Part 13

From the pictorial point of view these windows are much more accomplished than anything that had so far been done in England. In comparing English and French fifteenth century work, however, it must always be remembered that the best English work was done during the first half of the century, and is far better than the French work of that time, whereas the best French work was done in the second half of the century when the English Perpendicular style had for the most part become stereotyped and dull, and seemed to resist the introduction of new ideas. These Evreux windows represent the style which, under the influence of contemporary picture-painting, was growing up on the Continent, but which did not obtain a foothold in England till the advent, almost at the end of the century, of the school which produced the Fairford windows.

FOOTNOTE:

[18] It is true that the glass is not now in its original position, but I think it must always have filled two lights.

XVI

MALVERN AND FAIRFORD

So great was the quantity of stained glass produced in England in the fifteenth century, and so much still remains, that it is impossible, in this book, even to mention all the more important examples. We have seen the growth and perfection of the Perpendicular style at York. At Great Malvern Priory you may study its gradual decadence.

[Sidenote: Great Malvern: the "Creation."]

The best of the windows there are undoubtedly the earliest, namely, those in St. Anne's Chapel which include the famous "Creation," of which the date is perhaps 1440-50. It cannot, I think, compare with John Thornton's "Creation" in the east window of York Minster,--the colour scheme is so much more conventional and less expressive,--but it is nevertheless very beautiful. The resemblance of some of the scenes to those in Thornton's window is perhaps no more than one would expect to find in two representations of the same subject in the same period, but at the same time the Malvern "Creation" is very much akin to York work, though rather to the later phase represented by the St. Cuthbert and the All Saints' windows, than to the work of Thornton. I may be wrong, but I sometimes suspect that the inhabitants of the Severn and Avon valleys had more intercourse with the North of England--to which access would be easy by the Avon and Trent, navigable most of the way--than with the Thames Valley and South of England, from which they were cut off by the wild and inhospitable Cotswolds.

[Sidenote: The north transept window.]

In comparing the later windows in Malvern Priory with the "Creation" and its neighbours in St. Anne's Chapel, one can trace a decided and increasing decadence. The forms are the same but stereotyped and dull, the artists seem timid in their use of colour, and all the life seems to go out of the style. The great north transept window, given in 1501-2 by Henry VII. (it once contained his portrait and still has that of his son Prince Arthur and the architect, Sir Reginald Bray), is, compared with the earlier work, a very poor affair. The yellow stain in particular is very coarse and overdone, yet such was the hold which this style had got on our countrymen that in spite of the late date of the window there is not a hint in it of the new ideas which were then coming in, although it is probable that before it was finished, the famous windows of Fairford, not forty miles away across the Cotswolds, had at least been begun.

[Sidenote: Fairford.]

The old church of Fairford with its square central tower, standing on a green slope above a rushing trout stream, which, a few miles below, unites with the baby Thames and makes it a navigable river, occupies a unique position, not merely as the only village church in England--one may, perhaps, say in the world--which still retains the whole of its original set of stained-glass windows almost intact, but from the quality of the windows themselves. Some, it is true, have suffered damage, but there is not a subject unrecognizable, nor a window missing.

[Sidenote: The new style.]

The church was begun by John Tame, merchant of London, and finished by his son, Sir Edward; but since John Tame's will, dated 1496, while bequeathing various sums for ornaments to the church, makes no mention of the glass, it is argued that the glass had been already ordered. The Fairford windows are usually classed as Perpendicular on the strength of their association with Perpendicular architecture and the presence of Perpendicular detail in the canopies and elsewhere, but it is a wholly different style to the Perpendicular of York, of Malvern, of Warwick; the style which, with little change, had held the field in England since the beginning of the century. Fairford, in fact, marks a revolution in English stained glass. It is an early, if not the first work of a new school which, throwing away the old native tradition, based its style on that which had grown up on the Continent and, still more, upon Flemish painting. The Fairford windows represent a phase of their art which did not last very long, for their style soon began to assimilate itself to that of the Renaissance. In the windows of King's College Chapel at Cambridge you may see the change happening, and in the latest windows there you may also, alas! see the rapid setting in of decadence. It was, indeed, a style which contained in itself the seeds of decay, which germinated all too rapidly; but these, its first-fruits, at Fairford are magnificent, and disarm criticism.

