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. 

Meysey Hampton, Gloucestershire

I am under the weather at the moment, because the 21st-century plague has struck me at last. So here is a reprise of a post from some years ago, showing a church monument to a doctor, who lived at a period when plagues were a constant threat. If you click on the image it should appear in a larger and clearer form...

A practised classicism

According to the way the history of English church architecture is usually written, there were relatively few churches built between the point when Henry VIII dealt his knock-out blow to the old religion by breaking with Rome and the rise of Classical architecture, which, although it had a brief flowering under Inigo Jones in the Jacobean period, really only got going with Wren after the Great Fire of London in 1666. The churches that were built in the years in between these two watersheds are often in a kind of hybrid style that isn't always easy to classify – a mix of Gothic, Classical, and vernacular – that means they're not 'good examples' of any one style, and so they get overlooked or glossed over.

But if there's not much church building, there's certainly a lot of church architecture from this period. How can this be? Because the architecture is not for the living but for the dead: it is the architecture of church monuments. Here's a wonderful example, from the church at Meysey Hampton in Gloucestershire – it's worth clicking on the picture to reveal some of the detail. It's the monument of James Vaulx (c. 1580–1625), a physician, and his two wives, Editha (on his right) and Philipe (a Jacobean Phillippa, presumably, on his left). The portraits of the three are charming – Vaulx in his doctor's gown and pointed beard, resting his arm on a skull and leaning towards his first wife, whose head is slightly inclined, in turn, towards him. Philipe stares ahead, by contrast, looking life in the face. She has no skull and carries a protective pomander: she survived her husband and lived to marry again. I find these figures rather moving and the nuances of pose that the sculptor allowed himself (or was allowed by eldest son Francis who commissioned the monument) very English in their restraint. Below them are tiny images of the children, Editha's twelve (how those women worked at childbirth) and Philipe's four; some, shown in bed, presumably died before their father. Above amongst the pediments at the top of the monument are figures of the virtues. 

And then there is the architecture. Look at the way the sculptor has invoked the panoply of Jacobean classicism – pediments variously shaped, scrolls, composite columns, panels, keystones, cartouches, cherubim with winged heads, niches – to frame and display his subjects. He was able to add colour too, reminding us that even in the supposedly retrained phase of the English church, things were brighter and more vivid than we sometimes think. It all adds up to a grand monument but in a rough-hewn provincial manner. Perhaps this is right for its subject. Vaulx was eminent but didn't make it to the top job of royal physician. When King James asked him how he knew how to heal, the doctor replied that he had learned through his practice. 'Then by my saule thou hast killed money a man,' responded James. 'Thou shalt na'practise on me.' 

 

Curry Rivel, Somerset

No gauze here

One of my favourite sketches featuring the comedians Peter Cook and Dudley Moore takes place in an art gallery. Among the pair’s most memorable remarks is something Peter Cook says about paintings of naked people in the Renaissance: ‘Of course you don’t get gauze floating around in the air these days like you did in Renaissance times. There was always gauze in the air in those days.’ Meaning that many Renaissance nudes have tastefully placed pieces of diaphanous material draped about those parts of their bodies that might otherwise cause offence, as if the gauze had just floated to rest there by accident. Indeed they do, although in some cases, the gauze was added later, as opinions about what was acceptable in images – particularly images in churches – changed.

And this was my observation when I looked at the figures on the canopy of the tomb of the brothers Marmaduke and Robert Jennings (died 1625 and 1630) in the church at Curry Rivel, Somerset. There are actually two of these reclining figures, one on each side of the coat of arms that tops the canopy so that they act as informal supporters of the arms. Their real pupose, though, is not heraldic but to hold hourglasses, symbolic of passing time and the end that hastens towards us all.

Many people are surprised or even shocked by such displays of human flesh in church. My grandparents, who would have countenanced no ‘graven images’ of any kind in any chapel where they worshipped, would have looked the other way; some Victorians would have hated such secular and classical excesses; and puritan iconoclasts of a little later in the century when this monument was built would not have liked it, although their destruction seems to have been aimed mainly at images of saints, bishops, and Jesus himself, representations that they considered ‘Popish’. My mind is broader, but that is my point: tastes and ideas change.

