Considerable remains of a lavish programme of sculpture survive in the north chancel chapel at St. Mary’s parish church, Cogges (Oxfordshire). Around the exterior hood of the east window are three finely-carved, bearded, male heads including a haloed Head of Christ at the apex.1 Fragments to either side and a shaft and ballflower frieze above indicate that the ensemble was originally more elaborate (Fig. 1). Inside, along the top of the north and south walls runs a sculptured frieze (Fig. 2).2 Inhabited by grotesques and interspersed by corbels representing animals playing instruments, it recalls the illustrated margins typical of fourteenth-century books of hours.3 The male heads outside and on the frieze inside have full beards, short fringes, and wavy hair reaching to below the ears, a style prevalent from the end of the thirteenth- to the mid-fourteenth century (Fig. 3).4 The frieze figures are densely-packed, each holding the tail or limb of its neighbour. Their mouths are open, grinning or snarling, their tongues lolling. The result is remarkable, at once threatening and humorous—not to say noisy—the effect intensified by the confines of the architectural space. The chapel was evidently the location of a chantry furnished for memorial Masses, indicated by an ornate corner piscina with an ogee, finialled canopy, and a tomb monument with recumbent female effigy in early-fourteenth-century dress.5 No identifying marks remain but an extensive scheme of heraldic stained glass recorded in the seventeenth century included the arms of Oddingsell and de Grey in the east window.6 John Blair and John Steane’s analysis of this glazing shows convincingly that the monument commemorated Margaret Oddingsell (fl. 1330), widow of John de Grey of Rotherfield, Oxfordshire (d. 1311), who held the manor of Cogges in dower.7 The arms of Margaret’s two de Grey sons, John and Ralph, appeared alongside hers in the east window.8 Those of her sister Ida Clinton, her great-aunt Ela Bassett, countess of Warwick, and her second husband, Robert Moreby (d. 1336), by whom she had a third son, William, were in the north wall windows.9
The east window has a shallow, triangular head enclosing elegant, curvilinear drop tracery. Part of an abstract composition in stained glass of between 1325–50 survives in a striking palette of yellow, orange, black and red (Fig. 4). The design is composed of roundels, some of which contain suns or stars and other radiating figures, possibly representing heaven.10 A single, red roundel in the central, north wall window implies that the scheme extended here as well. All three north windows have reticulated tracery and are embellished with ballflower and quatrefoil motifs on the internal soffits (Fig. 5). A mural was discovered on the east wall in 1883, described as richly coloured but not otherwise described.11 The plaster has since been stripped.
Although fairly widespread as exterior corbel tables, grotesques in the form of a continuous frieze framing interior space are uncommon at this date.12 The Cogges frieze is not recorded before 1870 but appears to be in situ. The eaves beam of the roof rests on top of the frieze, while the intermediate rafters are located over the heads of figures that are lowered to accommodate them (Fig. 6).13 It should therefore be considered as an integral part of the chapel’s decoration.
The sculpture has been noted for its quality and unusual character before but has not been the subject of close attention.14 Yet there are several ways in which its study can contribute to medieval art history, in particular the cross-disciplinary debate surrounding marginalia.15 The field was reopened in 2014 by Paul Binski in Gothic Wonder, where he questions the usefulness of the very term ‘marginalia’ over the Bahktinian opposition it implies between a ‘lively’ margin of ‘low art’ and a ‘dead’ centre of ‘high art’.16 He prefers instead to see the margin in a legitimate, balanced relationship with the centre, as an aspect of it rather than an alternative, and with hilaritas, a beneficial, virtuous kind of humour, as one of its properties.17 Such an approach fits well with the antics of the Cogges grotesques, several of which appear to address the viewer directly, demanding a response from those looking up from their devotions in the central space (Fig. 7).
Further contributions have come from Betsy Chunko-Dominquez, writing about marginalia on late-medieval English misericords, and from Jonathan Foyle, writing about the painted ceiling of c.1240s at Peterborough Cathedral.18 While exploring marginalia in widely different contexts these writers all acknowledge the layers of meaning carried by such imagery and the wide range of sources from which it emerged, including political and legal texts as well as religious material, actual events, and oral culture.19 Take, for example, the miscellany of grotesques on the Peterborough ceiling. High over the chancel arch is the motif of the three unclean animals: the ape preaching to an owl, riding backwards on an ass. This might, as Binski has suggested, be a mocking reference to disorder in the nave and monastic choir beneath, or an example of ‘Roman salt’: an array of witticisms, satirical comments, and madcap imagery that, according to William of Malmesbury, alleviated tedium through variety, an effect that did not rely on learned interpretation.20 Foyle discerns a further layer of meaning which is both more learned and more localised, seeing the entire ceiling as ‘one of the great cultural manifestos of medieval Britain’, its pictorial programme embodying the abbey’s tense relationship with the monarchy in the early-thirteenth century.21 In this context, the three-beasts motif, a recognised metaphor for idiocy and sin, becomes the counterpoint to good governance represented by the preceding sequence of wise kings and archbishops.22 At Cogges, we find a mouth-puller, an acrobat, and an exhibitionist, motifs that are common enough from other marginal contexts (Figs. 8, 9, and 10). Individually they no doubt carried connotations of sin and excess in a general sense, and perhaps of ‘Roman salt’, but their close integration with the other sculpture and their proximity to the devotions taking place in the chapel space implies another layer of meaning, as at Peterborough, in this case pertinent to the interests of Margaret Oddingsell and her circle.
