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Belief and Patronage in the English Parish before 1300: Some Evidence from Roods

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

Carol Davidson Cragoe
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Extract

The late medieval English laity expressed their piety through ostentatious artistic and architectural patronage. The rood, a large-scale image of Christ on the cross, flanked by the Virgin and St John, and placed in or above the chancel arch, was a particular object of both liturgical and financial devotion in the later Middle Ages.1 One of the more interesting conclusions of recent scholarship has been the recognition that the late medieval desire to express one’s piety through donations to the church was not limited to the upper classes or to one gender. Both men and women of all social classes and ages participated to the best of their ability through collective as well as individual giving.2 Moreover, people made very deliberate choices about the types of images and architectural forms on which they spent their money.3 Scholars have argued that the roots of this very active lay patronage lie in the mid-thirteenth century when diocesan statutes first assigned responsibility for maintaining the nave and most of a church’s ornaments to its parishioners.4

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Architectural History , Volume 48 , 2005 , pp. 49 - 68
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Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 2005

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References

Notes

1 ‘Caius’ is a Latinization of Caius’s various birth names, all pronounced ‘keys’; the pronunciation is kept in the Latin form. See Venn’s, John ‘Introduction’ in The Works of John Caius (Cambridge, 1912), p. 2 Google Scholar (hereafter Caius Life). A scheme of gateways was clearly appropriate for one so-named. The gate was substantially restored in 1958, and the lost obelisks were reconstructed on the basis of Thomas Loggan’s print of 1688. For the history of the gate and its restoration by William Topper, see Powell,, Frank ‘New Buildings, Restorations and Alterations: the Restoration of the Gate of Honour’, in Biographical History of Gonville & Caius College, ed. M. J. Pritchard et al., 7 vols (Cambridge, 1978), vii, pp. 534–41.Google Scholar

2 The gates are thus termed in no. 52 of the college statutes: Documents concerning the University and Colleges of Cambridge, 2 vols (London, 1852), n, p. 274. For documentary studies, see especially Willis, Robert and Willis Clark,, John The Architectural History of the University of Cambridge, 3 vols, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1988), in, pp. 156–85.Google Scholar For a discussion of Caius’s statutes, see Brooke,, Christopher A History of Gonville and Caius College (Woodbridge, 1996), p. 67.Google Scholar

3 For the symbolism of Caius’s arms and ceremonies, see Venn,, Caius Life, pp. 18–20 Google Scholar; and Venn,, J. The Annals of Gonville and Caius College (London, 1904), 1575, p. 59 Google Scholar; also Fox,, Paul ‘On the Symbolism of the Arms of John Caius and of the College Caduceus’, The Caian, 89 (1986), pp. 46–56.Google Scholar For speculation on Caius’s continental influences, see Radcliffe,, A. ‘John Caius and Paduan Humanist Symbolism’, The Caian, 90 (1987), pp. 121–26.Google Scholar

4 For continental entries, see Les fetes de la Renaissance, 3 vols, ed. Jean Jacquot (Tours, 1956-72); Court Festivals of the European Renaissance: Art, Politics and Performance, ed. James Ronald Mulryne et al. (Aldershot, 2002); Art and Pageantry in the Renaissance and Baroque, ed. Barbara Wisch et al. (Pennsylvania, 1990). For English entries, see Roy Strong, Art and Power (Woodbridge, 1984); and especially Sydney Anglo, Spectacle, Pageantry and Early Tudor Policy (Oxford, 1997).

5 Simon,, Joan Education and Society in Tudor England (Cambridge, 1966), p. 333.Google Scholar See also Cressy,, David Education in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1975).Google Scholar

6 Kuyper,, William The Triumphant Entry of Renaissance Architecture into the Netherlands (Leyden, 1994), p. 48 Google Scholar; Cornelius Grapheus Scribonius, Spectaculorum in susceptione (Antwerp, 1550).

7 Powell,, ‘The Restoration of the Gate of Honour’, pp. 534–41 Google Scholar; Summerson,, John Architecture in Britain, 1530-1830 (New Haven, 1993), pp. 160–61.Google Scholar For Serlio, see Tutte I'opere d'architettura e prospetiva, trans. & ed. Vaughan Hart et al. (from the 1551 edition of Books i-v) (London, 1996).

