Part 7
_Bere Regis._—J. Skerne and Margaret, his wife. This monument consists of two kneeling figures, fourteen inches high, cut round the outline, and represented as kneeling on the pavement; between them is a rectangular plate, with coat of arms (Skerne impaling Thornhull), and an inscription on another plate below. Skerne wears a long gown, with sleeves nearly touching the ground; his wife, a dress, with ruff and a widow’s wimple. The inscription states that the memorial was erected by the aforesaid Margaret in 1596.
In the same church there is an inscription to Sir Robert Turberville, 1559. There are also remains of three altar tombs, all with empty matrices; two in the south aisle probably mark the last resting-places of members of the Turberville family. It is of these that John Durbeyfield, in Thomas Hardy’s _Tess_, boasted, “I’ve got a gr’t family vault at Kingsbere and knighted forefathers in lead coffins there.”
_Caundle Purse._—The brass of W. Longe, 26 ins. high, represents a man in armour, with long flowing hair; the head is inclined to the right. Its matrix was found by the writer in the North, or Longe, Chantry. The brass is heavy, being ⅜-in. thick; it is poor in execution, and is, unfortunately, away from its slab.
The monument of Richard Brodewey, rector, is far more interesting. The head has been broken off; the figure, only ten inches high, represents the priest as laid out for burial, clad in eucharistic vestments. This brass is specially noteworthy, because it is the only known memorial in England in which the maniple is represented as buttoned or sewn, so as to form a loop to prevent it from slipping off the wrist. This was the final form that the maniple assumed; in earlier times it simply hung over the arm without attachment.
_Evershot._—The brass commemorating William Grey is rather larger than that at Caundle Purse, and is in better condition. Like Brodewey, Grey is represented as laid out in his eucharistic vestments—amice, alb, maniple, stole, and chasuble; between his raised hands he holds a chalice, with the host (similar to Henry Denton, priest, Higham Ferrers, 1498). There are only about a dozen representations of chaliced priests in England, so that this memorial may be classed among rare examples. It was customary to bury a chalice (usually of some secondary metal) with all ecclesiastics in priests’ orders.[22]
_Fleet._—The two brasses in this church are engraved on rectangular plates. In each, the husband kneels on the opposite side to the wife (he dexter, she sinister), with a _prie Dieu_ between them. Their many sons and daughters kneel behind the father and mother respectively.
_Milton Abbey._—Sir John Tregonwell is represented, kneeling, in a tabard; and this is the latest tabard brass in England.
Another very interesting and almost unique brass in the Abbey is that to John Artur, of this place “_monachus_.” Brasses to monks are exceedingly rare.
_Moreton._—The inscription on the monument of James Frampton is unusual; the letters are raised above the background, instead of being sunk in it.
_Piddletown._—The effigy of Roger Cheverell has only the upper part left—10½ in. by 6 in. in size. The dress is that of a civilian of good standing, for the cloak is lined with fur; the head is bare and the hair long.
Christopher Martyn’s brass is engraved on a rectangular plate. The lower half is occupied by the inscription; above it kneels the figure in conventional armour, with a tabard bearing arms over. A scroll comes from the mouth, bearing, in abbreviated form, the prayer, “Averte faciem tuam a peccatis meis, et omnes iniquitates meas dele.” Two shields, one low on the right side of the figure, another high above the left shoulder, bear the well-known Martyn arms; and above the former, the All Father sits on a throne, with two fingers of the right hand raised in blessing, and the left hand holds between the knees a Tau-shaped cross, on which the Son is nailed. There is, however, no dove, so that it cannot be regarded as a complete representation of the Trinity. At Bere Regis there is a matrix of an enthroned figure of almost identical outline.
The memorial to Nicholas Martyn and his wife belongs to the other type of brass. In the centre, indeed, are two rectangular plates, one bearing the heraldic shield (Martyn impaling Wadham), the other the inscription; but the other plates are cut round the figures, and have little background. On the right or dexter side, the husband, clad in armour, but not wearing a helmet, kneels, with hands clasped in prayer, before an altar covered with a fringed cloth, on which lies an open book; behind him kneel his three sons, wearing cloaks, with ruffs around their necks. On the left-hand side, Margaret, his wife, kneels before a similar altar and book; behind her are her seven daughters, all engaged in prayer. They all wear Elizabethan costume—hoods, large ruffs, long bodied peaked stomachers and skirts, extended by farthingales of whalebone.
