LIBRARY THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA BARBARA PRESENTED BY MRS. MACKINLEY HELM OUR ENGLISH MINSTERS OUR ENGLISH MINSTERS BY THE VERY REV. F. W. FARRAR D.D. F.R.S. DEAN OF CANTERBURY And Others With Illustrations by Herbert Railton and Others LONDON ISBISTER & COMPANY LIMITED 15 & 16 TAVISTOCK STREET COVENT GARDEN LONDON : PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED. DVKE STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.E., AND GREAT WINDMILL STREET. \V. CONTENTS. i. WESTMINSTER ABBEY. BY THE VERY REV. THE DEAN OF CANTERBURY . 17 ii. CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL. BY THE HON. AND REV. CANON FRESIANTLE, M.A. . 129 in. DURHAM CATHEDRAL. BY THE REV. CANON TALBOT, M.A 159 iv. WELLS CATHEDRAL. BY S. M. S. PEREIRA 181 v. LINCOLN CATHEDRAL. BY THE REV. PRECENTOR VENABLES, M.A. . . 225 8 CONTENTS. PAGK vi. WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL. BY THE REV. CANON BENHAM, B.D. . . 267 vn. GLOUCESTER CATHEDRAL. BY THE VERY REV. THE DEAN OF GLOUCESTER . 305 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. WESTMINSTER ABBEY. ST. MARGARET'S AND THE ABBEY . . Frontispiece POET'S CORNER AND HENRY VII. ! S CHAPEL ... 25 CHAPTER HOUSE 31 ENTRANCE TO CHAPTER HOUSE 33 INTERIOR OF CHAPTER HOUSE 37 SOUTH CLOISTERS -39 CLOISTER GARTH 43 SOUTH TRANSEPT 45 LITTLE CLOISTERS 47 CHOIR ' . . -SI CONFESSOR'S TOMB 57 SOUTH AMBULATORY 6 1 NORTH AMBULATORY 65 68 HENRY VII.'S CHAPEL 71 CRADLE TOMB 75 TOMBS OF ABBOT CRISPIN AND ABBOT VITALIS . 8 1 TOMB OF AYLMER DE VALENCE 8<1 TOMB OP EDWARD III.'S YOUNG CHILDREN ... 87 io LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE TOMB OF SIR FRANCIS VERE 91 TOMB OF LADY NIGHTINGALE 93 TOMB OF EDMUND CROUCHBACK 97 ST. EDMUND'S CHAPEL 100 TOMB OF SIR CLOUDESLEY SHOVEL . . . . IO2 TOMB OF LORD CHATHAM HO TOMB OF LORD SHAFTESBURY 123 CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL. CANTERBURY FROM THE EAST 133 ST. AUGUSTIN'S CHURCH GATEWAY . . . . 137 CLOISTERS 139 PLACE OF MARTYRDOM 143 THE CRYPT 146 TOMB OF THE BLACK PRINCE 15 1 THE ENTHRONEMENT CHAIR 153 WEST GATE 155 DURHAM CATHEDRAL. CATHEDRAL FROM THE RIYER 163 CATHEDRAL FROM BOW LANE 167 A BRIDGE HOUSE 1/3 ELVET BRIDGE . . . -177 WELLS CATHEDRAL. STAIRWAY TO CHAPTER HOUSE AND CHAIN GATE . 185 VIEW FROM SOUTH-EAST . . . . .188 THE OUTER GATE . ... 191 CENTRE OF WEST FRONT . . ,n, CATHFDRAL FROM 5OUTH-EAST If) - CATHEDRAL FROM MARKET SQUARE . . . . 2OI STATUE OF KING STEPHF.N, FROM WEST FRONT . . 204 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. \\ PAGE SOUTH TRANSEPT AND NAVE 2O7 THE CHAIN GATE 211 VICARS' CLOSE 215 MEDAL TO COMMEMORAIE ACQUITTAL OF SEVEN BISHOPS 2l8 REVERSE OF MFDAL 2 ig LONGLEAT .221 THE CHAPTER HOUSE . . . . . - . 22J LINCOLN CATHEDRAL. CATHEDRAL AND EXCHEQUER GATE ..... 23! CATHEDRAL FROM THE POTTER GATE .... 239 THE CHOIR 255 THE CHAPTER HOUSE 26l WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL. THE ABBEY MILLS 2;i THE BUTTER-CROSS 275 TOWER, SOUTH TRANSEPT, AND PRIOR'S HOUSE . .281 THE CLOSE GATE 285 CHOIR FROM THE NAVE . 289 CATHEDRAL FROM SOUTH-EAST 295 WYKEHAM CHANTRY 299 THE APSE 3O2 GLOUCESTER CATHEDRAL. CATHEDRAL FROM NORTH-WEST 309 NORMAN NAVE 313 ACROSS THE SOUTH TRANSEPT 315 THE CHOIR 317 SHRINE OF EDWARD II 321 KING OSRIC'S TOMB FROM ALTAR STEPS . . . 324 KING OSRIC'S TOMB FROM AMBULATORY OF CHOIR . 325 1 2 LIST OF ILL USTRA TIONS. PACK THE CLOISTERS ... .... 32" CATHEDRAL FROM OX- BODY LAM; . . . - 33 1 THE sF.nn.iA 333 TOWER FROM THE DEAN'S GARDEN .... 335 THE DEANERY 339 COLLEGE LAM: 341 CATHEDRAL FROM SOl'TH-EAST 343 CATHEDRAL FROM NORTH-WEST 347 A PEEP FROM THE NORTH TRANSEPT .... 349 LAVATORY IN THE CLOISTERS 350 PUBLISHERS' NOTE. Of all the monuments of our national history that haw survived the ravages of time and the violence of human passions, our minsters and cathedral churches are the most beautiful, the most interesting, the most eloquent of old-woiid men, strange faces, other minds. They are at once poems and chronicles, epitomes in stone of the character, the aspirations, the faith, the achievements ami failures of our forefathers. To ivrite the story of the great churches of England would practically amount to writing English history from before the Norman Conquest to the Reformation ; it would mean a history of religion in these islands from the early Saxon foundations to the iconoclastic days of the Puritans; it would involve a survey of the development and progress of architecture from an antiquity almost mythical down to the close of the fifteenth century. However ignorant one may be of the spirit and technicalities of architecture, it is impossible to stand in the shadow of these majestic buildings ivithout feeling that they embody an ideal of the human heart, an aspiration of human genius, as unmistakable as any expressed in music or poetry. Our minsters were no mere shelters for the assemblage of worshippers ; they were themselves a form of worship, an embodiment of praise and prayer in materials less fugitive than the breath of psalm or antiphon. It has been argued that in these days of ours the Christian spirit i 4 PUBLISHERS' NOTE. has found an outlet in homes, hospitals, charities, missions, rather than in the erection of costly edifices. One cannot but remember, however, that most of these objects were not overlooked in the centuries before the Reformation, and it is worth while to consider that it may not be the purest spirit of zeal which asks, " To what purpose is this -waste ? This ointment might have been sold for much and git-en to the poor." Wonderful as are the masterpieces of poetry and music, if one considers the medium in which the artist worked it is scarcely possible to regard as less marvellous the genius which manipulated these mighty masses of brute material, gave them icings, and let them soar into the high heavens. Should the reader do no more than analyse the " element of the tracery" in a window, he will be amazed at the knowledge and ingenuity which produced such seeming freaks of exquisite fancy from the stern geometrical principles on which a painted casement is constructed. How was the lovely east window at Carlisle contrived out of eight ij- six pieces of stone, on a design drawn from tiro hundred and sixty -three centres ? In these pages the story of several of our English minsters has been told briefly and simply, yet in such a manner as to include at least an outline of these three salient characteristics the histoi'y, religion, and architecture of our ancestors. The heart)] welcome accorded to the first series of " Our English Minsters " has encouraged us to issue herewith a second series, on which no less care has been expended by both authors and artists. WESTMINSTER ABBEY I. THE BUILDING. SOME French author I think it was Voltaire said of the English that " they amuse themselves gloomily, according to the fashion of their nation." So far as the observa- tion is true, the gloom comes from hurry. There are very few of us who have sufficient leisure from our occupations. We crowd each page of life up to the very edges, and leave no margin for beauty and convenience. It is, for instance, distressing to see the aimless and listless way in which mul- titudes of weary sight-seers wander through the en- chanted rooms of the National Gallery. This is not their fault. It is no doubt mainly due to a lack of all training in the objects, the principles, the history of art. But it is also due to the fact that so many of them regard the National Gallery as a thing to be " done," so that when they are asked, " Have you seen the National Gallery ? " they can B 1 8 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. say " Yes." But, in any case, no human being could gain from that magnificent collection of pictures one hundredth or even one thousandth part of what it may well and delightfully teach us, unless he visits it many times, and bestows much care on the study of separate pictures. It would be of immense advantage to the people if at stated hours some competent guide would conduct parties of working youths round the Gallery in such a way as to interest them in its precious treasures, which might thus be to them " a joy for ever." But here, too, we should probably be beaten by the problem of our numbers. So many would desire to go, that the plan would become impossible. I am met by the same difficulty in Westminster Abbey. I have very many times had the pleasure I admit that it is a most fatiguing and exhausting pleasure of conducting parties of youths, of choir-boys, of soldiers, of policemen, of working-men, of public- school boys, of pupil teachers, and the members of Bible-classes of both sexes, round the Abbey. But no sooner does one appear on the scene, than a number of strangers coagulate round the party, who do not belong to it, and often entirely defeat my object, unless I succeed in throwing them off. For to explain anything satisfactorily in a narrow space to more than some thirty or, at the outside, forty persons, would require the eyes of an Argus and the voice of a Stentor. Even with a moderately-sized party the whole Abbey cannot be thoroughly visited WESTMINSTER ABBEY. ig under four or five hours. But it is very unwise to spend more than two hours at once, for at the end of that time the voice of the conductor is weary, and the attention of the visitors is more or less worn out. And yet I am often distressed to see how less than nothing is the amount of real pleasure and advan- tage gained by multitudes of those who stroll about in hundreds day after day, not knowing at what they ought to look, or what they ought to see in it, or what is to be gained from seeing it. I once had the pleasure of conducting the genial American poet, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, round the Abbey for two hours, and when I left him he told me that he should always recollect those two hours spent there as among the most memorable in his life. But " the eye can only see what it brings with it the power of seeing." The outward impressions are as meaningless without the inward susceptibility, as colours to the blind or melodies to the deaf. To those who have neither eyes to see, nor knowledge to understand, nor sensibility to enjoy, a visit to the Abbey is too often a blank of dulness and disappointment. But what such a visit might be to a man of universal knowledge, unlimited interest, and complete sympathy, no one can under- stand ; for no single person possesses or can possess the consummate culture which would be requisite for the reception of such full impressions. Let me try to catalogue some of the varied regions of delight and interest. First, there is the religious symbolism of the 20 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. building. Its structure is by no means accidental. Down to the minutest particulars it is " a theology in stone." Its prevalent number is three triple height, triple length, triple breadth to remind us of the doc- trine of the Trinity. Its other predominant numbers are four the number of earthly perfectness, the sig- nature of the world, and of divine revelation ; and seven the signature of the covenant, and of the seven spirits of God, and of the seven pillars of the House of Wisdom. Its structure is cruciform to remind us of the Atonement. Even the geometrical designs which lie at the base of its ground plan are combinations of the triangle, the circle, and the oval the symbols of the Trinity, of Eternity, and of the saintly aureole. It would require the soul of a mediaeval theologian, a St. Thomas Aquinas or a mediaeval mystic, a Richard de Sancto Victore to take in all the rich significance of these elaborate emblems which extend even to the minutest details. Then there is the scientific and architectural interest. To the intelligent architect the Abbey, with all its exquisite proportions, becomes a sort of epic in stone. He looks with delight on all the details of its orna- mentation ; he easily observes where the work of Edward I. joins on to that of Henry III., and that of Richard II. to that of Edward I., and that of Henry V. to that of Richard II. ; and he sees at once that the great Perpendicular west window belongs to the age of Henry VII., and the days of Abbot Islip. He looks with delight on the minute varying details of arch and WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 21 moulding, and window tracery, and wall-surface deco- ration, and he traces in these variations the character and tendencies of the ages to which they belong. I once went over the whole Abbey with the late Sir Gilbert Scott, and he had fifty things to point out which no ordinary observer would have thought of noticing. To enter fully into them we should require the training and insight of such a man as he, or as Sir Christopher Wren, or Mr. Ruskin. Then, thirdly, there is the poetic and emotional sentiment. To realise that adequately we must have the mind and emotions of the poet, such as Congreve, when he says, " How reverent is the face of this tall pile, Whose ancient pillars rear their marble heads To bear aloft its arched ponderous roof, ****** Looking tranquillity ! It strikes an awe And terror on my aching sight. The tombs And monumental caves of death look cold, And shoot a dullness to my trembling heart." Or Wordsworth, in his famous sonnet, " They dreamt not of a perishable home Who thus could build ! Be mine, in hours of fear Or grovelling thought, to seek a refuge here, Or through the aisles of Westminster to roam ; Where bubbles burst, and folly's dancing foam Melts, if it cross the threshold ; where the wreath Of awe-struck wisdom droops." To enter into this we should require to feel as a Shakespeare or a Milton felt. But, fourthly, a great sculptor might again be chiefly interested by the artistic creations which meet 22 WESTMINSTER ABBEY him on every side. In this single building he can amply trace the rise, the fall, the decadence, the revival of English sculpture from the lovely effigy of Aveline of Lancaster, through the coarse, blubbering cherubs of the reign of Anne, and the heavy classi- calities of Gibson, and the false taste of Roubiliac, down to such fine statues as the bowed prisoner of Flaxman (behind the statue of Lord Mansfield), and the Viceroy Canning of Foley. To treat of this we should have to walk through the Abbey with such men as Mr. Gilbert, or Mr. Bruce Joy, or Sir Edgar Boehm. Then, again, how much should we gain at every step and every turn by a thorough and masterly knowledge of History ! Ho\v delightful an appreciation of this inexhaustible source of interest is shown by every allusion to the Abbey in the pages of Lord Macaulay ! It was while he was standing under the bust of Warren Hastings that Dean Milman sug- gested to him the idea of his splendid essay on the great Proconsul ; and his allusion to the effigy of Chatham is one of the best-known passages in his works. When we tread the pavement of the Abbey, not only is every step we take on holy ground, but also on classic ground. Here stood Shakespeare and Ben Jonson and Marlowe when they flung their pens and their verses upon the coffin of Spenser. Here Samuel Johnson leant in tears at the funeral of Oliver Goldsmith ; here sat Charles I., all in ill-omened white satin, at his coronation ; here little Prince Alfonso, son of Edward I., hung over the tomb of WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 23 the Confessor the golden coronet of Llewellyn, Prince of Wales ; here stood Henry VI., half-dazed, and marked for his grave the place where he was never destined to lie ; here sat Queen Victoria on the day of her Jubilee. Who could enter into even half of such associations unless he had some of the know- ledge of a Freeman or a Washington Irving ? Again an antiquarian would find much to observe with pleasure which another man would pass over from want of knowledge. Here he would stop to notice the change, from generation to generation, of the entire meaning and idea of monumental memo- rials. He would point to the first effigy which rises from the recumbent attitude of death to kneel upon its knees ; the first which stands upright ; the first which substitutes the ambitions and vanities of life for the humility and repose of the grave ; the first which sits and lolls in its easy-chair. Here, he would say, is the first instance on any tomb of the foolish and repellent symbol of the skull and cross-bones. Yonder is the earliest metal effigy, and so forth. A Dart or a Camden could pour a flood of new light on many an obscure and disregarded corner. And not to multiply too many illustrations, if a man be endowed with nothing more than the " pic- turesque sensibility " which was one of the charming characteristics of Dean Stanley, how much more vivid will be all his varied impressions, and how inexhaus- tible will be the power and the keenness of his interest ! Dean Stanley, as I can testify from per- 24 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. sonal knowledge, seemed to find fresh delight and fresh instruction in the Abbey every day. Now if a man takes with him but one of these elements of insight, knowledge, and sympathy, he gains much ; but what would be his gain if he combined them all ? Imagine a man who could visit the Abbey with the united gifts and feelings of a Wren, a Newman, a Wordsworth, a Scott, a Macaulay, a Flaxman, a Camden, a Stanley ! Thousands of visitors carry with them from the Abbey little beyond the impression that it is a dull and dingy place, full of ugly tombs, of which many are to unknown or forgotten personages. Such visitors lose everything ; but nearly every visitor loses something and even much. Our aim should be, even if we lose much, to gain at least something definite. Multitudes are puzzled by the fact that a parish church should stand so close beside the stately Abbey, which dwarfs into insignificance its smaller, yet not insignificant, proportions. We are often told that the rnediseval builders, in almost every cathedral city, delighted to erect smaller churches beside the huge masses of these minsters, to serve as a scale whereby to measure the size of the larger edifices. Certainly the result is effective. The would-be lovers of the picturesque who glibly talk about pulling down St. Margaret's to improve the view of the Abbey, talk ignorant nonsense. Many years ago a Government Committee, following all the best artistic advice of the age, decided that the aspect of the Abbey is in POETS' CORNER AND HENBY VII. 'S CHAPEL WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 27 every sense improved by the vicinity of the smaller building. The frontispiece may help to show that, as Mr. Augustus Hare says, " the outline of the Abbey is beautifully varied and broken by St. Margaret's Church, which is not only deeply interesting in itself, but is invaluable as presenting the greater edifice behind it in its true proportions." St. Margaret's, perhaps, saved the Abbey itself from destruction. Lord Protector Somerset wanted to pull down the church, in order to use its material for the building of his huge palace Somerset House ; and it was shrewdly suspected that, if he had succeeded in this, he would next have laid sacrilegious hands upon the Abbey also. But the inhabitants of St. Margaret's parish rose in fury, and drove away his workmen, so that his evil designs were perforce abandoned. London could never be guilty of so gross an act of barbarism as the destruction of a church which has a larger, more varied, and more interesting history than any parish church in England, and which is connected with associations of some of our greatest worthies among others of Caxton, of Raleigh, and of Milton. But the church was originally built as far back, certainly, as the days of the Confessor, and, perhaps, even earlier for the worship of the population. The Abbey was not intended for parochial services. Its choir was the daily chapel of the Benedictine monks. Its nave was not a place for worship, but was set apart for great national and ecclesiastical processions. St. Margaret's is the most ancient, and was at one 28 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. time the only, church west of Temple Bar. It served as the religious centre of a district which was then but sparsely inhabited, but now numbers myriads of inhabitants. It is only during the course of cen- turies that the parishes of St. Mar tin' s-in-the -Fields, St. George's Hanover Square, St. John's Westminster, and multitudes of others have been cut out of its original extent. But to turn to the Abbey itself, let us pause before the exterior of the east end of Henry VII. 's chapel, with the end of the south transept, one of the flying buttresses, and a corner of the Chapter House, pro- jecting behind the private house of one of the Minor Canons. The name, "Henry VII.'s Chapel," has entirely superseded the name of " Lady Chapel." In mediaeval minsters the chapel at the east end was invariably dedicated to the Virgin Mary, who was commonly referred to as " Our Lady." The position of the chapel, in the symbolism which ran through the minutest details of these sacred buildings, was meant to indicate the Virgin standing beside the Cross, during the Crucifixion. But just as the gor- geous chapel at Windsor was known as " Wolsey's," and now as the " Prince Consort's Chapel," so the splendid and lavish expenditure of the first Tudor king on this memorial, intended to enshrine his tomb, has connected it permanently with his name. It is perhaps the loveliest specimen of richly decorated Perpendicular architecture in the world. The reader cannot fail to observe the exquisitely delicate lace- WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 29 work of its ornamentation. It still retains its charm in spite of the deadly fumes which we suffer to be poured in volumes into the air of London from the neighbouring potteries and other works ; but when it came fresh from the sculptor's hands, and before it was densely begrimed by the ever-accumulating soot of centuries, it must have been a vision of perfect beauty. This scene is called " Poets' Corner," because it leads to the entrance into the south tran- sept, where the poets lie buried. Just as the remains of the sainted Confessor attracted round them the dust of so many kings and queens, so the grave of Chaucer acted as a magnet to draw into its neigh- bourhood the memorials of Prayton, Ben Jonson, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Gray, Addison, and many more, including the great Victorians, Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson. The Chapter House was commenced in A.D. 1250, when, Matthew Paris says, " the Lord King (Henry III.) built the incomparable Chapter House" The Chapter House was the building in which the Abbot, the Prior, and the monks met every week, to consult for the welfare of the monastery.* Abbot Ware, in his Custumal, says, " It is the house of confession, the house of obedience, mercy, and forgiveness ; the * The name is derived from the fact that when the monks assem- bled, a novice read aloud a chapter (capitulum) of the Benedictine rule (Mackenzie Walcott, "English Minsters," i. 46). Littre says capi- tulum ("little head") "apris le sens d'une courte lecon faite dans 1'office divin ; puis celui du lieu ou s'assemblaient les moines et les chanoines parcequ'on y lisait de courtes Ie9ons ; et enfin celui de corps meme desreligieux." 3 o WESTMINSTER ABBEY. house of unity, peace, and tranquillity, where the brethren make satisfaction for their faults." The monastic chapter houses were all hut invariably rect- angular ; this is an octagon which Henry III., with reckless lavishness, erected to replace the circular chapter house of the Confessor. Gargoyles stand out prominently at the tops of the buttresses. The projection of the gargoyles is a characteristic of the Early English style. The gargoyles themselves, in their grotesque and fantastic ugliness, represent the demons who are excluded from the sacred precincts.* The Chapter House is visited by comparatively few of the myriads who come to the Abbey ; but those who know what to look for may well linger for some time in this deeply interesting building. The splendour and loveliness of the entrance to it show the important place which it held in the general estimation. The stones under the left arcade of the vestibule are still deeply worn by the feet of genera- tions of monks, as they walked two and two to their weekly assemblies. The vaulting and its bosses are quaint and rich. The quaint entrance door itself, bleared and ruined as it now is, was once rich with gold and scarlet. The moulding around it represents " a stern of Jesse." On the pedestal between the two doors stood a lovely figure of the Virgin, and on * The name gargoyle (French gargouillc, Spanish gargola) is con- nected with garg, a word which, by onomatopoeia, was used for the lower part of the throat, and was, therefore, suitable, as Littre says, to describe " ces gosiers de pierre, vomissant de 1'eau, que portent les edifices gothiques." THE CHAPTER HOUSE. 32 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. eacli side of her was a censing angel. The central figure has been shattered to pieces, and the heads of the angels have been destroyed with ruthless bigotry ; but the drapery of the robes shows how lovely the figures must once have been, as their wings and faces stood out on the foliated diaper of the tympanum. If the visitor will look up, he will see on the central boss of the cloister the pulley, centuries old, over which once passed the rope for the lamp that was kept ever burning before this figure of the Virgin. It was this " superstitious use " which led to the demolition of the image. As we pass through the vestibule we may notice several things : It is low, because the dormitory of the monks ran over it, and it is supported by small pillars of Purbeck marble, which once shone with polished lustre. These pillars have been attached to the capitals by lead, over which was placed the stone moulding ; but the expansion and contraction of the metal, small as it is, has been sufficient entirely to destroy the stone moulding, and in many places to leave only a ring of lead. The door to the right led into a crypt, or treasury. It is of solid oak, with ancient iron lock, and on part of it are still to be traced fragments of the human skin the skin of some thief who had been executed which was once nailed over it to terrify depre- dators. The same was also the case with the door opposite to it, which leads into the Chapel of St. *"*~z. Faith (erroneously called the Chapel of St. Blaise), which was the old Revestry. On the left-hand side is the stone coffin of Valerius Amandinus, a Roman, which was found on the north side of the Abbey. It has evidently been utilised by some later ecclesiastic, as may be seen by the cross on the upper stone. Entering the Chapter House, we see at a glance o 34 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. an octagon of the noblest proportions, of which the roof is supported by a slender and graceful pillar of polished Purbeck, thirty-five feet high, " surrounded by eight subordinate shafts, attached to it by three moulded bands." The capital, though of marble, is richly carved. All round the building run seats of stone, under arcades with trefoiled heads. The marble capitals are carved with foliage ; the work is diapered with roses and other flowers ; the floor, long preserved by a wooden covering, is " one of the finest encaustic tile pavements now remaining," and, among other interesting designs, one of them preserves the only known copy of the ancient rose window at the end of the north transept, which has just been restored to its original condition. The walls under the arcades were once covered with frescoes. Those of the thirteenth century, in the sedilia of the abbot and his priors, are exquisitely beautiful figures of Cherubim and Seraphim, Angels and Virtues to whom Christ is setting forth the mysteries of redemption. On their wings are inscribed the names of the chief Christian virtues. The other frescoes, which are still preserved, are much coarser. They represent scenes from the Apocalypse, and were painted in the reign of Edward IV. by a monk named John of North- ampton. The painted windows were placed there as a memorial to Dean Stanley. One was given by the Queen, and one by Americans. In the central light, at the summit of each, is represented the greatest man of each century the Venerable Bede, St. WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 35 Anselm, Roger Bacon, Chaucer, Caxton, and Shake- speare. In the window over the door is Queen Victoria. The central band of the windows repre- sents many of the great historical events connected with the Abbey. The series of scenes on these Chapter House win- dows is so interesting that the reader may spend a delightful quarter of an hour in identifying them. As few people are able to do so, I here give them, and I should recommend the visitor to get a pleasant history-lesson by making them out with the following key: Beginning with the first large window on the left, which was Dean Stanley's own gift the window which has St. Anselm in the upper circle the four kings on the top row are William the Conqueror, William Rufus, Henry II., and Richard I. ; the historical scenes are : 1. The coronation of the Conqueror in the Abbey. 2. The miracle of St. Wulfstan. He was the only Saxon bishop who was allowed to retain his see, and the legend says that, refusing to give up his crozier to any one but the Confessor, from whom he had received it, he laid it on his tomb. There it miraculously stuck, and no one could lift it, until when he stretched out his hand for it, it was easily raised. He was therefore allowed to retain it. 3. The conflict of the Arch- bishops of Canterbury and York, described farther on. 4. The gathering of the Crusaders under Co3iir de Lion 3 6 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. In the next window, given by the Queen, the circle contains the head of Roger Bacon. The kings are John, Henry III., Edward I., and Edward II. The historic scenes are : 1. The signing of Magna Charta. 2. Henry III. examining the plans of the Abbey. 3. Alfonso, Prince of Wales, hanging up the coronet of Llewellyn. 4. The placing of the Stone of Fate in the Coronation chair. The next window, dominated by Chaucer, was given by the Americans. The royal personages are Edward III., Philippa, the Black Prince, Richard II. The scenes are : 1 . The monks in the Chapter House. 2. The House of Commons in the Chapter House. 3. The Black Prince carried to the Parliament. 4. Richard II. consulting the Hermit of Westminster before meeting Wat Tyler. Over the fourth window is Caxton. The kings are : Henry IV., Henry V., Henry VI., Edward IV. The scenes are : 1 . The death of Henry IV. in the Jerusalem Chamber. 2. Henry V.'s Council. 3. Henry VI. choosing his grave in Westminster the grave in which he was not destined to lie. 4. Eliza- beth Woodville, with her son, Richard, Duke of York, taking sanctuary in the College Hall. Over the fifth window is Shakespeare. The sove- reigns are : Henry VII., Henry VIII., Edward VI., and Mary. The scenes are: 1. The marriage of Henry VII. 2. Wolsey's convocation in the Chapter House. 3. Dissolution of the monasteries. 4. The funeral of Edward VI. CHAPTEB HOUSE, IXTEEIOE 38 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. As the Abbots of Westminster placed in the lowest compartments of the window are comparatively little known, I will not trouble the reader with their names. When the visitor stands in this glorious Chapter House, he stands on the spot round which centre some of the most important events in English history. The scenes here enacted may have been sufficiently excit- ing for the monks, when they confessed their sins to one another, or were accused and judged, and scourged in the sight of the community before that central pillar. But how far more memorable was the assembly when the Chapter House was set apart, before 1340, for the separate use of the House of Commons. The Speaker sat in the abbot's seat. Under this roof were passed such far-reaching Acts as the Statute of Provisors (1350) and the Statute of Prcemunire, which " pared the Pope's nails to the quick, and then cut his fingers." Here Wolsey held his court as Cardinal Legate. Here the martyrs, Bilney and Barnes, were tried and sentenced to be burnt for their Protestant opinions. Here were passed the Act of Supremacy and the Act of Sub- mission ; and before that slender pillar was laid the Black Book of damning evidence against the monas- teries, which led to their dissolution, and roused a cry of indignation from the listening senators. And here the House of Commons continued to sit till the last day of the reign of Henry VIII. In 1547, the first year of Edward VI., the Chapel of St. Stephen, in THE SOUTH CLOISTEES. the Palace of Westminster, was prepared for the use of the Lower House, and the Chapter House, though it was no longer used for their debates, was still regarded as public property, and was turned into the Record Office, in which, for three centuries more, were kept Doomsday Book and all the other precious documents of the Kingdom. In 1865 it was happily restored from its condition of neglect and defacement by Sir Gilbert Scott. 40 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. We now pass into the south cloister the one which is in a line with the entrance from Dean's Yard. This walk and the western cloister, which leads straight into the Abbey, were begun in 1350 by Abbot Lang- ham, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury and Cardinal, and finished in 1380 by Abbot Littlington, out of the sums which the Cardinal Archbishop bequeathed."" This southern walk was the place in which, under the supervision of the " spies of the cloister," the Benedictine monks passed the greater part of the day all that was not set apart for wor- ship, labour, sleep, and meals. Here, for centuries, they might have been seen in their long black tunics, with large- sleeved, black, upper frocks, and split cowls with pointed ends. Here they were shaved once a fortnight, and bled once a month. As he walks down the cloister let the visitor notice the ancient lockers which once contained the towels of the monks ; the gravestone of the little nephews and nieces of John Wesley ; the large flagstone (" Long Meg ") under which lie the bodies of twenty- six monks, who, with their abbot, Byrcheston, were swept away by the disastrous plague of 1348. Under the stone bench towards the east end lie the effigies of three of the abbots Vitalis, appointed by the interest of William the Conqueror, an excellent eccle- siastic, who died in 1085 ; Laurence, the first * The initials of Abbot Littlington (N. L. under a mitre) may be seen on the boss of groining near the entrance, and his arms on other bosses. WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 41 mitred abbot, who procured the canonization of Edward the Confessor, and died in 1176; and Gervaise, the natural son of King Stephen of Blois, a bad abbot, who was reproved by Pope Innocent II., and died in 1160, having been deposed from his office. The passage at the end of this cloister, leading to the right, is called " The Dark Cloister." Over it may be seen the square oaken frame of a window now filled up. It was, perhaps, the window of a sub- prior's dormitory, and by it is a bracket, evidently intended for a lamp. This dark cloister is interesting as a relic of the oldest part of the Abbey buildings. It is Early Norman work of the days of the Confessor. It led to the Infirmary, with its chapel and garden, where the sick monks had to be removed when they had suffered from bleeding or any other cause. Here they had rest and peace, and more indulgences than in the bleak cloister where their daily lives were passed. The West Walk now so familiar to the scholars of Westminster School, who stand along it on Sundays, in their white surplices, to await and salute the Canon and Master as they enter the Abbey was also built by Abbot Littlington, and was in old days the novices' school. For many a long year has it resounded with the murmurs of the boys as they sat conning their lessons, and sometimes, perhaps, with their cries, as they received the rough corporal punishment of past times. Their books 42 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. were kept in two aumbreys,* now obliterated by a square, hideous, pretentious tomb, erected to I know not whom. The holes which may still be seen here and there in the stone bench, sometimes arranged in nines, are a relic of the games at " knockings in and out," played by those boys of so many centuries ago. The building over the cloister is part of the modern Deanery, which was the palace of the former abbots. The green garth was pleasant to the eyes of the monks. It used, no doubt, to be bright with flowers, and sometimes a tame stork, or other do- mestic pet of the monastery, might have been seen wandering there. But, also, an open grave was always visible in the green space, and in that open grave each monk knew that his body would be placed if he happened to be the first to die. It was a per- petual memento tnori to wean their thoughts from the worldliness which could penetrate too fatally even into the cloister precincts. Let us next turn into the east cloister. To the right of it are crypts and treasuries, and monastic buildings, including the Chapel of the Pyx, as old as the days of the Confessor. The principal doors are those of the Chapter House vestibule already de- scribed, and that which now leads to the Chapter Library, but was once the entrance to the staircase leading up to the dorter or monks' dormitory. * Aumbrey, aurmary, armaria, aimoire, almonry, are all connected with each other. "Almonry "was sometimes used fora cupboard, in the sense of armorliim. Wedgwood. 44 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. Beyond the entrance to the Chapter House, on the right, is the tomb of Sir Edraond Bury Godfrey,* whose mysterious murder, in 1681, led to all the horrors of the " Popish Plot," in the reign of Charles II. Beyond this, is the part of the cloister cut off in reality from the space which properly belongs to the south transept of the church which was ex- clusively reserved for the lord abbot. The hole through which his bell-rope came down from the rubble roof is still visible. On the stone bench to the left sat the twelve beggars whose feet he washed, " with sundrie solemn rites and signs of great humilitie," on every Maundy-Thursday (the Dies Mandati, or day in which Christ gave His new command to His disciples) t in memory of the washing of the disciples' feet. The copper eyes from which (as Mr. Micklethwaite has conjectured) hung the carpet on which he knelt during the performance of the ceremony still remain under the nosing of the bench. Before we leave the cloisters, we must turn down the Dark Cloister, and to our left. The passage will lead us through the three arches, of different ages of architecture one Norman, one of the four- teenth, and one of the eighteenth century into the Little Cloisters, with their central fountain. They were the Abbey buildings set apart for the sick * He was the justice before whom Titus Gates laid his first pre- tended revelations ; and three weeks later his murdered body was found in a ditch near Primrose Hill. 46 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. monks.* They are now surrounded by the houses of the Organist, the Precentor, the Receiver, and some of the Cathedral clergy, which have replaced the old Infirmary, with its hall and ancient Chapel of St. Catherine and Infirmarer's house. Parts of these old buildings are still preserved among the modern houses, and the arches of the chapel (which was destroyed in 1571) are still visible. In this chapel the young monks used to be whipped privately, not like the older offenders, in the Chapter House. Bishops were frequently consecrated in its precincts. It was once a very memorable place, the scene of more than twenty provincial councils. In one of these occurred (in 1175) the dispute for precedence between Richard, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Roger, Archbishop of York, in the reign of Henry II. Finding the southern Primate seated at the right hand of the Cardinal Legate, the northern Primate promptly sat down on his lap ! The servants of the Archbishop of Canterbury plucked him away, while the Bishop of Ely threw the Prelate of York on his face, and trampled on him. He indignantly rushed off to the King, who was hearing mass in the Abbey, and showed his torn cope. He did not receive much comfort ; but from that time the Prelate of Canterbury was called " Primate of all * The large accommodation provided for the sickness of monks, who probably never exceeded seventy in number, seems to show that monasticism was not a healthy mode of life. But their frequent sick- nesses may have been partly due to the insane practice of monthly bleeding. 