Gone Medieval - A Stonemason's Secrets

Episode Date: October 15, 2024

Medieval churches are among our most enduring links with the Middle Ages. But it's not always easy to understand what parts of a church to look out for and what they can tell us about the people who built them.Dr. Eleanor Janega finds out how to achieve enlightenment through the very bricks and mortar of a medieval church from Andrew Ziminski, author of Church Going: A Stonemason's Guide to the Churches of the British Isles.Gone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega and edited by Jo Troy. The producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off your first 3 months using code ‘MEDIEVAL’ https://historyhit.com/subscriptionYou can take part in our listener survey here: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanor Yonaga and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes, to the Crusades.

We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were and how we got here. Medieval churches are some of our best and most enduring links with the Middle Ages. There's almost nothing I enjoy more than what I call ecclesiastical creeping, popping into various churches that I come across to have a look at their medieval features. Unless you're lucky enough to have training, it's not always easy to understand what parts of a church to look out for and what they can tell us about the people who made them.

Luckily, Andrew Ziminski, a master stone mason and repeat guest on Gone Medieval, has a new book, Church Going, a Stone Mason's Guide to the Churches of the British Isles that will help everyone learn exactly what to look for and what they're looking at. I'm absolutely thrilled to have him on today for some intense church chat. Andrew, welcome back to Gone Medieval. Hello, Eleanor. It's my absolute pleasure to be back here. I think it was 20,000. 21 when I was last on with cat and we, uh, surprisingly enough, we wouldn't have to look around a medieval church. I'm just, now I'm jealous because I wish we were in a church right now, but we're going to have to use our imaginations today a little bit more because you have written this excellent handbook that I'm incredibly excited about it because I think something that

the average excited individual doesn't necessarily know is how, I always say how to read a church. you know, because when you're an expert, you can kind of go in and you know what you're looking for, you know how to kind of pick out the little medieval bits of churches. And I suppose that that is a good as place as any to start with my first question is, can you explain to people what a medieval parish church would look like? You know, what are the kind of common physical features that people would think were commonplace and that they would expect to see when they go to look for a church? Well, I think the first thing to say on that is colour. Medieval churches would have been brightly painted.

They would have been brightly lit. There would have been candles everywhere. There would have been very, very different places to the stripped stone, Victorian repaired churches that we encounter and are familiar with every day. You know, they would have really, really been a challenge to the senses, both emotionally and visually, really. Yeah, I think that that is absolutely true. And I mean, we're lucky there are still one or two churches around the shop that you can find that have the initial paintings. But, yeah, most of them, sadly, the Reformation and the Victorians came for them. Yes, exactly. But if you know where to go, if you know where to look, the scraps that you will find are just astonishing.

I mean, the art that was created in medieval times in the British Isles is not widely considered to be that great in European context. but if you go into places like Ranworth in Norfolk and look at their painted rude screen, which is one of the wonders of northern European art, it's just astonishing. And then you look at the memorials to aristocrats, Alistair L'Apole down in Yorm. There is so much to see.

And you're really going to encounter an entire church that's packed full of medieval stuff, but it's the individual bits that I like. So you've already named a couple of individual bits which are things that I absolutely die to see. And one of which is a rude screen. Can you explain to our audience what a rude screen is? So within medieval churches, there were clear distinctions between areas.

The most important part of the church was the chancel, which is where the altar was kept. A church is basically a building to accommodate the altar. And to separate the chancel, the sacred part of the church, from the people's part of the church, the nave, if there would have been this division, a rude screen. And depending where you go within England, let's just say, they are quite different.

