Context 152 - November 2017

16 C O N T E X T 1 5 2 : N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 7 colours to bring out the geometry of the design.The best surviving examples come from Byland Abbey. Some are in situ, and a number have been reassembled in the British Museum. In the south of England a different tradition – two-tone tiles inlaid with designs – was preferred.They were first commissioned by Henry III in 1237 for the now lost St Stephen’s Chapel atWestminster, and subsequently for his palace at Clarendon, near Salisbury. Parts of pavements from the king’s and queen’s chambers in the palace were transferred to the British Museum under the supervision of Elizabeth Eames,who curated the museum’s collection for many years.Under her supervision they were displayed on the floor of a specialist tile gallery but they have since been removed to the walls of an all-purpose medieval room.The tiles were made by impressing a wooden stamp in the red clay body of the tile, infilling the impression with white clay, glazing and baking. Henry III’s finest inlaid tile pavement remains in situ in his chapter house atWestminster Abbey. Completed by 1258, the tiles contain 36 different designs, some of superb draughtsmanship, but altogether forming a unified pattern. Laurence Keen described the pavement as ‘without any doubt, the most important surviving example in Europe’. It has survived so well since the room was covered by a wooden floor after the Reformation when it was used as a record office. It was revealed and restored by Gilbert Scott in 1863. Some years ago it was possible to walk on it in felt slippers, enjoying to the full the experience of this magnificent floor, but the slippers have had to be abandoned in favour of matting. Medieval tiled floors continue to be rediscovered. One of c1300 was found in 1987 in the library at Lichfield; the complete medieval design has been recovered. In 2015 a floor at Exeter Cathedral was uncovered by the cathedral’s archaeologist, John Allan, during renovation work. It is in a room above a chapel, which in the middle ages was used as the Exchequer and in the 20th century as the Song School for boy choristers. It had probably been boarded for over a century, and no one alive had ever seen it.Allan observed that round the edges, where it had not been walked on by decades of feet, the glazing of the tiles was still intact and they looked as if they were new. AfterWestminster Abbey, the retro-choir ofWinchester Cathedral contains one of the most important spreads of 13th-century floor tiles in the country, including large areas where the original ‘carpet’ scheme has been preserved. Wear caused by visitors’ feet risked eventually causing the complete obliteration of the tile patterns in unprotected areas. As some of the tiles were loose, a number were stolen; a tile said to come from Winchester Cathedral was sold at auction in the 1980s. The Winchester pavements have now been restored. While some problems could not be rectified, the tiles look magnificent. Such inlaid tiles were widely used in great churches, for example in the muniment room at Salisbury.A number of the most famous series include those of c1350 depicting Tristan and Isolde and Richard the Lionheart and Saladin from Chertsey Abbey. A tile fromTring shows a schoolmaster striking the young Jesus. The tradition of inlaid tiles continued into the 15th century with a particularly fine collection at Great Malvern Priory. Here the floor tiles have been lifted and fixed to the walls, along with original wall tiles. While ornamental floors were laid in the chancel and east end, in other parts of the church floors were often laid with paving slabs, commonly of Purbeck marble. Even specialist accounts of medieval floors have tended to give little attention to such paving. Purbeck marble survives from the 13th century at Salisbury and from the 14th at Winchester, where the remains of Bishop Tiles in the retrochoir in Winchester Cathedral: an area before restoration and another after and (far right) Cosmati paving at Westminster Abbey