48 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. England," and the Prelate of York, "Primate of England." The visitor should walk back into the Chapter House and see the representation of this strange scene, on the first of the painted windows. In St. Catherine's Chapel, also, occurred (in 1252) the solemn ratification of Magna Charta by Henry III., in the presence of St. Edmund of Canterbury, when the Archbishop, the Bishops, and the King himself stood with lighted candles in their hands, and " dashed them to the ground, whilst each dignitary closed his nostrils and his eyes against the smoke and smell, with the words, ' So go out, with smoke and stench, the accursed souls of those who break or pervert the Charter.' " * The anathemas, however, ended in smoke, and nothing else, for weak King Henry incontinently violated the Charter again and again. Thus, then, in a walk round the cloisters, the visitor may gain a notion of the whole life of a Bene- dictine monk in the Middle Ages. Passing through Dean's Yard he is in the Sanctuary precincts, which contained their granary, mill, calberge, and guest- house. Entering the cloister he passes through the reception-parlour, Avhere they met their relatives and visitors. Then he must imagine that the west cloister, to his left, is full of boys who fill it with the busy murmur of their voices as they study under the stern rule of the master of the novices, though their eyes often wander to the petulant tame stork which is so fond * Dean Stanley's " Memorials of Westminster Abbey," p. 413. WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 49 of coming up to them for food and caresses. The cloister before him still contains the stone " lockers " where the monks kept their towels, close by the adjoining lavatory. Up and down this cloister walked its appointed guardian, who saw that the monks were silent and employed. Behind this wall ran their vast refectory, of which the windows, now filled up, may be seen from the opposite side of the garth above the cloister leads. In the green garth sleep generations of monks who have passed away and been forgotten. In the east cloister are the entrances to the dorter and the Chapter House, and the part reserved for the lord abbot's Maundy ser- vice. The quadrangle is completed by the Scrip- torium full of monks diligently engaged in reading or in copying and illuminating manuscripts. The beau- tiful door at the end of the west cloister opened into the Abbey, and through it they often wended their way with solemn litanies. By the east door they usually entered for their seven daily and nightly services. We now leave the cloisters, and enter the Abbey itself. Before us is the choir, the east end, with the sacrarium, or space in which stood the high altar. This was regarded as the most sacred part of the church. The choir was set apart for the daily seven services of the monks, which took place every three hours lauds, prime, tierce, sext, nones, vespers, and compline. Only " the religious " were as a rule present in the choir. The present pavement of black D S o WESTMINSTER ABBEY. and white marble was presented by the celebrated Dr. Busby, the " flogging master " of Westminster School, in 1695. The present stalls and screen are the work of Mr. Blore in 1848, and succeeded those of Orlando Gibbons. The gravestone which breaks the regularity of the pavement is in memory of a Royalist lady, and the epitaph is remarkable for its very anti- thetic style. The front of the reredos, richly orna- mented with statues, mosaic, and gems, is modern. The aspect of the choir, when it is filled with one of the great Sunday congregations, and all the clergy and the choir and the Westminster boys are there in their white surplices, is impressively beautiful. And here, as I have mentioned Dr. Busby's gift of the marble pavement, I may refer to a fact which has always caused me surprise. It is that West- minster Abbey is scarcely ever the recipient of any voluntary offering. One such gift was spontaneously offered it more than twenty years ago. With a munificence and public spirit which is only too rare, Mr. G. W. Childs, of Philadelphia, presented a fine stained-glass window to the Abbey in memory of the two religious poets, George Herbert and William Cowper ; as he also presented a memorial fountain, in honour of Shakespeare, to the town of Stratford- on-Avon, and a window to St. Margaret's Church in memory of Milton. But with the exception of this one spontaneous gift, nothing has been offered to the Abbey, so far as I am aware, either in living memory or for many previous years. In old days, indeed, the THE CHOIR. WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 53 Abbey was very wealthy ; but its immense revenues passed long ago into the hands of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. It now possesses not a single acre of estates, and the annual sum devoted to its main- tenance is so inadequate, that it has already been necessary to suppress one of its canonries in order to provide funds to prevent its actual fabric from crumbling to pieces. Barely able to maintain its daily staff, choir, and services, the Dean and Chapter are totally unable to provide additions to its splen- dour and beauty. Tens of thousands of pilgrims yearly visit it ; the whole English-speaking race expresses love and veneration for it as the shrine of all our great historic memories. Yet no one does anything to immortalise himself by its adornment, and during so long a time it has received but one voluntary offering, and that from an American ! We pass from the choir into the Chapel of the Confessor. The shrine of the founder, or patron saint, is frequently placed behind the sacrarium, as at St. Albans and at St. Thomas Cantelupe at Here- ford. This shrine was the splendid work of an Italian artist, Peter of Rome, whom Henry III. employed in the lack of English artists of sufficient skill. Origi- nally it blazed with colour, gilding, and mosaic, but it shows the defacing ravages of time during the six centuries which have passed since it was erected. It consists of three parts. (1.) The feretrum, or base- ment of stone, with arcaded recesses in which pil- grims might sit who were afflicted with diseases which 54 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. they desired to cure by thrusting themselves as close as possible to the saintly relics. One of the stones at the north end of the shrine, is hollowed out by the knees of innumerable pilgrims. (2.) The theca, loculus, or upper chest, which contains the body of the saint. (3.) The co-opertorium, cover, or lid, which might be lifted off to exhibit the coffin. The present cover is the only trace left in the Abbey by Fecken- ham, its last abbot ; the only addition made to the ornamentation of the Abbey in the reign of Mary Tudor. It was once inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and looked sufficiently gorgeous, but, being of poor mate- rial, was probably only intended to be temporary. The abbot to whom I have here alluded was a great and interesting personage. His real name was John Howard, and he was called " de Feckenham," because he was born near the forest of that name in Worcestershire. He was the last mitred abbot of England, the last abbot who sat in the House of Peers. Trained as a youth in Evesham Abbey, and a convinced adherent of the old religion, he engaged in theological disputes with Cranmer and Hooper, and was lodged in the Tower. At Mary's accession she made him, first, Dean of St. Paul's, and then Abbot of Westminster. Before the dissolution of monasteries there had been some seventy monks. When he re- turned here as the last abbot there were but thirteen, and four of these had been brought from Glastonbury. The deserted and neglected cloister must have been a comfortless abode, but it was dear to the returning WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 55 Benedictines. On St. Clement's Eve, November, 1555, Feckenham was consecrated in the presence of Cardinal Pole, Bishop Gardiner, and many other bishops, and he preached the sermon. On December 6 he entered the Abbey in procession with his heralds, preceded by three homicides, to whom, as in the old days, was accorded the right of sanctuary. One was the murderer of a tailor in Long Acre ; one was Lord Dacre in a white sheet, who was whipped as he went ; and the third was a Westminster scholar who had killed a big boy who sold books and papers, by throwing a stone which hit him under the ear. In the following January the abbot restored to its shrine the body of the Confessor, and repaired the old work. He re-established the right of sanctuary by a plea delivered before the House of Commons. He took part in the Reconciliation Service on November 30, 1558, and in the funeral of Anne of Cleves, who had abandoned Protestantism. But he had hardly been in the Abbot's House for a year when Queen Mary died, and Feckenham preached her funeral sermon.* Sitting in the House of Lords he protested against the English Liturgy and the Royal Supremacy. It has been said that Queen Elizabeth offered him the Archbishopric of Canterbury if he would conform to the new religion, but he refused to do so. When she sent for him he was planting elms in the College garden, and refused to go till he had finished his work. During his brief period of power he had * See Stanley's "Memorials," pp. 429 434. 5 6 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. won universal respect by his moderation and kindness. He had done his best for the persecuted Protestants in Queen Mary's reign, and Queen Elizabeth was personally indebted to him, for he had even ventured to incur her sister's displeasure by the persistence with which he had urged that she should be allowed her liberty. He was consigned to the Tower, but only for a time. He was afterwards left in the hon- ourable custody of various bishops, and finally died at Wisbeach Castle, in the Isle of Ely, in 1585. A man so moderate and so generous deserves commemo- ration, and he has won golden opinions from all quarters. Camden calls him "a learned and good man, that lived long, did a great deal of good to the poor, and always solicited the minds of his adversaries to benevolence." Bishop Burnet calls him " a charit- able and generous man that lived in great esteem in England ; " and Fuller describes him as " a man cruel to none, courteous and charitable to all who needed his help and his liberality." The floor of the chapel was once inlaid in rich mosaic, which may still be partly seen on the space where now stands the coronation chair. It has been mostly worn away by the hurrying feet of generations. A lovely fragment of it, of a sort of tartan pattern, once adorned the grave of little Prince Alfonso, son of Edward L, who, on August 19, 1284, hung over the shrine the golden circlet of Llewellyn, Prince of Wales. It may be seen by uplifting the step under the chantry of Henry V. WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 59 It was the presence of the saintly Confessor and the desire to rest near his bones, which gathered into the little chapel the remains of Henry III., Edward L, Edward lit., Richard II., Henry V., and of the Queen Edith, daughter of Earl Godwin, good Queen Maud, Eleanor of Castile, Philippa of Hainault, Anne of Bohemia, Katherine of Valois, and of many princes and princesses, including the once highly-honoured Thomas of Woodstock, whose treach- erous murder is a serious blot on the character of his nephew, Richard II. The tombs here represented on the right are those of Edward I. and his queen. The chantry at the end is that of Henry V., the most splendid monu- ment in the Abbey. Under it is the warped and ruined effigy of heart of oak, which the passionate affection of the nation placed over the bones of its hero-king. Originally it was plated with silver, and had a head and regalia of silver, all of which had been stolen before the end of Henry VIII. 's reign. The chantry was built for the use of monks, who were to sing masses for the king's soul ; and here, a few years ago, after curious and romantic fortunes, were re-buried the remains of the hero's queen, Katherine, daughter of Charles VI. of France. On the beam above are the helmet, shield, and saddlebow used by Jlenry V. at the battle of Agincourt. Such is the tradition of the Abbey ; but antiquarians assert that this is a mere tilting helmet carried before 60 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. the bier at the King's funeral, and not what Shake- speare calls ". . . . the helm Which did affright the air at Agincourt." The massive and artistic iron gate was the work of a London smith in the ninth year of Henry VI. Besides these memorials of the past there are many other things in this chapel well worthy of the visitor's notice. He should look carefully at the tomb of Richard II., which is full of minute points of interest ; of Edward III., and of his Queen Philippa of Hainault. On the other side he should study the tomb of Henry III., the builder of the present Abbey. He will also find much to absorb his attention in the ancient Coronation Chair, and in the carved frieze above the screen which represents in full series the events, both legendary and historical, in the life of Edward the Confessor. We now pass into the south ambulatory, and ask the reader to study the marvellous complexity, yet exquisitely symmetrical unity, of the architecture. The view here presented is a very favourite one with artists, though it requires a thorough and even con- summate artist to sketch it perfectly. The word ambulatory is applied to the walks on either side of the choir and round the chapel of the Confessor. The tomb at the left is that of the great Plantagenet, Edward III. Its canopy is " of carved wood, with imitation vaulting, pinnacles, and buttresses." The niches in it will show the aspect of a royal family in WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 63 the fourteenth century, though the figures are not visible in the picture. The first statuette of gilded bronze represents the famous Edward the Black Prince in a long mantle with the edges cut in leaves. Next to him are Joan of the Tower, the genial giant Lionel Duke of Clarence, Edmund of Longley Duke of York, Mary of Brittany, and the boy William of Hatfield. The sub-base of the monument is enriched with the Perpendicular quatrefoil ; in the centre of each quatrefoil is an emblazoned shield of English enamel. The king's effigy is a likeness from a cast of the features taken after death. It is a kingly face and has reminded many observers of the features of the late Lord Tennyson, who, I believe, traced his descent from the great Plantagenet on the mother's side. It will be interesting to the visitor to recall that this tomb is mentioned in Shakespeare's Richard II. as " The honourable tomb That stands above your royal grandsire's bones." Beyond this is the once costly but now much ruined tomb of Edward III.'s wife, Queen Philippa of Hainault. The very plain and prosaic Flemish face is a likeness, and the hideous horned head-dress which was the fashion of the day is again represented n the tiny alabaster bust of her daughter, Blanche de la Tour, in the adjoining chapel. The tomb has suffered more than any other in the Abbey, and was considerably encroached upon by the chantry of Henry V., part of which is visible beyond it. To the right are the chapels of St. Edmund and St. Nicolas, 64 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. which are crowded with interesting tombs and full of historic associations. In the north ambulatory the tombs immediately to the right (see sketch on opposite page) are those of Edward I. and Henry III. The tomb of Edward I. was always a very plain one ; perhaps because he had ordered his son to carry his bones at the head of the army till Scotland was subdued. The tomb never had niche, or enamel, or colour, or effigy, but it was once covered with a painted canopy and protected by a fine piece of ironwork. These have disappeared, as well as the embroidered pall which probably once covered the unadorned monument of this warrior king. The tomb which fronts us in this view is that of Sir Louis Robsart, Lord Bourchier. The huge stone banners carved upon it are a reminiscence of the fact that he was Henry V.'s standard-bearer at the battle of Agincourt. The antiquary Dart, in his great book on the Abbey, says that the arms on the flags " three wheels or on a field argent" are those of Sir Payne Roet, the father of Chaucer's wife, and of Catherine Swinford, wife of John, Duke of Gaunt, or at any rate the mother of his legitimated children. Dart says that he also found Chaucer's own arms upon the monument, namely " argent and gules per pale, or bend countercharged." There was probably no other connection between Lord Bourchier and the great poet than one by some intermarriage of both with the Roet family. THE NOETH AMBULATORY. E WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 67 In the smaller sketch we see the north ambulatory from the other direction. The tomb of Edward I. is the one by which the verger is standing. The other tomb is that of Henry III. The bronze effigy is by a great artist, Torel, and is not a likeness like that of Edward III., but the ideal effigy of a king much younger than Henry III. was when he died, and without his defect in the eyelid. The tomb was once covered with glittering mosaic, of which but little remains. It is said that his son, Edward I., brought with him from the Holy Land the precious stones of jasper with which it is enriched. In the garments of the effigy there are holes for other precious stones, which have been torn out. But mutilated as the monument is, enough remains to show its original splendour. The picture on page 71 shows us the chapel raised for the reception of the Tudor king, Henry VII. Here stood the old Lady Chapel dedicated to the Virgin, which Henry destroyed in order to replace it by this sumptuous and lovely building. Every- thing in this chapel is worthy of careful study. The bronze gates, once shining, now dim, are not only an exquisite specimen of a rare kind of work, but also illustrate the quiet yet intense determination of Henry VII. to put into the forefront every possible indication of his claims to the crown of England. The gate is ingeniously adorned with the falcon and fetterlock of the House of York ; with the portcullis of the House of Lancaster ; with a double Tudor rose ; WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 69 with the interwoven letters H. R. ; with crowns sur- mounted by daisies, in allusion to the name of his mother, Margaret of Richmond ; and besides all this, it is here and there decorated with a dragon, which is meant for the Red Dragon of Cadwallader, and was designed to hint that Henry's claim was strengthened by his supposed descent from that British king. Henry's ancestor, Owen Tudor, was pronounced by a Welsh commission of inquiry to be an undoubted lineal descendant of Brute, the Trojan, and of ^Eneas himself a genealogy of forty-seven degrees, which they claim to have incontestably proved, and in which there was only one female ! The fan tracery of the self-poised roof, which is also to be found at St. George's, Windsor, and in King's College Chapel, Cambridge, is never found in Continental architecture, but is the peculiar glory of the English style. This style of architecture is exquisitely described by Words- worth in his sonnet on King's College Chapel, Cam- bridge. " Tax not the royal Saint with vain expense, With ill-matched aims the architect who planned, Albeit labouring for a scanty band Of white-robed scholars only this immense And glorious work of fine intelligence. Give all thou canst ; high Heaven rejects the lore Of nicely-calculated.less or more ; So deemed the man who fashioned for the sense These lofty pillars, spread that branching roof, Self -poised, and scooped into ten thousand cells, Where light and shade repose, where music dwells Lingering and wandering on as loth to die ; Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof That they were born for immortality." 70 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. The choir stalls and Miserere seats are exquisitely and elaborately carved, but with designs which are sometimes grotesque and satirical. The niches which run round the walls once contained one hundred and seven stone figures, of which ninety-five remain. All these figures, except those of some philosophers, in the south-east bays, have been identified by the anti- quarian knowledge and research of Mr. Micklethwaite. Some of them are exceedingly curious. One is to a saint who has been for ages forgotten. It is the fifth figure from the east in the south aisle, and represents a bearded woman leaning on a T-shaped cross. It is St. Wilgefortis, who was also known as St. Uncum- ber and Santa Liberada. She was apparently a saint only of the vulgar, and is ignored by Alban Butler and by Abbe Glaire. She used to be approached with an offering of oats by peasant couples who desired to be loosed from unhappy marriages ; and the legend is that she prayed to be free from a match which was being forced upon her. Her prayer was granted, and the contract was ended by her growth, in one night, of a manly beard, as she is here represented. It is perhaps the only figure of her in England. We can but hope that Henry did not place her among his accustomed " avours or guardian saints " out of any uneasiness which he felt in his marriage with the fair and gentle Elizabeth of York. The cost of the whole chapel was stupendous, and it shows that Henry VII., though accounted miserly, stopped short at no expense for the glorification of WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 73 X himself and his dynasty. The banners are those of the Knights of the Bath, of which this was constituted the chapel by George I. in 1725. The banner of George I. and of his grandson, Prince Frederick, are among them. The magnificent tomb in front is that of the founder of the chapel, whose effigy a marvel of delicate sculpture lies beside that of his wife, Elizabeth of York. " He lieth at Westminster," said Lord Bacon, " in one of the stateliest and daintiest monuments of Europe, both for the chapel and the sepulchre. So that he dwelleth more richly dead in the monument of his tomb than he did alive in Richmond or in any of his palaces." The bronze "closure" round the tomb is the work of the fierce Florentine sculptor, Torregi- ano, who as a youth broke the nose of Michael Angelo with a blow of his mallet ; who frightened Benve- nuto Cellini from accepting his invitations to England by his " loud voice, and frowning eyebrows, and boasts of his feats among those beasts of Englishmen ; " and who finally starved himself to death in a Spanish dungeon of the Inquisition, where he was imprisoned because in a fit of rage he had dashed to pieces his own fine statue of the Virgin for which the Duke of Arcos, who had given him the commission, paid him insufficiently. It would require too much space to describe adequately this noble tomb. In front of it, behind the hanging chains, is the small altar-tomb of Edward VI., of which the delicate sculpture is also the work of Torregiano. It is a restoration, for, strange 74 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. to say, the only tomb which the Puritans entirely destroyed in the Abbey was that of the only English king who was an absolute Puritan. This is easily accounted for when we recall that it was an altar-tomb, and was erected in the reign of Mary Tudor. The end of the north aisle of Henry VII.'s Chapel is known as " Innocents' Corner," since only children lie buried there. The cradle tomb to the left is that of the Princess Sophia, an infant daughter of James I., who died in 1606, aged three days. The next is that of her sister, the Princess Mary, who died in 1607, at the age of two years, and whom her father describes as "a little royal rose prematurely plucked by death." The small sarcophagus in a recess of the east wall between these two tombs con- tains the bones of the two poor boys, Edward V. and his brother Richard, Duke of York. They were mur- dered in the Tower, by order of their uncle, Richard III., in 1483, and their bones were found in 1674 in a chest under a staircase in the Tower. As there could be no doubt that these were the bones of the two royal boys, Charles II. spared an infinitesimal sum from his gross and selfish extravagances to erect this paltry little memorial in their honour. The design is by Sir Christopher Wren. The sculptured figures above will show the cha- racter of all the statues with which the chapel is surrounded, most of which are so high up that they cannot easily be examined. All the saints repre- sented have been identified by their emblems. Of I! the three which front us in the sketch, the one on the right is St. Lawrence with his gridiron, and the middle one is a king with a book, which may be meant for St. Louis of France or King Henry VI., whose canonisation was, however, not completed, because Henry VII. grudged the large fees which the Pope demanded. The one to the left was long an 76 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. enigma to the antiquaries. It represents a priest who is bearded, is vested for mass, and has a scapular pulled over his chasuble. But he appears also to be a soldier, for he wears iron gauntlets ; and a student, for he carries a book ; and a slayer of monsters, for his right hand holds a stole, which is twisted round the neck of a dragon. Mr. Micklethwaite, F.S.A., has now proved that this is an ideal figure an " All- hallows," of which it is an almost unique example. It was the custom in medieval churches to place at the east end an image of the patron saint. When a church was dedicated to All Saints, a figure was sometimes placed above the altar, which represented the combined attributes of many saints ; and this is the probable explanation of this curious composite figure. II. THE STATUARY. AMONG the many glad and elevating feelings which must fill the mind of every thoughtful observer as he wanders beneath "the high-embowed roof" of the Abbey, there must always mingle some re- grets. He may sigh as he looks on the general dinginess and the accumulation of dust which make the building contrast so strongly with the brightness of provincial cathedrals. Yet how can this be avoided? The Abbey is placed in the midst of blighting fogs and corroding smoke, and is crowded with hundreds and often thousands of daily visitors. We may feel inclined to resent the intrusion into so sacred a building of mountain loads of tombs, some- times pretentious and vulgar, sometimes positively hideous, often Pagan, worldly, and entirely out of place. We may mourn above all for the ruthless barbarism which destroyed the fine architecture and heraldic insignia, the embossed shields and graceful arcading and delicate wall-sculpture of the thirteenth century, to make way for the meaningless and ugly memorials of many who were never very famous and 7 8 WESTMINSTER ABBEY- are now entirely forgotten.* But we must take the Abbey as it is ; and there is some consolation for all our regrets when we remember that it is the most national building in the world. The landmarks left by English art, and taste, and history, and religious life are visible at every step, and we may read upon its walls the ebbing and flowing of national wisdom and seriousness, as legibly as we read on some ancient shore the history of its advancing or receding tides. The tale is told even by the traces of destructive Vandalism. It was not only in the eighteenth cen- tury that the Present thought itself at liberty to deal roughly with the architecture and memorials of the Past. There is a striking proof of this in the magni- ficent tomb and chantry erected by the nation to their popular hero, Henry V. Superb as it is, it yet encroached so ruinously on the tombs of the good Queens Eleanor and Philippa as practically to destroy their dignity and symmetry. If it be urged that, in this instance, something which was beautiful was at least replaced by something which was equally beautiful, we must remember that this was always * Goldsmith, in his " Citizen of the World," was indignant at a monument erected in the Abbey to " some rich man or other," and complains of the ' ' sordid priests ' ' who removed the tombs of good men to make room for others of equivocal character. He alludes, perhaps, especially to the tomb then recently erected to General Har- grave. " Alas ! alas ! cried I, such monuments as these confer honour not on the ' great men ' (this is sarcastic), ' but on little Roubiliac.' " (See Stanley, " Memorials," p. 252.) But, with the exception of titled persons, now utterly forgotten, few were buried in the Abbey unless they were in some way connected with it, or had some claim to celebrity. WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 79 supposed to be the case. The most tasteless Vandals regarded their intrusions as an improvement on what they swept away. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they clearly admired their lumpy monu- ments, and heavy effigies, and blubbering cherubs, and artificial pomposities as far more precious and interesting than the chaste and noble design of the original architects. It may be humiliating to see that the taste of a whole nation can be so much perverted. We are filled with astonished indignation to learn that, but for Horace Walpole, the vulgar modern monument of General Wolfe, with its con- geries of vanities and absurdities, would have been thrust into the sacrarium to the demolition of the noble gothic tomb of Aylmer de Valence.* But, after all, such facts are full of instructiveness. They throw fresh light on page after page of English history. Bishop Butler thought that entire nations could go mad ; we may read in the tombs of West- minster Abbey that national taste in art, and national sincerity of religious feeling, may sink many degrees below zero. Nations, as Mr. Ruskin truly points out, leave behind them in their art an autobiography which is entirely unconscious and therefore absolutely sincere. We may be deceived by their literature and by their military annals : we cannot be deceived by the proofs which they leave of what they most admired, * As it was, the screen of St. John the Evangelist's chapel was destroyed, and Abbot Esteney's monument dislodged to make way for this portent. 8o WESTMINSTER ABBEY. the tendencies which their architecture expressed, and the ideal at which their artists aimed. Westminster Abbey contains specimens of the sculpture of five and a half centuries, from the recum- bent effigies of the Plantagenets to Sir E. Boehin's statue of the Earl of Shaftesbury and Mr. Gilbert's memorial of Mr. Forster. If we enter the cloisters we see still more ancient monuments in the South Cloister, where there are three effigies in low-relief of early abbots. The oldest is that of Abbot Vitalis, 1085. Some of the earliest memorials are the work of foreigners Pietro Cavallini, Torregiano, Coysevox, and Herbert le Sueur. There is scarcely one English sculptor of any name * who has not cumbered the Abbey with some sign of his incapacity or enriched it with some specimen of his skill. Nathanael Stone, Gibbs, Bird, Rysbrach, Scheemacher, Kent, Roubiliac, Bacon, Flaxman, Chantrey, Nollekens, Westmacott, Andrews, Banks, Baily, Gibson Calder Marshall, Foley, Woolner, Armistead, Boehm, Bruce Joy, Gilbert, and many others are represented in the best that they could achieve. I cannot say what is at present the exact number of the statues. I find from a paper of Mr. Mogford in 1860, that there were then sixty- two recumbent statues of life size, several of them of bronze, and some of them highly gilt or richly enamelled ; forty-six portrait statues, life size or colossal ; six sitting and six kneeling portrait statues ; * There is, however, no monument by Gibber (d. 1700), and only one poor one, that of Mrs. Beaufoy, by Grinling Gibbons (d. 1731). WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 81 ninety-three busts or me- dallion por- traits; two hundred and four allego- rical statues ; at least one hundred and twenty sta- tues of apos- tles, prophets, saints, mar- tyrs, confes- sors, virgins, and philoso- phers, in the Chapel of Henry VII; a multitude of figures in the Chantry of Henry V. ; bassi and alti relievi without num- ber.* Besides these, "among * See " Gleanings >.y Sir Gilbert Scott," pp. 4447. F 82 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. the decorations or exemplifications of the virtues of the dead, there will be seen an abundance of angels and cherubs. Every virtue is personified in marble to excess. Figures of Fame are blowing trumpets. In this Christian church there are statues of Minerva, Neptune, Hercules, and other heathen deities ; charity children are not omitted and, to complete the variety, there are not wanting negroes and Red Indians.* There are also a number of statuettes of attendants, children, saints, or others, as weepers over the de- ceased." And, to complete the list, there are multi- tudes of dogs, lions, dragons, and other creatures, imaginary or real. Of the latter, few which are not heraldic deserve much notice. I cannot even admire the highly praised lions by Flaxman couched beside the pedestal of the statue of Captain Montague. Of the artistic merits and demerits, however, of these very numerous specimens of statuary I shall say but little, t I shall speak mainly of the general inferences which we may draw from them, and then ask the reader to come with me and look at some of those which have a special interest. One remarkable change in their general character- * A negro kneels by the dying C. J. Fox ; Red Indians support the sarcophagus of Townshend, by Eckstein (1757) : there is a captive Mahratta on the cenotaph of Sir Eyre Coote. t As very beautiful specimens of modern sculpture, considered only from the artistic standpoint, may be mentioned the Indian captive on the tomb of Sir Eyre Coote ; the agonised youth, or condemned prisoner, who sits behind the statue of Mansfield ; the statue of Viscount Canning, by Foley ; and the effigy of Dean Stanley, by Sir Edgar Boehm. WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 83 istics can hardly fail to strike us. The older monu- ments are religious, the latter ones are mundane. I. Every one of the earlier tombs which com- memorate the dead, whether in the form of effigies or of monumental brasses, represents them in the atti- tudes of death and prayer. " Two praying hands," says the Russian proverb, " and life is done." The tomb of the Confessor is a shrine rich with mosaic decorations but without sculpture.* On the tomb of Henry III., the founder of the present Abbey, lies his effigy perhaps the earliest of its kind cast in gilded metal, by Torel, whom Stanley calls an Italian artist, f The effigies of Edmund Croucnback, William and Aylmer de Valence, Aveline of Lancaster, Edward III., Queens Eleanor arid Philippa, Richard II. and his Queen, and Henry V. are all recumbent as in death. The latter is now a distorted wooden block, warped by the copper bolts by which it was fastened, but was once resplendent with a silver headand entirely covered with silver plates, which were stolen as far back as the sixteenth century. The Tudors, Henry VII. , Elizabeth of York, and Queen Elizabeth since whom no English king or queen has been honoured with a tomb as well as Mary Queen of Scots, Margaret of Lennox, and Margaret of Richmond, are all similarly * The designer is called Pietro, a Roman citizen. He is identified by some with Pietro Cavallini, a painter of the school of Giotto, to whom is attributed the Madonna and Child, with St. Francis and St. John, in the church of Assisi, published by the Arundel Society. t It is now the general opinion that Torel was an Englishman, and that Torel is only a variation of Tyrrell. TOMB OF AYLMER DK VALENCE. WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 85 represented. The later ones, it is true, sometimes hold a ball and sceptre, but all the earlier have the two hands folded as in prayer upon the breast. The thought of what life has been is not excluded. The kings sometimes wear their golden crowns ; the knights and crusaders are clad in their hauberk and mail; the young Prince John of EHham wears the coronet round his helmet ; the ladies are clothed in the nun's dress like Eleanor of Gloucester or Mar- garet of Richmond ; the royal or noble kinsfolk are sculptured round the base ; the heraldic insignia are blazoned in Limoges enamel ; and over the tombs of Edmund and Aylmer we see them on their chargers, lance in rest, riding tumultuously into battle. Even the little son and daughter of Edward III. William of Hatfield and Blanche of the Tower are represented in alabaster on their lovely little tomb with jewelled baldric and broidered robe. But the splendours of life are represented as nothing in comparison with the awful and pathetic majesty of death. The pleureurs, or weeping angels, support the head ; the praying hands plead mutely for compassion. A.t the head of the powerful Earl of Pembroke are three figures their heads have unhappily and ruthlessly been shaven off by Cromwell's Puritans of whom two are upholding in their arms the kneeling figure of the third. They were two angels presenting to God the troubled soul of the dark and silent warrior " Joseph the Jew," as he was nicknamed by insolent Piers de Gaveston who commanded our army at Bannockburn, and 86 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. played so large a part among the turbulent barons of the reign of his half-cousin, Edward II. As these monuments increase in the sumptuousness of decora- tive accessories, they tend in most instances to lose their grandeur. The introduction of the children kneeling in prayer round the altar-tomb is, however, a touching and effective addition. II. Dean Stanley and others have pointed out how gradual, but how decisive, was the change of senti- ment which led to the exhibition on the tombs of the pride and self-assertion of life in lieu of the repose and helplessness of death. " It was not in England alone," says Westmacott,* " that the miserable decline in ecclesiastical sculpture was apparent." It is observable in Italy, in St. Peter's, even in the tombs of the Popes. The true spirit of religious art disappeared, and sculpture, like painting, became a mere theatre in which to parade the vain science of the living, and the empty self- satisfaction of the dead man or his survivors. These later tombs are so lacking in repose that some of them look " as though they had been tumbled out of a waggon on the top of a pyramid." After the sixteenth century it no longer seems to be the object to teach us that man is a thing of nought, that his days pass like a shadow, that he is crushed before the moth, but rather to display, as though they were enduring and desirable, the prizes and the magnificence of life. The epitaphs are no * " Handbook of Sculpture," p. 352. 88 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. longer brief and simple, but revel in the enumeration of titles and the eulogy of achievements. The dead man flourishes his sword, or displays his book, or looks about him for applause, while (in time) all sorts of allegorical figures point at him, and crown him, and naked cherubs shed over him their imaginary and hypocritic tears. The figures of the departed first rise to their knees, as on the tomb of Lord Bur- leigh ; then stand erect, as on that of Sir George Holies ; then sit in their easy-chairs, like Elizabeth Russell, or even loll therein like Wilberforce. Like Lord Mansfield they preside in wig and ermine on the seat of justice ; like Pitt command the applause of listening senates, and are swept into passionate gesticulation by the rush of oratory ; or like Chatham they " seem, with eagle face and outstretched arm, to bid England still be of good cheer, and to hurl defiance at her foes." No one can fail to see that the mediaeval form of commemorating the dead is the humbler and the more becoming ; but in palliation of the others it must be pleaded that tombs had come to be re- garded less as the sleeping places of the dead than as memorial cenotaphs in the great national Valhalla. The tomb of Sir George Holies, which I have just mentioned (A.D. 1626), marks an artistic phase in many respects. The statue is the first that stands erect ; the first that wears the costume of a Roman general ; * and the first which in the bas-relief of * As does Lis nephew, young Francis Holies, in St. Edmund's Chapel WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 89 the battle of Nieuport below it represents some complete historic scene in which the dead person was engaged.* It was also one of the first which is embellished with pagan deities and which imitates a physical peculiarity of the deceased by painting the right eye black. It was sculptured by Nicholas Stone in 1626. The defects of this tomb, which arrogantly dis- placed the old altar of the chapel, are thrust into greater prominence because being the earliest tomb which expresses the worst features of the Renaissance in its decay it stands by the last tomb which has caught some sunset reflection of the beauty and grandeur of the old Gothic sentiment. This is the noble tomb of Sir F. Vere, uncle of Sir G. Holies, who died in 1608. Four knights, sculptured with perfect skill and dignity of one of which Roubiliac said, " Hush ! he will speak presently ! " support the dead knight's arms on a bier beneath which he lies. III. Another wave of tendency which is most observable and significantly interesting, is the different aspect in which death itself is regarded. The early tombs were like radiant phantoms, with blue and vermilion, and gold, and glass mosaic, and lustrous enamels, and floral sculpturings, and angels with outspread wings. In these death was not pre- sented as a thing revolting and abhorrent, nor was any prominence given to the mere accidents of * Stanley, " Memorials," p. 20". go WESTMINSTER ABBEY. corruption and decay. The tombs of a later age become widely different. The skull and cross-bones most futile, most conventional, most offensive of all " decorations " appear for the first time on the unfinished tomb of Anne of Cleves. After that we get, with increasing frequency, the ridiculous nudities of weeping children, and the females who sit under willows and clasp urns to their breast.