Stained glass is the most extensive surviving monumental manifestation of the English medieval painters’ art. This is often overlooked thanks to the damaged and confused state of some of our medieval windows and the relatively inaccessible height of others, making studying them a particular challenge. It is also the case, however, that this glittering and translucent medium continues to cast a spell on generations of visitors to churches, chapels and cathedrals up and down the land; and nowhere more so than in Oxfordshire, one of the richest counties for stained glass of all periods.
Despite the Reformation, responsible for so many losses of medieval art, the functional role played by stained glass – keeping out the rain and wind while letting in essential light – meant that windows were one of the last things to be attacked by the religious iconoclast. Over eighty Oxfordshire parish churches preserve medieval glass, dating from the thirteenth century, when stained glass first made a significant impact on the parish church, to the mid sixteenth century when the Reformation and dissolution of the monasteries heralded a period of decline. This single county offers a comprehensive overview of the development of the medium in its medieval heyday and it was for this reason that Oxfordshire was the first county to be surveyed by the British Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi, and the international academic project devoted to the study and publication of historic window glass. Not surprisingly, perhaps, some of the most important stained glass in England is to be found in the city of Oxford, where the wealth and prestige of the University was expressed in stone and glass of the highest quality.
The chapels of Merton College, Christ Church, New College, All Souls and Balliol preserve some of the most important glazing schemes of the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries anywhere in Europe. Recent research has identified the glazier responsible for the Merton choir windows William de Thame and dates them to the period 1307-11, making this the earliest surviving English glazing scheme that can be attributed to a named glazier. It is clear that the thriving market town of Thame was home to a significant number of glaziers in the fourteenth century and on stylistic grounds glass at a number of locations throughout the country (including Ashthall, Aston Rowant, and Dorchester) has been attributed to Master William. Another of the most famous and admired English glaziers of the Middle Ages also came from Oxfordshire; Master Thomas Glazier (d.1427-8) was employed in the 1380s and 90s to glaze the chapels of New College, Oxford and Winchester College (where he is actually represented in the east window) for Bishop William of Wykeham (c.1324-1404), founder and patron of both institutions. Thomas’s work is also found in Merton College chapel and he probably also supplied glass for Winchester Cathedral.
The subject-matter found in Oxfordshire’s medieval windows is varied and rich. Narratives of the life of the Virgin Mary, the principal heavenly intercessor and believed to have a special relationship with England, are preserved at Beckley and Stanton St John, while at Kidlington and Marsh Baldon she is taught to read by her mother, St Anne, a devotional image likely to have had great appeal for mothers and daughters. Thomas Becket was the English saint best-known throughout medieval Christendom, but his imagery was singled out for destruction in the reign of Henry VIII and is consequently now rare. However, in the third quarter of the 15th century an extensive narrative of the Life of St Thomas Becket was installed in the chapel of St Mary Magdalene in Woodstock and two scenes have survived, relocated in the 19th century to the Bodleian Library. One shows the exiled archbishop received by King Louis VII of France, while the other shows the penance of the contrite Henry II. A single 14th-century image of his martyrdom survives tucked away in the Lucy Chapel Christ Church Cathedral. In the east window of the Stapeldon chantry of All Saints, North Moreton (formerly Berkshire, now Oxfordshire), images of saints universal to medieval Christendom, Peter, Paul and Nicholas accompany the Crucifixion and images of the Virgin. Oxfordshire windows also honour some of the county’s local saints. At Kidlington there is an image of St Frideswide (who is also probably one of the saintly abbesses at Merton College), while at Dorchester there are images of the life of St Birinus, whose body was enshrined there.
In the second quarter of the sixteenth century the troubled private life of the King resulted in momentous religious change throughout the country, touching the lives of every citizen and causing a calamitous decline in the national glaziers’ craft. Surviving early sixteenth-century stained glass in the county of Oxford, such as Heythrop (c. 1522), Waterperry (c. 1527) and especially in Balliol College Chapel (1529) show the quality and vigour of this tradition cut short. The demand for stained glass art fell away and the numbers of craftsmen and artists involved in the craft witnessed a similar decline.
In the same period technical aspects of glazing also underwent a transformation, with the medieval ‘painted mosaic’ technique abandoned in favour of colouring white glass with coloured vitreous enamel paints. When a building boom began in the early years of the seventeenth century, Oxford was at the heart of a renewed interest in coloured windows and preserves the best collection of 17th-century stained glass in the country. Between 1613 and 1622, the earliest of the newly founded chapels, Wadham, was provided with a new suite of chapel windows, painted by three glass-painters working in this new method, with only limited passages executed in traditional ‘pot metal’ coloured glass, creating a sometimes ‘grid-like’ impression. The outstanding east window, by German immigrant artist Bernard van Linge (dated 1622), is a magnificent example of this style of painted glass, illustrating the Passion of Christ with its Old Testament antecedents. Bernard was soon joined in England by his younger brother Abraham, whose work can be seen at Balliol, Lincoln, Christ Church and Queen’s Colleges. In contrast to the richly coloured work of the van Linges, the windows of Richard Greenbury at Magdalen College are sombrely monochrome, but are animated by a theatrical manipulation of lighting effects, especially in the dramatic west window.
