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I cannot say that the work of the Mooning Men Group and the odyssey of John Oakham are unique. Almost certainly they are not. What is interesting is that these carvings have been widely unremarked and nobody has taken sufficient interest in them to spot the similarities and patterns. This in itself speaks of a widespread apathy amongst mediaeval arts academics whose focus seems always to be upon the “Romanesque” period. You may be sure that every jot and tittle of Norman carving has been “interpreted” to the point of absurdity and the churches of Europe have been scoured for “similarities”. The attitude to post-Romanesque sculpture is well attested by Nikolaus Pevsner, whose writings still inform so many Church Guide writers even today, who showed little interest in external carvings, even if he deigned to recognise their existence at all. Simon Jenkins is little better. He managed to visit Langham and notice the tedious Decorated style ballflower decoration and miss everything else on the parapets. At Oakham he waxes lyrical about the Decorated style arcade capitals but managed to overlook hundreds of carvings adorning every cornice. They don’t even get mentioned. It is quite extraordinary. I am not “blaming” Pevsner and Jenkins: it just seems to me that their apparent disdain is symptomatic of a wider malaise. They don’t see it as “art” and that’s an end to the matter. Of course, there is a widespread market for the “ho ho ho” approach to mediaeval carving. That involves publishing little books showing a range of “amusing” grotesques and face-pullers. That extends to misericords. “Just look at our weird forefathers, ho ho ho”. “Ooh look, here’s a bum, tee hee.” Even university academics know that a palette of sexual and scatological imagery will always find an audience. They go very coy, by the way, when asked what it all means. Then there are the resin “gargoyles” flogged at garden centres or those carved with chainsaws and hawked at the roadside, the “Green Man” mirrors and pendants. There are thousands of designs in our churches that could be copied but, no, how much better to just invent something? It’s rather sad, really, and vaguely disrespectful of our past. Whether or not you see the sculpture on these pages as being art of the best or worst kind is a matter for you. I love it because it is the art of the common craftsmen of hundreds of years ago. Men doing their best with primitive tools in a world ravaged by plague, war and famine. Men showing their humanity and attitude to life. I find it humbling and priceless. It is not its importance as an art form that matters here, however. The significance of this art is not within the world of the university “Faculties of Mediaeval Art”. It is within that much smaller world of people who are curious at what social forces led to the mediaeval churches emerging in the form that we see them now. It is about the stonemasons. I offer to you my own view on what the sculpture means for our understanding of mediaeval building. 1. The Mooning Men Group might be England’s first building “Company” as we would know one today. Look at the characteristics. We have what are very recognisable trademarks (and if you are still not convinced about the meaning of the mooning men here I think you should have stopped reading long ago!) and what seems to have been a “Unique Selling Proposition” - the MMG will decorate your church when it has finished building. All of the churches are within a quite local area. The group clearly had a reputation and probably touted for business as well as waiting for it to come to them. They were organised and peripatetic. Above all, they knew what their business was: one of extending churches, reroofing them and decorating them. They were exploiting post-Plague demand for bigger and brighter churches with room for chantries and lady chapels. There was continuity of employment for the masons if they wanted it. Apart from their trademarks they had other idiosyncrasies, vested either in individuals or the wider group: the use of lead for eyes, their preoccupation with the goffered caul headdresses, the extensive use of gargoyles. Mediaeval academics have long ago established that the mediaeval building trade was unique in that it paid wages mainly by the day rather than via piecework. Again this is a characteristic of a company as we would know one today. They will have worked under contract. 2. The Mason-Contractor was a different breed from a “Master Mason” We don’t see great works of architecture here. The men were not of the same breed that were glorifying cathedrals and Oxbridge colleges. They were practical masons who know how to do what they did and there is no sign that they ever undertook anything more ambitious. Let us be clear, however, that saying there is no evidence means just that. We do not know. The whole concept of the Master Mason has taken a battering from me on this website. I do not deny their existence: I simply believe that they were few in number and worked on prestigious projects. Those masons did not schlep around the East Midlands raising clerestories. They were usually highly paid employees who probably did not get their hands too dirty. In modern terms they were architects whereas my masons were builders. The continuity of the work is amply attested here. We know from the few remaining mediaeval contracts that (surprise surprise) there was always a contractor and we know that they were almost never given the title “Master Mason”. 