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.
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| William Henry St John Hope |
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| 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'
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'...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.'
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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.
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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'.
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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)
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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?
