Until the later twentieth century, repairs within Canterbury’s stained glass windows were done at the discretion of the restorer. While this work was largely well-intentioned, it destroyed much important material and could be misleading. Today, the aim is to do as little intervention as possible, and proposed changes have to be approved by two decision boards, one internal and the other external to the cathedral.
In the case of nIII, we applied for and received permission to change two wayward heads. One of these heads was found on the third panel of the leper Ralph’s story. Austin must have found this panel in bad repair. He reconstructed a significant portion of it, and in an unintentionally amusing slip-up, he supplied Ralph with a woman’s wimpled head. This mistake is particularly egregious because as Ralph steps forward to give thanks at Becket’s tomb, his tunic has parted to show much of his leg and even a bit of his blue underpants. No woman exposes her underpants in the miracle windows!
To rectify this problem, Léonie Seliger modelled a new head for Ralph and a small section of cloak by his neck, basing them on surviving medieval examples. Isabelle Davis cut pieces of glass to the correct size, painted the head and piece of cloak, and gave the glass the appearance of age. The female head made by Austin was removed and archived, and the new pieces were inserted.
The other wayward head was found in the second panel of Goditha of Hayes’ story. We now know that this complex panel contains, at its centre, a inserted scene from window nV picturing the gift of Becket’s clothing to the poor. In 1947, this panel was examined by the art historian Bernard Rackham. Not knowing that a scene had been inserted, he found it mystifying. He especially could not understand why a mitre was perched on top of a chair, not realizing that the mitre was there to signal that Becket’s clothing was being given away.
Asked to provide advice, the glazier Samuel Caldwell Jr removed the mitre and created a man’s head to take its place. At the time, he needed no permission to interfere with the panel in this way. Rackham thought Caldwell’s work improved things, though the new head made it look as if a man with no feet or legs was looking on the scene from behind a chair.
In 2022, Léonie Seliger discovered that Caldwell had saved and reused the mitre in a panel he constructed in the early 1950s for window nVII. Though it was tempting to rescue and restore the original mitre, we decided to leave the nVII panel intact and create a replica mitre instead. Isabelle Davis painted a replica mitre, the head inserted by Caldwell was removed and archived, and the replica put in its place.
By giving Ralph a male head and returning a replica mitre to the gift of clothing scene, our aim is to reduce confusion and restore what we can of the medieval glaziers’ vision and intent.