Bottoms up: a corbel in Felmersham church, Beds

Felmersham, Beds, west front

Last week a friend and I spent a day cycling round churches west of Bedford. Of the six we visited, four were open (one of these was generally locked but we happened to arrive as a very friendly lady was cleaning): a hit rate of 66.66% is pretty good going, I think you'll agree. We started at Turvey, which is remarkable for a major series of Renaissance monuments, and worked our way north, encountering much to make me reflect how underrated Bedfordshire is. It even seems to underrate itself; in the 1990s the slogan that appeared on the road signs on the county boundary announced that you were entering 'Bedfordshire', which was 'Central to the Oxford-Cambridge arc'. Claiming a distinction in being not quite halfway between two other places seems to display an almost pathological sense of existential anxiety. 'Sorry, we know we're rubbish, but we're not far from some really quite nice places. Sorry to have troubled you. Sorry!' On the evidence of the countryside, villages and churches we saw, the county has no reason to belittle itself.

The architectural climax of the trip was Felmersham church, which I've known about for years but unaccountably have never visited before. It was built from about 1220 to 1240, and is a superb example of Early English Gothic. The west front (above) and crossing (see the bottom of the page) are both breathtaking; no one seems to know why a relatively unimportant village should come to have such a large and elaborate church. However, I'm not going to write about the building now - maybe another time - but instead I'm going to concentrate on one eye-catching feature. Well, it certainly caught my eye, though as far as I can see it hasn't previously been noticed by anyone willing to look at it in detail, which is a good reason to discuss it now. I mean the fourth nave corbel from the west on the south side:

The church has a good website (here), which has better, and more, pictures than my hasty snaps. It describes the corbel as an 'upside-down male figure with his head between his legs, poking out his tongue.' This description is true enough as far as it goes, but stops some way short of being complete. The same website comments 'Much can be read into this figure but the original purpose was to ward off evil spirits entering the church through the north chancel [sic] door*' (a slip for 'nave door'). This at least acknowledges that there's more to be said; how true it might be, and whether it's the whole truth, we'll come to in a minute. There's also the excellent Greater English Churches website, which doubts that the figure is male, commenting that it seems 'buxom', an easy enough mistake to make if you look at it only from immediately below and not from the sides.

A slide held by the Bedfordshire Archives and Record Services is titled simply 'Corbel with protruding tongue', which again overlooks the most obvious feature of the corbel: the man is displaying his buttocks. It's as if everyone wants to avoid confronting or even mentioning this awkward fact.

There is a significant tradition of sexual, or apparently or arguably sexual, carvings in medieval churches. They most commonly take the form of sheela na gigs, exhibitionist females displaying (usually greatly exaggerated) vulvas, but men displaying their anuses or penises occur too. (See the Sheela Na Gig Project, which includes male figures along with the women, though so far it's overlooked Felmersham's example.) The Felmersham corbel is clearly what is known as an anus-shower**, or a variation on that theme. He is sticking his tongue out, as the previous observers have noted, but what they've failed to see, or failed to record, is that he is sticking his tongue into, or licking, his anus. A mooning man in himself is perhaps just amusing, but this detail is shocking.

Sexual carvings are found in churches in France, Spain, England, Wales and Ireland. (Perhaps they occur in other countries too but are yet to be documented, or have all been destroyed or mutilated beyond recognition.) They mostly seem to date from around the 12th century. The drawings below are from Images of Lust: Sexual Carvings on Medieval Churches by Anthony Weir and James Jerman (1986), one of the very few books on the subject (it too overlooks the Felmersham corbel). All three of the anus-showers illustrated here are from churches in south-west France.

Anus-showers seem to be relatively rare, but there are probably hundreds of sexual carvings extant. What were these carvings for? The only certain answer is that we don't know. No documents survive, as far as I know, and even if one did it would prove only what one person at one place and time thought they meant. But we can make educated guesses:

• They're apotropaic, ie intended to ward of evil.  This is an attractive theory. This is the explanation given by the Felmersham church website (but I don't think there's any compelling evidence that medieval people thought that evil came from the north: there are plenty of south-facing possibly apotropaic carvings in churches). We might ask, though, why they're not therefore much more widespread. Didn't all churches have to defend themselves against attacks from the devil?
• They're warnings against the sin of lust. It's enticing to think that they're dire warnings against the enticements of the flesh, which could send you to Hell. Medieval Christianity, following the teachings of the early Fathers Jerome and Augustine, was extremely concerned with the evils of sex; punishments for the sins of fornication and sodomy, for example, were severe. The Church elevated the virginal and celibate over the married (quite unlike Judaism). There was also a virulent streak of misogyny running through the Church. All this perhaps explains why sheela na gigs in particular are nearly always distorted and ugly: to make them and sex seem as off-putting as possible, in order to frighten the populace and ensure they followed the Church's teachings. This explanation seems highly plausible, though if the Church was so set on condemning most sexual activity, why did this condemnation find physical expression only in the form of corbels and other stone carvings? Why not, for example, stained glass and wall paintings? This quibble can be countered by positing that all, or nearly all, such artefacts would have been destroyed since the Renaissance as obscene, whereas stone carvings, especially if they're high up in a church roof, are much harder to damage.
• They're fertility symbols. All cultures have to be concerned with fertility: crops have to grow, farm animals have to breed, married couples have to procreate, in order for society to survive. In pre-industrial societies these concerns were extremely pressing, as a poor harvest could well mean famine and starvation. The sexual carvings are a way of encouraging nature to continue renewing itself, or a plea to God that he should ensure that nature will do so. This is another attractive theory, putting medieval Christianity in a much more appealing light than the previous explanation. I'd really like to think that churches were places where fertility rites took place. But, unfortunately, this goes against most of what we know about the Church, and if this were true you'd expect some corroborating evidence to survive in the form of, say, written records of such ceremonies, and as far as I know none does. (If I'm wrong I'd be delighted to hear about it.) Also, if the carvings are intended to effectively encourage sex, why are they so ugly, the opposite of arousing?
• They're relics of pre-Christian religions. This explanation is clearly related to the previous one. Christianity made an effort to subsume and supplant paganism; several churches are next to prehistoric standing stones, for example, and Knowlton church, Dorset, is built within a Neolithic henge monument, presumably as a way of visibly demonstrating that a new religion had triumphed over the old, but simultaneously almost acknowledging the continuing power of the old gods. Perhaps the sexual carvings are Christianised versions of pagan gods and goddesses. In particular, it's been claimed that sheela na gigs represent the 'divine hag', which can be loosely explained as a powerful and probably terrifying Celtic territorial or war-goddess. Again, I want to believe this, but there's too little evidence for it to be more than a hopeful guess. Would the patrons, those who paid for the building, decoration and furnishing of churches, be happy to finance pagan idols in their sacred buildings? It seems most unlikely.
• They're pornographic. On the face of it this seems absurd, and I don't suggest that patrons ever intended to have titillating carvings in or on their churches. But it's just about possible that the patrons paid for moralistic carvings and got something they didn't quite mean. The masons who actually did the carving may have gleefully slightly misinterpreted their instructions in order to produce images designed to appeal to the sexual instincts of the populace. It's not hard to imagine young men sniggering at sheela na gigs as young men nowadays titter over page three.
• They're humorous. Some carvings, including the Felmersham corbel, make us smile today. Chaucer will be invoked to describe the type of humour they apparently embody. It seems all but certain that bums and willies and bodily functions have always had their humorous side; surely hunter-gatherers must have laughed at fart gags. There are other carvings in churches, notably misericords, that seem to display a sense of humour; maybe the sexual carvings were just meant to be funny. But there's the problem of the patrons again: would they have paid for jokes in a deadly serious building, one designed to steer the congregation away from Hell and towards Heaven? Furthermore, many of the carvings don't seem funny now, and it's hard to see how they ever could have been.
• They're satirical. Perhaps they're lampooning individual members of the community, or types of people, who for whatever reason had fallen foul of the patrons, or masons, who took their revenge by portraying them in humiliating postures. I'd love to think that this happened, and that the man in the Felmersham corbel was, for example, the local miller who'd short-changed the mason, who stuck his likeness and posterior up in the roof for posterity to laugh at. If this happened at all, however, it's very hard to think that it happened more than a handful of times; and many of the carvings have too generalised or distorted facial features to be recognisable portraits, which would defeat the satirical object.

Not all of these explanations are mutually exclusive; more than one of them could be true, or they could all be true at different times and in different places. Weir and Jerman think that most of the sexual carvings are primarily moralistic messages about the dangers of lechery. They're usually designed to shock, frighten and persuade the populace to obey the Church's teachings on sexual behaviour. I tend to agree with the authors as this explanation best fits the facts, though, as I've said, I hope some of the other theories are true at least sometimes.

All this might not seem to explain the Felmersham corbel, and the carvings of other anus-showers, which are rude and crude but not obviously sexual. There are two possible approaches to finding an explanation.