The field of manuscript studies also offers insights that can be usefully applied at Cogges. Kathryn Smith’s recent work on female book ownership has shown how the interrelated visual and textual programmes of books of hours—so popular with élite laywomen—contributed to the construction of the book-owner’s sense of self.23 The intimate, personalised surroundings of a chantry chapel performed something of the same function for the deceased, and Smith’s work on manuscripts provides a model of how this might apply to Margaret’s chapel. Writing in the related area of music and manuscripts, Emma Dillon notes that texts accompanied by images of lay worshippers attending church ritual enabled the reader to envisage herself witnessing the public event while praying in private: a situation that applied most closely to the Office of the Dead, where the lay text in the book of hours was the same as that in the Breviary, chanted by the priest at the altar.24 This virtual parallel between the devotional environment provided by a book and by architectural space extends fruitfully to Margaret’s chantry chapel in which the Office of the Dead was celebrated in a space defined by manuscript-like imagery.
The prevalence of animals in the sculpture evokes the complex human-animal relationship at the centre of late-medieval culture, explored in a recent volume edited by Brigitte Resl.25 Only humans possessed a fully developed soul yet the boundary between human and non-human was not always clear cut, blurred by the sinful behaviour of humans and the ability of some animals to exhibit intelligence or loyalty or to perform human-like actions.26 The beast musicians at Cogges perhaps visualise this unsettling relativism, expressed thus in the Physiologus, a second-century, Christian collection of moralised beast fables, still influential in the bestiaries of the later Middle Ages: ‘There are some in the church who have the form of piety but deny its force and though they are in church as men, when they depart from the church they become beasts’.27 The dissonance embodied by the corbel beast musicians is continued by other creatures in the frieze who bray and bang gongs. The implied disharmony invites reference to the emerging field of sound studies, typified by the work of Emma Dillon, Susan Boynton and others exploring the representation of sound in medieval art, music, and poetry.28 In one theme, identified by Susan Kay in the troubadour poetry of Marcabru (fl. 1129–48), sound is a metaphor for the danger posed by the unintelligible cacophony of everyday life drowning out the sound of sacred song, a plausible interpretation for the sounding sculpture at Cogges.29
The approaches outlined above demonstrate the variety of physical forms taken by marginalia, the different contexts in which they occur, their polyvalent character and the need for a broad, cross-disciplinary approach to interpretation. With this in mind, the following article explores the sculpture in the small, enclosed chantry chapel at Cogges and proposes a new way of understanding this unusual space.
The church and chapel
The church is one of three, high-status medieval buildings to have survived from the ancient settlement of Cogges. It is flanked to the north by what was once a small, alien priory belonging to Fécamp in Normandy and to the east by the manor house, now a museum of rural life. Together they evoke the nucleus of the medieval village and the close relationship that existed between parish, priory, and patron. Cogges was once a thriving manorial and administrative centre, as these buildings suggest. However, over the course of the thirteenth century it was gradually eclipsed by the expansion of the neighbouring borough of Witney under the patronage of the bishops of Winchester. From the mid-thirteenth to the end of the fourteenth century the major landowners in the area were the Greys of Rotherfield.30
The Oddingsell chapel is situated north of the chancel and, at seven by four metres, is a little shorter and narrower than the chancel itself (Fig. 11). It opens to the north aisle through a narrow archway, and to the chancel through a moulded two-bay arcade under which sits the monument to Margaret Oddingsell. The two bays are differentiated, the east bay having more elaborate mouldings on both inner and outer faces and four head-stops: an unremarkable male pair at the east end and a more distinctive female pair at the west end with expressive faces and different headdresses (Fig. 12). The monument currently stands under the west bay but has been moved, evidently from the more honorific east bay where it was recorded in 1870, attached to the central pier.31 With the tomb in this position, the characterful female head-stops would be over the head of Margaret’s effigy. The plainer west bay suggests that it was not intended for a second monument and that the chapel commemorated Margaret alone.