8 For the library, see Grierson,, Philip ‘John Caius’s library’, in Pritchard, Biographical History, vii, pp. 509–25 (p. 5:9).Google Scholar

9 Wells-Cole,, Anthony Art and Decoration in Elizabethan and Jacobean England (New Haven, 1997), p. 10.Google Scholar For Caius’s tomb, compare Hart, Tutte I'opere, p. 386.

10 Brooke,, History of Caius, pp. 70–76.Google Scholar

11 The gate is first mentioned in 1566. Venn,, Annals, p. 122.Google Scholar

12 Venn,, Annals, p. 189.Google Scholar Close comparisons can be made with the tomb of Robert Dudley in St Mary’s, Warwick (after 1588), and the triumphal arch gateway Dudley added to Kenilworth Castle (c. 1563-72).

13 Venn,, Annals, p. 187.Google Scholar

14 Gresham was himself at Caius. Lord Mordaunt’s tomb may be connected to the Buckinghamshire monuments to Sir Anthony Care (Chicheley, 1576) and Alexander Denton (Hillesden, 1574-76). See Edis,, J. D. ‘The Tottenhoe School of Masons’ (doctoral thesis, De Montfort University, 2000).Google Scholar

15 I am indebted to Dr Margaret D'Evelyn for this new observation. For subsequent editions, see John Bury ‘Renaissance Architectural Treatises and Architectural Books: a Bibliography’, in Les Traités d’architecture dans la Renaissance, ed. J. Guillaume (Paris, 1988), pp. 486-503. Caius’s great friend Conrad Gesner compiled a bibliography of architectural treatises in his Bibliotheca Universalis of 1545; see Carpo,, Mario Architecture in the Age of Printing, trans. Sarah Benson (Massachusetts, 2001), pp. 109–12.Google Scholar

16 I am grateful to Professor Quentin Skinner for alerting me to this classical prototype. See Platner,, Samuel Ball A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome, rev. Ashby, T. (Oxford, 1929), pp. 258–60.Google Scholar The connexion with the Caius gates is made in Frederick John Stopp, The Emblems of the Altdorf Academy: medals and medal orations, 1577-1626 (London, 1974), pp. 30, 113, 214 (n. 209). For the scheme’s importance to sixteenth- century pedagogical writers, see, for instance, Juan Luis Vives, De tradendis disciplinis (Antwerp, 1531), 1, vi (6gr).

17 See Livy,, Historia ab urbe condita Google Scholar, xxx. For Serlio, see Hart, Tutte l'opere, fol. 56.

18 Platner,, Topographical Dictionary, pp. 258–60.Google Scholar

19 McGowan,, Margaret The Vision of Rome in Late Renaissance Trance (London, 2000), p. 329. Consider also Dürer’s ‘Gate of Honour’ for Emperor Maximilian I (1515-17).Google Scholar

20 College of Arms MS 1st M 13, fols 27-74V. Quoted in Anglo, Spectacle, p. 90.

21 For Caius’s love of ritual, see Venn, Caius Life, p. 17. For Elizabeth’s entry, see Nichols,, John Progresses of Elizabeth I (London, 1823), 1, p. 7.Google Scholar

22 Caius,, De libris propriis liber, reprinted in Venn, The Works of John Caius, pp. 74–102.Google Scholar The University of Padua was itself being rebuilt while Caius was there in the 1540s, although there are few similarities with the Cambridge scheme.

23 Pevsner,, Nikolaus Cambridgeshire (Penguin, 1954), p. 64.Google Scholar

24 For architectural treatises in English libraries, see Lucy Gent, Picture and Poetry 1560-1620, Relations between Literature and the Visual Arts in the English Renaissance (Leamington Spa, 1981), Appendix. For élite patronage, see Maurice Howard, ‘Self-fashioning and architecture: the classical moment in mid-sixteenth century England’, in Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture c. 1540-1660, ed. Lucy Gent et al. (London, 1990), pp. 198-217.

