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!

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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 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 have 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

The Picture Tellers: where can I see twelfth-century paintings in Sussex?

There are three churches with a lot of medieval paintings in the West Sussex villages of

Hardham, Coombes, and Clayton. 

Hardham: Mary Hears the Message from the Angel (chancel arch)

Coombes: The Starry Canopy of Heaven (chancel arch)

Clayton: St Peter (detail: chancel arch)

The survival of these wonderful paintings is serendipitous. Their fate hangs by three conjoined threads of fortuitous circumstance:

1. The artist was adept at using true fresco technique, which bonds together pigment in fresh plaster to make a much more durable painting medium than can be achieved by simply putting paint onto a dry wall. An ancient technique that remained common among Byzantine artists, before the time of the Sussex muralist there had been no paintings in Britain made in this way since the Roman occupation. The frescos of St Mary’s Church, Houghton-on-the-Hill (Norfolk) and St Mary's Church, Kempley (Gloucestershire) are of a similar age, but the wall paintings at St Botolph’s, Hardham  (West Sussex) are the most extensive medieval frescos in Britain. 

2. Hidden by whitewash for centuries, the Sussex frescos were not casualties of the Protestant Reformation: they had been covered up long before the Tudor purge of ecclesiastical art. These strange paintings may have been on view for only a few decades in the 1100's before they were whitewashed. The artist may even have lived to see their work obliterated in the second half of the twelfth century. Lime wash seems to have been intended to erase any memory of the original community and its beliefs and practices. Ironically, historical censorship has acted to conserve the paintings and the beliefs which they embody, in ways the defacer cannot have either imagined or intended.  Now revealed, these 'difficult' paintings ask questions of the modern viewer, as challenging today as they were for the haters who just wanted them to disappear.

3. When the unusual paintings were revealed, the vicars of Hardham, Clayton and Coombes intervened, perhaps contrary to expectations, to ensure that they were preserved.

Not every incumbent, finding themselves curator of such an unexpected legacy, shared this antiquarian desire for conservation. Until the 1860’s there used to be more painted churches in the area. The chancel wall of St Martin’s Westmeston was once covered with an extensive fresco scheme, now known only from a rough sketch made before the original artwork was chipped off the wall during the restoration work of 1862-3; St Cosmas and St Damian, Keymer, lost its murals when the church was rebuilt in 1866; although the frescos on both sides of the chancel wall at St Michael’s Plumpton were destroyed in the 1860’s, enough remains of the scheme in the nave to see strong similarities with the Clayton murals. It would be easy to regret the current poor state of conservation of some of the surviving frescos, particularly the badly damaged paintings at Hardham. I have learned to be thankful that these murals have survived at all, and continue to charm and intrigue visitors to the South Downs.

How do I get there?

The churches of Hardham, Coombes and Clayton lie close to

 the Roman trackway known as The Sussex Greensand Way

(map after Ivan Margary, 1919)

It’s about 20 miles by road from Hardham to Clayton, taking in the little church at Coombes on the way. The painted churches are sited on a route which roughly follows a path running east-west between Lewes towards Hardham. This was once an old trackway associated with the Roman iron processing in the Weald, known today mostly as a line on a map given the name The Sussex Greensand Way. You can make a relaxed road trip which traces this route by car, visiting all three churches in a day, or it would make a great picnic day out on the bike in nice weather, if you start early either from Pulborough or Hassocks stations. You can plot a cycle route that is mostly quite quiet, not too strenuous, sometimes off-road, and usually very beautiful, but do take care on the busier roads! 

If you can’t get to West Sussex, Roy Reed’s 360-degree interactive images of Hardham and Clayton churches at 360cities.net make a perfect armchair introduction to the frescos.

Hardham

https://www.360cities.net/image/the-nave-hardham-church-west-sussex-england

Clayton

https://www.360cities.net/image/clayton-church-west-sussex-england

How can I become a heretic?

Originally haíresis simply meant something like ‘choice’, from αἱρέω hairéō ‘to select, prefer or choose’. The Ancient Greek word didn’t have any particularly negative connotations, and you’d have heard it in the marketplace, at an election, or used to describe a school of thought or belief. It was only with the rapid spread of Christian literature that ‘heretic’ began to take on its polemical meaning: ‘people who have made a bad choice’. It was used by those Christians who considered themselves orthodox (‘right-thinking’) to attack others who had chosen a different path. This shift in meaning hardened, and exercising ‘choice’ in faith or lifestyle became an increasingly perilous move. That’s also what makes early heretics so culturally intriguing. 

Two of the Twelve Apostles at 
'The Washing of the Feet' (John 13; Matthew 26)

Hardham Church: chancel, south wall (c. 1100)

Heresy was only in the mind of the persecutor. In 'The Violence of Orthodoxy' (2008) Averil Cameron writes: 'to describe oneself as a heretic is in essence a logical contradiction'. Although the caricature of the malign, lurking heretic may have been largely a nightmare in orthodoxy's imagination, nonetheless the people demonised for practicing their right to 'choose' were very real. These same descriptions of 'heresy' can help fill in the void left by 'choicey' minority social groups and persecuted people whose authentic voice is often scraped and scoured from the written record, not only historically but also in much modern scholarship. 

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What has 'heresy' got to do with art?

