Tag Archives: Stained glass angels

The angel’s bonnet

15 Monday Jun 2020

Posted by in Norwich history, Stained Glass

≈ 28 Comments

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It started with a Tweet. Something cropped up on Twitter that led me a merry dance through the sub-species of medieval headgear. By the end, I felt I knew how many angels’ bonnets could fit on the head of a pin.

Five years ago, my very first post was on ‘Norfolk’s Stained Glass Angels’. In it I showed one of this county’s most beautiful glass paintings of an angel in a feather suit completed by a feather hat [1].

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Harp-playing angel wearing a feather suit. All Saints, East Barsham, Norfolk. Painted by the workshop of John Wighton from c1450.

When I want to know about a Norfolk church my first port of call is Simon Knott’s site for the descriptions of the astonishing 912 churches he has visited in Norfolk [2]. In May, Simon posted a Tweet on this C15 angel from Feering in Essex.

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Simon Knott’s Tweet

The feather hat I’d seen in East Barsham and other Norfolk churches was virtually identical to one that Simon had seen in Essex so I asked him via Twitter if feather bonnets were East Anglian, rather than an exclusively Norfolk thing.

Angel redone

C15 painted angel from All Saints, Feering, Essex. Photo credit: Simon Knott 

In my first blog post [1], I found that it was possible to overlay the East Barsham head on top of other Norfolk C15 painted-glass angels. The exactness of the match suggested they were copied from the same template, meaning they were from the same workshop. One stylistic tic uniting glass from various Norfolk churches with the figures drawn in the great east window of Norwich’s St Peter Mancroft (the benchmark for Norfolk painted glass) was the double flap covering the entrance to the ear. I hope regular readers will forgive me banging on but this lug flap is known as the tragus. A double tragus is a developmental rarity, yet both the ‘Essex’ and the Norfolk angels share this distinguishing feature. Simon Knott pointed out that the glass in All Saints, Feering, Essex was a loose collection of English and Continental 15th to 18th century pieces brought together by Father Bundock, who died in 1989 [3]. So, the ‘Essex’ angel may well have been recycled from a Norfolk church and was almost certainly painted in Norwich. 

David King, the authority on Norwich School glass, detected the ‘hand’ of at least three artists responsible for painting the east window of St Peter Mancroft, Norwich [4]. The glass was made in the mid C15 in the Norwich workshop of Alderman John Wighton, who was succeeded by John Moundford of Utrecht (assisted by his wife), followed in turn by Moundford’s son John.

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A C15 angel from John Wighton’s Norwich workshop. From the east window, St Peter Mancroft, Norwich

But I digress. What I was really interested in here was the Feering angel’s feather bonnet. Sally Badham, former President of the Church Monuments Society, suggested via Twitter (@SallyBadham), that the headgear was an orle of the kind she had seen on glass and monuments in Yorkshire. I had to look this up. One definition of an orle is a border set in from the edge of a shield, giving a clue to the heraldic origin of the name.

Orle

However, there is an alternative definition of orle that gets us closer to the angel’s bonnet. Wiktionary gives it as: ‘the wreath, or chaplet, surmounting or encircling the helmet of a knight and bearing the crest; a torse’.  ‘Torse‘ is an obsolete French word for wreath and appears to be synonymous with ‘orle‘.

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Knight with an eagle crest at the Saracen Joust in Arezzo, Tuscany. Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0 Cavalieredicasata,  to which I added the arrow pointing to the torse. The knight’s squire also wears one for decoration while the knight himself probably wears one inside the helmet for comfort.

In heraldic terms, the torse – introduced in the late C14 – is described as the cloth circlet  intended to hide the join between the ornate tournament crest and the helmet [5]. The colours in the coil were the same as the wearer’s livery colours except, it seems, when the knight wore a lady’s favour. Such a makeshift torse could be a handkerchief, a ribbon or even the lady’s sleeve, twisted into a rope and worn around the helmet.

This twisted rope – the torse or orle – also applied to something that the knight originally wore in combat. For comfort, he would have worn a padded, circular orle beneath the heavy helm to lift it away from the head and eyes. With the development of lined, padded helmets the orle became redundant but was retained for decorative purposes. Below, on the effigy of Sir Richard Vernon, a highly decorative orle is worn outside the helmet [6]. The sculptor has carefully depicted the roll of fabric studded with beads or even jewels and pearls. So, by this stage, not a utilitarian thing.

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The effigy of Sir Richard Vernon, St Bartholomew’s Church, Tong, Shropshire (d.1451) Wikipedia. CC-BY-SA/2.0. Photo credit: Sjwells53

Below, the two celestial beings appear to be wearing stuffed orles around their heads, in which case the material billowing out of the hollow doughnut could be a caul or crespine – a bag-like net  of gold, silver or silk thread.

