorial features need to be described here.4 Written on vellum, the manuscript measures 286 x 205 mm and consists of 130 leaves and three contemporary flyleaves; the binding is of the seventeenth century.5 The book commences with a Calendar (fols 1– 6v). Several blank pages follow before the Register is kickstarted in spectacular fashion by its opening decoration. The preamble on fol. 13r giving the opening year and dedication commences with an elaborate initial and is framed by rich acanthus leaves entwined around a bar border, flowers, a parrot and a shield of Rotherham (Fig. 1). The motifs and style bear the hallmarks of an English illuminator. By contrast, fols 13v and 14r are by a highly accomplished South Netherlandish artist, almost certainly from Bruges. The full-page frontispiece (fol. 13v) shows the 3 The decoration of the two registers is compared briefly in C. Richmond, ‘The Visual Culture of Fif­teenth-Century England’, in The Wars of the Roses, ed. A. J. Pollard (Basingstoke, 1995), pp. 186–209 (references on pp. 187–8). 4 The principal study is The Register of the Fraternity or Guild of the Holy and Undivided Trinity and Blessed Virgin Mary in the Parish Church of Luton, ed. H. Gough (London, 1906). The manuscript came into the possession of John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute (b. 1713, d. 1792), who had purchased the manor of Luton and the advowson to the parish church; it remained in the ownership of the same family until 1984 when it was acquired by Luton Museum. The most authoritative discussion of the illumination is in Sotheby’s Catalogue of the Bute Collection of Forty-two Illuminated Manuscripts and Miniatures (13 June 1983), lot 19. A very useful analysis of the membership is J. Lunn, ‘The Luton Fraternity Register’, Bedfordshire Magazine, 19 (1983–85), 177–82; the last is distilled from a much larger (untitled) study published privately in 1984 with the financial assistance of the Friends of Luton Museum (henceforward referred to as Lunn, Register). The present writer is indebted to Mr Lunn for sharing so freely his unrivalled knowledge both of this and of the Dunstable Register. 5 The guild accounts for 1533–34 record the payment of £2 for a cover for the register (Gough, Register, p. 208). The account book for the years 1526–47 is in the Bedfordshire County Record Office.

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founder-members of the guild kneeling before the enthroned Holy Trinity within an ecclesiastical setting (Fig. 12); glimpsed through the open arch on the left is a street lined with Flemish-style buildings. Pride of place in the foreground is given to Bishop Rotherham, who kneels between groups that are divided by gender and led respectively by Edward IV and Queen Elizabeth. Behind the former are both clerics and laymen, amongst whom, no doubt, feature various Rotherham kinsmen; next to the queen is the king’s mother Cecily, Duchess of York. This iconography of the Trinity with God holding the body of the dead Christ, occurs from the early fifteenth century. The closest parallels are found in Flemish painting, including panels attributed to the Master of Flémalle (the Frankfurt altarpiece and the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg); also the altarpiece by Van der Goes that was probably commissioned for the collegiate church of the Holy Trinity in Edinburgh and executed at about the same time as the Luton Register.6 The royal theme is continued in the opening initial on the opposite page, which has Edward IV’s shield of arms with supporters and enclosed by the collar of the Order of the Golden Fleece. The border decoration, which includes a hunter stalking a bird, a peacock and Samson wrestling with the lion, is also Flemish in style (Fig. 2). 7 The subsequent decoration is the work of numerous hands, but the formula is similar, consisting of borders enclosing the names of the members enrolled in each year and those who had died and usually commencing with an elaborate initial. The decoration varies in elaboration. Sometimes the foliate borders are enlivened by anthropomorphic elements. Kneeling figures of abbots and monks of St Albans occur on fols 28r and 97r (1499, 1532), on the latter accompanied by the rector of the college of Bonhommes at Ashridge (Figs 3, 6); the 6 This iconography of the Trinity is discussed in C. Thompson and L. Campbell, Hugo van der Goes and the Trinity Panels in Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1974), p. 76. As the authors point out, on the Edinburgh panel (on loan from the Royal Collections to the National Galleries of Scotland) the depiction of God uncrowned stresses his humanity as a father mourning his dead son. The Frankfurt, St Petersburg and Luton images portray God in full majesty. 7 Compare for example the borders in two manuscripts in Cambridge (A. Arnould and J. M. Massing, Splendours of Flanders. Late Medieval Art in Cambridge Collections, exhib. cat. , Fitzwilliam Museum [Cam­bridge, 1993], nos 18, 19); also a copy of Jean de Wavrin’s Croniques dangleterre (BL, Royal MS 15. E. iv) executed for Edward IV (J. M. Backhouse, ‘Founders of the Royal Library: Edward IV and Henry VII as Collectors of Illuminated Manuscripts’, in England in the Fifteenth Century. Proceedings of the 1986 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. D. Williams [Woodbridge, 1987], pl. 1).

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only other individual depicted is Walter Blythe, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield (fol. 32r, 1504). These figures are accompanied by shields of arms, some blank; on fols 81v and 102r are three stags, referring to Sir Thomas Rotherham, Master of the fraternity in these years (1528, 1534) (Fig. 5). In addition to their appearance on fol. 14r, the royal arms were introduced in the opening initial for 1508 (fol. 34r), when Henry VII joined the guild, and remained a constant until 1546 (fol. 122v) (Figs 4, 5). Punning allusions on the town’s name (a lute and a tun) first occur on fol. 29r (1501) and are a regular feature from fol. 41v (1511) (Figs 4 – 6). The Trinity in its more conventional form, with God holding the figure of Christ on the Cross, appears in or above the initial on fols 28r, 32r, and continuously between fols 39r and 58r (1510 –1518/19) (Figs 3, 4). For the most part the decoration is executed in an indigenous manner, although on fols 50r, 54r and 56r (1516 –18) the large flower and fruit motifs in the panelled borders reflect elements of Ghent-Bruges book decoration that well before this period had become absorbed into the repertoire of English illuminators (Fig. 4). These Netherlandish motifs recur together with standard acanthus foliage in the last few years of the fraternity’s existence; between 1543 and 1546 (fols 116r–124r) the principal pages are by a single painter. They are particularly lavish in their use of colour and flower designs and the execution of the borders and heraldic initials is skilful.8 The diversity of the decoration is matched by the quality and variety of execution. It has been suggested that about a score of different hands are represented.9 Several of the pages are signed, and at least one of the signatures is that of someone who was both scribe and illuminator. The name William occurs on fol. 30v and the text on fol. 39v is signed in gold and silver letters ‘Quod T. Paytwyn’. The note on fol. 121r ‘This wryttyn a[nd] lymmed by John Shrppey/Requyre in fyny lybry’ presumably refers to the illuminator of fols 116r–124r.10 The borders and heraldry from 1543 have been compared with the decoration in contemporary royal charters (Sotheby’s, Bute Collection ). 9 Ibid. 10 The Shrppey note is illustrated in ibid., where the name is transcribed as Shippey. The name of the scribe and/or illuminator Thomas Wygg of Paternoster House (presumably in London) occurs on fol. 52r (for 20 Henry VIII) of the Register of the Assumption of the Virgin belonging to the Skinners’ Company of London. I am most grateful to Mr Hall, the Beadle, for permitting me to examine this manuscript and the companion Register of the 8

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Although the Fraternity of St John the Baptist in Dunstable was established over thirty years before its Luton counterpart, its Register only exists for the years 1506–8, 1522 and 1525–41. It has been the subject of several short articles, but has never received the detailed treatment accorded to its neighbour.11 It consists of 83 vellum leaves which measure 392 x 276 mm; the binding is modern. The precise circumstances of its creation are made explicit by three inscriptions. The first occurs on fol. 2r: Thes ben the namis of the brethren and sisters made in the tyme of Master William Grene president of this fraternite of Saint John baptist [blank space] Wardeyns of the same fraternite In the yer of owre Lorde god m.lo ccccc.° vi. Then follow membership lists for this and the following two years (fols 2–4r). It seems likely that these leaves were extracted from an earlier register by Grene, for they act as a preface to what is in effect a new record begun when he became President again in 1522. This commences on fol. 5r with this note: This Boke was newe made in the vigill of Seynt John baptist at mydsomer in the yere of oure lorde god mcccccxxii by me [erased] beyng p(re)sident of this ffraternite in the xiiij yere of the Reigne of kynge henry the viijth. That the missing name is that of Grene is confirmed by the third inscription, on fol. 6v: These ben the namys of all the brethren and systers made in the tyme of Master Willyam Grene in the second time that he was president of this Fraternite by whose ordinau(n)ce and devise this p(re)sent book was made and fenisshed upon his owne propur goodis costis and expensis, Corpus Christi fraternity, both of which contain interesting illumination. They are both described briefly in J. F. Wadmore, Some Account of the Worshipful Company of Skinners of London (London, 1902), pp. 26–42, and the Assumption Register (more extensively) in K. L. Scott, A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles. Vol. 6. Later Gothic Manuscripts 1390–1490 (Oxford, 1996), no. 130; see also below, n. 18. 11 A. Buck, ‘The Register of the Fraternity of St John the Baptist, Dunstable, 1506– 8, 1522–41’, Bedford­shire Historical Record Society, 25 (1947), pp. 10–14; Anon. , ‘The Dunstable Fraternity’, Bedfordshire Maga­zine, I (1947–49), pp. 132–3; F. Hackett, ‘The Register of the Fraternity of St John the Baptist’, Bedfordshire Magazine, 18 (1981–83), pp. 74–5. A typescript list of members arranged in alphabetical order has been prepared by Mr Nicholas Bagshawe. Formerly a Phillipps ms, the Register was acquired by Luton Mu­seum in 1946.

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then beyng wardeyns of the same Wm Coryngton and Henry Grene. In the yere of owre Lorde god m.lo ccccco xxij.ti For the good p(re)servac(i)on of my lorde the prior of this place of Dunstapule and all the hole couent of the same place. The leaves dating from 1506–8 (fols 2, 3r) are embellished with sprays spreading into the margins from small coloured initials. With the exception of fol. 7r, which also has fine sprays and a maiolica jug bearing the sacred monogram IHC, the decoration of the Dunstable Register from 1522 (fol. 5v) until 1541 (fol. 25r) is even more formulaic than the Luton book. The standard elements are a miniature of St John the Baptist with full border decoration containing, in a series of compartments, the figures of the president and two wardens for each year kneeling in prayer and facing their wives in the opposite border. In the centre of the lower border is St John the Baptist’s head on a chalice and in the upper and flanking borders are repeated images of his head on a charger and the Agnus Dei. A repertoire of flowers and fruit is drawn upon for the remaining spaces, including Tudor roses, carnations, irises, pansies, cornflowers and strawberries (Figs 8–10). For the most part the figural decoration is confined to the verso leaf, where the list of annual officers and new members commences. Variations on the basic theme are introduced in some years. William Grene ensured that his gift of the Register commenced with a flourish, for the year 1522 is the most lavishly decorated in the book. On fols 5v and 6r Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon are accorded the place of honour in the borders. In addition, on fol. 6r the royal arms and supporters, flanked by members of the fraternity and segregated by gender, occupy the base of the page and the pomegranate device of the queen is introduced (Figs 7, 13).12 The same fruit also occurs on fol. 6v as well as a fleur-de-lis and a shield bearing the arms of Dunstable. In 1525 the wives of the president and wardens appear on the opposite page (fol. 8r). Two armigerous presidents, George Cavendish and Adam Hylton, are also represented by shields of arms (fols 7v, 8r, 14r; unfinished on fol. 18r); the other holders of this office, with the exceptions of William Grene, William Brews, Thomas Knyghtley and William Cadyngton, have their initials on the shield. Grene on fol. 6v addresses an invocatory prayer to St John. The other principal changes occur 12 The queen’s name is erased from fol. 5v. The brotherhood had a grandstand view of the proceedings of the court which sat in Dunstable in 1533 to adjudicate on Henry’s claim that his marriage to Catherine was void.

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in 1527 (fol. 10v) and 1534 (fol. 17v), where the miniature of St John the Baptist is replaced respectively by Salome bearing his head on the charger and by Herod’s feast (Fig. 9) For the years 1535 and 1537 the decoration is unfinished, with only the colours blocked in (on fol. 20v for 1539 the head on the chalice and miniature of St John the Baptist are complete) (Fig. 10); for 1536, 1538 – 40 and 1542 it is absent; the last illumination is on the leaves for 1541 (fols 24v, 25r). The miniature of Herod’s feast calls for particular comment (Fig. 9). Seated behind the centre of the covered table is the king, flanked by a very décolleté Herodias and her husband Philip, with an onlooker behind him. On the table, St John‘s head lies on the charger and Herodias is inserting a knife into the wound on the saint‘s forehead and appears to be offering the head to the man and woman standing in front of the table with their backs to the viewer. Philip points to the head and Herod indicates to the young couple the Agnus Dei in the adjacent border. Standing on the left is the figure of the president, Thomas Finch, and behind him is a buffet on which gold vessels are displayed. Herod, whose head bears some resemblance to contemporary images of Henry VIII, must be communicating Matthew 14:2: ‘Hic est Joannes Baptista; ipse surrexit a mortuis, et ideo virtutes operantur in eo’. Verse 9 also seems to be relevant to this image: ‘Et contristatus est rex: propter juramentum autem, et eos qui pariter recumbebant, jussit dari’. Finch’s presence suggests that he is both visualizing the scene and, through the placing of his hands on the table, participating in it. Although the principal date celebrated by the fraternity seems to have been the feast of the Nativity of St John the Baptist (24 June), the repeated occurrence in the manuscript of the saint’s head on a charger indicates that the anniversary of the Decollation of St John the Baptist (29 August) was also a major event.13 On both occasions Mass would have been celebrated with particular solemnity at the fraternity altar; at least on the Nativity anniversary the liturgy would have been followed by the procession to the communal banquet in the guildhall, at which the president and wardens were elected for the year. In fraternities oath-taking by officeholders and new members assumed a place of special importance.14 What we may be seeing here is a symbolic representation of The feast of the Nativity of St John is mentioned on fol. 5r of the Register (see above, p. 769). 14 For oath-taking by officers and members, see The Records of the Guild of the Holy Trinity, St Mary, St John the Baptist and St Katherine of Coventry, II, ed. G. Templeman, Dugdale Society, 19 (1944), pp. 25–31. 13

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the ritual surrounding admission to the fraternity. The couple ought to be the servants (‘pueri’) who are addressed by Herod; however, their rich attire, which includes the purse worn by the male figure, a signifier of wealth, suggests that they are more likely to represent new recruits to the fraternity. In commissioning an image which combined the circumstances of the Baptist’s martyrdom with a feast, Finch is reminding new entrants and the existing brothers and sisters of the binding nature of oaths and the solemnity attached to the breaking of bread with one’s fellow-members.15 Moreover, in the account of the beheading of St John in Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend (a text with which most, if not all, members of the fraternity would have been familiar), keeping one’s word is underlined by reference to a sermon of St Augustine on this feast-day.16 Finch’s gaze is directed towards the young couple and in administering the oath he would have recalled the event depicted in the miniature. Was it re-enacted at the banquet? Perhaps the rites of induction involved the quasi-eucharistic consumption of a St John’s head modelled in an edible substance. Images like those proliferating in the margins of the Register must have featured prominently at the guild

15 Although neither the ordinances nor accounts of the Dunstable fraternity survive, the feast and election arrangements are standard features of those guilds for which records are extant. The fraternity feast is discussed in G. Rosser, ‘Going to the Fraternity Feast: Commensality and Social Relations in Late Medi­eval England’, Journal of British Studies, 33, no. 4 (Oct. 1994), pp. 430–46. The Luton fraternity feast was very sumptuous (Gough, Register, pp. 181–237, esp. pp. 185–9). In a town which contained butchers, fishmongers, maltsters, vintners and innkeepers the Dunstable feasts must have brought financial as well as social benefits to many members of the fraternity. Thomas Finch’s trade is not known, although he had prop­erty in the town; however it may be significant that John Finch, presumably a kinsman, is listed as a butcher in 1542–43 (Court of Augmentations Accounts for Bedfordshire – II, ed. Y. Nicholls, Bedfordshire His­torical Record Society, 64 [1985], p. 118). The feast of the Ludlow Palmers’ Guild is depicted in the fifteenth-century glazing of its chapel in the parish church (see E. W. Ganderton and J. Lafond, Ludlow Stained and Painted Glass [Ludlow, 1961], p. 51). The most perceptive discussion of this scene is C. Liddy, ‘The Palmers’ Guild Window, St Lawrence’s Church, Ludlow: a study of the construction of guild iden­tity in stained glass’, Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological and Historical Society, 72 (1997), pp. 26–37. 16 The Golden Legend or Lives of the Saints as Englished by William Caxton, ed. F. S. Ellis (London, 1900), V, p. 69. The same text also cites St John Chrysostom on St John as a model of moral behaviour: ‘John the Baptist beheaded is become master of the school of virtues and of life, the form of holiness, the rule of justice, the mirror of virginity, the ensample of chastity, the way of penance, pardon of sin, and discipline of faith’ (p. 70).

