Decorated ostrich egg, rebuilt from pieces from a grave in Naqada, Egypt. c.3600BC. Source: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
Just for fun, I thought I’d sketch a very brief history of Easter eggs, their relationship to the Easter Bunny, and throw in a few Easter-themed culinary ideas at the same time.
In Britain we eat over 12 billion eggs annually, mainly the standardized brown hen’s variety (and standardization, of course, means that our eggs are graded and priced accordingly), but we also have the opportunity to enjoy those special breed varieties that produce smaller eggs with coloured, speckled shells. We also enjoy the much bigger and richer white-shelled duck eggs and the much smaller and more delicate quail eggs. We are a very eggy nation. So why did such an everyday item become such a fixture of a religious holiday?
The earliest known eggs were laid by dinosaurs. Today ostriches are the layers of the largest eggs. In the prehistoric savannahs of the eastern Sahara, before the deserts claimed the land at around 4500BC, ostrich eggs were valued for the dietary value, with high protein and fat content, and their shells were used to make beautiful bead bracelets and necklaces. A friend of mine was given one by his friends when his Sahara archaeology PhD was awarded. I have no idea how he cooked it!
A hen posing on the grass, 1447. Bibliothèque d’Amiens Métropole (Bibliothèque Louis Aragon), Ms. 399 (Livre des propriétés des choses), folio 145r. Source: The Medieval Bestiary.
Eggs were only seasonally available, laying during long periods of sunlight. Today artificial light permits year-round farming, but prior to modern farming methods, hens laid eggs between spring and late autumn. Winter was largely egg-free. The first eggs of spring were something to celebrate. Before the arrival of intensive farming with artificial lighting all year round, eggs were still prized rather than being taken pretty much for granted as we do in Britain today. Both chickens and hen eggs were much smaller. English chickens started increasing in size from the late Middle Ages and continued to do so throughout the post-medieval period. In the earlier Middle Ages, when payment could be made in products rather than coinage, eggs were an important contributor to livelihoods, supplementing purchase prices, salaries, taxes and loan repayments, and serving as offerings and gifts. For a wonderfully exotic Medieval stuffed eggs from the Mediterranean (with saffron, herbs and spices and curd cheese) see the recipe on the Lavender and Lovage blog.
1899 German postcard showing an osterhase couple carrying eggs. Source: The German Way
Although chicks are now associated with Easter, in the 1600s the Easter egg was connected not with chickens, ducks or quails, but with hares. The first recorded discussion of the egg-producing hare is in a medical essay by Johannes Richier published in Germany in 1682. The Osterhase, or Easter Hare, was a mythological hare from the Alsace region, producing and hiding colourful eggs for children to find. One might wonder why an egg-laying hare myth might emerge, and one interesting theory connects to the fact that the hare’s ability to conceive whilst pregnant (called “superfetation”). This was sometimes believed to be evidence of self-impregnation, which morphed into an association with the Virgin birth and was associated ideas of purity. Quite how this translates into the Easter egg tradition is probably anyone’s guess, but a plausible theory is recounted by the St Neot’s Museum: simple nests that hares make on open ground were confused with nests made by ground-nesting birds, leading to the belief that hares laid eggs. However the story initially emerged, it spread throughout Germany and in the 1700s made the hop to America with German migrants.
White House egg roll race in 1929. Source: Wikipedia
Visually similar in appearance to hares, rabbits are smaller, more prolific and more familiar. Breeding on a legendary scale, they were an obvious symbol of fertility. The spring egg and the German Osterhase eventually merged together to become the Easter Bunny, a rabbit whose role is to provide decorative eggs to children as symbols of renewal in spring.
In spite of superfetation an egg-laying Easter bunny did not dovetail particularly neatly into serious-minded Christian doctrine, but some traditions were difficult to ignore and more acceptable alternatives emerged, not least the association of the egg with the resurrection of Jesus. In this Christian legitimization of eggy celebrations, the shell of the egg is the tomb of Jesus and the chick within is Jesus awaiting resurrection.
It might seem a bit of a stretch to see how the religious interpretation could be translated into Easter egg hunts, in which eggs, sometimes painted in bright colours and sometimes wrapped in colourful paper, were hidden on a trail for children to find, but this was all part of a community celebration of Christ’s resurrection. In some parts of England the “pace egg” (from Paschal, another term for Easter) were hard-boiled eggs that could be given as gifts and used in games, such as Preston’s annual egg-rolling event, which is echoed in Washington DC where an White House annual egg roll is an unexpected side to presidential living. Closely related is the pace egg play, again still performed annually at some places in England.
I suppose that from egg rolling and pace egg plays it was a relatively small step in the new age of industrial advances and experimentation to replace an actual egg with a sweet pseudo-egg, and in Britain it was the Frys and Cadbury’s brands that led the charge, producing the first moulded chocolate eggs in the mid 1870s. The tradition of enclosing chocolate eggs in ribbons and decorative wrappings became a sure-fire winner on a national scale. Decorative and shiny foil was both ornamental and helped to keep the chocolate fresh, whilst glossy cardboard packaging propped up the awkward shape. Prototypes of the Cadbury’s Creme Egg began to appear in the 1960s, but the branded success story was first launched in 1971, one of those Marmite love-or-hate moments (hate, in my case – far too icky sweet!).
Polish Easter eggs. By Praktyczny Przewodnik. Source: Wikimedia Commons CC BY 2.0
In central and eastern Europe, real hard-boiled eggs continue to be an important part of the celebration, usually painted with traditional decorative themes, like the ones right. At the outbreak of the Russian war on Ukraine I wrote a short post about a traditional Ukrainian egg recipe (divine – фаршировані яйця). The egg cavity was stuffed with the yolk mashed up with mayonnaise, sour cream, as well as finely chopped chives or spring onions, and the whole lot was topped with a low-cost version of caviar and served on a bed of ramsons (wild garlic leaves), which you can find here.
Not being at all skilled at either confectionery or dessert cookery, and with few artistic skills at my fingertips, my own celebration of Easter below, using Churton honesty eggs, is a rather more mundane and sugar-depleted affair for Good Friday.
Eggs marbled by boiling, then randomly cracking the egg shell and then adding food dye to the water to create the marbled effect.
My egg doodles on hard-boiled hen eggs, below, were modeled not on eastern European examples, to which they bear a surprising if faint resemblance, but on the elaborate doodles that I have been producing since childhood. It’s so much more difficult to do this sort of thing on the rather slippery surface of a hen’s egg, and let’s face it, I’m no Grayson Perry. I assumed that the trick with the hand-painted egg would be to find some way of holding it still whilst I drew on it. I first tried to use a cocktail stick poked firmly into the end of the hard-boiled egg, and then jammed into a ball of blue-tack (plasticine and variants thereof would work well too). The blue-tack was on a saucer so that I could turn the egg without getting my hands covered in still-wet ink. It was a monumental failure for the sort of detail that I was attempting so I gave up and picked up, the egg holding it in one hand and drawing with the other (and getting covered in indelible ink in the process). Here are my very crudely rendered attempts, but although they are pretty poor it was a lot of fun, even if a rather time-wasting pursuit 🙂
Seriously more successful are the shortbread biscuits that my friend Helen Anderson made with her grandchildren, using bright piped icing to create the decorative features. Love them! Really pretty, really bright and very celebratory. And I bet they were delicious too.
Lovely home-made Easter biscuits, courtesy of Helen Anderson who both made them and sent me the photos of the biscuits and the icing. Copyright Helen Anderson
Happy Easter!
Watercolour by Helen Anderson, painted from one she found, and used with permission. Gorgeous. Copyright Helen Anderson.
Beautifully coloured and speckled eggs of common garden birds . By Henrik Grönvold, from ‘British Birds’ by Kirkman & Jourdain, 1966. With thanks to Helen Anderson not only for sending me the image but for tracking down the source.
On a recent visit to the National Waterways Museum at Ellesmere Port on the Wirral, I noticed a long, dusty glass cabinet with what looked like a big length of seriously traumatized tree trunk inside. Having seen pictures of logboats that looked just like this, but never having seen one on display, I went to have a closer look. Sure enough, it was the Baddiley Mere logboat. In its presumably temporary display position it was hemmed in by other objects and difficult to reach and the cabinet was seriously dusty making it difficult to view properly. Happily an information poster was clearly displayed explaining that this is a nationally important piece of English heritage.
Baddiley Mere Log Boat at the National Waterways Museum, Ellesemere Port, not really living up to its full potential as an exhibit and an artefact of national importance.
Finds of logboats or dugout canoes (properly known as monoxylous crafts) are comparatively rare, and their survival is always due to environmental conditions that favour their unexpected preservation. The Baddiley Mere log boat is one of a short list of survivors to have been found in the boggy conditions of Cheshire, all of which are discussed below. In western Europe, log boats have been found in the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, France and Scandinavia as well as Britain and Ireland. In Britain, many were found at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, often due to land drainage and water cleaning activities, including all of the Cheshire examples. This post lists the Cheshire logboats, and puts them into the context of British logboats in general.
The environments that preserved the logboat
Artist’s reconstruction of the Poole Harbour logboat, which dates to the Iron Age. Source: Wessex Museums
The relatively small number of logboats discovered relates partly to accidents of survival and partly to accidents of discovery. If you were to look at a distribution map of logboat locations (had I been able to find one), you will be looking at where logboats were found, not the full geographical range over which they were used. Organic remains like bone, wood, leather and reed are so much less commonly preserved than the durable tools made from stone, ceramic and metal that Linda Hurcombe refers to organic objects that must have dominated the human toolkit throughout prehistory as “the missing majority.” Differential conditions of preservation for organic remains means that logboats are only found in very specific environmental conditions.
It is almost certain that logboats were a standard part of the riparian kit during later prehistory, if not before. The waterways were an important communication network over considerable distances, but even when used for purely local activities, boats would have been useful for getting around, crossing rivers and for fishing and capturing wildfowl. The remarkable example of eight logboats found at Must Farm in Cambridgeshire near contemporary eel-traps and hurdle weirs creates a picture of experiments with slightly different forms of boat, in use for everyday activities in the fenland area.
The Carpow logboat in Perth, Scotland, as it was found.
The distribution of logboat finds is confined in Britain to waterlogged environments where oxygen, which enables decay, has been eliminated, and where these waterlogged environments have been preserved for 100s, sometimes 1000s of years. These anaerobic conditions only exist under certain conditions but may be found in meres, swamps, marshes, fens, carrs, riverbanks and deeply silted river and lake beds. Peat deposits, especially waterlogged ones, may be acidic, which hinders bacterial decay and helps to preserve organic remains. Waterlogged acidic conditions are ideal for preservation of wood and plant remains. As organic remains decay rapidly, even something as large as a log boat would have to be buried with anaerobic sediments very quickly, making preservation even more of a challenge.
Discovery is always by accident, at times when activities are taking place to drain or clean waterlogged environments, to dredge silt, to dig up peat, or where hot summers or longer-term climate change desiccates waterlogged areas, exposing wooden items. Other organic items that are found preserved include trackways, platforms for buildings, tools and objects made of bone, wood, leather and reed, and even fabrics.
Cheshire Logboats
The short list below shows the Cheshire logboats, prehistoric and early medieval that I have been able to find information about.
Table of logboats from Cheshire. Click to expand to read more clearly
The Baddiley Mere logboat, now in the National Waterways Museum in Ellesmere Port (and formerly in the Grosvenor Museum, Chester), can be visited. The Ciss Green example has been in the Congleton Museum from the museum’s opening in 2002. I have been unable to find if the others are still preserved.
Baddiley Mere
The log boat was found in Baddiley Mere (about 15 miles south west of Nantwich) in 1911, when the water quality in the mere, a glacial lake, was being improved for supply to Nantwich. Baddiley Mere is part of a group of wetlands in the south-west of Cheshire, that lies between between Cholmondeley and the Shropshire border, and they can be associated with areas of peat and other waterlogged deposits.
It was found in peat deposits at around 6ft c.1.83m) beneath the surface, embedded in the anaerobic conditions that ensured its preservation. It is formed of a single piece of oak and is nearly 18ft (5.5m) long by just under 3.3ft (c.1m) wide. It weighs 458kg. Its slightly distorted shape is due to shrinkage after it was removed from the waterlogged conditions. In 1929 a preserved paddle, about 4ft long (1.21m) was found near the findspot and may (or may not) have been associated with the boat. Rust was found in a hole in the boat, thought to be from a nail. A vertical hole at one end is thought to have been for a mooring rope or for fastening a pole into position.
The Iron Age date suggested by a piece of rust in a nail hole may be indicate that the boat does not predate the Iron Age. There was not a lot to rule out a later date in terms of the features of the logboat itself, but a radiocarbon date suggested a late prehistoric date.
The Baddiley Mere logboat was apparently on display in the Grosvenor Museum until at least 1974, so must have been moved to the National Waterways Museum at Ellesmere Port sometime after that date. See the end of this post, just before Sources, for a link to a TikTok video of Professor Howard Williams talking about the Baddiley Mere logboat.
Warrington 1 and 2, Arpley Meadows
Arpley Meadow Logboat March 1884 by Charles Madeley. Source: Madeley 1894
In 1894, just a year after the discovery, Charles Madeley wrote about the discovery of two logboats during the construction of the Manchester Ship Canal:
The construction of the Manchester Ship Canal has been, in one respect, a great disappointment to those who dwell upon its banks. It was only natural to expect that the excavation of so great a cutting for thirty-six miles, through the soil of the Mersey valley, could not fail to result in large discoveries of relics of the former inhabitants of the district, and numerous additions to the contents of our museums. But these anticipations were speedily relinquished on the advent of the steam navvy, whose rapid evolutions and wholesale manner of procedure obviously offered little prospect of the preservation of any but the largest objects which might be in its way. Of such large objects, however, two very interesting examples were the two canoes which were found, not in the course of the canal itself, but on the banks of the Mersey, during certain subsidiary operations at Arpley, in the township of Warrington. . . .
Early in September, 1893, during the completion of the new course for the Mersey which was cut across the Arpley meadows, the dredger came upon an obstruction, which proved to be a dug-out canoe, over ten feet in length. Later, on the 28th March, 1894, another and larger canoe was discovered, at a point 600 yards further east and close to the west end of the present Walton Lock. Each canoe lay 20 to 25 yards north of the former bank of the River Mersey, and at a depth of about eighteen feet below the surface of the ground. On their discovery both canoes were carefully removed and preserved, under the direction of Mr. William Burch, C.E., the Ship Canal Co.’s engineer for this section, and Mr. H. Davenport, who was in charge of the dredging operations when the first discovery was made. The canoes were eventually presented by the Canal Company to the Warrington Museum.
Arpley Meadow logboat September 1893. Source: Charles Madeley 1894
The 1893 logboat (Warrington 1) was the bigger of the two (shown above right), and shows a number of interesting features, described in detail by Madeley. Its length was unbroken and measured 12 feet 4 inches (c.3.8m) long. The width was irregular, 2ft10ins (c.87cm) at the stern and ; the greatest width, near the stern, was about 2ft3 1/2 ins (69cm) from midsection to bow. The depth was also slightly irregular, at around 15ins (38cm) at the stern and 12ins (31cm) at the bow. The timber of the base is around 2ins (c.6cm). Two internal ribs remain on the floor of the boat, as shown in the above diagram. The ends of the boat are rounded, inside and out, both in plan and section, but it not known whether there was what Madeley refers to as “a projecting nose,” like that on the smaller canoe. At each end there is a section of gunwale and at the stern end some timber waling fastened down with four trenails an inch (c.2.5cm) in diameter. Indentations in the stern suggests the presence of a plank perhaps serving as a seat or a standing platform at the stern end, clearly visible in the top of the sketches.
The 1894 Walton Lock logboat (Warrington 2) was discovered (shown above left) and this was smaller and of a slightly different form. It measures 10 feet 8 1/2 ins (c.3.30m) in length and was probably about 2ft 9ins (c.84cm). Its depth was about 14 inches (c.36cm) and the rounded bottom was in places as much as 4 inches (c.11cm) thick. It features “an overhanging nose or prow, the remains of which project some three inches beyond the stem.” The bow has a vertical auger-hole on the starboard side, which may suggest a waling-piece similar to that other logboat. The timber was oak and “very free from knots.”
Radiocarbon dates listed by Switsur suggest that they are Anglo-Saxon, placing them in the second half of the first millennium A.D.
One of the Warrington logboats found at Arpley, although it is unclear which one. Source: Festival of Archaeology 2022
The Heritage Gateway entry record is as follows:
Logboat found in dredging the Mersey opposite the Corporation Electric Works in 1908. It is 10 ft 3 inches long (3.14m) x 2 ft 8 ins (0.80 metres) wide and 1 ft 7 inches (0.48 metres) deep ). One side and some of the bottom have been lost. Made from oak it has a radiocarbon date of around 875 AD.
