The Armourer's PrenticesYonge, Charlotte M. (Charlotte Mary)
History
The Armourer's Prentices
Yonge, Charlotte M. (Charlotte Mary)
Great Britain -- History -- Henry VIII, 1509-1547 -- Fiction
Again the unwilling Stephen had to submit. There was no feeling for the
incongruous in those days, and reverence took very different directions
from those in which it now shows itself, so that nobody had any
objection to Spring’s pacing gravely with the others towards the Lady
Chapel, where the Hours were sung, since the Choir was in the hands of
workmen, and the sound of chipping stone could be heard from it, where
Bishop Fox’s elaborate lace-work reredos was in course of erection.
Passing the shrine of St. Swithun, and the grand tomb of Cardinal
Beaufort, where his life-coloured effigy filled the boys with wonder,
they followed their leader’s example, and knelt within the Lady Chapel,
while the brief Latin service for the ninth hour was sung through by
the canon, clerks, and boys. It really was the Sixth, but cumulative
easy-going treatment of the Breviary had made this the usual time for
it, as the name of noon still testifies. The boys’ attention, it must
be confessed, was chiefly expended on the wonderful miracles of the
Blessed Virgin in fresco on the walls of the chapel, all tending to
prove that here was hope for those who said their Ave in any extremity
of fire or flood.
Nones ended, Father Shoveller, with many a halt for greeting or for
gossip, took the lads up the hill towards the wide fortified space
where the old Castle and royal Hall of Henry of Winchester looked down
on the city, and after some friendly passages with the warder at the
gate, Father Shoveller explained that he was in quest of some one
recently come from court, of whom the striplings in his company could
make inquiry concerning a kinsman in the household of my Lord
Archbishop of York. The warder scratched his head, and bethinking
himself that Eastcheap Jockey was the reverend. Father’s man, summoned
a horse-boy to call that worthy.
“Where was he?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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