Dear Christine & All,
The east window at Exeter Cathedral was created by the glazier Robert Lyon of Exeter in 1389, but he seems to have reused a great deal of older glass although he was fairly scrupulous about matching up the style. St. Sidwell is one of the reused panels and would originally have featured in a slightly smaller window of 1360x80. She is part of a set with St. Helen, Edward the Confessor, and Edmund - all of them indigenous saints; but although the window would have been commissioned about the time that Bishop Grandisson was working on his Legenda, there doesn't seem to be any organising scheme in the choice of saints, except that the women are on the left and the men on the right. I'm relying on Herbert E. Bishop's The Building of the Cathedral Church of St. Peter in Exeter (James G. Commin, Exeter, 1922) pp154-5 for all this.
Any ideas based on the St. Neot's window should be taken with great caution as they were extensively restored (i.e. mucked around with) by J.P. Hedgeland in 1826-9. The fish-and-well panels were among of the more fragmentary ones and he may have added details to the well which weren't there before. Gordon MacNeil Rushforth first drew attention to this in Devon & Cornwall Notes & Queries 17 (1932-3) pp224-6, which I've seen, and afterwards published A Short Guide to the Painted Windows in the Church of St. Neot, Cornwall (Exeter, 1937), which I haven't.
St. Neot seems to belong to a genre of Life-and-Miracles windows for local saints: apart from the St. Thomas ones at Canterbury, they all seem to be 14th or 15th centuries, with the subjects set out one by one in the panels of Perpendicular glazing. There's St. William at York, St. Werstan at Great Malvern, and St. Robert of Knaresborough at Morley (but originally at Darley Abbey). The St. Chad windows at Peterborough, described by Hope from information supplied by Canon James Raine, were in the cloisters and seem to have survived until the Civil War. There may be more information in the online Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi.
A list of mediaeval art showing saints and their wells would be worth having. St. Endelient and her well appears on the rosary of Nicholas Roscarrock, which is in the V&A - it's illustrated in Nicholas Orme's edition of the Lives, but not very helpfully. I've seen an alabaster plaque of St. Armel with dragon on a leash and a well springing at his feet. There are early depictions of the Flintshire Holywell, aren't there? Otherwise not much.
Hope you had a good Christmas and best wishes to all for the New Year.
Jeremy Harte
-----Original Message-----
From: WATER TALK - the email discussion list for springs and spas
enthusiasts [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Stephen
Buckley
Sent: 29 December 2005 11:54
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Wells in stained glass windows
'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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