Logboat found in 1922 in works on the north bank of the Mersey at the Corporation Electric Works. Boat is 11 ft 6 ins (3.5 metres) long with part of the bow broken off. 2 ft 11 ins (89 cm) wide and 20 ins (50 cm) deep. It was covered by 20 ft (6 metres) of river sand, mud and earth. Found in association were two rows of alder stakes forming a fore-runner of the later ‘fish-yards’ or traps It has a radiocarbon date of around 1072 AD.
Warrington Logboat 5, Arpley
The Heritage Gateway entry record is as follows:
Logboat dredged from the old river channel near its junction with the diversion at Arpley in 1929.It is 11 ft long (3.35metres) x 2 ft 4 ins wide (71 cm) and 22 ins deep (56 cm).It is damaged and may have been longer.The find spot is only a few yards to the east of the find spot of Warrington logboat 2. It is made of oak and has a radiocarbon date of 958AD.
Warrington Logboat 7, Walton Arches
The Heritage Gateway entry record is as follows:
Logboat dredged from the Mersey, west of the central pier of Walton Arches in 1931 though it probably came from the vicinity of the junction of the river diversion where other logboats have been found. It is 13ft 6ins long (4.11 m) x 2ft wide (61 cm). Made of oak it dates to 1090 AD.
Warrington Logboat 11, Gateworth
Piece of the Gateworth logboat. Source: Festival of Archaeology 2022
The Heritage Gateway entry records this piece of a logboat as follows:
Logboat found in 1971 at Gateworth sewerage works, near Sankey Bridges. The boat is made from elm and was found at a depth of 3.3 metres in coarse sand. The end is rounded and has a protruding ‘beak’ through which there is a horizontal hole. A radio carbon date of 1000AD has been given.
Cholmondeley 1 and 2
The discovery of the logboat found in a peat bog below Cholmondeley Castle was found in 1819 and published in the Chester Chronicle in the same year. It was reported to be 11ft c.3.35cm) long and 30 inches (c.76.2cm) wide, but very little additional information is available on the subject other than that it was hollowed out of the trunk of a single tree. Although initially believed to be Iron Age in date, it is more likely to be of a similar date to other Cheshire logboats that lie in the date range from the eighth to thirteenth centuries AD. A second Cholmondeley logboat is mentioned on the Heritage Gateway website, but the link to it is broken (SMR/HER 525/2).
Ciss Green Farm, Astbury, near Congleton
The Ciss Green Farm, Astbury logboat on display at the Congleton Museum. Source: Wikipedia. Photograph by Ian Dougherty ex oficio Chairman of the Board of Trustees Congleton Museum
Found in 1923 by farmer Charles Ball during gravel digging near the source of Dairy Brook, the Ciss Green logboat was found near Asbtury, and was stored in the basement of the Manchester Museum until it was eventually moved to the new Congleton Museum in time for the museum opening in June 2002, where it was one of the star attractions. The Museum website does not appear to mention it, so I do not know if it is still there.
Its original measurements are unknown because one end was broken off, but it was made of oak and was nearly 12ft long (c.3.66cm) when found It had a square cross-section with vertical sides. Two holes in the boat have have held oars. Although it was assumed to be prehistoric when it was found, Switsur’s radiocarbon dating puts it in the Anglo-Saxon period at around 1000BC.
Oakmere, near Delamere
In September 1935 an oak logboat was discovered by during extraction of water from Oakmere in September 1935, which lowered the level of the mere. Frank Latham’s local history book on Delamere happily contains a first hand account of the discovery by the gamekeeper George Rock, who had lived there since 1910. Rock noticed what was the prow sticking up out of the shallow water and recognized that it was something man-made. He reported it to his employer, and in due course Professor Robert Newstead of Liverpool University was brought in to supervise excavations.
The Oakmere logboat at the time of its discovery. Source: Cheshire Archaeology News, Issue 4, Spring 1997, p.2
The logboat was found to be lying on a bed of glacial gravel and silt. At that time it survived to its full length of c.3.6m (dsfdsfds) with a width of 0.79m (sdfsdf) but following removal from its waterlogged habitat, which had preserved it, it became fragmentary. Newstead published a paper about it stating his opinion that it was at least 2,000 years old, probably associated with the nearby Oakmere Iron Age hillfort. Eventually radiocarbon dating carried out by Professor Sean McGrail provided a date range between 1395 and 1470 AD.
A site visit described on the Heritage Gateway website found that both the vegetation and the shoreline had altered considerably since discovery and it was therefore impossible to identify the exact find site. Apparently the landowner Captain Ferguson, who had photographs of the boat as it was found, “waded into the lake and endeavoured to identify the site by means of photographs of the boat in situ. He used detail which was between 250 and 600 metres distant, and was identifiable on the ground and on the photograph. He estimated that the find site was at SJ 5731 6768.”
The canoe was sent on loan to the Grosvenor Museum and then in 1979 or 1980 it was sent on loan to the Maritime Museum at Greenwich. The National Museums Greenwich Collection Search website confesses to owning a piece of logboat from Llyn Llydaw, but makes no mention of one from Cheshire, so its current location remains unknown.
Other submerged wooden constructions
Other significant constructions made of wood have been found in Cheshire in waterlogged environments such as at Lindow Moss in Wilmslow and Marbury Meres near Great Budworth, both of which produced evidence of prehistoric trackways, another important means of communication and local resource exploitation. At Warrington, during the works for the Manchester Ship Canal, pilings were found that suggested the presence of a wharf, although it is unclear if these were contemporary with the logboats found.
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Dates
List of radiocarbon dates from the north of England. I have highlighted those from Cheshire in pink. Source: Switsur 1989, p.1014. N.B. Switsur also gives dates for the rest of England, Wales and Scotland on subsequent pages.
Although their simple design and overall similarity of appearance often lead to the assumption that the logboats are prehistoric, it has been demonstrated by radiocarbon dating that log boats were far more common during the Anglo-Saxon and later Medieval periods, whilst in Scotland they may have been in use as late as the 18th century.
In his 1989 paper on the dating of British logboats, from which a table of the logboats from the north of England is shown right, Roy Switsur comments:
The general condition of the vessels together with lack of bark or sapwood seems to make dendrochronology [tree ring dating] of less practical use for these objects than at first imagined, so that, thus far, the chronology for the boats has depended on radiocarbon measurements. 14C determinations of several early craft from England and other regions of Europe have been published and reviewed . . . and these have shown that some of the boats originate as late as the Medieval period.
Graph showing the distribution of radiocarbon dates for British logboats of all periods. Source: Lanting 1998, p.631
An additional difficulty with logboat dating is that early attempts to preserve boats that were taken out of bogs and meres in the late 19th century and early 20th century used substances that changed the composition of the wood and made radiocarbon dating difficult if not impossible.
The earliest example is not a boat but a paddle made of Betula (birch) that would have accompanied a boat, found in 8th millennium BC contexts in the Mesolithic environs of Star Carr. In his 1998 survey of logboat dates in Europe Lanting estimates between 350 and 400 recorded logboats in Britain and Ireland, but of these the prehistoric examples are a very small minority, with the majority of the earliest dating to no earlier than the Neolithic, most appearing in the Middle Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age (dates in the 4th millennium BC).
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The manufacture of a logboat
A reconstruction of how the Poole logboat may have been built. Source: Berry et al 2019 e-book
Most surviving logboats were constructed from the trunks of the oak, probably because of the hardness and enduring properties of the wood. However, it is probable that many other types of tree were also used for boat construction, as suggested by the elm example from Warrington. Even though softer woods would have been less durable and more prone to damage, they would have been easier to hollow out and carve into shape. Unfortunately softwoods are much less likely than hardwoods to survive as well after deposition.
The skills required for the hollowing out of tree trunks would have represented a fairly mundane activity, although the cutting down of a live tree for use of a whole trunk would have meant different things at different times. A paddle dating to the 8th millennium BC at Star Carr in the Mesolithic was made at a time when wood was plentiful and had not yet been cleared for agricultural activities. By the later Bronze Age and Iron Age the use of a whole live tree for a single boat would have represented more of a pause for thought. Cut marks are preserved on some boats, suggesting how they were carved and what sort of tools might have been used.
A logboat from Must Farm Cambridgeshire, showing features within the hollowed out section. Source: Must Farm Flickr page
All of the boats described as log boats are carved from a single piece of wood, which in Britain is usually oak. Some may have been burned to assist the shaping processes. Although many were not elaborated any further, some were carefully shaped to improve their movement through the water, and some were provided with additional features to improve the usability of the logboats. Even those of a similar date may have very different features in terms of bow and stern shape, holes and fittings. Most have been found in association with inland waterways, lakes, meres, marshes and estuaries, where the shallow and calm waters were suitable for such vessels, and were almost certainly fabricated as near to the shoreline as possible to prevent the very heavy boat having to be dragged too far.
The means for propulsion would have been made at the same time. Logboats could have been either rowed, punted with a pole, or paddled, and a small number of paddles have indeed been found, but not in unambiguous association with logboats. The annual lighter (unpowered barge) races on the Thames show the power of using a combination of oars to row with a paddle at the rear to steer.
It would be surprising if an enterprising person or group had not made the attempt to manufacture a copy of one of these boats, and sure enough The Promethsud Project at Butser Experimental Farm made a logboat using a tree that had come down in the 1987 storms. More recently, the BBC in October 2023 reported that an experimental build was underway in Northamptonshire, part of a £250,000 Heritage Lottery project. Replicas of traditional Bronze Age tools and techniques are being used, including fire, and it is hoped that the two logboats will launched later in 2024.
Experimental reconstruction of a Bronze Age logboat. Source: BBC News
In his book Making, Tim Ingold draws attention to the creation of objects and built environments as a process in which people become involved with materials,during which objects become part of a seamless relationship with their makers. As cultural items, fully integrated both into ways of thinking as well as ways of doing during manufacture, lifetime and at the point of disposal, logboats would have been tied in to perceptions about materials, landscapes, waterscapes and the ability to travel.
Potential uses of logboats in daily life
The uses to which the logboats were put were central to livelihood management, such as fishing, traversing rivers, and travelling over short distances. As mentioned above, the Must Farm Bronze Age logboats were associated with eel traps and river captures, demonstrating how the management of waterways was incorporated into resource management techniques.
The truly remarkable state of preservation of fish traps found in association with logboats in Must Farm, Cambridgeshire. Source: Excavator Francis Pryor’s “In The Long Run” blog.
It has been calculated that the well known Carpow logboat could have carried up to fourteen people, or with a crew of two, around one tonne of cargo. The Brigg logboat was found in an estuary inlet in the river Humber (Hull) where it has been suggested that it could have been employed in carrying heavy cargoes such as grain, wood and perhaps iron ore, as well as having a capacity for up to twenty-eight people. These figures give a good indication that log boats really could make a difference for communities that, as well as fishing, wanted to move resources around including, for example, foodstuffs, ceramics, construction materials and people.
Major riparian connections showing how the river network links from Wessex, the Thames valley and the Humber estuary. These are just as valid for prehistoric, Saxon and Medieval periods. Source: Bradley 2019, p.20
More ambitiously, logboats could have been used for longer distance travel, forging and maintaining links between communities in different areas, exchanging gifts or commodities like salt, heavy objects like stone querns, or exotics (items not available locally), or helping to reach valley-based livestock herds, or move communities to new habitats as part of a mobile livelihood system.
There are independent measures of the value of log boats to communities. Even in some prehistoric periods, sacrificing an entire tree for one vessel would have represented something of a commitment, if not a sacrifice. Most communities would prefer to use branches from slow-growing live trees like sturdy wide-beamed oaks for construction work, only killing off the whole tree if it was necessary for particularly large buildings and other important structures. This suggests that the logboat was deemed to be of sufficient value for the sacrifice of a mature live tree to be worthwhile.
That logboats were valued on an ongoing basis has been demonstrated by the extensive repairs that were made to them. Prior to conservation the Carpow logboat was carefully recorded, including taking an inventory of all its features, including the repairs that had been carried out on it.
Repairs that had been made to the Carpow logboat were carefully recorded during conservation. Source: Woolmer-White and Strachan (ScARF)
Bob Holtzman’s tabulation of all the known repairs of logboats, published in 2021, and his analysis of these findings, has recently highlighted that repairs are another lens through which logboats can be understood. He identifies 73 repaired logboats incorporating 128 repairs, dating from the Middle Bronze Age to the post-medieval period. His typology of repairs clearly indicates that every form of damage that could be imposed on a logboat had a corresponding solution, and that considerable trouble was taken to ensure the longevity of these vessels, some repairs being rather ad hoc, whilst others were far more skilled and permanent. You can read his paper online for his full analysis (see Sources below).
Preserving and conserving logboats
Removing sugar crystals from the logboat following preservation. Source: Wessex Museums
Not only do waterlogged conditions make the discovery of logboat and other large wooden items difficult, but ongoing preservation becomes tricky once the item is removed from the waterlogged conditions that preserved it. Many early logboat finds were removed from their waterlogged contexts and put proudly on display, but began to dry out. Cracks formed and fragmentation began to occur, as well as decay. Attempts at preservation were often unsuccessful, and where successful changed the chemical makeup of the vessel, and made radiocarbon dating difficult if not impossible.
Items have to receive special treatment in order to remain above ground. Decisions have to be made about whether it is best to treat the item in order to retain it in for display in a museum, which can be costly, or to return it to the waterlogged conditions in which it was found. Various techniques have been tried. The Carpow boat from Scotland was kept wet as it was recorded but another solution was needed for long-term display It was decided to use a waxy polymer called polyethylene glycol (PEG) which would replace the water in the wood. The boat was submerged in the solution, in three pieces, in a specially made tank, after which it was freeze-dried, which converted the water turning into ice enabling its removal as a vapour. Prior to these measures, the logboat and its contemporary repairs had been recorded in detail using high-resolution digital photography and 3D scanning. The Poole Harbour logboat was also initially kept in water to prevent it drying out and disintegrating, but in the 1990s conservators from York Archaeological Trust came up with the idea of preserving it in over six tons of sugar solution before being dried out in a sealed chamber. The excess white sugar crystals that covered the boat had to be removed manually.
The Medieval Giggleswick Tarn logboat. Source: Leeds.gov.uk
A rather different problem was presented by the Medieval Giggleswick Tarn logboat (North Yorkshire), originally discovered during drainage works in 1863, “which was blown to pieces during a Second World War air raid” in 1941. It was not until 1974 that the fragments of the ash-built vessel were sent to the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich where they were examined and partially re-assembled, and dated to c.1335AD. The Giggleswick Tarn boat was luckier than the Brigg (Hull) logboat which was destroyed in the bombing of the museum where it was on display, suspended from the ceiling, in 1943. In the latter case, all that survives of the boat is the information that was recorded before it went on display.
Prehistoric logboats as special objects
One of eight Bronze Age boats found at Must Farm in Cambridgeshire was decorated, suggesting that particular care was given to the appearance of the boat. Logboats that were used for longer distance journeys and the forging of new connections with other communities have had a special status. Some boats may have been specially created for this purpose, giving them additional prestige and kudos.
Decorated Bronze Age logboat from Must Farm in Cambridgeshire. Source: Must Farm Flickr page
Normally objects that are found isolated and abandoned were discarded at their place of use when no longer needed. They might be deliberately disposed of in middens, broken and swept to the edges of settlements, could be lost to flood or fire or simply dropped by accident and never recovered by their owners. However the deposition of hoards of Late Bronze Age and Iron Age metalwork, like that in Llyn Cerig Bach (Anglesey), and the discovery of an Iron Age preserved body in Lindow Marsh, are associated with the idea of ritual deposition (i.e. deposition of bodies and items connected with specific rites of passage and religious ceremonies). In later prehistory there is often a connection with lakes, rivers and bogs.
The idea that some of the prehistoric logboats might belong to this latter category has been explored by a number of writers, including Joanna Brück, who describes them as objects that had crossed boundaries, and entered liminal spaces, becoming associated with ideas of transformation in the process. In this they might have required a special “ritual decommissioning” process to ensure that any embedded danger or risk associated with the places through which it had past was neutralized, transforming it from active to inert. Logboats may therefore have equally have been lost by accident, or deposited deliberately when, for whatever reason, they went out of use. It is not always easy to tell which was which, but Panagiota Markoulaki makes the attempt in her 2014 PhD thesis (see Sources below), which is available online for anyone wishing to pursue this subject further.
There is a possibility that a small number of prehistoric the logboats discovered were used mainly or exclusively for ceremonial purposes. A logboat from Lurgan in Co. Galway which is over 46ft (c.14m) in length was far too long for practical purposes, being almost impossible to navigate, and may have been used in ceremonial contexts.
