Breaking the image: a 12th-century Ai Weiwei?

The Fall

My previous posts have set the scene in the part of West Sussex where the Sussex muralist worked and taught. By now you should have a pretty good idea where the three painted churches are, and a picture of the ways in which the area's Roman legacy was still very present in the early 1100's, when the frescos were being made. 

We'll turn now to look in detail at the murals themselves. I'll begin with a sequence of posts focussing on a painting which is probably most emblematic of all the challenging images which survive from this artist's brush: Hardham's Deception of Eve and Adam. It was audacious when it was made: the artist's own Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, and every bit as much a slap in the face for traditional art lovers of its day as Ai Weiwei's 1995 provocative sequence of photos, which showcased the wilful destruction of a two-thousand-year-old vase. 

The Deception of Eve and Adam
Hardham chancel wall

Ai Weiwei's unsettling triptych still provokes discussion concerning the monetised value of art, authenticity, and respect for cultural heritage. It seems the Sussex muralist knew very well what they were doing with their own carefully judged swipe at convention in The Deception of Eve and Adam. Other of the Hardham murals suggest that the medieval painter was fully aware of the possible consequences for challenging the accepted idea of what a holy image must be. 

Art-martyrs

The north wall/lower frieze in the nave at Hardham shows a sequence of historical martyrs who challenged attitudes towards the sacred image, turning their agonised gaze towards us as they endure appalling torture. These were once the first eyes that would meet ours, upon entering the church. Saint George is scourged on a wheel for refusing to worship Emperor Datian's idols, calling on God to 'utterly destroy these miserable images, even as wax melts at a hot fire' (Aelfric, c. 996). Further along the wall, the hands of notorious ninth-century art dissident Lazaros Zographos are scorched to the bone by red-hot iron plates. 

St George is tortured on the wheel for disrespecting the idols
Hardham nave, north wall, lower frieze

Lazaros Zographos has his hands mutilated with red-hot iron plates:
in the foreground stands the bowl of the torturer's brazier.
Hardham nave, north wall, lower frieze

Lazaros had continued to paint in contravention of an imperial prohibition on representational art during the period 815-843: Byzantine Emperor Theophilos ordered the mutilation of the recalcitrant artist's hands, so he would never be able to paint again. In spite of the Emperor's assault Lazaros survived, and found enough strength and fine control in his left hand (shown being seared in the Hardham portrait) to continue his work. It was with great pride that the Hardham artist placed their own unstoppable creativity and refusal to moderate their work in the company of this stoical welcoming committee, dedicating their challenging new mural composition to the memory of these brave historical art-martyrs. The Sussex muralist walked in their footsteps, following the same treacherous path, acknowledging the art-martyrs' fate as possibly their own.

'The only way to build a new world is to destroy the old one'

Above this roll-call of art-heroes on the north wall is a small cartouche, a rare depiction of the apocryphal story of The Fall of the Idols of Sotinen told in The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, Ch. 22-23. It shows two temple idols in a before-and-after scenario. In the first frame, the figures are shown in their pomp, arranged proudly on a shelf. This sets the scene for the chaos to come in the frame below, when the shelf collapses. The idols now come to life as animated homunculi, tumbling helplessly to the floor the moment the infant Christ entered the pagan temple. Like the second frame of Ai Weiwei's photographic freeze-frame of the doomed Han vase, the inverted, flailing figurines in the second frame remain tantalisingly suspended in the air, about to be smashed to shards. 

The Fall of the Idols of Sotinen
(Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew Ch. 22-23)
Hardham nave, north wall, upper frieze

Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (first two frames)
Ai Weiwei, 1995

For both artists, their work was about breaking idols. Alarming for us, however, is the dissonant thought that their iconoclasm didn't stem from a simple hatred of images. On the contrary, the image destruction of Ai and the Hardham muralist expresses instead a profound love of art: Saint George, confronted with the Emperor's idols, repeatedly refused to kiss the cherished images, yearning instead something more spiritual, more enduring than a flippant endorsement of Datian's pride and esteem. Ai Weiwei was placed under surveillance and threat of arrest as a 'deviant' for Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn. Responding to furious criticism, Ai paraphrased Mao Zedong in words which echo George's condemnation: 'the only way to build a new world is to destroy the old one'. 

How would Hardham's innovatory paintings be received? Would the audacious frescos survive the critics, or was the Hardham artist about to become a 'deviant', earning their own place in the gallery of art-martyrs alongside Lazaros Zographos and Saint George? 

Why do you worship plaster and paint?

'I don't get it: what is so threatening about Hardham's Deception of Eve and Adam?' 

