Hereford

Wooden leg, or, Odd things in churches (19)

How odd to find the effigy of a medieval leg leaning against one of the piers in the aisle of Hereford cathedral. It’s the leg of Sir Richard Pembridge, a knight from the county, who died in 1375 having fought at the battles of Crecy and Poitiers. He was made a Knight of the Garter by Edward III and his tomb, which was made of alabaster, included his garter insignia on the left leg, in the correct position; there was, in accordance with the custom of the order, no garter on the right leg.

During the 17th century the effigy’s right leg was damaged* and a replacement leg, made out of wood, was made and fitted to the monument. However, this replacement was carved with a garter. During the 19th century, the Archdeacon of Hereford, Lord Saye and Sele, had a new leg made in the correct material, alabaster, and without the garter. This replaced the wooden leg, putting everything right with the monument.

At this point, the wooden leg was removed and passed into private hands until, much later, its owner gave it back to the cathedral, where it was displayed, standing very gamely by the pier and indeed securely attached to it, lest it wander from its home once more. Here it remains, to interest visitors and to tell this curious story of a mistake rectified. You really never know what you are going to find in churches and cathedrals.

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* This may have been something to do with the Civil War.

Ludlow, Shropshire

 

Mermaids revisited

One morning recently the Resident Wise Woman and I, finding ourselves in the middle of nowhere in northern Herefordshire, realised we were not far from Ludlow. Lunchtime was looming so we decided to make our way there for refreshment. It was a no-brainer to pay a visit to St Laurence’s church, one of the largest and best in the country bordering Wales, while we were there. We’d visited this church before, but we knew there was more than enough there to make another visit rewarding.

I headed for the chancel, where the choir stalls have a lovely set of misericords, those seats that tip up to provide a ledge to lean on during the long periods of standing required during the medieval liturgy. Beneath the seats, invisible when they’re in the ‘down’ position, are delightful carvings, many of which are designed to make a moral point in an amusing or entertaining way. One of my favourites is a carving of a mermaid, the subject of my previous post about church graffiti.*

The Ludlow mermaid is in generally excellent condition. (Click on the picture to see her more clearly.) Nearly all the standard features of a medieval mermaid are intact – her long hair, exposed breasts, scaly, fishy tail, and the mirror she holds in her right hand. Only her left arm has gone, together with what it held, which would have been a comb. The mirror, though, is enough to remind the viewer that in the Middle Agers the mermaid was a symbol of vanity, and of the way she was said to use her physical attraction to lure men into the sea. A moral lesson in a visual form, carved with care and vigour – those tresses, those scales.

This misericord is also a reminder of the fascination of the sea. The mermaid was not the only monster to lurk there – think gigantic krakens ‘battening on huge sea-worms’,† sea-serpents, sirens, all threatening, rumoured presences, coming to get the unwary sailor or preying on one another, as Shakespeare said that monsters of the deep were wont to do.§ The pair of supporting carvings on either side of the Ludlow mermaid are chunky toothed fish who look as if they’d willingly chew on a mariner’s foot. ‘Stay away from the fishes’ realm,’ they seem to say. Yet their fascination, and that of the mermaid, endures.

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* On such graffiti, see also Matthew Champion, Medieval Graffiti: The Lost Voices of England’s Churches (Ebury Press, 2015)

† See Tennyson’s poem, ‘The Kraken’ (‘There he hath lain for ages, and will lie | Battening upon huge sea worms in his sleep…’)

§ King Lear, Act IV, Scene ii (‘Humanity must perforce prey on itself, | Like monsters of the deep.’)

Churchdown, Gloucestershire

 

Who did that?

Many people see graffiti as a modern phenomenon. It’s the young, you’ll hear, who do it – they have too much time on their hands, they have no respect, they should do something useful, and so on. Against that, others will put forward the graffiti of artists such as Banksy, who make social and political points by painting on buildings – this is graffiti that means something, that makes important points. ‘It’s art,’ people will say. ‘It’s fine…I agree with it…provided it’s not “enhancing” my house’...although some, valuing the work of Banksy (aesthetically, or financially, or both) welcome the artist’s interventions on their property.

But graffiti has been with us for a long time. The Romans had it, it exists in medieval churches. People who study medieval buildings are finding more and more ancient graffiti, and treating it seriously for what it might tell us about the interests of medieval and later people, and their religious beliefs. The marks made by scraping shallow lines on ancient stone can be hard to see, but they have their fascination. There’s an excellent book on the subject, Medieval Graffiti by Matthew Champion (see my review of it, here), and there are some good websites about the subject too.

In this post I want to give just one example of a piece of graffiti in a church not many miles from where I live. This is St Bartholomew’s, Churchdown, a church that’s often locked, but volunteers currently open it on Saturday afternoons in summer. There are quite a few graffiti marks around the doorway in the north porch, and one of the most remarkable depicts a mermaid. The image is indistinct, but not hard to make out once you get your eye in. I have increased the contrast in my photograph so that some of the details are a little clearer. If you click on the image to enlarge it, you may be able to make out the mermaid’s head and one eye, her strands of sticking-out hair, a narrow neck, an upper body in which one breast is still clearly visible, and a scaly tail that narrows and curves away to the left, getting less distinct at the end. As our eyes follow the mermaid’s stick-arms, we see that she holds a square mirror in one hand and a comb with two rows of teeth in the other.

