How to Visit the English CathedralsSingleton, Esther
History
How to Visit the English Cathedrals
Singleton, Esther
Cathedrals -- England
The =South Porch= is the principal entrance. It is the work of Morwent
(1421-1437). Over the doorway stand St. Peter and St. Paul and the four
Evangelists, and below them are King Osric and Abbot Serlo, the founders
of the Abbey church. In the niches of the buttress stand St. Jerome, St.
Ambrose, St. Augustine and St. Gregory. The windows of this porch have
been formed by piercing the tracery of the inside. Over the porch is an
unfinished parvis. The doors date from the Fifteenth Century.
We now enter the =Nave=.
“The first impression of the nave changes all earlier thoughts of
the age of the building. It is unmistakably 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 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
Norman wooden ceiling no longer are 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 sermon 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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