Category: Altars and Screens

Norfolk has some fabulous late medieval painted screens, but what is left is certainly just a remnant of what once existed.  A significant number of screens and their painted decoration have been lost since the mid-sixteenth century as a consequence of vandalism, iconoclasm, philistinism, apathy and neglect.  Iconoclasm in my view can be overstated, but […]

The Seven Sacrament altarpiece by Rogier van der Weyden is now in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp.  It was painted between 1445 and 1450 when van der Weyden was in Brussels and is generally held to have been commissioned for a church in Poligny in the Jura département in eastern France.  It is […]

The Seven Sacrament altarpiece by Rogier van der Weyden is now in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp.  It was painted between 1445 and 1450 when van der Weyden was in Brussels and is generally held to have been commissioned for a church in Poligny in the Jura département in eastern France.  It is […]

Set into the east wall of Somerton church in Oxfordshire is what appears to be at first glance a complete medieval reredos.  It portrays the Last Supper with Christ and the disciples ranged behind a long table covered in a pleated cloth.  They are all tucking in to food and drink, eating from wooden trenchers […]

The parish church of St Mary and St Thomas of Canterbury in Wymondham in Norfolk, is all that is remains of a Benedictine Priory founded in 1107 by Wiliam d’Aubigny, which was raised to abbey status in 1448. When Wymondham Abbey was dissolved in 1538 at the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the people of Wymondham […]

Wellingham is a remote little hamlet in the middle of Norfolk to the south of Fakenham.  It’s church, heavily rebuilt in 1896 is rather undistinguished, but it contains a great treasure.  The dado of a rood screen from the 1530s.   Rather interestingly the screen is inscribed and precisely dated. The inscription on the upper […]