Cathedrals -- England; England -- Description and travel
But apart from its architecture the church is full of interest. Where
can we find anything to match the exquisite iron screen of the eleventh
century which used to guard St Swithin's shrine but which, now that is
gone, covers the north-west doorway of the nave? Is there another font
in England more wonderful than that square black marble basin
sculptured in the twelfth century with the story of St Nicholas? Is
there any series of chantries in England more complete or more lovely
than these at Winchester, or anywhere a finer fourteenth century
monument than that of Bishop Wykeham? Nowhere in England certainly can
the glorious choir stalls be matched, nor shall we easily find a pulpit
to surpass that in the choir here dating from 1520. If the restored
retablo over the high altar is disappointing in its sophistication,
we have only to pass into the Feretory to discover certain marvellous
fragments of the original reredos which are so beautiful that they take
away our breath--that broken statue of the Madonna and Child, for
instance, perhaps the loveliest piece of fourteenth century sculpture
to be found in England. No, however we consider the great church of
Winchester, it stands alone. As a mere building it is more tremendous
and more venerable than anything now left to us upon English soil; as a
burial place it possesses the dust not only of the Apostle of the heart
of England but of the greatest of the Saxon kings, while beneath its
mighty vault William Rufus sleeps, the only Norman king that lies in
England. And as a shrine of art it still possesses incomparable things.
It stands there as the Pyramids stand in the desert, a relic of a lost
civilisation; but by it we may measure the modern world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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