Itinerant performance artists in the middle ages were treated as tolerated aliens, subject to the most severe social stigma and suspicion. As late as the sixteenth century it was still said the Spielleut (‘entertainer’) was ‘more like the dead than the living’ and had the ‘mere semblance of humanity’ (Sächsische Weichbildrecht, 1537). Although you couldn’t kill a musician in medieval Amsterdam with impunity, nonetheless pipers, fiddlers and lute players were deprived of all legal rights and honour (Pieter van Schouwen: Sachsenspiegel, 1451). 

In the face of such vilification, performers were typically drawn from the same outgroups who faced persecution for their ‘choicey’ otherness, a position not unlike that of the highly-skilled black musicians and dancers of The Cotton Club who made ‘jungle music’ for New Yorkers in the 1920’s and ’30’s. Like early Ellingtons, some later medieval musicians found that by satisfying the European love of authors, composers, conductor-led performance and the commercial value of publishable text and music notation, artists could smooth the rough passage through waves of prejudice directed at unruly extemporising ‘heretics’. Early music celebrates the tip of the iceberg which represents music surviving in notation, but we should bear in mind the unwritten music of the seven-eighths below the surface: made of the same stuff as the gleaming, visible apex, and just as fascinating.

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Art and Heresy blog posts divide mostly into two groups, based on my two main research projects: 

The Picture Tellers

The Emperor drew back the curtain...

Coombes Church, near Lancing College (West Sussex, c. 1120)

Since 2018 I’ve been looking at the twelfth-century paintings in three West Sussex churches, revealed after over eight hundred years lying dormant beneath layers of disapproving whitewash. These are some of the oldest surviving wall paintings in Britain. The frescos were probably all created by one remarkable refugee artist, spokesperson for a community fleeing persecution to pursue religious tolerance, gender equality, a diet without animal products, and perhaps of greatest interest to us, freedom of artistic expression in the isolation of the South Downs. The paintings are damaged, and have a reputation for being strange, difficult and enigmatic, but seeing these collections for the first time is like making a tour of a site-specific art installation from the middle ages *spine tingle*. You can visit all three painted churches in one day by bike on a twenty-five-mile route across the Pulborough Brooks nature reserve, through medieval Steyning, over the salt marsh of the Adur river before passing below the spectacular Devil’s Dyke escarpment, essentially travelling the same Roman track across the South Downs which the artist knew. Or you can drive.

Watchers on the Wall

Design for a tower clock with musical automata
(Northern Syria, 1206)

Ismail al-Jazari: The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices

My other project looks at the ancient tradition of musical watchmen who played a horn from a tower at sunrise and sunset, protecting city walls right across Eurasia. George R. R. Martin’s Night’s Watch swears this oath: ‘I am the watcher on the walls. I am the fire that burns against the cold, the light that brings the dawn, the horn that wakes the sleepers, the shield that guards the realms of men’ (A Game of Thrones, 1996, Chapter 48). Actual medieval horn blowers may sound a bit niche, but if I tell you that Johann Ambrosius could trace his ancestors in the church records among generations of Bachs whose shoes had worn down the stairs of various towers in Eastern Germany in order to sound the curfew and reassure the townsfolk, might you be more interested? Ambrosius’s son Johann Sebastian Bach was extraordinarily proud of this long lineage, although he didn’t join the family business of ‘blowing a horn to wake the sleepers’ because… well, like Jon Snow, his destiny lay elsewhere.

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Tolerance and compassion

‘Art & Heresy’ might sound like a really weird pairing. Search the web for ‘medieval heresy’ and you’ll find lots of eye-catching manuscript illustrations of judicial prohibition and destruction: heretics being arrested; heretical books being thrown on the pyre; heretics burned en masse at the stake, all accompanied by the odd black cat or horned devil for verisimilitude. Beautifully rendered as illuminations in prestigious volumes, these sumptuous images endorse the reader’s ethical superiority over godless ‘heretics’, whose cultural contribution was thought to extend only to an iconoclastic urge to disrespect and trash the cultural artefacts and values of orthodoxy. Contrary to appearances, ‘heretics’ were highly creative. They just did it in their own way.

Two pyres shall today be lit, and on one of them 
let a cross be fixed. Go now and 

make your choice.

St John the Baptist Church, Clayton, south wall (c. 1120)

The blog isn’t going to get drawn into the polemical representation of the crazed, dissembling, icon-stabbing, heretical sociopath and their struggle against the fanatical, strait-laced, art-loving, orthodox killjoy. When we talk about the stark choice between the flames of heresy and the Cross of right-thinking belief, we only revive the reductive perspective of a persecuting historical orthodoxy (R. I Moore: The Formation of a Persecuting Society, 1987). These incendiary illustrations of the ‘triumph over heresy’ hide a more nuanced and enduring relationship in which ‘heresy’ and ‘orthodoxy’ were intimately entwined: hate terms only distort what was often a spectrum of attitudes in which there was no good and evil art, and where there were no heretical and righteous people. 

Instead of renewing the hunt for orthodoxy’s malevolent tormentors, the modern study of ‘heresy’ could (indeed, should) have been an opportunity to understand the long history of social and cultural diversity in Europe. A more balanced study of heresy might focus instead on tolerance and compassion, so we can understand what happens when mutual respect and toleration break down and begin to fail.

Too often our modern engagement with historical music, drama and the visual arts has served to breathe fresh life into old enmities, finding justification for modern orthodoxies of belief, class, race and gender in our apex view of the iceberg of creativity which neglects, even denies the presence of the  submerged seven-eighths. The historical arts should have been the place to view this presence, a chance to observe the cultural activity and social integration of marginal communities at work. 

How different might early European society look
if historians of the arts had made respectful 
and representative space for people

who had made other 'choices'?