Chapter XII: Late Fourteenth Century Glass in England

(TRANSITIONAL--GLOUCESTER AND THE WORK OF THE WINCHESTER SCHOOL)

An interesting thing about the design of stained glass in the fourteenth century is that it never stands still, but changes more rapidly than at any other period in its history. At Gloucester, not more than from ten to twenty years after the latest of the windows I have been describing, the great east window of the Cathedral was filled with glass, which already faintly foreshadows the change into the style of the succeeding period.

The Severn valley is rich in glass of the fourteenth century, the work of a school which may have had its headquarters at Gloucester, where, in later times, at all events, there were important glass-works, which may still be seen in seventeenth century views of the city.

The fourteenth century glass at Shrewsbury, Tewkesbury, and Wells is all of this school, and differs in many little ways from the work at York, among which are the frequency of the ogival arch and gable in the canopies, and, at Wells, the presence of foliated brackets which support the figures. Whether the work in Bristol Cathedral also belongs to it I am not quite prepared to say.

[Sidenote: The east window of Gloucester Cathedral.]

I have no space, however, to describe these windows, and must return to the east window of Gloucester Cathedral which is later in style than any of them. Winston, who has given it the same careful study that he had devoted to the Peter de Dene window at York, points out that the coats of arms in it are all those of nobles who took part in the Campaign of Crècy in 1346 and deduces that the date of the window is not later than 1350, whereas Westlake thinks it cannot be earlier than 1360. In either case it is remarkable. To begin with, the tracery of this immense window, the second largest in England, is pure Perpendicular, and the earliest important example of it. The glass, on the other hand, in its architectural detail, style of drawing, and material used, belongs almost wholly to the Second or Decorated Period, and it is mainly in its planning and general colour scheme that we find a hint of approaching change. The perpendicular mullions and horizontal transoms divide the great window, which is slightly bowed outwards to give its strength, into a series of horizontal rows of narrow lights one above the other, fourteen lights in a row, each light being about two feet wide and from six to nine feet high. The lower tiers (and originally this was true of the tracery as well) are filled with quarries, and the upper one of these, the first that extends all across the window,--for the entrance to the Lady Chapel makes a gap below it,--is decorated with the splendid row of coats of arms already mentioned. Above this each light, row upon row, contains a figure under a canopy, the side shafts of which extend into the light above and support the canopy there, while the central pinnacle also extends upwards past the transom and expands into a flat-topped pedestal which carries the figure above. Figure and canopy are white, their whiteness only emphasised by touches of yellow stain, and relieved against a coloured background. The background of the two central columns of lights is ruby, that of the column on each side blue, and the next ruby again and so on alternately. Thus the general effect is of a white pattern on a background that is striped vertically with alternate red and blue. It is this simple but effective colour scheme that gives the window its resemblance in effect to Perpendicular glass; but there are other features--the complete absence of borders, the pedestals that carry the figures (which are first found at Wells), and the decoration of the quarries--which all indicate the coming change. The quarries, where the original ones remain, still have the "trellis" pattern, but instead of the continuous flowing pattern of foliage running through them each quarry has a sort of star pattern in the middle of it, stained yellow, a design much more common in the fifteenth than in the fourteenth century. This placing of quarries at the foot of the windows and in the tracery has its origin, of course, in the old fourteenth century arrangement of a horizontal stripe or stripes of figure and canopy work on a ground of grisaille.

The subject of the window is the enthronement of the virgin surrounded by apostles, saints, and angels; the same subject as that of the west window of York Minster which it was probably meant to, and certainly does, surpass. The figures themselves, however, still suffer from the conventionality and affectation of the period, and it was not for twenty years more that there was to be a change in that quarter as well.

[Sidenote: William of Wykeham and Thomas the Glazier.]

It was in 1380, or soon after, that new life came into the art through the piety and enterprise of William of Wykeham, whose influence may be compared to that of Abbot Suger in the twelfth century, and the genius of his master glazier, Thomas. Of the latter we only know his name from the portrait of himself which he put in the windows of Winchester College Chapel (now, alas! only modern copies of the originals), with the inscription "Thomas operator ist. vitri," but his hand is easily recognizable not only at Winchester, and in the three original lights from thence now in South Kensington Museum, but in the glorious set of windows in the antechapel of New College at Oxford.