Churchdown is nowhere near the sea, although not far from the inland port of Gloucester. But you don’t need to live near the sea to have heard about mermaids. Tales of such creatures were known widely in the Middle Ages and later. Medieval mermaids were generally portrayed with long hair and a mirror and comb. In folklore they were symbols of vanity, pride and the perils of lust, and woe betide any man who fell in love with a mermaid and pursued her. He’d most likely be captured and come to a watery death. There are quite a few ‘official’ images of mermaids in churches – in wall paintings, for example, and on bench ends. Here someone long ago – who knows who? – has added their own.

Kirkburn, East Yorkshire

 

Beasts, chevrons, and scrolls

I apologise to any readers who have been frustrated at my previous post, which illustrates a notable Norman church but discusses the flowers in the churchyard. If that’s a little perverse for an architecture blog, I’d argue that a building’s context is often as important as the building itself. However, as St Mary’s, Kirkburn, is a Norman churches with some memorable carvings, I’m not going to let it pass without a few words, and a couple of pictures, of its memorable entrance.

This is the south doorway of the church, and it’s a star example of the kind of entrance that the builders and sculptors of 12th century England liked to produce when they had the time and money to do so. The overall design will be familiar to many people who like to visit old churches: a semi-circular opening featuring several more or less concentric bands of decoration, known as orders because they sit on a series of miniature columns (known in the business as shafts). The inner orders are recessed, leading the eye towards the door and the interior of the church. The capitals at the heads of the shafts and carved with scrolls, which give a distant hint of the Roman Ionic or Corinthian, reminding us that the style of architecture in Britain known as Norman is also termed Romanesque.

Kirkburn’s south doorway has three orders, the inner one decorated with chevron ornament, the second also of chevrons, with some carved decoration on each triangular outer surface, and the third of beakheads. There’s a fourth, outermost, band that has no shafts supporting it. This is known as the label and this one is unusual in that it bears quite striking figurative carving – labels are often quite plain.

My second photograph shows the central part of each ornamental band, so that you can see them in detail. The first, innermost, band has multiple rows of  finely cut chevrons, both on the front face of the arch and the underside. This is high quality work by someone at home with mallet and chisel – and it’s a standard pattern of this period so you’d expect it to be done competently. Before the next order comes a band of stones carved with mostly abstract patterns (chevrons, squares, scrolls and one crudely cut head); this band tapers towards the sides, to accommodate the difference in curvature between the lower order (segmental, to fit the door) and the upper orders (semicircular). The carving here is much less assured, almost as if it had been left blank and a less skilled mason had later decided to decorate it.

The next order up is again made of chevrons, but exceptional ones because there are carved motifs on the upper surfaces. These motifs range from stylised stars, leaves and spirals to beasts – on the far left there’s what looks to be a serpent. Next comes the outer order of beakheads, crisply carved, with the usual features of these creatures: pointed beaks and furrowed brows. With both these orders, we are back to more confident work.

Finally, there are the carved stones of the outer band or label. It’s mostly difficult for the 21st-century eye to identify the subjects of these. The excellent website of The Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland (CRSBI) tries hard.* This site is compiled by people who are used to looking at and studying Romanesque sculpture, so if their conclusions are surprising, they’re at least based on knowledge of the subject that spreads broad and goes deep. From left to right they identify the subjects in the close-up picture as: a sheep; two serpents with foliage sprays in their mouths; two lions; a horse; a woman holding a torch (sideways on to fit the stone); a dragon among stars; three birds with their eggs; and two animals with foliate tails and tongues.

If one could be sure of the animal identification, one could no doubt draw conclusions about the moral or spiritual lessons to be drawn from the creatures illustrated. But I hold back from trying to do this when the ‘sheep’ is so elongated and stylised, when the ‘lions’ have tufted tails but not a lot else lionish about them, and when some animals are not identified at all. I prefer to marvel at the skill of the carvers (even work we might describe as ‘crude’† is graphic and effective), at the good state of preservation (apart from the odd chipped beak) and the strong sense of design. There’s plenty here to scratch one’s head about, but much to give pleasure too.

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* I cannot stress enough what a useful resource this site is. It’s here.

† If, looking at the ‘sheep’, you’re tempted to say that a child could have done it, remember Picasso’s remark when accused of a similar lack of sophistication: ‘Once I drew like Raphael, but it has taken me a whole lifetime to draw like children.’ There are various variations on this remark of Picasso’s online, but the one I give is the one I believe to be most accurate. 

Kirkburn, East Yorkshire

Green thoughts

Churchyards. I’ve been in a lot of them in my time and mostly I can concur with the narrator of Samuel Beckett’s First Love, ‘Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards, I take the air there willingly, perhaps more willingly than elsewhere, when take the air I must.’ I’ve known churchyards where grass grew knee-high, and others mown to within a millimetre of their lives; churchyards in Leicestershire full of elegantly cut slate gravestones and ones in the Cotswolds populated by tombs made of glowing oolitic limestone; I’ve been in churchyards so deserted and unkempt that my only company was a furtive rat scuttling into a crack in the side of a table tomb; I’ve been in a churchyard when sheep were grazing there and in another where a young man in gaiters and tweeds looked like a ghost from the 1920s as he swept leaves in the midge-haunted twilight. In all of these, save perhaps the one with the rat, I’ve taken the air willingly. There are many beautiful and engaging churchyards, and they spark our admiration in all kinds of different ways.