The first involves relating the carvings to those of acrobats and contortionists, who were, along with sexual sinners, subjects of ecclesiastical opprobrium. This might seem a bit unfair on the poor old entertainers, who probably seem harmless to us, but to medieval priests were far from so. As Weir and Jerman put it, acrobats are usually depicted in such a way as to make it 'plain to see that the artist wished to impart to us some notion of uncouthness, of lack of decorum and spirituality.' This is a pretty good description of the Felmersham corbel. Acrobats were being used as symbols of ungodliness. Acrobats and other popular entertainers were despised by a puritanical Church as they led the populace away from a moral life and to a world of deeply suspect pleasure. As St Augustine put it, 'Devils take pleasure in popular songs, in frivolous display, in the manifold immoralities of the theatre.' So the corbel is a dire warning about the dangers of show business. What would Augustine have said had he seen Keeping up with the Kardashians or Big Brother?

The other approach to try to find a meaning in the corbel is to examine its sexuality. The man is sticking his tongue in his anus in a way that could be read as lascivious or inviting. It's possible that the corbel is intended as a fierce denunciation of sodomy. Weir and Jerman claim that 'sodomy was the most heinous crime in the Middle Ages, its punishment often far exceeding that doled out for manslaughter or murder. St Augustine [what a pleasure to meet this cheerful chappy again so soon] considered it the vilest of acts, amounting to a sin against the Holy Spirit because it was so contrary to nature.' Its supposed unnaturalness is emphasised by the extremely cumbersome, not to say impossible, contortion of the man; he looks very uncomfortable, and hardly human.  The bestial nature of the act he is contemplating is thus stressed. This seems to me the best and likeliest explanation of the corbel. Why Felmersham out of thousands of other places found it necessary to so publicly condemn homosexual acts we can't know; conceivably there had been a recent local case when the corbels were commissioned, and the church authorities were acting to stamp out similar sinful activities.

The clerestory the corbels support is one of the few later additions to the church, being 15th century Perpendicular, but the corbels themselves date from the original 13th century building. Another mystery of the church is why a building on which no expense was spared has such poor quality nave corbels. Some of them are really crude, not in the way the anus-shower is, but in the unsophistication of their carving. (They're bigger than usual too, and so easily visible from the ground.)

St Mark is shown in the guise of a lion, or at least one mason's attempt at a lion.

A characterless lady in a box-like headdress.

An only slightly more competently carved man.

An ungainly angel holding a shield.

This lady is if anything even less well carved than the other. This mason really couldn't do mouths, could he?

St Matthew in the guise of an angel, slightly more convincingly carved.

St Luke in the guise of a goofily grinning ox.

A man, possibly a monk?

The anus-shower.

Another characterless man.

A shouting or grimacing bearded man, looking almost Romanesque in style. Perhaps the most characterful corbel.

St John in the guise of an eagle, with a face like that of a befuddled penguin.

Felmersham crossing

Felmersham crossing, north-east pier

Felmersham church is I believe open every day, so don't get left behind (oh come on, give me a break - I've been very restrained; this is only the third buttocks-related feeble pun in a fairly lengthy post), visit soon, and relish the spectacular architecture, but look up and hail the church's very own backside-barer.

* The supposed association between the north door and evil is a post-Reformation invention, dating back possibly no earlier than the Victorian period. It was invented, probably, to make medieval people seem quaint and picturesquely superstitious. There is no evidence at all to support it, and plenty of evidence to contradict it. See this article by Dr Nicholas Groves for a thorough demolition job: https://www.academia.edu/12109373/Devils_Doors_Revisited

** An anus-shower is obviously someone showing their anus, but, because of the sometimes wonderful, sometimes infuriating ambiguities of English, in some contexts it might seem as if a shower (as in a rain shower) of anuses was meant, which has a surreal charm, or a shower from anuses, which doesn't.

DRUNK ON INK: MY LIFE IN BOOKS, chapter three

This is chapter three. Chapter one is about the books I read until the age of eleven or twelve, and chapter two continues the story until my later teens. This is the third and final chapter.

                                                                             ***

Anthony Powell's 1971 novel, Books do Furnish a Room; dust jacket by James Broom-Lynne

I like books because I like reading them; this is so obvious it’s not worth saying. But there’s a lot more to it than that. Books contain the world, both in the sense of having the sum of the world's knowledge contained within them, and in the sense of controlling or limiting the world, as a disease or explosion might be contained. This seems to suggest that I regard the world as threatening or dangerous, as something to be kept at bay, which I don’t think is true, or at least no more true for me than most others. Because of course everyone wants, to a greater or lesser extent, to control the world; to control their world, anyway. Doing so makes it safe, or safer. Books impose an order on the world, and thus control it. The world is sprawling and messy and sometimes ugly; books tidy it up, tell it to pull its socks up and wipe its nose and make it altogether more beautiful. 

