The Parish Church of St Neot, Cornwall

Left: St Neot, south porch. Right: Interior, looking east.

Welcome to our ancient parish church in the village of St Neot, nestling on the southern edge of Bodmin Moor. You have probably come to view our magnificent late medieval stained glass, the most complete set of parish church windows after Fairford in Gloucestershire are the opening words of the church guidebook, which goes on to describe the church as a magnificent example of what can be achieved with intractable granite. Although the visitor is urged to look around at other objects of historical interest, I had eyes only for the glass. Every window is filled with stained glass, not all of it in its original position but all of it heavily restored by John Hedgeland in the 1820s. In my account of the windows I have started in the south east corner with the Creation window then circled clockwise around to Hedgeland’s Last Supper window behind the altar.

Left: South east corner with Creation and Noah windows. Right: Top of Creation window.

Left: Creation window detail, Death of Adam. Right: Bottom of Creation window.

The Creation window retains 95% of its original 1480s glass. In its tracery (above right) is a set of the nine orders of angels, the panels below show the early history of the world from God marking out the sun in the sky with a pair of compasses at top left to God commanding Noah to make the Ark at bottom right. The detail above shows the death of Adam, with his son Seth putting pips from the Tree of Life under his tongue.

It’s obvious that the next window, the story of Noah, has sections by Hedgeland - look at that light blue glass - the tracery lights and most of the scenes in the bottom row are replacements. The Ark, shown in the detail below (c.1480) is a fifteenth century sailing boat with Noah, his wife and pairs of animals inside while the dove and the raven fly away.

Left: Noah window detail, Noah and his wife on the Ark. Right: Noah window.

Row of windows along the south aisle.

It is remarkable that so much of this fifteenth and sixteenth century glass has survived the vandalism that took out a lot of the stained glass in English churches. The suggested reason for this is that most of the windows depict saints chosen by private donors with their families commemorated below, thereby representing local pride and an interest in keeping the windows safe. Those in the south aisle are named for the donor families - Borlase, Martyn, Mutton, Callaway and Tubbe (above). The last two of these windows are not in their original positions, similarly some of the donor panels that would have been on the north side of the church and therefore with the donors facing the altar. A row of these lovely little figures with interesting backgrounds and a request for the saint to pray for them is shown below.

Details of donor panels from the bottom of the south aisle windows.

Left & Centre: details of St George’s window, he is torn with rakes, he is thrown into a cauldron of molten lead. Right: St George’s window.

I’ve missed out a couple of later windows at the west end of the church, before coming to the north west corner with windows depicting the Saints George and Neot in sequences of scenes from their lives. The St George window (above) dated from 1500 to 1510 has episodes in his life not seen elsewhere; in scenes 7 to 11 he is tortured in different ways before being beheaded in the final panel.

Left: North aisle. Right, St Neot window.

Like all the windows in the slightly later north aisle, the St Neot window has a plainer shape with straight tops. The story telling in this glass, dated 1530 and given by the young men of the parish, is wonderfully simple and repetitive, strip cartoon style, with a consistent castellated background. It seems to me the most legible of the windows, with the Hedgeland additions blending in to the colour scheme. The last scene shows St Neot on a visit to Rome being blessed by the Pope, said to be Marinus (882 - 884). There is some confusion about St Neot as the stories about a Cornish hermit and a Saxon saint were mixed together after the Cornish St Neot’s bones were taken to Huntingdonshire following the Saxon conquest of Cornwall, only the right arm remains in the sepulchre in this church.

Lower half of St Neot window. In panels 5 to 8 Neot is lying in bed, his servant Barius cooks fish from the well, then throws them back where they return to life. In panels 9 to 11 a robber steals Neot’s cattle, stags come voluntarily to take their place before the robber repents and returns the stolen oxen.

Row of windows in north aisle.

The next three windows return to the scheme of saints and donors and are named for the donors - Young Women’s, Wives’ and Harry’s. They present a consistent row of ordered proportion and tone, with a series of richly coloured gowns at the bottom of the first two windows and patterned settings for the Harry family in the third.

Details of donor panels from the bottom of the north aisle windows.

Left: Redemption window. Right, detail of Redemption window.

The three last windows in my sequence, Redemption, Acts and the Last Supper were designed by John Hedgeland, the latter based on a German woodcut of 1491 that he found in the British Museum. Redemption and Acts were moved from the south aisle and are now rather hidden behind the organ in the vestry, while the Last Supper window in the chancel has itself been recently restored and includes original glass in the tracery. These are all interesting windows with shapes in the bands of lettering and the canopies and a colour balance that ties them in to the rest of the windows in the church. The painting of the figures is free and lively, the work of the skilled glass painter James Henry Nixon who worked with Benjamin Baillie and John Hedgeland on this complete restoration scheme.