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In the tracery of SS Peter & Paul, East Harling, Norfolk

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The Virgin Annunciate in the tracery of Stratton Strawless, St Margaret. The doughnut-shaped headdress of this female saint is decorated with bosses. 

Another item – the chaperon – plays a key part in the development of medieval headgear. This gets quite technical but, basically, the chaperon seems to have evolved out of Marty Feldman’s hood from the film, Young Frankenstein.

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Marty Feldman as Igor in Mel Brooks’s ‘Young Frankenstein’. He wears a hooded cape with a long tail – the cornette or liripipe – at the back. It ends in a pom-pom glimpsed beneath his left hand.

By wearing the face-opening of the caped hood around the top of the head – not the face – and tying it up with the long tail, the cape evolved into a hat that was worn throughout Europe in the Middle Ages.

FinalTurban

Place the face-opening of your wife’s sweater over your head then wrap the loose arms around your head (or, in the case of a medieval hood, the long cornette hanging at the back).

The chaperon became ‘the most commonly worn piece of male headgear in Early Netherlandish painting’ [7]. And it is this form, with the long hood tied up on top, away from messy paint, that is being modelled in this probable self-portrait by Jan van Eyck (d. 1441). Sometimes titled, ‘Man in a Red Turban’ it should really be called ‘Man in a Red Chaperon (tied up with its Cornette or Liripipe)’.

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Probably a self-portrait by Jan van Eyck 1433. National Gallery, London. Known to have been in the collection of the 1st Earl of Norfolk ,’The Collector Earl’ (1585-1646), when he was exiled in Antwerp. 

Van Eyck was one of the first (Vasari said the first) artists to paint with oil, using thin translucent oil glazes to build up luminous flesh. In this, the painters of the Northern Renaissance were ahead of the Italians. Based in Bruges, the Italian Giovanni Arnolfini spent most of his life in Flanders; van Eyck painted his portrait wearing another complicated headpiece of red woollen fabric, this time the flaps are down and the loosely-twisted roll is clearly visible.

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Portrait of Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini by Jan van Eyck c.1435. Gemäldgalerie, Berlin

The earliest of van Eyck’s portraits to survive shows a man in the same three-quarter profile pose. Here, the chaperon appears to have developed into a more formal version, pulled over the head like a mob cap or Scotch bonnet, instead of something wound around the crown.

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Portrait of a Man with Blue Chaperon by Jan van Eyck c1430. Brukenthal National Museum

These examples of men’s headwear suggest how fashions from heraldic dress worked themselves into everyday life. They also transferred to female fashion: a C14 chronicler (quoted in [8]) described how ladies riding to a tournament would affect a masculine appearance by wearing short hoods that were wrapped about their heads by the liripipe. 

Again on Twitter, Sally Badham suggested that the angel’s headpiece could also be based on the bourrelet.  Like chaperons, bourrelets appear to have originated by rolling up a hood around the head but by the mid-C15 they had developed into a more formal, doughnut-shaped padded roll [7].  Now, however, the doughnut-shaped bourrelet had undergone a further transformation into a ring of fabric folded around a framework, possibly made of wire [9].  

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The very large bourrelet of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy c1450. After Rogier van der Weyden

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The doughnut-shaped bourrelets of ‘The Tax Collectors’, late 1520s by Quentin Massys. The Collections of the Prince of Liechenstein, Vaduz-Vienna

Planché [8] suggests that the turban-like headgear worn by European men and women in the mid C15 evolved out of the chaperon – the hooded cape, twisted into fanciful shapes. On the other hand, both the stuffed or hollow bourrelet and the twisted torse have been likened to the turban that crusaders had seen in the Middle East. Separate influences or convergent evolution?

The bride in the Marriage Feast at Cana, from SS Peter & Paul East Harling, was said by Norwich-glass expert Christopher Woodforde to be wearing a good example of a ‘turban head-dress decorated with a large jewelled ornament’ [10]. 

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C15 Norwich School glass by the Wighton workshop. SS Peter & Paul East Harling, Norfolk. 

Clues to the kind of headwear fashionable in mid-to-late C15 Norfolk can also be found in this county’s outstanding painted rood-screens. For instance, St Cecilia is illustrated (below) wearing a wreath of lilies to symbolise her virginity (the purity of which has been sullied by political emblems: the red rose of Lancaster and the white rose of York – two houses united by Henry Tudor in 1485). The copy of the floral wreath she holds in her hand reveals it to be made of two twisted strands. This perhaps tells us more about wreath-making than contemporary fashion but I’ll show this fine portrait of sorrowful Cissy anyway, since it is so different from the usual stereotypes.

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St Cecilia with her wreath of virginity, from St Mary’s North Elmham, Norfolk.

