The Fetternear Banner
The preservation of a relic from pre-Reformation Scotland and how it turned up in Aberdeenshire.
Life in Medieval Scotland was undoubtedly hard, the majority of the people affected by poverty, hunger and disease, but there was occasional respite in the many Holy Days which offered a break from the daily grind. Music and processions, candles and flowers, liturgies and devotions, which lifted them out of the temporal into the eternal. Then, in 1560, a single Act of Parliament put an end to it all, and the colour, song and light went out of their lives. Very little survived the Reformation: statues were removed, stained glass was smashed, even many church buildings were demolished, the stones taken away for new buildings or drystone dykes, and any church vessels, fittings and furnishings made of precious metals were melted down for their monetary value. A few items survived, taken into hiding by families who remained true to the Faith, and handed on down through the centuries. We still have the poetry of the Medieval “Makars”, with its intermingling of the secular, the religious, and popular piety, the latter often credited for keeping the Faith alive in Britain. We have music too, in the surviving sacred works of Robert Carver, a 16th century Canon Regular based at Scone Abbey, music that has enjoyed a recent revival in popularity. How much more has been lost? Of the pictorial arts, very little was left, though vestments and fragments of parchment manuscripts surface from time to time, cloth and parchment being easier to hide from sight. One rare artefact which has survived against all the odds is the “Fetternear Banner”.
The Fetternear Banner, dating from the early 16th century, is so called because for almost a century after it resurfaced, it was kept in the chapel house belonging to the little parish church of St John and Our Lady of the Garioch in Fetternear, Aberdeenshire. How it was preserved in penal times, and how it eventually arrived in rural Aberdeenshire, is unclear, but survive it did and in remarkably good condition, the only existing medieval banner of its kind in the whole of Britain, and one of very few in Northern Europe. What we do know is how, where and when it came to be made.
The Banner was commissioned in 1520 by the Confraternity of the Holy Blood, intended for the Collegiate Church of St Giles in Edinburgh, where they had had an altar of the Holy Blood near the old northern door of the church. Two years previously, a new altar came into their possession, in the recently built Holy Blood Aisle on the opposite side of the church. Many such altars were to be found in East Coast ports and trading centres in Scotland, often endowed by local Guilds. Confraternities and Guilds saw it as a sacred duty to provide fittings and furnishings for their churches, much as Round Tables and Rotary Clubs today raise funds for secular charities. The Holy Blood Aisle, it is recorded, had already been dug up by 1564. Medieval popular devotion was centred especially on the Passion and the “Image of Pity”, Christ surrounded by the instruments of his Passion; and the Holy Blood featured widely in this devotion, with Masses offered at the altars, banners carried in procession, and religious poetry and song spilling over into everyday life. Pilgrimage, by those who could afford it, probably including merchants belonging to the Confraternity, would have been made to Bruges, then a great centre of commerce, where a relic of the Holy Blood was preserved and where the Confraternities of the Holy Blood were first founded. Pilgrims and other travellers would have returned to their home towns, filled with enthusiasm for the ceremonies and processions they had witnessed and eager to see them re-enacted at home. In 15th century Aberdeen, for example, the “Haliblude Play” was performed, possibly based on the annual procession in Bruges.
For some reason, the Banner was not completed and was never handed over to hang by the new altar in the Collegiate Church of St Giles. If it had been, then no doubt it would have been destroyed at the Reformation. One reason perhaps lies in the personal history of Gavin Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld, a member of the Confraternity and provost of St Giles, even after he became bishop, until he was forced into exile in 1521, dying unexpectedly, possibly of plague, in London the following year. The Banner is believed to have been commissioned as a gift from one Alexander Graham, a furrier and burgess of Edinburgh, member of the Confraternity and one of four “Kirkmaisters” of the Holy Blood altar. At some point, soon after the work was discontinued, the Banner came into the safekeeping of the Grahams of Fintry, whose coat of arms features in the embroidery, and who remained faithful Catholics long after the Reformation.
In turn, the Banner passed into the safekeeping of another recusant Catholic family, the Leslies of Balquhain, in Aberdeenshire. A descendant, Sebastian Leslie, told me how the Banner is reputed to have been brought to the 2nd Siege of Vienna in 1683, possibly for the Mass held before the battle against the Ottomans. (Vestments, made from gold and silver cloth taken from the Turkish tents after the battle, are now in Blairs Museum, near Aberdeen.) Many other relics of the Catholic past ended up furnishing the Leslie residence of Fetternear House in 1690 and, though many of these were disposed of by a subsequent Protestant Leslie widow, the Banner again survived to be gifted to the church of St John (built by the Leslies) when it was built in 1859, some years after emancipation legislation meant that Catholics were able to worship openly again. There has been a Catholic Church on, or near, the site since at least 1150. There, it was kept in the chapel house, occasionally hung in the church on great festivals, until around a hundred years later it was given “in loan” by Bishop Walsh to the Scottish Museum of Antiquities where it has been ever since.
