Norfolk: Chedgrave, Parish Church of All Saints

A mid-twelfth-century church with the tower to the north of the chancel of c.1500 and north and south Norman doors and south porch. A brick north aisle was added in 1819 for the Rev. Thomas Beauchamp and the north aisle was extended by another brick building in 1993–4. The only original glass in the three-light east chancel window is in the top quatrefoil, F1, where there is an in situ head of God the Father set on a glory. This was drawn by Thomas Martin in the eighteenth century with a note that beneath was a three-light Crucifixion with St Mary and St John and a fragmentary and disordered inscription which he read as:

'Orat p(ro) Jacobo fi| militia imp| ornato d(omi)ni regs. uxoris eus qui cancellam| impellane ista(m). xxi '

He queried if ‘xxi’ was for ‘MoCCCCCXXI’. The mention of somebody called James and the third part of the inscription, which can be reconstructed as 'attornato domini regis' firmly links this donor inscription to Sir James Hobart (d.1517), attorney-general to Henry VII from 1486 until 1507. He lived in Hales Hall near Loddon and from about 1500 onwards he and his third wife Margaret, daughter of Piers Naunton of Letheringham, started on a programme of charitable works including the completion of Bishop Goldwell’s refurbishing of the choir in Norwich Cathedral and the rebuilding of Loddon church. The mention of ‘cancellam’ in the lost inscription would suggest that the chancel at Chedgrave was built by Sir James and his wife, also mentioned, which would accord with the dating of this part by Pevsner and Wilson to c.1500. However, if the reading of the date in the glass as ‘1521’ is correct, then the donor of the glass was probably Sir Walter Hobart, son of Sir James and Margaret, who presented to the church in that year, and the window can be seen as a memorial to his father. The style of the head of God the Father is retardataire, showing no signs of Flemish influence. In the tracery light A1 of sII are some Tudor painted quarries, mainly patterned, but three have an initial in Renaissance lettering, reading ‘H’, ‘E’, ‘I’, perhaps from the word ‘Henricus’ for Henry VIII. These may be part of the original glazing.

Apart from the head in F1, the glazing of the east chancel window consists of foreign glass presented to the church by Lady Beauchamp Proctor of Langley Hall and acquired by her, almost certainly from Hampp. The glass was installed by Yarington of Norwich in 1819. ¹ The earliest foreign glass here is a group of three grisaille figures of c.1430–c.1440 of Rhenish glass, probably from Cologne. That in 3a depicts the bust of a bearded figure facing to sinister, perhaps Christ; that in 2b is a half-length figure of St John the Evangelist holding a palm, possibly from a Crucifixion, and the last is of a bearded man facing to dexter, although very little original glass survives. These panels may be compared to the so-called Gnadenstuhl-Fenster (nXIX) in Cologne Cathedral consisting of panels of c.1430–35 very probably from the destroyed Corpus Christi church of the Augustinian canons in Cologne. ² Another small German piece with an angel playing a trumpet with a banner bearing the arms of Cologne of the late fifteenth century is in 2c. Three panels in the tracery can be attributed to the glazing of the cloister at Steinfeld. That in A3 is part of a quatrefoil tracery light from window XII, made in 1531 or 1533, depicting Joseph being sold by his brothers to the Ishmaelites. ³ The kneeling Premonstratensian monks in A1 and A6 can be assigned to the Steinfeld glazing on account of their style and form and association with glass clearly from there, although it is not known which window they come from. ⁴ The other glass is French, from Rouen. The panel of an enthroned Virgin Mary was identified by Françoise Perrot in 1977 as part of a window formerly in the church of Saint-Nicolas-le-Painteur, Rouen, depicting the Triumph of the Virgin; a drawing of this window had been made by Jean Barc in 1716–20. ⁵ John Knowles had thought that two panels in York Minster were copies of the ‘Seven Capital Sins’ and the ‘Adam and Eve fallen’ in the Vitrail de Chars from Saint-Vincent de Rouen. ⁶ Jean Lafond subsequently identified them as from the Triumph of the Virgin window from Saint-Nicolas-le-Painteur. ⁷ Another drawing by Jean Barc has helped to identify the two further panels at Chedgrave, 4a and 4c, as coming from a mid-sixteenth-century window in Saint-Nicolas-le-Peintre in Rouen possibly illustrating Le pèlerinage de la vie humaine. ⁸ Two human hybrids riding polycephalic monsters in 4a and 4c are from lights b and c of the top main-light register of the window. That in 4c was in the centre and the purple leg on the left belonged to the figure of the pilgrim carrying a staff to the left of whom was a figure of Moses carrying the tablets of the law. Top right a winged figure on a tower raises an arm. ⁹ In the background were the towers of a town. That in 4a was in light c of the upper register which also had the pilgrim standing on the left looking in a book and a female figure in the middle. ¹⁰ The extant panels from this window show the influence of the Le Prince workshop and can be associated with the Rouen-based St Vincent workshop. The panel with two angels in 1b is also Rouen work of c.1530–c.1540. For many years it was covered by a wooden stand on which a cross stood.