T
LINCOLN, 14th cent.eemingly probability and evidence go hand in hand to shew that a great bulk of the church mason work of this country was the work of foreigners. Saxon churches were probably first built by Roman workmen, whose erections would teach sufficient to enable Saxons to afterward build for themselves. Imported talent, however, is likely to have been constantly employed. Edward the Confessor brought back with him from France new French designs for the rebuilding of Westminster Abbey, and doubtless he brought French masons also. Anglo-Norman is strongly Byzantine in character, and though the channels through which it passed may be various, there is little doubt that its origin was the great Empire of the East. Again, the great workshop of Europe, where Eastern ideas were gathered together and digested, and which supplied cathedrals and cathedral builders at command, was Flanders; and there is little doubt that during some five centuries after the Norman Conquest, Flemings were employed, in a greater or less degree, on English work. Italians were largely employed. The Angel Choir of Lincoln is one distinct witness to that. The workmen who executed the finely-carved woodwork of St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, King’s College, Cambridge, and Westminster Abbey, in the sixteenth century, were chiefly Italians, under the superintendence of Torregiano, a Florentine artist. He was a fellow-pupil of Michael Angelo, and is best known by the dastardly blow he dealt him with a mallet, disfiguring him for life. The resentment of Lorenzo de Medici at this caused Torregiano to leave Florence. He came to England in 1503.
The architect, however, of King Henry VII.’s Chapel was Bishop Alcock, an Englishman, born at Hull, the already existing Grammar School of which place he endowed, and, perhaps, rebuilt. Many other architects of English buildings were Englishmen, probably the majority, and doubtless a large proportion of the workmen also,[1] but it would be idle to deny that imported art speaks loudly from work of all the styles.
The carved detail may be relied upon to tell us something, and it speaks of an original reliance upon the East, which was never outgrown. The carvings found in England are not marked by anything at all approaching a national spirit, even in the limited degree that was possible. Except for a few carvings of armorial designs, and still fewer with slight local reference, there are none in wood or stone which would not be equally in place in any Romance country in Europe. The carvings, also, in the Continental churches present familiar aspects to the student of English ornament.
But if we have yet to wait some fortunate discovery of rolls of workmen’s names, with their rate of wages, we are not without such interesting information concerning the old carvers as is contained in portraits they have left of themselves. Just as authors sometimes recognize how satisfactory it is to have their “effigies” done at the fronts of their books, so have the carvers of old sometimes attached to their works portraits of themselves or their fellows, in their habits as they lived, in their attitudes as they laboured.
AN INDUSTRIOUS CARVER, LYNN.
Our first carver hails from Lincolnshire. In 1852, when the Church of St. Nicholas, Lynn, was restored, the misericordes were taken out and not replaced, but passed as articles of commerce eventually to the Architectural Museum, Tufton Street, London. Among these is a view of a carver’s studio, shewing the industrious master seated, tapping carefully away at a design upon the bench before him. There are three apprentices in the background working at benches; there are at the back some incised panels, and a piece of open screen-work. Perhaps we may suppose the weather to be cold, for the carver has on an exceedingly comfortable cloak or surcoat. At his feet reposes his dog.
CARVER’S INITIALS, ST. NICHOLAS’S, LYNN.
There is an interesting peculiarity about these Lynn carvings; the sides of the misericordes are designs in the fashion of monograms, or rebuses. The sides supporting the carver are his initials, pierced with his carving tools, a saw and a chisel. The difficulty is the same in all of the set; the meaning of the monograms is not to be lightly determined. In this case it may be U.V., or perhaps U is twice repeated.
COMMUNICATING A STRIKING IDEA, BEVERLEY MINSTER.
The next carvers belong to the following century. Here also we see the principal figures in the midst of work. In this case, however, there has arrived an interruption. Either one of the workers is about to commit mock assault and battery upon another with a mallet, or a brilliant idea for a grotesque has just struck him, and he hastens to impart it. From the expression of the faces, and the attitudes for which two other workmen have stood as models, at the sides, the latter may be the more likely. It is not impossible that the carver of the fine set of sixty-eight misericordes in Beverley Minster had in mind the incident of the blow given to Michael Angelo, and it would be interesting to know if any of Torregiano’s Italians worked at Beverley. This aproned, noisy, jocular crew are very different from the dignified artist we have just left, but doubtless they turned out good work of the humorous class.
The two “sidesmen” are occupied in the two ways of shewing intelligence and contempt known as “taking a sight,” etc.
MUTUAL CONTEMPT, BEVERLEY MINSTER.
