Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln: A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval EnglandMarson, Charles L. (Charles Latimer)
History
Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln: A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England
Marson, Charles L. (Charles Latimer)
Hugh, of Lincoln, Saint, 1140-1200
The church itself is the best comment upon this somewhat obscure
account, and it may be briefly divided into Pre-Hugonian, Hugonian, and
Post-Hugonian parts. The first, the Norman centre of the west facade,
does not concern us, except that its lovely face often looked down upon
the great bishop in his dark or tawny cloak trimmed with white lambs'
wool, which hid his hair shirt. Except for this Norman work and the
Norman font, it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the whole is
by or for Hugh, for his shrine, his influence, and his example,
completed what his work, and his plans, never dreamed about. Yet these
last are responsible for much. He built a cruciform church, beginning
with the entrance to the choir, with the aisles on either side. The
chapels of St. Edward Martyr and St. James{24} form the base or step of
the cross. The east transept, with all chapels adjoining, the
choristers' vestry, antevestry, dean's or medicine chapel, with its
lovely door and the cupboards in the now floorless room above it, the
vaulted passage and chamber adjoining, are all his. So are, possibly,
the matchless iron screens between the two choirs (topped with modern
trumpery). South-east of the Medicine Chapel is one of St. Hugh's great
mystic columns, and there are a pair of them. Where the Angel Choir now
lifts its most graceful form and just behind the high altar, rose the
semi-hexagonal east end, the opened honeycomb, where most fitly was
placed the altar of St. John Baptist. It was somewhere in the walls of
this forehead that the original bishop's eye and dean's eye were once
fixed, possibly in the rounded eye sockets which once stood where Bishop
Wordsworth and Dean Butler are now buried.{25}
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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