Ways of Seeing: Scenes from Christ's Life on Faversham’s Painted Pier

Description: The Kent Archaeological Society hosted a talk by Dr Sheila Sweetinburgh on the painted Medieval church pillar in the Kent town of Faversham. One of a series of talks by KAS Trustees and other guests. For other events please check our calendar: https://www.kentarchaeology.org.uk/news/events

Transcript: [Music] good evening everyone welcome to the kent archaeological society series of talks this is the second some of you may have attended the one with richard taylor last month about caesar's arrival and possible places of embarkation in britain on the kent coast uh it's a great pleasure this week uh to have uh one of our other trustees sheila sweetenberg who's going to be talking uh about the fabricium church uh painted pillar and her talk is entitled ways of seeing scenes from christ's life on favisham's painted pillar dr sheila swedenborg is a co-director of the center for kent history and heritage at canterbury christ church university and a specialist associate lecturer in medieval and early modern studies at the university of kent she edited early and later medieval kent as part of the kent history project series and is one of the editors for maritime camp through the ages to be published this year she's also published widely on medieval and tudor kent topics using a micro history approach exploring themes from civic ritual to maze bowls and much in between we're very grateful that sheila has agreed to give this month's talk she's been a long-term trustee of the kent archaeological society and she will be talking for about 40 45 minutes if you wish to have a question there should be a small icon with a question mark and a kind of dialogue a sort of bubble in in there on your screen and if you could type any questions in there then i would be able to ask them to sheila after her uh talk is finished the candidate archaeological exec can archaeological society exist to promote the wider understanding of the archaeology and history of the ancient county of kent and we are really really grateful for your support in attending this evening and hope that you will be attending future events that will be holding in this series now i will be inviting dr sweetenberg to give her talk thank you very much right thank you very much kerry um i hope everybody can see the the first slide which is just uh say the title and what i'm going to do is i expect lots of you know of the painted pillar and maybe quite a lot of you've actually seen it um if you haven't i would really suggest um a trip down to favisham when the church reopens is well worth it um and today i'm going to be more this evening i'm going to be using um slides uh of images taken by my very good friend imogen corrigan um which i hope will give you a good idea of just how wonderful this pillar is and what i want to do this evening um is to think about it with you as it may have been envisaged and used here in the later middle ages by people in their devotional lives so i'm going to take you back in time i hope and to do this i'm going to take you on a tour of the pillar but first i want to explore what may have been the catalyst for such a high quality church painting to have been made in the first place however i freely acknowledge that nobody wrote down their feelings or responses to the pillar consequently this investigation rests heavily on its potential use by contemporaries rather than on solid documentary or other evidence or to put it another way this is an experiment of thinking about process and how it relates to construction and reception which i think um is not only applicable in terms of fabricium but also elsewhere so the painted pillars context or how and why may it have come about now i'm sure you're all well aware that uh fabishan was a royal town and that king stephen decided to give the manner of fabricion to his newly founded abbey on the edge of the town in 1147 this at times brought friction between the people of favisham and their overlord and it's a situation you can find here or could certainly have found in lots of the sink ports during the middle ages and of course favisham was a sleep port because it was linked to its head port of dover however babashimabi was not the only ecclesiastical heavyweight in the town because the advancement or patronage of the only parish church in favisham that is mary's was held by or saint augustine's abbey in canterbury now issues surrounding hierarchy status and jurisdiction were not solely contentious between civic and church authorities in the middle ages and to be honest beyond but it was just as likely between different institutions within the church and this is where fabishan rather got drawn in so i want to take you back to late 13th century fabricion by this time the leading citizens had managed to rest some rights and privileges from faber-shamabi and they'd even managed to acquire a common seal by the 1290s nevertheless the abbot of favisham abbey was not keen to let go and the senior men of fabisham were heavily engaged in melting a defense in the king's court in that very late 13th century period and that involved hiring the services of a lawyer and getting themselves a copy of magna carta uh and the idea is i think in the relatively near future that magna carta will be indeed on show uh in the heritage hub actually in the center of faversham however this was not the only tussle taking place in faversham cindergastian's abbey had long maintained that it answered only to the pope and certainly not to the archbishop of canterbury uh and while some archbishops were prepared not to press the issue others were very keen to press it and amongst these was archbishop she'll see and as occurred a century earlier uh archbishop hubert walter had similarly i indeed pressed the case that saint augustine's was under the archbishop now in late 13th century faversham things turned nasty when archbishop