* The attempt to force into prominence the fact that death is a thing for which to weep, and the angel of death a king of terrors, culminates in two tombs in the chapel of St. John the Evangelist. One with the inscription Lacrimis struxit amor is spotted all over with imaginary tear-drops, falling from an eye which is carved above it ! The other is the famous tomb of Lady Elizabeth Nightingale, of which Burke disapproved, but which is usually regarded as Roubiliac's masterpiece, and which Wesley is said to have considered the finest monument in the Abbey, as showing " common sense among heaps of un- meaning stone and marble." Considered merely as sculpture, the contrasted figures of the dying wife and the startled, agonised husband are undeniably fine and skilful, but nothing can be more repellent or less like the feeling with which the early Christians * " The sum of a life expended, a pearl in a swine-trough cast, A comedy played and ended and what has it come to at last ? The dead face pressed on a pillow, the journey taken alone, And the tomb ivith an urn and a willow, and a lie carved deep in the stone." G. J. Whyte- Melville. 92 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. regarded death, than the revolting skeleton who issues, with his javelin, from the dark tomb below. Such allegory is a preposterous jumble of the material and immaterial. The " Death," as Allan Cunningham says, "is very meanly imagined the common drybones of every vulgar tale." Apparently Roubiliac's imagination could not rise above this fleshless anatomy, for he repeats it on the tomb of General Hargrave in the nave. Here time is breaking the arrow of a crowned skeleton across his knee. But how different is this bony Grotesque from the vague and awful magnificence of Milton's imagi- nation : " What seemed his head The likeness of a kingly crown had on !" Flaxman calls Roubiliac an enthusiast, " whose thoughts are conceits and his compositions epigrams ; the character of whose figures, though they sometimes seem alive, is mean, their expression grimace, and their form frequently bad." The judgment is severe, but the faults of Roubiliac, who is so largely repre- sented in the Abbey, were those of his time. He had been bred in the school of Bernini, who despised the lovely repose of ancient statuary, and placed beauty in action. But let it be said to Roubiliac's credit that though he was affected by the pseudo-classical epoch, with its " frozen progeny of sterile fancies," he partly put them to flight by his introduction of movement and emotion. IV. The Renaissance, when it had sunk to deca- 94 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. dence, was accompanied by a gradual fading of the old religious ideals ; but it left as sad a legacy in the history of monumental sculpture by what it introduced as by what it discarded. It was marked by sheer paganism, vapid allegory, ostentatious science, pseudo-classicalism, insincere or affected religionism, and monstrous incongruities. A few instances will illustrate the disastrous change. Let the visitor walk, first, to the effigy of Margaret of Richmond, the gentle and noble mother of Henry VII., who died, practically as a nun, in the monas- tery of Barking. It is in the south aisle of Henry VII.'s Chapel, and is interesting in a variety of ways. The brief Latin inscription which runs round it was written by no less a person than Erasmus, and he was rewarded for it by a gift of twenty shillings. The effigy is the work of Torregiano, the violent rival of Michael Angelo. As a piece of sculpture it is very lovely. We seem to see the royal lady lying before us in her simple religious dress, with her face ema- ciated by asceticism, and furrowed, as in life-time, with many a tear. The hands, folded in prayer, are delicately perfect. There is no pride or pomposity about this memorial of the ancestress of a line of mighty kings. Walk from this monument to what remains of the vulgar and preposterous cenotaph to the now utterly forgotten Admiral Tyrrell, who died in 1766. It is in the south aisle of the nave " a prodigious WESTMINSTER ABBEF. 95 mass of rocks, clouds, sea, and ships." It almost blocked up an entire window with clouds like oyster shells, from which it received the name of " The Pancake." It is remarkable for the most ridiculous imitation of waves ever devised by man. History, Navigation, Hibernia are represented as semi-nude figures under the sea among the rocks ; the latter is rapturously pointing to the spot on the terrestrial globe where the Admiral was born. The Admiral himself, nude, is or rather was, for the figure is now removed ascending out of the sea and soaring heavenwards, " looking for all the world," said Nolle- kens, " as if he were hanging from a gallows with a rope round his neck." We see the same " kicking gracefulness " on the tomb which represents the bald and semi-nude Kempenfeldt also soaring heaven- wards. The incongruousness of such a symbol might have struck even an eighteenth -century sculptor. Tyrrell's monument is by Read, a pupil of Roubiliac, and it marks almost the nadir of degradation in art and taste. Read seems to have been a boastful per- sonage, and when he was telling Roubiliac of what he would do some day the irascible Frenchman replied, " Ven you do de monument, den de vorld vill see vot d ting you vih 1 make." The prophesy was fulfilled ! V. Perhaps the earliest invasion of paganism into the monumental sculpture of our Christian minster is in the costly and pompous tomb raised by his widow to the Duke of Buckingham, the murdered favourite 96 WESTMINSTER ABBEY, of Charles I. It is by Nicholas Stone. Here we have Fame " even bursting herself and her trumpets to tell the news of his so sudden fall " ; and the pensive or weeping figures of Mars, Minerva, Nep- tune and Beneficence ! The juxtaposition reminds one of the four figures on the roof of the library at Trinity College, Cambridge, which as freshmen were told, stood for Faith, Hope, Charity, and Geography ! Next in point of date we have the representation of Pallas and Bellona, riding side by side with Sir George Holies to the battle of Nieuport. This preposterous piece of fanfaronade was much admired. In the eighteenth century paganism reigned supreme. Her- cules lovingly upholds the bust of Sir Peter Warren, while Navigation (who was regarded as de regie on the tomb of an Admiral) crowns him with laurel.* On the tomb of General Fleming, Hercules (again) and Minerva strangle a ludicrous little adder which represents the spirit of Detraction. The first thing which strikes the eye on entering the north transept is the stupendous Neptune, by Nollekens, on the monument of three of Rodney's captains, f When Adrian VI. was shown the Apollo Belvedere, and the other masterpieces of ancient sculpture in the Vatican, he horrified the highly-cultured Romans by the contemptuous remark, Sunt idola anti- quorum ! But few would accuse him of mere * So close is the likeness that the sculptured face is pitted with marks of the small-pox ! t He attracts the attention of Britannia to three medallions. l;fll;l'/ 'iii TOMB OF EDMUND CEOTTCHBACK. G 9 8 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. Philistinism if he should have felt aggrieved at seeing these marine deities wallowing so con- spicuously, and so very meaninglessly, on the tombs of a sacred shrine. " Is that Christianity ? " asked a visitor, pointing to Neptune and the trident. " Yes," wittily answered Dean Milman, "it is Tri- dentine Christianity." VI. Yet these obtrusive heathen symbols are hardly so banales as the vapid allegorical figures of the later tombs. They appear in the guise of Wisdom and Sincerity (?) on the tomb of the Duke of New- castle (1676), by Gibbs and Bird. "There is nothing," says Allan Cunningham, " in the monu- ment of the three Captains but the common materials of ten thousand monuments. Such designs may be made by receipt. All, however, is done that art, in the absence of genius, can do. Britannia is very sorrowful ; her lion looks particularly savage. Nep- tune is like all other Neptunes, and carries a weighty trident ; and Fame has the buoyant body and gossa- mer drapery necessary for ladies whose road lies through the air ! " On the tomb of General Wade, Fame drives away Time, who is curiously endeavour- ing to destroy the eternal record of the General's achievements. These sterile repetitions of Britannias, Victories, and Fames show how complete was the dearth of originality. Even on the tomb of Chatham by Bacon, we must have Commerce and Manufacture pouring Plenty from the four corners of the world into the lap of Britannia. An anecdote will show WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 99 how meaningless the symbolism became. Banks was offered three hundred pounds to carve a monument for some provincial gentleman. " Who was he ? " he asked. " Was he benevolent ? " " Well, I don't know," said the visitor, " but he always gave sixpence to the old woman who opened the pew for him on Sunday." " That will do ! that will do ! " said the sculptor, " we must have recourse to our friend the pelican!" Rysbrach (d. 1770) and Scheemacker (d. 1769) are, as a rule, more sensible. The bas- relief of the former on the tomb of Sir Isaac Newton is full of ingenuity and charm. Chantrey is some- what prosaic, but to him we owe the final abandonment of these foolish figures. Once when another sculptor told Chantrey that he had been sculpturing a statue of Adam, Chantrey took snuff and looked up with the quick question, " Is it like ? " VII. The ostentation of technical skill is one of those lurid plague spots of art which showed itself most virulently in the mannerists who followed Michael Angelo. To this is due the tasteless folly of many of the eighteenth-century monuments. To it we owe the extravagant, often disagreeable, fondness for the nude. We see it in the tomb of Captain Westcott in St. Paul's, who is sculptured nude, and yet Victory is presenting him with a heavy sword. The same penchant is obtruded into Wilton's monu- ment of Wolfe. The very conception of the monu- ment is a mistake, since it loses all the repose and dignity of sculpture in a crowd of accessories and ST. EDMUND S CHAPEL. WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 101 emblems in wild disorder. It attempts to repre- sent more than sculpture can represent. The best part of the monument is the bronze relief below it by Capizzoldi, representing the river St. Lawrence and the heights of Abraham. But the crowning absurdity of it is that the sculptor, "in order to display his knowledge of anatomy," represents Wolfe lying naked or with only his shirt and stockings on the field of battle. He is supported by the faithful Highland sergeant in full costume. Two lions lie at his feet, and an angel with a crown is hovering over his head. Look across from this monument to the recumbent effigy of Edmund Crouchback, and you will be able to estimate the gulf of difference between the feelings which they express. VIII. The later monuments illustrate also the influx of pseudo-classicalism. It first showed itself when a modern general, like Sir George Holies, is decked out in Roman armour. The difficulties presented to a sculptor by our modern dress may be conceded, but nothing can defend the absurdity of representing Sir Robert Peel, as Gibson has done, in the toga of a Roman senator. IX. This pseudo-classicalism becomes still more ridi- culous when it is accompanied by glaring incongrui- ties, as, for instance, when Admiral Holmes* is repre- sented in Roman garb, leaning against a cannon He died in 1761. TOMB OF SIE CLOUDE8LET SHOVEL. mounted on a sea-carriage. The culmination of all absurdities in this direction had already been reached in the tomb of Sir Cloudesley Shovel,* erected by Queen Anne, and carved by Bird. There, not to * He died in 1707. WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 103 mention other follies, the bluff English sailor lies under a canopy, represented (as Addison said) " by the figure of a beau, dressed in a long periwig, and reposing himself upon a velvet cushion." He is partly nude, and partly in Roman armour and sandals, and yet the sculptor could not resist the fascination of the great full-bottomed curly wig ! Similar confusion had already occurred on the tomb of Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham, who reclines in Roman armour, while his wife (the natural daughter of James II.) weeps beside him in the dress which she wore at the corona- tion of Queen Anne. X. The general insincerity, or it would perhaps be fairer to call it the affectation and unreality, of the later Renaissance epoch is abundantly illustrated. A simpler and more devout state of feeling than that which had become prevalent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would never have permitted on any sepulchral monument the wildly impossible attempt to represent the Resurrection, which we see on the tomb of General Hargrave. Still less, I think, would a real spirit of reverence have introduced the figures which soar to heaven, as a matter of course, on the tomb of Admiral Kempenfeldt or Admiral Tyrrell. It is a matter of congratulation that the taste of modern times has returned to the tone of pre- Raphaelite days, and the effigies of Dean Stanley and Lord John Thynne are of the older and simpler type. There are some who have urged the sweeping away 104 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. of many of the cumbersome monstrosities of the later centuries, and restoring something of the archi- tectural beauty and symmetry which they in part deface. Dean Stanley ventured to take a few timid steps in this direction by pruning the luxuriance of the Tyrrell monument, and reducing the towering height of the one erected to Captain Cornewall. If an annexe to the Abbey existed I confess that I should like to place in it one or two of the huge structures which express the naval pride and exulta- tion of the nation in the days of Howe and Rodney. They blot out many a fine vista, and take up a disproportionate amount of valuable space. I would also ruthlessly diminish the masses of marble placed behind some of the statues, those for instance, of General Stringer and Lord Chatham. But further than that I would not go. The Abbey reflects the changes of every succeeding epoch. The very fact that it does so adds materially to its interest. We must not forget that in the eighteenth century even Admiral Tyrrell's monument, when it was erected, was looked upon as an ideal and a masterpiece, though in our day it has long come to be regarded as an eyesore and a blot. Every age in turn considers its own taste to be the norm for other ages. There is such a thing as a true standard of taste and definite laws which guide our artistic criticism ; yet it is important in the history of the mind and of nations, to see the unconscious proofs of the enormous changes of view which have taken place. Few things WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 105 are more interesting than to trace back those changes to the deep-lying moral and spiritual facts in which they originated, and there is perhaps no building in the world where it is so easy to do this as it is in Westminster Abbey. III. THE EPITAPHS. MANY papers have been written on epitaphs, but I am not aware that anything has been written on the epitaphs in the great Minster, which, by the accidents of history, has also become our great national mausoleum. It contains many hundreds of epitaphs, and a brief consideration of some classes of them may be neither uninteresting nor unprofitable. An epitaph, intended to be for years, perhaps for centuries, the sole remaining memorial of a person who has been in many cases honoured, and in most cases presumably beloved, is a composition which usually involves much care and consideration. Yet it is undeniable that nothing in the Abbey receives less attention than these inscriptions upon the tombs, though the tombs themselves are gazed upon with curiosity every year by hundreds of thousands of visitors ; and this is the more strange because many of these inscriptions have been written by men who were selected for their eminence and lite- rary skill. One chief cause for this nesrlect is to be found in WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 107 the inordinate length of these too-often pompous and needlessly verbose eulogies. That the epitaphs are invariably eulogistic was perhaps to be expected. " Where, then, do they bury the bad people ? " asked a child, after reading in a cemetery the superhuman and exceptionless virtues of such a multitude of immaculate women and blameless men. There have been instances in which the record on the gravestone has been so notoriously belied by the memories of the life that we are not surprised at the line of the satirist " Believe a woman or an epitaph." But if we desire, as most men do, to struggle against that iniquity of oblivion which so "blindly scattereth her poppy," and to preserve, at least for a few years, the memory of our beloved, experience shows us that the briefest record is the most likely to be effective. A long and wordy epitaph is rarely read, and never remembered. Not a few of the longest and most platitudinous epitaphs are exactly those which are passed by with the most entire indifference. The eccentric and pedantic Sir Samuel Morland has effectually hidden the merits of his two wives by recording them upon one tomb in Greek and Hebrew, and on the other in Hebrew and Ethiopic ! Such an inscription, as Addison said, is truly modest, for it would not be understood once in a twelvemonth! But merits may as effectually be hidden under a mountain-load of English words. Let one instance suffice out of scores io8 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. which might be chosen. In the north transept is the tomb of Sir J. Balchen, who was "Admiral of the White Squadron of His Majesty's fleet in 1744. Being sent out Commander-in-Chief of the combined fleets of England and Holland, to cruise on the enemy, was, on his return home in his Majesty's ship the Victory, lost in the Channel by a violent storm ; from which sad circumstance of his death we may learn that neither the greatest skill, judgment, or experience, joined to the most firm, unshaken resolution, can resist the fury of the winds and waves ; and we are taught by the passages of his lif e, which were filled with great and gallant actions, but ever accompanied with adverse gales of fortune, that the brave, the worthy, and the good man, meets not always his reward in this world. Fifty-eight years of faithful and painful services he had passed, when, being just retired to the govern- ment of Greenwich Hospital to wear out the remainder of his days > And so it goes on at interminable length with multi- tudes of superfluous adjectives. Of the writers of such epitaphs we can only say with Homer ' ' Foolish ! nor do they know how much more half is than the whole ! " Doubtless many of the persons described at such exorbitant length were worthy of the applause thus bestowed on them, and it is quite natural for imme- diate survivors to suppose that they honour the dead by a long enumeration of their titles and offices. In point of fact, however, very few years elapse before posterity has ceased to feel the smallest interest in such details. We do not greatly care to know of John Holies, Duke of Newcastle " That he was Knight of the Bath and Baron Ogle in right of his mother ; Viscount Mansfield, and Baron Cavendish of Bolsover, Earl of Ogle, Earl, Marquis, and Duke of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Lord Lieutenant of the counties of Nottingham and Northumberland, First Lord of the Bedchamber to King James I., Guardian to Prince WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 109 Charles, Privy Councillor, and Knight of the most Noble Order of the Garter ; that, for his fidelity to the King, he was made Captain- General of the forces raised for his service in the North." Perhaps the palmary instance of unconscious vanity and incongruity in this direction is found on the bust erected by Benson to Milton, in which we have one line about Milton and four or five about the small official magnificences of Benson. This curiosity should be given entire. It is " This bust of the Author of ' Paradise Lost,' was placed here by William Benson, Esquire, one of the two Auditors of the Imprests to His Majesty King George II., formerly Surveyor-General of the works to H.M. King George I." If the tombs of really great men were crowded with such facts their epitaphs would almost assume the proportions of biographies. The greatest men and women, as a rule, have the shortest epitaphs, and have been those who would care least about long ones. A few words were adequate for the good Queen Eleanor, and a line of Latin by Erasmus for the Lady Margaret of Richmond. Few greater men are buried in the Abbey than Lord Chatham. Yet these few lines suffice for the tomb, from which he seems still " with eagle face and outstretched hand to bid England be of good cheer and hurl defiance at her foes " : " Erected by the King and Parliament as a testimony to the virtues and ability of "William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, during whose admini- stration, in the reigns of Geo. II. and III., Divine Providence exalted Great Britain to a height of prosperity and glory unknown to any former age. Born November 15, 1708. Died May 11, 1778." It was written by Bacon, the sculptor ; and though WESTMINSTER ABBEY. in George III., on hearing this, bade him stick to his chisel, there is no fault to find with it. Three or four lines also suffice for his son, " the heaven-born Prime Minister," and merely record that ' ' This monument is erected by Parliament to William Pitt, son of William, Earl of Chatham, in testimony of gratitude for the eminent public services, and of regret for the irreparable loss of that great and disinterested Minister. He died Jan. 23, 1806, in the forty-seventh year of his age." Two words, Garolus Magnus, were enough for Karl the Great. We know that on the grave of Words- worth, in Grasmere Churchyard, are only the two words " William Wordsworth." Keats wished noth- ing else carved on his tombstone than " Here lies one whose name was writ in water." On the fine bust of Dryden, raised to his memory by the Maecenas of literature in his day, John Sheffield, Duke of Buck- ingham, the Duke knew that it was wholly unneces- sary to add anything to the words, " John Dryden, born 1632, died May 1, 1700." Already on the tomb of Spenser had been inscribed the words "Here lies (expecting the second coming of our Saviour Christ Jesus) the body of Edmund Spenser, the Prince of Poets in his time, whose divine spirit needs no other witness than the works which he left behind him. He was born in London in 1553, and died in 1598." The tombs and graves and busts of Samuel Johnson, David Garrick, Isaac Watts, George Grote, Charles Darwin, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, and others, are marked only by their names and the dates of their birth and death. On the grave of Newton are the words, Hie depositum est Isaaci Newtoni quod mortale fuit. ii2 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. As a rule, the longest inscriptions encumber the least distinguished graves. And the worst of some of them is not only their tedious prolixity, but also their fatiguing prosiness. For the splendid tomb of Mansfield, which is adorned by one of Flaxman's finest and most pathetic statues, the two lines of Pope might have sufficed ' ' Here Murray, long enough his country's pride, Is now no more than Tully or than Hyde." His memory would have been immortalised by his great speeches, and did not need any fulsome addi- tions, still less the dull bathos and anti-climax which follow. On the colossal statue of Watt, by Chantrey, placed with hideous incongruity in the Chapel of St. Paul, the two words, James Watt, would have been ample ; and in his case, as in many others, we might have said Ccetera hlstoria loquatur. Lord Brougham was, however, asked to compose the inscription, and it is as follows : ' ' Not to perpetuate a name, which must endure while the peaceful arts nourish, but to show that mankind have learned to honour those who best deserved their gratitude, the king, his ministers, and many of the nobles and commoners of the realm, raised this monument to James Watt, who, directing the force of an original genius, early exercised in philosophical research, to the improvement of the steam- engine, enlarged the resources of his country, increased the power of man, and rose to an eminent place among the most illustrious followers of science and the real benefactors of the world. Born at Greenock, 1736, died at Heathfield, in Staffordshire, 1819." In some instances, where the man has been the representative of a great cause, a longer inscription WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 113 is permissible. Such is the case with those which commemorate the leaders in the great battle for the abolition of ,the slave-trade. Clarkson, not the least self-sacrificing of them, has not even a tablet, and the record on the arm-chair statue of Wilberforce is commonplace ; but no one will regret the eloquent account of Granville Sharp, which though the writers admit it to be diffuse, they excuse on the ground that it is not panegyric but history " Born and educated in the bosom of the Church of England, he ever cherished for her institutions the most unshaken regard, whilst his whole soul was in harmony with the sacred strain ' Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace, good will towards men ; ' on which his life presented one beautiful comment of glowing piety and un- wearied beneficence. Freed by competence from the necessity, and by content from the desire, of lucrative occupation, he was incessant in his labours to improve the condition of mankind. Founding public happiness on public virtue, he aimed to rescue his native country from the guilt and inconsistency of employing the arm of Freedom to rivet the fetters of Bondage, and established for the Negro Race, in the person of Somerset (his servant), the long disputed rights of human nature. Having, in this glorious cause, triumphed over the combined resistance of Interest, Prejudice, and Pride, he took his place among the foremost of the honourable band associated to deliver Africa from the rapacity of Europe, by the abolition of the Slave Trade." To Sir J. F. Stephen was entrusted the inscription under the bust of Zachary Macaulay, and it deserves to be remembered as a beautiful piece of English : " In grateful remembrance of Zachary Macaulay, who, during a protracted life, with an intense but quiet perseverance, which no success could relax, no reverse could subdue, no toil, privations, or reproach could daunt, devoted his time, talents, fortune, and all the energies of his mind and body to the service of the most injured and helpless of mankind ; and partook for more than forty years in the counsels and in the labours which, guided and blessed by God, first rescued the British Empire from the guilt of the Slave Trade, and finally conferred freedom on 800,000 slaves." H ii4 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. Every one has noticed the extraordinary tendency to be jocose over the remains of the dead, which can alone account for the strange words on the gravestones of country churchyards. There are some approaches to these, sometimes intentional, and some- times through unconscious dulness. Thus on the tomb of Sir J. Fullerton we read that " he died fuller of faith than of fear, fuller of consolation than of pains, fuller of honour than of days." Again, on the tablet to William Lawrence, a servant to one of the pre- bendaries, in the North Walk of the Cloisters, we read ' ' Short-hand he wrote ; his flower in prime did fade, And hasty death short-hand of him hath made. Well couth he numbers, and well-measured land ; Thus doth he now that ground whereon you stand, Wherein he lies so geometrical : Art maketh some, but thus doth nature all." In the Little Cloisters we have the extraordinary remark that Thomas Smith, in 1663, "through the spotted veil of the small-pox rendered a pure and unspotted soul to God " ! Quaintness of expression is common on tombs, but there are not many instances of it in the Abbey. One occurs on the tomb of Grace Scot, whose husband and father were both among the judges of Charles I. ' ' Hee that will give my Grace but what is Hers Must say her Death hath not Made only her deare Scot, But Vertue, Worth, and Sweetnesse Widowers." On the cenotaph of Samuel Butler, the author of WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 115 " Hudibras," J. Barber, Lord Mayor of London, placed the not unhappy turn of speech, " Ne cui vivo deerant fere omnia Deesset etiam mortuo tumulus." In the epitaph of our great English musician Pur- cell, written it is said by Dryden, we are told with happy brevity that " Here lyes Henry Purcell, Esq., who left this life and is gone to that blessed place where only his Harmony can be exceeded." Less successful are Dryden's lines on Sir Palmes Fairborne, though they are historically interesting as illustrative of the dread of a Jacobite invasion in 1680 " Ye sacred reliques which your marble keepe, Heere undisturb'd by warrs, in quiet sleepe, Discharge the trust which (when it was below) Fairborne' s disdaunted soul did undergoe, And be the town's Balladium* from the Foe." It might have been expected that Pope, so great a master of the antithetic and epigrammatic style, would have been specially successful in epitaphs ; yet the only good one that he ever wrote is that on Mrs. Elizabeth Corbet, in St. Margaret's, Westminster. Those in the Abbey are without exception bad. There is a pre- posterous disproportionateness in his lines on Sir Godfrey Kneller " Kneller, by Heav'n, and not a master, taught, Whose art was nature, and whose pictures thought When now two ages he has snatch'd from fate Whate'er was beauteous, or whate'er was great Rests, crown'd with princes' honours, poets' lays, Due to his merit and brave thirst of praise : Living, great Nature fear'd he might outvye Her works ; and dying, fears herself may dye." * Sic. u6 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. The last two lines are stolen from Cardinal Bembo's distich on Raphael. Even when addressed to Raphael, they are only excusable as reflecting the national style and idiomatic extravagance of Italy and the Renais- sance ; but the notion of nature dying because Sir Godfrey Kneller had died was one which only the artificiality of an eighteenth-century poet could have accepted as otherwise than outrageous and grotesque ! Pope, however, had the sense to admit that " it was the worst thing he ever wrote in his life." The same straining after false antithesis is observable in Pope's lines on Craggs " Statesman, yet friend to truth, of soul sincere, In action faithful, and in honour clear, Who broke no promise, serv'd no private end, Who gained no title, and who lost no friend. Ennobled by himself, by all approv'd, Prais'd, wept, and honour'd by the muse he lov'd." And still more in the lines which he wrote for New- ton's grave "Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night, God said, ' Let Newton be ! ' and all was light." The tomb of Gay is defaced by the frivolous cyni- cism and impiety of his self-chosen epitaph " Life is a jest, and ail things show it, I thought so once, and now I know it." But the last four lines of Pope's inscription are as unreal as anything can be " These are thy honours ; not that here thy bust Is mixed with heroes, or with Kings thy dust ; But that the worthy and the good shall say, Striking their pensive bosoms Here lies Gay ! " WESTMINSTER ABBEF. 117 In the lines on Rowe, the poet -laureate, and his daughter, Pope wrote ' ' To these so mourned in death, so loved in life, The childless parent, and the widow' d wife With tears inscribed this monumental stone, That holds thine ashes, and expects her own." He was exceedingly disgusted when the last line was falsified by the speedy re-marriage of Mrs. Rowe, who is represented weeping above. The extraordinary incapacity of Pope to recognise what was essential in an epitaph, and what was ab- surdly misplaced, is shown by his proposed epitaph on the monument of Shakespeare. He had been natur- ally disgusted by Auditor Benson's parade of his own titles on Milton's cenotaph, and had written in his " Dunciad " "On poets' tombs see Benson's titles shine " ; and he had also disliked Barber's mention of his own name on the tomb of Samuel Butler. He suggested for Shakespeare's cenotaph ' ' Thus Britons love me, and preserve my fame, Free from a Barber's or a Benson's name ; as though Shakespeare would have been honoured by such ephemeral spite ! The single epitaph by Tickell on his friend Addison is more successful, and the lines are really beautiful " Ne'er to these chambers, where the mighty rest, Since their foundation, came a nobler guest ; Nor e'er was to the bowers of bliss conveyed A fairer spirit, or more welcome shade. Oh, gone for ever ! take this long adieu, And sleep in peace, next thy loved Montague." n8 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. Among other epitaphs which contain forcible and memorable lines we may mention the following. Francis Holies, son of the Earl of Clare, died in Flanders at the age of eighteen. His epitaph is " What so thou hast of nature or of arts, Youth, beauty, strength, or what excelling parts Of mind and body, letters, arms, and worth, His eighteen years beyond his years brought forth ; Then stand and read thyself within this glass, How soon these perish, and thyself may pass : Man's life is measured by the work, not days; Not aged sloth, but active youth, hath praise." The following lines on the tomb of Michael Dray- ton, the author of " Polyolbion," are also good, and are either by Ben Jonson or Quarles " Doe, pious marble, let thy readers knowe, What they and what their children owe To Draiton's name, whose sacred dust Wee recommend unto thy trust. Protect his memory and preserve his story ; Remaine a lasting monument of his glory. And when the ruins shall disclame To be the treas'rer of his name, His name, that cannot fade, shall be An everlasting monument to thee." The Abbey contains but two epitaphs by Lord Tennyson. One is on Sir Stratford de Redcliffe ' ' Thou third great Canning, stand among our best And noblest, now thy long day's work hath ceased, Here silent in our Minster of the West, Who wert the voice of England in the East." The antithesis here is not specially forcible, and the quatrain on Sir John Franklin is more successful " Not here ! the white North has thy bones ; and thou, Heroic sailor-soul, Art passing on thy happier voyage now Toward no earthly pole." WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 119 In the same chapel is the lovely monument on brave Sir Francis Vere, on whom the following epitaph is found in Lord Pettigrew's collection " When Vere sought death, arm'd with the sword and shield, Death was afraid to meet him in the field, But when his weapons he had laid aside, Death, like a coward, struck him, and he died." Several of the epitaphs have curious incidents attached to their history. In the west cloister the visitor will pass a grave- stone to John Broughton, who combined the double distinction of being champion prize-fighter of England, and for many years one of the vergers of the A obey. It was from his colossal proportions and mighty muscu- lar development that Roubiliac modelled his figure of Hercules on the tomb of General Fleming. It will be observed that there is a blank line under his name. It is accounted for by the fact that he wished the words " Champion Prize-fighter of England " to be recorded under it. The Dean and Chapter objected ; the decision was postponed ; and as more than a century has elapsed since the man's death, we may assume that it has been postponed sine die. On the tomb of John Philips, the author of the now-forgotten poems of " The Splendid Shilling " and "Cider" which is indicated by the wreath of apple interwoven with laurels, and the motto, Honos erib huic quoque porno had once been written the enor- mous exaggeration that he was " Uni M'iltono secundus et primo pane par," 120 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. It might have been thought that the words would have been excluded because they express so false a literary estimate. They were, however, excluded on the very different ground that, in the judgment of the then Dean the time-serving Bishop Sprat the Abbey walls ought not to be disgraced by the name of Milton ! On which we can only say " Enough ! high words abate no jot or tittle Of what, while man still lasts, shall still be true ; Heaven's great ones must be slandered by earth's little, And God makes no ado ! " Another epitaph with a history is that on John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham. As he himself wrote it, it ran as follows ' ' Dubius sed non improbus vixi ; Incertus morior, non perturbatus. Humanum est nescire et errare. Christum adveneror, Deo confido Omnipotenti, benevolentissimo. Ens entium miserere mei ! " But Bishop Atterbury, then Dean of Westminster, unwisely and unfairly struck out the words " Christum adveneror," because he said that " the verb " was not full enough as applied to Christ who is thus left altogether unmentioned. The inscriptions on the tombs of later days show a marked increase of taste and common-sense. They are in many cases brief, striking, and essentially illus- trative of the lives and characters of those whose memory they are intended to perpetuate. This was mainly due to the genial wisdom, wide reading, and literary taste of Dean Stanley, to whom all who love WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 121 the Abbey owe an inestimable debt of gratitude. He made the epitaphs not only fitting memorials of the dead, but also to be, like the Hermae at Athens, a source of instruction and moral ennoblement to all who read their lofty sentiments. Thus, under the bust of the first Lord Lawrence are inscribed the words spoken of him by a friend " He feared man so little because he feared God so much." On the ceno- taph of John and Charles Wesley are carved three famous sayings of the founder of the Methodists " The best of all is, God is with us ; " which were the words repeated by him three times, with strange energy, as he lay on his death-bed. " I look on the whole world as my Parish," . words which he used as a defence of the evangelistic energy of his life ; and " God buries his workmen, but carries on his work." In a grave where rested for a time the remains of the philanthropist, George Peabody, are inscribed his best-known words ' ' I have prayed my Heavenly Father day by day that He would enable me to show my gratitude for the blessings which I have received by doing some great good for my fellow men." Another instance of a selected sentence, full of sig- nificance, may be found in the small marble tablet, erected, in 1841, to the memory of Jeremiah Horrox, curate of Hoole, who, had he not died at the age of twenty- one, would probably have been as great as Newton. He was buried at Hoole, and had no 122 WESTMINSTER ABBEF.