The Medieval Stained Glass Windows at Upper Hardres

( 153 THE MEDIEVAL STAINED GLASS WINDOWS AT UPPER HARDRES. BY N. E. TOKE. IT is noticeable that those churches of Kent which contain the :finest remains of medieval stained glass are situated neither in the towns, nor in the more important villages, but in sparsely inhabited country parishes which lie, for the most part, away from the main roads. Several reasons may be assigned for this fact. When Queen Elizabeth, at the beginning of her reign, prescribed the removal and destruction of" pictures, paintings, and all other monuments of feigned miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry, and superstition ", stained glass windows were frequently allowed to remain more or less intact because the re-glazing would have entailed too great an expense. The glass containing figures was therefore, in all probability, retained longer in the poorer than in the richer parishes. The same question of expense may also have restrained the destroying hands of the iconoclasts in the seventeenth century. Ultra-puritanical persons might have desired the destruction of the images in glass which offended their eyes every Sabbath day, but the parishioners hesitated to incur the cost of their removal. It is also not unlikely that the smaller villages were less puritanically inclined than the larger centres of population, and that the majority of their inhabitants, as well as the squires who were, in many cases, descendants of the donors of the windows, resented any attempt to destroy the ancient glass. An. instance of this opposition by a squire occurred at Cranbrook, which was a large and important village in the sixteenth century. Walter Roberts, son and heir of John Roberts, Esq., of Glassenbury, who died in 1460, had inserted in the east window of the chancel a painting of his father, in armour, kneeling before a desk on which lay a 154 THE MEDIEVAL STAINED GLASS WINDOWS book inscribed with a prayer for the souls of the deceased, his wife, and the donor Walter and his three wives. This painted glass remained intact for twenty-four years after the order of 1559 prescribing the destruction of inscriptions savouring of Romish doctrine, although the churchwardens were summoned more than once to remove it. The opposition came from another Walter Roberts of Glassenbury, who resented the removal of his ancestral glass. Walter Roberts died in 1580, and his son and heir, Thomas, who, in 1582, married a lady who was strongly attached to the doctrines of the Reformation, seems then to have withdrawn the opposition of. the family, for the glass was destroyed in 1583, when a glazier was paid" for mending of the windows of the church, and taking down of pictures in the said windows, 15s. 4d." The destruction of stained glass which took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was continued in the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century, when the restoration of churches was accompanied by a desire for more light, and consequently by a preference for clear glass. It is much to be regretted that few of the restorers were of the opinion of the Rev. Philip Parsons, who remarks in his Monuments and Stained Glass in One Hundred Churches (published in 1794) :-" I confess I am delighted with this beautiful ornament [painted glass] in whatsoever place I meet with it, but more especially in our churches where I think that windows ' With painted stories richly dight Casting a dim religious light ', are infinitely superior to the glaring glass of our modern churches, and much more suitable to a place of devotion. . . It is therefore with regret and some kind of indignation that I see these beautiful and venerable memorials too often shamefully neglected and broken in churches, as well as very frequently falling to pieces and unregarded in the halls and kitchens of farmhouses, where once they were the honest pride and pleasure of our ancestors." AT UPPER HARDRES. 155 Fortunately public opinion has changed and every effort is made now-a-days to preserve the few fragments which remain to us of the splendid glass which once filled our churches. It is, however, unfortunate that these remains are, in many cases, difficult of access, and that they are, in consequence, seldom visited. This has been the case with the church of St. Peter and St. Paul, Upper Hardres, which contains some of the oldest and , finest medieval glass in Kent, but which was almost unknown, except to archreologists, until omnibuses started running, via Stone Street, between Canterbury and Folkestone. The Perpendicular west window of the church is filled with a medley of grisaille and quarries of various dates in which a,re inserted three beautiful medallions of the early part of the thirteenth century. They can be inspected and studied with ease at close quarters by means of the ancient wooden gallery which runs along the west end of the church immediately again􀂧t the window. The northernmost (Plate. I) of the three medallions illustrates the well-known legend of St. Nicholas and the three poor i;:m.aidens. The story goes that in the city, where the saililt lived, a nobleman was reduced to abject poverty, an