Two of the 14th-century pictorial Tring Tiles, and two fragments, have been secured on loan from the collection of the V&A, and are now on display at Tring Local History Museum.
The tiles are thought to be connected with Tring’s parish church of St Peter and St Paul, since all of the tiles known to exist were rediscovered in the Tring area. The British Museum has eight of them, and our museum has always displayed replicas of these, but not those at the V&A.
Rare examples of the ‘sgraffito’ technique of ceramic decoration, the tiles tell stories about the childhood of Jesus, some from the Bible but mostly from the ‘apocryphal’, or unofficial, gospels. Some of the stories are familiar, but others are wildly improbable, even violent. The artist is thought to have based the work on older, conventional illustrations and rendered them in cartoon-strip form, like Dennis the Menace. It is thought they were displayed on the church walls, to grab the attention of illiterate people, but who made them and where has remained a mystery.
The V&A acquired their tiles from local people in the 1920s and 30s. The two complete tiles came from Mrs Foulkes, widow of a churchwarden; one of the fragments was found by Mr Butcher, the banker, and the other by Mr Vaisey, the town clerk.
Alongside the V&A tiles, the museum is displaying some tiles recently made by artist Susan Elaine Jones. She has researched the origins of the stories and, concluding that there were once many more tiles in the Tring sequence, has drawn the ‘missing’ scenes in the same anarchic style, going on to make and fire her own tiles. They include recreations of the V&A fragments as they may have looked when they were intact. She has also written a book about the stories, on sale at £12.
