Dinton, Buckinghamshire

Advice to the wise

To go with the pair of tympana that have caught my eye during recent church visits, here’s another tympanum, this time from my archives. It is both stunning and very unusual.

The doorway itself is another showy late-Norman (12th-century) piece of design, complete with an outer row of billet mouldings (the repeating raised rectangles), a band of chevrons, a plain roll moulding, and, innermost, around the tympanum itself, a lovely bit of interlace that is carved in quite low relief. The ornament continues lower down, too – the capitals of the shafts on either side of the door are just visible at the bottom of my photograph.

The tympanum shows two monsters that have lion-like manes and dog-like heads but each beast has only two legs and their bodies taper into their tails. They are eating fruit from a tree which may be a tree of life. Below on the lintel is another beast – this time winged, to make it look more dragon-like. It’s said to be the dragon attempting to devour St Michael, who defends himself with a cross.

Between the tympanum carving and the lintel is an inscription in Latin, which is a very rare thing indeed to see in a Norman doorway on a parish church. It’s not easy to read, because its capital letters are run together without word spaces and the second line is placed on the edge of the lintel, but it seems to go: ‘Praemia pro meritis si qis despet habenda Audiat hic preepta sibique sit retinenda’ and this has been translated as ‘If anyone despairs of having rewards for his merits, Let this man hear the advice and let it be retained by him.’  Which is hardly specific, but suggests, I suppose, that it would be a good idea to listen to what you’re told in church – an interesting emphasis on the teachings of the church at a time when there was a greater stress on liturgy and the sacraments than on sermonizing.

Dinton, Buckinghamshire

With restraint, or, Odd things in churches (2)

A set of stocks does seem an odd thing to find in a church, but it's less odd if viewed in a historical perspective. In the 16th century, the vestry, a committee of parishioners chaired by the church's incumbent, was becoming the key body in parish government. Its responsibilities embraced civil as well as ecclesiastical affairs and included keeping the peace, dealing with vagrants, mending roads, and destroying vermin. These important roles of the vestry continued until Parish Councils were introduced in the late-19th century. Maintaining instruments of punishment, such as stocks and whipping posts, was therefore part of the work of the vestry, and sometimes stocks were set up by the churchyard wall. A few have found their way into the church as historical curiosities, like this set in Dinton, which is kept in the church porch. 

Malefactors – drunks, rowdies, vagrants, and scolds – were often put in the stocks for a while, the mixture of shame, inconvenience, and discomfort being a punishment and a way of detaining people until they calmed down, or sobered up. Perhaps the main punishment was that, stuck in the stocks with feet clasped firmly, a person was brought down a peg or two and was, indeed, a laughing stock.

There's one other curious thing about these stocks, though. There are five holes, and an odd number of holes doesn't seem to go with the usual human complement of two feet. The town where I live also has an old set of stocks with an odd number of holes and the tradition here is that they were made that way because a one-legged man was among the local wild bunch who often got into trouble. I don't know how true this is. Maybe having a single foot in the stocks was considered restraint enough: you certainly wouldn't be walking anywhere with one foot stuck in there. But an uneven number of holes certainly makes these stocks in the porch of Dinton church numerically, as well as ecclesiastically, odd.

Dinton, Buckinghamshire

Eyecatcher

Someone recently asked, ‘How do you find your buildings?’ Well, sometimes they’re structures I’ve known about for years, often I just stumble upon them as I travel around. But now and then, I get a hint from a map. Maps, especially Ordnance Survey maps, offer all kinds of hints about the buildings that are dotted all over the countryside, and this is a subject I hope to come back to. Meanwhile, here is one example.

Between Thame and Aylesbury I spotted the abbreviation ‘Cas’ on a map. I knew of no medieval castle thereabouts, so I made my way along the A418 to have a look. What I found was ‘Dinton Castle’, an 18th-century eyecatcher, now ruined and shielded by trees. It was built in 1769 for Sir John Van Hattam and designed to be visible from his house in the village, over on the other side of the main road. It’s in typical Gothick sham castle mode – an octagonal plan with two round side towers, and ogee-topped windows – designed to impress passing riders and carriage-travellers.

The building is in a terrible state, and obviously has been so for a long time – in the 1960 edition of Pevsner it is described as ‘now in decay’, while the 1981 Shell Guide to Bucks refers to its ‘ruinous condition’. But there are plans to restore it, so it may yet be saved to make a still more dramatic impression on those who pass by on the way from Thame to Aylesbury. I certainly hope so.