I am indebted to the facsimile copy of a 1937 guide to the windows by G. McN. Rushforth which gives thorough descriptions of each panel and an account of what used to be where that I bought in the church alongside the afore mentioned church guidebook.

Left: North east corner of the church with Acts window. Right: Last Supper window.

Behind the Scenes

Left, East Hagbourne, Oxfordshire. Right, Urchfont, Wiltshire.

To see the medieval glass patchworked into a window at St Andrew’s Church, East Hagbourne (above left) I had to poke my head through a screen of heavy curtains that hide the vicar’s desk. To get up close to Rosalind Grimshaw’s window in Urchfont church I had to move piles of chairs and toys (above right). I’ve now started looking out for the children’s corners which, like kitchens in churches, give an indication of how the church is being used.

Left, inviting at North Moreton, Oxfordshire. Right, austere at Potterne, Wiltshire.

Steeple Ashton, Wiltshire.

In the huge church of St Peter and St Paul, Steeple Ashton, everything is clean and neat with fragments of medieval glass in almost all of the windows. The door to the vestry, not a separate room but just a space sectioned off, was open and everything inside was in order (above left). The children’s corner (above right) looked like you might want to spend time there, it seemed to have been arranged by someone who actually cares what the place looks like.

My best behind the scenes photo, above left, is from the corner of another huge church, this one at Madley in Herefordshire. The scene is simply furnished, the atmosphere is timeless. In the east window of the church is a wealth of medieval stained glass (below), but even more unusually there are twenty first century paintings by Edward Kelly installed in the nave and the crypt (above right). The triptych in the crypt is a particularly wonderful sight because paintings, particularly modern ones, are rarely found in English churches.

This from The Rev Simon Lockett, who I like to imagine sitting on that pink cushion. ‘It is a great joy to have the triptych “The Lillies of the Field” here in Madley Crypt. I have lived with these paintings for a long time now and they have helped to bring this beautiful space alive giving the crypt depth as well as a flourish of colour and bold form. They have helped with a contemplative practice as well as a daily reminder not only of the beauty of creation but of the natural cycle of abundance, death and new life’.

Medieval glass in the east window of The Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Madley.

Introduction to the French Road Trip

Rouen Cathedral with stained glass by Max Ingrand 1956 (below)

The first leg of our road trip consisted of a journey from the north - Calais - to the south - Mazamet - with stops along the way, some for stained glass and some for camping. Our first stop was Rouen and a quick evening visit to Notre Dame Cathedral, famous for its façade painted by Monet, drawn by Ruskin and admired by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones on their sight seeing visit in 1855. On our trip the heat wave was on and the sun was blazing through tall thin windows filled with excellent examples of stained glass from the 13th to the 16th century. The 1950s windows, most notably by Max Ingrand, replaced the ones that were bombed during the Second World War. They are similar to the cathedral’s medieval and renaissance windows in terms of composition, with colours and imagery that fit in, in an unremarkable way. I loved the patterned windows (top right) in a design of squares and diamonds with painted details that makes the glass look padded, like a quilt.

Stained glass windows in the church of St Ouen, Léry.

Early the next morning we stopped outside a church 15 miles away, and found it open, the interior beautifully kept. It looked, sounded (taped organ music) and smelt in perfect order, with painted walls, tiled floors, wooden sculptures and a complete set of twentieth century windows. The ones in the lower windows (shown above) were all of a similar design in different colour combinations and they became more satisfying the longer we looked at them. Like the patterned windows in Rouen Cathedral, I couldn’t find a name or a date, and like those windows they were in harmony with the architecture. When I was an art student I used to call this sort of stained glass ‘subservient to the architecture’, now I tend to think that’s a positive quality for a stained glass window to have.

Chartres Cathedral: east window, west window and Notre Dame de la Belle Verrière. 12th and 13th century glass.

We spent a day in Chartres, where I hadn’t been since I was a school student. I knew the interior had been controversially cleaned, so the pools of coloured light projected through the glass don’t seem so intense now that the interior is mostly white, rather than mostly black. However the medieval stained glass in its entirety is the best there is; huge and intricate, overwhelming and predominantly cobalt blue. The windows above the west door are beautiful (above centre) and so is the window of Notre Dame de la Belle Verrière (above right) that was always one of my favourites in my stained glass picture books. That’s one of the points of the road trip - to stand in front of your favourite artworks, an experience that is completely different from looking at them in a book or on a screen.

