DECORATIVE patterns, motifs, and the red-painted outline of faux masonry are commonly seen painted on church walls. They can be regarded as a type of art that was created for the clergy, nobility, and common folk. They are often faded, and can be difficult to understand, but it’s worth making the effort to interpret their time-worn stories.
Regardless of their location, the saints’ lives will be similarly displayed, and they tend to follow a formula. With a good torch and a discerning eye, their narratives will reveal themselves; the modern-day viewer might be grateful that part of the technique with which they were painted involved inscribing lines in the plaster that give outlines to the now-faded colour.
As with painted glass, their purpose was not to explain the Bible’s teachings — their images would have been meaningless to anyone who did not already understand them. At that time, after all, everyone knew these stories. The paintings were made to create a shared religious experience, where anyone travelling far from home would have recognised the scenes they depicted.
Wall paintings were also points of meditation and devotion, which existed to reinforce the words delivered from the pulpit. The themes painted on to church walls may be grouped under a few headings: the Infancy and Passion of Christ; the Virgin Mary and the Saints; Judgement and the Afterlife; and Pieties and Transgressions.
Among the figurative subjects often included are saints (George, Catherine, and Christopher are particularly common), as people with whom everyone could identify; as well as biblical scenes, such as the Annunciation and the Last Judgement (often painted on either side of the chancel arch), the Adoration of the Magi and Christ’s Passion.
Other wall paintings offered spiritual and practical support that would help the viewer in everyday life. On the opposite wall as you entered most churches, there would have been an image of the patron saint of travellers, St Christopher, carrying the infant Christ; this would have been a welcome sight, since the saint was thought to offer protection from sudden death. Images of St Margaret were also common, and existed as points of devotion for both expectant mothers and their husbands, who might have placed a rose, some wax for a candle, or a penny at her feet as an offering.
Wall paintings could also offer moral guidance. The vividly painted Sunday Christ at St Breaca’s, Breage, Cornwall, is shocking even to the modern viewer. It presents a disturbing picture of Christ, still highly coloured, his body, legs, and arms lacerated and covered in drops of blood. Floating around him are the tools that inflicted these horrible injuries: axes, shears, drawknives, and other tools used by tradesmen and farm workers.
A harp, playing cards, and a lute are also depicted — a further warning to those people who dared to work or engage in frivolous acts on the sabbath that they were directly contributing to Christ’s suffering rather than reflecting on the holiness of the day of rest.
VISITING the two churches where “warning to swearers” paintings have survived has not, unfortunately, helped me to break the uncouth habit — but in fact they have to do with the swearing of an oath on a particular part of Christ’s body. This was commonly heard among all classes, including even the aristocracy.
The painting of the group of swearers at St Lawrence’s, Broughton, Buckinghamshire, centres on the pietà, where Mary holds her dead son in her lap. Surrounding the two central figures are nine young men, all holding various body parts — a handful of bones, a heart, and hands. One figure, dressed in bright blue stockings, seems to be holding Christ’s head. Beneath them all, two men sit on either side of a backgammon board. One has drawn his sword and is striking the other, who seems to be holding a cross, on the head. The message was clear: the painting was an attempt to persuade the onlooker against the blasphemous habit, assuring swearers that their words literally wounded Christ.
Andrew ZiminskiAdam and Eve wall painting at St Botolph’s, Hardham, West Sussex
Most of the paintings that are visible today remained hidden under layers of whitewash that were later covered with inscriptions by the Puritans, before being discovered in the 19th century. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if thousands more wall paintings await discovery on lumpy, whitewashed walls; every medieval church we’ve worked on seems to have something to be uncovered.
St Mary’s, Hemington, Somerset, is typical. When we carefully removed loose layers of flaky paint before limewashing the walls in the traditional way, we found that every surface had a fragment of Puritan script — big Gothicised black letters that had been painted over richer colours and were now in need of the talents, scalpel, and syringe of a professional conservator.
The first large-scale painted schemes still await full discovery within such churches of the early 12th century as St Botolph’s, Hardham, West Sussex — home to a near-complete scheme of frescoes which was painted on to still-wet plaster in about 1100. Colours that were once rich have faded to a red ochre; a series of cartoons in a boxed-in outline run along two tiers of the nave and chancel.