25 Caius was the first significant patron of an Oxbridge college since Queen Mary at Trinity College, Cambridge and Wolsey at Cardinal College, Oxford.

26 Thomas, Rogers, Anatomie of the mind (London, 1576), Lib. 2.Google Scholar

27 Cicero,, De officiis, 1, xxxii. For the importance of a moral edification for studentsGoogle Scholar, see Foster, Watson, On Education (Cambridge, 1913), hi, iii.Google Scholar This is a translation of Book 11 (five chapters) of Juan Luis Vives, De tradendis disciplinis (Antwerp, 1531).

28 Achille, Bocchi, Symbolicarum quæstionum (Bologna, 1555), symbol xxxiii.Google Scholar I am grateful to Professor Quentin Skinner who pointed this out to me. See Elizabeth, Watson, Achille Bocchi and the Emblem Book as Symbolic Form (Cambridge, 1993), p. 75.Google Scholar Caius certainly knew Bocchi: see Venn, , Works of John Caius, pp. 74, 102.Google Scholar

29 For Erasmus’s pedagogical texts, see introduction and texts in Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto, 1974), vols 23-24. For Vives, see note 27 above. For a discussion of their relative importance to Tudor pedagogy, see Simon, Education and Society, pp. 102-23. Caius’s philosophy is very close to Vives’, who also wrote a treatise on wisdom. De tradendis formed part of the Eton syllabus in the sixteenth century, and was admired by Richard Mulcaster in his Positions ... which are necessarie for the training vp of children ... (London, 1581), chapter 42. Vives lived in London in the 1520s and wrote pedagogic treatises for Catherine of Aragon and Mary Tudor. For his medical connexions, see Travili,, A. ‘Juan Luis Vives: a Humanistic Medical Educator’, Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 5 (1987), pp. 53–76 (pp. 54–55).Google Scholar

30 Plutarch, Moralia, Books 1 & 2; Quintilian, Institutio oratoria; Cicero, De oratore. See Simon, Education and Society, pp. 103-05.

31 Venn, Caius Life, pp. 7, 17.

32 Cicero, De officiis, 1, xxxii. See also Watson, On Education, II, i.

33 Grierson,, Caius Library, p. 525 (Item 145).Google Scholar

34 Nicholas, Cooper, Houses of the Gentry (New Haven, 1999), p. 25.Google Scholar

35 Cicero, De inventione, 1, v.

36 This suggestion is partly based on the pilasters which, unusually, are tapered in both places. See Paul, Davies and David, Hemsoll, ‘Sanmicheli through British Eyes’, in English Architecture, Public and Private. Essays in Honour of Kerry Downes, ed. Edward Chaney et al. (London, 1993), pp. 121–34 Google Scholar (p- 122)- Tapered pilasters appear on other arches in northern Italy, however, such as that at Pola. For the dates of the Gate of Virtue see Venn, , Caius Life, p. 33.Google Scholar

37 See also Ernst, Gombrich, ‘From the Revival of Letters to the Reform of the Arts: Niccolo Niccoli and Filippo Brunelleschi’, in The Heritage of Apelles: Studies in the art of the Renaissance (Oxford, 1976), pp. 93–111 Google Scholar; Christy, Anderson, ‘Monstrous Babels: Language and Architectural Style in the English Renaissance’, in Architecture and Language: Constructing Identity in European Architecture c. 1000-1650, ed. Paul Crossley and Georgia Clarke (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 148–61.Google Scholar

38 The gate was moved from its intended position in the nineteenth century and its original appearance can only be gathered from early prints. For Vitruvian decorum, see Vitruvius, , De architectura, 1, ii, 5Google Scholar; for rhetorical decorum, see Cicero, , De oratore, in, 199.Google Scholar

39 Hart, Tutte I'opere, p. 320. Precisely the same Ionic capitals were carved in the arcade at nearby Madingley Hall in the 1590s; see Royal Commission on Historical Monuments: Cambridgeshire (London, 1968), pp. 180-86.

40 Based on ideas found in John Onians, Bearers of Meaning (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 287-94.

