Highways and Byways in Cambridge and Ely Part 29

The stall seats are on hinges, and are known as "Miserere" (_i.e._ mercy) seats. They were thus named from being so contrived that when turned back they gave a merciful support to the monks, who could thus sit after a fas.h.i.+on, instead of having to stand, during the lengthy nocturnal services in which they were engaged; but if the occupant of the stall abused this relief by permitting himself to be overcome with sleep, he and his seat fell forward together with a crash, to his great discomfiture. When turned back the quaint carvings usual under such seats may be seen, the work of the fourteenth century carvers.

The subjects represented are strangely varied; scriptural, legendary, grotesque, according to the taste and fancy of the carver, and no two are alike. We find here Noah's Ark, a pelican feeding her young, a nun at prayer, monkeys and dragons, a woman beating a fox for robbing her hen-roost, a fox attired as a bishop, a monkey extracting a man's tooth, a king and a monk fighting, St. Martin sharing his coat with a beggar. The upper canopied work of these stalls is of delicate beauty, little damaged by all it has undergone, whether of neglect or of change, during the six centuries and a half of its existence.

But while admiring these choir stalls, we are almost inclined to grudge their presence, for they obstruct the view of the stone arches against which they stand. We are still beholding the work of the great Alan; after the tower fell he and his workmen built these three bays, with the triforium and clerestory arches above; and we feel how perfectly brain, heart, and hand must have worked together in harmony to produce so exquisite a result. It was Bishop Hotham who provided the funds for most of this work.

Pa.s.sing on up two steps beyond these three bays we come to arches somewhat different; while we observe a corresponding change in the character of the liern vaulting overhead. We are now in the presence of Early English masonry, wrought a century before under Bishop Northwold, and perhaps yet lovelier than the Decorated work which was her daughter. Arch beyond arch, six in number, extends this Presbytery, as it is called, ending in an east window of three lower lancet lights, with an upper tier of five smaller lancets. The Northwold Presbytery does not merge imperceptibly into Alan's Choir; for the transition is marked on either hand by a semicircular shaft of stone that soars aloft, the only remnant left to us of the eastern limb of the original Norman church. These venerable piers therefore deserve our special notice, though they might not attract it if we were ignorant of their story. They themselves stand as raised by their builders, but Bishop Northwold gave them new capitals of Purbeck marble harmonising with the work he was erecting eastward.

Next let us study the modern reredos or altar screen, all of white stone and marble, having as its background the three lancet windows of the east end, filled with not unworthy modern gla.s.s, against which it stands out with grace and dignity; a s.p.a.ce of thirty feet intervening.

The reredos consists of five spandrels surmounted by gables, and is made of alabaster, lavishly gilt and bejewelled, inlaid with mosaic.

On the highest gable stands a figure representing Christ in Glory, His hand held forth to bless His people. Immediately below comes the Annunciation, carved in low relief in a trefoil-shaped medallion.

Below again is a statuette of our Lord, with Moses and Elijah on either hand, and beneath these, under a canopy of alabaster, is the Last Supper. In a line with this, still in the same high relief, is sculptured our Lord's triumphal entry into Jerusalem, His was.h.i.+ng of the Disciples' feet, His agony in Gethsemane, His bearing of the cross. Immediately over these Gospel scenes, under the shadow of a marble canopy, we have the heads of the four great prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, on one side, balanced on the other by the four Latin doctors of the Church, St. Jerome, St. Ambrose, St.

Augustine, St. Gregory. Within the four side spandrels are carved the heads of Mary Magdalene, of Mary the mother of James, of St. John the Evangelist, and St. John the Baptist; on the points of the gables above are the four Evangelists, while between them, and flanking them, stand on spiral pillarets delicate figures emblematical of faith, hope, and charity, of justice, prudence, and fort.i.tude--those graces and virtues which made the saints here represented to be such.

On the retable at the foot of the reredos, stand two ma.s.sive candlesticks of silver gilt. These were procured for the cathedral in 1660, on the restoration of the Chapter and the return of Bishop Wren after his imprisonment of eighteen years. During the Commonwealth the cathedral staff had dwindled down to one canon and one verger. It is recorded that the first requisites purchased by the Chapter on being reinstated were these very candlesticks--plus a wheelbarrow and a broom.

And now we shall do well to make an appreciable physical effort, in order to get a view of two bosses of special interest in the vaulting overhead. It is somewhat neck-racking work, and a gla.s.s is absolutely necessary if we are to carry away any definite impression of the sculptures in question. On one of these bosses the coronation of the Virgin is carved most gracefully and reverently; on the other is St.

