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 figural representations were banned from windows in Cistercian abbeys, a ban that was repeated on several occasions. I 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):
Stained glass provides no evidence of any rising antipathy amongst the laity to~ards orthodox religion in the last two decades preceding the Reformation, judging from the number of testamentary bequests of windows which although' not numerous appear to be no fewer than in the late fifteenth century. During the 1520s and early IS30s outbreaks of iconoclasm occurred in various locations in England; the targets were three-dimensional images and crucifixes rather than windows or other paintings. As an Elizabethan homily against idolatry put it, 'Men are not so ready to worship a picture on a wall, or in a window, as an embossed and gilt image set with pearl and stone.'4 For the same reason no official attack on pictorial stained glass tookplace until Edwar~ VI's reign, but windows did not escape unscathed from the Henrician Reformation. So thorough was the despoliation of buildings during the dissolution of the monasteries (1536-41) that very little can be said of the glazing of monastic churches; only a few former Benedictine establishments, such as the metropolitan church of Canterbury, Gloucester (which was raised to cathedral status), Tewkesbury, Great Malvern and the nunnery at Wroxall in Warwickshire, serve to give much indication of what has been lost. The principal survivals of Augustinian glazing are Christ Church, Oxford, Dorchester in Oxfordshire, Bristol Cathedral (thirteenth and fourteenth centuries), Cartmel, Cumbria (fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries), and Launde in Leicestershire (early fifteenth century).5 Only a few fragments exist of the stained glass of the Cluniacs, Premonstratensians, Cistercians, Gilbertines, Carthusians and the Mendicant
Orders. Mostly the buildings were ruthlessly stripped for their materials in accordance with the official instructions to the dissolution commissioners: they were to 'pull down to the ground all the walls of the churches, stepulls, cloysters, fraterys, dorters, chapter howsys', etc.6 The collegiate establishments suffered a similar fate and their dissolution was completed in Edward VI's reign.
