INTRODUCTION
Benefaction boards record charitable donations and bequests made to the parish for the welfare of its inhabitants. They form a memorial to the donors and a reminder to act likewise, evolving from the pre-Reformation practices around salvation and collective remembrance of the dead described by Duffy,Footnote 1 to comply with Protestant doctrine.Footnote 2 Recent scholarship has shown how the display of commandment boards and other didactic visual material belongs to a broader post-Reformation wave of material investment and renovation in church interiors.Footnote 3 In her pioneering survey of English benefaction boards, Badham highlights how little scholarly attention they have received. She describes the Alcester example, displayed in St Nicholas Church, now in the diocese of Coventry, as ‘the most spectacular […] in England’.Footnote 4 Most benefaction boards display only text, occasionally with heraldry or some other decoration. The Alcester Board is outstanding in its structural complexity and figurative imagery. It belongs within the vernacular tradition of work produced outside metropolitan fine art practice by locally trained craftsmen, rooted in domestic styles and techniques.Footnote 5
Contemporary writers on painting technique tended to focus on ‘limning’ in aqueous media, as more suited to their educated readers.Footnote 6 The Gloucestershire herald, John Guillim (1551–1621), and John Abbott (1639/40–1727), a Devon plasterer, offer rare practical notes from working decorative painters, whilst the encyclopaedic work of Randle Holme iii (1627–1700), a herald-painter from Chester, contains information about tools, materials and how to represent different subjects.Footnote 7 Robert Tittler’s studies of artists’ and herald-painters’ practice and organisation in provincial early modern England provide important background, as does Llewellyn’s work on English post-Reformation funeral monuments, whilst acknowledging the existence of ‘hundreds of cheap, painted memorial tablets which have never been properly catalogued’.Footnote 8 Davies’s research on secular wallpainting in the Welsh Marches covers materials and makers active in the region extending into the English Midlands. More locally, Hughes’s examination of building trades in seventeenth-century Worcester, then the diocesan centre for Alcester, further illuminates the networks within which such decorative works were produced.Footnote 9
Despite its significance, the Alcester Benefaction Board has never been thoroughly studied. The antiquary William Dugdale did not mention it, although he spent enough time in the church to sketch the sixteenth-century Greville tomb,Footnote 10 and recorded Walter Newport’s bequest for Alcester Free School.Footnote 11 Not until 1858 did the Board appear in print as ‘a wooden table with folding leaves or doors, which, when open exhibit on the inside rude paintings, some of which appear to represent members of the fraternity of Freemasons with their symbols’.Footnote 12 It is described in the 1945 Victoria County History,Footnote 13 mentioned by Pevsner in 1966Footnote 14 and included in the 1967 Historic England listing of the church.Footnote 15 These accounts all contain inaccuracies, including uncertainty about its date.
Although parallels exist with furniture and house-painting,Footnote 16 comparable analytical data is sparse.Footnote 17 In 2018 the Board was removed from the church during building work, creating the opportunity to assess its condition and carry out conservation work alongside a full technical examination.
DESCRIPTION OF THE BOARD
The Alcester Benefaction Board is a painted wooden structure in the form of a shallow cupboard approximately 1m square, with panelled doors, a cornice at the top and a sill at the bottom (fig 1). Empty slots and the remains of dowels on the top and bottom of the Board suggest that it may originally have incorporated cresting or a pediment, with corbels and an apron piece underneath, emulating contemporary stone funerary wall monuments.Footnote 18
Alcester Benefaction Board, exterior with doors closed. Photo: author.
Fig 1. Long description
The structure is a wooden cupboard with two doors, each door featuring two panels with text. The text is written in black letter script. The top left panel reads, ʼBehold within this Table are the names with the memorable acts of those who have most liberally extended their bountie to help Tradesmen, and releeve poore and aged People, dwelling within the Towne and Parish of Alcester.ʼ The top right panel reads, ʼLet your light soe shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorifie your Father which is in heaven. Math. 5. 10 Give, and it shall be given unto you, good measure preassed downe, and shaken together, and running over. Luke 6:38.ʼ The bottom left panel reads, ʼThou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poore, and to thy needy: for the poore shall never cease out of the land: Deut. 11. 11. Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many dayes. Eccle. 11.1.ʼ The bottom right panel reads, ʼThere was a woman at Joppa called Dorcas, full of good works and alms deeds which she did. Acts 9:36. Let us not be weary in welldoing: for in due season wee shall reap if wee faint not. Gal. 6. 9 . 1683.ʼ
Painted text on the closed doors call the viewer to read the list of benefactors inside, followed by biblical verses relating to acts of charity. Inside, the centre of the Board contains a modern list of thirty-six charitable bequests from 1562 to 1904, handwritten on two sheets of parchment. A glazed frame has been fitted over the parchment (fig 2). Four paintings on the inside of the doors are each accompanied by a biblical text.
Alcester Benefaction Board in situ before conservation with doors open. Photo: © Michael A. Linton, New Zealand.
Left door, upper panel (fig 3)
Alcester Benefaction Board, interior panel, upper left. Photo: author.
Fig 3. Long description
A banner above the figures reads: ʼBlessed is he that considereth the poore and needy. Psalme. 41.1.ʼ
Two men are shown handing purses of money to a barber, a carpenter and a butcher. The costumes and hairstyles are comparable to those of the sons of Giles Savage (d 1631) on his monument at Elmley Castle, Worcestershire. Although the text on the outside of the board mentions ‘those who have most liberally extended their bountie to help Tradesmen’, it seems that the money is not being given to tradesmen in need, but for them to provide services for others.
The list of benefactions includes Fulke Lord Brooke’s gift of £300 in 1618 ‘for building the Town Hall’. As the upper storey of the building is timber,Footnote 19 the carpenter is presumably shown being paid for this work. Burnby found records in various parish accounts of medical practitioners (represented here by the barber) being paid out of local charity funds.Footnote 20 A painting recording the benefaction of William Andrews (d 1641) in All Saints, Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire, includes the provision of ‘money to buy meat’ for poor widows on three days of the year. The butcher here is likely being paid for something similar.
Left door, lower panel (fig 4)
Alcester Benefaction Board, interior panel, lower left. Photo: author.
Fig 4. Long description
The painting shows five men in historical attire. The man at the upper left is holding a jug and a goblet or chalice. The man at the lower left is dressed in red and holding a hat and a pair of shoes. The third man is holding a tankard. There is a jacket hanging up next to him. The fourth man is wearing a hat and holding a staff and a bowl. His eyes are closed. The fifth man is bare-chested and dressed in a cloak. He has a wooden leg and is using crutches. A banner above the figures reads: ʼHe that hath pittie upon the poore lendeth unto the Lord, Pro, 19, 17.ʼ
Three men are shown giving food, drink and clothing to a blind beggar and an amputee on crutches. The benefaction list includes ten shillings per annum given to the parish ‘out of the Angel Inn’. In 1647 and 1648, Katherine Lady Brooke paid the Alcester mercer, Fulke Emes, ‘for 53 yards of black frieze for the poor widows’ gowns […] at Christ-tide’,Footnote 21 presumably out of the benefaction for that purpose made by Elizabeth Greville in 1562.
