Today's Church Crawl took us to Weobley, a charming village on the "Black and White" trail, with a multitude of appropriately-timbered houses, and a relic of the more recent past (still in use in fact?) that I couldn't resist putting into black and white too. The church is huge: mostly fourteenth-century as we see it, with the second-highest steeple in the county. A preaching cross stands outside, which we are told still has openings into which the Eucharistic elements would be set. It took me back to a much earlier Cross at Bewcastle which with some its other eighth-century companions had holes drilled in in them in which relics would be placed before using at as a mass station. The church has the air of being well-loved and well-used by the people of today, and inside inevitably are also reminders of those in the past who did the same - a civil war Colonel, a medieval lady (some hair-do!) and a whiskered gent from more recent times. I wonder if the DAC would ever allow a modern effigy to be added? And if so , who would be the subject? Above in the south aisle are the re-set remains of some remarkable fifteenth-century stained glass. Pevsner and the church guide just say "six seraphim" and leave it at that. Seraphs they may be, though I am struggling to see six wings. But what it are remarkable are their costumes and the objects they are holding. They are not so much angels as people dressed up as angels, wearing angel-suits in fact - as is so often seen in Norfolk - and they seem to be holding not symbols of angelic office but of local trades - a hammer, a ladder, a sheaf, a spear. I'm going to stick my neck out and say that here we have a could just possible have an illustration of a local pageant or mystery play in which representatives of local trades or guilds would don their angel-suits and proudly carry the symbols of their occupations. What do you think? David Thomson | February 2, 2019 at 3:37 pm | Categories: Uncategorized | URL: https://wp.me/poSLL-3EN |