'The English Church' by Tim Tatton-Brown and John Crook includes pix of the
windows at St Neot, Cornwall, showing the life of Neot and dated to 1520s.
St Neot's well is shown as a low, round stone structure with an outflow at
the side - through a lion mask somewhat akin to foliate heads - surrounded
by grass with daisies (therefore outdoors). An earlier window at Exeter
Cathedral shows Sidwell with her well, also round (though apparently
covered) and with an outflow, but less helpful on its setting.
As restored, St Neot's Well bears little or no resemblance to the window.
Sidwell's well just outside Exeter, as it survived into 18th or 19th C, had
a well house around the spring. Windows were usually not made at the
location where they were installed; do the St Neot's and Exeter windows have
any claim to authentic medieval representation, or are they adding to
confusion between shaft wells and springs, because the artists imagined them
as shaft wells? Well houses could be later additions, of course - the one at
St Kenelm's Well on the Sudeley estate just outside Winchcombe dates from
the 1570s, and apparently uses stone from the abbey church. Are there any
other medieval representations of springs or spring heads?
(The Neot window also refers to a motif in the legend whereby the saint
restored to life two fish which had lived in the well, but which had been
killed by a servant. Elizabeth Rees ('Celtic Sites and their Saints')
remarks that the 12th C legend was apparently written at the Benedictine
abbey of Bec - in Normandy, but associated with England through Lanfranc and
Anselm, and with English land-holdings. She comments that several Irish
motifs were incorporated into Neot's legend. Which suggests how synthetic
hagiography could be.)
Christine Buckley
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