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?

How themes were selected

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.
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The role of misericords

A sense of meaning

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.
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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.

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.

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)

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.

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:

• Chester Cathedral (formerly St Werburgh’s Abbey)
  • Located at What3Words ///torn.trying.snow
• Gresford All Saints’s Church:
  • Located at What3Words ///pegs.embedded.poppy
• Malpas St Oswald’s Church
  • Located at What3Words ///clues.intention.dusty
• 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)
  • Located at What3Words ///title.online.roses

 

 

Sources

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

Baxter, Ron. 1998. Bestiaries and their Users in the Middle Ages. Sutton Publishing
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340870845_Bestiaries_and_their_Users_in_the_Middle_Ages_Sutton_Publishing_1998_ISBN_0_7509_1853_5

Beal, Timothy K. 2002. Religion and 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

Chunko Betsy L. 2011. Vernacular Imagery on English Misericords:  Framing Interpretation. St Andrew’s Journal of Art History and Museum Studies, 2011, vol.15, p.5-12
https://ojs.st-andrews.ac.uk/index.php/nsr/article/download/255/264/

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

Gee, E.A. 1953. Oxford Carpenters 1370-1530. Oxoniensia, vol 17-18, 1952-3, p.112-184

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://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/29816745.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

Websites

All Saints’ Church, Gresford
https://www.allsaintschurchgresford.org.uk/about-us/our-history/

Bodleian Library
MS Bodley 964 (Bestiary)
https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/e6ad6426-6ff5-4c33-a078-ca518b36ca49/

British History Online
Chester Cathedral – A History of the County of Chester: Volume 3. Originally published by Victoria County History, London 1980, pages 188-195
https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/ches/vol3/pp188-195

The Camelot Project, University of Rochester (New York)
The Legend of Yvain.  By Dongdong Han, 2010
https://d.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/text/han-the-legend-of-yvain

Clwyd and Powys Archaeological Trust
Church of All Saints, Gresford (although note that his has no mention at all of the misericords)
https://cpat.org.uk/Archive/churches/wrexham/16785.htm

Internet Archive
Liber monstrorum. A translation of the Old English text. By Andy Orchard, taken from Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf Manuscript, University of Toronto Press; 2nd ed. edition (19 April 2003)
https://web.archive.org/web/20050118082548/http://members.shaw.ca/sylviavolk/Beowulf3.htm

The Medieval Bestiary. Animals in the Middle Ages
https://bestiary.ca/

The National and University Library Slovenia
The Elaborate Details in a Medieval Manuscript. Treasures of the National and University Library of Slovenia
https://artsandculture.google.com/story/the-elaborate-details-in-a-medieval-manuscript-national-and-university-library-of-slovenia/aAXhCkz6RxgiIw?hl=en

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

St Oswald’s Church, Malpas
https://www.malpaschurch.co.uk/st-oswalds-malpas/

Princeton University
The Elaine C. Block Database of Misericords
https://ima.princeton.edu/digital-image-collections/collection/block/intro

World of Misericords
https://www.misericords.co.uk/ by Dominic Strange

• Chester Cathedral (St Werburgh’s Abbey)
• Gresford All Saints’
• Malpas St Oswald’s
• Bebington St Andrew’s
• Timeline and gazetteer