A few weeks ago, I visited a church in the Midlands called Harpswell. They have some pre-Reformation church pews which were well worth the visit but they also had a detached bench end which features a depiction of the Five Wounds of Jesus. I decided to look into this devotion a bit more, but in doing this I realise I have bitten off more than I can chew! So this is going to be a rather brief look at it.
The Five Wounds was a popular medieval devotion and Primers or Books of the Hours all had prayers to the Wounds. It may seem a bit strange to have a picture of disembodied wounds to our eyes, but for medieval people, physical representations of religious realities made them present to them. This was, above all, an aid to prayer.
The Five Wounds are, of course, the ones which Jesus showed to his disciples after the Resurrection, as proof of his rising from the dead. In the Gospel of John, Jesus invites Thomas to put his fingers in the wounds of his hands and feet, and put his hand in his side.
This carving was one of the bench ends in this church, likely made in the late 15th/early 16th century. Here are two of the surviving benches.
You can see how these bench ends are designed to have a painting in the space at the end and were most likely painted all over. After the Reformation, the paintings, which were presumably of saints, would have been scrubbed off. The Five Wounds Devotion, being an indulgenced prayer and a Mass said especially for the dead, fell out of favour with the new Protestant overlords. This is a carving rather than a painting so could not easily be removed. It could have been chiselled off, but someone, a sympathetic Catholic clinging to their faith presumably, must have taken the decision to detach it and hide it somewhere. Perhaps there was a chapel in this church dedicated to this devotion, perhaps it was just a bench that some local person had paid for and didn’t want to see destroyed, who knows? And so it survived.