The monument
The monument comprises the finely-carved effigy of a laywoman in early-fourteenth-century dress, with angels at her head and a lion at her feet, lying on top of a chest edged with ballflower (Fig. 13). There are six equally-sized panels with moulded frames on the chest: four containing the symbols of the Evangelists with blank scrolls; two with grotesques carrying heraldic shields, also blank but perhaps originally painted. Flecks of yellow, black, and red polychromy on the effigy and the angels suggest it was once richly-coloured, perhaps reflecting the palette in the east window glass. The panels were originally arranged symmetrically along the two long sides of the chest with an Evangelist panel on either side of a central coat of arms. On the north side of the tomb this arrangement remains undisturbed, confirmed by unbroken mouldings along the top and bottom edge (Fig. 14). However, when the monument was moved, the three panels from the south side of the chest were wrongly re-assembled.32 The St. Mark panel was placed against the short end of the tomb under the effigy’s feet. The heraldic panel was placed against the other short end, under the head. Neither panel belongs in these positions as there is inadequate room for the frame mouldings and, with the monument in its original location abutting the east return of the east bay, the foot end would be invisible. The St. John panel was placed in the centre of the south side with blank spaces to left and right (Fig. 13). Several small round holes appear on the slab perimeter, irregularly arranged, one containing the remains of a wooden peg which may be medieval. If so, it suggests that the monument was surmounted by a wooden tester or other covering, another possible support for imagery. Two image brackets, now lost, at the head of the effigy were noted in 1870.33
The monument was clearly more elaborate than its current appearance suggests. The design of the base is unusual in featuring the Evangelists so prominently. They often appear as subsidiary details in commemorative sculpture but not as the main focus.34 Contemporary examples include the tomb chest of Elizabeth Montacute (d. 1356) in the Latin chapel at Christ Church, Oxford. Panels with relief figures, probably members of Elizabeth’s family, line the long sides of the chest.35 The symbols of the Evangelists appear in pairs on the short ends as supporters of the Virgin and another female saint. Small-scale Evangelists appear twice on the base of the Harington Tomb, c.1340, at Cartmel Priory, at the bottom corners of the chest and on its ends, and a third time painted on the underside of the tester surrounding Christ in Majesty.36 These examples suggest that lost elements of Margaret Oddingsell’s monument may likewise have supported imagery that related to the Evangelists in some way, perhaps on the underside of the putative tester or on the lost image brackets. An appropriate image does survive in the Head of Christ although this is sculptured into the exterior of the east window frame. Nonetheless, Margaret’s effigy was oriented towards this window—looking at it, as it were—and it seems probable that the stained glass it once contained continued the heavenly theme, connecting the two elements.37
Margaret was closely associated with Cogges throughout her married life. In 1304 her husband obtained licence to have Mass said in an oratory there for himself, his wife and family, suggesting that Margaret was in residence.38 Her son John, aged four at the time, is likely to have been with her and perhaps her younger son, Ralph, too although his date of birth is not recorded.39 Cogges was her principal dower property for at least twenty years after her husband’s death in 1311 and she had relatives at nearby Broadwell in Kelmscott.40 A sense of connection would explain her lavish commemoration in this somewhat out-of-the-way location rather than at Rotherfield (Oxfordshire) or Sculcoates (East Riding, Yorkshire), the main seats of the de Greys; at Stillingfleet (North Riding, Yorkshire) where her second husband Robert Moreby owned land and was commemorated; or at Solihull (Warwickshire), which she part-owned and where her Oddingsell family had an impressive chantry chapel.41 The sculptural programme, the elaborate stained-glass design, and the prominent display of Margaret’s personal connections in the heraldry are all highly individual, not to mention expensive, features. Together with the choice of location, they are, I think, indicative of personal choice and strongly suggest that the chapel not only commemorated Margaret but that she was its patron. Assuming she survived Moreby, her second widowhood in the years after his death in 1336 would have provided her with the means, motivation, and opportunity for establishing and furnishing a chantry.
The marginalia
The stately tetramorph on the monument and the refined heads round the east window are in stark contrast to the profusion of marvellous grotesques in human, animal, and monstrous forms populating the frieze. The ‘babewynes’ are closely packed, engaging animatedly with one another and with the viewer below, the effect magnified by the confines of the architectural space which the frieze delineates (Figs. 15 and 16).
The creatures are interrupted along the north wall by a series of corbels depicting musicians, three of which are beasts wearing wry expressions that seem to acknowledge the racket they are making. A man in hood and cape plays the hand-bells and double pipes. He is accompanied by a bear playing a zither laid across his lap, a monkey plucking a harp, and a lion strumming a citole (Figs. 17–20).
In the adjoining aisle west of the chapel is a second series of slightly smaller corbels also depicting one human and three animal musicians. They are not apparently in situ. The cow in the north-east corner does not marry up with the wall-post above and the horn-blower has been taken out of the series altogether and placed in the corner opposite on the wrong side of the wall, exposing a flat, unfinished surface (Figs. 21 and 22). This set seems to belong stylistically and iconographically to the chapel where, lined up along the south wall, they would have faced their counterparts on the north wall in a series of matched pairs, contributing to the atmosphere of noise and misrule in the confined space of the chapel.4
Considerable traces of polychromy remain on the aisle corbels and it is probable that the other carvings were similarly coloured. However, even in their present, damaged, dingy, and dusty condition, these grinning, leering figures demand attention. Their slinking poses and downward-facing gazes give the impression they are prowling along the top of a wall or ledge, peering down at activity below. They form a continuous, close-linked chain, rubbing shoulders with one another, biting or grasping part of the figure to either side or holding what might be their tails or lengths of cord between them, suggesting a ghastly circle dance.43 Other figures stick out their tongues, expose their genitals or brandish weapons; they grin, growl and hiss, bang gongs and blow horns (Figs. 7, 10, 15, 16, 23 and 24).