So West country rude screens tend to spread all the way across the aisles, the separation between the Chancellor Lodge and the separation between the Chancellor and the Naive. Whereas in the Eastern counties, they tend to just separate the nave and Chancellor only. And they're much taller as well because East Angling churches are a lot taller. Oh yeah, absolutely. I think that it's quite interesting how high East Anglian churches can get. And if you compare them with, say, West country churches, I find that they are a little bit more squat. Oftentimes when I'm looking at churches, for example, in Cornwall, they can be quite sweet and blocky, which I really like about them. I remember chatting to someone in a pub once, surprise, in Cornwall about the local churches there. And they were asking, questions about what they called the ice cream cones on the top of the towers, which I thought was incredibly sweet, and now I can't call them anything other than an ice cream cone. And I think

that that's, like, it's just delightful how you have these different expressions in stone that you find on churches. I've worked to repair so many pinnacles over the air, as they should be called, Eleanor. I'm now going to adopt ice cream cone, that's all witch's hats, I suppose. I suppose, So Pinnacles are a feature of a tower. When we're looking at the towers on churches, what are different things that we might see other than that? So my specialism is the repair of stone roof faults and late medieval towers. So I live in Somerset.

I live in a little town called Frum. And if you go out into the Somerset levels, which is a very level area of formerly marshland that's now farmed, You look across the Somerset levels, and it's the late 15th and early 16th century towers that make the landscape what it is. They mark where all the villages and the communities are. And these towers were built to accommodate bells, but they're also built by perhaps a well-to-do local merchant or aristocrat who was rather envious of their neighbouring parishes' tower. So they would build it a bit grander and a bit taller. but their primary use was to contain bells and a clock as well.

A medieval clock wouldn't have had a clock face. It would have just told the hours. So I'm particularly in love with Somerset towers, and I've worked on loads and loads over the years. But the towers of Norfolk are almost as good, I would say. But they're almost as good to my mind, because they are largely built of Flint. And Flint is an incredibly difficult material to build with.

You know, we're all familiar with the round towers of Norfolk and the stories that you can't build corners with Flint because it's like building with marbles. So stonemasons in Somerset really did have a much easier time of it because a lovely square limestone that they could just soar up, literally saw up and build with blocks. So if I've got a favorite tower, I would say it's I in Norfolk. Was it Suffolk? Anyway, someone will pull you up. Oh, no, the East Anglans. are going to be incensed at us at this point. Yeah, sorry, East Anglians.

It's got telescopic corner buttresses. When I say telescopic, the buttresses are like upside down telescopes, and they're sort of octagonal in form. So they're really pushing this rubbish material, Flint, to build this incredibly tall tower. I think that that's one of the things that is so exciting about medieval architecture is what people do with really not necessarily the best. best material in the world, you know, because since supply chains are usually a lot more local,

unless, you know, I don't know, you're the king of England and you can have the Cosmati paving brought in from Italy, you know, or something like that. You're working with whatever the vernacular stone is. And so we get these great particularized and really local expressions that tell us a lot about the communities and how they can think through problems. And I find that that's really exciting, actually. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's going back to the use of Flint again. Medieval builders just used the materials that they had to hand,

unless, like you say, you know, royal. Like the building stones of Southern Britain are rubbish. You know, the only option is to use Kentish ragstone or cornstone from France, which was shipped in and used extensively. It fascinates me how the logistical aspect of moving stone across the water to build churches in Norwich or. Westminster or, you know, southeastern England. I suppose that we've kind of already got onto some of the features that we find really

exciting, you know, try to stop a couple of church nerds for saying what they like. But what do you think are kind of features that non-experts often overlook in medieval churches? I would go straight in and say a feature that you find in the chancel, a proscena, which is where the vessels of the Eucharists would have been washed. that water would have been literally fused with the body of Christ. So it was incredibly important to deal with that water and any wine that was left in an appropriate way. So they wouldn't just like chuck it outside.

It had to stay in the sacred area of the church. So this pucina will have a little bowl inside and there'll be a drain that drains from the bowl through the wall and allows the water to drain away under the floor of the chancel. And we've repaired quite a few of these over the years. You know, it's just a feature you take for granted. But my colleague Pete, he thought he saw something within this sacrarium, this holy drain in one church in Somerset.

