The Channel IslandsMorris, Joseph E. (Joseph Ernest)
History
The Channel Islands
Morris, Joseph E. (Joseph Ernest)
Channel Islands
Most of the interest of Jersey, however, except its fields of giant
cabbage-stalks, and its green lanes of quaint little pollarded trees,
will probably be found on the sea-coast, or near it. Let us, from Mont
Orgueil, set our faces to the west, calling, on our way towards
modern St. Helier, at the two ancient parish churches of Grouville and
St. Clement's. In Grouville churchyard are buried seven soldiers who
fell in a skirmish with a detachment of the French who had been left
behind by Rullecourt, when he landed on this spot and advanced on St.
Helier on January 6, 1781. Grouville church itself has little
interest. Like other churches in the island, it is built of granite,
and has windows with good Flamboyant tracery, except where this last
has been cut away for the insertion of ugly "church-warden" sashes. It
possesses, however, in the south wall of the south chapel, a very
curious feature, the object of which is obscure. This is a niche on
the level of the floor, with a late segmental head, and with what
seems a broken cavity in the lower part at the back. I do not know
whether this was once used as an oven for baking the sacramental
wafer, such as those that are sometimes thought to have been found in
the Surrey churches of Limpsfield, Nutfield, and Dunsfold. St.
Clement's, a mile to the south, and lying off the direct road to St.
Helier, should be visited for the sake of its ancient wall-paintings.
One of these exhibits St. Michael; another St. Margaret of Antioch,
emerging from the body of the dragon, who had vainly tried to swallow
her; and another St. Barbara of Heliopolis, standing near her tower.
Still more interesting are the scanty relics of the "Trois Vifs" and
the "Trois Morts"--the legend of the three Kings, who, when hunting in
the forest, were suddenly confronted by three open graves, or by three
hideous skeletons. The classical instance of this morality is in the
Campo Santo at Pisa; and there is another fine example, in a kind of
vestry, on the south side of the great abbey-church of St. Riquier,
near Abbeville. It was altogether rather a favourite subject with
medieval, religious artists, not less than twenty-three examples being
recorded in England by Mr. Keyser, as well as one at Ste. Marie du
Chastel, in Guernsey. It must not be confounded with the parallel
"Dance of Death," of which there are only five recorded instances, in
addition to the one at old St. Paul's. There is still a grand example
of this last on the back of the north choir stalls, in the strange old
abbey-church of La Chaise Dieu, in Central France.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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