I like books because I like beautiful things around me. Books can be beautiful in the sense that they contain beautiful words, pictures, ideas and so on, and in the sense that they are often physically beautiful objects. The satisfaction of a well laid out page of text in a dignified and attractive font. The richly intimate inky smell of a new book, or the slightly musty smell of an older one, hinting at past readers and their lives. The crackle as the stitching gives a little when first opened. The smooth or textured touch of the paper and the weight and solidity of the cover. (Don't worry, I don't get my kicks by going round stroking and sniffing books, but their physicality, and in particular their tactility, is one of several reasons why various electronic devices, excellent though they are in their way, will never completely replace books.) The quest for beauty is obviously another manifestation of the universal desire for control. We want to shape the immediate world to our own tastes. Some cultivate their gardens, at great expense of physical effort and probably financially too, to bring order to their own little patch of ground; I cultivate my library. 

Writing had been around for more than three and a half millennia when some genius finally came up with the idea of books. Books (i.e. codices, series of flat sheets hinged along one edge, as opposed to scrolls or tablets) are one of the world's great inventions. They tend not to appear on lists of the top ten inventions (the printing press usually does, rightly so, but would have been of much less practical use had the book not been invented first), probably because it's hard to think of them as needing to be invented, as if they've just always existed*. In fact, books were invented by the Romans, perhaps in the first century CE. Coincidentally, paper was invented, in China, very soon after (in the early second century CE), but it seems that books made of paper (rather than, for example, parchment) didn't appear for well over a thousand years (at least in the West; I'm not sure about the East). Like all familiar things, it's very easy to take books for granted and to fail to fully appreciate them, but think about them afresh for a moment and wonder at their brilliantly simple, effective, elegant design. They can store an awful lot of readily accessible verbal, numerical or pictorial information in a relatively small space, and what's more they look and feel great. (Computers obviously do the storage even better, but they're never going to look or feel as good.) A shelf of books is an asset anywhere, giving a civilising touch. Books do indeed furnish a room.

                                                                                      ***

William Golding (1911-93) is an author who seems to be relatively unfashionable now (perhaps the inevitable fate of most writers in the several decades after their deaths, though almost all his books are still in print), and consequently I’ve been able over a period of few years to build up an almost complete collection of first or early editions of his books without spending much money. Missing from my shelves are the very early Poems (1934), which would cost several thousand pounds (for a slim pamphlet), Lord of the Flies (1954), and his sole play, The Brass Butterfly (1958) (though I've got a paperback of the latter). Lord of the Flies, his first published novel, retains its kudos, and so it's impossible to find affordable early editions (not just first editions, first impressions, but all impressions) in their Anthony Gross dustjacket. Fortunately, having taught it so often that my pleasure in it, great book though it undoubtedly is, is utterly exhausted, I never want to read it again, so I’m fairly sanguine about its absence from my library. If I did ever come across a cheapish copy I would buy it, though, not to read but just for the pleasure of seeing it next to The Inheritors. I realise that many will find this odd or worse, and I have to admit I have a lot of sympathy with this view. I’d still buy it, however.

I like the fact that Golding’s most considered words are immediately available to me, compactly and pleasingly presenting themselves on my shelves. Each narrow spine promises a wide wealth of words.

The Golding sequence excellently illustrates my point about the beauty of books; almost every one is a satisfying artefact, with a cover design by a prominent artist. Darkness Visible is printed on horribly cheap paper (it’s less than 40 years old but already it’s badly yellowed and seems on the verge of crumbling to dust), but nevertheless I very much like them as a collection (as well as, obviously, individual books). 

His first four novels have jackets by Anthony Gross (1905-84). The Inheritors is from 1955, and Pincher Martin from the following year.

Free Fall was published in 1959. I don't know why Gross didn't get the job of designing the cover of The Spire (1964); it went instead to John Piper (1903-92).

The cover of The Hot Gates (1965) (a book of essays) is by Michael Ayrton (1921-75), and that of The Pyramid (1967) by Leonard Rosoman (1913-2012).

The cover of The Scorpion God (1971) is uncredited, but obviously incorporates an Egyptian tomb painting. That of Darkness Visible (1979) is from a painting by Russell Drysdale (1912-81).

The cover of The Paper Men (1984) is by Paul Hogarth (1917-2001), and that of the posthumously published The Double Tongue (1995) incorporates a picture from Athenian red-figure pottery.

Rites of Passage (1980), the first volume of the trilogy later titled To the Ends of the Earth, has a cover by Cathie Felstead (b.1954), who Wikipedia tells me was born and lives in Hertfordshire. It must have been a great boon to her career to be commissioned to design the cover for what turned out to be a Booker Prize-winning novel in the year she graduated from the Royal College of Art. I like her work, but it's a shame that one artist didn't design all three covers. The other two (1987 and 1989) are by Paul Hogarth.

