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.
(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.
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