Other logboats may have been used as models for burials, or even incorporated into such burials. Boat-shaped burial mounds are known in Britain, and some burials appear to emulate the shape of logboats, with one from Oban (Scotland) apparently having a re-used logboat at its centre. These date to between 2200 and 1700 BC.
Final Comments
Artist’s impression of the Carpow logboat transporting people across the river Tay. Source: Woolmer-White and Strachan (ScARF)
I started this piece after seeing the Baddiley Mere boat knowing almost nothing about logboats, and certainly nothing helpful. It was fairly slow going without access to an academic library, but thanks to some good some excellent papers shared online, some very useful online articles and the occasional references in books hanging around the house, I have finished up with a real appreciation for what is still a developing field of research.
The 19th and early 20th century discoveries, although marked by enthusiasm and good intentions, were often problematic. Many did not think to consider the context within which objects were found, meaning that logboats were often divorced from any associated objects or structures. A failure to understand the likely outcome of removing logboats from their waterlogged environments led to fragmentation of the wood, and sometimes complete disintegration. Attempts at preservation were variable in their success rate, and some altered the wood so profoundly that later scientific techniques like radiocarbon dating could not be employed. Still, they are to be commended for their appreciation of what they found, and their attempts to preserve both the objects and, in various publications, the knowledge that they had of the objects.
The Carprow (Perth, Scotland) logboat, which dates to around 1000BC, showing the well-sculpted interior. Source: Perth Museum and Gallery
It is a common misconception that most logboats are prehistoric. The same basic manufacturing method, using a hollowed out tree trunk, gives the illusion of contemporaneity, but the similarities are misleading. Although many of the 19th and 20th century discoveries of logboats were simply assumed to be prehistoric, radiocarbon dating, and some dendrochronological determinations have indicated that most of them are more recent and prehistoric logboats are in fact rare. The small number of Cheshire examples were early and later Medieval, with only one lying in the realms of later prehistory. In other areas the date range can extend as late as the early 18th century, although these very recent examples are also uncommon. As a whole, the small number of prehistoric logboats do not provide a sufficient sample to lend themselves conveniently to statistical sampling, and this applies even to the somewhat larger of Anglo-Saxon and Medieval examples.
Possible catamaran-style arrangement of two logboats, suggested by researchers working on the Medieval River Conon logboat. Source: AOC Archaeology Group
Although they look the superficially same, the tools with which they were made and with which they were associated will have differed considerably over time, and no two boats were the same. Even during the Bronze Age at Must Farm, the designs changed and new features were added whilst others were discarded, demonstrating that over time there was no generic logboat, and each had its own shape, features and fittings. Whilst some of the underlying considerations will have remained the same from one century to the next, the skills and tools available will have moved on, and in some cases the underlying needs for logboats and how they were thought about will have been very different. Landscapes and population densities, economic opportunities, social hierarchies and belief systems will have born little resemblance from one period to the next, and it as well to remember that similarities in appearance of logboats disguise huge discrepancies of lived experience. This pull and push between similarities and differences over very long periods is part of what makes the logboat so interesting.
Types of repairs to logboats, by Bob Holtzman 2021
It is good to see a number of publications tackling some of the complexities head on, both for academic and public consumption. The excellent book and e-book The Poole Iron Age Logboatedited by Jessica Berry, David Parham and Catriona Appleby is, for example, a fine example of a publication dedicated to a single example, using all the data available to follow, where possible, the life history of the object from tree to discard.
Technological advances are helping studies. For example, improvements in lighting, laser scanning and new photographic techniques have enabled more accurate capture of surface details, which in turn is helping researchers to understand how different types of tools and techniques were employed in the making and maintenance of logboats, enabling past methodologies to be recreated.
New academic studies are beginning to move beyond the vital building blocks of logboats as typologies and tables of dates to build on this work and consider logboats as integral to both economic and social activity, involved in different levels of livelihood and experience. Looking at how logboats are built has emphasised the role of communities in securing the wood and forming it into the correct shape, creating a communal resource and a shared experience in the process. Some researchers have considered how log boats may be involved not only in everyday activities but as components of mobile livelihood patterns and cross-community contacts. Some researchers have considered logboats in terms of their role in ceremonial and funerary activities, demonstrating that the same themes involved in the humdrum of everyday life are woven into the more esoteric aspects of self-identity and awareness. Others are looking at the significance and social context of repairs or the types of decision and activity required in the final discard of a logboat. Each new thread of research contributes not only to what is known about logboats, but to what is known about the societies and communities that produced them.
Although many of these studies focus on prehistoric examples, there is no reason why the same questions and approaches should not be applied to early and later medieval examples. Instead of being isolated from their contemporary economic and social contexts as something exceptional that requires special explanation, logboats are being repositioned at the heart of our understanding of different periods of the past and the reasons why such boats may have continued to be so attractive. Although the Cheshire logboats represent only a small part of the jigsaw, each one is unique. Both as a group and as individual activists, they too have much to contribute to the overall picture.
Hurcombe, L.M. 2014. Perishable Material Culture in Prehistory. Investigating the Missing Majority. Routledge
Ingold, Tim 2013. Making. Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Routledge
Kröger, Lars 2018. Within the network of Fluvial ports. In: L. Werther / H. Müller / M. Foucher (ed.), European Harbour Data Repository, vol. 01 (Jena 2018)
McGrail, S. 1978. Logboats of England and Wales. National Maritime Museum Archaeological Series 2, British Archaeological Reports, British Series 51 (volumes I and ii), National Maritime Museum Archaeological Series 2. Archaeopress
McGrail, S. 2010. An introduction to logboats. In D. Strachan (ed) Carpow in Context. Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, p.1-8.
Mowat, Robert J. C., Cowie; Trevor; Crone Anne and Cavers, Graeme 2015. A medieval logboat from the River Conon: towards an understanding of riverine transport in Highland Scotland
Proc. Soc. Antiq. Scot. 145 (2015), p.307–340
Thanks to Paul Roberts for his continued updates via the Focus newsletter (LibDems). Sincere apologies that this is a very battered copy, but hopefully it is still legible. Paul’s March 2024 newsletter draws attention to the proposal for a new housing site on Sibbersfield Lane, which would accommodate 287 houses. This would seriously increase the traffic and pollution along Sibbersfield Lane and Chester Road, and cause further risk on the junction with the A534. Paul raises other concerns too. You have until 16th March to comment.
Paul draws attention to various concerns with the proposal and provides the link for commenting on the plan. In case my dreadful copy makes this difficult to read, here’s the link: https://app.maptionnaire.com/q/9pn72k8ibb8a
In terms of usability, this online interface is really rather horrible. You first have to find the development on the interactive map, then zoom in on it and then click on it. Only then can you add a comment.
Thanks to the March 2024 Focus LibDem newsletter from Paul Roberts for the information that the operating hours of the no.5 bus service between Chester and Wrexham via Churton, Farndon and Holt have been extended. This is very welcome news.
When I was driving back home from Peterborough after a visit to the small city’s stunning Romanesque cathedral (see part 1) I took a detour to see the exquisite Grade 2 listed Georgian St Matthews Church on Rutland Water, also known as Normanton Church, near Oakham. It is about half an hour’s drive from Peterborough. The interior was unavailable due to a wedding, which was a shame as I have a real weakness for Georgian churches, but it is always good to see a church earning its keep today. Even without seeing the interior, it was well worth the detour just to enjoy the sight of the ridiculously lovely church on its little artificial island.
Source: Normanton Church before the flooding of the valley. Source: Rutland Photographic
The church used to sit on dry land, overlooking the Rutland valley on the site of a medieval church. This was largely rebuilt in 1764 by Sir Gilbert Heathcote, although the original tower was retained. The new tower and the western portico were built in the 1820s. I particularly like the way that the open architecture of the tower provides visibility of the views beyond, helping it to blend in with its environment. Even though the church and its tower were built in two separate phases, the integrated whole works splendidly.
The future of St Matthew’s looked very precarious when plans were made for the Rutland valley to be flooded to create a reservoir to meet the demands of a growing population, which was carried out in the 1970s. It was predicted that the water would reach the level of the little church, even though it sat on land near the top of the valley, submerging its foundations. It was only rescued from watery decay when there was a public outcry.
You can read the brief story of its salvation at the Normanton Church Wedding website, but essentially the bottom of the church was filled with rubble and provided with a concrete floor to stabilize it against water damage at its base. With a little isthmus from this artificial island connecting it to the land at the edge of the lake, the church was once again accessible and, unsurprisingly given its charming personality and its wonderful scenic setting, is a very popular wedding venue and visitor attraction. It is quite simply delightful.
The history of the church is shown on the Historic England website, apparently via Pevsner, as follows:
Former church. 1826-9 and 1911. By Thomas Cundy, Sen. and Jun., and J.B. Gridley of London. Ashlar and balustraded slate roof. W tower with W portico and nave with apse. Now entirely filled to half-way up previous wall height for the purposes of the reservoir which encircles church. In classical style. Portico, vestibule and tower of 1826-9 with semi-circle of 4 Ionic columns for the portico and 2 piers and 2 further columns in antis either side outside the vestibule. Balustrade above vestibule and tower over. This is open and on circular plan with 4 free-standing Corinthian columns in NE etc. directions, with Corinthian entablature over and sloping roof with pine cone finial: the whole close to the towers at St. John’s, Smith Square, Westminster. Nave and apse of 1911, by Gridley, of 3 leaded windows either side. Stone shouldered architraves with chamfered lintels and prominent keystones. Windows framed by order of Ionic pilasters with entablature and balustrade over. Niche on E end. N doorway with 2 leaved door. Inside, the nave cove has 3 arches with decorated coffers and the apse simple plasterwork. Pevsner.
There is a large car park for visits to the church and other lake attractions, with barriers, and has a pay point. The church is along a short walk from the car park, along a metalled path, which takes about 5 to 10 minutes.
This is a slight departure for this blog, the usual premise of which is that every visit can be accomplished in a day, there and back, from where I live in Churton. The visit to Peterborough required a stop overnight. I have always wanted to see the Romanesque cathedral at Peterborough, which is a former Benedictine abbey. I set out by car early on a Wednesday in November 2023 and stayed one night in Peterborough near the town centre, visiting the cathedral both on the Wednesday afternoon and again on the Thursday morning. On my way home on Thursday afternoon I visited the lovely Normanton Church. The routes taken and other visiting details are at the end.
Peterborough Cathedral is covered in part 1 (here) and a very brief snapshot of Normanton Church on its custom-made plinth on Rutland Water is in part 2. Needless to say, I have barely skimmed the surface of the cathedral’s history.
Introduction
South transept
Peterborough Cathedral is somewhere I have wanted to visit from the moment that I laid eyes on photos of it in a book. It has an almost split personality with its magnificent and unique 3-bay Gothic frontage, its sublime Norman-Romanesque interior, the stunning painted nave ceiling and the almost organic delicacy of the fan vaulting in the date eastern extension.
The abbey was terminated in Henry VIII’s dissolution of all the monasteries, but like Chester Cathedral was fortunate to escape some of the indignities of this process when it was converted to a cathedral. The building that visitors see today, dedicated to St Peter with St Paul and St Andrew, is the third abbey. The first abbey, Medeshamstede, was destroyed by Danish invaders. The second abbey church, built over a century after the demolition of the first, burned down by accident although the cloisters survived. The third abbey church was started from scratch, and is remarkable for the survival of the magnificent Romanesque vision. All three abbeys were built on the same site, and there is some evidence for a Roman building beneath them. The three phases are described very briefly below. For detailed descriptions see one of the guide books available, or the cathedral website’s History page (details in Sources at the end). If you go in person, I recommend the guided tour.
The 7th Century Abbey – Medeshamstede
Artist’s impression of Medhamstede, shown on an information poster in the cathedral
Bede’s 8th century Ecclesiastical History says that the first abbey on the site, Medehamstede, was established in the 7th century, and it is now thought that it was founded in around 654, and was probably built of wood. A later phase may have seen the rebuild of the wooden walls in stone, imported from a quarry to the west. Very little is known about the building and its phases, although the artist’s impression to the right is a useful suggestion of what might have been on the site. The first abbey was very isolated, deliberately divorced from human settlement to provide a suitable environment for contemplation and prayer.
The River Nene in Peterborough
Perched on the side of the River Nene and on the edge of the marshlands and mudflats of the Fens, it was an ideal location for peaceful contemplation and prayer. For this and subsequent abbeys on the site the nearby marshy Fenlands provided one of the best resources for freshwater fish in England, offered a rich habitat for wildfowl and supported reed beds that provided the raw materials for thatching roofs. The land also had the farming potential required for an expanding self-sufficient and isolationist community, providing summer pasture for livestock, and later on, when improved techniques of land drainage were mastered, the opportunity for agricultural development. Communication links were provided by the River Nene and the nearby Roman road.
The monastic community would have been organized along very austere lines adhering to the so-called Celtic tradition of monasticism. The abbey became an important early religious centre, and founded a number of daughter houses in Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Kent, Surrey, and Bermondsey (now in southeast London), which were important vanguards of the spread of Christianity. I
The Hedda Stone
Housed today in the cathedral chancel / presbytery is the Hedda Stone shown above, a large and beautifully sculpted piece of limestone belonging to this period of the abbey’s history, showing Christ, Mary and the Apostles. It is carved on both sides and pierced with holes that have no generally agreed purpose. It is quite easy to miss, so do make a point of finding it, as it is delightful.
In 870 the abbey was plundered and destroyed during a Danish attack on the east coast, and the site, now abandoned, became part of the Danelaw territory.
The 10th Century Abbey – Gildenburgh
Plan of Saxon and Medieval Peterborough showing the outline of the second church. F is the site of the gate stormed by Hereward and the Danes. It is thought that E is the old marketplace, replaced by the new town in 1133-1155. The motte is thought today to have been built by Abbot Thorold. Source: Current Archaeology 89, 1983
In the 10th century, Æthelwold of Winchester had a vision of Christ in which he was instructed to rebuild the abbey of St Peter. He was assisted in this challenge by Dunstan of Canterbury and by King Edgar and Queen Ælfthryth. It was consecrated in the early 970s by Dunstan as a Benedictine monastery (i.e. one following the guidelines for monastic life developed in the 6th century by St Bendict of Nursia, Italy). From fairly early on it was decided to provide it with a defensive wall, making it a fortified settlement or “burgh.” The church was laid out along traditional lines with a nave, two transepts and a chancel at its east end. It must have been provided with a belfry, because Æthelwold provided 10 bells for the church. Although there were no sources of stone and wood close to the site, these were imported from Barnack and Rockingham Forest respectively.
The prestige of the monastery rose when it acquired an important relic, the right arm of Oswald, a Saxon king and saint who was noted for his kindness to the poor and whose arm, with which he handed out so many alms, survived, perfectly preserved, after he was killed in battle. The monastery’s position was again strengthened in 1041 when one of the monks, Æthelric, was chosen as Bishop of Durham. The selection of the abbey as the final resting place for Ælfric Puttoc and subsequently Cynesige, both archbishops of York was an indication of how well regarded the abbey was in the 11th century. Like many Benedictine monasteries, it became a major landowner, becoming wealthy and both economically and architecturally ambitious, accumulating books for a library, and fine objects for its ceremonies and liturgies. It was so rich that it became known as the golden burgh, Gildenburgh.
Reconstruction of the abbey precinct at the time of Hereward’s attack. Source: Peterborough Abbey
The second abbey was still standing proud when William the Conqueror landed in England. Its abbot, Leofric, died in the Battle of Hastings. Abbot Brand, who followed him, was also Saxon and supported opposition to the Norman invasion. This opposition was punished with heavy taxation, and when Brand died in 1069 the abbey was put into the hands of an abbot, Thorold, loyal to William. In the event, a local Saxon rebel, Hereward, had found an ally in King Swein of Denmark, and in 1070 the Saxons and the Danes marched on Peterborough and plundered it. Although the arm of St Oswald was saved by the prior (second in command) the rest of the treasure vanished with the rebels. The abbey itself was badly damaged, and what survived was occupied by the abbot and sixty knights and significant portions of land that had once formed the basis of the abbey’s wealth was now allocated to many of those knights, filling the formerly rebellious countryside with loyal Normans.
When Thorold died in 1098 he was replaced by two successive abbots who had very little impact, but the third abbot to be appointed, in 1107, was Ernulf who was prior of Canterbury, a scholar with a good understanding of political manoeuvring, who had plenty of ambition for his new posting. He began by rebuilding the damage to the cloister buildings that had been largely destroyed by Hereward. In 1114 Ernulf moved on to Rochester and was replaced by Abbot John de Séez.
In early August 1116 when a fire broke out in the bakery and took most of what remained of the abbey church with it, although Ernulf’s new claustral buildings survived beyond the abbey church. A new church was now not only desirable but necessary.