when shall see clashed with saint augustine's abbey they clashed because the abbot fenden had been appointed the earl a year earlier and he was in a sense um using his muscle uh in terms of saint augustine's abbey and therefore was on a collision course with a new archbishop now caught between the archbishop and the abbey the vicar and favisham peter de millstead found himself excommunicated and turned out of his vicarage by the abbot in the autumn of 1300 after he took his oath to the archbishop rather than the abbot as his superior he'd previously taken his um oath to the abbot but then he sent rescinded that and went with the archbishop now the abbot sent monks to favisham to celebrate mass and other services but peter didn't give in and instead celebrated masses at other local churches taking a sizeable proportion of the townspeople with him things came to a head when a famishing man died and his coughing was fought over in the street on one side were his family and friends with the mayor and other armed men and on the other side he was they were confronted by armed monks clerks and their supporters now the mayor's party wanted to bury the man at neighbouring preston where the service would be conducted by peter the monks wanted the corpse buried in the churchyard of barrack fish and parish church exactly what happened next is not really clear but saint augustine's story was that when they took the rioters to court was that the mayor's party had sounded the common hall which brought more townspeople and in the subsequent melee the monks dropped the coffin in the churchyard and fled into the church the monks were again attacked by this mob led by the mayor and the vicar the doors of the church were broken down the bell ropes were cut and church ornaments investments belonging to the abbey were seized now this conflict continued for the next couple of years until the archbishop and thus the vicar and his supporters finally got the upper hand in 1304 as a result about 1307 new regulations were drawn up between saint augustine's and peter's successor whereby saint augustine's agreed to repair and rebuild the chancel and it seems highly likely from the architecture of favisham church that the leading townsmen took the opportunity to rebuild and redecorate their part of the church that is the nave and the transits and this sort of development although not due to uh such a violent incident was taking place in many parish churches in the late 13th and early 14th century so i now want to move on to why paint a pillar well medieval churches were covered in war paintings sometimes there was um an overarching scheme which might relate to a series of saints or to scenes relating to the life and passion of christ and all the life of his mother now often but not exclusively these were naive war paintings and if you're thinking about nave war paintings you need to think about how you would read a book so if you think about if you think about the north wall of a church you started in the west and you move towards the east and if you're thinking about the south wall of the church you move from the east towards the west and you started at the top and worked your way down so that's walls but walls were not the only places where you found wall paintings because you could also find them on pillars pillars offered these further spaces and they were seen as valuable in their own right and one of the reasons they were seen as valuable was due to the symbolism that was attached to everything within the parish church and according to william durand a 13th century bishop and theologian just as columns held up the church buildings so bishops and theologians were seen as sustaining the church and this idea of symbolism is to be found i say within the parish church just about everywhere and symbolism was only limited by man's inability to understand all the symbolism that god could put forward so you can incense almost can't push symbolism too far from that perspective in the medieval period now an eight-sided pillar is of course very valuable in and of itself but it's also important in terms of the idea of the eight sides because eight was seen um symbolically as introducing the idea of regeneration creation had been achieved in seven days and therefore the eighth day was the idea of regeneration and if you're thinking about fonts you've still got you've got again that idea of eight now as far as fabrication is concerned we have got our eight-sided pillar in the case of some auburn's abbey there are six of these round pillars and it is worth noting that here these pillars were used as a riridos the two paintings here for an altar and we'll come back to that idea of alters in a little while so if we're thinking about fabisham's pillar it's in the north transit so it's lying in lay's space rather than being in the chancel which was clerical space and this differentiation between lay and clerical space was becoming more important from that late 13th century onwards so just at the time that this is taking place now you can see where i've pointed to which of the pillars we're going to be looking at and it's also worth noting that there are traces of paint on three other the transect pillars in other words the four nearest the central nave and chancel of the church this unfortunately is the only survivor so the next thing is to think about what's on the pillar we have our eight faces and on the top tier we have two major scenes of christ's passion and a third scene this will work yes we have one scene of the passion there one scene of the passion there and then here we have it's now very difficult to tell what it is but it's either a tree or a vine but if we're looking below that we've got the middle and bottom tears provide us with six scenes from christ's nativity again they vary in length and we'll be going through those in a bit of detail in a minute but i think there are two crucial issues that we need