And that is one of the best things about so many English churches. Having been there for centuries, they bear the marks of changing tastes. It’s a shame some of those changes have brought destruction, but every remaining fragment, every surviving piece of 17th-century oddity, tells us something about altering and enduring attitudes and about where we have come from. These fragments of our past mark time – as the naked ladies of Curry Rivel are meant to do with their hourglasses – and tell us something about what we have been, and who we are.

Hereford

Pigs in blankets

Strolling around Hereford cathedral the other week, once again impressed by the richness of detail almost everywhere, we came across a monument consisting of a recumbent effigy set in a niche. The style of the arch and the ballflowers decorating it suggest a date somewhere in the first half of the 14th century, but the ballflowers are outnumbered by tiny carved pigs – sixteen of them – each wearing on its back a heraldic blanket and each snuffling its way towards a carefully carved acorn. These contented swine suggest that the monument commemorates a member of the Swinefield or Swinfield family. There was a Bishop Richard Swinfield, successor to the famous and saintly Thomas Cantelupe and a man who successfully prepared the case for Thomas’s canonisation. But it’s not this Swinfield: he has his own monument elsewhere in the cathedral.

The monument of which I show a detail is said to belong to John Swinfield, who died in 1311 and was the cathedral’s Precentor. Clearly a member of the bishop’s family, he may have been one of Richard’s nephews, real or metaphorical. The precentor was the member of the chapter responsible for overseeing the musical side of worship.* He was thus a very important figure in the daily life of the cathedral, and could also deputise for the dean on occasion.§ Swinfield’s position, then, certainly merited a monument as large and prominent as this one. Few monuments, though, have such charming details as this. 

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* And, sometimes, for wider respsponsibilities in the organisation of worship in the cathedral.

§ The heraldry on the pigs relates to the arms of the Deanery.

Avebury, Wiltshire

Dream topping 

Was I dreaming? The west churchyard wall at Avebury seemed to have a roof of very neatly finished thatch. It seemed an unlikely covering for a wall made of sarsen stones, among the toughest kind around. The result seemed worthy at least of a photograph and some later research. 

Looking it up when I reached home, I discovered that this exceptional wall is listed at Grade II. The listing text describes the structure as built of ‘Squared sarsen approximately 1.6 m high, with topping of cob and thatched coping.’ So there we have it. The top of the wall, oddly is made of cob, a mix made with mud and vulnerable to damage if exposed to the rain. Wiltshire has many cob walls that have thatched coping, and this is one with a difference. 

The thatch also helps shelter a rather well cut monument to Francis Knowles, a biologist (and an FRS) and Professor of Anatomy at King’s College, London. Knowles bought the manor from Francis Keiller in 1955 and lovingly restored it.* It’s good that his memorial is nearby, protected by the thatched coping of the churchyard wall.  

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* The house is now owned by the National Trust, who did further conservation work around ten years ago. 

Llanwarne, Herefordshire

Ionically…

The variations on the classical orders of architecture – Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Composite, Tuscan – are legion. They’ve been the subject of posts on this blog before, but I don’t think I’ve covered a Jacobean variation. This is from a wall monument inside the ruined church at Llanwarne that I featured in my previous post. Maybe some dedicated pursuivant of heraldry could work out whose monument it was from the coats of arms on it. Perhaps it commemorates the person who paid for work on the church in the 17th century, including the south porch – but that’s speculation and in this post I’m concentrating on one small detail of the monument’s design.

Even now the stonework is weathered, the amount of effort expended by the carver is clear, and one focus of that effort was to delineate a variation in the Ionic order that’s very much of its time. Even the shaft is distinctive, with its deep, curving convex mouldings, in contrast to the concave flutes that are more usual on classical columns. There’s additional fine detailing between each moulding that looks as if the sculptor has created a series of miniature flutes topped with tiny roundels. The necking ring above is very deeply moulded, and above it is a band ornamented with tiny hemispheres in groups of five, arranged in a pattern that’s repeated in the capitals above. Between the capital’s spirals is what looks like some egg and dart decoration, but this has worn rather flat. Adjoining the shaft and capital to the right are the rolls and scrolls and flat patterns we now called strapwork, something typical of 17th century English interiors.

