Reading Stained Glass: Corpus Christi and the Pelican

‘A wonderful bird is the pelican …’* Anyone who only knew about pelicans from this celebrated limerick might be forgiven for smiling at the mere thought of these rather bizarre birds. But the pelican, along with the dove and the eagle, is one of the most important symbols in Christian iconography. I believe his earliest appearance in stained glass - though from now on I must say ‘her’, not ‘his’ – is in Chartres Cathedral (fig.ii) in the 13^th century ‘Redemption window’ where a pelican, with wings outstretched, pecks at her breast to allow her chicks to feed on her blood. The seated king, looking on, is David, and in his hand he holds a long scroll with the inscription ‘Similis factus sum pellicamo’ (from Psalm 102: ‘I am become like the pelican in the wilderness’). So this one image both looks back to the Old Testament, foreshadowing of the loneliness of Jesus in the wilderness, and forward to the crucifixion and the redemptive shedding of Christ’s own blood. The pelican becomes established as the symbol of Corpus Christi, the body [and blood] of Christ. The feast of

Corpus Christi is always observed on the second Thursday after Whit Sunday. In the later middle ages, this was an important public holiday, celebrated with processions, pageants and mystery plays performed by members of the different Guilds. All long gone, now, but the pelican remains.

 

From then until now, the elements of the symbol – the bird, the blood, the chicks and the nest –

hardly change. They appear throughout Europe not only in stained glass but in stone and wood carving too, for instance on a 15^th century misericord in Cartmel Priory (Cumberland; fig. iii).

 

Oxford and Cambridge each have a Corpus Christi College, and an heraldic pelican appears on the arms of both. At Cambridge the college was founded in 1352 jointly by the Guild of Corpus Christi and the Guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary, hence the shield is quartered between the pelican and the lilies that are the symbol of Mary. At Oxford, Corpus Christi was founded in 1517 by Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester, whose own crest was a golden pelican. There is a splendid 16^th century sundial in the College quad, surmounted by a pelican in her piety.

 

The pelican is one of the very few pre-Reformation religious symbols to have survived the upheavals in English church life during the 16^th and 17^th centuries. Later, indeed, she enjoyed a dramatic revival in stained glass during the 19^th century. A remarkable image in an early (1864) window by  Morris & Co at Bradford Cathedral depicts the pelican in graphic, almost comical, close-up (fig.iv:) staring – or glaring? –  down her beak at the first rubber-necked chick, she struggles to steer a glob of blood towards his gaping mouth while the other two wait eagerly for their turn. 

 

The range of textures and patterns in this image is worth our attention. At the base flowers and grass reach up around the neatly woven wicker basket of a nest in which the downy chicks appear half submerged in hay. The dark blue background is an intricate pattern of tiny quatrefoils created out of a lattice work of black lines and dashes, all painted on by hand. Looking carefully, you can see one or two places where the design goes wrong. At the top the wavy grey-green clouds are actually the only indication that this is a religious symbol at all: clouds represented like this, though rather less freehand than here, always denoted in medieval glass the clouds of heaven and William Morris was careful to follow that precedent. The artist who designed this window was Morris’s close friend, Philip Webb.  

 

At Much Marcle in Herefordshire she appears above the Crucifixion scene in the church’s East

window (fig.v), designed in 1877 for Charles Eamer Kempe by Wyndham Hope Hughes. This design clearly shows Kempe’s debt to the Chartres pelican, but with the rather neat added touch that the nest is drawn as the cup of an acorn and the bird perches on a branch of oak leaves.  

 

No artist in the 19^th century paid more attention to the pelican than Kempe, for whom the bird had a special significance. That Kempe often signed his windows with a wheatsheaf – one of the elements of his family’s coat of arms – is well known; much less well known is that the crest on top of the Kempe shield depicts a pelican pecking at a wheatsheaf. For Kempe, this image had a key symbolic significance. He had originally hoped to be ordained as an Anglican priest, but a severe stammer prevented this and after leaving university he decided to develop a career in church decoration and stained glass. Throughout his career he believed that he had a special vocation to teach and indeed to preach through his windows. What he could not say from the pulpit because of his stammer, he could express though stained glass.  It is no surprise that the poet George Herbert meant a great deal to him:

 

Doctrine and life, colours and light, in one

            When they combine and mingle, bring

A strong regard and awe; but speech alone

            Doth vanish like a flaring thing …. (‘The Windows’)

 

He came indeed to see the wheatsheaf and the pelican, his personal crest, (fig.vi) as an endorsement of his vocation, for together they are emblematic of the Eucharist – the wheatsheaf representing the bread and the pelican, the wine. No other stained glass designer invested the pelican with greater presence, nor saw the bird so clearly as the embodiment of Christ. Whenever you see a pelican in a window, look also for the text accompanying it. If this reads ‘Ihesus pelicanus noster’ (Jesus our Pelican; fig.i - see above) the window is by Kempe.

