Stained Glass of Percy Bacon & Brothers

East Window; St Pancras of Rome, Crucifixion and St Boniface, Bishop of Fulda.

Exeter St Pancras, East Window 1895. Crucifixion, Ss Boniface & Pancras

of Rome.

The little church of St Pancras sits uncomfortably in a courtyard of the modern Guildhall Shopping Precinct amidst the bustle of consumerism, often surrounded by impromptu stalls selling street food. Despite never having had a parsonage, glebe or tithes, and always having been joined with neighbouring parishes, it is a remarkable little survivor. The original church can be traced back to 1191, but it is likely that an earlier Saxon building stood on the site. In medieval times it stood cheek-by-jowl with the dwellings and businesses of central Exeter serving as a chapel of ease for the local population. However, it's history has been chequered having been more or less abandoned, closed most of the time and allowed to fall into disrepair since the reformation. By the beginning of the 19th century the fabric had been allowed to become ruinous. In 1831 some efforts were made to save the church when repairs were undertaken by Robert Cornish. However, it was not until 1888 that a thorough restoration was undertaken by J L Pearson, the architect responsible for Truro Cathedral¹. The church website has a more detailed history.

There is a single stained glass window in St Pancras, the east. It is small, of three lights and depicts Christ on the cross flanked by the child martyr, St Pancras of Rome, and St Boniface. Above Christ a Pelican with a "fruitful vine" at its feet. St Pancras is depicted as a young man who was martyred by Diocletian in 304. St Boniface attired as Bishop of Fulda holds a crozier and a sword piercing a book. The window was the gift of Bishop William George Tozer (1829 - 1899), first Bishop of Zanzibar.²

The window is a curiosity as far as Percy Bacon and Brothers is concerned. Although attributed to that studio^{3 4}, the style is so at variance with the output of the studio in the mid 1890s, one wonders whether the attribution is correct. The report in the Western Daily Mercury of 15th February 1895 (repeated in The Builder) indicates that the window was designed and executed by Percy Bacon & Bros, under the supervision of Mr Pearson. However, the usual hallmarks of Bacon's style; the heavily bejewelled garments, soaring elaborate canopies with wide columns of white glass, and finely painted figurative work are nowhere to be seen. Bacon's depictions of the crucifixion are relatively rare (around twenty of the 700 or more windows made during the firm's existence) so the subject matter is rather unusual for his studio. Also in all the Bacon crucifixion windows I have seen Christ looks to his right whereas in this window he looks to his left. It can safely be said that this window was not painted by Percy Bacon himself, but who the artist is remains a mystery.

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1. Exeter Churches; Creswell, Beatrix. F. 1908. p134 etc. Available at The Internet Archive.
2. Ibid, p136.
3. Western Daily Mercury, 15th February 1895. See also the report in The Builder Vol 68, 16 Feb 1895, p131 available at the Internet Archive.
4. See also Express and Echo - Friday 15 February 1895, p3