Chest problem
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Here is a strange tale from Oxford, the story of the Courtrai chest: as Holmes would have said, one of those simple cases which are so extremely difficult.
In 1905 the Warden of New College, Dr Spooner (he of the 'isms'), was visiting College properties. On one of them not far from Oxford. Harris's farm at Stanton St John, something caught his eye: a curious chest which was being used as a cornbin. It was carried off in return for a £50 remission of rent, and it has stood in the Warden's Lodgings ever since..
The chest is some four foot long by three foot broad and high. Its singular feature is a carved front panel of oak, hinged half-way down to fold forward. The carving depicts a medieval battle in strip cartoon form (imagine something like the Bayeux Tapestry in bas-relief).
The historian Charles Oman soon identified the battle as Courtrai, fought in Flanders, in what is now northern Belgium, in 1302. His identification — based on such things as coats of arms carried by knights. and other details which tallied with descriptions of the battle — was accepted by fellow scholars, including the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne. In 1914 Charles Ffoulkes decided that the panel was carved by a Fleming, probably a member of the Guild of Carpenters who had been present at the battle. If the chest is authentic it is unique among surviving examples of medieval furniture: there is nothing else quite like it.
But is it authentic? In the course of time doubts were cast by Belgian antiquaries and art historians, who suggested instead that it was a 19th-century forgery. Their evidence was based on, to quote from a learned journal, 'anomalies artisanales et stylistiques'. Such details as the way that the clothing of a monk was depicted were, it was said, uncharacteristic of 14th-century art. Moreover, there were suspicious deposits of red lead in the interstices of the carving. Illustrations in a mid-19th-century reference book, and a 16th-century mural of the battle (now vanished), could have provided for forger with his sources. In 1952 M A. Viaene, the editor of the journal Biekorf. pronounced that the panel had been carved some time after 1860 (maybe after 1880)in Bruges, where forgers were known to have worked.
The matter rested there until the 1960s when the College thought of exhibiting the chest. If it was to be exhibited it would have to be insured. Underwriters needed to establish its value, which in turn meant resolving the question of its origin. As well, at about this time the College first contemplated selling the chest, following the unhappy tradition by which institutions which should know better regularly dispose of their heritage for ready cash.
Art-historical evidence is one thing, and is not always conclusive. You and I may look at a Mondrian and confidently say that it is not of the quattrocento; the most learned scholars, though, may disagree as to who painted a renaissance portrait. But there is also scientific evidence. In 1968 Dr J. M. Fletcher of the Oxford Research Laboratory for Archaeology, with colleagues including Mr F. S. Walker and Professor E. T. Hall, the noted hot-air balloonist and wood-fancier, subjected the panel to dendrochronological examination. I am not competent fully to explain tree-ring dating; suffice it to say that scientists have built up historical records of tree rings — thick one year, thin the next, as the climate varied — and can now take any piece of wood hewn from a tree in northern Europe in the last thousand years and say to within a few years when the tree was cut down. So it was that the dendrochronologists made and announced their findings: the wood of the panel did indeed date from the end of the 13th century.
Since then battle lines have hardened between those who do and those who don't accept the panel's authenticity. And these are deeper waters than we might have thought — or more turbulent waters. The background to the conflict is — let us say — significant. You may not readily recall the name of Courtrai (or Kortrijk). Belgians do. It was there at the 'Battle of the Golden Spurs' on 11 July 1302 that the flower of French chivalry under Philip IV took on the despised Flemish burghers, and was destroyed by them.
Now, it is not necessary to have read Professor E. H. Kossman's recent The Low Countries, or even Richard Cobb's review of it in these pages, to see how that distant event still produces a frisson in Belgian domestic affairs. The townspeople of Kortrijk believe that the panel is genuine (and would like to buy it): they are Flemings. descendants of the doughty pikemen who slaughtered the French knights. The art historians of Brussels who insist that it is a fake are disinterested scholars: but they are of course Walloons. And if one thing has not changed in that corner of Europe in the last 700 years it is the want of love lost between Flemings and French-speakers. Without impugning anyone's motives, it seems no coincidence that opinion has been split on national lines.
There the question remains. An objective observer would now probably say that the Ayes have it. The scientific evidence is irrefutible and almost conclusive: a 19thcentury forger might have found a piece of 700-year-old wood to work with, but it scarcely seems likely, especially as there was no way of dating wood a century ago. Other objections can be dealt with. It has long been understood that the rest of the chest, to which the panel is attached, is of the 16th century; and the red lead deposits probably date from the beginning of this century when the chest was examined and cleaned at the Ashmolean.
There is no way of telling how the chest (or panel) reached Oxfordshire, though it may be conjectured that when the French retook Courtrai in 1382 the original chest was broken up, that part of it was hidden and later removed. It is certainly no easier to explain how the work of a Bruges forger might have found its way to an English farmhouse within a few years of manufacture: the Belgians have not come up with any convincing explanation of that. Or can't but hope that in time the bruxellms 'Non' is gracefully withdrawn. And I certainly hope that any idea of selling the chest will now be quietly dropped.
As I say, an odd and piquant narrative, and one which seemed worth relating to an extra-Oxonian audience. It was told to Me recently, late at night at the New College sexcentennial Gaude. I could tell manY another tale of the evening. But that, like the giant rat of Sumatra. is a story for which the world is not yet prepared.
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