Today’s abbey, established in the 12th Century
The Romanesque architecture
Plan of Peterborough Cathedral. Click to expand. NB – the “sanctuary” is referred to in most of the Peterborough Abbey literature as “presbytery” so I have stuck with the latter throughout. Source: Sweeting 1899, Project Gutenberg
Abbot John de Séez oversaw the construction of a stunning new Romanesque building, complete with a vast vaulted presbytery. The scale of his ambition saddled the abbey with such an enormous financial and logistical commitment that it took 120 years to complete. Masons who had worked at Durham were brought in to ensure that the most up to date civil engineering techniques were employed, and what unfolded was a mixture of magnificent vision and superb skills. The church was laid out on the usual cross-shape, with a long nave, side transepts (containing chapels) and a shorter east end. The south wall of the church (the righ thand side of the plan) made up the north wall of the cloisters, the administrative and domestic buildings were located, arranged around a square garden called the garth.
Entering the nave, the interior is light-filled and breathtaking. With windows on three levels, light pours in. Cromwell’s soldiers destroyed the medieval stained glass, and the plain replacement glass allows in much more light than the stained glass would have permitted. Of course it does help that the cathedral has installed artificial lighting, but even allowing for the changes, the layers of window and the soft, faintly reflective pallor of the Barnack limestone walls must have provided a degree of light that was remarkable in the Middle Ages.
View from just inside the west entrance to the end of the presbytery, with the pulpit in the foreground, and the modern rood (crucifix) hanging over the entrance to the Victorian choir
Because there is no surviving pulpitum (a stone division between nave and choir in monastic churches) or rood screen (again, between nave and choir), there is a very rare almost uninterrupted view from the west end entrance to the restored stained glass windows at the east end. In spite of the 19th century marble edifice that sticks up in the middle of the presbytery, the impression of a vanishing point is dramatic and gives a real sense of the length of the building. The walls soar upwards too, meeting a unique and fabulous painted ceiling.
On the death of Abbot John, the new Abbot Benedict, from Canterbury, persisted with the same vision. This is interesting because at Canterbury new ideas from France, captured in the Gothic style, were being implemented, but for whatever long-lost reason, Benedict retained the Romanesque plan that Abbot John had initiated, including semi-circular apses at the east end, one of which survives within the rectangular “New Building” that surrounds it. This apse is a rare survivor as most British churches had their apses removed for replacement by rectangular extensions such as Lady Chapels and similarly prestigious expansion projects. Benedict extended the original design west by two bays, and if you stand at the west end and look at the arches of the aisles you can clearly see the difference.
Blind arcading in the north aisle beneath the great arches of the windows
The nave and the two transepts contain the bulk of the easily visible Romanesque architecture. That within the east end presbytery is more difficult to view. The long nave with its side aisles is monumental. The massive arches of the aisles, with characteristic geometric decoration, are supported on vast octagonal piers. They are topped with another set of arches, each of which contains twin arches separated by slender columns topped with square capitals. The top level features rather smaller central arches, each flanked by even smaller blind arcades. The transept ends are simpler, each with three levels of of arches, each of the same size, with unpainted roof panels in the same lozenge shapes as those in the nave.
The lost cloister and infirmary
Artist’s impression of the cloister on an information board in the remains of the abbey cloisters.
Today’s cathedral was once the abbey church, and is a wonderful survival, but it was only one part of the monastic establishment. A cloister was always an integral part of the monastic establishment, with buildings along three sides of a courtyard or garden, with the church making up the fourth side. This cloister was usually on the south side of the church, sheltering it from the worst weather and providing it with seasonal sun. The central part of it was often a garden of some description, called the garth. The buildings arranged along the three sides included the refectory, where the monks ate, the dormitory where they slept and the chapter house where they held daily meetings. Some of these buildings could be very elaborate and ornate, particularly the chapter house.
If you leave through a door in the south side of the cathedral (on the right as you head from the entrance towards the end of the nave) or turn right in front of the cathedral and head down a narrow pathway, you will find yourself in what remains of the cloister. There is some very fine stonework left behind, giving a hint at the magnificent buildings that once stood here, and many of the changes that the buildings clearly underwent. The buildings were robbed for building materials following the Civil War.
Cloister wall, where it meets the abbey church
Beyond the cloister was the infirmary. Many monastic establishments were furnished with an infirmary, mainly to take care of the elderly and unwell within the monastic community, but most of these are long gone, and again there is some attractive gothic arcading that indicates where the monastic ifirmary was located, to the east of the cloister. It was built by Abbot John de Caux in around 1250. It is worth mentioning, because it gives some idea of the scale of the monastic operation at Peterborough.
Relics
The 12th century Becket Casket (Height 29.5cm; Width 34.4cm; Depth 12.4cm). Source: V&A Museum
No important abbey was viable without relics of saints, which gave it great spiritual credibility, prestige and integrity. Amongst the valuable relics collected were the arm of the Saxon saint Oswald of Northumbria. More prestigious by the 12th century were the bloodstained objects directly connected to the murder on 29th December 1170 of St Thomas Becket of Canterbury (the reliquary for which survives in the V&A museum). A 12th century genuine British martyr, canonized in 1173, was a remarkable thing, and the snaffling of authenticated relics for Peterborough was a real coup. Benedict did not witness the martyrdom, but he became an ardent collector and collator of Becket miracles. Becket had actually been to Peterborough, visiting with King Henry II in 1154. A chapel was built to St Thomas at the abbey gate in 1174 to hold this and other relics, allowing pilgrims access to monastic relics without permitting them to disrupt the abbey church itself.
Painted walls and woodwork
Romanesque cathedrals in Europe often preserve painted decorative patterns on walls and ceilings, some emulating red mortar, but only faint hints survive in Britain. Fortunately, some very delicate paintwork in Peterborough survives. As well as imitation mortar, and some lovely swirling curves, there is a truly charming section on the ceiling with tiny red flowers that may have been intended to evoke the Virgin Mary, who is often associated with red and white roses.
Within the apse, at the rear of the Presybytery, accessible from the New Building ambulatory, there are coats of arms painted on the white walls. Given that the eye is inevitably drawn first to the Hedda stone and the enormous marble high altar, it is easy not to notice the paintings. I have been unable to find out anything about them either in the literature I have to hand or on the Peterborough Cathedral website, but they probably belonged to wealthy benefactors of the abbey or the later cathedral.
The chapels in the south transept were provided with wooden screens to provide access and entry, and provide privacy. Remarkably, some of the decorative painting on these also survives.
The west front, the porch and the Lady Chapel
The Romanesque building did not escape the fashion for Gothic style embellishments. Tracery in the window arches, for example, is Gothic, and the Romanesque interior was topped and tailed with a remarkable Early English west front and a stunning fan-vaulted rectangular ambulatory around the central semi-circular apse at the east end.
The unique 3-bay frontage was started in 1195 but progress was halted when King John, and England as a whole, were excommunicated from the Catholic church in 1209. When the crisis was over, building resumed under Abbot Hugh, and it is thought that he made some changes the original design. The result is three 29m high arches at the front, the central one narrower than the two flanking ones. Inset into these are further arches. Flanking the arche tops and and built into the triangular gables above were a total of 22 figures looking out from the front, although many have crumbled and have now replaced. The three at the top of the gables are Saints Paul, Peter and Andrew. The figure at the very top of the central gable is St Peter, overlooking the entrance, and marking the transition from the impure outdoor world to the heavenly space within.
Following the 13th century fashion for adding a Lady Chapel to a church, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, one was built at Peterborough 1272-1286 to the north of the presbytery, accessed from the north transept, and was still standing by the 17th century, when it was taken down during the Civil War. It was in the Gothic style and was probably elaborately decorated and furnished.
A later Gothic porch, dating to 1375, protrudes from the middle of the west front. I was inclined to be more than a little judgmental about the porch, which looked like a very misguided vanity project, but I stand corrected. It was found that the central arch of the west front was beginning to tip forward, and the engineering solution was to create a wedge to prop it up. The structurally necessary wedge was designed as a Gothic style galilee porch with perpendicular windows, and although it breaks up the magnificent frontage, has done a great job of preventing its collapse.
The 15th century “New Building”
The so-called “New Building,” a sublime gothic vision, is in fact an eastward extension of the Romanesque cathedral. The New Building was probably built between 1496 and 1508 by star architect John Wastell of Bury St Edmunds (later responsible for the fan vaulting at Westminster Abbe, under the abbey’s superior, Abbot Robert Kirkton. This was no mere add-on, but a fabulously imagined and beautifully crafted piece of fan-vaulted delight. The abbot who took the gamble of gluing on an extension to a perfectly conceived Romanesque delight lived up to the legacy of his predecessors. The ceiling bosses, some of which are shown in the above photograph, were carved with both secular and religious themes showing coats of arms, symbols of the saints, and other familiar subjects. The job of the extension was to enclose the central semi-circular apse within a rectangular extension, providing a low-level ambulatory around the inner sanctum, which rises above it, for ceremonial processions. Ambulatories often contain additional chapels, but the cathedral’s architecture remains largely uninterrupted and therefore retains the impact of the fabulous fan-vaulting, which is one of the largest examples in England.
Ceiling boss showing the instruments of the passion
The New Building also, of course, delivered some fairly glossy feathers to the cap of the abbot who was so pleased with himself that he incorporated his name, a partial rebus, into the building itself. Abbot Robert Kirkton was not a self-effacing man – his initials are also conspicuous in the elaborate Prior’s Gate that he built and which celebrated key royal figures in the form of their heraldry, and ornamented with Marian roses, managing to be both obsequious and self-congratulatory.
Prior’s Gate by Abbot Kirkham
The unique 13th century painted ceiling
Magnificent painted ceiling of the nave
Deserving a post in its own right, the wooden ceiling is a marvel. Unique, it was started in around 1238 and was finsihed sometime in the 1240s. It is made up of a series of lozenge-shaped panels, which one painted either with a small scene or with leaf and floral motifs. The repeating pattern of the lozenges is dramatic from below. Interpretation of the scenes has established that the individual subjects are arranged into a series of core themes, but there is much that it still unclear. Obvioulsy religious scenes like the Creation, The Lamb of God, Saints Peter and Paul and the Anti-Christ are accompanied by historical clerics and kings, music, astronomy and the liberal arts. A scene showing a money riding backwards on a galloping goat whilst holding an owl is a representation of folly. John Foyles dedicates several pages to the ceiling in his book and there is a book about it by Jackie Hall and Susan Wright for those who want to delve deeper (see sources at the end).
Unpainted wooden ceilings over the apses are also arranged in lozenges, and are very fine in their own right.
Lozenge-shaped framed painting on the ceiling of the nave., showing St Paul holding a sword in his right hand and a book in his left (panel C7). The sword evokes the means of his martyrdom (beheading) and the book represents his epistles.
The Tudors before the Dissolution
The main contribution of the Tudors to the cathedral are the tombs of Katherine of Aragon, who died in 1536 and Mary Queen of Scots in 1587.
Katharine of Aragon had been married to the heir to the English throne, Arthur, elder brother of the future Henry VIII. When Arthur died, Henry VIII married his widowed sister-in-law. When the marriage failed to produce the necessary male heir, Henry decided to annul the marriage. Unable to obtain papal permission to do so, he split from the papacy and established the Church of England. Katherine was shuffled off to Kimbolton Castle, where Henry hoped that if she was out of sight of the public, she would also be out of mind. When she died she provided, on Henry’s orders, with a tomb in Peterborough Abbey, the nearest important ecclesiastical building to Kimbolton. Here she was identified as the widow of Henry’s brother Arthur. This was presumably Henry’s excuse for not granting her a place in Westminster Abbey. Deposited under the floor up against the south side of the presbytery, where she would be close to God, she was provided with a monument above the grave. This was destroyed in the Civil War, but the grave beneath remainsin situ, marked by a stone slab and gold lettering.
The Dissolution
The opening page of the Valor Ecclesiasticus (the survey of monastic establishments that paved the way to the Dissolution), showing Henry VIII. Source: Wikipedia
The New Building had only just been finished in the first years of the 1500s when Henry VIII fell out with the Catholic papacy. Henry, having found a way to both dissolve a marriage that produced a daughter but no male heir to his throne, and simultaneously remove papal authority over both his personal affairs and the management of the church, also found that being the head of his own Church of England enabled him to raise substantial funds by laying claim to all the properties and goods of the monasteries, priories and friaries, by simply denying their ongoing right to exist. The Dissolution caught up with Peterborough abbey in 1539, which had survived the first round of closures that took place in 1536. The abbot at the time was John Chambers, and he was unusually fortunate. He took no part in the protests in Lincoln or the Pilgrimage of Grace, and although initially pensioned off his meek resignation to the inevitable was rewarded. Whether it was because of the creation of new dioceses at this time, or because Henry VIII’s first wife Katherine of Aragon was buried here in 1536, the abbey escaped demolition and was converted instead to a cathedral in 1541 with John Chambers as its first bishop. Of all the 100s of abbeys, priories and friaries that were dissolved by Henry VIII, only a handful were converted to cathedrals, of which Chester Cathedral is another example.
Fifty years later Peterborough was again the royal choice of burial place for an embarrassing queen. Executed in 1587, Mary Queen of Scots was buried on the opposite side of the presbytery from Queen Katharine. She remained there for 25 years until her son, James I, removed her remains to Westminster Abbey.
The Civil War
Peterborough, from Speed’s 1610 map, shortly before the Civil War. Source: Sweeting 1899, Project Gutenberg
During the English Civil War of 22 August 1642 – 3 September 1651, each side attempted to use the medieval castles to gain advantage. The result was that many 13th century castles were slighted (demolished) to prevent re-use at the end of the Civil War. Castles were fair game, but religious institutions were also targeted because they represented a different threat – the challenge to Puritan religious belief. Henry VIII had rejected Catholic authority, but his Church of England was established for convenience, and the Church of England contained many lingering aspects of its Catholic ancestry. Oliver Cromwell’s soldiers were given free reign to obliterate any of the artistic signs of lingering tendencies to papism to force through reform. What they could reach they either maimed or destroyed. What they could not reach they sometimes hit with musket fire.
One of three surviving misericords at Peterborough Cathedral
At Peterborough, as in so many places, the medieval stained glass was demolished. Some of the stained glass windows at the east end today was formed of the fragments that people picked up and saved after the Puritans had left. The painted ceiling over the east end apse was shot with muskets, but somehow the ceiling over the nave was missed. The choir stalls, together with the misericords (the so-called mercy seats once in the choir stalls, all of which were carved with fascinating scenes on their undersides) were also destroyed at this time. Only three of the misericords survive (at Chester there are 48 misericords, which gives some idea of the level of destruction at Peterborough). The survivors are preserved in a chapel on the south side of the nave near the entrance, a sad reminder that something quite spectacular has been lost. The high altar was also destroyed. The cloister buildings were used as the raw materials for nearby Thorpe Hall.
The 17th and 18th centuries
This sub-heading would normally be an exercise in naming and shaming, but, amazingly, the abbey has not suffered the usual indignities of an important ecclesiastical building during this period. There are no 17th and 18th century monuments jostling for position on the walls to undermine the sense of coherence and uniform splendour. The soaring nave in Westminster Abbey, utterly spoiled by truly awful funerary memorials, is a good example of how badly a beautiful building can be dramatically undermined by later insensitivities. Although some of the monuments in Peterborough Cathedral were damaged during the Reformation, there seem to have been restrictions on the number permitted.
The biggest surviving monument is baroque, dedicated to wool merchant Thomas Deacon, former high sheriff of Northamptonshire and founder of a charity school for 20 boys. He died in 1730. His wife, who died 10 years later, is also commemorated on the monument. I would much rather that it had not been built in the cathedral, at the entrance to the New Building, because it is such an alien presence, but it is a particularly fine example of its type.
The Victorians
Two of the most active restorers of the Victorian period were Sir George Gilbert Scott and John L. Pearson. Unfortunately, although their ideas of restoration included the valuable rescue and repair of serious damage and decay, it also involved what they clearly thought of as improvements to the original vision of earlier architects and artists. Enthusiasts of Chester Cathedral and Valle Crucis Abbey in Llangollen will probably have Gilbert Scott’s name ringing in their ears.
The crossing
In the late 1800s the tower was on the verge of collapse and it was Pearson who was responsible for dismantling and rebuilding it, a massive undertaking that saved the cathedral from irreparable harm. His work altered the 14th century tower but was done to blend in with the existing architecture. The twin sets of choir stalls, to the east of where the originals were located, the cathedra (bishop’s throne) and the pulpit are also Pearson’s work, and although clearly not medieval, are a skilled emulation of a medieval style quire. Pearson’s, however, was the evil genius that created the temple-like marble high altar within the presbytery as well as the cosmati floor leading up to it.
Cosmati floor
Gilbert Scott was responsible for the painted ceiling over the apse, which he claimed at the time was based on the damaged example that he was replacing. It is unmistakeably Victorian in its rendition and colouring.