The figures are standing on raised rectangular slabs. Comparison with paintwork on the board’s exterior indicate that the painted pattern imitates marble. The slabs therefore represent gravestones.
Right door, upper panel (fig 5)
Alcester Benefaction Board, interior panel, upper right. Photo: author.
Fig 5. Long description
A banner above the figures reads ʼTo doe good and communicate forget not. Heb. 13. 16ʼ The text is partly obscured with black paint.
The upper right panel shows a schoolroom. A school had been held in the church’s chantry since the late fifteenth century. It survived the Dissolution thanks to a lease granted by Queen Elizabeth to Lady Elizabeth Greville, containing the covenant ‘not to convert the preistes Chamber to none other use then a schole’.Footnote 22 The third entry on the manuscript sheets in the centre of the Board is Walter Newport’s bequest in 1600, ‘for the maintenance of the free school for ever’. Ink is being made over the fire at the right. In the foreground are inkwells, one strung with a penner containing quills. The biblical verse on this panel has been partially obscured with black paint.
Right door, lower panel (fig 6)
Alcester Benefaction Board, interior panel, lower right. Photo: author.
Fig 6. Long description
The painting shows three figures in historical attire standing next to a tower. The faces of two male prisoners are visible behind barred windows in the tower. The left-hand woman holds a basket of eggs and is offering a coin from a purse held in her left hand. A man in the centre holds a small barrel in his left hand and is offering a tankard with his right hand. At the right, a woman in a red dress and white apron presents a dish of food. Above the figures, there is a text banner that reads, ʼThe mercifull man doeth good to his owne soule. ʼ Pro. 11.17ʼ
In the lower right panel, a man and two women bring food and drink to two men imprisoned in a tower. The woman nearest the tower is offering a coin from a purse in her left hand. To visit prisoners was the sixth of the pre-Reformation corporal works of mercy.Footnote 23 The giving of money could reference the ransoming of prisoners in exchange for indulgences.Footnote 24 This would have been anathema to Protestants. Samuel Clarke, rector of Alcester 1633–45, praised the charity of the Nonconformist clergyman Joseph Alleine to prisoners in Oxford Gaol, who were encouraged to hear his preaching, not with money, but ‘a considerable allowance of Bread, at his own cost’.Footnote 25 Yet in Richard Daye’s popular Book of Christian Prayers (the source of much decorative material), a gentleman hands a coin through prison bars under the heading ‘Charity visiteth prisoners’, validated as here by a biblical text.Footnote 26
DATE
The Board is dated 1683 on the lower right exterior panel, but the date has long been suspected to have been changed; the Victoria County History claims it originally read ‘1603’.Footnote 27 Historic England describes the paintings as ‘in C16 style’.Footnote 28 Pevsner and Wedgwood dated the Board to the seventeenth century, calling the gadrooned frieze ‘Early Georgian’,Footnote 29 whilst a twentieth-century guidebook observed that the figures wear early Stuart dress.Footnote 30
Infrared reflectography (IRR) (fig 7) shows beyond doubt that the original painted date is 1632. Dendrochronology of one of the backing boards gives an estimated felling date between 1610 and 1644, consistent with a 1632 construction date.Footnote 31 Optical microscopy and examination of paint samples in cross section confirm that the original exterior paint scheme was selectively overpainted and the date altered to 1683.Footnote 32
Infrared reflectogram showing the original date of 1632. Image: © Tager Stonor Richardson.
THE MAKING OF THE BOARD
Background
Alcester, eight miles west of Stratford-upon-Avon, lies at the junction of two Roman roads still in use during the seventeenth century. In 1637, John Taylor noted weekly arrivals in London from carriers based in Worcestershire and Warwickshire,Footnote 33 but before 1750, the main coach routes bypassed Alcester and winter travel by road was unreliable. The nearest navigable river was at Bidford, four miles south.Footnote 34 Well into the eighteenth century, water remained the faster, cheaper and more dependable option for moving goods to and from London.Footnote 35 Worcester, Alcester’s diocesan centre in the seventeenth century, was an important overland transport hub and a key Severn port connecting to Bristol downriver.Footnote 36 These factors would have influenced the availability and cost of the materials used in the making of the Board, whether local, native or imported.
William Camden recorded in 1610 that Alcester was ‘decaied’,Footnote 37 and according to the Worcester visitation book of 1615, the church was then in disrepair.Footnote 38 The first quarter of the seventeenth century saw several spikes in burial numbers, and in 1607 a charity collection had been authorised in Stratford-upon-Avon on behalf of the plague-stricken inhabitants of Alcester.Footnote 39 Tittler notes that the slightly earlier portraits of benefactors to the city of Gloucester were produced at a time of economic difficulty and ecclesiastical instability, to bolster local pride and encourage further philanthropy.Footnote 40 Similar impulses may have been at work in Alcester.
The Board could also have been part of a campaign to restore the church under the rising influence of William Laud, appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633. The rector of Alcester in 1632 was Thomas Powell, who had connections with local Royalist and Catholic-leaning families,Footnote 41 but Robert Greville, lord of the manor of Alcester and patron of the church from 1628, was Calvinist. The townspeople also inclined towards puritanism.Footnote 42 The gift of a silver communion cup and cover by Fulke Greville of Thorpe Latimer is listed in the table of benefactions. Donations of cups for the laity to receive communion wine according to Protestant doctrine had become fashionable under James i.Footnote 43 This donor was the birth father of Robert Greville. Llewellyn found that commemorative art in English churches peaked in the 1630s.Footnote 44 Within this trend, the making of the Board might relate to Fulke’s death in Alcester in 1632.
Creation and design
The Board diverges from contemporary Palladian architectural norms in features such as the inclusion of a double row of alternately spaced dentils and corbels beneath the cornice.Footnote 45 Nevertheless, the carving is ultimately rooted in classical ornament. The moulding beneath the sill, for instance, is a stylised palmette or acanthus design that has apparently evolved into alternating sunflowers and lilies. Versions of this motif are frequently found on seventeenth-century oak furniture.Footnote 46
A gadroon moulding had high-class associations,Footnote 47 and is found on contemporary furniture and chimneypieces. The earliest example illustrated by Chinnery dates from c 1575.Footnote 48 When Lankester examined the Board in 1984, he believed that the gadrooning belonged at the bottom, having been incorrectly reassembled at some point.Footnote 49 This theory is disproved by the presence of green paint belonging to the 1632 scheme on both the moulding and the wooden pins attaching it.
Examination of the Board suggests that a joiner adapted his routine techniques to fit the commission, a structure outside his standard repertoire. He combined well-made familiar components, such as panelled doors, with elements attached with glue or nails. A joiner could probably have carried out the carving,Footnote 50 which is closer to contemporary furniture than to neo-classical architecture. The craftsman’s skills must have influenced the design.
It seems likely that there was ecclesiastical input to ensure that the texts and pictorial content were appropriate, especially in the matter of avoiding ‘superstitious’ messages or imagery. Oldridge confirms that the diocesan authorities intervened in Warwickshire over alterations to church interiors and seating.Footnote 51 There is evidence of practical involvement in the visual arts among Protestant clergy, whether as drawings in private notebooks, the ornamentation of printed sermons or assisting in the design of whole church interiors.Footnote 52 Rector Thomas Powell could therefore have contributed to the board’s initial design.