It's one of the best-preserved and most beautiful images of the whole composition, and seems to show just the usual figures: Eve, Adam, and the Serpent in the tree of knowledge of good and evil, offering forbidden fruit. Well, it's not the alluring central image that's the problem: it's those trompe l'oeil hooks, appearing to stick out from the wall, which will blow your mind. The scene has been painted to look like a cloth hanging, suspended by 'loops' which attach to those 'hooks' in the wall. 

What are we looking at? Is it Eve and Adam? or a painting of Eve and Adam? or a painting of a tapestry of Eve and Adam? The real presence of the saints in a holy icon recedes, fading until it vanishes, so all we are left with is plaster and paint: there's nothing behind that 'cloth' except the wall. Sometimes iconoclasts weren't necessarily trying to 'destroy icons'. This was something even more disturbing.

Detail from The Deception of Eve and Adam, showing the trompe l'oeil hooks and loops
Hardham chancel

Even as we think about the dilemma of biblical Eve and Adam and their gullibility in listening to the deceitful Serpent, we teeter on the edge of our own, new deception, about to make the same old mistake. We're in the world of Magritte's Treachery of Images (1929): are we going to carry on, falling for the allure of art, mistaking the treasured image for some sort of reality, or can we break out of the cycle? Like Banksy's Love is in the Bin (2018), the Hardham trompe l'oeil Deception draws attention to the fact we're looking at just paint on a wall: the image itself threatens to shred any sacred value, even as we look at it.

Love is in the Bin
The stencil by Banksy sold at Sotheby's London in 2018 for £1,042,000

This irreverent, often playful attitude to spirituality in art could drive orthodox believers round the bend. 'Why do you worship walls, and planks, and plaster, and pretty colours?' We can almost feel Patriarch Germanos II's spitting fury as, during his Lenten sermon in defence of the holy icons, he quoted the impudent words spoken to him by one these 'sons of destruction', an advocate of a twelfth-century artistic New Wave, before declaring anathema on them all as 'heretics'. Contemporary accounts can give a immediate sense of the simple head-spinning horror which an untethered painting like the Hardham trompe l'oeil could provoke among those invested in the traditional way of making sacred images imbued with the spirit of the saints, when faced with the disruptive work of a twelfth-century Ai Weiwei. Ask the martyrs on Hardham's north wall, like Lazaros Zographos, about their unwavering commitment to art as a powerful medium of change, and the very real threat facing the artist who used their work to question orthodox belief.

The Hardham fresco ensemble did indeed succumb to censorship, along with the artist's other work, when the challenging Sussex murals were all whitewashed within a few decades of being made. In doing so, the censor inadvertently conserved a unique record of this exceptional community, seen through the imagination of their remarkable spokesperson and artist. The revealed images can still be disturbing, even today: like the work of more recent disruptive artists, the Hardham muralist didn't paint to make you feel comfortable.

A detail from P. M. Johnston's tracing made from The Deception of Eve and Adam
showing the trompe l'oeil hooks and loops with greater clarity
V&A, 1900

Did we think there was anything behind a holy image, or special about a two-thousand year old utilitarian Han-era vase? The Deception of Eve and Adam pulls the plug on the sacredness of sacred art, so that a painting becomes a painting, nothing more, and nothing less. I'm going to devote a series of posts to unpacking the profound shockwave created by this exhilarating shift in artistic representation. 

Come and experience what all the fuss was about at these three churches in West Sussex, and follow the blog to get the updates which will show you around all the elements which make up these extraordinary and unique medieval art installations.

Coombes, where medieval paint still hangs in drips and swirls

Where is Coombes Church?

It’s on Coombes Road, adjacent to Lancing College on the River Adur, about a mile inland from the Shoreham flyover interchange on the A27. Although now a secluded hamlet, from the time before the arrival of the Romans until the time church was built Coombes and the River Adur remained at the heart of great activity. 

Coombes Church 

Shoreham Cement Works is in the distance, on the other side of the river

Decrescendo to pianissimo

The River Arun, which surrounds Hardham Church about 16 miles west of Coombes, today flows south to meet the sea at Littlehampton. Since Roman times until the period of our frescos, however, the Arun had turned east to join the River Adur (AY-DER) at Bramber, a town which the artist knew as a thriving sea port, and which had recently received a boost under the new Norman administration of William de Braose. Coombes Church was built next to a working river that was navigable by the larger boats of the day, even as far up as the town of Steyning. In the muralist’s mind map, their fresco cycles at Hardham and Coombes were, in effect, connected by the same busy tidal river. As early as the mid-1300’s, however, the Adur's sea window was starting to close. The upstream towns were beginning to see their fortune turn, going into decline as their population and activity were greatly reduced by drifting shingle, and the steady silting up of the estuary. The Arun changed its allegiance, shifting its course several times before establishing its modern outlet at Littlehampton around 1500. Coombes Church remained part of a small village into the late 1600’s. It now stands isolated on a hillside, next to Coombes Farm.

