ONE

Dies Irae

At some point in the pitch black of the November night, the painted glass bulged, exploded and crashed to the nave floor, skimming and splintering. Through the gaping hole in the Great West Window shrieked a destructive stream of air. The creaking of ancient timbers and the thunderous falling of stonework filled the church with a massive, pandemonic fugue. As the storm raged on, more glass was torn from the mullions and tracery so that by daylight, with a gale-force wind still howling, one of the finest works of English medieval art lay in ruins. But all had gone unheard in the greater roar; an unearthly and terrifying sound that covered the south of England from Land’s End to the North Foreland. The new day was 27 November 1703. The worst storm experienced in historical times in England was playing itself out at Fairford in Gloucestershire.

Once the wind had begun to die down, chimneys ceased to crash through roofs, tiles stopped flying through the air, thatch and haystacks no longer filled the sky with wind-borne straw, and the vicar ventured out to examine the damaged fabric of his church. His home, a large house on the south side of what is now London Road (then Vicarage Street), was a couple of hundred yards from the church. As he picked his way across the debris-strewn Market Place, passing the inns which provided the small Cotswold town with much of its prosperity, parishioners, like Job’s comforters, may well have led him to expect the worst. In common with the 600–700 members of his flock, Edward Shipman, must have been both relieved to be alive and amazed by the degree of devastation. His church of St Mary the Virgin, having resisted the ugly iconoclasm of the civil wars half a century before, its marvellous painted-glass windows lime-washed over, still stood. But its glory was in ruins, a blasted wreck of late medieval magnificence.

Unlike most English parish churches, the exterior of St Mary’s is all of a piece, having been rebuilt in the Late Perpendicular style in the last decade of the fifteenth century: ‘John Tame began the fair new Church at Fairforde and Edward Tame finishid it’. So symmetrical was the building that Shipman, who had been vicar for seventeen years and had known the church all his life, would immediately have noticed that part of the battlemented wall above the porch was missing and that on the roof the wind had rolled up the sheets of lead like scrolls of paper. Only when he got to the west end of the church, however, would the real loss become apparent: the sickening sight of the Great Window, 25 ft high, and 15 ft across, smashed through so that little remained above the transom, and the windows on either side, especially that to the south, were likewise blown in, wrecked.

This must have been a grim spectacle all too clearly brought into focus when he entered the church. As the smithereens of glass crunched beneath his feet, the familiar scene, which had inspired him, his father before him and the parishioners of Fairford for so long, was revealed in ruins. Shipman perfectly understood, none better, the true nature of the loss. A few weeks later, by which time he would have known that this was no freak storm which had singled out his little corner of Christendom alone, he wrote a letter