Drayton and Yarnton, Oxfordshire

Our cellar

When we decorated our cellar Ray set some of his relief plaster panels, made about twenty years ago, into the walls. It may not be obvious why from the photo above, but I like to think of the link these have to altar pieces, particularly those carved in Nottingham alabaster from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. We went to St. Peter’s church in Drayton, Oxfordshire to see a set of particularly fine examples of the genre which had survived because they were buried for safety and rediscovered when a vault was dug out in 1814.

Fifteenth century altar piece in St Peter’s church, Drayton, Oxfordshire

There are six scenes crowded with dynamic figures, heads, animals and angels. The panels, some with missing sections, are about 40 cms. tall with traces of paint visible and are mounted in the wall behind an altar. I was so captivated that I couldn’t really be bothered with the (nineteenth and twentieth century) stained glass in the church, but we did find a guide book that told us about a similar Nottingham alabaster altar piece in St. Bartholomew’s at Yarnton, only 15 miles away - a church I knew by name but couldn’t remember why.

The two end panels of the Drayton altar piece

Fifteenth century altar piece in St Bartholomew’s church, Yarnton, Oxfordshire

This altar piece (above) with two of the six panels missing, proved much less exciting than the Drayton one mainly because of the way that the panels are mounted, surrounded by heavy stone, and lit with a dim yellow light. However, every window in the church is filled with fragments of the most fantastic medieval english and continental stained glass, most of it given by alderman William Fletcher, Mayor of Oxford, in 1813. We stayed for a long time, admiring the details and the style of the figures so in keeping with the altar piece; I was delighted not to have my medieval reverie interrupted by any more modern glass here.

Yarnton church: East window (above the Nottingham alabaster altar piece) mainly English C15th and detail.

Two more depictions of the virgin and child (with other painted fragments) in the north windows of Yarnton church.

Details from the north west window of Yarnton church.

Left, The only C15th pieces that are in their original position in the top tracery, north window. Right, Head and birds in the sanctuary window, Yarnton.

To me, the most exciting windows are the reset angels in deep alcoves, lit by sunshine in the south west corner of the church (below). The windows are small enough for the mainly fifteenth century pieces to make a complete picture in each one, with some pattern, some objects ( a wheel or a surveillance camera, a football or a flower?) some border pieces, some incongruous bird and animal segments, fritillaries and bluebells. The faces that loom out of the bottom of the right hand window (bottom picture) have a particular other worldly quality - there is nothing in the centuries of stained glass painting that I would rather see.

Angel windows in the south wall of Yarnton church.

The two angel windows in Yarnton church.

Details of painted glass in the bottom of the left hand angel window

Detail from the bottom of right hand angel window

Disembodied head

Purple man from ‘These People Are Intellectuals…’ Left, in progress. Right, in the exhibition at Norwich Cathedral

Purple man’s disembodied head was an unplanned addition to our exhibition at The Hostry, Norwich Cathedral. When making the stained glass panel ‘These People are Intellectuals, They Live in Houses Full of Books and Have Nothing Worth Stealing’ (described in a previous blog post) purple man ended up with two alternative heads. I did a second one (on the left in the photos above) out of the same piece of flashed streaky purple glass because I thought I’d sandblasted too much of the purple layer off on the first head. However head number one turned out to be the best one, so head number two ended up on its own stand in the display case alongside an explanation of how the window was made.

St Margaret, Stratton Strawless Left, the south aisle. Right, north window containing medieval glass.

When you start looking at old stained glass in churches you get used to seeing disembodied heads. These are pieces of medieval stained glass that have survived breakages or the releading of windows and find themselves either part of another picture or out on their own. We made a trip to the village of Stratton Strawless, just north of Norwich, to see a perfect example of fifteenth century Norwich glass painting in the angel head which has been set into a clear glass window (above and below). Miraculously the church was not locked and it is full of stupendous monuments and second hand books as well as the angel head which seems so beautifully done now that I’ve started painting heads myself.

Stratton Strawless, the C15th angel head.

Stratton Strawless, glass in the windows of the south aisle.

Set into the windows of the south aisle are a collection of other glass fragments, including the heads of a bishop, a king with a fascinating web of lead lines where he has broken and a strange head which is all beard and no hair (above right). All of the other churches we drove to were locked, so thank goodness for a visit to Castle Acre Priory. Here were windows and arches, carved patterns and lines and among them just a few carved heads (below).

Stone heads from Castle Acre Priory.