Tales of English Minsters: HerefordGrierson, Elizabeth W. (Elizabeth Wilson)
History
Tales of English Minsters: Hereford
Grierson, Elizabeth W. (Elizabeth Wilson)
Hereford Cathedral
It was not only with the English Barons that the Bishop had
differences, he had them with the Pope himself, when he thought that
the rights of the Church of England were being tampered with; and
it was when he was returning from Rome after having been to the Pope
about one of those differences, that he died in Italy, on August 25,
1282.
Illustration: _Photochrom Co., Ltd._
HEREFORD CATHEDRAL: TOMB OF BISHOP CANTILUPE.
His desire was that his bones should be laid to rest in his own
Cathedral Church in far-away England, so, as it was an almost
impossible task to convey a dead body across Europe in those days,
do you know what his followers did? They _boiled_ his body, until
the flesh separated from the bones; then they buried the flesh in
the Church of St. Severus near Florence, and the bones, which were
now quite easy to carry, they brought to Hereford, and buried them
in the Lady-chapel. They were afterwards removed to a little chapel
known as the Chapel of St. Catherine, and at last this beautiful
shrine was prepared for them, and they were placed inside.
Not very far from the shrine of Thomas de Cantilupe, on the east wall
of the transept, there are two tablets, one above the other, which
I think you would like to look at, for they tell a very curious and
pathetic story.
As you see, they have both been placed there in memory of the same
man, Captain Arkwright, but not at the same time. For if you read the
inscriptions you will see that one of them is thirty-one years older
than the other.
Captain Arkwright was a young soldier who was very fond of
Alpine-climbing; and on October 13, 1866, he set out to try to ascend
Mont Blanc. He never returned, for he was caught in an avalanche, and
swept away out of sight. Although careful search was made, his body
could not be found, and after a time all hope of ever finding it was
given up, and this topmost tablet was erected to his memory.
Thirty-one years passed by, and those of his friends who were alive
had become elderly men and women, and I suppose his memory had grown
a little dim to them, when strange news came from the little village
of Chamonix, which lies at the foot of the great White Mountain.
You all know what a glacier is? A river of ice which moves very very
slowly down the side of a snow mountain, but which comes at last to
the region where the air is so warm that it melts, and runs away down
into the valley in a torrent of muddy water.
Well, Captain Arkwright’s body had been swept by the avalanche into
a deep crevasse, or ‘crack’ in one of these glaciers, and all these
years it had been moving, encased in ice, slowly down the mountain,
until, on August 23, 1897, it appeared at the foot of the glacier
near Chamonix, in a perfect state of preservation, just as it was on
the day when he was killed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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