The remarkable series of screen paintings in St Michael and All Angels at Barton Turf, painted in the late C15 [11],  illustrates three Saints and nine Orders of Angels. This figure is a protective Principality from the Third Order of Angels. Ignoring the gold crown, this appears to be a twisted bourrelet or turban encircling a conical cap.

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One of the Principalities (First Order of Third Hierarchy), incidentally holding a flask of urine. St Michael and All Angels, Barton Turf, Norfolk

Again from Barton Turf, Archangel Michael in late C15 armour (below) wears a hat that encircles the head. This floral headwear, seen against the background of the halo, could be a hollow bourrelet studded with foliage.

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 Archangel (Second Order, Third Hierarchy) in late C15 plate armour. St Michael and All Angels, Barton Turf, Norfolk. 

The Cherubim below, from the Second Order of the First Sphere of Angels, wears a crown encircled by a red, doughnut-shaped wreath – the dabs of white suggestive of feathers.

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A Cherubim with two pairs of wings, its omniscience symbolised by the all-seeing eyes on the wing feathers; the cap seems to be covered with smaller contour feathers. St Michael and All Angels, Barton Turf, Norfolk

The leader of the Powers, Archangel Raphael, is seen below thrashing the devil. His headgear is comprised of a helmet encircled with overlapping feathers decorated with a central badge.

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Archangel Raphael, usually depicted in armour. St Michael and All Angels, Barton Turf, Norfolk

Similar feather hats are depicted on painted glass.

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From St Mary’s, Burnham Deepdale, Norfolk

An angel in the tracery of the east window at SS Peter & Paul, East Harling also wears a feather bonnet. If made at the same time as the superb main panels then this glass was painted around 1480 by John Wighton’s successors in his Norwich workshop. Angels were often depicted wearing feather onesies that ended neatly at neck, cuff and ankles, reflecting the outfits worn by actors in medieval mystery plays [12]. In this case, the angel’s feather hat could simply be the natural accompaniment to these outfits. However, there is evidence that by the late fifteenth- early sixteenth century, caps and bonnets were also in great vogue in secular life, ‘ornamented with a profusion of feathers‘[8].

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From Saints Peter and Paul, East Harling, Norfolk 

Postscript

After posting this article, photographer Paul Harley (whose site contains superb images of Norfolk angels https://paulharley.wordpress.com/category/angels/ ) sent me this photograph of a harp-playing angel from Weston Longville.

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From All Saints, Weston Longville, Norfolk. ©Paul Harley

It is a beautiful painting. Not only does the angel wear a very similar bonnet to the one worn by the East Barsham angel, but the overall pose is identical – the angels sharing many details, including that double tragus in the ear.

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Left: East Barsham; right: Weston Longville (©Paul Harley)

Paul also sent images of two ‘Powers’ from the Order of Angels, set in the tracery of the east window at Salle. Note the decorative orles worn around their helmets.

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The Powers hold chains and bundles of birch to vanquish evil, around their heads are suns representing the heavens. ©Paul Harley

©2020 Reggie Unthank

Thanks: I am grateful to fellow Tweeps: Simon Knott (@last_of_england) and Sally Badham (@SallyBadham), for their readiness to help and for starting me out on this trail, and to Sue Roe (@SueRoeGardener) for the mugshots. Thanks, too, to Paul Harley for sending photos from his collection of Norfolk Angels.

Sources

  1. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2015/12/19/norfolks-stained-glass-angels/
  2. http://www.simonknott.co.uk/
  3. http://www.simonknott.co.uk/essexchurches/feering.htm
  4. King, D. J. (2006) The Stained Glass of St Peter Mancroft, Norwich, CVMA (GB), V, Oxford.
  5. Arthur Charles Fox-Davies (1909). A Complete Guide to Heraldry. A project Gutenberg e-book (2012). https://www.gutenberg.org/files/41617/41617-h/41617-h.htm#page402
  6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaperon_(headgear)
  7. Paul F Walker (2013). The History of Armour 1100-1700. Pub: The Crowood Press Ltd.
  8. James Robinson Planché (1876). An Illustrated Dictionary of Historic Costume: from the First century BC to c1760. Reprinted by Dover Publications Inc in 2003.
  9. https://www.virtue.to/articles/women_roll_hats.html
  10. Christopher Woodforde (1950). The Norwich School of Glass-Painting in the Fifteenth Century. Pub: Oxford University Press.
  11. Nikolaus Pevsner and Bill Wilson (1997). The Buildings of England. Norfolk I: Norwich and the North-East. Pub: Yale University Press.
  12. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2016/08/18/angels-in-tights/
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Suleiman the Magnificent by Titian c1530

Angels in tights

18 Thursday Aug 2016

Posted by in Decorative Arts, Stained Glass

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Angels aren’t as common as they used to be. Five hundred years ago, before the Reformation, church was where most people would see artistic representations. The subject matter was strictly religious with angels playing important parts. Angels were ubiquitous and could be seen painted on rood screens, or as wooden roof angels, on wall paintings, painted glass and carved in stone. The way that angels were represented in these religious contexts may, however, have borrowed something from less strictly religious mystery plays.

