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Tales of English Minsters: Hereford

Now that we have learned all about its history, let us enter the Cathedral and look what it is like inside. As you see, it is built of red stone, in the form of a cross, the choir being separated from the nave by a curious screen, which is made of four metals—iron, copper, brass, and bronze. The nave is very grand and stately, with rows of massive Norman pillars and beautifully carved arches. Although St. Ethelbert’s shrine no longer exists, if we go into the choir we can see the place where it stood—here, in this arch, between the two pillars nearest the altar on our right-hand side as we face it. A statue of the murdered King has been placed, as you see, on a pedestal, close to one of the pillars, and here, on the floor, in front of the altar, is a circular slab of marble, on which is traced a representation of his murder. But if we cannot visit St. Ethelbert’s shrine, we can visit another, which is six hundred years old, and which was erected to hold the bones of a very celebrated Bishop of Hereford, who was such a good man, that, after his death, people thought he deserved the name of Saint;—Thomas de Cantilupe. It stands in the north transept, and is just a great marble chest, with what looks like another ‘openwork’ chest, also of marble, above it. Round the sides of the lower chest a great many figures are carved, and if we look at them closely we shall see that they are figures of Knights Templars, with their cloaks and crosses, for Bishop de Cantilupe was Grand Master of that Order. Perhaps he obtained this office because he was very fond of soldiers, and when he was a little boy he wanted to become one. This was a very natural wish, for he was the son of a powerful Baron, who had an estate and ‘manor’ in Buckinghamshire, and to become a soldier was the common lot of most boys in his position. He had an uncle, or great-uncle, however, who was Bishop of Worcester, and this Prelate had other hopes for his nephew’s career. One day, when little Thomas was staying with him, he asked the child what he would like to be. ‘A soldier,’ said the boy promptly, looking up in the Bishop’s face. The old man patted him gently on the head. ‘Then, sweetheart, thou shalt be a soldier, but a soldier of the King of kings,’ he replied, ‘and thou shalt fight under the banner of thy namesake, St. Thomas of Canterbury, and thy harness shall be the cassock of a priest.’ So the little fellow put the idea of earthly warfare out of his head, and set himself to study Greek and Latin instead, and when he was older he went to Oxford, and then to Paris with his brother Hugh, and soon became a very distinguished student. When he returned to England he became Chancellor of the University of Oxford, and a very good Chancellor he was, for he knew how to rule the students who were often very high-spirited and turbulent, just as students are nowadays. But their high spirits took rougher and more dangerous forms, just as the times were rougher and more dangerous, for they used to fight with one another with swords, and bows and arrows, and the Chancellor used to get hold of these weapons and confiscate them, until such time as their owners came to beg them back on condition that they kept the peace. Afterwards King Henry III. gave him a more important position, that of Chancellor of England, for you must remember that in those days the clergy were politicans as well as priests, and often held the highest offices of State. Then, in 1275, when he was quite an elderly man, he became Bishop of Hereford. And a true ‘Father in God’ he proved himself to be, to the poor people, at least, for he had one or two very serious and rather funny quarrels with the rich and powerful nobles who lived in his Diocese. These quarrels arose not because he was jealous of his own dignity, but because he was jealous of the dignity of the Church, and he imagined that any slight or insult paid to him as Bishop, was really a slight and insult paid to the Church of God. In fact, he must have been rather a puzzle to the rich people over whom he was set to rule in spiritual matters, for some of his views were so different from theirs. They saw that he was haughty and imperious to anyone, no matter how great he might be, who disobeyed him, or encroached on his dignity, and they saw also that he was always splendidly dressed, like a King indeed, for he wore a tunic trimmed with Royal miniver, and had a miniver covering to his bed. But they did not understand that under his haughtiness and imperiousness, which certainly were faults, and under the apparent luxuriousness of his dress, lay a very real desire, not for his own honour and glory, but for the honour and glory of the King of kings, whose ambassador he felt himself to be. Sometimes they caught a glimpse of his real self and were more puzzled still, for when they were dining with him they would see him deliberately pass dish after dish which they knew he was very fond of, and content himself with the plainest and poorest fare, in order that he might learn to say ‘No’ to his own wishes. Then, when the meal was ended he would rise, and select some dainty from the table, and carry it out of the