In these historic islands, we can’t often see things exactly as they’d have looked through the eyes of our ancestors. Landscapes shift, buildings age and crumble, old things disappear under the soil, forgotten and replaced by the new.
But there’s still a place where you might stand and share a view with your ancestors. Go to your local church. Chances are, there’ll be stained glass windows. Likely as not, you’ll occupy the same spot and wonder at the same images as your Victorian or Georgian or Elizabethan – or even medieval predecessors.
I snapped most of my pictures of stained glass in this post almost absentmindedly, during random trips out and about. (Like of the lovely Victorian girls at the start of this post, taken at St. Oswald’s Grasmere, last Autumn). There’s a lot of it about. Yes, our great cathedrals and abbeys contain masterclasses in the craft. But even the most humble country church will likely have a piece of stained glass with a story to tell.
A born storyteller
How did it all begin? Well, if you believe Pliny, the Roman historian, it was thanks to a group of Phoenician sailors. (Phoenicia was located around where Israel and Syria are today). Shipwrecked, they set up camp on a beach. They made a fire to cook with, using soda from their shipwrecked cargo. Next morning, the heat from their fire had melted the sand and soda, and left in the fire’s remains – glass. A nice story to be sure, although Pliny was not the most reliable of narrators.
However, he captured the main components – sand and heat, together with a flux, such as soda, to lower the melting temperature, resulting in molten glass.You might then layer the glass in a slab – but that’s very thick and not very transparent. So how do you make thin, transparent sheet glass? By either blowing the molten glass through a funnel, and then flattening the resulting globe, before it cools, or rolling the molten glass. Of course, you can also shape the globes you have blown into pots and glasses and other artefacts. These techniques were used throughout the ancient world; archaeologists have found ancient Egyptian glass beads, and the Romans made exquisite glass vases, like this one I spotted on display in Colchester museum. The Romans were also the first to use glass as window coverings.
Pigments of your imagination
The next step in the journey was the discovery of how to stain the glass. By adding natural elements to the sand and flux in the heating process, you end up with glasses of differing colours. For example, adding copper oxide produces a bluish green, cobalt gives a vivid blue. Gold results in a dark red colour. The coloured glass could then be fitted together between leaded frames to form pictures.
We know the Anglo Saxons decorated some of their most prestigious churches with stained glass, but very few intact pieces survive, let alone in situ. Fragments of coloured Saxon glass were found at the Abbey in Jarrow. That famous monk, the Venerable Bede wrote in the early 700s that his abbot, Benedict Biscop, went to France in 675, to find the best glassmakers to make windows for his new abbey in Jarrow, the craft of glazing being unknown in England at the time. Were the discovered fragments the very ones that Bede described?
It’s interesting to learn that, when the glass fragments were analysed, they were found to be made from recycled glass, mixed with new glass imported from – Syria! (Perhaps made by shipwrecked Phoenician sailors?).
Glass explosion
Edging forward in time, we reach the explosion, if that’s not too dangerous a word of stained glass production, in the medieval period. The first pieces in England that are still in situ date to the 1100s, some of the earliest being in Canterbury Cathedral. Of course, they were used as illustrations for folk who were largely illiterate. What better way to teach bible stories, or the lives of saints, than to put pictures high up in a church, illuminated by the sun shining through?
The most skilled glass craftsmen were still based in continental Europe, so it was hard initially for the emerging English craftsmen to emulate glories such as the marvellous windows of Chartres Cathedral, for example.
But English glass developed its own unique simplicity and charm. For example, I found this endearing Hobbit-footed angel high up in St. John the Baptist, Cirencester, this Spring.
If you don’t find the thought of plodding around dusty English churches as beguiling as I do, don’t despair – all’s not lost. Here’s a website set up by some academics, building up an archive of British ecclesiastical medieval stained glass. Searchable by county and church location, although some areas are better served than others. I did find some distinctly suspect Victorian glass which had sneaked into the database, so the term “medieval” has been applied loosely. It’s well worth a look, for some real wonders.
In the dumps
But from the Tudor period, stained glass production languished somewhat. Most of the great churches and cathedrals had already been endowed with ample glass by generous benefactors. The Dissolution of the monasteries, following Henry VIII’s break with Rome, did little to help. His “executor-in-chief’, Thomas Cromwell was probably responsible indirectly for the destruction of more medieval glass than WW2 bombs, following the great Tudor sell-off of religious houses.
And of course, followers of the new Protestant religion, especially its more Puritanical, fanatic adherents, were all for simplicity and purity in church architecture. They didn’t approve of Catholic imagery, whether stained glass or elsewhere in church. Another wave of destruction followed in the 1640s during the English Civil War. Many church windows – along with other religious imagery – were smashed by the more fervent protestants in Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army. (Or so the Royalist propaganda of the time would have you believe).
“One of the ruins that Cromwell knocked about a bit…”
As I wrote in my Oliver Cromwell post a while ago, that old music-hall song could apply equally to Thomas Cromwell and his dismantling of religious houses in the 1500s, as to his namesake Oliver in the 1640s.