 

© Adrian Barlow

 

*A wonderful bird is the pelican: 

His bill can hold more than his belly can.

He can keep in his beak

Enough food for a week

But I’m blowed if I know how the hell he can!

              Dixon Lanier Merritt (1910)

 

You can read more about the significance of the pelican in my book, Kempe: the Life, Art and Legacy of Charles Eamer Kempe (2018)

 

Illustrations:

Fig. i:  Pelican in her Piety by John Carter for C.E. Kempe, in St Botolph’s Church, Cambridge, 1889

Fig. ii: King David and the Pelican in her Piety, Chartres Cathedral, 13^th century

Fig. iii: Pelican in her Piety, carved misericord seat in Cartmel Priory, 15^th century

Fig.iv: Pelican in her Piety (by Philip Webb, for Morris & Co.) Bradford Cathedral, 1864

Fig v: Pelican in her Piety, by Wyndham Hope Hughes for C.E. Kempe, St Bartholomew’s Church, Much Marcle, 1877

Fig.vi: Kempe’s Bookplate, depicting the Pelican and the Wheatsheaf

 

All photographs © the author.

 

 

 

Counting to a Hundred: ‘Let it Go!'

This is my hundredth post since 16^th August  2011. For two years before that, while still working in Cambridge, I wrote a blog called World and Time, which began life as a way of bringing Madingley Hall’s programme of courses to the notice of a wider audience. I’m not sure it was particularly successful in this, but keeping a blog became for me a way of reflecting on how my interests in literature and teaching, Cambridge and Venice, architecture and stained glass have helped to shape the life I lead now. In my introductory post I wrote the following:

'Who am I writing this blog for? For my students past and present; all those who have taught me more than I have taught them, and with whom I have had great pleasure talking about why writing matters and reading matters just as much; for students I have yet to meet; for friends and colleagues; for fellow teachers of English; for anyone interested in what I have to say, even if (particularly if) they don’t agree with me; for myself – on the ‘how do I know what I think till I hear what I’ve said?’ principle.'

When I retired from Cambridge, I wanted to stay in touch with these same students, colleagues and friends – some of whom had been rash enough to ask me to keep writing. So I called my new blog  (the first post of which was published on the same day as my last post for World and Time) simply Adrian Barlow’s Blog, in the hope that people would find it easy to track down if they wanted to. So it has proved, and the joy of blogging for the past four years has been hugely enhanced by the number of new friends I have made, and old friends with whom I have reconnected. I have been amazed by the popularity of my blog: it’s currently receiving well over 100 visitors a day: not exactly ‘going viral’, I admit, but readers come not just from the UK but from the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and more recently from Russia too. This has led to the only conscious change in the way I have written: at the outset I assumed all my readers would, broadly speaking, have the same frames of reference that I have; more recently I have tried (unobtrusively, I hope) to give a bit more context when introducing people, places, books etc., that may not be familiar to all.

I had written about blogs before I started to write my own. In my book World and Time: Teaching Literature in Context (C.U.P. 2009), I included a chapter entitled ‘Essays and blogs: Woolf, Carter and Beard’, in which I tried to find links between the way three writers I admire - Virginia Woolf, Angela Carter and Mary Beard - address their readers. ‘The blog,’ I wrote,

… is a phenomenon already shifting our perception of how ideas, opinions and prejudices can be shared and expressed in print – even if in cyberprint. Curiously, it has led to a revival in the art of the conversational essay: everyone who writes a blog tries, consciously or otherwise, to shape their prose in such a way as to get across effectively what they want to say and, in doing so, to give an impression of themselves as someone participating in a conversation.

My childhood introduction to the art of the conversational essay was Charles Lamb’s ‘Dissertation upon Roast Pork’, and I have been a fan of Lamb’s work ever since. It pleases me very much that a piece written for World and Time in 2010, ‘Charles Lamb and Cambridge’, led to an invitation to give a lecture (‘Lamb and Cambridge: Cambridge and Lamb’) to the Charles Lamb Society in London earlier this year. I’m pleased, too, that going to London to deliver this lecture prompted me to compose one of the posts  I am most pleased to have written: an impromptu meditation on London, Lamb, and the poetry and people to be found in Queen Square. But before I paused in that secluded square on my way to give the lecture, I had no idea that before nightfall I’d have written ‘In London, with Charles Lamb’.

