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Finchingfield (Essex)

East Haddon (Northants)

Anstey (Hertfordshire)

Gnosall (Staffordshire)

Earl Stonham (Suffolk)

Norton (Suffolk)

Ixworth Thorpe (Suffolk)

Tutbury (Staffordshire)

Nantwich (Cheshire)

Penmon Priory (Anglesey)

Llaneilian (Anglesey)

Llanbadrig (Anglesey)

Lower Peover (Cheshire)

Leverton (Lincolnshire)

The joy of English parish churches is their sheer variety. A thousand years of changing fashions, architectural innovation, liturgical change and endless interventions by patrons has ensured that no two churches are remotely identical. Yet, each region of the country displays idiosyncrasies in its churches. In the West Country, for example, they favour bowed “waggon roofs” that you will see hardly anywhere else. The round tower churches of Norfolk and Suffolk are sufficiently recognised to have a society dedicated to them. Those “regions”, of course, do not follow ancient or modern county boundaries nor even necessarily the vaguer modern regional designations such as are used, for example, by TV companies. A mason would not have recognised the word “Midlands” let alone “East Midlands”.

Who or what, then, created these variations? Often it was down to local materials. The round tower churches of Norfolk and Suffolk, for example, are believed to be the result of non-availability of local quarry stone for the corners of square towers. Stylistic or decorative preferences are less easy to explain within a geographical context but one factor is paramount: the availability of suitable stone. Many types of stone are totally unsuitable for sculpture. The granite used in many Cornish churches, for example, is so hard that sculpture is a rarity. The lovely white stone quarried underground in Beer in Devon was also sculpted underground because once it had been exposed to the warmer air outside it became too hard. The Normans were so unimpressed with the suitability of some English stones that they imported a lot  from their native Caen at vast expense. Norwich Cathedral in stone-starved Norfolk imported stone from Barnack near Peterborough at enormous cost. This tiny village had the distinction of providing stone for three English cathedrals. If stone that is easy to carve is almost non-existent in Cornwall in the East Midlands there is a super-abundance. It lies in part on the so-called “Limestone Belt”. I have already made mention of Barnack – which is long-exhausted – but even now there are numerous working quarries in the area at places such as Clipsham and Holywell.

Left: Arcade capital in Beer stone at Colyton, Devon. Centre: Triple waggon roof church at Altarnun, Cornwall. Right: Round tower church, Bungay, Suffolk

It is, perhaps, too easy to fall back on “fashion” as an explanation for regional variations. In the absence of mass media fashions would be very localised. It is true that wealthy patrons would be expected to have had broader horizons – and they were desperately aware of fashions in costume - but after the great plagues of the second half of the fourteenth century it was the parish that was increasingly the patron of the local church, not the manorial lord. By this time most parish churches were built. Very occasionally a church might be completely rebuilt but the tendency was towards expansion of what was already there. In an atmosphere of terror of the after-life aristocratic patronage was increasingly focused on the preservation of immortal souls through the building of chantry chapels – themselves frequently leading to the expansion of an aisle. Then there was the important issue of showing family status through the commissioning of grand funerary monuments.

Large scale investment in churches became more the province of the wealthy merchant class that grew from the post-Plague reordering of society. Lacking lineage and still precluded from the higher offices of state it was the local church that often benefited from their largesse. It would be fatuous to suggest that neither knight nor merchant was influenced by what he saw on his travels but the evidence is that a more compelling motivation, especially amongst the parishioners, was to match or exceed what their neighbours had. The few church-building contracts we have sometimes explicitly enjoin the stonemason contractors to emulate or surpass a specified neighbouring church in some way. For local people, it was local one-upmanship that mattered.

The notion of the better-travelled members of society influencing church building through their knowledge of architectural fashion is then, perhaps, a little fanciful. It was more a case of emulation.

In the case of the geographical area covered by this study it is difficult to pinpoint many characteristics that set the church architecture apart from others. One is certainly the massive thirteenth century Early English style west towers that are found primarily in the tiny county of Rutland (and which I therefore call “Rutland Bruisers”) and surrounding non-Rutland towns such as Stamford St Mary. It is important to note, however – and this is true of many regional church archetypes – that the vast majority of churches do not have this characteristic feature at all. Put another way, if one was to be presented with ten pictures of Rutland churches and asked to which county they belonged the presence of one of these towers (Ryhall or Ketton, for example) would allow one to say with a fair degree of confidence “Rutland”. If it was to be a random selection of ten Rutland churches the odds would be that there would be no characteristic west tower and one would have to rely on recognising an individual church. The same would be true of most geographical “specialities” throughout England. Regions are perhaps defined as much by what you never see than by what you sometimes see!

Left: Early English Tower, St Mary’s Church, Stamford, Lincs. Centre: Early English Tower - a “Rutland Bruiser” - Ketton, Rutland, 3 miles from Stamford Right: Wool Merchant Largesse: Holy Trinity Church, Long Melford, Suffolk.

