These colourful but damaged panels were probably painted as part of a fifteenth-century altarpiece for an unknown monastery in Rhineland, Westphalia. Four scenes are included on each of the five oak panels. The narrative sequence was designed to be read from left to right across the upper scenes on each panel, and then in the same direction across the lower scenes. The panels were acquired, shortly before 1879, by the Scottish painter Sir Joseph Noel Paton, whose research for his own history paintings had fostered his interest in early pictures, in addition to medieval armour.