- memorial till this humble tablet was placed by the west door two centuries after he had been the first to ob- serve the transit of Venus. After recording mathe- matical and astronomical discoveries truly amazing in so mere a boy, it mentions that his famous observa- tion of the transit of Venus had been taken in the interval between three full Sunday services ; and so far from despising these humble ministrations to the inhabitants of a poor village, he said that he was in- terrupted in his observations by being ad majora adcocatus, quce ob Jicec parerga negligi non decuit. Again, on the grave of Livingstone, which is always a point of the deepest interest to all visitors of the Abbey, are recorded the last words he ever wrote the words which he had written in his diary very shortly before he was found by his black followers dead upon his knees. " All I can add in my solitude is, May Heaven's rich blessing come down on every one, American, English, or Turk, who will help to heal this open sore of the world," i.e., the slave trade. One more specimen of a most felicitous inscription is that upon the white marble pedestal of the statue of Lord Shaftesbury ; the last statue added to the Abbey, and almost the last for which there will be room. The most conspicuous epitome of the aim of his life and the lesson of his example, is summarised in the shortest possible exhortation to a noble and un- selfish career the two monosyllables, "LovE. SERVE." WESTMINSTER ABBEY. Certainly the two epi- taphs in the Abbey which, as epitaphs, are most fa- mous and most fre- quently re- peated are those on a great drama- tist and an unknown little child. Every one reads with interest the well - known words, "0 Rare Ben Jonson," which a casual passer-by had engraved, at a cost of half- a-crown to the sexton, on the square stone under which the poet was buried upright. He has never needed any other memorial. In the cloister is a plain tablet to a little child of the humbler classes, who died in TOMB OF LOBD SHAFTESBUKY. i2 4 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. infancy in the year of revolution 1688. "In that event- ful year of the Revolution," says Dean Stanley, " when Church and State were reeling to their foundation, this dear child found her quiet resting place in the eastern cloister. The sigh over the prematurely-ended life is petrified into stone, and affects us the more deeply from the great events amidst which it is enshrined." There is no other inscription of all these hundreds which recalls the pathetic, exquisite simplicity of the epitaphs in the Catacombs, where the persecuted Christians of the first centuries rest in peace. It is simply, ' ' Here lyes Jane Lister, dear Childe." On Dean Stanley's own altar-tomb of alabaster is an inscription such as he himself would have ap- proved. It gives no pompous enumeration of titles and honours, but the date of his career, and the appropriate text ' ' I know that all things come to an end ; But Thy commandments are exceeding broad." I think that a visit to the Abbey may teach us two lessons, among many others, which we should all try to learn ; namely, tolerance for opinions, and sympathy with men. We should here learn to be tolerant of opinions which differ widely from our own. Here lie side by side a multitude of those who were equally good and great, yet who in their lifetime regarded each other WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 125 as heinous heretics and monstrous blasphemers. The dust of Romanist abbot sleeps side by side with the dust of Protestant dean, and the great Elizabeth, true queen of the Reformation, shares the same quiet tomb with the Papist Mary, as they each expe- rienced the trials of the same uneasy throne. Sir Walter Scott, recalling that the great rivals, Pitt and Fox, sleep under the same pavement within a few feet of each other, sings "Here, where the end of earthly things Lays heroes, patriots, bards, and kings, Where still the hand and still the tongue Of those who fought, and spoke, and sung, Here where the fretted aisles prolong The distant notes of holy song, As if some angel spoke again, ' All peace on earth, good will to men ' If ever from an English heart, Oh, here let prejudice depart." If the aspiration be needful as regards political differences, how much more needful is it with reference to those " unhappy divisions " which rend asunder the peace of the Christian Church ! But the lesson of a wise and noble tolerance in judging of opinions is closely connected with the duty of loving sympathy for men. To create gaps and chasms in history which separate us from this or that age of our forefathers by the discontinuity of fierce aversions, is even a smaller evil than the almost universal lack of charity in speaking or thinking of living men. Westminster Abbey should be " a great temple of silence and reconciliation, where the discords iz6 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. of twenty generations lie buried." Let us dwell on the greatness and goodness of " famous men, and the fathers who begat us," rather than on their differ- ences, and human frailties, and mutual persecutions, and all their "glimmerings and decays." Of all tempers that exist among mankind, surely the vilest and the most serpentine is that which delights in criticism and depreciation. If sensuality belongs to the beast within us, malice and envy and lies belong to the demons. To revel in " the loathsome and lying spirit of defamation, which studies man only in the skeleton, and nature only in ashes," may be the glory of the worldling, but it is the infamy of the Christian. Here, in the quiet light of history, we may read that many who, in their lifetime, hated and denounced each other, who embittered each other's brief, sad lives, and would even have burnt one another, were yet the common servants of one dear Lord. " The meek, the just, the pious, the devout," said William Penn, " are all of one religion." How bitter have been the mutual animosities of schools, and parties, and rival Churches ! Yet here surely we may honour, and reverence, and love the beauty of holiness in all God's saints, and pray that He would make us mindful to follow their good examples. Ho.w fully may they have learnt beyond these noises, " That all their early creed was not correct, That God is not the leader of a sect " ! Once in the French wars, an English frigate WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 127 encountered another during the night. Each mistook the other for a French man-of-war. They fought with each other furiously, they injured each other des- perately, in the darkness. Day dawned, and lo ! with salutes and bitter weeping, amid the dead and the dying and the shattered de'bris of the fight, each recognised the English flag flying over the other ship, and found that they had been injuring their common country, slaying and shatter- ing their friends and brethren. Ah ! let us not make the same mistake in the twilight of our earthly opinions. When we are tempted to shoot out our arrows, even bitter words, against those who differ from us, let us remember how we must weep and blush for such base and ignorant railing when we see them shining in the light of their Saviour's pre- sence, God's chosen saints before His throne. F. W. FARRAR. CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL. CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL. HE Metropolitical City is visited each year by increasing crowds of pilgrims from the surrounding summer resorts. Its interest increases with the increasing study of his- tory, and from time to time new disco- veries are made which throw fresh light upon its antiquities or architecture. At the time when Canterbury first comes before the eye of the historian, it had ceased to be the Roman Dorovernum, the existence of which is now attested only by the numerous Roman bricks, some even in the walls of the Cathedral, and had become the Burgh or Bury of the men of Kent. It was approached by Augustine from the east over St. Martin's Hill, from the northern side of which our principal sketch is taken. The foundations of St. Martin's Church and the lower part of its walls, which are Roman, stood in 598 as they stand to-day ; and they were the walls of the little church which had been given to the Christian Queen Bertha and her chaplain Bishop Luithart, by her pagan husband King Ethelbert. When Augustine 132 CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL. passed towards the city, as described by the Venerable Bede, with his little procession headed by the monk carrying a board on which was a rough picture of Christ, and a chorister bearing a silver cross, his heart, no doubt, beat high with hope : but his hope would have grown into exultation could he have looked forward through the centuries, and beheld the mag- nificent Cathedral which was to spring up where his episcopal throne was fixed, and the energetic and varied Christian life which has issued from this first home of Anglo-Saxon Christianity. To us the scene is full of historical recollections. Between the place where we are standing and the Cathedral are the city walls, on the very site which they occupied in the days of Ethelbert, and the postern-gate through which Queen Bertha came each day to her prayers ; in the nearer distance, a little to the right of the Cathedral, are the remains of the great abbey which Augustine founded ; to our left is the Pilgrims' Way, by which, after Becket's canonization, those who landed at Dover made their way to the shrine of S.t. Thomas. The eye glances over the valley of the Stour, en- closed between the hill on which we are placed and that of St. Thomas, crowned by the fine buildings of the Clergy Orphan School ; and ranges from Harble- down (Chaucer's " little town under the Blean ycleped Bob- up-and-down") on the left to the Jesuit College at Hale's Place farther to the right ; and thence down the valley to Fordwich, where formerly the CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, 135 waters of the Stour joined those of the Wantsome, the estuary separating Thanet from the mainland. This town at the Domesday epoch was a port with flourish- ing mills and fisheries. There the Caen stone was landed to build the Cathedral, and the tuns of wine from the monks' vineyards in France were lifted out of the ships by the mayor's crane. For the use of this crane forty shillings a year continued to be paid by the monks and their successors of the Dean and Chapter for some four centuries after Fordwich had ceased to be a port an anachronism only paralleled by the fact that Fordwich, now a village of a hundred and fifty people, returned two members to Parliament till 1832, and was tinder the jurisdiction of its own mayor and corporation till 1886: the memorials of which facts the handsome mace, the election drums, the bar, the jury-room, the prison for malefactors, and the ducking-stool for scolds may still be seen, most of them in the queer little wood-and-plaster court- house which is believed to have been built in the reign of Queen Mary. We pass down towards the great city, leaving on the right the county prison an eyesore on which Mr. Ruskin's wrath has been justly vented and the in- firmary, in the grounds of which are the ruins of the old church of St. Pancras (a church originally built by Augustine, and named by him after Pancratius, the Roman martyr boy), with its foundations those of a Roman temple and its walls composed of Roman bricks ; and passing the cemetery-gate of the great 136 CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, abbey, now turned into Monastery House, and along under the chapel and the din ing-hall, formerly the guest-room of the abbey, we stand in front of the great gateway of St. Augustine's. We can but glance at the history of the institution, first as a centre of learning where Greek was first taught in England under Archbishop Theodore (673-708), a native of Tarsus, the city of St. Paul and of the Stoic Univer- sity ; then as a centre of the English missionary energy, by which the Gospel was carried in the eighth and ninth centuries into Frisia and Germany ; then as a great abbey, with its noble Norman church, and fine tower, commonly called Ethelbert's Tower, its abbot sitting in the House of Lords, and its wealth, which was an object of a king's jealousy, as described in the well-known " Ballad of King John and the Abbot of Canterbury " ; then after the dissolution of the monastery by Henry VIII., as a hunting-box for the King (there is a picture in the dining-hall of a stag-hunt among the ruins) ; then in a phase of deeper degradation, as a tea-garden, with the Tower of Ethelbert tottering and decaying, and at last, in 1822, levelled with the ground by the aid of a bat- tering ram and two cannon ; the wall of the Norman abbey patched up to form a racquet-court, and the room above the great gateway turned into a brewer's vat; and lastly, since 1848, a Missionary College. The gateway has survived all changes from the day when in the thirteenth century it stood forth as a choice specimen of decorated Gothic, till the present day, ST. AUGUSTINE'S CHTTECH GATEWAY. 138 CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL. when it has undergone a timely restoration, the ancient lines being exactly preserved. But it is time that we go into the Cathedral pre- cincts. Making use of a canon's key, we pass, by Queen Bertha's Postern, through the old city walls, along a piece of the ancient Queningate Lane a reserved space between the walls of the City and the precincts, along which the citizens and troops could pass freely for purposes of defence : through the Bowling Green, where the tower of Prior Chillenden is seen to have been used as a pigeon -house, into the Cathedral Yard. In so doing we pass under a Norman archway of the date of Lanfranc and the Conqueror, which formerly stood in a wall separating the cemetery of the monks from that of the laity ; then along the south side of the Cathedral, passing Anselm's Chapel, and the beautiful Norman tower attached to the south-eastern transept, with its elaborate tracery, which shows how delicate Norman work could be ; past the south porch, over which is a bas-relief of the altar where the sword of Becket's murderer was preserved ; and round, past the western door, into the cloister. The cloister occupies the same space as the Norman cloister built by Lanfranc, but of the Norman work only a doorway remains at the north-east corner ; there is some Early English arcading on the north side, but the present tracery and fan-worked roof be- long to the end of the fourteenth century, when Arch- bishops Sudbury, Arundell, and Courtenay, and Prior \'. < i 4 o CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL. Chillenden (1390 1411) rebuilt the nave, the clois- ter, and the chapter-house. The later work cuts across the older in the most unceremonious way, as is seen especially in the square doorway by which we shall presently enter the "Martyrdom," which cuts into a far more beautiful portal of the decorated period. If we take our stand at the north-west corner of the cloister, from which a very fine view is gained of the Cathedral, especially about sunset, we may picture to ourselves the life of the monks. Above the north-eastern side of the cloister are the old Norman arches of their dormitory, now taken in to the new library; on the eastern side is the chapter-house, with its fine geometrical ceiling, where they transacted their business ; on the south the great church, the services of which occupied so many hours of each day. At the centre of the north side are two arches wider than the rest, as shown in the sketch, under which runnels of water were conducted from a fountain close by, to enable them to wash their faces and hands before dinner ; and opposite to these is the door through which they passed to the refectory. The hours not consumed in church or chapter, in dormitory or refectory, must all be passed in the cloister itself : there they walked and sat and talked, and read the books which were given them as a kind of task ; there they heard the scanty news, and gossiped over it; there they wrote, if the temperature which reached them through the unglazed tracery permitted writing. Ordericus Vitalis, the monkish historian, at the be- CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL. 141 ginning of one winter in his cloister in Normandy, says, " The weather is so cold that my fingers have become stiff, and I must cease writing until the spring." No wonder that the monk's life was accounted harder than the soldier's, and that they were very shortlived. It was reckoned that each of them must spend some three days every month in the infirmary, to which a Norman passage conducts from the east side of the cloister, and of which the pillars and arches still stand, bearing on their reddened surface the marks of the great fire of 1174. If from the place at which we have in imagination been standing, at the north-west corner of the cloister, we look for a moment behind us, we see in the wall a blocked-up door with a curious hole at the side of it. The hole is said to have been made in order to pass bottles and other articles through from the cellarer's lodgings, which were on the other side of the wall. The doorway was the entrance from the Archbishop's Palace, which occupied the space a little further to the west ; and through it Becket passed out to his death, on the 29th of December, 1170. The knights, who had come to England to force the Archbishop to a change of policy on pain of death, had held a violent altercation with him in his palace. They complained of the act which had thrown their master, King Henry II., into a paroxysm of fury, namely, that on returning to England after a recon- ciliation with the King, the Archbishop had at once re-opened the quarrel by excommunicating the bishops 1 42 CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL. who had, at the King's desire, taken part in the coronation of his son as his colleague on the throne. Becket had refused all concession, and the knights left him in great wrath. Soon after it was reported that they were arming in an orchard at the west of the Cathedral, and the Archbishop's friends urged him against his will to take refuge in the church. They were hardly able, even by the bluntest words, to shake the combined courage, obstinacy, and fatalism by which he was possessed ; and they had to drag and even carry him along the north and east sides of the cloister to the door of the Cathedral represented in the sketch. When the door was closed, he re-opened it to let in the cowering monks, notwithstanding that the knights were already entering the cloister. " God's house," he said, "shall not be turned into a castle." He refused to go to the high altar, or down into the crypt, where he might have been safe, but stood on the steps leading up to the aisle, the arrangement of Avhich was different from that now existing. The knights having come along the south side of the cloister, passed through the door into the transept, where the dark- ness of five o'clock on a December day was but little relieved by the light at the shrine of St. Benedict, then occupying the space where the stone screen oppo- site the doorway now stands. " Where is the traitor ? Where is the Archbishop ? " they cried. " I am here," answered Becket, " archbishop and priest of God, but no traitor." " Then absolve the bishops," they re- torted, and so the altercation proceeded, with violent PLACE OF MARTYRDOM.. 144 CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL. words on both sides. They dragged him down from the steps to the floor of the transept, wishing to re- move him from the church and thus avoid the charge of sacrilege ; but he placed his back against a pillar, which then supported a chapel on a higher level, dedicated to St. Blaise, and taking one of the knights in his arms, flung him down in his armour upon the pavement. The others rushed upon him, and he was felled by their blows. Then he knelt on the floor and commended his soul to the saints, saying that he died in the Church's cause ; and the last blow which was dealt him severed the whole crown of the head from the rest, and spilled the brains upon the stones. The knights then fled ; and after rifling the palace, made their way back to Saltwood Castle, near Hythe, whence they had started in the morning. Their deed had very opposite effects from their intention. They themselves, indeed, did not suffer ; but the cause for which they committed the crime was depressed for nearly four centuries. Henry had to do penance, and practically to concede the clerical immunities for which Becket had contended ; and Becket became a saint, " the holy, blissful martyr," himself the worker of a thousand miracles, and his shrine the goal of pilgrimages from all parts of England and of Europe. But, whatever we may think of this, his death was certainly the making of Canterbury and its Cathedral. Four years after Becket' s death the choir was burnt down (1174) : but the treasure which was poured into the martyr's church enabled the CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL. 145 monks to rebuild it in its present grander proportions ; and the city, which before was insignificant, became wealthy, populous, and renowned. The crypt was the first place of Becket's interment, and into the crypt we now pass. The column which is figured in the sketch stands under St. Anselm's chapel. Its fantastic fluting is probably due to Italian influence, both Anselm and his predecessor Lanfranc having been natives of Italy. The capital of the column is filled with grotesques a concert of the beasts, who are playing on various instruments and the vaulting above it retains some of the original painting (twelfth century), and also the great rose, combining the red petals of Lancaster with the white of York, which was placed at the crown of all the arches by Archbishop Morton, when he decorated the crypt in the reign of Henry VII. The dark chapel of St. Gabriel close by, which can only be entered by special leave, shows, when lighted up, some remarkable fres- coes of the twelfth century, depicting the nativity of our Lord, and of the Baptist, and other subjects, which are still for the most part in good preservation. In the apse of St. Anselm's chapel above, on the removal, some two years ago, of some strengthening masonry probably placed there about the year 1180, another striking fresco was brought to light, and can now be seen, representing St. Paul shaking off the viper into the fire. The tomb in the crypt, represented in the sketch, is that of Isabel, Countess of Atholl, who owned the K THE CEYPT. castle of Chilham, five miles from Canterbury, in the reign of Edward I. (d. 1292). Beyond it, on the left, was the shrine of the Virgin, with its silver statue, the elaborate tracery of its screens, and the unparalleled wealth of its votive offerings ; and further to the left the tomb of Cardinal Morton, Avith its historical emblems, the crown and united rose, the cardinal's hat, the portcullis of the House of CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL. 147 Lancaster, and the punning representation of the name, the Mort (or hawk) and Ton. Further, beyond the Duchess of Atholl's tomb, the crypt is much loftier, and becomes almost a church in itself. This is the part beyond the apse of the original cathe- dral, the place of Becket's first burial, where Henry II. did penance, passing the night in fasting, and in the morning baring his back and receiving three lashes from each of the monks. Here the miracles began to be wrought, and the " Tumba," even after its contents were removed, was still reckoned a holy place. The present lofty crypt was built over and round the Tumba after the great fire of 1174 ; and, some forty years after its completion and that of the Trinity Chapel above it, the remains of Becket were translated by Stephen Langton, with great pomp, to the shrine prepared for them in the sanctuary above. Some few years ago there was found near the spot where the Tumba was originally placed, a short stone coffin, into which were huddled the bones of a full- grown man, the skull showing some marks of violence. The theory was immediately formed that these were the bones of Becket himself, but the evidence appears to be unfavourable to this theory. It is believed that a decree was made, on the demolition of Becket's shrine, that his bones should be burned ; but atten- tion has been recently called to some notes by William Thomas, Clerk of the Council under Edward VI., intended for the basis of a political sermon in which the preacher would have declared that the bones hod 148 CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL. not been burned, but had been buried " in a noble tower ; " this expression, however, being erased. It is certain that the demolition of the shrine was carried out very hurriedly, and it is possible that some zealous monk may have taken the bones and have buried them in the crypt below. On the other hand, there are contemporary statements to show that they were burned ; the marks on the skull do not corre- spond with the accounts given by eye-witnesses of the blow from which Becket died : and it is hardly credible that, if the bones were buried, the fact should not have been known in the reign of Mary, or that, if this was known, they should not, like those of St. Frideswide at Oxford, have been exhumed, and become again the object of veneration. The position of the shrine in the chapel above, at the side of which the tomb of the Black Prince was subsequently placed, is clearly marked. The pave- ment in the centre of the Trinity Chapel (the part east of the screen) is very rough, being composed of the stones which formed the steps and pavement of the shrine ; but the marble pavement round it is still as it was when the shrine was standing, and a per- ceptible line marks the impress of the pilgrims' feet as they stood in a row to see the treasures. The shrine stood upon a platform approached by three marble steps, some stones of which, grooved by the pilgrims' knees, are still seen in the flooring. The platform was paved with mosaic and medallions, speci- mens of which may still be seen in the present pave- CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL. 149 ment. Above this platform was the chased and gilded coffin of the saint, supported by three arches, which were hung with votive offerings of extreme richness, and between two of which sick persons were allowed to pass, so that by rubbing themselves against the stones they might draw forth virtue from the relics of the saint. The whole was covered with an oaken case richly decorated, which, at a given signal from the monk whom Erasmus styles the mystagogus, or master of the mysteries, was drawn up and revealed the riches within to the wondering gaze of the pilgrims. In the painted windows of the chapel are the records of the miracles wrought by the inter- cession of St. Thomas : here, a dead man being carried out to burial is raised ; there, the parents of a boy who has been drowned in the attempt to catch frogs in the river are informed of their loss by his com- panions with eager gestures, and he too is restored to life ; and in each case offerings of gold and silver are poured upon the shrine ; the madman is seen coming back in his right mind ; " Amens accedit, sanus recedit " : and on several occasions the saint himself comes on the scene to heal the sick man upon his bed, in one case flying forth from the shrine in his episcopal robes. The worship of Becket was the favourite cultus of the unreformed Church of Eng- land ; yet, strange to tell, from the day when Henry gave orders to demolish the shrine, and to expunge his name from all the service books and his memo- rials from all the churches, no one seems to have i5o CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL. thought anything more about him. The blow which, to adapt the language of the Old Testament, " destroyed Becket out of Israel," though violent, was timely. The Black Prince, whose wife was the Fair Maid of Kent, was specially attached to Canterbury, and founded two chantries in the crypt or undercroft. These now form the entrance to the French Church, where the descendants of the Walloon and Huguenot refugees still worship in the forms of their ancestors. The Prince had desired to be buried below ; but, partly from the special devotion which he had to the Trinity, partly that so great a man might have the place of honour, his tornb was erected at the side of Becket' s shrine. He left to the Church of Canter- bury his velvet coat embroidered with lions and lilies, his ornamental shield, his lion -crested helmet, his sword and his gauntlets, all of which still hang above his bronze effigy, except the sword, which is said to have been removed by Cromwell, and of which only part of the scabbard remains. The effigy is believed to be a good likeness. It was placed upon the tomb where the body lies soon after his death, which occurred on the 8th of June, 1376, the feast of the Trinity, as recorded in the inscription in the French of his own Aquitaine. The Prince of Wales's feathers and the lions and lilies, with the Prince's two mottoes, " Ich Diene " (I serve), and " Houmout" (High Courage), form the ornaments of the tomb, which is also surrounded by some French verses TOHB OF THE BLACK PRINCE. i52 CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL. chosen by the Prince himself, and describing the vanity of earthly glory. A little to the east of the Black Prince's tomb, but on the other side of the aisle, beneath the window, is a tomb which was till recent years a mystery to all inquirers. Many conjectures had been made as to its contents ; and the absence of all certainty, and the notion, derived from its shape, and from the numerous effigies on its covering stone, that it was a shrine or reliquary rather than a tomb, seemed to justify the opening of it, which was effected in December, 1889. Within were found the remains of an archbishop, who has since been identified as Hubert Walter, the warrior Prelate and Crusader, who was elected in the camp at Acre, and who kept the realm for his master, Richard Cceur de Lion, and raised the ransom for his release. He was clad in his robes, with a long silken under-garment and leathern leggings. All that was of linen had disappeared, but the silk, the leather, and the embroidery, which was very rich about the neck, remained : and the crozier of cedar wood was per- fect, as were also the cup and paten, and the ring with its strange Gnostic emblem of Chnuphis, the serpent- god, with sun-rays about his head, the Egyptian JSsculapius, the giver of health. These relics were not put back when the tomb was re-closed, but kept for exhibition in a case which stands in the chantry of Henry IV. on the opposite side of the Trinity Chapel. Coming to the extreme east end, we notice the THE ENTHRONEMENT CHAIE. Enthronement Chair, which is placed under the cir- cular chapel called Becket's Crown. This chair, which is sometimes called the chair of St. Augustine, but which belongs to the thirteenth century, is composed of three massive blocks of Purbeck marble. In it each successive archbishop for the last six hundred years has sat when he has been admitted to his 154 CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL. metropolitical functions. Here have sat Peckham, the bold defier of Edward L, and Brad wardine the Schoolman ; Sudbury, who was decapitated in Wat Tyler's insurrection ; Courtenay, the friend of the Black Prince and the foe of Wycliffe ; Arundell, the persecutor of the Lollards ; Chichele, who persuaded Henry V. to make war with France so as to draw away the attention of the country from the Lollard schemes for the confiscation of clerical property ; Warham, and Cranmer, and Pole, the representatives of opposite sides in the Reformation struggle : the ill-starred Laud, the liberal Tillotson, and the whole succession of primates down to Sumner, Tait, and Benson men ancient and modern, Romanist and Protestant, clericalist and liberal, statesmen, chan- cellors, and ecclesiastics, showing the continuity and the variety of the English Primacy, and giving us a good hope that it will know in the future, as in the past, how to adapt itself to the ever-changing needs of the nation. And now we leave the Cathedral, and pass out of the precincts by the Christ Church Gate, still beau- tiful even in its defacement, and through the narrow Mercery Lane, where stood in old times the booths for the sellers of relics and of the little leaden bottles supposed to contain in their water some drops of St. Thomas's blood ; where also stood the Chequers of the Hope, at which Chaucer's pilgrims regaled themselves, and of which one fragment, marked by ihe Black Prince's emblem of the lion with protruding rx CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL. 157 tongue, may still be seen at the corner of the lane ; down the High Street, where we pass the old East Bridge Hospital, founded by Lanfranc, endowed by Becket, and saved from confiscation by Cranmer, with its low Norman doorway and the crypt under its hall ; and leave the city by the West Gate, which was erected by Archbishop Sudbury on the line where the eastern wall ran along the Stour ; and past the Falstaff Inn, where the sign of the roystering old knight hangs out on some beautiful ancient iron- work, and welcomes the cyclists who specially affect his inn ; and so on to the South Eastern Railway Station. We entered Canterbury on foot with Augustine, we leave it by a modern railway. We have traced the monuments of the past, and the men of many genera- tions. We have reviewed the institutions of days long gone by, their changes, demolition, and recon- struction ; and through all we have traced a con- tinuity of life. The glory of England is its capacity to blend the old with the new, not to destroy but to adapt ; to learn from the past, but not to be enslaved by it ; to rejoice in modern progress, but to attach it to that which has preceded it. We must judge the men and institutions of old times not with blind admiration nor with an equally blind contempt, but with a true estimate of their circumstances, and of their position in the development of our history. And, as we perceive a gradual increase in force and in enlightenment, in knowledge, in the arts, in refine- i$8 CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL. ment of life, in force of character, in the reality of religion, throughout our past history, so we may look on to the future with the hope that all these bless- ings will abound more richly still ; that the conflicts of the past will be merged in a higher unity, the strife of statesmen and ecclesiastics in a common effort for social and religious good, the monastic dis- cipline in the employment of all we have in the cause of God and man, the rivalry of town and cathedral in a practical and civic Christianity, our ecclesiastical and political divisions in a fuller brotherhood ; and that so the great Church which is the mother of English Christianity, may look forth in the ages to come on a world-wide community knit together as one family by true relations, and fostered by the divine and beneficent Power to which her aisles and towers have borne witness through succeeding centuries. W. H. FREMANTLE. DUKHAM CATHEDEAL. DURHAM CATHEDRAL. HE romance of this great Cathedral of the north may be said to begin, as far as the visitor of to-day is concerned, with the impression which its enormous propor- tions make as he stands on Framwellgate Bridge. From the banks of the Wear he looks up a steep cliff to where that great pile crowns the height : " half house of God, half castle 'gainst the Scot." On the edge of the same cliff, and on a level with the Cathedral, frowns the companion castle. The river Wear almost encircling the hill on which both Cathedral and castle stand is the com- pletion which nature has given to a position of unequalled security. As one looks at the castle and Cathedral in their strong dwelling-place the mind is carried back to days of turbulence and trouble. "We are naturally led to think of the rough and violent ages in which those works were reared, of the strange vicissitudes of national history which these grey stones have wit- nessed, of the magnificent skill of a former nge which L 1 62 DURHAM CATHEDRAL. has expressed itself for all time in these immortal monuments. Still to-day the Cathedral of Durham is an outward embodiment of the strong and dominant character of the natives of the far north. Their strength has happily found more peaceful mode of expression, and their energy expresses itself now in other directions than that of architecture ; but for all that it is the character of the men of the north which speaks in the silent eloquence of this great temple, and a natural sympathy makes the men of the north as passionate admirers of their great Cathedral as ever Asia was of her great Ephesian temple. The origin of the Cathedral connects itself with the character of the great St. Cuthbert, the saintly Bishop of Lindisfarne. The grave evangelist of the north lived in simplest and austerest manner on the North- umbrian coast. As Bishop of Lindisfarne, in succes- sion to St. Aidan, he made a name for holiness which has never died away. He made Christ in his own age such a reality in the north that he can never be forgotten. Ketired in his latter days to one of the Fame Islands, rendered illustrious centuries later by the fame of Grace Darling, Cuthbert passed thence into the life to come in the year 687. His body was brought to Lindisfarne, or Holy Island, and preserved there as a sainted relic. Two hundred years passed away, and the body of the saint rested quietly in Lindisfarne. But in 875 the Danes were fiercely ravaging Northumbria, and in consternation at their approach the inhabitants of Holy Island fled with THE CATHEDRAL FROM THE RIVER. DURHAM CATHEDRAL. 165 the precious body, and found, for the time being, a resting-place in Chester-le-Street, half-way between Newcastle and Durham. A century later, in 995, the body was transferred to Durham and with it the seat of the northern bishopric. The visitor to Durham Cathedral will notice in a niche of a turret on the north wall of the building the sculpture of the famous Dun Cow. The present sculpture is a modern reproduction of a much more ancient work. This curious sculpture commemorates the legend which connects itself with the choice of this site for the final resting-place of St. Cuthbert's remains. The legend runs that after the removal from Chester-le-Street, St. Cuthbert announced in a vision his determination to rest at Dimholm. The place was unknown ; but whilst the monks were wan- dering in search of it, a woman was heard asking another if she had seen her cow that had strayed, and the answer was, " It's down in Dun-holm." Dun-holm signifies the hill-meadow, and Durham is its modern equivalent. It was, indeed, nothing but a rough field, which the bearers of St. Cuthbert's body found when they arrived from Chester-le-Street. A small church of twisted boughs was at once formed until a more permanent building of wood could be prepared. This again was succeeded by a stone building, in which, in the year 999, the body of the saint was reverently laid. But a grander structure was to be the memorial of the great mission- ary-bishop. We have come now to the Norman Con- 1 66 DURHAM CATHEDRAL. quest and to that great leap in architecture which England took under the inspiration of the continental influences for which the invasion of William had opened the way. But before the event of the begin- ning of the present great structure, another event occurred which gave to the see of Durham a peculiar importance. As the Conqueror surveyed his new kingdom, his military genius could not fail to per- ceive that there were certain Christian parts of his kingdom too far removed from himself to come under his personal control. Wales and Scotland with their highland fastnesses were sources of continual danger to the security of the crown. William, therefore, formed the two Palatinate counties of Chester and Durham. These counties Palatine, as they were called, were two large areas, over each of which was placed a vice-gerent to act for the king, and who was called a Count Palatine. This functionary held a very similar position to a modern viceroy. Most of the powers of the crown were vested in the Count to exercise at discretion over the area of his Palati- nate. The Palatine of Chester was a temporal lord, but the Palatine of Durham was a spiritual peer he was the Bishop of the see the distinguishing title he received was that of a Prince Bishop. As a suitably imposing residence for the Prince Bishop of the Pala- tinate of Durham the Conqueror founded Durham Castle. The see of Durham, therefore, from the early times of the Conquest gained a precedence of dignity CATHEDBAL FROM BOW LANE. over all other bishoprics. Professor Freeman brings the whole position forcibly before us in his history of the Norman Conquest : " Durham alone among English cities, with its highest point crowned not only by the Minster, but by the vast castle of the Prince Bishop, recalls to mind those cities of the empire Lausanne, or Chur, or Sitten where the priest who bore alike the sword and the pastoral staff looked down from his fortified height on a flock which he had to guard no less against worldly than against 1 68 DURHAM CATHEDRAL. ghostly foes. Such a change could never have taken place if the see of St. Cuthbert had still lingered in its hermit island , it could hardly have taken place if he had finished his wanderings on a spot less clearly marked out by nature for dominion. The transla- tion of the see to Durham is the turning point in the history of that great bishopric." But we must hasten on to the episcopate of William of St. Carileph (1081-1096), who, in 1083, gathered together at Durham the Benedictine monks previously located at Wearmouth and at Jarrow. Ten years later Carileph commenced the present lordly structure, one of the grandest specimens of the massive Norman architecture which can be found anywhere. By the time of Carileph' s death only the choir had been completed. Four years elapsed before the appointment of another bishop, but during those four years the monks themselves worked at the tran- septs. The next bishop, Ralph Flambard (1099- 1128), completed the nave. In the year 1104 the body of St. Cuthbert was brought to its final resting- place and laid behind the altar. In quick succes- sion subsequent prelates completed the adjuncts of the Cathedral and the extensive monastic buildings which occupied the south side of the church. With this hasty review of the history of the building we must pass on and say a few words upon each of the most noteworthy features of the structure. And first of all the north entrance door tells an interesting tale. The present door is a modern DURHAM CATHEDRAL. 