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[6007] All Saints, North Street, York : Pricke of Conscience Window
All Saints, North Street, York.
Pricke of Conscience Window (detail), c1410. Depicting the events of the last fifteen days of the world as told in a medieval poem 'The Pricke of Conscience.'
The iconography of this window is unique in European art. It is based on an anonymous Middle English poem called the Pricke of Conscience. The text of the Pricke of Conscience was concerned with the final fifteen days of the world. The window reads from bottom left to top right with each of the final days given a separate panel with a Middle English text that paraphrases the poem. The first nine panels are concerned with the physical destruction of the earth. This begins with the seas rising and falling and giving up monsters that 'make a roaring that is hideous to mans hearing.' Then follows the destruction of buildings by an earthquake (see the new-built spire of All Saints falling), and the burning of all physical matter. The last panels illustrate the fate of frightened mankind, and the end of all things. Men hide in holes, emerging only to pray. Finally on the fourteenth day 'all that lives then shall die, both children, men and women.' The end of things comes, the stars fall from the sky, the bones of the dead rise, and finally the 'the world burns on every side'. As its name suggest the window is intended to be a moralistic call to repentance, so as a reminder of this, in the quatrefoil tracery lights at the top of the window, are two panels that show redeemed souls being let into heaven by St Peter and the dammed being taken to hell by demons. It is thought that members of the Henryson and Hessle families paid for this window. Both families, related by marriage, were among the freemen, who were the urban elite of medieval York. The kneeling figures of the families at the base of the window are particularly expressive and seem to look on in horror at the events going on in the panels above.
[6007] All Saints, North Street, York : Pricke of Conscience Window
All Saints, North Street, York.
Pricke of Conscience Window (detail), c1410. Depicting the events of the last fifteen days of the world as told in a medieval poem 'The Pricke of Conscience.'
The iconography of this window is unique in European art. It is based on an anonymous Middle English poem called the Pricke of Conscience. The text of the Pricke of Conscience was concerned with the final fifteen days of the world. The window reads from bottom left to top right with each of the final days given a separate panel with a Middle English text that paraphrases the poem. The first nine panels are concerned with the physical destruction of the earth. This begins with the seas rising and falling and giving up monsters that 'make a roaring that is hideous to mans hearing.' Then follows the destruction of buildings by an earthquake (see the new-built spire of All Saints falling), and the burning of all physical matter. The last panels illustrate the fate of frightened mankind, and the end of all things. Men hide in holes, emerging only to pray. Finally on the fourteenth day 'all that lives then shall die, both children, men and women.' The end of things comes, the stars fall from the sky, the bones of the dead rise, and finally the 'the world burns on every side'. As its name suggest the window is intended to be a moralistic call to repentance, so as a reminder of this, in the quatrefoil tracery lights at the top of the window, are two panels that show redeemed souls being let into heaven by St Peter and the dammed being taken to hell by demons. It is thought that members of the Henryson and Hessle families paid for this window. Both families, related by marriage, were among the freemen, who were the urban elite of medieval York. The kneeling figures of the families at the base of the window are particularly expressive and seem to look on in horror at the events going on in the panels above.