My photograph shows one that I admired very much. It’s at Kirkburn, East Yorkshire, near Driffield, north of Beverley. What I love about this place is that part of the churchyard has been set aside as a haven for wildflowers together with the insects and other animals that find food or shelter in such a place. It’s a part of God’s acre that contains old and often illegible stones, so not an area that many people will want to access – most visitors, I hope, will like me be happy to keep to the pathways. I’m sure most people will find heartwarming the sight of ox-eye daisies, knapweed, buttercups, and – yes! – a pyramidal orchid, among other things. Bees and other pollinators will be more happy still.

I didn’t realise when I was in Kirkburn, looking mostly at Norman architecture and carving, that it’s set in an area with a lot of intensive farming. This fact makes even this small bit of nature conservation more worthwhile still. CPRE North and East Yorkshire reports that species lists for the churchyard are growing, and remarks that Kirkburn’s was the only church they visited with a Pipistrelle dropping on the church door!† This is progress, although one hopes that the bats do not pose too many problems of their own in the context of the ancient church building. The approach wouldn’t work in every churchyard, but if just a few thousand of England’s 16,000 or so parish churches could set aside an area like this, what a benefit it would be to the environment.

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* Most of my churchyard blog posts have been about things (gravestones, buildings, walls) in churchyards, but for nature, see my picture of ox-eye daisies at Bradford-on-Avon; and for another way to enjoy churchyards, see my thoughts on a picnic (and other things) in Tixover.

† See their website here for a report on their church visits. It’s to the CPRE that I owe the information about local intensive farming.

Somerton, Oxfordshire

 

A moment of confusion

Standing in St James’s church, Somerton* recently, I was amazed, Why was this not more famous: a 14th-century reredos consisting of a depiction of the Last Supper, with intact figures of Jesus and the apostles in a row of niches. The architecture of the niches is exactly right and the carving has that element of wear that is testimony to the age of the piece. This is as rare as hens’ teeth, I said to myself. And the figures are characterful and ooze charm – Jesus sits with the head of the apostle he loved best (normally said to be St John the Evangelist) on his lap; one diner seems to be refusing a drink; another pours from a jug; yet another gesticulates, as if in conversation. The faces, some with curly hair and beards, are delightful. The story is that the reredos was removed from its place behind the altar at the time of the Reformation and hidden away. It was, say different accounts, reinstalled during a restoration of the church in 1822, or after another in the later-19th century.

And in the back of my mind there’s a nagging doubt. If something seems too good to be true, as they say, it probably is. Setting aside such normally authoritative sources as Pevsner and the listing description of the church, I do another Google search. This time I find a short piece on a website called The Antiquary. Here, the historian Dr Allan Barton gives a different story. That the figures, damaged beyond repair during the Reformation, was at some point restored. The restorer remade the faces and other details (handles, vessels, etc) using plaster of Paris attached to the surviving 14th-century stone (the arches, table, the bodies of the figures) by means of wooden dowels.

Barton does not give a source for his account, although it would no doubt be possible to tell the difference between stone and plaster on very close examination. But this version of events seems plausible. It would account for the style of the facial sculpture, which is rather more like Romanesque sculpture than 14th-century Gothic. And it would account for the good condition of the faces, which are surprisingly crisp for medieval survivors that had been removed, hidden and reinstalled.

There are problems with this kind of restoration. It is, of course, going against longstanding principles of historic buildings conservation to replace old work with new, and if damaged medieval carving was destroyed in the process, this would be cause for great regret. However, if the iconoclasts of the Reformation had hacked off whole faces and limbs, one’s attitude to a later sculptor adding new work would be more accepting. Even so, disguising the difference between old and new is also a problem. It should be clear what has been done and where the original ends and the repair begins. 

The usual 21st-century attitude to such items is to condemn them as fakes or forgeries. But we are where we are. Simple pleasure at what we are left with now is also a legitimate response.† It would be fascinating to know more, however. How does Barton know what material the additions are made of, and how they’re attached? Who modelled these faces and when, and was their intention to pull the wool over our eyes or just to renew something in their own way? What did the reredos look like in its damaged state? Oh to know more.

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* The Somerton in Oxfordshire; there are others.

† Albeit with questions about what if any medieval work was sacrificed during the restoration. 

Swinbrook, Oxfordshire

 

Shelved

About 13 years ago I did a post on this blog about some tombs in the churchyard at Swinbrook. a delightful village on the edge of the Cotswolds in Oxfordshire. I implied that I’d write another post about something inside the church, but I wasn’t very happy about my photographs of what I wanted to write about, so I put the post on hold…and then forgot my original intention. A few weeks back, I returned to Swinbrook, looked at the monuments to members of the Fettiplace (sometimes Fettisplace) family, and took some rather better, though far from perfect, photographs. The surprising tombs of this important landowning family deserve their long-awaited blog post. Here it is. 

They lie, says John Piper in his Shell Guide to Oxfordshire, ‘on slabs like proud sturgeon’. Most of us, though, look at the enormous monuments, which cover most of the north wall of the chancel, as sets of shelves, supported by columns and topped by canopies of an architectural magnificence that’s somewhat at odds with the humble surroundings. As I’ve remarked before, if there are relatively few English churches of the 16th and 17th centuries compared with the vasts numbers of medieval churches, architectural features on church monuments abound from the Tudor and Stuart periods, and these two grand memorials make use of the panoply of classical orders (Corinthian here), pediments (semicircular with heraldry) and other devices.