The triptych form
There are regional precedents for painted wooden triptychs: the Cornewall family monument in St Mary, Burford, Shropshire (signed and dated 1588 by Melchior Salaboss), a wooden triptych in St Peter, Besford, Worcestershire, related stylistically to the Salaboss workshopFootnote 53 (c 1600), and the St John memorial painting in St Mary, Lydiard Tregoze, Wiltshire, dating from 1615 with alterations between 1683 and 1718, which is the largest and most impressive of all.
On a pre-Reformation winged altarpiece, the exterior decoration of the doors would typically be the least elaborate. The interior faces might feature narrative paintings, often the lives of saints, whilst the central portion could be sculpted in relief, more richly decorated and gilded. Eade’s argument that the triptych form retained symbolic power after the Reformation is borne out by the Elizabethan Royal Arms and Commandments in St Mary, Preston, Suffolk.Footnote 54 These display only text when closed, the more colourful painting being reserved for the interior, as on the Alcester Board. On the Suffolk examples, the texts covering the commandments reference acts of charity, whilst those on the Royal Arms consist of biblical condemnations of images and idolatry, thus asserting the supremacy of the Word.
The doors of the Cornewall monument bear images of the twelve apostles. Regardless of their traditional attributes, all the saints hold books, again emphasising the Word. The Evangelists are portrayed in the act of writing the gospels and the text above them reads ‘Regard not theise picturs: But follow the Lord. As did the Apostles: In Lyff and in Word’. The Alcester Board follows a similar scheme, showing only text on the exterior. Inside the wings, the saints are replaced by lay people in contemporary dress, accompanied by biblical texts to validate the imagery.
There was a narrative or theatrical element to the opening and closing of a pre-Reformation winged altarpiece. Eade calls the Cornewall, Harewell and St John triptychs ‘in effect displaced altarpieces’.Footnote 55 Carne believes that the St John triptych was normally kept closed and only opened for visitors,Footnote 56 although Eade found evidence that it may have been opened on Easter Sunday.Footnote 57
All three monuments are on the north wall of the chancel close to the altar in their respective churches. The area was associated with the pre-Reformation Easter sepulchre, which housed the sacrament in Holy Week.Footnote 58 It was the usual location for the aumbry, a wall cupboard for storing the sacrament.Footnote 59 In the reformed Church of England, parishioners were expected to take communion three times a year, but in practice it was often only once, at Easter, when charitable donations tended to peak.Footnote 60 It is tempting, therefore, to envisage the cupboard-like Alcester Benefaction Board in this spot. It needed to be low enough to be legible and is best viewed face-on, but its original location remains unknown.Footnote 61
Tittler alludes to the mystery and ‘totemic’ quality bestowed on paintings by coverings, whilst acknowledging their practical value.Footnote 62 Rare survivals of original picture frames from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with slots for a sliding panel or attachments for curtains show that frames were understood to have a protective function.Footnote 63 The central part of the wooden monument to the Royalist Richard Colchester (d 1643), in St George, Kencot, Oxfordshire, has the format of a typical heraldic memorial panel, but the outer frame is fitted with panelled doors. There is no evidence these were ever painted. This suggests that the triptych form here did not carry religious connotations, that the doors were simply for protection and perhaps temporary concealment in uncertain times.
Construction
Wherever timber is visible it appears to be oak. The strongest regional tree-ring matches are with Gloucester, Worcestershire and Warwickshire – similar to the timber used in the later phase of Alcester Town Hall.Footnote 64 The oak probably came from somewhere nearby, such as the Ragley Estate.Footnote 65 Inventories show that local craftspeople also farmed, so it seems likely they obtained timber from land they occupied.Footnote 66 The three horizontal backing boards feature a rare and technically challenging vee-joint (fig 8), probably used intentionally to counteract warping in the local timber. Woodworkers were apparently not numerous in Alcester, but Edward Measie of Arrow (d 1666) had a shop in town where he sold furniture and coffins.Footnote 67
Macro photo of the unusual joint between backing boards, before conservation.
Photo: © Hugh Harrison FSA.
The broader social range of people being memorialised in this period influenced the choice of materials for monuments. These possessed a symbolic hierarchy of their own, referenced in the verse on Thomas (d 1586) and Marie More’s wooden monument in St Mary, Adderbury, Oxfordshire.Footnote 68 If there is indeed a connection between the Board and the death of Robert Greville’s father in 1632, it may have been felt that wood was sufficient for ‘an obscure Lincolnshire squire’.Footnote 69
The Board references more expensive material in the painted marble effect on the side brackets. Red marble with streaks of white, grey and blue, called ‘rance’, was commonly used for supporting columns in tomb-building.Footnote 70 The ‘handwriting’ of the brushstrokes matches that of the gravestones in the lower left painting, indicating that the whole object was painted by the same person. The marbling continues over the door hinges, reinforcing the resemblance to a monument made of coloured stone when the doors were closed.
This was not only a means to cut costs. Little Moreton Hall in Cheshire has painted imitation panelling, ‘in a house where funds were not lacking to have real panelling’; Rouse connects this to the value placed on skilful artifice, the imitation of one material in another.Footnote 71 The grandiose wooden Cornewall monument uses painted marbling with no suggestion of economy.Footnote 72
The wood has been prepared for painting with a natural chalk ground, ubiquitous in northern European paintings on wood in this period. An additional salmon pink priming layer was applied selectively under the figurative paintings and the marbled brackets. John Guillim mentions two coats of white ground in notes on oil painting supplied by Melchior Salaboss. For flat ‘tables’, but not carvings, he describes an additional pink priming.Footnote 73 Similar-coloured primings have been found on Tudor portraits.Footnote 74
A ridge or ‘barbe’ in the preparation layers around edges of the paintings show that the doors were assembled before the surface layers were applied. The paintings were executed last, overlapping the inner cavetto moulding of the door frames (fig 9). This indicates that the Board was conceived and made as a whole, rather than the outer construction being envisaged as merely a frame for the images and ‘table’.
Alcester Benefaction Board, macro detail showing how the schoolroom scene extends onto the sight edge of the door frame. Photo: author.
1632 parchment
Watt discusses the fact that the term ‘table’ at this period covered both images and text, often arranged in columns.Footnote 75 After removal of the glazed frame and modern manuscript sheets, fragments of parchment were found around the outer edges of the opening.Footnote 76 From surviving corners, it was possible to deduce that the original Table was probably made from three calf skins (fig 10).
Diagram showing how the 1632 parchment ‘table’ could be made from three calf skins. Image: author.
Like the Alcester Board, the fourteenth-century Mappa Mundi in Hereford Cathedral was drawn on vellum attached to board and ‘kept in a frame with two doors’.Footnote 77 However, in Alcester the surviving parchment fragments are sandwiched between the framework and the backing planks, indicating that the Table must have been stretched across the open back of the structure before the backing planks were nailed on. This accounts for the care taken by the joiner to reduce warping in the backing, although the surface of the planks was left unfinished because they would not be seen. Stretching the support directly onto the back of the frame was common practice for canvas painting before the introduction of expandable stretchers, and continued much longer for heraldic hatchments.
