Our monthly meeting was about stained glass and the speaker, Christopher Parkinson, who is presently co-authoring a book on stained glass in Essex was the perfect person to guide us through local examples of this art and craft.
The earliest example of coloured glass in church windows was in the twelfth century and the church in Rivenhall still has some of this. Glass is basically melted sand with flux added, and could only be used in medieval times in small quantities. As the years went by, other processes like adding silver nitrate and using enamel were invented and Christopher had many beautiful photographs from local churches – Denston, Depden, Thurlow, Lidgate and Nowton – to illustrate his talk.
He also told us about the designers of windows from Pugin, William Morris, Charles Kempe and others who worked locally. The first woman to work in stained glass was the designer Mary Lowndes, a former suffragette. Most of us had heard of john Piper who was working in the 1980s but the big surprise was the beautiful window in the church at Whittlesford which commemorates the pandemic. One side is dark and shows the bad side of people in masks and behind windows and the other is light and bright and shows people hugging and gathering together.
This brought the subject right into the 21st Century and made us all want to go and visit our beautiful local churches.