England, Picturesque and Descriptive: A Reminiscence of Foreign TravelCook, Joel
History
England, Picturesque and Descriptive: A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel
Cook, Joel
England -- Description and travel
destroyed at the Reformation: some fragments have been since discovered,
and the shrine thus reproduced with tolerable completeness. On the side
of the chapel is a wooden gallery, with cupboards beneath and a
staircase leading up to it. In the shrine and cupboards were the abbey
treasures, and in the gallery the monks kept watch at night lest they
should be despoiled. This vigilance, we are told, was necessary, for
rival abbeys were by no means scrupulous about the means by which they
augmented their stores of relics. This quaint gallery, still preserved,
is five hundred years old. Near the shrine is the tomb of Duke Humphrey
of Gloucester, brother of King Henry V. and regent during the minority
of Henry VI., who was assassinated at Windsor. The tomb was opened in
1703, and the skeleton found buried among spices and enclosed in two
coffins, the outer of lead. The vault remained opened, and visitors
purloined good Humphrey's bones till nearly all had disappeared, when
the authorities concluded it was better to close up the vault and save
what remained. The massive gatehouse, which still exists, was built in
Richard II.'s reign, and was used for a jail until not long ago they
determined to put a school there. In front of it the martyr Tankerfield
was burnt, and buried in 1555 in a little triangular graveyard which
still exists. Fox, in his _Book of Martyrs_, relates that he endured the
pain with great constancy, and testified to the last against the errors
of his persecutors.
[Illustration: THE SHRINE AND WATCHING-GALLERY.]
[Illustration: CLOCK-TOWER, ST. ALBANS.]
[Illustration: BARNARD'S HEATH.]
In the town of St. Albans, near the abbey and at the junction of two
streets, stands the ancient clock-tower, built in the early part of the
fifteenth century, and mainly of flint. It occupies the site of an
earlier one said to have been erected by two ladies of Verulam, who,
wandering alone in the woods and becoming lost, saw a light in a house,
sought refuge there, and erected the tower on the site as a memorial of
their deliverance. The bell in this tower was in former days used to
ring the curfew. The town itself has little to show. In the church of
St. Peter, among the monumental brasses, is the one to a priest often
quoted, that reads:
"Lo, all that here I spent, that some time had I;
All that I gave in good intent, that now have I;
That I neither gave nor lent, that now abie[A] I;
That I kept till I went, that lost I."
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