Later in my chapter on essays and blogs, I reflected on the significance of the term ‘post’:

You post a blog. And this suggests two things: not only sending it by mail as if it were a letter that someone would open and read at the other end, but also pasting it on a wall like a poster so that any casual passer-by can read it [….] Posters are general, aimed at a wide audience who may or may not take any notice.

It is one of the pleasures of blogging to discover that people have taken notice, and have sometimes been interested, moved or irritated sufficiently by something I have written to post a reply, email or write directly. You get far more feedback to a blog than to a book, in my experience. I treasure a message of thanks sent by someone working in the Janitor’s Department of Alcatraz. But my thanks to all who have ever got in touch after reading my blog.

This, however, will be my last post. 100 not out seems a good score with which to retire, if you’ll forgive the cricketing metaphor. Over the past four years, a few pieces have written themselves at a single sitting, but I find I’m spending longer planning, writing and editing them now, for each one has to be just 1000 words. I still enjoy this, greatly, but I don’t want my posts seeming laboured to those who kindly read them. Besides, the book I’m now writing - Kempe: Life and Legacy - presses insistently. Some friends have suggested I publish a collection from my blog. I’ve been tempted; I even chose a title, Short Measures. But blogs, I have concluded, are best left in their native element, which is cyberspace.

Adrian Barlow

[illustration: an urn inscribed with the words of William Blake’s poem ‘He who binds to himself a joy’. My post about this poem, Short Measures (i): William Blake and Eternity’s Sunrise, has been by far the most visited page of my blog.

www.adrianbarlowsblog.blogspot.co.uk  will continue to be found at its present address, and I am compiling an inventory of all my past posts, if anyone cares to revisit them.  I hope to publish this online very soon.

Text and illustration © the author

The Hawk Woman of Cambridge

The closest most of us get to birds of prey is to read about them in books, where they are often known by shortened names – Kes, in Barry Hines’ novel Kes (originally A Kestrel for a Knave) and Gos in The Goshawk, by T.H. White. But in H is for Hawk Helen Macdonald calls her goshawk Mabel, in reaction against the names given to other hawks she has heard – Macbeth, Baal, Odin, Death etc. ‘My hawk needed a name as far away from that awful litany, as far from Death as it could get.’ So she chooses Mabel, ‘From amabilis, meaning loveable, or dear. An old, slightly silly name,’ she admits. She’s right: Mabel as a name sounded oddly quaint even in my childhood.

In the past fortnight I have read and now re-read H is for Hawk. As much as it’s about a hawk, about the loss of a father and about the writer T.H. White – though it’s about all these - in this remarkable book H is definitely also for Helen. Hence hereafter, ‘Helen’ when I’m talking about the woman who trains a hawk; ‘Macdonald’ when I talk about the author who writes about herself trying to come to terms with the loss of her job, her house and her father by training a goshawk she buys for £800 on a Scottish quayside.

There is much travelling in this book. Macdonald is strong on landscape and a sense of place; economical too. She locates the Forest of Dean, for instance, ‘at the edge of England before it tips into Wales; a land of red earth, coal-workings, wet forest and wild goshawks.’ If you’ve ever driven from Cinderford to Coleford, then on down the long hill across the River Wye into Monmouth, you’ll agree her twenty-one word description leaves nothing unsaid. But given the number of places where Macdonald makes us follow Helen during her training of Mabel, it comes as a shock to realize that the book is actually rooted in one location: Cambridge.

Back in 2011, before she had even started to write H is for Hawk, Macdonald had made some trenchant comments about the city in her blog:

My university town is an eccentric place. But its eccentricity isn’t kindly. It has its own rules. You can wear holey tweed and shoes with flapping soles; you can sit in cafés discussing Latin syntax and be so absent-minded you forget your name, but if your eccentricity isn’t of this particular strain, goodbye. Cambridge is a cold place. If you smile at someone in the street their expression will register one part alarm, one part suspicion, one part embarrassment. And then they’ll walk on by.             (Fretmarks 17 April 2011)

To shut yourself in your home, filling your fridge with bits of rabbit, disconnecting the phone and keeping visitors at bay while you get to know your goshawk might count as eccentricity anywhere; but when Helen takes Mabel out into the streets and open spaces of Cambridge, she finds it has become an unnerving place where hawk and human are constantly under threat from cyclists and joggers: ‘They come towards us like tumbling rocks in a video game, threatening destruction with the merest glancing blow.’