Much has been written about the apparently incongruous use of grotesques in sacred spaces where they appear perched along roof lines, round the edges of shrines, under misericords, and as architectural punctuation marks.44 Contemporary scholarship agrees that such category-breaking creatures, whether carved in three dimensions or painted in two, cannot all be whimsy on the part of an inventive image-maker nor the remnants of a not-quite-forgotten pagan past.45 They have been variously described as ‘the other’; ludic ambiguities; warnings of the wages of sin; examples of a topsy-turvy world; references to folk tales or clever riddles; apotropaic figures deterring thieves or warding off the devils that, according to a contemporary sermon, were believed to ‘flye above in the eyer as thycke as motis in the sunne’.46 After provoking an initial, visceral response of perhaps laughter or shock, such images were probably fluid in meaning with a range of connotations. Binski warns against a too-literal pursuit of meaning for marginalia, an approach which assumes they are to be ‘read’ rather than savoured.47 Yet it may be possible to identify an organising theme at Cogges based less on an interpretation of isolated figures than on the visual impact of the whole programme, which here acts as a framing device for devotional activities taking place in a chantry chapel. The carvings are not stationed like lookouts at particular vantage points or around entrances like, for example, apotropaic and guardian figures. Instead, they define the interior contours of a small, intimate space which related very specifically to one individual, Margaret Oddingsell. Following Kathryn Smith’s insightful account of three fourteenth-century English women and their books of hours, the Cogges chapel seems to me to echo elements of these specially-commissioned, luxury items.48 The personalised collections of texts and images in a book of hours served the spiritual and social interests of a living patron rather than a deceased one but otherwise shared many of the same functions as a chantry chapel, reflecting the owner’s devotional preferences and aiding her path to salvation while performing a range of other related functions as well that might include visualising dynastic connections, commemorating events in family, political or religious history, and facilitating literacy: in a sense, embodying the owner’s social self. In one of these, the de Bois Hours which was made for Hawisia de Bois in 1320–25, probably in Oxford, Hawisia and her kin are integrated as petitioners into four, full-page, prefatory miniatures focusing on intercession and judgement, implying a confident hope of salvation.49 Coats of arms are liberally sprinkled throughout, displaying the status of the de Bois family and their connections. Hawisia’s own literacy and piety are implied by her ownership of the book and specifically by a cross written in above her name in a personalised prayer, indicating both that she could read and that she understood the prompt to sign herself with the cross.50 Smith elucidates other less obvious ways in which the pictorial programme was oriented to Hawisia’s interests. For example, an image sequence of the history of the True Cross is accompanied by marginal coats of arms identifying Hawisia’s long dead crusader ancestors. The story provides her with a powerful role model in the empress St. Helena, but its inclusion also highlights her family’s historic connection to the crusades, the True Cross being central to crusader ideology.51 The sequence is one of several carefully-chosen themes threaded throughout the book that helped Hawisia envision herself both in society and in respect of salvation.
Margaret Oddingsell’s chapel was similarly personalised by the choice and design of its imagery. The layout of the grotesque frieze replicates the form of margins and encourages the comparison between this architectural space and a bespoke book of hours. The carvings may repeat the visual motifs of a book that Margaret knew or owned herself, something like MS W 102, for example, a beautifully-illustrated, female-owned book of hours made in England around 1300, now held at the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.52 It contains several initials depicting a woman at prayer, including one of mother and son, and is decorated throughout with wrestlers, monsters, and animals, some of whom play instruments.53 Margaret is likely to have undertaken the early education of her sons herself when they were living at Cogges, and probably used a book of hours to teach them their letters, their first prayers, and to understand their family heritage.54 A book that was full of animals and monsters would certainly have held a small child’s attention. The re-use of the same figures on the chapel walls would prompt memories in her offspring and, more importantly, their dutiful, intercessory prayers for her soul. The use of manuscript illustrations as direct models for sculptural motifs has been noted before, including in memorial contexts.55 I would like to push the analogy further in this case and propose that one way of understanding Margaret’s chapel is to see the whole thing as a monumental version of an illustrated page in a book of hours and thus subject to some of the same analytical approaches.
There can be little doubt that a woman of Margaret’s social standing was a book owner. Perhaps she even commissioned her own. She lived near Oxford, a noted centre of book production, and can be placed within a milieu of female book patronage. Among her near neighbours in Warwickshire where she grew up, and Oxfordshire where she lived after marriage, were the de Bois family.56 Hawisia de Bois’s lavishly illustrated book of hours, mentioned above, included Margaret’s family arms of Oddingsell seven times, one of them apparently marking the marriage of an Oddingsell daughter to one of the Revel family, overlords in Warwickshire (Fig. 25).57 It is likely that Margaret and Hawisia were acquainted and that they would develop similar tastes for fashionable forms of religious/artistic patronage. An interesting comparison can be made between Margaret’s chapel and a page in Hawisia’s book (Fig. 26). The sculptured frieze, which runs along the long walls of the chapel, is like the painted frame running round the page. It is punctuated by the corbels, which approximate to the historiated initials, and the heraldic imagery in stained glass and on Margaret’s tomb equates to the armorial shields in the borders on the page. The east wall of the chapel with its striking window and altar beneath would have provided a similar visual focus to the painted miniature at the top of the page (Figs. 25 and 26). The liturgy offered for Margaret’s soul in the physical space defined by the frieze recalls the sacred text in the centre of the page within the confines of the painted border.