PAINTED IMAGERY AND TEXT
Sources and meaning
Alongside the arguments, injunctions and intermittent iconoclasm surrounding the propriety of images in the reformed church, contemporary homes were decorated with paintings. Saville’s analysis of seventeenth-century inventories and wills in Alcester found ten instances of painted cloths. The latest occurrence was 1632.Footnote 78 Late Elizabethan wallpaintings in the White Swan Hotel in Stratford-upon-Avon depicting the apocryphal story of Tobias show the type of moralising narrative painting that would have been familiar outside church.Footnote 79
Literacy among the peasantry and ‘non-gentle’ in the seventeenth and late sixteenth centuries has been shown to be higher than was once believed. The struggle between sects around the Civil War generated copious printed material aimed at a popular readership.Footnote 80 Hamling showed how religious scenes for domestic decoration in the first decades of the seventeenth century were derived from printed Protestant conduct manuals.Footnote 81 As well as these ‘godly’ publications, anyone in the market town of Alcester could have accessed cheaper secular material sold by travelling chapmen or pedlars.
The woodcut illustrations to these ephemera re-used images, sometimes printed from the same blocks attached to different texts, over many years.Footnote 82 In the Holme Collection, amassed by a dynasty of seventeenth-century Chester herald painters, printed material clipped from illustrated books bears evidence of direct transfer by pricking and pouncing.Footnote 83 The Alcester painter did not literally use prints as templates, but they would have informed what Spufford called their ‘mental world’,Footnote 84 and that of the board’s intended viewers.
Continental engravings were almost ubiquitous as source material for the decorative arts.Footnote 85 The saints on the Cornewall monument are based on Flemish prints, and the painter of the wooden More monument in Adderbury was clearly familiar with the work of Hans Vredeman de Vries (1527–1609). It could be argued that Melchior Salaboss was probably Flemish, and the Mores were Catholic recusants connected to Oxford’s intellectual elite, but there is plentiful evidence that artisans far from London owned and used continental prints for reference.Footnote 86 In a particularly sensitive religious context, the 1568 Bishops’ Bible was illustrated with copies of woodcuts by the German Virgil Solis, but the blocks were physically altered to remove forbidden depictions of God.Footnote 87
The Alcester painter has instead relied on native, secular imagery. This may not stem from naivete or ignorance but represent careful choice to mitigate the danger of idolatry and appeal more directly to the local community. It could even have contributed to the board’s survival, since, although it is displayed in a place of worship, it serves the acceptable civil purposes of remembrance and moral guidance.Footnote 88
The tradesmen
The depiction of identifiable trades and types of people on the Board closely follows descriptions and illustrations in Randle Holme iii’s encyclopaedic Academie of Armorie. For instance, the correct heraldic representation of a barber is ‘Argent a Barber bare Headed, with a Pair of Cisers in his right hand, and a Comb in his left, cloathed in Russet, his Apron Cheque of the first [ie white] and Azure’ (fig 11). Although the book was not published until 1688, the manuscripts were compiled over several decades. Such notebooks were not unique to the Holme workshop.Footnote 89
The barber drawn by Randle Holme III. From the British Library Collection Harleian MS 2027 f.245, Drawing q.
The tradesmen are identified by their tools as the saints on a winged altarpiece were by the instruments of their martyrdom. In a story from the Golden Legend, retold in John Mirk’s late fourteenth-century homily for All Souls’ Day, a man who prayed for the souls of the dead in the churchyard next to his house was rewarded by their rising up ‘each one with an instrument in his hand of his craft’ to defend him from his enemies, the message being that prayers for the dead also profited the soul of the living.Footnote 90 Mirk’s popular Festial remained in print into the sixteenth century. Unlike the exterior text, the painting permits a similarly reciprocal interpretation of charity benefitting the whole community, because it does not specify whether the tradesmen are performers or receivers of it.
The beggars
This painting draws on well-known contemporary imagery. The figure holding a goblet and jug is close to a woodcut re-used multiple times for ballads published throughout the seventeenth century (fig 12). Badham identified a much earlier use of the motif in fifteenth-century wall paintings depicting the Acts of Mercy at St Mary, Ruabon.Footnote 91 Several woodcuts, dated as early as 1625 from the costumes, are arranged as a triptych showing beggars holding out their hands to the allegorical figure of Charity, who echoes a pre-Reformation Madonna with the infant Christ and John the Baptist (fig 13).
Woodcut illustrating the ballad Roaring Dick of Dover, 1632. EBBA 20204, by permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.
Woodcut illustrating the ballad The Beggars Chorus. EBBA 33798, National Library of Scotland, Crawford.EB.1129. Reproduced with permission from materials on loan to the National Library of Scotland from the Balcarres Heritage Trust.
The beggars conform to types described by Holme.Footnote 92 The amputee could represent a veteran of the Thirty Years War. Charity was distributed to war veterans through parish relief until the Parliamentary Ordinance of 24 October 1642 acknowledged a duty of care. Before the Reformation it was quite usual for lay recipients of alms to be required as ‘beadsmen’ to offer prayers for the soul of their benefactor. Some, such as the brethren of Lord Leycester’s Hospital in Warwick, were old soldiers.Footnote 93 The seventeenth-century ballad The Maunding Souldier Footnote 94 references the practice, long after the abolition of chantries.
The blind beggar is an ambivalent figure. He is expensively dressed: the black, fur-lined gown is an indicator of high civic rank and his grey beaver hat cost more than the regular black.Footnote 95 The beaver hat connotes falsehood,Footnote 96 and appears in ballads as an instrument of seduction.Footnote 97 Holme gives a long list of ‘Counterfeit Crankers, Rogues that are able, yet make themselves lame and sore’, but also invokes the legend of blinded Belisarius, the Roman general, who ‘by Fortunes Wheeling, now stands by the High way side, and Begs’.Footnote 98 This ambivalence reflects timeless anxieties around the procurement of charity by deception. Saville gives examples of contemporary concern about rising poverty in Alcester and suspicion of needy outsiders. In 1603 several people were presented to the manor court for lodging chapmen – the itinerant pedlars who sold broadsheets – and in 1620 the constables were ordered to search the town to flush out ‘idle persons’.Footnote 99
Innumerable funerary monuments visualise the bond between the living and the dead by showing mourners praying for the soul of the deceased around their tomb. The gravestones underfoot in this painting make a similar connection through the whole community, without explicitly linking acts of charity to consequences for the afterlife, a concept rejected by Protestants.Footnote 100 The sources used by the painter already contain multiple connotations. These layers of meaning would have affected the way in which the painting was understood by its viewers.
The schoolroom
The schoolchildren are all boys. Young boys in the seventeenth century commonly wore doublets over skirts.Footnote 101 The children are bareheaded, when girls at this period are invariably shown wearing a cap or hair ornament.Footnote 102 Red signified martial virtues,Footnote 103 and light red/pink clothing was associated with boys until the twentieth century. Boys were ‘breeched’ between the ages of five and seven.Footnote 104 Around this time, as shown in the painting, they progressed from hornbooks via primers to reading and writing.Footnote 105
The boy at the lower left has written the Tetragrammaton, the four Hebrew letters spelling the name of God. The inclusion of the vowel points spelling out ‘Adonai’ suggest that it was copied from the title page of the 1611 New Testament of the King James Bible, where it replaced forbidden imagery, becoming a ‘blazon of the new orthodoxy’.Footnote 106
On the facing page, the boy has drawn the characters for the six known planets arranged heliocentrically. Although astronomy and cosmography were a recommended part of a gentleman’s education,Footnote 107 these subjects were not taught in most grammar schools.Footnote 108 Fulke Greville, first Baron Brooke, moved in the most advanced intellectual circles and had hosted the ‘Ash Wednesday Supper’ dialogues with Giordano Bruno in London.Footnote 109 His adopted son and successor, Robert Greville, was also a thinker and writer.Footnote 110 The image may be intended to showcase this modernity.