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feasts in the form of table sculptures.17 In common with the Luton Register, the decoration is by a multitude of hands — around a dozen excluding the illuminator of the folios for 1506 – 8. The majority of the miniatures depict St John within an interior or against a wall, the remainder (fols 5v, 6r, 7v, 8v, 12v) place him in a landscape setting. As on fols 50r, 54r and 56r of the Luton Register, the panelled borders with their large flower and fruit motifs are derived from Ghent-Bruges book decoration. The painting is neither skilful nor elegant, although some hands are more accomplished than others, notably that responsible for George Cavendish’s page (fol. 7v, 1525). Compared with the Luton book, the Dunstable Register is more ostentatious, with extensive use of gold leaf and red and many figures. By framing the names of new recruits with these embellishments the prestigious nature of admission to the most important social organization in the town is signified. The illumination also serves to enhance the status of the president and wardens and the individual holders of those offices. The hierarchy is made explicit by discrete indicators — the president is usually depicted on a larger scale and clad in a more ostentatious gown than the wardens; the same distinction is extended to the respective wives. Moreover, by ringing the changes in raiment, hair styles and colour each set of office-holders is distinguished from its predecessors. These two Registers are amongst the most elaborately decorated of this genre to have come to light, surpassing even the contemporary Registers of the two fraternities associated with the Skinners’ Company of London and that of the elitist Corpus Christi guild at Boston in Lincolnshire.18 17 Almost certainly the fraternity would have possessed at least one example of the alabaster carvings of St John’s head which were so popular in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. See W. H. St John Hope, ‘On the Sculptured Alabaster Tablets called St. John’s Heads’, Archaeologia, 52 (1890), pp. 669–708. For the iconography, see H. Arndt and R. Kroos, ‘Zur Ikonographie der Johannesschlüssel’, Aachener Kunstblätter, 38 (1969), pp. 243–328. 18 Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, no. 130; Wadmore, Skinners, pp. 26–42. The Assumption Register has an image of Margaret of Anjou as the widowed queen of Henry VI (fol. 42v) and on fol. 41r the three-quarter page illumination of the Virgin ascending to heaven is accompanied by angels bearing ermine caps of the Skinners’ Company — a very explicit piece of appropriation. The sequence of decoration in both manuscripts was not broken at the Reformation. The Boston Register is BL, Harley ms 4795. Other registers survive for Coventry, Lichfield, Ludlow, Stratford-upon-Avon, York and several London parishes. This list makes no pretence of being comprehensive. The Ordinances of the Fraternity of the Immaculate Conception (Oxford, Christ Church, ms 179), whose

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The illumination and the Gothic textualis bookhand used throughout the two manuscripts indicate that they were fair copies intended as showpieces for display on important occasions in the fraternity calendar, such as the banquets, fraternity processions on major feast-days and at the guild altar for the patronal feast and other solemn occasions.19 That two of the most sumptuous of all Registers come from neighbouring towns can hardly be merely fortuitous. If the first folios of the Dunstable Register are representative of the decoration of the entire earlier record, the pre-1522 Register must have been unexceptional. As he was also a member of the Luton fraternity, William Grene would have seen its Register; presumably he decided to commission a new and ostentatious Register in order to match that of the Luton guild. This assertion of civic identity was also manifested at the same time in conspicuous alterations and additions to the fabric and furnishings of Dunstable’s most prominent building, the priory church — or at least the parochial part of it (the nave). Both individually and collectively, through membership of the fraternity, the leading townspeople in the first four decades of the sixteenth century stamped their impression on the nave. They embellished it with gifts of vestments, they contributed to the splendid new timber roof and many of their burial places were marked with brasses. The fraternity itself acquired through the Fayrey family an elaborate pall for use at funerals that is embroidered with male and female members of the guild and its patronal saint (Fig. 11).20 members were drawn from the French community in London, has an elaborate frontispiece and borderwork of 1517 (see J. J. G Alexander and E. Temple, Illuminated Manuscripts in Oxford College Libraries, the University Archives and the Taylor Institution (Oxford, 1985), no. 823, pl. lvi. Caroline Barron also drew my attention to an unpublished Royal Holloway College BA dissertation (1993) on this manuscript by Anna Watson, ‘French Men in London and Westminster in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries’. 19 The suggestion that such manuscripts were displayed at the guild altar is made in A. G. Rosser, ‘The Town and Guild of Lichfield in the late Middle Ages’, South Staffordshire Archaeological and Historical Society Trans­actions, 27 (1985–86), p. 43. 20 Nicholas Purvey, for example, in 1521 bequeathed money for vestments and the roof and was commemo­rated by a brass on his tomb, which was to be located ‘near the seat where he used to sit’; see Bedfordshire Wills proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury 1383–1548, ed. M. McGregor, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, 58 (1979), no. 90. The pall is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum; see B. Chambers, ‘The Fayrey Pall’, Bedfordshire Magazine, 9 (1963–65), pp. 311–15. In a curious historical reversion, during the early nineteenth century it was hired out for funerals by the churchwardens. For the tombs see W. Lack, H. M. Stuchfield and P. Whittemore, The Monumental Brasses of Bedfordshire (London, 1992), pp. 28–36; their original locations are indicated on a drawing of c. 1815 by

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The employment of so many artists and scribes over such an extended period in both manuscripts raises questions about the process of production. The named craftsmen in the Luton Register are not recorded elsewhere, but it is hardly likely that either town could support an illuminator’s workshop. Given the proximity of the towns to the capital and the links of some of the membership with London, it seems almost certain that both Registers were sent to London at the end of the fraternity’s year for the page bearing the list of new entrants to be written and decorated.21 One of the Luton founder members, Thomas Kippyng, was a London draper who owned a book decorated by a Netherlandish limnour. It has therefore been suggested that it was through his agency that the illuminator of fols 13v and 14r was employed.22 However Bishop Rotherham is just as likely a candidate. He was a confidant of Edward IV, who in 1471 appointed him as one of the ambassadors to Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, whose wife Margaret of York was the king’s sister and possessed a library of fine books.23 As these leaves are part of a gathering and have English decoration and script on their reverse it is more likely that their artist was resident in London than that they were dispatched to Bruges. Either way, their illumination takes its place amongst a series of important commissions of Flemish art by British patrons in the 1470s.24 The absence of any reference to the writing of the names Thomas Fisher (see Bedfordshire Churches in the Nineteenth Century. Part i, ed. C. Pickford, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, 73 (1994), p. 48). Some earlier members, including Laurence Pycot, one of the founders, were also commemorated by brasses here. John Lunn argues that the carved figures on the roof represent members of the fraternity: ‘Medieval Figures in Dunstable Priory Church’, Bedfordshire Magazine, 24 (1993–95), pp. 67–71. 21 See Lunn, Register, p. 65 for a list of the London members. 22 Sotheby’s, Bute Collection. For Kippyng see K. Scott, The Mirroure of the Worlde, Roxburghe Club (Oxford, 1980), Introduction, Chap. III. 23 H. L. Bennett, Archbishop Rotherham (Lincoln, 1901), p. 56. For Rotherham, see also Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford, 1917), 17, pp. 301–3. For Margaret, see M. Hughes, ‘Margaret of York, Duchess of Burgundy, diplomat, patroness, bibliophile, and benefactress’, The Private Library (Spring 1984), pp. 3–78; Margaret of York, Simon Marmion and The Visions of Tondal, ed. T. Kren (Malibu, 1992), esp. pp. 257–63. 24 A summary of major commissions is in R. Marks, Stained Glass in England during the Middle Ages (London, 1993), pp. 205–6. For an overview of Netherlandish artistic impact on England see C. Barron, ‘Introduc­tion: England and the Low Countries’, in England and the Low Countries in the Late Middle Ages, eds C. Barron and N. Saul (Stroud, 1995), esp. pp. 16–17; see also the essays by Scot McKendrick and Andrew Martindale in the same volume. That Edward IV only acquired the bulk of his library of South Netherlandish manuscripts in 1479–80 rather than during his residence with Louis of Gruthuyse in

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and illumination of the Luton Register in the surviving guild accounts indicates that the costs were borne personally by the president during his year of office.25 William Grene purchased the Dunstable volume out of his own pocket and as at Luton and elsewhere it seems that subsequently each incoming president paid for the writing and illumination for his year of office.26 The names of new members (and in the case of Luton, those who had died) must have been written into both Registers at the end of each year. Many different scribes were employed over the years. Although the folios from 1522 of the Dunstable Register may represent an attempt to emulate the frontispiece of the Luton manuscript, the decoration and imagery of the two are very different. There is not one illuminator whose hand is found in both manuscripts. Even leaving aside the iconographical distinctions stemming from the dedications of the two guilds, each book has its own individual character. In the Luton Register, no identifiable office-holders are portrayed (Fig. 12). 27 Elsewhere the only figures are the two abbots and two monks of St Albans, the Rector of Ashridge and the Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield (Figs 3, 6). By contrast, the non-sacred imagery in the Dunstable Register consists almost exclusively of the depiction of each president and warden together with their wives. None of the more illustrious members in terms of lay or ecclesiastical status is included. What factors might explain why a formula was adopted for the Dunstable Register which differed so markedly from its Luton precursor? A potentially promising starting-point might be to look at the social composition and economic basis of the membership of the two organizations. Luton and Dunstable shared certain common characteristics. Both were unincorporated towns and neither had a guild merchant. Most of the sources of income were identical: trade, sheep and brewing. Luton with its market 1470–71 has been argued persuasively by Janet Backhouse, ‘Founders’, pp. 23–41, esp. pp. 25–8; see also S. McKendrick, ‘The Romuléon and the Manuscripts of Edward IV’, in England in the Fifteenth Century. Proceedings of the 1992 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. N. Rogers, Harlaxton Medieval Studies, 4 (Stamford, 1994), pp. 149–69. 25 See above, note 5. Extracts are printed in Gough, Register, pp. 181–237. They include payments for a manu­script of the fraternity’s ordinances in English and Latin written in London and for the binding of the Register. 26 It may have been established practice for the costs of making fair copies of membership records to fall upon the elected head of fraternities. A sampling of the Skinners’ Company accounts failed to reveal any payments for either of its two guild Registers. 27 Two men wear chains, but as they wear no livery and there were three officers in the Luton guild they cannot be identified as masters or wardens.

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was a focal point in the region for the sale of produce, with sheep and barley forming the basis of the economy; the latter provided the staple product for the malting ‘industry’ which flourished in Luton in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: Leland observed that it was ‘a very good market town for barlye’.28 There were also the usual tradespeople found in urban centres, including drapers, innkeepers, butchers and bakers. The occupations of Luton members are rarely given in the Register, but surviving wills show that both maltsters and sheep farmers were represented.29 Members were also drawn from the aristocracy, gentry and clergy and the towns and villages of the locality.30 In addition recruits were found amongst the ranks of merchants in London, Boston in Lincolnshire and Kendal in Cumbria. From the outset the membership reveals close contact with the mercantile community of London. Amongst the first names are those of the London draper, Thomas Kippyng, and (posthumously) Sir Geoffrey Boleyn, Lord Mayor of London, who was married to one of the co-heiresses of a large Luton estate. Women members are numerous as wives and widows; also from 1519 a separate category of maidens and bachelors is identified.31 The social composition of the Dunstable fraternity was broadly similar to that of the Luton guild, with artisans and tradespeople and their wives and widows providing the backbone of the membership.32 As far as can be assessed from testamentary evidence, the occupations were similar to their Luton counterparts, with sheep-farming and malting to the fore. There were also butchers, vintners and innkeepers, reflecting Dunstable’s location on The Itinerary of John Leland in or about the Years 1535–1543, ed. L. Toulmin-Smith (London, 1964), V, p. 7. For the medieval economy of Luton, see S. Bunker, R. Holgate and M. Nichols, The Changing Face of Luton (Dunstable, 1993), pp. 38–46; J. Godber, History of Bedfordshire 1066–1888 (Luton, 1969), pp. 121–2, 159–60, 203–5. 29 Bunker, Holgate and Nichols, Luton, p. 45. Some examples are in McGregor, Bedfordshire Wills, nos 51, 73, 76, 78. 30 See the geographical analysis of the Luton membership in Lunn, ‘Luton Fraternity Register’, p. 181 and idem, Register, pp. 48–66. 31 Caroline Barron considers that ‘the fact that wives, single women and widows could all belong to frater­nities on equal terms with men, must have contributed considerably to their popularity’; see ‘The Parish Fraternities of Medieval London’, in The Church in Pre-Reformation Society. Essays in Honour of F. R. H. Du Boulay, eds C. M. Barron and C. Harper-Bill (Woodbridge, 1985), pp. 31–2. 32 As there is no category of maidens in the Dunstable Register, it cannot be established without further research that unmarried women were permitted to enrol, although it is unlikely that they were excluded. 28

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the major arterial route of Watling Street: in 1540 there were twelve inns in the town.33 Around 1500 the more prosperous townsfolk seem to have been better-off than their Luton counterparts, judging by their bequests.34 As at Luton, a leavening of aristocrats and gentry as well as some royal officials and clergy, both secular and monastic, were also enrolled.35 Recruitment extended into the neighbouring villages; in general the network was more localized than Luton’s, but it too embraced London merchants with connections with the town.36 A number of individuals, like William Grene, belonged to both fraternities. That the rank and file membership of the Luton and Dunstable guilds was dominated by artisans and their womenfolk is typical of the English urban fraternity movement as a whole.37 However, the similarities in occupational patterns do not help us comprehend the differences between the two Registers. Nor is an explanation to be found in the distinctions which can be drawn between the guilds in membership numbers and financial resources. For most years where the data is available, enrolment was higher in the Luton fraternity. For example, in 1522, 85 new names were entered in the Luton guild compared with 75 for Dunstable. The respective figures for 1525 are 115 and 38 and in 1527, 101 and 37.38 The Holy Trinity fraternity was empowered to acquire assets providing an income of up to £20 per For general accounts of the town’s economy, see Victoria County History, The County of Bedford, III (London, 1912), pp. 349–64; Godber, Bedfordshire, pp. 59–62, 119– 21, 157–9, and 201–3. 34 Godber, Bedfordshire, p. 160. 35 In 1522 the Dukes of Suffolk and Kent with their wives, and in 1539 the Earls of Derby and Shrewsbury, Lord Gray and the Marquess of Dorset became members. The 1539 entries must have been connected in some way with the fallout from the impending dissolution of the priory and intended to safeguard the interests of the fraternity, perhaps even make a bid for the town’s incorporation. 36 Sir Thomas Chalton, Mayor of London in 1449 and John Fayrey (d. 1540); both were mercers and Fayrey was also a Merchant of the Staple (Godber, Bedfordshire, p. 158). 37 Barron, ‘Parish Fraternities’, p. 30. 38 Over 6,000 names occur in the Luton Register, but as they include posthumous and deceased brethren and non-Luton residents it will require a level of research which lies beyond the scope of this paper in order to try to estimate the proportion of the inhabitants who were members. The same applies to Dunstable, where the picture is further complicated by the fact that after 1522 none of the places of domicile of the new members is given. In the 1548 Chantry Returns, the ‘houselyng’ figures for Luton are 1200 and for Dunstable 400 (Chantry Certificates for Bedfordshire, ed. J. E. Brown [Bedford, 1908], pp. 40, 48). It has been estimated that in London and Westminster, fraternity membership was 10% or 33

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annum, compared with the limit of 10 marks set for the Dunstable guild.39 At the dissolution their net income was valued at £23 12s. 1d. and £9 19s. 5d. respectively.40 However, as we have already observed, the Dunstable Register is the more ostentatious of the two and in any case this disparity in wealth is not, of course, relevant to their decoration as they were not financed from communal funds. It is more instructive to compare the circumstances surrounding the founding of the two fraternities and the respective power structures in Luton and Dunstable. Dunstable had no rural hinterland within the parish boundaries, which meant that there were no large estates headed by established gentry. It was controlled by a single overlord, the prior of the Augustinian monastery in the town. Its founder Henry I had granted the priory virtually complete authority in matters judicial and economic, exercised by means of the borough court. These rights resulted in a series of bitter disputes between the burgesses and the priory in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The most serious was during the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, when in common with other towns dominated by monasteries the townspeople demanded a charter of liberties. This was granted only to be revoked when the Revolt was suppressed. The conflict simmered for several years and in c. 1390 came to the boil again over parochial rights in the nave of the priory church. At the time the Dunstable laity had use of the altar of St John the Baptist in the north aisle; this was far too small a space to house the populace and in practice it must have spilled over into the main body of the nave, thereby providing a cause of friction with the canons. The townspeople demanded and obtained the right to have use of the nave as a whole, with a new altar of the Holy Trinity at which a secular priest (not a canon, as previously had been the case) could celebrate all services apart from on the six principal feast days when masses were held at the less of the total parish; outside the capital the percentage seems to have been much higher: the Fraternity of St Mary and St John the Baptist at Lichfield may have numbered at any one time between 200 and 1,000 out of a population of 1,500–2,500. See Barron, ‘Parish Fraternities’, p. 28; G. Rosser, Medieval Westminster 1200–1540 (Oxford, 1989), p. 286; Rosser, ‘Lichfield’, p. 41. 39 Cal. Patent Rolls Henry VI, vol. iv. A.D. 1441–1446, p. 69; Cal Patent Rolls Edward IV–Henry VI. A.D. 1467–1477, p. 447. 40 Brown, Chantry Certificates, pp. 39, 48. Their income was derived from property rentals (ibid., pp, 38–40, 46–8; Nicholls, Court Accounts, pp. 118–25). These figures do not tell the whole story, for both fraternities also had halls and assets in the form of plate, hangings and furniture plus the embellishments of their fraternity altars.

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high altar of the priory church. Legally the entire building remained part of the priory, i.e. the nave was not a parish church, but the parishioners were responsible for the repair of the nave, which in its entirety was devoted to lay worship.41 If the townspeople could not alter the status quo as regards the priory’s regulation of the civic and economic life of the town, evidently they wished at least to control their own spiritual affairs. However, another fifty years passed before the fraternity was founded.42 It was established in 1442 by three leading burgesses, William Anable, Laurence Pycot and Henry Mauntell; the prior of Dunstable is not mentioned in the petition.43 Significantly its dedication was that of the original north aisle altar and this became the fraternity altar. Equally significantly there is no further record of disputes between the townspeople and the priory, which perhaps indicates that the leading lights amongst the population redirected their energies away from pursuing civic power into social aspirations and communal activities in the fraternity, an institution over which the prior had no vested authority.44 The impression that by at least the sixteenth century, relations between town and priory had improved appears to find some corroboration both in William Grene’s 1522 prefatory statement regarding the preservation of the prior and convent and in the enrolment of the prior and canons on various occasions. The model already existed in other unincorporated towns (and in incorporated towns too). At Cirencester, Lichfield and Westminster, all of which were governed by either bishops or abbots, guilds came into existence in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The Cirencester example is a precursor of events at Dunstable, in that the Trinity fraternity was founded in Edward III’s reign, shortly after the townspeople had made an abortive attempt to obtain a degree of independence from the abbot’s control.45 It has For details of this and the earlier disputes see Victoria County History, County of Bedford, II, (London, 1904), pp. 319–20, 328; III, pp. 356–60. 42 The gap may be connected with the suspicion in which guilds were held by the government as possible focuses for sedition at the end of the fourteenth century, an attitude that changed under the Lancastrian kings, who saw them as bastions of orthodoxy. See D. J. F. Crouch, ‘Piety, Fraternity and Power: Reli­gious Gilds in Late Medieval Yorkshire 1389–1547’ (University of York unpublished DPhil thesis, 1995), pp. 21, 27, 71, 73. I am most grateful to Dr Crouch for the loan of a copy of his thesis. 43 Cal. Patent Rolls 1441–46, pp. 68–9. 44 The shedding of the burdensome responsibility for the repair of a large part of the priory church is likely to have encouraged the canons to adopt a more conciliatory tone. 45 E. A. Fuller, ‘Cirencester: the Manor and the Town’, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeo­logical Society, 9 (1884–85), pp. 298–344, esp. 321–9. 41

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1. Luton Guild Register, fol. 13r (Luton Museum).

