Holy Trinity, Coventry: Doom

At Coventry’s Holy Trinity Church, a rare surviving ‘doom’ painting is extant. It shows the Lord Jesus as judge, presiding over the final judgement, with the pious admitted into paradise while the wicked are being escorted to their fiery hell by attendant devils. Most medieval churches would have enjoyed the benfits of such a scene; when sermons were brief and masses long, congregants could gaze up at these pictures and reflect upon their own eternal destinies.

Holy Trinity’s, perhaps like certain others, helpfully depicted some of the sins which observers should avoid if they wished to avoid the flames. A group of three women, whose heads are fashionably dressed for the 1430s but remain otherwise naked, are led off to perdition by dark-coloured demons with long teeth. Curiously, they each carry vessels or jugs. Were they wealthy alewives who sold short measures or watered down the ale? Were they themselves winebibbers who succumbed to drunkenness? Are they temptresses whose charms lured astray the good menfolk of Coventry? We cannot be certain, so whatever warning they are meant to offer is lost on moderns.

Doom paintings are rather charming, enjoyable peepshows into the distant world of medieval theology and mindset. Yet their wider message remains as true as ever. There is a Day of Reckoning coming; we will be held accountable for actions, for our 'thoughts, words and deeds'. Christ offers forgiveness to all who come to Him, repenting, but the prospect of a terrible setence waits for all who live and die without Him.

And there shall in no wise enter into it any thing that defileth, neither whatsoever worketh abomination, or maketh a lie: but they which are written in the Lamb's book of life. Revelation 21:27