I have a more or less complete set of Pevsner’s Buildings of England (only more or less complete because, while I have got volumes covering every county, I haven’t got all the latest revised editions). They make a fine sight in their black-spined dust-jackets, occupying the best part of two yards of shelf space. They’re not quite uniform as, as well as being two different sizes, the original Penguin volumes have sans serif titling in a variety of colours (written the ‘wrong way up’ on the spine, that is, so that when the book is face up the lettering is upside down; why are spines ever lettered like this?), while since about 2000 the  larger volumes published by Yale have white serifed titles (the right way up). I’m not quite sure if I’d prefer the set to be fully uniform; on the whole I think I like its diversity as this reflects the capricious variety of the country it so comprehensively delineates. 

The books are attractively designed and produced, with the exception of the central pages of photographs which are too small, too grey and often unimaginatively composed (the Yale volumes are better). The books are of course a cornucopia of knowledge and information, and I wouldn’t contemplate going on a journey without the relevant volumes accompanying me. This is only part of the reason I like having them, though. I very much like the sense of ownership they give me, as if the buildings and places they describe belong to me (which they do in a way, since they’re the common heritage of the inhabitants of these islands), and I belong to the culture that created them. On reflection, I think this is a large part of the reason I like all books: they make me feel that I’m an integral part of the world. Having Golding’s books on my shelves is as if I’m responsible for them, in the sense that it’s the next best thing to having written them myself, and in the sense that I have a duty to preserve them and the civilisation that created them. I realise that this is erroneous, pompous and ridiculously self-regarding, but nevertheless it contains a large psychological truth.

This is volume one (the only one I've got, of four originally published) of The Dramatick Works of Thomas Shadwell, Esq, published in London in 1720. I've had it for decades; it's of little monetary value, being a stray volume from a set (Abebooks has the four volumes from £265, though if I sold this solitary book I'd be lucky to get a tenner). Thomas Shadwell (c.1642-92) is generally considered not much more than a footnote in the history of English Literature. His plays are very rarely performed and his poetry hardly read (though his lyric 'Nymphs and shepherds, come away' survives because Henry Purcell set it to music). I've read a couple of the four plays in this volume, and I'm not going to claim that he's an overlooked master (but he's certainly not without interest - I rather enjoyed The Virtuoso, a satire on science and scientists - and deserves better than posterity's neglect). Nevertheless, I like the book very much.

I like the marbled boards, their worn patches telling of innumerable past perusals, of being taken from and put back on shelves dozens, hundreds of time over the centuries. The seven raised bands, outlined with gilt, of the spine give the volume a touch of swank and swagger. The little headpiece woodcuts try to do the same, but despite their pretensions they're cheerfully rustic. The text is set in a very sturdy font, which is not however without whimsy - see the little flourishes on the italic capital Ds in the words 'Shadwell' and 'London' below, for example. The typesetting is a little uneven, evidence of its being laboriously done by  overworked printers straining their eyes in cramped workshops. Like all paper books published before the invention of wood pulp-based paper in the 1840s, the paper is rag-based (i.e. made from textiles such as cotton and linen). This gives the pages a delicious almost creamy colour and a wonderfully crisp texture; rag-based paper also lasts much longer than some paper made from wood.

This book has survived almost 300 years; it's just about as readable and attractive now as it was when it was first printed. I like the sense of history it embodies, all the past readers and owners, all the happenings it's witnessed. 

As long as it's treated tolerably well it will last for another 300 years, and more. This is the final triumph of books over electronic devices. Data stored on computers will become inaccessible as technology moves on, while books will remain readable for centuries, probably even millennia. I've got some old floppy discs with things I've written over the years stored on them; even though they're not much more than a decade old, finding the equipment to read them would be difficult. I could, if I tried hard enough, extract the data now, but what about in ten years time, or fifty? Computers will have moved on so much that it will be impossible. We all have photos on our phones and laptops, which no doubt we'd like to look at in decades to come, and our descendants would want to see in the further future. But these photos will effectively disappear as the technology storing them becomes obsolete. Future generations will have better access to family photos from the 1910s than they will from the 2010s.

The classic example of this technological obsolescence is the Domesday Book project of 1986. The original Domesday Book was completed in 1086, and its parchment pages are entirely legible (and beautiful).  It's lasted for 930 years so far, and is still going strong. In 1986, to celebrate its 900th anniversary, a project to compile a modern version of Domesday was finished, and stored on what was then the latest technology, laserdisc. Since then laserdiscs have been replaced several times over by better devices, and the hardware necessary to read them has been discarded. So the 930 year old book is near enough as good as new, while the 30 year old technology is useless. It's true that efforts have been made to successfully retrieve the data, but it will have been stored in another format which will inevitably become obsolete in its turn, and in a lot less than another 30 years will be once again inaccessible. 