Etheldreda, crowned and gorgeously robed, seated with a crozier in her right hand, as Abbess. Both are richly coloured, and have escaped, through being inaccessible, the injury done to the other images in the cathedral. For more than 600 years they have looked down on the tomb of Bishop Northwold, the builder of this n.o.ble Presbytery, erected, we must remember, to do honour to the shrine of the Foundress.

This Presbytery of wondrous beauty, enriched by the best that could be wrought by human hands, alike in the past and in our own days, may well recall to us Keble's lines:

"Love delights to bring her best, And where Love is, that offering evermore is blest."

The "Angel Choir" in Lincoln Cathedral, built at the same time, is so nearly a twin with Bishop Northwold's Choir at Ely that to distinguish the two, if their photographs are placed side by side, requires some nicety of observation. Whether either was actually copied from the other we do not know, for in those days the torch of architectural inspiration quickly pa.s.sed from hand to hand. This is the case in our own time with regard to inventions due to the increase of scientific knowledge; when no part of the civilised world remains long behind the rest, if light, locomotion, or medicine is concerned. Age after age man sets himself to make his own the best that can be obtained, and to say for himself, no less than for the world at large

"Let Knowledge grow from more to more."

CHAPTER XVII

Monuments.--West's Chapel.--Alc.o.c.k's Chapel.--Northwold Cenotaph.--Basevi.--Shrine of Etheldreda.--Lady Chapel.--View from Tower.--Triforium.--Exterior of Minster.--Palace, "Duties"

of Goodrich.--St. Mary's.--St. Cross.--Cromwell's House.--Cromwell at Ely.--St. John's Farm.--Theological College.--Waterworks.--Basket-making.

The monuments within the Ambulatory may now claim our attention.

Starting at the southern entrance, let us look first at a canopy of coloured stone, the tomb of De Luda, Bishop of Ely from 1290 to 1298.

The builder of Ely Chapel,[226] Holborn, he was eminent for learning, and was keen to enrich the See; as a man of note he was sent by Edward the First to France to settle terms of peace. Here we can study the details of Decorated work at its best. Close at hand is Bishop Barnett's tomb of grey marble, of a date somewhat later, robbed of the effigy in bra.s.s which was once part of it. Next we come to the cenotaph of Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, who lived during the Wars of the Roses. He had travelled to Jerusalem, and had made his home in Italy, and was known as "The Pilgrim Scholar." A pioneer of Greek, then reviving in the schools of Western Europe as the result of the fall of Constantinople, he was also a patron of Caxton and his novel printing press. Under Edward the Fourth he tried his hand at governing Ireland, where his cruelty toward the Lancastrians gained for him the name of "the Butcher." He was beheaded in 1470, and appears here in marble lying between his two wives. Next note Bishop Hotham's tomb, of the Decorated period. His name is familiar to us as having promoted by every means in his power the work carried out by Alan of Walsingham.

[Footnote 226: See p. 322.]

So far the tombs we have noticed have stood in a line under three arches of the Presbytery, as the eastern part of the Choir is called: we now turn to the south aisle to look at that of Peter Gunning, Bishop of Ely under Charles the Second, who wrote (as we mentioned before) the prayer to which we owe the phrase "All sorts and conditions of men." The mitred bishop rests his head on one hand, in an att.i.tude somewhat ungainly, and his monument is of little artistic merit. But the resolute, delicately-cut features deserve our study, and the epitaph is of interest as recording how he had vindicated the Church of England in the presence of Cromwell himself. Let us pause a few steps further east to look at the calm face of Canon Selwyn, a nineteenth century lover of the cathedral; and then, as we pa.s.s the tomb of Bishop Eustace, who built the western porch, let us go back in thought to the far-off troublous days of King John.

From the Retro-choir we enter Bishop West's chapel, rich with the ornament of Perpendicular architecture at its highest pitch of elaboration. Nicholas West was Bishop of Ely under Henry the Eighth, from 1515 to 1533; and little did he foresee that the sanctuary he was adorning with the devotion of a lover who offers of his best would be despoiled and defaced by his own immediate successor in the See.