Gilbert Scott’s ceiling in the apse
In this period the circular cast iron Gurney stoves were added, manufactured by The London Warming and Ventilating Company who bought the patent registered in 1856 by Goldsworth Gurney, surgeon turned engineer. The stove looks like the filter in my wet-and-dry vacuum cleaner, with ribs standing out from a central cylinder, distributing heat in a full circle. It was fired by anthracite, and the entire thing sat in a trough of water, helping to add humidity to the air. Peterborough cathedral retains several of them, and they are in many other cathedrals too. The Peterborough ones are powered by either as or oil, and they do a stunning job.
Modern additions
There has been some restoration work in the last few decades, but the emphasis has generally been on preservation rather than modernization. For example, many of the badly decaying figures on the west front were replaced by Alan Durst between 1949 and 1975.
A particularly noticeable modern addition is a hanging rood – a red crucifix with Christ in gold affixed to it, suspended from the ceiling at the east end of the nave, added in 1975. This hangs above the line that the rood screen would have taken across the nave. Up against the south side of the presbytery some very fine gold lettering, was put in place to mark the burial place of Mary Queen of Scots, which works well. In the New Building, someone has seen fit to place framed photographs on the walls between the fan-vaulting columns, which really doesn’t do the architecture any favours. The entrance to the west end has automated glass doors, which add to the light, and there is of course the inevitable gift shop on your left as you enter. Outside, Thomas Becket’s chapel is now a tea room.
Final Comments
The Romanesque is so comparatively rare in Britain, that this stunningly coherent and unfettered example is a particularly amazing treat. When the decision was made to extend the east end in a contrasting style, the slender, delicate columns and fan-vaulting of the New Building provided contrasting but additional brilliance. Moving through the building from the Norman to gothic gives the sense of being in an ecclesiastical time machine, a transition from one perfect world to another.
There is so much more to be said about the abbey and its features, inside and out, so much that has been missed out here. If you decide to visit, you won’t be disappointed.
Visiting
View from the choir to the east end
I am accustomed to driving to southeast London, so rather than looking at other options I took was my usual route, zipping down the A41, the M54, the M6 and the A14. From the A14 the A605 goes straight to Peterborough and I was there, end to end with no delays, in just over three hours. The A41 is always the joker in the pack because it is a long way from Chester to the M54, there are very few sections of dual carriageway and it can be difficult to overtake if you find yourself behind something slow. The A5 to Shrewsbury and the M54 is sometimes quicker.
The cathedral opening times are on the website, where any special events and closures are shown. Although I had done some top-level background reading I was lucky enough to arrive half an hour before a Highlights Tour was due to start, so I had a wander around on my own and then returned to the entrance for the tour. I failed to get my guide’s name, which is particularly sad as I had her to myself, November being a quiet time of year, and we had a great chat. She was splendidly knowledgable, encouraged my stream of questions and added multiple layers of detail and interpretation to my visit.
There was full-on white frost resembling snow over the days that I visited, and it was exceedingly cold, but thanks to the deployment of multiple Gurney stoves in the cathedral (fabulous heat-generating monsters like the ones in Chester Cathedral), I actually had to take off my top layer. It is the first cathedral I’ve ever visited that actually felt cosy!
For those who are dealing with unwilling legs, Peterborough as a whole is on the flat. The cathedral has very few steps to negotiate, automated doors provide access to the cathedral, a ramp is provided to get into the chancel from the New Building to visit the Hedda stone, and there are a great many places to sit down even beyond the nave.
I returned home via Normanton Church (see my short post with photos), for no better reason than it looked pretty and I do love a well-proportioned Georgian church, so my return journey was different, following the A606 to Melton Mowbray (I didn’t stop but it looks interesting), the A6006 and the A50 to Stoke on Trent and Nantwich, and the A534 home. Thanks to a convoy of lorries on the A6006 it was slow going but it was a spectacularly beautiful day and the unfamiliar landscape showed to terrific advantage in the sunshine. The A50 is dual carriageway, very unlovely but a smooth run. The drive from Peterborough to Churton, via Normanton Church, took me just over four hours (not including the time wandering around at Normanton).
Sources
Books and papers
Pair of figures believed to be Roman, possibly late 2nd century. In the west wall of the south transept
Biddick, Kathleen. 1992. The Other Economy: Pastoral Husbandry on a Medieval Estate. University of California Press
Foyle, Jonathan. 2018. Peterborough Cathedral. A Glimpse of Heaven. Scala
Higham, Jack (Revd. Canon). 2001. Peterborough Cathedral. The Pitkin Guide. Pitkin
Selkirk, Andrew and Selkirk, Wendy 1983. Peterborough. Current Archaeology, no.89, vol.VIII, October 1983, p.182-183
Sweeting, W.D. (Revd.) 1899 (second edition). The Cathedral Church of Peterborough. A Description of its fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See. G. Bell and Sons Ltd. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/13618/13618-h/13618-h.htm
Book about the nave’s painted ceiling (which I have not read, but is listed here for those who would like to find out more)
Jackie Hall and Susan Wright (eds.) 2015. Conservation & Discovery: Peterborough Cathedral Nave Ceiling and Related Structures. MOLA———
Creature wheeling two women in a barrow towards a hellmouth. All Saints’s Gresford
Apologies that it has taken a couple of weeks for part 3 to appear. The subject is so massive and it seems impossible to do it justice in a blog post but eventually that big, accusing Publish button just has to be clicked 🙂
Part 1 introduced misericords and described some of the themes captured in the choir of St Werburgh’s Abbey (Chester Cathedral). Part 2 described the misericords at Gresford, Malpas and Bebington. This 3rd and final part addresses who might have been responsible for the themes chosen, who may have paid for the misericords, why they were contained within the most sacred part of the church and how they might be understood. Finally I have added some visiting details for the cathedral and the three churchs, plus a list of references for all three parts.
Selecting the misericords
How were the topics selected and by whom; who carved them; and who paid for them?
Each misericord showed a different subject matter, and whether there were 48 (as at Chester) or 14 (as at Gresford) there could be great diversity in the themes selected. The patron saint of an abbey or church might dictate the subject matter in a single misericord, like the miracle of St Werburgh at Chester, but this accounts for only one misericord of any one corpus. Some themes are commonly found throughout misericord collections and are evidently part of a popular repertoire or corpus of themes. As Anderson says in his survey of gothic art, “The subjects of misericords did not have to be consistent, so any good design, from whatever source it came from, could be used on them,” but particular themes and ideas were probably favoured in each different establishment, leading to a different character and ambience from one set to another. The enthusiasm for certain themes will have changed over time, reflecting both popular and intellectual fashions, but all were chosen from similar types of source material.
Folio 49v from the Smithfield Decretal showing a fox, with mitre and crozier, preaching to a flock of birds. Source: British Library
Manuscripts were an obvious source of ideas. Bestiaries such as the beautiful MS Bodley 764, referred to in parts 1 and 2, provided a wealth of ideas, as did travelogues. Both Old and New Testaments, missals and hagiographies (biographies of saints, often at least partly fictional) were also alternative sources. The Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine in the 13th century was a particularly popular account of the lives of saints, which even today is a good read. The marginal scenes shown on various religious illuminated manuscripts including psalters (books of psalms) and books have hours (personal books for private worship) probably supplied others, which included so-called drolleries and grotesques. The Luttrel Psalter and the Smithfield Decretals are good examples. Contemporary chivalric romances, popular narratives and collections of stories like the 14th century French Cy Nous Dit (which contained versions of the tales of Tristan and Isolde, Alexander carried over the edge and the exploitsof the knight Yvain – all of which are at Chester) were good sources of stories with a moral thread. Towards the end of the Middle Ages it has been demonstrated that some themes were inspired by woodcut images that were circulating in Europe following the success of the printing press in the mid-15th century.
Image and supporters copied from earlier examples. The model for the central image was first carved at Lincoln in the 1370s (top), then reproduced with much more gusto and exuberance at St Werburgh’s Chester in the 1380s (middle) and finally, with much less energy than either, at St Mary’s Nantwich in the 1390s (bottom). All sourced from Christina Grössinger, The World Upside-Down, p.47 (see Sources at end)
Carvers almost certainly brought ideas with them from other abbeys, cathedrals and churches, which they could share with their new employers. Some topics are clearly copied from one ecclesiastical establishment to another, probably introduced by carvers who moved to new building projects as they became available. Sixteen designs in Chester were based on those from Lincoln, and six in the the impressive parish of St Mary’s church in Nantwich, were copied from Chester. The herons on a misericord in St Werburgh’s, for example, were very nearly clones of a misericord at Lincoln Cathedral, although the supporters are different. An even more striking example is a crowned head with wild hair and beard, flanked by two heads in profile. This appears first in Lincoln Cathedral, then at St Werburgh’s Abbey in Chester.
Although St Werburgh’s may have been expected, by virtue of its proximity, to have provided the inspiration and basic model for the later examples at Gresford, Malpas and Bebington, none of the misericords are copies of surviving Chester examples. There are indeed shared themes, but there are no attempts at replication. This suggests that in each case the choices made drew on other sources for their ideas, perhaps reflecting the time gap between the Chester and later misericords, or otherwise reflecting local choices or preferences.
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Who would have been involved in the choice of themes?
Abbot with staff and book. MS. Ludwig IX 6 (83.ML.102), fol. 222v. Source: Getty Museum
It is not known exactly how the topics depicted on individual misericords were chosen, but there are a number of possibilities. At an abbey or independent priory, the superior (abbot or prior) and the senior personnel may have dominated the decisions, but individual monks from the larger monastic community may have contributed to the selection process too. External patrons, whose financial input would have been necessary for a project on the scale of the Chester quire are likely to have wanted to contribute to their own favoured themes. In a parish church both the senior clergy and the bishop would probably have dominated the decision process, but external, private financial contributors such as local landowners may also have had a vested interest in the selection of themes. Multiple sources of finance, each perhaps buying a vote in the selection process, would help to explain the diversity of the subject matters chosen both within a single choir, and the differences from one church to another.
It is sometimes suggested that misericords were the brainchildren of the craftsmen who carved them, indulging themselves with creative and sometimes (to the Victorian mind) off-colour designs without any direct input from the clergy. Being confined to the choir in the most sacred part of the church, however, it seems unlikely that anything could have been selected and installed without the permission of a head cleric, such as the abbot in the abbey, or a parish priest (or his bishop) in a church. It also seems implausible that an abbot or bishop would sit back and allow expenditure to be used unchecked on fantastic frivolities that would have to be accounted for to both superiors and inferiors alike. Although carvers probably suggested certain popular themes based on their own experience, the misericords and their themes must have been sanctioned at the highest levels.
Who carved the misericords?
Stained glass portrait, thought to be Master Carpenter Hugh Herland. Source: Upchurch Matters
Remarkably little is known about the wood carvers who created these remarkable vignettes. For prestigious projects carvers seem to have moved from building to building. Christina Grössinger identifies a single London workshop as having been responsible not only for the Chester and Lincoln wood-carvings, but also for those that at St Katherine’s in Stepney (London) and the former Carmelite friary in Coventry. John Harvey had formerly identified the hand of famous Master Carpenter Hugh Herland, who worked on a number of royal and prestigious college projects in the 14th century, at Lincoln and particularly Chester, but Grössinger rejects this suggestion, and a quick look at Herland’s list of responsibilities for the decades in which the Lincoln and Chester misericords were made (1370s and 1380s respectively), suggests that he was probably far too busy on prestigious works elsewhere to oversee these two projects as well. Present in Chester between 1377 and 1411, however, was William Newell the king’s chief carpenter who was probably involved with the work on the choir, at the very least in an advisory capacity. For a Benedictine monastery like St Werburgh’s it was important not merely to raise the status of the individual abbey, but to contribute to the prestige of the Benedictine order as a whole, particularly in a period when monastic orders were becoming much less influential in society and politics. Whoever was responsible for overseeing the project, many carpenters will have contributed to the misericords and canopies, and both the designs and the work are certainly exquisite.
St Andrew’s, Bebington
The preference for the most prestigious carvers available in the country suggests that where prestige was important and the finance available, only the best carvers would do and could be hired from places at considerable distance from the institution concerned. The impressive churches of Malpas, Gresford and Bebington would not have had the same scale of financial resources, nor the same ambitions for national prestige reached for by the abbot Chester abbey, but quality was still important. Carvers were more likely to have been sourced closer to home, but even so the skills required may still have required importing specialists to oversee and ensure high quality. In his paper on the carvers of the Oxford colleges, Gee says that during the 14th century the pay for a Master Carpenter, was around 4d monthly. For a nationally recognized and prestigious Master Carpenter of whom the above-mentioned Herland is an example, this rose to around 1s. There was therefore a wide scale of pay for different levels of skill and creativity. work.
Who paid for them?
Canopies above the choir stalls in Chester Cathedral
Elaborate choir stalls with misericords were luxury items for a church, raising the prestige of the incumbent clergy and the establishment as a whole either nationally for an abbey or cathedral, or regionally for a collegiate or parish church. They were, in functional terms, unnecessary but for some monasteries and churches, the investment may have been important for institutional and social reasons, reinforcing the position of the church in the wider community at a time when ecclesiastical influence was in decline. Status and vanity projects always come with a substantial bottom line, and the funds would have been acquired from a number of different income streams and one-off sources.
A monastic establishment like St Werburgh’s might have any number of income streams. The Benedictines, the longest established monastic order of the Catholic tradition in Britain, had been endowed with enormous estates and resources. Monasteries were amongst Britain’s greatest landowners, owning huge swathes of the rural landscape. This level of royal and significant magnate investment had trailed off by the early 1300s, so monastic establishments were forced to make the most of the property they already owned and attempt to secure smaller but still significant bequests and investments, and one-off donations for special projects. Ongoing sources of funding included tithes (funds appropriated from churches that it adopted), the often impressive output of produce sold from a network of monastic farms, private bequests in wills, and contributions by living benefactors. Appropriating churches, and securing their income, was increasingly important throughout the later medieval period. Chantries were also an excellent source of income for urban monasteries. These were financial foundations set up by individuals to pay for an ordained monk, or several monks, to recite multiple prayers for himself/herself after death, as well as for his or her family and ancestors; These were invaluable income-generators for monasteries. Pilgrim shrines could also be very lucrative for monasteries with appropriate relics, particularly if they were reputed to perform miracles.
Probable burial places of some of the medieval abbots in the cloister at St Werburgh’s, Chester
The abbot and monks themselves, might contribute to prestigious projects. Although the earliest Benedictine monastic orders had been based on vows of poverty, and the reforming orders of the late 11th and early 12th centuries renewed these vows and intentions, by the late 14th century the Benedictine monks had lost their ambition for poverty, and were rarely self-effacing. Although it was a particular thorn in the side of Henry V in the early 15th century, abbots and their monks might well be considerably wealthy in their own right. This was in spite of St Benedict’s proscription against the ownership of private property in the Rule on which the Benedictines were supposed to base their monastic lives. An abbot’s subordinates too might have access to personal wealth. To ensure his own personal legacy an abbot of an important urban monastery might invest in a prestigious project that, in the case of St Werburgh’s included not only the choir stalls but the elaborate and intricate canopies above. The abbot would probably be able to secure contributions from his community of brethren as well, and would certainly attempt to secure donations from beyond the cloister. For those both within the community and those outside it, there was the hope that by contributing their mite to the glorification of God, they might serve less time paying for their sins in purgatory. Even where in-house monastic funding was available, the gifts of patronage might be important to elaborate monastic improvement, and for a project as immense as the St Werburgh’s quire, significant investment would have been welcome.
In an urban environment although there might be additional opportunities for securing funds, there might be competition with other establishments. For example, St Werburgh’s charged for burials within its cemetery, and was in competition with other ecclesiastical establishments in Chester to secure those payments. However, there was a particular prestige to being buried in a monastic context, and more importantly the possibility of being as close as possible to the divine. Any wealthy Chester resident who wanted to be buried within the of the abbey precinct, and particularly the abbey church itself, would have to pay a very steep price for the privilege.
Elaborate and costly wood carving on the screen at the entrance to the choir at All Saints’ Gresford.
Perhaps more intriguing are the sources of the investment for the three parish churches. These might also include tithes, which were a type of tax due from every household to fund the parish church (in the form of produce for much of the Middle Ages), if there was any surplus remaining after the clergy had been paid and church costs defrayed. Another form of income were chantries that were set up in parish churches as well as monasteries, particularly the more prestigious parish churches. These too might provide an income from which a surplus could be saved for special projects. A more promising source of sufficient funds for a was likely to be bequests and donations made by a number of particularly wealthy benefactors and patrons, either individuals, families or organizations. For parish, collegiate and cathedral churches crowd-funding by the congregation might have been a possibility. Although most of the congregation was excluded from the chancel, (within which the choir was located), Nicholas Orme makes it clear that wealthy and influential parishioners, as well as choristers, might be given access. These more privileged members of the congregation would have access to any work within the chancel to which they contributed either large one-off gifts or piecemeal funding, even if they were not primary benefactors or members of founding families. It is also possible that access to the chancel was an incentive for anyone who had the money to invest in ecclesiastical projects. Access to the chancel, and burial within its confines, were highly desirable as this was the closest that most people would come to the divine prior to death. If the parish priest was independently wealthy, he too much contribute to the costs, as might the bishop.