In other words, this detail shows an English carver doing what English carvers so often did – taking a classical motif that we associate with ancient Greece or Rome and giving it a character that’s both more local and very much of its time. True, some of the ideas may come from pattern books published in France or the Low Countries, go-to sources for much English Renaissance design. But the effect – vigorous, rural, but showing visual flair – is very English, and shows, as so often, that the orders were an adaptable starting point for craftworkers who’d learned the classical ropes.

Longborough, Gloucestershire

Dazzled

The huge southern window at Longborough featured in my previous post makes the church’s south transept gloriously light, especially on a sunny day like the one when I last visited. The downside is that this makes the two monuments placed beneath the window very difficult to photograph. My image shows the older of the two, a medieval knight, whose armour dates him to around 1325, when this part of the church was built. Could he have been the patron who paid for the extension to the building? Perhaps.

His image is very stylized and there’s not a lot of detail. It’s not – or at least not in its present state – outstanding sculpture in the way that the south window (see my previous post) is outstanding stonework. So when I aimed my camera at it, I went for atmosphere rather than detail, and made the image as contrasty as I could.

Chew Magna, Somerset

Stop and look

Sometimes I want to share something on the blog, even though I have little to say about it. Instagram can be the place for this, but because not everyone looks there, here’s one of the monuments in the church at Chew Magna that caught my eye. It’s to Sir John and Lady St Loe and dates to the mid-15th century. They’re members of the family that built the church house in my previous post, and their monument, a tomb chest topped by these recumbent figures, is one of several outstanding monuments in this church. It’s a reminder, if we needed one, that even in a parish church in a relatively out of the way place, there’s terrific sculpture waiting to be discovered. I’d encourage anyone with even a passing interest in these things to get out there and look for themselves

Farthinghoe, Northamptonshire

Lift up your eyes…

Here is the other monument that caught my eye in the church at Farthinghoe. It’s to George Rush, father of the two young women whose monument was the subject of my previous post, and he died aged 70 in 1803, just two years after his daughters. He was clearly a man of substance – the inscripton on the monument refers to him as ‘late Patron of the Rectory of Farthinghoe and Benefactor to the Parish’. He died, what’s more, at his house in Upper Brook Street, Grosvenor Square, London, an address almost as upmarket then as it is now. The family could clearly afford a good sculptor to do his effigy, and the man they chose was CharlesRegnart.

Regnart was the son of a carver from Flanders who settled in Bristol, but by the time this monument was made he had moved to loved, where his studio was established in Fitzroy Square. His family claimed descent from Raginhart, a Goth who had fought with Alaric when Rome was sacked. If his ancestor really did take part in the fall of the Roman empire, Charles Regnart did not work in a Gothic style. This monument is classical in sensibility, and certainly striking in its quality. The sculpture shows Rush recumbent, holding a substantial book, presumably a copy of the Bible. But he has looked up from his reading, to stare not at us, but at something beyond, at the beyond, it may be, or at the sky or ceiling at any rate. His expression doesn’t look at all sad: maybe his heirs took heart that he had found consolation or inspiration from what he was reading. It seems that he had finished the book…and that the book of life was about to be closed.

In my book, the carving is very good indeed. The face is well handled and characterful, the hands lifelike, the folds of drapery dramatically undercut. Even the book is believable – the thick leather binding, the pages delineated, some pages even slightly ruffled to tell us that this is a volume that has been used. I was very impressed indeed by this sculpture, and even though the lighting didn’t make it easy to photograph, I hope my image has captured its essence. Hats off to Mr Regnart. I hope that the family of the deceased found the monument consoling and maybe even uplifting. Over 200 years on, I was not a little uplifted myself.

Farthinghoe, Northamptonshire

The old order, changing

I have learned, as an inveterate church-visitor, to accept that old churches have had to evolve in order to accommodate changing usage, and that such evolution continues. Many of the buildings are medieval, and since they were built churches have acquired now-common features such as vestries and organs that take up space or mean that parts of an ancient building have had to be adapted for new purposes. The locations of major fixtures and fittings – seating, pulpits, screens, the main altar – may have changed. And church buildings may have to accommodate such facilities as kitchen areas, children’s corners, and the Mothers’ Union noticeboard.