_Thorncombe._—The brasses to Sir Thomas and Lady Brooke, of Holditch and Weycroft, are two of the most distinguished to be found of the fourteenth century. He was sheriff of Somerset, 1389, and of Devon, 1394, and is shown clad in a long gown with deep dependent sleeves, guarded with fur around the skirt, and pulled in at the waist by a belt studded with roses; within the gown a second garment appears, with four rows of fur around the skirt. His hair is short, and his feet rest on a greyhound couchant, collared. Lady Brooke wears a long robe, fastened across the breast by a cordon with tassels, over a plain gown; her hair is dressed in semi-mitre shape, and confined by a richly jewelled net, over which is placed the cover-chief, edged with embroidery and dependent to the shoulders. At her feet is a little dog, collared and belled. Sir Thomas and his wife each wear the collar of SS.; their arms are in tightly-fitting sleeves, and the hands are raised in prayer. The inscription around the effigies has been restored, and plain shields inserted in place of originals, which would have shown Gules on a chevron argent a lion rampant sable; Brooke with, among others, Cheddar, Mayor of Bristol, 1360-1, and Hanham.
_Wimborne Minster._—The Ethelred effigy here is only half length. The king is represented, in part, in priestly vestments. (“As kings by their coronation are admitted into a sacred as well as a civil character, the former of these is particularly manifested in the investiture with clerical garments.”) Though the brass commemorates a king of the West Saxons, it dates only from 1440. The inscription is on a copper plate, and the king’s death is said thereon to have occurred in 873, two years too late. A brass plate on which the date is correctly given is preserved in the Minster Library. It is supposed that the figure and the plate bearing the inscription were removed from the matrix and hidden for safety in the time of the Civil Wars, and that the plate could not be found when the figure was replaced, so that the copper one now on the slab was engraved to take the place of the one lost, which, however, was afterwards found, but not laid on the stone. It is a noteworthy fact that the effigy is fastened to the stone with nails of copper, not of brass; doubtless these are contemporary with the copper plate which bears the inscription. The Ethelred brass is the only brass commemorating a king that is to be found in England, and is so illustrated in Haines’ _Manual_, p. 74.
_Wraxall._—Elizabeth Lawrence, wife of Mr. William Lawrence, 1672. A six-line verse and an impaled coat of arms.
_Yetminster._—This brass, one of the finest in Dorset, was at one time loose at East Chelborough Rectory, but it has now been fixed to a slab on the south wall of the church. It was originally laid on a large stone in the floor of the chancel. John Horsey is represented in full and very richly ornamented armour; his wife is in a graceful gown and mantle, with dependent pomander, and fine head-dress.
SHERBORNE
BY W. B. WILDMAN, M.A.
Sherborne, as far as we can tell, owes its existence as a town to the fact that it was chosen in 705 to be the site where the bishop-stool was fixed of St. Ealdhelm, the first bishop of Western or Newer Wessex. Sherborne, like its daughter-towns Wells and Salisbury, is a Bishop’s town; but, unlike them, it was also, from 998 to 1539, the seat of a Benedictine Monastery. Thus Sherborne has suffered two distinct shocks in its career; the first came upon it when it lost its bishop in 1075; the second, when its Abbey was dissolved in 1539.
Another point worth mentioning concerning the past dignity of the town is this, that Sherborne, or at any rate, a part of it—Newland—was once actually a borough, as was also what we may call the suburb of Castleton.
This part of Sherborne is still called the Borough of Newland; it was given burghal privileges by Richard Poore, Bishop of Sarum, in 1228, and, according to Hutchins, it actually sent members to the House of Commons in 1343. But long after Newland got rid of this then burdensome privilege it still kept the name and other privileges of a borough, and both it and Castleton were for administrative purposes outside the Hundred of Sherborne; they kept their own tourns twice a year, and their own courts every three weeks; they had their own view of frank-pledge quite apart from the rest of the town and Hundred. It is not known to what bishop Castleton owed its title and dignity of _burgus_.
When Sherborne came into being, the surrounding country bore a very different look from that which we see to-day. It lay on the western edge of the great forest of Selwood, a fragment of which still remains to us here in Sherborne Castle Park. There were then no trim water-meadows, and the course of our river was marked by moor and marsh. Here, in the last fold of the Wessex hills, under which lies the great plain of Somerset, Ealdhelm’s seat was fixed, in a site central and convenient for the new district, which had barely a quarter of a century before been added to the West Saxon realm.