Macdonald calls the chapter at the mid-point of her book, ‘The Line’. This refers both to the creance, the ultra-long leash on which Mabel is kept while being trained always to return to Helen’s gloved fist, and to the line she crosses from being inside to outside the closed world of her Cambridge College  – what she had called ‘the Cantabridgean glamour’. As she starts to analyse the way people react to seeing her and Mabel (‘A woman stalking the park with a bloody great hawk on her fist and a baleful stare on her face’) she decides they are both outlaws, living outside ‘the laws of God and man and …College’. She likens herself to Alice, falling down the rabbit hole into a world more nightmare than wonderland. When a College porter strides comically across the cricket pitch to tell her she can’t fly Mabel there, she has to remind herself, ‘I’m a bona fide College Fellow, and what I am doing is not against the rules’; but when the Master’s wife invites her to bring Mabel to show guests at a garden party, her confidence in her university identity deserts her – “I used to be a Research Fellow, a proper academic. Now I am in motley. I am not Helen any more. I am the hawk woman”. – She thinks of Hamlet, who knew he was going mad, but only some of the time: when the wind was southerly he knew a hawk from a handsaw.  Cambridge has a Hawks Club, but it’s strictly for elite sportsmen: no place there for a woman mucking about with a hawk on the playing fields of Jesus College.

As the summer passes, Helen feels ‘hollow and unhoused’. She becomes ill, it rains incessantly outside, and flying Mabel is almost impossible. Inside, meanwhile, she is surrounded by boxes and trying to pack up her belongings, ready to move though without anywhere to move to. Eventually she crawls into an empty cardboard wardrobe box, hiding where ‘No one can see me. No one knows where I am. It is safe here.’

That is her worst moment. Part Two of the book begins with a chapter entitled ‘Flying free’. From here on, Macdonald charts Helen’s recovery, as she accepts that she now has a life defined by a hawk, not by Cambridge; and as Mabel flies further and further on the creance, and eventually off it, so Helen’s ties with the city and the university loosen too, and all but disappear.

A friend emails me that she became obsessive about reading H is for Hawk.  I have felt the same. I am very glad to have read it, though I know no other book that describes so chillingly the cold regard cast by Cambridge on those it decides don’t really belong there.

Adrian Barlow

Postscript: another friend, having read my thoughts on ‘Helen' and ‘Macdonald’ above, has sent me the following:

"I took a rather different slant on the book.  Helen Macdonald relates to Freud and I think acts out his theories, even down driving her father’s car - this in relation to Anna Freud who wore her fathers clothes and was pushed around in his wheelchair. I think her obsession with her father confirms her belief in Freud - and his death theories - she never considers her mother or brother’s reaction to her fathers death, she is just so involved with herself.  We all have to bury our parents, no matter how wonderful!!  I found her obsession with her father frankly worrying.  She talks about Cambridge as this cold place that her parents would not understand as she went to the local comp and on to a red brick uni.  This of course is completely ridiculous as it transpires that her father was a highly regarded well known Fleet Street photographer, who knew all the great and the good - indeed Alistair Campbell gave a speech at her father’s memorial service.  Again, I felt she was writing to make a point rather than anything that was real!!  Again and again she referred to anger, death, resentment (of who - her mother/everyone!!)  isolation and invisibility - all very Freudian!!"

[illustrations: (i) H is for Hawk (jacket illustration © Chris Wormell) superimposed over the engraving of Jesus College by David Loggan, in Cantabrigia Illustrata (1690), Plate XXIV.

(ii) Topiary in Jesus College, described by Helen Macdonald in H is for Hawk: ‘Beyond my office building are a host of yew trees clipped into absurd wind-blown boulders” (p.123).

All quotations, except where otherwise stated, are from Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk (London: Jonathan Cape, 2014)

Text and illustrations © Adrian Barlow

Perambulations with Pevsner

Pevsner (n): an authoritative but quirky architectural handbook, any one in the series of county-by-county guides, properly entitled The Buildings of England; eponymously so called after founding editor, Nikolaus Pevsner.

It’s not the least of Sir Nikolaus Pevsner’s achievements that he is possibly the only man in English publishing history to have given his name not just to one reference book (no mere Bradshaw, Brewer, Burke or Crockford he) but to a whole family of reference books; most were written by himself, and all bear his imprint if not actually his imprimatur. Pevsner completed the first series of The Buildings of England in 1974, and died in 1988; but new editions and editions of new sub-series, such as Buildings of Scotland, (and Wales and Ireland) continue to appear.