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2. Luton Guild Register, fols. 13v–14r (Luton Museum). 3. Luton Guild Register, fols. 27v–28r (Luton Museum).

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4. Luton Guild Register, fol. 50r (Luton Museum).

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5. Luton Guild Register, fol. 81v (Luton Museum).

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6. Luton Guild Register, fol. 97r (Luton Museum).

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7. Dunstable Guild Register, fol. 6r (Luton Museum).

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8. Dunstable Guild Register, fol. 8v (Luton Museum).

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9. Dunstable Guild Register, fol. 17v (Luton Museum).

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10. Dunstable Guild Register, fol. 18v (Luton Museum).

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11. Dunstable guild members on the Fayrey Pall (on loan to the Victoria & Albert Museum from the Rector and Churchwardens of Dunstable Priory Church).

12. Luton Guild Register, fol. 13v (Luton Museum).

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13. Dunstable Guild Register, fol. 5v (Luton Museum).

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been suggested that in some cases these fraternities acted as shadow town councils operating behind (and perhaps with the consent of) the official authorities. If this phenomenon occurred at Dunstable it has left no trace.46 Nonetheless the presidents and wardens of the St John the Baptist fraternity were men of substance in the community, sometimes with a background of administrative experience. The description of the officers of the Westminster Fraternity of the Assumption of the Virgin fits their Dunstable counterparts exactly: ‘... precisely those individuals and families who, in an independent borough, would have occupied the chief posts on the ruling council’.47 The most prominent example is George Cavendish (President 1525), almost certainly identifiable as the gentleman usher in Wolsey’s service who wrote a life of his old master and was the holder of extensive property in the town.48 In contrast with Dunstable, the extensive parish of Luton was primarily agricultural, divided between several large and small estates.49 Power was vested principally in the lordship of the manor of Luton; in the late fifteenth and entire sixteenth centuries this was held by the Rotherham family. Following the death of john Lord Wenlock at the battle of Tewkesbury in 1471 his estates, which included Luton, were granted to Thomas Rotherham, Bishop of Lincoln and subsequently Archbishop of York and Lord Chancellor to Edward IV. After Thomas’s demise in 1500 the property, which included the unfinished brick residence of Someries, passed to his nephew Thomas, who was succeeded in 1504 by his son, also named Thomas. Other important estate owners in Luton during the existence of the Trinity fraternity were the Acworth family and St Albans Abbey, which also owned the advowson Rosser, ‘Lichfield’, pp. 44–7; Rosser, Westminster, pp. 289–90. In Victoria County History, County of Bedford, III, p. 360, it was suggested that something of this sort may have taken place at Dunstable. 47 Rosser, Westminster, p. 289. 48 The marital links traced by John Lunn have established the connection more or less conclusively. For Cavendish’s account of Wolsey see Two Early Tudor Lives, eds R. S. Sylvester and D. P. Harding (New Haven and London, 1962), pp. 1–193. For his properties in Dunstable in the 1530s, see Nicholls, Court Accounts, pp. 122–5. George’s father Thomas was an exchequer official and a member of the fraternity attached to the London parish of St Botolph without Aldersgate; see Parish Fraternity of the Holy Trinity and SS Fabian and Sebastian in the Parish of St Botolph without Aldersgate, ed. P. Basing, London Record Soci­ety, 18 (1982), pp. xviii–xix, 77. The Dukes of Devonshire are descendants of these Cavendishes. 49 Bunker, Holgate and Nichols, Luton, pp. 38–47; Godber, Bedfordshire, p. 159. 46

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to the parish church.50 Unlike Dunstable, the initiative for the foundation of the Holy Trinity guild came not from the artisan and mercantile class in the town but from the landowning interests. It was established in 1474 by Bishop Rotherham, his brother Sir John (the first Master), Sir John Acworth, John Lammer the vicar of Luton (Master in 1475) and nine of the more prominent residents of the town and its hamlets. Its ostensible purpose was ‘... to found a chantry of two chaplains to celebrate divine service for the good estate of the king and his consort Elizabeth, queen of England, and the said brethren and sisters and for their souls after death and the soul of the king’s father, Richard, late Duke of York, and the king’s progenitors at the altar of the Holy Trinity in the south part of the said church .. ’51 However it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Rotherhams had agendas in which self-interest and political considerations were intertwined with pious intention. The bishop and his family were newcomers in the area; what better way of cementing oneself into the community than founding a guild which embraced its leading lights, especially if through this vehicle favours and patronage could be bestowed and influence maintained? That Thomas saw Luton not as a short-term possession but as the permanent family base is made explicit in his last will: ‘Item do et lego ecclesiae de Luton, ubi mater mea sepelitur, et frater, necnon ubi, quantum in me est, stabilivi successionem sanguinis mei...’ 52 The establishment of the fraternity also has to be seen within the context both of Rotherham’s advancement under Edward IV and the traitorous behaviour of John Lord Wenlock, the previous holder of the manor of Luton.53 Although the granting of a royal licence to found a fraternity was conditional on the inclusion of prayers for the souls of the sovereign and his family, the presence of King Edward, Queen Elizabeth and the king’s mother Cecily on the frontispiece to the Register together with Bishop Rotherham (Fig. 12) makes a political as well as pious statement, unequivocally reinforced by the description on the opposite page of the king’s father, Richard, Duke of York, as ‘veri et indubitati heredis corone anglie’ (Fig. 2). It cannot be coincidental that in the years 1473– 75 fraternities were set up in three of the larger towns in Bedfordshire: in 50 In addition to the sources cited above, see Victoria County History, County of Bedford, II (London, 1908), pp. 348–66; W. Austin, The History of Luton and its Hamlets (Newport, 1928), I, pp. 169–260. 51 Cal. Patent Rolls 1467–77, pp. 446–7. The fraternity chapel and altar almost certainly were located in the Perpendicular south transept and/or its pair of eastern chapels. 52 Bennett, Rotherham, p. 196.

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addition to Luton, these were Corpus Christi at Leighton Buzzard and Holy Trinity at Biggleswade. One of the founders of the last was none other than Rotherham and, once again, Duke Richard, ‘father of the king’, was to be included in the prayers. The instigators of the Leighton Buzzard guild were Alice Duchess of Suffolk and her son John, who held Grovebury Manor there; Alice had much to gain from attaching herself to the Yorkist cause and Rotherham as bishop of the diocese would have been involved in its establishment.54 Not only were the origins of the Luton and Dunstable guilds very different, but so were their power structures. The gulf between the upper echelons of the Holy Trinity fraternity at Luton and the rank and file membership was not a feature of its Dunstable counterpart. The Rotherhams remained influential in the former: the office of Master was filled on more occasions by members of the family than any other.55 All the indications are that the Dunstable fraternity was run by its overwhelmingly lay, artisan and mercantile brethren and with little or no interference from the prior, the equivalent power-broker in the town to the Rotherhams in Luton. The distinctions are underlined by the burial patterns of guild members in the two towns. In Luton parish church, the Rotherhams and the Acworths were not interred alongside their fellow-members in the Trinity Chapel or in the nave, but in the north transept and adjacent Wenlock Chapel.56 As we have seen, at Dunstable brethren and sisters were buried in the nave. Many of these burials are (or were) marked by slabs bearing brasses. However the most potent pictorial manifestation of the differences between the two institutions is the figural decoration of their Registers. In the frontispiece to the Luton Register Bishop Rotherham takes centre stage, with even the royal family relegated to the middle ground (Fig. 12). Nowhere in

Godber, Bedfordshire. pp. 134–5, 159. Victoria County History, County of Bedford, II, p. 214, III, p. 415; Cal. Patent Rolls 1467–77, pp. 417, 485–6. For Alice see J. Goodall, ‘God’s House at Ewelme, Oxfordshire’, Country Life, 188 (21 July 1994), pp. 40–5. Richard, Duke of York was not included in the prayers of the Leighton Buzzard guild. This pattern underlines how far the wheel had turned in royal attitudes to fraternities. From being potential hotbeds of sedition they were now important agents of royal control (see above, note 42). 55 Rotherhams were wardens on eight occasions (1475, 1477, 1493, 1528, 1529, 1534, 1535 and 1538). 56 H. Cobbe, Luton Church (London and Bedford, 1899), pp. 318–57; Lack, Stuchfield and Whittemore, Brasses, pp. 63–72. 53

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the manuscript is there a place for the depiction of the master and wardens — unless of course the former office was held by a Rotherham, in which case heraldry sometimes occurs (Fig. 5). Apart from the frontispiece, the only other figures in the Register are the representatives of that other powerful institution in Luton, the monastery of St Albans, and two more clerics in important positions (Figs 3, 6). Although their names occur below those of the office-holders, it is they who are commemorated pictorially.57 The more prosperous of the artisan and mercantile members could attain office in the Holy Trinity fraternity, but becoming master or warden did not confer admission to the ranks of the leading wielders of influence in the town. Even though figural representation is hardly extensive in the Register, the absence of the master and wardens underlines the fact that real power lay elsewhere. The converse is indicated by the Dunstable Register. Here it is the prior who is conspicuous by his absence from the decoration; so too are all of the more illustrious recruits, both lay and clerical. In this town the pinnacle of social advancement must have been election to office in the fraternity; above all, to the presidency. Little wonder, therefore, that apart from fols 5v and 6r (Figs 7, 13) the figural imagery in the Register is devoted to the office-holders and their spouses (Figs 8–10). Within the basic formula there is personalization, mirroring both the corporate nature of the fraternity and the role and status of its elected leaders. To have your ‘portraiture’ as well as your name inscribed in the Dunstable manuscript demonstrated that you had climbed the highest rung of the social ladder in that community. For one numerous element amongst the viewers of both manuscripts there was a similar message. On the Luton frontispiece and on fol. 6r of the Dunstable Register the representation of women as well as men was a reminder that the two fraternities were organizations which were open to the former on equal terms with men, even if they were excluded from office-holding. Whatever the diverse origins and power structures of the two fraternities, there can be no doubt that they played a major role in the spiritual, social and economic life of their respective communities; not just as pious organizations 57 The presence of some of these figures might be explained by familial and other networks. Abbot Ramrydge on fol. 28r (Fig. 3) was apparently a nephew of John Lammer. The enrolment and depiction of Bishop Blythe in 1504 (fol. 32r) evidently bore fruit for another incumbent, Edward Sheffield, for four years later he was appointed to a canonry in Blythe’s cathedral church at Lichfield. See Cobbe, Luton Church, pp. 171, 258; A. B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Cambridge to 1500 (Cambridge, 1963), p. 521.

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but also as predominantly lay, social bodies with extensive properties and commercial and kinship networks extending beyond the town boundaries. Guilds can be described as the equivalent of the contemporary Rotary Club, with the added dimension of religion. In both Luton and Dunstable the fraternity’s physical presence was manifested in its altar in the parish church and the Brotherhood hall, the focus of much of the town’s social life. The influence of the Luton fraternity on town affairs is demonstrated not only by the luxurious fittings and trappings of the hall but by its location at the hub of the town, dominating both literally and metaphorically the market place, from where the majority of the members derived their livelihood.58 For the members of these bodies they were a means of regulating social behaviour in the interests of the common good, combining personal piety with charitable and social activities and of demonstrating status in the community and offering opportunities for economic reward.59 Guilds were a late medieval religious and social phenomenon which touched the lives of more people than any other institution but which has been effaced from the visual and mental landscape more profoundly than the monasteries. Vanished entirely are the collective activities which were their raisons d’ être : the masses and obits, the funerals, the processions on the patronal saint’s day and the great festivals of the year — and the annual banquet. The observation made on Lord Curzon’s predilection for pomp and circumstance can be applied to outward display by late medieval fraternities ‘... ritual was visual advocacy: the opportunity to make a case, to impart a message, to impress an audience, to reinforce a sense of identity and community, and to cement those links between past and present ...’ 6o The Luton and Dunstable Registers are 58 It was on the site of the ‘Red Lion’ public house, on the Market Hill corner of Castle Street (Austin, History of Luton, p. 208). In 1542–3, £1 1s. 3d. was spent on new glass for the hall windows in the brother­hood house (Gough, Register, p. 228). Parts of the original fabric may survive. 59 Guild ordinances often included clauses regulating the moral behaviour of their members; see B. R. McRee, ‘Religious Gilds and Regulation of Behaviour in Late Medieval Towns’, in People, Politics and Community in the Later Middle Ages, eds J. Rosenthal and C. Richmond (Gloucester, 1987), pp. 108–22. What the Dunstable brotherhood thought about John Holdern’s (president in 1508) fathering of an illegitimate son is unrecorded (McGregor, Bedfordshire Wills, no. 108, p. 136). 60 D. Cannadine, Aspects of Aristocracy (Harmondsworth, 1995), p. 82. For the importance of urban guild activities see C. Pythian-Adams, ‘Ceremony and the citizen: the communal year at Coventry 1450–1550’, in The Early Modern Town. A Reader, ed. P. Clark (London, 1976), pp. 106–28.

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tangible reminders of these activities and as luxury artefacts in their own right would have been sources of pride to those whose names were recorded in them and framed by their lavish illuminations. Acknowledgements The illustrations were provided by Luton Museum (Figs 7–10, 12, 13), the Conway Library, Courtauld Institute of Art (Figs 1–6) and the Victoria and Albert Museum (Fig. 11); they are reproduced with the kind permission of these institutions, with the exception of Fig. 11, for which acknowledgement is made to the rector and churchwardens of Dunstable Priory Church.

XXXI To the Honor and Pleasure of Almighty God, and to the Comfort of the Parishioners: The Rood and Remembrance

T

he most striking of the glories of St Jakobus’s cathedral at Lübeck in north Germany is the spectacular polychromed oak Triumphkreuz between the choir and the nave (Fig. 1). This great work was completed in 1477 by the painter and sculptor Bernt Notke and his workshop for Bishop Albert Krummedick. He is represented kneeling at the foot of the cross (which contained relics) and forming a pair with Mary Magdalene on the other side. Krummedick’s association with the Crucifixion group is underlined further by carved inscriptions in Latin and German on both side of the beam on which it is placed and by shields of arms held by angels. The entire commemorative edifice is completed by the bishop’s grave below the structure, which also acts as a kind of baldachin for the cathedral’s high altar, which Krummedick had relocated here.1 To attempt to link Notke’s awesome and wondrously rendered creation with the Roods which formed the dominant liturgical and devotional focus in the nave of every English church might seem a futile task, given the ferocity and comprehensiveness of the Bildersturm during the Reformation in this country compared with the relatively benign iconoclasm of Lutheran Lübeck.2 In respect of design, style and craftsmanship, this is out of the 1 See K. Petermann, Bernt Notke: Arbeitsweise und Werkstattorganisation im späten Mittelalter (Berlin, 2000), pp. 45–55, 124–126, 153–157; K. Stoll, E. Vetter and E. Oellermann, Triumphkreuz im Dom zu Lübeck: Ein Meisterwerk Bernt Notkes (Wiesbaden, 1979). 2 M. Aston, England’s Iconoclasts. Vol. I, Laws Against Images (Oxford, 1988), pp. 39–43; idem, ‘Cross and Crucifix in the English Reformation’, in P. Blickle, A. Holenstein, H. R. Schmidt and F-J. Sladeczek (eds), Macht und Ohnmacht der Bilder. Reformatorischer Bildersturm im Kontext der europäischen Geschichte (Munich, 2002), pp. 253–272.

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question: only three carved Rood groups have survived from the Gothic period, all incomplete and from small rural churches, two of which are in Wales.3 Nevertheless, the cupboard is not entirely bare. In a few instances visual and/or documentary traces permit a glimpse of the kinds of social frame created by Bishop Krummedick’s English contemporaries around the Rood and its associated imagery.4 I have come across only one instance of a Rood benefaction which by its value approaches the scale of Bishop Krummedick’s. This is in the bequest to the City of London church of St Michael’s Cornhill in the will made in 1500 by Jane, Viscountess Lisle: …I bequeth to and for the newe makyng kerving & gildyng of the Crucifix wt. the crosse and the ymages of Mary and John, and also of Centurio Longius (sic), and other ymages and werks to be doon and performed according to a patron thereof devised & made, to be sett in & upon the high Rode loft of the said parish Church of Seynt Mighell to the honor and pleasure of Almighty God, and to the comfort of the parishioners there, and of all other devoutly beholding the same IIIIxx x li sterling. Amongst the which werks I will that myn executors wt. out delay after my decesse…shall doo to be made and sett up II scochons the oon of them wt. the armes of my right noble lorde and husband the Viscount and myn armes joyntly, and another with the armes of my Right worshipfull husband Robert Drope and myn joyntly, to thentent that our soules my reason thereof may the rather be remembered and praied for.5 Viscountess Lisle and her first husband evidently had particularly strong devotion to the Passion as she wished to be buried in her first husband’s tomb which doubled as the Easter Sepulchre.

3 Cartmel Fell (Lancs.), Kemeys Inferior and Mochdre (Wales). Traces of some painted Roods also survive. From the late Saxon and Norman periods there are the wooden fragments from South Cerney (Glos.) and a remarkable number of stone Roods. 4 The concept of the social frame in connection with imagery is formulated in Richard C. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (Ithaca & London, 1980), pp. 91–6; Michael Baxandall’s description of Italian Renaissance paintings as deposits of social relationships is similar (Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford, 2nd ed., 1988), p. 1). See also R. Marks, Image and Devotion in Late Medieval England (Stroud, 2004), pp. 176–181. 5 C. Eveleigh Woodruff (comp. & ed.), Sede Vacante Wills, Kent Archaeological Society Records Branch, 3, 1914, p. 132.