to take into account when we're actually looking at the pillar the first thing that i think is crucial is the line of sight of either christ or the virgin mary and i'll explain that as we go through and the second thing i think is absolutely crucial is the west facing side of the pillar so here as you can see on the top tier we have christ crucifixion on the second on the middle we have the christ child cycling as part of the nativity and then on the bottom tier we have the virgin and child as the final panel of the adoration of the magi so if we're thinking about lines of sight which is where i want to start so you can see if we're looking at the the we're here as you can see on the on the bottom tier and if we start with the annunciation to the virgin we have gabriel who faces mary and i think predominantly you're to see this as a self-contained unit particularly in the case of mary mary is definitely looking towards gabriel think gabriel is primarily looking towards mary but if you've got if if gabriel is looking anywhere else at all then he's looking up and if he's looking up then he's looking up to another angel associated with the annunciation to the shepherds but i think primarily you to see this as self-contained if we move to the second so we're moving conventionally right to the right around the pillar as you would read a book we meet mary and her cousin elizabeth so here we have cousin elizabeth and here we have mary now mary is slightly shorter than her cousin which means that she looks up and left and by so doing she looks up to the shepherds so she joins the shepherds who like their dog here and i i i absolutely adore this this dog i think that's absolutely fantastic to actually get the dog in there you have the both the dog and the shepherds looking up and all partly towards the angel i know by so doing in that way they stay on this level but they also look up and are confronted by saint john at the crucifixion so by if we're thinking about that idea of of moving conventionally towards the right here we've got the shepherds if looking up and to the left so i think from that point of view you need to think about the shepherds and where they're looking angel in contrast if anything is conventionally looking beyond the shepherds to the presentation of christ in the temple which we'll come to in a minute so i think again this this is the only time in a sense where you've got it's not christ or the virgin mary but it is the shepherds who are looking if we then move on to our next set of paintings we come to the nativity now as you can see i hope joseph has disappeared he's been lost but he would have been looking towards mary and the child and the scene is in a sense completed above by the ox and the ass again they're looking towards the center however mary looks neither at christ nor joseph but down and to the right and i think his incense is really important whereas in a sense christ is to a degree looking towards his earthly father so if we're taking in this time mary's line of sight this takes us down her and the viewer down to the adoration of the magi now this is a four panel scene it's the longest in the nativity tears and it finishes with mary as you can see here and we have mary and we have christ and as we've already seen she's on the west facing of the bottom tier now this is not the virgin mary as in the earthly mother of christ at nativity as you can see she's crowned so we're seeing her as queen of heaven and she's staring out towards the viewer but christ on her lap and the christ child is haloed which i don't know see just there christ is looking left and up and again so he's looking against the conventions and he's looking up so he's looking up in against the conventions in both cases and if we then move on to the next one we come to the presentation in the temple and what we have here is the final nativity sequence christ's presentation in the temple that idea of candleness the idea of the purification of our lady and of course this also ended the christmas tide season so it's an important final scene from that perspective now here again we've got joseph and mary and they are looking at their child simeon looks at christ and upwards and christ even more looks beyond simeon and meets the gaze of his crucified self on the top tier i don't know if you can see but christ's hand is raised in blessing and it's also worth noting that we have on this christian altar what appears to be a chalice so really important from that perspective we move up to the top tier and therefore the passion sequence we have the crucifixion and we have as we've already seen christ staring down at his infant self but neither mary nor saint john engage with any of the figures instead they're looking down sorrowfully and john's gesture is one of in comprehension so we've at this point we got a really important sequence and again with it if we note remember this is on the west facing part of the pillar if we move to the final passion sequence we've got the empty tomb and we've got the three mary's as you would expect now in since we have two pairs here so we have the first mary who faces the angel while her two companions face each other and they're all standing behind the empty tomb from which the cloth which wrapped christ's body sticks out so again we've got how the painter is using a pillar so again the importance of the sequence is brought up by the fact that we've actually got four panels for it and then you can just about see on this side that it you know the the final ones panel of the tree or the vine is is very difficult to read now it could be seen possibly as christ as the vine or the tree of life or the tree of paradise could also be possibly seen as the idea of the acanthus tree which was symbolic of death and the afterlife and therefore the resurrection or even possibly the peridiction tree with its doves which came from the physiologus and symbolically provided the protection