A picture of the Downs

The church is considerably shorter now than in it used to be in its heyday. It seems a tower had been added at some time to the west end, perhaps at the same time that alterations were being made to the church during the later middle ages. By this stage, our dramatic paintings were seen only in the collective memory, already long hidden by whitewash. A map with Coombes Church in 1677 shows a tower similar to one attached to the nearby church at Botolphs, known then as 'St Peter of Old Bridge' (i.e. not the Hardham church). This tower was added in the thirteenth century, and topped with a pyramid-shaped roof, like the one we see in the old drawing of Coombes. However the encroaching slope on which Coombes Church stands was gradually making its tower unstable. By 1602 the structure was found to be 'a little faltie', before in 1724 a surveyor was called in to assess the damage caused by the 'Tower and part of the church lately falln'. The reassuring and uplifting view these towers gave of activity on the river, observing the ships that sailed up the river with the tide from Pende harbour (somewhere near Lancing) towards the ports at Bramber, Botolphs and Steyning, would have been quite different to the quiet, constrained existence of the Adur today.

Coombes Church seen in a map of 1677, 

when its west tower was still standing

The modern, post-industrial vista from the church is dominated by the quarry, chimneys, silos and mills of The Shoreham Cement Works. Disused since 1991, this state-of-the-art postwar plant had its roots in early small-scale mineral excavations which burned chalk in brick kilns to produce fine lime plaster, a local industry probably since the Roman occupation. Inside the church, we’re surrounded by the same high-quality lime paste which had attracted The Portland Cement Company to Shoreham in the 1870’s, plaster which is the sine qua non for fresco painting. Deployed by the Sussex muralist as a bonding medium for their locally sourced paints, Sussex lime plaster combines with local earth pigments in murals which are, quite literally, a picture of the Downs.

A map of the area (1725) shows the Erlingham Chalkpits 

on the other side of the river to Coombes

The site is currently occupied by Shoreham Cement Works. 

The postcard looks across the river towards Coombes Church

Craters, drips and swirls

Coombes is the smallest and most damaged of the three surviving medieval art ensembles. Gothic windows and modern funerary monuments, smashed through what appeared at the time to be blank walls, made large craters in many of the fresco scenes while the paintings were still concealed. The pictorial narrative scheme also vanishes as it approaches the place at the west end where the wall was rebuilt, after the faulty tower was demolished. In compensation, you’ll be treated to a really close-up view of what remains of the medieval artwork which, unlike Hardham, is very well conserved. Some of the paint on the chancel arch still hangs in swirls and drips, as if the artist has dabbed the wall, put down their brush, and stepped outside for a break. To see this sort of thing in an art gallery would be wonderful, but to walk into such an art ensemble, finding yourself surrounded by pictorial narrative which still talks to us after nine hundred years, is truly transcendental.

A design on the chancel arch representing Heaven's starry canopy

showing the crispness of the preserved brush strokes

Don’t just visit for the wonderful paintings

Strolling down to the Adur, we can perhaps imagine the river’s more expansive presence at the time of the Domesday Book, when Coombes was a sizeable village, and hogs foraged in the woods. Steam rises gently from boiling hearths tended by the ecclesiastical slaves of Coombes Church, evaporating brine drawn from the river's tidal flats: some eighteen large saltern mounds, the accumulated waste heaps of medieval salt production, were found next to Coombes Church and farm alone. The village grew in importance as it played its part in a lucrative network which brought together local specialities, the production of food staples which were essential not just to villagers, but had a signifiant role in the area's development of maritime trade. Locally produced pork, freshly caught herring and mackerel from Shoreham boats, bream, mullet, pike and eels from weirs and fish traps would have more than satisfied local demand, allowing a surplus to be prepared, brined or smoked, and packed into casks brimming with salt to be sold in Bramber and Steyning. Barrels of the Adur's salt and preserved foods might be taken on board, stowed as ship's meat on freshly-victualled vessels which sailed by the church, on their way back out to the English Channel. The prosperous, international years of Coombes and its river were good, while they lasted.

Back in the church, look out for the holes and grooves in the wooden floor slat under the arch where a screen once separated the nave from the sanctuary. While you’re down there, notice that you’ve been walking on original terracotta floor tiles. Look out too for the incised Nestorian cross, its four equal-arms flaring towards the tip and mounted on a pedestal, carved in the stone of the chancel arch. Side lighting from the flashlight on your mobile also reveals many small graffitoed crosses, scratched and gouged around the entrance door. The simple oak door itself, with its speculatorium (peephole with a sliding cover), is original. Did the muralist close this same door, casting a backwards glance through the hatch, as they left for the last time nearly nine hundred years ago? 

