THE “FLEUR DE LIS.”
Of the inns of St. Albans I shall say little in this place, for much has been said of them in the pages of the Holyhead Road and the Great North Road. But a word or two, and a sketch, must be reserved for the “Fleur de Lis” inn, close by the Market Place. Like Canning’s “Needy Knife-Grinder” it has no story to tell, but its courtyard, with the odd little external staircase shown here, sufficiently justifies notice, even though in history, national or local, the house has no place. An effective item in the view—the object resembling a church-tower—is entirely extrinsic. It has nothing to do with the inn, except serving the purpose of composing a picture; nor is it even strictly ecclesiastical, being a fourteenth-century curfew-tower, once of remarkable interest, but shorn of much of that quality after Sir Gilbert Scott laid his heavy restoring hand on it, some forty years ago.
XIII
ST. ALBAN THE MARTYR
The Cathedral of St. Albans, as it must now be called, for the ancient Abbey became the Cathedral Church of a new diocese in 1875, was said by Freeman to be “the vastest of English ministers.” He was not quite correct, for the huge Cathedral of Winchester is ten feet longer; but the bold and elevated site on which St. Albans stands advertises its bulk in the supremest degree, while the site of Winchester Cathedral, being flat, and its precincts enclosed, the dimensions of that most interesting of all English Cathedrals are not fully displayed.
The reasons that impelled the first architects of St. Albans Abbey to so greatly distinguish their church, for size, above all others, are found in the fact that it was here that St. Alban, the first British martyr, suffered, in the dim era of the Diocletian persecution, in the Roman domination of Britain. “This year,” says the Saxon Chronicle, referring to A.D. 283, “suffered St. Alban the Martyr,” but Bede, in his “Ecclesiastical History,” places the date at A.D. 305, and as the death of St. Alban was a direct result of the savageries instituted by Diocletian, decreed two years earlier by that tyrant, the historian is probably correct.
Bede died in A.D. 735, four hundred and thirty years after the event he recorded. He and the even earlier chronicler, Gildas, who wrote in A.D. 564, mention a church of sorts being very early built upon the site of the martyrdom; but all earlier buildings were swept away on the coming of the Normans, and already in 1077, only eleven years after the Conquest, Abbot Paul de Caen had cleared the ground and began the immense building of which the existing Cathedral is the representative, still retaining large portions of his work; including the tower, transepts and choir, nine bays on the north side of the nave and three on the south.
There was at that time no spot even distantly approaching the especial holiness of this, and none could have foreseen the tragedy at Canterbury in 1170, that was, in little less than one hundred years, to completely overshadow St. Alban and set the Blessed St. Thomas à Becket above him.