Medieval carving is probably my favourite style of carving. At first glance, it can often appear simplistic or naive, but the more time you spend looking at it, the more complexity you see in it. Medieval carvings have a sense of freedom and instinctiveness in them that is wonderful to see. They weren’t made in the tighter, more rigorous mode of later carving, but instead in an intuitive way that somehow manages to make mistakes without it being to the detriment of the finished piece. Often, the mistakes make the carvings better for it. Carvers were working day in, day out, in one style, and it meant that they needn’t work to models or drawings for a lot of their carvings - in fact many of them appear to be created off the cuff. More complex scenes like those featured in miserichords may well have had some reference, but the running ornament and foliate details that are so often seen in cathedrals were forms the craftsmen would have worked with time and again, until they could be carved without needing to reference anything but their own experience. There were similar expectations of many of the carving workshops throughout history, but when this is combined with the almost playful medieval aesthetic, this lends the carving a fluidity that’s very appealing, and often a deceptive simplicity that belies the skill of the craftsman who made it.
This carving, made on behalf of Lincoln for their Heritage Skills Festival 2017, and taken from a stone carving detail in the cathedral sanctuary, really typifies that practice. The bird depicted looks very naively carved at first glance, with its shallowly inscribed round eye and its splayed feet, but the more you look at it the more it rewards you for looking. At 200mm x 100mm it’s small enough to be held in the hands, and when remembering that the original was carved in stone it tells you not only the fineness and quality of Lincoln Cathedral’s stone but the skill of their carvers to get such beautiful details. Every feather (at no longer than 8mm and in some as small as 3mm) has its shaft cut in, and the leaves are all V-cut and curling gently at the edges. There are other details too, that came to light as I worked on it. The bird initially looked more like a symbolic representation of a bird rather than a particular species, but the square curve of its neck where it meets its belly follows the distinctive shape of a dove’s breastbone, and cast in that light the round, staring eye makes sense to anyone who’s been the recipient of a sidelong stare by a pigeon or a dove.
I got the privilege to carve this in some of the original 12th Century oak, which had suffered from wood worm and been removed from the cathedral roof beams as part of the restoration process. Often old timber can be problematic or unpleasant to work with, becoming very hard, or brittle, but this particular piece was lovely to work with. Oak is always more intractable than other varieties of wood - with its strong and open grain it demands a level of attention and understanding that other woods don’t, and moments of inattention or frustration can result in the forms you’ve been carefully shaping snapping off and (if you’re unlucky) joining the piles of hundreds of other wood chips around your work. There’s also a lot of variation between different species of oak. American White Oak tends to typify the negative qualities of oak, so while it’s a beautiful wood in joinery it’s never been a favourite to carve with, and even among the European stock there is always a lot of variation. This is one of the nice quirks of working in wood - that even two trees of the same species can differ so much simply based on growing conditions. Carvers want a close grained wood, which means a slow growing tree. I always joke that we need the trees to live a hard and suffering life for our work, but there’s something in it. Cold winters, less water and nutrients lead to a reduced growth, pulling the annual rings closer together and resulting in a finer grain, which is ideal for carvers.
The life of a tree is an interesting thing. When we cut them down, we can see a visual history of the years they lived, the hard years and the good ones, written in their growth rings. Looking at the past, at timber that grew to maturity and was cut down some 900 years ago, we get a very different story to the one we get now. We know that the winters were colder then, and the climate different, and that in turn reflects changes in the body of the trees that grew then. Anyone who’s taken one of Lincoln Cathedral’s (free) tours of the roof will see the immense size of the beams used there - the trees of that time were also allowed to grow to sizes that aren’t really viable for commercial timber nowadays. The piece of oak I carved this from was dense, and heavier than I’ve often found modern oak to be. I remember when I first began carving being disappointed by the weight of a piece of oak - it felt so light, for its size. It’s become a synonym in our language for heavy, dense and strong, and it’s only when carving English Oak and now this piece of very old English oak that I really feel it has the weight I’m subconsciously expecting.
There were also other differences. When you cut with the grain and down across on most timber, you’re often rewarded with a lovely shine to the cut. It’s not always possible to do this all over, as some angles are simply inaccessible, but that’s the surface you hope to get when working on a carving. Oak is always particularly rewarding in this, perhaps because it’s such a contrast to the tormented surface you get when cutting against the grain, and this very old oak produced a really satisfying, almost waxy finish to the cut.
It’s always challenging to work on a replica. You’re required to mirror cuts and shapes that were made spontaneously by the carver; in this case a carver working many hundreds of years ago in a different material. In wood at least you can see the shapes the chisels left and match them to your own knowing that chisels have been the same shape for at least that long, but the finish and surface quality of stone is very different. The original was also part of a larger moulding that couldn’t have been replicated well when carving in section, so there came a point when this carving diverged slightly in the angle it was presented at, but I remained as faithful to the spirit of the original as was possible.
