Excerpt from English Church Woodwork: A Study in Craftsmanship During the Medieval Period, A D 1250-1550

MR herbert batsford has asked me to explain in a foreword the genesis of this book. For over twenty years it has been my habit to spend Six weeks of each year in studying and measuring up the medieval church woodwork of England. During the earlier years this was accomplished with the aid of a sketchbook, but the impossibility of purchasing photographs of detail, and the over whelming mass of material found, compelled me to resort to the aid of the camera. The negatives mounted up by stages into thousands, and Mr Batsford, overhauling the accumulated result, was anxious it should take some permanent form, and proposed a book on the subject. Two points became accentuated as the evidences were brought together: the superiority of the fifteenth century over all other periods, and the differences of type in construction and detail in the different parts of England. This, as far as my knowledge extends, has never been understood, or if so, it has been ignored by our restoring architects and commercial furnishing firms, and it is largely owing to this ignorance that the modern attempts to copy mediaeval woodwork have produced only dry bones, mechanical and dull, for the true spirit of Gothic art has not been breathed into them. This spirit cannot be understood by studying textbooks or copying a few standard examples, no living art is hidebound, but works out its own salvation in innumerable channels of independent thought and methods of craftsmanship. One never tires of examining the fragments of carved woodwork yet remaining in our now furbished and smartened churches, for there is always some thing to learn, some fresh idea to register.

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