Crosses scratched around the entrance door

The original 12th-century oak door still has its slatted 
speculatorium, or peep hole

Clayton, and its breathtaking Apocalypse frescos

 Where is St John-the-Baptist Church, Clayton?

Underhill Lane is a sharp turn on a bend in the Brighton Road A273 as it leaves Hassocks, before it climbs Clayton Hill over the South Downs. You may know the Jack and Jill windmills, the local landmarks of Clayton Gap which are visible for miles around. Clayton Church is at the foot of that hill. It is by far the grandest of the three early twelfth-century painted churches of West Sussex featured in my blog. 

Roman Clayton

Clayton village lies on the Sussex Greensand Way, a Roman track identified by Ivan Margary that once joined up the garrison of Hardham in the west with a similar station at Barcombe, near Lewes (currently the subject of investigation as The Culver Archaeological Project https://www.culverproject.co.uk). A large Roman cemetery, in use mostly during the third century, was found about a half a mile from the church, adjacent to the Stonepound Crossroads. It speaks of a significant Roman presence at this road junction across the South Downs, presumably associated with the exploitation of Sussex minerals and the extraction of iron around modern Crawley. The remains of a Roman villa, with bath and mosaics, were discovered in the grounds of Clayton Old Rectory on Spring Lane, but were reburied and are no longer visible. 

Margary's map (1919), showing the location of Hardham, Coombes and Clayton relative to 

the Sussex Greensand Way, and the Roman garrisons at Hardham and Barcombe

Chasm and Bridge

The twelfth-century Sussex muralist not only had a very good feel for composition, filling the available wall space with imaginative designs which express a keen interest in rhythm and symmetry: they had an equal interest in emptiness. Doorways, arches and architectural space become more than just functional gaps in the structure, bringing an artistic and spiritual dimension to the void as an organic and exciting part of the fresco composition. While the idea of the chasm also finds its expression in the paintings at Hardham and Coombes, the high walls and grand scale of Clayton church gave the artist an opportunity for their most exquisite and dramatic expression of emptiness and fulfilment, an exposition on the theme of chasm and bridge.

Christ in Majesty, flanked by the Apostles

Clayton chancel arch

The centrepiece of the Clayton cycle of frescos is a magnificent ensemble on the chancel wall, with Christ in Majesty as the keystone above the arch, flanked by the Twelve Apostles. Raising his hands in blessing, Christ sits on a cushion atop the arches of an astonishing four-tiered bridge, a feat of engineering usually associated with Roman architects, such as the Segovia or Milagros aqueducts in Spain, or reminiscent of the 9th-century medieval aqueducts of Salerno, but unlike anything ever seen in Britain. Balanced above the chasm of the chancel arch, Christ makes a magisterial bridge between the two dramatic processional friezes along the north and south walls which talk to each other across the nave. 

Christ the Bridge

Sat on a four-tiered structure which spans the chasm of the arch,

Christ unites the two long friezes of the nave 

At the other end of the church, it seems the artist intentionally cut short the narrative of the long friezes in the nave. The paintings stop abruptly before the west wall, so that Christ’s glorious uniting presence in the eastern dawn looks down towards… well, towards nothing, a sepulchral void of chaos and disruption in the nocturnal west. We’ll return to look in detail at the fascinating narrative of the Clayton Apocalypse and its historical background in future posts.

After the intimacy of Coombes, the grandeur and drama of Clayton’s Apocalypse frescos is stunning. The height of the walls does mean that much of the artwork is over five metres above our heads, so some bright binoculars come in handy to pick out the detail in the faces and clothing which you'll otherwise miss. The lights installed to view the frescos are mixed blessing: some features are clearer, but the vertical beam also emphasises the irregularity of the plaster and casts distracting shadows. It benefits just to acclimatise your eyes and visit on a sunny day. With binoculars.

Fade to white

Photos from 1947 still show some of the clarity and crispness conservators had discovered beneath the layers of whitewash. Even some fifty years before Gernsheim’s photos in 1899, however, restorer Philip Mainwaring Johnston had begun to notice significant fading and deterioration since the paintings were first uncovered. Over a century on from Johnston’s warning, and the frescos continue to fade under pressure from the harmful effects of atmospheric exposure, damp conditions, light, and even bat urine. The ‘preservative treatment’, advocated by Johnston and ruinously deployed at Hardham, was mercifully not applied to the Clayton murals. Enhanced protection measures and modern conservation, including a thorough digital archive of these unique paintings, are nevertheless overdue.

Helmut Gernsheim's photo, 1947

July 2024

The academic neglect of these unique frescos is an indication of the extent to which this artist’s unusual and challenging work, much loved by walkers and non-expert visitors, has nonetheless been allowed to fall off the map of sites of scholarly interest. There has been no fresh study to reappraise the artwork in all three churches since the 1980’s. The destruction of unorthodox communities didn’t always require whitewash, fires and hammers: sometimes simple studious neglect would do.