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Archangel Gabriel wears a feather suit. C15th Norwich School glass, from St Peter’s Ringland. 

In medieval mystery plays the angels would wear – in addition to wings – feathers that covered the body, ending neatly at neck and ankle. These costumes are variously described as ‘feather tights'[1] or feather-covered ‘pyjama suits’[2]. The roof angel below is covered with only few ‘feathers’ but this probably reflects the case that such body suits may have been covered with scale-like flaps of cloth or leather to represent feathers [1]. The feather suits worn by actors would have provided a model for the depiction of angels in church art, and vice versa.

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Roof angel, St Agnes Cawston, Norfolk, adorned in relatively few large flaps painted as feathers. The Cawston angels are unique in standing upright on the hammer beams. Charles Rennie Mackintosh was fascinated by them (below).

In the early C13th, Pope Innocent III became so concerned about the growing popularity of clergy in these mystery plays that he banned them from appearing. The dramas were taken over by town guilds who courted popularity by dispensing with Latin and adding comic scenes [3]. Such performances were known to have taken place at York, Coventry and Norwich. From Norwich, one play survived: this was performed by the Grocer’s Guild and named Paradyse [3] or The Fall of Adam and Eve [4]. The text of the Norwich Stonemasons’ play, ‘Cain and Abel’ is lost [4]. The Norwich guilds are likely to have mounted their parts of the cycle in a pageant, which involved elaborate ‘pageant wagons’ [2], staged on the early summer feast of Corpus Christi [5]. This C19th engraving of the Coventry mystery pageant gives an idea of what such events looked like.

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Coventry Mystery Pageant, engraved by David Gee (1793-1872). Source: Beinecke Library

There were nine orders of angels, ranked in order of importance [6]. Chief were the seraphim, with three pairs of wings (often depicted in red): one pair for shielding their eyes  from God, one pair for flying and the third pair for covering their feet in respect. However, some say the latter were for covering their genitals, representing base instincts, and this is how they can appear in medieval images.

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Six-winged angel at St Peter, Ketteringham, Norfolk. Norwich School painted glass late C15th

Cherubim had four wings, usually depicted in blue. Then, after Thrones, Dominions, Virtues, Powers and Principalities we come to the more familiar Archangels who transmitted messages from God as Gabriel is doing in the first image above. Last were Angels – intermediaries between heaven and earth. Clarence was James Stewart’s guardian angel in “It’s a Wonderful Life”.

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Clarence Odbody (Angel Second Class). From “It’s a Wonderful Life” RKO 1946

Some of the most beautiful medieval images of feathered angels in the country can be seen in Norfolk’s rood screens. Two stunning examples are at Ranworth and Barton Turf. Below, one of the Archangels, the “debonair and fantastical” [7] Michael, slays a many-headed dragon. The dragon probably represents Satan, who – according to Milton in Paradise Lost – was wounded by Michael in personal combat [6A].

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Archangel St Michael from the church of St Helen, Ranworth, Norfolk. (C15th).

While most of the 12 screen panels in Ranworth represent saints, the equally beautiful rood screen at Barton Turf offers a rare depiction of The  Angel Hierarchy. The painting can be dated to the late C15th based on the detailing on the armour [7].

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Cherubim (left) have gold feathers, two pairs of wings and are typically covered with eyes. To the right is one of the Principalities. At St Michael and All Angels, Barton Turf, Norfolk

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Left, Archangel Raphael – the leader of the Powers (usually depicted in their armour) – with a chained demon beneath his foot. The face on the devil’s belly denotes  base appetites. Right, one of the Virtues. 

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Left: one of the Thrones holding scales, presumably for weighing souls. (This Throne has six wings normally used to depict Seraphim [6]). Right: an Archangel in late C15th plate armour. Note the fashionable late C15th turban.

During the Reformation then the Civil War the iconoclasts, who were most active in East Anglia, destroyed countless idolatrous and superstitious images so it is surprising that so much of the Barton Turf masterpiece survives intact. Only two of the panels were defaced.

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The Dominion (left) and Seraphim (right) were probably defaced because of their papist tiara and incense-containing censer, respectively.

Curiously, the feathered angels swinging censers in the spandrels of the west doorway at Salle [8]– less than 20 miles from Barton Turf – were untouched by the iconoclasts.