Exactly who in any given area set the precedent that other churches felt bound to follow can never be established. We cannot know where the first Rutland Bruiser tower was built and whose idea it was. Perhaps it was St Mary’s Church in the important mediaeval town of Stamford (ironically just outside the boundaries of Rutland)? Who then decided to build a second at, say, Ketton or Ryhall? These may seem hypothetical questions but they are not. Whoever built that first tower got the idea from somewhere, we know not where; but they had to have the masons who were able to execute that vision. Believe me, if you visit St Mary’s Stamford and see how large that tower is and how steep is the hill upon which it has stood for over eight hundred years you will understand that “feasibility” and “capability” would be high on your list of discussion points if you were to think of building something similar!

Those emulating that tower elsewhere in the area faced smaller geophysical challenges but capability would still have been a cardinal issue. It is unlikely that the masons would have toured Rutland building a series of these structures so the chances are that the necessary knowledge was passed from mason to mason, generation to generation. Today we would write text books. Nobody believes that there were church-building manuals in the thirteenth century (or, at any rate, not for parish church masons). The knowledge was almost certainly vested in the masons, not in the patrons nor in the clerical hierarchy. If you wanted a tower like Stamford’s you had to hope you could find masons who knew how to do it or who had the confidence to suck it and see.

With all that in mind, it is clear to me although previously unremarked upon by any other writer I am aware of, that the area of the East Midlands of which I write in this book has an unusually large proportion of churches that have decorative friezes below the parapets of their roofs. When I say “unusually large” I should qualify that by saying “compared with most areas where they are almost or totally non-existent”. I have identified thirty-five churches that have significant lengths of decorated frieze. There are innumerably more that have perfunctory and uninteresting friezes on cornices below the top stages of their west towers. Of these, perhaps a dozen have tower friezes of significant sculptural interest. Let us say that perhaps no more than fifty parish churches define this regional speciality. This is a very small proportion of the churches within the area. What, though, is “the area”? Within this context the area is defined by the churches themselves and that is a much more limited geographical area than that which today we would call the East Midlands.

Sculpted Cornice Friezes South Aisle and Clerestory, St Andrew Church, Whissendine, Rutland. Note the stylistic differences between the two friezes, that on the clerestory being much the more vibrant. Also on the clerestory, note the “mooning” exhibitionist extreme left and unidentifiable creature (a flea? a louse?) to its right. Note also the elaborate gargoyles and the battlemented parapets.

The area of principal interest is shown in the map below. When looking at the distribution of the sites of major significance to this study it is striking how closely they are located. From Tilton-on-the-Hill in Leicestershire at the extreme south of the area to Muston in the north is a crow’s flight distance of twenty miles. From Hungarton in the west to Ryhall in the east is about the same distance. Some eighty percent of the significant sites are contained within a roughly triangular area of about thirty square miles bounded by Hungarton, Buckminster and Exton.  As we begin to identify trademark carvings and individual styles of carving this density of sites will be of compelling interest.     

Of course the area is not defined by administrative geography at all but by the extent of demand for the work and the availability of the appropriately skilled labour to supply it. Of these two factors it is the latter which is the deal-breaker. If a church needed extending then the wish for decoration was hardly likely to be the most important consideration to the parish patrons and would not justify a long delay until the “right” mason was found. If masons, on the other hand, were to offer decoration then a parish would balance the extra cost of such a frippery against their sense of pride and desire to emulate. As we proceed with this study it will become very clear that all of this decoration was probably driven by the stonemasons’ ability to supply something that the patrons valued.

What, though, is a church frieze? For the purposes of this account it is a length of decorative carved sculpture. It forms the cornice at the junction between wall and roof. The cornices are long and so they are, of course, formed of many smaller lengths and on each length there might be between one ir two carvings and very occasionally three. Because they were constructed piecemeal it is clear that in places the planning went awry and the spacing of the sculptures was a little irregular.

It is important to distinguish a frieze from a series of corbels. A corbel is any piece of stone built into a wall with the sole helping to support the roof. They are found inside or outside churches, supporting either wood or stone structures. Corbels, like friezes, are a general architectural feature and not confined to the world of ecclesiastical buildings. In churches they have always been a favoured surface for sculpted decoration of wood or stone. The apotheosis of corbels on English churches came in the Norman period where many churches had long series of corbels. They were usually adorned with sculpture. Such lengths of corbelling are usually known as “corbel tables”. Most have long gone due to centuries of church expansion and re-roofing but several remain, some of them celebrated for their sculpture, such as Kilpeck in Herefordshire and Elkstone in Gloucestershire. The decorated corbel table was obsolete almost instantly with the takeover of the Gothic style of architecture late in the twelfth century.

Top: One of the most celebrated Norman corbel tables in England on one of the finest Norman churches: St Mary and St David, Kilpeck, Herefordshire. Bottom: Carved friezes on the the south aisle and south clerestory, St Nicholas Church, Cottesmore, Rutland.

