Patrick Comerford
I am about to take part with the choir in the Maundy Thursday Liturgy in Saint Mary and Saint Giles Church, Stony Stratford, this evening, with the traditional foot washing and the Maundy Thursday Eucharist.
Because this is Holy Week, there was no choir rehearsal last week. But in recent weeks we have been adding to our repertoire for the future, including working the director of music, Jonathan Kingston, on Franz Schubert’s Mass No 6 in E flat.
This has been a controversial work ever since its first performance in 1829. It was commissioned for Holy Trinity Church, Vienna, the same church where Beethoven’s funeral had taken place two years earlier in 1827.
Schubert removed several lines from the Gloria and Credo while repeating other lines – as he did in all of his concert masses. It was quite a bold decision, considering the Mass was commissioned for Roman Catholic worship.
Schubert died soon after completing t Mass and he never heard it performed. Eventually, in 1897, because of his omissions from the text and his adaptations, Schubert’s masses were specifically barred from use as liturgical music.
As we were rehearsing the Gloria in Latin, my mind was brought back to Lichfield, and I started wondering about a stucco image that has been missing for some years but one that is appropriate to think about on this Maundy Thursday.
The Latin words include the lines:
Quoniam tu solus Sanctus,
tu solus Dominus,
Tu solus Altissimus
(For you alone are the holy one,
you alone are the Lord,
you alone are the Most High)
Quonians Lane in Lichfield, between Dam Street and Stowe Pool and between the Cathedral and the Market Square, is a much-photographed corner of Lichfield. The lane is mentioned as early as 1325 in the Book of Dean and Chapter Possessions, when it was said to lead to a well. This may have been a pilgrims’ path from the city to the Well of Saint Chad at Stowe.
The buildings on the left-hand or north side of Quonians Lane date from the 16th century. The best-known building, now an antiques shop, still retains the sign of R Bridgeman and Sons, the stonemasons’ firm founded by Robert Bridgeman in 1879.
The firm had worked on Lichfield Cathedral and continued to work on churches, ancient buildings and city walls all over the world until it closed in 2011.
Samuel Johnson attended Dame Oliver’s School on the corner of Dam Street and Quonians Lane.
Because the lane is so close to Lichfield Cathedral, I had presumed all along that Quonians Lane off Dam Street was a misspelling of that Latin word in a phrase in the Creed, Quoniam tu solus Sanctus. Certainly, it was called Quoniames Lane in the 14th century.
But Joss Musgrove Knibb points out in her recent book, Lichfield in 50 Buildings (2016), that the word quoniam ‘was used as a euphemism for a woman’s “nether-regions” by the Wife of Bath in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.’ And she asks: ‘Could Quonians Lane have been a Middle Ages haunt of “ladies of the night”?’
Quonians Lane is attractive and photogenic with its strange name, its Tudor timber-framed buildings and its carvings and plaques. None of that charm is lost despite the closure of Bridgeman’s and the recent development at the east end of Quonians Lane by Pegasus of Lichfield Bonds Retirement Housing.
The apartments, with views across Stowe Pond and of Lichfield Cathedral, are spread across three buildings, with 64 one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments, and with an owners’ lounge, social kitchen and communal garden. Figures available last week quoted £1,754 as the monthly rent for a ground-floor one bedroom apartment, and £2,297 a month for a two-bedroom apartment.
The hanging sign with Bridgeman’s name disappeared some time in the last 20 months, between August 2022 and November 2023. But, at one time, Bridgeman’s remaining legacy included a number of statues and stucco works, including statues of Christ and an angel, and peeling, faded stucco plaques of the Last Supper, Saint Christopher carrying the Christ Child on his shoulder, and the Virgin Mary with the Christ Child.
During a recent afternoon walk along Quonians Lane, I could only find the small plaque of Saint Christopher in a niche, and the faded, peeling roundel displaying the Virgin Mary with the Christ Child hidden behind heavy green growth at the east end of the lane, railed off public view.
But are they going to remain in situ for much longer?
The stucco plaque depicting the Last Supper, which has been missing from Quonians Lane for some time, would have been so appropriate in its original position and on public view today, Maundy Thursday.
No comments:
Post a Comment