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£90 is a very considerable sum of money and the Rood in St Michael’s Cornhill must have been impressive, comprising not merely Christ Crucified between the Virgin and St John, but also Longinus and probably other ancillary participants in the drama of the Passion. The reference to ‘the comfort of the parishioners there, and of all other devoutly beholding the same’ underlines the role of the Rood in collective as well as private worship in the English parish church, hence it was the responsibility of the community as a whole to provide, maintain and either refurbish or replace the Rood. The admittedly very scanty surviving evidence suggests that Viscountess Lisle’s bequest may have been exceptional; the usual pattern was the raising of money through ‘gatherings’ and social events like church ales as well as smaller-scale individual gifts and bequests. Fund-raising for new or refurbished Roods could be protracted and their creation piecemeal. For example at Reculver in Kent, a testator left 20 d. to the making of the High Cross in 1475, but it was still not executed fifteen years later, when his widow bequeathed 6 s. 8 d. for it ‘a new to be made’. By 1495 the Rood itself was in place, but lacking the figures of the Virgin and St John, for which another parishioner left provision for them to be ‘made in proportion to the Crucifix of timber work, and to be set up within twelve months of my death’.6 Pro pictura tocius huius operis Donations and bequests varied in value according to the wealth and generosity of individuals. The provision and maintenance of the Rood might be the responsibility of the parish as a whole, but this did not preclude acknowledgement of major personal contributions in visual form.7 The screen in the parish church of St Mary at Woodbridge (Suffolk) is a rare survivor of this practice. Only fragments exist, comprising fourteen dado panels, in each of which is painted a slender standing figure. Between 1839 and 1874–5 part of it was incorporated into a reading desk within a threedecker pulpit arrangement, but subsequently the dado was reinstalled in its original location; in 1894 a new traceried superstructure was made for A. Hussey, Testamenta Cantiana: A Series of Extracts from Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century Wills relating to Church Building and Topography. East Kent, in Archaeologia Cantiana, Kent Archaeological Society (Kent Records), Extra Volume, 1907, p. 255. 7 For an overview, see S. Cotton, ‘Mediaeval Roodscreens in Norfolk: their construction and painting dates’, Norfolk Archaeology, 40 (1987), pp. 44–54. 8 R. Tricker, St Mary’s Woodbridge – Its History and Treasures ((forthcoming 2010). 6

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it and four years later the fourteen dado panels were replaced by a replica, which itself was removed in 1970 (Fig. 2).8 There is no architectural division between the aisled nave and chancel and the former location of the screen is shown only by the entrances to the stairs giving access to the roodloft in the south aisle wall. The original elements are in a poor condition: the heads of all the figures are either erased or defaced by gouging and there is much paint loss on the bodies; in every case the applied tracery in the head of each panel has been removed (Fig. 3). In addition the surviving panels have been reassembled in two sections without regard to the original sequence. Further details were provided by John Weever in his Antient Funeral Monuments, first published in 1631 and the screen, or at least its dado (or most of it), was still intact at the end of the eighteenth century, when it was depicted in a series of coloured lithographs by Isaac Johnson pasted into Craven Ord’s manuscript; they in turn provided the models for the 1890s paintings by J. T. Carter.9 The lithographs permit the original size and arrangement of the dado to be reconstructed. The complete screen traversed the side aisles of the church as well as the central vessel. In respect of imagery it is the most extensive known East Anglian scheme and merits closer study than it has hitherto received. Thirty-four figures are represented, most of which are identified by labels and/or attributes. Sixteen were in the central section, ten in the south aisle and eight in the north aisle, suggesting perhaps that two panels were already missing from the latter section by the time the lithographs were made. The lithographs also reproduce the painted inscription running above the figures in the central section, some of which survives (parts show signs of retouching) and is replicated on the late Victorian screen. Even with Johnson’s illustrations the precise wording is not entirely reconstructable (the abbreviated words are given in full): Orate [ pro animabus] Iohannis Albrede et Agnetis consortis sue qui soluerunt pro pictura tocius huius operis superiis… videlicet crucis crucifixi[s?] Marie Archangelorum et tocius candlbri

J. Weeever, Antient Funeral Monuments of Great Britain, Ireland and the Islands adjacent [1631] (London, 1767 ed.), p. 488; Collections…Illustrative of the Topographical History of the County of Suffolk (London, British Library, Additional MS 8987 former ff. 30v–32r). The screen is discussed in M. R. James, Suffolk and Norfolk (London & Toronto, 1930), p. 97; A. Vallance, English Church Screens (London, 1936), pp. 63–64; J. Arnott, ‘The Church and 9

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John Albrede was, as an inscription on his tomb recorded, a twillweaver (see below, p. 806). Although death dates for neither he nor his wife are mentioned on the screen, they can be established with some degree of accuracy from their wills, which also add further information on their largesse.10 John made his will on 24 April 1448 and probate was granted on 27 July 1450; Agnes’s will is dated 14 August 1458, with probate issued on 30 October the same year. Both wills refer to the work commemorated on the screen dado. John left £10 to the painting of the great crucifix (the Rood) on the candlebeam together with the Virgin and St John. His widow’s legacy was 10 marks (£6 13s. 4d.) for the painting of the great candlebeam. The screen inscription and the two wills provide both overlapping and complementary information. Firstly, that while both the Rood and the candlebeam were at the very least planned and may well have been in progress or even finished when John made his will in 1448, the work he and Agnes funded can only have been carried out after the granting of probate for John Albrede’s estate and probably completed after probate was issued for Agnes’s estate.11 Secondly, John’s will specifies the Rood and the Virgin and St John, but not the Archangels included in the screen inscription. These are associated with Roods in several other late medieval Suffolk wills, as at Blythburgh; in some they are described as angels, for example Haughley.12 At Hanchet in the same county cherubim are specified and it is likely that the various labels all applied to what were represented as cherubim, as shown flanking the Rood over the high altar in Westminster Abbey in Abbot Islip’s (d. 1532) Mortuary Roll. Rood cherubim are documented from at least the twelfth century in England.13 The Rood is flanked by cherubim on the painted tympanum at Ludham church (Norfolk), which probably dates from Priory of Woodbridge’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and Natural History, 9 (1897), pp. 340–341; Cotton, ‘Mediaeval Roodscreens’, p. 53. J. T. Carter had worked for G. F. Bodley and C. E. Kempe (Tricker, St Mary’s Woodbridge). 10 Ipswich, Suffolk Record Office, Suffolk Archdeaconry Court wills vol. 1, 52, vol. 2, 20. 11 This is a point of some importance, as often it is only the date the will was made which is cited by scholars in connection with work to medieval fabric and furnishings. 12 P. Northeast, ‘Suffolk Churches in the Later Middle Ages: The Evidence of Wills’, in C. Harper-Bill, C. Rawcliffe and R. Wilson (eds), East Anglia’s History: Studies in Honour of Norman Scarfe (Woodbridge & University of East Anglia, 2002), p. 99. 13 For Hanchet see the manuscript notes of the late Peter Northeast; for cherubim see P. Binski, Westminster Abbey and the Plantagenets. Kingship and the Representation of Power 1200–1400 (New Haven and London, 1995), p. 151, Pl. 199; idem, Becket’s Crown. Art and Imagination in Gothic England 1170–1300 (New Haven & London, 2004), pp. 236–237.

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Queen Mary’s reign.14 Thirdly, the Albrede wills suggest that the painting (and no doubt the very expensive gilding) of the Rood ensemble preceded that of the screen, to which Agnes made a substantial contribution. This hypothesis partly depends on the meaning of the word ‘candlebeam’. Strictly speaking, it was the beam on which the Rood was placed or suspended from, together with the lights which burned before it. However, late medieval terminology was not precise and the ‘candlebeam’ label could include not only the beam but also the roodscreen with its loft. This is demonstrated by a bequest of 1458 to the painting of the candlebeam called ‘rodeloft’ in the parish church of Little Waldingfield in Suffolk.15 There are no traces in the Woodbridge fabric of a candle- or roodbeam which stood free of the screen superstructure and from which the Rood was suspended, as can still be seen at Denston (Suffolk) and Cullompton (Devon). The elevated position of the entrance to the loft in the south wall also indicates that the candle- or roodbeam proper was incorporated into its structure. Woodbridge church is unusual in that the present edifice is a new building, not a rebuilding of an existing structure. Testamentary evidence suggests that this took place in the second and third quarters of the fifteenth century. The body of the church was probably completed shortly before John Albrede made his will as a large number of bequests were made to the erection of the tower between 1444 and 1463 and north porch (1455–1463). John was one of the tower benefactors — indeed, his bequest of 20 marks (£13 6s. 8d.) exceeded his contribution to the Rood painting.16 If not on the scale of Viscountess Lisle’s largesse at St Michael at Cornhill, John Albrede’s £10 and Agnes’s 10 marks were still very substantial bequests. Moreover they funded the painting (and no doubt gilding) of the crucial feature, the Rood and its ancillary images, a part of the making process which could amount to more than the carving. The cost of carving the Virgin and St John for St Margaret’s Westminster in 1478–80 was 14 They also appear with the Rood on several East Anglian screens designed by Ninian Comper (eg Lound, Suffolk, Wymondham, Norfolk). 15 P. Northeast (ed.), Wills of the Archdeaconry of Sudbury 1439–1474: I Wills from the Register ‘Baldwyne’ Part I: 1439–1461, The Suffolk Records Society, 44, 2001, p. 408 no. 1193. Alternative terms for the roodloft and screen include perch or perk and solarius: ibid., pp. 151, 254, nos. 397, 696; see also Northeast, ‘Suffolk Churches’, p. 98. At Bodmin in Cornwall the term stagium designated the roodloft: N. Orme (ed.), Cornish Wills 1342–1540, Devon and Cornwall Record Society, ns 50, 2007, p. 128. 16 Tricker, St Mary’s Woodbridge; Suffolk Archdeaconry Court wills vol. 1, 52.

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33 s. 4 d; a further 40 s. was paid to a carpenter for making the crucifix and roodbeam. The gilding of the imagery and the four Evangelists (probably set on the arms of the cross) came to no less than £6 6 s. 8 d. In 1495–6 the painting of a new Rood group here cost far more — £16.17 The Albredes may have been the principal benefactors of the work, hence their commemorative and invocatory inscription, but neither it nor their wills make reference to the carpentry and carving of either screen or Rood. Moreover the assertion in the inscription that they were the sole funders of the screen paintings is contradicted by the will of one Galfridus Hyll, who in 1456 left 6 s. 8 d. to paint the new screen.18 We can assume, therefore, that the entire undertaking was financed by a number of contributions. The Albrede inscription occurs in the central section of the screen and although it refers to the entire candlebeam, it is possible that the mention of the ‘great candlebeam’ in Agnes’s will signifies solely this part and not the extensions in the aisles. Their size and woodwork details are the same as in the central section, but their figures are slightly larger and appear to be different in style. Could it be that Mr Hill’s bequest went towards the provision of the dado saints flanking the aisles in another phase of the work?19 The imagery of the screen dado combines the universal with the individual.20 Pride of place in the central section below the Rood is accorded to the apostles, witnesses to the Passion and who Christ had prophesied would sit enthroned and judge Israel at his second coming (Fig. 3).21 This is a common eschatological theme on screen dados in East Anglia and Devon and elsewhere sometimes was set on the lofts proper in closer proximity to

J. C. Cox, Churchwardens’ Accounts (London, 1913), pp. 178–179. Norfolk Record Office, Norwich Consistory Court will Alblaster 6. See Cotton, ‘Mediaeval Roodscreens’, p. 53. John Albrede’s name was also inscribed on a stone set in the tower, no doubt because there too he was the principal benefactor of the work (Tricker, St Mary’s Woodbridge). 19 It is evident that some Devon screens were painted in more than one campaign, e.g. Hennock, where some panels were also left unfinished. Eamon Duffy has also pointed out that screens like Woodbridge which refer only to a single donor might be funded by others as well (E. Duffy, ‘The parish, piety, and patronage in late medieval East Anglia: the evidence of rood screens’, in K. L. French, G. A. Gibbs and B. A. Kumin (eds), The Parish in English Life 1400–1600 (Manchester & New York, 1997), p. 142). 20 British Library Add. MS 8987, see above, note 9. 21 Duffy, ‘The parish’, p. 149; idem, The Stripping of the Altars. Traditional Religion in England c. 1400–c. 1580 (New Haven & London, 1992), pp. 158–9. 17 18

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the Rood.22 On either side of the entrance to the chancel was the Coronation of the Virgin, a subject found occasionally on Devon screens. While there is an obvious allusion to the dedication of Woodbridge church, two of the three Devon examples are in churches whose patron is not the Virgin.23 The end panels adjacent to the aisles were occupied by a canonised archbishop and a bishop or mitred abbot. Arrayed on the aisle screens were more of the ‘holie company of heven’. In the north aisle were eight female saints (including Barbara, Helen, Ursula and Cecilia), perhaps indicating that this was the part of the church set aside for the women of the parish. Ten male images are recorded for the south aisle screen, amongst whom were the Saxon kings Edward, Kenelm and Oswald, also Ss Anthony, Quintin, Leodegar, and Jerome. The identities of the others are not certain; Weever, however, noted Ss Cuthbert, Blaise and Barnabas.24 Collectively the choice of saints demands closer study; for present purposes it suffices to note that a local saintly presence is conspicuous by its absence: there is no St Edmund nor Etheldreda. Represented instead were kings from Mercia (Kenelm) and Northumberland (Oswald, the latter paired with Cuthbert). The two French saints, Leodegar and Quintin, were also paired. The presence of Blaise, the patron saint of wool-combers, would accord with John Albrede’s calling, although he was popular in every area in England connected with the wool and cloth industry. No benefactor inscriptions are recorded for the aisle screens, but the diversity of images suggests that the choice of imagery was a collective one, ‘advysed and appoynted by the parochyners’, as on the roodloft commissioned in 1520 for the church of St Mary the Great in Cambridge, no doubt with the guiding hand of the parish priest.25 Even allowing for the unidentifiable figures, it is noteworthy that, with the exception of St Barbara, the dado saints do not repeat the altar dedications and devotional images mentioned in wills.26 22 W. W. Williamson, ‘Saints on Norfolk Rood-screens and Pulpits’, Norfolk Archaeology, 31 (1955–57), pp. 300–304; W. W. Lillie, ‘Screenwork in the County of Suffolk. Part III. Panels painted with Saints’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and Natural History, 21 (1931–33), pp. 179–202. 23 F. B. Bond and Dom Bede Camm, Roodscreens and Roodlofts, vol. 2 (London, 1909), pp. 260, 321, 344, 355. 24 Weever, Antient Funeral Monuments, p. 488. 25 Duffy, ‘The parish’, pp. 141–142, 150; E. Venables, ‘The Church of St Mary the Great, Cambridge’, Cambridge Antiquarian Society Publications (1898), p. 65. 26 Tricker, St Mary’s Woodbridge; I have omitted the prescribed images of Our Lady and St Andrew as they appear in different contexts on the screen.

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In the middle pace Were there any other visual associations between the Albredes and the screen and Rood at Woodbridge? There is circumstantial evidence to suggest that, like Bishop Krummedick, the Albredes may have been buried below the Rood, in rites witnessed by the assembled saints depicted on the screen and who watched over their mortal remains thereafter. A marble slab with indents for a man and a woman lies before the former roodscreen entrance to the chancel. The slab is laid in the modern raised floor, but occupied the same location prior to the 2003 re-ordering of this area.27 There is nothing to prove that it can be connected with the Albredes, who merely stipulated interment within the parish church without identifying a precise location. Nonetheless, the absence of indents for shields of arms is suggestive (the Albredes were non-armigerous); so too is the omission of indents for offspring (none is mentioned in either of the Albrede wills). A slab with an inscription to the Albredes existed in Weever’s day, which he recorded: ‘Hic iacet Johannes Albred, quondam twelewever istius ville…ob. primo die Maij…1400 (sic) et Agnes vxor eius…’28 Weever also noted two other tomb inscriptions, both of men with three wives, so the slab in question could not have been for either of them. Of course, this is not conclusive as Weever would have excluded other slabs which lacked their brasses. Prelates and heads of religious houses had been buried before the Rood since at least the eleventh century; by the Late Middle Ages, interment below or near the Rood was a much coveted and prestigious location for the laity, eligibility for which seems to have been based on one of, or a combination of, social status and generosity to the church fabric and fittings, especially the Rood.29 Such 27 Ibid.; I am also indebted to the rector, Canon Kevan McCormack, for information on the pre-2003 location of the ‘Albrede’ slab. 28 Weever, Antient Funeral Monuments, p. 488. 29 Marks, Image and Devotion, pp. 173–176; K. Imesch, ‘The Altar of the Holy Cross and the Ideal of Adam’s Progeny: ut paradysiace loca possideat regionis’, in E. E. Dubrick and B. I. Gusick (eds), Death and Dying in the Middle Ages (Studies in the Humanities: Literature, Politics, Society, vol. 45) (New York etc., 1999), pp. 73–106; N. Rogers, ‘Hic Iacet…: The Location of Monuments in Late Medieval Parish Churches’, in C. Burgess and E. Duffy (eds), The Parish in Late Medieval England, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 14 (Donington, 2006) pp. 261–281; J. E. Jung, ‘Beyond the Barrier: The Unifying Role of the Choir Screen in Gothic Churches’, The Art Bulletin, 82 (2000), pp. 622–657, esp. pp. 629–630. It was also a favoured burial site for parochial clergy.

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was the demand for burial in this location that what constituted ‘before the Rood’ could be interpreted to encompass the length of the nave along what is referred to in wills variously as the ‘middle pace’, the great or principal ‘aley’ and the processional way. While medieval tombslabs have frequently been uprooted from their original locations, in many churches they still remain laid in file from the entrance to the choir westwards, in posthumous simulacrum of the regular liturgical processions over them.30 The most impressive and complete of a number of extant brasses which are (or were) directly located below the Rood is at Burford, Oxfordshire, and commemorates John (d.1437) and Alice Spycer (Fig. 4) The inscription below their kneeling figures reads: Y pray yow all for charite hertely that ye pray for me To oure lord that syttith on hye fful of grace & of mercye. The wiche rode soler [loft] in this chirche Upon my cost y dede do wirche. Wt a laumpe brenyng bright To worschip god both day & nyght. And a gabulwyndow dede do make In helth of soule & for crist sake. Now Ihu that dydyst on a tre On us have mercy & pite. Ame[n] The couple address bidding prayers to the Virgin, the indent for whom with the Child is in the framed niche above. The rim inscription referring to John’s death on the eve of the feast of the Purification of the Virgin (2 February) explains her added intercessory value.31 Like the Albredes, John Spycer’s munificence included the roodscreen; also the provision of a perpetual light before the Rood and a window which probably lit the Rood. There can therefore have been few objections to according him and his wife the prime burial site in the closest proximity to the works he had funded. The salvatory significance of this location is evident by the inscription, with its dualism of meaning. Ihu that dydyst on a tre/ On us have mercy & pite is both an evocation of the crucified Christ perceived ‘in the mind’s eye’ and a direct allusion to the actual image suspended above 30

W. G. Henderson, Processionale Ad Usum Praeclarae Ecclesiae Sarum (Leeds, 1882).

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1. Lübeck Cathedral, Germany: Bernt Notke’s Triumphkreuz consecrated 1477 (photograph: Susie Nash).