hall with his own hands; and if he had been followed, he would have been found beside the bed of some poor sick servant, coaxing him to eat what he had brought to him. They knew also that he ordered bales and bales of woollen stuff to give to the poor in winter, with which to make stout cloaks and petticoats, and that he examined the goods most carefully when they arrived, to see that the colours were nice and bright, and just what he wanted them to be. Once, as was his wont, he was going to visit a poor sick person in a miserable hovel in the town, when a high-born Baron met him, and remonstrated with him, telling him that such work was beneath his dignity, and that he should leave it to the common clergy. ‘Sire,’ replied Bishop Thomas gravely, ‘I have to give an account to God for the souls of the poor as well as of the rich;’ and the Baron had no answer to make. There is just one other story which I will tell you about him, and this shows his haughty and imperious side. The Castle at Ledbury belonged to him as Bishop, so did the right of hunting over the Malvern Hills, which were Church lands. It is quite possible that he did not care in the least for hunting himself, and that he would have granted the privilege to anyone who had come and asked him for it. But when, one day, he was riding with his attendants on these same Malvern Hills, and heard the sound of a hunting-horn, and, on asking what it meant, was told that Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, who was at that time the most powerful noble in England, also claimed the right of hunting there, and was out that day with his hounds, his anger rose, and he rode forward alone to meet the Earl and order him off the ground. The Earl looked at him contemptuously, and, answering with a sneer that ‘he was not going to be driven off his ancestral land by a “clergiaster,”’ and that ‘he had a good mind to chastise him for his impertinence,’ rode on. Not a word spoke the Bishop; he simply turned his horse’s head and galloped back to his attendants. A few hours later the Earl and his followers, tired out with the chase, had dismounted, and were resting under the shade of a wide-spreading oak, when the trampling of hoofs was heard. Looking up, they saw an extraordinary procession, a procession which was generally only to be seen in a church. There was the Bishop in the foreground, vested in mitre, cope, and stole, and there, behind him, rode his attendant priests and acolytes, carrying lighted candles, and a great bell, and a book! And while the Earl stared at them, half in anger, half in fear, the book was opened, the candles extinguished, the bell tolled, the most solemn curses of the Church levelled at his head, and a form of excommunication read, whereby he was denied all the rites of his religion, even Christian burial itself. And all this because he had hunted the wild deer on the Malvern Hills in defiance of Bishop de Cantilupe, which in Bishop de Cantilupe’s eyes meant in defiance of Almighty God. 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. <div class="ctr pgbreak v6" id="i_51"> <ANTIMG class="figfull" alt="" style="width:800px" src="images/i_51.jpg" /> Photochrom Co., Ltd. HEREFORD CATHEDRAL: TOMB OF BISHOP CANTILUPE. </div> 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. It was taken from the ice which had held it so long and so mysteriously, and laid in Chamonix churchyard, and one of Arkwright’s old schoolfellows, who by this time had become Dean of this Cathedral, had the second, or lower, tablet erected as a memorial of the strange event. Now let us cross the church, and go into the south transept to look at a curious raised tomb which stands there, which I am sure all the little boys and girls, at least, would like to look at. As you see, three figures rest upon it. A father, a mother, and a tiny little baby, who lies half-hidden among the draperies of her mother’s gown. If you look at the baby’s forehead you can trace the letters of her name, ‘Anne’; and this tells you that the tomb is what is known as a ‘chrysome’—that is, it is the burial-place of a little child who died within a month of its baptism, and who was buried in its baptismal robe. As a rule in such a case, a cross is marked on the baby’s brow, but this child is marked with its name instead. The girl-mother, for she was only eighteen, who died when her baby was born, and was buried along with her, was the wife of a knight named Sir Alexander Denton, who was so broken-hearted at his loss that he made up his mind that he would never marry again, and that when he died he also would be buried here. But in later years he married another lady, and, after all, was buried in a church in Buckinghamshire, though, as you see, his effigy has been placed here to make the family group complete. There are three very ancient things belonging to this Cathedral at which we must look before we leave it—a very old map, which hangs in that wooden case on the wall, quite close to the ‘chrysome’ tomb; a very old chair which stands on the north side of the altar; and a very old manuscript, which we can see in the library. Let us look at the map first. At one time it was believed to be the oldest map in the world, and although an older one