ABSTRACT
The following paper considers the composition and working methods of a sculptural atelier active in the southern Welsh Marches over the second quarter of the 12th century. Known as the ‘Herefordshire School’, the workshop specialised in small-scale commissions, producing portals, corbel tables, chancel arches, tympana, and fonts. Notwithstanding a general workshop tendency to favour repetition, the sculpture was inventive and open to external influence, a susceptibility which may be due to the way the workshop operated. It regularly collaborated with other masons, while its constituent workforce seems to have been flexible, expanding or contracting according to circumstance. It will be argued that the workshop’s origins can be traced to Hereford Cathedral but that, once it was formed, all the churches for which the sculptors worked were either small or required relatively little carved stonework. In this it was essentially a child of the boom in masonry parish church construction. The type of sculptural workshop organization adopted by the ‘Herefordshire School’ was probably relatively common in early to mid-12th-century Europe.
