The Iconography of English Medieval Windows

Biblical references to light in Genesis 1:2–5 and Revelation 21: 11–25, 22: 5 invested windows with particular metaphysical significance. Light as a symbol of God’s presence was common sermon material; medieval preachers would have interpreted the multi-coloured, glittering transparency of stained glass in the windows around their congregations in terms of creating on earth the heavenly Jerusalem built of shimmering gold and precious stones as described by St John in the Book of Revelation. Windows in medieval churches also had more tangible spiritual functions. They were paid for and installed for the greater glory of God and the company of Heaven. They could be objects of meditation or contemplation for both clergy and laity and, when ‘readable’, used for instruction. Usually their subject-matter must have reflected the particular devotions of the donor or patron as well as bearing witness to their generosity and hopes for spiritual benefits. The last are often expressed on the labels which accompany donor portraits; these not only record for posterity their names but also exhort the viewer to pray for them. An explicit instance is recorded at Mapledurham, Oxfordshire, where a chancel window once contained this text below the late fifteenth-century figures of John Iwardby and his wife:

John Iwarby and Katherine his wife specialy you pray to say as oft as ye this window see ii deprofundis for them Edward Elizabeth John and Jane there fathers and mothers or on(e) pater noster and on(e) Ave and for the soule of John wich here by the walle lieth sonne of the said John and Katherine of whome almighti Ihesu have mercy. ¹

As late as the seventeenth century, the efficacy of a deed granted four hundred years previously by John de Mowbray to the tenants of his manor at Epworth in Humberside, which barred his successors from making encroachments on the common land, was strengthened by its juxtaposition with an image in a nearby parish church:

The manner of keeping this deed hath been in a chest … in the parish-church of Haxey … by some of the chief freeholders, who had the keeping of the keys, which chest stood under a window, wherein was the portraicture of Mowbray [presumably a donor figure] set in ancient glass, holding in his hand a writing which was commonly reputed to be an emblem of the deed. ²

A number of medieval writers justified the use of images in churches on the grounds that they served to instruct the unlearned in the central tenets of the Christian faith and hagiography. The most famous exponent of this view is St Gregory the Great:

to adore images is one thing; to teach with their help what should be adored is another. What Scripture is to the educated, images are to the ignorant, who see through them what they must accept; they read in them what they cannot read in books… It is not without reason that tradition permits the deeds of the saints to be depicted in holy places. ³

How and to what extent images were used didactically is however a complex issue, as some recent studies have underlined. ⁴ A basic practical consideration affecting stained glass windows was their legibility. It is one thing to ‘read’ an aisle window in a parish church where its contents are just above eye level; it is quite another to attempt to interpret without some sort of key the ranks of saints set high in the choir clerestory at Wells and York Minster. The same applies even more to the small historiated medallions frequently arranged in what are to twentieth-century eyes complex narrative patterns in the tall lancets of the choir and Trinity Chapel of Canterbury Cathedral. Glazing (and murals), however, could be utilized for instruction, edification and to inspire devotion. To cite but one instance of the last, in 1511 a bequest of a taper was made to bum before an image of St Christopher in the glass of a window at Lyminge in Kent; the testator would have looked to the saint to intercede for him in Heaven. Such beliefs in the efficacy of imagery in windows could even survive the Reformation. In 1633 a celebrated case was heard before the Court of Star Chamber concerning the destruction of a window depicting the Creation in St Edmund’s church, Salisbury. One of the justifications for this iconoclasm was that the window had been a ‘cause of idolatry to some Ignorant People’ and evidence was cited of lay-folk bowing, kneeling and praying before it. ⁵ The didactic value of windows and wall-paintings would explain why moral themes such as the Corporal Works of Mercy, Seven Sacraments and Warning against Gossiping are more commonly represented in these media than in manuscript illumination. ⁶ The absence of, or very brief, explanatory labels in these and other historiated subjects (e.g. the St William and St Cuthbert windows in York Minster ( Pl XX ; Fig. 41 )) indicates that they often had to be interpreted or explained to the onlooker, perhaps with the aid of an illustrated or written guide. The Guthlac Roll ( Fig. 97 ) (BL MS Harley Roll Y.6) of c. 1210 may either have been a vidimus or a guide to a window dedicated to the life of this Lincolnshire saint; it has been suggested that a fourteenth-century roll, on which are recorded inscriptions from the typological windows in the choir aisles of Canterbury Cathedral, was originally displayed in this part of the church as an interpretative aid (Canterbury Cathedral Library, MS C 246). That windows needed explaining to layfolk is underlined by The Tale of Beryn, one of the additions to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in which a group of pilgrims revealed their ignorance of the images in the glazing of Canterbury Cathedral. ⁷