Devotional

There is no recorded date for the installation of the east window at Swanvale Halt church, but I suspect it dates to the late 1870s or early 1880s. There are hints in some of the other decorations in the church that its devotional practice was starting to creep up the candle at that time, but that was probably very little to do with the then incumbent, a bluff former soldier who'd been in place for twenty-odd years by then. The following rector was significantly more in sympathy with the Catholic movement in the Church of England, and this bit of High-Churchery is probably from his time.

It wasn't generally the fashion to install rood screens in Victorian churches until the 1890s, and even then only in advanced Anglo-Catholic churches which were trying to be really authentically medieval, like St Cyprian's Clarence Gate. I think our window was a sort of rood screen in glass, fulfilling the same devotional function of linking the sacrifice of the eucharist with the sacrifice of Jesus on Calvary. It looks like a rood, with Christ flanked by the Virgin and St John; and originally the altar would have stood directly beneath it. The priest would have raised the chalice at Mass right below the image of the angel receiving Christ's blood into the spiritual chalice shown in the window. It makes the point.

In reality, the window doesn't quite look like the picture above, as there are in fact three widely-separated lancets along with a vesica above showing Christ in Majesty. I thought it would be helpful to amalgamate them into one devotional image. Only been here eight years before that idea occurred to me.