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St Peter and St Paul, Salle, Norfolk

Angels were commonly depicted playing musical instruments. A favourite is this beautiful painting of an angel playing a harp at All Saints East Barsham. The glass was probably painted in the latter part of the C15th by the Norwich workshop of John Wighton [9] (see my first blog post on Norfolk’s Stained Glass Angels).

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The harpist wears a fashionable turban. The ‘ears of barley’ at the bottom are typical of the Norwich School’s way of depicting wood grain.

Another harp player at St Peter and St Paul, Salle.SalleAngelHarp.jpg

At St Mary’s North Tuddenham this angel plays the lute…NthTuddLute1.jpg

… and at St Peter Hungate, Norwich – bagpipes HungateBagpipes.jpg

One of the glories of East Anglia is the large number of angel roofs, 84% of which are found in this region [13]. David Rimmer has examined two explanations for this. The first focuses on the Lollard heresy. (The name derives from their mumbling at prayer [from Middle Dutch lollaert = mutter]). Lollards were followers of John Wycliffe who – over a hundred years before the Protestant Reformation – objected to the pomp, imagery and idolatry of the Catholic Church. Their first martyr, who was burnt at the stake in London 1401, had been priest at St Margaret’s King’s Lynn. Lynn’s church of St Nicholas was the site of East Anglia’s first angel roof (1405-9) [13] suggesting that the large number of angels in East Anglia could be a counterblast to the Lollardism that was rife throughout this region.  In Norwich, men and women were burnt in Lollards Pit, a chalk pit once used for digging the foundations of the cathedral.

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Lollards’ Pit pub near Bishop Bridge, Norwich

Another hypothesis involves the Royal Carpenter Hugh Herland who had created the first angel roof at Westminster Hall in 1398. Herland and his craftsmen came to make the new harbour at Great Yarmouth and it is argued that his influence spread throughout the region (although the first datable angel roof was in Kings Lynn [then Bishops Lynn] rather than Great Yarmouth).

Norwich has five* angel roofs: St Mary Coslany, St Michael at Plea, St Peter Hungate, St Giles and St Peter Mancroft [13]. (*A reader later informed me that St Swithins, which houses Norwich Arts Centre on St Benedicts Street, also has an angel roof hidden in the black-painted interior). St Peter Mancroft Norwich has a particularly fine mid C15th angel roof, said by Michael Rimmer to be “virtuoso medieval carpentry” [13]. The Perpendicular fan vaulting in wood masks hammerbeams whose free ends are capped by angels.

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St Peter Mancroft, Norwich

Cawston, north of Norwich, has one of the finest angel roofs. As well as the demi-angels with spread wings, forming a frieze around the wall plate, man-size angels stand vertically at the ends of each hammer beam as if ready to dive.

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Single hammer beam roof at St Agnes Cawston

Thrust from the heavy roof tends to splay the walls outwards. Opposite walls can be held together by tie braces that span the width of the church but in hammerbeam roofs, the force is deflected downwards onto the jutting hammerbeams beams that only project partway into the volume. Cawston has a single row of these hammerbeams. Below, Knapton has double hammerbeams, allowing an ‘amazing’ span of 70 feet [7]. Double-deckered angels at the ends of these beams, together with two rows on the wall plate, result in a total of 138 angels.  KnaptonRoof.jpg

The roof was added to C14th Knapton church in 1503. This probably dates the earliest angels [7] although some clearly derive from later restorations – the lower rank from the 1930s [10]. KnaptonAngel.jpg

One of the lower Knapton angels, dating from the restoration of the 1930s Charles Rennie Mackintosh is associated with East Anglia by the pencil and watercolour drawings he made when he and wife Margaret stayed in Walberswick, Suffolk, in 1914. But he had previously visited Knapton, Norfolk, in 1896/7.

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Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Knapton roof angels. Creative Commons. Source: Glasgow School of Art Archives and Collections 1897 [Ref11]

According to the Hunterian Gallery’s archive in Glasgow, Mackintosh had toured Norfolk with fellow architects Alfred(?) Greig and John Stewart, ‘possibly’ in 1896.  This is Greig’s sketch of a Cawston angel standing at the end of a hammerbeam.

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Pencil drawing.  Roof truss St Agnes Cawston 1896? (c) The Hunterian Museum Art Gallery, University of Glasgow 2016.[ Ref  14]

Booton St Michael was enthusiastically but eccentrically revived in Victorian Gothic Revival style by Reverend Whitwell Elwin, a local man who claimed to be a descendant of the North American Indian princess Pocahontas [12]. Completed in 1891, his updating of the medieval church gets a mixed reception from various commentators: Simon Jenkins thought the interior was “blighted by the customary Victorian frigidity” although architect Edwin Lutyens concluded it was “very naughty but built in the right spirit” [12]. But Lutyens had a vested interest since he married one of the ‘Blessed Girls’ – the seemingly numerous young beauties whose portraits appear in the tracery glass [12, 13].