Little of the abbey church survives at Basingwerk
A different possibility is the purchase, wholesale or piecemeal, of the misericords from another building. If an abbey or priory church went out of use, a set of choir-stalls might become available for purchase at a fraction of the price of commissioning a new set from scratch. A parish church with wealth of its own, or with patrons who wished to make a mark, might benefit from the unexpected windfall. The Dissolution of the Monasteries under the reign of Henry VIII from 1535 to around 1540 liberated many church furnishings for purchase by less exalted establishments. In Lancashire, for example, choir stalls from Whalley Abbey found their way into a local parish church, whilst in Lancaster itself the misericords may have come from a nearby Premonstratensian establishment. There has been a suggestion that the Gresford misericords might have been sourced from Basingwerk Abbey at Holywell following its 1535/1536 dissolution. However, the impressive Monastic Wales research portal states that the choir stalls from Basingwerk actually went to St Mary’s on the Hill in Chester, presumably complete with misericords, a claim echoed in the ChesterWiki page for the church (but unsupported by any citation) as part of a general refurbishment. I have not seen the original sources and their arguments for either proposal. If the stalls were once at St Mary’s on the Hill they are not there now. Gresford All Saints’ seems, anyway, to have had both the ambition and the funds if it wished to comission its own choir stalls during the 15th century when the church was substantially remodelled. ———
The role of misericords
A sense of meaning
All Saints’, Gresford
In spite of the genuinely fascinating and academically impressive work carried out on the subject, there are no definitive answers about how a corpus of misericords is best understood. There is so much variety and as Gombrich observes, for some of these images “[t]here are no names in our language, or categories in our thought, to come to grips with this elusive dream-imagery in which ‘all things are mixed’. . . It outrages both our ‘sense of order’ and our search for meaning.” The overtly religious themes on some misericords are accompanied by far less obviously appropriate scenes including on the one hand horror, myth, fantasy and the monstrous and, on the other hand, humour, farce, ribaldry, Colish’s “red thread” of satire and, perhaps, some very early forerunners of schadenfreude and even burlesque. Misericords are one of the few ecclesiastical contexts in which the lower echelons of society can be observed. The acrobats at Gresford have already been mentioned in Part 2, and entertainers and sports of various sorts are common.
St Werburgh’s Abbey, Chester
In spite of the difficulties it is irresistible to try to address some of the questions. For example, why was highly irreligious imagery, some of it very funny, included in the most sacred of ecclesiastical spaces? Why were naked human private parts, women beating men, foxes lecturing geese, upright cats, writhing dragons, strange beasts, wildmen and ugly monsters shown side by side with, on the one hand, lowly peasants and jesters and, on the other hand, saints, angels, kings and heraldic symbols of the nobility?
Whilst parts 1 and 2 demonstrated how individual misericords can successfully communicate certain stories and convey specific ideas, an entire corpus of misericords is rather more interesting as a sum of the various parts, presumably containing somewhere within it the religious, ideological and cultural motivations, the very heart of why these carvings existed in the first place.
A framework for living
Alchemic approach to four humours in relation to the four elements and zodiacal signs. Book illustration in “Quinta Essentia” by Leonhart Thurneisser zum Thurn (gen. Leonhard Thurneysser). Source: Wikipedia
From today’s perspective, the world of the Middle Ages encompassed a very different set of experiences, and this has to be factored into any attempt to understand medieval imagery. These many challenges of the Middle Ages were understood within a descriptive and explanatory framework that helped to give a sense of order. As well as the overarching structure provided by Christianity, there was a framework for neatly organizing existence into manageable chunks. The natural world was divided into four primary elements: air, fire, earth and water, with air opposite earth and water opposite fire. The human body was divided into four “humours,” and the human condition was divided into four “states.” All were characterized in terms of heat and moisture, and were influenced by both the four seasons and the 12 astrological points of the zodiac. In Christian terms, the presence of the devil and his demons, the reality of purgatory and hell, and even the performance of saintly miracles were all aspects of a world that for most people, were a reality in which the supernatural was entwined with the everyday. Structuring the world in this complex way formed a model for understanding it and operating within it.
There were also less structured but equally useful mechanisms for coping with a life in which more nebulous anxieties and worries did not fit neatly within the conventional framework. The supernatural had its own role, which did not always dovetail smoothly with other explanatory models. Superstition, the rumblings of magic and divination and the presence of evil in the dark corners of the supernatural all had a role to play.
The realities of medieval life
The central theme of this misericord is a two-bodied monster with a single head. The supporters are also monsters, their tails connecting them to the misericord.
Everyday life in the later Middle Ages, and the 14th century in particular (the century in which the Chester misericords were carved) was hard. The 14th century was not merely a matter of political change and social unrest, but incorporated the Great Famine of 1315-17 the arrival of the terrible Black Death of 1348-1350, and the recurrence of plague outbreaks in 1361-2, 1369, 1374-9 and 1390-3 during which thousands of people died and entire villages were permanently abandoned, and following which economic challenges inevitably occurred. Other notable events included the relocation of papal power from Rome to Avignon in 1309; the Ordinances of 1311, which imposed limits on Edward II’s power; Robert de Bruce’s defeat of Edward II at Bannockburn in 1314; a period of political and military turmoil followed by Edward II’s forced abdication and probable murder in 1327; Scottish independence in 1328; the beginning of the 100 Years War in 1337 under Edward III, which brought with it periods of purveyance and heavy taxation; the 1341 parliamentary crisis; the 1351 Statue of Labourers (Edward III’s attempt at wage-fixing); the death of Edward III in 1377; the Papal Schism of 1378; John Wycliffe’s anti-Catholic writing (inspiring his Lollard followers) and his vernacular English editions of the Bible in the mid to late 14th century; the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381; and the removal of Richard II from the throne in 1399. For Cheshire and northeast Wales, the appointment of Edward III’s son the Black Prince as Earl of Chester in 1333 and Prince of Wales in 1343 were also particularly relevant. A great many more dates could be added to this brief and selective list, but this is probably sufficient to highlight the social and political turbulence of these decades. The late 14th century misericords in British monasteries and churches, with their often threatening and subversive themes may say as much about social anxiety as spiritual fervour.
Lion fighting a dragon flanked on each side by a wildman (wodehouse), one riding a wyvern and the other killing some form of dragon-like creature. St Werburgh’s Abbey, Chester
Writing about the monsters, hybrids, wildmen and grotesques populating the margins of the Luttrell Psalter (dating to the 1320s-30s), Michelle P. Brown could also be commenting on the 14th century misericords when she says: “They reflect the neuroses of a society in flux, one rightly concerned in the face of political corruption, international warfare, civil war, famine and demographic decline.” Some of these anxieties and concerns are translated into analogous images on the misericords, which became vehicles for representing the extreme aspects of both familiar realities and potential realities that link life as it is lived and the “other.” Here the familiar meets the unfamiliar in the liminal, teetering right on the edge of the unknown beyond where mermaids, dragons, wyverns, unicorns, strange humanoid beings and the unknown lurked. These territories on the edges and margins of observable reality are places of high risk, where strange beings and actions are not only possible but plausible.
This was obviously not a simple matter of juxtaposing conventionally opposing ideas like saints-and-angels versus devils-and-demons. In the medieval period the there was a recognition of the border spaces between the sacred and the profane, the religious and the domestic, a blameless life and a misspent one, good and evil, life and death, death and rebirth. This in-between existence is space that is neither hell nor purgatory and might act as a reminder that between this world and that occupied by the divine, there was significant uncertainty.
Bearded man at St Andrew’s, Bebington. Source: Dominic Strange, World of Misericords
Although the unusual, the mythical and the allegorical stand out, ordinary people may also be represented. They do not feature prominently at either St Werburgh’s or Gresford’s St Oswalds, where most of the original misericords are present, but ordinary people occur on misericords outside the Chester area. The obviously religious themes interlock with scenes of everyday life, some allegorical, some empirical, some scurrilous. Michael Camille suggests that misericords are like the Mystery plays in that they allow “anecdotal details and the depiction of social manners” including folk stories and fables and scenes of domesticity and seasonal activities. The inclusion of peasants engaged in hard work, such as those shown in the Labours of the Months, (the most complete example of which is at a church in Ripple, Worcestershire, shifted there from Whalley Abbey after the Dissolution) may represent a dependence on the annual cycle, but may equally capture the nature of the social order itself, with saints at the top and serfs at the bottom, all equally important at least in God’s eyes.
Woman as a tornado of anger with cowering man, flanked by two very cross characters. Chester St Werburgh’s
As Grössinger says, however, most of the everyday people shown on misericords are engaged not in the domestic realm or in serious pursuits, but in “a subversive view of everyday events that can both entertain and teach.” These depictions include acrobats, contortionists, hunting, wrestling, feasting, brawling, bear-baiting and music making. When ordinary people begin to behave in a challenging way, there may have been a great deal of unease about the reality of God’s creations humans being less than perfect specimens who were unable or unwilling to use free will for good. Misericords depicting women beating men, foxes preaching to geese, gymnasts displaying their private parts, may well represent the use of derision and humour to mediate the uncomfortable realities of everyday social discord, another aspect of the subversion of an idealized view of life. This was perhaps just as true of medieval creative thinking as it is of today’s, and ties in with an explanatory framework in which both monsters and monstrous behaviours were part of God’s creation, and should be included in any understanding of reality as it is perceived and the liminal areas beyond our immediate vision or geographic location.
The lovers Tristan and Isolde. St Werburgh’s, Chester
Heroic, chivalric and romantic tales bear testimony to the rewards of idealized behaviour in the face of such challenges, but clearly comment too on the risks confronted by good people who encounter evil, temptation and other dangers. These narratives offer approaches to handling danger and mechanisms for defeating fear and the fearsome.
Interestingly, the misericords do not tend to focus on the image of death itself and only rarely give death a voice, unless it is to remind the onlooker of Christ’s sacrifice for humanity. Demons, hell and people being delivered to the hellmouth are certainly represented, but these are more a threat to the living, teetering on the edge of the abyss, than a characterization of death itself. Depictions of skeletons, the personifications of death, fairly unusual, even in the 15th century when the Danse Macabre (and John Lydgate’s derivative Dance of Death) and cadaver monuments, and in particular transi tombs, became popular.
Fox preaching to cockerel and geese. All Saints’, Gresford
Finally, there is always the matter of tradition. Whilst the 14th century misericords at places like Lincoln, Chester and Nantwich may have been a response to the difficulties of the times, it is quite likely that much later misericords were seen more in the light of a connection with the historical integrity of the church, the honouring of an ecclesiastical tradition and a form of validation of more modern works, as well as a resistance to ecclesiastical change, by reference to the past.
Why were carved misericords incorporated into sacred spaces?
View of the choir from steps to the central altar, Gresford All Saints’. The carved screen divides the sacred space of the choir, the choir-stalls and the misericords from the public nave beyond.
In a church the choir is divided from the long nave, where the congregation gather, by a screen. Perhaps the dangerous and threatening was best contained and restricted within the choir, where religious rituals were concentrated, and where the clergy and monks could contemplate and learn from the disruptive and unsettling scenes before (and under) them. It must have been accepted at some point that the inclusion of irreverence and crudity sitting alongside religious themes had a useful role and would not, most importantly, be offensive to God. If the themes were essentially a coping strategy consisting of fashionable morality tales and derisive warnings against bad behaviour, such forms of expression probably needed to be safely contained, segregated from those who might misinterpret them and retained for the benefit of those who could contemplate them and understand their role. Acknowledging risk and conceptualizing it in the form of margins and misericords was a way of bringing a wit and energy to the unknown world of the “other” that sat beyond the edges of medieval life, but it was not suitable for everyday consumption.
One of the Victorian replacements at Chester St Werburgh’s showing one of Aesop’s fables, the fox and the stork.
It is worth remembering that at least in the context of monastic establishments and collegiate churches, and probably in the greater majority of the parish chancels, the choir was the domain of men alone. It is all too likely that the more risqué of these themes were considered far too warm and witty for delicate female sensibilities and, in the majority of cases, for their inferior intellects too. Confining such scenes to the choir would normally guarantee an exclusively male audience.
Context: Themes that reflect the misericords in other forms
Delightfully grotesque creature, one of many clinging to the walls of All Saint’s, Gresford. Its beautifully chosen red sandstone skin against the pale yellow masonry makes it particularly ghastly!
Very briefly, where misericords are found, it is worth having a look around to see what other types of similar imagery may exist both within the church and on the exterior. The subject of architectural gargoyles and related grotesques has already arisen on this blog in connection with Gresford All Saints’ church, where the twisted, deformed, ugly and bizarre look down on gathering congregations and passers by, marching in sequence along the string-course, spewing out water, or apparently poised to pounce from window corbels and string courses. There was no limit to medieval imagination, and the exteriors of many medieval churches display some of the most extraordinary and creative monsters anywhere in the late medieval world.
Pilgrim and bench end, St Werburgh’s Abbey, Chester
Interior imagery includes choir-stall arm rests, bench-ends and bench-end carvings and sculptural components such as corbel supports. In some big ecclesiastical establishments the ceiling bosses and vaulted arch corbels are also used to capture the mythological, the fantastic and the entertaining. Camber bream ceilings may be accessorized with sculptural components in wood or stone where the ceiling beams meet the walls. Baptismal fonts sometimes display elaborate imagery, and where original medieval floor tiles remain, these too often display images and symbols. Medieval stained glass, where it survives, although better known for its display of the great and the good sometimes captures subjects from the margins. These may or may not be contemporary with misericords, but add to the story that successive generations of clergy and congregations could read in their place of worship.
Together, all these carved forms, whether in wood or stone, formed a complex ecclesiastical world in which miracles, judgement, purgatory and the apocalypse were the stuff of fact, and in which saintly shrines channelled divine power, and where the unregulated performance of domestic solutions were probably manifestations of harmful superstition and demonic magic inspired by the devil. The messages of risk and uncertainty, coped with by following Christ’s example and ameliorated by belief in the love of God, were carried throughout the church, inside and out. xxxxxxx
Final Comments
Over the three posts in this small series I have barely touched the surface of what misericords meant to churches and their clergy and why they merited their cost. That is partly because the topic is so rich and the corpus in Britain alone so massive. There have been many attempts to get to the root of what the misericords, in each corpus, are intended to do, what role they are designed to perform. It is possible in each place to pick out key themes in misericords, including religious and miraculous scenes; domestic, seasonal and everyday activities; kingly and knightly pursuits and adventures, many of them referencing popular chivalric romance and courtly love; the fantastic, monstrous, mythical and legendary; and the seriously crude and scatological. The medieval interest in the “other” is very conspicuous.
All Saints’, Gresford
Misericords did not shy away from even the most bawdy elements of human existence, challenging the binary, recognizing the complexities of Christian lives. Rather than simple black and white contrasts of good versus evil, the misericord vignettes capture an entire kaleidoscope of social and cultural perception and commentary. It does not matter in which order the overall message is read, but it does matter that it incorporates a deeply felt form of reality beyond the immediately observable, which may offer both opportunity and risk. Whether amusing, tender or shocking, misericords have the ability to tell a moral tale, carrying real impact in their didactic role, encouraging introspection and self-awareness.
Arm rest. St Andrew’s, Bebington
Between life as it was lived every day, the the supernatural as it was imagined, and those strange foreign lands and invisible realities with with strange monstrous beings, there was plenty to worry medieval people. These are sources of potential anxiety and stress that paid no respect to social standing. Misericords represent the diversity and unending variability of living things and their experiences, both natural and supernatural along the entire continuum of human and divine life. Although sometime based on stories captured in manuscripts, and sometimes loose copies of paintings and prints from northwest Europe, the misericords have a voice of their own. Approaching them as embodiments of layered meaning can add depth and richness to each individual piece, but they are equally appealing for their visual splendour, and can be appreciated simply for their beauty, mischief, boldness and charm.
Visiting (as of December 2023)
The layout of the choir stalls and description of their misericords. Source: Stephen Smalley 1996 (see “Sources” at end)
On my multiple visits to Chester Cathedral in 2022 and 2023 the misericords have usually been available to view. Although they are sometimes roped off, particularly when an event is upcoming, you can usually go between the lower choir benches to lean over and see some of the misericords, and there are usually cathedral staff around to ask if you can get a little closer. On my visits to Gresford and Malpas, the misericords were accessible to view when the church was open to visitors and not being used for services and events. St Andrew’s in Bebington can only be visited by appointment (see below) but again the three misericords are on unrestricted display.