So he got one of those drain clearing little grabber things. And he put it in there and he started pulling out pins and glass and buttons and little buckles and stuff like completely crazy stuff. we're thinking what's going on here and I've investigated a few over the years now and yet again this is a much overlooked area of ritual magic I suppose

I think they were trying to turn away spirits who were determined to enter the church with evil intent you know these are apotropae devices so in this first church and as we always do we carefully put everything yeah we recorded it carefully put everything back in

but we found this gold little lozenge in there. We thought, blimey, this is really special. And on it it had a image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Central American saints. It's the biggest shrine in Mexico, I believe. But this was fake gold, and it was on a little plastic thing.

So someone had come from South America within the past few years, recognized the importance of this piscina and made their own little devotional act in there. It's something no one's done. therefore, well, since well before the Reformation. I absolutely love this because it shows one of my favorite things about churches, which is that they are actually these live spaces, you know,

and living spaces where, okay, yes, it's certainly true. These were built as Catholic spaces, and now the great majority of them in England, at the very least, are Anglican rather than Catholic. But I like that there is this ongoing focal point, for worship. And essentially people are doing the same thing and have been doing the same thing for hundreds of years. And so when you use a church in these ways, you're in communion with everyone in the past. So we still have people who are bringing over their devotional objects and

recognize what a pisina is, recognize what they feel are spiritual threats and are engaging in the same ritualized actions in order to counteract them. And I think that's really powerful. you know, it's such, it's a direct link to our medieval past. These ritual actions, you can see all over the church. I mean, with the graffiti that I'm sure you've had speakers on before, again, it's this apoptrophate graffiti. I mean, there are three types of graffiti. There are Mason's marks.

Mine is just a big Zed with a line through it that Putin stole. Then the next one is sort of commemorative graffiti, you know, if there's an event going on outside. you know, the person in a community with some artistic talent will inscribe what's going on to record that moment. Then you have a punctual graffiti where you have Marion Marks, Daisy Wheels, devices that are scratched into walls to capture, again, spirits who are determined to enter the church through the windows and through the doors with bad intent. And I think that is what the role of gargoyles and grotesques were as well. You quite often find them in groups of three either side of a window and I think that's performing the same act. Just going back to apotrophate graffiti, we went up to the Ness of Brodgar archaeological excavation, which is a Neolithic site and we spent a week in the summer working up there.

And this site is absolutely covered in graffiti. It's 5,000-year-old graffiti and much of it is very, very similar to graffiti that I see peppered around churches all over the place. So these superstitions, if I may put it that way, and these actions to turn away evil have just been in use for thousands of years. There's a particular piece of graffiti up there called the Brodgar Butterfly, and that I've seen very, very similar around door openings and window openings in churches throughout Britain. So what are the kind of tools that people are using and that they have access to? because these are incredibly complex buildings that are being made. But obviously, you know, you don't have forklifts and, you know, drills and things that we use today. I mean, in terms of dressing stone, and my tools have remained unchanged.

My father was a stonemason after the war. He was working on granite quarries in Scotland. You know, I've still got his hammers and his dummies, and they were given to him. So the tools that I use at least 100 years old, and I think they would have done. just been a continual handing over across the generations of tools because the king of trades, the blacksmith, would have kept the chisels sharpened and, you know, they would have kept the buckets together and the troughs in one piece. So every building site would have had a blacksmith, obviously a carpenter to create the formwork to support the windows and the vaulting

and the roof itself. So there would have been a whole range of craftspeople who were drawn together for a single project. Scaffolders, people who actually made the scaffolding itself, which would have been made from ash limbs that grow really quickly and are very sturdy, a very tall. And the medieval names for scaffold poles are the same as modern scaffolders use, you know, standards and that sort of stuff. So there's an incredible continuity in the world of the medieval builder and our world.

