When the distemper on the walls was steam cleaned by Frank Perfect & Son, in 1951/2, considerable evidence of wall painting was found all over the nave, but cost limited the further investigation of many of them. Near the pulpit, several superimposed series of post-Reformation texts came to light, including parts of the Lord’s prayer thought to date from about 1700 (probably 1709, when according to the Parish Register, ‘the Sentences in the Church were writt, & new Painted’). Opposite the north door there was a panel with traces of pigment, thought to be 15th C.

The most exciting discovery was the three consecration crosses that Clive Rouse, then Editor of the Records of Buckinghamshire, dated to the 13th C, based on the pigment used and the method of scribing. They must have been considered important in earlier restorations because they had survived as little sunken islands in the midst of later plastering. They are set out by compass, about 16 inches in diameter, and are all unusually elaborate and of different design. The crosses, which are alternately red on pink or cream, or vice versa, are contained within three bands or circles using yellow, light red or vermilion and some black or grey for the decoration.

Nave, South wall

Nave West wall, South

Nave West wall, North

There may well be more crosses undiscovered under the plaster, because when a church was dedicated or re-dedicated after major alterations, it was the medieval custom to paint or carve 12 crosses both inside and outside the church. The Bishop, with his entourage, first processed three times around the outside anointing the crosses with holy oil. He then struck the threshold of the main entrance with his crozier three times, at which the deacon flung open the door and the Bishop entered.

A cross of ashes and sand was sprinkled on the floor and the alphabet in Greek and Latin was traced in it. (Anyone know why? Was it ‘I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end?). The Bishop then consecrated the altar with hallowed water and wine and anointed all the crosses on the walls with holy oil. After which, the bells were rung and the parishioners admitted for Mass at the High Altar. Thereafter, the crosses were treated with great reverence and lights were burned before each one on the anniversary of the anointing.

Consecration was an important rite and was the necessary conclusion to a major re-ordering anywhere in the church. Important items of equipment, such as the vestments or vessels used in the Mass would be sent individually to the Bishop for a blessing – at a cost.

© Miles Green, December 2001.

The font in the South Aisle, ca.1890

The earliest specific record of the font is a pencil drawing of 1819, which notes that the bowl is lead. However, there is no doubt that we have a medieval font, for reasons that I will go into in a later article, but let us first consider its appearance.

It is not a solid lead font as many suppose, but it is an early medieval stone font covered with 16th or 17th C lead.. The font is covered with three separate pieces of lead sheet joined by seams ~ one flat on the bottom inside with the drain pipe in the centre; another around the inside walls turning over on the top rim; and a third around the outside, hammered into the chamfered shape of the underside. Many porous stone fonts had inside linings of lead on the bottom and sides, but to cover the outside with lead as well seems to be almost unique.

I am told, by Mr W.N. Paul, who wrote a very informative article on English fonts in the journal, The Local Historian (Vol 23, No3, Aug 1993), that he has only come across one other example of a stone bowl encased in lead and that is the 12th C font at Ashover in Derbyshire. (Does anybody know it?). Like ours, it has a small 2 ft diameter bowl, but, unlike ours, the lead is decorated with the figures of the twelve Apostles. We therefore need to look for an explanation for our unusual font. There seem to be two possible reasons – to conceal either decoration or damage.

Fonts were at considerable risk from Puritan zealots at the Reformation, who saw them as symbols of Popish superstition and preferred a simple basin. They believed that ‘a child could just as well be christened in a tubb of water at home or in a ditch by the way, as in a founte stone in the church‘. So many fonts were being damaged or removed that, in 1561, Queen Elizabeth issued a Royal Order requiring that ‘the Font be not removed from the accustomed place: And that in parish churches the curates take not upon them to confer Baptism in basins but in the Font customably used.’

Many parishes defied this royal order and the simpler and plainer a font, the more likely it was to survive. Penn’s font is far plainer than most anyway, but it just may    have decorative carving around the outside which needed to be concealed. Elsewhere, such carving was sometimes plastered over for the same reason. There is a mildly encouraging hollow ring when the lead is tapped.

Still more damage was done to fonts by Puritan zealots in the Civil War and Commonwealth, from the 1640’s to 1660, but the date of 1626, scratched into the lead by a bored parishioner, tells us that our font was already covered in lead by then.

