Both Worcester cathedral and Great Malvern Priory church have fine surviving medieval misericords. Misericords were shallow shelves on the underside of hinged seats in the Choir of a medieval monastic church which allowed the allowed the monk a rest point while remaining standing as was required for much of the eight dayly acts of worship which the brethren were required to attend. The word is derived from the Latin for ‘mercy’, as in a section of the Catholic Mass.
Most surviving misericords have under the shallow shelf a central wood carving with two ‘supporters’, carvings, either side. The one from Malvern church illustrated above shows a swineherd shaking acorns from an oak tree for the domesticated boar (swine) to feed on. Often the ‘supporters’ were unrelated to the central carving. Clearly here the misericords were the handiwork of a very skilled, a relatively expensive, carver. The misericord shown here was originally one of 12 forming a ‘Kalendar’, but successive restorations muddled the sequence.
Misericords provide much evidence of medieval folklore, costumes and ideas, they are a product of their time. Presumably the wood-carver had a high degree of freedom in choosing what to portray as some are very irreverent. For example another misericord at Malvern shows three mice hanging a cat from a beam with two owls as supporters. This, maybe, to reverse convention, ‘cats eat mice’, or symbolic in some way as the medieval mind would have known what the cat, the mice and the owls represented. One explanation for the freedom given to the wood-carver is that religious representations were unsuitable for sitting on – an explanation that seems to me lacking.
Another brilliant programme last night on Channel 4 about the great progresses made in cosmology and current ideas about ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’. It is amazing that we are witnessing an age when the origin, nature and future of the Universe are being revealed.
Would, please, anyone who reads this stuff send me a message – its a lonely pursuit.