![]() Easier for men, who weren’t allowed to show “unmanly” emotions, to project them onto a female figure. In an age of stiff upper lips, repressed emotions and daft ideas about the unshakeable resolve and firm character (dammit sir!) of the Englishman, it would have been socially unacceptable to have a male statue expressing grief. (Yes, I know the logic doesn’t work: if a = b, it doesn’t always follow that b = a. Angels were women, and women were angels. ![]() It does seem possible, though, to link it to the attitudes at the time to the sexes. ![]() Victorian and Edwardian Anglicans knew their Bible, so they’d have noticed the change presumably, it just didn’t bother them. But there didn’t seem to be any female ones. “Angel” is related to the Greek verb “angello” – “I announce” or “I deliver a message”: they were considered to be messengers from God. All the angels in the New Testament are male (or at least masculine) they’re given the pronoun “he” and the definite article for them is in its masculine form. Depends how good the sculptor was.)Īnd yes, these statues really were called weeping angels. (Actually, some of them look more like they’ve got toothache than in mourning. So, as they wanted nice statues but were a bit squeamish about crucifixes, they hit on a substitute: figures of angels who looked pretty sad. These were considered a bit suspect by lots of Anglicans – not because they didn’t believe in the crucifixion but because they were just a bit too “Romish”. Well-off Catholics tended to go for large stone crucifixes (note for pedants like me: a crucifix is a cross with a statue of Christ on it a plain cross is just called a cross). ![]() No weeping angels for paupers, O dear me no. Needless to say, statues for memorials of the dead were expensive, so they were only available to the well-off: to the middle classes and the aristocracy. While there was a rediscovery in the Church of England of its Catholic heritage during the Victorian period, this wasn’t universal and many Anglicans just weren’t buying it: they maintained that Anglicans were Protestants, not reformed Catholics, and any manifestations of Catholicism were deemed deeply suspect. It does seem that they were much more common in Anglican than in Catholic churchyards. Some interesting bits of social history come into play here. They had their heyday during the Victorian and Edwardian period after the death of Edward VII in 1910, they fell out of fashion, though you can still buy them from some suppliers of decorations for graves (and, of course, This Planet Earth will sell you some splendid Weeping Angel statues to put in your garden to scare the neighbours). No doubt they hoped that it would jump on some of the fiercer teachers and eat them. When my kids were at primary school in the next village to ours, there was a churchyard next door to the school and it had a weeping angel in it, to the delight and terror of the tinies. These lower case weeping angels are pieces of statuary which can be found in some churchyards in the UK it was these which inspired Steven Moffat to wonder what would happen if they moved when you weren’t looking at them. There are weeping angels (with no initial capital letters) – but these are not to be confused with the Silent Assassins from Doctor Who. No, I’m not trying to say that the Weeping Angels exist.
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