Welsh Journals

PENNANT MELANGELL PART 8 Saint Melangell's Shrine, Pennant Melangell W.J. BRITNELL and K. WATSON' INTRODUCTION The shrine and altar, now sited within the chancel (fig. 8.9), is reconstructed from fragments found at various times within and around the church. The Romanesque capitals, arches and gables, richly carved in shallow relief, suggest local, 12th-century craftsmanship. Although the fragments are no doubt an unusual survival of a more widespread form, there are continuing uncertainties about its original construction. The earliest extant British shrines, of a variety of different types, are largely of mid-13th century and later date.2 Little is known of the status of Pennant as a cult centre of Melangell in the medieval period, but the income of £ 2 14s 8d given in the Valor Ecclesiasticus3 for 'oblaciones ad reliquas' suggests that the shrine still survived and provided a significant source of income in 1535. Precisely when the shrine was demolished is unknown, but like many other shrines and images in England and Wales it would have been under threat of destruction between the mid-16th and mid- 17th centuries.4 Parts of the shrine became incorporated in the 17th-century lychgate and in parts of the church repaired in the 18th and possibly the 17th centuries. Fragments were first noted in the south wall of the church by Thomas Pennant in the 1770s, and subsequently by the Revd John Parker in the 1830s.6 Until the latter part of the 19th century they were thought to be parts of an earlier church.7 In 1894 Worthington G. Smith suggested that they formed part of a shrine and was the first to attempt to reconstruct how it had appeared. A critical appraisal of Smith's reconstruc- tion was made by Harold Hughes during an excursion by the Cambrian Archaeological Association in 1923: he argued that the gables must have been higher than in Smith's 'Cefn y Maes, Pare, Bala, Gwynedd. 2See C.A.R. Radford. The native ecclesiastical architecture of Wales (c. 1100-1285): the study of a regional style, in 1. LI. Foster & L. Alcock (eds) Culture and Environment, 355-372. (London. 1963),371-2; L.A.S. Butler, Church dedications and the cults of Anglo-Saxon saints in England, in L.A.S. Butler & R.K. Morris (eds) The Anglo-Saxon Church. (CBA Research Report 60, London, 1986), 48: J. Crook, The typology of early medieval shrines a previously misidentified 'tomb-shrine' panel from Winchester Cathedral, Antiquaries Journal 70 (1990). 49-64. }Valor Ecclesiasticus temp. Hem: VIII, vol. 4, (Record Commission, 1821), 451a. 4See Crook op. cit. (note 2). 49; G. Williams, The Welsh Church from Conquest to Reformation. (Cardiff, 1962), 495: C.A. Gresham, Medieval Stone Carving in North Wales: Sepulchral Slabs and Effigies of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. (Cardiff. 1 968), 57-6 1 G. Williams, Poets and pilgrims in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Wales. Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion 1991, 69-98. J. Rhys (ed.), Tours in Wales by Thomas Pennant Esq, vol. 3 (Caernarfon, 1883), 163-5. 6NLW Parker Collection, fo. 331, p. 10, 1837. Archaeologia Cambrensis 3 (1848), 224 [324]; T.W. Hancock, Pennant Melangell: its parochial history and antiquities. Montgomeryshire Collections 12 (1879), 62. ^Archaeologia Cambrensis 11 (1894), 140.