Medieval spectacles

Medieval spectacles, and by that I do not mean High Masses, Coronations, Joyeuses Entrees, Tournaments and the like - all eminently worthy of study - but rather, the medieval pair of glasses are something which may well attract the attention, indeed the eye, of those of us interested in medieval life, and who have to do so from behind modern spectacles. 

Medievalists.net recently had an article bases on one in Notes and Queries which demonstrated that by the period 1433-44 spectacle makers, probably from the Low Countries, were established in Southwark, and thus anyone living or passing through London could potentially acquire a pair.  This is earlier than the first recorded shop specialising in glasses cited by Wikipedia infra which was recorded in Strasbourg in 1466.

Reading glasses were nothing new. Developed from Arabic translations of ancient writers from at least the eleventh century by the late thirteenth century the idea of linking two magnifying lenses had apparently resulted in the typical late medieval type in the 1290s, the work of the Florentine Salvino d’Armate. In 1352 they are first depicted in an Italian fresco. 

In England prototypes are referrrd to by two great Oxford scholars - Robert Grosseteste, the future Bishop of Lincoln writing in the years 1220-35, and Roger Bacon OFM writing in the period 1262-8. This might suggest that the Oxford Franciscan house, which both men knew, was one of the first places in England to see spectacles in use.

The 1326 inventory of the possessions of the murdered Bishop of Exeter, Walter Stapledon, who was the builder of much of Exeter Cathedral and founder of Exeter College in Oxford, included a pair of glasses valued at two shillings. This, save for Grossteste’s description a century or so earlier, is the first certain reference, to my knowledge, to an English bishop owning spectacles.

In south aisle of the beautiful church of All Saints North Street in York is a stained glass window of circa 1410 showing a man with a pair of typical glasses of the period.

The earliest surviving pair, found in Germany, date feom about 1400.  

During the fifteenth century depictions increased in both Netherlandish and Italian art and the statue of St Matthew in the King Henry VII Chapel in Westminster Abbey assigns him a pair of rectangular lenses as a legacy of his time as a tax gatherer.

Meanwhile in addition to the original lenses to assist hyperopia ( farsightedness) in the course of the fifteenth century lenses to correct myopia ( nearsightedness ) were created.

Wikipedia gives a history of the development of these aids towards the end of its general article Glasses

In the sixteenth century they continue to be shown as an attribute of scholars and those dealing with money. Monarchs also used them, even if not depicted with such an indication of human frailty.

In England it is thought that King Henry VIII may well have used them in his later years as his ailments increased. Amongst his children both King Edward VI and Queen Mary I wore them.

I was quite surprised to come across a description by an ambassador of a meeting with King Edward in the garden of one of his palaces, in which he described the King as tall for his age and wearing glasses. There is no reason why King Henry VIII’s son should not be tall but the portraits somehow nearly always convey a slight, boyish figure. Add to that glasses and one sees him as a bespectacled gangling teenager rather than the boy-king of Reformation iconography.

Queen Mary I is normally believed to have worn glasses, possibly as a consequence of the medical conditions which are thought to have plagued her final years. This may account for the squint or frown that appears in so many of her formal portraits by Antonio Mor.

Whether Queen Elizabeth I wore glasses is less clear, although given that she significantly outlived her half-siblings who did, it is perhaps likely. Neville Williams’ biography records her selling off a pair of gold rimmed spectacles - they were probably inherited and not needed by or of use to the Queen