On the left as we look at the wall of the chancel, are the effigies of the earlier three generations of Fettiplaces: Sir Edmund (d.1613) at the top, then William (d.1562) and Alexander (d.1504). They look very similar and wear similar, but not identical, suits of armour. They are rather stiff and somewhat stylised figures and although they’re provided with stone cushions for the elbows on which they lean, this doesn’t seem to make them very comfortable. The architectural framework is impressive, but I remember that my instinct when I first saw them very m any years ago was to laugh. It was the combination of the shelves, the grand architecture, and the stiff but imposing figures that provoked this reaction I think. The sculptor is unknown, and authorities agonise over whether it was some local ‘primitive’ or the same craftsman who produced the Seymour monument at Berry Pomeroy in Devon, on which three figures recline in a very similar manner.

The second monument (above) is to another three male members of the same family, Sir Edmund (d.1686) and two Johns. The work here is more sophisticated. The faces are more individual, the bodies seem more naturally posed and more relaxed, and the stonework’s mix of pale and grey marble, together with gilding for the capitals and other details, is more confidently handled. This time, the work is signed, by William Byrd of Oxford. Byrd did many jobs for Oxford’s university and colleges, including the carving of the original emperors’ heads that surround the Sheldonian theatre, on which he would have worked with Sir Christopher Wren. No mere provincial he. The conjunction of these impressive sculptures with their less sophisticated neighbours made me smile this time rather than laugh, and itv was a smile of pleasure: I’m glad I returned.

Aston Somerville, Worcestershire

Looking more closely

I like to think I’m good at taking in a building when I visit it, at getting straight not just the overall architectural history§ but also the details – all those tombs and carvings and incidental oddities that fill my numerous blog posts on country churches. But when I found myself near Aston Somerville in Worcestershire and stopped to have a second look at the church, I found something I’d not noticed before. Aiming a long lens at the grotesques at the top of the church tower, I found the creature in my photograph. I say ‘creature’ because I’m not sure what it is – if those protrusions at the top are ears, then it’s not human, something that the muzzle-like face also suggests. Is it a bear? An ape?

But the species doesn’t particularly matter. What matters, of course, is the pose. This is what’s described in serious writing about this sort of thing as a ‘male exhibitionist carving’, the masculine equivalent of the Sheela na gig.* To modern eyes it’s odd, to say the least, to display this sort of sexually explicit imagery on a church. But anyone who has visited a lot of medieval churches will know that the grotesque is far from unusual in medieval church decoration. Dragons, monsters, foxes dressed as bishops, people showing off their private parts – it’s all there, whether we like it or not. Mostly, this kind of exhibitionist carving is outside the church, but there’s the occasional example inside, including one in a church roof in Hereford.†

Various reasons have been suggested for this sort of thing. To some, it’s a protection against evil spirits. To some, it’s a warning against lust. To yet others, exhibitionist carvings and other grotesques form a more general reminder of the wicked ways that threaten us when we allow ourselves to veer away from the protection of the church. There’s also undeniably a sense of humour here too – people could laugh at this sort of carving while also appreciating the moral message, just as monks could giggle at the lewd or humorous images in the margins of otherwise highly serious medieval manuscripts. People knew the difference between what was on the ‘margins’ of a building and what went on in the sacred spaces inside.¶

If there were lessons here for the original medieval users of the church, there are lessons today’s church-crawlers too. Look more closely, look up, take a pair of binoculars or a camera with a long lens on your travels. And if you’ve done all these things, revisit anyway, because everybody misses things first time around. You may be surprised at what you find.

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§ Well, fairly straight – unpicking the history of ancient buildings is rarely simple.

* See my post from back in 2009 on the famous Sheela na gig at Kilpeck. There are some interesting further remarks and interpretations in the comments to this old post too.

† This is a human figure and is now easy to see because a mezzanine floor, part of a church café, has been installed, brining the viewer closer to the roof.

¶ My go-to reference for medieval ‘marginal’ imagery is Michael Camille, Image on the Edge (Reaktion Books, 2019), which I have recommended before on this blog.

Dennington, Suffolk

 

One foot or two?

When you hear that a church is furnished with medieval benches, you wonder what to expect. They were often an extensive canvas for woodcarvers. Bench ends alone offered vast scope for a talented carver. In the past I have noticed on this blog a bagpiper in a Cornish church and a fox dressed as a bishop in Somerset. Here’s another unusual subject from the church at Dennington in Suffolk – a mythical creature called a sciapod.* The usual definition, drawn from classical sources such as the ancient Greek dramatist Aristophanes (in The Birds) and Pliny the Elder (in his Natural History) and medieval bestiaries, describes a human figure with a single leg ending in a very large foot. The creature is portrayed lying down and using its foot as a sun shade. Its name comes from the Greek ‘shadow-foot’.

All the depictions I’ve seen show a creature with a single leg and foot. A British example is the famous medieval map of the world (Mappa Mundi) in Hereford cathedral, where these single-legged humanoids are shown in India and in the far south of the inhabited world. However, looking closely at the Dennington sciapod he appears to have a pair of legs and feet, both of the same form. This seems to make him unorthodox, but we are in the world of myth and legend after all, so why should there not be variations in iconography?

