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.’)

Ludlow, Shropshire

Looking up, looking down

St Laurence’s, Ludlow, is a large parish church (the largest in Shropshire) and its tall crossing tower is a fitting crown for the building and the beautiful town where it stands. And yet Ludlow’s tightly packed streets make the rest of the church difficult to see in the town centre, and hard to photograph. A good view is to be had from within the castle, from which the way the tower dominates the surrounding countryside is clear. It’s also clear that the architecture of the tower is 15th century, in what was fittingly called the Perpendicular style by 19th-century antiquarian Thomas Rickman and those who followed him. The quality of verticality is embodied not only in the sheer height and the upward-pointing corner pinnacles, but also in the perpendicular mouldings that cast shadows across he middle part of the tower wall and the mullions of the windows, which stretch from the bottom of the window almost to the very top, rather than getting interrupted by complex patterns of tracery as they usually did in 14th-century architecture.

The interior is high, airy, and full of windows in the same style. But one feature that has engaged me on several visits to this outstanding church is the carving of the misericord seats. Looking through some of the very few photographs I have kept from before the digital era, I see that shadows and backache seem to have prevented me from getting decent images of many of them – when visiting churches it is just as important to look down as to look up, but this can be a painful business! This is a shame since there’s a rich array of medieval carving in these stalls, from satirical images such as the fox preaching to the geese, through bits of everyday life, to heraldic designs, such as the falcon and fetterlock badge of Richard Duke of York, lord of Ludlow. Here is a rather splendidly leonine king to give readers who’ve not seen the originals an idea of the quality of the carving. I must return when I can, and see if the churchwardens still allow photography.

Ripple, Worcestershire

Flowers and fields

I have posted pictures from Ripple on a couple of previous occasions, including one on which I shared an image of one of the church’s impressive set of misericords. These seats, which flip up to reveal lovely and often humorous carvings, are mostly found in cathedrals, monasteries, and large collegiate churches, but here, in a quiet Worcestershire village, there are sixteen of these carved seats, all 15th-century, twelve of which feature a sequence of images quite common in medieval art: the labours of the months.

From church portals to books of hours, these depictions of the appropriate works for the twelve calendar months are widespread – a medieval constant, one might say, portraying the key points and cycles of life in the countryside through the seasons. Except that they are not entirely constant, because the climate and agriculture in, say Italy is rather different from that in England, and even in England there may be local variations. So in March, for example, they might be ploughing in France, pruning the vines in Italy, and here in Ripple, they’re scaring birds from the crops, rather as the Resident Wise Woman has recently been doing as the seedlings went in.

Ripple’s misericord for May shows the figure of the Virgin Mary carrying bunches of flowers. So what’s she doing here while in Italy they’re harvesting hay and in France they’re hawking? Apparently, the carving is a commemoration of the custom of carrying an image of the Virgin bearing flowers into the fields on Rogation days, when Christians took particular time to pray to God for protection from calamities. Rogation days occurred in the run-up to Ascension Day,† and were a time of processions and the image of the Virgin was carried around the fields during the blessing of the crops.

Blessing the crops with the appropriate ceremony was clearly a vital part of the agricultural year and worth marking as one of the twelve important labours. This simple carving, placed out of the way on a folding seat, becomes, it seems to me, rather moving when one understands how much hope and faith it embodies, summing up as it does how vital this crop will be to the community. There’s also something rather lovely about the way it celebrates spring flowers, which are themselves, and like Mary herself, living symbols of growth, renewal, and hope.

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* They’re inevitably rural labours. The work of the town merchant or craftsman is less bound by the seasons than that of the farmer or grower.

† There is a ‘major’ Rogation Day on 25 April, and three ‘minor’ Rogation Days in May.

Ripple, Worcestershire

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun

St Mary’s church, Ripple, has an impressive set of misericords, those medieval fold-up seats that have a ledge that protrudes when in the folded position, enabling tired monks or canons to lean while standing to say, or sing, the office. Twelve of them illustrate the labours of the months, but my photograph above shows one of the others, a rather splendid sun. It’s quite unusual for a parish church in a small village to have carved misericords like these, but Ripple church is quite surprisingly large. No doubt this is because it was in the Middle Ages a possession of the cathedral-priory of Worcester.

The carvings on the seats – vigorous and here quite deeply chiselled – are not the sort of great sculpture that the cathedral authorities would have used to adorn the walls and vaults of their great ‘mother church’ in Worcester. In contrast, they are typical of the vernacular work that one finds on misericords, and more than good enough for a monk to rest his bottom on, and for us to admire when in this summer’s searing heat we take refuge in a shady church, for the peace and the cool.

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I have put a couple of other misericords from Ripple on my Instagram page @philipbuildings