Alternatively, and perhaps more probably, the lead might conceal damage done to the font. There is some denting in two places around the underside of the bowl; the Purbeck marble stem and base have been cemented together at some stage; and the circular stone platform has been badly damaged. We have no record of when all this damage happened, whether on one or several occasions.

It could have been the result of one of several moves to different positions in the church. The font must have first been placed in the nave and then moved to the south aisle when it was added on in the 14th C. The 1899 photograph shows it in the south aisle and you can see that the stone platform had already been damaged. It could have been further damaged in the most recent move from the south door to the west door in the 1950s. However, the overall damage is also consistent with a violent attack on the font during the Reformation perhaps followed a century later by a further damage during the Civil War and Commonwealth.

© Miles Green, February 2002

The earliest surviving sketch of the font was made in pencil, in 1819, and is in the British Museum. It was noted that it was made of lead. There was no font cover shown. The present octagonal, oak lid is Victorian, its shape laid down by the leaders of the Gothic Revival as representing the seven Sacraments and crucifixion.

All the principal authorities agree that the Purbeck marble stem and base, immediately below the bowl, are 12th C. They also agree that the circular platform on which it stands is formed of a ring of clunch (hard chalk) with a filling of red brick and cement that looks like it was once the base of a Norman, 12th C, pillar. The Purbeck marble of the stem and base is likely to have come from one of three sources – the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset, Petworth in Surrey or Bethersden in Kent. Ready-made pieces were produced in these factories.

Purbeck is not a true marble, but a hard limestone chiefly composed of fossilised fresh water snails varying in colour from creamy white, grey, light brown, green and blue. It can take a high polish and can be darkened to a near black with varnish or oil. The beauty of the highly polished marble was preferred to richness of design, but if left in damp conditions, over the centuries it flakes and roughens, as ours has done, and this is why Purbeck marble went out of fashion in the 14th C.

The dating of the cup-shaped bowl itself presents problems. It is not a solid lead font, it is a stone font covered with lead. The stone is completely concealed, inside and out, under a layer of lead, which is generally dated to the16th or 17th C, presumably on the basis that graffiti scratched into the lead on the outside of the bowl, run from 1626 to 1776. RCHM assumed that the bowl itself was probably 16th or 17th C; Pevsner declared it to be a bowl of uncertain date; Clive Rouse thought that the lead was 16th or 17th C, possibly covering an original bowl; and NADFAS declared the bowl shape to be of the Transitional period, c.1200.

However, there is a visible clue to the age of the bowl that settles the question and which all these eminent authorities appear to have missed. A church law, dating from 1236, required medieval fonts to be kept lidded and locked to prevent the theft of the holy water, highly valued for cures and for witchcraft. The lids were required to be secured by a padlocked metal bar across the top. The metal bar usually passed through two large iron staples set opposite each other in the top rim of the font. This arrangement was probably in general use before 1236, but thereafter, throughout the Middle Ages, Bishops’ visitations included a check that it had been done.

This requirement ceased abruptly with the Reformation, after which belief in holy water was regarded as idolatrous. The staples were removed, often leaving either a stump or a hole, and their presence is firm evidence of a pre-Reformation font. We have exactly this evidence on our font. On one side of the rim there are two 5/16 inch diameter stumps standing just proud under the lead about 2 inches apart, and directly opposite there is one corresponding sunken hole of similar size. This confirms that we have a medieval bowl and the dimensions (2 ft 2 inches wide, 1 ft deep) and shape of the bowl are consistent with the late 12th C.

Since this matches all the historical evidence, in particular that of the Vicar in 1802, that he had seen the date 1177 on a foundation stone under the chancel, we can be confident that our font is as old as the church and that both are over 800 years old.

© Miles Green 10 March 2002

Holy Week, from Palm Sunday to Easter Day, was the heart of the late medieval church’s year, full of elaborate ceremonies and ritual. The obligatory annual confession by all the lay parishioners to the parish priest took place during the week, followed by their annual communion on Easter Day.

Palm Sunday started with Mass and the telling of the story of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, after which the ‘palms’ (in practice flowers and green branches, usually of yew, box or willow), were distributed and clergy and people accompanied by the church’s principal relics, processed out of the church into the churchyard. After various ceremonies they moved to the west door where the priest took the processional cross and struck the door with its foot, symbolically demanding entry for Christ. The procession moved to the Rood-screen separating the nave and the chancel, where all through Lent a great painted veil had been suspended in front of the Rood, the large wooden cross with Christ crucified. This veil was now drawn up on pulleys, the whole parish knelt and the anthem Ave Rex Noster, ‘Hail our King’, was sung. The Gospel story was then read or sung often from high up on the Rood-loft at the foot of the Crucifix.

