Observer’s guide to the wind-trunk hole
There is something odd about the wall at the church of St Mary the Virgin, Kelling, in Norfolk. It’s the north wall of the chancel to be exact and the observant eye of Martin Renshaw spotted a patch of brickwork high up in the flinty surface.
It is a prime suspect as a wind-trunk hole. In other words there has been infilling of the hole in the wall between a loft where a man or two operated a bellows and the narrow organ loft in the chancel of the church. A hollow tube acted as a conduit for wind to keep the organ sounding. After all, if the noisy bellows were operated right next to the organ, it would have been fearfully distracting.
If your church is medieval and has, or had, a north-east building tacked on to the chancel, it was probably for organ bellows.
Mr Renshaw has been singing and playing (and building) organs for 60 years. He’s right to celebrate the amazing virtuosity of medieval church organs. We are hardly aware of these marvellous machines because, I think I’m right in saying, no organ survives from before the Civil War.
In a fascinating short book (with good, instructive colour plates) called ABC of a Medieval Church, Mr Renshaw examines the functional parts from those centuries and shows what remnants might survive to indicate those that are lost. The title is playfully misleading for ABC stands for Altar, Barrier (the screen) and Church (the nave).
He is absolutely right to explain that the words we fling around for the parts of old churches are not the words that would have been used when they were built. They did not speak of the transept, or the nave (before 1500), or the apse, or the retable. The quire was spelt with a Q until the etymologisers confused it with chorus and made the spelling choir.
I don’t know that I’m convinced by all Mr Renshaw’s verdicts on old church vocabulary. He insists that chancel is the place where people chant. I’d accept the philologists’ explanation that the word derives from the Latin cancelli, “bars of latticework”, which enclosed it. He is certainly right in distinguishing the chancel as the part where the holy rites took place, as distinct from the nave, where the faithful laity stood to follow the Mass and see the elevation of the host.
Again, I think he goes a bit far in insisting that the nave was simply known as the church. There is evidence that church referred to the whole caboodle. Nor was the nave free from sacred rites. As Eamon Duffy outlined in The Stripping of the Altars (1992), even small churches had their quota of altars for guild and chantry Masses, all crammed into the nave. So, at Ranworth, Norfolk, the beautifully painted rood screen was not a barrier against contact with the Mass, but the backdrop for it. Two altars in the nave flanked the central portion of the screen, so that the paintings on its northern and southern extremes acted as a reredos for each.
Mr Renshaw does stress the importance of lay guilds, and he deals trenchantly with the treatment of rood screens. “Nineteenthcentury architects and their clients,” he writes, “caused the loss of far more screens of all kinds than all the three previous centuries of reform.” We’d also have had far more screens with their original colours had not the Camden Society (from 1845, the Ecclesiological Society) recommended a product supplied by a tradesman in Stowmarket that removed every trace of paint.
It takes knowledge and examination to know what used to be in your church. It’s not just wind-trunk holes. You should read Mr Renshaw on chancel stringcourses.