Wiltshire's Medieval Doom Board Painting
Probably dating from the mid 15th Century, the Doom at the Church of St James the Great in Dauntsey, North Wiltshire, is one of only five such paintings on wooden boards in England. Portraying The Last Judgement, the Doom was restored in the 1990s and sits where it was first positioned around six hundred years ago over the rood screen between the nave and chancel of the church.
Wiltshire has two significant Doom Paintings, one at Dauntsey, the subject of this blog, and the other in Salisbury. Whilst the latter is the county’s most artistically impressive Doom, painted on the chancel arch of St Thomas’s Church, it is the Dauntsey Doom that is for me the more interesting of the two. Having studied it during my recent Masters Degree in Medieval Studies, and also having given a public talk on it at the church in 2023 to nearly a hundred people, I wanted one of my first posts on this website to be about the Dauntsey Doom.
Dooms are paintings of the Last Judgement, when Christ descends to earth to determine the future of all souls as to whether they should spend eternity in Heaven or Hell. The main Biblical basis is from Matthew 25 in which Christ separates the sheep to his right, to go to Heaven, and the goats to his left, to be sent to the fires of Hell, depending on whether or not people have committed the seven acts of mercy (“For I was hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in” etc.). Such paintings were very common in medieval churches, and mostly situated over the rood screen, often as a backdrop to the Rood itself, which was comprised of the three figures of: Christ on the Cross, the Virgin Mary, and John the Apostle. For congregations attending Mass, they would watch the Priest raising the host over his head as the body of Christ, whilst above him could be seen both the Crucifixion and the Last Judgement.
The Dauntsey Doom is painted on boards which have been dated as being from trees felled between 1369 and 1399. The visible images on these boards is the third paint scheme to have been put onto the wood, the previous ones having mostly been more decorative. Although some have suggested that the Doom was painted during the reign of Mary Tudor, when Roods and visual images were briefly returned to churches after the damage of such things wrought across the country under Henry VIII and Edward VI, it is more likely that it was painted around a hundred years earlier in the early to mid fifteenth century. What is clear though, is that during the Reformation, most probably in the late 1540s under Edward VI, the painting was covered over to prevent its destruction. It then remained hidden for almost three centuries until rediscovered during renovations of St James in the 1820s or 1830s. Displayed elsewhere in the church after that time, it was restored by English Heritage in the 1990s and then returned to its original position above the rood screen.
Most of the images on the Doom are typical of such English paintings and share much of the same iconography as medieval depictions across Europe of the Last Judgement. Those such as Michelangelo’s 16th Century masterpiece in the Sistine Chapel, or Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych in Vienna, are far more complex and sophisticated in their design, but the basic premise remains consistent. Be it European masters, the restored Doom in Salisbury, or the other Doom Boards in Suffolk, Gloucestershire, Buckinghamshire or Oxfordshire, the iconography has the same basic elements as at Dauntsey.
For example, as can be seen on the Doom Boards of Holy Trinity Church, Penn in Buckinghamshire, angels sound the last trump, Christ is on a rainbow, Mary and John the Baptist are with him to assist in the passing of judgement, and souls are rising from graves to discover their fate.
In the Penn painting, as with the partially restored Doom at Wenhaston in Suffolk, there are more detailed portrayals of other figures (Apostles supporting Christ at Penn, a Cardinal, Bishop, King and Queen at Wenhaston) but the message would have been the same: you go to Heaven or you go to Hell. And at Wenhaston, as with Dauntsey, the mouth of Hell is all too visible in the bottom right.
Much more could be said about this Doom. For example there are other significant figures represented, all with their own back stories, such as St Michael, St Peter, Adam and Eve, and maybe even Satan himself. Then there is the portrayal of souls, naked and in shrouds, and their connection to local, contemporary burial customs and perhaps also the wish of a 14th Century Lord of the Manor to be buried naked as the day he was born. From a wider, historical perspective, the Doom can be used as a vehicle to better understand the commonality of visual images in medieval churches and the nature of religious observance and worship in parish churches when it was first installed. Lastly, and of direct relation to the history of these Boards, the story of the Dauntsey Doom is also in many ways the story of the enormous religious change triggered in England by the mid 15th Century Reformation and all that followed that, from Thomas Cromwell to Edward VI, through Mary Tudor and beyond, and the changing attitudes towards iconography that was central to so much of the differences between Protestants and Catholicism in the 16th Century.
I aim to publish a more detailed article on all this in 2024, and I have also been asked to deliver a further lecture at the church that year with a greater emphasis on The Reformation and its impact in churches such as Dauntsey.