The only long term solution is to print the text and still pictures (books admittedly aren't of much help with moving images) and store them in books. The two thousand year old technology wins hands down. Pixels are poxy; paper is powerful. No wonder I'm intoxicated by the possibilities offered by books; I'm drunk on ink.

***

When I wrote the first version of this essay a few years ago I wanted to put a suitably bookish epigraph at the top, and I thought of a quotation from Shakespeare that I remembered seeing on a poster in the English department at a school I taught in once. I remembered it as something like ‘I pity the poor fellow who has not drowned in ink.’ I realised this wasn't absolutely word perfect, and I couldn’t remember the next phrase, which was another metaphor about being absorbed by reading (‘wrapped himself in paper’, something like that), and I wasn’t sure which play it came from, so I emailed my friend Robert who worked at the school to check the details. He replied that neither he nor any other member of the department had any memory of such a poster. 

A quick check in a concordance revealed that Shakespeare never uses the phrase ‘drowned in ink’, or anything like it. What’s more, a Google search drew a complete blank; not only had Shakespeare not written these words, but apparently no one else had either. Had I just made up the quotation, or was I half-remembering something I’d seen or heard elsewhere? If I'd had the gumption to search the concordance for 'ink' rather than 'drowned' I would have solved the conundrum far more quickly than I did. (And if I'd stopped to think sensibly for a moment I'd have realised that drowning by definition means having too much of something, and so drowning in ink couldn't possibly be a good thing.) My memory had seriously garbled a quotation from Love's Labour's Lost, which is about drinking ink, not drowning in it. 

Sir, he hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book.
He hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink.
His intellect is not replenished; he is only an animal, only sensible in the duller parts.
And such barren plants are set before us that we thankful should be -
Which we of taste and feeling are - for those parts that do fructify in us more than he.**

In these lines (from Act IV scene 2) Sir Nathaniel the curate (assistant priest) is describing Anthony Dull, the dim-witted constable. Nathaniel is likeable enough but by no means an entirely admirable character; his pomposity, and the fact that he's nothing like as learned as he thinks, means that we don't have to agree with everything he says. I wouldn't apply his condescending words, calling Dull 'only an animal' and a 'barren plant' whose 'intellect is not replenished' because he's not a 'bookman'***, to anyone just because they don't read much; many non-booklovers are of course full of 'intellect', 'taste' and 'feeling'. And yet I secretly (or not so secretly now I'm blogging to the world about it) want to cheer Nathaniel's words. Dainty delights are bred in books. Eating paper and drinking ink does replenish the intellect.****

None of this solves the mystery of whether there was a poster in the English department with a quotation from Love's Labour's Lost. Did I just imagine it?

Having taught English for 36 years it shouldn’t continue to surprise me that so many people get no pleasure from reading, but it does. I've spent hours over the last few years in hospital waiting rooms, and I've observed that about ten percent of people will be reading a book, another ten percent a newspaper or magazine, and maybe twenty or thirty percent will do things on their phone or other electronic device (which perhaps includes reading). Which means that at least half of them choose to sit, sometimes for hours, apparently staring blankly into the middle distance. This baffles me; why don't they read something? (I suppose part of the answer is that they feel the same way about reading novels as I do about reading the small print on credit card agreements.) Yet maybe they’re usefully mulling over their lives, effectively meditating, as they sit seemingly doing nothing. Maybe it’s me, with my horror of being stationary anywhere for more than a minute without something to read (a characteristic my son has inherited), who is to be pitied for my lack of self-sufficiency and inability to use such times for healthy introspection? Well, maybe; but I'm going to continue to eat paper and drink ink.






* Ink, a vital but easily overlooked ingredient of books, also needed to be invented. Apparently it's been invented independently by many different cultures at different times, but the Chinese got there first in the 23rd century BCE.

** Nathaniel's words are about having drunk ink, not being made drunk by it, and I've consciously misquoted them in my title for my own purposes.

*** Later in the same scene Dull calls Nathaniel and Holofernes (a schoolmaster) 'bookmen', a word the Princess of France has used earlier in the play to describe the King of Navarre and his lords. Boyet, the Princess's lordly attendant, also describes them as 'bookmates', a brilliant coinage which Shakespeare uses nowhere else. It suggests being mates with someone because of a shared taste for books, and also being mates with books.

