How to Visit the English CathedralsSingleton, Esther
History
How to Visit the English Cathedrals
Singleton, Esther
Cathedrals -- England
Of the Nave windows none remain entire. The great =West Window= is made up
of fragments from the others. It contains the arms of Richard II.
impaling the Confessor’s; and those of Anne of Bohemia (north); and
Isabella of France (south).
The beautifully carved =Screen= of solid stone, separating the Nave from
the Choir, was placed there in the Fifteenth Century. Of the six crowned
figures in the lower niches, the one holding the church is supposed to
be Ethelbert; and the one on the extreme right, Richard II. The figures
of Christ and the Twelve Apostles, which filled the thirteen mitred
niches around the arch, were destroyed by “Blue Dick” and his
companions. A staircase leads to the top of the Screen.
Another Screen partly fills the space between the two western piers of
the central, or Angel, Tower.
“The piers which support the central tower are probably the
original piers of Lanfranc’s erection, cased with Perpendicular
work by Prior Chillenden at the same time with the building of the
nave. To this Prior Goldstone II. (1495-1517) added the vaulting of
the tower, and all the portion above the roof, together with the
remarkable buttressing-arches supporting the piers below, which had
perhaps shown some signs of weakness. These arches have on them
the Prior’s rebus, a shield with three golden bars, or stones. The
central arch occupies the place of the ancient roodloft, and
probably the great rood was placed on it until the
Reformation.”--(R. J. K.)
The =Choir= of five bays shows the earliest instance of the Pointed Arch
in England and groining on a large scale. The clerestory of the Choir is
filled with windows representing the genealogy of the Saviour. The
carvings on the stalls are said to be by Grinling Gibbons.
In 1096, Prior Ernulf began a longer and wider Choir than originally
existed; and this was dedicated in 1114, before he left Canterbury to
become Bishop of Rochester. Prior Conrad, his successor, finished the
decoration of it and “the glorious Choir of Conrad,” as it was somewhat
unjustly called, was consecrated in 1130. In 1174 it was destroyed by
fire to the great distress of everybody. All that remains is a portion
of the pavement consisting of large slabs of “stone or veined marble of
a delicate brown colour,” between the two Transepts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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