The very first picture of Canterbury pilgrims
Aremarkable discovery about pilgrims to the shrine of St Thomas at Canterbury has been made, hiding in plain sight.
I was thinking about Becket (as he wasn’t known in his time, Becket being a sort of nickname) last weekend because I spent a couple of hours sitting in the very atmospheric Eastern Crypt of the cathedral, where his body was revered in the years after his martydom in 1170.
The two hours were spent enjoyably listening to a wonderful recital for flute and piano by Patrick Williams and the conductor Stephen Barlow. One item they played was a surprisingly approachable transcription of part of
Messiaen’s Meditations on the Mystery of the Holy Trinity.
Messiaen’s piece was particularly appropriate because the crypt where we sat supports the chapel of the Trinity above, built to house a more magnificent shrine for Canterbury’s holy martyr. The chapel includes stained glass windows depicting miracles worked by the prayers of the saint.
It is surprising that any glass to do with St Thomas survives, for his shrine was completely smashed up.
On Nov 16 1538, Henry VIII, who didn’t care for the idea of a saint that stood out against the king, issued a proclamation declaring him no saint at all and ordering that “his ymages and pictures, through the hole realme, shall be putte downe, and avoyded out of all churches, chapelles, and other places; and that from henseforthe, the dayes used to be festivall in his name shall not be observed”.
By the late 19th century, when antiquarianism outbid hostility to saints of old, the windows of the Trinity chapel were restored. One panel of a window depicted pilgrims to the shrine of St Thomas, and by the 1980s, when a catalogue of the medieval window glass was made, it was decided that this was among the replacements for missing glass made by Samuel Caldwell (Snr) in 1894.
This is where the brilliant sleuthing of Prof Rachel Koopmans, from York University, Toronto, came
in. Prof Koopmans was working on the papers of Emily Williams, the author in 1897 of the first guidebook to Canterbury’s stained glass.
In a box of documents she found a drawing by Williams of the window in the Trinity chapel, with the panel of the pilgrims marked “Old”. Since Williams had been briefed by Caldwell himself, this was a serious claim. Moreover, a photograph from 1861 showed the panel much as it looks today.
The panel was removed and the hundreds of pieces of glass in it examined microscopically by Leonie Seliger, the director of Canterbury’s stained glass studio. There could be no doubt that the glass was medieval, not a Victorian replacement. Indeed, it dated from the 1180s, in the decade after St Thomas’s martyrdom, the earliest depiction of pilgrims to his shrine, two centuries before Chaucer’s poem on the Canterbury pilgrims.
“Most stained glass surviving from the Middle Ages dates to the 13th century or later,” Prof Koopmans told Medievalists.net. “The irony is that it was found in the window for which it was made over 800 years ago.”
What had looked, when seen from the Trinity chapel like a strip of white road beneath the horses’ hooves was revealed by raking light to be an inscription “Peregrini St–”: Pilgrims of (or perhaps to) the Saint.
There they are, vividly portrayed in their travelling cloaks, two on horseback and others on foot.
They carry satchels for their provisions and walk in striped boots, staffs in hand, over the greensward of Kent.