The glass now in these two windows was commissioned for the east window of the Winchester College Chapel by its founder, William of Wykeham. In 1393, Wykeham’s household accounts record payment for two carts ‘carrying glass for windows of my Lord’s College at Winchester’. This almost certainly provides a date for the arrival of most of the stained glass for the chapel.

An impressive seven-light window depicting the Tree of Jesse dominated the east wall of the chapel.  The subject was a visual representation of Isaiah’s prophecy: ‘And there shall come forth a rod out of the root of Jesse, and a flower shall rise up out of his root’ (Isaiah 11:1), combined with Christ’s genealogy which opens the New Testament (Matthew 1). Jesse is shown reclining, with a tree growing from his body, containing his descendants (accompanied by prophets), and culminating in Christ, usually with the Virgin, at the top. The Jesse window was set in a wider context by the surrounding windows, which contained figures of prophets, apostles and saints, selected for their particular relevance to the founder.

Unfortunately the scheme in the chapel, which must have been magnificent, has been the subject of much interference. In 1821, the east window was removed by the firm of Betton and Evans, to be restored ‘to its original brilliancy’, followed by the side windows between 1825 and 1828. Once in their workshop, a decision was taken to replace the glass entirely.

Thanks largely to the Herculean efforts of Herbert Chitty (1863–1949), bursar of the college, a considerable amount of the original Jesse window glass was tracked down over many years and returned to Winchester, where it can now be seen in the west window of Thurbern’s Chantry, and the east window of Fromond’s Chantry. The only surviving inhabitants of the side windows are the dignified figures of the prophet Ezekiel, St John the Evangelist, and St James the Less, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (Accession numbers 4237:1 to 9-1855).

 

Text by Eleanor Townsend, extracted from Medieval Stained Glass at Winchester (see ‘Literature’ below).

Image 1: Thurbern’s Chantry, west window. © Gordon Plumb
Image 2: Fromond’s Chantry, east window. © Gordon Plumb
Image 3: Diagram showing the Chapel, east window. The Betton and Evans glass (1821) in black and white, is overlaid with colour images of the surviving original glass (1392–93) now in Fromond’s and Thurbern’s Chantries

 

Exhibited: ‘Age of Chivalry’, Royal Academy of Arts, London, November 1987 – March 1988, no. ? (panel with Richard II?)

Literature: Charles Ball, An Historical Account of Winchester with Descriptive Walks (Winchester, 1818), p. 155;  John Dolbel Le Couteur, Ancient Glass in Winchester (Winchester, 1920); Christopher Woodforde, The Stained Glass of New College, Oxford (Oxford, 1951); John H. Harvey and Dennis G. King, ‘Winchester College Stained Glass’, Archaeologia, vol. 103 (1971), pp. 149–77; Jonathan Alexander and Paul Binski (eds), Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England 1200-1400 (London, 1987), pp. 474-75, 539; Trevor Brighton and Brian Sprakes, ‘Medieval and Georgian Stained Glass in Oxford and Yorkshire. The work of Thomas of Oxford (1385–1427) and William Peckitt of York (1731–95) in New College Chapel, York Minster and St James, High Melton’, The Antiquaries Journal, vol. 70, no. 2 (1990), pp. 380–415; D. Gordon, Making & Meaning: The Wilton Diptych (London, 1993), p. 55, plate 16; Painton Cowen, English Stained Glass (London, 2008), p. 123; D. Gordon (ed), The Wilton Diptych (New Haven and London, 2015), pp. 35 (ill), 57; Veronika Decker, ‘In the Vineyard of the Lord: Art, Imagination and the Stained Glass Commissions of William of Wykeham in Fourteenth-century English Colleges’, in Jessica Berenbeim and Sandy Heslop (eds), Invention and Imagination in British Art and Architecture, 600-1500 (2017); Suzanne Ceiriog-Hughes, ‘Jesse Window, College Chapel, 1393-94’, in Richard Foster (ed.), 50 Treasures from Winchester College (London, 2019), pp. 52-53; Sarah Brown, ‘Medieval Stained Glass and the Victorian Restorer’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, vol. 30 (2020), particularly pp. 6–9; Tim Giddings, ‘When I’m Cleaning Windows – the Story of the Chapel Glass’, The Trusty Servant, no. 131 (May, 2021), pp. 18–20; Sarah Griffin and Eleanor Townsend, Medieval Stained Glass at Winchester College (2021),  pp. 5-10, 16-17.

Provenance: Commissioned by William of Wykeham for Winchester College

Location:  Thurbern’s Chantry and Fromond’s Chantry