East window (late 15th century - early 16th century), Church of St Andrew, Greystoke, Cumbria.

Photo: © CVMA/Gordon Plumb

Detail of central south window of the chancel (late 15th century), Church of St Andrew, Greystoke, Cumbria.

Photo: © CVMA/Gordon Plumb

Church of St Andrew, Greystoke, Cumbria

Address

Church of St Andrew, Church Rd, Greystoke, Cumbria, CA11 0TL

Recommended by

Penny Hebgin-Barnes (10)

Highlight

East window and central south window of the chancel

Artist, maker and date

Medieval glaziers, late 15th-century, and York workshop, early 16th-century

Reason for highlighting

The east window contains a large assembly of glass including in the two lower rows a number of late fifteenth century panels illustrating a popular apocryphal account of the life of the church’s patron St Andrew: in two of the best preserved scenes he disembarks from a ship and conducts a mass baptism in a river. In the upper part of the window are a bishop saint, the Virgin Annunciate and groups of donors of early sixteenth century date, and the Five Wounds of Christ, another bishop saint and various heads. The tracery is filled with medieval fragments and nineteenth century shields and emblems.

The central south window of the chancel, known as the Bestiary window, contains a collection of nine fifteenth century roundels with speckled grounds depicting a Trinity shield surrounded by birds including eagles and a phoenix, a weasel, an ass and an antelope. The beasts are described by English inscriptions as “nas” and “nantelope” while the birds have Latin scrolls bearing texts such as “Osanna”.

Other comments

The east window was assembled in 1849 by Thomas Willement who not only supplemented the church’s existing glass with new canopies and armorials but inserted some fourteenth century fragments that he had removed from the Lady Chapel of Wells Cathedral, demonstrating a rather cavalier approach towards restoration that was characteristic of the mid-nineteenth century.

The north-east and south-east windows of the chancel dated 1848 are by Willement who modelled them on the Bestiary window which he had restored, with the same arrangement of nine round centrepieces depicting shields set on speckled grounds.

Sources:
T. Lees, ‘On the Stained Glass in the East Window of the Chancel of Greystoke Church’, Transactions of the Cumberland & Westmorland Antiquarian & Archaeological Society ii, 1876, pp.375-89 ( https://doi.org/10.5284/1064887 )
K. Ayre, Medieval English Figurative Roundels, Oxford, 2002, pp. 16-18.

Artist/maker notes

The workshop which produced the bishop saint, Virgin Annunciate and donors also worked at St Anthony’s, Cartmel Fell and Bowness-on-Windermere in Cumbria. It was almost certainly based in York where its output from the 1530s remains at the church of St Michael-le-Belfrey and in the chapter house of York Minster.