'The Thomas Becket Miracle Windows Project' Restoration Film

Welcome to Canterbury Cathedral. We're here in the east end of the building and I'm standing in front of some of our miracle windows. They tell the story of the pilgrims who came to the tomb of Saint Thomas Becket. They were built in the 12th and 13th century and we have the evidence which tells us about so many of the people behind the images. We see them coming burdened with illness and worries and yet in their encounters in this place they leave healed, restored, transformed in some kind of a way. These windows are some of the oldest stained glass in the UK and some of the finest medieval glass in the world. They're subtle and humorous and sad and we want to look after them so we're restoring them window by window with great scholarship, great skill and in order that we hand them over to future generations to inspire those who today come in all kinds of need for their own healing and for their own restoration. So here we are at the top of the easternmost window on the south side of Trinity Chapel. All of the windows suffers very badly from warping so you may be able to tell that some of the panels have warped by almost 20 centimeters so that is the edge of the panel and this is where it is in the middle. That's the distortion which is huge and it puts stresses on the glass. It means that this medieval stained glass actually now pushes against the protective glazing and that means that it'll have condensation happen on it which will cause corrosion of the glass and the physical stresses of pushing against the protective glazing can potentially break glass. So it's really urgent that we get to this and improve the whole system. So in order to do that the first thing that has to happen is we have to remove the stained glass from its 1970s frame and take it to the workshop and try to flatten it gently over a long period of time. Well here we are in the conservation studio of Canterbury Cathedral and Canterbury is famous as the site where Thomas Beckett was murdered in 1170 by four of Henry II's knights and after he was murdered this is where I think it gets really interesting because he became one of the most famous miracle working saints of the entire Middle Ages. I'm the historian on this project and I'm working with the conservators here at Canterbury Cathedral and we're able to combine our expertise and with that to really come to a brand new understanding of who is being pictured in these windows, what the glaciers were trying to do with them and what the entire sequence means for us as this fantastic early 13th century treasure house of pictures about pilgrims coming to Canterbury Cathedral. So for instance we're able to do things like look carefully at these inscriptions and many of the inscriptions were thought to be illegible but in fact we can read them now that they're in the stained glass studio and we can get close to them and we can use different lighting conditions to be able to see what is actually on the glass in ways that you simply can't while this glass is up in the window. And what's amazing about this glass is that it shows us ordinary people and ordinary people don't often show up in medieval art. We usually get famous saints or biblical stories or kings or prophets but what we have with the miracle windows are ordinary men, women and children who felt that they experienced a miracle through Thomas Beckett's age and that is really unusual. Usually we just don't see that in medieval art and in the Trinity Chapel around Thomas Beckett Shrine we have dozens of these stories again of these ordinary people. So the window that we're looking at today here in the studio has six surviving stories and each of the stories are told in two panels each. Now this window would originally have had two more stories but we've lost those. They may have been smashed out in the 17th century. Now the window looks complete today but that's because we have Victorian replacement panels that were put into the window sometime in the middle of the 19th century. Now three of these stories are about men and three of them are about women but unfortunately we just don't know what the other two stories would have been about. Now the miracle stories that were chosen for this window all came from a collection of stories that was written by a monk of Canterbury named Benedict of Peterborough and in this collection there are over 275 stories so the glaciers could pick and choose which ones they wanted. And for this particular window what they chose were pilgrims from Kent who were healed at Beckett's tomb with the exception of the top most story which is about a knight from the region of York. So one of the wonderful things about the miracle windows is that they each have a rhyming Latin verse inscription in a certain kind of meter called a hexameter. So somebody had to sit down and write these verses and then glaciers had to paint the lettering on the actual glass and this one that we're looking here is in all but perfect condition. There are only a few repair leads but otherwise we have all the glass is here and it's very clear and easy to read. And let me just read this in the Latin. So you hear that line between vestis and testis and the translation of that is his staff, his clothing, and his boot are witnesses to his cure. And when you look at the panel yes that's what you see. You see his cloak, his boots, and his staff as witnesses to his cure. Now in the case of others though the glass has corroded so much that the lettering is no longer easily visible or even visible at all. In some cases the pieces have been swapped around into incorrect order by earlier restores. Sometimes pieces have been lost altogether and often in those cases other lettering from other inscriptions has been put in that doesn't belong there. So one of the really satisfying aspects of our work here is that we're able to try to reconstruct the inscriptions and with permission to make