Like you say that we have forklifts. Well, I don't have a forklift, but, you know. Personally. Yeah, we just find a way. But with a block and tackle and some winching material, you can lift a lot, you know. I actually find medieval winches incredibly exciting. You know, that's one of those things that I think about a lot, especially when you see really tall bits of work, you know,

when you see, you know, a really tall, east angling, church or something, thinking about how they winched all these materials up there is really, I don't know, humbling to a certain extent, you know, how brave these people are in order to build these incredible monumental things that we're still interacting with. There's a fantastic winch at Salisbury Cathedral in the Tower where I first started my training, not on the winch, by the way, but it's just a leftover medieval winch. So it's, you know, it's a wheel and there would have been a couple of guys inside, you know, running around like hamsters.

And that would have been hoisted up by smaller winches in sections. And that would have been used to build the sections, the bays within the nave. So they would have been a scaffolding and a platform. The winch would have drawn everything up. And then when that one bay was a completely modular system, they were then just on railway tracks, I think, wooden tracks. They would just slide the form work along with the winch on it and then build the next section. And I think by the time they got to the tower, it sorts of me then it was relatively easy transfer.

And that was still used, I think, until the 1950s to draw bells up. So still, you know, they've got electric winch there now, but still very useful. This brings me to my next question, which is how long would each section of a church have taken to build? So a standard medieval stone tower of, say, I don't know, 80 to 100 feet would take about three to four years, which I think is pretty fast really. Masons were governed by the building year and the seasons. So obviously they'd be working stone over the winter, cutting stones to shape, cutting mouldings and the sculptural aspect. That would be winter work and then come Easter they would start building in earnest. So all the materials would have been accrued, and then Easter comes, started pistols fired,

and they would build through to Micklemus, which is in October. Then they would put everything to bed for the winter, cover everything out with Hesian blankets and straw. The lime would need time to just carbonate to draw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which turns it into a stone-like material. That would happen over winter, and then they could start building again. If they built too quickly, then the walls would... be able to take it, the mortar would remain sloppy. The stone would still be green. The stone when it comes out of the ground has to be seasoned like timber. There has a lot of quarry sap in it.

So yeah, you have to, you know, they would have had to think a couple of years before they actually started to build to get things going. But obviously they didn't, you know, they were jerry-built churches back then that I've seen that, you know, like with a tower that started to list to the left and then they start to build it, a list to the right. And if you look at it with a trained eye, you can see it's slightly zigzagging as it goes up. Didn't put good enough foundations in. You can see that even in really grand churches.

I mean, Lincoln Cathedral, they are just kind of building slightly the wrong way at one point in time straight down the nave and they had to correct for that, which always I find it very endearing. I love seeing that, you know. This also, I think, it's a lovely opportunity to kind of think about

what inspires builders like this? Do you have an idea in your head of what you're going to be building? Or do you kind of, are you a bit of a magpie when you are designing a building like this and you take bits of inspiration from here, there and everywhere? Or do you go in and you say, oh, I am Anglian and we are going to make a nice Flint church right now? I think we underestimate how much people traveled in medieval times. And matons would, you know, travel over a very, very wide area. Like, for example, now, I know a Mason who's been working at Notre Dame in Paris,

and she's going to come back in a couple of months' time, and she's going to share her knowledge with us. And that's exactly the same with the very first Gothic church that was built in Paris. And there would have been English masons working out there. Those designs in themselves would have come from what continental masons would have seen in the Arabic world. The pointed art is an Islamic device. no dome architecture of Islam means no spire architecture of the English Midlands.

And that's because the device called a squinch, which is like a corner arch in a square tower that you would find. So I love that. There's just a constant exchange of information going on from Byzantine times through to Islamic times that made its way up here. And you know, you can see the hand of Islam at work throughout British, Northern European architecture. You can in Romanesque sculpture. The influence is very marked. You can see it in the incredible portal at Kilpet Church. You know, there's all sorts going on there.

