A Sliver of Painted Wood
have I solved a medieval mystery?
Hello, between-the-moons friends. It’s lovely to have your company again.
The outside world is full of strife and grief and I’m keenly aware of that. At the same time there is, perhaps, a comforting timelessness about a story starring the scratched painted figure of a medieval saint. So that’s why I decided that it might just be the perfect time to share this essay. I wrote it several months ago but it’s been sitting in my folder, waiting with the patience of - dare I say it - a saint :)
I hope you’ll enjoy it.
The ancient door creaks behind me and my breath rasps in the silence. I say ‘silence’ but in fact the air is full of jostling presence and expectation. I rush in, eager as ever for the jolt of recognition in that first glimpse. Nostrils filled with familiar scents of dust and polish I gaze down the length of the nave to where colours dance before the high altar. The rood screen and its cast of saints stare back as they have done for 600 years or more.
St George (with red beard) and St Erasmus, on the screen of Hempstead church, Norfolk.
Hempstead church’s medieval rood screen is faded and lovely. Simon Knott of the Norfolk Churches website describes it as one of East Anglia’s most remarkable art objects. Unlike many other rood screens it has never been restored or touched up; the painting is ‘exquisite, and certainly on a par with Norfolk’s best at Barton Turf ‘. The screen features a very unusual pale radiant blue; utterly stunning to encounter and perhaps unique within Norfolk as it would have been extremely expensive to produce.
The painted panels are now so ghostly that it takes a few minutes to get my eye in and notice all the details; the telltale emblems that help to identify each of the well-loved helpers. For lovers of patina and weathered layers of colour and pattern it is a delight. I bask in it. Like a book, I tend to read a screen from left to right and it is on the right - south - side that the extraordinary blue is most noticeable. It clothes both St Stephen with his fistful of stones and St Laurence, one hand on his heart and the other lightly supporting his grid iron. St Francis too, who raises his arms to show palms bearing the stigmata that are almost indistinguishable from the constellations of woodworm holes.