has been discovered in Germany, the two must have been made about the same time, for they closely resemble each other. As you may think, it is very precious, so precious that during the time of the Civil War it was hidden under the floor of a little chantry on the other side of the church, and was only discovered some hundred and fifty years ago. If we examine it we shall see what the people who lived in the year 1300 or thereabouts imagined the world to be like. To begin with, they made the top of the map east, and the bottom west, so their ideas of direction were different from ours. The world is round, surrounded by the sea, and at the top of it lies the garden of Eden, with rivers running out of it. In the centre is Jerusalem, and all round that city are representations of Old Testament events: the Flood, and the Ark; the Red Sea, and the journey of the Children of Israel; Lot’s wife, etc. Great Britain is marked on the map, with the names of very few towns, but most of the Cathedrals are noted; while the other countries of Europe are also shown, with the animals which were supposed to live there, and it is very curious to notice how monkeys were believed to live in Norway, and serpents in Germany. We must not spend too much time here, however, for we have still to see the old chair and the old book. The chair is in the sanctuary, on the north side of the altar. It stands here because it was used as the Bishop’s chair (for it is so plain we can hardly call it a throne) until the present throne, which stands near the choir-stalls, was erected. We do not know when it was made, or how many Bishops have sat in it, but it must be at least nearly eight hundred years old, for we know that the wicked King Stephen visited Hereford, after its Bishop had been forced to fly, and in his pride and arrogance dared to sit in his place during Service, wearing his Royal crown. Now let us go out by this door in the south wall of the nave, and pass along what is known as the ‘Bishop’s Cloister,’ until we come to the library which is built on the site of the ‘Old West Cloister.’ The building is new, but the books it contains are very ancient and valuable. For this is a chained library—that is, most of the books are fastened by chains to a rod which is placed above the shelf on which they stand, so that anyone can take them down, and lay them on the broad desk-like shelf which finds a place below the bookshelves, and read them there, but they cannot be taken away. Here is the very ancient book which I have mentioned. It is a copy of the Gospels, written in Anglo-Saxon characters, and it must be at least a thousand years old. But old as it is, there are many other books, bound in boards of thin oak covered with sheepskin, which are quite as interesting. Here are two Prayer-Books, for example, one of which lets us see the Order of Service used at Hereford in 1265, the other that which was used at Bangor, in Wales, in 1400. They are quite different, and, as you look at them, the librarian will tell you that one is ‘Hereford Use,’ the other ‘Bangor Use.’ For you must understand that long ago the Service in church was not the same all over England, as it is to-day. One form of Service was used in one Cathedral, and in all the surrounding district; another, a little different, was used in another, and so on. In this way there was a ‘Roman Use,’ which was the same as that used in Rome; a ‘Sarum Use,’ which was the most common, and was the same as that used at Salisbury; a ‘Hereford Use’; a ‘Lincoln Use’; a ‘York Use’; and a ‘Bangor Use.’ Let us take down this enormous volume, and see what it contains. The whole of the Books of Genesis and Exodus, with beautifully printed notes, and spaces for other notes, which have never been put in. Look how straight and neat and symmetrical the columns of printing are, and the spaces between them. How did the monks manage this, do you think? See, these tiny punctures in the vellum, like tiny pin-pricks, tell us. They used a little wheel with tiny spikes in the rim, to space their columns. Here is an ancient book of devotion. To whom did it belong? Open it and you will find out, for ‘H. Latimer’ is written inside—he who died for his belief at Worcester. Here is the ‘Neuremberg Chronicle,’ a famous book in bygone days, for it was almost the only picture-book that children had, and it contains two thousand quaint woodcuts, showing the progress of the world from the Creation down to the time it was written. Here is a ‘Breeches’ Bible, which gets its name from the fact that the printer has printed that Adam and Eve made themselves ‘breeches’ instead of ‘aprons’; and near it is a ‘Cider’ Bible, which was printed by a man named Nicolas de Hereford, who was so accustomed to the beverage used in his native county that he translated the verse in Judges, which tells us that Sampson’s mother was to drink no strong drink, by ‘drink no cider.’ Here we can see William the Conqueror’s seal, and here is that of Oliver Cromwell. Indeed, there are so many interesting and curious things to be seen in the chained library at Hereford that a book could be written about them alone. BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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