Medieval stained glass in Norfolk
Feb. 5th, 2006 11:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fivemackIs somebody else's research topic, but last Tuesday Dad and I served her as driver and photographer around five large Norfolk churches.
There's a fantastic depth of detail to the glass, and a rich and strange iconography; very few full windows survive, so it's mostly a matter of assembled fragments, but some of the fragments are in themselves pretty cool:
[anyone filkish want this as a userpic?]
Norfolk is basically a post-collapse setting; eight hundred years ago, Britain's major export was wool, and the place from which wool was exported was East Anglia because that's where Flemish weavers had settled. The Industrial Revolution put an irredeemable dent in this, and mighty manufacturing centres like Aylsham and Worstead are now tiny villlages; if you dig a hole in any of a number of what are now potato fields or open-air pig farms you'll find the foundations of houses that have since gone away.
On the other hand, this is England, and village churches tend not to be allowed to go away:
Iconoclasts have scratched out the faces of a lot of the figures on the wooden screens in the churches, and contemporary curates tend to have put fake-Victorian massive-oak semi-portable lecterns or ugly institutional chairs in front of them, but what remains, flash-lit and perspective-corrected, is really quite impressive:
There are half a dozen saints each side of the screen, carrying their identifying symbols, with the words of the Nicene Creed spread over the scrolls they're carrying. I've no idea how old these screens are, but without context I'd have thought the images came from somewhere much further south and east than Norwich.
There's a fantastic depth of detail to the glass, and a rich and strange iconography; very few full windows survive, so it's mostly a matter of assembled fragments, but some of the fragments are in themselves pretty cool:
[anyone filkish want this as a userpic?]Norfolk is basically a post-collapse setting; eight hundred years ago, Britain's major export was wool, and the place from which wool was exported was East Anglia because that's where Flemish weavers had settled. The Industrial Revolution put an irredeemable dent in this, and mighty manufacturing centres like Aylsham and Worstead are now tiny villlages; if you dig a hole in any of a number of what are now potato fields or open-air pig farms you'll find the foundations of houses that have since gone away.
On the other hand, this is England, and village churches tend not to be allowed to go away:
Iconoclasts have scratched out the faces of a lot of the figures on the wooden screens in the churches, and contemporary curates tend to have put fake-Victorian massive-oak semi-portable lecterns or ugly institutional chairs in front of them, but what remains, flash-lit and perspective-corrected, is really quite impressive:
There are half a dozen saints each side of the screen, carrying their identifying symbols, with the words of the Nicene Creed spread over the scrolls they're carrying. I've no idea how old these screens are, but without context I'd have thought the images came from somewhere much further south and east than Norwich.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-02-06 01:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-06 01:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-06 11:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-06 11:03 am (UTC)http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~twomack/erica-centaur-1.png
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~twomack/erica-centaur-2.png