The schoolroom scene is the only panel for which no obvious visual template has been found. It is also the only picture that departs from the frieze-like arrangement of figures with an attempt at perspective, suggesting it could have been painted from lived experience, one that many of its viewers would have shared.
The prison visitors
A crenellated tower resembling the prison in the painting is represented in the woodcut illustrating Luke Hutton’s The Black Dogge of Newgate (fig 14), but, again, the image predates the Protestant Reformation. Late fourteenth-century wall paintings of the Acts of Mercy featuring similar structures survive at St George, Trotton, West Sussex, and from the mid-fifteenth century at SS Peter and Paul, Pickering, Yorkshire. Since the paintings in Alcester’s medieval church were still extant in 1632, the painter may not have had to look far for a model.
Title page of The Black Dog of Newgate, 1612. Guildhall Library (City of London Corporation).
The three donors resemble some of the uncharitable family members in the woodcut A Most Excellent Ballad of an Old Man and His Wife, c 1620 (fig 15), namely the central pointing man and the group of women at the right hand side. This ballad recounts the grisly outcome of a wealthy son’s refusal to help his impoverished parents, with a clear reference to Judgement.Footnote 111
Woodcut illustrating A most excellent Ballad of an old man and his wife, c. 1620. EBBA 20028, by permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.
Fig 15. Long description
The woodcut illustration shows an old man and his wife at the left, appearing distressed and seeking help. They are facing their children, who are dressed in elaborate clothing and seem to be turning them away. The old man is gesturing towards his wife, while one of the family is pointing at them dismissively.
Text
All the text on the Board is in black letter with elaborately ornamented capitals, some in red. The painter is imitating a typeface used in the earliest printed text, which emulated Gothic script. Black letter was chosen for the 1602 Bishops’ Bible, the 1611 King James version and the Book of Common Prayer of 1562. It carried a sense of biblical tradition and ‘Englishness’, in contrast to the modern clarity introduced by the Geneva Bible’s use of Roman type.Footnote 112
Most of the text on the doors appears to have been copied from the 1611 King James Bible. The King James Bible and the Prayer Book should have been immediately accessible, since, under the 1604 Canons, every church was obliged to use the Prayer Book and provide a ‘Great Bible’ in English.
In the original 1632 paint scheme, the blue borders of the doors were decorated on both sides with a delicate scrolling pattern in black, now only clearly visible in IRR (fig 16). Blank spaces in the background of the text on the exterior are filled with smaller foliate decorations. Such ornament is common in book design of the period. The 1611 Bible and the Book of Common Prayer both have Roman capital letters with decoration that could have been expanded into the repeating pattern on the doors.
Infrared reflectogram showing the original decorative borders. Image:
© Tager Stonor Richardson.
Fig 16. Long description
The central area of the image contains Gothic style black letter text, surrounded by borders featuring intricate repeating foliate motifs.
The texts superimposed on the four interior paintings are painted on white parallelograms. The white shapes separate the words from the figurative paintings for visual clarity but also recall the fictive scrolls and banners of heraldic and earlier Christian art where text and images were combined. The texts remind viewers that, whilst responsibility for welfare might have shifted to the parish, individual giving still had a role to play. The content of the pictures has to be interpreted through the list of donors and benefactions in the centre, but the texts affirm that the imagery is legitimate.
PAINTING TECHNIQUE
Lines were ruled for the text inside the doors of the Benefaction Board, but no underdrawing was visible on the painted panels in IRR, nor any evidence of transferred designs such as incised lines, tracing or pricking and pouncing. This is surprising, given the complexity of the compositions. It is possible a drawing material invisible to IRR was used. Red underdrawing was used by the stainers of painted cloths,Footnote 113 and has been found on a sixteenth-century English portrait.Footnote 114 White chalk would have shown up on the pink priming, but becomes invisible when saturated by the oil binder of the paint.
The representation of facial features, hands and musculature using dark red outlines, and the modelling of drapery such as the amputee’s blue cloak, follow methods described in treatises considered to correspond to English practice of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.Footnote 115 The slow-drying oil medium has allowed some blending of brushstrokes,Footnote 116 but there is no real attempt to achieve illusionistic modelling.
Sparse shading, limited colour range and essentially two-dimensional, stereotypical representation of the human figure are held by Tittler to typify the vernacular productions of native painter-stainers.Footnote 117 He suggests that, whilst painters outside London may have lacked the ability to achieve verisimilitude, this might not have been their aim if the purpose of the image was to commemorate their benefactions rather than the people.Footnote 118 Llewllyn proposes that the absence of realism in English Renaissance art may be interpreted as conscious sensitivity to the risk of idolatry.Footnote 119 In a world where ‘continuity and discontinuity co-existed’,Footnote 120 it also reflects the painter’s visual sources in older wallpaintings, print and heraldry.
1632 PAINT SCHEME
Inventories and rare surviving examples show that furniture and woodwork was commonly painted at this time, either in a single colour or more highly decorated.Footnote 121 Dedicated painters were few and craft demarcations more fluid outside London. Joiners may have had some of the necessary skillsFootnote 122 or worked closely with those who did.Footnote 123 In Alcester, there is no firm evidence either way, but the complexity of the painting technique and imagery suggest the latter.