of the trinity or if we might even possibly um the fact that it is very sort of serpent-like are we looking back to the idea of eden and eve and the fact that mary through her re redemptive powers is is almost putting right the the first sin of eve now why is this exciting well i just want to give you just um briefly some ideas about seeing from a medieval perspective there were two theories in relation to seeing there was the idea of extra mission the idea of the eye actively seeing by sending out rays that lighted on an object to make it visible that was one theory but there was also the theory of intromission where the image sent out rays that passed into the idea and then to different parts of the brain so you had a dynamic relationship between subject and object added to this there was the idea that yes you saw with the bodily eye but that could be transformed into seeing by the mind's eye and as a result that would reveal higher spiritual levels of knowledge and this enhancing brought into play the viewers emotional engagement with the image for example christ's christ suffering on the cross would bring a heightened sense of devotion what is commonly called affective piety an emotional response and if anybody has ever read the book of marjorie kemp you will see the um affective piety uh in in action now not everybody agreed that this was right there was a feeling at times that this was excessive or indiscreet love or idolatry and this was particularly the feeling of the lollards at the time but affective party was very important in terms of medieval devotion so thinking about the whole of the pillar we've got christ's mother is present in all bar two scenes so like her son she plays a principal role and it's her line of sight that the viewer follows as much as christ and this is probably not surprising it considering that the church at fabishim is dedicated to our lady but i now want to in a sense take us to um the sort of final part of this talk where i want to sort of look at the wills from the church for the later middle ages so we've looked at the construction we've looked a process in terms of construction now i want to look at a process in terms of reception and to do this as i say i'm going to draw on the wheels for favisham now in the 15th century as well as the high altar there were about 14 subsidiary altars in faversham parish church including uh the chapel of saint thomas of canterbury uh in the north chancel isle which i hope you can see there and on the south side we've got the trinity chapel also on the north side we've got the aisle of saint john and that would have seemed to have indicated a an altar in the east wall of the north transept because there is a pesina that survives or at least part of a persina and john priest left five marks for a priest to sing for his soul at the altar of saint john the baptist and i think this is significant because said john the baptist could be linked to the holy family and to the idea of the eucharist because saint john the baptist could also be seen through his own sacrificial role in biblical history as providing that link to the eucharist now many of the other altars and the three further chapels are likely to be in the nave and the south transit and there were two chapels in the cemetery now among the various altars we get the usual virgin martyrs and traditional saints so we've got some clement some nicholas and some peter but there's also the morrow mass altar and the high altar was called the jesus altar and i think that's really really interesting um the jesus mass came into kent pretty early we have a reference to it in sandwich in the 1460s and that's early um so uh kent is very much um in the in the vanguard of these new devotions and i think fabian because of its trading links is sort of part of this from that perspective the church had more lights than any other parish church in kent there were at least 27 including some more unusual ones like uh the light of saint sif and master john shawn and our lady of guessing or bedlam and we'll come back to our lady of guessing in a minute because that's especially interesting and it was said to be in the north part of the church now i think the location and the pillars emphasis on the nativity suggests that they could be one and the same in other words the columns nativity painting on the west side facing side of the pillar where mary is shown suckling christ she half reclines could be the image of our lady of gessen and i it means our lady in child bed um and therefore you would had lights candles set before it now i agree this is to a degree speculative but it is certainly possible we actually are looking at an altar there uh not least because or said to be an image of christ in this area and as we've already noted that on the west facing images of the pillar all have this eucharistic imagery so we've got at the bottom the magi worshiping at the altar of christ in the center we've got the lactating virgin nurturing christ who in turn nurtured mankind through his blood at the crucifixion and we have of course the crucifixion which is directly above and if you think if you can we go back to the nave pillars our instant or punjabi you've got those same sort of uh images in terms of the rear dots there and furthermore we have the squint from the anchor hold which was just outside the parish church and the line of sight from that anchor hold would have included the painted pillars west face so i can't prove it but i think you know all of these things help to us to understand what was going on there now if we're thinking about the other lights that were dedicated to the virgin mary in the church we find that from the wills some of the images were very well supported in particularly our lady of pity in the south oil and if you remember we've got here the authors of our lady of pity and anne and of christian anne is the was the mother of of mary so very much we've got that