Vicky Joynson's Blog

… the dying embers of a revolution.  Step behind the traditional façade of this 13th century building and you’ll see the traces of a vibrant cultural revolution that swept the country in the middle of the 19th century. 

Like so many parish churches, St Mary’s Wavendon in 1848, emerged from the comfortable shadows of regular and unquestioning usage into the sudden glare of ecclesiological awakening.

Gothic Revival

Beginning with an appreciation for the picturesque and rustic in the late 18th century, through the romanticism of Scott’s Waverley novels, a growing nostalgia for the pre-industrial landscape and fuelled by the post-revolutionary market in French antiquities, the early decades of the 19th century brought a re-evaluation of all things medieval – a perception that the dark, barbaric pre-renaissance period had in fact been an age of chivalry, true craftsmanship and religious piety. By the 1820s a full blown Gothic Revival was on the horizon.

With debate raging about the appropriate style of architecture for the scores of new churches being erected annually to accommodate a growing population, the fabric, arrangement and usage of existing churches also came under scrutiny, not least through the new enthusiasm for surveying churches sponsored by the Ecclesiological Society: founded at Cambridge University to revive historically authentic worship through architecture. Hundreds of local churches were refurbished in the 19th century as a result of their efforts.

Economic Crisis, Stock Market Crash and the Bankers

1848 came at the tail end of the hungry ‘40s, a decade which had seen three consecutive years of failed harvest, fluctuations in the price of corn, rising unemployment and interest rates. When the bubble burst on Railway Mania, middle class families were among those whose life savings vanished in the stock market crash. Elsewhere in Europe there was widespread revolution: major regime changes in France, Prussia, Austria, Spain and the Low Countries.

In rural Buckinghamshire, though, daily life still revolved essentially around the landowners of the ancient Norman manors. Although the completion of the Grand Junction Canal at the turn of the century had revitalised trade in the area and the arrival of the London to Birmingham railway in 1838 had created thousands of jobs and a new town at Wolverton, in the village of Wavendon in 1848 the revolution was largely cultural. It was nevertheless a revolution.

The refurbishment of St Mary’s church was initiated by the Hoare family; forward thinkers who’d gone from horse traders to bankers in a single generation and whose baronial manor at Stourhead became one of the nation’s first Palladian mansions. In a time of economic uncertainty they donated the equivalent of £0.3m to the complete restoration of the local church and engaged one of the greatest of the Victorian Gothic architects to carry it out.

William Butterfield had started out as a builder’s apprentice and largely self-taught architect and would become one of the most distinctive and influential designers of his day. Even as he worked on St Mary’s Wavendon, 50  miles away in London the first bricks and foundations were being laid for his most remarkable achievement, a church that would change British architecture for ever: All Saints Margaret Street, the unforgettable ‘model church’ in which Butterfield’s strident and eye-catching style would be most fully realised.

Commissioned by the Ecclesiological Society, All Saints Margaret Street has been variously acclaimed as a “savage masterpiece”[1] and “the beginning of the revolution in architecture”[2] (Sir John Betjeman). It marked the birth of High Victorian, the movement away from the mere reproduction of historic gothic to a uniquely Victorian reinterpretation of the form.

Back at St Mary’s Wavendon, however, Butterfield’s characteristic traits are still gentle forerunners of that more controversial style.

True to the tenets of the Ecclesiological Society, Butterfield was dedicated to restoring historical forms of worship and central to this in the restoration at St Mary’s Wavendon was the differentiation of the chancel, the area around the altar and the focus of sacramental worship, from the rest of the nave.

Here it is achieved by rich decoration recalling the brightly painted murals and motifs of the medieval church interior, and by the miniature gates. Butterfield was no exponent of the full rood screen, the decorative partition and crucifix (rood) which originally separated the congregation from the celebration at the altar, and whose reinstitution brought some Gothic revivalists into such heated controversy during this period.

