One of the first things Revd. Diane Ricketts noticed when she came for her interview to be the vicar of St. Nicholas Church, Laindon with Dunton, was the strange animal head high up in the window above the altar.

It took me about five years to notice it and even then, I think someone had to point it out to me before I spotted it.

In my defence, it’s not very large but now I know it’s there, I often look at it wondering where the rest of it is and where it was originally.

In 2008, one of the teachers from James Hornsby School, Christopher Parkinson, gave a talk about stained glass but unfortunately, I was away on holiday and I missed it. However, most of his talk was reproduced in the St. Nicholas Church Parish Magazine here and I learned more about stained glass and about our quirky stained glass animal head.

Apparently, Christopher wasn’t able to find out much information about our little stained glass chap other than that he is a Jessant-de-Lis, which is a leopard’s head with a fleur-de-lis passing through it and it has been dated by the Royal Commission on Historic Monuments (RCHM) as 16th Century. Christopher had not been able to find out the significance of the Jessant-de-Lis, apart from them being in heraldic arms of noble families and he wondered if they may be to do with representing royal connections. If you know more about them, please let me know!

Interestingly, the Jessant-de-Lis can be found in other churches in Essex, such as Kelvedon, Sible Hedingham, Purleigh and Pebmarsh so our little chap in St. Nicholas Church isn’t unique but I still find him fascinating!

Our Jessant-de-Lis would have looked down from his window, on Daffodil when she first went into St. Nicholas Church for her cousin’s wedding, in the ebook ‘Daffodil and the Thin Place’. He would also have watched her interacting with the pupils in Puckle’s School when she slipped back to the Victorian Times. If you’d like to know what he saw, click here to buy a copy from the Muse It Up Publishing website. #MuseItUp