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Most agree that the stained glass and roof angels made up for other misjudgements. The local master carpenter James Minns carved this hovering roof angel at Booton [13]. BootonAngel.jpg

James Minns is also credited with designing the bull’s head emblem for Colman’s mustard [13].

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Left to the end: how Jeremiah James Colman made his money [15]

** STOP PRESS. WHO WAS JAMES MINNS? **

Just as I was finishing this article, Costessey resident Peter Mann responded to a previous blog article on Gunton’s brickworks by naming all the workers (below) at the Costessey brickyard.  Excitingly, he identified the arrowed figure as James Minns with John Minns seated on his right. Both were labelled as “Carvers of Norwich”, consistent with census returns giving their occupations as ‘carver’ (or, once for James, ‘sculptor’).  The entry for Minns [16] on the Mapping of Sculpture website gives his full name as James Benjamin Shingles Minns (ca 1828-1904). James was sufficiently confident of his skill to submit (successfully) a carved wooden panel of ‘A Happy Family’ to the 1897 Summer Exhibition of the Royal Academy; he had also carved the mantelpiece and panelling for Thomas Jeckyll’s commission for the Old Library at Carrow Abbey (1860-1) [17]. The presence of this highly skilled sculptor and his son at the Costessey Brickyard strongly suggests that they carved the moulds for the ornate ‘fancy’ bricks and panels for which Guntons were locally renowned. From his independent status as ‘Carver’ it seems possible that “James Minns of Heigham” [17] might have been freelance rather than a full-time employee, especially since his address was ca. five miles away from the Costessey Brickyard. Minns@Guntons.jpg

Employees of the Guntons Brickyard Costessey. James Minns is arrowed (white) with his son John, arrowed red. Pre-1904. (c) Ernest Gage Collection at Costessey Town Council

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Norwich is a small city and its many lines of history are interwoven. A previous blog focused on the Boileau Memorial Fountain once sited at the junction of Newmarket and Ipswich Roads. James Minns collaborated again with architect Thomas Jeckyll by carving this coat of arms in the tympanum of the fountain [17].

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“Minns of Heigham” [17] carved this plaque for the Boileau Fountain formerly at the Newmarket/Ipswich Road junction. (C) Norfolk Library and Information Service: Picture Norfolk

Back at Booton and another angel – the statue of St Michael above the porch … Richard Cocke [18] has suggested that Minns could have sculpted the model for Archangel Michael.

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Church of St Michael Booton. A rather stern St Michael sheaths his sword, with a bemused Jabberwockian dragon at his feet. Attributed to sculptor James Minns.

Sources

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feather_tights
  2. http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O7802/panel-norwich-school/
  3.  http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Mystery_play
  4. http://gildencraft.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/the-norwich-stonemasons-play-by-gail.html
  5. http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/medieval/mystery_plays.php
  6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_angelology Ref 6A: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_(archangel)#Art_and_literature
  7. Mortlock, D.P. and Roberts, C.V. (1981). The Popular Guide to Norfolk Churches; I. North-East Norfolk. Pub: Acorn Editions, Fakenham.
  8. http://www.norfolkchurches.co.uk/salle/salle.htm
  9. King, David. (2004). Glass Painting. In, Medieval Norwich eds C. Rawcliffe and R.Wilson. Pub, Hambledon and London. pp121-136.
  10. http://www.norfolkchurches.co.uk/knapton/knapton.htm
  11. http://www.gsaarchives.net/archon/?p=collections/findingaid&id=459&rootcontentid=10386
  12. Jenkins, Simon(2000). England’s Thousand Best Churches. Pub: Penguin.
  13. http://www.angelroofs.com/images-2
  14. http://www.huntsearch.gla.ac.uk/cgi-bin/foxweb/huntsearch_Mackintosh/DetailedResults.fwx?SearchTerm=53014/11&reqMethod=Link
  15. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremiah_James_Colman
  16. http://sculpture.gla.ac.uk/view/person.php?id=ann_1283258555
  17. Soros, Susan Weber and Arbuthnott, Catherine (2003). Thomas Jeckyll: Architect and Designer, 1827-1881. Pub: BGC, Yale.
  18. http://www.racns.co.uk/sculptures.asp?action=getsurvey&id=1065

Thanks to Peter Mann for identifying James Minns; Brian Gage for giving permission to reproduce an image from the Ernest Gage Collection at Costessey Town Council; Paul Cooper for providing the new photograph of the Guntons workers; Jocelyn Grant of the Glasgow School of Art for assistance with Mackintosh’s (K)Napton angels; Michael Rimmer of angelroofs.com for his help with the Norwich angels; and Clare Everitt of Picture Norfolk.