Sherborne was never a walled town; it lay under the protection of the fortified palace of its bishop, and in troublous times of Danish inroad its site was a safe one. The story that Swegen ravaged the town rests on nothing like contemporary evidence; on the other hand, the safety of its position, coupled with the fact that it was once the second city of Wessex, accounts for its being chosen by King Æthelbald for his capital, so to speak, when Winchester, in 860, was laid waste by the Danes; indeed, the change may have taken place soon after 856. Sherborne continued to be the capital of Wessex till about the year 878. During a considerable part of that time we may well believe that King Alfred spent his boyhood here, almost certainly during King Æthelberht’s reign; and here, in this centre of education which Ealdhelm had founded, he may well have received such education as he got during his boyhood. There is no other centre of education which has so good a claim to him; here were buried his two brothers, Æthelbald and Æthelberht, who successively reigned before Æthelred and himself. Æthelberht was his guardian after his father’s death. Alfred must have known Sherborne well; he was a benefactor of our church, and we claim his boyhood.
But besides Alfred and Ealdhelm, early Sherborne claims other heroes; Ealhstan, our bishop, the first West Saxon general to win a decisive victory over the Danes, was the right-hand man of Kings Ecgberht, Æthelwulf, Æthelbald, and Æthelberht; he was the most powerful man of his time. Here, in Sherborne, he lies buried beside Æthelbald and Æthelberht.
We claim, too, among our Sherborne bishops, St. Heahmund, who fell fighting against the Danes at Merton (probably Marden, Wilts.); Asser, the biographer of King Alfred, who is said to lie buried among us; Werstan, another warrior who fell in battle; St. Wulfsy and St. Alfwold, names rather forgotten now, but great and famous in their day. St. Osmund, who compiled the _Use of Sarum_, was one of our abbots; and St. Stephen Harding, the author of the _Carta Caritatis_, and the real founder of the Cistercian Order, is the earliest scholar of Sherborne School whom History records as such.
Nor can Sherborne forget what it owes to the great Roger Niger, that dark, stalwart Bishop of Sarum, who built the Norman Castle here and the Norman part of our Abbey Church, who organized the English Court of Exchequer, was the trusted adviser of the “Lion of Justice,” Henry I., and deserved a better end than to break his heart in a contest with such a poor creature as King Stephen.
Our Abbot, William Bradford, will not be forgotten by lovers of architecture, for under his rule in the fifteenth century the choir of our Abbey Church was rebuilt; while to another Abbot, Peter Ramsam, we owe, later in the same century, the restoration of our nave. To Abbot Mere we are indebted for a little building, which every visitor to Sherborne knows, the Conduit, which stands in our old market-place, now called by the somewhat affected name of the “Parade.” This conduit, though it was built, as we have said, by Abbot Mere (1504-1535), is described by one of those omniscient gentlemen who have lately been enlightening us about the beauties of Wessex, as “a structure of the fourteenth century.” It originally stood on the north side of the nave of the Abbey Church, inside the Cloister Court, which is now a part of Sherborne School; but it was removed to its present site, or nearly its present site, by the school governors in the latter part of the sixteenth century. It is to this day the property of the school.
And so we are brought to the time when our ecclesiastical lords, the Bishop of Sarum and the Abbot of Sherborne, passed away from us, and their places were taken by lay lords. Here, too, we meet with famous names. We have the Protector Somerset, to whom, indirectly, Sherborne School may owe its post-Reformation endowment. We have, also, Henry, Prince of Wales, that “young Marcellus of the House of Stuart,” the eldest son of James I., whose hatchment, as that of a squire of Sherborne, still hangs in our Abbey Church; we have Walter Ralegh, that restless, strenuous soul, whose dearly-loved home Sherborne was, where he would gladly have been buried; we have John Digby, first Earl of Bristol, whose name stands high among those of English worthies in the reigns of James I. and Charles I., a man worthy to have lived in a better age, and to have hazarded his all in a better cause. And another name insistently presents itself to anyone who has followed Sherborne history—that of Hugo Daniel Harper. To him Sherborne town and school owe much that is precious and enduring. That a little town like ours has kept something of its ancient state, that here we can still so easily call back the past of Wessex, can still see standing in beauty and dignity these buildings which the Middle Age has left us—all this is in no small degree owing to that famous headmaster of Sherborne School and to his successors.
We now proceed to write more particularly of the most interesting of these ancient buildings and institutions. They are four in number: the Abbey Church, the School, the old Castle, and the Almshouse.
With the exception of a small part of the west front of the Abbey Church, there is, so far as we can tell, not a single piece of wall standing now in Sherborne which was standing in the year 1107, when Roger of Caen became Bishop of Sarum and Abbot of Sherborne. We know that the doorway, now blocked up, on the north side of the west front of the church, and, therefore, also some of the adjoining wall, is older than Bishop Roger’s time; but with that exception, we are forced to admit that the Norman from Caen pulled down all the rest of Ealdhelm’s church. If he left any more of it, either time has destroyed this, or he so used the walls that they cannot now be recognised with any certainty. At the same time there is a piece of outside wall at the north end of the north transept, in the old slype, which looks very like pre-Norman work.