The first county book appeared in 1951; Pevsner aimed to publish two a year. In the succeeding sixty years many have been revised, sometimes two or three times, and now a third generation of architectural historians is at work, led by Simon Bradley, the present series editor, who has just published a revised, enlarged Cambridgeshire to acclaim. I was given it at Christmas and have been reading and admiring it ever since. It has to be admitted, though: Pevsners are no longer as portable as they used to be. I bought my first, Bedfordshire, in 1974, and could carry it around in the pocket of my mac. In those days I cycled everywhere, having no car, and rather resembled the chap in Philip Larkin’s ‘Church Going’, taking off my cycle clips in awkward reverence – a manoeuvre that could almost count as a genuflection, if the church looked the sort of place where such a thing was expected. Sir Ninian Comper used to say that a church should bring you to your knees on entering; nowadays, just carrying around a Pevsner might do the same for you. Let me illustrate my point.

The original volume, Cornwall (BE1), was a paperback – as they all were at first. Penguin used to publish them, and Pevsner always acknowledged his debt to Sir Allen Lane for supporting the project from its earliest days. (Nowadays, the series is published by Yale). Cornwall measured 7 by 4½ inches, had 251 pages and weighed 7½ oz.; my Bedfordshire (1968, hardback by then) had grown a half-inch taller, boasted 414 pages and weighed 13oz.; Simon Bradley’s new Cambridgeshire (2014) by contrast, is nearly 9 x 5ins, has 790 pages and weighs 2lbs.

An expanding series, therefore, but the remarkable thing is that the format has stayed unchanged since 1951. Maps of the county, with every town and village marked and grid-referenced; an introduction providing pre-historical, topographical and architectural overviews of the county; next the gazetteer, with every church mentioned, no matter how briefly, and  other buildings of significance identified. For larger towns Pevsner provides architectural walking routes he calls ‘Perambulations’. In the middle of each book a swatch of photographs – grey and grainy at first, high definition colour now –  illustrating the architectural and decorative highlights described in the text . Pevsner made a point of seeing everything he described, so his descriptions alternate between rapid-fire architectural shorthand and pithy tut-tuts of praise or disappointment. Thus, from Cornwall, and on the same page, for Portreath he says simply,

The Church of ST MARY, by Wightwick, 1841, is rather depressing, with pointed windows and a bellcote.

For Poughill he seems to have transcribed his notes almost as he must have scribbled them down (his record was nineteen churches visited in a single day):

ST OLAF. A Danish dedication. Nave of four bays; N aisle with arcades of Cornish granite standard section, but shorter than usual (late C14?); S aisle with thicker projection l. and r. of each of the standard hollows (cf. St Veep); quatrefoil decoration of the abaci.

For Pevsner it was important to instruct readers how to ‘read’ a building, so he wasn’t afraid to use technical terms. But he always included at the end, along with an index of artists and architects and an index of places, a glossary. This glossary, expanded like the series, is now available as an app.

Pevsner didn’t drive. Cornwall is dedicated to ‘TO LOLA, who drove the car’. Lola was his wife. Later on, eager young researchers used to chauffeur him; some in time co-edited counties with him or indeed became editors of the later revisions. He inspired great affection and loyalty. Simon Bradley doesn’t drive either. While working on Cambridgeshire he was given rooms at St John’s College, and in his Foreword duly acknowledges that ‘Not the least of the amenities provided by St John’s for this non-driving author was a pass for the college bicycle sheds.’ He thanks his family and friends for ferrying him out to ‘Areas of Cambridgeshire beyond the practicable reach of pedals or public transport’ (much of rural Cambs. is far beyond the bounds of any bus route) and ends by thanking ‘Bridge Cycles of Magdalene Street for repairs and advice’.

I’m glad to applaud a new book that follows a great tradition, a tradition one can say confidently was begun by a single man. Pevsner was beguilingly eccentric in some ways, dauntingly precise and systematic in others. He came to love England: nobody knew it better, architecturally speaking, than Pevsner did. He described himself, in writing the Buildings of England, as an outsider, but saw this as an advantage. In the Foreword to Herefordshire (BE25, 1963; the midpoint of the series) he defended his decision to write most of the series himself because

 the outsider keeping in mind the whole of England and perhaps even something of the continent seems to me to have overriding advantages …. It is not that I want to hog the whole enterprise [a few lines later it’s a ‘crazy enterprise’]. On the contrary, I want to live to see it completed, and I am only anxious to preserve a certain unity of approach and treatment.

He did; and his successors have gone on preserving it in a manner he would have applauded. So, even if the books no longer fit in our pockets, we still have many reasons to be grateful to Pevsner - the man and the eponym.

Adrian Barlow

[illustration: Pevsners including the first, Cornwall, (1951) and Cambridge, (3^rd, ed. 2014).

I have blogged elsewhere about Pevsner, on the Kempe Trust website:

Pevsner and Kempe (i)

Pevsner and Kempe (ii)