169 restoration, and some of the original features of the famous entrance have been obliterated. Towards this door many a poor wretch hastening to escape the hands of the avenger has sped his fearful steps in days gone by. Attached to the door still glares a fearful-looking metallic head holding a ring in its mouth. In its now eyeless sockets were once in all probability balls of crystal or enamel. When once the ring was grasped by the hand of the fugitive he was safe. He had claimed the " peace " of St. Cuth- bert and the sanctity of the neighbouring shrine shielded him. Above the door by day and night watched relays of monks to admit those who claimed sanctuary. So soon as ever the fugitive had reached the door he was admitted. This done he had to con- fess the crime of which he was guilty, and his state- ment was taken down in writing. All the while a bell was tolling to give notice that someone had taken refuge in the church. Then the culprit was arrayed in a black gown with a yellow cross on his left shoulder, and remained within the precincts for thirty-seven days. If at the end of that time he could not obtain a pardon of the civil authorities, he was conveyed across the seas to commence his life again elsewhere. As we pass within we find ourselves in full sight of the imposing interior which, including the Galilee Chapel, measures 461 feet in length. The uniform character of the architecture and its enormous solidity produces the feeling so well expressed by Dr. John- 1 7 o DURHAM CATHEDRAL. son of " rocky solidity and indeterminate duration." The whole extent of the Cathedral can now be seen from the west end, but before the Reformation a series of screens divided the eastern or choir portion from the nave. The choir was then the church of the monks and the nave the church of the people. At that time in front of the choir screen stood the Jesus Altar, having painted above it on the screen carved figures descriptive of the Life and Passion of our Lord ; above again were figures of the Apostles, and on the parapet, " the most famous rood in all the land," were figures of the Yirgin and St. John, supported by archangels. " For the beauty of the wall, the stateliness of the pictures, and the liveliness of the painting, it was thought to be one of the grandest monuments in the church." This of course has been removed long since, and lately in its place has been erected a modern screen, which in no way impedes either sight or sound. The choir itself, apart from the beauty of its architecture, contains many objects of interest. The most noticeable feature is the great screen behind the altar called the Neville Screen, on account of its expense being in a large measure borne by Lord Neville of Raby. The screen was erected in 1380. The prior of the day employed at his own expense seven masons for nearly a year to fix the screen, the execution of which is supposed to have been the fruit of the labours of French artists. The screen originally was much more elaborate than at DURHAM CATHEDRAL. 171 present, being covered with rich colour, and every niche filled with sculptured figures, but even now its present appearance is graceful. On the south side of the choir lies the body of Bishop Hatfield. The Bishop's effigy, fully vested, lies upon an altar tomb beneath a canopy, and above rises the epis- copal throne which he himself designed. The throne is lofty and imposing, and ascended by a flight of stairs. At the back of the throne rich tabernacle work fills in the space of the choir arch. Behind the altar is the great eastern transept, which goes by the name of the Nine Altars. The architecture here is in striking contrast to that of the choir and nave, being a magnificent specimen of early English architecture of the thirteenth century. The choir, as designed and carried out by Carileph, had an apsidal termination. In consequence, how- ever, of its ruinous condition, it was necessary to take it down when the present exquisitely graceful structure replaced it. Originally nine altars dedi- cated to various saints stood here, and gave its name of the Nine Altars to this transept. The most interesting feature of this part of the Cathedral is the lofty platform which adjoins the back of the altar, and wherein lies the body of St. Cuthbert. The platform is approached from two doors on the side of the altar, and the much-worn pavement gives witness to the number of pilgrims who from time to time have visited the spot. At the dissolution of the monastery the Visitors broke 172 DURHAM CATHEDRAL. open the iron-bound chest in which the body of St. Cuthbertlay, and "found him lying whole, uncorrupt, with his face bare, and his beard as of a fortnight's growth, and all the vestments about him as he was accustomed to say mass, and his met wand of gold lying by him." The relics were removed until " the king's pleasure should be known." And when at a later time the king's pleasure was apparently under- stood, the body was again buried in its former place. In the year 1827 the tomb was once more opened, and a skeleton was found wrapped in robes which had once been of great richness. A skull was also found which was supposed to be the skull of King Oswald, which, according to tradition, had been placed in St. Cuthbert's coffin. The skeleton and the skull were re-enclosed in another coffin, and interred beneath the platform behind the altar. There is, however, a tradition that the real body of St. Cuthbert was secretly conveyed away by the monks at some time and buried in a certain part of the Cathedral, which is only known to three members of the Benedictine order, who, as each one dies, choose a successor. In allusion to this legend (for probably it has no real foundation) the lines of Scott may be quoted : " There deep in Durham's Gothic shade His relics are in secret laid, But none may know the place ; Save of his holiest servants three, Deep sworn to solemn secrecy, Who share that wondrous grace." A BEIBGE HOUSE, DUEHAM. The Galilee Chapel must not be omitted in a description of the church. It was designed for the sake and for the use of the women who wished to worship in the church. Its name of Galilee has probably some reference to Galilee of the Gentiles, and implies that it was considered less sacred than the rest of the Cathedral. St. Cuthbert had a more than usual monkish fear of women, and they were not allowed to approach the shrine. A cross let into the pavement of the nave at the far west end curiously marks the far removed spot nearer than which women might not approach. The prejudices of the good saint were thus perpetuated long after his death. 1 74 DURHAM CATHEDRAL. The architecture belongs to the transitional period. The building, which is founded upon the rock, over- hangs the river on the precipitous cliff. Within, the building is of an oblong form, of five aisles. The arches are richly decorated with zigzag moulding, and are supported upon two slender shafts of Purbeck marble, to which two other shafts were added at a later time. The whole effect is light and graceful, and if the women were not allowed to enter farther than the western extremity of the church, they certainly had a most beautiful place of worship. The most interesting monument here is the plain altar slab which marks the burial place of the great Northumbrian scholar. On the tomb are engraved the well-known words, Hac sunt in fossa Bedce Venerabilis ossa (In this grave lie the bones of the Venerable Bede). According to the old legend the monk, who was casting about for a word to complete the scansion of his line between " Bedse " and " ossa," left a space blank until he could in the morning return to his task with a mind refreshed. However, during the night an unknown hand added the metrically suitable " Venerabilis." This, accord- ing to the legend, is the origin of the peculiar prefix Venerable, always associated with the name of Bede. We must not forget that Durham Cathedral was the church of a great monastic house until the Reformation. The whole fabric was cared for with infinite pains by the monks, and in some measure was actually built by them. Closely attached to the DURHAM CATHEDRAL. 175 Cathedral on its south side are the remains of the monastery, which show one what a large community once lived under the shadow of the church. The cloisters raise up many thoughts of the busy stream of life which in the days of the old order must have flowed through them. Here a door leads into a refectory, another into the church, another to the dormitory, another to the prior's lodgings, another to the chapter house, another to the cemetery, where the brethren were laid down under the shadow of the minster. Still to-day we can stand in the splendid room with its rough oak beams, as rough almost as after their first felling, where ah 1 the monks slept. And here again is still intact the refectory where they ate their meals. Here, too, is the strong room where the rebellious monks were subdued by a paternal discipline. Still standing is the great octagonal kitchen which supplied the bodily needs of the com- munity, and there the guest chamber, where strangers were entertained. Ruthless Vandalism has spoiled of all its beauty the magnificent chapter house where the brethren conferred over their affairs and position. No one can look through these wonderfully complete remains without feeling that he has had a glimpse of that ideal of life which is not ours now, but which in its own time was so great a healing and preserving influence in a rough and violent world. As we leave the Cathedral once more, and look up at the great central and western towers, one more historic recollection comes to us before we quit this i 7 6 DURHAM CATHEDRAL. home of memories. We are carried back to October 17, 1346. " The city of Durham lay in dreadful suspense, a prize to the conqueror ; and whilst the remaining brethren of the convent poured forth their hymns and prayers from the highest towers of the Cathedral, their eyes wandered with anxious doubt over the field of approaching combat." It was the day of the battle of Neville's Cross, and the north was trembling for her safety before the Scots. The day was won by the English, and Durham breathed freely again. The following year Ralph, Lord Neville, one of the victors of the day, passed away. A special honour was accorded to him. He was the first layman buried under the cover of the Cathedral. His disfigured effigy lies still upon the south side of the nave. The names of some of the occupants of the see of Durham, who have been enthroned in this Cathedral, will add their element of human interest in this romantic spot. Few bishoprics, in the long line of their episcopal roll, contain more moving names than that of Durham. If Aidan and Cuthbert were not, strictly speaking, Bishops of Durham, they have a very real connection with that see, since they were Bishops of Lindisfarne, a see which re-appears, only under another name, in that of Durham. Native, home-bred evangelists, as they were, we cannot but feel thankful for what God made them, to be, and gratefully connect their names with the bishopric of Durham. Bishops, like Carileph, Flambard, Pudsey, ELVET BBIDGE. Le Poore, have left their mark in various parts of the externals of the Cathedral. The magnificence of the work, as it strikes us to- day, is the monument of their combined labours. Bishops, like Anthony Bek and Hatfield, remind us how the fighting Prince Bishops, the King's Count Palatines, faithfully fulfilled the trust reposed in them, to act as bulwarks against the attacks of the enemies of the State. Bishops, like Kichard of Bury, and Wolsej 7 , remind us of that strange mixture of politics and theology, characteristic M 178 DURHAM CATHEDRAL. of an age when the ministers of the Church were often, on account of their pre-eminent qualifications, mini- sters also of State. The name of Cosin reminds us of the Commonwealth and the succeeding Restoration period, and gives us a foretaste of that time when Durham should be celebrated above all sees for the literary acumen of its bishops. It was in the middle of the last century when the literary fame of Cosin was rivalled by that of the famous author of the "Analogy," Joseph Butler, Bishop of Durham. In the year 1836, on the death of Bishop van Milder t, the founder of Durham University, the title of Count Palatine ceased. The Prince Bishops came to an end. A peaceful country needed no more the defence which the bishopric had once afforded. But while some old, and now happily useless, associa- tions of the historic see were then removed, its fame did not grow less in popular esteem. With no name will the bishopric be more associated than with that of the great scholar, ruler, saint, who has lately been taken away. Bishop Lightfoot summed up in him- self the great qualities of his predecessors their courage, their liberality, their firmness, their massive- ness, their saintliness, their learning. He did not wield the traditional mace of the Count Palatine ; but his word was weightier than a rod of iron. He was not a Prince Bishop, but he was a prince of bishops. Such men, so richly endowed as he was with wisdom and knowledge are rare. With what DURHAM CATHEDRAL. 179 could such a life be more fittingly linked than with the stirring associations of Durham ? " How awful is this place ! " Surely we must deeply feel that saying, as we stand and thoughtfully look on that storied pile, and recall its many memories. An old writer tells us how, prior to the Reformation, before the high altar in Durham there hung three silver lamps, always burning as a sign that "the house was ever watching unto God." Those lamps are put out now ; but as we behold the house to-day, we feel that the whole majestic sanctuary carries on the thought and is of a truth ' ever watching unto God." K. T. TALBOT. WELLS CATHEDRAL. WELLS CATHEDRAL. ITUATED in a rich and fertile valley to the south of the Mendip range, the centre of a varied landscape of hill and dale, wood and meadow, Wells may fittingly be compared to a rare and price- less gem framed in a lovely and appro- priate setting. Were we merely to name the most salient and striking features of the scene, pre- eminently the Mendips with their far extending summits, the bold grey hill of Dulcote, the swelling uplands of Milton, the breezy plateau of Lyatt, the strange and solitary cone of Glastonbury Tor such enumeration would wholly fail to convey to one un- acquainted with the locality any idea of its charms. But to those who know the country each one of these names will conjure up a fair and well-loved picture. Of the numerous approaches to the Cathedral, it would be difficult to decide which among them fur- nishes the finest view ; for every rising ground affords a prospect, more or less beautiful and perfect, of the glorious pile. Perhaps for splendour of effect 1 84 WELLS CATHEDRAL. preference may be given either to the Bristol Road, which commands a bird's-eye view of the entire structure, or to that which leads in a south-eastern direction from Shepton Mallet. From this latter point the eye rests upon "a group of buildings which, as far as I know, has no rival either in our own island or beyond the sea. To most of these objects, taken singly, it would be easy to find rivals which would equal or surpass them. . . . The peculiar charm and glory of Wells lies in the union and harmonious grouping of all. . . . Palace, cloister, lady chapel, choir, chapter house, all join to form one indivisible whole."* For convenience of general description, we may choose the High Street as our starting point, and, leaving behind us at the extreme west of the city the fine old Parish Church of St. Cuthbert, ascend the main thoroughfare, and enter the wide quaint Market Place to which it leads. The houses on the north side of the square, as shown in the accompanying illustration, were built by Bishop Beckyngton, a fifteenth- century prelate of splendid munificence, to whom both Cathedral and city are indebted for various public monuments ; a fact to which his arms and rebus, the latter a blazing beacon and tun, still visible in the carved stonework of most of them, bear witness. It was Bishop Beckyngton who, with a view to the welfare of the citizens, *' ' History of the Cathedral Church of Wells." By Professor E. A. Freeman. \\ WELLS CATHEDRAL. 187 supplied the main street with those " streamlettes of springes " mentioned in Leland's quaint history. These owe their sources to St. Andrew's Well, which rises within the precincts of the palace, and whence they were carried by pipes to the conduit erected by Beckyngton in the market place. A modern conduit has taken the place of the original one, and the waters still flow down each side of the High Street. The magnificent gateway in the centre of the east side of the square, and the smaller one at the north-east corner, were erected by the same liberal hand. The more stately portal gives access to the demesne of the palace, one of the finest specimens of a baronial residence extant in England. This edifice alone would furnish to the antiquary or to the ecclesiastical architect sufficient subject matter to fill a weighty volume. It dates from the thirteenth century, was fortified in the fourteenth,* and the battlemented walls are still washed by the waters of the tree-bordered moat, which we must cross by a drawbridge before we can enter the private grounds through the inner gate-house built by Ralph de Salopia. The stately ruins of Bishop Burnell's Great Hall, destroyed by Sir John Gates in the reign of Edward VI., in their present condition of pic- turesque decay, stand prominently forth, and seem scarcely to harmonise with the modern neatness and beauty of smooth shaven lawns, ornamental shrubs, * The licence necessary for fortifying it was granted by Edward III. and blooming parterres, by which they are sur- rounded. The terrace, which forms the southern boundary of the gardens and commands so fine a view, is especially associated with the memory of Bishop Ken, who is said to have composed his Morning and Evening Hymns in the summer-house at the south- eastern corner. We may here be pardoned a digression if we take occasion to remark that Wells is closely connected with the name of a still more eminent light of the English Church than even its revered non-juring bishop. Dr. George Bull, consecrated to the see of St. David's in 1705, a man not only equal in piety WELLS CATHEDRAL. 189 and moral courage to Bishop Ken, but also our greatest theologian, was born in St. Cuthbert's parish. He catne of a good old Somersetshire family, the members of which were, however, so numerous that the father of the future prelate was brought up to a trade, though he yearned for a learned career, and becoming a leading member of the Corporation, was twice mayor of his native city. His only son, George, was placed at the Grammar School of Wells, but was soon removed, "to great advantage," his biographer tells us, to Blundel's school at Tiverton, with which event his more immediate connection with the Cathedral city ceased. His high moral courage was triumphantly tested by his refusal, while study- ing at Oxford when barely seventeen years of age, to take the oath to the Commonwealth, "as it was then established, iciihout a King or House of Lords" notwithstanding the fair promises held out to those who would comply, and the penalty of ineligibility for any office in Church or State imposed upon those who resisted. The youthful undergraduate at once quitted the University, to retire with his tutor and many fellow-students to a remote Somersetshire village, there to find the peace and quiet which were not to be had at Oxford. To the general reader, however, Bishop Ken is by far the more interesting figure, associated, as he is, with some of the most striking historical episodes in the history of the seventeenth century. A brief reference to the chief events of his life will, therefore, i go WELLS CATHEDRAL. not be out of place in writing of the Cathedral which he served so faithfully ; but we must first proceed to describe the building itself, and its immediate sur- roundings. Retracing our steps and skirting the broad, sunny old Market Place, we pass beneath the arch of the lesser gateway, called Penniless Porch, and, turning eastwards, find ourselves face to face with the gor- geous west front. " This front," says Collinson, " is esteemed one of the most superb pieces of Gothic architecture in this kingdom, being loaded with a profusion of images beautifully carved in niches or recesses, the vaults of which are supported by elegant slender pillars of polished Purbeck"* marble. At the top are the twelve Apostles, below them are the hierarchs, and one whole line of the breadth of the portail is occupied by a grotesque representation of the Resurrection in small figures, wherein are ex- pressed all the various attitudes of the resuscitated bodies emerging from their earthly mansions. The larger figures which adorn the front are also inter- spersed with other Scriptural representations pour- trayed in groups of high relief, and each side of the great buttresses is filled with statues, as large as life, of kings, queens, abbots, bishops, knights, popes, and cardinals." Poor and meagre words, indeed, to de- scribe this rich embodiment of a sublime ideal, as changing in the phases of its grandeur as though endowed with life and sense stern and solemn * Since replaced by Kilkenny marble. WELLS CATHEDRAL. 193 beneath the grey skies of November ; solemn still, but kindling into warm and rosy tints when lighted by the rays of a cloudless sunset, or shadowy and mysterious beneath the moonlit midnight sky ; under each and every aspect fair, majestic, eloquent with deep and sacred symbolism. Remaining for a few moments on the Cathe- dral Green, a wide area of exquisitely smooth turf, bounded on the south and west by fine old lime trees, let us look around upon that group of buildings pronounced by the late Professor Freeman " the finest collection of domestic buildings surrounding a Cathe- dral church to be seen anywhere."* To the north is the Deanery, built by Dean Gunthorpe, who en- tertained within its walls no less a personage than King Henry VII., by whose name one of the sleep- ing chambers is still known. The Deanery has seen some strange vicissitudes. In the time of Henry VIII. it was held by Thomas, Lord Cromwell, for the space of three years, a layman who consequently was unable to discharge the functions of the office so shamefully conferred upon him. Under the Com- monwealth, the fanatical Cornelius Burgess, who had purchased the revenues of the see and the buildings pertaining to it, took up his abode in this stately residence until the Restoration drove him from it, to give place to its proper occupant. * This richness in domestic architecture is accounted for by the fact that Wells was never a monastic foundation, and that, therefore, from earliest times each official of the great church dwelt in his own separate house. N 194 WELLS CATHEDRAL. Not far from the Deanery, and opposite to the north porch of the Cathedral, is the Archdeaconry, which dates from the time of Ed- ward I. This fine old house became alienated from ecclesiasti- cal uses, and was only restored to its position among CENTRE OF WEST FRONT. WELLS CATHEDRAL. 195 the dependencies of the Cathedral in 1889, when it was purchased by the trustees of the Wells Theological College, largely aided by munificent donations from the Chapter, and by general contributions ; and it is now complete, and admirably adapted for its new and worthy purpose. To the south-west of the Cathedral stands the ruin of what was once the organist's dwelling. Beyond the Archdeaconry and at right angles to it, spanning the whole breadth of the road, is the marvellously beautiful Chain Gate, a covered gallery leading from the Chapter House, at the north-east side of the Cathedral, first to the hall of the Vicars' Close, then into the Close itself, a set of dwellings designed for the accommodation of the vicars, clerical and lay, founded by Bishop Ralph de Salopia, and restored from decay by Bishop Beck} 7 ngton. This double range of quaint, high-chimneyed houses, with their deep, mtillioned windows and bright little garden plots, entered at the south end by the great stone gateway underneath the hall and closed in at the northern extremity by the Vicars' Chapel, is " without a rival," " suggesting the very perfection of collegiate life."* Modern alterations have done much to spoil the original features of this Close, but it still remains unique in its tranquil, old-world beauty. A narrow, winding flight of steps, external to the east end of the chapel, leads into the North Liberty, a portion of * " History of the Cathedral Church of Wells." By Professor E. A. Freeman. ig6 WELLS CATHEDRAL. what elsewhere might be styled the Cathedral Close, containing some handsome though modernized canon- ical houses, standing back from the road behind their old grey garden walls, made gay with crimson vale- rian, yellow wall-flower, and other bright-hued weeds which love to light up hoar antiquity, and over- shadowed by many a noble elm or chestnut. The full-page view of the Cathedral, taken from the south-east and exhibiting the west towers, nave, central tower, choir, and Lady Chapel, will give a better idea of its grandeur than would entire volumes of verbal description ; but a few words must be devoted to the Chapter House, which has generally been considered the chef d'ceuvre of the whole fabric. " The first view," says one of the historians of the county, " presents a coup d'ceil of such splendid workmanship and architectural beauty as cannot be exceeded by any similar building in the kingdom. This room is an octagon of fifty feet in diameter, the roof supported by a slender and lofty column composed of delicate shafts of Purbeck marble. A highly enriched capital rests on them, and it becomes the foundation for the clustered ribs forming the cross springers of the roof, which diverge on every side, and are met by similar ribs resting on the capitals of clustered columns attached to the outward wall between the windows. The intersection of these ribs unites with a central one, which forms the point of the groining of the roof and extends round the centre column, having sculptured bosses, orbs, and foliage WELLS CATHEDRAL. 199 at each angle. The windows are wide, divided by heavy mullions with four lights, the heads filled with tracery of a simple yet imposing character, and forming a contrast with the elaborate and exquisitely finished interior of this building. A raised step or dais, and above this a stone seat, runs round the room, and a series of tabernacles or ornamented panels, with cinque-foil heads, triangular crocketed canopies with finials, and terminated by a hollow moulding filled with rosettes, which forms a cornice to the whole." As every design of the architects of our great historical churches had its own typical meaning, we may assume that the " central pillar and its sur- rounding stalls, the many ribs of its vault converging to one centre," symbolize " the government of each diocesan church, with its many members, clergy, and laity gathering around one common head and father." * The north porch is adorned with some curious allegorical sculptures; and we must not omit to mention the clock dial on a buttress of the north transept, with its significant motto " Ne quid pereat," and the two armour-clad figures above it, which strike the quarters upon two bells with their battle-axes. This dial and the " quarter-jacks," as the figures are called, are connected with Peter Lightfoot's famous old clock, brought from Glastonbury at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries, and furnishing one * ' History of the Cathedral Church of Wells." By Professor E. A. Freeman. 200 WELLS CATHEDRAL. of the earliest and most curious specimens of clock making. In strong contrast with its present smiling aspect, must have been the appearance presented by the country around Wells when the collegiate foundation which is said to have preceded by about two hun- dred years the earliest beginning of a Cathedral Church in the Mendip valley was instituted. We may here remark that it is in the ecclesiastical portion of the history of Wells and its Cathedral that the main interest must be sought. Wells never figured largely in national history. It is true that the great- est and noblest of her bishops, Jocelyn, was among the signatories of Magna Charta. There is also a stirring episode in her history when all Somersetshire was in arms, for or against the unhappy " King Monmouth " ; and we read of the rebels marching upon Wells, tearing the lead from the roof of the Cathedral for bullets,, defacing the sculptures, and being only withheld from still greater outrages by Lord Grey, who stood with drawn sword before the altar. Moreover, the council chamber of the City Corporation displays a portrait of " the fighting Bishop," Peter Mews, of Winchester, translated to that see from Bath and Wells, who received a bullet wound in his cheek (he was careful to turn that cheek and its black patch to the artist), at Sedgemoor, where he fought for his lawful king ; though when that sovereign was forced to seek a refuge in France, the doughty warrior, less scrupulous than his sue- cessor at Wells, took the oaths to William, Prince of Orange. At the beginning of the eighth century the Mendip Hills were covered with a wild, tangled mass of trees and undergrowth, tenanted by ferocious beasts, wolves and wild boars, while the lowlands lying to the south were simply an expanse of marsh and swamp, useless either for human habitation or for agricultural pur- poses. Glastonbury, with its monastic establishment, stood upon an island, and many of the neighbouring eminences were also surrounded by water. The old British race still predominated, but they lived in thorough subjection to their West Saxon conquerors. 202 WELLS CATHEDRAL. Ina, the greatest of the West Saxon kings, was rapidly extending his dominions by conquest from the Welsh, who still peopled Devon and Cornwall, until he brought the whole of what is now called Somerset- shire beneath his sway. The Sumorsaetas already had a bishop, though the diocese, the seat of which was at Winchester, was not one of the oldest sees in England. Consequent upon the victories of Ina, the area of the episcopal jurisdiction became so greatly enlarged that in the eighteenth year of that monarch's reign the diocese was divided, and Sherborne was fixed upon as the seat of the second bishopric. About this date, 705, tradition, supported by the strongest probabilities, tells us that Ina founded a church beside St. Andrew's Well, and placed it under the care of a little band of secular priests not monks, be it remembered. Nothing is known of the existence of any town or settlement upon that spot in those days ; indeed, it is not until the time of Richard I. that we hear of Wells being incorporated as a city. We cannot doubt that the ecclesiastical foundation first came into being, and then the town by degrees grew up around it. But few, if any, trustworthy records are extant of the history of the church at Wells until the time of Edward the Elder, in whose reign the great diocese of the West was again subdivided ; a third bishopstool was set up at Wells in the year 909, and Athelhelrn became its first occupant. The see appears to have WELLS CATHEDRAL. 203 been a poor one, for even in the next century the canons did not number half-a-dozen. From the first bishop of Wells to Gisa, who ruled the diocese from 1061 to 1088, we have a list of fourteen chief pastors. Gisa, who did much to raise and improve the position of the struggling community, lived to see not only the Norman Conquest, but the death of the Conqueror, whom he survived three years. On the decease of Gisa, William Rufus appointed John de Villula, a native of Tours, to the vacant see, where- upon there followed great changes for Wells. The first act of this prelate was to remove the episcopal chair to Bath, after having prevailed upon the king to make a grant of the abbey of that city to the bishopric of Wells, thereby transforming the hitherto indepen- dent monks into the Cathedral chapter of the new bishop. John de Villula did not, however, entirely with- draw his countenance from Wells. He built for him- self a residence there, first making room for . it by pulling down all the canons' houses built by Gisa. By this time, it would seem that the number of canons had risen to ten. Nor was this ungentle shepherd content with scattering his flock ; he cur- tailed the canonical incomes by paying them accord- ing to the old standard worth of the property from which these stipends were derived, and which had increased in value, appropriating the difference to his own uses. Passing on from this French bishop, and only 204 WELLS CATHEDRAL. FROM THE WEST FRONT. naming his succes- sor, Godfrey, we come to Robert, of Flemish descent, but English by birth. Under his episcopate, an im- portant and active one, full of great works at both Bath and Wells, the Ca- thedral Corpora- tion was reconsti- tuted, the position of the canons esta- blished on a much sounder basis and detached from de- pendence on the bishop ; and the offices of Dean and Precentor, probably those also of Chan- cellor, Treasurer, and Sub-Dean were founded. It would be alike interesting and profitable to pause here .and enter upon WELLS CATHEDRAL. 205 a detailed account of the important functions attached to each of these dignities, for nothing else would so forcibly illustrate and explain the true meaning and aims of Cathedral life meaning and aims which, if carried out in their integrity, should make the Cathe- dral Church of every diocese a very centre of life, light, help, and consolation. Suffice it to say that Bishop Robert's institutions formed, in the main, the basis of the Cathedral constitution as it now exists. It would seem that this wise and energetic prelate found the church at Wells in a decaying, if not in a positively ruinous condition, for he either largely restored or entirely rebuilt it. But the Norman structure which he reared appears to have been des- tined to perish speedily, for there are only scanty traces of his work discoverable in the now existing fabric. The commencement of the church, as we know it, was reserved for Bishop Reginald, who appro- priated to the building fund the revenues of all vacant benefices throughout the diocese, from the time of their falling vacant until they should be filled up again ; such grant to continue in force during the entire progress of the work. Charters securing gifts from private individuals augmented the bishop's munificence. During the episcopate, from 1192 to 1205, of Reginald's successor, Savaric, who was occupied in an endeavour to annex Glastonbury Abbey, and who bore the title of Bishop of Bath and Glastonbury, 2o6 WELLS CATHEDRAL. the building of the Cathedral made little or no progress. Savaric was succeeded by one, the greatness of whose name exceeds that of any who have gone before or followed after him ; the greatest of the three great " makers of Wells," Jocelyn, a native of that city and first a canon of the Cathedral, then bishop of the diocese. The early portion of his epis- copal reign, which lasted for thirty-six years, was troubled, not only by a continuation of the dispute with Glastonbury, which ended by Jocelyn relinquish- ing the claims insisted upon by Savaric, but by the displeasure of King John, who sent him into exile, the duration of which extended over the space of five years. But this latter apparently signal mis- fortune led to great results, for in the course of his enforced sojourn abroad Bishop Jocelyn had an opportunity of studying the best examples of foreign ecclesiastical architecture, an experience which, in after years, bore rich fruit to the profit of his own Cathedral Church. Fixing his episcopal residence at Wells, on return- ing from exile, Jocelyn devoted himself to his life- work, and under his fostering care the fabric grew and prospered, until it included " nave, north porch, transepts, and three western bays of present choir ; the three towers were carried up to the level of the roof of nave ; the ' pulpitum/ or rood screen, was under the western arch of central tower, the choir under the tower, and eastward of it the presbytery, \\1 and to the high altar at the square eastern end dedicated to St. Andrew." The west front completed the work, and in 1239 the church was consecrated. This was Jocelyn's last great act. In 1242 he died, having bequeathed " his body to the church he loved so well," and was laid to rest in front of the high altar, " the first bishop buried at Wells, and not at Bath, for 150 years." 208 WELLS CATHEDRAL. And now the main part of our Cathedral Church was finished. For forty years after Jocelyn's death no further progress in building was made. In 1248 an earthquake caused considerable damage by dis- lodging some of the stonework, which, in falling through the roof, occasioned further mischief to some of the buttresses and pillars. Fresh troubles had arisen in the diocese by reason of the jealousy of the Bath Chapter, a feeling which manifested itself in an unjustifiable endeavour to obtain the royal and papal consent to the election of their candidate for the bishopric, without any reference to the opinions or wishes of the Wells Chapter. Journeys involving enormous expense were undertaken by the chief dignitaries of both Chapters in order to advocate their respective causes at the court of the king, then at Bordeaux, and at that of the Pope, who was at Lyons, and Rome was also visited for the purpose of consulting certain great authorities there. The Bath Chapter gained their immediate object by securing the royal and papal assent to the elec- tion of their candidate. " But," we are told, " the Pope made amends to Wells by the decree that henceforth the dual elections by the two Chapters must be strictly carried out, and that the style of the see should be henceforward for ever ' Bath and Wells.' " * * See Proceedings of the Somersetshire Archaeological and Natural History Society for 1888, from which much valuable information, more especially concerning Jocelyn, has been derived. WELLS CATHEDRAL. 209 The Wells Chapter, by means of vigorous exer- tions and very great personal sacrifices, succeeded, in the year 1263, in almost extinguishing the heavy debts incurred by the consequences of the late con- flict, and work was recommenced. The repairs rendered necessary by the earthquake were made, fresh building was undertaken, and by the end of the century the Chapter House was finished. The year 1326 saw the completion of the exquisite Lady Chapel at the east end, soon after the raising of the central tower. This latter achievement led to the introduction of a very remarkable feature in the nave. But few years had elapsed after the building of this tower when it became evident that the supports on which it stood were giving way beneath its tremendous weight To remedy this and to save the whole church from destruction, the famous inverted arches were constructed, somewhat to the detriment of the original design. The close of the fifteenth century witnessed the final perfecting of the Cathedral ; but before con- cluding our account of the rise of this noble church, we must dedicate a few words to the cloisters, which, with the south side of the Cathedral, form a quad- rangle enclosing the beautiful Palm Churchyard, so called, it is said, because in it were distributed to the pilgrims of olden days, on the Sunday before Easter, the consecrated palms sent from Rome by the Pope. The original cloisters were built by Gisa in the reign of Edward the Confessor, together with a dor- 210 WELLS CATHEDRAL. mitory and a refectory, but John de Villula, deeming such appendages unnecessary to a non-monastic foundation, pulled them down, and built with their fragments the palace already mentioned. This struc- ture also seems to have been doomed to speedy destruction, for the present episcopal residence, partly reconstructed and much altered in the course of time, represents a lordly mansion erected by Bishop Jocelyn in the first half of the thirteenth century. This same prelate also set about the rebuilding of the cloisters, though without dormitory and refectory ; but the present cloisters differ widely from the original design. Bishop Bub with, or some say Bishop Becky ngton, continued his predecessor's work by erecting the eastern cloister, over which Bishop Bubwith built rooms that have long contained many venerable tomes forming the valuable library of the Chapter. Bishop Beckyngton began the south cloister, and its com- pletion, shortly after his death, brings the main history of the building of Wells Cathedral to a close. On the south side of the nave is a window, beau- tiful in design and in the subdued tones of its colouring, placed there within the last ten years, in memory of Bishop Ken. Beneath it is a brass, on which is inscribed the name of that prelate's latest biographer (the late Dean Plumptre), under whose auspices, while Dean of the Cathedral from 1881 to 1891, the scheme of thus commemorating the great bishop was formed and carried out. Thomas Ken was born at Berkhampstead in 1637. Md Owl His father was an attorney- at -law, an offshoot of the Kenn family of Somersetshire. He died while Ken was still a boy, leaving him an orphan indeed, for the mother had only lived to see her son complete his fourth year. The place of parents was supplied to Ken's childhood and youth by Anne Ken, his half- sister, twenty-seven years his senior, and by the famous Izaak Walton, whom she married in 1646. The year of Ken's birth is remarkable as having been that in which John Hampden made his protest against ship-money, thereby giving the first audible warning of the storm which was soon to break in rebellion, civil war, and the downfall of a king. The year 1637 is also memorable in Scottish annals as that in which Laud's ill-advised efforts to plant 212 WELLS CATHEDRAL. episcopacy in Scotland were so vigorously repelled. Twelve years later, on the 30th of January, 1649, young Ken witnessed the terrible scene of his sove- reign's execution. The Walton family were devoted Royalists ; it is easy, therefore, to account for the deep impression of loyalty made upon the boy by the stirring and startling events that culminated in the tragedy of that snowy winter morning. In September, 1651, Ken became a scholar of Winchester College, and remained there until 1656, when he went up to Oxford, to become, in the fol- lowing year, a member of New College. The Univer- sity was at that time in a state of sullen calm after the wild excitement of the struggle between King and Parliament. But a little while ago, the streets had resounded with the clangour of arms, fierce party- cries, and words of stern military command. Loyalty had risen to a frenzy of enthusiasm when Charles I. and his consort had sought a refuge within the walls of St. John's College, and received willing tribute in the shape of coin minted from the rich college plate. Students had become soldiers, and in the case of many of these, the subsequent re-transformation into students had proved to be an impossibility. With the King's death, all changed. Under the Common- wealth, grey gloom settled upon Oxford. The legiti- mate authorities, preachers, professors, and fellows, had been ejected to give place to usurpers. Order and regularity seemed at an end, and Royalists and Parliamentarians alike contributed to a state of WELLS CATHEDRAL. 