Huish Episcopi, Somerset

 

With my best wishes

Casting around for something seasonal to post, I found this picture in my files. I’ve actually posted it before, but so long ago that I doubt anyone reading this now will remember it from back then. It’s a stained glass window designed by Edward Burne-Jones and made in the workshop of William Morris and it shows the Nativity scene in the stable at Bethlehem. As well as being a prominent member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Burne-Jones was also a founder member of Morris’s firm and the window is one of many wonderful examples of their bringing together of art, craft and design.

The host of angels, crowding beneath the roof of the stable and into the foreground, focus their gaze on Mary and Jesus. Mary is recumbent, as she often is in ancient images of the scene, and so she and the child form a long centre band across the window, with angels above and below. On the left-hand side of the picture, the Magi wait to present their gifts. I like everything about this window, from the colours and the composition to the tenderness with which the mother holds her baby and the way in which the heads of the figures in the side panels lean in towards the holy family. I hope you like it too.

Have a happy Christmas and may the new year bring peace, not least to the part of the world where this scene took place.

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Note You may be able to see a little more detail if you click on the photograph.

Huish Episcopi, Somerset

Foiled again

The quatrefoil. A shape in the form of a simple stylized four-leaf clover, flattened. It’s everywhere: Gothic churches, public buildings, doorways, fabric patterns. It appears over hundreds of years, in many different cultures, in diverse contexts. It can be part of window tracery, a frame for a sculpture, a decorative motif on a wall. It’s on modern jewellery and on Louis Vuitton bags too.

It’s often made out of stone, but it’s harder to carve than a simple square or a circle or a diamond. So it’s most often used on highly ornate, high status buildings. It probably originated in Islamic art but it’s most familiar in Gothic tracery and ornament. So you’ll find it on the great French cathedrals, and on the Doge’s Palace in Venice. And on English medieval churches and Gothic revival buildings of all kinds. One of the first blog posts I ever did was about a 19th-century building in Manchester that’s in the Venetian Gothic style and has quatrefoils all over it. Now here’s an example from a medieval church at Huish Episcopi, Somerset.

My photograph shows quatrefoils used as a decorative motif on the tower of the church. I could no doubt have chosen other towers in this region of stunning towers that use this pattern, but Huish Episcopi is one of the most ornate and beautiful of all the great Somerset church towers and quatrefoils are used lavishly on it – in the horizontals bands that mark the storeys, in a vertical arrangement in the window-like openings that allow the sound of the bells to carry, in the glorious ornate openwork parapet right at the top.

One key reason why the quatrefoil succeeds as a design motif is that it manages to combine the idea of a natural form (it looks like leaves or a flower) with a very precise, reproducible geometry. In other words it’s an abstract pattern that makes us think of nature. In Gothic, the geometry of such patterns is ramified, so that there can be shapes with many different numbers of ‘foils’: trefoils with three lobes, cinquefoils with five, sexfoils with six, and so on. Medieval Christian master masons no doubt saw symbolism in these numbers. If trefoils suggest the Holy Trinity, quatrefoils perhaps remind us of the four Evangelists.

A carver at Huish Episcopi also had another idea: that the quatrefoil could accommodate the shape of Christ on the Cross. As so often in medieval architecture, high seriousness and visual facility are united.

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There’s more about the quatrefoil in an episode of the marvellous 99% Invisible, the tiny but constantly entertaining and informative radio show about design. Presenter-producers Roman Mars and Avery Trufelman discuss the quatrefoil here.

Isle Abbots, Somerset

God and the details

This is another of the wonderful late-medieval Somerset towers, a cousin of the one I recently described at Huish Episcopi, and it is one of my favourites. It’s tucked away at one end of a village among winding, high-hedged lanes, from which the visitor can occasionally glimpse its openwork parapet and pinnacles above the trees. Closer to, the tower reveals itself as an exemplar of the 15th-century Perpendicular Gothic style – a kind of architecture unique to England, characterized by a strong emphasis on verticals. The windows and bell openings, with their strong uprights, are typical of Perpendicular Gothic, as is the door, with its slightly flattened arch.

The glorious thing about this tower – apart from its fine proportions and its village setting – is that so much of its decoration is intact. Towers like this were often adorned with statues of saints, but these were mostly removed by Protestant iconoclasts of the 17th century, who saw such works of art not as the icons of piety that they originally were but as ‘graven images’ that were apt to distract the faithful from the word of God. As a result, empty niches are all that usually remain to remind us how beautifully decorated late-medieval churches were, and how these churches, with their statues, stained glass, and wall paintings depicting Biblical scenes, saints, bishops, and so on, were intended to symbolize the entire community of the faithful.


But at Isle Abbots the iconoclasts only reached the lower statues. Maybe they didn’t bring a long enough ladder. Maybe the locals did not take kindly to their church being defaced. Who knows? Whatever the reason, on the upper levels of the tower such figures as St Catherine (above) remain. She is shown with two of her symbols, the wheel, on which her persecutors tried to kill her, and the sword, by which she finally died. Although the stone is worn, one can also make out the saint’s cascading tresses and the drapery of her clothes. The surrounding carving – the supporting angel and the ornate canopy above the saint’s head – survive too, to remind us that for medieval masons as for later architects, God was indeed in the details.

Huish Episcopi, Somerset

Season's greetings

The more medieval parish churches I visit, the more I’m struck by the way their architecture and decoration varies form region to region. Often this is a matter of building materials, but just as frequently it’s a question of some local preference for a specific kind of feature or visual effect. And sometimes, this preference produces work of such quality that it stands out from the crowd – the graceful stone spires of Northamptonshire, the extraordinary decorative carving of the small Romanesque churches of Herefordshire, the woodwork – screens, font covers, angel-crowded roofs – of East Anglia are all memorable examples. So are the wonderful late-medieval towers of Somerset, of which Huish Episcopi is one of my favourite examples.

These tall and elaborate towers, built in the 15th century, dominate town centres and sometimes surprisingly small villages. They mostly follow a similar pattern, on which the masons played subtle variations. There is a large window above the doorway; above that, storeys are separated by bands of carving, and the upper levels have openings that look like windows but contain pierced stonework to allow the sound of the bells to carry. There are sometimes niches for statues. The tower is crowned with a lace-like openwork parapet and slender pinnacles. The tower at Huish Episcopi has all these features, arranged in a beautiful balance, so that we look up in admiration. The 100-foot tower is rather big for the church it crowns, but, no matter, it takes the breath away.


The interior of this church has one treasure from a later era that also stops visitors in their tracks. This is the stained-glass window of the Nativity, designed by Edward Burne-Jones and produced in the workshop of William Morris. Crowded round with onlooking and music-making angels, Mary reclines on the straw of the stable, cradling the infant Jesus in her arms. The Magi wait on the left to present their gifts. It’s an unusual composition, dominated by the pale robes and pinkish wings of the host of angels, topped by the stable roof and the hint of a starry sky, and the elongated figures are very much of their time. If the recumbent Mary seems odd to our eyes, she has a long pedigree: there are examples of this posture in Nativity scenes in medieval stained glass in Chartres and Cologne, worthy sources of inspiration for a window in this noble building crowned with its wonderful tower.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the blog this year. Season’s greetings to you all.

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Note: A commenter has pointed out that the Mary is often portrayed in a recumbent posture in Byzantine art. There are a couple of examples here.