Professor George Henderson gives his new thoughts on the iconography of the Lichfield Angel.

In other accounts of the Lichfield angel which I have read, and again in Warwick Rodwell’s article in Current Archaeology No. 205, the angel is unhesitatingly identified as Gabriel annunciating the birth of Christ to the Virgin Mary. Given the archaeological evidence that the angel panel is to be associated with the shrine of St Chad, it surprises me that an alternative interpretation is not at least aired, namely that the lost portion of the composition showed Chad himself, and that the angel is the ‘beloved guest’ (hospes ille amabilis) of Bede’s account of St Chad’s death and enshrinement (Ecclesiastical History, IV, 3).

Chad is recorded by Bede as reporting a visitation of angels come to summon him to heaven, and a second anticipated visitation actually to take him with them. The ‘beloved guest’ who ‘has deigned to come to me, to summon me from this world’, is understood by Bede’s editors, Colgrave and Mynors, to have been Chad’s brother Cedd, but they also note the role of angels as psychopomps in Anglo-Saxon hagiography, pointing out the important example of the apparition to St Wilfrid of the Archangel Michael, ‘in shining raiment’ (Life by Eddius Stephanus, LVI). The shrine of St Chad, as subsequently elaborated with stone sculpture, might reasonably be expected to focus in its imagery on the history of the saint himself.

Professor George Henderson, 31 May 2007