There's Scandinavian work carved into the walls. There's clearly Moorish influence. There was a massive transfer of information constantly going throughout Europe and even up to here, even into the furthest reaches of Scotland. This kind of brings me on to my next question. which is when you look at churches like this, very clearly, since you're so trained in it, you can kind of tell a little bit about the craftsmen themselves

who built these churches. You can say, okay, this person is quite influenced by Scandinavian design, or this one is really into Islamic fashions. And I think one of the things that is easy to overlook is the fact that craftsmen are all sorts of different people. You've got people with different backgrounds. You've got a really skilled trade and can make a lot of money. So you move around Europe very well.

And these people also leave these little hallmarks that give us some hints about who they are. So what can you see and what can you pick out about various craftsmen when you look at a church? Well, first of all, they're lunch. They love eating oysters back in the day. and they would use the oyster shell, the waste from their lunch, to prop up stones that weren't cut quite squarely, and then then pack them out with a building mortar. And you see that in every single church. You know, they were eating oysters by the dozen every lunchtime. How they got into the middle of Wiltshire, which is a long way from the coast, I don't think that.

I mean, you know, they could have used, you know, little slips or bits of slate. So, yeah, they were definitely a byproduct of their lunch, I like to think. But in terms of individual teams, there are three churches close to me. Somerset. My little team and I, we've worked on each three churches to repair the tower. It's definitely by the same crew. There's three people working on these towers. The way the gargoyles are carved, it's very specific and comedic as well. And the way the internal corbels, they've got these wonderful angel corbels, these three churches at Hemington, Buckland, Dinham and Kilmerston. You know, they were probably built over a 10, 12 year period by this little crew. Even the way they've

cut the tracery into the windows. So that's the sort of framework that you would get in a Gothic window. They've used a specific type of tracery called Somerset tracery that you only find it in Somerset. And it's like a lattice work. It's quite basic, but it's very effective. And you find that over the bell chamber. So that will allow the sound of the bells out, but also protect the bells from the elements as well. What can you tell about the lives of these people? So you can tell, from these churches, there's a small team just like yours that's worked on these churches in the area. Are these local people? Are they people who've just been brought in and they're saying, okay, well, for this 15 years, I guess, that we're local for now? What does the average

craftsmen working on churches do all day? So it would have been a life dedicated to work, but they weren't, I don't think, working to the glory of God. They were just working for a wage to keep their family going. So they would have had their family with them as they traveled around, I think. They would have just been staying in, you know, Yee, Airbnb, on a temporary basis. Perhaps they might have had some sort of caravan

or transportation that they dragged along with them. But, I mean, what they got up to in the evening, so I've no idea. I don't really want to think. So you've also mentioned very, before you've got a hallmark that you leave when you do stonework. What is a way that people can find graffito from a particular Mason? Probably best to start inside and look at the piers, which are the shafts that separate

the from the aisles of a church, just shine your torch, you know, up and down the piers. And individual Mason's Mark will come shining out. In Mel's Church in Somerset, near to me, the Mason there was very keen on swastikas. And they would plant them right in the middle of the block. So, you know, males' churches full of swastikas, which I think is quite funny. Yeah, I mean, it's a good reminder of the fact that symbols can be misused and, you know, it's all something that we put on them and it has nothing to do with what a medieval person might have thought, right? Exactly. You don't need any special equipment to go. If you want to know something about the lives of medieval people, just go to churches, you know, if you want

to see what they look like, just look at the images of the data. donors that you will find in most medieval glass, if it survived. Very often only the image of the donor will survive, I've noticed, and they will be there in glorious technicolor. Their wardrobe will be swaying and their beads will be, you know, lagging behind them. Like they've been captured with some incredible Instagram filter. I think the donors at All Saints in North Street in York, I would recommend people to go and see.