Four brilliant sites

Norfolk’s stained glass angels

19 Saturday Dec 2015

Posted by in Decorative Arts, Stained Glass, Uncategorized

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Angels’ Ears

The first exhibition I saw in The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, in the 1980s, was Treasures of Norfolk Churches. The most beautiful piece was a head of an angel painted on glass and I had the poster of this fifteenth century angel on my office wall for many years.

Later, my wife and I were paying homage to Robert Marsham who recorded how nature changes over the seasons and so started the science of phenology in the eighteenth century. We traced him to St Margaret’s church in Stratton Strawless (poor soil, poor wheat, little straw) (1) where there was a small display of his work alongside the imposing memorials to his ancestors. Most of the remaining medieval glass was in the upper traceries of the windows but there, in the otherwise clear main light of the north aisle window, was the angel from the poster (visit the excellent: norfolkstainedglass.co.uk (2)).

SSangelPixlr.jpg

Over many years of staring at this poster on a daily basis I had noted some peculiarities. First was the angel’s curly hair with a distinctive double S curl in the centre of the hairline; the second was the peculiar double tragus – the flap in front of the ear. Normally, this is a single-pointed prominence covering the opening to the ear. Abnormally, an accessory tragus can form as a smaller tag  but the ear of the Stratton Strawless angel shows a more equal bi-lobing giving it a pie-crust appearance. A friend who spent time as a paediatric dermatologist never encountered a double tragus, indicative of it rarity.

Ear_PixlrA.jpg

In another chance encounter I visited The Burrell Collection in Glasgow (3) and saw a very similar head in a 15th century stained glass panel attributed to The Norwich School (see also ref 4). Comparison with the Stratton Strawless angel shows they share the double tragus, the double S curl and evidently visited the same hair stylist. The noses are drawn with identical strokes of the brush, as are the philtrums (the double-lined channel between nose and mouth). But there is an overall cartoon-like quality to the Burrell saint that is missing from the softer Strawless angel. Whereas the Burrell saint has expression lines drawn at the corner of the mouth the more wistful appeal of the Strawless angel derives from the smoky shading at the edge of the mouth, giving the face a quizzical look somewhat reminiscent of the Mona Lisa.

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Head of St John. St Peter Mancroft glass from The Burrell Collection Glasgow. Image reversed for comparison. Reproduced courtesy  of Glasgow Museums.

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Stratton Strawless angel. Note the double tragus in the ears of this and the figure above.

From the same family then but not identical twins. At this distance it is not easy to identify the artist but there are clues.

The Burrell glass (3) is attributed to the St Peter Mancroft church, Norwich. In 1450-55 Robert Toppes, a rich wool merchant, donated painted glass panels to this, Norwich’s ‘most prestigious’ parish church (4). An unknown proportion of the glass must have been destroyed by  iconoclasts during the mid sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the explosion of 90 barrels of gunpowder at the Royalist Committee House in nearby Bethel Street didn’t help. In 1647, during the Civil War, this ‘Great Blow’  killed or injured a hundred people (4,5). Apart from the panel now in The Burrell Collection, Glasgow, and two in Norfolk’s Felbrigg Hall (one of which is on loan in the Mancroft treasury) the rest of the surviving glass was gathered together in the east window in an apparently random fashion (4,6). Robert Toppes himself is depicted in the donor panel (below) along with female members of his family. The head of a curly-haired saint or angel replaces a lost third female head.

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Robert Toppes and family in the donor panel of the east window of St Peter Mancroft, Norwich. The head of a blond saint/angel replaces one family member. Close inspection shows that Toppes’ ear is also painted with a double tragus.

Toppes (1405-1467) was probably Norwich’s wealthiest tradesman at the height of the city’s trading power, demonstrating the rise of the merchant class. He became mayor and was member of parliament four times. He built his own trading hall in King Street, adjacent to the River Wensum that was used to transport his fine cloths and wool for trade with the continent. This hall, then called Splytts, is now known as Dragon Hall after the carved dragon exposed amongst the roof timbers during restoration.

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Dragon discovered in the roof timbers of Dragon Hall, King Street, Norwich. Courtesy of The Writers’ Centre

Records show that Norwich had been a regional centre for glass painting since at least the thirteenth century (7). The Toppes window was made by the prominent workshop of John Wighton (6,8) who was alderman when Toppes was mayor and whose workshop is likely to have been close to Toppes’ trading hall, Splytts. During his mayoralty Toppes paid for the windows of the Guildhall’s council chamber to be glazed by Wighton and on a tour of the Guildhall (highly recommended) it is possible to see generic similarities between figures in this and the Toppes window in St Peter Mancroft.

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Stained glass window in Norwich Guildhall, painted by the Wighton workshop and funded by the mayor, Robert Toppes. Note Toppes’ coat of arms between the two angels.

