Royal Winchester: Wanderings in and about the Ancient Capital of EnglandL'Estrange, A. G. K. (Alfred Guy Kingan)
History
Royal Winchester: Wanderings in and about the Ancient Capital of England
L'Estrange, A. G. K. (Alfred Guy Kingan)
Winchester (England) -- Description and travel
[Sidenote: Fox’s Chantry.]
We now come to Fox’s Chantry, and admire the diversified stone carving
of the exterior. It is most refined and in the best taste, while the
figure of Death stretched beneath it is in the worst, and reminds us of
the skull and cross-bones, with which headstones were formerly adorned.
We enter, and think we can see the dark ascetic bishop kneeling in
his little stone study, for hither when blind, in his old age, he
was led daily for prayer. His memory will ever be cherished lovingly
here, and in Oxford, where he founded Corpus Christi College. Through
this chantry, we reach the Feretory (from _feretra_, biers). Here, in
ancient times, the gold and silver shrines of Birinus, Swithun, and
other saints, the head of St. Just, and one of the feet of St. Philip,
stood upon a platform higher than the present one, and reflected a
holy light upon the worshippers in the choir. The contents of the
feretory are now not so brilliant, though interesting. Here lies a
prostrate giant--a figure of Bishop Edington--which was once perched
up over the west front, but becoming dilapidated, was replaced by that
of Wykeham. Here is the lid, or side of a reliquary chest (1309) with
sacred subjects painted on its panels. The other remains are melancholy
to behold, heads and portions of the bodies of statues found about the
Cathedral.
“It looks like an old curiosity shop, or a sculptor’s studio,” observed
Miss Hertford.
“And it reminds me,” chimed in her father, “of a story I heard about
some country labourers, who had been visiting the British Museum. When
asked how they liked it, they said, ‘Very much, but some had no arms,
some had no legs, and some had no heads. The butler, however, was very
kind, and told us it was intended to represent a railway accident.’”
On the other side of this feretory is Gardiner’s Chantry. He is
generally associated in our minds with fire and faggot, but when we
first read of him, he was a young man at Paris, chiefly remarkable for
his skill in mixing salads. How unfortunate that he did not confine
himself to this cooler occupation!--he would at least have received
the blessings of epicures. Why should we recall the ghastly past?
Gardiner’s violent Catholicism was partly from jealousy of Cranmer. Had
he been made archbishop, he might have been a reformer; for there was
a time when he was in Rome brow-beating the Pope, on behalf of Anne
Boleyn.
[Sidenote: Death’s Effigy.]
The only good act the rebels did in the Cathedral was done here; they
knocked the head off the wretched figure of Death, which had been
placed, I suppose, as a companion in misery for that in Fox’s Chantry
opposite. Perhaps the poet Young, had these scarecrows, which he knew
well, in his mind, when he wrote--
“Who can take
Death’s portrait true? The tyrant never sat.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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