Stained glass of the middle ages in England and FranceArnold, Hugh
History
Stained glass of the middle ages in England and France
Arnold, Hugh
Art, Medieval; Glass painting and staining -- England; Glass painting and staining -- France
The first five windows in the south aisle seem to me to follow these
immediately in order of execution. The style is just a little more
advanced; stain is used more freely, and the canopies begin to grow up
into the white panel above them until their pinnacles reach its centre
and do away with the coloured boss there altogether; they spread into
the borders in many cases in order to give more room to the figures
under them, thus giving rise to the three-gabled form of canopy. In
colour they are still very beautiful, but have suffered much more
damage than those in the north aisle. Several of them have been
repaired and restored by Peckitt, of York, as the inscriptions show,
at the end of the eighteenth century, but Peckitt's restoration was
merciful compared to that which the fourth one has undergone at the
hands of a modern firm of stained-glass manufacturers. Whole
quantities of the old glass have been replaced by new, and the whole
has been smeared with some brownish mess to make it look old
again. As a result, all life and beauty have gone out of the window
which is merely a sort of embalmed corpse, and this is the more to be
regretted that it seems to have been a particularly interesting
window. The lower panels each contain a pair of kneeling figures, five
knights, and one churchman who hold aloft shields which show them to
be various members of the Yorkshire family of de Mauley of Mulgrave.
The founder of the family was the Poitevin ruffian, Piers de Mauley
who, at King John's orders, murdered Prince Arthur and was rewarded
for this service with the hand and estates of an unfortunate Yorkshire
heiress. The descendants of this miscreant seem, however, to have been
gallant soldiers who distinguished themselves in Scotland and Gascony
and were made barons by Edward I. A peculiarity of the family was that
the eldest son was always called Peter, and they distinguished
themselves by numbers, like kings. One of the portraits must be the
particular Peter who afterwards, in 1346, commanded the forces which
Queen Philippa raised in her husband's absence against the invading
Scots, whom he routed at Neville's Cross, taking their king, David
Bruce, prisoner, and partly avenging Bannockburn. An interesting
point of heraldry is the way in which the arms of the different sons
are distinguished, not by the marks of cadency used later, but by the
addition of different charges to the original shield which is or, a
bend sable.
The fifth window was once a Tree of Jesse but is now a mere wreck. It
is, however, the earliest Jesse Tree I know of in which the stem and
foliage of the tree are green.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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