Robert Tittler’s database, ‘Early Modern British Painters c 1500–1640’, lists no painters in the town of Alcester itself, but seven in Stratford-upon-Avon. One, Stephen Bartlett, is recorded as active in 1636. Tittler points out that ‘anyone designated in their own time as a “painter”, may have done painting of any sort’,Footnote 124 so the type of work Bartlett did is unknown. The only other painter listed as active in the wider area in 1632 is John Atkins or Atkinson in Worcester. Between 1625 and his death in 1677, Atkinson carried out work for churches in the city and surrounding parishes including ‘writing the sentences and the Lord’s Prayer, with “their several flourishinges”’. Alongside more humdrum projects, such as colouring and varnishing doors and wainscot, he also carried out gilding and heraldic work.Footnote 125
In Tittler’s view, some of the crudest early seventeenth-century painted portraits might have been painted by ‘people formally trained in some other craft occupation’ who were transgressing local guild monopolies, or who had failed to serve out their apprenticeships.Footnote 126 Baird cites two examples, one in Shrewsbury, of painter-stainers employed in the 1560s to paint heraldic items.Footnote 127 The Worcester painter, John Davies Sr, was described as a painter at his burial in 1620, but as ‘harald’ at his wife’s in 1624.Footnote 128
The closeness of some of the Alcester images to heraldic blazons, the lack of familiarity with the rules of perspective, the use of colour and choice of materials all suggest that the painter of the Board knew something of heraldic work. He need not have been licenced by the College of Arms, since there is no heraldry on the Board. By the 1630s ‘certain traditional decorative work’ such as hatchments and tomb decoration ‘were below the rank of a painter proper’ and were more likely to be carried out by local craftsmen.Footnote 129
Tittler found that ‘the widespread permanent residence of painters in small rural communities had come pretty much to an end after the mid-sixteenth century’,Footnote 130 so a workman might need to travel and be versatile. There is evidence that workers were brought in from other centres for specific projects.Footnote 131 Hughes suggests that, during the time John Atkinson is not documented as working in Worcester, he might have been on site elsewhere.Footnote 132
The painter of the Board must have been literate,Footnote 133 an important skill in the Church, where display of the Royal Arms, Creed and Ten Commandments were technically compulsory after 1604.Footnote 134 If he had some training in ‘limning’ – the use of aqueous media on parchment – there is no reason why he could not have lettered the central ‘table’ as well as painting the woodwork.Footnote 135
Pigments
Pigment samples were identified in the first place by polarised light microscopy.Footnote 136 Supporting analysis of selected samples was carried out by Dr Tracey Chaplin, using scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive X-ray analysis to identify the elemental content, and Raman spectroscopy and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy to identify organic materials.Footnote 137
Using information obtained from pigment analysis and optical microscopy, it was possible to make a digital reconstruction of the 1632 paint scheme (fig 17). This reveals the juxtaposition of brilliant, jewel-like colours typical of contemporary church interiors.Footnote 138 Colours are used pure and unmixed, as in heraldry. The exterior was dominated by orpiment, a toxic glittering mineral that served for gold.Footnote 139 It was rarely used by artists in Britain by this time,Footnote 140 but some Holme-type heraldic memorials have gilded backgrounds to lettering (fig 18).
Alcester Benefaction Board, digital reconstruction of the 1632 paint scheme. Image: author.
Heraldic monument to David Wynne (d 1636), St Mary’s, Mold, Flintshire. Photo: © Cath Cainen.
Fig 18. Long description
The framed heraldic monument features a coat of arms divided into multiple sections, each containing different symbols such as lions, crosses, and other heraldic charges. Below the coat of arms, there is an inscription that reads, ʼDavid Wynne of the Tower Esq died on the 28th day of March Anno 1636.ʼ The monument is mounted on a wall.
It required expertise to use metal leaf and refractory pigments such as orpiment successfully. The gold effect of the orpiment was found to have been heightened with a reddish glaze.Footnote 141 Staining tests on paint samples in cross section showed that indigo blue mixed with chalk was bound in aqueous glue size on the doors and sill.Footnote 142 On the blue gadroons it was bound in oilFootnote 143 and modified with lead white, since chalk becomes transparent in oil.Footnote 144 The painter was skilled enough to create two different effects with the best blue pigment that was both available and affordable.
White
White is used as a colour only in the figurative paintings and marbling. It was not analysed, but is assumed to be lead white, the white pigment most commonly used in oil until the twentieth century. There is evidence of lead white manufacture in England by 1596.Footnote 145 Guillim paid 4d per lb for white lead. It was valued at approximately 2d per lb in the inventory of Robert Blease, apothecary in Chester (d 1633).Footnote 146
Alternate gadroons on the cornice were ‘silvered’ with tin leaf. The 1635 Brussels Manuscript gives instructions ‘to fix the tin on coats of arms’.Footnote 147 Tin was mined in Cornwall, from where it could be transported by water to the industrial Midlands.Footnote 148
Black
The black text was identified as lamp black, or soot. Lamp black could be bought from the apothecary or made by the painter.Footnote 149 Blease had a barrel of lamp black valued at 1s, whilst Guillim paid 2s per lb for it, placing it at the lower end of mid-priced pigments.
Red
The only red pigment identified in the 1632 scheme was a red iron oxide-containing earth or ochre. The samples exhibited a wide range of different particle colours, indicating a natural origin. Ochres occur widely in England, the Forest of Dean being a noted source in the Midlands.Footnote 150 They were not expensive. ‘Russetting for painters’ (red ochre) is listed in the Bristol Rate books for exported goods both before and after the Civil War.Footnote 151
Green
Elemental analysis of the green paint found a copper-based pigment such as verdigris, mixed with a small amount of lead white, possibly extended with green earth.
It appears that there was no significant manufacture of verdigris in England at this period,Footnote 152 although the method was known.Footnote 153 Wine regions, notably Montpellier in France, were notable for verdigris production.Footnote 154 Since the French wine trade was significant in Bristol at this time, it seems likely that verdigris could enter by the same route. Guillim recorded the price of verdigris as 4s per lb. Like the black and white, Blease’s verdigris was valued at half what Guillim paid.
The best green earth was said to come from Italy,Footnote 155 but mineral glauconite occurs frequently in Britain, including in Warwickshire. Sources of green earth pigment are recorded in the Mendips and Cornwall.Footnote 156 There is even evidence of it being exported to Antwerp in 1652,Footnote 157 so the English product was presumably of high quality.
Yellow
The 1632 scheme makes plentiful use of bright yellow, identified as natural orpiment – arsenic sulphide, extended with chalk or gypsum. Mineral orpiment occurs in Devon, Cornwall and Wales.Footnote 158 From there, it would most likely have arrived in the Midlands by river. The price of orpiment appears to have been highly variable,Footnote 159 but it could be cheap enough to use for wallpainting.Footnote 160
Blue
Blue paint was found to contain the dyestuff indigo. The colouring matter of indigo is chemically indistinguishable from woad. It is therefore presently impossible to identify the origin of the pigment on the Board. The price depended on its quality and origin. The Indian product was more highly valued because of its tinctorial strength. In the seventeenth century, a great deal of indigo and woad was passing through the port of Bristol in both directions.Footnote 161 Woad was grown near Stratford-upon-Avon.Footnote 162
Suppliers of pigments
Researchers have noted the absence of specialist colourmen outside London. Tittler concluded that provincial painters either had to source pigments from multiple merchants, travel to London or make them themselves. He found that most probate inventories of provincial apothecaries and grocers in the early decades of the seventeenth century, unlike those in London, yield ‘no pigments at all, or very few and of the most common sort’.Footnote 163
Pigments that Tittler considered potentially difficult to obtain outside London were vermilion, saffron, ceruse (lead white), orpiment, ultramarine, azurite, cochineal red lakes, gold and silver leaf.Footnote 164 Baird’s findings broadly agree with Tittler’s analysis, although John Stain, apothecary in Derby (d 1615), and John Trym, ironmonger in Whitchurch, Shropshire (d 1627), both held orpiment. Stain also listed vermilion.Footnote 165
The 1633 inventory of Robert Blease in ChesterFootnote 166 also contains materials that Tittler considered difficult to obtain outside London,Footnote 167 including vermilion, saffron and two batches of ‘Orptment’ in quantities large enough to be used for painting, not small medicinal doses. A listing of ‘lapis lasula’ could be ultramarine, although the price suggests azurite. Blease also held many materials that could be used for lake pigments or coloured glazes, and three different formats of gold leaf. Although numerous dyestuffs are listed, there is no obvious reference to indigo, woad or their associated products. Some of the inventories examined by Baird contained indigo, but these stockists were all described as mercers, suggesting that the textile connection was stronger for this material than any other application.Footnote 168
Sadly, the contents of the apothecary Margaret Yarnold’s shop in Alcester were not itemised on her death in 1661,Footnote 169 so it is impossible to know what might have been obtainable in Alcester itself. But there were dyers, weavers and other textile workers in Alcester from the sixteenth century, and wealthy mercers were influential in the town.Footnote 170
It appears, then, that the pigments used in the 1632 paint scheme were neither the very cheapest nor unobtainable outside London. Some, such as verdigris and indigo, may have been imported. If so, they most likely entered the country at Bristol and were brought to Alcester or a larger centre by river. Woad and natural earth pigments could both be found locally. The minerals orpiment, green earth and metallic tin could all have originated in the mines of the West Country and arrived by the same river route as imported goods.
