Cathedrals -- England; England -- Description and travel
The church of St Mary of Great Chart is not mentioned in the Domesday
Survey, but that a church existed here in the twelfth century is
certain, for even in the present building we have evidences of Norman
work, for instance in the walling of the south chapel, and in the
vestry doorway. According to the Rev. G.M. Livett, [Footnote: K.A.S.
26.] the Norman nave was as long as that we have, which is built in
all probability on its foundation. The aisleless Norman church,
however, had a central tower to the east of the present chancel arch
and transepts, as well as a chancel. This church appears to have stood
till the fourteenth century, when it was entirely rebuilt and
reclaimed, and all the lower part of the present church built, to be
heightened and lengthened at the end of the fifteenth century when the
clerestory and the chancel arcade were built, a new aisle wall set up
on the north and the south aisle raised, the rood loft built or
rebuilt.
We are reminded of all this history by the fine altar tomb in the
north chapel where lie William Goldwell and Alice his wife (d. 1485).
Their son James was Vicar of Great Chart in 1458, and became Bishop of
Norwich in 1472, when he obtained from the Pope "an indulgence in aid
of the restoration of Great Chart church which had been damaged by
fire." Here is the cause and the source of the fifteenth century
alterations and the church we see. The brasses in the church are also
interesting. Many of them commemorate the Tokes of Godinton, who
founded the almshouse in the village, which, rebuilt more than once I
think, we still see. All these things and more than these the great
yew in the churchyard has seen as its shadow grew over the graves.
From Great Chart I went on through the spring sunshine across the
Weald to Bethersden, whose quarries have supplied so much of the grey
marble one finds in Kentish churches, in the monuments and effigies
and in the old manor houses in the carved chimney-pieces fair to see.
These quarries are now all but deserted, but of old they were the most
famous in Kent, which is poor in such things. Most of the stone for
the cathedrals and greater religious houses in the county came from
Caen, whence it was easily transported by water; but this stone not
only weathered badly, but was too friable for monumental effigies or
sculpture. For these harder stone was needed, resembling marble, and
this Bethersden supplied, as we may see, in the Cathedrals of
Canterbury and Rochester and especially at Hythe where the chancel
arcade is entirely built of it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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