I missed some fine misericords last weekend, by all accounts. I was in Beverley in the East Riding to give a talk, and was struck by the beauty of the medieval market town's church and minster. I was told they have excellent carvings inside them, but to be honest, I was tired from talking about Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo and I staggered to the train station instead.
My loss. Britain's churches are full of glorious art. It is well known that our medieval heritage of religious art was badly damaged, in many cases obliterated, by the Reformation. Perhaps it is too well known, because it is a half-truth. Before Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, their cloisters were richly decorated, and even parish churches had murals, painted rood screens, sculpted portraits and exquisite wood carvings. Even the violent attacks and systematic destruction inflicted on these buildings in the 16th and 17th centuries could not utterly efface such abundance. Relics of medieval art survive in parish churches as well as cathedrals all over Britain.
This art has been rediscovered by historians in recent decades. The large section of photographs in Eamon Duffy's influential book The Stripping of the Altars is a treasure trove of forgotten British art. Diarmaid MacCulloch's book Reformation begins with a discussion of a 14th-century figure carved into the stonework of Preston Bissett church in Buckinghamshire.
Visual evidence has now become integral to historical research, and these broken figures are windows on to how people in Britain thought and felt about the world 600 years ago and earlier. But they are also magical works of art. How wonderful is it to see a face grinning and gurning in a carving chiselled by a nameless artisan who lived at the time of Chaucer?
The parish church where my grandparents prayed has a lovely stained glass window. Local lore told of it being carefully buried to save it from 17th-century iconoclasts. What about churches in your area? Do they have ancient stained glass (rare) or traces of wall paintings? This is a kind of Time Team investigation we can all do, without a spade. Nude peasants, brave knights and the devil himself are all to be found in the churches of Britain.