Whilst some economies were made on the Alcester Board, such as the substitution of tin for silver and orpiment for gold, the colours were more varied, expensive and vivid than expected, confounding the expectation that the range would be limited and derived from the cheapest, locally available pigments.
THE LOCK
It is not certain when the lock on the right-hand door of the Board was attached. It is of typical seventeenth-century design and there were certainly skilled metalworkers in Alcester who could have made it.Footnote 171 Harrison noted that the facetted nails attaching the lock are similar to those attaching the lower cornice board to the frame.Footnote 172 They also resemble the nails attaching the hinges, which must be original since they are covered by the painted marbling.
One argument against the lock being part of the original conception is the fact that it is wider than the rail to which it is attached. However, Chinnery illustrates a mid-seventeenth-century decorated oak box, on which the lock is ‘banged on’ in a ‘cheerfully unconcerned manner’, and finds that this ‘casual approach’ is very common in boxes of the period.Footnote 173 The 1632 paint layers continue under the lock with no reserve. This tells us that the lock was fitted after the door was painted, but not how long afterwards (fig 19).
The lock inside the right-hand door. Red overpaint on the door frame moulding does not continue behind the lock. The original 1632 scheme extends underneath it. Photo: author.
If the lock was not envisaged in the original construction, it could have been a precaution taken by the Puritan Samuel Clarke, who succeeded Powell as rector in 1633. Clarke believed he had managed to rehabilitate the town, ‘which before was called drunken Alcester’,Footnote 174 through his spiritual leadership. He refused to read the 1633 Book of Sports permitting certain recreational activities on the Sabbath, but his General Martyrology of 1651 is illustrated with graphic depictions of torture, showing that he could accept figurative images depending on their purpose. Paintings in the church were not removed during his tenure, suggesting that he allowed the Board to stay, under correct supervision.
Paint on the lock is consistent only with the 1683 repainting. The thick paint would have clogged the mechanism, indicating that it was no longer used by 1683.
DEFACEMENT OF TEXT
The text above the schoolroom scene reads ‘To doe good and to | communicate forget | not, Heb, 13.16’. The original text was painted with lamp black pigment. It has been partially obscured with paint containing a different pigment, bone black (fig 20). Since the perpetrator needed a pot of paint and probably the key to unlock the doors, the defacement must have been intentional.
Alcester Benefaction Board, defaced text on the upper interior panel of the right door. Photo: author.
Fig 20. Long description
The painting depicts a schoolroom scene with several figures engaged in activities. The central figure, a man with a beard, is seated and appears to be writing or teaching. He is surrounded by other figures, including children, who are holding books and papers. Above the scene, there is a text banner that has been partially obscured by paint. The text on the banner is partially legible and reads ʼTo doe good and to communicate forget not, Heb, 13.16.ʼ The figures are dressed in historical clothing.
Parliamentary orders of 1641 had put responsibility for the removal of images and other innovations into the hands of local clergy and churchwardens.Footnote 175 Samuel Clarke was absent in London from the outbreak of war in 1642 but quoted the same text in a sermon preached there in 1654 to ‘the gentlemen natives of Warwickshire’.Footnote 176 He cited it again in The Marrow of Divinity in the chapter concerning charity.Footnote 177 It therefore seems unlikely that he sanctioned the defacement.
Clarke was replaced in 1645 by the more strongly dissenting Samuel Tickner. At the Warwick Quarter Sessions at Easter 1657, Thomas Waldron, one of the Alcester churchwardens, requested reimbursement of eight pounds, which the inhabitants had agreed to pay, spent on ‘beautifying and painting’ the church, but the court withheld one pound from the fee, ‘since exception is taken to the work done and the uselessness thereof’. Moreover, the local justice, Matthew Bridges, was commissioned to demolish the rood loft and deface any ‘superstitious paints’ in the church.Footnote 178
This is the only text on the Board containing a direct exhortation to perform good works, which for Protestants were not the means of salvation, but the obliteration is careless and incomplete. The other texts and paintings representing the inhabitants of Alcester are untouched, perhaps suggesting someone working under orders without much conviction.
1683 PAINT SCHEME
Timothy White was rector of Alcester from 1675 to 1712. During this time, as in 1632, there were concerns about rising levels of poverty in the town.Footnote 179 Saville paints a picture of neglect under White and his predecessor Henry Teonge,Footnote 180 but churchwardens’ accounts from the last years of the Commonwealth to 1685 do record expenditure on building maintenance, including frequent repairs to the windows, clock and bells alongside furnishings and cleaning.Footnote 181 In 1684 the diocesan inspection found ‘nothing amisse’, albeit signed off by White himself.Footnote 182
In 1683 a new bishop of Worcester, William Thomas, known for his interest in charitable giving and church restoration, was elected. In 1679 Thomas had published a defence of the Church of England using the topical metaphor of the physical restoration of church buildings to argue for spiritual and institutional unity.Footnote 183 In 1681 the purchase of materials such as bricks, sand, lime, hair and large pieces of timber by the Alcester churchwardens suggests some significant building work. In 1683, perhaps in response to the new leadership, seating was repaired, mats acquired and six shillings was spent on Bristol lime, glue and nails.Footnote 184
Moderate views within the Church of England after the Restoration remained largely aligned with the Elizabethan homilies on the ‘superflous decking of churches’.Footnote 185 Whitewash had long provided a background for the necessary display of text, not always applied in an act of iconoclasm:Footnote 186 in the Worcester church of St Michael, after ‘destroying images and whiting church’ in 1548, whiting was done approximately every ten years for maintenance and repair.Footnote 187 Domestic paint schemes also became more subdued and made extensive use of white.Footnote 188 Surviving Alcester churchwardens’ accounts do not mention painting, but it can be inferred from intermittent payments for lime,Footnote 189 and the presentment of 1714 stating that the church ‘wants whitewashing’.Footnote 190
Analysis of the 1683 overpainting reveals colours now obscured by discoloured surface coatings (fig 21). The dominant colours are white, blue and black, with touches of red. A small amount of original golden orpiment is left visible as an understated trim. Instructions of 1664 for the painter of Auckland Castle Chapel describe a similar colour scheme.Footnote 191
Alcester Benefaction Board, digital reconstruction of the 1683 paint scheme. Image: author.