3. The Mobility of Masons There are very occasional occurrences in mediaeval records of a common mason turning up in two or more places. Lack of consistency in the use of names and a dearth of documents bedevils the tracking of individual mason. This makes some people turn to the highly dubious (but to them very exciting!) hunt for masons marks. We know little, however, of how mobile a mason might be. The Mooning Men Group shows us that a mason might indeed be mobile - even if we do know the real name of a single one of these men. The area also shows, however, the limits to their mobility. Much more than twenty miles and it seems it was too far from the village homes that these men must have had. Even within the MMG it is worth noting that “Lawrence of Leicester” is only seen to the west of Oakham. He may have lived in the west of the area and limited himself geographically. Who knows, though, what work he may have undertaken still further west outside the area where the MMG mason-contractors were themselves willing to work? John Oakham, however, shows us a different breed of mason. He worked within the MMG and either before (or more likely after) the MMG ceased operations he was prepared to travel as far as Boston on the east coast and as far north as Brant Broughton to find work. This was a man who either had no village home or was prepared to leave it for extended periods. He probably was accompanied by his son/protege Simon Cottesmore. 4. Masons could not be Choosy John Oakham, again, is our guide here. His work at Brant Broughton is magnificent. It is inconceivable that decoration so lavish and well-executed was done by a man just “finishing off” at a building site in the way that I believe was occurring at most of the MMG sites. John must have spent a great deal of time here and we cannot know whether it was as a mason-carver employed by a mason-contractor or in a separate role as “Ymaginator” employed by the patrons. Either way, this was surely the commission of John’s life. He played a major part in producing what is regarded today as one of the finest village churches in England. At Oakham his work was also extensive and well executed but much less imaginative. At Whissendine he produced one frieze of great interest but others of everyday mediocrity. At Boston he would certainly have been a quite minor part of a huge team building the church of St Botolphs. Everything points to a man who took what work was offered him and was mainly working at a much lower level than the capabilities he showed at Brant Broughton. As always, we must also entertain the idea that he worked as a common hewer of stone when circumstances dictated - on the building site or at the quarry. 5. Masons could have Long Careers A big frustration with this study is that we have no idea of time scales for programs of work. The few remaining mediaeval contracts do often mention time-scales but there is not a large enough body of evidence to allow us to make firm conclusions. In any event, the time allowed would obviously depend upon the amount of labour available to the contractor and the supply of materials. We must also bear in mind that the speed of progress might well be constrained by the availability of parish funds. A parish might prefer a slower rate of progress (and ipso facto a smaller number of builders) in order to raise funds along the way. Gabriel Byng’s book (often referred to in this account) “Church Building in the Later Middle Ages” (Cambridge 2017) talks at length about the challenges parishes faced in fund raising. Despite these reservations, it was striking that at Catterick Church, Yorkshire in 1412 - almost concurrently with the MMG - a whole year was allowed for the addition of the plain parapets to the rebuilt church when the rebuilding of the church itself was to take only three years. A year was also to be allowed for the battlementing of Orby Church in Lincolnshire in 1529 although this contract was never fulfilled because, amongst other things, the mason William Jacson was impressed into the king’s service! To this day, only the tower of Orby Church has battlements. Catterick is not a large church. How long then would it take to build battlemented parapets with cornicing below and a sculpted frieze at a larger church such as Oakham? Two years? Three? That is without taking account of any building work he might also be engaged in before the parapet and sculpting work could begin. We might speculate that John Oakham was at his namesake church for as much as three years. As we have already established, his role probably changed from church to church but with at least thirteen churches to his name we might reasonably speculate a career measured in decades, not years. There is no reason to suppose this was particularly unusual. It is only his legacy of a trail of sculpture to follow that makes him stand out. Another important insight from Catterick was that the parapets not only were regarded as a “finishing” job but that that the work was entrusted to the same contractor. This reinforces my belief that this finishing work would, within the MMG, continue after the rest of the gang had moved on to the next job. 6. Decorative Sculpture was an Optional Extra Almost all of the churches within the MMG that had high quality cornice friezes were demonstrably provided by that group of men. There are others within the area and probably from around the same time but most of them were inferior even to the most mediocre of the MMG’s work (at, say, Cottesmore). For every church with a frieze there are ten or twenty that have none. We cannot know whether the MMG worked on those churches. But it is self-evident that for any given church sculptural decoration was optional. If the decoration was regarded as “apotropaic” then that concept was clearly of secondary importance. The example of Catterick mentioned above shows the parapets being paid for within the overall cost of 160 Marks (about £100). Parapets themselves, then were probably regarded as being a pre-requisite at that time. We must, however, assume that a sculpted frieze cost extra although I believe the contractor-mason probably buried the price within an overall contract price. This might explain why some of the MMG churches have battlements and friezes only on their west towers but we need to be cautious: it could also be because only the tower was being altered at that time. Either way, we must assume that some churches had tight budgets and sacrificed decoration at least to some extent. Churches were not commissioning friezes to scare away the Devil! 