Sacred Mysteries: Norfolk’s best collection of medieval stained glass
A woman in a white fur cap sits in thought, with a red squirrel in her lap and a starling at her shoulder. This well-liked portrait by Holbein has hung in the National Gallery only since 1992, when it was bought from the Marquess of Cholmondeley for ￡10 million.
Why a squirrel? Squirrels feature on the coat of arms of the Lovell family. Why a starling? It is a play on the place-name East Harling, Norfolk, where the Lovells inherited a large estate in 1526, when the portrait was painted.
If this seems slightly far-fetched, go to the church of St Peter and St Paul in East Harling and there, large as life and twice as red, is a squirrel high up in the stained glass of the great east window above the altar.
This, then, is a portrait of Anne Lovell, whose family had taken over from the Harlings when their line ran out of children. But the church was largely the work of another Anne, Anne Harling, three times married and richer each time. Born in 1426, she had been brought up with Sir John Falstolf as a guardian, whose name at least was borrowed by Shakespeare for Falstaff. She got going beautifying and enlarging the church from 1447, when she came of age.
It is undoubtedly the glass at St Peter and St Paul that leaves a strong impression. The tall east window is divided into five narrow lights, each filled with four panels of glass, one above the other, showing different biblical scenes.
These marvellous windows feature in Stories in Glass, a 160-page guide to the medieval stained glass in Norfolk. The text is by David King, the foremost expert on the subject, and the fine colour photographs are by Paul Harley. Though stained glass looks so bright and colourful, it is surprisingly difficult to photograph well, but he knows how.
East Harling has the most important collection of medieval stained glass in the county. How did it survive the Reformation in so prominent a position? It didn’t. The Lovells, who continued to be Catholic after the Reformation, kept it safe in East Harling Hall, a moated house with a gatehouse like that of Oxburgh. The Hall was demolished in the early 19th century, by which time the glass had been returned to the church.
It was not refitted in its original position, in the Lady Chapel, but in the main chancel. The panels had been made in the 1460s by the renowned workshop of John Wighton (by then run by John Mundeford), which had supplied glass for St Peter Mancroft in Norwich. They narrate the connected lives of the Virgin Mary and her son Jesus. And what panels they are! They are full of vigour, character and iconographic force.
Take the Ascension of Jesus into heaven. Into the blue cloudy border of heaven, Jesus has already entered, apart from his feet. The window makes clear that, though his is a risen body, it remains that of the man who was crucified. The holes that the nails left in his feet are plain. Below them are two footprints left on the golden hillock from which he ascends.
Around this an overlapping throng of haloes indicates the presence of the Apostles, and in the centre, looking upward, stands the figure of the Virgin Mary, her hands held up in worship.
In examining the motives for paying for such glass to be made (such as to convey the teaching of the Creed or to illustrate the works of mercy, or to represent the helper saints who would pray for parishioners), David King declares: “One reason for providing stained glass that is sometimes not given enough attention was the simple desire to praise God.”