Don’t miss

If you have time, it’s worth following the bridlepath up to the top of the hill and the Clayton windmills, where the view towards the North Downs and Surrey Hills is spectacular even on a stormy day. So much a part of the landscape in medieval Sussex, windmill sails may have turned with the steady, year-round breeze at Clayton Gap even before the murals were created.

View from Clayton Hill, near the windmills.

The red tiles of the church tower are just visible 

in the centre of the photo, above the gatepost. 

Refugees caught 'between two pyres': medieval protest art in West Sussex

If you've visited the dramatic twelfth-century frescos at Hardham, Coombes and Clayton you may well be wondering what these strange images are all about. I've been studying these extraordinary paintings since 2017: here is my best shot at giving the background to the artist, describing how this radical Byzantine painter came to create their unique and important fresco schemes on the walls of churches in isolated locations in West Sussex. Go see them for yourself!

❧

The Bosphorus Strait, near the mouth with the Black Sea

Around the late 1080's a radical artist-monk created a new fresco scheme for their isolated monastery located in the Phoberou or 'Fearsome' ravine, near the wild Black Sea mouth of the Bosphorus Strait. Although many considered the paintings ‘beautiful and varied’, traditionalists said they were like ungodly graffiti on the walls of a stinking heretic's toilet. The monastery, ‘once great and famous and admired … was reduced to nothing', and the frescos were destroyed. It may not have been only the disdain the painter had shown for the respected art of the Byzantine icon which incensed Orthodoxy. The artist may also have used their frescos to affirm such principals as a commitment to upholding the role of women as leaders in the church and a wider belief in social equality, the advocacy of strict self-restraint on a vegan diet without alcohol, and the search for a spiritual experience of the divine which didn't require a hierarchy of bearded men to act as intermediaries. 

Very laudable modern values, you might think, but beliefs like this would not receive the blessing of the Byzantine Emperor nor the patriarchs of the Orthodox Church, who detested having to pollute their minds or mouths with discussion of such persistent and self-evident 'heresy'. Orthodoxy ridiculed the strange beliefs and practices of the babbling foreigners, fomenting mistrust and hatred towards those who call themselves Christians but who are, in fact, 'ravening wolves dressed in sheep's clothing' (Matthew, 7:15). 

Determined to cleanse Constantinople of this 'cloud of heretics', their confrontation with the Byzantine state came to a head around 1104 when Emperor Alexios I Komnenos rounded up as many dissenters as he could find. In a public spectacle staged in the arena of Constantinople, the foreign Christians were forced to choose between an Orthodox death on an immense pyre with a cross, or a ‘heretic's' death on a similar pyre but with no cross. Those who chose to remain true to their beliefs discovered they were to be spared the flames by the Emperor's magnanimity: their sentence was nonetheless commuted to life imprisonment, 'to die in their impiety'. An example was made, however, of their leader Basileos, who was indeed thrown alive into the inferno.

'Go now, and make your choice!' 

(Clayton, south frieze)

All those who chose the pyre topped with Orthodoxy's cross were, according to the Emperor's undisclosed plan, released with an official caution. Many then seized their opportunity to escape. Some went west, seeking refuge among like-minded communities of displaced Eastern Christians scattered in isolated and remote regions, often as the human legacy of Roman metal extraction and processing operations worked by unfree, transported labour. One gifted artist with close connections to the infamous Fearsome frescos travelled as far as Andredeswald, the dense woodland barrier of the 'Untrodden forest' which then stretched across Southern England from Kent to Hampshire. 

There, on the edge of the South Downs in a group of churches from Lewes to Pulborough, the muralist resumed the radical work of the censured artist of the Fearsome ravine. Their almost cinematic ensembles of remarkable paintings brought vividly to life not only the community's commitment to a mystical Christian spirituality and social equality. The murals of Hardham, Coombes and Clayton also commemorate the harsh experience which had sent the community, like the Holy Family escaping the murderous fury of a tyrannical Herod, as refugees into foreign lands. The horror they faced in Komnenos's 'choice between two pyres' was regularly reenacted through the monumental Apocalypse paintings at Clayton, a breathless, single-take sequence of dramatic images which burn with the intense rage of Pablo Picasso's 'Guernica’ (1937).  

The Dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre signals a New Jerusalem in Sussex 

(Clayton, north frieze)

The joy the refugees found in a New Jerusalem at the other end of Christendom, seen in this image which concludes the Clayton murals, was to be short-lived. By the early 1160's the Cluniac monks of Lewes Priory had evicted their foreign co-religionists, declaring them outlaws. The painted churches became abandoned. Painted eyes were gouged out, taking the life from the painted figures, before the frescos were obliterated by layers of whitewash, not to be seen again until the late 1860's. These strange and enigmatic murals can now tell the forgotten story of the migrants who fled to Britain to escape persecution, a window onto the optimism of 'heretical' refugees who helped to shape British culture through their exceptional art, music and drama.