None of the locations have obligatory entry fees, but Chester always has someone at its reception requesting a voluntary donation into a big perspex box (or by swiping a debit/credit card). There is also a gift shop and very good café in the former abbey refectory, which is a wonderful space in its own right.
Swordplay. St Oswald’s, Malpas
Gresford, Malpas and Bebington do not have reception staff, but as village churches they are even more in need of voluntary donations. Given how beautifully these churches are maintained, it is well worth giving them support.
Gresford All Saints’ and Malpas St Oswald’s are still open for services, weddings and funerals, as well as community activities, but are generally also open daily for visitors. You can park outside All Saints’ on the road. At St Oswald’s it is better to find the car park, just five minutes away, and walk.
Bebington St Andrew’s is only open for Sunday services and other formal events, and visiting is by appointment only. My thanks to the office for making arrangements for me to visit. I’ll be writing up the entire church on another occasion. There is plenty of parking on the road when the church is not in use for services, weddings etc.
I have included the What3Words location for those with the app installed (it works beautifully with the free Google satnav). Check the individual websites for services, opening times and other details:
Bebington St Andrew’s. The church’s main website is here, but does not have a heritage section. Instead, the church’s own heritage pages at can be found here, but are not working properly at the time of writing (December 2023)
My thanks again to Dominic Strange and his World of Misericords website for allowing me to use so many of his images. He is an absolute star, and his website is a fabulous resource, one of the best examples of how websites can really contribute to research projects.
Each of the three posts in this short series was originally a lot longer, and some of the references below relate to those chunks that I cut out, but in case the full bibliography is of interest, I’ve left it unaltered. I have not managed to track down all the references that I might have found of use, so there are gaps. If you are looking into misericords and want the references that I have noted down for future reference but have not used here, just let me know and I will email them over.
Books, booklets and papers
Anderson, M.D. 1954. Misericords. Medieval Life in English Woodcarving. Penguin
Anderson, M.D. 1971. History and Imagery in British Churches. John Murray.
Asma, Steven T. 2009. On Monsters. An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears. Oxford University Press
Avilés, Alejandro García 2019. The Visual Culture of Magic in the Middle Ages. In (eds.) Sophie Page and Catherine Rider. The Routledge History of Medieval Magic. Routledge, p.402-431
Barber, Richard. 1992. Bestiary. MS Bodley 64. The Boydell Press
Beal, Timothy K. 2002. Religion and Its Monsters. Routledge
Bennett, Carol. 2015. Lincoln Cathedral Misericords and Stalls in St Hugh’s Choir. Lincoln Cathedral.
Bildhauer, Bettina. 2003. Blood, Jews and Monsters in Medieval Culture. In Bildhauer, Bettina and Mills, Robert (eds.), The Monstrous Middle Ages. University of Wales Press.
Bildhauer, Bettina and Mills, Robert. 2003. Introduction: Conceptualizing the Monstrous. In Bildhauer, Bettina and Mills, Robert (eds.), The Monstrous Middle Ages. University of Wales Press
Broughton, Lynne. 1996. Interpreting Lincoln Cathedral: The Medieval Imagery. Lincoln Cathedral Publications
Brown, Michelle, P. 2006. The World of the Luttrell Psalter. The British Library
Burne, R.V.H. 1962. The Monks of Chester. The History of St Werburgh’s Abbey. SPCK.
Camille, Michael. 1992. Image on the Edge. The Margins of Medieval Art. Reaktion Books
Clifton-Taylor, Alec. 1974. English Parish Churches as Works of Art. B.T. Batsford Ltd.
Colish, Marcia L. 1997. Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition 400-1400. Yale University Press
Davies, Owen. 2012. Magic. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press
Dickinson, John. 2008. Misericords of North West England. Their Nature and Significance. Centre for North-West Regional Studies, University of Lancaster.
Fry, Nick. 2009. Chester Cathedral. Scala
Fudgé, Thomas. 2016. Medieval Religion and its Anxieties. History and Mystery in the Other Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan
Gombrich, E.H. 1979, 1984. The Sense of Order. A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art. Phaidon Press Ltd.
Green, Richard Lancelyn (revised by Roberts, Alan) 2018. St Andrew’s Bebington. St Andrew’s Heritage Committee
Greene, J.Patrick. 1992. Medieval Monasteries. Leicester University Press
Grössinger, Christa. 2007. The World Upside-Down. English Misericords. Harvey Miller Publishers
Hardwick, Paul. 2011. English Medieval Misericords. The Margins of Meaning. The Boydell Press, Woodbridge
Hardwick, Paul. 2017. Chaucer’s Friar John and the Place of the Cat. The Chaucer Review, 52(2), p. 237-252
Harte, Jeremy 2003. Hell on Earth: Encountering Devils in the Medieval Landscape. In Bildhauer, Bettina and Mills, Robert (eds.), The Monstrous Middle Ages. University of Wales Press
Harvey, John. 1947. Gothic England. A Survey of National Culture 1300-1550. B.T. Batsford
Hiatt, C. 1898. The Cathedral Church of Chester. A Description of the Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See. George Bell and Sons. Available on the Internet Archive
Jones, Bethan. 1997. All Saints Church Gresford. ‘The Finest Parish Church in Wales’. The Friends of the Parish Church of All Saints Gresford.
Jones, Malcolm Haydn. 1991. The Misericords of Beverley Minster: A Corpus of Folkloric Imagery and its Cultural Milieu, with Special Reference to the Influence of Northern European Iconography on Late Medieval and Early Modern English Woodwork. Unpublished PhD thesis. https://pure.plymouth.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/38446601/303331.pdf
Laird, Marshall. 1996. English Misericords. John Murray
Luxford, Julian. 2005. The Art and Architecture of English Benedictine Monasteries, 1300-1540. A Patronage History. Studies in the History of medieval Religion Volume XXV. The Boydell Press
Orme, Nicholas. 2021. Going to Church in Medieval England. Yale University Press
Page, Sophie. 2017. Medieval Magic. In: Davies, O, (ed.) The Oxford Illustrated History of Witchcraft and Magic, Oxford University Press, p.29-64
Riches, Samantha J.E. 2003. Encountering the Monstrous. Saints and Dragons in Medieval Thought. In Bildhauer, Bettina and Mills, Robert (eds.), The Monstrous Middle Ages. University of Wales Press.
Rider, Catherine. 2012. Magic and Religion in Medieval England. Reaktion Books.
Roberts, Alan. 2018. St Andrew’s Bebington. Church and Churchyard Tours. St Andrew’s Heritage Committee
Ryands, T.M. (no date). An Illustrated History of St Oswald’s Malpas.
Smalley, S. (with additional research, Fry, S.) 1996. Chester Cathedral Quire Misericords. The Pitkin Guide. Chester Cathedral
White, Carolinne. 2008. The Rule of Benedict. Penguin.
Williams, David. 1996. Deformed Discourse. The Function of the Monster in Medieval Thought and Literature. Liverpool University Press.
Woodcock, Alex. 2018 (2nd edition). Of Sirens and Centaurs. Medieval Sculpture at Exeter Cathedral. Impress Books
San Francisco State University Ywain and Gawain. (Editors: George W. Tuma, Professor Emeritus of English, and Dinah Hazell, Independent Scholar, hosted by the English Department, San Francisco State University) https://www.sfsu.edu/~medieval/romances/ywain_gawain_rev.html
Although quite literally freezing cold, the sun was stunning yesterday so on the spur of the moment, having just run an errand to Rossett, I plotted a route to the National Waterways Museum at Ellesmere Port on the Wirral. It’s very easy to find, being just off the M53. I have been meaning to visit ever since I moved to this area. It is one of those places best done in dry weather, because there is as just as much, if not more, to see outside as indoors. Visitor information details are at the end.
Background History
The museum occupies the 19th century canal and port complex, re-using the lovely brick-built buildings for exhibits and displays and using sections of the docks and basins for a number of fascinating canal and waterway vessels. Ellesmere Port was the largest Inland Waterway dock complex in the United Kingdom. The name Ellesmere Port refers to the town of Ellesmere, where many of the decisions about the Shropshire Union canal network were made. There was no Ellesmere Port until the port was established in 1796 as a small base at the Mersey end of the Shropshire Union Canal.
The Shropshire Union Canal was one of a number of canals built at different times which, in 1846, were amalgamated into a single operational network. The earliest part of this network was the Nantwich to Canal section. The earliest part of the system was the Chester Canal which ran from Chester to Nantwich in 1772. It was not until 1793 that a section connecting Chester to the Mersey was built, with its terminus at Ellesmere Port. The section from Nantwich to Birmingham, the Birmingham and Liverpool Junction Canal, was the main north-south artery of this network, and was not completed until 1835, joining the national canal network for which Birmingham was the central hub.
By 1802 as well as a series of locks with a lock keeper’s house, there was also three basins, wet and dry docks, a small wharf, a clerk’s house and a canal lighthouse. Over subsequent decades additional wharves were added and warehouses, workshops and sheds were built. A scheme by Thomas Telford for a dock and entrance for seagoing vessels was completed in 1843, significantly improving the port’s suitability for transhipping. During the 1850s the most important cargo was iron, followed by ceramics from the Potteries, and substantial facilities were provided for both.
The opening of the Manchester Ship Canal in 1894, and the simultaneous improvement in facilities at Ellesmere Port significantly improved the prosperity of the port. Unfortunately this was something of a swansong for the canal port, and In 1921 the Shropshire Union Canal Company sold its fleet of barges and the commercial viability of the canal and the port for freight handling came to an end. The railways replaced the canals throughout Britain, with many of the former wharves and ports falling into disuse and dereliction. Ellesmere Port managed to survive until the 1950s and became a museum in the 1970s.
More details of the history of the port, (together with some of the business and industries it attracted, the development of the surrounding settlement and details of the drainage of Stanlow marshes by German prisoners of war in the First World War), are available in Vince Devine and Jo Clark’s excellent survey (see Sources at end).
The Museum
The derelict port buildings became a museum in the 1970s after a heroic effort by a group of volunteers, and is now a conservation area with nineteen Grade II listed buildings. It was originally known as the North West Museum of Inland Navigation and had various other names until it became The National Waterways Museum, with its emphasis on inland waterways, both rivers and canals, although coastal vessels are also included. As well as boats and exhibition and display spaces, the site is also home to the Waterways Archive, and education centre, conference facilities, a shop and café and other amenities, all located within the port buildings.
Map of the museum. Sorry it’s a bit crumpled, but there does not appear to be a clean version online. Click image to expand.
Entrance is via the ticket office that sits between the shop and the café. There is a 5 minute video to watch if required, and then access to the rest of the museum is on the other side of the shop, which sites on the side of the canal entrance to the port. There were obligingly two narrowboats moored further up the quayside, hemmed in with ice, and this is a very good place to orientate oneself with the help of the excellent map that comes with your entry ticket. It’s quite a complicated site, with several buildings containing exhibits, so the map is invaluable.
I started out by walking over the bridges towards the Exhibition Hall, former warehousing, taking in some of the historic boats moored up alongside the quays in the Upper Basin.
The big former warehouse, called the Island Warehouse, has displays on two floors. The ground floor is a vast collection of objects connected to the waterways, including bits of engine, windlasses, tillers, rudders, sack barrows, buckets and lamps and a zillion other objects, parts and bits. There’s very little information on display, although a QR code promised more details about some of the objects via your smartphone (I had left mine in the car by accident).
A really wonderful find on the ground floor was a long glass cabinet containing a prehistoric log boat found in Baddiley Mere in Cheshire, and made of a single, hollowed-out trunk of oak. This is a nationally important object and it was splendid to see it. I had no idea it was at Ellesmere Port. Sadly, the cabinet was hemmed in on all sides with other objects. It was also covered in dust and the glass sides reflected the surroundings, so it was difficult to get close or see it properly and impossible to photograph well. I do wish that it was on the first floor exhibition area, where it could be seen and appreciated properly. According to the Heritage Gateway website, it is on loan from the Grosvenor Museum.
The prehistoric log canoe, which could be rather more conspicuously and sympathetically displayed.
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The first floor is a more formal exhibition area. There is a cut-away narrowboat called Friendship with its painted bow and stern and a tiny little cabin, the unimaginably small living quarters of the narrowboat’s operator and his family. A delightful pleasure boat, the 1954 Amaryllis, glows with glossy mahogany and polished brass. My favourite was an example of a long, slender boat called a “starvationer,” designed to run on the 46 miles (74km) of subterranean canal tunnels in the Duke of Bridgewater’s Worsley coal mines. Other cabinets have model boats and ships showing a range of different types and sizes. A couple of cabinets have examples of canal art associated with narrowboats. Items commonly found in the dock and canal port are included. There’s even a working model of the Anderton Boat Lift. Information boards provide plenty of detail.
A “starvationer”
Sack chute
Out on the other side of this building, back outside, there are more boats. Some of the boats that are usually out in the summer are under cover for winter, still visible but not as accessible. This is particularly true of the valuable wooden narrowboats like Gifford and the ice-breaker Marbury. Being under cover, they are also easier to work on. The ongoing care and repair of wooden boats is a major part of the out of season work at the museum, and there information boards explaining what is being done to each.
The ice-breaker “Marbury”
Walking to the left, a splendid ship hull rests in a giant covered cradle, the remains of the Mersey flat barge Mossdale. According to the signage she is the only surviving all-timber Mersey flat. She was initially named Ruby, in which guise she carried cargoes of up to 70 tons, towed by steam tug on canal, river and along the coast. In spite of her flat base she was very stable. She was sold in 1920, after which she carried pottery, grain, flour and sugar along the Bridgewater canal.
Mossdale
Beyond this is the splendid Pump House with its 69ft (21m) chimney built in 1873. This was closed to the public on the day I visited.
Heading back, the next place to visit is Porters Row, four terraced houses, each one fitted out with furniture, accessories, wallpaper, technology and kitchen equipment that would have been found in dock workers’ homes of the 1830s, 1900s, 1920s and 1950s. This is such fun, a really evocative way of getting a sense of how past objects were deployed in ordinary homes, although some were clearly more prosperous than others, one with a piano, and more remarkably one with a organ!
Beyond and downhill (reached via a ramp, or by locks if you are in a boat) is the Lower Basin containing more boats, with the rather well disguised Holiday Inn hotel beyond.
Crossing to the other side of the port, there is another set of buildings that includes the old stables (for the horses that pulled the unpowered narrowboats), the blacksmith’s forge (still operational), and the Power Hall, which is a display of ship engines, one of which can be operated via a push-button.
FCB18 – a barge made of concrete
On the other side of the Power Hall are two more boats, one of which, the barge FCB18, is fascinatingly made of concrete, which is a crazily counter-intuitive concept. But there it is, happily afloat. The information signage says that she was built in 1944 during the war, which was a time of steel shortage. Concrete was readily available and cheap, and although steel was still required, only 18 tons was required, as opposed to the 56 for a steel barge with a carrying capacity of 200 tons. Unfortunately, the resulting barge was heavy, difficult to steer, and brittle.
The other boat is Basuto, looking like something built of rusty Meccano, but again, still afloat in a sea of green weed.
Back up towards the exit is a sign pointing you to the slipway with its blue-painted wooden winch house, and from here you can see over to the channel that connects the Manchester Ship Canal to the River Weaver and Ellesmere Port. When you leave the museum, you can turn left along the road that passes between the museum and the car park, and walk along the channel’s edge towards the Holiday Inn, where there are some great swing bridges and more canal-side buildings, including a unique port lighthouse.
The above is just a sample – there’s lots to see. A great visit.
Visiting Information
A dry day is preferable for a visit, because there is a lot to see outside, and the buildings themselves are part of the attraction. Opening times are on the Canal and River Trust website here. At the time of writing (January 2024) the entrance fee was £11.75 for an adult, which seems quite steep but the ticket lasts for a year, and I will certainly be making use of mine for another visit. Other entrance fees are on the museum’s website on the above link. There is a nicely presented shop with books, toys and canal-themed ornaments, and a bright, comfortable café. Outside there are plenty of picnic benches, and a play area. The museum was amazingly quiet. Given the bright sunshine I thought that it would be fairly busy, but the cold was obviously a deterrent, the docks being frozen solid.
I was warned at the ticket office about icy surfaces, which takes on a particular resonance when you are walking along the edges of frozen expanses of water with almost no-one around. But they had done such a good job with the salt and grit that even in the cold shadows there was no ice on which to slip.