[Sidenote: New College antechapel.]

There had been no such work as this last done since the best days of the thirteenth century. Here, once again, one finds the art used as a means of emotional expression not only in the deep and solemn harmonies of colour that strike one with a thrill on entering the building, but in the treatment of the subjects themselves, in which the artist breaks completely away from the conventionalism of the preceding period.

The antechapel of New College, a graceful piece of Early Perpendicular, is really, like that at Merton, a cross transept at the west end of the Chapel, forming a =T= of which the antechapel is the head, having windows on all its four sides--two on the east, on either side of the entrance to the Chapel proper, two on the north, one on the south, and three on the west. The glass of the great central west window was taken out to make room for Jervais' smudgy rendering in muddy browns and yellows of Sir Joshua Reynolds' famous Virtues. I am not concerned with this but with the other windows, which contain, though some of the lights are evidently out of their order, the original glazing which William of Wykeham placed here when he built the Chapel, between 1380 and 1386.

[Sidenote: The canopies.]

The design of the windows is a very simple one. The horizontal transom divides each window into two equal tiers of four, or, in the eastern windows, six, lights with tracery above. Each light is filled with a figure standing on a pedestal and under a canopy, both canopy and pedestal being white, enriched with touches of yellow stain, relieved against a background which is, or was, blue and red in alternate lights, the colour of the background inside the canopy being counterchanged with the colour outside. From this arrangement and from the presence of the pedestal I think the artist had seen both Wells and the east windows of Gloucester Cathedral, but the architecture of his canopies is of a fantastic kind peculiar to this school and unlike anything in glass of the styles which preceded and followed it, but based to some extent on the stone canopies of the late fourteenth century, such as those on the screen of the west front of Exeter Cathedral. The most noticeable feature in them is the number of queer rounded turrets with pepper-box tops, modelled in relief. Indeed for their solidity, as well as for their violent and untrue perspective, these canopies have more in common with those introduced at Fairford a hundred years later, when the continental influence was coming in, than with the typical canopy of English Perpendicular.

From the large amount of space that is occupied by the canopy work, the general effect of these windows is rather a white one (though white in all old work is a relative term, the white in this case consisting really of a delicate play of greenish, yellowish, and pure white continually contrasted), and the most beautiful to my mind are those in which, as in the windows on the north side which face one on entering, the figures themselves are almost entirely covered with a coloured mantle which makes a broad splash of distinctive colour in the middle of each light.

[Sidenote: The eastern windows.]

Although all the windows conform to the same general design, those on the east side, on each side of the entrance to the Chapel proper, seem to me to be by a different hand, and were probably done first. They contain or contained originally no colours but red and blue, and the drawing of the figures has much of the conventionalism of the earlier fourteenth century work. The upper tier consists of the twelve apostles, and the lower is believed to have contained the figure of the crucified Christ with His mother and St. John on either side, repeated four times. The figures of Christ have all been destroyed and replaced by figures from elsewhere, perhaps from the destroyed west window; but three figures of the Virgin and three of St. John remain, though it was only in 1900 that they were replaced in what I have little doubt were their original positions. It may, of course, be that these windows are by the same artist as the others, but done before he had quite found himself or emancipated himself from the conventionalities of his predecessors, for he has infused a certain amount of life into the old forms; and the "Mater Dolorosa," in spite of her conventional S-like pose, is a tender and pathetic figure.

[Sidenote: The colouring.]

There is, however, no trace of this conventionality in the other windows, quaint though the drawing may be, and in the colour of them the artist has fairly "let himself go." I know of no better piece of "colour music" in the world than is afforded by the double tier of prophets and patriarchs which occupy the two northern windows which face one on entering--deep rich purple of many shades, warm green, slaty-blue, brown, and a splendid blood-red ruby with a great deal of variety in it; the changes are rung on these in the mantles, hats, and shoes of the figures, while the reds and blues of the backgrounds form a connecting link between them all. A pretty detail is the powdering of the backgrounds to the figures in all the windows with the initials of the personage represented, in white Lombardic letters surmounted by little gold crowns. The drawing is, I admit, quaint,--Thomas was not a great draughtsman even for his time; far from it,--but it is always big, masculine, and expressive, with a strong feeling for decorative line. To copy the scrolls which twist and flutter round the prophets in the upper tier is in itself a lesson in design.

