An overdoor relief with an angel and a shield displaying the white rose of York
English
Category
Art / Sculpture
Date
c. 1450 - 1480 (or c. 1820-1850)
Materials
Wood
Measurements
265 mm (H)1080 mm (W)240 mm (D)
Order this imageCollection
Oxburgh Hall, Norfolk
NT 1209655
Summary
Sculpture, wood; pediment with an angel with the white rose of York; English, c. 1450-1480 or later, c. 1820-1850. The overdoor relief depicts an angel holding a shield with the white rose of the House of York, one of the key symbols in the Wars of the Roses fought from the 1450s to the 1480s between supporters of the houses of Lancaster (red rose) and York (white rose). Sir Edmund Bedingfeld (d. 1496), the builder of Oxburgh Hall, was a committed Yorkist, who nevertheless changed loyalty to the new Lancastrian king Henry VII after the Yorkist defeat at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. The form of the angel in the relief has analogies with some of the medieval angel figures that populate the roofs of many churches, especially in East Anglia. So the relief could well date from the fifteenth century and might even be a rare surviving early element from Oxburgh Hall, built c. 1482, but with some later restorations, including the head of the angel. But alternatively it might have been made much later in the nineteenth century, when antiquarians such as Sir Henry Paston-Bedingfield, 6th Baronet (1800-62) eagerly sought for their collections supposedly ancient objects, especially those with romantic historical associations.
Full description
A painted and gilded wooden pediment, with a crouching half-angel with outspread wings, holding in its hands a shield with a white rose, symbolizing the House of York, the torso terminating in a band of amorphous and stylised vegetation. The angel is placed atop a form of console with, at each end, a three-leaved flower and, either side of the angel, two areas of wood. The one under the left wing is incised with a sinuous vine-like plant with crude leaves, whilst the space under the right wing has a pattern of small rectangles formed by vertical and horizontal incised lines. There is some damage to the object; a section at the far right has been lost and replaced, whilst there is an inserted piece of wood in the centre of the left-hand flower. The head of the angel seems under-sized and is likely to be a later replacement, although it is very difficult to confirm this, with the sculpture in its present position above a doorway and with heavy overpaint in this area. The current painted surface is thoughBedingfeld (d. 1496), the builder of Oxburgh Hall, was a committed Yorkist, although he had the foresight to switch allegiance to Henry Tudor after the defeat and death of Richard III at the battle of Bosworth. The permission to build Oxburgh Hall came from the Yorkist king Edward IV in 1482, whilst at Richard III’s coronation in 1483, Sir Edmund was created a Knight of the Bath. The design of the half-angel is close in conception to medieval angel types that today largely survive as part of roof decorations. Good examples include the half-length angels with spread wings that run along the cornice (wall-tablet) of the nave roof of St. Mary’s Church, Bury St. Edmunds, of c. 1480 (Montagu 1998, p. 78, Pl. 123; Rimmer 2015, pp. 76-83). Roofs including angels are a particular characteristic of medieval churches in East Anglia, where the vast majority of surviving examples are to be found (Rimmer 2015, pp. 2-9). These often feature angels with huge wings, who hold an heraldic shield or other object in both hands. Some forty churches in Norfolk have surviving angel roofs, most from the fifteenth century, for example St Mary and St Thomas of Canterbury, Wymondham (Rimmer 2015, pp. 70-71) or St Mary’s, Baconsthorpe. The stylised bunched leaves that terminate the torso of the half-angel can be found in some of the roof angels, such as those at St Peter’s church, Upwell, Norfolk of c. 1410-30 (Rimmer 2015, pp. 64-65), or St Peter and St Paul, Bardwell, Suffolk, dated 1421 (Rimmer 2015, pp. 72-73). But most half-angels were sited along the wall-tablet, the point at which the wall of the building becomes the roof, for example a rather crude half-angel in the church of St Andrew, Kimbolton, Cambridgeshire (Rimmer 2015, p.100). So it is entirely possible that the relief was made in the later fifteenth century, presumably before the Yorkist defeat at Bosworth. It might even be a surviving old fitting from Oxburgh Hall itself, and may have been made from the start as an overdoor. The iconography of the two fields beneath the angel’s outspread wings is very curious and needs further research, the space on the right seemingly some sort of tree of life, and a mysterious chequerboard pattern on the left. The large repair at the lower right and the probable replacement of the angel’s head both suggest the relief is more likely to be an old object with subsequent additions and repairs. But it cannot be excluded that it is a nineteenth-century antiquarian concoction. There was a strong revival of interest in the Wars of the Roses in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Sir Walter Scott coining the term 'Wars of the Roses' for the first time in his 1829 novel 'Anne of Geierstein'. The story of the Princes in the Tower, relating the imprisonment in the Tower of London by Richard, Duke of York, later Richard III, of the deposed King Edward V of England and his younger brother Prince Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York, and their supposed murder at the hands of Richard, became an immensely popular subject in both literature and the visual arts. It could therefore well be imagined that an object displaying the Yorkist white rose would be highly attractive to Sir Henry Paston-Bedingfield, 6th Baronet (1800-62), who revelled in the notion of Oxburgh as an ancient house and filled the house with carvings and other decorative elements, some of them old but many others confections mixing old and newer elements. The wooden relief with the Grandison arms between two lions at Oxburgh (NT 1209793), for example, must very probably have been acquired by the 6th Baronet. There are a couple of other nineteenth-century carvings known of angels holding heraldic devices. One is an Angel holding the White Rose of Yorkshire in All Saints Church, Barwick, West Yorkshire, which is thought to date from the restoration of the church between 1844 and 1856. At Hever Castle there is another nineteenth-century variation on the theme, a plaque celebrating the marriages of Thomas Boleyn and Lady Elizabeth Howard, and of King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, with a standing winged angel holding the shields of the two matrimonial alliances (Emmerson and McCaffrey 2022, p. 36, fig. 15). Both these carvings are much more obviously nineteenth-century productions than the Oxburgh overdoor relief. It is to be hoped that technical research might help to pinpoint more closely its date of production. Jeremy Warren January 2026
Provenance
Part of the Bedingfeld Collection. The house was given to the National Trust in 1952 by Sybil, Lady Bedingfeld (1883-1985), her daughter Mrs Greathead, and her niece Violet Hartcup.
Makers and roles
English, sculptor
References
Montagu 1998: Jeremy Montagu, Minstrels and Angels. Carvings of Musicians in Medieval English Churches, Berkeley 1998 Rimmer 2015: Michael Rimmer, Angel roofs of East Anglia: unseen masterpieces of the Middle Ages, Cambridge 2015 Emmerson and McCaffrey 2022: Owen Emmerson and Kate McCaffrey, Becoming Anne. Connections, Culture, Court, Hever 2022