The same rich decoration transforms the ancient sedilia, the (usually) triple seats built into the chancel on the south side of the altar for the officiating priest, deacon and sub-deacon.

Recovering the Lost Arts

Of course, restoring the medieval was never quite as easy as might first appear even for dedicated Victorians. Whilst an extensive network of great churches and cathedrals allowed architects of the Gothic Revival to study the elements of structural design, and illuminated books and manuscripts revealed the typical motifs and colours of interior decoration and vestments, two essential art forms eluded the revivalists’ early efforts to recreate the medieval church.

The Art of Stained Glass

A defining characteristic of medieval gothic had been the ability to construct ever bigger windows which admitted more and more light to interact with the internal arrangement of columns, arches and decorative stone tracery. From the 12th century onwards the use of stained glass to transform these great windows into colourful celebrations of biblical scenes and holy lives gave rise to a flourishing art form. So effective was the glass at reinforcing traditional church teaching and practices that its destruction became a matter of priority in the attempt to eradicate past loyalties and instigate change during the reformation period. Few windows were left intact following the royal injunctions of Edward VI and a subsequent order of the House of Commons under Cromwell. What glass remained increasingly fell into disrepair and was replaced by plain glass as the skills needed to restore stained glass were gradually lost   

A significant amount of the stained glass in today’s parish churches hails from the Victorian period. An estimated 80,000 stained glass windows were installed in England during the 19th century according to John Harries[3] with the great boom in stained glass manufacture between 1840-70. By then, successful manufacturers such as O’Connor & Sons and Burlison & Grylls, responsible for the windows at St Mary’s Wavendon, had benefited from the sustained efforts of earlier pioneers such as Charles Winston and Thomas Willement, whose experimentation and investigation had made considerable headway in recovering techniques for producing high quality coloured glass and for the proper use and integration of lead strips in formulating the design.

O’Connor’s windows in the chancel at St Mary’s are notable for their rich use of colour whilst fragments of original 15th century glass have been incorporated into the tracery in windows in both north and south aisles.

Herbert Minton of Stoke

While the great windows at Chartres, Strasbourg and Sainte-Chapelle and surviving glass at York and Canterbury inspired the recovery of the original Gothic window, it was the ornate pavements of a number of French cathedrals, together with fragments preserved from English abbeys at Rievaulx and Fountains that bore testimony to the decorative floor tiles favoured by the medieval builder. Among those searching for the clue to the lost art of encaustic – the production of a single multi-coloured tile from a variety of different clays – was Herbert Minton: a man described by Rosemary Hill in her excellent biography of A W N Pugin as ‘the epitome of the Victorian antiquarian-industrialist, a man who brought to the revival of the Middle Ages all the resources and the energy of the steam age’[4].

So successful were his efforts that Minton became the byword for a product increasingly in demand throughout the 19th century. As Rosemary Hill so eloquently puts it: ‘Practical, hygienic and authentically Gothic, encaustic flooring, most often in buff and red, was – and remains in thousands of churches, schools and domestic hallways – the essence of Victorian decoration’[5]. 

The examples at St Mary’s Wavendon are typical of Minton’s work.

The Good Way

St Mary’s Wavendon, A N Other village church all but swallowed up now by the modern housing and urban development of Milton Keynes. Step inside though and you’ll find the smouldering embers of a revolution, the cultural revival of a nation alarmed by the detrimental impact of industrial change, disaffected by the immediate legacy of the previous generation and turning to the perceived wisdom and beauty of a bygone age for the solution.  

“Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.”

[1] Theodore Hoppen, K. (1998) New Oxford History of England: The Mid-Victorian Generation, Oxford: Oxford University Press

[2] Four with Betjeman, Victorian Architects & Architecture, 1970 (TV Programme) BBC

[3] Harries, J. (2006) Discovering Stained Glass, Princes Risborough: Shire Publications Ltd, p75

[4] Hill, Rosemary. (2008) God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain, London: Penguin, p 229