Although some straightforward paintings of the Virgin and Child still remain in English churches, the Virgin actually suckling the Christ Child is very uncommon and only a few others are left. Two are now on the site, however, at Faversham and Belchamp Walter respectively. Another at Great Canfield in Essex is still to come. Eve, in a scene of Adam Delving and Eve Spinning, might also be suckling a baby at Bledlow. This painting of Eve doing so, painted on a pier in the south aisle, is surrounded by some odd details, and there are some attendant figures, one of them still visible, who may have been donors.

Below is the central detail; the Virgin, crowned, and with her hair loose, with her left hand presents
her pear-shaped breast to the Child. Her right hand is raised, not, I suspect, in a gesture of blessing, but indicating what is going on above. The very elaborate frame, enclosing a highly decorative rose and trellis background, shows well here, but I can see nothing now of the kneeling figure ‘almost entirely defaced’¹, that Tristram detected below at the left - a tiny figure, right hand raised, at the lower right (main picture, left above) may or may not be part of this scene.

Above the Virgin and Child, and in a cusped, many-sided frame of their own, are some details evidently concerned with Judgement and damnation (detail, below right).

Directly above the Virgin is an angel, extending its left arm towards a kneeling female figure in robe, cloak and headdress, who seems in her turn to be holding the hand of another figure, necessarily very small and now otherwise disappeared. The kneeling woman has no visible halo (although this need not rule out the Virgin, appearing again in another role) and it is difficult to know what these details mean, especially given the presence of a devilish, grinning creature on the left. Beside this devil, but outside the frame and visible in the previous photograph, is an obscure figure on a three-legged stool, or, perhaps more likely, in a pot placed over a fire. Probably some sort of battle for souls is taking place,² and the details further above, outside the frame, seem to support this.
At the top of the painting, hellish activities are going on. Above the angel, but again outside the frame, a figure roasts impaled on a crude spit made of forked sticks and a crosspiece with a turning-handle. Below this handle, at the extreme right, a very obscure figure operates a pair of bellows, fanning the flames underneath the spit. To the left, another figure hangs by his heels from a hook, perhaps awaiting the same fate. A third devilish figure, described by ET Long as ‘half-man, half-beast’³ and distinguished by what looks like a fat tail like a fox’s brush, stands in a crouching posture behind the spit. Long is probably right to suggest that this figure is pouring something - the obvious substance would be oil - over the man being roasted . Although it might explain much, neither Long nor Tristram could read the upper-case inscription above, and neither can I, although I wonder if the final word might be some form of sperare, to hope (for).

Beside the painting to the left, and clearly separate from it, is part of a Weighing of Souls, but this, I think, is connected with the Doom above the chancel arch. But the Beckley Virgin & Child is altogether a very interesting painting. Plain didacticism, with the moral to be drawn clearly presented visually, is avoided, and much is left to suggestion. The Virgin, painted principally as Mother but also as Queen, may not be shown in any direct intervening role, but the implication that she is a powerful intercessor for the Christian soul wishing to escape damnation seems clear enough (and see Note 2, below, added in December, 2002).

¹ Tristram 111, p.139
² It is possible that the angel here was once holding a balance, although it would have been hard to fit this into the available space. Nevertheless, and although there is a Weighing of Souls elsewhere, it may be that this is a newly-dead individual being weighed - an individual who has called in extremis upon the Virgin. Not, in other words, the much more familiar Weighing at the Resurrection-General, but a much rarer illustration of a single soul’s travails at the critical moment. I think the hypothesis is plausible, and it makes sense in connection with the presence of the donor seen by Tristram, envisaging his own death and judgement and presenting it as a visual meditation in honour of the Virgin - expressing in fact exactly the same sentiments as the lines of contemporary verse quoted in the Introduction to this subject.
³ ET Long, Medieval Wall Paintings in Oxfordshire Churches, Oxoniensia, Vol. XXXV11, 1972, p. 91;

St. Anne teaching the Virgin to read, Corby Glen, Lincs	St. Anne & Virgin/Miracles of Virgin, Chalfont St. Giles, Bucks	Annunciation/Visitation, Ashampstead, Berkshire	Annunciation, Barnby, Suffolk
Annunciation, Chalgrove, Oxon.	Annunciation, Little Melton, Norfolk	Annunciation, Gisleham, Suffolk	Annunciation, Slapton, Northants
Annunciation, Sth. Newington, Oxfordshire	Annunciation, Tarrant Crawford, Dorset	Annunciation, Martley, Worcestershire	Annunciation/Visitation, Faversham, Kent
Annunciation/Visitation/Nativity, Newton Green, Suffolk	Annunciation/Visitation, Pinvin, Worcs	Annunciation-Fring, Norfolk NEW	Visitation, Dale Abbey, Derbys	Visitation, Salisbury (S.Thomas), Wilts.
The Burial of the Virgin, Pickering, N.Yorks	Death, Burial & Coronation of the Virgin, Sutton Bingham, Somerset	Coronation of the Virgin, Black Bourton, Oxon	Background to Statue, with painted angels, Brent Eleigh, Suffolk
Virgin Enthroned, with angels, Arundel, Sussex	Virgin Enthroned, with donors, Cawston, Norfolk	Life of the Virgin, Broughton, Oxon.	Virgin & Child, with wand and apple, South Newington, Oxford
Virgin & Child, with sceptre & orb(?), Wickhamford, Worcs.	Virgin suckling the Christ Child, Beckley, Oxon.	Virgin suckling the Christ Child, Belchamp Walter, Essex

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14/8/2001