[Sidenote: Eve.]

Perhaps nowhere is his originality of conception so well shown as in the figure of Eve, in the northern west window. Instead of representing her, as nearly every other artist has done to the best of his ability, as a graceful nude, he has given us a peasant woman of his own time, spinning with a distaff and spindle. I do not know that he has even tried to make her pretty, and in the simple drawing of the folds of her colourless dress he has managed to suggest that it is of coarse thick stuff. She is neither nymph nor princess but the sharer of man's daily drudgery. In looking at her one is unavoidably reminded of the lines which Wat Tyler's followers had sung only a year or two before:--

When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?

The little upright tracery lights are filled with angels, but in the summit of the northern east window is a small figure of William of Wykeham kneeling before his Saviour, who shows His wounds. This and the mutilated inscription at the base of each light, "Orate pro Willelmo de Wykeham, Episcopo Wynton, fundatore istius collegii," is all there is to tell of the donor. There was a new spirit abroad; no longer were the portrait and arms of the patron allowed to usurp half, or, as at Tewkesbury, the whole of a church window, nor in England, at all events till the end of the fifteenth century, was the practice again revived to quite the same extent.

These windows mark the second of the great periodic impulses in stained glass, which I spoke of at the beginning of the book. Only the second, I consider, for though there had been many changes in style since the twelfth century, each had meant, on the whole, a loss of beauty rather than a gain, whereas now we find a sudden infusion of new life into the art, which did not in England lose its force for fifty or sixty years to come, and produced a new style, the style of the Third Period. To me these windows are one of the great art treasures of the world, yet as I lately sat there all through a long spring afternoon, party after party of visitors, many of them people educated enough, one would think, to know better, came in to gaze awe-struck at Sir Joshua's muddy brown Virtues, and left without a glance at the glorious colour harmonies which surrounded them.

[Sidenote: Winchester College.]

Of other work of Thomas the Glazier and his school--the Winchester school, as Mr. Westlake calls it--little but fragments remain, unless one counts a window in the south aisle of the Lady Chapel of York Minster, the third from the east, which somewhat resembles their work and represents just about the same stage in development. William of Wykeham's next great work was the founding of Winchester College in 1387, and in what remains of its glass the hand of Thomas can be clearly seen. But, alas! in the early nineteenth century they took out the old glass and substituted modern copies; it was their method of restoration in those days. The old glass seems to have been the perquisite of the glazier, and three of the lights, after various peregrinations,--spending eight years in a window of St. Mary's, Shrewsbury,--have found their way to South Kensington Museum where they may still be seen. In style they are very like the north, west, and south windows at New College, and quite obviously by the same hand, though perhaps the canopies, at least in one case, show a very slight progress towards the regular Perpendicular type. The material seems to me much the same as at New College, but for some reason the coloured glass is much more pitted by the weather and consequently obscured, though the white, perhaps from a different shop, is in splendid preservation.

[Sidenote: Winchester Cathedral.]

The great west window of Winchester Cathedral contains fragments and a few whole figures of very similar work, and there are others in the side windows of the nave. William of Wykeham's will, made in 1403, leaves money for the glazing of the Cathedral windows "beginning from the west at the first window of the new work done by him," which sounds as if the west end had been already glazed. Indeed the fragments there are more like the eastern windows (the earliest, if I am right) in New College antechapel, while in the fragments that remain in the side windows of the nave the later hand can be traced, though the tendency in the canopies of these is to assimilate gradually to the regular Perpendicular type which by this time had been developed elsewhere.

Winston thinks the west window of the Cathedral may have been glazed in the time of William of Wykeham's predecessor, Bishop Edington, in which case it is not unlikely that it and the east windows of the antechapel at New College were the work of Thomas's master, whose style was further developed and improved by Thomas himself.