alterations to some of them. Putting pieces in the correct order, putting new backplating on the inscriptions so that they're legible and readable once they're in the window, and in some cases even supplying new lettering for pieces that have been lost. So that is a fantastic aspect of our work that we can do that without making any changes to the medieval glass whatsoever and from that to bring these inscriptions back to life. So the Victorian restorer who worked on this window actually made a mistake with Ephedraeta's story. He put them in the wrong order and what we've been able to do now that the panels are in the studio is to swap the order and actually do some work on these panels and the work was done by a conservator here named Joy Mead and that means that when the window goes back into the cathedral we're going to be able to read this story in the proper order for the first time in 150 years. So almost everything we do on these windows we do in-house with our own staff. We treat all kinds of ailments in these windows. Some of them require surgery, others require a real improvement of their environmental conditions, others yet have been completely misunderstood and rearranged in the wrong way so they don't make any sense anymore. And so we have to address all these different issues for each individual window. So one of these windows has really severe problems with bowing. The panels have distorted under strong sunlight to the shape of soup bowls. Now what we're doing rather than take the whole thing apart which would potentially endanger every single piece of glass, we're using oscillating diamond blades to cut through the solder joints so that makes the whole panel mobile without taking it apart. But the oscillating saw can't actually get in between the glass pieces so we then have to use scalpel blades to very carefully cut through the heart of each lead. Because you can't see where that's happened our colleagues have to mark up exactly which joints have been freed like that on a plan. And once every one of those joints is freed the whole thing is turned over and the process happens again on the other side. And so once all the joints are opened like that we then wrap the panels in heated blankets, place sandbags strategically on some places and then allow it to settle very very slowly under this gentle weight. And it works like a charm. It looks really quite worrying but it is in fact the least invasive and gentlest way of dealing with this very severe problem. Once the whole thing has actually flattened we then re-solder those joints that we just cut through to make it rigid again. What we have here is a section of the new frame which will hold the medieval stained glass in the cathedral and before it's installed we want to make sure that the panels fit the new frame exactly. And so we're trying it all out in the workshop before we take it all in the cathedral and then discover oops it doesn't fit. That fits like a glove right and that will then be held in in position with the second bar here. So all the conservation work to the window and the small changes we have made to the stained glass are done. So this is now the last chance to see the extra bits that our carpenters have added to increase the distance between the two layers, the protective glazing on the outside and the historic stained glass on the inside. And that new arrangement will actually allow the window to breathe much more comfortably and for the medieval glass to be kept at a much more stable temperature than it was before. So what's so extraordinary is that we still have the original 13th century iron framework. So the main frame that holds the 1980s protective glazing dates to the early 13th century and so do the saddle bars and so do many of these wedges. They are medieval iron. Just to think that something has been here for well over 800 years and it's just a thin sliver of iron and it's still doing a job. And it's such a joy to see the way they are curved here to spring into the logs. In structural engineering it's actually quite a good thing sometimes to be able to accommodate change, to react to wind forces, to the building settling and all those things that enabled these medieval frames to last for over 800 years. So that's part of the reason why we wanted to get rid of these 1980s aluminium frames which are too rigid. So the new subframes are actually working on exactly the same principles as the medieval ones. For me this project is really a dream project because it allows me to really make a change in how people will eventually understand the cathedral, its stories, how they can connect with people in the middle ages, people all over ages and discover that we are all the same. We all share the same problems, we all help each other and it really brings to life the place and the people who made it and the people who maintain it. The work of restoration and renewal goes on and it is such a joy to see these windows coming back to life, almost as if one could imagine those people first seeing them 800 years ago. And we now know so much more about these stories and have great confidence in what these windows are telling us. Isn't it wonderful, those Latin inscriptions which rhyme so beautifully and I'm sure it has really touched the heart of so many people down the ages. One of the brilliant things about these windows is that they are so close to us. For example, a figure like Æthelreda, you can almost reach out and touch her because she's just sort of in our eye line and we can see her and get a sense of her face, her story and the real human person that sits behind these medieval cartoons. And that's the point of them really. They look like us, they tell stories like us, they are close to us and we now as the modern contemporary pilgrims and visitors can come close to them and reframe, recolour, relight our lives in the light of this medieval glass. So do come and see for yourself and be transformed as the pilgrims of old.