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2. St Mary’s church Woodbridge, Suffolk: interior looking east showing the replica roodscreen in the location of the original screen (photograph: National Monuments Record). 3. Detail of the original roodscreen in St Mary’s church, Woodbridge, Suffolk (photograph by F. T. S. Houghton, National Monuments Record).

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4. St John the Baptist’s church, Burford, Oxfordshire: tombslab of John Spycer (d. 1437) and his wife. Rubbing in the Monumental Brass Society Portfolio Vol. 4, 1912.

the rood and remembrance

5. The Sotheby Hours (private collection), f.172v: miniature attributed to the Fastolf Master of the chanting of the Office of the Dead showing the bier enclosed within the hearse, mid 15th century (photograph: Conway Library, Courtauld Institute of Art, London).

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the Spycers’ grave. In the same way hertely that ye pray for me/ To oure lord that syttith on hye/ fful of grace & of mercye is both a reference to an interiorised vision of the Last Judgement and the Doom presumably pictured above the Rood at Burford. The wording of the inscription therefore explicitly links the Spycers as represented on their tombslab with their ‘good works’, the image of Christ’s sacrifice and the resurrection and granting of eternal life to them in Heaven at the Second Coming; in so doing it implicitly encourages the use of images as a devotional tool.32 The Spycers also enjoyed, as it were, ringside seats for the great liturgical feasts, above all the great Easter rituals, when the Rood was shrouded until Palm Sunday and Christ’s Passion and Resurrection solemnly re-enacted; at Burford this probably including the singing of the Passion from St John’s Gospel during the Good Friday Mass from the roodloft John Spycer had funded.33 A further spiritual boon enjoyed by the Spycers derived from the fact that their grave below the Rood was where the bier containing the bodies of most of the laity was placed for the performance of funerary rites, as is attested by several late medieval wills from Suffolk and Kent. Over the bier was set a hearse in the form of a wooden or metal frame which held candles; these are depicted in several late medieval manuscripts (Fig. 5).34 Whenever funerary rites were performed, as also month’s minds and obits in the same location, their grace was thus extended to the Spycers. Postscript John Spycer’s brass is the sole remaining testament to his generosity at Burford. The manifestations of John and Agnes Albrede’s munificence have not fared much better. The Rood they embellished perished in Edward VI’s reign; the screen has lost its entire superstructure and its dado has been reduced to less than half its original size. In January 1644, during the course The main inscription is given in Vallance, English Church Screens, p. 63. Marks, Image and Devotion, pp. 16–18, with further bibliography for medieval justifications of the use of images. 33 This is recorded in several late medieval parish churches, including Long Melford (Suffolk) and Lydd (Kent). 34 Northeast, ‘Suffolk Churches’, pp. 102–103; idem, Wills of the Archdeaconry of Sudbury, pp. xlvi–xlvii. For Kent references see Hussey, Testamenta Cantiana… East Kent, pp. 74, 82, 366. 31 32

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of his iconoclastic rampage through East Anglia, William Dowsing indulged his penchant for removing ‘Orate’ inscriptions by erasing completely the invocation to pray for the souls of the Albredes on the screen which had been recorded just over a decade before by Weever; Dowsing may also have been responsible for the defacing of the dado images.35 Today the battered and disordered remnants, encased behind glass (Fig. 3), have been relegated to the back of the church behind the font. The thoroughness with which Dowsing obliterated the offending opening to the inscription is there to be seen; but, remarkably, the names of John and Agnes, together with their bequest remain. Thus, in one respect at least, the screen retains its original function as a repository of memory for John and Agnes Albrede. Acknowledgements The subject of this paper is indebted to the inspirational studies of Paul Crossley on the great Gothic churches bordering the North Sea and the ritual and commemorative uses of imagery and spaces within them. It is a spin-off from a current project on the Rood in medieval England and Wales, which has been funded by the award of a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship. Canon Kevan McCormack, the rector of St Mary’s Woodbridge, provided invaluable information, including a draft copy of Roy Tricker’s forthcoming guide to the church; this is a model of accessible scholarship and I am most grateful to its author for permission to make use of it prior to publication. I am also indebted to Professor Colin Richmond’s knowledge of Woodbridge church. My thanks too to Anna Eavis and Derrick Chivers for their help in securing illustrations and the Suffolk Record Office for providing photocopies of the Albrede wills. Susie Nash kindly provided her excellent photograph of Bernt Notke’s Rood at Lübeck. No-one who writes on medieval Suffolk can ignore the contribution of the late Peter Northeast, who so freely gave of his time, researches and knowledge to others, including the present writer. It was a privilege to have known him as a scholar and a friend; in both capacities he is sadly missed.

35 T. Cooper (ed.), The Journal of William Dowsing. Iconoclasm in East Anglia during the English Civil War (Woodbridge, 2001), pp. 224–225, 380; also 101–105; Weever, Antient Funeral Monuments, p. 488.

Publications by Richard Marks 1973 ‘The Tympana of Covington and Thurleigh’, Bedfordshire Archaeological Journal, 8 (1973), pp. 134–135 ‘Some Early Representations of the Garter in Stained Glass’, Report of the Society of the Friends of St George’s and the Descendants of the Knights of the Garter, V, no.4 (1972–73), pp. 154–156 1974 ‘Henry Williams and his “ymage of deth” roundel at Stanford on Avon, Northamptonshire’, The Antiquaries Journal, 54 (1974), pp. 272–274 ‘The Stained Glass Patronage of Sir Reginald Bray’, Report of the Society of the Friends of St George’s and the Descendants of the Knights of the Garter, V, no.5 (1973–74), pp. 199–202 1976 ‘Medieval Stained Glass in Bedfordshire’, Bedfordshire Magazine, 15 (1975– 77), pp. 179–184, 228–233 1977 ‘Two early sixteenth-century boxwood carvings associated with the Glymes family of Bergen op Zoom’, Oud Holland, 91 (1977), pp. 132–143 ‘Sculpture in the Duchy and County of Burgundy c.  1300–1500’, The Connoisseur, 194, no.781 (March 1977), pp. 154–163 ‘Window Glass and Leading’, in B. Cunliffe, Excavations at Portchester Castle Vol. III: Medieval, the Outer Bailey and its Defences, Report of the Research Committee of the Society of Antiquaries of London No. 34 (London, 1977), pp. 128–131 1978 British Heraldry from its origins to c. 1800 exhibition catalogue (British

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Museum, London,1978) (co-editor with A. Payne) ‘Pageantry and Early Antiquarianism’, The Connoisseur, 198, no.798 (August 1978), pp. 310–315 (co-author with A. Payne) ‘The glazing of Fotheringhay Church and College’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 130 (1978), pp. 99–109 1979 ‘The glazing of the Collegiate Church of the Holy Trinity, Tattershall (Lincs.): A study of late medieval glass-painting workshops’, Archaeologia, 106 (1979), pp. 135–156 The Warwick Vase (Glasgow, 1979) (co-author with B. Blench) Review of the Die Parler und der Schöne Stil 1350–1400 exhibition (Stuttgart), The Connoisseur, 200, no.806 (April 1979), p. 303 1980 ‘A late medieval glass-painting workshop in the region of Stamford and Peterborough’, in P. Moore (ed.), Crown in Glory (Norwich, 1980), pp. 29–39 ‘A mediaeval gittern’, British Museum Quarterly, 4 (1980) pp. 83–135 (co-author with M. Remnant) ‘The Matrix of the second Great Seal of Queen Victoria’, British Museum Occasional Paper, no.10 (1980), pp. 23–28 1981 The Golden Age of English Manuscript Painting 1200–1500 (London and New York, 1981) (co-authored with N. Morgan) ‘An English stonemason in stained glass’, in A. Borg and A. Martindale (eds), The Vanishing Past. Studies of Medieval Art, Liturgy and Metrology presented to Christopher Hohler, British Archaeological Reports, International Series vol. III, 1981, pp. 105–107 ‘Two Bedfordshire Medieval “Portraits” ’, Bedfordshire Magazine, 18 (1981– 83), pp. 8–12 1982 ‘Yorkist and Lancastrian political and genealogical propaganda in the visual arts’, Family History (1982), pp. 132–147 ‘The mediaeval stained glass of Wells Cathedral’, in L. L. Colchester (ed.), Wells Cathedral a History (Shepton Mallett, 1982), pp. 132–147

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Review of A. Andersson, Medieval Wooden Sculpture in Sweden, Vol. III. Late Medieval Sculpture (Stockholm, 1980), The Burlington Magazine, 129, no.948 (March 1982), pp. 171–172 Review of M. Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (London and New Haven, 1980, The Burlington Magazine, 129, no.952 (July 1982), pp. 451–453 1983 The Burrell Collection (London and Glasgow,1983) (co-author) Burrell. Portrait of a Collector (Glasgow,1983; 2nd revised ed., 1988) ‘Medieval Sculpture in the Burrell Collection’, Apollo, 118, no. 283 (October 1983), pp. 284–291 ‘The Re-building of Lambley Church, Nottinghamshire, in the Fifteenth Century’, Transactions of the Thoroton Society, 87 (1983), pp. 87–89 Review of C.  R. Councer, Lost Glass from Kent Churches, Kent Records (Kent Archaeological Society) XXII, 1980, The Antiquaries Journal, 63 (1983), pp. 185–186 1984 The Stained Glass of the Collegiate Church of the Holy Trinity, Tattershall (Lincs.) (London and New York, 1984) (in the series Outstanding Theses from the Courtauld Institute of Art) ‘The Howard tombs at Thetford and Framlingham: new discoveries’, Archaeological Journal, 141 (1984), pp. 252–268 ‘Building the Burrell’, Scottish Art Review, 16 no.1 (1984), pp. 3–8 ‘Recent discoveries in medieval art’, Scottish Art Review, 16 no.1 (1984), pp. 13–20 1985 The Souvenir Guide to the Burrell Collection (Glasgow, 1985) 1986 ‘Cistercian Window Glass in England and Wales’, in C. Norton and D. Park (eds), Cistercian Art and Architecture in the British Isles (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 211–227 1987 Introductory essay (‘Stained Glass c. 1200–c. 1400’) and catalogue entries

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on stained glass in J. Alexander and P. Binski (eds), Age of Chivalry. Art in Plantagenet England 1200–1400 exhibition catalogue (The Royal Academy, London, 1987) 1988 ‘Window glass’, in T. B. James and A. M. Robinson, Clarendon Palace, Report of the Research Committee of the Society of Antiquaries of London no. 45, pp. 265–294 1989 Sussex Churches and Chapels (Brighton, 1989) (co-author with D. Beevers and J. Roles) Review of T. W. French and D. O’Connor, York Minster; A Catalogue of Medieval Stained Glass I: The West Windows of the Nave (Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi Great Britain Summary Vol.III/I) (London, 1987), The Antiquaries Journal, 69 (1989), pp. 374–376 Review of S. Crewe, Stained Glass in England 1180–1547 (London, 1987), The Antiquaries Journal, 69 (1989), p. 374 Review of H. Wayment, King’s College Chapel. The Side-Chapel Glass (Cambridge, 1988), The Antiquaries Journal, 69 (1989), pp. 376–377 1990 Review of C. Brooks and D. Evans, The Great East Window of Exeter Cathedral: A Glazing History (Exeter, 1988), Journal of Stained Glass, 19 no.1 (1989–90), pp. 89–93 1991 ‘Window Glass’, in C. Blair and N. Ramsay (eds), English Medieval Industries (London, 1991), pp. 265–294 1992 ‘Stained and painted window glass’, in D. C. Mynard, R. J. Zeepvat and R. J. Williams, Excavations at Great Linford, 1974–80 (Buckinghamshire Archaeological Society Monograph Series No. 3, 1992), pp. 213–217 1993 Stained Glass in England during the Middle Ages (London and Toronto, 1993) ‘Archives and the Visual Arts: Potsgrove church, its fourteenth-century

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glazing and other fittings’, Bedfordshire Historical Miscellany: Essays in Honour of Patricia Bell, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, 72, 1993, pp. 39–53 1994 ‘Sir Geoffrey Luttrell and some companions: images of chivalry c. 1320– 1350’, Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, 46/47 (1993–4), pp. 343–355 ‘Robert Hobbes, last Abbot of Woburn’, Bedfordshire Magazine, 24 (1993– 95), pp. 277–283 Review of M. P. Lillich, Rainbow like an Emerald. Stained Glass in Lorraine in the Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries (Pennsylvania, 1991), Art History, 17, no.1 (March 1994), pp. 135–6 Review of P. Theocharides et al, Greek Traditional Architecture: Mount Athos, Athens, 1992, Friends of Mount Athos Annual Report 1994, pp. 63–65 1995 ‘The glazing of Henry VII’s Chapel, Westminster Abbey’, in B. Thompson (ed.), The Reign of Henry VII (Proceedings of the 1993 Harlaxton Symposium) (Stamford, 1995), pp. 157–174 1996 ‘The thirteenth-century glazing of Salisbury Cathedral’, in L. Keen and T. Cocke (eds), Medieval Art and Architecture at Salisbury Cathedral (British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions, 17, 1996), pp. 106– 120 1997 ‘Memories of the Moat House — and Charles Freeman’, Bedfordshire Magazine, 25 (1995–97), pp. 313–317 1998 The Medieval Stained Glass of the County of Northamptonshire (Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi Great Britain Summary Catalogue 4) (Oxford, 1998) ‘Two illuminated guild registers from Bedfordshire’, in M. P. Brown and S. McKendrick (eds), Illuminating the Book: Makers and Interpreters. Essays in Honour of Janet Backhouse (London and Toronto, 1998), pp. 120–141 ‘The reception and display of Northern European Roundels in England’, Gesta, 37(1998), pp. 217–224 Review of K. L. Scott, A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles.

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VI Later Gothic Manuscripts (London, 1996), The Burlington Magazine, 140, no.1146 (September 1998), pp. 623–624 1999 Review of C. L. Pickford (ed.), Bedfordshire Churches in the Nineteenth Century Part II Parishes Harlington to Roxton, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, 77, 1998, Bedfordshire Magazine, 26 (1997–1999), pp. 346–347 2000 ‘Medieval stained glass: recent trends and future scholarship’, Journal of Stained Glass, 24 (2000), pp. 62–79 Review of the Tilman Riemenschneider exhibition (Washington and New York, 1999–2000), The Burlington Magazine, 142, no.1168 (July 2000), pp. 470–471 Courts and Regions in Medieval Europe (York, 2000) (co-editor with S. ReesJones and A. J. Minnis) 2001 ‘Glazing in the Romanesque parish church’, in F. Dell’Acqua and R. Silva (eds), Il Colore nel Medioevo. Arte Simbolo Tecnica. La Vetrata in Occidente dal IV all’XI Secolo (Lucca, 2001), pp. 173–181 ‘Altarpiece, Image and Devotion: fourteenth-century sculpture at Cobham, Kent’, in P. Binski and W. Noel (eds), New Offerings, Ancient Treasures. Studies in Medieval Art for George Henderson (Stroud, 2001), pp. 417–444 2002 ‘A late medieval pilgrimage cult: Master John Schorn of North Marston and Windsor’, in L. Keen and E. Scarf (eds), Windsor. Medieval Art and Archaeology of the Thames Valley (British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions, 25, 2002), pp. 192–207 ‘Viewing Our Lady of Pity’, in Magistro et Amico. Amici Discipulique Lechowi Kalinowskiemu w osiemdziesieciolecie urodzin (Cracow, 2002), pp. 101–121 2003 Introductory essays and catalogue entries in Gothic. Art for England 1400– 1547 exhibition catalogue (Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 2003); co-editor with P. Williamson

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‘Images of Henry VI’, in J. Stratford (ed.), The Lancastrian Court (Harlaxton Medieval Studies 10, Stamford, 2003), pp. 111–124 ‘The Ymago Sancti Loci in the English medieval parish church. Its status and function in the liturgy and private devotion’, in A. Moraht-Fromm (ed.), Kunst und Liturgie. Choranlagen des Spätmittelalters. Ihre Architektur, Ausstattung und Nutzung (Ostfildern, 2003), pp. 31–58 Review of N. Saul, Death, art and memory in medieval England. The Cobham family and their monuments, 1300–1500, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 54 (2003), pp. 150–151 2004 Image and Devotion in Late Medieval England (Stroud, 2004) ‘Wills and Windows: Documentary Evidence for the Commissioning of Stained Glass Windows in Late Medieval England’, in H. Scholz, I. Rauch and D. Hess (eds), Glas. Malerei. Forschung. Internationale Studien zu Ehren von Rüdiger Becksmann (Berlin, 2004), pp. 245–252 Articles on Sir William Burrell, Thomas Glazier (of Oxford), John Prudde and John Thornton in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) 2005 ‘Sir Edmund Thorp and his ancestors: the lost east window of Ashwellthorpe church’, in M. Aston and R. Horrox (eds), Much Heaving and Shoving: Essays for Colin Richmond (Lavenham, 2005), pp. 17–23 Review of Byzantium, Faith and Power (1261–1557) ed. H. C. Evans (exhib. cat. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2004), Sixteenth Century Journal, 26/4 (2005), pp. 1244–1245; also a slightly different version in Friends of Mount Athos Annual Report 2004, pp. 84–87 2006 Review of G. Peers, Sacred Shock: Framing Visual Experience in Byzantium (Pennsylvania, 2005), Sixteenth Century Journal, 27/2 (2006), pp. 576–577 ‘Pilgrimage to the Moldavian Monasteries: 22–30 October 2005’, in Friends of Mount Athos Annual Report 2005, pp. 77–83 2007 Late Gothic England: Art and Display (Donington, 2007) (editor) and Preface (pp. xiii–xv)

