Patrick Comerford
St Albans Cathedral is visited every day by pilgrims who come to see the shrines of Saint Alban, Britain’s first Christian martyr and saint, and the shrine of Saint Amphibalus, the priest he died trying to protect.
For me, however, the most impressive sight in the cathedral during my visits to St Albans in recent days is the late 15th century Wallingford Screen. The screen ranks with the great screen in Winchester’s as one of the finest in England.
The mediaeval High Altar and Reredos were built ca 1484 at a cost od £733 by William of Wallingford, who was the 47th Abbot of St Albans at a time when it was the largest and most important Benedictine abbey in England.
Most of the statues on the screen were destroyed during the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the reign of King Henry VIII, and for three centuries after the Reformation, this beautiful screen stood battered and broken.
With the restorations of the cathedral in the Victorian era and the formation of a new Diocese of 1877, there was a renewed interest in the pre-Reformation heritage of St Albans. The mediaeval wall paintings in the nave and the north transept were rediscovered, for example, and the former Governor of the Bank of England, Henry Hucks Gibbs (1819-1907), 1st Baron Aldenham, spent vast sums of money from his personal fortune at the end of the 19th century to restore the Wallingford screen.
The statues on the screen were restored or recreated by the Victorian architectural and ecclesiastical sculptor Harry Hems (1842-1916).
Harry Hems was inspired by Gothic architecture and was part of Gothic Revival in church architecture. He founded and ran a large workshop in Exeter, Devon, which he named the Ecclesiastical Art Works and which produced woodwork and sculpture for churches all over Britain and abroad. At one time, Hems employed over 100 craftsmen in Exeter, and also had staff in London, Oxford and Ireland.
Probably his most notable work was the restoration of the large mediaeval screen in St Alban's Cathedral, which was dedicated, appropriately on All Saints’ Day 1 November 1899.
The Wallingford Screen is a Victorian reconstruction of the original screen which was destroyed in the Reformation. The scale and number of individual statues is amazing. The exquisite canopies of the three tiers of niches were restored to their original beauty, and all the statues – about 70 in all – are new.
The statues on the top layer are Saint Edmund, King Offa, Saint Edward the Confessor, Saint Hugh, Pope Adrian IV and the Venerable Bede. In the second row are Saint Cuthbert, Saint Helen, Saint Benedict, the Virgin Mary, Saint John, Saint Patrick, Saint Ethelreda and Saint Germanus. In the third row are Saint Augustine, Saint Alban, Saint Amphibalus and Saint Erkenwald, a seventh century Saxon prince who was Bishop of London in 675-693.
Under a fine Crucifixion in the centre of the screen is Christ in the centre with the Twelve Disciples in a delicate row of alabaster figures: Peter, Andrew, James, John, Philip, James, Thomas, Bartholomew, Matthew, Simon, Matthias and Jude.
Below this row, Christ is seen rising from the tomb in a panel sculptured by the sculptor Sir Alfred Gilbert (1854-1934), who also designed the ‘Eros’ statue in Piccadilly Circus, London.
On each side stand three saints: Saint Alban; Saint Amphibalus, the priest Saint Alban died defending; the Venerable Bede, who provides one of the earliest accounts of the martyrdom of Saint Alban; Saint Hugh of Lincoln – St Albans was originally in the Diocese of Lincoln; Saint Edmund the Confessor; Pope Adrian IV, Nicholas Breakspear, the only Englishman to have been elected Pope.
On one side of the screen is a statue of the Madonna and Child, and over the two doorways are figures of Saint John the Baptist and Saint Stephen.
St Albans Cathedral launched its ground-breaking new project this week, ‘Saints in Colour’. For a limited time, visitors can discover how the Wallingford Screen might have looked in the mediaeval period – with the benefit of 21st century technology.
The cathedral has worked in close partnership with Hogarth, a WPP agency, to explore ground-breaking techniques for bringing history to life, using the latest technology from Panasonic and Epic Games.
Cutting edge scanning and projection techniques using Reality Capture software bring to life the 15th century screen and its 19th century statues with a millimetre accurate 3D scan and re-colourisation, based on research by Dr James Alexander Cameron.
The colours have been produced by the artist Amara Por Dios, and the technology was used to train apprentices in WPP’s Creative Technology Apprenticeship programme, which aims to diversify the emerging technology workforce.
St Albans Cathedral is committed to social justice, so it is also bringing the statues to life in a racially diverse way, reflecting where each of the saints depicted came from.
‘Saints in Colour’ can be seen each day at 11 am, 2:15 pm and 3:45pm. These projections fare or a limited time. It began on Wednesday (17 January, 2024) and ends at 4 pm on Sunday 28 January.
Separately, as part of a cathedral’s 900th anniversary celebrations, seven statues of martyrs were installed in the mediaeval nave screen to complete work that began almost 700 years ago.
The seven sculptures of the martyrs stand the nave screen, which is thought to have been put up ‘quickly’ in 1350. The niches in the nave screen were left empty, probably because of the Black Death.
The seven modern statues by the sculptor Rory Young are believed to be the first painted statues to have been restored to a such a screen in an English cathedral since the Reformation.
Four martyrs have local connections: Saint Alban; Saint Amphibalus, the priest he sheltered; Alban Roe, a Catholic priest who was imprisoned in the Abbey Gatehouse; and George Tankerfield, a Reformer who was burned at the stake near the cathedral during the reign of Mary I. Three lived in the 20th century and represent the cathedral's ecumenical congregations: Archbishop Oscar Romero, Saint Elisabeth Romanova and the German Lutheran Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
The sculptor Rory Young received the commission in 2010 and spent two years researching the martyrs. This painstaking research included asking an optician to fit his statue of Dietrich Bonhoeffer with glasses.
The seven martyrs in the nave screen are, from left:
1, Saint Oscar Romero, the Archbishop of San Salvador, who spoke out against poverty, social injustice and torture of the totalitarian regime in El Salvador. He was murdered on 24 March 1980.
2, Saint Alban (Bartholomew) Roe, a Benedictine monk who was imprisoned for a time in St Albans Abbey Gatehouse and hanged for treason in London on 21 January 1642 for being a Roman Catholic priest.
3, Saint Amphibalus, the priest who was sheltered by Saint Alban in the third century CE when Christians were being persecuted.
4, Saint Alban, Britain’s first saint and martyr, a citizen of Roman Verulamium, martyred by the Romans on the site of the cathedral.
5, George Tankerfield, a Protestant, burnt to death in Romeland, at the west end of St Alban’s Abbey, in 1555 during the reign of Mary I.
6, Saint Elisabeth Romanova, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria who married into the Russian royal family and joined the Russian Orthodox Church. As a widow, she became a nun and abbess and she was murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918.
7, Dietrich Bonhoeffer – a Lutheran pastor and theologian imprisoned in a concentration camp for his opposition to the Nazis, tried without witnesses or defence and hanged in April 1945.
The statues were a gift to the cathedral by a former High Sheriff of Hertfordshire, Richard Walduck, who died in 2021, and his wife Susan Walduck, a lay canon of St Albans.
The Dean of St Albans Cathedral at the time, the Very Revd Dr Jeffrey John, said: ‘The presence of all these saints together … is a powerful statement that sanctity is not the possession of any one faith or denomination.’
