Fig. 1. Sorgheloos in poverty. Christ Church, Llanwarne. © C B newham
Parishioners in the tiny village of Llanwarne (Herefordshire) have launched a fund-raising appeal to help with the cost of restoring twenty-six Flemish roundels that were given to the church in 1901.
The roundels feature some extremely rare subjects, including scenes from the story of Sorgheloos (sometimes spelt Sorghelos), a late-medieval Dutch morality tale about a young man who squanders his fortune on gambling, loose women and false companions [Fig. 4]. When he becomes penniless, his friends and family desert him and he ends up destitute. Unlike the Christian parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke XV, 11–32), Sorgheloos is rejected when he returns home. It is a harsh warning to the irresponsible and feckless. Sorgheloos has been the subject of a previous Vidimus ‘Name that Roundel’ puzzle; see Vidimus 41.
The glass was donated to the church by the then rector, Walter Baskerville Mynors (1826–1932), after it was removed from the parish church of St Weonard in 1884 by Walter’s younger brother Robert Baskerville Mynors (b.1819), to make way for a memorial window to their mother. The Mynors family lived at nearby Treago Castle, a fortified manor house built c.1500. The glass had been brought to Herefordshire by Walter and Robert’s mother Elizabeth (née Halliday) after she married Peter Mynors (b.1787) in 1817, and came from part of her family’s Somerset estate at Chapel Cleeve.
A fund-raising appeal is being launched in the village over the weekend of 18–20 May. This will include an exhibition and a talk by Dan Humphries of Holywell Glass. Telephone 01981 540825 for more information and tickets.
If anyone would like to contribute to the appeal, please send cheques payable to ‘Llanwarne PCC’ to Anne Hyde Smith, The Old Manor House, Llanwarne HR2 8JE.
NOTE
The Llanwarne glass is described by William Cole in his Catalogue of Netherlandish and North European Roundels in Britain, CVMA (GB), Summary Catalogue 1, Oxford, 1993, pp. 131–34. The Sorgheloos roundels are also discussed in. J. Berserik and J. M. A. Caen, Silver-Stained Roundels and Unipartite Panels before the French Revolution. Flanders, II: The Provinces of East and West Flanders, Turnhout, 2011.
