A major impetus for building and elaboration of existing great churches during the latter part of the thirteenth and first half of the fourteenth centuries in particular was the enhancement of the settings for devotion to saints. Shrines of St Werburgh, at Chester, at St Albans, and of St Frideswide at Oxford were given new, elaborately carved stone bases often depicting scenes from their lives and enabling the gold shrines to be elevated for better display.48 Cathedrals especially promoted their own cults of bishops and a remarkable amount of building activity, for example at Salisbury for St Osmund (canonized in the fifteenth century), at St Paul’s, London, for Bishop Niger, at Chichester for St Richard, and at Lincoln for Bishops Hugh, Grosseteste and Remigius, can be associated with enhancement of their spiritual status or even attempts to achieve their canonization.
There was also a widespread trend for the elaboration of the setting for worship. As part of this, screen divisions, especially those with a liturgical purpose in marking the transition from nave to choir, increased in size and complexity. We have records of the choir screen at Lincoln erected in St Hugh’s time. It seems to have consisted of a simple low wall supporting a series of posts carrying the beam which supported the rood, and must have allowed views through to the high altar. It was replaced in the early fourteenth century by a massive solid stone pulpitum covered in rich diaper and foliate ornamental carving and decorated by tall niches capped with nodding ogee-headed canopies. Despite the fact that any large figures that might have stood within the niches have gone, the effect is still of great decorative richness. The pul-pitum served both as a grand entrance and processional route, for it had a ceremonial door through the centre; a locus for the reading of the gospels from its roof; and a place for display of the rood. It also formed the backdrop to the elaborate pinnacled wooden choir stalls, another developing phenomenon of the later medieval church in the great ceremonial around worship. Great pulpita or choir screens of similar type survive at the cathedrals of Exeter (1317-25), St David’s, York (1480-1500), and Canterbury. The Exeter screen, like earlier counterparts on the continent, especially Naumburg or Hildesheim in Germany, once had a sequence of Passion scenes carved in relief around the top of its main facade. The Canterbury and York screens both preserve their figures: a row of what may be intended to represent either biblical or historical English kings. Perhaps as the seat of archbishoprics, this imagery was intended to represent in both places the notion of temporal authority. The first such appearance of a gallery of kings was on the facade of Reims cathedral, the coronation church for the kings of France. However, in England the phenomenon also appears on the facades of Lincoln (c.1380) and Exeter (c.1380), demonstrating the pervasiveness of the visual culture of royalty through frequent reinforcement of the image of the crowned king.
As had been the case at Westminster abbey in the mid-thirteenth-century altar furnishings, especially retables and reredoses often echoed in concentrated form elements of the design of the buildings they adorned and could form a focal point. The great eastern reredos at Exeter cathedral (c.1325), of which now only fragments and descriptions survive, once formed an enormous screen of carved, painted and gilded figures in niches rising from the altar to the stained-glass window above. There the imagery of saints in canopied niches was continued in translucent form to the roof. It was part of a lavish provision of furnishings for the choir, which included a great choir screen and the largest remaining, and possibly the largest-ever, wooden bishop’s throne (1316-24) of the middle ages.49 Also devoid of figures now, but originally dependent on them for its impact, the Neville screen behind the high altar at Durham (c.1380) is a free-standing reredos allowing glimpses through between the finely carved buttresses and foliate pinnacles of its canopywork to the space behind.50
Figurative imagery, and of course rich colours and gilding, are also found on medieval church vestments, often designed by the same artists who made manuscripts. The death and burial of the Virgin are embroidered in panels on the Syon cope, along with her coronation, scenes from the life and Passion of Christ and representations of saints. It is a magnificent ceremonial robe in red and green silk, gold and silver thread, and represents a type of which several examples are known. The craft of English embroidery was specialized and renowned, already having a great reputation in the middle ages as attested from its use for diplomatic gifts. It is one of the few medieval art forms known by its country of origin: ‘Opus Anglicanum’. The Clare chasuble remains as a rare and multilated survivor of a once-typical example of a religious textile which came to the church via secular ownership. It was made for Margaret de Clare between the date of her marriage to Edmund Plantagenet, nephew of Henry III, in 1272, and 1294, when the couple divorced. Figures of the Crucifixion, the Virgin and Child and the martyrdom of Stephen are set within cusped quatrefoils, all worked in gold and silver thread on a blue silk ground. While Margaret came from a family who maintained among their female members strong traditions for the commissioning of religious art, we learn otherwise of the detail of chapel furnishings for pious women from chance survivals, such as the inventory of Margaret, Lady Hungerford, dating from c.1487.51
World History