There's a particular window there where the guys being covered. commemorated doing good works throughout his community. So you can not only see him, but you can see the community, the people on crutches, the street life, so on and so forth, people on their deathbed. All of medieval life is laid out for you to see if you look at the glass work, which not everyone does. People get a bit bored of medieval stained glass, unfortunately. But you shouldn't.

Well, unless it's Victorian and it's generally rubbish. I once had Victorian stained glass described to me as a sentimental Victorian. trash by a medieval historian. And I always say that now. I've stolen it. So one of my favorite sets of images of donors is actually in the Orford Church

over again in East Anglia. There's some lovely funerary brasses on some donors' tombs, but it also has all of their children right out so you can see a lot about their life. And these are kind of 15th century brasses. And you mentioned in your book that

the 15th century or to you, who's a wanky historian term, the long 15th century, is a real, it's a real golden age for building churches in Britain. Can you explain why that was? Every corner that you would turn, there would be someone making glass or slaking lime or carving stone or creating wooden benches. There was just an incredible explosion.

It was like something radioactive had gripped Britain, gripped England. And where did all these grass people come from? It's astonishing that, you know, most of the church towers that I work on were built after the main body of the church during this period. So, you know, if I could get in the time machine and go back, that would be the time I would just wander around and talk to people and try and figure that very question out about how, basically, the profits made from the wool trade paid for all that. Also, monies bequeathed after the black death. You know, people died, people left money, those that survived. would commission works to churches that were already very up and together. So they would have to create extra work.

They would build transepts to accommodate charter chapels. They would build towers, like I say, they would extend the altar, chancel, and that sort of thing. So you have this great boom time and golden age for church building. And then you suddenly hit the exact opposite, which is the Reformation. And, you know, it's a terrible time. where in the first place, we basically have no churches built until we hit the restoration until about 1660 or so. But I've heard it called an asteroid strike. You know, it's like what wipes out the dinosaurs in certain ways wipes out this entire huge and grand tradition. I'm wondering what

you can tell us about the reformation and what it did to churches like this, the kind of damage that it caused. Well, I mean, first of all, the damage to craftwork. Where did all these craft workers that we had just been talking about? Where did they go in the late 1530s? I can't help them think that they headed out to Europe and used their skills that way. But the Reformation, goodness me, you know, so there are about 11,000 churches in Britain of medieval origin. I've probably been to about getting on for half of them. And the impact of the Reformation's just really got under my... skin. I've seen so much destruction and defacement and debasement of wonderful, wonderful artwork. Yeah, that was one of the motivations that made me write the book because there's so much stuff that can be seen on its own, out of context, and I wanted to draw that all together. Wall paintings, stained glass. It was just a free-for-all, wasn't it? I find it really upsetting at times, especially almost in contrast to when you do happen to stumble across the church where things weren't torn down.

It makes you realize what we've lost, you know. So I can't remember. Cool story, Eleanor, but I can't remember the name of a particular church I was in over in Suffolk. But it had been a place of pilgrimage. And it had a really incredible old statue of Mary being taught to read. St. Anne's holding this little book that's got inscriptions on it. And it was still all brightly colored and absolutely gorgeous. And it had somehow been hidden.

And it made me realize that we really don't know exactly how every single church was laid out or the wonderful artwork that it had and the stories it was telling because there is this push to make everything a whitewashed box. And it's just sad. It's just really sad, you know. One of the things in my book is how much was secreted away. And my interest in this was part when we found a very small depiction of the crucifixion. known as a rude under a bench. And it had been secreted away, not during the Reformation, but around the time of the Civil War, we think, because the benches were a little bit later. So we fixed that back on the wall. All the faces have been bashed off, but the colour was still