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2008 ‘Alabaster Carvings from St Helen’s Skipwith’ in R. A. Hall. T. A. Kendall and C. Bryden, ‘St Helen’s Church, Skipwith, North Yorkshire’, Archaeological Journal, 165 (2008), pp. 462–466 Review of J. Elsner, Roman Eyes. Visuality & Subjectivity in Art & Text (Princeton and Oxford, 2007), The Pelican Record (journal of Corpus Christi College, Oxford), 43/2 (Dec. 2007), pp. 75–77 Review of É. Ó Carragáin and Carol Neuman de Vegvar (eds), Roma Felix – Formation and Reflections of Medieval Rome (Ashgate/Aldershot, 2007), The Art Newspaper, 17, no. 196 (Nov. 2008), p.56 2009 ‘Sir William Horne and his ‘scowred’ window at Snailwell, Cambridgeshire’, in E. S. Lane, E. C. Pastan and E. M. Shortell (eds), The Four Modes of Seeing: Approaches to Medieval Imagery in Honor of Madeline Harrison Caviness, (Aldershot, 2009), pp. 99–110 ‘The Architectural Icon: Picturing Solovetski Monastery’, in A. Lidov (ed.), New Jerusalems. Hierotopy and Iconography of Sacred Spaces (Moscow, 2009), pp. 671–698 ‘Picturing Word and Text in the Late Medieval Parish Church’, in L. Clark, M. Jurkowski and C. Richmond (eds), Image, Text and Church 1380–1600. Essays for Margaret Aston (Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, Toronto, 2009), pp. 162–202 Review of R. Rosewell, Medieval Wall Paintings in English and Welsh Churches (Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 2008), The Ricardian (June 2009), pp. 155–158 Review of K. M. Woods, Imported Images: Netherlandish Late Gothic Sculpture in England, c. 1400–c. 1550 (Donington, 2007), The Antiquaries Journal, 89 (2009), pp. 454–457 2010 ‘Entumbid right princly: The Beauchamp Chapel at Warwick and the Politics of Interment’, in C. M. Barron and C. Burgess (eds), Memory and Commemoration in Medieval England (Harlaxton Medieval Studies 20, Donington, 2010), pp. 163–184 ‘The Dean and the Bearded Lady: Aspects of the Cult of St Wilgefortis/ Uncumber in England’, in J. Luxford and M. Michael (eds), Tributes to Nigel Morgan. Contexts of Medieval Art: Images, Objects and Ideas (Harvey Miller/ Brepols, 2010), pp. 349–363

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Review of P. Binski and A. Massing (eds), The Westminster Retable: History, Technique, Conservation (Harvey Miller Publishers, for The Hamilton Kerr Institute, 2009), The Art Newspaper, No. 214 (June 2010), p. 68 Review of J. Durand, D. Giovannoni, I. Rapti and R. Clavien (eds), Sainte Russie. L’art russe des origines à Pierre le Grand, Technique, Conservation (exhibition catalogue, Musée du Louvre in association with Somogy éditions d’art, Paris, 2010), The Art Newspaper, No. 217 (October 2010), p. 54 2011 ‘The Glazing of Stanford on Avon church, Northamptonshire c. 1324– 50 and the Taxonomy of English Medieval Stained Glass Studies’, in L. Monckton and R. Morris (eds), Medieval Art, Architecture and Archaeology in Coventry and its Vicinity (British Archaeological Assoc. Conference Trans., 2007) (2011), pp. 190–205 ‘The Englishness of English Gothic Art?’, in C. Hourihane (ed.), Gothic Art and Thought in the Later Medieval Period (Princeton, 2011), pp. 64–89 ‘To the Honor and Pleasure of Almighty God, and to the Comfort of the Parishioners: The Rood and Remembrance’, in Z. Opacic and A. Timmermann (eds), Image, Memory and Devotion: Liber Amicorum Paul Crossley (Studies in Gothic Art, vol. 2) (Tumhout, 2011), pp. 213–223 2012 ‘A will casts light: Robert Hunt and the west window of St Margaret’s Westminster’, in P. Binski and E. New (eds), Patrons and Professionals in the Middle Ages (Harlaxton Medieval Studies 22) (Donington, 2012), pp. 366–385 ‘Sir William Burrell and the formation of his collection of stained and painted glass’, in T. Ayers, B. Kurmann-Schwarz, C. Lautier and H. Scholz (eds), Collections of Stained Glass and their Histories (Transactions of the 25th International Colloquium of the Corpus Vitrearum in St Petersburg, 2010) (Berne, 2012), pp. 215–226 Forthcoming ‘From Langford to South Cerney: the Rood in Anglo-Norman England’, The George Zarnecki Memorial Lecture, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 164 (2011), pp. 172–210 ‘Russian Icons through British Eyes c. 1830–1930’, in A. Cross (ed.), ‘A People Passing Rude’: British Responses to Russian Culture (Proceedings of

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the 5lh Fitzwilliam Colloquium in Russian Studies, Cambridge, 2011) (Cambridge, 2012) Windows and Wills (Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi Great Britain, Occasional Paper) Sett on hey in Holy Chirch: The Rood in Medieval England and Wales (Woodbridge) The Medieval Stained Glass of the Counties of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire (Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi Great Britain, Summary Catalogue) In a Perpetual State of Becoming: The Icon of the Mother of God of Vladimir

Acknowledgements The articles reprinted in this volume first appeared in the following works I

Gothic — Art and Thought in the Later Medieval Period, C. Hourihane, ed. (Princeton, 2010), 64–89

II

Journal of Stained Glass 24 (2000), 62–79

III

Medieval Art, Architecture and Archaeology in Coventry and its Vicinity, L. Monckton and R. Morris, eds. (British Archaeological Association Conference Trans. 33, 2011), 190–205

IV

Gothic. Art for England 1400–1547 exhibition catalogue, R. Marks and P. Williamson, eds. (Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 2003), 12–24

V

Family History (1982), 132–47

VI

Image, Text and Church 1380–1600. Essays for Margaret Aston, L. Clark, M. Jurkowski and C. Richmond, eds. (Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, Toronto, 2009), 162–202

VII

English Medieval Industries, C. Blair and N. Ramsay eds. (London, 1991), 265–94

VIII

Glas. Malerei. Forschung. Internationale Studien zu Ehren von Rüdiger Becksmann, H. Scholz, I. Rauch and D. Hess, eds. (Berlin, 2004), 245–52

IX

The Four Modes of Seeing: Approaches to Medieval Imagery in Honor of Madeline Harrison Caviness, E. S. Lane, E. C. Pastan, and E. M.

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Shortell, eds. (Farnham, 2009), 99–110 X

Il Colore nel Medioevo. Arte Simbolo Tecnica. La Vetrata in Occidente dal IV all’XI Secolo, F. Dell’Acqua and R. Silva, eds. (Lucca, 2001), 173–81

XI

Cistercian Art and Architecture in the British Isles, C. Norton and D. Park, eds. (Cambridge, 1986), 211–27

XII

Medieval Art and Architecture at Salisbury Cathedral, L. Keen and T. Cocke, eds. (British Archaeological Association Conference Trans. 17, 1996), 106–20

XIII

Wells Cathedral a History, L. L. Colchester, ed. (Shepton Mallett, 1982), 132–47

XIV

Journal of the British Archaeological Association 130 (1978), 99–109

XV

The Reign of Henry VII, B. Thompson, ed. (Proceedings of the 1993 Harlaxton Symposium) (Stamford, 1995), 157–74

XVI

Bedfordshire Magazine 15 (1975–77), 179–84, 228–33

XVII

Bedfordshire Historical Miscellany: Essays in Honour of Patricia Bell, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society 72, 1993, 39–53

XVIII Crown in Glory, P. Moore, ed. (Norwich, 1980), 29–39 XIX

Gesta 37(1998), 217–24

XX

Oud Holland 91 (1977), 132–43

XXI

New Offerings, Ancient Treasures. Studies in Medieval Art for George Henderson, P. Binski and W. Noel eds. (Stroud, 2001), 417–44

XXII

Kunst und Liturgie. Choranlagen des Spätmittelalters. Ihre Architektur, Ausstatung und Nutzung, A. Moraht-Fromm, ed. (Ostfildern, 2003), 31–58

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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XXIII Magistro et Amico. Amici Discipulique Lechowi Kalinowskiemu w osiemdziesieciolecie urodzin (Cracow, 2002), 101–21 XXIV Windsor. Medieval Art and Archaeology of the Thames Valley, L. Keen and E. Scarf, eds. (British Archaeological Association Conference Trans. 25, 2002), 192–207 XXV

The Lancastrian Court, J. Stratford, ed. (Harlaxton Medieval Studies 10, Stamford, 2003), pp.111–24

XXVI Tributes to Nigel Morgan. Contexts of Medieval Art: Images, Objects and Ideas, J. Luxford and M. Michael, eds. (Harvey Miller/Brepols, 2010), 349–63 XXVII Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, 46/47 (1993–4), 343–55 XXVIII Memory and Commemoration in Medieval England, C. M. Barron and C. Burgess, eds. (Harlaxton Medieval Studies 20, Donington, 2010), 163–84 XXIX Archaeological Journal 141 (1984), 252–68 XXX

Illuminating the Book Makers and Interpreters. Essays in Honour of Janet Backhouse, M. P. Brown and S. McKendrick, eds. (London and Toronto, 1998), 120–41

XXXI Image, Memory and Devotion:  Liber Amicorum Paul Crossley, Z. Opacic and A. Timmermann, eds. (Studies in Gothic Art, vol. 2, Turnhout, 2011), 213–23

Index

Abbey Dore (Herefs.) 249, 252–4, 257–9, 298 Acworth family 792–3 Adam Theodrici 487 Addington (Bucks.) 465–8 Age of Chivalry. Art in Plantagenet England exhib., 18, 21, 24 Alabaster v, 92, 97, 102–3, 502, 523, 526, 534, 547–8, 550, 556, 560–2, 574, 582, 612, 625, 627, 685, 709, 734, 755 Albastyr, John and Agnes 648, 650 Albrede, John and Agnes 801–7, 813 Alemayne, John 163, 165 Alford (Lincs.) 611 Altarpieces 99, 101, 132, 158, 493– 505, 521, 640, 755 Alne (Yorks.) 532 Alnwick (Northumb.) 610, 624, 627, 629 Alphington (Devon) 603 Altenberg an der Lahn (Germany) 57 Alton (Sussex) 612 Amelungsborn Abbey (Germany) 257 Ampthill (Beds.) 403, 404 Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum 484, 625, 627 Andrew, Richard, dean of York 116, 629–30 Anthony of Pisa 163

Arnoult de Nijmuegen 189, 320–1 Arques-la-Bataille (Normandy, France) 756 Ashburton (Devon) 612, 626 Ashby-de-la-Zouch (Leics.) 734–5 Ashridge (Herts.) 466, 776; Bonhommes, prior of 767 Ashton (Devon) 145, 154, 157 Ashton-under-Lyne (Greater Manchester) 610 Axminster (Devon) 533 Aylesbury (Bucks.), Fraternity of Our Lady 148 Aylewyn, John 204 Badges, heraldic 215, 355–7, 371, 373, 388, 393, 396, 398–400, 404, 614, 627 Badges, pilgrim 584, 597, 602, 604, 609–10, 624, 626–8 Badlesmere (Kent) 233 Baker, John 206 Bale, John 638 Bamberg (Germany) rider 665 Bampton (Oxon.) 503 Bardwell (Suff.) 576 Baret, John 99, 100–1 Barfreston (Kent) 530 Barnack (City of Peterborough) 444 Barnburgh (Yorks.) 214

830 Barton (Beds.), church 410, 413; old rectory 404, 409, 411–2 Barton Turf (Norf.) 624, 626, 628 Basset of Drayton, Ralph, Lord 661–3, 665, 679–80 Bateman, Richard 462 Battle (Sussex) 755 Battlefield (Salop) 560, 562 Beauchamp, Richard Earl of Warwick and family 23, 103–4, 682–723 Beauchamp, Richard Lord St Amand 730 Beauchamp Pageant — see under Manuscripts, London British Library Beaufort, Lady Margaret 372, 390, 393–4, 434 Beauvais, St Etienne (France) 649 Bebenhausen Abbey (Germany) 257 Bedford: Museum 410–11, 414; St Paul’s 531, 549, 612, 626, 630 Bedford Hours and Psalter — see under Manuscripts, London British Library Bedfordshire, stained and painted glass in 402–29 Belton (Leics.) 77, 80 Bernard of Angers 513 Beverley Minster (Yorks.) 296 Biblia Pauperum 389, 391, 394–5 Binham Priory (Norf.) 603, 624 Biron (Dordogne, France), château de 757 Bisham (Berks.) church 735; Priory 326, 721 Bishops Cannings (Wilts.) 158–9 Bledington (Glos.), 152–3 Blois, William of, bishop of Worcester 531 Blunham (Beds.) 559–61 Blythburgh (Suff.) 206, 802 Blythe, Walter, bishop of Coventry

and Lichfield 768, 776 Bolnhurst (Beds.) 409 Bond, Richard 192–4, 196 Bonlieu Abbey (France) 251 Bordesley Abbey (Worcs.) 253–4, 258–9 Boston (Lincs.): Corpus Christi Guild 773; Holy Trinity Guild 129 Boughton Monchelsea (Kent) 613, 626 Bourges Cathedral 50, 296, 300–1 Boxford (Suff.) 635, 637 boxwood iv, 473–89 Boyton (Wilts.) 283 Boyville, John, Eleanor and Elizabeth 443 Brabourne (Kent) 233, 252, 298 Braconash (Norf.) 756 Bradford (Yorks.) 610 Bradwardine, Thomas 512 Bradwell (Bucks.) 528, 594–5 Braine, St-Yved (France) 48 Bramley (Hants.) 532, 534 Brampton, John 188, 194–5, 505 Brandeston (Suff.) 153 brasses — see Monuments, funerary Bray, Sir Reginald 434, 446 Breadsall (Derbys.) 561 Bredon (Worcs.) 426 Brent Eleigh (Suff.) 502, 532 Brentwood, John 684 Bridges, John 334–41, 344–6, 348 Bridgnorth (Salop) 611 Bridlington Priory (Yorks.) 92 Bristol, All Saints 129, 133, 144, 154, 215, 548; Cathedral 57, St Mary le Port 636–7 Bromham (Beds.) 411 Bromley (Kent) 577 Brooke, Lord 734 Broughton (Bucks.) 563 Broughton Astley (Leics.) 77, 80

INDEX

Browne, Sir Anthony 755 Browne, William and Margaret 430–3, 446 Brownfleet, William 92 Bruges, St John’s Hospital 640 Buckden (Cambs.) 409 Buckingham (Bucks.) 595 Buckler, John 282 Bunwell (Norf.) 635, 637, 640 Burford (Oxon.) 807, 812 Burgh, William 194 Burgoyne, Thomas, rector of Sandy 403 Burmarsh (Kent) 613 Burnham Abbey (Bucks.) 532 Bury (Sussex) 635 Bury St Edmunds (Suff.) 92; St Mary’s 99 Bushmead Priory (Beds.) 409, 412, 445 Caister, Richard of 585 Calder Abbey (Cumbria) 254 Cambridge, Great St Mary’s 805; King’s College Chapel 35, 85, 97, 164, 186, 192–4, 196, 372, 389– 92, 395, 398, 729, 756; St John’s College 190, 193, 196, 614 Campsall (Yorks.) 157–8 Campton (Beds.) 425 Canterbury, Cathedral 16, 35–6, 50–1, 106, 128, 284, 291, 296, 394, 626, 729; tomb of Henry IV and Joan of Navarre 709; tomb of Edward the Black Prince 709; St Andrew’s 555; St Augustine’s Abbey 504; St George’s 555; St John the Baptist’s Hospital 209, 213 Carter, John 282, 292, 296, 300, 462, 801 Catechism 123, 129–30, 151, 153

831 Caversham (Berks.) 612 Cawston (Norf.) 603 Caxton, William 152 Cely family 99, 101–3 Cennini, Cennino 163 Châlons-sur-Marne Cathedral 291 Chamber, John the younger 186 Chard, Thomas, abbot of Forde 260 Charles, Nicholas, Lancaster Herald 281, 729 Chartham (Kent) 518 Chartres Cathedral 46, 48–52, 59, 290–2, 300 Chatsworth (Derbys.) 485, 488 Chaucer, Geoffrey 581 Checkendon (Oxon.) 532, 534 Checkley (Staffs.) 75, 77 Chemillé-sur-Indrois (Indre-et-Loire, France), 232, 235 Chenu (Sarthe, France) 232, 235, 246 Chertsey Abbey (Surrey) 608 Chichele, Henry, archbishop of Canterbury 89, 98, 104, 107–9, 626, 630, 705–6 Chichester Cathedral 197 Chicksands Priory (Beds.) 411, 414 Chiddingfold (Surrey) 197 Chillendon, Thomas, prior of Christ Church Canterbury 107 Chinnor (Oxon.) 144 Choke, Dame Margaret 213–4 Christchurch Priory (Dorset) 503 Cistercian Order, iii, architecture 16, glass 59, 83, 233, 248–79, 297–8, 302 Civray-de-Touraine (Indre-et-Loire, France) 246 Clare Cross 102 Clarendon Palace (Wilts.) 174, 254, 299 Cleeve Abbey (Som.) 258, 259–60, 273

832 Clement of Chartres 189 Clifton, Walter de, abbot of Warden 274–9, 403, 409, 412 Clopton, John 101, 148, 150, 152, 157 Cobham (Kent) v, 490–524, 534, 550, 734 Cobham, Lord 455, 462; family 490– 524; Sir John de 490, 494 Cockayne, John and Elizabeth 434, 444 Cockayne Hatley (Beds.) 409–14 Codex Manesse — see under Manuscripts, Heidelberg Cole, William 202 Colet, John, dean of St Paul’s 632–3, 640, 651–3 Collyweston (Northants.) 165, 191 Colmworth (Beds.) 409, 413–4 Cologne, Cathedral 46, Schnütgen Museum 640, 649 Colyar, Bennet 213 Combs (Suff.) 152–3, 207 Cooper, Oliver St John 428 Copenhagen 487 Copford (Essex) 233 Cople (Beds.) 404 Corby Glen (Lincs.) 148, 563 Corfe (Dorset) 575 Cornwall, Sir John, Lord Fanhope 404, 406 Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi 15, 22, 34–8, 62, 63 Costessey Hall (Norf.) 57 Cotterstock (Northants.) 518 Coventry, 64–84; Cathedral 35; St Mary’s Hall 109, 115, 447, 626 Cowden (Kent) 634, 637, 639 Coxyde (Belgium), Musée de l’Abbaye des Dunes 257 Cranbrook (Kent) 213, 579 Creed 123, 134, 144, 153, 158, 393,