[Illustration: PLATE XLIX ANGEL'S HEAD, FROM GREAT ROSE WINDOW IN NORTH TRANSEPT OF ST. OUEN'S, ROUEN Fifteenth Century]

They mark, as I say, a complete departure from the older standards of English fifteenth century glass. It is the same story, once more repeated, of old conventions of drawing becoming out of date, and failing to satisfy a newer generation. Of the more advanced schools of painting, the Flemish was the one that Englishmen were most in touch with, and it was thence that the new school of English glass-workers took their inspiration, with the result that a Flemish feeling is traceable in all their work. One immediate result of the more pictorial standard now expected of the artist was that he came to depend in quite a different way on the painting of his glass as distinct from the glazing. At Fairford, elaborate landscape backgrounds are put in with the brown enamel alone, helped by yellow stain, sometimes on white, sometimes on grey-blue glass, to which latter the stain gives a green for grass and trees. Not as yet, however, does the painting take precedence of the glazing, the balance being for a time held equal between the two. Indeed the craft of glazing, as well as that of painting, was now at its height; the artist had all the resources of both at his command and used them to the full, but as yet the limits of the medium were not overstepped.

Another result of the pictorial standard now arrived at, was that the artist began to feel cramped by the narrow lights he had to fill, and to let his subjects spread through more than one of them, ignoring the intervening mullion. At Fairford many of the subjects occupy two lights, and the "Crucifixion" at the east end and the "Doom" at the west spread right across the whole width of the window. As yet this is not so done that one loses the sense of the design decorating the stone-work; but both these developments are indications of a tendency which was to increase as time went on, and eventually to ruin the art.

The new point of view naturally affected the canopy, which is shaded like solid stone-work, giving it a heavy and clumsy effect. In many of the subject windows, however, the canopy is omitted altogether, the sky of the picture, which is sometimes white, with clouds and circling swifts painted on it, continuing right up to the stone-work.

[Sidenote: The problem of the authorship of the windows.]

I agree with Mr. Westlake in finding the work of more than one hand in the windows. Two there are certainly, and possibly four. The east window is certainly by a different, and, I think, an older hand than the west, and the windows of the north aisle, though they may be by the same hand as the west windows, are certainly by a different one to the Apostles opposite them, which are the poorest windows in the church. I think the differences are greater than could be accounted for by any development that might take place in the same man's style during the execution of the windows. The west windows are the work of a different temperament to the east windows. The forms are fuller, stronger, and more rounded, and show a much stronger sense for the decorative placing of a line.

There is no record to tell us who these men were, and there has been much discussion as to whether they were Englishmen or Flemings. Indeed the wildest theories have been advanced as to the origin of the windows. They have been attributed to Dürer, without the slightest internal or external evidence except the presence of an A which does not resemble his signature. Another story which, though not heard of, I believe, till the eighteenth century, has obtained wide credence, is that they were captured at sea, bound for Rome, by Edward Tame, and the church built to contain them; but the most casual examination of the windows ought to convince any one that they were made for the church and not the church for them.[19]

As to the question of the English or Flemish authorship of the windows, it is true that Flemish details crop up here and there both in architecture and the costumes; but this is not surprising, for the style, new then to England, was largely based on Flemish art, and on the other hand the English characteristics are in excess of the Flemish.

[Sidenote: Barnard Flower.]

In Henry VII.'s Chapel at Westminster, high up in the central clerestory window of the apse, is a single figure under a canopy which bears a most striking resemblance to the series of the Prophets at Fairford (Plate L.). In the figure, in the scroll he holds, in the canopy, in the treatment of the drapery, and even in the queer drawing of the hands, the resemblance is so close that I for one cannot doubt their common authorship. Now it is on record that the windows of Henry VII.'s Chapel were glazed by "one Barnard Flower," the king's glazier, who also is the glazier named in the first contract for the windows in King's College Chapel at Cambridge, but who died in 1525-26 before they were finished. A comparison of those windows at Cambridge which are believed to be his work, especially that over the north door, with the Fairford windows, reveals many points of resemblance, and, allowing for the twenty years which probably separate the execution of the two works, I think we should not be far wrong in assigning to Flower the whole of the north aisle at Fairford, and perhaps the Latin Fathers in the south aisle. Whether the west windows are his work too I do not feel sure, and to the names of the other artists who took

## part in the work we have no clue.

[Illustration: PLATE L THE PROPHETS JOEL, ZEPHANIAH, AMOS, AND HOSEA, FROM THE NORTH AISLE OF THE NAVE, FAIRFORD Late Fifteenth Century]

[Sidenote: The general scheme.]

[Sidenote: The "Doom."]