Their four main themes are Adam and Eve, Judgement and Apocalypse, the story of Christ’s early life from the Annunciation to the Nativity, and the Flight into Egypt. Alongside these can be seen a depiction of St George, as well as the rural labours of each month.
It is impossible to do justice to these masterpieces. The crowning glory appears on the inside south face of the chancel arch, where the Fall of Adam and Eve is depicted. The most prominent is an unusual trompe-l’oeil representation of the Temptation, made to look like a textile wall hanging. Adam and Eve stand elongated and distorted facing each other with their arms raised, a winged dragon with a curled tail places the fateful apple from its mouth into Eve’s outstretched hand.
Other scenes show the pair hiding their nakedness as they bathe amid stylised red waves, as well as sitting back to back and lamenting the Fall. There’s also an image of Eve milking a cow.
Trouble relating to the conservation of the paintings is brewing at St Botolph’s; even on a cool day, the church has a damp atmosphere, likely caused by the missing roof tiles that let in the rain. This may be oppressive to the visitor, but it’s even worse for the paintings, and, unless something is done about it, will in time lead to the destruction of this unique and near-complete work of art.
THE south wall of St Cadoc’s, Llancarfan, in the Vale of Glamorgan, holds the most original and bravura work that I have ever seen painted on a church wall in Britain (with the possible exception of those at Kempley in Gloucestershire). Recently discovered, the depiction of saints and sinners — as well as an imposing image of St George, triumphant in full armour on his white horse as he impales the dragon — presents a sequence of vivid cartoons, in stark contrast to many wall paintings that can be so difficult to interpret or understand.
The patron saint of England, mounted on a steed wearing a horizontal red sash with tassels that drape over the saddle and flank, is framed by the windows of the church’s south wall, against a backdrop of stencilled roses. The dragon has been knocked on to its back, and the horse is trampling on it as George jams his lance into its opened jaws, the tip protruding through the back of its head.
All this is happening in front of a princess, who waits to be sacrificed as her terrified parents look out from the battlements of a turret. Meanwhile, the Virgin Mary blesses St George beneath a shield emblazoned with the coat of arms of a sponsor, probably the local Bawdrip family.
The action is not just between George and the dragon: his horse’s eye is fixed on the monster, whose long pointed tongue darts up to lash at the horse’s nostrils. The composition reminded me of a tombstone for a Roman cavalryman I once conserved in the Roman baths in Bath: the rider and horse’s direction and posture over a trampled soldier below were similar in their triumphant message.
St George is depicted in many country churches, and was invoked by kings and their priests to help change the course of battles. Medieval monarchs used their devotion to him to show their worthiness to be king; the timing of this painting seems to fit with the victory of Henry VII at Bosworth Field.
More importantly, George was the patron saint of farming to the rural congregation — the name literally means “earth worker” (from the Ancient Greek geo-, meaning “earth”, and érgon, “work”). In the painting, he is accompanied by a depiction of the Seven Deadly Sins which indicates what would happen if you were to commit one of them.
A seven-headed, long-necked monster writhes into each panel, as if in a game of snakes and ladders, while folk in late-15th-century dress are surrounded by devils that delight in participating in the moment sinners are sucked into flaming mouth of hell. First Lust, then Sloth — a suicide plunges a sword into his stomach, helped by a devil who pushes it with his bottom — followed by Pride, Anger, Gluttony, and Avarice; the latter is illustrated by a miser sitting behind a tray of coins, supported on the open mouth of another serpent, and further seduced by three devils holding bulging sacks of money. Envy is missing and replaced by somnolencia, a form of sloth, where a young man has slept through the call of a church bell.
This sequence fills the south-western window, revealing the seven works of corporate mercy on the north-western side, like the one that is depicted in stained glass at All Saints’, York. Lower down is an earlier painting of the tale of Death and the Gallant, a popular variation on the Danse Macabre that emphasised the futility of earthly vanity. A young man wearing a knitted Monmouth cap, the height of 15th-century fashion, looks back at the altar as he is led into a graveyard by a corpse recently buried in a shroud and burdened by worms and a black toad painted over its heart.
This is an extract from Church Going: A stonemason’s guide to the churches of the British Isles by Andrew Ziminski, published by Profile Books, £25 (Church Times Bookshop special price £20); 978-1-80081-868-2. Andrew Ziminski will be speaking at the Festival of Faith and Literature, which runs from 28 February to 2 March. faithandliterature.hymnsam.co.uk/tickets