Gray Days and Gold in England and ScotlandWinter, William
General
Gray Days and Gold in England and Scotland
Winter, William
Great Britain -- Description and travel; Literary landmarks -- Great Britain
There are five churches in the immediate neighbourhood of Bosworth
Field, all of which were in one way or another associated with that
memorable battle. Ratcliffe Culey church has a low square tower and
a short stone spire, and there is herbage growing upon its tower and
its roof. It is a building of the fourteenth century, one mark of this
period being its perpendicular stone font, an octagon in shape, and
much frayed by time. In three arches of its chancel, on the south side,
the sculpture shows tri-foliated forms, of exceptional beauty. In the
east window there are fragments of old glass, rich in colour and quaint
and singular. The churchyard is full of odd gravestones, various in
shape and irregular in position. An ugly slate-stone is much used in
Leicestershire for monuments to the dead. Most of those stones record
modern burials, the older graves being unmarked. The grass grows thick
and dense all over the churchyard. Upon the church walls are several
fine specimens of those mysterious ray and circle marks which have long
been a puzzle to the archæological explorer. Such marks are usually
found in the last bay but one, on the south side of the nave, toward
the west end of the church. On Ratcliffe Culey church they consist
of central points with radial lines, like a star, but these are not
enclosed, as often happens, with circle lines. Various theories have
been advanced by antiquarians to account for these designs. Probably
those marks were cut upon the churches, by the pious monks of old, as
emblems of eternity and of the Sun of Righteousness.
Shenton Hall (1629), long and still the seat of the Woollastons, stood
directly in the path of the combatants at Bosworth Field, and the
fury of the battle must have raged all around it. The Hall has been
recased, and, except for its old gatehouse and semi-octagon bays, which
are of the Tudor style, it presents a modern aspect. Its windows open
toward Radmore heath and Ambien Hill, the scene of the conflict between
the Red Rose and the White. The church has been entirely rebuilt,--a
handsome edifice, of crucial form, containing costly pews of old
oak, together with interesting brasses and busts, taken from the old
church which it has replaced. The brasses commemorate Richard Coate
and Joyce his wife, and Richard Everard and his wife, and are dated
1556, 1597, and 1616. The busts are of white marble, dated 1666, and
are commemorative of William Woollaston and his wife, once lord and
lady of the manor of Shenton. It was the rule, in building churches,
that one end should face to the east and the other to the west, but
you frequently find an old church that is set at a slightly different
angle,--that, namely, at which the sun arose on the birthday of the
saint to whom the church was dedicated. The style of large east and
west windows, with trefoil or other ornamentation in the heads of the
arches, came into vogue about the time of Edward the First.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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