The next carver is a figure at Wellingborough, Northamptonshire. This is locally known as the Wellingborough shoemaker, but nearly all local designations of such things are wrong, and this is no exception. Elsewhere in speaking of this sedate figure, I have conjectured he may be cutting something out of leather, and not making shoes. However, I have since arrived at Miss Phipson’s conclusion: the figure can only be that of a carver. He is fashioning not a leather rosette, but a Tudor rose in oak, to be afterwards pinned with an oak pin in some spandrel. He is rather a reserved-looking individual, but a master of his craft, if we may suppose he has “turned out” the two eagles at his right and left.No doubt there were several ways of building churches, or supplying them with their art decorations. Some masons would be attached to a cathedral, and be lent or sent here and there by arrangement. Others would be ever wandering, seeking church work. Others might come from abroad for particular work, and return with the harvest of English money when the work was done. For special objects there were depÔts. It is an acknowledged fact that the black basalt fonts of Norman times were imported from Flanders. There are occasionally met other things of this material with the same class of design, evidently from the same source, such as the sculptured coffin-lid at Bridlington Priory, given on a following page. I have not seen it noted, but I think it will be established that “brasses,” so much alike all over the country, were mostly ready-made articles also from Flanders. From the stereotyped conventionality of the altar-tomb effigies, they also may be judged to be the productions of workshops doing little but this work, and probably foreign.
A PIECE OF FINE WORK, WELLINGBOROUGH.
What is required to determine the general facts on these points is a return from various fabric accounts. We shall probably find both English and foreign carvers. There is little or no doubt that the carvers of our grotesques were members of the mysterious society which has developed into the modern body of Freemasons. It would be interesting—if it were not so apparently impossible—to trace in the records of early Freemasonry, not only the names and nationalities of the masons and carvers, but the details of that fine organization which enabled them to develope ideas and improvements simultaneously throughout Europe; and which would tell us, moreover, something of the master minds which conceived and directed the changes of style. But the masonic history of our carvers is much enveloped in error to the outside world. Thus we are told that in the minority of Henry VI. the masons were suppressed by statute, but that on his assuming the control of affairs he repealed the Act, and himself became a mason; moreover, we are told he wrote out “Certayne Questyons with Awnsweres to the same concerning the Mystery of Maconrye” which was afterwards “copyed by me Johan Leylande Antiquarius,” at the command of Henry VIII.; the MS. being gravely stated to be in the Bodleian Library. No such MS. exists at the Bodleian Library. If it did, its diction and spelling (which is all on pretended record in certain books probably repudiated by the masonic body proper) would instantly condemn it as a forgery. Certainly an Act was passed, 3 Henry VI., which is in itself a historical monument to the importance of Freemasonry. It is a brief enactment that the yearly meetings of the masons, being contrary to the Statute of Labourers (of 25 Edward III., 1351) fixing the rates of labour, which the masons varied and apparently increased, were no longer to be held; offenders to be judged guilty of felony. The Commons did not quite know what to style the meetings, using in this short Act the following terms for them: Chapters, Assemblies, Congregations, and Confederacies.
But important though this proves the masons to have been, there is no account of the statute being repealed until the 5 Elizabeth, when another took its place equally intolerant to the spirit of Freemasonry, and Freemasonry really only became legal by the Act of 6 George IV.
But the prohibition of 1424 was not abolition. If the masons were debarred from being allowed to exercise their advanced notions of remuneration, or to have any legal recognition whatever, it scarcely seems to have affected their action. For if they had refrained from exercising their freedom, and submitted to being put down by statute, it is probable we should have met them in the form of more ordinary gilds as instituted by other craftsmen. But we do not meet them thus, and the inference is that they went on in their own way, at their own time, and at their own price. It may be presumed that the more or less migratory habits of the masons made the Act impossible to be rigidly enforced.
Coming down towards the end of Gothic times, we find, at any rate, there was one place where images might be ordered. In the Stanford churchwardens’ accounts for 1556 there occur the following entries:—
| “It. | In expences to Abyndon to speke for ymages | | vijd. |
| It. | for iij ymages, the Rode, Mare, and John | | xxijs. iiijd.” |
It will have been noticed that the portraits of the carvers are Late. It is a great merit, on antiquarian grounds, that Gothic work, prior to the revival in art, was too much unconscious to admit anything so self-personal as a thought of the workers themselves, though frequently their ‘marks’ are unobtrusively set upon their works. By the sixteenth century, the sculptor’s art developed with the rest of mental effort, and the artists drank fresh draughts from the springs coming by way of Rome, springs whose waters had been concerned in the existence of nearly all the art that had been in Europe for ten centuries.
DOG AND BONE, BRECHIN.
