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Crostwight, Norfolk (‡Norwich) : The Seven Deadly Sins (C.14/15)

Photo:T.Marshall Seven Deadly Sins, Crostwight [92KB]
A very fine example of a Tree-Diagram version of the subject, close in date and similar in conception to Hoxne but more refined in design and execution. The Tree is placed centrally and is very well painted, with naturalistic branches and leaves. Shapes, now much obscured, at the end of the branches once showed the various Sins. To the left and right of the trunk stand two figures who may once have had ‘labels’ identifying them in the small rectangles above their heads. The one on the (onlooker’s) right is male and is possibly Adam. He gestures towards the Tree with his right hand. By implication the figure on the left may be Eve, but it is impossible to be sure now.
Below this figure is a devil, perhaps Satan himself, shown in a crouching but confident posture and also gesturing upwards towards the Tree. To the immediate right of this figure is a cauldron shaped rather like a boat¹, with flames beneath and possibly figures inside. The Tree either stands behind this or grows from it. A Consecration Cross in a circle (there are several more in the church) has been superimposed at the bottom left, over Satan’s feet. The meaning of the painting is fairly clear as it stands - the sins grow ultimately from Satan’s domain in Hell, where nothing except evil can be generated, but there is more.
7 Deadly Sins, Crostwight:Trestle table & figures [131KB]Above the north door beside the painting is a mysterious subject, shown in the photograph at the right and almost certainly related to the Seven Deadly Sins. A trestle table is placed horizontally, with a couple apparently embracing standing behind it. According to EW Tristram² there were once three couples here, along with a large demon, but a 19th century drawing in the church shows figures, probably angels, standing beside the human figures while a disgruntled-looking devil stands nearby. So this may have been a Psychomachia, very different in kind from that at Claverley, but perhaps broadly similar to that at Swanbourne in Buckinghamshire, showing the contrasting condition of souls at death.

Crostwight is one of the most interesting painted churches in Norfolk, obscure as some of the subjects now are. The very fine Passion Cycle is also on this site.


¹Unless, of course, it is another sideways-turned bestial Hell-Mouth, as at South Leigh but left-right reversed in this case. Quite possible.
¹EW Tristram, English Medieval Wall Painting : The Fourteenth Century, p.112. Tristram’s tentative suggestion that this is a Witches’ Sabbat is, I think, unlikely on the evidence.

(‡ in page heading = Diocese)

Alveley, Shropshire Cranborne, Dorset NEW Crostwight, Norfolk Hessett, Suffolk Hoxne, Suffolk
Little Horwood, Bucks Raunds, Northants South Leigh, Oxfordshire Trotton, Sussex

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17/12/00