Stained Glass Tours in EnglandSherrill, Charles Hitchcock
History
Stained Glass Tours in England
Sherrill, Charles Hitchcock
Cathedrals -- England; England -- Description and travel; Glass painting and staining -- England
We seem to see Alfred the Great and his tutor St. Swithin; King Canute,
whose imperious sway stopped only at controlling the tide; William of
Wykeham, the great builder of cathedrals, churches and colleges; Jane
Austen, friend of us all; the gentle Isaac Walton, and many another.
Shades and visions of shades! Nay, even the lovely New Forest through
which we are travelling seems peopled with ghosts from homes destroyed
to provide space for it by the ruthless Norman conqueror William--ghosts
that old legends say winged the arrow that here slew his son William
Rufus. And is not Winchester itself the ghost of the kingly capitals it
has been--the Saxon capital of Alfred, who here wrote the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle; the Danish capital of Canute, whose sway extended far out
over Scandinavia; the Norman capital of William ruling both sides of the
Channel? In harmony with this weird ghostliness is a strange story that
has to do with the building of the cathedral. William's Bishop,
Walkelin, received a grant from his royal master of all the wood that he
could cut from the forest of Hannepings during the space of four days.
When William rode forth to see how much had been removed for the
purposes of the new building, he at first thought magic had been
invoked, for lo! the entire forest was gone! The only magic used proved
to be the great energy shown by the Bishop in collecting such a horde of
workmen as to perform this tremendous feat in so short a time.
Stately and impressive as is the long grey cathedral, and pregnant as
are its memories, there are others in Winchester equally potent to
conjure up the distant past, for in the County Hall we shall see
suspended against the wall the Table Round of King Arthur and his
knights. Tennyson, in his description of King Arthur's Hall, shows
himself a stout advocate of how glorious a part stained glass can play
in a scheme of decoration. He says:
"And, brother, had you known our hall within,
Broader and higher than any in all the lands!
Where twelve great windows blazon Arthur's wars
And all the light that falls upon the board
Streams thro' the twelve great battles of our King.
Nay, one there is, and at the eastern end,
Wealthy with wandering lines of mount and mere
Where Arthur finds the brand Excalibur."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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