The tale of the scandalous trough
It sounds like the name of a satirical story by Jonathan Swift, but ‘the tale of the scandalous trough’ was the title of Lindsay Allason-Jones’ Presidential Address to the Royal Archaeological Society on 11 May 2022, in which she gave an account of her work of the last 12 years. She has been tracking down uncatalogued examples of Romano-British sculpture for the Elusive Sculptures project, to be documented in the Corpus Signorum Imperii Romani: Volume I, Fascicule 11 – sculpture from the hinterland of Hadrian’s Wall, which is to be published shortly (see CA 384 for more on this research).
The ‘scandalous trough’ of the title refers to the font in the church of St John the Evangelist in the parish of Lund in Lancashire which, according to the parish register, was thus described by parishioners when it was first set up by church warden Matt Hall in 1688. Perhaps the congregation was scandalised by the fact that the Christian sacrament of Baptism was being administered from a converted Roman (hence pagan) altar. Alternatively, they might have considered the carvings inappropriate, since they depict three dancing girls, with raised arms and swirling skirts and hair.
Fortunately, the objectionable trough has survived, though the figures are so eroded that you need advanced powers of imagination to see anything erotic or outrageous in these maenads – female followers of the wine god, Dionysus. Maenads became the favourite topic of a certain kind of Victorian artist, because the depiction of a ‘Classical’ subject gave them licence to paint half-naked women carried away by wine-fuelled ecstasy. In their original state, however, the carvings probably resembled the rather demure kind of dancing figures that are also on the Great Plate of Bacchus from the Mildenhall Treasure in the British Museum.