The structural elements now missing must still have been present in 1683, since none of the broken edges have been overpainted, except with later surface coatings. The 1632 Table and the right-hand door were damaged by a musket ball during the Civil War,Footnote 192 but there is no evidence that any part of the pictures was overpainted or altered subsequently. Their excellent condition can be attributed to the protection of the closed doors.
The re-presentation of the board’s message at a time of renewal, and the repainting in more restrained colours, can therefore be seen not just as a decorative or local project, but as a reflection of wider religious and cultural dynamics shaping the English church and society in the seventeenth century.
The 1683 painter
The civil wars profoundly disrupted the painter’s trade throughout the country.Footnote 193 The 1666 Act for rebuilding the City of London after the Great Fire permitted ‘artificers’ of all trades to work in London without being freemen of the London guilds, so craftsmen flocked there for work.Footnote 194 This must have created shortages elsewhere. Specialist painters were still rare around Alcester, although a painter from Alcester is found working at Coughton Court in the 1660s.Footnote 195 In 1661 the Alcester churchwardens paid £3 1s 6d for ‘setting up the Kinges Arms’, but did not record who made them.Footnote 196
Around the same time as the Board was repainted, additions were made to the Lydiard Tregoze monument, considered by Carne probably to have been done by ‘a competent coach-painter’.Footnote 197 Whoever repainted the Alcester Board was certainly less skilled than the first painter. The lettering is cruder and there is no attempt to reproduce the delicate border on the doors. The figurative scenes are untouched.
Alcester’s church was rebuilt in 1730, so the digital reconstruction of the board’s 1683 paintwork may provide the only insight into the re-decoration of the medieval church after the Restoration. An updated set of benefaction boards were made for the new building, listing donations up to 1733,Footnote 198 and this Board was consigned to the vestry.Footnote 199
1683 pigments
White
Unlike the 1632 scheme, the 1683 overpainting makes plentiful use of thick lead white paint. In principle, lead white could have been produced locally: the method of manufacture from metallic lead corroded by acid had been known for centuries. The plumbers, glaziers and ammunition-makers of Alcester all needed supplies of lead, probably from Derbyshire or Cornwall. Wine vinegar (acetic acid) was imported from France, although Churchley found several Alcester people engaged in the production of verjuice from crab-apples,Footnote 200 and verjuice was one of the materials ‘proper to make into vinegar’.Footnote 201 However, London was an important base for the manufacture of white lead for domestic and export markets. A white lead factory was recorded in Hatton Garden in 1679,Footnote 202 and in 1687 Smith found three kinds of lead white available at the colour-shops at different prices.Footnote 203
Black
Bone black was used in the repainting. Robert Blease’s 1633 inventory had listed ivory black at 1¼d per ounce, more expensive than his barrel of lamp black, but considerably cheaper than an unspecified ‘fine black’ at 2s 4d per ounce. At that date, the pigment was probably made from genuine ivory, but it became cheaper when manufactured commercially from bone.Footnote 204
Red
The red paint used to overpaint the cavetto moulding around the panels was found to contain vermilion either in the form of natural cinnabar or ‘dry process’ synthetic mercuric sulphide, mixed with lead white. Deposits of natural cinnabar are very rare in the British Isles, and there is no evidence of their commercial exploitation. The method of making artificial vermilion by the ‘dry process’ had been widely known for centuries. English vermilion had a poor reputation,Footnote 205 but the Dutch product was well-regarded.Footnote 206 Whereas Bristol’s trade with The Netherlands only accounted for a very small percentage of its traffic,Footnote 207 Harley found that customs records for London show increasing amounts of Dutch vermilion being imported through the eighteenth century.Footnote 208
It seems reasonable to assume, therefore, that the red pigment is synthetic vermilion obtained from London. By the seventeenth century, the price of vermilion was in the mid-range.Footnote 209
Blue
The doorframes, now a dull greenish colour, are painted with lead white mixed with indigo. Some of the blue pigment particles in the 1683 overpaint have a distinctive appearance in cross section under high magnification: the outer rim of the pigment particle is dark, blackish blue but the centre is light and translucent.Footnote 210 This suggests that the blue dyestuff has been mixed with starch, and that some of the starch grains have only taken up the colour on their outer surface. A recipe of 1758 involves boiling woad with slaked lime, then mixing the scum arising on the surface, called florey, with a little starch, which ‘makes indigo’.Footnote 211 The colour was so dark it was usually mixed with white, so although ‘somewhat costly’, a little went a long way and it was ‘much used in vulgar Painting’, according to Smith.Footnote 212 By this time, indigo was arriving in Bristol from ‘both the Indies’,Footnote 213 but woad was still grown in the English Midlands.Footnote 214
Suppliers
Although John Smith’s manual of ‘vulgar painting’ devoted three chapters to burning, washing and grinding pigments, he advised in 1676 that ‘for coarse ordinary work’ they could be used ‘as you buy them at the Shops’.Footnote 215 By 1687, anyone who wanted to avoid ‘the trouble of grinding Colours themselves, may have of any sort, or quantity, ready ground, at the Colour-shops, at reasonable rates’,Footnote 216 at least in London.
John Yarnold, apothecary in Alcester, owed money at his death in 1707 to a grocer in Worcester and a London druggist ‘from whom he no doubt sourced some of his wares’.Footnote 217 He may therefore have been able to supply painters’ materials.
1683 Parchment
The surviving fragments of the 1632 parchment Table are crumpled concertina-fashion, indicating that it was cut, not particularly carefully, out of the Board. The more laborious alternative would have been to remove the backboards. The present modern parchment lists four benefactions made between 1632 and 1683, so a new Table was presumably made in 1683 to include these.
After the hole in the backboard was plugged, the front face of the backboard, exposed by removal of the parchment, was coated with the same white paint used on outside of the Board. Surviving nails, unpainted and therefore inserted after the backboards were painted, show that the replacement Table was attached to the boards from the front. The arrangement of nails indicates that the new Table was assembled economically from two entire sheets and a third cut in half, as before, but now with a horizontal division one-third down, resembling the layout of contemporary printed papers such as broadsheets (fig 22).
Alcester Benefaction Board, diagram showing the location of nail holes believed to date from 1683, represented by triangles. Extant nails are represented by dots. Image: author.
CONCLUSION
Research into the materials, sources and historic context of the Alcester Benefaction Board reveals the work of a maker whose visual vocabulary was formed by heraldic representation and popular prints rather than the imagery or art theory of continental Europe. The Board is a unique survival, a microcosm of social, political and cultural history, not only in Alcester but over fifty years of Reformation, Civil War and Restoration in England.
It is hoped that this research will encourage more technical study and preservation of these neglected items of church furnishing.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks are due to the parishioners of Alcester’s energetic fundraising for the conservation and analysis of the Alcester Benefaction Board, the generosity of donors, my brilliant colleagues and co-workers and the editorial skills of Rachel Gallen, without whom this work would not have seen daylight.
SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL
The supplementary material can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1017/S000358152610064X.
ABBREVIATIONS AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abbreviations
- ADLHS
-
Alcester and District Local History Society
- BL
-
British Library, London
- CALS
-
Cheshire Archives and Local Studies Service
- EBBA
-
English Broadside Ballad Archive
- EEBO
-
Early English Books Online, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
- IRR
-
infrared reflectography
- WAAS
-
Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service
- WCRO
-
Warwickshire County Record Office