there, gold leaf, turquoise from crushed up lapis lazuli that had been brought from Afghanistan. You know, this is in the middle of rural Wiltshire. So again, the trade links and the connections of people to just bring materials to decorate these icons, really. There are two sculptures that I find incredibly moving. One is in Mercer's Hall in the city of London, and it's a depiction of Christ laid out after the crucifixion. It's absolutely mind-bogglingly beautiful and very moving still. It's life-size, single block of stone, and it's found buried face down after the London

blitz during the war. So they rebuilt the chapel of the city library company, and it's now on display. But it's very difficult to go and see, so I was very lucky to go and encounter this wonderful artwork. Christ's arms have been bashed off. You know, someone's taking a hammer to him, but his face, they couldn't bring themselves to destroy his face. I can just picture the moment where this oath is standing there thinking, maybe I can't do this. So they just flits him over and buried him. So they've really harmed the rest of the image, but not his face.

And his face is so wonderfully portrayed. His tongue's slightly hanging out. I mean, it's completely lifelike. They've bashed off the crown of thorns, but there's a single thorn that's punctured his forehead. It's astonishing. That and the great image of Jesse in Abigavenny Church, which is an even more wondrous survivor. I mean, it's the size of a rhinoceros. So Jesse, he's always depicted on his side.

He's a very popular icon in Wales where he's sometimes known as Jesse on the telephone because he's just leaning on his hand in a nonchal way as if he's having a chap. He's the origin of Christ's family and from his midrith there would be this stump that comes out and then Christ's family will be portrayed in stained glass of stone. He's astonishing, he's carved out of a single trunk of Welsh oak. You know, why he wasn't burnt like everything else. and it just gives this tiny suggestion of what was, you know. In Kalompton, in Devon, there's the base of a rude.

It's about 20 feet wide, and it would have sat on top of the rude screen, which still exists. But the actual crucifixion scene has gone, but it's gone gother. So it's all skulls and rocks, and then a wooden trunk, a socket that would have received the crucifixion scenes itself. I think it'd be rather great if they could put that back on top of the rude. screen, which is still, like I say, is still there, recreate the actual whole entity. Well, Andrew, I'm afraid I have to go run out and break into the Mercer's Hall so I can go see this statue after this.

But just to wrap us up, I think we've said so much here about how incredibly special we both find medieval churches. You know, you go into them and they still have this instant atmosphere. And I'm wondering if you could just say a few words. about the legacy of medieval churches and what they tell us about our own communities today. Well, the medieval churches are in many respects on their knees, but they are still the hub of the community in many respects, especially in rural areas.

And I think churches are really ready for a revival, perhaps not in religious terms, but in social terms. You know, the nave was always the people's part of the church. There were in fairs held in their entertainments. why should churches now not be used for that sort of thing? And why should there not be a great government fund that helps pay for that, become self-sufficient and earn their own keep by charging a fee, keep the chance of religious use?

Well, I couldn't agree more. And I have to say that I suppose the secularization of culture more generally makes us think that churches have to be reserved for just this one thing, which is religious offices. But they can be so much more, and they can be a draw. And indeed they are for incredibly cool people like us. But I think that they could draw and draw and even more people.

I completely agree. You know, church is just the best community centre going if it's managed and maintained and cared for in the right way. Andrew, I want to thank you for being one of the people that does look after these buildings. Oh, Eleanor, it was really great and nice to meet you. Thank you. Thanks so much again to Andrew for joining me.

and be sure to pick up churchgoing, a stonemason's guide to the churches of the British Isles. Thank you so much for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. As always, my co-host Matt Lewis will be back on the Gone Medieval Throne on Friday. Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly and ad-free podcasts by signing up at historyhit.com forward slash subscription. And we're offering 50% off your first three months

when you use the code medieval at checkout. If you can't bear to be apart from me for a whole week and who can, there are some fabulous films we've made to enjoy including my recent series Meet the Normans. Or, for even more church chat, you can check out my series Going Medieval, where I cover the lives of the clergy or those who pray. Remember, you can follow Gone Medieval

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