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To the north of the choir in the Abbey’s Church of Saint Gregory the Great, one may have noticed two simple side doors leading to a connecting hallway. One may also have caught glimpse of a stained-glass window, adding illumination and intrigue to the view. In more precise parlance, the hallway is known as a “slype.” And if one ventures to observe more closely what it contains, one discovers four windows of a similar character completing its northeastern face. Each of these windows holds its own story, and together they belong to a larger saga that spans back to the 15^th century. Presently they have come to reside in our “slype,” an architectural feature that has quietly played an important role in monasteries throughout medieval Europe. 

Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it. (Matthew 7.14)

The above verses were chosen by Sarah Meyrick of Christ Church in Oxford for a 2018 post about the slype door of Oxford’s cathedral. The spiritual role of the slype may indeed be associated with that “narrow gate,” serving as the connecting path between the profane and the sacred, providing a transformative space opening on to the space uniquely dedicated to prayer and worship. Meyrick notes, “... it’s through this unprepossessing passageway that our wonderful Cathedral Choir emerges into the Cathedral each day.” And here it is through our own slype that the monastic community emerges into the Oratory of Saint Gregory the Great. And through that same passage, recessionals take the community back out to “the workshop” of the cloister, as Benedict frames it. 

Britannica tells us that a slype “may lead from either the transept or the nave of the church proper to either the chapter house (the monks’ assembly room) or the deanery (the residence of the dean). Most frequently it is adjacent to and east of the cloisters, covered walks lying south of the transept in most cruciform churches.” One finds the feature in all sorts of larger churches from the 11th century and later, notably Winchester and Durham cathedrals and the abbey church of St. Albans. One can find the remains of slypes marked out in the ruins of monasteries and cathedral, having to reconstruct in one’s visual imagination how the passage may have originally looked. 

What are we to make of this unpresupposing passage, this simple portal between the human and the divine? The American Heritage online etymology adds an intriguing note that slype is, “Perhaps akin to Dutch dialectal slijpe, secret path.” Indeed, the mystery of the slype inspired an eponymous 1927 novel by Russell Thorndike that “teems with murder, blackmail, serial kidnappings of man and beast, a secret book pointing the way to a long-lost treasure, an ancient cathedral rifled with hidden tunnels and clandestine doors, all tied to a haunted passageway called the Slype.” We might more comfortably opt for a more straightforward description: “A covered passage, especially one between the transept and chapter house of a cathedral.” Still, even this basic function carries a deeper theological implication. As Meyrick comments: “We’ve probably all got some kind of Slype in our homes; maybe in our lives, too...”

Perhaps the greatest mystery in our own slype involves its four stained-glass windows. While it may not possess elaborate arched entryways, nor open onto a glorious Chapterhouse, it does incorporate these four beautiful works of Renaissance Germany. The windows depict – appropriate to the Church – Saint Peter and – appropriate to the monastery – Saint Benedict. The other two depict Saint George of Cappadocia and Saint Catherine of Alexandria. While we know the four windows are the product of the early 16^th-century, their original home and the journey they took to get here remain somewhat elusive. The windows themselves reveal clues to their construction, original setting and patronage. And their story illuminates much of the religious, political and economic history of Europe. 

The provenance of the four windows has been subject to some recent research and scholarly revision. It has been clear that they represent examples of Renaissance stained-glass from the German Rhineland, in the vicinity of Cologne. They are products of fifteenth and sixteenth-century Rhenish workshops and were originally designated for sacred edifices that no longer exist. Less clear are precisely when and by whom they were designed and executed, for which church, and how they ultimately made their way to Portsmouth Abbey. 

Saint Peter: “The saint is presented in an all-powerful manner, with a monumental key in his right hand… The donor couple kneel before him, the husband in medieval armor, the wife wearing a Renaissance bonnet decked with pearls and a billowing veil… The faces look unusually broad, and the facial features, the lips, nose and eyes, are very large and expressive.”

Saint George of Cappadocia: “St. George’s armor is almost hidden by his cloak, so that there is little of a military nature in his appearance. His facial features have been very delicately delineated. He holds a lance in his right hand, and on his breast-plate is a black cross on a pale ground.” (descriptions from Wolff-Wintrich)

The leading theories have been guided by Hilary Wayment, British historian of stained-glass, who had claimed that their original location was most likely the Church of the Maccabees in Cologne. This was a reasonable claim, as its construction was of the time period, the windows were of the right style, and the Church of the Maccabees had not survived the nineteenth century. Cologne held a particular devotion to the Maccabees and was noted for its collection of relics representing that biblical period. The church in question in fact belonged to a Benedictine convent that had been founded in the 12^th century and had become home to a thriving community of Benedictine nuns who undertook a reconstruction project of their church at the end of the 15^th-century, the correct time for our windows. 

More recent scholarship, however, has settled on the Trappist monastery of Mariawald as the original site of the windows. The Victoria and Albert Museum, which possesses a substantial collection of its former stained-glass, tells us that, “Mariawald Abbey in Germany was built between 1480 and 1539. It is in a wooded area just south-west of Cologne named after a miracle-working statue of the Virgin Mary – Mariawald literally means ‘Mary forest’. From the mid-15th century onwards the statue's miracle-working powers began to draw large numbers of pilgrims. The original chapel on the site was not large enough to accommodate them, so in 1480 the nearby Cistercian monastery at Bottenbroich financed a new abbey.” Brigitte Wolff-Wintrich has dedicated extensive scholarly study to this particular abbey, obtaining a doctorate from the University of Bonn, her dissertation focused on the Mariawald windows and their history. In a comprehensive article in The Journal of Stained Glass (Volume XXXII), she outlines schematically the entirety of the windows at the original church at Mariawald, identifying artists and patrons. It is a complex logical puzzle to piece together from chronologies, historical records, dates of donations, and various other bits of evidence. But some of the details of our own collection come into view.

