Northumberland Yesterday and To-dayTerry, Jean F. (Jean Finlay)
History
Northumberland Yesterday and To-day
Terry, Jean F. (Jean Finlay)
Northumberland (England) -- Guidebooks; Northumberland (England) -- History
Other treasures of the Abbey are the beautiful Old Rood Screen,
dating from the end of the fifteenth or beginning of the sixteenth
century; some wonderful old paintings, especially the portraits of
the early Bishops of Hexham, Alcmund, Wilfrid, Acca, Eata,
Frithbert, Cuthbert, and John, which date from the fifteenth
century; the mediaeval carved and painted pulpit, and the tomb of
good King Alfwald of Northumbria. Many of the stones used by
Wilfrid’s builders were of Roman workmanship, and seem to have come
from the Roman city of Corstopitum, at Corbridge. An inscription on
one of these old stones in the crypt takes us back some centuries
before even Wilfrid’s time, for it commemorates the Emperor Severus
and his two sons, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (Caracalla) and Publius
Septimius Geta, and has the name of the latter erased, as was done
on all similar inscriptions throughout the Empire, by order of the
inhuman Caracalla, after his murder of his brother.
A very interesting feature of the building is the stone stairway in
the South transept, by which the monks ascended to their
dormitories above.
Quite near to the Abbey, at the other side of the Market Place, the
ancient Moot Hall claims attention. The modern visitor to the old
town walks beneath the gloomy archway, with its time-worn stones,
which forms the basement over which the Moot Hall stands. Another
building, grim and dark, near at hand, is the Old Manor House, in
which the business connected with the ancient Manor of Hexham was
transacted.
An old foundation in the town was the Queen Elizabeth Grammar
School, which, after having fallen into desuetude for many years,
has been revived in a form appropriate to modern needs, and housed
in a worthy building, formally opened by Sir Francis Blake on
November 2nd, 1910. The site on which the new Grammar School of
Queen Elizabeth stands is one of the finest in the county,
commanding, as it does, an uninterrupted view of the river valley
for some distance, and of the rising ground beyond.
At the beginning of last century, Hexham was famed for its
glove-making: but that industry has forsaken the town for many
years. Now, Hexham is surrounded by acres of market-gardens, from
which the produce of Tynedale is carried far and wide.
The spacious stretch of level meadow-land below Hexham, rising
gradually up to the swelling ridges beyond, is said to have been
the scene which John Martin had in mind when he painted the “Plains
of Heaven”; though the level reaches above Newburn, unencumbered
with buildings in John Martin’s time, and then a scene of quiet
pastoral beauty, also claim that honour.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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