Yet though one may thus trace various hands in the work, the windows form a connected whole, the planning of which must have been the work of one mind. The arrangement is the traditional one whereby the whole church forms an exposition of the foundations of the Christian faith. The windows of the nave contain single figures, the Prophets on the north side (Plate L.) facing the Apostles on the south. Each Apostle holds a verse of the creed, and the Prophet opposite him a corresponding verse from his writings. The four Evangelists face the four Latin Fathers. Farther east, within the now vanished screen, the windows unfold the Gospel story, those on the north leading up to the Passion in the east window, those on the south showing the Descent into Hell, the Resurrection, and the events that followed. Then, as the spectator turns to the west, there faces him, in the great west window, the tremendous "Doom" or Last Judgment. Do not look at the upper half where Christ sits enthroned as Judge, surrounded by saints and angels; it has suffered the fate of the Winchester College glass. Blown in by a storm in 1703, it was "restored" in the middle of the nineteenth century, which means that the old glass was removed and a bad copy substituted. Where the blue ring of Heaven passes through the tracery lights the original glass remains, and the difference between it and the new is an object lesson in good and bad stained-glass work.

But below the transom the window is still unspoilt. In the midst stands Michael with sword and scales, and below him the dead are rising naked from their graves. Michael himself, it must be confessed, is a somewhat lackadaisical figure; it was not possible for an artist of that time and school to give a figure the arresting quality of the Methuselah in Plate III.; neither does one's eye linger long over the Saved, who troop up the golden stairs on Michael's right, but is irresistibly attracted to the other side of the picture, where in a great glow of ruby glass are seen the Flames of Hell, to which devils--grey and blue at the outer edge of the fire, but darker and more purple as they are farther in--are carrying the wretched souls of the Lost. Just outside the flames an angel and a devil are fighting in mid-air for the possession of a soul, and a comparison of these figures with the similar ones in the Descent into Limbo or "Harrying of Hell," which is by the same hand as the east window, shows at once the difference between the work of the two men.

[Sidenote: The west windows of the aisles.]

On either side the west windows of the aisles contain, as types of the Last Judgment, on the north, the Judgment of Solomon, which protected the innocent; on the south, that of David on the Amalekite, which condemned the guilty. It seems to me not unlikely that the position of these windows was originally reversed, Solomon's judgment being on the side of the Saved in the "Doom" and David's on that of the Lost. They have both suffered greatly in the storm of 1703 and contain many blank spaces, but from what remains they seem to me, together with the "Doom," the most accomplished work in the church.

[Sidenote: The clerestory.]

Very splendid, too, are the Persecutors of the Church, who, clad in all the bravery of wickedness, fill the north side of the clerestory, fronting the somewhat insipid row of Martyrs on the other side. Here is Herod transfixing an Innocent; Nero, if it is he, with the head of St. Paul; the King of the Huns, and Diocletian, perhaps, with bows and arrows; and, in a dark blue robe, Judas, with the halter round his neck and the bag in his hand, between Annas and Caiaphas. In the tracery lights above the Martyrs are rather commonplace white and gold angels, but over the Persecutors are fascinating little figures of devils, grey, blue, and green, on a background of ruby flames. I am afraid there is no question which series the artist enjoyed doing most!

Fairford marks the end of mediæval stained glass in England. Conservative artists might still, as at Malvern and at St. Neots in Cornwall, try to carry on the older tradition, but their works are isolated survivals. The Fairford windows themselves represent, as I have said, a very short-lived phase in English glass, of which they are the most complete example, others being the fragments in Henry VII.'s Chapel at Westminster and the remains of Bishop Fox's glazing in Winchester Cathedral, now collected into the east clerestory window there. Flower's own work at King's College, Cambridge, twenty years later than Fairford, shows signs of change, and that of his successors in the same building, as at Basingstoke, at Balliol College and elsewhere must be classed as wholly of the Renaissance. With Fairford, then, these notes on Stained Glass of the Middle Ages may fitly end.

FOOTNOTE:

[19] This is fully gone into by Canon Carbonel in an article in _Memorials of Old Gloucestershire_. Another theory he examines and rejects is that they were the work of the Dutch painter Aeps.

