Arlingham, Gloucestershire

All about line

I’d planned to go over to Frampton-on-Severn, stroll along the enormous village green, and look at some favourite buildings. But as I approached the place I saw signs saying in large letters, ‘FRAMPTON VILLAGE FEAST – FUN FAIR’ and when I arrived the village green was full of roundabouts and dodgems ready for the big day. So I decided to push on to Arlingham, a village set deep in the River Severn’s most dramatic loop, and look at the church, which until now I’d not managed to get inside.

When I got there I found the church locked, but a telephone number on a noticeboard put me in touch with the key’s helpful custodian and I was soon inside. To me the most engaging of the many delightful things in the church were four panels of mid-14th century stained glass. Each panel shows a standing saint and the two in the photograph above* are St Mary and St John, both set against a rich red background within ornate white architectural frames. Both saints, especially John, display the slightly sinuous form of the body typical of the period: his head is tilted to the left, his upper body slopes slightly to the right, his abdomen is straighter, and one foot points to the right. This is not quite the stylised S-shape of some 14th-century figures, but definitely tends that way.

However, the feature of the figure drawing that particularly struck me was the depiction of John’s right-pointing foot and Mary’s hands. The foot has exaggeratedly long toes, unrealistic in their proportions but so carefully enough drawn that each toe has its nail delineated. Mary’s hands likewise have very long fingers and they are drawn with one continuous line to produce the effect of interlocked digits. I like this carefully executed but rather eccentric effect, as I do the other linear details, the face, the headdress, and the architectural adornments – crockets and finials.

And in this window there’s a lovely bonus. High up in the quatrefoil that fills the top of the window is a tiny but beautifully formed image of St Catherine, with her wheel (see my second photograph). This little portrait has more interesting line work, including the face (with its somewhat scornful glance at the instrument or torture), the patterns, and another long-fingered hand, holding the wheel. How pleased I was that my avoidance of preparations for the fun fair and feast and had led me to a small feast for the eye in these windows at Arlijngham.

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* Please click the photograph to see the details more clearly.

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.