2
BCD Special Report on
Historic Churches
17th annual edition
Reformation,
Iconoclasm and
Restoration
W
e tend
to think of hostility
to imagery in stained glass
as something confned to the
Reformation of the 16th century, but this is
a misconception. In the middle of the 12th
century, for example, St Bernard, founder of
the austere Cistercian order, prohibited the use
of imagery in the churches of his order on the
grounds that it distracted the monks from their
devotions. In the late 14th century, the poet
William Langland famously criticised donor
portraits in stained glass as an expression of
vainglory. Despite these criticisms, stained
glass remained immensely popular with
the wealthy patrons of England’s thousands
of parish churches, as the extraordinary
display in the windows of the Church of
All Saints, North Street, York, attests.
Te greatest stained glass losses were,
of course, a consequence of the wholesale
dissolution of the monasteries during the
Reformation. From a 21st-century perspective
it is almost impossible to imagine the scale and
impact of the tidal wave of destruction and
despoliation that ensued. Of the thousands
of examples of monastic medieval glazing
schemes, only a handful escaped through the
Stained glass in England
C
1540–1830
Sarah Brown
Te head of a prophet, c1340, in the choir clerestory of Tewkesbury Abbey (all photos by the author unless otherwise stated)