He was no novice as an architect when he came to Ely; for while Dean of Windsor he had completed the vaulting of St. George's Chapel. This chantry abounds in work characteristic of the Renaissance, extremely rare in England. Again and again, always with arabesque ornament that recalls the designs of Raphael in the Loggie of the Vatican, is reproduced the bishop's favourite motto, _Gratia Dei sum quod sum_ ("By the grace of G.o.d I am what I am"), alluding, it may be, to his own humble parentage; for, born the son of a baker in Putney, he rose to be Bishop of Ely, and to live "in the greatest splendour of any prelate of his time"; he kept a hundred servants; nor did he forget the poor, feeding two hundred of them daily at his gate; or it may be that the motto refers to his having in early life brought upon himself disgrace by his violent temper. He had been turned from these evil ways to become the friend and ally of the two saintliest men in England--Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher.

Besides embellis.h.i.+ng this chapel with this motto, he adorned it further with exquisite statuary. Here delicate canopies, upwards of two hundred in number, still overhang corresponding pedestals, on which there stood once, for a few short years, statuettes of workmans.h.i.+p equally delicate; but of these nothing is left beyond a few traces of their feet, which being carved out of the solid stone did not give way when the tiny statue of which they formed a part was broken off by the mandate of Bishop Goodrich. When the quarrel arose between Henry the Eighth and the Pope as to his repudiating Catharine of Aragon, Bishop West was true throughout to the cause of the injured Queen; but he died in 1533, just before the bursting of the storm in which his friends, More and Fisher, laid down their lives, and was buried in the chapel that bears his name.

Here, too, lie the bones of the great Earl Brithnoth, who, as we remember, was brought back hither headless, from the battle of Maldon, by the monks of Ely to be buried amongst them according to their promise. We connect this warrior's character with the dying words attributed to him in Anglo-Saxon poetry, "G.o.d, I thank Thee for all the joy that I have had of Thee in life."[227] Other Anglo-Saxon worthies of the ninth and tenth centuries rest also in this chapel: an Archbishop of York, a Swedish Bishop, and several Bishops of Elmham, in Suffolk, and Dorchester, in Oxfords.h.i.+re--Sees which were in later years transferred to Norwich and Lincoln respectively. It is held that these were retired prelates, who had come to end their days at Ely; where they were welcome guests, as they were licensed by the Diocesan to perform the often-needed episcopal functions of the Abbey, without calling in the distant and over-busied Bishop of Dorchester, to whose See Ely belonged. This was a convenience both to the Brotherhood and to the Diocesan himself. The names of Earl Brithnoth and of these contemporaries are inscribed on tablets let into the wall of this chantry.

[Footnote 227: See p. 312]

Touching it on the northern side, behind the screen of the High Altar, we see a fine tomb, Perpendicular in style, where lies buried the Cardinal de Luxembourg, a foreign prelate presented to the See of Ely in 1438 by King Henry the Sixth, but never (it seems) canonically confirmed as Bishop. In order to gain s.p.a.ce for his chapel, Bishop West did not scruple to take a slice off the tabernacled work of unrivalled beauty that adorned this adjoining tomb, but the northern side he left in its perfection. Notice, too, close at hand, a bronze monument to Dr. Mills, professor of Hebrew, who died about the middle of the nineteenth century. The rec.u.mbent figure is of great beauty.

Next we come to Bishop Alc.o.c.k's chapel, occupying the northern corner of the ambulatory, as Bishop West's does the southern. It was built, a generation earlier, by Bishop Alc.o.c.k only a few years after his reconst.i.tution of St. Radegund's Priory at Cambridge as Jesus College, recorded in our sixth chapter, and is marked as his by the frequent recurrence of his "canting" armorial bearings, a s.h.i.+eld and crest _all c.o.c.ks_, or, rather, black c.o.c.ks' heads. He was a great builder, a great worker, and, like many another ecclesiastic of his day, a great politician, being Lord President of Wales, and Comptroller of the Royal Works to Henry the Seventh; yet withal he was a man of marked sanct.i.ty. His chapel is rich in Perpendicular ornament. A wreath of grapes and vine-leaves in stone runs round it in all directions, as if verily clambering. The undercutting of this wreath is wondrous, but perhaps the marvel of it culminates in a pendant boss of vine-leaves on the northern side so deeply wrought that we can see right through it, yet perfect to-day as when first carved.

The masons who worked here liked their joke; and one of them made a boss of foliage, graceful enough when seen from above,--but stoop down to look at it from below, and behold a grinning imp. This stonework was chiselled _in situ_, the rough blocks were placed where they were to stay, and there they were cut into the shape required, several being even yet unfinished. Canopied niches abound here, but of the statuary that once filled them one figure alone has escaped destruction, and still indicates how beautiful its companions must have been. To Bishop Alc.o.c.k Jesus College, Cambridge, owes its existence, and Peterhouse many benefactions; and here is his tomb. In 1900 Bishop Alwyne Compton filled the window of this chapel with stained gla.s.s, depicting four of his most noted predecessors.

