Lichfield cathedral was being eaten by bees the last time I wrote about it. That was eight years ago, and the bees, of a species that make their homes in little tunnels, had mistaken the crumbling sandstone masonry of the cathedral for a sandy cliff-face and had burrowed into it. Since then, human masons have overtaken the depredations of the bees and the cathedral is looking finer than ever.

This time, roses have caught my attention, because, in a splendid new illustrated history of the cathedral published by Scala, Jonathan Foyle, the historian often seen on television, devotes some pages to these flowers carved in stone at Lichfield. Dr Foyle has a bit of a bee in his bonnet, as it were, about roses – not without reason.

Dr Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo, a medieval historian at Lincoln University, heard Dr Foyle begin a lecture on the subject with the words: “You will leave this room with a radically different view on what you have always accepted as part of the 'historical’ truth.” By the time he had finished, she agreed that he was right.

An object lesson in what he meant is a rose (above) carved in the roof vaulting beneath the south-west tower at Lichfield. The man responsible was James Denton, Dean of Lichfield from 1522 until his death 11 years later. He belongs in my mind to the magnificent but rather totalitarian world of the Renaissance Tudor kings of England. He was a royal chaplain, among other preferments, and appeared with King Henry VIII at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, “clothed in damask and satin”. So he was well aware of the power of visual symbolism, and spent much of his income benignly on beautiful public buildings.