The analogy between chapel and book is further demonstrated by a page from another contemporary example, the De Lisle Hours, also discussed by Smith, on which the owner herself is depicted. A large roundel forming the initial O shows a woman under the central bay of a triple arcade, at prayer before an image of Christ and the Virgin Enthroned (Fig. 27). She is Margaret de Beauchamp, wife of Robert de Lisle, a third Warwickshire heiress whose family had property interests in Oxfordshire, and another of Margaret Oddingsell’s neighbours.58 The top and right-hand borders of the page contain biomorphic figures playing the fife and drum and blowing a trumpet from which flutters a banner with the de Lisle arms. A rabbit, a dog, and some birds also appear, benign cousins of the more menacing creatures in the Cogges frieze. Here again, the painted margins frame the prayer space they create in a similar way to the frieze, heightening its significance. The text within is from the opening of Matins of the Virgin: ‘and my mouth shall tell forth thy praise. God, come to my assistance’. The woman kneeling at the top of the page can be taken as praying these same words, the Little Hours of the Virgin being a key component of the book of hours. It was also very probably part of the liturgical cycle offered at Cogges where Margaret Oddingsell is likewise presented at prayer, hands folded and eyes open.59 However, unlike the living Margaret de Beauchamp, who is shown as a kneeling supplicant, the deceased Margaret Oddingsell lies in serene repose in a state of perpetual adoration as if already gazing on the divine presence. Those praying around the effigy, perhaps with their own books of hours in hand, might be expected to see this as affirmation of their intercessory efforts.
Marginal figures present a challenge in prayerful contexts. Some may be there as attention grabbers, for mnemonic, comic or decorative effect, but others comment in quite specific terms on the devotions they accompany. For example, in the Macclesfield Psalter, a bristle-backed hog with a curly tail blows enthusiastically into an enormous trumpet, accompanying Psalm 46. The text reads: ‘with the voice of the trumpet, Sing psalms to our God, sing psalms … For God is the King of all the earth. Sing psalms wisely’ (Fig. 28). Later on, beneath Psalm 100, a donkey-headed hybrid with a face for a backside has its mouth open and head thrown back. The text here reads: ‘I will sing psalms … And I will have understanding within the immaculate way, when you will draw near to me’ (Fig. 29). The animal musician and the hybrid are absurd impossibilities and the juxtapositions of image and text suggest a metaphor for the difficulties men and women have grasping ineffable truth. This was a problem for contemporary preachers who complained about parishioners gossiping, fighting, playing dice, needleworking, and sleeping during services.60 As the ass with the lyre, it was an established trope, going back to Boethius and beyond and was used by both secular storytellers such as Chaucer and sermon writers.61 One medieval preacher used the image of an ass raising its head from the manger at the sound of pipe or trumpet as a metaphor for the sinful man for whom ‘holy prechynge … commeth in at the one ere, and goyth oute at the othere’.62 A similar idea may be behind the foolish, zither-playing bear and harp-strumming monkey at Cogges, going through the motions but deaf to the significance of the sacred ritual being enacted at their feet.
Margaret’s liturgical requirements are not known but they would have included at least the Requiem Mass and Office of the Dead, consisting largely of extracts from the psalms, partly sung, partly spoken. Could the disharmony of the beast musicians be an admonitory reminder to her chaplain to voice these properly and, just as importantly, not to show off? Both were matters of concern regarding the performers of polyphony.63 Perhaps it extended to Margaret too or members of her household if, like the female owner of the Walters book of hours, they were accustomed to sing the Hours themselves.64 Chaucer’s description of Madame Eglyantyne, his worldly prioress, suggests her efforts at singing were more for show than genuine praise: ‘Ful wel she song the service divine, Entuned in her nose ful seemly’.65 Equally, the use of sophisticated stringed instruments, while part of the traditional iconography of praise, could be censured, as, by the fourteenth century, practitioners were likely to be skilled laypeople, the jongleurs of dubious reputation whose skills crossed over into the temptation-ridden world of popular entertainment and carnival.66 Beast musicians seem to reflect this conflicted view, recalling the stern words of St. Paul: ‘If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels but have not love, I am a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal’.67 In the Walters text, the last page of the Office for the Dead and the whole of the Hours of Jesus Crucified are accompanied by illustrations of the Funeral of Reynard the Fox, where animals process, playing instruments (Figs. 30–35)
This resonates with the sculpture in Margaret’s chapel where animal musicians preside over her memorial services, a similar juxtaposition of image and circumstance. In both cases, animals mock human pious behaviour, rendering it ridiculous, implying the participants’ incomprehension, lack of reverence or expertise, or worse, their insincerity. The discordant music sounds out a warning, both to the false priest and the inattentive parishioner, stock characters from popular culture and no doubt known to Margaret and her circle.68 The jeering, capering figures in the frieze, some of them masked or banging gongs, suggest other reprehensible activities such as the tradition of ‘charivari’, the cacophonous serenading of newly-weds by the community.69 Others represent acrobats and dancers, linked together (Figs. 16 and 36, and, for comparison, Fig. 37). Their antics suggest the world of misrule or carnival and the dangerous distraction from religious devotion offered by worldly entertainments: the singing, dancing, acrobatic shows, miracle-plays, and tavern life railed against by commentators. John Bromyard (d. c. 1352) for example bemoaned the lure of the ‘strumpetis dance’ that kept people from hearing God’s word.70 Robert Mannying (d. c.1338) recounted the story of the sacrilegious dancers of Colbeck who carolled round the churchyard on Christmas Eve instead of attending Mass and were consequently cursed to continue their dance for the rest of the year.71
In conclusion, I propose that in terms of layout and function, Margaret’s chapel represents an architectural version of a page in a book of hours, using visual imagery to individualise, add interest and intensify its effect. The sculpture contains all the elements found on a personalised page in such a book, combined in like fashion with similar effect, creating a physical space for devotion where the page creates a mind-space, and mediating the patron’s image, presenting her amidst her dynastic connections, so important for the success of her family, but also close to God and the saints, establishing her as both materially and spiritually privileged and hinting at her eventual salvation. The grotesques draw on recognisable tropes such as the animal musician, the world-upside-down and carnival, all acceptable material despite, or perhaps because of, their subversive character which works to encourage devout attention, ward off evil spirits, deter thieves and warn of the perils of sin. The unhappy restlessness of the belligerent crowd of monsters and deviants—jeering down from the balcony, as it were—presents a preposterous counterpoint to the ordered ritual of the sacred liturgies taking place beside the monument below. Banished to the sidelines and immobilised in stone, they point up the power of these rituals, thus contributing to Margaret’s salvation and that of those praying for her. The innovative decorative programme of her chapel evokes for today’s viewer not just the sight but the sounds and actions that characterised a medieval chantry, offering a glimpse of the sensory, imaginative world in which Margaret Oddingsell, her family, and wider community lived, inside and outside the church walls.