Leaving this chantry behind we see on our right, under his own Early English bays, the monument to our old friend, Hugh de Northwold, who lies buried not in this spot but in the middle of his presbytery.

Before he became Bishop of Ely he had been Abbot of Bury St.

Edmund's, for which place he ever retained a warm affection. His feet touch a block of marble, on which is sculptured the martyrdom of St.

Edmund, whom we see tied to a tree and shot to death by Danish arrows, while his beheading is also represented. Here, too, is a wolf guarding the Saint's head, according to the legend. The story ran that, after the Saint's martyrdom and decapitation, his surviving subjects, to whom his "universal graciousness which yet suffered no unbecoming familiarity" had deeply endeared him, sought, so soon as the Danes had marched away, to take up his remains for fitting burial. The body they soon found, but the head had been cast into a thicket, and was not discovered till the searchers heard a voice crying, "Here! Here!

Here!" which guided them to the spot where it lay. A huge wolf was standing, as it were, on guard over the sacred relic, but did not offer to attack the finders, who, on their part, suffered it to remain unhurt. The faithful beast followed them like a dog till it saw the head laid together with the body, and then quietly departed into the forest, no man doing aught against it.

Close at hand, leaning against the northern wall of the aisle, is a detached fragment of stonework, once the arm of Northwold's abbatial chair which he brought with him from Bury St. Edmund's. This, too, is made in the form of a beast of prey (somewhat distantly resembling a wolf), holding between its paws a human head. The Abbey of Bury St.

Edmund's, it may be mentioned, was, in some sort, a daughter House of Ely. When King Edgar, "the Peacemaker," founded that monastery in honour of the Royal Martyr he populated it, in the first instance, by drafting forty monks from Etheldreda's earlier royal foundation.

We will next look at the impressive monument of William of Kilkenny, Bishop of Ely for three years under Henry the Third. He gave great offence through being consecrated bishop by the Archbishop of Canterbury in Italy, instead of in England, where it was felt that both prelates ought to have been attending to their duties at home; he, moreover, died abroad on a journey to Spain, whither he was going on the King's business. A traveller and statesman, he was also a generous promoter of education, as is shown by his founding scholars.h.i.+ps at Barnwell Priory. A rec.u.mbent figure holding a crozier, he rests on a pillow as if asleep.

Next we reach the tomb of Bishop Redman, who held the See for a very short time in the opening years of the sixteenth century. The tomb is of fine Perpendicular work, and the Bishop lies under a canopy rich in armorial bearings; but the figure is strangely truncated at the foot, which derogates not a little from its beauty.

Retracing our steps for a few yards, we find beneath our feet a bra.s.s which records one of the tragedies that the Minster has witnessed; here lies buried Basevi, the gifted architect of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, who met with his death in 1845 while accompanying Dean Peac.o.c.k over the work of repair going on in the western tower.

The Dean had just a moment before given the architect a caution to take care how he walked. Basevi, familiar with scaffolding, smiled at the advice, and going on with his hands in his pockets, came to a hole he had not perceived, and fell through in a way that would have been well-nigh impossible had his hands been free; his feet struck the pavement below with a jar so intense that death was almost instantaneous.

And now we end our tour round these sepulchres and monuments by contemplating all that remains of what was once the rallying centre for those countless pilgrims who travelled hither in search of spiritual and physical benefit--the shrine of St. Etheldreda. It was once enriched with gems and costly hangings. It has been told how Queen Emma, in 1016, gave it a "purple cloth worked with gold and set with jewels."[228] Sixty years later the shrine is described as "made in part of silver, as adorned with pearls, emeralds, onyxes, alamandine stones, embossed with images in relief, among which were two lions carved in crystal, also four figures of angels carved in ivory." Such it was made by Theodwin, who was Abbot for three years under William the Conqueror, and such he left it. After another sixty years it was robbed by Bishop Nigel, who took away much of its gold and silver and used it for his own purposes.

[Footnote 228: See p. 314.]

But if it was despoiled in one century it was enriched in the next.

