Fig. 14. St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol: from the north-east.

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§ 45. The double crypt at Grantham, below the south chapel of the chancel, is not a very usual feature. The entrance to the Grantham crypt was originally by two external doors, which still remain. In process of time, it is not improbable that the relics, which at an earlier date were in the chapel above the north porch, were translated to the eastern crypt. A stairway, with a very imposing doorway at its head, was made to it from the south side of the chancel in the early part of the fifteenth century. A certain number of crypts of Saxon date still remain beneath chancels: these, however, are few, and perhaps the last survival of the confessio in the English parish church is the aisled crypt at Lastingham, near Pickering. The greater part of a twelfth century crypt, with ribbed vaulting, remains beneath the chancel at Newark. Where the church is built on ground with a steep slope eastward, it is more economical to build the chancel on an open crypt, which also may have its uses as a bone-house when the churchyard is cleared, than to build it on a solid lower stage. This accounts for the crypts at Bedale and Thirsk in Yorkshire, and Madley, near Hereford, which are really lower stories to the chancel, and not subterranean chambers. The Lastingham crypt is also built on an abrupt eastward slope. The site of St Mary Redcliffe at Bristol allowed for the construction of large crypt-chambers on its south side and beneath the lady chapel. Sometimes, as at Hythe in Kent, the floor of the chancel was raised to make room for a crypt below. Such crypts were used as bone-houses, when the churchyard was disturbed to make room for new burials. The crypt beneath the south aisle at Rothwell, in Northamptonshire, contains a collection of bones to which, as to that at Hythe, ill-founded legends have been attached. Both these large bone-holes contain altars, at which masses for the dead were said: there is also an altar in the eastern crypt at Grantham. Sometimes, as at Oundle and St Mary Magdalene’s, Bridgwater, there is a small crypt or bone-hole beneath one of the transeptal chapels. Bone-holes also occur beneath the east end of an aisle, as at Higham Ferrers in Northamptonshire, and Hallaton in Leicestershire. At Burford, St Thomas’ chapel, to the west of the south transept, has its floor raised to give headway to the vault of the bone-hole below. A similar bone-hole is entered from the interior of the south aisle at Bosham, in Sussex: the altar at the end of the aisle is raised on a platform above it, as the floor of the hole is only a little below the level of the aisle. The splendid twelfth century crypt at St Mary’s, Warwick, extended beneath the chancel and transepts of the collegiate church, and is to be classified with the crypts or lower churches of our Norman cathedrals, rather than with the less ambitious crypts of our parish churches.

[CHAPTER IV]
THE FURNITURE OF A MEDIEVAL PARISH CHURCH: CONCLUSION

§ 46. Our parish churches, as we have them to-day, are stripped of much that made them beautiful. The cold walls, often scraped of all their plaster and whitewash; the windows, glazed with white glass, or with modern glass of very uncertain merit, reveal merely the structural skeleton of the building. The robe of colour with which the interior was clothed is gone; and only fragments here and there remain to tell us of the beauty of the decorative art which was, at the close of the middle ages, at its very highest point. But enough is left to enable us to picture to ourselves the appearance of the interior of an English medieval church, and reconstruct that arrangement of furniture and pictorial decoration which made it so beautiful.

§ 47. To take, first, the features common to nave and chancel alike, the walls of the building were covered with paintings executed on a plaster surface. As might be expected, the best remains of such paintings are to be found in districts where the churches are built of rubble, and the plaster covering, necessary to the internal wall-surface, afforded the fullest field for this form of decoration. There are numerous and beautiful examples in Sussex and Surrey, from which a good idea may be gained of the general scheme of painting in a medieval church. The earlier wall-paintings, such as those at Copford in Essex, or South Leigh in Oxfordshire, or the probably thirteenth century paintings at Easby in Yorkshire, are stiff in drawing and somewhat crude in colouring. From the earliest times, however, this method of decoration was adopted, and gradually assumed a more independent existence and a more pictorial character. As the history of art advanced, and the demand for special kinds of work increased, the lesser arts, hitherto treated as mere servants of masoncraft, began to strike out paths for themselves. The painters at Pickering in Yorkshire or at Raunds in Northamptonshire, treated the walls on which they worked as the backgrounds of strong and brightly coloured designs bearing no relation to the architectural divisions of the building. Where the space to be covered was limited, like the wall between two aisle windows, the treatment was more restrained: in these positions there occur, as at St Breage in Cornwall, panel pictures of saints. In the north aisle at Kettering there is a faded picture of St Roch, the blue background of which, studded with gold stars, is a beautiful example of medieval colour. But the general treatment pursued by the later medieval painters, in their subject and figure painting, was unconfined by architectural limits, and sometimes a single subject spreads below and round a window. Above the chancel arch was usually a painting of the Doom, of which traces remain in many churches, as at Holy Trinity, Coventry, and (much restored) at St Thomas, Salisbury. At Liddington in Rutland and at Kettering, the Doom seems to have been extended to the north and south walls of the nave: there is on the north clerestory wall at Kettering, a figure of an angel looking towards the middle of the wall above the chancel arch; while there are remains on the south wall at Liddington, of a huge whale-like figure representing the mouth of Hades. The subjects represented in these paintings were of the utmost variety. A good idea of the beauty of colour attained by the artists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries may be gained from a study of the fragmentary figure and pattern paintings at Cirencester or the important remains at Bloxham. To the end of the middle ages much pattern and diaper work was used in painting large surfaces or filling in backgrounds. In several Northamptonshire churches the soffits of arches are covered with reddish brown scrolls of leafage, at its best most elaborate and delicate. The shafts in the angles of the tower at Fairford are painted with a spiral pattern in two colours, like a barber’s pole, and at Fairford and Burford there are important remains of late diapered backgrounds. One of the best pieces of fifteenth century diaper painting known to the present writer is that above the chancel arch at Llanbedr-ystrad-yw in Breconshire, which served as a background to a rood and figures of St Mary and St John.