in the two transits the holy family are in a sense extraordinarily well represented and if we're thinking about late medieval party that move from christ's divinity to christ's humanity was a very very important factor so the idea of the holy family and since was a central part of that part of of the ideas of devotion so we've got the fact that we have these alters and we have therefore a series of popular foci for the cult of the virgin mary around the church so they're offering parishioners as worshipers considerable opportunities to either concentrate on one image or to move from one image to another around the building and they would do that um and what they might do in terms of thinking about christ so in a sense they was the idea was that they would with in their mind's eye see themselves with mary at the crucifixion so they are imagining and engaging emotionally with christ and his mother at the crucifixion and at the nativity and of course at the idea of the altar in relation to the presentation in the temple and they would do this through prayers and particularly in terms of books of hours in relation to the hours of the virgin and the hours of the cross and if i'm right then at the painted pillar this could have been a particularly important and special liturgical space which was both linked to the christmas tide celebrations and also the since the eucharist and the mass that would take place there furthermore of course it's very close to saint thomas's chapel and therefore if pilgrims were drawn there as they were on their way to canterbury they would pass the pillar and possibly again engage in the saying of prayers as a result now to to since i'm coming to the conclusion but i'm not quite there yet so if we're thinking about surviving records can they actually tell us any more or is it incense cues pure speculation in terms of the potential of the pillar as a place of devotion well i think there are tantalizing pointers that come from fabian in so much as i think that in a sense we can put forward the idea that the people in late medieval fathership did have knowledge and understanding of relatively sophisticated ideas about spirituality uh and i'm basing that on the fact that there's a presence of poetry associated with the mystic john of burlington in the town's custom and these this provides ideas about meditation and about mystical experience now this is hardly surprising considering fabricion's trading contacts in this country and overseas thus i think the painted pillar pro can provide us with some really interesting ideas about the spiritual life of the church for the townsfolk but is this as a final slide want to point out that yes i am perfectly well aware that the past is a foreign country and they do diff things differently there but i just want to point you to this um tomb in sandwich in some peter's church and if you look at the recumbent husband and wife effigies and you follow the line of sight of the images of the of the effigies you would find that they actually are at the point in front of the altar where at the at the point of transubstantiation the chalice would have been held so i think in a sense lines of sight are really important for medieval people and for us to try and understand medieval people we've got to try and think back into their lives so thank you very much great thank you very much sorry about that it's like technical problem um i just had a couple of quick questions before i go to one um on the on the q a um i mean is it possible to give a bit of context of um this this particular kind of art i mean um you know they're comparable works in in i mean you mentioned in sandwich but that's obviously slightly different but are there comparable works like this in kent in england or even in europe i mean presumably there was a european dimension to this you mentioned the importance of the catholic church i mean is there something that sort of is similar to this that you can compare it with yeah i mean we've got it's usually um wall paintings rather than on painted columns that's the point so you've got um the passion sequences are the more usual um you've got lots of parish churches with those there's a particularly good group um in the sort of flaster round towards sort of oxford area um there's there are some fantastic ones again from the similar sort of period so late 13th and into the 14th centuries uh but it's i say it's more on the walls it's the fact that this is on a column is interesting um obviously you have got column paintings because you've got them as an album's abbey um now whether of course uh favisham they painted on the column because the you know the walls were already covered who knows i mean you know we they've got everything else is well there's some paintings in the um chapel of saint thomas but that's all that's left now um but these are very high quality i mean they are they are definitely um as far as art historians are concerned this is really high quality early 14th century paintings um in terms of the draperies um and in terms of the sort of the the sinewy shapes of the figures so it's top it's top-notch stuff um now whether of course we're looking at a painter from canterbury it's a possibility um equally of course we could be looking at a painter from london uh or even from overseas um but i mean fabricium was an important trading port so it did attract um i high-end um people um both sort of living there and also passing through um and you know so you've got wealth you've got prosperous people who would be able to afford um to be the patrons of of such paintings from that perspective so yes um they are in terms of subject matter you've got uh other paintings uh in kent and elsewhere in england that are even even more in terms of the passion um but um it's it's the pillar that's the really interesting part great thank you so we have one question here um which is really about uh the con the the tension or even