Images: British Museum; Victoria & Albert Museum; Tring Museum
Clavis number: ECMA 147
Other descriptors: none
Location: eight tiles and two sherds in the British Museum, London; two tiles and one sherd in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London
Accession number: 1922,0412.1.CR (British Museum); C.470-1927 (Victoria & Albert)
Category: tiles
Related literature: Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, Infancy Gospel of Thomas
Featured characters and locations: Jesus Christ, Joseph (of Nazareth), Mary (Virgin), Zacchaeus (rabbi).
1. DESCRIPTION
Material: earthenware tile; red clay slip; lead glazed. These tiles were handmade, and etched in a technique known as Sgraffiato.
Size: 328 × 164 mm; depth 35 mm
Images on the eight tiles from the British Museum:
1. Left Side: Jesus is making three round pools. Another boy with a stick is suspended upside down in front of him (indicating that he is dead). Right Side: Mary, with hand raised, leads Jesus (carrying a book) off, behind the resuscitated boy.
2. Left Side: Zacchaeus the teacher looks on as a child jumps on Jesus’ shoulder and is killed (child shown upside down). Right Side: Parents of the murdered child speaking to Joseph. Jesus stands with the resurrected, who is walking off.
3. On the Left Side: A man with a key, has locked a boy in a tower. Right Side: Jesus has pulled the boy through a crack in the tower.
4. Left Side: A teacher slaps Jesus, who scolds the teacher for his actions. Right Side: Jesus, standing before two smiling teachers, has healed two people.
5. Left Side: Villagers harvest grain (end of a story). Right Side: Jesus standing beside an oven with three adults pointing at the oven (first scene of a story).
6. Left Side: Three lion cubs with Jesus; Mary and Joseph stand behind Jesus with two onlookers (second scene of a story). Right Side: Two carpenters discussing a crooked beam; Jesus pointing at it.
7. Left Side: Jesus is holding a piece of wood and instructing the carpenters. Right Side: Two villagers work with the repaired plough.
8. Full width of tile: Jesus blessing the food and wine at a large feast.
Images on the two tiles at the Victoria and Albert Museum:
9. Left Side: Jesus is speaking to three boys who appear to be praying to him (end of a story). Right Side: Jesus fetches water from a well as other villages wait in line.
10. Left Side: Joseph is being admonished by a crowd of concerned parents. Right Side: Jesus preaching to a group of small children, who are on their knees and praying.
The images on the tiles very closely resemble those in the manuscript Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Selden Supra 38 (fols. 1–36), which contains the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew in French. They are not copies of the images from the manuscript, but the curator at the British Museum believes that both may have been made from a common source.
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Selden supra 38 (1315–1325)
Date: ca. 1300 CE; the British Museum analyzed the tiles by thermoluminescence in 2007/2008, and dated the origins of tiles to somewhere between 500 to 800 years prior.
Provenance: associated with the Tring Church in Herfordshire County, England. The town of Tring is relatively small (population 11,731 in 2003 according to the Hertfordshire Local Information System), and due to the exceptional craftsmanship of the tiles, the curator at the British Museum notes that it is “puzzling” that the tiles were associated with such a minor parish church. The method of creating the tiles, Sgraffiato, could only be done by hand and was likely a very costly endeavour. This method was popular in France during the era in which the tiles are believed to have been created, suggesting that the tiles themselves may have been made in France. The British Museum tiles were purchased in a curiosity shop in Tring in the mid-nineteenth century. The two additional tiles that were sold to the Victoria and Albert museum were in the possession of a Mr. Foulkes, who had been renovating the parish church in Tring. He was told they were found under the flooring of the building, sometime in “the early [eighteen] sixties,” and they formally came into his possession in 1881. The Victoria and Albert museum eventually purchased these tiles, though if they were purchased from the descendants of Mr. Foulkes or through another dealer is unclear. Mary F. Casey (2007: 8) suggests instead that they may derive from Ashridge College, located just east of Tring. The tiles are in exceptional condition considering their age, and because they are not worn and do not appear to have been walked on, it is believed that they adorned either the walls of a church or possibly a frieze. It is unclear how they came to be stored underneath the flooring of the church in Tring.
2. RELATION TO APOCRYPHAL LITERATURE
These tiles tell stories of Jesus’ childhood. These stories find their origins in various infancy gospels, though their primary vehicle in the West is the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, which is a combination of the Protevangelium of James, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, and other free-floating tales. The connection between the tiles and the illustrations from the French translation of Ps.-Mt. from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Selden supra 38 helps to determine the tiles’ relationships to the infancy stories and indicates where there are gaps in the sequence due to lost tiles.
Tile 1 relates to the story of the cleansing of the pools and the withering of Annas from Ps.-Mt. 27–28 and Inf. Gos. Thom. 2–3.