Much as I might find some of these things intrusive, in years of church-crawling I’ve learned to look around or beyond such distractions, and have found rewarding carvings in vestries, stained glass behind organs, and monuments in all sorts of places. I have benefitted from the hospitality of vicars and churchwardens, who have ushered me through locked doors to find hidden Norman doorways and Saxon crypts.* And I have occasionally quietly moved notices and bits of freestanding furniture so that I can get a better look at things, before carefully replacing them.

At Farthinghoe, I was enticed by a plinth and a bit of carved drapery poking out from beneath a pinboard containing all kinds of notices to do with the choir, the Parochial Church Council, and the Mothers’ Union. This noticeboard was set upon a table that was to one side of the drapery; to the other side was a white, formica-covered shelving unit. It didn’t feel right for me to move either of these pieces of furniture, but the noticeboard was not attached to the wall, resting only on the table, and could easily be shifted to one side. What was behind it is in my photograph.

It’s the monument of Henrietta and Catherine Rush, unmarried sisters, who both must have died in or around 1801. The accompanying tablet, of which I caught sight at the other side of the table, says that the monument was ‘erected by their afflicted father, 1801’.† Pevsner adds that the monument has been broken into two parts – two parts comprising the figure and the tablet, presumably, though I couldn’t work this out fully because I couldn’t quite see what was going on behind the furniture. But at least I could appreciate the delicate carving of the figure and urn, the pretty if rather stylised face, the folds of drapery, the fluted pattern on the urn.

If I’m occasionally irritated by the inelegant impedimenta of the working church, I console myself with the thought that this at least means that the building is used…although I also remember with sympathy the exasperated words of Pevsner, finding a church full of worshippers who made it impossible for him to examine the building properly: ‘Really, the uses some people put these buildings to...’¶ It was, of course, partly the great man’s joke about himself. So it was with a wry smile at least in part at my own expense that I carefully replaced the noticeboard, tiptoed out into the sunshine, and went on my way, grateful for what I’d seen.

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* And sometimes at inconvenience to themselves, to help someone who had turned up out of the blue; I am humbled. On one occasion I was chilled to be shown a crypt full of human bones, a sight I have not yet found it possible to write about.

† The father, George Rush, has his own monument, another stunner, to which I will return.

¶ The remark was remembered by Pevsner’s collaborator Bridget Cherry and is quoted in Susie Harries’s excellent biography of Pevsner; see Nikolaus Pevsner: The Life, p. 541.

Ilmington, Warwickshire

Looking ahead

I’d not got far up the churchyard path to St Mary’s, Ilmington, before I saw the extraordinary monument near the church’s south doorway. Once I was a little nearer I began to take it in, and to see what it was: an 18th-century tomb (the date is 1750, it turns out) that aspires to be a miniature building, with a lower section parapeted with castle-like battlements, and the whole thing topped with a lantern-tower and spire.

The masonry of the lower part looks plain at first sight, but close-to one can distinguish some pilasters at the corners topped with tiny cusped blank arches, while the battlements are decorated with quatrefoils that have partly weathered away. The tower is quite elaborate – there are cusped openings all the way around and the spire also has (tiny) windows and a carved finial at the top. It all looks more like the mid-18th-century Gothic that it is, and yet the highly fancy Gothic that Horace Walpole promoted had really only just going – Walpole had begun to remodel his famous house at Strawberry Hill in 1749. 

So who created this forward-looking bit of design? It was built for Ann and Samuel Sansom. Pevsner compares their tomb to the Despenser monuments in Tewkesbury Abbey, and it’s true that some of the Tewkesbury chantry chapels do have similar, if much more ornate, tops. He also directs us to the researches of Howard Colvin, who points out that the Chipping Campden mason-architect Edward Woodward had proposed a similar design of tower and spire, at full scale, for the church at Preston-on-Stour.* It could well be Woodward, experienced in building plainer Gothic structures not far away from here, trying his had at something more adventurous.

If he did, it was admirable, although as I attempted to photograph the miniature building I had to try several angles so as not to get the spire clashing with window mullions and tracery behind. And then it occurred to me that the tomb was sited rather invasively near the church and its entrance. I wondered what the parishioners thought when they had to pass it every Sunday? I like it, but it must have been a bit of a shock, and an enforced reminder of the deceased couple. Let’s hope they were remembered with affection.

