Norfolk: Norwich, St Stephen, Parish Church of St Stephen

This was the last medieval church in Norwich to be rebuilt, and was not completed until after the Reformation. ¹ Chancel and nave are not differentiated architecturally and there are sixteen clerestory windows on each side. The north aisle runs the full length of the church, but the south aisle stops one bay from the east; a vestry was built in the remaining bay in the nineteenth century. ² North transeptal chapel and north porch with tower over it. The church is of the first half of the sixteenth century with some earlier parts retained, such as the north tower porch of c. 1320 and probably the line of the north wall of the north aisle, to which a transeptal chapel was added dateable on style to the second half of the 15th-c. The aisles were extensively restored in the nineteenth century. The church was appropriated to Norwich Cathedral priory in the time of Henry I, and the receipts were paid the chamberlain. In 1501 the sum required to be paid by the vicar to the priory was reduced to 53s 4d on account of the poverty of the benefice. In that year and the next, the chamberlain laid out part of a total sum of £7 12s 4½d spread over three years for repairs to the chancel. This would have implied a total expenditure of £11 8s if an agreement drawn up in 1303 setting the joint responsibility of the priory and the vicar for the upkeep of the chancel was followed. The funding was probably obtained on the initiative of Thomas Bowyer, vicar, who died in 1530 and left £6 to rebuilding the chancel. ³ Blomefield and Parkin recorded that Bowyer’s successor, Dr Thomas Cappe, glazed the east window of the chancel in 1533 and that there was an inscription in it for him and those who helped him. They saw the remains of this inscription: '… qui vitriari fecit Ao Dn’ Mocccccoxxxiiio, … propicietur Deus Amen. … Dompn’. in .. xxx. …' ⁴ The following year a letter of fraternity was granted by the priory to Robert Coraunt for rebuilding the chancel. ⁵ Thus, although the inscription in the window is now fragmentary, the completion of the chancel with its glazing in 1533 seems very probable. Between that date and 1550 the rest of the church was rebuilt.

In 1547 an inventory records that plate was sold for £71 5s to pay for the building work, as the collapse of the church was feared. ⁶ Other Norwich churches in this inventory give details of the often considerable expenses incurred from replacing their painted glass with plain, but there is no mention of glass at St Stephen’s. Perhaps only the windows of the chancel had been glazed with figurative painted glass before the campaign against imagery gained strength. The surviving glass in the east chancel window indicates that, as at Norwich, St Andrew, the central Crucifixion image was destroyed by iconoclasm, probably at the Reformation, while the Old Testament scenes in the outer lights survived. ⁷ In light a are parts of the Sacrifice of Isaac and in 1e, of the Raising of the Brazen Serpent, the Old Testament parallels of the the Crucifixion used in the Biblia Pauperum. Unlike St Andrew’s, here parts of the subsidiary figures of the large three-light Crucifixion are still to be seen and lights b and d and parts of a donor panel belonging to this window are in 2e. The window may also have been damaged in the gunpowder explosion of 1648, which did so much damage to the glass at nearby St Peter Mancroft. ⁸

Part of the original glazing of the tracery lights of window I is still extant, although some had been lost by the late nineteenth century when new figures of angels were installed and more was destroyed by bombing in 1942. Harford and Nelson record the much more complete glazing seen in their time. In the upper row were six ‘archangels’ (probably orders of angels), three bishops and an archbishop; the lower row had St Stephen; St Augustine; Dorothy holding flowers; St Apollonia holding pincers, tooth and palm; the five sacred wounds upon a blue shield; a shield bearing instruments of the Passion; St Catherine with wheel; St Lucy with dagger; a bishop with crozier and St Lawrence with gridiron. ⁹ It is difficult to retrieve what might have been the original scheme from this. If ‘St Augustine’ was a bishop, this would give a scheme with six ‘archangels’, six bishops/archbishops, six saints and two shields, but fitting this symmetrically into two rows of ten lights which already had some nineteenth-century figures is impossible. The shields may have come from the heads of the main lights, where they are now. The conclusion must be that the some of the figures came from one more other windows. The most likely original arrangement would have been ten angels in the top row and ten saints in the lower one.

Several pieces of inscription now in the main lights of window I, all with identical blackletter script and at least three of them, probably all originally, on rectangular plaques, are from chapter six of the Acts of the Apostles, which tells the story of St Stephen, proto-martyr, to whom the church is dedicated. ¹⁰ Windows relating to the saint to whom a church was dedicated were most often seen in one of the side windows of the chancel in Norfolk, as at the nearby St Peter Mancroft, where a Life of St Peter has been ascribed to window nII, or possibly sII. ¹¹ At St Stephen’s church there is only one side chancel window, sII, of three lights, and this is the most probable original position for such a window. These texts are different from the tituli found in other windows, where they are not verbatim Vulgate quotations, but labels of the scenes depicted, sometimes beginning with ‘Hic’. ¹² None of the plaques are complete and their length is not known, but is very probable that only short extracts from the Acts were written on them rather than complete verses.