What is such a weird beast doing in a church? There are interpretations that attempt to place sciapods in the context of arguments against sin – they are ‘deformed’ beings whose bodies show the results of sin. Other writers simply saw them as monsters that we should fear. St Augustine applied the criterion of rationality – if they were capable of rational thought, he believed, they were human, have a soul, and deserve to be treated as such. Whether they’re meant to remind us of the dangers of evil, or to point out that appearances can be deceptive, or to protect us from evil spirits, or whether they were valued mainly for amusement value, like the figures and creatures drawn in the margins of many medieval religious books, they warrant our notice, and their creators command our respect.†

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* I know of only one other example in a English church, although there may be others.

† For a good account of the marginal figures in medieval manuscripts and similar images, see Michael Camille, Image on the Edge (Reaktion Books, 2019).

Wilmcote, Warwickshire

 

Beauty of holiness

My interest provoked by hints in Pevsner that the church at Wilmcote might be eccentric or beautiful or possibly both, I crossed the road opposite Mary Arden’s Farm, walked back to the main street, and walked along the usefully named Church Road. There I found a small Gothic Revival church of c. 1840 designed by Harvey Eginton. The kind of Gothic chosen by the architect is Early English, the first phase of Gothic on these islands, sometimes chosen by early Victorians as representing the ‘purest’ form of the style with its simple lancet windows and plain but elegant deeply moulded arches.

On entering, though, it was clear that something unusual was up. This church is very highly decorated inside with wall paintings, lavishly supplied with statues of saints and of the Crucifixion, and altogether rather ornate – far from plain and simple, in fact. This was indeed one of the first churches to be built and decorated under the influence of the Tractarians, that group of clergymen and scholars (many originally based in Oxford and Cambridge), who believed that a church should be highly embellished, that the clergy should wear colourful robes, and that such ritual accompaniments as incense should be used. Worship in ‘the beauty of holiness’* was the aim, in sharp contrast to the plain style of the previous few generations. The person behind this aspect of St Andrew’s, Wilmcote was the Rev. Edward Bowes Knottesford Fortescue, a keen Tractarian who knew many of the movement’s leaders. However, it’s said that a later clergyman, the Rev. F W Doxat, may have been responsible for some parts of the decorative scheme.

The chancel glows in green and gold, its walls painted with stylised flowers and leaves. The decoration, if overwhelming, also does an excellent job of defining the chancel as the most sacred space. The nave is much darker, but when one’s eye adjusts, its possible to make out very different wall decoration: a series of paintings, mainly monochrome compositions showing saints, scenes from the life of Christ, and religious texts. Close examination reveals that these are actually done on panels that have been attached to the walls – in fact, they are on sheets of zinc, a material I don’t recall seeing used for church murals before. I’d been led to this church by the description in Pevsner’s Warwickshire volume in the Buildings of England series, and I’m indebted to the book for the information it contains. But it did not prepare me for the amazement I experienced inside. Such surprises are what keep me looking – and recording here what I find.

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* This phrase is a rewording of the verse in Acts 2:4, describing the scene at Pentecost. The King James Bible gives, ‘And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost…’. For an excellent account of this change in Victorian worship and architecture, see William Whyte, Unlocking the Church, which I reviewed here.

Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire

Perennial

There are some buildings I never tire of looking at, and some of these I have blogged about more than once. One of my favourites is the abbey church of St Mary, Tewkesbury, a large building that just keeps on giving, with its Norman and Gothic architecture, its wealth of carvings and its impressive monuments. There’s even some outstanding 20th-century stained glass, to bring the story of the church almost up to date. One of the best features is the large central tower, which has been called the best Norman tower in Britain.

The tower probably dates to the mid-12th century, at the end of the long campaign of building that brought the huge abbey church into existence. The abbey’s founder, Robert FitzHamon (a relative of William the Conqueror) initiated the building process in the late 11th or very early 12th century, but died in 1107. The church was consecrated in the early 1120s, but the structure was unlikely to have been complete by this date.* The architecture of this period is chunky, with thick walls, round-headed windows and doors, and enormous cylindrical columns. But there was also much carved decoration, as one can see on the outside walls of the tower.

The lower part of the tower is very plain, but very little of this would have been visible when the original, steeply pitched roofs were in place – the position of these is clear from the remains of old masonry that trace the old inverted-V-shaped lines of the roofs. Above this level, things get very ornate indeed. There are three horizontal bands of ornament. The upper band has tall arches (some with louvred bell openings, some blind), with sides and tops carved in a chevron or zig-zag pattern. Beneath these is a narrower band completed covered in arches that intersect, producing a geometric pattern of light and shade. Further down again is another band, this time with tall, carved arches, displaying a different pattern of bell openings from the one above. All of this is the work of 12th-century masons, apart from the battlements and corner pinnacles, which are later.

There was once a spire, made of wood covered with lead, on top of this tower, but this fell down in 1559. Even without the spire, the tower is a magnificent piece of architecture, drawing the eye as one approaches from the west (the approximate viewpoint of my photograph), making a striking landmark from across the fields to the north, or providing a pleasant distraction as one glimpses the top above the shops and houses that cluster nearby. It could so easily not be here today. The abbey was dissolved by Henry VIII in the 16th century, but the locals bought the church from the king in 1542, and it has served as the town’s parish church ever since.† It still gives much pleasure, not just to worshippers, but also to those who attend concerts there, and to anyone who, as I do, savours its magnificent medieval architecture. 

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* Church-builders usually started at the east end (where the altar is placed) and worked their way westwards. The chancel, crossing, transepts, and maybe a small part of the nave were likely to have been completed by this date.

