LECHLADE.
Fairford nowadays stands aside from all these activities. Its day is done, and except on those occasions when the motor-omnibus between Lechlade and Cirencester plods through, and on the weekly market-day, there is no stir in the place at all. Its fine church and the famous windows alone bring strangers here. The church is due to the munificence of the Tame family. John Tame, merchant, of London, purchased the manor in 1498, and died twenty-seven years later. He must have been a typical “new man,” with plenty yet to spare of the abounding energy that had made his wealth in London, for it was he who began, and nearly completed, the rebuilding of Fairford church. We may well picture him, in our imagination, hopeful of founding a family, as many other successful traders of that expansive age had already done, or were doing. His immediate descendants, however, failed him, and the name is extinct. It was his son, John, who completed the church, and died in 1534. Monumental brasses to the memory of these Tames, and of the third and last, Sir Edmund Tame, are seen here, but their greatest monument is the church itself, a beautiful example of the last developments of Perpendicular architecture, in which the coarsened mouldings, here and there noticeable, the curiously-set pinnacles of the tower, and the character of the grotesques carved on the exterior, alone hint of that new leaven in matters architectural and spiritual, the Renascence, that was presently to overthrow ancient architecture and much else.
But the wonderful windows, twenty-eight in all, the finest and largest set of old stained-glass windows in England, are our chief concern at Fairford.
The question as to the foreign or English workmanship of these windows has always been in dispute; unnecessarily, it would appear to the present writer. They are, for the most of them, obviously of Flemish origin; and a late discovery would seem to have at last settled the point. In the west window of the south aisle will be observed an executioner with a sword, on which is a monogram A. An ape also appears in the window, for no very obvious reason, except that it affords material for a pun; a form of humour greatly favoured by the old craftsmen, as all conversant with ancient churches well know. The monogram and the ape point to the glass being the work of Aeps, a Flemish worker in this sort at the period of the Fairford church-building.
The large figures of the prophets and apostles which fill the windows of the aisles are so unmistakably Flemish that there should never have been the least doubt about them. If there were any room for incertitude, it would be in respect of the great west window, the most remarkable of the series, which appears to disclose no foreign element; but, as it in all other respects obviously belongs to the general scheme, it may perhaps be called Flemish, in common with the others.