The church which Roger built extended as far east as the present church does, excluding the lady chapels; for the lady chapel of the thirteenth century must have abutted on the Norman east end, just as it now does on the Perpendicular ambulatory. The church extended probably rather further to the west than the present church does, for there exists evidence to show that, before the parish church of All Hallows was built on to the west end of the Abbey Church in the fourteenth century, the west front of the Abbey Church was embellished with a large porch of Norman work.
The chief traces of Roger’s work still existing in the church are the piers and arches that carry the tower, the transept walls, the arches leading from the transept into the side aisles of the nave, and the walls of these aisles. Other interesting traces of Roger’s work will be found in the little chapel which projects eastwards from the north transept; also in the south and west walls of the early English chapel on the north side of the north aisle of the choir, commonly called Bishop Roger’s Chapel, and now used as the vestry; these Norman walls were outside walls of Roger’s church before this early English addition was made. There is also the jamb of a window to be seen on the outside of the east wall of the south transept, the only relic which gives us an idea of what the Norman clerestory was like.
The choir of Roger’s church extended west of the central tower, and to allow room for the stall-work, the shafts of the east and west tower arches were corbelled off above the line of the stalls, as may still be seen in the existing church. That part of the Abbey nave which lay to the west of the Norman choir was used, until the building of All Hallows, as the parish church; and the fine Norman south porch, which has been rather over-restored in the nineteenth century, was, no doubt, a parochial porch, for it faces the town, not the monastic buildings, which are on the north side of the church.
The tower up to the floor of the bell-chamber is Norman. Over the pier-arches which carry it, except on the east side, there is a passage in the thickness of the wall, with an arcade of semi-circular arches resting on circular and octagonal shafts, eleven inches in diameter. On the east side the Norman pier-arch was removed at the rebuilding of the choir in the fifteenth century, and the removal of this arch so weakened the tower that its condition in the course of years became dangerous. The tower was made secure in 1884-5, and these shafts on the north-west and south sides of the lantern, which had been concealed by the fifteenth century masonry, were again displayed to view.
A large lady chapel was added in the thirteenth century; the fine Early English arch, by which it was entered from the church, may still be seen in the east wall of the ambulatory. The centre of this arch is to the south of that of the fifteenth century arch, and hence the corbels of the Perpendicular vaulting do not correspond at all with the Early English arch; one of them is actually constructed to hang as a pendant, free of this arch altogether.
The changes made inside the church in the fourteenth century were so slight as to need no mention. Outside the church, however, a great change took place, for towards the end of this century the church of All Hallows was built. The great west porch was pulled down so that All Hallows might stand directly against the west front of the Norman church. There are still to be seen remnants of All Hallows, viz., the lower part of the north wall of the north aisle, and four responds built into the west wall of the Abbey Church. When All Hallows was standing with its pinnacled western tower, one would have seen a church some 350 feet long, with a central and a western tower. This latter tower had a ring of bells of its own, at least five in number; and it was to this ring of the parish, not to the Abbey, that Wolsey gave our great bell.
In the fifteenth century Sherborne saw great things in the way of building; not only was the Almshouse then built, but the church also underwent those changes which gave it the appearance it keeps to-day. The choir was taken down during the last year or two of Abbot John Brunyng’s rule, and rebuilt from the ground by his successor, William Bradford (1436-1459). During this same century the smaller lady chapel, called the Bow Chapel, was built, and the nave restored in the style of the time by Abbot Peter Ramsam (1475-1504). To these two men we owe our present splendid fabric. Any visitor to Sherborne Abbey can for himself easily perceive the differences which mark off the choir as a building from the nave. The choir from floor to vault is one harmonious piece of work, so lovely, so complete, that the wit of man could scarcely design anything finer; while the nave is a compromise, for in the nave yet stand the old Norman piers cased in Perpendicular panelling, and the effect which the nave gives us is that of two stories distinctly marked off the one from the other, the lower story bearing strong traces of its Norman origin, the upper or clerestory plainly a Perpendicular work, and worthy of the companion clerestory of the choir. The pillars of the southern arcade of the nave are not opposite those of the northern arcade, and the arches are of different widths; the clerestory arches of the nave, on the other hand, are of equal widths, and hence the clerestory arches are not directly above the arcade arches. This compromise has, however, been effected so cleverly that few people notice the irregularity.