Tracing the provenance of our particular four windows adds intrigue to the saga, which still remains substantially untold. Still, Wolff-Wintrich’s historical and artistic analysis of the windows leads to some fairly precise findings on the origins and the journey of the four.

The masters whose names are associated with these works are Everhard Rensig and Gerhard Remisch, though which is responsible for the Portsmouth windows is not clear. Their Renaissance ateliers provided the windows for many churches and monasteries of the Cologne and the greater Rhineland region. Of the four windows of the slype, we can confidently pair Peter and George, although we cannot conclude which window at Mariawald housed them. The windows of the Mariawald church originally included three main panels of the size of our set. Wolff-Wintrich narrows the setting for George and Peter to two, and one of those possible settings completed the triplet with the St. Catherine window. Despite the close match in the framing one now finds within the glass of Benedict and Catherine, things are not as meets the eye. This pairing was not in the original settings, but is the product of a later modification to fit their new setting in England in the 19^th century.

Saint Catherine of Alexandria (wheel is behind her): “In one hand she is holding a sword, in the other a ring, hence alluding to her mystical marriage to Jesus. she is dressed in the latest fashion, with a close-fitting bodice divided down the middle. A capacious cloak rests on her shoulders, secured by a cord and two chaps.”

Saint Benedict: “The Saint faces the viewer holding a book and Bishop’s crosier… His name is inscribed in his nimbus (St. Benedict Abbot) … Altough the Saint Catherine window… has the same framing, the two are not a pair.” (descriptions from Wolff-Wintrich)

The original donations (Wolff-Wintrich numbers them as VII, XI, and XII in the diagram above) were from 1514 and 1516, as the church was gradually being completed – a several decades-long project, spanning from 1492-1539, the finished product renowned for its resplendent beauty. The donors can be identified by features of the windows, combined with donation records, which also help to situate their placement in the church. Wolff-Wintrich concludes that the donors of the St. Catherine (XI) window were Adam von Wevorden and Katharina Hase (1516). The arms at her feet represent the Drove and Hase families on the left, and Vlodorf and Stammheim families on her right in the original orientation (This is in fact the mirror of our present setting, which has Catherine facing the opposite direction from her original setting). St. Benedict’s patrons (Window XII) were Johan von Salm-Reifferscheid and Anna von Hoya – determined directly from the large shields placed at St. Benedict’s feet that bear their arms. Although we have the most vivid images of donors kneeling in both the George and Peter windows, Wolff-Wintrich does not determine just who these are.

Mariawald Abbey today (no monastic community since 2018)

The journey these panels took to Portsmouth reveals something of the political and economic history of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. First, we must look to the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon for their initial displacement. The 18^th-century saw the rise of secularization and the suppression of religious orders. Both the nuns of the Maccabees convent and the monks of Mariawald fell victim to this wave, and their communities were closed in 1802. In signing the Concordat of 1801, Pope Pius VII had consented to the purchase of church property, opening an intriguing and growing market that found many works of art dispersed around Europe. One particular name stands out for stained-glass making its way to England: John Christopher Hampp. Originally from Wurttemberg, Hampp had emigrated to Norwich, England in 1782. Economic opportunity soon returned him to the continent, and among the varied products he sold, stained-glass became prominent with its sudden availability, as aging churches came to be dismantled in the Napoleonic age (see article by P.L. Laurence). We may view these mercantile motives with mixed feelings, as they facilitated the loss of such precious and beautiful sacred spaces, yet they also preserved much of their content from complete destruction.

Costessy Hall (demolished 1925), second home of the four panels

The initial purchaser of these panels through Hampp was Sir William Jerningham for Costessy Hall in Norwich, a large Gothic estate he was having built in the early 1800’s. By 1913, his descendants were selling the contents of that estate, and in 1925 it was demolished. From Costessy Hall, the works were purchased in 1918 by Roy Grosvenor Thomas, until later sold in the early 1920’s to the American financier and chairman of the board of the New York Philharmonic, Clarence Hungerford Mackay for his Harbor Hill Estate on Long Island.

Mackay was the son of John William Mackay, who had risen from poverty in Dublin, Ireland to become a baron of industry in the United States, thanks in large part to silver mining. Two interesting additional side notes on Clarence Mackay: his second wife - whom because of his Catholic faith he would not marry until after the death of his first wife from whom he had been separated - was Anna Case, a soprano for the Metropolitan Opera Company who had been extensively recorded by Thomas Edison for “tone tests”, to see if audiences could distinguish live from recorded voices. Secondly, Mackay’s son-in-law was the noted composer Irving Berlin, who married his daughter Ellin in 1926.

Clarence Hungerford Mackay

In the early 1950’s, the windows were given to this monastery by his son John William Mackay, in memory of his father. They were exhibited at the Busch-Reisinger Museum and the Mary Hutchinson Compton Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts prior to the construction of the abbey’s Church of Saint Gregory the Great.