From 1252 it stood behind the High Altar in Bishop Northwold's Presbytery, erected purposely for its reception; with the figure of the Foundress of the Abbey gazing down upon it from the central boss of the vaulting overhead. The shrine was thus held in honour till the reign of Henry the Eighth; when the Royal greed swooped down upon it, the dust of Etheldreda was thrown we know not where (though the chapel in Holborn bearing her name, and the church of the Dominicans at Stone in Staffords.h.i.+re claim to possess relics of her hand), her coffin was broken up and destroyed, the treasures that adorned her shrine were dispersed. Love of loot was the great motive for this spoliation; hatred of abuses, some real, some imaginary, was the hypocritical excuse. Whatever may have been the pretext for its demolition, the shrine was robbed and left empty.

The existing monument is a vaulted canopy of the fourteenth century, and is held to be due to Alan of Walsingham. Much of the ancient colouring survives on its northern side, but the southern has been completely refaced with new stone-work. Let no one leave without stooping down to pa.s.s beneath it, where it is easy to stand upright.

It was here that pilgrims congregated, happy in the sense that they were in close proximity to the bones of the sainted Abbess. Here once was sheltered the sarcophagus of marble that held the body of the Foundress of the Abbey. St.u.r.dy blows must have been needed to annihilate it; but destroyed it was, and no tradition gives any record of its fate, nor has any remnant of it ever been recovered. Stripped as we see the shrine, now set aside in the northern aisle of the presbytery, it seems left to prove that dignity may linger on for ages, long after the word has been spoken "Thy glory is departed."

Before leaving the cathedral we must pa.s.s into the Lady Chapel adjoining the north-eastern transept, connected with it by a pa.s.sage.

We have already told when and by whom it was built, and when and by whom it was desecrated. At the Reformation it was rededicated to the Holy Trinity, and became a parish church, replacing the church of St.

Cross, which once stood close to the cathedral, but was pulled down during the sixteenth century. Our visit must have its painful side, as we remember how one form of faith built this chapel and another defaced it. We could envy those who saw it fresh from the hand of gifted sculptors and masons, its windows, now so bare, all aglow with colour of a richness to which the few poor fragments that remain bear eloquent testimony.

This chapel measures a hundred feet in length and is about half that width, the roof is of a single span, with no pillars to support it.

Around it runs a stone bench, divided up by canopied niches still bearing traces of the old colouring--red, blue, green and gold. The canopied work over these niches is in almost perfect preservation, rich and free in design, but the statuary which once abounded under and above it has been ruthlessly and deliberately broken. Only one head half hidden by sculptured foliage escaped the iconoclasts as they went round the hallowed walls to "break down all the carved work thereof with axes and hammers."

We look up and see some relics of stained gla.s.s, accidentally spared when the rest was smashed, in colour most harmonious, the greens and reds incomparably mellow in tone; while certain small outlined figures strangely traversing it, stiff yet vigorous, recall the painting on Egyptian monuments. A few square feet of this precious gla.s.s, a mult.i.tude of headless yet graceful statuettes canopied by unblemished stone-work, are still left to show us how beautiful the whole must have been when in its glory. We leave with a sigh the chapel, designed by Alan of Walsingham, and built by his faithful subsacrist John of Wisbech.

Those who desire it can, before they quit the Minster, climb to the top of the western tower, and if the day is clear they will be well rewarded by a superb view over the "boundless plain" below; towns and hamlets, steeples and spires, spread there beneath us, nor must we forget the railways, with their kindly evidence of modern life at its fullest. To the east the horizon is bounded by those East Anglian uplands which nurtured Etheldreda for her great work here. But, beyond almost any other, this is essentially a man-made landscape; its salient features are not hills, but buildings, not rivers but lodes.

Peterborough, the sister Abbey-Cathedral, is in view twenty miles away to the north-west, and many a church of note and beauty is prominent within nearer range, including the towers and spires of Cambridge fifteen miles to the south. The very cornfields and pastures beneath us have been reclaimed from the marsh by man; while, far on the north-east, is "Denvers Sluice" protecting the rich fenland from inundation. The view from the top of the tower is well worth a climb, if we have time and strength for the venture.

Those who wish to be acquainted with the structural secrets of the cathedral should make an effort to gain admittance to one of the spiral staircases to the upper pa.s.sages that lead from triforium to triforium, from clerestory to clerestory. In these higher regions we shall still come upon deeply wrought crocketing, such as that in the upper eastern lancet windows--crocketing seen only by the stray visitor, yet worked with ungrudged labour and skill. Here we may step along the plank that takes us from beam to beam for a hundred feet over the vaulting of the Choir, through the s.p.a.cious chamber that separates this vaulting from the outer roof. On every beam stands a pail of water ready in case of fire.