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* The Woodwards – Thomas and his son Edward – were certainly on the ball: they were doing very rococo Gothic work at Ascot Park, Warwickshire, in the 1750s. Their proposal for the Preston-on-Stour tower showed a crown-like top like St Nicholas, Newcastle, with the finial designed in the manner of the tomb at Ilmington: amazing. For a reproduction of the drawing, see the recent revised edition of the Warwickshire Pevsner.

Whittington, Gloucestershire

Roses for Lady de Croupes

The church of St Bartholomew Whittington is a small medieval building set very close to 16th-century Whittington Court – so close that the two almost touch. The church contains several monuments from a time before the big house was built. Here’s my favourite, a wimpled woman from the early-14th century. She is probably a member of the de Crupes or de Croupes family, who were lords of the manor and patrons of the living in the Middle Ages. I like the worn quality of the woman’s face (which contrasts by the way with the sharper, probably recut, features of a pair of male effigies nearby.

I like also the way that this monument is clearly regarded by someone here with respect, or reverence, or affection. The candle may have burned down, the effigy may be worn smooth, but the roses are a fresh and lovely touch.

Meysey Hampton, Gloucestershire

A practised classicism

According to the way the history of English church architecture is usually written, there were relatively few churches built between the point when Henry VIII dealt his knock-out blow to the old religion by breaking with Rome and the rise of Classical architecture, which, although it had a brief flowering under Inigo Jones in the Jacobean period, really only got going with Wren after the Great Fire of London in 1666. The churches that were built in the years in between these two watersheds are often in a kind of hybrid style that isn't always easy to classify – a mix of Gothic, Classical, and vernacular – that means they're not 'good examples' of any one style, and so they get overlooked or glossed over.

But if there's not much church building, there's certainly a lot of church architecture from this period. How can this be? Because the architecture is not for the living but for the dead: it is the architecture of church monuments. Here's a wonderful example, from the church at Meysey Hampton in Gloucestershire – it's worth clicking on the picture to reveal some of the detail. It's the monument of James Vaulx, a physician, and his two wives, Editha (on his right) and Philipe (a Jacobean Phillippa, presumably, on his left). The portraits of the three are charming – Vaulx in his doctor's gown and pointed beard, resting his arm on a skull and leaning towards his first wife, whose head is slightly inclined, in turn, towards him. Philipe stares ahead, by contrast, looking life in the face. She has no skull and carries a protective pomander: she survived her husband and lived to marry again. I find these figures rather moving and the nuances of pose that the sculptor allowed himself (or was allowed by eldest son Francis who commissioned the monument) very English in their restraint. Below them are tiny images of the children, Editha's twelve (how those women worked at childbirth) and Philipe's four; some, shown in bed, presumably died before their father. Above amongst the pediments at the top of the monument are figures of the virtues.

And then there is the architecture. Look at the way the sculptor has invoked the panoply of Jacobean classicism – pediments variously shaped, scrolls, composite columns, panels, keystones, cartouches, cherubim with winged heads, niches – to frame and display his subjects. He was able to add colour too, reminding us that even in the supposedly retrained phase of the English church, things were brighter and more vivid than we sometimes think. It all adds up to a grand monument but in a rough-hewn provincial manner. Perhaps this is right for its subject. Vaulx was eminent but didn't make it to the top job of royal physician. When King James asked him how he knew how to heal, the doctor replied that he had learned by practice. 'Then by my saule thou hast killed money a man,' responded James. 'Thou shalt na'practise on me.'

Shugborough, Staffordshire

'Get a cat' again

In a post a couple of years ago I recalled the lovely story in Patrick Leigh Fermor's Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese about a Greek ship's captain whose boat was troubled with rats. The captain called in a priest, who duly carried out the rituals for casting out vermin – chants, incense, holy water, the lot. As the clergyman prepared to take his fee and depart, he assured the seaman that he would have no trouble now: the rites always worked. 'One more thing,' the priest added. 'Get a cat.' And Paddy remarks: 'Since then the phrase "getting a cat" means, in maritime circles, making surety doubly sure.'