For those with unwilling legs, there are ramps nearly everywhere. In the Island Warehouse there is an elevator to the first floor, but this was out of order when I visited so it might be a good idea to phone first if you need it. There is a lot to see on the first floor, so it would be best to go when the elevator is working. The Pump House was closed, but this appears to be accessible only via a short flight of steps (5 or 6 steps). Otherwise, as far as I could see, the whole site seemed to be fully accessible for wheelchair users and those with unwilling legs.
From the “Farndon Ward Matters” newsletter (Cllr Adrian Waddelove). It looks as though we are stuck with the dreadful thing for the time being. See also the final paragraph about the proposed closure of Sandy Lane in Chester.
In Part 1 of this 3-part series, the subject of misericords in choir stalls was introduced, the four churches covered in this three-parter were identified, and the St Werburgh’s Abbey (Chester Cathedral) misericords were discussed. Part 2 takes a look at the misericords in the smaller churches of Gresford All Saints’, Malpas St Oswald’s and Bebington St Andrew’s. References for all three parts can be found at the end of Part 3.
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Chester, Gresford, Malpas and Bebington (continued)
Basic data about the misericords at the four churches
The misericords carved for St Werburgh’s Abbey (Chester Cathedral) were discussed in Part 1. All Saints’ church in Gresford, St Oswald’s at Malpas and St Andrew’s in Bebington were considerably more modest in scale than St Werburgh’s Abbey, but all were impressive when measured against other parish churches in the region, and obviously had access to relatively substantial funding. The table above was also posted in part 1 and provides some of the vital statistics of all four sets of misericords.
All Saints’, Gresford
All Saints’ Church in Gresford
All Saints’ Church in Gresford is unexpectedly big for such a small and unimposing village. The stone church was founded in the 13th century and underwent a major revamp in the 15th century, and is still busy today. I have written about All Saints’ on two previous posts, one about the history of the church in general, and the other about the 15th century gargoyles and grotesques that inhabit its exterior. It has been suggested that the misericords were sourced from Basingwerk Abbey at Holywell in north Wales and added to All Saints’s after the abbey was dissolved in the early 1500s, but although this remains a possibility, it is also probable that All Saints’ was sufficiently well provided for to pay for its own misericord carvings.
Choir stalls at Gresford All Saints’
Neither the All Saints’ guidebook nor the CPAT survey suggest a date for the misericords, and the church’s web page does not mention them. Based on the presence of a preaching fox, a theme thought to represent mendicant friars who were only present from the 14th century, they must have carved after the late 14th century. It is also very probable that they post-date those at St Werburgh’s (1390) as there was nothing else nearby to provide a model. Although the Gresford misericords could plausibly have been associated with the major rebuild of the church in the 15th century, when two new aisles were added and many other changes were made, Dominic Strange’s misericord timeline places the misericords in the late 15th or early 16th century, over 100 years after the Chester misericords. If correct, it demonstrates the durability of themes that were popular in earlier periods.
Sketch plan of the Gresford misericords.
The choir stalls provide a good example of a three-sided arrangement in a squared U-shape. In total there were originally fourteen misericords, four on the north, four on the south and two lots of three on the west. The latter flanked the entrance from the nave to the choir. Today two are blank, either because they were never completed, or because they were removed due to inappropriate content or severe damage (I can find nothing to help determine which). Some are quite badly damaged, but the entire group indicate great skill and include some varied topics.
The choir, Gresford All Saints’
The misericords are separated by arm rests that curl up the sides of the chairs and along the backs, each one featuring a small human figure at the front of the arm rest. Exceptions are at the corners between the north and west rows and the west and south rows, which feature fantastic beasts.
As in St Werburgh’s, a fox is dressed as a friar but this time he is in a pulpit preaching to chickens and geese, demonstrating that this theme was of interest not merely to monastic establishments but to churches as well. The allegedly venal of some elements of the mendicant cause may be the theme here. The earliest mendicant friars were poor and itinerant, begging for alms. By the later middle ages they were comfortably established in friaries of their own, the recipients of patronage, gifts and wills. The apparent hypocrisy was a source of grievance for the clergy beyond the seclusion of the cloister. The parish priest may also have felt threatened by the powerful public sermons and the more evocative style of engagement with the general public delivered by the friars. In the parish church, as well as in the heart of the monastery, friars might be seen as a threat to the role of the conventional clergy, to be satirized, derided and, if possible, undermined.
One of the more puzzling themes that occasionally appears on misericords (but is missing from Chester, possibly due to removal in the Victorian period) is the revealing of male nether regions. At Gresford this is given a context. The misericord shows an acrobat hanging over a pole held by two men, ostentatiously exposing his undercarriage, apparently during a performance, possibly a form of slap-stick entertainment. Quite what these were doing on misericords is uncertain, although there is a lot of speculation on the subject. Whilst there may have been a warning against lewdness and impurity, it is difficult to deny that at least some of these depictions were intended to include a degree of crude humour.
A badly damaged misericord shows two cats, both standing on their hind legs in front of something that is now missing but appears to show a mouse hole at the base, with a tiny mouse with pointed ears to its right. The cats are holding hands, with one apparently leading the other. The leading cat seems to have been holding something in its outstretched paw. Perhaps the upright stance reflects the cat’s commanding, self-possessed and often self-satisfied view of its position within its own universe. An alternative interpretation is that when animals are shown adopting human behaviour, it is a reminder of human failings. Similarly standing on their hind legs are the cats in MS. Bodley 764 (folio 50r), which also shows cats on the hunt.
Wheelbarrows feature quite frequently in misericords, and one of the Gresford misericords shows two women seated side by side in a wheelbarrow being pushed towards the open jaws of a monster’s head by a creature with staring eyes and a forked tail. The cavalcade is followed by a man. All the participants in the scene stare out at the onlooker. The open jaws of the monster represent the gateway to hell. This is a much simpler version of a well-known example at St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, which shows two monks being wheeled towards the hellmouth by either a demon or the devil himself, leading to the suggestion that the two wimpled women on the Gresford misericord may be nuns (but bearing in mind that wimples were not exclusive to nuns). The supporters appear to be small rodents, but it is difficult to see how they might relate to the central narrative.
A splendid winged griffin, facing left, is positioned between two delicate unicorns, one of which is missing its head. The griffin has the head and wings of an eagle, the body of a Lion and is four-legged. Like the lion, which can exert its power for either good or evil, depending on the context. When Alexander the Great encounters the enclave of griffins in his voyage to the end of the world, the creature is a true monster, ugly, frightening and vicious. On the other hand it is a pair of griffins that carried Alexander over the edge of the world. The griffin is often used to represent rival ideas and can, in different contexts, represent such opposing individuals as Satan and Christ. The griffin also represents the combination of the opposing elemental forces of air (eagle) and earth (lion). It is difficult to know what, in this context, the griffin is intended to convey. The presence of unicorns, which are often associated with Christ, may either be supportive companions, opposing forces, or hapless victims, and there is nothing to help determine which. The supporters are decorative flowers.
Another misericord, also quite unlike its companions, seems to refer to the gargoyles and grotesques so strongly featured on the exterior of the building. It may have had no specific symbolic meaning. It is a monster’s face with vaulting emanating from its head. The vaulting may be intended to evoke the magnificent screen that separates choir from nave at All Saints’, although the flowers at the intersections on the misericord are not present on the screen. Perhaps it is intended to bring indoors the collective message that the gargoyles and grotesques were communicating from the exterior of the church (discussed briefly in an earlier post).
Some of the All Saints’ misericords are very badly damaged, leaving the core subject matter very difficult to identify. A particularly frustrating example is the misericord whose central subject matter is completely missing. Flanking it there is a wonderful winged angel on the left and, on the right, a lady in an elaborate dress kneeling before a personal altar with the soft folds of her dress flowing behind her on the floor. Perhaps this was either the Annunciation or the Coronation of the Virgin, particularly as there are no other overtly religious stories included in the All Saints’ corpus.
Another badly damaged misericord shows a woman on a four-legged animal, the head of which is missing and is therefore unidentifiable. It is short, has particularly bandy legs and ill-defined feet, none of which suggest a horse. Two carvings, one in front of the woman and animal, and one behind, are lost. The one behind is almost certainly another figure in a long garment, but the one in front may or may not be.
Some of the misericords contain no narrative or obviously symbolic component. One misericord has no central subject matter and no obvious sign of damage, with just two images as supporters, right on the edge of the underside of the seat. These are two three-quarter partial heads, almost sketches, looking towards one another. The meaning of this, if there was any, is lost. If there was a central carving, there is not even a shape left to suggest a subject matter. It is possible that it was carved at a much later date to replace one of the original misericords that might have been damaged or whose subject matter was considered inappropriate. These lost stories are very frustrating.
St Oswald’s Church in Malpas. Photograph by Alan Marsh. Source: Historic England
St Oswald’s Church in the village of Malpas was founded in the late 1300s. The church underwent a similar modernization in the 15th century to that at Gresford, including a similar camber beam roof. It has a great many features that continue to impress, particularly the spectacular tomb effigies of the 15th and early 16th centuries, but its remaining misericords are disappointingly confined to three choir stalls.
There is a set of three choir stalls with three misericords, in a single row, still displayed in the choir area in St Oswald’s. The visitor guide to the church says that there were “at least twelve” 15th century choir stalls with misericords, with only nine surviving and six “much restored.” Given that there are only three on display, it is something of a puzzle as to what happened to the remaining six of the nine surviving. There are no descriptions of any of the misericords, and nor does the booklet say where the surviving misericords (other than the three still in the choir at Malpas) are located today.
The remaining row of choir stalls at St Oswald’s with the misericords hidden beneath the seats.
The choir stalls have carved armrests, although they less elaborate than those at Gresford, and have no carved bench ends. This may suggest that carved choir stalls were never a very important component of the chancel at St Oswald’s, or that the funds required for a more ambitious project were not available. All three remaining misericords are described here, with the disclaimer that they represent only a very small sample of the original corpus. Two of the three are damaged.
I particularly like the mermaid. Mermaids appear on many misericords in Britain. Mermaids resembled Greek sirens, representing both the temptation and lust that men might find hard to resist on the one hand, and the dangers represented by the deformation of the human image in the form of a hybrid creature on the other. They were usually shown, as at Malpas, with bared breasts, with a comb in one hand and a mirror in the other, warnings not merely of seduction but of the vice of vanity. The Malpas mermaid looks down and seems to be moving gently to her right. Her tail has been lightly carved to suggest fish scales. Her bare chest is distinctly flat and smooth, unlike most misericord mermaids, perhaps to avoid encouraging carnal thoughts amongst the Malpas choristers. She holds the comb in her left hand, which rests on her thigh (separated from her upper arm by breakage), and the mirror in the other, overlapping one of the supporters. Both supporters are three-lobed leaves.
A winged monster has one head, shown facing outward, but two bodies that are shown in profile either side of the head. This is probably the simplest and least worked of all three, with minimal details carved into the image, although there are shallow markings to suggest the scaled nature of the wings, and clawed feet. The face is shown in more detail, with three protrusions from the head, which may or may not depict serpents. It is clearly a monster with affinities like the wings, tails and claws that are shared with dragons. Dragons, wyverns and related monsters may represent paganism, power, uncontrolled violence or lust, the Devil himself and unspecified evil and sin that must be confronted and neutralized, or at the very least rationalized. As such creatures are usually associated with remote, often hostile landscapes, they may also represent fear of the unknown. It may also offer a shifting geographical component, so that the dragon may be feared in the remote landscape but is only confronted when it threatens human habitation and safety. The three-lobed leaf supporters are nicely done, with clearly defined edges. A much more elaborate version of a single-headed and double-bodied monster is shown in the Luttrell Psalter (folio 195v), but is evidently part of the same family of images familiar and available to medieval illuminators, carvers and sculptors.
Single-headed two-bodied monster from the Luttrell Psalter (Add MS 42130 f.195.v). Source: Groteskology
Finally, two knights are shown engaged in an athletic, almost balletic fight with swords. Of the three this is by far the most complex, compositionally. At first glance it is very difficult to see exactly what is going on, and whose limbs belong to whom, vividly capturing movement. The pointed shoes, generally confined to the well-to-do, emphasize the mobility and athleticism of the figures. Perhaps it refers to a scene from a chivalric romance, such a the Chester examples that show scenes from stories of Yvain and Tristan and Isolde. Again, the supporters are foliage.
St Andrew’s, Bebington
St Andrew’s, Bebington
As I was just about ready to hit the Publish button on this post I had a whizz through Dominic Strange’s Timeline and Gazetteer, which revealed that St Andrew’s in Bebington on the Wirral possesses misericords in three choir stalls, plus two that have survived being separated from their choir stalls, now serving as corbels. Although the church is not open except for Sunday services, weddings etc., Karen from the church office very kindly arranged for me to visit when volunteers were working there.
Choir stalls in St Andrew’s, Bebington
It is particularly nice to have found these misericords because, as with St Oswald’s in Malpas, the misericords at St Andrew’s rarely appears in books about misericords, always overshadowed by Chester Cathedral and Gresford All Saints’. It is clear that they should be included here not only because they are local and under-sung but because they show some themes that are not shown in the misericords at the other locations discussed in these posts.
The pelican in her piety
Dominic Strange places all five misericords in the 15th century. The guidebook to the church, by Richard Lancelyn Green, says that there were originally twelve of them, with six surviving until 1847 when they were split up due to damp and dry rot. Presumably the other six were discarded. Initially, in 1871, they were split into pairs and then, in 1897, three of them were reassembled into the row that survives today in the chancel, just to the side of the main altar. Two of them have been removed from their original choir stalls and are deployed as corbels but there is no mention of the sixth 1847 survivor.
At the far left of the choir stall is the pelican in her piety plucking her breast (shown above), already described in connection with Chester in part 1, but flanked here with foliage.
The head of a man with beard and hat or other form of head covering may or may not be a portrait. Many misericords show human faces, some characterized by particular expressions or actions, but many contain no clues about the significance. The supporters feature pomegranates. Pomegranates are associated with numerous ideas from antiquity onwards. The symbolism attached to them ranges from fertility, regeneration and good luck to representing the shedding of the blood of Christ and as a symbol of the church and its congregation. Without knowing quite what the man’s head represents it is difficult to interpret the entire message of the misericord.
The third in the row is a splendid dolphin flanked by equally splendid seahorses, presumably designed by someone who had seen neither dolphin or seahorse. The dolphin is a rather terrifying looking creature, but there seem to be no negative narratives associated with it. The bestiary in MS Bodley 764 includes the dolphin, but attaches no special meaning to it, stating that “they follow men’s voices, or gather in shoals when music is played . . . if they go in front of the ship, leaping in the waves, they appear to foretell bad weather.” The only other misericord dolphins that I’ve seen in my online travels are at Norwich Cathedral and St Laurence’s Church in Ludlow.
The remaining two misericords, now used as corbels, show what may be a bull’s head, and a sow with a litter. You can see them on the World of Misericords website. The sow with a litter is a theme also featured on one of the St Werburgh misericords. MS Bodley 764 is quite clear on the negative connotations: “The sow that was washed and returns to her wallowing in the mire is filthier than before; and he who weeps for his admitted sins, but does not desist from them, earns a graver punishment, condemned by his own misdeeds which he could have prevented by repentance; and he descends as if into murky waters because he removes the cleanness of his life by such tears, which are tainted before the eyes of God.” Sows represent unclean spirits and are often associated with gluttony and, more disturbingly, heresy. And in the medieval mind, where heresy lurks, paganism may be lurking nearby.
Contributors to knowledge
Even in such small numbers, the churches at Malpas and Bebington contribute to the body of information about Medieval misericords, helping to build up a database of knowledge about the themes that were of interest to those who commissioned them for the most sacred parts of their monasteries and parish churches. Unless an early report describing or illustrating some of the other misericords emerges, the legacy of those who commissioned, funded and carved the misericords at Malpas and Bebington are confined to just these three and five examples respectively. Although the themes were represented elsewhere, none of the topics shown replicate any of those surviving at St Werburgh’s.
Other churches in the region with misericords
Grapevine misericord at Nantwich St Mary’s. Source: Dominic Strange, World of Misericords
The above are the only churches with misericords in the Wrexham-Chester area, but there are others in the general region. For example, there is a set of fourteen dating to the late 14th century in St Mary’s Nantwich to the east, in the town centre. There are 20 dating to the late 15th century in St Asaph’s Cathedral to the west in north Wales. Another set of sixteen dating to the late 15th century can be found in St Bartholemew’s in the village of Tong to the southeast (where the A41 meets the M54). Finally, there are two fine sets of 15th century misericords (the first of sixteen in 1425 the second of twelve in 1447) in St Laurence’s church in Ludlow.
Part 3 wraps up the series, looking at who was involved in the creation of misericords, how they were paid for, and why they featured so frequently in the most sacred part of a church, often hidden from view but containing a mixture of messages that in each case contributed to the sense of a church’s identity. Visitor details and references are also added at the end of part 3.
Based in Churton 
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