The Hardham frescos and 'the great Cluniac Priory of Lewes': a decisive moment in the history of intolerance

During the closing years of the nineteenth century, as Philip Mainwaring Johnston and his team were working to reveal and restore the medieval frescos at Hardham church, twenty-five miles away William Henry St John Hope was engaged in an archaeological excavation at the site of Lewes's Priory of St Pancras with collaborator George Somers Clarke. The spades and picks of St John Hope's labourers worked to reveal the ground plan of the first great Cluniac monastery complex in Britain, constructed on the edge of Lewes town and all but destroyed during the Reformation, while Johnston's scalpels and brushes painstakingly picked and flicked at the centuries of whitewash which had hidden the colourful frescos of this small church nestled in the Pulborough marshes. 

The story of each of these two great Sussex monuments, both dating from the late eleventh century, were now being brought simultaneously to light by two Victorian architects and antiquarians. Did Johnston and St John Hope exchange notes and follow the progress on each other's Anglo-Norman sites? The fate of these buildings seemed destined to be intimately entwined.

William Henry St John Hope

George Somers Clarke

   

'Noble parentage'

Following a lead in a contemporary document which appeared to show that Hardham and Clayton had been owned by the Priory, Johnston built an origin story for the frescos which brought together Lewes Priory and the painted churches. According to Johnston, a travelling workshop of skilled artists, probably trained outside Britain, took their materials and skills around nearby churches (or not so near, in the case of Hardham). He identified the powerful Cluniac priory as the centre for this creativity, settling on the name 'The Lewes Priory school of painters' as the theory gathered adherents. In 1901 he described the painters' nobility and mastery: 

'one can detect a master tradition in them, and here and there a master's touch, which proclaim a noble parentage.'

In 1909 Johnston elaborates on the theme of the noble patronage behind the frescos:

'The great Cluniac Priory of St. Pancras, Lewes, founded by William de Warrenne and his wife Gundrada about 1077, must alone have been the cause of importing a host of foreign artificers ... These are practically proved to have been executed by the Lewes Priory school of painters' 

'...here and there a master's touch'

Brushwork on Hardham chancel arch

For the first half of the twentieth century, Johnston's vision of the 'wealthy foundation' as an artistic hub, generously sending out travelling artisans to adorn churches in its care, seemed compelling and gained widespread acceptance. E. W. Tristram's compendious English Medieval Wall Painting (1944) confirms:

'The evidence to support the theory that they are ... inspired by ... the chief Cluniac house in this country, is sufficiently strong to place the matter beyond dispute.' 

Disagreements in a dysfunctional family

However, as the newly-revealed paintings opened themselves to discussion and scrutiny, it became clear that Johnston's paintings by a master of 'noble parentage' were replete with many strange and anomalous features. The iconography at all three more-or-less complete ensembles at Hardham, Coombes and Clayton resist simple explanation, and the interpretation of certain scenes became the cause of much disagreement. Johnston's notion of a 'noble parentage' behind the murals was now hard to maintain: if these paintings had noble parents, the children were clearly not listening to the grown-ups. Relationships in this family must have been pretty dysfunctional. 

To account for these interpretative complications, the 'painters of the Lewes School' were increasingly portrayed as jobbing decorators, reliant on a noble master of greater intellect and spirituality to devise the scheme. If there were discrepancies, that's because the artisans' vivid realisations may not always have lived up to the Prior's lofty vision. The Sussex frescos were now believed to be made in imitation of finer murals, 'derived from the painted scheme of a great church' (Park, 1984), but where the unseen originals had been lost. The 'crude and barbaric figure drawing' which Johnston saw in the Hardham murals ('Memorials of Old Sussex', 1909) was giving rise to the belief that the Sussex must must be low-budget pattern-book copies of the real thing, the distorted reflection of noble artistic prowess.

Master John

In his fictionalised version of the creation of the Hardham murals (1987), the modern artist Christopher Aggs encouraged a view of the his medieval counterpart, 'whom we may as well call 'Master John', as a skilled labourer whose creative hand is, however, nothing without the guidance of his patron's exacting vision. In May, as the project is well under way according to Benefactor's detailed instructions, Aggs describes how the monks of Lewes pay an inspection visit to the site, an encounter which puts Master John firmly in his place:

'...the monks scoured the designs for doctrinal mistakes while the Benefactor complimented John...'

