GO into any church and chances are you'll find, hanging from hooks behind the pews, colour-fully embroidered kneelers or hassocks. Many will be patterned with familiar Biblical motifs-a dove, a cross, a cup and so on. Some may have heraldic or royal insignia; others might be considerably more eccentric. In her wonderful new book, Kneelers: The Unsung Folk Art of England and Wales, Elizabeth Bingham offers illustrations of kneelers depicting a de Havilland DH 108 jet aeroplane, a stethoscope, beach huts, the Sizewell nuclear-power station and an oil rig.
Despite the kneelers' richness and diversity, we tend to overlook these often anonymous examples of skill, imagination and pride in community. Instead, we raise our eyes to the stained glass or the spire or the vaulting. The direction of our gaze is illustrative. Whether we've entered the church for devotional reasons or simply out of interest, we are all heirs of a prevailing view that encourages us to look up and to think, to reflect, to use our minds (and our guidebooks), rather than our bodies.
However, unlike the decorated windows or the architectural flourishes or the memorial tablets, these kneelers aren't for looking at (or not merely for looking at): they are useful. The kneelers modestly tucked under the pews are a reminder that we're in the church not only as enquiring minds, but as living bodies, with flesh and blood and creaking knee joints. These days, we're encouraged to 'read' a church as we would a text. Richard Taylor's 2003 book How to Read a Church makes no mention of kneelers in all of its nearly 300 pages.
Denne historien er fra December 13 - 20, 2023 (Double Issue)-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra December 13 - 20, 2023 (Double Issue)-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