213 general disorganisation. Yet rough and unpromising as was this new school of morals and manners, it doubtless had the effect of confirming and strengthen- ing Ken in his highest and worthiest aims and aspira- tions; for his soul must have revolted from much that he was forced to witness and experience, no less from those who professed his own religious and political views than from the opposite party. He, with Francis Turner, afterwards Bishop of Ely, and a few like-minded friends, formed the habit of meeting together in a private house for the purpose of holding services according to the rites of the Church of England ; and it speaks well for the Republican Vice- Chancellor, Dr. John Owen, that, although he must have been aware of these assemblies, he made no attempt to exercise his power of punishing these offenders against the new regulations. While Ken was still at Oxford, where he remained as tutor after taking his degree, the Restoration gave fresh occasion for outbursts of enthusiastic loyalty (and of wildest licence also) ; and a general restitu- tion of rights was set on foot. Comparatively few, however, of those who had been deprived appeared to reclaim their official posts. " The rest were either dead, or married, or had changed their religion," so the record tells us. Having taken Holy Orders, Ken finally quitted Oxford to become the rector of Little Easton, in Essex. He devoted himself to his pastoral duties with rare zeal and diligence, dealing carefully am 1 2i4 WELLS CATHEDRAL. anxiously with each soul committed to his charge, comforting the afflicted, relieving the distressed, and consoling the dying. He was loving in exhortation, gentle even in rebuke, and manifested in his own mode of life a degree of self-denial amounting to asceticism. Not long after his appointment to Little Easton, a fellowship at Winchester College was offered to and accepted by Ken, and he was soon after pre- ferred to a prebendnl stall in the Cathedral of that diocese. This period of his life is more especially marked by the composition of his well-known " Manual of Prayers for Winchester Scholars," and by his bold refusal to allow his prebendal house to be used as a lodging for the unhappy Eleanor Gwynne, a low- born favourite of Charles II. This latter act might have been expected to operate as a barrier to all further advancement, but the reverse soon proved to be the case. The see of Bath and Wells shortly afterwards fell vacant, and when the King was con- sulted as to the appointment of a new bishop, his answer was quickly given in his good-natured, easy fashion. " Why, who should have Bath and Wells," he cried, " but the little black fellow who would not give poor Nelly a lodging ? " In one short week from the day of the new bishop's consecration his royal patron was lying upon his deathbed. The Archbishop of Canterbury and three other prelates were present at the dismal scene ; but it was Thomas Ken, of Bath and Wells, who was foremost in anguished efforts to arouse the frivolous King to a sense of contrition. He certainly suc- ceeded in eliciting from Charles an expression of regret for his contemptuous neglect of his Queen, and for his many sins against her ; but little else was gained. Bread and wine in readiness for consecra- tion stood upon a table near the bed, but the King would neither express a wish to receive the last rites, nor would the degree of penitence that had been evoked warrant the prelates in an offer to administer them. The secret of the dying man's reluctance was only revealed when, after the expulsion by the 2i6 WELLS CATHEDRAL. Duke of York of almost everyone from the apart- ment, it became known that a Romish priest had been introduced to hear the King's confession, absolve and receive him into the Roman Church, and administer to him the last sacraments. Charles had thus concealed his attachment to an alien communion until the moment of his death. His successor made no secret of his own adherence to that faith, and new troubles came thick and fast upon the English Church. As long as it was possible to do so, the nation clung tenaciously to the belief that James II. would hold inviolate his coronation oath. But alarm soon took the place of confidence, and Anglican and Puritan animosities were sunk to allow both parties to make common cause against impend- ing danger. Mass was openly celebrated at White- hall in the presence of the King, and before long a Court of High Commission was appointed " with unlimited power to reform all abuses, contempts, and offences of whatever nature, to cite before them ecclesiastical persons of every degree or dignity, and to censure, suspend, or deprive them without appeal ; and further, to alter the statutes of the universi- ties, and all other corporations, civil and religious." A prominent member of this court was Lord Chan- cellor Jeffreys, soon to become notorious as the pre- siding judge at the "Bloody Assizes;" for as it became more and more evident that the full establish- ment of Romanism throughout the realm had been resolved upon, the handsome and dissolute young WELLS CATHEDRAL. 217 Duke of Monmouth took advantage of the popular feeling to pose as the champion of Protestantism. He landed at Lyme Regis in June, 1685, at the head of a few adherents, gathered followers as he proceeded inland, chiefly Mendip miners, and traders of Taunton and Bridgwater, had himself proclaimed king, was ignominiously defeated at Sedgemoor, and taken captive in a ditch. When he knelt upon the scaffold Ken knelt beside him, praying, exhorting and entreating. " May God accept your imperfect repentance ! " was the cry wrung from the lips of the faithful prelate, after he had vainly striven, as at the deathbed of the royal traitor's father, to extort a full avowal of contrition. Meanwhile, matters in State and Church were hastening to a crisis. The abolition of the Test Act, introduced under Charles II., and requiring that all persons admitted to public employment, civil or military, should sign a declaration against the doctrine of transubstantiation and receive the Holy Communion according to the rites of the Church of England, was publicly proclaimed. The palace was filled with Jesuits ; the Fellows of Oxford were once more displaced, this time to make room for Romanists, and Magdalen College was turned into a Romish seminary. A Roman Catholic Bishop was also thrust upon the see of Chester. Then King James for the second time published his Declaration of Indulgence, which did away with all religious tests, and he ordered every bishop to promulgate the 218 WELL S CA THEDRA L . decree throughout his diocese, that it might be read in all the churches of thje land on two successive Sundays, namely, on the 20th and 27th of May, 1688. The climax had come. Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, called together such bishops as were near at hand, that he might consult with them as to what were proper to be done. He sent an express to MEDAL TO COMMEMORATE ACQUITTAL OF SEVEN BISHOPS. Wells, requesting Ken to repair to Lambeth with secrecy and dispatch, and on the 17th of May that bishop arrived in London accompanied by Trelawney of Bristol. The other prelates who assembled were those of Ely, St. Asaph, Chichester and Peterborough. After long and anxious debate, it was decided that a petition should be presented to the King by the above six bishops. The Archbishop had already WELLS CATHEDRAL. 219 offended his Majesty by refusing to act as a member of the High Commission, and was therefore precluded from appearing in his sovereign's presence. By the time the petition was drawn up and signed, it was nearly ten o'clock at night ; but the matter was too urgent to admit of delay. Stepping into Sancroft's barge, the bishops took their silent way to Whitehall. They were at once admitted to the presence, and the petition was placed in the royal hands. At first James was gracious in demeanour. He relied so completely upon the blind loyalty of those whom he knew to be among the wisest and most pious of his subjects, that no inkling of opposi- tion had dawned upon his mind. But as he read, he frowned. "This is rebellion!" he exclaimed. "This is a 220 WELLS CATHEDRAL. standard of rebellion. I did not expect this from you." The bishops made their impassioned appeal, but to no purpose. Trelawney, falling upon his knees, protested that no member of his house could be a rebel. The King repeated his assertion. " Sir," interposed Ken, " we are commanded to fear God and honour the King. We would fain do both. We desire to honour you, but we must fear God." " God has given me the dispensing power," was the King's sullen reply, "and I will maintain it." On the following Sunday the Declaration was read in but four churches throughout the whole of London. When the Dean of Westminster, Sprat, read the first words, everyone except the choir rose and left the Abbey. The father of John Wesley preached on the words : " Be it known unto thee, King, that we will not serve thy god, nor worship the golden image that thou hast set up." In the ensuing week the Archbishop and bishops were formally arraigned before the King. Jeffreys conducted the legal part of the proceedings. Repeated sittings resulted in the committal of the seven prelates to the Tower, on a charge of sedition and libel. They were sent thither in the royal barge to await their trial. As the vessel passed up the Thames, vast crowds of people stood upon the banks, and thousands of voices were raised in blessing, while many plunged into the water to crave a benediction from the s.iintlv men. At the Traitor's Gate, through which the bishops were to pass to their captivity, the sentinels knelt and asked their blessing, and the soldiers told off to guard them would not be restrained from drinking their health. The imprisonment lasted but a week ; then the accused were set at liberty, and allowed to prepare for their trial, which was fixed for the 29th of June. The result of that trial, and the declaration on the following day of the verdict, ' Not Guilty," awakened demonstrations of the most passionate enthusiasm on the part of the populace. The very soldiers, who had been massed on Hounslow Heath by order of the King to overawe the people, joined in the shouts of 222 WELLS CATHEDRAL. exultation ; and the monarch heard the tumult as he sat in Lord Feversham's tent. " What means such uproar ?" he demanded in some uneasiness. " Nothing," was the answer ; " the soldiers are glad that the bishops are acquitted." " Do you call that nothing ? " was the angry rejoinder. " So much the worse for them ; so much the worse for them." But no royal frown could stem the torrent of popular rejoicing. The churches were thrown open, and quickly thronged with those who hastened to offer up their thanksgivings for a great national deliverance. The bishops' retirement from the court resembled a triumphal procession ; and the jury could hardly make their way through the crowd, for every- one must shake them by the hand, and every tongue must bid God bless them for " honest, good-natured gentlemen." The ringing of all the church bells, the blazing of many bonfires, universal feasting and revelry marked the close of one of the most memor- able days recorded in English history. But although Ken had resisted his sovereign on a matter of conscience, and " withstood him to the face," his fidelity to the oath of loyalty taken both at his ordination and subsequent consecration remained steadfast and unshaken. When James II. was deposed, and William occupied his throne, Ken found himself unable to take fresh vows of fealty. He resigned his see, and retired to find a hospitable shelter at The (Rkpfer Hov/a, Longleat, the seat of his generous and devoted friend Lord Weymouth. His successor in the diocese, Dr. Kidder, is more remarkable for the manner of his death than for any gifts or graces displayed during 224 WELLS CATHEDRAL, his life ; for, after an episcopate of twelve years, he, together with his wife, was killed in his bed by the falling through the roof of a stuck of chimneys in the course of a tremendous storm of wind. We can hardly think that Kidder had held his bishopric in perfect peace of conscience, if we may judge from his pathetic exclamation when, being pressed to sanction some measure to which he could not yield assent, he was asked if he remembered whose bread he ate. " If I eat any man's bread," he cried out in his remorse, "it is poor Dr. Ken's!" When Queen Anne came to the throne she gladly acquiesced in a proposal to reinstate Ken in the see of Bath and Wells, while Kidder should be translated to Carlisle, which was then vacant ; but the venerable non- juror declined, partly on the ground of growing infirmities. For twenty years he lived at Longleat as Lord Weymouth's guest ; for, on his deprival his private fortune did not amount to a thousand pounds ; then came the welcome summons. " I can but give you my all myself, my poor heart, and my last blessing," were his dying words to his noble bene- factor. And so, on the 19th of March, 1711, in his seventy-fifth year, Thomas Ken fell asleep. A few personal relics remain to remind us of his episcopate at Wells ; but his memory still hovers round the old Cathedral, as that of one of the saint- liest of the long line of chief pastors who have ruled the diocese, and sat enthroned within her grey old walls. S. M. S. PEREIRA- LINCOLN CATHEDKAL. LINCOLN CATHEDRAL. BEAUTIFUL for situation, the joy of the whole earth. On the north side lieth the city of the Great King." These words of the Psalmist instinctively occur to the mind when one gazes up from below at Lincoln Minster, seated in queenly ma- jesty on what Wordsworth so aptly styles her " sove- reign hill," looking down in serene repose from her northern height on the din and turmoil of the busy streets and crowded factories which fill the valley below, or climb the steep hill-side. Nor is the first impression lessened on closer approach. The nearer we get to it, the more minutely we examine it, the more fully shall we realise the exquisite grace, both of the building as a whole and of its separate parts, down to its minutest detail. But beyond its architectural glories, beyond the memory of the great and good men who have pre- sided over the see of which it is the centre, beyond the stirring events of which it has been the scene, that which makes Lincoln Minster a veritable piece 228 LINCOLN CATHEDRAL. of the history of our country, which gives it its highest dignity, is the fact that it is a house of God, a Christian church ; for eight centuries the home and gathering place of Christian souls, where they have met to hold communion with their God, that they might learn how to serve Him more truly and gain strength to do so. To this sacred character it owes its permanence. Castles and fortresses framed with even greater strength have passed away, or exist only in shattered ruins : the Cathedral of Lincoln and her fair sisters remain in all, or more than all, their pristine glory. As Dean Stanley has eloquently said of his own Abbey of Westminster, " Whatever our cathedrals have become of heroic, or historic, or artistic, they would have ceased to be if they had not been over all, and above all, places dedicated for ever to the worship of Almighty God." Such thoughts as these fitly rise in the mind as we make our way along the High Street, crowded with market-folk and factory hands, and slowly climb the hill, justly called "The Steep," to the Cathedral precincts. As Ave mount, every few steps present some new object of historic interest, carrying us back to the earliest periods of a nation's annals such as few towns can show : the tall pre-Norman tower of St. Mary-le-Wyford, bearing on its face the sepulchral slab of a Roman soldier and his wife and son (Gauls by nation), utilised in later centuries but so far back that the Norman Conquest was still a thing undreamt of to commemorate the building LINCOLN CATHEDRAL. 229 of the church by the Saxon Ewig " to the praise of Christ and of St. Mary ; " the Grey Friars con- duit, speaking of the holy zeal of the Franciscans who, everywhere settling themselves among the lowest dregs of the population, and feeling that " cleanliness was next to godliness," laid down pipes and brought pure water from the hill to the very doors of the uncared-for and the hopeless ; the High Bridge, still preserving on one side the houses which here, as in all mediaeval towns, converted the bridge into a continuation of the street. Here once stood the wayside chapel of St. Thomas Becket, in which wayfarers might give thanks for their preservation from the perils of the road, or pray for a safe return on their homeward journey. Then, too, we have the Stone Bow which spanned the street as the southern gate of the old city, and carries the Guild- hall on its broad arch ; the two Jews' houses, with their solid masonry and richly ornamented Norman doors and windows, at the same time telling of the wealth which enabled the Hebrew money-lender to build such stately mansions, when all around the houses were low hovels of wattle and daub, and of the fear which perpetually harassed them lest their hoards should become the booty of the marauder, and dictated their enclosing themselves and their treasures within strong stone walls ; the Bull- ring, where, almost within living memory, bulls were regularly baited for the diversion of a brutalized populace ; the blackened stones which mark the 2 30 LINCOLN CATHEDRAL. site of the southern gate of the Roman colony, built eighteen centuries ago ; the Conqueror's castle, with its frowning gateway and massive towers, under the shadow of which took place not a few of the struggles that have been the turning-points in English history. At these and other historic spots we might linger with profit and with interest ; but we must pass them all, and hurry on to the object of our visit, "the Cathedral Church of the blessed Virgin Mary of Lincoln." On reaching the summit of the almost precipitous ascent, glad enough to be on level ground once more, we turn to the right, with the castle gate behind us, and in front the massive western gatehouse of the Close, known as the Exchequer Gate from the Minster accounts having been kept there in old times, with the Cathedral towers and the upper part of the west front soaring above it. Under the shelter of this archway we may do well to pause a few minutes, and, while we recover breath after our climb, take a brief review of the history of the building. When, on the eve of the Norman Conquest, llemy, or Remigius, as his name was Latinized, the almoner of the Abbey of Fecamp by the Norman seaboard, made his offer to Duke William of a ship and twenty armed men as a contingent for his invad- ing force, neither of the parties could have anticipated that one fruit of the offer would be the erection of a cathedral which, even in the founder's days, was to hold high rank among the minsters of the newly- MKed LINCOLN CATHEDRAL. 233 conquered land, and which was in later times to blossom forth into the vast and beautiful church we now see before us. The very name of Lincoln, or " Nicole," as the Normans called it, unable, like the Ephraimites, " to frame to pronounce it aright," must have been almost unknown to him. Whether, as was scandalously reported, there had been a secret compact between Remigius and William that if the land changed masters a bishopric should be his reward, it was evidently understood that those who cast in their lot with William were pretty sure to participate in the fruits of his success. Kemigius embarked with his fighting-men, landed with his chief at Pevensey, and, if not with his arms, which is by no means unlikely certainly by his words, influenced and contributed to the Norman victory. It will be remembered that while Harold's English forces are reproached with having spent the night before the battle in drinking and singing, the Normans spent their night in listening to the religious exhortations of the bishops and other clergy, and in prayer and the confession of their sins. Of these exhorters Remigius was one. His reward was not long in coming. The year after the Conquest, Wulfwig, the English bishop of the vast Mercian diocese which had its " bishop's stool " as our fore- fathers called it at Dorchester-on-Thames, died, and his see was bestowed on llemigius. Contemporary chroniclers present us with his portrait : dwarfish in stature, dark in complexion, undignified in aspect. 234 LINCOLN CATHEDRAL. "Nature," says William of Malmesbury, "seemed to have formed him to show that the noblest spirit might d \vell in the most wretched body." Discontented with a cathedral planted in a small village at the extreme smthern end of his diocese, he obtained William's licence to transfer his see to Lincoln " the Lindum Colonia" of the Romans, hoar with an antiquity of near a thousand years. There, having purchased the site of the burghers, he at once began to build a o 7 *J cathedral on the hill-top, in the words of Henry of Huntingdon, almost his contemporary " ctrong as the place Avas strong, fair as the place was fair, as acceptable to the servants of God who were to minister in it, as it was secure from the attacks of all enemies." Begun about 1074, the church was ready for consecration in 1092. The 9th of May was fixed for the rite. Rufus had summoned all the prelates and great lords of the realm to the ceremony, which was to be of the grandest. But it did not take place. Three days before the day fixed, the founder of the church breathed his last, to find a grave in the still unhallowed fane. Remigius's church Avas after the Norman model, of which so many examples Avere then rising in every part of England. It Avas cruci- form in plan, ending in a semicircular apse, Avith a central lantern, and prepared for the pair of western towers Avhich so commonly formed part of a Norman design. Where Ave stand Ave have before us the only LINCOLN CATHEDRAL. 235 visible remnant of this first cathedral, in the cen- tral portion of the western facade. It is charac- terised by the stern, almost savage plainness of the early Norman style. Three deep, cavernous recesses, their arches unrelieved by moulding or chamfer, break the flat, unadorned wall. Within, the first bay of the nave shows us what the interior of the building was like. Much lower, much shorter, somewhat narrower, and in a 1 ! respects plainer than that which has succeeded it, we are thankful to have this one specimen of Remigius's building as an his- torical record, and still more thankful that the main feature has been supplanted by the light arcades and soaring vaults of Remigius's thirteenth -century suc- cessors. The springing of the semicirculai east-end remains on each side beneath the floor of the choir stalls, lost to the sight of all save the explorer. We shall have already observed three highly- ornamented Norman doorways, with carved shafts and grotesque mouldings, order within order, in the deep recesses of the front. And if we raise our eyes we shall see that the lower storeys of the western towers have arcades of the same style. On going round the corner, on either side a richly-ornamented gable similarly arcaded can be seen projecting from the face of the towers. All these tell of the handiwork of the third Norman bishop, Alexander "the Magni- ficent," i.e., the doer of great deeds. Remigius's immediate successor, Robert Bloet, left no mark on the fabric of the Cathedral. He inherited it finished .36 LINCOLN CATHEDRAL. and ready for consecration, and he may have thought that it wanted no more though the western towers were as yet hardly begun and that his wealth might be better bestowed on the essentials for divine service, and the enlargement of the staff. These he supplied with no niggard hand. He doubled the number of canons and their endowment, and furnished the church with silken palls, em- broidered copes, chalices, reliquaries, and what we shall regard as the best provision of all copies of the Sacred Scriptures bound in gold and silver. With all this munificence Bloet's character does not stand high. Whether the charge of sensual vices brought against him be true or not, he certainly was an easy-going worldly man, a lover of state and display. Henry of Huntingdon tells us how one day, when he was sitting by his side at table, the bishop burst into tears at the contrast between the rich liveries his retinue of servants had once worn and the plainei garb to which the vexatious lawsuits and heavy fines Henry I. had imposed had reduced them. His end was of startling suddenness. Riding to the chase in Woodstock Park, now the ducal domains of Blen- heim, in January, 1123, by the side of the sovereign, Roger, the mighty Bishop of Salisbury, riding on the other 'side, he suddenly threw up his arms, and with the words, " Lord King, I die," fell forwards stricken with apoplexy. He was buried in his Cathe- dral, his grave, according to popular belief, being LINCOLN CATHEDRAL, 237 haunted by foul spectres " until it had been puri- fied by masses and alms." His successor, Alexander, the nephew of Henry's mighty chancellor, the aforesaid Roger, like many of the prelates of the time, was more of a great temporal potentate than of a father in God ; in his earlier days, at least, a builder of castles (he erected three Sleaford, Banbury, and Newark) rather than a builder of churches. At Lincoln, however, he deserves to be remembered gratefully. In 1141, the minster having lost its roof and been otherwise damaged by an accidental fire, such as were continually occurring in the flat timber-ceiled Norman churches, Alexander vaulted the whole church with stone, and repaired the injury " with such subtle artifice," writes the chronicler, "that it looked fairer than in its first newness." As we have already said, the western doorways, of remarkable beauty and richness, the lower portions of the towers, and the side gables bear witness to Alexander's munificence and the skill of his architect. The towers were originally capped with tall spires of timber, covered with lead. These were removed at the close of the fourteenth century the precise date and the name of the builder are entirely unknown when the lofty belfry storeys which soar into the air above us with their tall coupled windows were added. These, too, were finished with leaden spires, which, falling into decay and needing constant repair, were taken down, to the indignation of the people of Lin- 238 LINCOLN CATHEDRAL. coin, in the early years of the present century. From their exceeding slenderness, the spires were very doubtful ornaments to the building, but they were a piece of the original fabric, and nothing could justify their removal. Much as there is to see within and about the minster, we cannot yet leave the west front. It will be seen that Remigius's plain Norman walls are set in a kind of frame of richly arcaded work of Early English date. Though architecturally a mistake, for it does not honestly answer to anything behind it, and is little more than an ornamental screen-wall, no one can deny that the west front of Lincoln is a composition of singular grandeur of outline and beauty of detail. It belongs to the earlier half of the thirteenth century, the time of Robert Grosseteste, the Suffolk peasant's son, who from his cottage home rose to the highest celebrity in his generation as a scholar, a theologian, a mathematician, a philosopher, and who claims our special admiration as the daunt- less champion of the liberties of the Church of England against Papal rapacity and Papal usurpation, and as the unsparing corrector of the flagrant immo- rality, covetousness, and indolence of the clergy of his day, while he himself exhibited the highest pattern of holiness of life and devotion to duty. The front is flanked by tall turrets crowned with spirelets. That to the south bears on its summit the mitred statue of Saint Hugh, the holy bishop who may be truly called the second founder of the Cathedral ; on CaiUtel y^x? tfkfe LINCOLN CATHEDRAL. 241 that to the north is seen the famous '' Swineherd of Stow," a thirteenth-century Gurth blowing his horn to call his herd together. The story goes that he saved a peck of silver pennies in his life-time and bequeathed his hoard to the fabric of the minster, and that the Dean and Chapter set up his statue where all might see it, and it might say to them, ' Go and do thou likewise." The open doors invite us to enter the Cathedral, but we must deny ourselves the privilege a little longer, until we have walked round the building, and rapidly traced its architectural history. Turning the south corner of the front we have a view of the long line of the nave, with its lancet windows, sturdy buttresses below, and flying buttresses above, arcaded clerestory, and western chapels. Here recorded his- tory fails us, but we know that this part of the Cathe- dral must have been built between the death of St. Hugh in 1200, and the episcopate of Grosseteste, which began in 1235; and that the moving spirit was probably Grosseteste' s predecessor and patron, another Bishop Hugh, known from his birthplace as Hugh of Wells, whose brother Jocelyn was at the same time engaged in rebuilding his own native cathedral. The only certain date is given by a catastrophe, which architectural evidence assures us must have taken place after the nave and transepts had been fully completed. This was the collapse, in 1237, of the central tower, which had been recently Q 242 LINCOLN CATHEDRAL. built, but, as was often the case with these mid-towers, on pillars too slight to sustain the huge mass they had to bear. Grosseteste was just then beginning his vigorous episcopate, and one of his first acts was to put his own house his Cathedral Chapter in order. Much needed reforming there ; but, as usually happens when the need is the most pressing, the sub- jepts of the reformation resisted it most indignantly. They stood upon their rights ; they even resorted to forgery to maintain them. "No bishop had ever visited them ; no bishop ever should." In the full heat of this struggle one of the canons having to preach in the nave, appealed to the people against his bishop. "Such," he cried, "are the deeds of this man, that if we were to hold our peace the very stones would cry out." The words were hardly out of the preacher's mouth when down came the tower, crushing two or three innocent people in its fall, but not injuring the chief offender, who did not fear to speak evil of dignities. Grosseteste, strong man as he was, disregarded the omen, prosecuted his visita- tion, purged the Chapter of the slothful luxurious men who were its disgrace, and manifested equal care for the material fabric. His renowned episcopate, which shed lustre on the whole English Church, saw the commencement of the great central tower, which is the chief glory of the Cathedral, and which may be styled one of the two or three most beautiful towers in Christen- dom. In his days were built the two lower storeys, LINCOLN CATHEDRAL. 243 the walls of which are encrusted with the diaper, seen also in the gable of the west front, and popu- larly known as Grosseteste's mark. The Cathedral had to wait till the end of the century for the lofty belfry stage, which is the crowning ornament of the central tower, as pure an example of the Decorated style as the lower part is of the Early English. This was promoted by Bishop John of Dalderby a holy man, whose canonization the Chapter vainly tried to procure from the venal Roman Church and was ready to receive its bells in 1311. This tower, like its western sisters, once had a tall leaden spire the loftiest, it was said, in England which was struck by lightning and fell in the early days of the boy- king, Edward VI., the 31st day of January, 1588. The transepts, or cross-aisles, are intermediate in date between the choir and the nave. Each of them, as at Westminster Abbey, has a circular or rose window in its front. These round windows rather a rare feature in an English church formed part of St. Hugh's original plan. The Metrical Chronicle tells that they were meant to symbolize the two eyes of the church ; that to the north, on which side lay the deanery, signifying the "Dean's Eye," watchfully open to guard against the snares of Lucifer, the Evil One, who, according to Isaiah xiv. 13, "sits in the sides of the north ; " that to the south, overlooking the episcopal palace, the "Bishop's Eye/' inviting the genial influences of the Holy Spirit. The present Bishop's Eye has delicate flowing tracery of Decorated 244 LINCOLN CATHEDRAL. date, a century later than the window which origin- ally occupied its place, and which, like the Dean's Eye, had what we call plate-tracery of the Early English style. At the south-west corner of the south transept stands a lofty two-storeyed vaulted porch, known as the Galilee. It is an example of Early English at its loveliest and purest. The room above served as the court of justice of the Dean and Chapter, at the time when they enjoyed exclusive jurisdiction in the Close. The name " Galilee," which we find also at Ely and Durham, was in frequent use in the Middle Ages for a porch ; and according to the old ritualists, it w r as supposed to have reference though the connection is by no means evident to the words of the Gospel, Matt, xxviii. 7, " Lo, He goeth before you unto Galilee ; there shall ye see Him." Beyond the transepts we come upon the most interesting portion of the building, both architec- turally and historically, the choir of St. Hugh. We cannot here narrate the career of this singularly " holy and humble man of heart," one of the most fearless champions of right before the fierce Planta- genet kings, the constant friend of the poor, the outcast, and the oppressed, whose name so deser- vedly occupies a place in the Anglican Calendar on November 17th, the day when in the last year of the twelfth century he entered into rest. We can now only briefly mention his connection with this Cathedral. LINCOLN CATHEDRAL. 245 When in 1186, in obedience to the will of his sovereign, Henry II., who had previously sum- moned him from his much-loved cell at the Grande Chartreuse to preside over a Somersetshire monastery of his own royal foundation, he reluctantly accepted the see of Lincoln, he found his Cathedral rent from base to summit by an earthquake occurring in the previous year. Its restoration was one of his first cares. It was to be built in the new style Early English Gothic, as we call it which had recently been developed, step by step, out of the ruder Norman, and to be in every part as worthy of its high purpose as human skill could make it. Six years were spent in preparing for so great a work. In 1192 the foundation was laid, and before his death, in 1200, the choir and eastern transepts, and a portion of the western transept, were com- pleted. As originally built, it ended like West- minster Abbey in a polygonal apse, with a six- sided lady-chapel behind. But all beyond the eastern transept was removed half a century after St. Hugh's death for the erection of the matchless " Angel Choir," built to form a fitting shrine for the remains of the sainted founder, to which they were " translated " such is the recognised eccle- siastical term in 1281, in the presence of Edward I., his much-loved Queen Eleanor, and their royal children, and a host of bishops and barons sum- moned from all parts to swell the pageant With the erection of this easternmost portion, in 240 LINCOLN CATHEDRAL. which English Gothic architecture reaches a perfection of beauty of form and delicacy of detail which has been rarely equalled and never surpassed, the fabric of the Cathedral, with the exception of the towers and one or two small side chantry chapels, was brought to a conclusion. The whole work of re-edification, from the laying of the first stone of St. Hugh's church to the translation of his body, occupied something less" than a century, no unduly long time for so great a work. In old times men built slowly, and they built solidly, and therefore their labour remains. It was no task work they did ; they put their hearts into it. They loved it, and did it as well as they knew how, because they felt that the house they were building was " not for man but for the Lord God." The light of the lamp of sacrifice beamed in every detail, and rendered the whole an offering worthy of Him who was to be worshipped therein. As Wordsworth writes ' They dreamt not of a perishable house Who thus could build." And in this they had their reward, as all will have who humbly and faithfully work for God. For the law of our being is that the more we give the more we love ; the more we forget ourselves in the service we render, the happier the rendering of that service becomes, and the richer its fruit. Entering the Cathedral by Bishop Alexander's richly-sculptured and pillared Norman doorway, one LINCOLN CATHEDRAL. 247 of the grandest portals of its date in the kingdom, we have on each side of us one bay of Remigius's Norman cathedral, plain, stern, solid, lower, and narrower than that which has supplanted it. Before us stretches the long arcaded vista of the vaulted nave, the work, as it will be remembered, of the episcopate of Hugh of Wells, in the early part of the thirteenth century a marvellous combination of dignity and grace, in which we hardly know whether to admire most the boldness of its construction or the elegance of its detail. Impressive as this noble nave is when empty, it is still more impressive when it is full, as it is every Sunday evening and on many other occasions. The day is happily past when our cathedrals were regarded almost as the private chapels of the Deans and Chapters, with doors fast locked and barred except at the hour of divine service, and that service strictly confined within one small portion of the vast build- ing; when preaching was rare, and that of an "academic" sort, addressed ad clerum rather than ad populum, to the educated few rather than to the uneducated many ; when worshippers were scanty and select, attracted too often more by the music than by the opportunity for united prayer and praise ; when their naves were empty, looked upon as a stately vestibule to the sanctuary rather than as a part of the sanctuary itself, and the idea of employing them for worship had scarcely dawned on the minds of any of their guardians, and the little use made of 248 LIXCOLN CATHEDRAL. our cathedrals provoked the question why they should be kept up at all except as specimens of architecture and museums of archaeological curiosities. God be thanked, such a dreary abuse of great oppor- tunities has everywhere ceased, and our cathedrals are felt to be important and influential engines for good, not for the classes only, but still more for the masses. But to pass from the use of the building to the building itself, one of the most striking objects in the nave is the grand Norman font of black marble, supported on four shafts round a central column, its sides carved with mythical monsters recalling the Nineveh sculptures. Similar fonts occur in Win- chester Cathedral and in some other Hampshire churches, and one in Lincolnshire. Recent investiga- tions tend to show that they are all of Belgian origin, and that the marble of which they are formed is hewn from a quarry near Termonde. What brought them here ? Who can tell or even guess ? The nave itself exhibits that bold disregard of rigid uniformity combined with general harmony which imparts to mediaeval buildings a living character as things that have grown bit by bit, not monotonously fashioned by rule and measure. The piers that support the arches are of two or three patterns, and the wall- arcades beneath the aisle windows are different on the two sides. More than this, when the tower fell and tore down a bit of this arcade on the north side, the repairers scorned to copy what they saw, LINCOLN CATHEDRAL. 