Aggs elaborates on his view of the power relationship between the distant Cluniac monastery and its presumed satellite, as the Hardham artist waits patiently for a monk from Lewes to inscribe the monastery's literate blessing on the frescos, as only they know how: 

'The painters watched, not without a certain professional jealousy as the monk formed the beautiful Lombardic capitals on their red background. The sense of these strange marks escaped them; they understood pictures, but, like their audience, they were illiterate.' 

The Annunciation 

showing the 'beautiful Lombardic capitals'.

Tracing by P. M Johnston from original

(Hardham, chancel arch east) 

David Park ('The Lewes Group of Wall Paintings', 1984) similarly seems to consider the Sussex artist's unique iconography to be the work of an unruly ingénu, prone to errors as a result of inexperience and inadequate supervision. In his attempt to to account for one of the most difficult iconographical anomalies at Clayton, Park's analysis of the unexpected placement of the large red cross (south wall) assumes the artist ran out of space on the adjacent chancel arch and had to push it round the corner, squashing the cross into the composition elsewhere:

In [an] ivory plaque [of c. 1000 CE], angels are shown supporting the cross directly below the Majesty, and this was probably the case in the original model for Clayton, where, however, because of lack of space on the east wall, this part of the subject-matter had to be fitted in rather awkwardly at the east end of the south wall.

Angels supporting the cross, 

'fitted in awkwardly' on the south wall according to Park (1984)

(Clayton, south wall) 

From my time studying academic music analysis, if you have to move the notes around to make the composition fit your theory of how the composer should have written the piece, you're not getting any nearer to understanding or respecting the actual music.

Lewes Priory and Stockholm Syndrome

There were two revelations during the 1940's which should have put an end, once and for all, to Johnston's 'Lewes School' theory. Art historian Audrey Baker's first article about the Sussex frescos appeared in 1942. In the appendix Baker showed that any presumed connection between Lewes Priory and the painted churches had been greatly overstated. The impression of a group of compliant artists answerable to the preferences of the Cluniac monastery (as typified in Aggs's fiction) was unrealistic.  

The other event was the discovery a new ensemble of extraordinary frescos on the walls of the little church at Coombes, near Lancing. 'Extensive traces of paintings' had been noted by Johnston as early as 1898, but it was Clive Rouse who was responsible to their careful restoration in 1949. With a style and motifs that closely resembled the composition at Clayton, the frescos were clearly associated with the same artist. Coombes parish, however, had never had any formal connection to Lewes Priory, corroborating Baker's advice that Cluny was not a unifying factor. As Robin Milner-Gulland ('The Problem of the Early Sussex Frescoes', 1985) put it, 'Rouse's remarkable discoveries at Coombes, in fact, knocked the bottom out of the 'Lewes Priory School'.

Paintings on the chancel arch at 

Coombes, facing east

With the 'great house' hypothesis on the backfoot, other considerations which argued against Johnston's theory now seemed to accrue significance. A fragment of wall decoration found at Lewes Priory during St John Hope's excavations showed a 'quite different technique and painterly manner' to the West Sussex murals (Milner-Gulland, 1985): the Hardham frescos had nothing to do with the lost artwork of Lewes Priory. Park (1984) agreed that the paintings of Clayton and Hardham are 'certainly in no sense Cluniac'. As Audrey Baker (1942) had pointed out, wealthy foundations were not going to spend money on their parish churches unless they really had to. Fancy wall paintings would not have been in the budget. 

In any case, there is no way that the monks of Lewes would have put any money on the table to encourage the sort of original visual thinking which came from the imagination of the Sussex muralist. Aggs writes dreamily about the Hardham frescos 'reminding the participating observer of the unity of Christendom', ignoring the multiplicity of unusual and challenging features which would never have been signed off by any monastic inspector tasked with checking for 'doctrinal mistakes'. The Sussex muralist's work is more notable for a stubborn and persistent iconographic independence than for any reassuring continuity. On the contrary, the first Cluniac mission to Britain was established in Lewes to address and rectify the reality of a wide variety of approaches to Christian faith. 

We can see the hand of Cluny everywhere at Hardham, Coombes and Clayton, not in the blessing of a distant benefactor and mastermind behind the colourful frescos, but in the firm grip of the censor, responsible for daubing whitewash and smashing large holes through the painted narrative schemes. Cluny came to define itself by its tenacity in seeking a unified Christian orthodoxy, and its fierce war on choice in faith, decried as 'heresy'. As Dominique Iogna-Prat describes: 'the power, prestige and pretensions of the Cluniacs ... represented a decisive moment in the history of intolerance' (Order and Exclusion, 2002, p. ix)

Cluny's 'decisive moment in the history of intolerance':
An aperture for a new, large window made in the south wall c. 1200
with no regard for the narrative friezes, by then obliterated by lime wash. 
Hardham nave, south wall 

As Johnston had suspected, the history of Lewes Priory and the Hardham murals were indeed closely entwined. However, there's something a bit Stockholm Syndrome about naming these important art ensembles after the persecuting institution which did its best to make the paintings disappear, and dispersed the community that created them. There aren't many academics who still find the description either credible or helpful, yet the inappropriate and discredited idea of a 'Lewes Priory School' still gets used on the internet and in guide books, perhaps simply for want of a better alternative. 