41 The original arrangement is described in Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting (London, 1828), p. 107. The scheme can also be seen in ‘Hamond’s map’ of 1592, see Willis and Clark, Architectural History, vol. 1, p. ci.

42 In private discussions Professor Quentin Skinner has argued persuasively that these are figures of Fortuna, based on a Machiavellian/Petrarchan scheme. Yet Fortuna figures little in Caius’s own moral philosophy and these figures lack Fortuna’s usual emblems of blindfolds, unstable spheres or flowing forelocks, while similar figures of Victory appear in the overtly triumphal context of contemporary tombs and pageant arches (although normally winged). Vitruvius proposed that great scholars be rewarded with palms and triumphs, in his introduction to Book ix of De architectura.

43 Augustine saw Sapientia as divine knowledge accessible only through the grace of God. See Augustine, De trinitate, xii, xv, 25 and xii, xv, 25.

44 Venn, Annals, p. 113

45 Willis, Architectural History, p. 172.

46 The comparison with fortified gateways is made in Brooke, History of Caius, p. 66. William Wilkins, himself a fellow of Caius, greatly admired the gate and published accurate drawings of it in Vetusta Monumenta, London, 4 (1809), attributing the design to the enigmatic John of Padua. For the design of the porters’ lodge at King’s College nearby he retained the basic form of the gate, with added gothic ornament and monumentality.

47 William, Thomas, The History of Italy (London, 1549)Google Scholar; abridged edition, ed. Parks, G. (New York, 1963), p. 34.Google Scholar

48 Particularly the pseudo-Cicero’s Rhetorica ad, herennium and Cicero’s, De oratore, 11, 86, 350–55.Google Scholar See, for instance, Giulio Camillo’s Memory Theatre in Frances, Yates, The Art of Memory (London, 1996), pp. 129–59 Google Scholar, and Mary, Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric and the Making of Images, 400-1200 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 24–59.Google Scholar

49 Venn, , Caius Life, pp. 19–20.Google Scholar

50 See also Proverbs XXII, iv & XI, ii.

51 Consider, for instance, Hieronymous Coecke’s design for his own tomb, published in 1565, or the monument to William, first Earl of Pembroke (d. 1569): the earliest of many similar late-Tudor tombs. See Adam, White, ‘England C.1560-C.1660: A Hundred Years of Continental Influence’, Church Monuments, 7 (1992), pp. 34–74.Google Scholar The connexion between honour and immortality was celebrated in Andrea Alciati’s Emblemata (first published 1531), see the 1550 edition, trans. & annot. Betty Knott (Aldershot, 1996), p. 147.

52 Hart, , Tutte L'Opere, p. 358.Google Scholar Caius’s entire scheme was echoed in the monument to Lord Tanfield of 1628 in Burford, Oxfordshire. See Jean, Wilson, ‘Ethics girls: the personifications of moral systems on early modern English monuments’, Church Monuments, 13 (1998), pp. 87–105.Google Scholar

53 Venn, Annals, p. 189. Anthony Radcliffe proposes Giambologna’s figure of Mercury, planned for the University of Bologna in 1565, as a possible precedent; Radcliffe, John Caius and Paduan Humanist Symbolism, p. 124.

54 For symbolism, see Knott’s edition of Alciati’s Emblemata (Lyons, 1550), pp. 130, 195; also Watson, Achille Bocchi, pp. 140-43.

55 Willis, , Architectural History, p. 182 Google Scholar; from Venn, Annals, p. 190. In the drought of 1578 a pump was also set up in Gonville Court, topped by a figure of Aquarius; Willis, , Architectural History, pp. 183–84.?Google Scholar

56 Vitruvius, De architectura, ix, viii; I am grateful to Judi Loach for this reference. The sixty dials probably consisted of five of the pentagonal dodecahedrons depicted next to the portrait of Haveus in the Master’s Lodge. For an alternative reconstruction, see Willis, , Architectural History, pp. 182–84.Google Scholar Compare Haveus’s sundial with no. 2456 of the Institute and Museum of the History of Science, Florence.