249 and made up the breach with a patch of a different design. Passing into the transepts we see, on either side the circular windows, the two " eyes " of the church of which we have already spoken ; the " Dean's Eye " of the thirteenth century to the north, and the " Bishop's Eye " of the fourteenth century to the south. Each glows with rich mediseval glass. That of the " Dean's Eye," representing the heavenly hier- archy adoring the Divine Being, is a priceless work, of the date of the window, but that of the " Bishop's Eye " is a mere collection of confused fragments, the survival of Puritan devastations, the effect of which, however, in its confusion, especially when the south- ern sun is shining on it and through it, is so splen- did that one could hardly wish it other than it is. The story told here, as in so many other places, of the apprentice who saved the bits of glass rejected by his master, and put them together so skilfully that it outdid the work of his master, who, in his vexation hurled him from the triforium gallery, is as devoid of foundation at Lincoln as everywhere else. There is at least a hundred years between the two windows, and the glass is of many dates. At the south-west corner of the south transept stands the two-storeyed Galilee Porch, of which we have also spoken, built to provide a state entrance for the bishop, whose palace lies a short distance to the south. The two buildings, Cathedral and palace, are separated by the city wall and the lofty earth- 250 LINCOLN CATHEDRAL. works, mound and ditch which formed the southern boundary of the Roman city of " Lindum Colonia." The bishop, therefore, had no direct access to his Cathedral until Henry I. gave Bishop Bloet leave to pierce the city wall, provided it could be done with- out injury to the security of the citizens. The roundheaded archway then formed still stands firm and strong after the lapse of nearly eight centuries, but it has long since been blocked up, and is now half buried by the rise of the soil. Past it runs the favourite walk of the present bishop. There among his snow-white pigeons and gorgeous peacocks, on a sunny terrace bordered with gay old-fashioned flowers, the tribute of the parsonage-gardens of the diocese, with the stately towers of the Cathedral rising on one side and the busy town with its tall chimneys and huge factories filling the valley below, he finds what may be called a typical position for a bishop's residence, " below the church and above the world." The present bishop is the first since the Reforma- tion who has lived where, as a rule, all bishops ought to live, in their cathedral city, and close to their cathedral church. The shameless robbery of the see by the greedy statesmen who exercised authority in the name of the boy-king Edward VI., compelled the Bishops of Lincoln to seek a more modest home. So the palace was deserted the palace which had been the episcopal residence since the beginning of the twelfth century ; the home of St. Hugh and of LINCOLN CATHEDRAL. 251 Grosseteste ; of Alnwick, the counsellor of Henry VI. in his royal foundation of Eton and King's College, Cambridge ; of Smith, the founder of Brasenose Col- lege, Oxford, in which Henry VII. spent his first Easter after his accession to the throne, and " full like a Cristen prynce," with his own noble hands " humbly and cristenly for Crystes love," washed the feet of twenty-nine poor men in the Great Hall, and in which Henry VIII. and his fifth queen the loose- living Katherine Howard, who, the next year, lost her head for acts, of some of which this palace was the scene were received, on their way into Yorkshire, by Bishop Longland, the bitter persecutor of the early " Gospellers." Then came the Great Rebellion, when the palace was first turned into a prison, and then despoiled of its lead and even of its ironwork, windows, and wain- scots, and all that would fetch money, and left to the slow but sure action of the elements as a useless ruin. In the dark days of the last century, when all reverence for ancient buildings had died out, and they were regarded as mere encumbrances of the ground, the palace was used as a stone quarry for the repairs of the Cathedral, the chapel was pulled down, its roofless hall was turned into an orchard, and each year saw the once grand pile sinking into more irre- parable decay. But happily the palace never passed out of the possession of the see, and little by little it has recovered its ancient purpose. Bishop Jackson made it the residence of his secretary, and the place 2 5 2 LINCOLN CATHEDRAL. of his weekly interviews with his clergy ; Bishop Wordsworth, though unable to carry out his much- cherished wish of making it his home, commenced the work of restoration in the repair of Bishop Alnwick's Tower, for the use of the students of the Chancellor's Theological School. The work has been completed by Bishop King, and Lincoln has once more welcomed its bishop as a permanent resident. The old episcopal chapel being hopelessly ruined, a new chapel has been cleverly constructed out of a portion of the domestic buildings, and additional rooms have been built, with long suites of bed- chambers for the reception of the clergy and of the candidates for Orders at the Ember seasons. But, though some account of this historic palace cannot be regarded as out of place, it is time that we should return to the Cathedral. Beyond the transepts is the choir, the work of St. Hugh, at the close of the twelfth century, at which he sometimes wrought with his own hands, the earliest-dated example of pure Gothic in the country, without any trammelling admixture of earlier forms, simple and dignified. We enter it under a richly-carved vaulted screen of the fourteenth century, originally resplen- dent with gilding and colour, on which now stands the organ, but which in earlier days supported the Great Rood or Crucifix with the images of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. John on either side. The choir is furnished with a range of sixty-two stalls, with elbowed seats below, rising in three tiers on each LINCOLN CATHEDRAL. 253 side, and returned at the end. The Dean occupies the right-hand stall at the entrance ; the Precentor, the chief musical officer, that to the left; the Chan- cellor, the theologian and literary official of the Chapter, who in old times wrote the letters and arranged the preachings, and took care of the library, is seated in the last stall of the southern range to the east ; the Treasurer was originally placed in a corresponding place on the north side. The reason of the dignitaries being so placed was that they might overlook every part of the choir, and maintain order among the vicars and singing boys, not always so intent on their sacred functions as they should have been. But where the Treasurer used to sit, a treasurer sits no longer. At the Reformation the office ceased. A cathedral treasurer was not like a treasurer of modern times, the financier and account-keeper of the body. His charge was not the treasure, but the treasures of the church, i.e. the altar vessels and furniture, the mitres and vestments, the pixes and paxes, the crucifixes, staves, and processional crosses, the censers and chrismatories and the other costly ornaments and adjuncts belonging to the unreformed service, with which no cathedral was more richly furnished than that of Lincoln. Under the cloak of zeal for the purity of religion the whole of this gorgeous store, with which the piety of former ages had enriched the Cathedral, was carried off by the Commissioners of Henry VIII., and went into the 254 LINCOLN CATHEDRAL. king's jewel-house and thence into the melting-pot of this royal " robber of churches." The Cathedral treasure-house was left empty. The story goes that the then treasurer, feeling " his occupation gone," dashed down the now needless keys on the floor of his stall, removed to that of the prebend, which he held together with his treasurership, and never entered it again. Certain it is that no subsequent treasurer was ever appointed. "Abrepto thesauro thesaurarii desiit munus," writes the chronicler of the day. " The treasure being carried off, the treasurer's office came to an end." But to turn from their occupants to the stalls themselves, we may look far to find tabernacle work of greater beauty than that of the tall, spire-like canopies which tower above them. According to the late Mr. Pugin they have no equals in England for " variety and beauty of design and accuracy of work- manship." The niches of these canopies, long vacant, have recently received as tenants statuettes of the saints of the Anglican Calendar from St. Andrew onward, all being voluntary offerings, mostly from the present occupants of the stalls. Each stall has a hinged turn-up wooden seat, with a projecting bracket on the under side, known in old times as misericord* or misereres. This name they gained from being merciful provisions for the relief of wearied human nature, offering a partial support to the body during the protracted services of the earlier Church, with- out adopting the irreverent attitude now, alas, too THE CHOIR. LINCOLN CATHEDRAL. 257 common of sitting in prayer. Those who used them, however, had to beware lest drowsiness overtook them. If the body was thrown too far forward the seat lost its equilibrium, and the sleeper was in danger of being hurled down, to his own disgrace and the derision of others. All these " misericords " have quaint carvings, some of sacred subjects, such as the Resurrection and Ascension ; some grotesques, not always quite in harmony with the sacred character of the building. The poppy head of the precentor's stall represents on its three sides, first, two monkeys churning ; secondly, a baboon who has stolen the pat of butter hiding among the trees ; and thirdly, the hanging of the thief, the churners pulling the ropes and the culprit with clasped hands offering his last prayer. On one of the turn-up seats below, the baboon's life- less body is being carried by the executioners to burial. Beyond the stalls, on the south side, is that from which a cathedral properly speaking, a cathedral church, " ecclesia cathedralis " receives its title, namely, the cathedra, or official seat of the bishop. This seat or " throne " is the distinctive mark of a cathedral. In whatever church, be it large or small, stately or mean, a bishop places his oificial seat, that church at once becomes his cathedral church. We have had not a few instances in recent times of this accession of rank to an ordinary parish church, as at Truro, Newcastle, Wakefield, and the meanest of R 258 LINCOLN CATHEDRAL. them all, a standing disgrace to the second city in the Empire, St. Peter's, Liverpool. In St. Hugh's choir the example of the Cathedral of Canterbury a plan derived from Clugny was followed. It was provided with a second pair of transepts, each with two semicircular chapels on the east side. One of these, that of St. John the Baptist, by the cloister door, was by his own desire the original burial-place of St. Hugh, whose patron saint the Baptist was. The last directions to his architect on his death-bed were for the construction of the altar in this chapel and its consecration. " I shall not be present in body," he said, " but I shall be there in spirit." " Bury me there," he continued, " where I have so often loved to minister ; but lay me by the side of the wall, where people will not be in danger of tripping over my tomb.'"' He had sought not to be a stumbling-block to his brethren in life, and he would be grieved to prove a stumbling- block to them when dead. The corresponding chapel in the south transept, that of St. Peter's, was in 1205 desecrated by the murder of the then sub-dean, William Bramfield, "a good and righteous man," we are told. As he was kneeling in prayer at the altar he was slain, for what cause we are not told, by one of the vicars of the church, who was speedily " torn to pieces " by the sub-dean's attendants, and his mangled body dragged through the streets and hung on the town gallows on Canwick Hill. LINCOLN CATHEDRAL. 259 The humble and holy Hugh was nut allowed to remain long in the lowly grave he had chosen for himself. Miraculous cures, according to the belief of the age, began to be worked at his tomb. He received canonisation from the Pope, and it was decreed that he must have another resting-place. So, as we have already said, the apse he had erected half a century before was pulled down, the Cathedral was lengthened by five bays, and on its completion the saint's body was carried in stately procession to a shrine covered with plates of silver gilt, standing behind the high altar, in the middle of the " Angel Choir," that exquisite architectural work, the very crown and glory of the Decorated style. At the Reformation, in common with all such " monuments of superstition," the shrine was destroyed by the command of Henry VIII., the gold and silver work sharing the fate of the before- mentioned ornaments of the church, and the bones of the saint were interred in a grave hard by. " His body is buried in peace ; but his name liveth for evermore." Of the tomb of his great successor, Robert Grosseteste, destroyed when the Cathedral was sacked by the Parliamentary soldiers in 1644, only some shattered fragments remain, awaiting a well-deserved restoration, which we trust may not be much longer deferred. Near Hugh's last resting- place rises the lofty canopied monument of one whose name will go down to posterity as one of the greatest prelates of the Church of England, great alike in 260 LINCOLN CATHEDRAL. learning, piety, and dauntless courage, the late bishop of the see, Christopher Wordsworth. His mitred effigy reposes upon a richly carved altar- tomb. At Bishop Wordsworth's feet is the chantry chapel of one of his predecessors in the fifteenth century, Bishop Fleming, noteworthy chiefly for the part he took in carrying out the decree of the Council of Constance for the exhumation and burning of the remains of the "arch-heretic" Wycliffe, the "morning star of the Reformation," to whom we owe the first complete English translation of the Bible. But how vainly does man endeavour to crush God's truth ! The hateful decree was carried out. Wy- cliffe's bones were burnt in Lutterworth churchyard, and the ashes cast into the river Swift which runs through it ; but, as old Fuller writes, " this brook did convey his ashes into the Avon, the Avon into the Severn, the Severn into the narrow sea, and this into the wide ocean. And so the ashes of Wycliffe are the emblem of his doctrine, which is now dis- persed ail the world over." Beneath the east window stands a monument which, though the most recently erected in the cathedral, commemorates a royal lady of the thir- teenth century, whose name shines with purest lustre in the annals of our land, Eleanor of Castille, the consort of Edward I., who died at Harby, within a few miles of Lincoln, the portions of whose body removed in the process of embalming were interred 1'HK CHAPTER HOUSE, LINCOLN CATHEDRAL. 263 here. It is, at the same time, a memorial of the large-hearted liberality of one of the leading citizens of Lincoln, the late High Sheriff of the county, Mr. Joseph Huston. The restoration of the beau- tiful monument, destroyed in the havoc of the Puritan soldiery in the Great Rebellion, was rendered easy by the existence of a drawing made by Sir William Dugdale before the great civil troubles began, and by the proof which this drawing gave of the Lincoln tomb being a "replica" on a smaller scale of that at Westminster. A richly- carved altar-tomb bears a gilt-bronze effigy of the queen, of exquisite grace and beauty. Much that Lincoln Minster contains of historical interest and architectural beauty must be passed over in this brief sketch ; but we cannot omit to mention one of its most instructive memorials, the shrine of little St. Hugh, in the south choir aisle. From the very earliest ages of Christianity down to our own times the horrible charge always, we are persuaded, groundless has been brought against the Jews of torturing and murdering Chris- tian children in mockery of our blessed Lord's suffering, and has been made the ground of cruel persecution. " Anti-Semitism," which has deve- loped so fiercely in late years, especially in Russia, is no new thing ; but, however contrary to the true spirit of Christianity, it is, sad to say, almost coeval with the establishment of its power as the dominant religion. In all countries the same 264 LINCOLN CATHEDRAL. hideous tales have been repeated and believed. In our own land the so-called martyrdoms of St. William of Norwich, St. Harold at Gloucester, St. Robert at Edmundsbury, and others, culminating in the most famous of them all, that which has taken a wide place in our ballad literature, and which Chaucer has immortalised " Young Hew of Lincolne slaine also With cursed Jewes, as it is notable For it nis but a litel while ago " bear witness to the same credulous acceptance of unfounded accusations against members of a hated race, whom it was very convenient to get rid of. The Jews, it will be remembered, were the great money-lenders indeed, the only money-lenders of the Middle Ages, and to get your creditor hanged and his account-books burnt was a rough- and-ready way to discharge one's liabilities. Whatever may be thought of the charge, the supposed murder of little St. Hugh, a boy of Lincoln, and the consequent execution of a large number of Jews and the confiscation of their pro- perty, as accessories to the crime, in 1255, are historical events which cannot be questioned. The Dean and Chapter begged the body of the little child, and gave it the honour of a richly- carved shrine and an altar in the minster, beneath which the tiny skeleton still reposes. His martyrdom holds its place in the Roman Catholic calendar. Five- LINCOLN CATHEDRAL. 265 and-thirty years after this Lincoln persecution, the Jews, as a body, were expelled from the realm, their property was confiscated, and any Jew found in England after All Saints' Day, 1290, incurred the penalty of death by hanging. How powerfully do such events bring to our minds the old word of prophecy! "The Lord shall scatter thee among all peoples . . . and among those nations thou shalt have no ease, neither shall the sole of thy foot find any rest . . . and thy life shall hang in doubt before thee ; and thou shalt fear day and night, and shalt have none assurance of thy life." " What is your strongest argument in support of Christianity ? " scoffingly asked Frederick the Great of one of his chaplains. " The Jews, sire," was the unanswerable reply. One is tempted to linger within the beautiful ten- sided Chapter-house, with its vaulted roof spreading from a central pillar, to dwell on the great historical memories of Edwardian Parliaments, to conjure up the scene of the trial of the much maligned, but not altogether guiltless, Knights Templars, or that of the " Pilgrimage of Grace " so vividly described by Froude ; but, though much has been left unsaid, we must bring our walk to an end, hoping that what we have told may induce many to visit Lincoln for themselves. WINCHESTEK CATHEDEAL. WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL. RAVELLERS from London to the ancient and once royal city of Winchester get a very fine view, as they draw near it, of a wide stretch of downs on both sides of the railway, but that on the left much the widest. The great sweeping undulations of smooth green turf, with here and there a wood dotted over them, have been the scene of many a conflict in olden days, and many legends and traditions belong to particular sites. Half the counties of England claim the house of the tragedy of the " Mistletoe Bough," but the village of Owslebury, of which I can see the church tower and the windmill, claim to possess the fatal chest itself. More certain is the story that in this church the last Mass was sung in the days of Edward VI. The priest refused to give up the old service, and Sir Thomas Seymour, brother of the Lord Protector, dragged him from the altar and had him murdered there and then. This Seymour had enriched himself with the property of the Church, and every one of his children came to beggary. 270 WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL. One conspicuous object has disappeared which I well remember on the most isolated of these downs : the Semaphore [Greek = " signal carrier."]. The roof of the house, which stood on the apex of the hill, was furnished with signals, and there was a con- tinuous line of them all the way to London. They were established in 1795, in the period of the great French war, to convey intelligence from Southampton and Portsmouth to London. The electric telegraph has superseded them, and most if not all of these "houses set on a hill" have been pulled down. If we could take a bird's flight from our carriage window to the top of those downs, we should get a beautiful view. On one side is a great panorama of villages towards Alresford and Alton, with Tich- bourne down below us, where half the ignorant rustics still believe in the "Claimant" ; on the other side that long white streak amid the deep green is Southampton Water, with the New Forest on the farther side of it ; and those downs beyond are the broad acres of Wilts, and with a glass you can see Salisbury spire. But I am letting imagination and memory run riot, for I am in the train and not on the Winchester downs. As the said train slackens speed we catch one glimpse, and only one, of the low central tower of the Cathedral. Very little of the city is visible from the station, for it lies in a hollow, and the shoulder of the hill which flanks the Station Road on the city side hides it. But just for a moment let us change our imaginary route, and come up the other way from Southampton. The estuary narrows into the clear sparkling river Itchen ; not majestic like Father Thames, nor pictur- esque with hills and deep reaches like the Dart ; yet. with a tranquil beauty of its own, with the rich meadows and villages on its banks. The down on our left, clothed as usual with short grass, and ever and anon showing a white chalk-pit, is Hursley Down, and who that hears of Hursley will fail to associate 272 WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL. it with the name of John Keble ? And so after a twelve-mile run we are once more nearing Winchester, but the approach on this side is one of rare beauty. Look at that magnificent Norman church, with the simple yet beautiful buildings around it, and the fine gateway, and beyond it the meadows and the shining river. That is the noble hospital of St. Cross, the work of two of the most famous bishops of Winchester ; Henry de Blois, brother of King Stephen, built the church, and Cardinal Beaufort the gateway and the " Hundred men's hall." St. Cross lies about a mile south of the city ; immediately after passing it we get a full view of the Cathedral in its vast massive- ness. On alighting, we may go down the broad but short Station Road, to the site of the old city wall, turn to the right along Jewry Street, and so come into the middle of the " High." But instead of this we will keep along a footpath beside the line over the rising ground I have before mentioned. This brings us to the top of the " High," and we turn down it to the left. It is a continuous but not steep descent for the whole length of the city. And Winchester High Street is the most picturesque that I know, at home or abroad. The upper street is not attractive till we come to the fine West Gate, which marks the line of the ancient wall on this side. Before passing through it we glance at the County Hall on our right. The history connected with it is not altogether pleasing. Charles II. had it in his mind to build a great palace WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL. 273 here which should rival that of his brother (and master), Louis XIV., at Versailles. There were to be fine roads and broad terraces, reaching down from the palace to the west front of the Cathedral, in such wise as to make the latter a mere appendage to the royal residence. What a grievous burden the French palace was, and what a frightful tragedy to the King's family it played no small part in producing, history knows too well. England was perhaps spared a like tragedy by the profligate King's death. The part which he built is now turned into the barracks. But in the ancient hall adjacent hangs the celebrated Round Table at which, so legend tells, the knights of King Arthur sat. On the site of this hall William Rufus held godless festival, and in it Judge Jeffreys sentenced Alice Lisle to death. As soon as the West Gate is passed the picturesque character of the street becomes manifest. The buildings are not stately ; but the gables and varied heights, the low arcades, the great projecting clock, the graceful " Butter-cross," all present an enchant- ing appearance ; the more so because some of the best shopkeepers have preserved the quaint fronts which were good enough for their forefathers, and have not been bitten by the desire for plate-glass. One of the most old-fashioned shops formerly belonged to one who is said to have been the most prosperous tradesman in Winchester. " However have you been able to make so much money ? " said a friend to him. "By always charging very 274 WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL. high, and bowing very low," was the unhesitating answer. We descend the High Street as far as the Butter- cross, and examine it at leisure. Its surroundings are almost as picturesque as itself. Look at that "Piazza," formerly better called "the Penthouse," the houses overhanging the street, the odd gables and bargeboards and rough ridge-tiles, and say what Continental city has a more perfect setting for a piece of beautiful architecture. There is no written record of the origin of this cross. Its details prove it to be of the fifteenth century, and we may take it for certain that it was the work of Cardinal Beaufort, who was zealous for such erections. The popular name has been explained as owing to its having been paid for by licences to eat butter in Lent, like the " Butter- tower " in Rouen Cathedral. Against this others allege that the name simply refers to the steps having been used on market days for the dairymen to put their butter upon. The fact deserves to be recorded that in 1770 Winchester actually had a town council who sold the cross to the Paving Commissioners for its materials, and it would there and then have been broken up had not the indignant burgesses arisen and prevented the outrage. A queer little archway close by the cross would lead us into the Cathedral yard, but instead of enter- ing it we pass on down the High Street. At the bottom is the very handsome new Town Hall, which Hi l< W < Itmr f W^^A , THE " BtJTTER-CBOSS." WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL. 277 need not detain us, and just beyond that is the river. Here is the bridge that spans it. It is the site of one of the many picturesque legends of St. Swithun, that of the old woman's broken eggs, which he restored to her. But it also marks the former limit of the navigability of the Itchen. This river used to be popularly called, and may be so still for aught I know, " the barge river." But the barges, which used to come up from Southampton laden with coals and heavy merchandise, are all at an end, thanks to the South- Western Railway. Every one of the old locks is in ruins, and the Itchen is now only a fishing river. Here then Ave get the reason of the site of the ancient city. The Dean of Winchester, in his short but masterly history of it, dwells upon the fact that it is really the end of the practicable valley. Comers up from the sea, first Celts, then English, reached thus far, and here under shelter of the downs built their inland city, known in the earliest records as Gwent ( = White City) of the Belga3, Venta Belgarum. The " white " probably refers to the chalk escarpment, visible on all sides. Immediately beyond the bridge St. Giles' Hill rises abruptly in front of us, and the city ends, the road turning left and right, the former over Magdalen Hill to Alresford, the latter to South- ampton. Retracing our steps now to the cross, we turn into the little " Square," as it is called, leading to the Cathedral yard, and pass the quaint church of St. 278 WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL. Lawrence, popularly believed to be the mother church of Winchester. There is no real evidence of this, but the belief is recognised by the fact that the bishops are sworn in there before going in procession to the Cathedral to be enthroned. And now we are in the Cathedral yard, a spot crowded with historical memories. At the corner we entered, reaching from Great Minster Street to Market Street, and from the High Street to the Square, was the palace of William the Conqueror ; east of that, as far as the end of the Cathedral yard, was " the New Minster " ; and beyond that again St. Mary's Abbey of Nuns, the Nunnamestre. The New Minster, so called to dis- tinguish it from the Old, that is the Cathedral, with its monastery, was founded by King Alfred, under the learned St. Grimbald, for the purpose of the education of priests and young nobles of his court. Within this New Minster Alfred himself was buried. But now look at the Cathedral west front through the stately vista of limes, and the huge nave. No one will deny that it looks heavy in its massiveness, with nothing to break the lines, only a very low tower at the intersection of the transepts in their great Norman simplicity almost as Bishop Walkelin left them eight hundred years ago. It is all very grand and solemn in the still churchyard, but the visitor at first sight would hardly put this in the first rank of cathedrals. There is not the grace of Salisbury, nor the rich ornament of Lich field, nor the stately towers of Canterbury and York, nor the splendid WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL. 279 situation of Durham and Lincoln. Massive gran- deur, but not beauty will be his first judgment, but let him suspend that judgment till he gets inside ; mean- while we will walk round the exterior. We pass the west front, which has a large Perpendicular window, and doorways of curious sharp-pointed arches. These are the work of Bishop Edyngdon (middle of fourteenth century). Then we come at the south-west corner to a narrow passage which conducts us round into the Cathedral close This passage, called the Slype,* was constructed by Bishop Curie (1636), in order to save the Cathedral from the desecration of a footway which went through it. It has these curious incriptions upon it : . ILLx. PREC\ AC ATOR AMBULA H/ VI / T Iliac precator, hac viator ambula. (" "Worshipper, go that way ; traveller, this.") CESSIT COMMUNT PROPRIUM JAM PERGITE QUA FAS. " Private right has yielded to public, now go by the way which is open to thee," /ACR\ S\ ILL\ CHx, S A IT A ORO \ERV/ F/ IST/ F/ ' ' Let that way be sacred to the choir, and this is made handmaid to the market-place." Entering the Cathedral close we have the great nave north of us, and south transept and the deanery * " Slype [cf . Dutch sleipdcur = a secret door ; s!eiphol=a corner to creep into ; slupen = io sneak, to slip], apassage between two walls." Encyclopaedic Dictionary. 2 8o WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL. on the east. Here then, as we stand in the close, is the best place for sketching the history of the Cathedral. Birinus, the apostle of Wessex, came hither in 634, but though Winchester was then the royal city, he went on further, to Dorchester on the Thames, there fixed his see, and there baptised the West Saxon king. At that moment the latter was hoping to push his dominions further north, into middle Eng- land, but was disappointed in that hope, and before long (in 676) the see was transferred to Winchester. A cathedral was built and a monastic house w r as attached to it. When Egbert, the King of Wessex, became King of all England, in 827, Winchester participated in his greatness. He died nine years later and was buried in the Cathedral. A mortuary chest is still to be seen bearing his name, but more of that presently. Soon after his death came an evil time, that of the invasions of the Danes, but the re- sistance made by his son, Ethelwulf, to these fierce invaders added glory to Winchester, for while other kingdoms of the Heptarchy came to grief, Wessex still held up its head. Ethelwulf had a wise coun- sellor in his bishop, St. Swithun, who persuaded him to build a strong wall round the Cathedral precincts. More than once that Avail saved the Cathedral from being harried. The Danes burnt Canterbury Cathedral, but not Winchester. And that wall, now more than a thousand years old, is still to be seen, or one reared on its foundations. In the illustration show- ytS PW- - xil> *& Hlii?-7V '. ing the " Close Gate/' we see the way through King Ethel wulfs wail into the street on the south which was the termination of the city on that side. The street is well called by the name of St. Swithun, and a very 282 WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL. curious little church over an archway just outside is dedicated to him. Nothing of the Cathedral of that date remains, though its records are many ; notably the burial of St. Swithun, first in the Cathedral yard somewhere near the north-west tower, afterwards in the church itself. The stories of Canute, of Queen Emma and the hot ploughshares, of Earl Godwin, of Dunstan and his forcing monastic rules upon the reluctant clerics, all antedate this church as we see it now. Its founder was Walkelin, the Conqueror's cousin, and the simple yet majestic Norman transepts are the portions of his work which remain. The Winchester people kept high festival the other day, on the eight hundredth anniversary of the consecration. This Close in which we are standing is the part most connected with mediaeval Winchester, for in and around it was the ancient monastery of St. Swithun, from which the Cathedral was served. Here, in the angle of the transept and nave, were the cloisters. The present Deanery was the prior's refectory, and its fine timber roof now covers dining-room, drawing-room, and three bedrooms. The beautiful doorway, with its three arches, is supposed to have been the work of Bishop Godfrey de Lucy. Here the pilgrims, who had come over sea from Southampton on pilgrimage to worship at the shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury, received food before passing on, and it is said that bones and animals' teeth are still found from time to time below the surface. Northward is the site of the old chapter- WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL, 283 house, where the remains of the seats are yet visible. Close by was the " monks' parlour." and on the site of the Bishop of Guildford's house (on the left of the picture) was the infirmary. When the monasteries were dissolved by Henry VIII. , a momentous change came over the position of the cathedrals. From that time they were classified as cathedrals respectively of the " old " and the " new foundation." The " old " were those which had always been served by secular canons, each man dwelling in his own house, not in a monastery. There were thirteen of these, among them York and Lon- don. There were nine which had monasteries attached to them, including Canterbury, Durham, and Winchester. Now the head of the monastery was the bishop ; he was its abbot, as well as bishop of the diocese ; and his representative in the monas- tery, ruling as his deputy, was the prior. When the change came, therefore, to these, and the monks were turned out, secular canons took their places, and the prior became dean. Kingsmill, who had been Prior of St. Swithun's, became the first Dean of Winchester. This is how it comes that such ancient cathedrals as Canterbury and Winchester are said to be " of the new foundation." But to resume our history of the building. In 1107 Walkelin's central tower fell in; there were people who said it was because the church had been profaned by the burial of the wicked Red King in the chancel. It was built up again, but it is impossible 284 WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL. to say how. Other works were in hand which claimed precedence, notably the removal of the New Minster from the Cathedral yard to Hyde Meadow, in the north part of the city, and the foundation of the first of the Cistercian abbeys, at Waverley, near Farnham. These were the work of Bishop Gifford, Walkelin's successor. The frightful civil war between Stephen and Matilda was nowhere felt more than at Winchester ; half the city was burnt down in the course of it, but, happily, the Cathedral escaped. The bishop at that time, Henry de Blois, King Stephen's brother, was able, rich, ambitious. He changed from one side to the other, not recklessly, but because both parties in turn angered him by bad management and cruelty. He did some noble things, and, as Dean Kitchin observes, "is in some ways the greatest of Winchester bishops." We have before alluded to his foundation of the Hospital of St. Cross. The present Cathedral owes to him two features. The one is the chests of relics which he placed in the crypt ; the other is the beautiful font, similar to three others in the county, and unlike any other anywhere else in England ; a square base, on which stands a thick circular shaft, and four smaller ones at the corners, supporting the bowl, which has a square exterior and circular basin. The material is black marble, and the sides are deeply carved, two in the Winchester font with symbolic figures, the others with incidents from the legendary life of St. Nicholas of Myra. The subjects differ in the other fonts. Their WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL. 287 history is unwritten. The guide-books have followed one another in saying that " they are, no doubt, of Walkelin's time" ; but there is a great deal of doubt, to say the least. The carving seems to be Byzantine, and a well-known antiquary, Mr. F. J. Baigent, who has made almost a life-study of Winchester records, has found evidence which satisfies him that they were the gift of Bishop Henry de Blois. But controversy is still active on this question. The next great name in the history of the Cathedral is that of Bishop Godfrey de Lucy, who, in the year 1200, began to remove the Norman east end and to rebuild it in the beautiful Early English style then in vogue. It is well known that in the olden time, when repairs or additions were made to churches, the builders did not go on the original plan, but adopted the style then in use. But Bishop Godfrey made one notable exception to this practice. He is said to have rebuilt Walkelin's tower, and, out of respect to his memory, to have followed the old Norman plan. His Avork in the Cathedral was not his only benefaction to the diocese. He gathered the waters of the Itchen to a head at Alresford, and so made a prolific fish-pond ; and it was he who made the river again navigable from Winchester to the sea. His new work at the Cathedral, as will be seen at a glance, is much lower than that of Walkelin. The picture on page 295 shows that, but it Avill also be seen that this picture does not show the east end as Lucy left it ; for there are 288 WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL. Perpendicular windows. When they were added we shall see later, but the core of the building, as seen from the inside, is his. We come now to the Perpendicular builders, and the wonderful metamorphosis which they effected. There were two of them Edyngdon (13451367) and William of Wykeham (1367 1404) and to their immediate successors also, one after another, the Cathedral and city owe very much. Edyngdon set himself to restore the nave, as Lucy had done the east end. He pulled down the Norman west front and rebuilt it as it is,* and he had begun to go eastward, but died before he had made much progress. The name of his successor is that of one of the most splendid builders in our annals. William of Wykeham was a native of the county, who had been placed at school in Winchester by the bounty of a rich man who recognised his ability. The boy in due course took minor orders, but had never been to a university, and was never a learned man ; but his talent for mathematics and for drawing was so marked that he was introduced to King Edward III., was made clerk of the works at Windsor, and built there the famous Round Tower. His religious life keeping pace with his practical work, he became at length Bishop of Winchester. There is no doubt he had been as a right hand to Edyngdou in that prelate's masonic work. His method of working, * Buskin in his "Stones of Venice" makes a furious attack upon it. ., v } >t * /;.'. 