The Banner is made of linen, 59 inches long and 31¼ inches wide, embroidered in brightly coloured silk thread (red, green, blue, gold and shades of brown, silvery white and yellow), remarkably well preserved, apart from some darkening of the cloth in patches and the perishing of black thread. At some point, an extra piece of linen was attached to the top, where a wooden rod might be inserted so that the banner could be hung in church or carried in procession.
In the centre is depicted Christ, clothed in a loin cloth and covered in wounds, from which multiple large drops of blood drip. His left hand holds the reed, given to him by the soldiers as a mock sceptre; his right hand points to the gaping wound in his side, from which blood trickles down his body. On his head is a crown of thorns in green and a halo with a golden cross on a blue background. Around him are grouped the traditional Instruments of the Passion and, at his feet, we see the Sepulchre, though incomplete, with the seamless garment placed over the lid and three dice lying on top: for my garments they cast lots. Right of the tomb is a lantern and near Our Lord’s left leg is a small rod, obviously the handle of the scourge with which he has been flogged. Behind Christ stands a T-shaped cross, with three nails affixed where his hands and feet would have been, and a little stick above the crossbar, where the black embroidery has perished, but which one assumes spelled out the initials I.N.R.I.
On the left, are other symbols of Our Lord’s Passion: the ladder, the spear, the reed and sponge. On the right, a brightly coloured cockerel stands atop the column of the scourging. Above the cross, we see Peter’s sword, with the letter P on it, alongside the hammer and the pincers. There are also two heads, otherwise unknown in Scottish iconography, but common in Northern Europe; one represents Judas, with a purse hanging round his neck; the other, far less acceptable in our own time, depicts the “insult and spitting” directed at Isaiah’s Suffering Servant, obviously representing the traditional caricature of a Jew.
The inner border is of a large rosary, divided into groups of five (although there are six beads in one group), perhaps suggesting devotion also to the Five Wounds of Christ, separated by medallions of red roses, representing the paternoster beads. The middle border represents the knotted cord worn by Franciscan third orders and confraternities, with various motifs at each corner and in the centre of each side. On the top, of the three intended coats of arms, one is largely missing, with only a bishop’s mitre to be seen; on the left is the known coat of arms of Gavin Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld; and in the centre we find what is perhaps a flight of fancy on the part of the designer: a “coat of arms” of the Holy Spirit, a white dove on a red shield, surrounded by columbines. In the centre of each side is an image of a heart with a golden scallop shell upon it. At the foot, a red rose has been embroidered in each corner, with another coat of arms in the centre, this time that of the Grahams of Fintry. The outer border is incomplete, alternating two motifs - the columbine and the scallop shell. These motifs are taken from the shields, whose background colours, red and gold, are repeated throughout the whole design.
The upper panel was never filled in, with not even faint tracings to suggest what was intended. One possibility is that, with God the Son in the main central panel and God the Spirit depicted as a hovering dove at the top, this panel would have depicted some representation of God the Father. This would have presented an image of the “Mourning Trinity”, very popular around this time in Flemish and German painting, and to be found in a woodcut, produced for devotional use, by Thomas Davidson, an Edinburgh printer in the mid-16th century.
We are truly fortunate that this beautiful example of our Catholic past has survived in such good condition, even though it is now preserved in a glass case in a museum where anyone can see it (if you can find your way into the bowels of the museum where medieval religion is displayed!). One consolation is that it is being well looked after, with computerised images one can study and imagine the colourful past of our forebears in faith. As the late Monsignor David McRoberts (co-founder of the Scalan Association and onetime editor of the Innes Review), and to whose little pamphlet on the Fetternear Banner I am indebted, put it so eloquently:
“…the designer has combined the sombre theme of Christ’s Passion and death with a grace and lightsomeness of line and colour, which strikes us today as strange. To our forefathers, however, accustomed to splendidly painted churches and brightly coloured dress, such a banner, fluttering the ‘Hiegait’ of Edinburgh, would have seemed as natural as the spring flowers in Passiontide.”
By Eileen Clare Grant, Obl. O.S.B.