After being lost for half a century, the seal of the Corporation of
Worcester has been found at Rouen, in Normandy. The antiquity of this
seal is not so curious, perhaps, as the locality where it has been
found. The device is a church, surrounded by a wall, having battlements
on it, and round the device is the inscription--"SIGILLUM COMMUNE
CIUIVM WIGORNIE," with something like the date "952." The figures,
however, are very indistinct, though it is supposed by a writer in the
"Worcester Herald" that they may refer to the date of King Edgar's
reign, who was a great friend to the city of Worcester, and might
have fortified it about that era; but then the use of figures was not
adopted in England, or in Europe generally, till some centuries after
the date assigned.
DESTROYING AN IMAGE AT WORCESTER.
In Macaulay's "History of England," vol. iv, p. 461, it is stated, that
when the Dutch army was marching from Torbay towards London, in 1688,
Sir Edward Harley, of Brampton Brian, and his son Robert (afterwards,
as Earl of Oxford, Queen Anne's minister, and a high churchman)
declared for the Prince of Orange and a free parliament, raised a large
body of horse, took possession of Worcester, and evinced their zeal
against Popery by publicly breaking to pieces, in the High Street, a
piece of sculpture which, to rigid precisians, seemed idolatrous.
EAST WINDOW OF ST. JOHN'S CHURCH.
"A Stranger," writing to one of the local newspapers a few months ago,
drew the attention of antiquaries to some painted glass in the great
east window of the above church which is not noticed by Dr. Nash or
Mr. Green, the Worcester historians. There is (he says) a head with
long flowing hair and a forked beard, and another head with the face
close shaven and a coronet. The first of these, I should suggest, was
painted in the reign of Richard II; on his tomb in Westminster Abbey
there is his effigy with a forked beard; and on the tomb of Edward III,
in the same place, his effigy has the long flowing hair. The head with
the coronet is exactly like one in the great church in Cirencester,
of which there is a coloured engraving in Mr. Lyson's Gloucestershire
Antiquities: that is supposed to be the head of Edward IV's father,
whose "feodary" (an official something between an English steward and
an Irish middleman), built this part of the church. Dr. Nash mentions
two circumstances connected with St. John's which coincide with these
dates. He says that in 1371, only six years before the reign of Richard
II, William de Lynne, Bishop of Worcester, suppressed the Chapel of
Wyke and constituted St. John's a vicarage; and that in the first
year of the reign of Edward IV, the Prior of Worcester granted to the
Corporation the privilege of attending Divine service at the Cathedral
with their officers, but if any officer should arrest, or do any act
in the monastery sanctuary, _or St. John's_, he should "forfeit his
mace and office without any hopes of restitution." This grant is
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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