To Malvern, to browse in the secondhand bookshops, to look around, and to pay a visit to the Priory. It’s a terrific building with a tower resembling the one at Gloucester cathedral, some outstanding stained glass (both medieval and recent), and a superb collection of medieval tiles. The examples in my photograph began life as floor tiles in the 15th century, but during restoration work in the 19th century they were taken off the floor and mounted on the wall that separates the sanctuary from the ambulatory. This has protected them from further wear and makes them very easy to see and admire.
The selection in the photograph shows the delicacy of the designs that the makers (who apparently were based on site and also supplied tiles to other churches, including Gloucester cathedral) could achieve by combining red and buff clay. Many of the patterns contain flower or leaf motifs arranged in quatrefoil frames or in circles subdivided with designs that are similar to medieval window tracery. Yet more like tracery is an abstract design (the second tile in the top row, and another in the third row) that is reminiscent of a rose window. Other tiles bear inscriptions or heraldry. These were in a sense humble objects, designed to be walked on every day, but their sophisticated decoration marks them out as high-status items, of the sort you’d seen mainly in large churches and the houses of the royal family or aristocracy. Monasteries, according to tile expert Hans van Lemmen,* were some of the best customers of the medieval tile-makers.
The influence of these craftsmen lived on for centuries. When Malvern Priory was being restored in the 19th century, the tile manufacturer Maw & Co were commissioned to make copies of some of the church’s ancient tiles, so that part of the building could be paved as it had been 400 years before. Contemporary tile companies, such as Craven Dunhill use the same technique of combining colours to make tiles today.
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*See Hans van Lemmen, Medieval Tiles (Shire, 2004)
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