conflict between uh augustine zabi and the archer bishop uh so it sort of relates turn genitally to um a kind of foundation but could you say a bit more about that whether there's any literature available on it this is just a comment from the q a box um if you mean literature uh in terms of has people written about it um yes to a certain extent but if you want actually um just to follow the conflict then um you if you can get hold of a davises copy of william thorne's chronicle from saint augustine debbie um thorne goes into great detail uh in terms of the dispute between the uh this this particular archbishop and the abbey he also goes into great detail in terms of every um dispute between saint augustine's and the abbey and central gustins and christchurch and augustine than anybody else from that point of view um so yes um there is and i mean and um uh davises uh is a translation of thorns chronicles so in a sense um you can actually read it in english from that perspective in modern english um but um the fact that central ghastines saw itself as um only under rome um i mean you know these these sort of tensions are are reasonably common between different ecclesiastical bodies from that perspective great thank you so we've got another question here uh which is really about the lines of sight so it's michael would all lines of sight in 14th century effigies be seen to look at important focal points i mean they're all equally important no i think there's a hierarchy um and you could at times um your your the artist would actually denote the lines of sight by by actually drawing painting lines um between his sort of figures or so from that point of view um if you want to make it absolutely explicit that's what you did so from that point of view um no um i say that there's definitely a hierarchy uh and that hierarchy is primarily based on in a sense your um biblical hierarchy so in a sense you're putting christ and and his mother at the top and then you can then you sort of work your way down so um but you can do the same thing with saints um if you think that um if you the idea was that if the painting of some christopher was usually on the opposite wall to the entrance into the church so the idea being that where if when you entered the church you immediately you were seen by some christopher anderson christopher saw you uh and that relationship meant that you were therefore he said christopher would protect you that day so from that point of view you're the way the saint is looking at you mattered so it's it's a it's the relationships with in the paintings but it's also the relationship between the paintings and the viewer great thank you and so uh if anyone has any questions then please do put them in the q a box um you said that favoritism had a very sort of had very special rights towards the end of your talk you talked about uh the special rights it had why did it have those special rights um you've lost me are the special rights in terms of um you said that there were um i think 20 you referred to this sort of oh you're living in the number of lights sorry yes okay yes yes um yes well it had all these devotional points in the church uh and when we say light we mean candles um so you would put candles in front of an image or an altar or a painting in other words devotional points within the church so the fact you've got nearly 30 of these devotional points within the church is extremely unusual um and the fact you've got some really some quite interesting ones from that point of view that you know you've got you've got the usual sort of you know um traditional states that you would expect from claremont nicholas peter um usual virgin martyrs uh catherine um what have you uh but you've also got since sith and mastered john shawn um and master john shawn um was one of those late medieval saints inverted commas in so much as he was a a pious individual from um north master new buckinghamshire who was said to have found a effectively a miraculous well um and and people who took the waters um were cured of gout and toothache and he was believed to have cast the devil into a boot um and uh he's off i mean he's shown most frequently with the boot with the devil trying to make sense get out of the boot now because he was never canonized um but his devotion was sufficient that um his his his bones were taken to windsor i think if i remember rightly um and he becomes in a sense um patronized by the royal family so um you know these these sort of late medieval saints um were either politically motivated um or they were this sort of rather oddball that you sort of get in the case of um master john shawn great so i've got a couple of questions um uh here one is uh when was the pillar painting in faversham actually discovered i mean if it wasn't rediscovered and then a sort of more technical question um how would a squint be used instead of direct observation from the within the church i mean you referred to a squint i presume this sort of sounds like why would you need that if you just look at the thing directly so yeah those two okay okay in terms of um i think it was found at some point in the 20th century i mean it's relatively very recently found um and so much as um elizabeth edwards who grew up in faversham was telling me um she didn't know anything about it until very recently so we are looking um in the last i don't know 20 30 years maybe something like that it's been found now in terms of the squint um you you were looking from outside the church that's the point so your your anchor hold where your anchorite or ankarese lived was just outside the church so it's a sort of um bit like a little cabin built onto the church um with a line of sight into the church so that the anchorite or anchor s could observe the mass when it was being um celebrated so you need to be able to see from outside so although um yeah i mean obviously i couldn't show you the squid from outside because it's now