**** Shakespeare himself seems to share my ambivalence. The play begins with the King and his lords vowing to shut themselves away from the world (and especially women) for three years while they read. Shakespeare must have deeply valued his time spent alone with books. Yet in the play's second scene the Princess and her ladies arrive, and predictably the men start falling in love with them, and the limitations of book-learning are rapidly exposed.

St Michael's church, St Albans, Herts - a medieval textbook, part two: contents

This is part two, concerning St Michael's furnishings etc. You can read part one, about the architecture, here.

Apologies for the currently unsatisfactory quality of many of these photos. The next time there's a sunny day and I'm free I shall go and try to take better ones.

A common feature of medieval churches was a depiction of the Last Judgement, known as a Doom, usually over the chancel arch. A substantial handful survive, for example, in Salisbury, Wilts:

and Chaldon, Surrey (an unusually early example from c1200, also unusual in being on the west wall):

They were usually painted on the plaster-covered walls, but sometimes (only five survive, apparently) they were on wood, as at Wenhaston, Suffolk:

and Dauntsey, Wilts:

They usually follow the same format (though the one at Chaldon is different): Christ is in the middle at the top, often sitting on a rainbow, with Heaven on his right (i.e. on the viewer's left), and Hell on his left. The saved are seen being welcomed into the former, while the damned are eternally tormented by devils in the latter. The Dooms were textbooks in a largely illiterate age, designed to teach the congregation about the bliss they would find should they get to Heaven, but also, and even more importantly, to thoroughly terrify them with the horrors of Hell, and thus ensure that they followed the Church's teachings.

Displayed on the south wall of St Michael's is one of only two Herts remnants of Dooms (the other is a fragmentary wall painting in Flamstead). Its rarity is increased by being on wood (though I don't think it counts as one of the five survivors as it's only a small section of the complete painting). Oddly, however, Pevsner ignores it.

In 1808 the remains of St Michael's Doom, probably dating from the 15th century, were discovered over the chancel arch. The custodians of the church at the time lacked the means or the will to preserve it, but at least it was documented before it was painted over, and a reproduction of the original copy of the Doom now hangs beneath the surviving section.

On the left is seen Heaven, imagined as a handsome building with St Peter standing in the doorway. To the right of this is Mary, and above her and to her right is Christ, seated on a rainbow, overseeing proceedings. The middle is a crucifixion, with angels sounding the Last Trump above, and below souls rising from the dead. (The semi-circular section at the bottom is the only surviving detail.) On the right is Hell, imagined as a monster with gaping mouth, swallowing sinners being chivvied in by bat-winged devils. One devil is giving a piggyback to a not especially alarmed woman carrying a tankard, her sin presumably being drunkenness and/or gluttony. The banner (the equivalent of a comic strip's speech bubble) at the devil's heel says 'Go, souls, into eternal fire', and sure enough in Hell's mouth the damned are burning.

But nearly all this has gone. What survives is a wooden tympanum which would originally have fitted under the chancel arch, with the lower third of the cross, and six dead awaking and looking toward Heaven. Note the unperspictival depiction of the coffins; perspective was invented in Italy in the early 15th century, but took well over a century to reach England.

The first figure (top left) seems to be a bearded Pope, wearing his papal tiara. (Incidentally, the dead have mostly lost their robes but retain their headgear as an indication of their status). His hands are not clasped, but extended, palms inwards; I assume that there's a meaning to this gesture but I don't know what it is. Perhaps someone could enlighten me.

The second is a king, also bearded, wearing a crown and what appear to be boxer shorts. Being royal he is spared the indignity of appearing completely naked. He is crossing his hands over his chest; again, I'm sure this gesture must have a significance.

The third (on the bottom left) is a man with a pudding-bowl haircut, familiar from portraits of Henry V (died 1422), so the style would have been fashionable when the Doom was painted. He has an especially awed expression; his gesture is similar to the pope's.

The fourth is a queen with flowing hair, crown and slender waist. She looks serenely joyful and clasps her hands together and to her chest in fervent prayer.

The fifth is a woman with hair even longer than the queen's. She is still wearing her shroud, and appears awed. She is the only one of the six not gesturing, as she's using her arms to get up.

The last of the awakening dead is perhaps the most humanly affecting of them all: he looks surprised, even shocked, arms spread wide and mouth agape, to be witnessing the Last Things and to find himself on his way to Heaven.

On the evidence of this tympanum, fifty percent of those who escaped Hell were either royalty or from the upper echelons of the Church: not very encouraging odds if you were one of the multitude.

The late medieval artist (though he wouldn't have thought of himself as an 'artist', merely as an artisan) who painted the Doom wasn't especially skilful or sophisticated, but he has brought some individuality and humanity to the six surviving resurrecting figures. Believe me, I've tried, but I really can't avoid saying that he's brought them to life.