My original post on this theme was about a church in Gloucestershire that got a cat and memorialized the creature in the churchyard. Now here is another of the remarkable garden structures at Shugborough, a monument to what may have been a genuine maritime feline. According to one account of the monument, this is a memorial to a family pet. But another story says that it commemorates the cat that accompanied Admiral George Anson on his ship the Centurion in 1740–44, when Anson undertook an expedition to the Pacific with the aim of seizing a Spanish treasure ship.

Anson's expedition was so poorly planned that one wouldn't have given it a chance. There were eight ships and the motley crew of 1,000 included 259 Chelsea pensioners (average age just under 70) and 210 untrained recruits. Ill winds and navigational errors played havoc with the expedition. At one point they mistook a fleet of Spanish warships for cargo vessels and had to make a hasty retreat. Disease killed hundreds of the men, supplies ran low, and at least one ill-repaired vessel simply broke up. Anson and his remaining 200 men pushed on, finally found a (heavily armed) Spanish galleon, attacked it, and relieved it of its cargo of treasure. Limping into the Chinese port of Canton, for a rest presumably, they found the place on fire and had to lend a hand putting out the flames. They eventually sailed home and Anson's share of the treasure helped rebuild Shugborough.

By the time he got home, Anson had circumnavigated the globe. I like to think that the cat did too, and that it is remembered with this imposing monument of the late 1740s, in its tranquil glade, surrounded by shrubs and a sea of green grass.

Brightling, Sussex

Fit for a king

As promised in the previous post, here is the pyramid in Brightling churchyard, beneath which the local squire, MP. philanthropist, and folly-builder John Fuller was buried when he died in 1834. The pyramid is a substantial stone structure, some 25 ft tall and taking up a large chunk of the southern side of the churchyard. It's similar in shape if not size to the resting places of the Old Kingdom Egyptian kings, but unlike the Egyptian pyramids has an entrance on one side, allowing visitors to peer into the gloomy space within. Fuller built the tomb in 1811, so his friends and neighbours had 23 years in which to get used to the fact that he had chosen this unusual form of monument. It was after his death, however, that the local gossip on the subject seems to have taken hold – in particular a story that Fuller was entombed in the pyramid sitting down at a table with a roast chicken and a bottle of claret. Such unconventionality seemed appropriate to Fuller's larger than life character, and the idea that he was buried with his dinner appeared to fit the ancient notion that the soul would need sustenance on its way to the next world. When the pyramid was restored in 1982, however, the rumours were found to be untrue. The squire is buried in the usual recumbent fashion beneath his pyramid.

Worcester

Simple gift

A stomach bug laid me low on Sunday, putting me off my stride and kicking my usual weekend post off the field of play. Here’s a brief post as compensation: one of my favourite pieces of monumental sculpture.

This monument is to Charlotte Elizabeth Digby, who died in 1820. She was wife of William Digby, who was a prebendary of Worcester Cathedral, which is how she comes to be here. Her monument was created by Francis Chantrey, who completed it in 1825. Chantrey, a prolific sculptor, was famous for his monuments to children. Some of the simplicity of his carvings of children is perhaps also seen in this reminder that after centuries of sleeping figures, putti, urns, berobed belledames, and theratrical gestures, a monument could show simply this: a young woman reclining on a couch, her hands together but not demonstrably prayerful, her head raised and calm, not downcast. Idealized? Yes. Classical? Certainly. But she belongs to the real world too.

Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire

Architecturally incorrect

It’s a happy coincidence that I visited Sunningwell, in the previous post, within a few days of going to Chipping Campden, where in the large 15th-century parish church I found this memorable monument in the chancel. Although quite large, it’s easy to overlook in a church that contains still bigger, more eye-catching tombs not far away. What links the monument to Sunningwell is that it’s from the Tudor period and is another example of the arrival of a particularly eccentric architectural classicism in England.

It’s the monument of Sir Thomas Smyth, who died in 1593, and what concerns me here is not his effigy, recumbent on its tomb chest, the head resting on the knight’s metal helmet, nor the figures of his two wives and 13 children arranged around the base, charming as they are. What I’m interested in is the canopy.