† The townspeople paid £453 for the church.

Down Ampney, Gloucestershire

Crockets

The architectural feature known as the crocket is something that is often viewed from afar. If you don’t know what a crocket is and can’t reach for a convenient copy of The Penguin Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, I’ll do that for you. ‘A decorative hook-like spur of stone carved in various leaf-shapes and projecting at regular intervals from the angles of spires, pinnacles, gables, canopies, etc., in Gothic architecture.’* That’s how Penguin’s exemplary reference book defines a crocket, although in the vernacular, as it were, I might say, ’The knobbly bits that stick out of the edges of church spires’, and you’d get the idea.

The crockets on church spires are by definition far from the ground and it’s difficult to see their details. When you get your eye in, however, it’s quite often possible to spot crockets near to ground level, as is the case on the pinnacle in my photograph, which adorns a tomb recess in the church at Down Ampney in Gloucestershire. Close-up, you can see that a well carved crocket is far from being a simple ‘knobbly bit’: it’s a flowing, organic-looking decoration that must have demanded considerable skill on the part of the carver. Great precision and a combination of delicacy and strength were required to carve the 20-odd crockets on this pinnacle and the matching finial on the top. To make the whole thing yet more intricate, the lower part of the pinnacle takes the form of a narrow, straight-sided arch, beautifully formed and set off with pairs of human heads that peer at us from the late-14th or 15th century.†  

There was a lot of this sort of thing about from the mid-14th century onwards, as English architecture entered the phase known to historians as Decorated Gothic. Much of it has been lost to the effects of iconoclasm and time – in particular, anything with an image of a human was likely to face the wrath of 17th-century Puritans and be defaced or simply lopped off. This makes the small heads on this example particularly precious survivals. Since much medieval stone carving was also painted in bright colours, there may have been another loss. However, light from the nearby stained-glass window has supplied a hint of colour, bringing a glow to a small marvel of the carver’s art.

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* John Fleming, Hugh Honour and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Penguin Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Penguin Books (5th edition, 1999)

† If you click on the image, a larger version should appear, making some of the details clearer.

Great Malvern, Worcestershire

 

Top of the year

It’s my habit at this time of year to look back through my posts of the last twelve months and see which have been popular with my readers – in the sense of gathering the most page views. Top of the pile for 2025 was a post I did back in September about some medieval tiles in the priory church at Great Malvern. I’m aware that various accidents and coincidences can lead to a post’s having many views – someone with lots of followers might have linked to it, for example, or it might have been used as an illustration in a school or university history course. Whatever the reason on this occasion, the tiles are so beautiful in themselves that I thought they were worth posting again, together with what I wrote about them in September:

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.

I wish all my readers a happy new year.

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*See Hans van Lemmen, Medieval Tiles (Shire, 2004)

Berwick, East Sussex

A Bloomsbury Nativity

I wish my readers a happy Christmas with this unusual church wall painting, the 20th-century Nativity scene in the church at Berwick, not far to the west of Eastbourne in East Sussex. Commissioned in 1941, the paintings in the church are the work of Bloomsbury Group artists Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell (the sister of Virginia Woolf), and Quentin Bell. They’re remarkable for being the only complete set of murals by major 20th-century artists in an English parish church.

Vanessa Bell’s Nativity scene is striking for its bold, direct style, although there’s something sombre about it – the colours are not as bright as in many of her works and the facial expressions are contemplative rather than joyous. The seriousness of the work no doubt relates to the story itself – the birth of Jesus is to be celebrated, but we know that his life on Earth will end in a brutal execution. Perhaps this quality in the painting also reflects the fact that the artist had lost not only her sister Virginia (who had taken her own life earlier that year) and her son, Julian, who was killed in the Spanish Civil War. Some say that she has painted the infant Jesus with similar features to those of Julian when he was a baby; the model for Mary was Vanessa’s daughter, Angelica. The sitters for the other figures were local farm workers and servants, so thet painting is steeped in the artist’s family and people she knew.

It is also very English (I am not only thinking of the clothes worn by many of the characters), and redolent of the local Sussex countryside in particular. The barn is probably based on one in the area; the view out looks towards the beautiful downland scenery that helped draw Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Vanessa and Clive Bell, and Duncan Grant to this part of the world. The lamb in the foreground is a Sussex lamb; the produce is in a Sussex trug; even the shepherds’ crooks are based on a local design.*

We are so used to plain whitewashed church walls punctuated with monuments and, just occasionally, a fragmentary medieval wall painting, that for many the extraordinary paintings in Berwick church must be something of a shock. As well as this Nativity, there’s an Annunciation, a Crucifixion, a Supper at Emmaus, a Christ in Glory, and much else. But I can’t help thinking that this location, this church, was right for a cycle of paintings by these British artists at the time of World War II. In spite of the solemnity, there is colour, optimism, renewal, and the faith in the future that must accompany the undertaking of any major project. They needed these things then, and we need them now. 

Season’s Greetings.

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* I am indebted to the Berwick church website, and to its guidebook, for much of this information.

