Monsters looming in the Norfolk roof timbers
The church of St Clement, Outwell, is thick with angels. They flock about the roof beams, more than 100 of them, some bearing musical instruments, others the instruments of the Passion.
The church stands amid the fens and dykes below the Wash, between the rivers Nene and Great Ouse, close to the Cambridgeshire border. It was a prosperous place in the second quarter of the 15th century, and from that period remains something curious that demands attention.
In addition to the angels, figures are carved in the wood of the roof posts at the top of the nave walls. Pevsner’s guide to Norfolk says they stand below canopies, but it’s more interesting than that. With the help of a cherry-picker and scaffolding they have been examined by Dr Claire Gobbi Daunton.
What she has brought to light is that figures of Apostles, delicately carved with emblematic detail, stand under larger looming heads-and-shoulders of semi-human and demonic figures, bearing the weight of the roof. What does this juxtaposing of holiness and the infernal mean?
The placing of the figures was planned. The Apostles stand in pairs. Time and death-watch beetle have done away with most of the identifying symbols once held by the Apostles (who have now been preserved after a fundraising effort by the parish). But one pair, on opposite sides of the nave, are still easy to name: St John, holding a chalice, and St James, with his pilgrim satchel and staff.
Leaning over St John is a furry-chested, beak-faced devil of the kind you might see in a manuscript illumination (or, at the time, perhaps in drama). Over St James (pictured) leans another unsettling figure: a large-featured woman with an exaggerated horned headdress and, in place of hands, taloned paws. Why put such things together in a church? Dr Gobbi Daunton does not quite say “Why not?” She has put her ideas together in a paper for the annual Harlaxton Symposium, now collected with 20 other papers in Saints and Cults in Medieval England, published by the enterprising Shaun Tyas.
She points to a study of medieval ideas of ludus “play” and seria “weighty things” with respect to art, published by Mary Carruthers in 2013.
An aspect of play is found in creation. Commenting on the Book of Proverbs, the 13th-century spiritual writer John of Forde wrote that: “The Wisdom of God played before the Father’s face over the whole expanse of the earth.” God played with the monster Leviathan too, the Psalm says.
Dr Gobbi Daunton notes that a medieval fondness for monsters presupposed the reliance of humanity’s creativity on the primary creation by God. As St Anselm, the philosopher (Archbishop of Canterbury 10931109) saw it, men could mentally rearrange elements of God’s creation and so make an artistic image of the composite centaur or chimera – or horn-headdressed woman with clawed paws.
At Outwell, then, the dignity of the Apostles is pointed up by the mirror-image ludicrous figures grinning above them. But it must be admitted that the carved figures are hard to see. When they were made, the brightest light was from distant candles or reflected daylight, and their details could seldom have been clear.
Yet, no doubt, the local yeomen, newly prosperous, the Beaupres and the Haultofts, would have been proud to pay for carved figures of the Apostles to join the angels aloft, and not have thought it out of place to have a few demons and chimeras thrown in as an artistic jeu d’esprit.