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Finchingfield (Essex)

East Haddon (Northants)

Anstey (Hertfordshire)

Gnosall (Staffordshire)

Earl Stonham (Suffolk)

Norton (Suffolk)

Ixworth Thorpe (Suffolk)

Tutbury (Staffordshire)

Nantwich (Cheshire)

Penmon Priory (Anglesey)

Llaneilian (Anglesey)

Llanbadrig (Anglesey)

Lower Peover (Cheshire)

Leverton (Lincolnshire)

This story begins at Ryhall in Rutland on the outskirts of Stamford. Its church is not well-known on the church architecture “trail”. I moved very close to it in October 2009. I had already tentatively launched my website www.greatenglishchurches.co.uk and hoped to find good reason to write about Ryhall Church.

In truth, I found it architecturally unexceptional although it is large and of pleasing proportions, and with a thirteenth century bruiser of a west tower in a style much favoured in Rutland and neighbouring areas. It also has rare and precious remnants of an anchorite’s cell at its northwest corner. On the whole, however, it was a church not calculated to much set the pulse racing. Don’t bother looking for it (or indeed most of the churches in this discourse) in Simon Jenkins’s famous book “England’s Thousand Best Churches”!

The village, I soon found, is not inordinately proud of its church and nor does it recognise it as having anything that sets it apart from its neighbours. As in most English villages, the church is just “there”, enjoying vague feelings of goodwill but impinging little on the consciousness of the villagers beyond a comforting sense of timeless permanence.

The church’s great treasure, however, is hidden in plain sight: unremarked by the legions of villagers who use the path through its churchyard as a convenient short cut. I found that the church had an extraordinarily rich fifteenth century frieze of carvings in the cornicing between its roofs and the walls of its chancel and aisles. This delightful, and almost intact, riot of mediaeval life and symbolism is known to the area’s church visiting cognoscenti but has little recognition beyond. One group of carvings around the south west of the building particularly took my eye. This is a cluster of grotesque creatures distinguished by black eyes, richly-carved “manes” and the most mischievous of faces. The whimsical style is unique and, for those with eyes to see, unforgettable.

Clearly in the same style of carving, we also have two unusually life-like faces that are surely portraits of individuals known to the carver. These are rare and precious treasures from an era when common people were rarely thought worthy of a portrait of any kind.

Many church architecture enthusiasts believe one of these images to be a self-portrait of the stonemason himself.  True, he clutches a mason’s hammer, but he also holds a miniature millstone. What he carries in his right hand is not at all obvious but my own theory is that it is a bread shovel – used for placing loaves inside the hot oven. The other figure seems to be flaming hammer in one hand a swathe of clothing the other. This is probably another composite representing a fuller and a blacksmith. Between them the two figures are surely intended to represent a variety of village trades. Is the left hand figure below a representation of a real person? I am sceptical of the widely-held notion that heads on churches are usually local worthies (although many inside a church probably are) but such is the distinctiveness of these two that I think we are entitled to believe that both of these faces were of real people.

The Ryhall Tradesmen: Left: Mason, Miller and Baker   Right: The Fuller and Blacksmith.

The story continues at Oakham Church (14 miles away and also in Rutland) which I visited shortly afterwards mainly to see the splendid Decorated style arcade capitals. I found that the church has friezes even more extensive than those at Ryhall, albeit much less varied. On the west end of the north aisle, however, was a cluster of grotesque figures incontrovertibly by the man who carved the maned figures at Ryhall and also with black eyes. 

Grotesque Carvings at Ryhall (top two photographs) and Oakham (bottom two photographs)

There are quite a lot of distinctive characteristics about these carvings. The main one is the black eyes that are made of lead and about which we will be talking a great deal more in future chapters. Some are missing. Note that the carvings upper and lower left even have miniature figures incorporated into the designs, easily distinguishable again by the lack eyes. The “tradesman” sculptures at Ryhall are also clearly carved by the same artist.

My telephoto lens at Oakham Church also revealed a cheeky little secret: there are three separate images of a man bending over, head between his legs with a strategically-placed little hole, “mooning” at the world! The sex of the figures is not left to the imagination! I called these the “Mooning Men”.

Oakham Mooners: Left South Clerestory; Centre: South West Porch: Right: North Clerestory

Students of church architecture take naughty – one might even say occasionally prurient - delight in the rude images that are sometimes seen on the outsides of our mediaeval churches.  Our forefathers had a surprisingly robust attitude to such things. There are whole websites devoted to “exhibitionist” carvings with a wide variety of gaping pudenda, tumescent willies and cheeky bums on show!  It is believed that the masons were given a free hand on the outsides of churches and they sometimes gave rein to a robust sense of humour. Three mooners on one parish church, however, still seems somewhat excessive and to the best of my knowledge unequalled on any other church in England.

At the time the Mooning Men at Oakham were no more to me than an amusing aside and my focus was firmly on the man who had carved the grotesque figures with the black eyes – my “Demon Carver”. I searched the whole area for cornice friezes. Some proved to be a disappointment, often in the earlier Decorated style when uninteresting “ballflower” friezes were all the rage. Many others, however, seemed to be in a similar artistic vein to those I saw at Ryhall and Oakham.

Most intriguingly, I found that the three mooner figures had counterparts at many of these other churches. This could not, I felt, have owed anything to coincidence. There was surely a story to be uncovered. I then found further recurring themes and sculptural designs.

Initially I was deluded into thinking that I was seeing the work of a single stonemason without spending time on what were to become the thorny questions and when and why they had been carved. As the number of churches rose into double figure and the number of individual carvings reached four figures it became more and more obvious that I was seeing the work of not one, but of a few men implying a much broader artistic and historical context. After much guesswork and inference I wrote my first book on the subject – “Demon Carvers and Mooning Men”. In that I identified five distinct sculptural styles that probably were attributable to five individual masons.

A year or two after that work was completed a visit to Exton Church near Oakham, Rutland led to the discovery of more carvings that clearly fitted the style of carving. Within days I had found by pure chance a significant gargoyle at Empingham Church, also in Rutland. Within a year of that still more material emerged as far east as Boston in Lincolnshire. It seemed also that much of this “new” work could be pointed at just one of the five masons identified in the first book – a man I had named “John Oakham”.

In the meantime I found a whole raft of scholarly material about mediaeval English stonemasonry, most significantly by Douglas Knoop and G.J.Jones of Manchester University and by Lon R Shelby of Southern Illinois State University. All of this material is little-known today but undermined many of the previous assumptions about the mediaeval building industry. This provided invaluable historical and industrial context for the sculptures as well as, it must be said, changing some of the conclusions I had reached in my first edition.

This edition will then look afresh at the sculptural work identified in the first edition and examine other examples within the East Midlands area. It will look at the body of work apparently attributable only to John Oakham who went on, it seems, to perpetuate this artistic form well beyond the original geographical boundaries of my original study. It will examine the significance of this work in our understanding of the mediaeval stone building industry.

At this point, unless you are a student of the mediaeval stonemasonry industry I strongly recommend that you read my brief account of it here

The Stonemasons and their World and The Stonemasons and their World Part II

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