being bricked up you can't see from outside uh into the church um but that's where you would have been you would have been outside and looking in okay and then uh there's a couple of questions here about um yeah i mean the sort of uh relationship between this wall painting and graffiti i mean you know the kind of extraordinary graffiti in rochester cathedral and other churches um and these are now being recognized i mean would graffiti does graffiti kind of figure in favors in church um it's amazing favoritism or uh was graffiti placed over the paintings no it was i mean they were whitewashed um um i mean that's what happened to most paintings they were either scraped off or if you're lucky they were just white washed over in which case that's actually protected them and when you remove the white wash as long as you're careful they're still there um in terms of graffiti i don't know of any graffiti in february but be honest i haven't looked for it um it's certainly in some cases it's likely that the graffiti was actually done by maybe not the painter but by in a sense um masons or those who were working on the church rather than um others who came into the church shall we say um as visitors or whatever so in a sense some some graffiti is very high quality because in a sense it was done by by masons and and similar are artisans from that perspective um but it does vary tremendously from that point of view um i mean there's some of the graffiti uh in canterbury cathedral crypt uh which yeah they they think was done when um the crypt was being [Music] sort of renovated under anselm um um and and also um in that period when um the trinity chapel above was also being done so in a sense you know you are you're looking at high quality and uh it's been done with a chisel it's not not done with a knife and it you know somebody has taken time to do it so it's not somebody it's not a pilgrim who is just coming in um with his knife um scraping on the pillar uh or whatever or the wall or whatever it is um where the graffiti is so there's again you've got a whole range of of graffiti from that perspective great thank you um so here's a couple of questions on uh the desecration from the reformation um so you know why did the pillar survive intact over that period and then one question on the new style of mass which um came in in the 1460s someone is asking you know did did you i mean i think you mentioned that um so what did that involve i mean what kind of impact did that have okay um in terms of of the reformation what usually happened um an awful lot of whitewash um obviously you you know you take out uh the statute well the statues are um are usually desecrated usually burnt um hacked to pieces whatever um depending on how strong the feelings were of the those who were in attack attacking them but in terms of the actual walls it's usually whitewash if you if you look in a church wardens account you'll find lots of money spent on whitewash so that that's what happened in terms of that in terms of the jesus mass um which comes in into kent in the 1460s this is the mass of the name of jesus um and it's a devotion that is focusing very much on christ in terms of the passion so it is very much focusing on thinking about the five wounds of christ so it's the mass of the five wounds so of jesus mass it's it's there's a whole series of these masses associated with christ and christ's humanity that's the point so you you're getting um images of this particular point and paintings as well where christ's body is really shown as broken um very very skinny um you are the painters and the sculptors are accentuating christ suffering as a way of gaining the the emotional response of viewers and and therefore getting much greater devotion through their emotional engagement with christ and christ's suffering and christ suffering from mankind leading on to the resurrection so you've got the crucifixion and then the the resurrection and in a sense the resurrection here is shown by the empty tomb so in since you're you're using that idea of um presence and absence in relation to the two scenes christ is present at the crucifixion he's absent um at the resurrection um but it's christ suffering that's what you're looking for um so you will i say find um paintings of christ where there's vast amounts of blood shown on christ um you know he's really really gory as a way of engaging with people's emotions from that perspective uh and i'm gonna say that the mass of of the five wounds and the mass of jesus is very much linked into that great thank you um so two more um you mentioned chroma on some of the other pillars uh do you have any kind of information on the subject matter of those and um would parishioners and pilgrims be looking at these pillars uh before the services um or did they actually sort of perform a function uh whenever you kind of went into the church regardless of the services how did they kind of uh you know kind of operate i guess in terms of ritual you can't tell um there's there's the amount of patents left on the other three pillars is so minute you can't tell um it's i would have thought it's highly likely you've got um painting you would have had paintings from the life of the virgin um maybe more from the passion sequence and maybe more of the nativity i think in a sense they would have revolved around those sort of three those three areas so the life of the virgin uh christ life in relation to his nativity in particular and the passion um in terms of how people use them and when they use them um your favoritism had more than it had its parish priest but it has brotherhood priests as well so your they would have been celebrating using the canonical hours just as you would do in a monastery so you would have they would have been celebrating the divine service so there would have been seven services a day going on in that church as a minimum now your your parishioners um would be in lay space