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Wall painting was once the national gallery of England. The imprinting of natural colours into moist plaster defied the passage of time. Kempley's colours seem to glow even more vividly when the walls become moist. Churches were entirely coated in these messages, telling stories, recording pilgrimages, terrifying the wicked, saluting St Christopher, the saint of travellers, or just graffiti celebrating life on Earth.
The Reformation whitewashed over most church murals, or over-painted them with "the word" - biblical texts, creeds and commandments. But substantial sets have come to light, the "Sussex school" at Clayton and Hardham, Copford in Essex, Ickleton in Cambridgeshire and the great Doom painting in St Thomas's, Salisbury. While stained glass, sculpture, screens and icons were stolen and smashed, wall paintings slept undisturbed until roused by scholars such as Ernest Tristram and Clive Rouse.
Many of these paintings would be on London pedestals, had some avaricious director been able to prise them from the walls, as they did so much of the stained glass and statuary now in the V&A and elsewhere. The lovely swaying figures of the Brent Eleigh crucifixion in Suffolk might have stepped from a work by Italian painter Cimabue. Norwich St Gregory's George and Dragon would pass muster in an Italian sanctuary. The terrifying Ladder of Salvation in Chaldon, Surrey, is pure Hieronymus Bosch. The Lily Crucifix in Godshill on the Isle of Wight is delicate beyond compare.
Overwhelming these delights is despair at the sheer ragged incompleteness of it all. To study this elusive art is to gaze on mostly a ruin. It is as if every painting in every gallery were a tattered piece of canvas in a broken frame; as if the parish church as the aesthetic climax of English life, offering a narrative of its past, were just a mausoleum.
Restoring Church murals in England

The extent of the destruction of English Christian heritage by Protestant vandals boggles the mind. Christians received better treatment from the Turks.