North Wales is home to nearly all the remaining stained glass from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in the whole of the country. Examples can be seen in churches from Aberdovey to Wrexham as well as in some private houses. The Church of St Dyfnog [1] in Llanrheadr has a stained glass window dated 1533 that is said to be the most beautiful of its kind in Wales. The five panels, or lights, depict a favourite medieval biblical topic: the tree of Jesse. This illustrates Christ’s ancestry as foretold in The Book of Isaiah (11.1): And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. The theme is taken up in the New Testament, by Matthew and Luke. Matthew starts the ancestry with Abraham and Luke works backwards in time to Adam.

The popularity of this topic in the Middle Ages is indicated by the numerous illustrations of the Jesse tree in manuscripts, wall paintings and, of course, stained glass windows in churches and cathedrals. Unfortunately, many of the medieval windows in the British Isles were destroyed during the Reformation and the Civil War. The story here is that the St Dyfnog window was removed and hidden during the Civil War and was thus preserved.
The typical Jesse tree window shows Jesse reclining and from his side or navel springing the trunk and branches of a tree or vine. On the branches are placed ancestors of Christ and some of the prophets who foretold the coming of Christ, while the trunk ascends vertically culminating in Mary and Christ. In the Church of St Dyfnog, the window has 23 identifiable figures and their arrangement is deliberate and significant. However, I don’t want to focus on the detail of these illustrations as all this is thoroughly explained in a booklet written by E. Gwynne Matthews, obtainable in the church.

What present day visitors may not be so familiar with is the meanings these visual representations had for a medieval congregation. We have to remember that most people at that time were illiterate and, in any case, books were not available and manuscripts were precious and kept safe in monasteries, universities and in certain homes of wealthy patrons. The Bible itself was not translated into English until the late fourteenth century (Wycliffe) and not fully into Welsh until 1588 (William Morgan).The iconography found in churches and cathedrals served, therefore, as visual aids to the understanding of the scriptures for ordinary people.
The key word here is ‘understanding’ because the images were there not just to remind people of biblical events but to help them interpret them according to their role within what was seen as a unified, created universe in which everything had its allotted place and symbolic meaning. Basically, scripture was interpreted in four main ways: its literal or historical meaning, its allegorical or symbolic sense, its moral significance, and its ‘anagogical’ or highest spiritual sense. In addition, the Old Testament was seen to be related to the New Testaments by typology, in which the figures and events of the Old Testament were seen to foreshadow characters and events in the New testament, each Old Testament ‘type’ having an ‘antitype’ in the New Testament. For the medieval congregation to be able to grasp these meanings, visual aids such as the stained glass windows could be used by priests as a way of explaining the main elements of medieval Christian belief.
To illustrate the significance a medieval congregation would attach to the scenes shown in the windows, I want to focus on just two of the images. First, there is Jesse himself. In the historical sense he is seen as a real ancestor of Christ because of the passage in Isaiah and the genealogies given by Matthew and Luke. The Jesse in St Dyfnog Church is depicted as sleeping with his head resting on his right hand. The artist who created this image would have had a reason for such a portrayal. This takes us into the symbolic meaning of the imagery. According to E. Gwynne Matthews, Jesse asleep symbolises the sleeping Jacob, who dreamt of a ladder reaching from Earth to Heaven. Thus, the allegorical significance of the tree itself becomes clearer: the tree trunk culminates in Christ but beyond Christ lies the route to Heaven. And, of course, the tree itself is redolent of Christian symbolism from the tree in Genesis through to the tree from whose wood the cross was made: so in a way the Bible can be said to begin and end with a tree. Furthermore, Jesse is not just Christ’s ancestor, he is also a type: he farmed sheep and his son, David, was a shepherd and so we have these two Old Testament characters foreshadowing Christ, who, in John’s Gospel describes himself as the shepherd whose sheep have been given to him by the Father. This one image, of the reclining Jesse with the tree growing from him, therefore, contains a range of meanings that the modern mind may no longer be attuned to.

The second image I want to discuss is the pelican, which appears directly above the Madonna and child. The pelican is standing on a nest of four chicks. To the modern mind a pelican might not have an obvious part to play in this depiction of Christ’s ancestry. However, medieval bestiaries gave rise to the idea that the pelican fed its young on its own blood, which flowed from its breast. Furthermore, it was believed that the pelican first killed its own young but after three days resurrected them by this act of feeding them from its blood. This image can immediately be seen as a symbol of Christ, who shed his blood to save his flock. The moral meaning is not only one of self-sacrifice but is also a glance towards the idea that human kind can learn from other, lowlier, creatures in God’s Creation; it speaks therefore of humility as a desirable quality. And finally, the ‘anagogical’ or higher spiritual meaning is the aspirational goal of humankind to achieve humility and self-sacrifice by putting the welfare of others (caritas) before self-love: in St Augustine’s words there are two kinds of love: ‘the love of God unto the forgetfulness of self, or the love of self unto the forgetfulness and denial of God’.
Medieval art is a fascinating means of describing the Christianity of the period in a way that does not need the written word and stained glass windows are one clear example of this method of exegesis. I hope in this small way I have been able to give a flavour of the richness of meaning that lies behind medieval iconography and that, when we view these remarkable examples of medieval art, we can learn to appreciate them not just for their artistic value but for the complex messages they were designed to convey.
[1] The church is named after a sixth-century saint, who is said to have stood in a well of cold water as a penance. The waterfall and well became a place of pilgrimage and the well was said to have healing properties.