410 Creping, Nicholas de 178 Cromer (Norf.) 558 Cromwell, Ralph, Lord 99, 446, 685 Croydon (Surrey) 165 Crypps, John 209 Cudot (Burgundy, France) 233, 298 Cullompton (Devon) 803 Curson, Walter and Isabel 146 Cusa, Nicholas of 158 Dalbury (Derbys.) 40, 232 Dance of Death 149–50, 152, 154 Dawlish (Devon) 533 Dean (Beds.) 404–5, 410, 413 Decalogue 123, 127, 130, 158, 160 Delyon, John 191 Denston (Suff.) 803 Didbrook (Glos.) 274 Diddington (Cambs.) 445 Dinton (Bucks.) 529 Dobrilugk Abbey (Germany) 274 Dominican Order glass 59 Donne Triptych 23, 90 Dorchester Abbey (Oxon.) 502 Dowsing, William 812–3 Drayton Bassett (Staffs.) 661–2, 670, 679–80 Drayton Beauchamp (Bucks.) 410 Dugdale, Sir William 261, 270, 352–4, 358–67, 633, 661, 713–4, 718; Book of Monuments/ Draughts — see under Manuscripts, London British Library Dunstable, Fraternity of St John the Baptist 100, 765–97; priory church 774, 779–80, 796 Dunster (Som.) 273 Dunster, William, abbot of Cleeve 273 Dunton (Beds.) 562, 577 Durham Cathedral v, 503, 610

INDEX

Durrant, Thomas 208–9 Easby (Yorks.) 63, 232, 235, 247 East Tisted (Hants.) 731 East Winch (Norf.) 759 Eastwell (Kent) 735 Eaton Bray (Beds.) 525–6 Eaton Socon (Cambs.) 410 Eberbach Abbey (Germany) 251, 297 Edworth (Beds.) 411–13 d’Egmont, Florent, Count of Bueren and Leerdam (Holland) 484 Elsing (Norf.), 152 Eltham Palace (London) 195–8, 396, 399 Ely, Cathedral 83–4, 284, 429; Stained Glass Museum 298 Eraclius 163 Erbach Castle (Germany) 57 Erth oute of Erth 149, 154, 156 Essards (Indre-et-Loire, France) 232 Eton College 102, 164, 196, 581, 595–6 Eversholt (Beds.) 612, 630 Exeter Cathedral 15, 46, 106, 164, 185, 193–5, 659–60, 666–7, 670 Eye (Suff.) 625 Eyeworth (Beds.) 404, 409 Fairfield (Norf.) 759 Fairford (Glos.) 60, 62, 90, 99, 215, 390–3, 395, 398 Faringdon (Berks.) 755 Fastolf Master 89, 811 Fastolf, Sir John 90, 98–9 Faversham (Kent) 579, 602 Fawsley (Northants.), church 57, 463–5, 468; Hall 463 Fayrey family 774 Fécamp Abbey (Normandy, France) 756 Fen, Katherine 214–5

833 fenestra caeli 432 Festial 152, 516, 549–50 (see also Mirk, John) Fiennes, Celia 281, 291, 300 Fillongley (Warwicks.) 259 Fisher, John, bishop of Rochester 370 Fisher, Thomas iv, 417, 424–6, 507 Fishlake (Yorks.) 208 Fitzroy, Henry, Duke of Richmond 727, 733–7, 754, 756–8 Fitzwilliam, Sir Thomas 755 Fladbury (Worcs.) 170 Flawford (Notts.) 534, 547–8, 550 Fledborough (Notts.) 40, 232 Flitwick (Beds.) 404 Flower, Barnard 165, 188, 193–4, 371–2, 396–9 Folkestone (Kent) 206 Forde Abbey (Dorset) 260 Fordington (Dorset) 529 Fortescue, Sir John 98 Fotheringhay (Northants.) iv, 118–9, 322–69 Fountains Abbey (Yorks.) 250, 252 Fox, Richard, bishop of Winchester 98, 394, 398 Framlingham (Norf.) 724–64 Francis, Adam 404 Frater Lupuldus 189, 255 Fraternities 100, 129, 148, 149, 152, 154, 765–97 Freiburg-im-Breisgau Cathedral (Germany) 284 Froxmere, Thomas 214 Fuentidueña (Spain), 530 Furness Abbey (Lancs.) 260 Garter, Order of 404 Gascoigne, Humphrey, rector of Barnburgh (Yorks.) 214 Gateley (Norf.) 603–4, 624, 626 Geddington (Northants.) 502

834 Geneva Cathedral 49 Gerald of Avignon, St 513 Gerlachus 189 Gerona (Catalonia, Spain) 169 Gerson, Jean 158 Glasgow, Burrell Collection 172, 320 Glass, Stained and Painted iii–iv, 15–17, 31–84, 91–2, 97, 102–3, 106–7, 109, 115, 118–9, 128, 134, 144–9, 151–7, 160–469, 550, 552, 559, 562, 597, 603, 610–12, 625–6, 657, 661–2, 679–80, 682–723, 727, 755, 759–61 Glastonbury (Som.), Abbey 40, 128; church 153 Glazier/Glasier, John (of Coningsby) 178 Glazier/Glasier (Browne?), John (of Stamford) 178, 449–51 Glazier, Thomas (of Oxford) 84, 97, 184, 189, 198, 413 Glaziers Company of London 178 Glemsford (Suff.) 215 Gloucester Cathedral 318 Glymes family, of Bergen op Zoom (Holland) 473, 483–4 Golden Legend 51, 131, 152, 156, 247, 512, 550, 594, 707, 772 Gontaut, Pons de 757 Gothic. Art for England 1400–1547 exhib. 23–4 Gotland (Sweden) altarpieces 504 Gouda (Holland), St John’s church 45, 49 Gouffier, Artus 757 Grand-Vabre (Rodez, France) 563 Grateley (Hants.) 284–5, 296 Gray, Thomas 281, 291 Great Brington (Northants.) 205, 755 Great Canfield (Essex) 526, 531 Great Hampden (Bucks.) 549

Great Malvern Priory (Worcs.) 153, 395, 399, 409 Great Waldingfield (Suff.) 206 Great Yarmouth (Norf.) 611 Greene, Ralph 103, 685 Greenwich, Observant Friars 192 Grey, Thomas (of Cople, Beds.) and wife Bennet 404 Grey, Thomas, rector of Wethersfield (Essex) 201–4, 207, 215 Grosseteste, Robert, bishop of Lincoln 528 Grotene, James, rector of Great Waldingfield (Suff.) 205–6 Guestwick (Norf.) 153 Guilden Morden (Cambs.) 157 Guilford Castle (Surrey) 178 Gwilt, C. E. 282 Haddenham (Bucks.) 410 Haddenham (Cambs.) 201–4, 207 Hadleigh Castle (Essex) 194 Hadzor (Worcs.) 83 Hailes Abbey (Glos.) 248, 253–5, 257, 260–1, 274 Haina Abbey (Germany) 189, 254–5 Halley, Richard, rector of Stowe (Bucks.) 204 Hammoon (Dorset) 503 Hampden, Thomas 549 Hampp, John Christopher 465 Hampton Court Palace 85, 191 Hanchet (Suff.) 802 Hanchich, Thomas 549 Hardham (Sussex) 530 Hardreshull, Sir John and Margaret 261, 270 Hardwicke, Maurice, rector of Bristol All Saints 548 Harlington (Beds.) 547, 612, 626, 630 Harlton (Cambs.) 502

835

INDEX

Harvey, John 2, 10–12, 21 Haslingfield (Cambs.) 735 Hastingleigh (Kent) 233, 254, 298 Hastings, Sir Hugh 152 Haughley (Suff.) 802 Hautrive Abbey (Switz.) 257 Heiligenkreuz Abbey (Austria) 257 Heiligenkreuztal Abbey (Germany) 257 Hengrave (Suff.), church 735; Hall 99 Hennock (Devon) 603 Henry VI v, vi, 107–9, 115–6, 598– 600, 607–31, 706, 710 Hereford Cathedral 611, 731 Heydon (Norf.) 148, 152 Hildesheim (Germany) 158 Hoby, Sir Philip and Sir Thomas 735 Holbein, Hans the Younger 755 Holme-by-Newark (Notts.) 283 Holme-by-Spalding Moor (Yorks.) 529 Holywell (Lincs.) 445 Hone, Galyon 192–4 Horne, Sir William iii, 146–7, 216–29 Hornton (Oxon.) 558–60, 574–5 Houghton Conquest (Beds.) 404, 412 Houghton Regis (Beds.) 553, 612, 627, 630 Howard, Thomas 2nd Duke of Norfolk, Thomas 3rd Duke of Norfolk and family 724–64 Hubbard, John Gellibrand, Baron Addington 466, 468 Hudson, Octavius 282 Huizinga, Johan 89 Huntingdon, Earl and Countess of 734–5 Ignorantia Sacerdotum 129–30, 155 Images, Devotional 24, 97, 104, 217, 471–654, 731, 798–813

Inglish, Thomas and William 170 Ipswich (Suff.), Chapel of Our Lady of Grace 205 Irnham (Lincs.) 663, 679 Islip, John, abbot of Westminster 371, 394, 399; Mortuary Roll 802 Iver (Bucks.) 547 James, Montague Rhodes 33–4 Jannys, Robert 756 Janyns, Robert 98, 393 Jarrow 39, 232 Jenney, Sir Edmund 204, 207 Johnson, Isaac 801 Kappel Abbey (Switz.) 257 Kempe, Margery 104, 520, 552, 559, 576, 582, 585 Kempley (Glos.) 233, 530 Kempsey (Worcs.) 83 Kidlington (Oxon.) 290 kings, cycles of 106–22, 447 Kings Glazier 188, 371 Kingscliffe (Northants.) 355–7 King’s Lynn (Norf.), St Margaret’s church 520, 552 Kirkham Priory (Yorks.) 250–1 Kirkheim am Ries nunnery (Germany) 256 Kirkstall Abbey (Yorks.) 254, 259 Knightley family 463, 465, 468–9 Knodishall (Suff.) 204, 207, 213 Königsfelden (Switzerland) 59 Krummedick, Albert, bishop of Lübeck 798–9, 806 Kytson, Sir Thomas and wife Frances Duchess of Suffolk 735 La Bénisson-Dieu Abbey (Loire, France) 251–2 La Chalade Abbey (Meuse, France) 257

836 Lambeth, church 728, 732, 761–2, Palace chapel 394 Lambeth Apocalypse — see under Manuscripts, London Lambeth Palace Lammas (Norf.) 153 Lancaster, House of 106–16, 121, 322 Langton, John 213 Laverstock (Wilts.) 283 Layer Marney (Essex) 734, 756 Le Mans Cathedral 247, 296 Legenda Aurea — see under Golden Legend Legh, Roger and Elizabeth 131, 146 Leland, John 97, 104, 327, 357, 370, 392, 430, 660, 684, 710, 713, 777 Lewisham (Kent) 613 Leybourne, Sir William de and family 658–9, 680 Lichfield Cathedral 662 Lichtental Abbey (Germany) 257 Lilly, Henry 727, 759–62 Lincoln Cathedral 106, 255, 296, 299–300, 394 Lindena (Germany) 274 Lisbon 562 Lisle, Jane Viscountess 799–800, 803 Littlebourne (Kent) 208–9 Little Brickhill (Bucks. ) 532 Little Malvern Priory (Worcs.) 399 Little Waldingfield (Suff.) 803 Little Wenham (Suff.) 534 Lojsta (Gotland, Sweden) 235 London, All-Hallows-by-the-Tower 99; Armourers and Brasiers’ Company 91; Bermondsey church 678; British Museum 473–4, 485–8; Coldharbour 164; Dominican church 731; Fraternity of the Immaculate Conception 773–4; Glaziers’ Company

83, 178, 185; St Christopher-leStocks 125–7, 129, 131, 133–4, 145, 158, 556, 578; St Michael Cornhill 799–800, 803; St Paul’s Cathedral 149–50, 152, 154, 632–3, 637, 650–3; St Stephen Walbrook 125, 127, 129–30, 134, 144, 153, 158–9, 554; St Thomas the Apostle, Knightrider Street 223–4, 226–8; Savoy Chapel 196–7, 399, 612; Skinners’ Company 765, 773; Tower of London 396, 399, 531; Victoria & Albert Museum 284, 373, 399, 445, 488, 599, 735; Vintners’ Company 562; Whitehall Palace 755 (For Westminster see under Westminster) Long Ashton (Som.) 213–4 Long Melford (Suff.) 101, 148, 150, 152–3, 157, 562, 760–1 Louth Abbey/Park (Lincs.) 258 Lower Gravenhurst (Beds.) 409, 412 Lowick (Northants.) 103, 685 Lübeck, St Jakobus’s Cathedral 798 Ludgershall (Wilts.) 299 Ludham (Norf.) 624, 626, 628, 802–3 Ludlow (Salop) 258 Luton (Beds.), church 403–4, 409– 10, 414, 554, 630, 793–4, 796; Fraternity of the Holy and Undivided Trinity 765–97 Luttrell, Sir Geoffrey and family 657– 81 Luttrell Psalter — see under Manuscripts, London British Library Lydd (Kent) 204–5, 552 Lydgate, John 149–50, 152–4, 560, 562, 576, 581–2, 707 Lyen, Robert 185, 193

INDEX

Lyminge (Kent) 49, 207 Macclesfield (Cheshire) 131, 146, 208 Magdeburg (Germany) rider 665 Magnificat 153 Mann, Sir Horace 455, 460 manus meditacionis 158–9 Manuscripts 9, 15–18, 89, 90, 97, 102, 119–21, 132–3, 147, 152–3, 166, 169, 191, 214, 318–9, 351–2, 373, 394, 448, 558, 614, 626, 657–81, 683, 685, 727, 729, 759–97, 801, 812 Arundel Castle: Lilly’s Howard Genealogy 724–62 Cambridge: Fitzwilliam Museum MSS 242 (Packham Clifford Hours) 15; 261 (ex libris Margaret Beaufort) 394 King’s College foundation charter 626 Magdalene College Pepysian Lib. MS 1916 (Pepysian Sketchbook) 166–7, 169 Canterbury Cath. Lib. MS C 246 51, 128, 132 Eton College foundation charter 626 Heidelberg, Universitätsbibliothek MS cpg 848 (Codex Manesse) 670 London, British Library: Add. MS 8987 (Suffolk collections) 801 Add. MS 17456 (Revd T. Powell notes) 417 Add. MS 17694 (D. T. Powell notes) 373 Add. MS 23049 (Dawson-Turner notes on Norfolk) 648 Add. MS 28564 (Beauchamp

837 Chapel accounts transcript) 685, 712, 714 Add. MS 29939 (J. Carter) 282 Add. MS 35211 (C. Winston) 282 Add. MS 33851 (C. Winston) 282 Add. MS 34376 (O. St John Cooper notes) 428 Add. MS 37138 (C. A. Buckler) 282 Add. MS 39917 (G. Rowe watercolours) 373 Add. MS 42130 (Luttrell Psalter) 18, 21, 168, 657–81 Add. MS 42131 (Bedford Hours and Psalter) 15, 21, 90 Add. MS 45131 (ex libris Thomas Wriothesley) 729–31 Add. MS 48976 (Rous Roll) 120–1, 716, 720 Add. MS 71474 (Dugdale’s Book of Monuments/Draughts) 352–4, 357–66, 661, 673, 702–3, 713, 718 Add. MS 74236 (Sherborne Missal) 97 Cotton MS Julius C. VII (N. Charles notes etc) 729 Cotton MS Julius E. IV. art 6 (Beauchamp Pageant) 119, 683, 719 Egerton MS 2358 396 Harl. MS 608 328 Harl. MS 2372 (ex libris Browne’s Hospital, Stamford) 433 Harl. MS 2838 (Speculum Humanae Salvationis) 393 Harl. MS 3244 (Peraldus treatise on vices 678 Harl. MS 4795 (Boston Corpus Christi Guild register) 773

838 Harl. MS 7026 (Lovel Lectionary) 97 Harl Charter 48 E. 47 505 Lansdowne MS 762 585 Lansdowne MS 863 404 Lansdowne MS 874 191, 214, 281 Royal MS 2. A.XXII (Westminster Psalter) 670 Royal MS 15. E.VI 616 Sloane MS 389 586–7 London, College of Arms: Rous Roll 120–1, 716, 720 London, Guildhall: MS 9531/3 201 London, Lambeth Palace: MS 209 (Lambeth Apocalypse) 678 London, Westminster Abbey: MS 37 (Lytlington Missal) 319; Islip’s Mortuary Roll 802 Luton Museum and Art Gallery: registers of the Dunstable and Luton Fraternities 765–97 Manchester: John Rylands Library MS 261 (ex libris Abbot Islip) 394 Oxford: Bodleian Library: MS Bodley 277 614. 615 Bodleian Library: MS Lat. liturg. a.2 128 Bodleian Library: MS Lat. liturg. f.2 119, 351–2 Bodleian Library: Topographical Northants MSS e5, f1 334–41 Christ Church College MS 92 (Walter de Milemete) 678 Christ Church College MS 179 (Ordinances of the London Fraternity of the Immaculate Conception) 773–4

Keble College MS 47 132, 558, 562, 577 Windsor St George’s: Book of Hours 585–7 Marienstatt (Germany) 254 Market Deeping (Lincs.) 347 Marlborough Castle (Wilts.) 190 Marney, Henry Lord 734, 756 Martin, John 418 Mass of St Gregory 126, 129, 131–3, 207–8 Massingham, John 91, 108, 713 Mayhew, Richard bishop of Hereford 731 Melrose Abbey (Scotland) 254 Memling, Hans 23, 90, 599, 640 Mendlesham (Suff.) 635 Merevale (Warwicks.) 83, 258–61, 270–3 Metalwork 89, 91, 102, 670, 678 Metz (France) 232 Middleham Jewel 102 Middleton (Norf.) 759 Mileham (Norf.) 307 Milemete, Walter de 678 Millbrook (Beds.) 403–4 Milton by Canterbury (Kent) 554 Minster-in-Sheppey (Kent) 658–61, 666–7, 670, 680 Mirk, John 152, 516, 549–50; see also Festial Moissac Abbey (Tarn-et-Garonne, France) 557 Monckton (Kent) 209 Monkwearmouth 39 Montmorency, Philippe de 757 Monuments, funerary vi, 23, 61, 68, 97, 99–100, 103–4, 128, 130, 146–8, 150–2, 203, 207–9, 223–4, 227–8, 271–2, 323–4, 327, 352, 366, 371, 397, 416, 425, 430, 490, 504, 517, 548,

