When believing is not all there is to seeing

In his 100-page introduction to the Collins Guide to the Parish Churches of England and Wales (1958), John Betjeman does not deem it necessary to explain any of the symbolism in architecture or decoration. It is interesting to speculate whether this was because he could have assumed that, despite only ‘scattered worshippers in the nave’, the majority of the country was churched, if only through the common rites of baptism, marriage and burial, or the National Service church parade. Just a decade later he could surely not have made that assumption.

A century and a half before Betjeman’s masterpiece, Cainy Ball’s ‘pore mother’ in Far from the Madding Crowd, being neither a ‘Scripture-read woman’ nor a church- goer, makes the mistake of naming her infant son because she thought ‘t’was Abel killed Cain’. She did at least know the names of two of the sons of Adam and Eve, but if she had been in the habit of going into church, even if not to church, would the building’s symbolism have taught her anything?

No, would say the author of this admirable little book. Richard Taylor, a lawyer who has evidently spent much of his life in choir, nave and chancel, maintains that the ‘explanation of church imagery as the “storybook of the illiterate’’ ’ is unconvincing. Cainy Ball’s mother would have had to be familiar with the basics, whether from the page or the oral tradition, else the imagery would have had nothing reliably to work on. ‘I do not believe that these images would have been any more useful for the peasant than for the king,’ says Taylor, which seems plausible since the costly decoration could not always have been mere altruism. ‘The power of the images to teach is even-handed.