7. It was a Parish Matter I hope that if you have been reading this website you will have grasped the first thing I tell to any set of church crawlers I travel with. Parish churches (as opposed to cathedrals), were not usually built by “The Church”. Then as now parishes did all the financial heavy lifting while The Church then loftily assumed some kind of proprietorship. Plus ca change plus c’est la meme chose. The naves of churches were quite specifically the responsibility of the parish. Contracts for parish churches were made by patrons or, more usually, members of the parish, not by bishops and priests. By this time parishes were using their churches for all manner of activities that to our sensitive eyes seem sacrilegious: storing produce, holding “ales” (drinking sessions), housing livestock, you name it. So much so, in fact, that eventually The Church did start to get a bit anxious, not least by the growing disorder within the church grounds, and encouraged the building of “Church Rooms” to house these activities. If the parish was paying, then the parish was specifying as well. It would be the parish or the patron that decided whether sculpture was affordable or desirable. They did not, it seems, feel that the objective of most of that sculpture was to praise God or to announce its religious function to the world. It was their village hall and they seemed to want decoration that entertained them and reflected the preoccupations and irreverent beliefs of their everyday lives. Hence the popularity of musician carvings, “world turned upside down” imagery, green men and so on. The mason-sculptors would have been on the wavelength of the parish community, not of the parish priest. 8. Lead Roofs were a Seriously Expensive Business In 1410, in about the period we are discussing, a contract was made for the provision of a south aisle at Hornby Church in Yorkshire at a price of £40 including materials. The National Archives equate this to about £25,000 in today’s terms. The complete rebuilding of Catterick Church - seemingly funded by a rich local resident cost £100; £63,000 in today’s terms. The magnificent chancel at Adderbury Church cost £400. That’s a quarter of million to you, affordable only because the church was owned by New College, Oxford.. These were huge sums. In his book Gabriel Byng tried the seemingly impossible: to work out what parishes could afford and how they went about raising money. He talks of, amongst other things, levies - voluntary and compulsory - church ales, collections, loans, gifts, legacies. Here are some extraordinary facts. The population of England in 1400 was about two million, down from about 4.8 million when the Black Death struck in 1348. It fell to another low of 1.9 million in around 1450. Simon Jenkins reckons (and I’m willing to trust him on this) that there are 8,000 pre-Reformation churches in England. That is a conservative number because it is known that a fair number of mediaeval churches have been lost to us. This implies that there was one church for every two hundred and fifty men, women and children in 1400. Studies have shown that the average size of family in the late mediaeval period was surprisingly low and all estimates and calculations show less than five and sometimes less than four. If we were to use four as a working figure then we arrive at the mean number of households for every parish church as being around sixty. Sixty! How on earth could sixty households find the modern equivalent of £25,000 to build an aisle? Now let us put a modern slant on this. Combs in Suffolk is one of many churches where in 2015 a bunch of scrotes stole the lead off the roofs. (Could we use mediaeval punishments for mediaeval crimes, do you think?) The replacement cost according to the Suffolk Times was likely to be around £150,000. Combs has a current population of 850. Let’s say there are 300 households. So, what do you think the chances are that the churchwardens of Combs would have been able to raise £150,000 from 300 households - the equivalent of £500 per household - in a largely secular age? None, I think you will agree. Looking at pictures of that church it is comparable in size with, say, Ryhall in Rutland to which this narrative makes frequent reference. Interestingly, I have already estimated that the roofs at Ryhall cost over £100,000 in today’s terms. Let us assume that Ryhall was an average sized parish in 1400. Their £100,000 would have had to be raised by sixty households - over £1,600 per household in today’s terms. This is just for lead roofs which are hardly the stuff to spare the blood of the faithful. And I doubt if Ryhall (current population about 1600) was even an average-sized parish. In truth, it is a safe bet that if there was a way of compelling the people of Combs to pay £500 each they could do it, given today’s affluence. In mediaeval days not even compulsion could have raised the money. Gabriel Byng has found ample evidence that there were compulsory levies in many parishes for church building, but such sums could never have been realised. In fact, of course, it is inconceivable that the ordinary people could have paid that money in Ryhall or in thousands of other parish churches in rural areas. It could only have been paid for by a group of well-heeled benefactors, doubtless supplemented by the widow’s mite of the householders and cottars. The cost of lead roofs, then, was as eye-watering in 1400 as it is now for churches serving very small communities. Yet it was more or less unavoidable for churches wanting to expand their accommodation via wider aisles and higher clerestories. The economic cost of this flood of church expansion (and it was a nationwide phenomenon, not a local one) must have been phenomenal. One might go as far as to suggest that the cost of the cornice friezes and ornate gargoyles was almost lost in the roundings and that might just explain why they were popular in the area. Such cost to the community would also, I suggest, engender a fierce sense of proprietorship. “You don’t like our bums and green men, Mr Priest? Tough!” |
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Recommended Next Section - The Churches |
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Church Building in the Post-Plague Era The Peregrinations of John Oakham What can we Learn? (You are Here!) |
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