The three Sussex fresco ensembles clearly belong together, but what collective title should we now give them? 

Hardham, an extraordinary medieval painted church

 Where is St Botolph’s Church?

This painted church is at the west end of Hardham, a hamlet which stretches along a lane set back from the A29 about a mile west of Pulborough. Keep your eyes peeled for the signs. There is space to park a car or two in the lane outside the church. Cycling along the causeway across the marshland of the wild brooks from Pulborough gives a much better feeling for the strange marshland of the Hardham Basin in which the church sits, an enchanting landscape, ringed by the Downs, which the artist knew well.

Approaching Hardham Church from the south, 

heading for the original entrance door on the left (now bricked up)

The oldest medieval wall paintings in Britain?

The frescos of Hardham Church c. 1100 are probably the oldest of the three Sussex ensembles of paintings that have survived. Although badly damaged in places, most of the original artwork remains. The cyclical scheme covers the walls of both the nave and, remarkably, continues in the chancel: we can still walk in the footsteps of those who once followed this pictorial narrative. These are said to be among the earliest surviving and most complete medieval wall paintings in Britain. Wow is a common experience here.

The Sussex muralist

I am going to write as if the same exceptional artistic imagination created the paintings at all three sites. The frescos at Coombes and Clayton do seem to display a more evolved technique and confident expression, which has led some commentators treat the three ensembles as the work of more than one artist. There are, however, strong thematic and stylistic similarities common to all the fresco ensembles, suggesting an artist whose work developed as they returned to expand on previously voiced thoughts and ideas over a number of years. The evolution of one artist’s style and creativity, or the product of many? Perhaps you should visit them all, and then decide for yourself.

’…insulated almost clear round by y^e high stream’

For most of its recorded existence Hardham has been known as an inland peninsula, almost entirely surrounded by water and marshland, joined to the mainland only by a neck of dry land in the west near Coldwaltham. At the opposite end of the peninsula, traffic on the A29 zooms over the modern Swan Bridge, crossing the River Arun as it skirts past Pulborough. Seasonal flooding can still make the 1930’s raised causeway disappear beneath the water, bringing traffic on the A-road to a halt and returning Hardham the serenity and isolation which the muralist knew.

Early Ordnance Survey map shows Hardham 'insulated by y^e high stream'.

Even the causeway from Pulborough is drawn with broken lines,

showing the Chichester road was not always passable, even in 1813

(the extent of the marshland has here been highlighted in blue) 

Roman Hardham

During the Roman occupation a garrison was built at the west end of the peninsula, straddling the path over the narrow isthmus from the mainland at Coldwaltham. This was part of a suite of measures which effectively locked down Hardham, securing control of both road and river passage. The road from Noviomagus (Chichester) to London Bridge known as Stane Street (aka the A29) deviates significantly from the usual Roman straight line in order to take advantage of the security offered by Hardham, which became a major hub in a network which fed the insatiable Roman appetite for minerals in Southern England.

'Ganymede abducted by Zeus in the from of an eagle'

 Mosaic in dining room at Bignor Roman Palace (c. 300 CE)

4km west of Hardham

Early Christianity, ancient slavery

Christianity came early to Hardham: a lead Romano-British baptismal basin with the early Christian Chi Rho symbol dated to c. 300 CE was discovered during drainage operations in the area in 1943. It is hard to ignore the thought that the first Christians at Roman Hardham may not have been free people, and may not have been locals. The Sussex churches and their frescos lie in a long shadow cast by ancient transportation: these unusual paintings have a great deal to tell us about the perseverance of early Eastern Christian beliefs and practices in England as a long-term consequence of Roman slavery.

Lead basin c. 300 CE, perhaps for baptism, 

with XP 'Chi Rho' decoration (from Greek χριστός 'Christos')

Found near Wiggonholt, now displayed at Parham House

Putting out the recycling

On the outside of the church you can still see dressed stone and terracotta tiles from earlier Roman buildings which once stood at this site, reused to build the church. The connection between Roman Hardham and the twelfth-century frescos is literally tangible.

Recycled Roman terracotta tiles form part of the chancel wall

Don’t miss

Allow time to visit the wild brooks, the magical marshland which is the very essence of Hardham. A visit to the RSPB reserve at Wiggonholt https://www.rspb.org.uk/days-out/reserves/pulborough-brooks is a great way to experience the allure of the marshes.

Midday light on the Arun at high water 

Greatham Bridge, December 2018