The old window.

The church we're looking for is found hidden in a side street behind the 1970's era Radisson Hotel. On one side is an empty lot left by the Luftwaffes bombing of the town in 1942. A few doors further down the street is a steak restaurant called the Whippet Inn which is popular with young officers from the Parachute Regiment entertaining their girl friends in somewhere that's convivial and 'reasonably' priced. Not, you would imagine, a neighbourhood where a rare unique medieval window illustrating the end of the world is to be found. 

The windows were made and installed around 1410. An extremely turbulent time in English history when the truly awful King Richard III ( untrustworthy was the best chroniclers of the time could say of him  ) was deposed by Henry IV. This was a shocking development in an era when Kings ruled by divine sanction. Plague, political violence and rebellion added to the unsettling mix of events. People found it hard to keep up with the speed and enormity of change.

There has been a church on this site since well before the Norman Conquest. The current one has bits from the 11th and 15th centuries with some makeshift repairs from the Civil War and some bizarre Victorian restoration work on the roof that, as you can see, is heavy on gilding.

The window we've come to see is set off to the side of the church in an unremarkable little corner. The signs of doom that precede the end of the world are set out in 15 panes that run from left to right. 

Underneath each pane there's a description written in middle English. This was highly unusual at a time when you could be executed for owning an unapproved English language versions of the Bible. The descriptions were there for a tiny elite who could read and write while the glass images with their tales of politics, climate and pandemics were for the illiterate masses. It's somehow reassuring to know that our forebears had exactly the same concerns. 

Here is a description, with some good photographs, of the weird and wonderful window :https://www.exploringbuildinghistory.co.uk/all-saints-york-pricke-of-conscience-window-morality-in-stained-glass-15th-c-style/

Floods bring sea monsters that walk the land. Fires devour fruit trees. Stars fall from the skies. It's all very Hollywood.

The family that were the benefactors of the window are shown on the very bottom level. Their faces seem to show they were suitably impressed.

The whole place is very human and domestic in scale. We're there for the better part of half an hour without anyone else so much as peeping through the door. I'd reckon not one in a thousand, possibly ten thousand, visitors even know it's here. A DaVinci Code thriller could be written around it.

Dinner last night was excellent although the wine list was again dominated by exotic offerings from lesser known parts of the Balkans or Latin America. This presumably appeals to a younger and more adventurous diner.  We opt for a Pouilly-Fuisse which is usually  a safe standby but which , this time, isn't.