On Maundy Thursday, after Mass, the high altar and all the side altars (there would have been half a dozen in Penn Church) were ritually stripped of all their coverings and ornaments and were then washed with water and wine using a broom of sharp twigs – vividly symbolic of Christ’s last hours.

Good Friday was a day of deepest mourning. The whole narrative was read from St John’s Gospel. A veiled crucifix was unveiled and clergy and people crept barefoot on their knees to kiss the foot of the cross. Then, the most imaginatively compelling of the Good Friday ceremonies took place. This was the symbolic burial of Christ in the Easter sepulchre in the chancel. In a modest country parish church like Penn, the sepulchre would have been made of a moveable timber frame in the shape of a hearse, with carved or painted panels. It was placed on the north side of the chancel and covered with a richly embroidered cloth. The priest, barefoot and without his customary vestments except for his surplice, wrapped a crucifix and a silver pyx containing the consecrated Host in linen cloths and laid them in the sepulchre. Parishioners followed suit, again creeping barefoot to the cross, a custom the Protestant reformers were later to find particularly odious. Candles were lit on stands around the sepulchre, and a continuous watch was kept all night.

On Easter Sunday morning a procession was formed to the sepulchre and the crucifix was solemnly ‘raised’ and carried triumphantly around the church with all the bells ringing and the choir singing Cristus resurgens, ‘Christ is risen’. Throughout the week, the empty sepulchre remained .,_ object of devotion. One of the commonest bequests, all over England, was for maintaining the sepulchre lights and for Penn we find Thomas Alday, in 1505, bequeathing an examen de apibus, a swarm of bees, to the lumini sepulture de Penn, to provide the wax for the lights.

[Anyone with a particular interest in this subject would greatly enjoy Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars,  from which most of the above has been gleaned].

© Miles Green, 10 March 2003

We are all used to the idea of our church having just one main altar under the east window and, more recently, a side altar in the chapel, but this has not always been so. In the Middle Ages, even modest country churches could have perhaps a dozen altars, many of them in the nave and under the control of the parishioners. The Protestant Reformation in the mid-16th century swept them all away and there was, in effect, no altar at all for three centuries. There was just a low table with cushions and a bible and no crucifix (see the Ziegler painting of the chancel, c.1850, in the church). It was not until 1865 that our own Victorian ‘restoration’ set out the church much as we see it today.

We can identify many of Penn’s medieval altars from bequests made in wills before Elizabeth I’s accession in 1559 marked the very end of any Catholic practice. I have seen 12 out of the 16 wills that survive from this period, the earliest dated 1492. They show bequests to 8 named altars or to the ‘lights’ that were burned in front of them.

Those named are shown in bold:
The stone High altar was where the main Mass was celebrated, and as prescribed by Canon Law, it had curtained niches on each side for the principal image of the Virgin (to the south), described as Our Lady light, and for the patronal image, in our case, of the Trinity (to the north), represented in another church by an old man, a crucifix and a dove. The Rood light was on the Rood loft below the Rood, which dominated the nave beneath the painting of the Doom. Candles were kept burning there all the time, tended by a Roodman. The Sepulchre lights were for the Easter sepulchre, an elaborate carved stone tomb in bigger churches, but probably a moveable, painted and gilded, wooden timber hearse in a country parish, around which dozens of candles were burned and a continuous watch kept over Easter.

In 1505, Thomas Alday of Nattetok (Knotty Green) left a swarm of bees to provide wax for these candles as well as 6s 8d to repair the roads of the parish. Thomas Eggam (Eghams Farm) was a witness.

Roger Playter left 4d to the priest ‘to say Mass in the chapel for my soul at a time convenient’, and John Salter left 12d to the Chapel of the Blessed Mary. There was a separate altar, somewhere, to Our Lady of Pity, which typically represented Mary as a grieving mother holding the crucified Christ and was a very popular image in late medieval England. John Puttenam left instructions that he was to be buried in the churchyard ‘nigh unto the aulter of the holy appostylle.’ This altar could have been in the south aisle, perhaps in front of a carved wooden screen to the Lady Chapel.

