Sheffield

Marks of quality

To Sheffield, where I gave a talk and spent a day or so admiring the architecture. Having little time, I restricted myself to the city centre and marvelled at the variety –  of stone and brick, industrial and commercial, old and new, filigree and brutalist. One of the highlights for me were a number of architectural sculptures by the Tory family, who were active in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. First there was Frank Tory, who got his training at Lambeth College of Art before coming to Sheffield to produce carvings for the corn exchange (no longer standing). As well as doing a range of architectural carving he taught at the Sheffield College of Art and among his pupils were his twin sons Alfred Herbert and William Frank.

Here’s a bit of Frank’s work, on Parade Chambers, an 1883 building for Pawson and Brailsford, a company of printers and stationers. The architects, M E Hadfield and Sons, gave his client an impressive Tudor style building in brick with stone dressings, with offices on the upper floors, shops below. It’s a memorable building, with ornate gables, turrets, oriels, and tall chimneys, but what sets it apart for me is the carving on the stonework. The panel in my photograph is in a window above the doorway and features heads of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Caxton within wreaths of leaves.

With this panel Pawson and Brailsford put themselves firmly in the tradition of great English printers – Caxton was thought to have introduced printing to England and his first known book was an edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. This was not an unusual line for printers to take – I’ve noticed a printer doing a similar thing in Bristol. However, Edward Everard, the Bristolian printer, also linked himself with a great modern master, William Morris, and chose the latest Art Nouveau style for the decoration of his building. This Sheffield firm by contrast emphasised tradition in both architecture and decorative subject matter and their use of first-class architectural sculptors also says something about their commitment to quality.

Burford, Oxfordshire

Fragments

I sometimes feel sorry for archaeologists. They can spend months digging for a couple of potsherds and a post hole, and then face the task of fitting this sparse and fragmentary evidence into some kind of pattern. I know that archaeology is about much more than digging. But even so, when it comes to material evidence, architectural historians have it better: enormous structures that can be read like books, even when there is no documentary evidence, for literal reading, to back up the stories told by the stones.

But sometimes it's not so simple. Medieval buildings can be as complex and enigmatic as any excavation. And as for their decoration – battered by time, alteration, and iconoclasm, it can be as challenging to reconstruct as buried foundations or shattered pottery. Medieval stained glass is a case in point. So much of it has gone, thanks to neglect and decay and the activities of image-smashing vandals. In many churches, there are just a few fragments of ancient glazing, like this one in a window in the large and beautiful medieval church at Burford.

So what can we make of this tantalising panel of medieval stained-glass bits and pieces? Staring at the central figure, I was struck by the hat. Wasn't that a pilgrim's hat? Yes, or more specifically, it's the hat of St James the Greater, with his cockle-shell badge, the disciple of Jesus who, having ended up in Spain made medieval Compostela the greatest place of pilgrimage after Rome itself. The bearded head of St James must have figured in many medieval windows, and here just his head has survived. Perhaps that's the top end of his staff, just to the right of his head.

Most of the other fragments on either side of St James and immediately above him are images of bits of architecture – niches, pinnacles, and spires. Their ornate crocketed tops mark them as late-medieval, and they're typical of the use of architectural motifs in so much late-medieval art. W R Lethaby, the great Arts and Crafts architect, writer, and teacher, expressed this use of architectural forms charmingly in his book Medieval Art:

The folk had fallen in love with building, and loved that their goldsmiths' work, and ivories, their seals, and even the pierced patterns of their shoes should be like little buildings, little tabernacles, little 'Paul's windows'.

'Paul's windows' refers to the rose windows in Old St Paul's Cathedral, London, and the reference to the pierced patterns of shoes recalls a description of a snappy dresser in Chaucer's Miller's Tale, 'With Paule's windows carven on his shoes'. Reliquaries, boxes, furniture, yes, even shoes, were made to look like little buildings in the 15th century. And figures in churches, whether carved in three dimensions or painted in windows, were frequently set in a context of decorative architectural detail. How wonderful that some of this detail should have survived here, flanking the venerable, curly-bearded, beady-eyed face of St James, the saint who inspired men to go on pilgrimages.

Ewelme, Oxfordshire

Stepping westwards

Alice de la Pole of Ewelme was the grand-daughter of the poet Chaucer and the wife of William de la Pole, who was made Duke of Suffolk in 1448 for his loyalty to the House of Lancaster. It was said that the couple, when not at court or at the de la Pole estate in Suffolk, lived much at Alice’s home village, bringing with them East Anglian retainers whose descendants still live in the area. They probably brought Suffolk craftsmen with them too, because when they rebuilt the church in the 1430s in a rich mixture of flint, stone, and brick, an East Anglian layout was adopted, with wooden screens rather than masonry used to divide the various parts of the building's interior.

One of the treasures of Ewelme church is a font cover built like a staggering spire of wooden tracery. This too looks just like an import from East Anglia, where there are a number of such tall and intricate covers, connected like this one to a pulley, so that they may be raised when the font is needed for a baptism.



In the year William was made Duke, the couple established a chantry, a foundation under which two priests and thirteen poor men were to pray for their souls and celebrate Mass at Ewelme. The priests and poor men were accommodated in an almshouse that William and Alice built near the church and the beautiful south-east chapel of the church was set aside as the place where the cycle of Masses and prayers could be said.

Alice's tomb, now sited in a space between this chapel and the chancel of the church, was installed just before she died in 1475/76. It is one of the most impressive of all 15th-century tombs, with a lifelike alabaster effigy of the deceased, a cadaver beneath (staring at a picture of the Annunciation), a host of angels above, and a row of standing figures – many still with their original painted colour.

Those traces of colour, making vibrant this reminder of mortality, was just one thing that made this building special when I visited it the other day. As the flag flew in the brisk breeze at the back end of April (the Chaucerian month) and the sun blazed through the windows, a group of ringers came to put the bells through their paces, adding music to colour to bring the place sonorously alive.