The Tring Tiles
- Gallery: Room 40
- Culture: Late Medieval
- Made in: Tring (?)
- Date: 14thC(early)
- Object type: tile
- Materials: earthenware
- Museum number: 1922,0412.3.CR
- Museum: The British Museum
- Collection record: British Museum website
- Image © The Trustees of the British Museum, shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence.
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About this object
Before you is "The Tring Tiles," a remarkable pair of late medieval earthenware tiles. Each tile shows a different scene, both rendered in red clay with a technique called sgraffito—where the artist first covered the tile in white slip, then carved through it to reveal red clay underneath.
On one tile, a father imprisons his son inside a tower. The other shows Jesus compassionately freeing the boy by reaching through a hole in the wall. The figures and actions are rendered with surprising wit and clarity, despite being carved in just a few lines and a flat format.
These tiles are linked to the parish church in Tring, Hertfordshire, and are among the finest examples of medieval sgraffito art in England. They depict stories from the Apocryphal Gospels about Jesus’s childhood, which were especially popular in the 14th century. The same scenes appear in a manuscript at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, suggesting both may come from the same visual tradition. This tile is a fragment of an artistic world long gone but clearly felt in every carefully carved line.
See it in person
The Tring Tiles is on display in Room 40 at the British Museum on Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury, London — free to enter. Choose British Museum on audioguide.london and take a photo of it to hear this free audio guide in six languages — no app download needed.
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