Works of art commissioned by medieval kings and queens demonstrated a consistent awareness of their broader continental context and a consciousness of the power of art to enhance their status. As rebuilding of the palace and the abbey of Westminster under Edward the Confessor, Henry III and Edward I indicate, it is to the king’s works that we often must look for the first importation of ideas from abroad and then to their wider dissemination and influence. A Savoyard mason, James of St George, was responsible for the design of the ten castles erected on behalf of Edward I in Wales. Built in order to secure the territory won during his three campaigns between 1277 and 1294, they acted as a means of defence and aggression: as ‘signs as well as the means of political change’.41 Enhancement of royal palaces and places of worship was a constant feature of the later middle ages, not only as a matter of duty but as a means of political propaganda and prestige. Despite a reputation for the exacting of heavy taxes to fund the wars with France, King Edward III and his queen, Philippa, spent more on extension and refurbishment of Windsor castle than any other monarch for any other palace building during the whole middle ages.42 As was the case already in the eleventh century, these royal works show the very distinctive uses of art in its widest sense for the demonstration of power. Both Edward and Philippa were highly conscious of the reinforcement of high status through visual display, concentrating considerable resources on personal adornment, ceremonial and dynastic imagery.43 Edward’s foundation of the Order of the Garter turned
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Plate 24.4 Crucifixion, Lambeth Apocalypse, c.1260-7. Lambeth Palace Library 209, f. 51v.
Historical hero-worship - the uniting of his patronage of St George and his interest in King Arthur - to a new level of court ceremonial which in turn stimulated a whole new series of material results from costume and furnishings to buildings and new ritual practices.
Around the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the fenlands were pasture for sheep producing the highest-quality wool in Europe, and the rich trade through the ports of the Wash and the resulting commerce via the bankers of Italy and Flanders created a period of local wealth which was in itself propitious for artistic patronage. However, the benefits were mainly apparent after the economic peak and most of the building activity in northeastern England from Sleaford to Boston, Lynn, Newark, Howden, Selby and York dates from after Edward III’s taxation had stifled the wool trade.44 Of these, only three were monastic or foundations for secular canons. Most of the rest were parish churches in market towns or in rural situations, paid for by a combination of patronage from the local manors and their own rectors and ecclesiastical patrons. At Sleaford, Boston and Newark we see the emergence of a newly powerful patronage by local merchant or bourgeois families who founded chantries for prayers to be said for their souls and associated these with building activity for an aisle or a window. It was thus that parish church art inevitably provided exemplars for virtuous and religious behaviour, in association with the maintenance of the established social and moral order. Patrons took their responsibilities for moral guidance seriously and it is notable that images of peasants are confined to its boundaries at the edges of roofs and monuments, while saintly figures, echoing the dress and deportment of the well-bred, occupied the prominent positions in tabernacles, the portal sculptures and the altar furnishings. Most of the parish churches in the area are rich in examples of small figures carved as roof and buttress corbels, which show men and women engaged in daily occupations alongside monsters and grotesques. Varying between reading from their primers to shouting or playing instruments, these images demonstrate a range of types of behaviour, most of it rowdy.45 An example of how social control might operate through such imagery is a corbel sited prominently in the nave of Sleaford, representing an especially animated version of ‘Tutivillus and the Gossips’, he being the devil who wrote down the words of the women who gossiped in church. It exists here as a warning to those tempted to disrupt services in a similar fashion.46 Similarly, in manuscripts, like the Luttrell Psalter (c.1340), the arduous labour of what we can take to be Sir Geoffrey Luttrell’s workforce is represented on the edges of pages, framing the text of the psalms. They are complex figures, existing here partly as a kind of pastoral conceit, a mark of his ownership, but also as a reminder of his social responsibilities and of the virtues and misfortunes of manual toil.47
World History