Three bequests to the High altar were for ‘for tithes forgotten’. The Church prudently taught that debt to the Church would result in excommunication, nullify the benefits of prayer and alms-giving and leave the soul for longer in purgatory.

The amount of the bequest to each light varied between 1d and 12d, usually 2d or 4d, and this totalled 46d for John Salter, quite a considerable sum when 1d was the daily rate for a labourer. The smallest total was 3d from Nicholas Asshwell. William Grove gave a sheep each to the Rood light and the Trinity light. All the earlier wills made a bequest to the ‘Mother Church of Lincoln’, Le., Lincoln Cathedral. Most testators named only two or three lights, adding a general bequest to each of the other lights, and it is very likely that there were more unnamed side altars in the nave and south aisle which reflected the particular devotional choices of the parishioners. St Anthony, the healer of men and farm animals, St Anne, believed to be Jesus’s grandmother, who could help with women’s fertility, and various apostles, were popular choices. A simple Mass would be celebrated at a side altar on weekdays, not the elaborate ritual of a Sunday Mass at the high altar behind the Rood screen.

The images and their niches or tabernacles were painted and gilded, and offerings of flowers, money candles, rosaries, kerchiefs and rings were made to encourage their interest and intercession.

© Miles Green, April 2005

My previous article established that five centuries ago, in the years leading up to the Reformation, Penn Church had at least eight altars, very probably several more, and that bequests of sheep, bees and money were left for their maintenance. So how was all this organised? What was the medieval equivalent of today’s PCC?   Churchwardens’ accounts would be useful, but very few have survived for this period and none for Penn.   However, all is not lost because we still have some useful clues and we have Morebath.

 The Vicar of Morebath , a parish in Devon on the Somerset border, 25 miles north of Exeter, kept meticulous records from 1520 to 1574 and Eamon Duffy’s The Voices of Morebath, uses them to provide an unrivalled picture of life in a late medieval parish. Penn and Morebath were remarkably similar: both were 4,000 acres, mainly sheep country, with about 200 inhabitants in scattered farms and hamlets on the edge of a large heath (Wycombe Heath/Exmoor). Their churches were roughly the same size and both had a small Augustinian Priory as their patron. Where evidence from Penn is available it invariably confirms that from Morebath, as we shall see in my next article, and so you can read the following description much as if it were for Penn.

 The lights burning in front of the twelve altars in Morebath Church were maintained by various ‘stores’ or devotional funds provided in various ways – by the return on wool from small flocks of sheep which were literally ‘earmarked’ for that purpose, as well as from church ‘ales’, devotional gatherings, and gifts and bequests such as money, sheep and bees to provide the wax for the lights. Each store, there were eight in Morebath, was maintained by a different group of parishioners who accounted for them every year in detail.

Two Church Wardens, known as High Wardens were elected annually. They had to account for the central funds of the parish, including the surplus from other stores and expenditure on purchases, repairs and projects. They also accounted for the two stores of the side chapel. They were elected together and served for just one year with election travelling in a rota round the farms and cottages of the parish. The head of every household was expected to serve in their turn, the poor as well as the prosperous, even if a widow. On a few occasions, both wardens were women. The junior of the two was responsible for the High Warden’s parish ale, the most important fund raising event of the year.

 The store of Our Lady was the most important in the parish and owned the largest flock of sheep, up to two dozen, each with a distinctive mark cut in its ear. It was managed by its own two wardens and existed to maintain a light in front of the principal image of the Virgin, which was next to the high altar in the chancel, with profits going to other needs of the church. The wool from these sheep, which were all looked after and accounted for, by individual parishioners, produced 30 to 40 shillings every year.

 The Maiden store was run by all the unmarried women of over 12 or so, who elected two of their number as wardens every year with fathers occasionally serving in their place if they were too young or inexperienced. They maintained ‘a taper be fore our Lady and a nother a fore the hye crosse’( ie the Rood) and another before a local female saint. They had no sheep and raised a few shillings from an annual gathering.

The Young Men’s store, consisting of all the bachelors of about fourteen years and above, maintained a taper (candle) before the patronal image of St George (for Penn, it would have been the Trinity) and two more before the Rood. They too elected two wardens every year, with fathers or mothers standing in if necessary, and they raised most of their money, several pounds a year, from an annual ‘ale’.

There were also four smaller stores for the remaining images.

© Miles Green, June 2005