English Alabaster Tables of about the Third Quarter of the Fourteenth Century

Abstract

UNTIL 1910, when the Society of Antiquaries of London held an exhibition of mediaeval English alabaster carvings, comparatively little attention had been directed to either the relative dating of such carvings or to the question of the local schools to which they, individually, might reasonably be attributed. Before about the last decade of the nineteenth century those carvings, which had been produced in somewhat astonishingly large numbers by the English alabastermen and of which a multitude were known to survive, had not generally been recognized as English in origin. In 1890 W. H. (afterwards Sir William) St. John Hope read a paper, which appeared in Archaeologia, LII, “On the Sculptured Alabaster Tablets Called St. John's Heads”; and in 1904 he followed this with another, in the Archaeological Journal, LXI (parts reprinted in the Illustrated Catalogue of the Alabaster Exhibition), “On the Early Working of Alabaster in England,” presenting documentary evidence leaving no room for doubt that the alabaster panels, carved with religious subjects, whose origin had long since been forgotten, were in fact of English manufacture. Yet as late as 1901 Bouillet, writing on “La Fabrication industrielle des retables en albâtre (XIVe–XVe siècles)”1 and listing some hundreds of such panels at that time preserved in France, did not even hint at that possibility.