To hell in a handcart, 72 feet above ground
If you want to see someone going to hell in a handcart, take a pair of binoculars and a train to Norwich. There, in the cathedral, 72 feet above the floor, a roof boss, carved in stone and painted, shows a devil holding a jug aloft, with an alewife upon his shoulders, wheeling a man to damnation in a barrow.
This boss is a little earlier than the scene in a stainedglass window of the last judgment at Fairford, Gloucestershire, from the first years of the 16thcentury, which shows a horned blue devil using a handcart for his human cargo.
At Norwich this is not the most striking or most beautiful of the roof bosses above the nave, and there are plenty to choose from – 255. A new stone-vaulted roof was constructed by Walter Lyhert, Bishop of Norwich 1446-72, to replace the timber roof destroyed by fire in 1463. His punning rebus is carved in several places, a hart lying in water (for “Walter”). He is portrayed on a boss above the west window, flanked by angels censing the Holy Trinity.
I feel grateful to Bishop Lyhert, who sank his own money into the expensive venture. He got the best man to work on the bosses, the master mason Reginald Ely, who had worked on King’s College, Cambridge. In their day few people could have seen the high bosses clearly. Now you can lie back with binoculars or download an app with clear images (at least on Android phones; it doesn’t currently function on iphones).
The bosses are masterly in conception and execution. The largest, each about 16 inches across, run down the spine-ridge above the gangway on the ground, from door to altar. From each, eight ribs radiate. Each rib is given a boss as soon as it intersects with another rib.
The bosses act as keystones, holding the arched ribs in place. The figuratively carved area is only the central, protruding part that gives the mason the opportunity to make a three-dimensional scene.
The bosses in the nave at Norwich follow a biblical narrative, from creation to the last judgment. The handcart to hell has a neighbour depicting the damned being thrust by a devil into the jaws of hell – a wide-open dragonish maw with dagger-teeth.
But earlier in the biblical chronicle, hell-mouth is forced even wider open by the risen Christ (displaying the wounds of his Passion), holding a staff with a red cross on a white pennant and shepherding the souls of the righteous from their captivity.
It has been pointed out that the vivid scenes – the creation of Adam and Eve, Noah’s ark, David and Goliath, the Nativity, the Last Supper and so on – may take their cue from the “mystery” plays that were seen in the streets each year.
Certainly there is a contemporary look to many. Pharaoh drowned in the Red Sea wears armour and a crown and his chariot looks like a farm cart. John the Baptist sensibly uses a pitcher for the water as he baptises Jesus in the Jordan, while angels on nearby bosses wait with a dry tunic and towel. Rebecca wears an apron as she lowers her bucket into the well.
At the Reformation, the bosses were whitewashed over, and their colour revealed only in 1870 by the Dean, Meyrick Goulburn. In the 1930s they were recoloured, under the guidance, I think, of EW Tristram. The result, with its gilding and strong hues, is not too much like the Humbrol school of repainting that afflicts too many church carvings here and on the Continent.
A complete set of photographs in miniature by Paul Hurst is available in his Norwich Cathedral Nave Bosses for £10.