Shrewsbury, Shropshire

The daily round

Many people know about the abbey at Shrewsbury because it features in the Cadfael novels of Ellis Peters, and is the home of the eponymous monk. But apart from the church, itself much truncated after the dissolution, little remains of the buildings of Cadfael’s monastery. The church is surrounded by roads, one of which slices its way through the site of the cloister, where the domestic buildings of the monks would have been sited.

This is one tantalizing fragment that has survived. It is a pulpit, and was originally part of the monks’ dining hall or refectory. Monks were expected to eat in silence, the only sound in the refectory being the voice of one brother, who would climb the stairs to the pulpit and read to the others as they ate. The lives of the saints were favoured for mealtime readings.

The ornate pulpit was built in the early-14th century. It is vaulted inside and carefully designed with broad openings, so that the reader could be heard, and small carvings to inspire those who looked up towards it. Cadfael, however, had he really existed, would not have known this delicate piece of stonework – he was a monk of the 12th century. He would probably have known a much plainer, round-arched pulpit, but the regular ritual of readings, like the continuous round of liturgy in the church, would have been the same.

Slapton, Northamptonshire

Christ's strongman

England’s medieval parish churches were originally decorated with wall paintings, collections of images depicting Bible stories, the lives of the saints, and other Christian subjects. Church interiors once glowed with colour as a result, but because of the iconoclasm that followed the English Reformation, most of these paintings were destroyed – commonly by overpainting with whitewash. Some have been restored, but whitewash, the removal of whitewash, and other wear and tear mean that most medieval English church wall paintings are at best fragmentary and faded.

Some of the best are in the church of St Botolph’s, Slapton, Northamptonshire. The subjects, painted in the 14th and 15th centuries, include the Annunciation, the Resurrection, St Michael weighing souls, and St Francis receiving the stigmata. But the best survival is a large painting of St Christopher, one of the most popular subjects of the medieval wall painters.

St Christopher is on the north wall of nave. This is the usual position for a painting of St Christopher – perhaps because he was the patron saint of travellers and his image was designed to be the first thing travellers would see as they entered through the south door opposite.

The image refers to a popular medieval story about the saint. He was said to have been a tall, strong man, who declared that he would serve only a person of supreme power. First he went into the service of a king, but the king was not supremely powerful because he feared Satan. So then Christopher became the servant of Satan, but Satan turned out to be fearful of the cross. So Christopher resolved to serve Christ, and a hermit told him that one way he could do this and use his strength was to help the weak cross a river. One of those he helped was a child who grew heavier and heavier as Christopher carried him. The child revealed that he was Jesus Christ and that he was carrying the weight of the world.

In the Slapton painting, the marks that delineate the saint’s face and the folds of his garment show the economical draftsmanship at work here; the red and earth colours give a hint at how bright the painting would originally have been. The saint’s staff is turning into a living tree, a miracle that happened when Christopher had been baptized by Christ. The teeming life of the river is represented by a handful of rather perky fish and, in the bottom left-hand corner, a small mermaid who, holding a mirror, is there as an embodiment of pride. The saint turns away from her and looks towards the traveller entering the church, and his gaze is as direct as it was 600 years ago.