ABSTRACT
The destruction of ecclesiastical buildings and fittings during the Reformation profoundly affected the glazier’s craft. Hostility to imagery in stained glass windows was not new in the sixteenth century. Several medieval authorities had expressed their antipathy to expensive and distracting glazing. In c. 1145–51 coloured glass and figurai representations were banned from windows in Cistercian abbeys, a ban that was repeated on several occasions. 1 The heretic John Wycliffe (d. 1384) saw the beauty of stained glass windows as a misdirection of men’s admiration for God into self-love. He and many of his followers objected to costly fittings and furnishings (including glazing) of churches as they absorbed resources which should have been devoted to helping the poor. 2 Wycliffe’s contemporary, William Langland, did not attack imagery as such in windows, but vented his scorn on donors who commemorated their gifts by ‘portraits’ and inscriptions (also on those who solicited such acts of generosity by promising pardon for sins committed by the donors):
And [ich] shall keuery youre [kirke] and youre cloistre maken
Bothe wyndowes and wowes; ich wolle a-menden Scglass, And do peynten and portreyn who paidefor the makynge, that euery seg shal see, and seye Ich.am sustre of youre ordre.
Ac god to alle goodfolke suche grauynge defendeth To wryten in wyndowes of eny wel-dedes,
Lest prude be peyntid there and pompe of the worlde.
For god knoweth thy conscience and thy kynde wille,
Thi cost and here couetyse and who the catelouhte.
For thy lewe lordes loue leueth suche wrytinges;
God in the gospel such grauynge nost a-loweth 3