Citations
[1] John Goodall, ’A Study of the Grotesque 14th-Century Sculpture at Adderbury, Bloxham and Hanwell in its Architectural Context’, Oxoniensia 60 (1995): pp. 318–9.
[2] A stone lintel with a roughened front face hints that it may have continued along the west wall too.
[3] For example, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MS W 120, discussed below.
[4] Compare with the effigy of Henry III at Westminster, 1293, and that of Edward II at Gloucester, early 1340s.
[5] For chantries, see Julian Luxford and John McNeill (eds.), The Medieval Chantry in England (London: Routledge, 2011).
[6] Richard Lee, Oxford, Bodleian Library (hereafter Bodl.) MS Wood D 14, 1574, ff. 56v-8; Nicholas Charles, London, British Library (hereafter BL) MS Cotton Lansdowne 874, 1610, f. 141v; Anthony Wood, Bodl. MS Wood B 15, 1652, f. 56; Bodl. MS Wood E 1, May 1658, f. 46; BL MS Harl. 4170, 1660, f. 48; Richard Rawlinson (1690–1755), Bodl. MS Rawl. B 400c.
[7] John Blair and John M. Steane, ‘Investigations at Cogges, Oxfordshire, 1978–81: The Priory and Parish Church’, Oxoniensia37 (1982): p. 109. Margaret’s date of death is not recorded. Blair and Steane suggest she may have died by October 1330 but the evidence is not definitive.
[8] Robert W. Mitchell, The Carlisle Roll 1334, 32 (Edinburgh: Heraldry Society of Scotland, 1983), p. 453.
[9] Calendar of the patent rolls preserved in the Public record office / prepared under the superintendence of the deputy keeper of the records [hereafter Cal. Pat. Rolls], 1334–38, Edward III, 3 (London: HMSO, 1891), p. 270.
[10] About half the glass is medieval; the rest was restored in 1965. Peter Newton, The County of Oxford: A Catalogue of Medieval Stained Glass (London: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 69.
[11] Witney Deanery Magazine, January 1883.
[12] Goodall, ‘Grotesque Sculpture’, pp. 323–30. Most internal friezes are composed of simple ballflower or other floral motifs, for example at Ducklington (Oxfordshire) and Icklingham (Suffolk). A figurative frieze surrounding the north aisle at Kersey (Suffolk) is not original to the building. It was installed as part of a sixteenth-century programme of refurbishment, perhaps salvaged from Kersey priory. Joanna Caruth and David Gill, ‘Archaeology in Suffolk, 1990’, Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and Natural History 37:3 (1991): pp. 255–82. Thanks to James Cameron for bringing this example to my attention. The closest parallel is with the south aisle at Gaddesby (Lincolnshire) although on a very much smaller and less concentrated scale. A narrow string carved with floral motifs and occasional grotesques runs along the top of the south aisle wall inside, an echo of the more elaborate version outside which lines the eaves and west gable of the fabulously-sculptured exterior.
[13] Proceedings and Excursions of the Oxfordshire Architectural and Historical Society. Michaelmas Term 1869 to Trinity Term 1870 (Oxford: 1870), p. 142.
[14] Blair, ‘Investigations at Cogges’, pp. 86–105; ‘Cogges: Church’, in A. P. Baggs et al, A History of the County of Oxford: 12, Wootton Hundred (South) Including Woodstock (London: Victoria County History, 1990), pp. 69–72, accessed 1 June 2021, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/oxon/vol12/pp69-72; Alan Brooks and Nikolaus Pevsner, Oxfordshire North and West, Buildings of England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), pp. 271–2.
[15] The literature is extensive. See for example Alixe Bovey and John Lowden (eds.), Under the Influence: the Concept of Influence and the Study of Illuminated Manuscripts (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007); Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: the Margins of Medieval Art (London: Reaktion Books, 1992); Lucy Freeman Sandler, ‘The Study of Marginal Imagery, Past, Present and Future’, Studies in Iconography 18 (1997): pp. 1–49; John Block Friedman, ‘Monsters and monstrous races’, in Graeme Dunphy (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Medieval Chronicle (Leiden: Brill, 2010); Paul Hardwick, English Medieval Misericords: the Margins of Meaning (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2011).