Tile 2 depicts the story of the cursing of the boy in the marketplace and its sequel, the teaching of Jesus by Zacchaeus from Ps.-Mt. 29–31 and Inf. Gos. Thom. 4–6.
Tile 3 is a representation of the boy locked in a tower from Ps.-Mt. 53 (in Paris, Bibliothèque national de France, lat. 11867).
The left panel of tile 4 is again related to the teaching of Jesus but the right panel with the healing of the two people before the teachers is unattested.
The left panel of tile 5 recalls the miraculous harvest of Ps.-Mt. 34 and Inf. Gos. Thom. 12. The right panel depicts the story of Jesus playing with the boys in an oven. This story is not found in any of the published manuscripts of Ps.-Mt., but it is present in the tradition as well as other infancy gospels, such as the Arabic Infancy Gospel (11).
The left panel of tile 6 depicts the taming of the lions in Ps.-Mt. 35–36. The right panel begins the story of Jesus stretching the beam for Joseph in Ps.-Mt. 37 and Inf. Gos. Thom. 13. The story continues in tile 7.
Tile 8 seems to depict the final story of Ps.-Mt.: the feast of the family of Joseph (42).
The left panel of tile 9 concludes the story of the boys who tried to copy Jesus by leaping from a mountain (in Ps.-Mt. 53 from Paris, Bibliothèque national de France, lat. 11867). The right panel depicts the story of Jesus fetching water in his cloak from Ps.-Mt. 33 and Inf. Gos. Thom. 13.
The left panel of tile 10 recalls the reaction to Jesus’ cursing of the boy in the marketplace from Ps.-Mt. 29 and Inf. Gos. Thom. 5. The right panel may represent the reanimation of the boy, which occurs only in Ps.-Mt.
3. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bagley, Ayers. “Jesus at School.” Journal of Psychohistory 13.1 (1985): 13–31.
Binski, Paul, and Jonathan J. Alexander. Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England 1200–1400. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1987 (pp. 283–84).
Blurton, T. R. The Enduring Image: Treasures from the British Museum. London: British Council, 1997.
Casey, Mary F. “The Fourteenth-Century Tring Tiles: A Fresh Look at their Origin and the Hebraic Aspects of the Child Jesus’ Actions.” Peregrinationes 2.2 (2007): 1–53.
Casey, Mary F. “Conversion as depicted on the Fourteenth-Century Tring Tiles.” Pages 339–52 in Christianizing Peoples and Converting Individuals. Edited by Guyda Armstrong and Ian N. Wood. Turnhout: Brepols, 2000.
Casey, Mary F. “The Apocryphal Infancy of Christ as depicted on the Fourteenth Century Tring Tiles.” MA thesis, University of Arizona, 1995.
Eames, Elizabeth S. English Tilers. London: British Museum Press, 1992 (pp. 35–36).
__________. Catalogue of Medieval Lead-Glazed Earthenware Tiles: In the Department of Medieval and Later Antiquities, British Museum. 2 vols. London: British Museum Publications, 1980 (vol. 1, pp. 56–61).
Graves, Alun. Tiles and Tilework of Europe. London: V&A Publications, 2002.
Handel, Katherine. “Medieval Jesus Fan Fiction.” Alluvium 5.1 (2016): no pages. Online: https://www.alluvium-journal.org/2016/03/30/medieval-jesus-fan-fiction/.
Hildyard, Robin. European Ceramics. London: V&A Publications, 2009.
Honey, William B. English Pottery and Porcelain. London: Black, 1947.
__________. “Art in Popular Culture: New Themes in the Holkham Picture Bible Book.” Pages 46–69 in Studies in Medieval Art and Architecture Presented to Peter Lasko. Edited by David Buckton and T. A. Heslop. London: Alan Sutton, 1994.
James, M. R., and R. L. Hobson. “Rare Mediaeval Tiles and Their Story.” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 42.238 (1923): 32–37.
Kauffman, C. M. Biblical Imagery in Medieval England, 700–1550. London: Harvey Miller, 2003 (pp. 213–42).
Mingren, Wu. “The Tring Tiles: Medieval Comics of Murder and Miracles in Jesus’ Childhood.” Ancient Origins, posted 28 May 202. Online: www.ancient-origins.net/artifacts-other-artifacts/tring-tiles-0011273.
Robinson, James, and Silke Ackermann. Masterpieces of Medieval Art. London: British Museum, 2008 (p. 118).
Strickland, Debra Higgs. “Gazing Into Bernhard Blumenkranz’s Mirror of Christian Art: The Fourteenth-Century Tring Tiles and the Jewishness of Jesus in Post-Expulsion England.” Pages 149–87 in Jews and Christians in Medieval Europe: The Historiographical Legacy of Bernhard Blumenkranz. Turnhout: Brepols, 2016.
4. ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
“Church of St Peter and St Paul, Tring.” Wikipedia.
Entry created by Ben Beauchemin, under the supervision of Tony Burke, York University, 3 April 2021.