Francis Bacon (1561-1626), 1st Viscount St Alban* and Lord Chancellor, an important figure in the history of science and of some significance in the colonisation of the New World, and in other aspects of life in early 17th century England, lived at Old Gorhambury House**.  The ruins of his home are well worth the mile and a half stroll from the church along a footpath past the theatre. He famously died (at least according to the gossipy John Aubrey) of pneumonia caught by stuffing a chicken with snow in order to study the effects of freezing on meat.

His life-size monument stands on the north side of the chancel. He is shown seated, an unusual posture for figures in monuments (they're usually either standing, kneeling in prayer or recumbent), and, even more unusually, and delightfully, he's having forty winks. This is very endearing, as if he were sitting for a portrait and just couldn't keep his eyes open. His right hand droops languidly and his legs are casually splayed. He's dressed in his best, including those absurd tied-up-above-the-knee breeches that look as if they've been inflated, and, below the knee, extravagant bows. A perky wide-brimmed hat tops off the sartorial composition.

There's a copy of this statue (by Henry Weekes, 1845) in the chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge, which, however, omits the hat. I was brought up to believe that, except in certain well-defined circumstances, hats were not worn indoors by gentlemen. (Not that my respectably lower-middle class upbringing gave me any cause to consider myself someone of such standing. I still pause at the doors of lavatories marked GENTLEMEN and worry that I'm getting above my station.) No doubt etiquette was different in Jacobean times. Perhaps the sculptor of the copy also thought that the indoor hat (especially in a house of God) was a social solecism and left it out to spare Bacon's blushes; you could say, to save his bacon. I'm sorry, I don't know what's come over me today.

It wasn't common for monuments to be signed at this date, and no documentary evidence about the origins of the monument apparently survives. Although it's well carved, it's not up to the standards of the best sculptor of the day, Maximilian Colt (who carved the superb Cecil monument at Hatfield).

There are lots of Jacobean pulpits (i.e. from the reign of James I (1603-25), Jacobus being the Latin equivalent of James), because James issued an edict requiring all churches to have one. (Similar rules had been made before, but presumably not rigidly enforced.) St Michael's example is particularly splendid; it's supported on dragons, and is complete with stairs, book rest, wrought iron hour glass (for timing the sermons), standard (the back board) and tester (the sounding board at the top).

The standard has flanking gryphons. There are also an altar table and a pair of chairs, all of similar date to the pulpit.

There's no medieval glass in the church; this small but richly coloured heraldic shield in the chancel is the only ancient glass.

There is however plenty of Victorian glass, most of it of at least acceptable quality. I'll draw your attention to just one of them, in the westernmost south window of the chancel. It was designed by Nathaniel Westlake (1833-1921) for the firm Lavers and Barraud, in 1861.  I think it's excellent; I like the way all the figures in the top are crammed together, frieze-like, with practically no background, making a very strong pattern, and the uninhibited colours. And, unlike much Victorian glass, the faces aren't too painterly and sentimental.

The window depicts, in the top, the Communion of Saints adoring the Agnus Dei, and, bottom left, Extreme Unction (the last rites), and, bottom right, the sacrament of Communion. There must have been plenty of parishioners in 1861 who shuddered at the Popish implications of all this.

The jambs of the easternmost south chancel window have Victorian painted decoration; a bit twee, but pretty enough.

This crudely painted and worn royal coat of arms dates from 1660, the year of Charles II's restoration to the throne after the Commonwealth.

The south door is original, and has some confidently carved names; they don't look like illicit graffiti, and are perhaps the names of churchwardens. This one records the name John Turner, with an 'I' standing in for a 'J' and a 'V' for a 'U', as was usual before the 17th century, which gives us some hint as to the date of the carving. The backward 'Ns', however, imply limited literacy.

There's more to see in St Michael's than I've mentioned here; in particular, there are three brasses (but, as any regular readers these indigations might have will know, brasses have usually got to be pretty special specimens to interest me). I've usually been lucky when visiting the church and have found it open and welcoming. It's more likely to be open in the summer months than the winter, but even if you are unlucky enough to turn up when it's closed you can console yourself by visiting all the nearby Roman relics. But the church is certainly worth a second (or further) attempt to get in.

* Confusingly, his title is sometimes spelt 'Alban' and sometimes 'Albans'.

** Its Palladian successor, Gorhambury House, is open to the public on Thursday afternoons from May to September (for details see here), and I thoroughly recommend a visit even though you have to join a guided tour and aren't allowed to explore at your own pace. The books in the library are still shelved and organised under classifications devised by Bacon.