57 See Maurice, Howard, ‘The Ideal House and Healthy Life: The Origins of Architectural Theory in England’, in Les traités d'architecture dans la Renaissance, ed. Jean Guillaume (Paris, 1992), pp. 425–33.Google Scholar For the importance of the educational environment in Vives’s pedagogic texts, see Watson, , On Education, 11, ii.Google Scholar

58 Willis, , Architectural History, p. 176.Google Scholar Similar three-sided courts in French sixteenth-century châteaux are known as cours d'honneur, but despite the name, the courts serve a different function: the focus for the entry of visitors into a great house rather than the climax to a pedagogic programme. The triumphal arch motif is used also at Anet (c. 1552), Ecouen (c. 1555) and the Louvre (c. 1547), but they post-date Caius’s continental travels; besides, there is no evidence that he ever went to France. Jacques Androuet du Cerceau’s Les plus excellents bastiments de France was not published until 1576, and close comparison of Caius’s works with those in France suggests that any similarities are superficial.

59 Greening Lambourn,, E. A. Oxford, 5 (1938), pp. 31–49 Google Scholar; Anna, Bedon, 11 Palazzo della Sapienza di Roma (Rome, 1991), p. 62.Google Scholar

60 Brooke, , History of Caius, p. 67.Google Scholar

61 Cicero, , De inventione, 1, iv Google Scholar; Tusculanæ disputationes, iv, xxvi. 57; De officiis, 1, xliii and II, ii. 5. Ambrose, De officiis, i, 65.1 am grateful to Judi Loach for emphasizing these continuities to me.

62 For a medieval form of the schola virtutum, see Stephen Jaeger,, C. The Envy of Angels (Pennsylvania, 1994) (pp. 76–117, 244–46).Google Scholar Caius’s scheme demonstrates few allusions to the key text on morality for the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. See also Watson, On Education, Appendix, p. 273.

63 See Eugene, Rice, The Renaissance Idea of Wisdom (Westport, 1973).Google Scholar

64 See, for instance, Thomas, Elyot, The banquette of sapience (London, 1534), fol. 23.Google Scholar

65 For frontispieces, see, for instance, Thomas, Geminus, Compendiosa totius Anatomie delineatio (London, 1545)Google Scholar, a medical text doubtless familiar to Caius.

66 Proverbs IX, i. See also Proverbs VIII. For architectural schemes of edification in medieval England, see Paul, Binski, Becket’s Crown (London, 2004), pp. 56–62, 179–97.Google Scholar

67 Anon., , The Courte of Sapyence (late fifteenth century); reprinted as The Court of Sapience, ed. Ruth Harvey (Toronto, 1984), p. 51, vs. 1485-98.Google Scholar

68 For Sapientia in pageants, see Anglo, , Spectacle, pp. 284, 287–88, 337.Google Scholar

69 See Lucy, Sandler, ‘John Metz, The Tower of Wisdom’, in The Medieval Craft of Memory, ed. Mary Carruthers and Jan Ziolkowski (Pennsylvania, 2002), pp. 215–25.Google Scholar I am grateful to Dr Paul Binski for alerting me to this.

70 Lucy, Sandler, The Psalter of Robert de Lisle (London, 1983), p. 82.Google Scholar

71 Venn, , Caius Life, p. 73.Google Scholar See Marina, Warner, Alone of All Her Sex (London, 2000).Google Scholar

72 See Grierson, , Caius Library, pp. 511, 523–25.Google Scholar

73 For Cicero’s importance, see Simon, , Education and Society, p. 123.Google Scholar

74 See Anderson, , ‘Monstrous Babels’, pp. 148–61 Google Scholar; also Yves, Pauwels, ‘The Rhetorical Model in the Formation of French Architectural Language in the Sixteenth Century. The Triumphal Arch as Commonplace’, in Crossley & Clarke, Architecture and Language, pp. 134–47.Google Scholar

75 For the impact of pageant arches on the visual culture of this period, see Tom, Nickson, ‘The Triumph of Tudor Architecture’ (undergraduate dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2003), and Howard Colvin, Essays in English Architectural History (London, 1999), pp. 67–94.Google Scholar

76 Willis, , Architectural History, p. 184.Google Scholar