open and someone to do the driving — but church crawling must be catching up fast as interest in local history increases. I suppose, you could always combine the two, imbibing spirit for mind and body on the same trip, as it were.

Out and about a couple of weeks ago my wife, Anne, and I dropped into the church of St Peter ad Vincula at South Newington, and met by chance historian Anthony Fletcher. He identified us as inveterate ‘church crawlers’ and rewarded us by explaining the intricacies of the extraordinary wall paintings there The 14th-century paintings have a claim, along with those at Chalgrove and North Stoke, to be among the best in Oxfordshire — a county in which, incidentally, a surprising number of such fragments have somehow survived the Reformation, during which, of course, most were destroyed. (At Eton, in next door Buckinghamshire, accounts show that paintings which cost five pence to whitewash over in the 16th century, cost as many hundreds of thousands of pounds to uncover in the 20th.) Now the paintings at the church of St Peter ad Vincula are to be the subject of a workshop and symposium on Saturday, June 5, and Sunday, June 6, organised as part of the South Newington Festival, to help anyone interested in finding out more about how such art came into existence in the first place, who were the patrons, and what sort of people were the artists.

An exhibition explaining the paintings’ history will then stay open at the church until the end of the summer.

On Saturday, Kathryn Smith, professor of Fine Arts at New York University, will explain how a number of artists working around Oxford on manuscripts and stained glass, as well as wall paintings, influenced each other.

On Sunday, Oxford University professor Diarmaid MacCulloch — known to millions through his recent BBC2 presentation of his book The History of Christianity — will join a panel of academics chaired by Anthony Fletcher, former history professor at Durham, and including Prof Kathryn Smith, Prof Miri Rubin (Queen Mary College, London), the author of a study of the Virgin Mary, just out in paperback, Mother of God (Penguin £12.99), and Prof Richard Marks (Cambridge), author of Image and Devotion in Late Medieaval England (2004, Sutton Publishing £25).

Prof Fletcher said: “The idea is to use our paintings to show in microcosm a little of how Medieaval English people thought.”

There are more than 400 medieval churches in Oxfordshire, some of which have been at the centre of village life for more than a thousand years. They were usually built by the local landowner and they contained (and to some extent still contain) imagery and symbolism that could be read by illiterate people. As William Langland, the 15th-century author of Piers Plowman (who incidentally died in Shipton- under-Wychwood), said: “These paintings and images are poor men’s books.”

At South Newington, there are three very fine images of the Virgin Mary: an annuncation, Virgin and Child and a Weighing of Souls. There is also a fourth probable fragment of a Maria Lactans. Altogether, along with the picture of St Margaret of Antioch — who was held in special esteem by pregnant women — they provide a sort of vehicle in which to travel into the mediaeval mindset of Oxfordshire people 650 years ago. Also in the church are a representation of the murder of Thomas a Becket (840 years ago) and the execution of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, who was implicated in the murder of Piers Gaveston, favourite of Edward II and possibly the most hated man in English public life ever! Gaveston was captured in Deddington in June 1312.

Kathryn Smith will explain at the symposium that the patrons of the paintings, shown kneeling before the Virgin, were local land owners John and Lucy Giffard. She will also point out remarkable similarities between the wall paintings and illuminations in the illuminated De Bois Book of Hours, created in Oxford in about 1325, which once belonged to the Giffards.

All in all, whatever you think of Christianity, churches certainly bring history to life. Further information on the symposium and workshop: snfestival@googlemail.com Box Office: 01295 720598