(Photos : T.Marshall)
This Seven Works is complete, although some scenes are clearer than others. As at nearby Moulton St. Mary, a woman performs the Works, and the general treatment here, including the architectural detail framing the individual scenes, is also reminiscent of the fine painting at Moulton. At the top left is Feeding the Hungry, damaged, but recognisable and including the explanatory speech-scrolls (now illegible) still visible in other scenes. Next to the right comes Giving Drink to the Thirsty, with a woman standing at
the right offering a large cup to a man with a long beard at the left. The man is a pilgrim, and he has a staff on which his hat hangs, as in the painting of St. Roch at Pinvin. My previous suggestion that this was actually a man holding a hawk was quite wrong, and relied far too much on the old drawings by Winter, never the most accurate of copyists, hanging in the church. The new photograph at the right should make this clear.
Next comes Clothing the Naked, with a man wearing a loincloth accepting a garment from a woman at his right. The scene beyond this is the most obscure, but it must be Receiving the Stranger.
Below at the left and pictured below left is Visiting the Prisoner, showing a man at the left with a shackle across his wrists and his legs in wooden stocks. His female benefactor wears an outdoor cloak and hands him something, possibly money.
To the right of this scene is
Visiting the Sick, pictured below, in which a woman is shown attending to a sick man in bed. She is offering him something - it has been identified in the church leaflet as a custard tart - suitable food for an invalids jaded palate, maybe, but it might in fact be a bowl of porridge or some similar less delectable offering.
To the right of this and pictured below comes the final scene of the Works proper - Burying the Dead. A tonsured priest wearing a cloak is placed centrally, with an acolyte holding a
book to his right. The priest is sprinkling with Holy Water a figure (almost completely gone now) in a coffin placed horizontally across the picture space. A man in a tunic and hood at the left assists at the burial - he is probably lowering the body in its winding-sheet into the tomb.
This is not a Requiem Mass, which would be sung solemnly in church, but the Office for the Dead, which might take place beside a bier within the church or at the graveside. Considered as one of the Works of Mercy, the social obligation aspect of the Burial of the Dead is interesting. Such was the importance of supplications for a dead persons soul that many medieval wills include clauses providing specific sums of money for the poor on the day of the testators burial - for buying victuals for the poor on the day of [his] burial and the eighth day after.¹ Attendance at the burial, it went without saying, would mean helpful prayers for the dead soul in Purgatory. That this should be rewarded with food and drink must have seemed the merest social courtesy.
The final scene here shows Christ, surrounded by several speech-scrolls, and raising his hand in blessing. Thus is the message of Matthew 25 : 34-46 reinforced.
¹ The will (proved 27 October 1430 at York), of William Byrley, butcher, of Attercliffe, Sheffield. (Abstract in A Catalogue of Ancient Charters, with abstracts of all Sheffield Wills proved at York prior to 1554, T. Walter Hall, Sheffield, 1913, p.32)