'VK^>^5.i?e > ^r f WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL. 291 though he, like Edyngdon, built in the Perpendicular style, was altogether different from his predecessor's, and it is one of the most wonderful achievements in the history of art. He did not pull down ; he left Walkelin's work standing, and even so transmuted that heavy Norman nave into the graceful beauty of the new style. And even he changed his method as he proceeded. His first plan was to cut Perpen- dicular mouldings in the great Norman pillars, but afterwards he encased them with new stone ; and he cleared away the heavy triforium. And thus nave and transepts are now so utterly unlike that it is difficult for a while to realise that one is only a modification of the other. Details can only be mastered by a personal visit, but Professor Willis, in his careful monograph on this cathedral, shows how on close examination you may find some of the Norman work still existing. So, with a few minor alterations, yet to be named, Winchester Cathedral took the form which it has retained ever since, and the visitor entering at the west door sees before him the joint work of Walkelin and William of Wykeham. It is a vista of magnificence which, almost like the first sight of the sea or the Alps, impresses itself on the memory for one's life. The wooden screen shown in our sketch of the choir is modern, the work of Sir Gilbert Scott, and is a joint memo- rial to Bishop Wilberforce and Dean Gamier. Of the Perpendicular window in the distance and the 292 WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL. screen below it we will speak presently. But let the reader understand that that distant window is by no means the east end. Godfrey de Lucy's beau- tiful work is all behind it, clean out of our pre- sent vision. By stepping, however, into one of the aisles we can get a good idea of the extraordinary length, though nowhere can we see from end to end. Bat the noblest work of Wykeham was not his restoration of the Cathedral, magnificent as that was. His foundation of New College, Oxford, and of the world-famed school at Winchester, has won for him the name of " founder of the English public-school s} T stem." These are works which do not come within the scope of these pages ; we can only say that no visitor to Winchester should fail to pass out of the Close by the gateway which we have already presented to the reader, and keeping along the outside wall eastwards, ask to be allowed to visit Wykeham's glorious " St. Mary's College." Nor must he omit another pilgrimage, namely, to St. Cross, which Henry de Blois founded, and to which Wykeharn's successor, Cardinal Beaufort, made such grand additions. He will enter Beaufort's gateway, call at the hatch for Beaufort's dole, and receive a piece of bread and a horn of " home- brewed." And if his belief in the communion of saints take this form he will say a Hequiescant for the souls of the founders before committing himself to the guidance of one of the " brethren," in their WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL. 293 long coats with the Maltese cross on their breasts, to go round and see what noble deeds those men of old wrought. Truly the roll of Winchester bishops all through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is a splendid one, and the very mention of it is the proper intro- duction to two special features of the interior of the Cathedral, which, if not absoluely unique, are unspeakably superior in kind to anything else in England. But first let us set down the succession for the hundred years after Beaufort's death : William of Waynflete (14471487), Peter Cour- tenay (14871493), Thomas Langton (1493 1500), Richard Fox (1501 1528), Cardinal Wolsey (15281531), Stephen Gardiner (15311555). What a wonderful roll it is ! But our immediate concern is with the Cathedral building. Take first Courtenay. He was a member of the noble family of that name, still held in honour in Devon, and was translated from Exeter. But he was almost worn out when he came here, and died in a few years. (By the way, let it be noted that the three bishops preceding him had ruled the diocese for one hundred and twenty years. Within the same time following them there were thirteen.) Bishop Cour- tenay added another bay to the east end, to Bishop Lucy's Lady Chapel. And by doing so he made this Cathedral longer than St. Alban's Abbey, which had hitherto been the longest church in England ; in fact, the longest cathedral in the world, except 294 WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL. St. Peter's at Rome. Courtenay was buried in the Cathedral ; but as there is no tomb to him, the Devonshire people used to cling to the idea that he was laid among his ancestry at Powderham. In 1885, however, his coffin was found in that part of the Cathedral which he had built, and there is now a handsome altar-tomb enclosing this coffin. Then Langton. His prior was Thomas Hunton, and be- tween them they added some very charming work to the south side of the Lady Chapel. The guides show you the rebuses of their names in the vault- ing ; the musical note called a " long " in a tun for " Langton," and a hen on a tun for Hunton. Next Fox, whose prior, Silkstede, was also a great improver of the Cathedral. The fine pulpit is his ; it has a skein of silk and a steed as his rebus. There is a chapel in the south transept called Silkstede's chapel, but it does not appear to have any work of his. But of Bishop Fox we have more to tell. We have already said there are two unique features in this Cathedral. Look at the screens at the sides of the choir, and the six mortuary chests upon them. It is the work of Bishop Fox. Cnut, and Queen Emma, and many early kings and bishops had been buried in the crypt by Bishop de Blois. Fox brought forth the bones, and put them together in these chests, and inscribed the names upon them, though he had found no names in the original resting-place. But even if he had been able to identify each skeleton, there WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL. 297 would be uncertainty enough now, for the Parlia- mentary soldiers are said to have dragged them forth in search of treasure. The second feature is the chantries. No other cathedral is half so rich in them. They are chapels built by bishops in their lifetime for their last resting- places. The first which meets us as we enter at the western door is Wykeham's, between the fourth and fifth nave pillars on the south side. Five " bays " farther on is Edyngdon's. The effigy of Wykeham, with flesh and robes coloured "proper," is accom- panied by the figures of three monks in prayer and some angels. It is startling to notice that the great builder-bishop has cut away more than a third of the two nave-pillars to make place for it. But he seems to have known what he was about, for there are no signs of breakage or displacement of the structure. There are seven of these chantries; the two finest are those of Beaufort and Fox. Beaufort, it will be remembered, is cruelly represented by Shakespeare as dying in despair, " Lord Cardinal, if thou think'st on Heaven's bliss Hold up thy hand : make signal of thy hope. He dies, and makes no sign ! " Beaufort's last will, signed two days before his death, breathes a humble and pious hope in the mercy of God through Christ. Able and politically wise as he was, no one can deny that he was ambitious and soifish. " One cannot," writes Dean Kitchin, " look at his effigy, as it lies in his stately chantry, 298 WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL. without noting the powerful and selfish characteristics of his face, and especially the nose, large, curved and money-loving. The sums Beaufort had at disposal were so enormous that he was the Rothschild of his day. More than once he lent his royal masters enough money to carry them through their expeditions." Good old Bishop Fox, able, wise, sweet of temper, and greatly beloved by the citizens and monks, was blind for ten years before his death, and was daily led into his chantry to meditate on the past and future, and to listen to the chant of the service. His chantry has no effigy, nor has Gardiner's, nor Orlton's, nor Lang- ton's. Gardiner had gone with King Henry in the first days of the Reformation, but had become alarmed by its course, and threw himself entirely into the work of Mary. But there seems good reason to believe that he died with a good deal of Lutheran theology in his soul. We cannot leave these chantries without noting that they contain the tombs of some of the noblest of England's benefactors Wykeham,the school founder ; Waynflete, the founder of Magdalen College, Oxford, and of other good works besides ; Fox, the founder of Corpus Christi ; and Beaufort, of the " House of Noble Poverty " at St. Cross. It is com- monly said that they were saved from destruction in the Civil War by the Parliamentarian captain, Fiennes, who was an old Wykehamist, and zealous on behalf of his Alma Mater. The royal dignity of Winchester waned as that of Westminster rose, but the city was much visited by monarclis all through the Middle Ages, and two royal marriages during that period were celebrated in the Cathedral. Henry IV. married Joan of Navarre there, apparently as an act of civility to Wykeham, whom his father had uniformly persecuted ; his name- sake, Henry I., had married Saxon Matilda there ; and there Philip of Spain married Queen Mary. The chronicle tells how, coming up from Southampton in 300 WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL. a storm, he was received at the three-arched doorway of the Deanery " dripping wet " ; and how there was a splendid procession through the western door on the nuptial day. Queen Mary's chair is one of the objects shown by the Cathedral guides. Sunt lacrymce rerum. No see can show so many bishops who were canonised ; none has had so many bishops who were also Lord Chancellors. There were eleven of them, the last being Wolsey. It must be confessed that the roll of post-Reformation bishops makes a sorry show as compared with their predecessors. Two worthy names are found in the seventeenth century : Lancelot Andrewes, who, however, is not buried here, but in St. Saviour's, Southwark, and George Morley. It was a characteristic of the reformed faith to bring the laity forward, and bishops were no longer the most prominent figures. As one walks through the aisles and ponders on the monuments of the later prelates, one sees history not obscurely written on the stones. Take Hoadly's wretched memorial, with the Magna Charta and the Bible engraved on it, the crozier and the cap of liberty. Another " terrible Whig preacher," but a mild and gentle nonentity, was Bishop Willis. His effigy is on the south wall, and there is a tale that the artist, having forgetfully turned the face westward instead of eastward, died straightway of grief. It is not true, for he lived many years after. A similar legend is told of several statues on horseback, how the sculptor committed WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL. 301 suicide because he had forgotten the stirrups. I have heard this myth of George IV.'s statue at Charing Cross, and of William III.'s at Petersfield. It is significant too that in the latest monuments there has been a return to recumbent figures. Those of the three last prelates have been a marked improve- ment on their predecessors', and partly for this reason, partly because of the Gothic revival, there has been this return. By far the most elaborate is Bishop Wilberforce's in the south transept. It has a fine canopy and rich ornament. The more reason for sorrow that the face is simply hideous through a flaw in the alabaster, looking as if it was seamed with scrofula, or disfigured by a great burn. It is much to be wished that the head may be removed and a fresh one substituted. We have only space to call attention to the flat stone close by which covers the remains of Izaak Walton, and bears a pretty inscrip- tion by his brother-in-law, Ken. Literature has another worthy name here, that of Jane Austen, and in the nave is buried Cowper's intimate friend, William Unwin. Making a tour through southern England, he was seized at Winchester with typhus fever, and died in 1786. Never had the Cathedral a more zealous or a more wise custodian than the present Dean, Dr. Kitchin. To his love of the venerable pile entrusted to his guardianship and to his reverent care of the memo- rials of its history, we are indebted for a noble work of restoration, The magnificent screen, begun by Beaufort and completed by '"'.' :> " Fox, is unsurpassed by any work of the kind. The central figure was, of course, a colossal crucifix, and in perpendicular niches, arranged in three tiers, were figures of saints, eighteen larger, and between thirty and forty smaller. These were all destroyed in the sixteenth century, and the Dean zealously undertook the task of restoring their ancient splendour. The great cross in the midst still remains blank. It will, we hope, before long, be filled with a figure of the Saviour, " reigning in glory from the tree," following the more ancient idea of avoiding the depiction of suffering. WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL. 303 The niches are all filled with figures, first of those saints who are the inheritance of the Church at large the Apostles and the four great doctors, Augustine, Gre- gory, Jerome, Ambrose. Then come worthies of the see, St. Birinus, the first bishop, standing beside the figure of the Virgin ; Swithun, patron saint of the church ; Benedict, the founder of the order to which the Priory belonged ; Giles, the hermit saint, who used to abide close by, but not in, the haunts of men, who gives his name to the tall hill just outside the city, where in mediaeval times a great annual fair brought much money to the monastery. The Queen gave the figure of Edward the Confessor ; the colleges those of the respective founders, whose names we have already mentioned ; the Dean gave King Alfred, who, it will be remembered, lies buried in the city, though the memory of the exact spot has been lost. Later times are not forgotten, for there are figures of Ken, Keble, and Walton. WILLIAM BENHAM. GLOUCESTER CATHEDRAL. GLOUCESTER CATHEDRAL. STRANGER gazing on the solemn beauty of Gloucester Cathedral, who knew noth- ing previously of its story, would hesi- tate before he called it a great Norman church. The lordly Perpendicular tower, if less vast than the mighty mid-tower of Lincoln that grandest of our English towers is certainly more graceful. The long line of Decorated windows looking into the college green, the huge choir window, the matchless Lady Chapel at the east end telling of the closing year of the fifteenth century all these prominent features would indicate rather a Perpendicular and Decorated than a Norman pile. Only, when the stranger began to look more closely into the details of the exterior of the great church, he would see signs of an older school of thought. When he examined the coronet of chapels surrounding the soaring choir, or marked the tall towers flanking the transept, " Surely," he would say, " the Norman builders have done these." But he would hesitate 308 GLOUCESTER CATHEDRAL. before pronouncing it a Norman church till he passed through the south porch, the principal entrance. Let us accompany him there. The porch itself is of Perpendicular architecture, rich with panelled tracery and sculptured figures. The great doors of the church are remarkable, much older evidently than the elaborate stone framework in which they are set. These doors are noble examples of Norman wood and iron work, coloured with that delicate and tender hue which only many centuries of use can give. The doors of the south porch rank high among the very ancient doors of England. The first impression of the nave changes all earlier thoughts of the age of the building. It is unmistak- ably Norman, grand beyond expression, but cold, severe, and deathly white. The stained glass (mostly modern) of the Norman and Decorated windows fails to supply the evident lack of colour. There was a time when lines of blue and scarlet and gold relieved the white vaulted roof, when altars agleam with colour and pale flickering lights gave light and brightness to the chill whiteness of this vast and mighty colonnade. On Sunday evenings, when the nave is filled with worshippers, and the bright searching daylight is replaced by the yellow gleam of the little tongues of fire above the great and massive arches, the want of colour is little felt, and the noble and severe beauty of the matchless Norman work in the great nave strikes the beholder. The nave of Gloucester, to be loved and admired as it CATHEDRAL FROM NOBTU-WEST. GLOUCESTER CATHEDRAL. 311 deserves, and as it appeared to men in the days of the Plantagenet kings, must be seen in one of the many crowded evening services. Save that the altars with their wealth of colour and light are gone, and the lines of colouring and the glint of gold of the Norinan wooden ceiling no longer is visible on the stone-vaulted roof above, and the south aisle Norman windows are replaced with exquisite Decorated work of the time of the second Edward, there is no great structural change since the day at the close of the eleventh century when Abbot Fulda from Shrewsbury preached his famous ser- mon to the Gloucester folk, the sermon in which he foretold the death of the imperious and cruel Rufus in words so plain, so unmistakable, that Abbot Serlo of Gloucester, who loved the great wicked king in spite of his many sins, was alarmed, and at once sent to warn his master, but in vain. Rufus disregarded the Gloucester note of alarm, and a few hours later the news of the King of England's bloody death, in the leafy glades of the New Forest, rang through Normandy and England. Yes, it is the same nave, only colder and whiter, on which Anselm, the saintly archbishop, and Rufusgazed ; the same avenue of massy pillars then scarcely finished through which Maud the Empress often went to her prayers with her chivalrous half-brother, Earl Robert. Beauclerc, her father, too, and some grey- haired survivors of Hastings must have looked on these huge columns crowned with their round arches which 3 i2 GLOUCESTER CATHEDRAL. excite our wonder to-day. They were a curious fancy of the architect of Serlo ; or was it not probably a design of a yet older artist of King Edward the Confessor ? These enormous round shafts, which are the peculiar feature of the nave of our storied abbey, have only once been repeated, probably by the same archi- tect, in the neighbouring abbey of Tewkesbury, a few years later. There is nothing like them on either side of the silver streak of sea. The Tewkesbury copies are slightly smaller ; otherwise they are exact repro- ductions of Gloucester. A solid and rather ugly stone screen closes the east end of the Norman nave. You pass through a small arch in the screen, and so beneath ths broad platform on which the great organ stands. Once a huge rood cross, or rather crucifix, filled up the space now tenanted by the organ. The vista has not gained by the substitution ; you stand now in another world of thought. The Norman and Roman- esque conception is replaced by a creation of two hundred and more years later. The choir on which you are now looking is very long not too long, however, for its great height for the fretted roof, a delicate mosaic of tender colours set in pale gold, soars high above the vaulting of the nave. The proportions are simply admirable. From the lofty traceried roof down to the elaborately tiled floor, the Avails are covered with richly carved panelled Avork, broken here and there with delicate screens of stone. The eastern end, hard by the high altar, is the home of several shrines, of which more anon. There is happily no lack of colour in this part of our Cathedral. The western end is furnished with sixty richly-carved canopied stalls of dark oak, mostly the handiwork of the fourteenth century. The curiously and elaboratelv fretted work of the roof we have 316 GLOUCESTER CATHEDRAL. already spoken of as a rich mosaic of gold and colours. The floor, if one dare breathe a criticism in this charmed building, is too bright and glisten- ing, but it is in its way varied and beautiful. The carving of the reredos, a work of our own day, is to the writer's mind open to criticism, but is still very fair, telling in every detail of loving work and true reverence. The whole of this, the loveliest choir in England, is lit by a mighty wall of jewelled glass behind the great golden reredos. This vast east window which floods the choir of Gloucester, beautiful as a dream, with its soft silvery light faintly coloured with jewelled shafts of the richest blue and red and here and there a vein of pale gold this vast window could not have been seen out of England or at least one of the grey and misty northern countries, where gleams of light or shafts of sunshine are exceedingly precious. In south or central Europe the effect of such a mighty window would be simply dazzling to the eye, would be painful from its excess of light. The master architect, who, it seems, in the Glou- cester cloister cells devised the aery fabric of the choir, knew how needful light was to reveal the love- liness of the panelled walls, that delicate veil of stone tracery. He had seen doubtless how the brightness of southern skies through comparatively little windows had illuminated the abbey churches of southern Ger- many, of Provence, Italy and Spain, Avith bright shafts of light, but he well knew that the pale blue of the GLOUCESTER CATHEDRAL. 319 skies of the Severn lands was very dim and light- less compared with the surpassing brilliancy of their heavens. Hence we explain the love of the English artist- monks for large windows. They would build their minsters, they would enrich them with curious fancies in stone and marble, they would furnish them with altars gleaming with dusky gold and ablaze with many colours, and to illumine these, they would admit all the light which they could draw from skies which were rarely of unclouded blue, which were, indeed, wellnigh always veiled with the soft grey hues of our island atmosphere. Never, as they planned their vast yet graceful windows, was there any danger of over-much light in their minster; there was no fear of the eyes being dazzled with excess of sunshine from English skies. This great east window is the largest painted Avindow in England the largest, the writer believes, in Europe. Its stone-work exceeds in size the magnificent east window of York Minster, which stands next to it. The respective measurements are, Gloucester, 72 feet high by 38 wide, York, 78 by 33 feet. The lower part of the centre compartments at Gloucester are not completely glazed, owing to the opening into the Lady Chapel. The glass of Gloucester is on the whole light- coloured, the designers being evidently anxious that the beautiful stone panels and screen work should be seen in all their exquisite details. The glass has suffered 320 GLOUCESTER CATHEDRAL. marvellously little from the ravages of weather and the fanaticism of revolutionary times ; the busy restorer, too, has dealt gently with it. There are 49 figures, and of these 37 are pronounced by our lynx-eyed experts to be absolutely genuine. Of the 18 armorial shields in the lower lights 13 are certainly the identical shields inserted by the survivors of Cressy. The whole of the gorgeous canopy work has been untouched. The subject of the paintings is the Coronation of the Virgin, and the figures consist of winged angels, apostles, saints, kings, and abbots. The coats of arms are those borne by King Edward III., the Black Prince, and their knightly companions, such as the Lords of Berkeley, Arundel, Pembroke, Warwick, Northampton, Talbot, and others who took part in the famous campaign in which occurred the battle of Cressy, and who in some degrees were connected with Gloucestershire. The window was in fact a memorial of the great English victory, and may fairly be termed the "Cressy" Avindow. While the stonework of this beautiful structure is of fully-developed Perpendicular, most curiously all the details of the glass are pure Decorated. The Perpendicular work in the choir was finished before A.D. 1350, and accordingly is a very early instance of this style ; our window, therefore, demonstrates that the development of the Perpendicular style took place at an earlier period among masons than it did among the craftsmen in stained glass. * >:sl"3M : GLOUCESTER CATHEDRAL. 323 The general scheme of colour is extremely delicate and beautiful. Pot metal and flashed ruby are only used for backgrounds, the whole of the figures and their canopies being in pearly white glass, with the drawing of the faces, drapery, and similar details in brown enamel, and some enrichments in silver stain varying from a lemon yellow to a deep orange. The drawing of draperies and of some of the faces, not a few, alas ! now sadly worn and scarred, is specially vigorous and effective. Extraordinary delicacy and precision of touch are to be seen in every line drawn by the glass painters of this window. In point of firmness and grace, one of our greatest critics in Greek art told me the work here reminded him of the drawing on the best painted vases of the Greeks. The white glass is of special beauty, when compared with that of modern times. Its luminous pearly look comes from the fact that the body of the glass is full of minute air bubbles, each of which catches the light, and then reflects it out from the interior of the glass, so that the glass is not only translucent, but is itself actually luminous with innumerable minute centres of radiation. The story of the gorgeous choir of Gloucester is a singular one. It seems as though the monks of Gloucester had long dreamed of beautifying and enriching their stern plain Norman church. Thoky, abbot in the days of Edward II., in the early years of the fourteenth century, evidently a great architect, perhaps began this scheme of ornamentation. The KINO OSKIC S TOMB FROM ALTAll STEPS. . . , . . _ . . . -T-*-^ KINO OSEIC'S TOMB FBOM AMBULATORY OF CHOIR. 326 GLOUCESTER CATHEDRAL. result of his labours is with us still. The stately Decorated windows which light the southern aisle are his. Men come from far to see his curiously beautiful work. Only a few days ago the most renowned of our living architects, who had seen these windows again and again, called my attention once more to their exceeding beauty. Abbot Thoky, however, had but slender means at his disposal, and his task in the south aisle took long years before it was finished. He was then an old man, but a strange incident, which had a great effect upon the fortunes of Gloucester, occurred just before the close of this blameless abbot's life. When Edward II. lay murdered in Berkeley Castle, some seventeen miles from Gloucester, the neighbouring religious houses of Bristol, Kingswood, and Malmesbury, dreading the vengeance of the dead king's widow Isabella, who had done her husband to death, declined to grant a sepulchre to the remains of the unhappy monarch. The brave old man who ruled in Gloucester had a stouter heart than the disloyal and time-serving abbots of these houses, and, caring nought for the anger of Isabella, Thoky boldly sent to Berkeley Castle and begged that the body of Edward might be laid to rest in his holy house of Gloucester. His prayer was granted, and, with all respect and honour, the dead king was buried in the abbey church. A few months later the wheel of fortune turned. Isabella was a captive. - The murdered king's son, the third Edward, was firmly seated on the throne, and GLOUCESTER CATHEDRAL. 329 all honour was paid the brave and loyal churchman who had given Christian burial to the discredited remains of the murdered Edward II. A stately tonib was erected by the new king, and, strange to relate, a stream of pilgrims to the royal tomb began to throng the old Norman minster. It was a strange cult this of the murdered sove- reign, and one hard to explain. It seems as though men in England felt that a curse lay on them, and on their homes and hearths, owing to their having suf- fered the Lord's anointed to be cruelly done to death in their midst. So thousands came and prayed at the dead king's shrine. Their offerings enriched the abbey coffers. Soon there was wealth enough, says the tradition, to have rebuilt the whole church from its very foundations. At all events, the desire of the monks to adorn their ancient home with new work could now be gratified. There is no doubt but that there existed among the Gloucester monks what we should now call a school of architecture. In this holy house undoubtedly was devised that favourite English form of Gothic usually known as Perpendicular. From the same school at Gloucester, too, issued later that beautiful form of vaulted roofs known as Fan- vaulting. When the stream of wealth began to flow in from the countless pilgrims to the tomb, Thoky was a very old man, too old to guide the new works he so earnestly desired to see completed, so he resigned the abbot's chair, and his friend Wygmore was chosen in his room. Wygmore deter- 330 GLOUCESTER CATHEDRAL. mined not to pull down but to remodel the whole of the great east limb of the abbey. He commenced in the south transept, and then proceeded with the choir. Roughly speaking, three great changes were carried out in the old buildings. The small Norman windows were replaced with vast Perpendicular ones. The mighty wall of stained glass at the east end of the choir, with its delicate tracery, was the crowning piece of this work. The roofs were stripped off, and the walls raised to a much greater height, and a new and elaborately carved stone vaulted ceiling covered the new work. Wygmore and his school loved a soar- ing choir. Over the old Norman wall, over the mas- sive rounded piers, over the low-browed round arches crowning the great piers, Wygmore so to speak flung a mighty stone veil of traceried panel-work. This is perhaps the best image to use when we speak of the strange transformation which the walls of the splendid choir of Gloucester underwent. Some call the " white stone veil" tossed over the old Nor- man wall and arches and piers, " applique work," others speak of it as a " veneer," others as though the new panels and pointed arches were nailed upon the old Avails ; but the " veil of stone " is the best and most vivid figure to employ. The south transept, with its great windows, its panel-work covering the whole surface of the Norman Avails, its graceful open screens, is regarded as the birthplace of Perpendicular architecture. Nor is it an improbable thought which ascribes the peculiar features of this specially CATHEHEAL FROM OX- BODY LANK. 334 GLOUCESTER CATHEDRAL. English form of Gothic to the special exigences of the work carried out by Wygmore and his successor, Abbot Horton. The panelling and tracery devised in the new work had to be carved on the old Norman walls and arches and pillars, and straight lines pecu- liarly adapted themselves to this service. The five principal historic tombs of Gloucester are in the choir. Three are on the right hand of the high altar, one is in the centre below the altar steps, and one on the left side, raised on a Perpendicular bracket of unusual workmanship. The canopied tomb, in the place of honour by the altar, is, as is usual, the rest- ing-place of the founder of the abbey, Osric the Woden-descended, the near kinsman of Penda and Ethelred, the Mercian kings. To this Osric belongs the high honour of having re-introduced Christianity into Gloucestershire and the neighbouring counties. Entrusted with the government of these districts, occupied by a West-Saxon people named the Hwiccii, Osric, about the year 681, displayed an extraordinary zeal in restoring the Christian religion. The West- Saxon invaders, under Ceawlin, about a hundred years before had swept away the Roman-British in- habitants, their cities, and their faith. This Osric, among other early foundations, built the first church and religious house at Gloucester. He subsequently became King of Northumbria, and, dying in A.D. 729, desired to be laid to rest in the abbey he had established. Through the varying fortunes of the monastery the remains of the founder GLOUCESTER CATHEDRAL. 337 were carefully preserved, although the place of their sepulture was changed more than once as the abbey was built and rebuilt. Guided by the words of Leland, the secretary of King Henry VIII., the writer of this study opened the founder's tomb, which was universally considered to be a mere cenotaph or memorial, and found the grey dust and bones of the ancient king in the spot indicated by Leland, in a coffin contained in the stone loculus by the high altar. The second of the choir tombs is in a line with that of Osric. It is a monument of rare beauty, with a singularly graceful Decorated canopy shadowing the noble alabaster effigy of the murdered Edward II. The beautiful face of the recumbent king was carved from a mask taken after death. Some thirty years ago doubts were entertained respecting the real place of sepulture of the unhappy Edward. Canon Jeune, afterwards Bishop of Peterborough, opened the paved floor hard by the slab on which the royal effigy rests, and found the enormous oaken chest which contained the body of the king. The corpse, doubtless embalmed, was carefully enveloped in folds of lead wrapped round and round. Many fragments of tarnished tinsel, the sad remains of the hasty lying in state arranged by Abbot Thoky, still adhered to the lead wrappings. The third is the chapel tomb of the last Abbot of Gloucester, Malvern. The little chantry is filled with quaint religious devices and armorial bearings. He was offered the bishopric of the see K 338 GLOUCESTER CATHEDRAL. by Henry VIII., but refused all gifts at the hands of the spoiler of his loved abbey, and died soon after the surrender of his monastery. In the centre of the choir pavement lies Robert Courthose, the Conqueror's eldest son, who expiated a wild and dissolute youth by his splendid deeds of gallantry and daring in the Great Crusade. In the famous holy Avar men said round the point of his lance ever played an unearthly fire. But his faults were sorely punished by his long captivity at Cardiff, lasting twenty weary years. He chose Gloucester Abbey as his last resting-place. The bracket tomb on the left, Leland tells us, marks the grave of Serlo, chaplain to the Conqueror, the first famous Norman abbot, who built the mighty nave, and to whose wise rule the house OAved all its later fame. Besides these renowned historic tombs there are many more monuments and slabs of marble and stone commemorating saintly abbots, knights, dames, doughty citizens, bishops who have lived since Henry VII I. 's day, judges, men of Avar, and others Avho, in the long line of centuries, have been judged worthy of a grave and memorial in the great abbey. The Lady Chapel of Gloucester Cathedral ranks high, if it does not stand first, among the " Mary " chapels of England. It was only finished a feAV years before the Reformation. Its exquisite charm, Avhich rough fanaticism and careless neglect have failed to spoil, tells us that the hand and brain of the monk-artist at the moment of his " passing" had not lost their cunning. Sadly disfigured, mutilated, ft 340 GLOUCESTER CATHEDRAL. defaced by the hands of Cromwell's rough soldiers, it seems in its pathetic scarred beauty, in its sweet, almost feminine loveliness to appeal more directly to the imagination than any other of the more stately portions of the proud church of the Severn lands, In my frequent wanderings through my loved Cathedral I hear more exclamations of wondering admiration uttered in the fair wreck of the exquisite Mary Chapel even than in the matchless choir. We are with infinite pains repairing the extensive ravages caused by the neglect of years, and in a comparatively short space of time this last fair effort of the sublime skill and perfect taste of the monk-architect Avill be safe, we hope, at least from wind and rain. Many have longed to restore the exquisite interior to something of its old dream-like loveliness. If what we long for so intensely should ever come to pass, then will Gloucester boast a triple glory. The stern and stately nave of Serlo, the Conqueror's chaplain, the gorgeous and magnificent choir of Wygmore, that matchless monument to a murdered king of England, and the Lady Chapel, the last sublime effort of the unrivalled genius of the monastic orders before they passed away. But alas! as yet (1893) our Lady Chapel is but a lovely ruin. We must not forget in this little fragment of a study on Gloucester Abbey, that beneath the eastern division of the church there lies another house of God, popularly called the crypt, more pro- perly the under-church. It has, as far as we kuow, CATHEDRAL FROM SOUTH-EAST. GLOUCESTER CATHEDRAL 345 never been used since 1541, the year of the dissolu- tion of the Benedictine house. It is stripped of all its sacred furniture, it is denuded of all gold and colouring. Its only beauty consists in the picturesque grouping of its short massy columns and low-browed arches, and its weird light, the light which is neither clear nor dark. But its chief glory is its memories. No scholar in archaeology would date this ancient under- church later than the last ten or fifteen years of the eleventh century. Not a few of us, for reasons well and care- fully thought out, consider it to have been the work of Edward the Confessor. Gloucester was one of his favourite residences. If the earlier and more pro- bable date be assumed, then in these gloomy aisles have worshipped the Confessor king and his court, half Saxon, half Norman ; here on these worn flags, beneath these sombre arches, have knelt and prayed Godwine and Harold, Gurth and Leofwine, Eustace and Tostig, Aldyth and Edith, the men and women who live in the eloquent pages of Lord Lytton's charming romance of " Harold," and in the graver story of Mr. Freeman's ponderous but absorbing history. As the mighty church rose above the foundation stories of this solemn undercroft, twice have the mas- sive arches bent beneath the weight laid upon them. Once in Norman days. Then the monk-builders strengthened the sinking work with a double row of low Norman pillars and strong double arches. Once 346 GLOUCESTER CATHEDRAL. more in the days of the third Edward. When the Perpendicular builders of Abbot Wygmore raised the walls of the soaring choir, and roofed it in with that mighty ceiling of fretted masonry, called in the old abbey chronicle the " magna volta," the crypt appeared to be in danger. To resist this new and enormous weight the monks built up on either side of the gloomy under- church two huge solid piers of stone. Their work was so well done that no sign of dangerous settlement has since appeared in this historic church of the Confessor, though nigh five centuries and a half have passed since the completion of the Perpendicular choir and of its " magna volta." Professor Freeman, whose memory still is green, not only in his own Oxford but in every country where English scholarship is valued, thus writes of what lies beneath the broad shadow of the superb house of God, the subject of this little study : " We cannot forget that here in Gloucester we have monastic buildings of admirable merit, externally far more preserved than it is usual to find them. At Gloucester we can see what a great Benedictine house was, far better than at Ely, or Norwich, or Peterborough. The cloister has no rival in its own class. ... Of the buildings on every side of the cloister the remains are neither few nor unimportant. The refectory of Abbot John de Fulda, the scene of royal feasting, has left fewer remains than any others, but enough sur- vives to give some notion of the design. Beyond it lay the more distant buildings of the monastery, the 348 GLOUCESTER CATHEDRAL. stately lodging of the abbot beyond a little stream now hidden, the second cloister and the graceful ruins of the infirmary. We come back to the cloister to mark to the west the quarters of the prior and of his successor, the dean, showing us a stage of architecture of which we have no exact specimen in the minster itself. To the east we have the slype, the dormitory, now the library, above, and the building of the greatest importance after the church itself, the chapter-house." One is tempted to linger among these buildings, some in ruins, some admirably preserved, with their many memories and their striking traditions, but we must pass on to the chapter-house. With the excep- tion of the apse at the east end, which has been changed by the Perpendicular builders of the fourteenth cen- tury, this great hall is of pure Norman work. Its exact date is uncertain ; much of it is of the eleventh century. In this chamber William the Conqueror on several occasions wore his " crowned helm," and pre- sided over his barons at the Christmas feast. It requires no vivid imagination to think of the mighty Norman who changed the whole course of the story of England sitting in this vast simple hall, little changed during the eight subsequent centuries, with his mighty men of war, the half-brothers Odo of Bayeux and Robert de Mortain, William Fitzosborne, Roger de Montgommeri, Geoffrey de Mowbrai, Roger Bigod, Gundulf of Rochester the architect-bishop, and the trusted counsellor, Lanfranc of Canterbury. GLOUCESTER CATHEDRAL. 351 Household words with many of us ! On one occa- sion King William in this same storied room held deep speech with his Witan, and arranged for the compilation of Domesday Book. This chapter-house has indeed been the scene of many a memorable incident writ large in English history. The Commons sat here in the memorable Parliament of Gloucester under King Richard II. Beneath the floor of the chapter-house lie buried several of the great Norman nobles who stood high in William's confidence. On the west side are still the stains of the great fire which destroyed the original Norman cloister, which was probably entirely con- structed of wood. The cloister we see to-day is comparatively of late work, and dates only from the days of Edward III. and Richard II. It is the most lovely cloistered walk in England, perhaps in Europe, and its old beauty is little changed for the Averse by the wear and tear of centuries. It is the earliest example known of fan-tracery vaulting ; and, as has been said, it is one of the titles to honour of the monk- architects of Gloucester that they first devised this exquisite and peculiarly English form of ceiling. H. DONALD M. SPENCE. LONDON : PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, DUKE STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.E., AND GREAT WINDMILL STREET. W. v.l THE LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW. Series 9482 3 1205 00579 6824 ill !