within the church which basically means your name and your transepts and obviously the isles that go with the triceps they would not the parishioners would not have been in the chancel and probably not so much in either the trinity chapel or saint thomas chap thomas's chapel they could to a degree but in a sense not as much um so your parishioners could indeed have been at services um at the same time when they were being conducted but this is not to say that their your parishioners could not have come into the church at other times as well so they could have engaged with um the painted pillar if i'm right uh with the altar of our lady of gessen not only during service times but also at other times as well um so they could have um followed the prayers within the if they had a book of hours themselves um or in a sense they could have prayed the paternoster which it was expected that everybody knew so from that point of view you you the choices were up to the parishioners um but the fact you've got a moral mass altar rather indicates that you had a very early mass of the day because that was the whole point of that was the fact that that was the first mass of the day and if you were a working person you could come in and you could obviously you weren't going to partake of the mass but you could indeed engage as witness to the mass and then you would go and and go and work in your normal day great thank you and so three final questions um mary and st john appear as statues uh on the rude loft above the root screen is there any link here between the location of the pillars in the church near where a root screen may have been so that's the first question the second question is quite simply um are the pillars you know is the pillar protected by varnish and then um a final question which is about this concept of eight linking to revivification hence eight-sided fonts and the careful positioning of the column uh does this speak to the personal does does this speak to the drama of personal devotion uh are moving around the church as ductus d-u-c-t-u-s so there's a final three questions right um first one was sorry the rude screen briefly yes um it's it's not far from the rude screen um in so much as um if you think about it your rude screen would have been a across here so you intense you're not far from that from that perspective um and of course not only are you um mary would have again would have been on the on christ's right hand side so in a sense um she would have been on the same side as the pillar from that perspective um and quite often you would have the lady chapel on the north side as well um you would also women you were usually on the north they are in terms of when parishioners were in the church then women were expected to be on the north side men were on the south side um so that it's close it's close so in a sense you've got all these positions around the church from that perspective um so yes um they're towards the the east end of the lay part of the church sorry kerry what was the second one oh yeah the second is just varnish yes is it i'm not sure but i don't think there is uh varnish but i'm not an art historian so i wouldn't like to sort of uh pass judgment on that one and then it's just a devotional um personal devotion yeah yes i i think people did i mean of course i can't i mean without without a time machine i will never know um but if you look up what we know from elsewhere um as far as we can tell and the fact that um there are manuals as to how people should act in relation to um that their devotion then the answer is yes um i think very much fabrication parish church had that potential whether that potential was realized by any or all we will never know but the fact that it was even the potential was there i think is is significant and it gives us ways of thinking about um how medieval people responded that in a sense um paintings are not for the illiterate this idea that you know um just because we are literate or at least we think we're literate you know we are so much more sophisticated than medieval people is wrong um apart from anything else literacy meant being able to read and write in latin it didn't mean english at all um but these paintings are sophisticated they are they require an understanding of the symbolism that was present throughout medieval society and it was a symbolism that they they got just like that just as we see an advert and immediately know what's behind it they could understand symbolism in the same way so symbolism had at least four meanings i mean in terms of any any image or any painting had at least four meanings behind it um and in a sense the idea was that you were looking for at least at least those four and if not more so all the time you're looking for greater depth uh and complexity within the the in your image and that of course is leading towards your devotion that's the whole point of this is this all leading towards salvation great thank you very much indeed um and so i'd like to um express my thanks to uh sheila our trustee for giving up her time this evening this is one of the many talks and lectures that we are hosting at the kent archaeological society and they will be available on the kent archaeological society youtube channel for anyone to re-watch remember if you're watching on youtube to click on subscribe below and to give us a thumbs up or even make a comment and we'll include links and further information in the description our next meeting will be on the 26th of march at seven o'clock where charles dorks will be talking about the excavations at snodlin roman villa and then again um next month on the 13th of april uh our other trustee rob legere will be talking about underground kent we really really appreciate you joining us this evening and thank you for your time and again thank you to sheila for a wonderful talk on these amazing pillars in faversham church thank you very much and good night everyone [Music]