Fallen Angels

The Suffolk Puritan William Dowsing travelled around East Anglia in the mid-17th century damaging or removing idolatrous church images, as Joad Raymond writes in Milton's Angels in December. He took particular exception to angels. So where exactly were (or still are) these angels? What churches did Dowsing visit on his iconoclastic journey? Luckily, the London Library has a copy of his diary, The Journal of William Dowsing which gives dates, locations and details of all the angels he targeted. He defaced the medieval rood screen at Southwold, Suffolk, and destroyed angels on bench ends including a couple in Cambridgeshire – though these were later restored. So has anyone photographed them? Well, I did find the nine orders of angels at Southwold where their faces were obviously obliterated, but the bench ends proved more difficult and needed a different approach.

Brian and Sally Shuel have been running Collections Picture Library specialising in the British Isles since 1990, and they have connections with photographers the length and breadth of the land, starting obviously with Brian himself. They’d already helped enormously with the Pentrich Revolution article in November. I had identified a few locations specific to the rising and, before you could say ‘stocking-frame worker’, they had a local photographer out and about in Derbyshire. Although they didn’t have photographs of the bench ends, they fancied a trip to Cambridgeshire to locate Dowsing’s handiwork and that was exactly what they did. They sent me a selection of photographs the following week, and we chose one of the restored pair of angels at Bourn.

Image:

One of a pair of restored angels on bench ends in the chancel at Bourn Church, Cambridgeshire.