[16] Paul Binski, Gothic Wonder: Art, Artifice and the Gothic Style, 1290–1350 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), pp. 263–4, 286.
[17] Binski, Gothic Wonder, pp. 292, 289.
[18] Betsy Chunko-Dominquez, English Gothic Misericord Carvings: History from the Bottom Up. (Leiden: Brill, 2017); Jonathan Foyle, Peterborough Cathedral: A Glimpse of Heaven (London: Scala, 2018), pp. 70–84.
[19] Chunko-Dominguez, Misericords, p. 6; Foyle, Peterborough, p. 72; Binski, Gothic Wonder, pp. 302–5. See also Alixe Bovey, ‘The Smithfield Decretals’, in John Lowden et al (eds.), Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination (London: The British Library, 2011).
[20] Binski, Gothic Wonder, pp. 302, 309.
[21] Jonathan Foyle, personal comment, 10 September 2018; Foyle, Peterborough, p. 70.
[22] Foyle, Peterborough, pp. 72–84.
[23] Kathryn A. Smith, Art, Identity and Devotion in Late-Medieval England: Three Women and their Books of Hours (London: University of Toronto Press, 2003).
[24] Emma Dillon, The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France, 1260–1330 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 214.
[25] Brigitte Resl (ed.), A Cultural History of Animals in the Medieval Age (Oxford: Berg, 2007). See also Kathleen Walker-Meikle, Medieval Pets (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2012).
[26] Pieter de Leemans and Matthew Klemm, ‘Animals and Anthropology in Medieval Philosophy’, in Resl (ed.), A Cultural History of Animals, pp. 157–9.
[27] Robert M. Grant, Early Christians and Animals (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 58.
[28] Dillon, The Sense of Sound; Susan Boynton, introduction to ‘Sound Matters’, Speculum, 91:4 (2016): pp. 998–1002.
[29] Sarah Kay, ‘The Soundscape of Troubadour Lyric, or, How Human Is Song?’, in ‘Sound Matters’, Speculum, 91:4 (2016): p. 1012
[30] ‘Cogges: Manors’, in Baggs et al, A History of the County of Oxford, accessed 1 June 2021, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/oxon/vol12/pp59-61
[31] Proceedings, p. 142.
[32] Proceedings, p. 142.
[33] Proceedings, p. 142.
[34] Sally Badham, ‘The Monument of Lady Margaret Grey’, accessed 1 June 2021, https://churchmonumentssociety.org/monument-of-the-month/the-monument-of-lady-margaret-grey-d-1330-at-cogges-oxfordshire
[35] Anne McGee Morganstern, Gothic Tombs of Kinship in France, the Low Countries and England (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), pp. 3–6, 107–8.
[36] James A. Cameron, ‘The Harington Tomb in Cartmel Priory’ (MA diss., The Courtauld Institute of Art, 2011).
[37] The notion of placing salvific imagery within the sight lines of the dead has been much discussed. See for example, Diane Heath, ‘Tombscape: The Tomb of Lady Joan de Mohun in the Crypt of Canterbury Cathedral’, in Diane Heath, Victoria Blud, and Einat Klafter (eds.), Gender in Medieval Places, Spaces and Thresholds (London: University of London Press, 2019), pp. 185–202; Lucy Wrapson and Marie Louise Sauerberg, ‘Late-Medieval Polychrome Tomb Testers in Canterbury Cathedral and Elsewhere’, in Polychrome Wood: Post-Prints of a Conference in Two Parts Organised by The Institute of Conservation Stone & Wall Paintings Group : Hampton Court Palace, October 2007 & March 2008. (London: Icon, 2010); John Goodall and Linda Monckton, ‘The chantry of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester’, in Martin Henig and Philip Lindley (eds.), Alban and St Albans: Roman and Medieval Architecture, Art and Archaeology (Abingdon: Routledge, 2001), pp. 234–6.
[38] Lincolnshire Archives, Episcopal Register of Bishop John Dalderby 1300–1320, Dioc. Reg. 3, f. 82v. My thanks to John McNeill for his help interpreting this licence and to John Blair for transcribing and translating it.
[39] B. Gregory Bailey, Meaghan E. Bernard et al, ‘Coming of Age and the Family in Medieval England’, Journal of Family History, 33:1 (2008): p. 43.
[40] Oxfordshire Hundred Rolls of 1279, The Hundred of Bampton, Eric Stone and Patricia Hyde (eds.), (Oxford: Oxfordshire Record Society, 1968), pp. 44–5; ‘Broadwell Parish: Kelmscott’, in Simon Townley (ed.), A History of the County of Oxford: Volume 17 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2012), pp. 111–45, accessed 1 June 2021, www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/oxon/vol17/pp111-145.
[41] Cal. Pat. Rolls 1330–36, 372; Cal. Pat. Rolls 1334–38; H. A. Doubleday, D. Warrand and Howard de Walden (eds.), The Complete Peerage or a History of all the House of Lords and all its Members from the Earliest Times, volume six (London, 1926), pp. 144–5; Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, 29 (1929): pp. 53–4; Robert Pemberton, Solihull and its Church (Exeter: William Pollard and Co. Ltd, 1905), pp. 7, 82.