Needless to say, for the next few hundred years, the skills of the stained glass craftsman were not in great demand, save for the stately piles of the richer classes. Non-religious themes dominated, like this lovely window from Betley Hall in Staffordshire depicting May-day celebrations. You can spot dancers, musicians, a hobby horse and of course a queen of the May.
Daylight robbery
Meanwhile, new technology changed everything as it always does. There was a boom in glass production in the 1600s, when a new method arose for making sheet glass. Far more efficient and so cheaper, than the old glass-blowing and rolling processes. Window glass became common in British homes. Inevitably the government did with glass what governments are very good at doing with all other commodities: they taxed it.
The Window Tax of 1696 required households to cough up annually a flat rate of two shillings per house, and then an additional tax above a threshold of 10 windows. You paid progressively more, calculated on your total number of windows. That’s why you see so many old houses with their windows bricked up – an early tax avoidance scheme!
The tax endured for over 150 years, only repealed in 1851, which explains why you see windows blocked in buildings of different architectural styles. Bricking up windows and later de-bricking them would follow the fortunes of the house owners.
Inevitably, the tax was wildly unpopular. We still echo the indignation of those Georgians against the tax, when we mutter their phrase: “it’s daylight robbery” !
Gothic revival
When Victoria succeeded, things changed. The fortunes of stained glass craftsmen improved dramatically. Why? Up until Victoria’s time, England had become increasingly anti-catholic, following the Reformation. Protestant-leaning movements such as the Methodists, Wesleyists, and Presbyterians had thrived.
But then in the 1840s, the Church of England fought back. The new “Oxford Movement” celebrated the link with the old medieval catholic traditions from before Henry’s Reformation. The Anglican community took on a decidedly catholic air – it was the period of Cardinal Newman, of Gerard Manly Hopkins and their high church “bells and smells”. It was anglo-catholicism with a small “c”. Although of course both these churchmen later converted to Rome.
Architecture followed this trend. The Gothic revival of the 1850s tried hard to replicate the marvels of medieval church architecture. Its greatest advocates were the architects Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin. Their masterwork was the Houses of Parliament (and of course) Big Ben. It’s so gothic, it’s hard to believe building only started on it in the 1840s, and not the 1440s.
Imitation game
What better to complement the medieval vibe than matching stained glass? Victorian glass, made in the old tradition, blossomed. How often have you looked at a window in an English church, and then had to peer closer, to tell if it was an original medieval piece, or Victorian glass in the gothic style? Look at these two beauties, spotted during our Spring Cotswold trip, in Cirencester’s St. John the Baptist:
At first glance, you’d probably date them somewhere around the War of the Roses. You’d be quite near on the first, but a few centuries out on the second- it was cast in 1870.
It has to be said, sometimes the trends of the times crept into the gothic vibe. I do like this depiction of a medieval-looking Saint George: who sports a late Victorian moustache that surely channels an Edwardian Sherlock Holmes or Doctor Watson.
Hard work
And what about this medieval-style window, also spotted in Ely Cathedral? A few centuries old, perhaps? Look closer.
It’s a depiction of a RAF Bomber. Their Squadron HQ was based near Ely during the second world war. Another great example of how the medieval style endured through the centuries as a template for contemporary images.
Incidentally, a little digression: the motto shown in the glass is in Dutch: Niet Zonder Arbyt. Which translates as “Nothing without hard work”. Why on earth use such a motto?
Actually, it’s the personal motto of Cornelius Vermuyden. Fellow Essex folk may recognise his name from the schools and streets of Canvey Island. Cornelius was the most famous of many dutchmen who came to watery East Anglia in the 1620s to help deal with a big local problem: too much water in the wrong place. He set up the sea defences on Canvey. The island actually lies below sea level. His defences there did a remarkable job, until the extensive floods of 1953, when the sea wall finally breached. An old family aunt remembers being rescued by a rowing boat from the roof of her Canvey bungalow!
Cornelius later set up the drainage of the Cambridgeshire fens, freeing up much land for productive farming. He received a knighthood for his work in 1629, and took on British citizenship. A wise move, considering the fraught British relationship with Holland: both countries jostled each other for far eastern trade, and were even at war for around 20 years.
South Cambridgeshire council adopted Vermuyden’s motto. Cambridgeshire is where of course Ely is located, hence his motto in the glass.
Tinker Tailor…
The glassmaker’s craft still lives on today. I spent a very happy birthday in Ely cathedral two years ago. Besides the glorious glass in the cathedral itself, it houses the Stained Glass Museum (found after a bit of a climb), up in the clerestory. And there, amongst all the historical glass, there were these wonderful contemporary pieces by Artist Rachel Mulligan:
A very modern take on the old nursery rhyme. In centuries to come, what will viewers make of their references to the COVID pandemic?
You can see the whole series on the museum’s web site, here.
Hiding in plain sight
I hope I’ve tempted you to take a closer look at the stained glass images you’ll find in our old buildings. Like so many artefacts in history, they show the unwitting zeitgeist of the times in which they were made, and tell far more interesting stories. I leave you with this last modern piece by Kehinde Wiley, of rapper Mark Shavers, posing as Saint Adelaide. Again, snapped at the Stained Glass Museum in Ely. What will this tell future generations about ourselves?
