Treasures of gold thread preserved by neglect
In the middle of a tutorial that Dr Malcolm Vale was giving, the phone rang and the college clerk of works said that some sort of tapestry had been found in the loft of the President’s Lodgings. Did he want to take a look before it was thrown out? He did, and the tutorial was postponed.
The object turned out to be a rare treasure from the 16th century, a liturgical banner depicting St John the Baptist. The emblem the saint held, of the Lamb and Flag, is familiar from the pub owned by St John’s College, Oxford.
The rest of the incomparable college collection of medieval vestments, embroidered and painted in gold, was scarcely known when Dr Vale was first shown it in 1978 by Sir Howard Colvin, the architectural historian. “Had I been a conservator,” Dr Vale recalled this week, “I would have had a nightmare. They were rolled or folded, so that the threads had broken off at the fold.”
How the vestments had survived at all has since been pieced together. The story was told this week in a two-day conference at St John’s. Medieval embroidery, in which England excelled, has become popular among academics in the past decade or so, and reflects the past religious life of Oxford, the country and of Europe.
St John’s was founded by Sir Thomas White, a London alderman, in 1555 during the reign of Queen Mary. White supported her idea of returning England to the Catholic faith. Mary inconveniently died, and, though the college went through a period of Catholic tendencies (with Fellows such as Edmund Campion leaving to be ordained abroad), it fell back into Calvinist conformity during the late 16th century.
After the founder’s death, the vestments were returned to the college by his niece, Amy Leech (who, it happens, was the greatgreat-great-grandmother of Jane Austen). She lived in the manor house at Fyfield, a large estate bought by White as part of his college endowment. There, perhaps waiting for better days, she had kept the vestments that had been part of her uncle’s gift to set up the chapel for a traditional liturgy. (The chapel had been adapted from the one left at the dissolution of the monasteries by the Cistercians evicted from their College of St Bernard.)
Thomas White’s plans were elucidated further in 2003 by the discovery of the college coat of arms on a triptych owned by Southampton City Art Gallery. The painting, by Goossen van der Weyden showed the debate in which St Catherine of Alexandria trounced 50 philosophers. It would have served, with suitable irony at academic pretensions, as an altarpiece in the college chapel.
As for the vestments, they survived by neglect and luck. A 1602 inventory called them “old superstitiouse church ornaments”. They include gold-embroidered copes. Copes were allowed in the Church of England, but not orphreys (panels) depicting saints, or dalmatics for deacons at Mass, least of all a large red liturgical banner showing the Virgin Mary assumed into heaven above a border with the emblem of the Five Wounds of Christ (taken up in 1536 by the anti-reformation rebellion of the Pilgrimage of Grace). This was the gift of one Thomas Campion, perhaps a relation of Edmund’s.
Later the vestments were casually referred to as “Laudian”, though they long predated the college presidency of William Laud, the Archbishop of Canterbury committed to the “beauty of holiness” and executed in 1645.
Today they are kept in an exhibition room, open to the public, in obscure Oxford style, each term on the Saturday of seventh week.