For the Toppes window, David King in a magisterial book devoted to just this one window, identifies the styles of at least three painters (6, 7). In addition to Wighton himself, he suggests that the Master of the Passion window may have been his apprentice William Moundford who came from Moontfort in Utrecht, underlining the close links between Norfolk and the Low Countries.  William’s wife Helen was – perhaps surprisingly considering the date – also a glazier in Wighton’s studio and she is thought to have made a contribution to the Toppes window. Their son John was also apprenticed to Wighton in 1446 and became head of the workshop in 1458.

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Panels from St Peter Mancroft’s ‘Toppes’ window. All visible ears display the double tragus.

On a recent visit to The Metropolitan Museum, New York, I saw fifteenth century stained glass attributed to Gloucestershire (9), in which the apostles also had the double tragus, although this bunch of ruffians  looked nothing like the angelic Stratton Strawless head. So by itself this facial feature cannot be considered diagnostic of a particular artist or school. Indeed, angels painted on the wooden panels of the beautiful rood screen of St Michael, Barton Turf, Norfolk have the double tragus, showing that this trait was not confined to glass painting.

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Angel painted on rood screen of St Michael Barton Turf. The angel’s ear shows the double tragus.

By comparing more than one facial trait it should be possible to further define the Strawless glass painter. A tour around Norfolk, based on the brilliant Hungate glass trails (10), reveals other saints and angels by the Wighton workshop and by using imaging software it was possible to overlay their images onto the Strawless angel. Below, these reunited fragments of an angel’s head from Warham St Mary share the double tragus and double-S curl with the Stratton Strawless angel.

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Head of angel, Warham St Mary’s Norfolk

The transparency of this image was increased and the face overlaid onto the Strawless angel.

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Overlaying the heads of the Strawless and Warham angels

The positions of the nose, ear and mouth of the two angels coincide  pretty well as do the eyes, despite the lead strip across the Warham figure.  Only the Warham angel’s more prominent jaw is significantly out.

Another angel with an enigmatic smile, and which rivals the beauty of the Strawless head, can be seen at All Saints Church, East Barsham, Norfolk. This musician wears ‘feather tights’ as worn in medieval mystery plays.

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Angel, All Saints East Barsham, Norfolk

Below, overlaying the semi-transparent heads of the Strawless and East Barsham angels reveals an exact coincidence between the alignment of ears (with double tragus), the angle of the nose, position of the pupils, size and shape of the mouth as well as the overall shape of the face, even the scratched shading inside the upturned collar.

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Overlay of the East Barsham and Stratton Strawless angels

The exactness of this coalignment strongly suggests that the two heads originated from the same workshop. However, different members of the shop may have used the same template or cartoon at different times yet produced identifiably different results, as with the various artists of John Wighton’s workshop thought to have painted the Toppes window. And remember that not all those figures by the Wighton workshop had the double tragus. It seems probable, therefore, that the Strawless and East Barsham (and Bale) heads are by the same artist.

So who was that artist? After more than 500 years there is little to go on (see 8). David King,  the eminent authority on Norfolk stained glass mentions  that in 1473 John Marsham left a bequest in his will for the glazing of Stratton Strawless north window (11). There is no guarantee that the Strawless angel was part of the bequest but if it were this would date the angel to the 1470s. In this case John Wighton died too early to have painted the angel’s head (1458). There is record of William Mundford’s will in 1457 so he, too, may have preceded the painting of the angel. However, his son John, who became head of the Wighton workshop, died in 1481 and could have painted the piece. What does seem clear is that the cartoon on which the Stratton Strawless angel was based originated in Norwich’s Wighton workshop and was adapted by its various artists over several decades.

©2015 Reggie Unthank

Sources 

  1. norfolkchurches.co.uk
  2. norfolkstainedglass.co.uk
  3. The Burrell Collection, Glasgow. Asset number 45.92_01
  4. Matthew, R. (2013) Robert Toppes: Medieval Mercer of Norwich. Pub, The Norfolk and Norwich Heritage Trust.
  5. http://www.heritagecity.org/research-centre/social-innovation/norwich-in-the-civil-war.html
  6. King, D. J. (2006) The Stained Glass of St Peter Mancroft, Norwich, CVMA (GB), V, Oxford.
  7. Woodforde, C. (1950) The Norwich School of Glass-Painting in the Fifteenth Century. Pub, Oxford University Press.
  8. King, D. (2004). Glass Painting. In, Medieval Norwich eds C. Rawcliffe and R.Wilson. Pub, Hambledon and London. pp121-136.
  9. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/463580?rpp=30&pg=2&ft=gloucestershire&pos=53
  10. http://www.hungate.org.uk
  11. King, D.J. (1974)Stained Glass Tours Around Norfolk Churches. Pub, The Norfolk Society.