[42] They were perhaps moved when the chapel ceiling failed and required shoring up. The same conceit of pairs of figurative corbels speaking to each other across a sacred space occurs in the chancel at Merton (Oxfordshire). The same toothy, horse-headed creature occurs at both sites and a common workshop is a possibility.
[43] Compare the human and animal dancers who hold short lengths of ribbon between their joined hands in the Queen Mary Psalter, BL MS 2 B VII, ff 176v, 179v, 189r.
[44] See note 9 above.
[45] Kathryn A. Smith, ‘Chivalric Narratives and Devotional Experiences in the Taymouth Hours’, in Alicia Walker and Amanda Luyster (eds.), Negotiating Secular and Sacred in Medieval Art, Christian, Islamic and Buddhist, second edition (Oxford: Routledge, 2016), p. 20.
[46] Camille, Image on the Edge, pp. 26–31; Binski, Gothic Wonder, pp. 286–93; Bovey, Royal Manuscripts, pp. 324–5; Hardwick, English Medieval Misericords, p. 2; Lesley Milner, ‘St Faith’s Chapel at Westminster Abbey: The Significance of its Design, Decoration and Location’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association 169 (2016): pp. 71–94; Lincoln Cathedral Library MS A.6.2 f. 133.
[47] Binski, Gothic Wonder, pp. 286–93.
[48] Smith, Art, Identity and Devotion.
[49] De Bois Hours, New York, Pierpont Morgan Library (hereafter PML) MS M 700, ff. 1v, 2r, 3v, 4r.
[50] PML MS M. 700, f. 147 v.
[51] Smith, Art, Identity and Devotion, pp. 84–95.
[52] Book of Hours, England, c.1300. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore (hereafter Walters) MS W. 102.
[53] Walters MS W 102, ff. 70r, 81v.
[54] Smith, Art, Identity and Devotion, pp. 264–5.
[55] Binski, Gothic Wonder, p. 104; Jessica Barker, ‘Invention and Commemoration in Fourteenth-Century England: A Monumental “family tree” at the Collegiate Church of St. Martin, Lowthorpe’, Gesta, 56:1 (2017): p. 12; Nigel Saul, ‘The Semi-effigial Tomb Slab at Bredon (Worcestershire): Its Character, Affinities and Attribution’, JBAA, 170 (2017): pp. 61, 70.
[56] Smith, Art, Identity and Devotion, pp. 28–30; ‘Standlake: Manors’, in A. P. Baggs et al, A History of the County of Oxford: Volume 13, Bampton Hundred (Part One) (London, 1996), pp. 180–3, accessed 1 June 2021, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/oxon/vol13/pp180-183; Inquisitions and Assessments Relating to Feudal Aids, with other analogous documents preserved in the public office, volume four (London: HMSO, 1899), p. 170.
[57] Smith, Art, Identity and Devotion, p. 100.
[58] ‘Parishes: Stoke Lyne’, in Mary D. Lobel (ed.), A History of the County of Oxford: Volume 6 (London, 1959), pp. 312–23, accessed 1 June 2021, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/oxon/vol6/pp312-323; Smith, Art, Identity and Devotion, pp. 12–19.
[59] Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, Traditional Religion in England c.1400–1580, second edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 210.
[60] G. R. Owst, Preaching in Medieval England: An Introduction to Sermon Manuscripts of the Period 1350–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926), p. 178.
[61] Julia Bolton Holloway, ‘The Asse to the Harpe: Boethian Music in Chaucer’, in M. Masi (ed.), Boethius and the Liberal Arts: A Collection of Essays. Utah Studies in Literature and Linguistics, volume eighteen, (Bern: Peter Lang, 1981), pp. 175–86.
[62] BL MS Royal. 18 B xxiii, f. 110b. Owst, Preaching, p. 192, note 1.
[63] Paul Binski, Becket’s Crown: Art and Imagination in Gothic England 1170–1300 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 263–5.
[64] Dillon, The Sense of Sound, pp. 282–3.
[65] Geoffrey Chaucer, Complete Works, Walter Skeat (ed.), (London: Oxford University Press, 1912), p. 420.
[66] Binski, Becket’s Crown: p. 264.
[67] 1 Corinthians, 13:1.
[68] John Mirk, Instructions for Parish Priests, Edward Peacock and Frederick James Furnivall (eds.) (London: Early English Text Society, revised edition 1902), pp. vii; 31, 33; William Langland, Piers the Plowman, (trans.) J. F. Goodridge (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966), pp. 26–7.
[69] Nicole Belmont, ‘Fonction de la dérision et symbolisme du bruit dans le charivari’, in Jacques Le Goff and Jean-Claude Schmitt (eds.), Le Charivari (Paris: Paris Mouton Éditeur, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1977), pp. 18–21.
[70] BL MS Harley 2276, f. 37.
[71] Robert of Brunne’s Handlyng Synne, AD 1303, With Those Parts of the Anglo-French Treatise on Which it was Founded, William of Waddington’s, “Manuel des Pechiez”, volume one, (ed.) Frederick James Furnivall (London: Kegan Paul, 1902), pp. 284–90.