INDEX

Abrasion, 8, 224

Angers-- 12th century, 55 Grisaille, 118

Becket, St. Thomas, 69, 74, 80, 87, 91

"Blue Dick" Culmer, 56

Bourges, 112

Brabourne, 24

Byzantine Influence, 24, 52, 69

Canopy-- 13th century, 107 14th " 136 15th " 215

Canterbury Cathedral-- 12th century, 45, 56 13th " 69

Chalons, 55

Chartres Cathedral-- 12th century-- West windows, 48 La Belle Verrière, 51 13th century-- Rebuilding, 92 Guild windows, 98 North Rose, 101 South Rose, 102 Apse, 104 Grisaille, 118 14th century, 188

Chartres, Church of St. Pierre, 185

Chartres, Clement of, 46, 95 His work at Rouen, 114

Chartres, St. Denis and Canterbury, school of, 44

Cloisonné enamel, 23

Denis, St., Abbey of-- 12th century medallions, 45, 53 Gryphon windows, 116

Designs, method of drawing, 89

Diaper, mosaic, 76, 80, 96, 103

" painted, 59, 77, 149

Egyptian glass, 16

Enamel, brown, 5, 21

" coloured, 6

Evreux Cathedral-- 14th century, 189 15th century-- Clerestory, 246 Lady Chapel, 249

Evreux, Church of St. Taurin, 250

Exeter Cathedral-- East window-- Earliest work, 158 Lyen's work, 227 Grisaille, 160

Fairford, 255

Flower, Barnard, 260

Glass-- Blowing, 14 Colour and quality-- 12th and 13th centuries, 32 14th century, 147 15th " 223 Flashed, 8, 224 Making, 13 Cutting, 15 Painting-- General, 5 Beginning of, 21 12th and 13th centuries, 37 14th century, 144 15th " 220

Gloucester Cathedral, 197

Grisaille-- 13th century, 115 14th " 132 15th " 222 Combination with figures, 122, 132

Iron-work-- Necessity of, 7 Early, influence of, 35 Bent, 37, 60 14th century, 129

Irradiation, 38

Jesse, Tree of, 50, 53, 72, 168, 178, 235

King's College Chapel, Cambridge, 256, 264

Leading-- General, 5 15th century, 219

Lincoln Cathedral, 77

Line work, 38

Louis, St., 93, 100

Lyen, Robert, 227

Mahommedan windows, 19

Malvern, Great, 253

Mans, Le, Cathedral-- Earliest glass, 24 12th century, 47

Matt shading-- Beginning of, 39 15th century, 220

Mauclerc, Pierre, 99

Medallion windows, 36

Merton College Chapel, Oxford, 153

Monkwearmouth, 22

Montfort, Amaury de, 99

Mosaic character of early glass, 34

" " loss of, 218

Natural plant forms in ornament, 145

" " " abandonment of, 221

New College Antechapel, Oxford, 201

Periods-- The three, 31 The First, 32 The Second, 125 The Third, 213

Peterborough, 111

Pictures, influence of, 243

Pliny's story, 15

Poitiers-- 12th century, 26, 43, 64 13th " 122, 166

Process, the, 4

Quarries-- 13th century, 121 14th " 135 15th " 222

Rheims, Cathedral, 112

" Church of St. Remi, 118

Roman windows, 17

Rouen-- Cathedral, 114 Church of St. Maclou, 248 Church of St. Ouen-- 14th century, 191 15th century, 246 whether Exeter glass bought at, 159

Ruby glass, 33, 49, 223

S-like pose of figures, 141

Sainte Chapelle, 112

Salisbury, 119

Selling, 167

Sens, 87

Shrewsbury, 198

Soissons, 118

Sophia, St., 18

Stain, silver, 8, 130, 240

Suger, Abbot, 45, 53, 98

Tewkesbury, 198, 207

Thomas the Glazier, 201

Thornton, John, 228

Troyes, 77, 166

"Type and antitype" windows, 61, 73, 88

Vendôme, 64

Venetian enamellers, 22

Wells, 198, 200

Westminster Abbey-- 13th century grisaille, 119 Henry VII.'s Chapel, 260

Westwell, 112

William of Sens, 57, 87

William of Wykeham, 201, 207

Winchester Cathedral-- West window and nave, 209 East window of clerestory, 264

Winchester College Chapel, 208

York, Cathedral-- 12th century, 55, 168 13th century-- "Five Sisters," 120 14th century-- Chapter House, 164 Vestibule of Chapter House, 167 Nave, clerestory, 167 North aisle, 169 South aisle, 176 West end, 179 East window, 229 Lady Chapel, 233 Choir, 235

York, All Saints', North Street-- 14th century, 181 15th " 237

York, St. Martin's, Coney St., 237

" St. Martin's, Micklegate, 181

THE END

_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.