‘Strikingly fresh and utterly beautiful’ glass
You could start at Eaton Bishop, since The Medieval Stained Glass of Herefordshire & Shropshire is a book to be used. After a 30-page introduction to the glass of the counties and how it was made, a further 270 pages, illustrated in colour, list each site in a gazetteer.
“Strikingly fresh and utterly beautiful” glass, according to the author, Robert Walker, awaits the visitor to Eaton Bishop, six miles west of Hereford and not far from the Wye. Three images stand out: the Virgin and Child, and the archangels Michael and Gabriel (the church being dedicated to St Michael).
The Virgin Mary is depicted holding a flower and with her body bent delicately to hold the Child on her hip. She stands dressed in red and gold before intricate green leaves. Jesus grasps her chin as she looks smiling at him. He holds what I take to be a goldfinch (emblem of the Passion). She is crowned.
The window dates from the first third of the 14th century. (There are affinities with the smiling, mannered statue of the Virgen Blanca at Toledo Cathedral, in a French Gothic idiom.) Although glass-making techniques developed in the succeeding centuries, windows did not improve artistically, to my eyes.
The craftsman who produced this window has been given, from his making of the Michael and Gabriel windows, the name of convenience of the Master of the Archangels. The upper part of the Gabriel’s head is frustratingly broken. Michael is shown weighing a soul in judgment; I wonder if his face has undergone some change. The archangels and the Virgin are set in the church’s magnificent east window, where a central Crucifixion surprisingly survived the destruction of 16th and 17th-century iconoclasts.
Robert Walker, a retired building conservation officer, considers some competing theories about the origin of these windows. Did the Master of the Archangels work in a local school of stained-glass production? A window obviously by him, of St Catherine of Alexandria, is to be found at Deerhurst, Gloucestershire.
It is tempting to connect Eaton Bishop with Madley, a mile and a half west by the old track through Wormhill. Madley church, dedicated to the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary (her birthday, not that of Jesus) is “one of the grandest village churches in Herefordshire”. Its wonderful glass is reset in the chancel windows.
Some, from the 13th century, is older than the work of the Master of the Archangels, medallions of sacred scenes in blue, red, green and gold. It is by no means simple to tell what is going on in them. A scene of the death of St John has also been interpreted as the raising to life of St George by the Virgin Mary. But they resemble contemporary glass in France, and Hereford had a French bishop in 1240.
Other images, from the 14th century, feature the “Madley mouth” – a widely stretched H shape, with lips above and below the crossbar. The glass historian Sarah Brown described the male figures depicted by the Master of the Madley Mouth as having “long faces, foxy features, sidelong glances, pointed beards and elegant, expressive hands”. He made windows for nearby Clehonger, Ludlow, and Abbey Dore.
In 1926, Herbert Read speculated about the glass at Eaton Bishop: “One can only suppose that it emanated from a local school of Hereford”. Perhaps, although Oxford is an alternative hypothesis. We lack documentary evidence, and we count the glass that survives as a rare blessing.