Great Malvern, Worcestershire

An enduring tradition

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)

Sudeley, Gloucestershire

Forty years on

Exactly forty years ago today, the Resident Wise Woman and I were married in St Mary's, Sudeley. I have written about my memories of the wedding and this building before, so here is what I wrote when we revisited Sudeley about two years ago:

The small church of St Mary, Sudeley is unusual in that it is both a parish church and the chapel of nearby Sudeley Castle. It’s an easy walk from where we live and from where the Resident Wise Woman grew up, and partly as a result of that, we hardly ever visit the historic castle, let alone its little church. In fact until the other day, the last time I set foot inside the church was in September 1985 when the Resident Wise Woman and I were married. It was wonderful to tie the knot in such beautiful and historic surroundings, pleasant for guests to be able to take a look at the gardens on the way in and out, and delightful to have the wedding reception in the castle afterwards.*

The beauty of the place is obvious enough, I hope, from my photograph, and the architecture – standard late-medieval-style window tracery with the added touch of a delightful bell turret corbelled out so that it overhangs the west front slightly – clear too. The history is that the shaping force behind the church was Ralph Boteler†, (c. 1394–1473), 1st Baron Sudeley and Lord High Treasurer of England under Henry VI. He rebuilt the castle and the nearby church, both of which owe much of their architectural character to him, although both were severely damaged during the English Civil Wars. After a period of neglect and dereliction, both castle and church were restored for the Dent family, who bought the castle in the 19th century and employed Sir George Gilbert Scott and his master perspectivist (later an independent architect) John Drayton Wyatt to undertake the restoration.¶

It’s thought that Scott and Wyatt took the church back to very close to its 15th-century appearance externally, renewing the tracery of the windows, preserving or recarving the gargoyles and other carvings, and restoring the bell turret. The church was refitted inside, with new woodwork and stained glass, and Wyatt designed a new tomb to house the remains of Katherine Parr, the last queen of Henry VIII – she lived at the castle after she married its then owner, Thomas Seymour, after Henry’s death. The result is a delightful little church which could not have been better for our small wedding.

Another of Scott and Wyatt’s additions was what I assume to be an underfloor heating system, with warm air emerging through grilles in the floor. As we left the building the other day, one of us stepped on the grille by the door and it made a loud clanking noise. Straight away, I was back in 1985, waiting for the bride to arrive. Suddenly, the silence was broken by a clank, and she and her father made their way up the nave towards where I and my best man waited. Vows, music (Thomas Arne, Henry Purcell), speeches, cake, and the chance to talk to our closest friends and relatives ensued: much of this is all a blur now. But I do remember smiling a lot. I’ve smiled a lot since.

Four decades. Say it like that and it seems a long time. But time’s winged chariot has moved swiftly through more than a decade together in London and nearly three decades in the Cotswolds (with, for an extended period, a parallel life in the Czech Republic). For much of this blog, my wife has been referred to as the ‘Resident Wise Woman’ – a joke, a truth and a ploy for anonymity. In this post I'll give her her real name: Zoë. I’ve edited and, latterly, written, lots of books. Zoë has moved through careers in arts management and urban regeneration, bringing transformative changes to people’s lives in London’s Vauxhall area and East Oxford; more recently she has published two volumes of her poetry, with a third on the way.§ Together we explore many of the buildings that end up on this blog and Zoë’s eye wonderfully stimulates, provokes and supplements my own wherever we are. While I have always been interested in architecture, I am lucky that she has encouraged me in my belief that the small adjuncts to architecture (such as signs, odd bits of carving, unexpected fittings and fixtures), the seemingly random associations that buildings can evoke, and the interest of the most modest of structures (privies, henhouses, so-called ‘shacks’) can be as rewarding as the facade of a great cathedral or the drawing room of a country house. On we go, ceaselessly into the past, but with at least part of us determined to remain hopeful for the future.

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* Back in the 1980s, weddings in country houses and castles were not the big business they are now. The church was not licensed for weddings when we got married and I had to go to a Church of England office next to Westminster Abbey and swear oaths to the effect that I was who I said I was, which allowed me to obtain an elaborate ‘special licence’ for the occasion. Today, people get married in the castle often, although I’m not sure that, even now, church weddings take place here. ‘I think it’s mostly blessings,’ a guide said, when we looked around the castle.

† Usually pronounced ‘Rafe Butler’. He was ‘one of a line of rather distinguished butlers,’ as my school history teacher said, even longer ago than the events I’m recalling here.

¶ Wyatt and Scott also designed a school and almshouses in nearby Winchcombe, which were funded by Emma Dent, then owner of the castle.

§ Zoë’s poetry books are Owl Unbound and Fool's Paradise.

Fretherne, Gloucestershire

A class act

Visiting Arlingham the other say (see my recent post here) reminded me of an occasion maybe eight or ten years ago when the Resident Wise Woman, our son and I celebrated my birthday with an excellent lunch at The Old Passage, an outstanding fish restaurant (it closed after covid, alas!) by the River Severn not far from the village. On the way home we stopped at the church of St Mary, Fretherne, which was on our route. My memory of the visit comes back to me through a haze of good food and wine, but we were all mightily impressed by this glorious building, packed with stunning craftsmanship – stone sculpture, woodcarving, painting, tiling, metalwork. To me, there’s something hard and cold about many Victorian churches – the architecture may be very correct Gothic, but the result lacks the irregularities, winning oddities and rough surfaces that make many older churches so delightful. Now and again, however, I find a church that turns these ideas inside out. Such a building is St Mary’s, Fretherne.

