A seventeenth century wooden carving in Warwickshire may hold a vital clue to the dating of the invention of spectacle sides. This has long been one of my research interests and I first posted an article on this topic, ‘A Bit on the Side,’on the BOA Museum’s MusEYEum website in early 2003. That webpage included a 1950s newspaper photograph of a wooden carving from the church of St Peter’s, Wormleighton on the border of Oxfordshire, north of Banbury, together with a summary of the accompanying article that speculated whether the carving could date from Tudor times. Well, I've now had an opportunity to revisit my bit on the side because in December 2005 I arranged to inspect this church and the carving that resides within. My findings, whilst not completely conclusive, were deeply interesting and may require a re-writing of the text books.

The oldest parts of Wormleighton church date back to around 1150 but the building has undergone many alterations over the centuries. Behind many of these changes was the Spencer Family, direct ancestors of Diana, Princess of Wales, which occupied Wormleighton Manor in 1506 and still owns the village estate with its ten houses. The surrounding sheep pastures made the family very wealthy and there was a string of royal and aristocratic visits to the manor house.

The carving is part of an altar screen and occurs in an elevated position at the far left end towards the north wall. A thick red curtain usually conceals it. The lefthand picture shows this curtain pulled aside whilst that to the right is of the other carved heads that are always more visible but, to the spectacle enthusiast, far less interesting. I went equipped with a ladder and a powerful torch. In the presence of Jane Williams the church warden and with her permission I also climbed the organ casing, in a manner a chimpanzee would have admired, to achieve a close-up view. In as much as any sculptural artistic representation can be said to show rigid sides (as opposed to loose cords or leather straps) I could believe that this was what the carving portrays. Unfortunately the terminals of the sides are not visible, being hidden by the figure’s curling locks of hair. My opinion depends largely upon the near right-angle of the ‘joint’ between front and side. Maybe others will view the evidence differently but I think my photographs are fairly convincing. What do you think?

The question remains as to the date of the carver’s work. The period since the appearance of the story in the Banbury Guardian on 21 February 1952 has seen both new research and the passing of key individuals, such that the basis of the claims made in the original article can no longer be established or tested. Clearly someone in the 1950s was sufficiently aware of the potential impact on the history of spectacles to inform George Giles at the BOA Museum. That little more came of this at the time was perhaps not surprising…to have visited a remote village church set within a private estate, unserved by public transport, would have been even more difficult in Post-War Britain than now. The carving is now dated according to a combination of oral tradition and the results of later twentieth century conservation surveys.

The screen was thought to have been taken from the Spencer Mansion in the village, built in the reign of Henry VIII (1509-1547) which would have made it early 16th century, up to two hundred years before sides were believed to have been invented around the 1720s.

Working with local historian Alan Flint we now know that the screen was almost certainly moved here from Southam Church during the Civil War when it was still relatively new, to protect it from Cromwell’s approaching army. It was placed in the Star Chamber of the manor house but not re-erected in a church setting until the 1680s when it was reduced in size. (Other fragments from the original much larger screen are still preserved at the back of the church). We believe that the man with spectacles, despite his Tudor appearance, is a new carving made at that time, i.e. an anachronistic addition of 1685.

This would still make this Restoration-period carving the earliest depiction of spectacle sides in figurative art. It would easily pre-date the Kirkliston stone from Scotland (1727), which the Club visited in 2001, with its carvings of bespectacled skulls (See OAICC Newsletter No 62, January 1998). Of course the interpretation of those carvings has always been tinged with doubt. The depiction of the ‘sides’ is too stylised and vague for the identification to be confirmed. That's me pointing to the relevant part of the gravestone on the occasion of that visit. It probably remains the case that the earliest certain illustration of sides is still the Edward Scarlett trade card but it is worth reminding the reader that no serious historian has suggested for a very long time that Scarlett actually invented sides (though he may have invented the spiral-terminal type).

The latest book on spectacles, produced by the Brilmuseum in Amsterdam in multiple languages, claims that spectacle sides were ‘probably’ invented in France, though without offering any evidence. As with many of the claims made concerning the development of spectacles the use of the word ‘possibly’ instead of ‘probably’ would have rendered this claim uncontroversial within an academic context and it is to be regretted that the author felt unrestrained. In any case, now that the Wormleighton evidence has been revisited it seems reasonable to say that the invention of sides was ‘possibly English’ and that date-wise we should be looking to the final quarter of the seventeenth century at the latest.

‘A Bit on the Side’ (updated) is back now on the MusEYEum website in the On-line Exhibitions section - Spectacles Gallery. Content accurate as of June 2006. Photographs © Neil Handley.

See also: Ole Roemer, article