Shrewsbury - St Alkmund's Church - WWI Memorial Window

Founded about the year 900, stands the church of St Alkmund which celebrated its 1100th anniversary in 2012.
St Alkmund’s Church stands at the highest point in the town of Shrewsbury. It is known that there was a Saxon market called the King’s Market at the heart of Shrewsbury all round the church of St Alkmund. Nothing visible remains of the church that Aethelfleda founded. What we see today is part mediaeval and part Georgian. The tower and spire (56 metres high) was built about 1475 in the Perpendicular style. It forms one of the five notable buildings that make the skyline of Shrewsbury so unforgettably interesting. The poet A.E.Housman immortalised this view in his words: “High the vanes of Shrewsbury gleam islanded in Severn stream”.

Following the collapse of a neighbouring church (old St Chad’s) in 1788 the congregation of St Alkmund’s became concerned that their church might also collapse. Whether this was truly the case or not, the decision was taken to demolish the old mediaeval church except for the tower and spire, and a local architect, John Carline, was commissioned to build a new church in the Gothic Revival style.

Had his work remained intact, St Alkmund’s would have been one of the best examples of this style in England. Carline built a wonderfully light church with twelve identical windows made with the latest technology of the period. They had frames made of cast iron at Coalbrookdale – about fifteen miles from Shrewsbury. Superbly crafted in sections, and filled with clear glass, three of these magnificent windows have survived and have recently been completely repaired. They are contemporary (1795) with the great house at Fonthill that William Beckford was building for himself in the same style, and would held their own in that famous creation. Fonthill collapsed with thirty years, but St Alkmund’s still stands, although nine of the twelve windows were altered in the late 19th century, when ideas about what was correct architecture for a church differed from those of the Georgian period.

The east window is the great treasure of St Alkmund’s. It is indeed a notable survival of the work of Francis Eginton, famed in his time as an enamel painter on glass. Living in Handsworth, Birmingham, where he had for a time been a partner of Matthew Boulton, Eginton received a commission to paint a window for the new church of St Alkmund in 1794. He was allowed £150 for the work, and immediately stated that he could not do anything remarkable for that sum, but that the budget could be increased to £200 he could do something notable. The churchwardens agreed. £200 was a considerable sum of money in those days.

Eginton happened to have acquired an engraving of a painting of the Assumption of the Virgin by Guido Reni (1642), then in a collection in Mannheim in Germany. It is now in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. He copied the figure of the Virgin, changing the colopurs, and brilliantly changed to surroundings of the figure to create an image of Christian pilgrimage. The cost came out at 210 guineas – that is, £20.10.0 over budget! That was more than a maid in domestic service would have been paid in a year. However, the churchwardens were so pleased with what Eginton had produced that they paid up on the nail and caused a letter of thanks to be sent to him. The window was installed in October 1795 and has survived, although much of Eginton’s work suffered from changes in taste in the 19th century and was removed or lost.

www.stalkmundschurch.co.uk/history.html

Taken on: August 3, 2019

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