INDEX

575, 578–9, 585, 632–3, 651–2, 657–764, 774, 794, 798, 802, 806–7, 812 More, Thomas 638–9 Morebath (Devon) 522 Morley (Derbys.) 103 Mynot, William 205 Namedy (Germany) 254 Nayland (Suff.) 625 Nettlestead (Kent) 205, 213 Neukloster Abbey (Germany) 256 Neville family, Earls of Salisbury, of Warwick vi, 120–1, 326, 366–7, 716–22 Newington (Oxon.) 145 Newminster Abbey (Northum.) 253 Nicholson, James 192–4 Nodde, Michael 638 Noirlac Abbey (France) 251 North Crawley (Bucks.) 528, 532, 547, 550, 553, 555 North Marston (Bucks.) 583–4, 587–8, 594–8, 601–2, 604–6 North Wingfield (Derbys.) 503 Northfleet (Kent) 634 Northill (Beds.) 404 Norton, Richard 731 Norwich, glaziers 177, 184; Cathedral 558, 560, 579–581; St George Colegate 756; St Giles 635; St James 635, 637, 640; St Nicholas’s Hospital 611; St Peter Mancroft 60, 449; St Peter Parmentergate 635, 651 Noseley (Leics.) 76 Notke, Bernt 798 Notre Dame de Valére bei Sitten (Switzerland) 252, 298 Oakley (Beds.) 413 Obazine Abbey (France) 251–2, 297

839 Oberndorf-bei-Arnstadt (Germany) 232, 246 Oddingley (Worcs.) 611, 625–6 Odell (Beds.) 409, 411, 413–4 Oiron (Deux-Sèvres, France) 757 Old Sarum Cathedral 532 Old Warden (Beds.) 274–7, 402–3, 409–10, 412 Orbais Abbey (France) 298 Orleans, Dukes of 756 Osgathorpe (Leics.) 77, 80 Ottery St Mary (Devon) 503 Oudeby, Walter, canon of St Paul’s 632–3, 637, 640, 652 Oxford, All Souls College 91, 104, 107–9, 188, 446, 626, 630, 708, 711; Christ Church College 191; Merton College 81; New College 413; St Frideswide’s Cathedral 83 Packham Clifford Hours — see under Manuscripts, Cambridge Fitzwilliam Museum Paris, Cluny Museum / Musée National du Moyen Âge 485, 560–2, 574; Louvre 474–6, 488; Notre-Dame Cathedral 666; SteChapelle 57–8, 290; St-Denis Abbey 284, 290, 300, 756 Parr, Sir William and family 731 Paston family 98, 102, 104 Peckitt, William 455, 462 Pecock, Reginald, bishop of Chichester 515 Peraldus, Gulielmus 678 Perier, Jean 46 Peterborough, Cathedral iv, 394, 433–4, 444–6, 448–9, 451; St John the Baptist 450–1 Petham (Kent) 299 Petty, John 164, 170, 186, 189, 260; Robert 170

840 Pever, Thomas 403 Pevsner, Nikolaus 1, 4–6, 10, 12, 15, 21, 31 Pietà (Our Lady of Pity — see also Images, devotional) 24, 104, 126–7, 129–33, 148, 509, 557– 82, 731 Pigott: John 403; Thomas 731 Pilton (Som.) 610 Pinchbeck (Lincs.) 611 Pipewell Abbey (Northants.) 255 Podington (Beds.) 404 Poling (Sussex) 40, 231–2 Pontigny Abbey (Burgundy, France) 254, 297 Potsgrove (Beds.) iv, 409, 411–2, 415–29 Powell, James (of Whitefriars) 466 Powell, Revd. Thomas 417, 425–6 Power, Robert 178 Pownder, Thomas and Emme 99 Preston (Kent) 299 Preston-on-Stour (Warwicks.) 463–4 Price, William, the Younger 455, 462, 464 Pricke of Conscience 149, 152–4, 157 Prudde, John 91, 102, 164, 186–8, 190, 196, 198, 447, 708, 713 Pugin, Augustus Welby 468 Pympe, Sir John 205, 213 Pynne, Robert 206 Quidenham (Norf.) 153 Quinel, Peter, bishop of Exeter 532–4 Radnage (Bucks.) 123–4, 160 Reculver (Kent) 800 Reformation 123–6, 159–60, 522–4, 758, 798 Renhold (Beds.) 403 Restwold, Thomas and Margaret 434, 443

Reve, Thomas 192–4 Rewley Abbey (Oxon.) 273 Rheims, Cathedral 301; St–Rémi, 48, 300 Richmond Palace 396 Rickert, Margaret 8–10, 15, 21 Rievaulx Abbey (Yorks.) 250–1, 254, 258–60 Rigdon, William 208–9, Thomas 209 Ripon Minster (Yorks.) 92 Rivenhall (Essex) 466 Rochester Cathedral 504 Rockingham Castle (Northants.) 255 Rood 798–813 Roper, John 209, 213–4 Rotherham, Thomas, bishop of Lincoln, archbishop of York and family 766–7, 775, 792–5 Rouen, Cathedral 39, 189, 296; Hôtel Jubert 756; St Jean 320; St-Vincent 46 Roundels (glass) 59–60, 453–69 Rous Roll — see under Manuscripts, London British Library and College of Arms Royaumont Abbey (France) 257 Rudby (Yorks.) 548 Rumbold, St 595 Rygge, Thomas 207 Sackville, Richard 731 Saffron Walden (Essex) 729 St Albans, Abbey 301–2, 394, 429, 767, 776, 792, 795; St Peter’s 612, 626, 629 St-André-de-Cubzac (Gironde, France) 560 St-Denis Abbey (France) — see under Paris St-George-de-Poisieux (Cher, France) 246 St Neot (Cornwall) 32, 60, 215

INDEX

St Neots (Cambs.) 444 St-Wandrille Abbey (Normandy, France) 653 Salcombe Regis (Devon) 533 Salehurst (Sussex) 169 Salisbury Cathedral 59, 254, 280–302 San Vincenzo al Volturno 39 Sandford-on-Thames (Oxon.) 523 Sandy (Beds.) 403 Santes Creus Abbey (Catalonia, Spain) 251, 257, 297 Savage, Richard 188 Saxlingham Nethergate (Norf.) 246 Scaldwell (Northants.) 522 Scheerre, Hermann 90 Schorn, Master John, rector of North Marston (Bucks.) 583–606, 624 Schulpforta Abbey (Germany) 256 Schwarzach 39, 231 Scott, Sir George Gilbert 491 Screens and Screen-Paintings v–vi, 92, 107–9, 115–6, 144–5, 150, 157, 416, 425, 428, 493, 503, 517, 555–6, 603–4, 611–12, 624–8, 635, 637, 640, 648–51, 653, 756, 800–13 Scrope, Richard, archbishop of York 116–20, 335, 344, 349–52, 367, 629 Sculpture (see also alabaster, boxwood, images (devotional)) 9, 12, 21–3, 90–2, 97, 102, 106–9, 115–6, 150–1, 395, 471–654, 657–81, 685–6, 706, 709, 711, 713, 724–64, 798–804 Sedding, J. D. 415–29 Sedgwick, William 352, 358–67, 661, 714, 727 Sekyngton, William 580–1 Selby Abbey (Yorks.) 69, 71, 82 Sele Priory (Sussex) 612 Sens, Musée Municipal 296, St-Jean

841 298 Seven Sacraments 127, 130, 144, 150–3, 159, 215 Sheffe, Thomas 579 Shelfanger (Norf.) 511 Shelton (Beds.) 411 Shene Palace (Surrey) 173, 187–8, 196 Shepherd, George 417, 424–6 Sheriff Hutton (Yorks.) 165 Shipton-under-Wychwood (Oxon.) 148 Shirley, Thomas and Robert 186 Shobdon (Herefs.) 462 Shurland, Sir Robert de 658–9, 680 Siferwas, John 97 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 667, 681 Skelton (Yorks.) 532 Skevington, Thomas, bishop of Bangor 272 Smarden (Kent) 613 Snailwell (Cambs.) iii, 146–7, 216–29 Soest (Germany), Sta Maria zur Wiese 132, 158; St Walpurgis 530 Southill, Henry and Anna 443–4 Speculum Humanae Salvationis 389, 391, 394–5 Spencer, Sir John 205 Spycer, John and Alice 807, 812 Stambourne (Essex) 611, 624, 626, 628 Stamford (Lincs.), All Saints 430; Browne’s Hospital 430–33, 444– 51; St George’s 356, 445, 455; St John the Baptist’s 356, 445, 448; St Martin’s 445 Stanford on Avon (Northants.) 60–1, 64–84, 156, 206, 214–5 Stapledon, Sir Richard 660–1 Stapledon, Walter, bishop of Exeter 660

842 Staplehurst (Kent) 552 Starup (Germany) 233 Stathum, Sir Thomas 103, 147 Staverne, Henry 194 Staverton (Devon) 533 Stewkley (Bucks.) 523, 547, 552, 556 Stockbury (Kent) 299 Stockerston (Leics.) 434, 446, 448 Stodmarsh (Kent) 299 Stoke-by-Nayland (Suff.) 727, 760 Stoke Canon (Devon) 533 Stoke Charity (Hants.) 534 Stoke Dry (Leics.) 534 Stone, Lawrence 8–10, 21–2 Stotfold (Beds.) 409, 413 Stothard, C. A. 658–9 Stowe (Bucks.) 204, 455, 462 Stowting (Kent) 547 Strasbourg 47, 231 Stratford on Avon (Warwicks.), Holy Cross Guild Chapel 149, 152, 154, 156 Strawberry Hill, Twickenham 52, 57, 399, 453–6, 460–5 Street, G. E. 466–7 Stukeley, William 445, 455 Sudbury (Suff.) 603 Suffield (Norf.) 603 Suffolk, Frances Duchess of 735 Sulgrave Manor (Northants.) 463 Survey of Illuminated Manuscripts in the British Isles 15 Suso, Henry 558 Sutton, Edward, Lord Dudley 730 Sutton-at-Hone (Kent) 576 Sutton Valence (Kent) 503–4 Swanbourne (Bucks.) 149, 154 Symondes, Simon 192–3 Symonds, Richard 281 Tale of Beryn 51, 128 Tables 125–34, 145, 153, 158, 729

Tame, John and Sir Edmund 99, 392 Tate, Robert 99 Tattershall collegiate church (Lincs.) 91, 102, 134, 153, 163, 178, 186, 196, 347, 394, 396, 444, 446, 449–51, 685 Taverham (Norf.) 145 Te Deum 145, 153, 342–3 terracotta 756 Terrington (Norf.) 610 Tewkesbury Abbey (Glos.) 318; Richard Beauchamp Earl of Worcester monument 716; tomb of Isabel Despencer 719 Textiles 90, 100, 103, 150, 400, 562, 578, 774 Texts 123–60 Thame (Oxon.) 558–60, 574–5, 582 Thanington (Kent) 547, 556 Thenford (Northants.) 172 Theophilus 163 Thetford Priory (Norf.) 724–64 Thompson, William 166 Thorney Abbey (City of Peterborough) 445 Thornham Parva (Suff.) retable 494, 502 Thorning (Denmark) 562 Thornton (Leics.) 77, 80 Thornton, John 31, 76, 84, 184, 187, 189, 193 Tickhill (Yorks.) 755 Tilsworth (Beds.) 559–60, 562 Tintern Abbey (Wales) 258 Toddington (Beds.) 403 Toft (Cambs.) 612, 625, 627 Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio (USA) 284 tombs — see Monuments, funerary Torrigiano, Pietro 89, 97, 397, 633, 734 Towcester (Northants.) 611, 630

INDEX

Trailly, Sir Reginald 404 Tredington (Glos.) 307 Triumphkreuz — see Rood Tunstall, Cuthbert, bishop of London 638 Twickenham, Radnor House 455–6; for Strawberry Hill see under Strawberry Hill Twycross (Leics.) 466 Twygge, Richard 91, 184, 399 Typerton, Nicholas 494, 505 Uncumber, St — see under Wilgefortis, St Unton , Sir Thomas 755 Upper Hardres (Kent) 246, 548 Upper Winchendon (Bucks.) 531 Utynam, John 164 Vale Royal Abbey (Ches.) 255, 259 Valle Crucis (Wales) 258 Vergil, Polydore 400–1 vernacular 151–4 Verona, S. Zeno 529; Scaligeri monuments vidimus 166–7, 190–2 Vita et Visio et Finis Simplici Orm 234–5 Volto Santo 633–4, 637 Waddesdon (Bucks.) 148 Wadhurst (Sussex) 634, 640 Walberswick (Suff.) 611 Wall Painting 22, 123–4, 148–52, 154, 156–7, 160, 233–4, 290–1, 511, 526, 530–2, 534, 550, 558– 60, 563, 574–5, 581–2, 634, 684, 708, 755 Walpole, Horace 52, 399, 453–6, 460–2, 464 Walsham-le-Willows (Norf.) 148, 152 Walsingham (Norf.), pilgrimage

843 chapel of Our Lady 192–3, 372, 688 Walter le verrator 185 Waltham Abbey (Essex) 503 Walworth, John de 185, 198 Warden (Wardon) Abbey (Beds.) 251, 253, 260, 274, 276–9, 411 Warndon (Worcs.) 170 Warning against Idle Gossip 69, 156 Warning to Blasphemers 148, 152, 156 Warwick, Beauchamp Chapel 91, 100, 103–4, 145, 164, 187–8, 190, 196, 396, 447, 682–723 Wastell, John 729 Waterperry (Oxon.) 146 Waynflete, William, bishop of Winchester 98 Weeting (Norf.) 760 Weever, John 658, 729, 731, 801, 806 Wells Cathedral iii–iv, 10, 82, 83, 303–21 Wells-next-Sea (Norf.) 611, 626 Wenlock, Sir John, Lord Wenlock 403 Westhampnett (Sussex) 731 West Horsley (Surrey) 246 Westminster: Abbey 91, 166, 173, 184, 194, 255, 292, 299–301, 399; Aymer de Valence tomb 659, 666; Crouchback tomb 504, 666; Edward III tomb 709; Frances Duchess of Suffolk tomb 735; Henry V’s chantry 711; Henry VII’s Chapel 23, 35, 85, 97, 190, 215, 370–401, 608, 635, 637, 640, 649, 734; Jericho Parlour, 399; John of Eltham tomb 663; Retable 494, 502; Richard II and Anne tomb 686, 709; Rood 802; St Faith’s Chapel 502 Palace: 187–8, 195; Hall 106,

844 396–7, 399; St Stephen’s Chapel 79, 80, 83–4, 163–6, 169–70, 173–4, 178, 186, 197 St Margaret’s 193, 555, 755, 803–4 Whitehall Palace 191 Weston, Sir John 100 Westwell (Kent) 207, 233, 246, 290, 299 Wettingen Abbey (Switz.) 256 Weyden, Roger van der 487 Whaddon (Bucks.) 731 Whichford (Warwicks.) 307 Whimple (Devon) 612, 624 Whytchurch, William, abbot of Hailes 274 Wienhausen Abbey (Germany) 256–7 Wiggenhall (Norf.) 759 Wilberforce, Samuel, bishop of Oxford 468 Wilden (Beds.) 410, 413 Wilgefortis, St 632–53 William of Norwich, St 648, 650, 653 William of Worcester 258 Williams, Henry, vicar of Stanford on Avon (Northants.) 206, 214–5 Williamson, Francis 192 Wills (bequests) 146–7, 166, 186, 190, 200–29, 260, 323–4, 371, 373, 404, 506–8, 517, 519–22, 525, 547–9, 553–4, 556, 574, 576–7, 579–80, 584–5, 600–1, 603, 609–13, 626–9, 632, 634–7, 639–40, 650, 652, 666, 683–4, 687, 705, 710, 712, 715, 720, 728–9, 732, 793, 799–800, 802–5 Wilton (Wilts.) 466 Wilton Diptych 23, 91 Winchelsea (Sussex) 659 Winchelsey, Robert, archbishop of Canterbury 551 Winchester 231: Cathedral 283, 398,

755; College 186, 188–9, 198; New and Old Minsters 40 windows — see under glass, stained and painted Windsor, Castle 195; St George’s Chapel 15, 79, 85, 97, 98, 163–5, 178, 197–8, 395, 398, 585, 596, 598–601, 604, 607–8, 612, 614, 631 Wing (Bucks.) 248, 555–6 Winston, Charles 281–3, 300 Wintonia, Peter de, rector of North Crawley (Bucks.) 528, 532, 547–8, 555 Woburn Abbey (Beds.) 248–9 Wolsey, Thomas, Cardinal 191 Wodshawe, Thomas 91, 184 Woking (Surrey) 372 Wolborough (Devon) 603 Woodbridge (Suff.) 800–4 Wood Ditton (Cambs.) 560 Woodville, Elizabeth, queen of Edward IV 349, 366 Worcester Cathedral 83 Works of Mercy 127, 130, 134, 144, 152–3, 156–7, 159, 215, 224 Wormald, Francis 9 Worstead (Norf.) 635, 637, 640, 648–51, 653 Wrangle (Lincs.) 446 Wright, Richard 193, 196 Wriothesley, Thomas, Garter King of Arms 730–1 Wunschendorf (Germany) 232 Wyatt, James 466 Wyher Chapel (Switzerland) 126 Wymington (Beds.) 402 Wymondeswalde, John, of Peterborough 78, 449–51 Yarnton (Oxon.) 273 Yelvertoft (Northants.) 209

INDEX

York 83, 170, 177, 184–5: All Saints North Street 149, 152–4, 157; Glaziers 177, 184–6; Minster v– vi, 40, 47–9, 62–3, 71, 81, 91, 97, 115–8, 128, 145, 163–4, 169, 187, 189, 193, 195, 197, 247, 255, 273, 290, 292, 298– 300, 318, 350–1, 413, 608, 629–

845 30; Minster Library MS Add. 2, 119–120, 351–2; St Denys 255, 307; St Martin-le-Grand Coney Street 145; St Mary’s Abbey 529 York, House of 116–21, 322–69, 793–4 York, Margaret of 100