The Lady Chapel was at the east end of the north aisle and the east window (nII) depicted ‘the whole history of the Virgin’s life, with many labels and inscriptions, a Salve Regina Mater Misericordiae, Ave Regina celorum, Ave Domina’. A fragmentary inscription and the arms of Browne, sable three cranes argent, suggested to Blomefield that it was repaired by Robert Browne, mayor of Norwich in 1522. Part of another inscription pointed to John Underwood, alias Leystofte, appointed vicar in 1437, as the original donor of the window. ¹³ The Lady Chapel housed the Brasyer chantry and in 1729 Mackerell noted that the arms of Brasyer impaled with the arms of the wife and that the same arms were in the window ‘under the Gallery to the East’. ¹⁴ He also saw Robert Browne’s arms in a south aisle window together with those of Godsalve and Holt. ¹⁵ Kempe c.1570 recorded the arms of Godsalve and his figure ‘in his coat armour very fair in glass being a benefactor to the building of the church and the glazing of the steeple windows’. ¹⁶ Another local donor was Mingaye, whose arms were seen by Blomefield and Parkin in the north aisle windows, and ‘often about the church’. ¹⁷

The two shields now in nX and nVI of France and England modern, for Henry VIII, and the same impaling the arms of Jane Seymour, were recorded in the west window by Blomefield and Parkin. ¹⁸ However, the west window was not built until c. 1550 and Jane Seymour was queen only in 1536-7; a posthumous shield for her is unlikely and the coats probably came originally from a window further east. Antiquarian sources list several other shields in the church which have disappeared, but it is not always clear which were in the windows. ¹⁹ The list in Harley 901 drawn up in about 1570 begins with the arms of Stafford, one which was born at various times by the Earls of Kent, Henry Stafford, Earl of Wiltshire, d. 1523, and Sir Edmund Woodstock. Next is the shield of Henry Despenser, bishop of Norwich from 1370 to 1407, followed by a comment that ‘Gregorie Stafford made the chancel windowes’. ²⁰ It is difficult to make sense of this, as the cathedral priory was patron, Thomas Capp is recorded as providing the chancel east window and the Staffords have no known connection with the church. The shield of Bishop Despenser may have been reused from earlier glazing, or may have been part of a series of shields of bishops of Norwich.

Nothing more is known of the history of the glass until 1799, when William Stevenson, at that time one of the sheriffs of the city and an inhabitant of the parish, gave an ‘elegant painting work on glass, representing the figure of St Stephen under a Gothic canopy with a base of the same, which is fixed into the center of the east window’. ²¹ This figure was identified by Harford with the panel now in 3-5c of this window, depicting a bearded saint, which in turn has been associated with the other four panels in the top half of the window, identified as German glass from the monastery of Mariawald. It has yet to be demonstrated that Stevenson (and/or Hampp) were engaged in the importation of stained glass from the continent at this early date and it is thought that the Mariawald glass was not sold until 1802. ²² The 1799 minute in the churchwarden’s book does not identify the glass as German, and the present panel in no way resembles the standard iconography of St Stephen. It may be that the glass given in 1799 was local medieval or newly painted glass and was later replaced by the Mariawald panels. ²³ When this occurred is not certain. Stevenson was an associate of Hampp, the importer of foreign glass, and between 1802 and 1804 Hampp travelled to the continent and imported much more glass, including that from the church and cloister of Mariawald in the Eiffel region, the provenance of the German glass in the top half of the four outer lights. ²⁴ It seems probable that Stevenson, who was a parishioner of St Stephen’s church, would have been involved in the acquisition of the Mariawald glass and that this would have occurred before his death in 1821. However, minutes of a number of vestry meetings in 1841/2 show that alterations to the east window occurred at that time, including the installation of some glass given by Mr Norgate to replace glass which had been put in by Mr Harland and later removed. ²⁵ It is possible that Mr Norgate’s gift referred to the panel of German glass in 2c which is not from Mariawald, or, more probably, some of the non-medieval tracery light figures.

In addition to the five large panels from Mariawald there is in light c a smaller narrative panel from a Life of St Barbara series, made according to Hilary Wayment for the Charterhouse of St Barbara in Cologne c.1500. ²⁶ The series is based on an account of the life of the saint compiled in the late fourteenth-century by Jan van Wakkerzeele in which St Barbara was converted to Christianity by a correspondence with Origen and a meeting with a messenger from him. The panel here depicts St Barbara standing with the messenger. Several other panels are extant in a number of collections. ²⁷

The glass was examined in the workshop of Devlin Plummer Stained Glass, 1 December, 2009. ²⁸