Just as a gargoyle has a function – that of draining water from the roof whereas a grotesque does not -  so a corbel table is functional; but a cornice frieze is not. They are also structurally quite different. A corbel needs to be part of the wall itself in order to function as a support. A frieze is usually attached to the wall almost as an afterthought.

So when we see a carved Norman corbel we are seeing the front portion of a stone that extends back through the width of the wall. Like an iceberg there is much more below the surface. When we see a frieze we are seeing almost all of it. Not all decorations have survived and where one has been lost it is clear that the sculptures were not carved and added to the cornice with mortar: both cornice and sculptures were carved from a single piece of stone. A carving may be broken or weathered but it is rarely if ever missing without trace. Each short length of cornice was carved from a long block of stone to leave a cornice-shaped cross-section interspersed with one, two or three blocks left behind which could then be sculpted into decorative designs. It seems likely that the man who shaped the cornice stone was not the man who then turned those blocks into sculptures but we cannot know for sure.

Although it is unlikely, it is not inconceivable that the initial shaping of the cornice was done at the quarry because by the fifteenth century labour shortages caused by decades of Plague had encouraged a degree of mass production at the quarries. This was certainly true of window tracery. Although today we might admire the graceful lines of the Perpendicular style window, its ambitious size and its complex cusping, artistically it is a regression from the beautiful one-off designs often produced within the pre-Plague Decorated style. We know that the individual pieces of stone used for Perpendicular window tracery were often produced at the quarry so it is not a leap of imagination to suggest that cornicing might too. Knoop and Jones’s work certainly suggests that the organisational and even the labour separation of quarry and building site were not as clear as had been once supposed.

Friezes can be found on any length of roof. Potentially, then, they can be on nave, chancel, clerestory, aisles, tower and even porch.. Some of the churches discussed in this book have friezes on all of these surfaces; but by no means all. The number of carvings on any given church can be over a hundred and, as you can see from the photograph of Cottesmore’s friezes most are inconsequential as individual sculptures. As a body of work, however, they can be striking. Other churches just have a couple of dozen carvings below the parapet of their west towers.

The friezes have no apparent function beyond decoration. They are massively outnumbered even in their own area by churches that have plain cornices. You might compare those with the polystyrene cornice material that is sometimes used on internal walls in some modern homes. They make the link between wall and roof neater. Others have very repetitious designs, occasionally interspersed by a grotesque or two. The Decorated style would sometimes see a frieze decorated by endless repetition of the then very fashionable “ballflower” design. The group of churches in this book, however, have friezes that are startling in the density and individuality of their designs.

So who decided whether or not and how they should be decorated? Well to start with we have to return to that question of capability. It is a pretty fair assumption that all but the least skilled of stone cutters (as opposed to layers) would be capable of shaping a cornice. Carving a design – in fact two or three designs on a single length of cornice – is an altogether different matter. Moreover, the capability to carve complex designs is one thing: having the imagination to create numerous miniature works of art quite another. So, such a question as “can you decorate our church to be like the one at Tilton-on-the-Hill, Mister Mason?” might have been met with consternation.

We need to be clear that decorative friezes are not unique to this area. There is a well-known group of Churches in Oxfordshire (including famously Adderbury, Bloxham and Hanwell) that have very fine friezes indeed – finer, in fact, on average than those being discussed here. They may pre-date the East Midlands friezes but it seems unlikely that they were carved by the same mason-sculptor and it is a small group of churches. The possibility must be entertained, however, that they were the inspiration for the friezes further east. Individual friezes can be seen at scattered locations in other parts of the country, especially on west towers, but there seems to be no strong tradition outside the East Midlands.

Nor was the tradition revived during the Victorian period. Kendal in Cumbria is the only one I can really think of. True, there are places where old friezes have been patched up, gaps filled in and so on. Whereas, however, big town churches quite like to put up faux mediaeval gargoyles and the odd carving as a kind of “right on” gesture towards the past, church friezes such as those at Cottesmore are seemingly consigned to mediaeval history.

Every way you look at it, these friezes are a localised phenomenon.

We have established that the stonemasons were the key players in this drama. It was their skills that determined whether cornice friezes were feasible at all and what they would look like. Cathedrals might be able to call upon the greatest artists in the land but parish churches had to make do with what was available locally. In the next chapter we will explore the world of the stonemason.

A rare Victorian revival of a mediaeval decorative tradition. Sculpted cornice frieze, Holy Trinity Church, Kendal, Cumbria. Note also the beastie figures on the pinnacles.

Recommended Next Section: The Gargoyle Master

Preface

Introduction

Friezes - a Local Speciality (you are here!)

The Gargoyle Master

Bums and Fleas

The Square Headdress

Black Eyes and Lead Roofs

Styles of Sculpture

Church Building in the Post-Plague Era

Mapping the Sculptors

Scratching those Fleas

The Peregrinations of John Oakham

The Sleaford Cluster

What does it all Mean?

The Cost of it All

What can we Learn?

The Churches

Other Local Friezes

Other Great Sculptures