Between chancel and chapel, tomb of Alice de la Pole.
St Mary’s church, Ewelme, is full of many beautiful things including fifteenth century decorations spared from destruction during the civil war and the famous alabaster tomb of Alice de la Pole, Geoffrey Chaucer’s grand daughter and Duchess of Suffolk. The tomb (above) is spectacular, her full length figure is lying above her full length cadaver in a shroud and carved angels rise on columns above it.
The wall painting at the east end of the church is simple, decorative, meaningful but illegible and I’ve no idea how heavily it has been restored. My favourite corners are up above the Clayton and Bell east window (below) where exotic plant tendrils underline the writing on the wall making a gorgeous pattern from a distance.
St Mary Ewelme, chancel and detail of east window.
The chapel on the other side of Alice de la Pole’s tomb has a paler window containing fragments of medieval glass, mostly yellow (silverstain) that is well complimented by the rerodos and altar frontal by Ninian Comper. In these two wall and window combinations I love to see the contrast between different ages and styles, in both of them there is a good balance of light and colour so you feel as if you are surrounded by a world of rich, subtle detail.
St Mary Ewelme, chapel window and detail.
St Mary, North Stoke, looking east. Painting beside pulpit showing murder of Thomas a Becket.
On the same day I visited St Mary the Virgin, North Stoke, a church close to the river Thames where the ridgeway path runs through the churchyard. It has a lovely interior with a beamed barn like roof, and plenty of light inside through windows that are either plain glazing or figures on a plain background. The tiers of fourteenth century wall painting around the walls of the nave are elaborate with recognisable, though fragmented, scenes including the murder of Thomas a Becket (above) and Christ’s betrayal (below right). In trying to get a photo that showed the wall and window combination here, it was obvious that the windows were letting in too much light for this to work using the phone camera. But I like the way these windows, with their patches of primary colour on odd parts of the saints’ bodies, have a fragmentary appearance similar to the painted figures on the walls. They are understated and subtle in the manner of the patchwork of medieval fragments at Ewelme, and are a style of nineteenth and twentieth century church window that I have never really admired before.