From the outside it’s dominated by a wonderful crocketed spire, upward-pointing pinnacles, and steeply pitched roofs. The two-tone stonework is a mixture of toffee-coloured Stinchcombe sandstone and Bath stone dressings, the latter lending itself well to window tracery, carved detail, crockets and other ornaments. Most of these details are exuberant imitations of the architecture of the 14th-century as reimagined by the local architect Francis Niblett in 1846–47. Niblett is not well known outside Gloucestershire. He was the younger son of the owner of Haresfield Court, a few miles to the east of Fretherne, and did quite a lot of church and other work in the county. Fretherne, where he had a sympathetic patron in the upper-class clergyman the Rev. Sir William Lionel Darell, is his masterpiece. Niblett was a dedicated follower of the work of A. W. N. Pugin, who advocated ornate 14th-century Gothic as the style in which to embody ‘the beauty of holiness’. These were also the ideas that the influential clergy of Oxford and Cambridge were behind: out with Classicism (the style of paganism) and in with Gothic (the style of catholic Christianity*); out with the old spartan preaching churches of the 18th century, in with beautiful buildings that were fit for the sacraments and could move you to prayer.

Inside St Mary’s there is beauty everywhere you look. The intricately carved pulpit and font cover; the painted organ case and pipes; corbels and brackets carved with foliage or with angels playing musical instruments; colourful Minton floor tiles; a reredos dripping with miniature arches and shafts and framing a pyrographic picture of the Supper at Emmaus done by a local clergyman; a painstakingly painted and stencilled roof; elaborate hinged metal grilles that allow doors to be left open for ventilation; innumerable details meaning that there’s always something to see that you’ve missed before. This is a very special building.

For all this high-Victorian glory, the place certainly does not feel stuffy. The parish has embraced the eco-church movement. There is community planting in the churchyard – cherry tomatoes were on offer when I was there and parts of God’s acre are kept wild. And amongst the wildness the crocketed lines of Niblett’s beautiful spire rise above the yew trees, thrown into relief by the sunshine and leading the eye upwards to the clouds and the patches of deep blue in the summer sky.

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*By ‘catholic’, the Anglican campaigners of the 1830s onwards meant true to the doctrines of the ancient, undivided Christian church. They believed the Church of England to be a truly ‘catholic’ church.

Angel mural, Fretherne church, Gloucestershire

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.

Wooler, Northumberland

In continued admiration

Up a street leading away from the town centre of Wooler I glimpsed the needle-like spire of a church. Intent on architectural wonders after the Black Bull Inn in my previous post, I climbed the upward-sloping street and quickly found that this was no ordinary church or at least no ordinary church tower, for the rest of the building in truth did seem rather ordinary, a plain nave with a flat wall to the street and a row of simple pointed windows. The tower, however, was something else.

I think of the style of this tower as Arts and Crafts Gothic with a dash of Art Nouveau. That’s to say, the architect (it’s George Reavell again) has taken the basic elements of the Perpendicular Gothic of the 15th century (pointed arches, window tracery with pronounced vertical elements but also transoms,* stone panelling that looks like blind windows, gargoyles, crenellations) and added other features that you’d never seen on a medieval building. Chief of these added things are the chunky pinnacles that lack the spirelets that top medieval pinnacles having instead little roofs with a curvy profile. Another such feature is the way in which the crenellations have tops that curve and dip towards the middle of each section. The curves up here are less Gothic than Art Nouveau and add a fin-de-siècle twist of lemon Victorian Gothic. 

Hats off, then, to George Reavell, who made this building over and gave it its outstanding tower in 1904 for the Congregational (now United Reformed) Church. There’s almost a touch of the admirable late Gothic of J. D. Sedding’s magnificent Holy Trinity Sloane Square, dubbed ‘the cathedral of the Arts and Crafts’ by John Betjeman. Not quite a cathedral, but an outstanding bit of architecture of which this modest Northumberland town should be proud. *

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* Apologies for the less than perfect picture. It was impossible to photograph this tower without at least one car and one overhead wire getting in the way. From this angle, the tower conceals another pleasing Reavell detail: a small louvre and spirelet crowning the nave roof. 

Wichenford, Worcestershire

 

Local colour

Monuments like this – a large 17th-century altar tomb commemorating four members of the same family – make me smile. I find them delightful because they’re colourful (and parish churches often lack colour, aside from the stained glass which not all churches have anyway) and because of the way that they connect us with the people of the past. The people in this case are John Washbourne, whose effigy is placed above that of his father, Anthony, and beneath those of his two wives, Mary (née Savage) and Eleanor (née Lygon). I do not pretend that these rather stylised portraits by a presumably local artist capture the subjects’ features with great precision – only those rich enough to hire a top-rank London sculptor could expect that, the rest had to make do with something more approximate or stylised. But the monument does tell us something about how they wished to be remembered, or more exactly how John Washbourne, who commissioned the monument when he was 84 years old, wanted them to be remembered. The delineation of the armour and the women’s clothes, as well as of their faces, has been done with care and the formality or stiffness of the figures is very much of its time.

So is the decoration – the array of foliate motifs, scrollwork, and strapwork. The bright colour is restored but must come near to the original. Very much of its time too is the heraldry. The arms of at the upper centre of the monument are of the Washbourne family. Lower down and also in the centre are the same arms quartered with those of two other related families, Poer and Dabitot. To the left these arms are combined with (or impale, to use the heraldic term) those of Savage on the left and Lygon on the right. Portraits and visual identifications and ornamentation combine to make an effect I find both impressive and charming. True, you had to be rich and powerful to have a monument like this and to be allowed to occupy quite a large part of a small church with it. But personally I don’t grudge them the space.