The Civil War and puritan Commonwealth that followed the execution of King Charles I in 1649 heralded another lean period for stained glass. The impeachment of Archbishop Laud, who had championed the Arminian revival of Charles’s reign, indelibly associated stained glass with ‘popery’, a reputation which even the stained glass artists of the 18th century found it difficult to shake off. In the age of Classicism and the Enlightenment when coloured windows were generally eschewed by architects and their clients, Oxford continued as a major patron of the medium. The work of two of the outstanding exponents of the art in the eighteenth century, William Price the Younger (d. 1765), a member of a London glass-painting dynasty, and William Peckitt (1731-95), a self-taught glass painter from York, can be seen in the chapel of New College, together with Sir Joshua Reynolds’s huge west window executed by Thomas Jervais between 1778-85.
Ironically, it was another revival that threatened the achievements of the enamel-painting era. The burgeoning Gothic Revival of the nineteenth century sought to recover the ‘true principles’ of stained glass as practiced in the Middle Ages.[] If the ‘mosaic’ technique of painted pot metal glass represented ‘true principles’, the enamel painted genre could only be regarded as a debased art form and many enamel-painted windows were replaced by the work of their prolific Victorian successors. The concept of ‘true principles’ of Gothic art derived from the persuasive and polemical writings of designer and architect A. W. N. Pugin (1812-52). Sadly, there is very little Pugin-designed stained glass left in Oxfordshire.
The most accessible survivors are two windows in the University Church of St Mary in Oxford (1841-2 and 1848), the gift of comic actor George Bartley, in memory of his children.[] Thomas Bartley, a former student of Exeter College, kneels in traditional donor posture, but brought up to date in his Victorian suit and academic gown. By the time of Pugin’s untimely death in 1852, the Gothic Revival he believed would transform British architecture and ecclesiastical design had taken firm hold. As a consequence, 19th-century stained glass is ubiquitous in British churches. While much of it is historicist in style and was manufactured in quasi-industrial commercial studios, and while by no means all of it is of the highest artistic standards, the churches of Oxfordshire can boast some of the best Victoria stained glass in Britain. One of the finest examples is undoubtedly the 1869 east window of St Mary’s church, Bloxham by the firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Company (afterwards known as Morris & Company).
William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones met while undergraduates at Exeter College, when both were entranced by the medieval past. Burne-Jones’s earliest work in stained glass was executed by the London firm of James Powell and Sons, who made his remarkable and vivid St Frideswide window (1859) in Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford. In 1861 Morris, Burne-Jones, the painters Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Ford Madox Brown and Peter Paul Marshall, architect Philip Webb and scientist Charles J. Faulkner formed a company which revolutionised stained glass design and was to have a transformative effect on all aspects of British design and the decorative arts.[] In common with all of the best early windows by the firm, the Bloxham window, described by Charles Sewter as ‘certainly one of the most beautiful windows of the firm’s first decade of activity’, combines the talents of several of the partners, in this case William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and Philip Webb. After 1875 the firm’s stained glass output was dominated by the genius of Edward Burne-Jones, responsible for four more windows for Christ Church Cathedral (1871-78) and the entire glazing scheme of Harris Manchester College Chapel (1895-99).
William Morris is widely held to be the father of the Arts and Crafts movement, whose exponents sought to reinstate the direct relationship between design, materials and craft. The father of the Arts and Crafts stained glass movement in Britain was stained glass artist, craftsman and teacher Christopher Whall (1849-1924), whose career as a teacher and authorship of the wonderful manual Stained Glass Work (London, 1905), spread his influence throughout the UK, Ireland and North America. One of his finest windows can be seen in the south transept of St John the Baptist, Burford (1908), with its scenes of the life of St John surmounted by a glorious vision of the New Jerusalem.
Inevitably, it is hardest to guess what will be the judgement of history as far as contemporary stained glass is concerned. It is inconceivable, however, that the achievements of John Piper (1903-92) and Patrick Reyntiens (b. 1925), will not loom large in any future assessment of the stained glass achievements of the post-war era. Two of their finest collaborations can be seen at St Bartholomew, Nettlebed, in the Dr Williamson Memorial window of 1969-70 and the Peter Fleming ‘Tree of Life’ memorial windows of 1974-79. Reyntiens as a solo exponent of the art of stained glass can be admired in the quirky and somewhat anarchic heraldic windows of the great hall of Christ Church, Oxford (1980-84) and in the explosive colour of the Millennium window of St Mary, Shipton under Wychwood (2004).
Inevitably, the ubiquity of stained glass in our cathedrals, churches and chapels (especially windows made in the nineteenth century), places a heavy burden of responsibility for its conservation and care on the shoulders of its owners and custodians. Thankfully, there are now a growing number of highly-skilled specialist conservators in this field and stained glass conservation is now a recognised scientific discipline governed by internationally validated conservation guidelines. It is now well-appreciated that prevention is usually better than cure, prompting many institutions to invest in specialist reports that enable a long-term conservation strategy to be devised, reducing the risk of conservation emergencies.
There is also a growing understanding the causes of stained glass deterioration and recognition of the need to respect all aspects of its historic construction. The important of environmental protection and a stable environment is increasingly widely appreciated. The oft-quoted and entirely erroneous statement that all windows require re-leading every 100-150 years, is now thankfully widely discredited among the younger generation of stained glass conservators. Britain has an enviable heritage of stained glass, much of it to be enjoyed in the county of Oxford. Advances in both scholarship and conservation training mean that we can hope to preserve it for many generations to come.
Sarah Brown
The York Glaziers Trust