You can tell straight away that this is a classical structure – there are Corinthian columns with their capitals of curly acanthus leaves, holding up a canopy topped with a triangular pediment. But look a bit more closely and the design breaks all the rules. The pediment does not run the whole width of the frontage and is far too high – and there’s half of another pediment on the short side. The carving in the triangle depicts not classical scenes but a coat of arms. Around the frieze beneath run designs that are neither Greek nor Roman but Elizabethan patterns including, near the corners, motifs that look a bit like interlaced strips of leather and are known as strapwork – there are also large versions of these on the underside of the canopy. And another thing – at the front there are three columns, one at each corner and one in the centre. True classical design does not use odd numbers of columns – an even number is used, so that there’s a gap, not a column in the middle.

All of which is enough to tell you that this monument has not been built according to the rules laid down by the architects of ancient Greece or Rome, or of their Italian Renaissance imitators. And this is not surprising, because English builders of this period got their knowledge of classical architecture not from Greece or Rome, where virtually none of them had been, but from France and the Netherlands, where the classical style had already been adopted and developed with the addition of different kinds of ornament. When the English took it over, they put their special spin on it too. The result: architectural hybrids like this tomb canopy.

But what a glorious hybrid! The monument is carved with vigour. It makes you look, but it doesn't dominate the entire church. The blend of Roman details and English ornament is happy. The whole thing has a liveliness that later English Classicism sometimes lacks. It reminds me a little of Shakespeare, its contemporary, who had ‘small Latin and less Greek’, but who put what he had to good use, in order to make something out of it that was special and rich and, occasionally, strange.

Knowlton, Dorset

Layers of history (2)

This is the ruined medieval church of Knowlton, Dorset, a village recorded in Domesday Book but now vanished – according to some online sources as a result of the Black Death. This church forms one of the most dramatic bits of historical ‘layering’ in southern England because it is built right in the middle of a circular prehistoric earthwork. The earthwork is a henge, the term for a round or oval prehistoric monument, usually bounded by a ditch and bank, and dating to between 3000 and 2000 BC. Henges are generally thought to have been ritual sites, and are often close to other prehistoric monuments – neighbours of this one include more henges, barrows, and other earthworks.

Judging by the abundance of semi-circular arches, the church must have been built originally in the Norman period – probably the early-12th century. No-one knows why the builders positioned their church inside the henge, though one would like to think that they knew that the site had been used for ancient rituals and wanted to adopt it for their own. Although churches in henges are uncommon, examples of continuity between pre-Christian and Christian religious ideas are not unusual – think of the abundance of ‘pagan’ carvings on the outsides of churches, for example. There are also quite a few circular churchyards where there is no evidence of earthworks, possible evidence of the reuse of an ancient ritual site of some kind.

The fact that the church stands here has helped to preserve the earthwork – earthworks on farmland often get flattened as a result of centuries of cultivation. The church’s unusual siting has probably helped its survival too – although the village has disappeared, the ruined church (itself an example of architectural layering with its Norman nave and later, probably 15th-century, tower) still stands, roofless but proud.

Burford, Oxfordshire

From the Brazils

This is one of the figures on the monument of Edmund Harman, barber-surgeon to Henry VIII, in Burford parish church. Harman became a prominent Burford resident in the 1540s, when he was one of the beneficiaries of his boss’s dissolution of the country’s monasteries. He and his wife were granted Burford Priory.

Like many a big cheese before and since, he made sure his monument was made well before he died. Dating from 1569, it also commemorates Agnes, ‘his only and most faithful wife’ and their 16 children, only two of whom survived their parents. Quite why the wall plaque is surrounded by figures like this one, whose feathered headdresses seem a long way from standard Oxfordshire attire, is not known. The best guess as to their identity – though there’s been a lot of scholarly argument about it – is that they hail from the banks of the Amazon. They may have been copied from illustrations in a Flemish book that appeared a few years earlier.

But why are they in Burford, on this particular monument? Apparently Agnes Harman’s family included merchant adventurers and perhaps it was her connexion with people who had sailed across the Atlantic that inspired these unlikely carvings, creating in the process one of the many pleasant surprises in this beautiful church on the edge of the Cotswolds.