“Dives.—The skyle is good; say forth.
“Pauper.—Before the image the priest says his Mass and maketh the highest prayer that Holy Church can desire for salvation of the quick and the dead; he holds up his hands, he leneth (i.e. bows down), he kneels, and all the worship he can do, he does. Overmore, he offereth up the highest sacrifice and the best offering that any heart can devise; that is Christ, God’s Son from Heaven, under the form of bread and wine. All this worship doth the priest at Mass afore the thing, and I hope there is no man nor woman so lewd that he will say that the priest singeth his Mass nor maketh his prayer, nor offers up God’s Son, Christ Himself, to the thing.
“Dives.—God forbid.”
On the altar, besides the two big candlesticks and the crucifix, were, as we learn from some inventories, three smaller candlesticks for low Mass—two to hold the tapers lighted during the whole service, and one for that which was ordered to be burning during the Canon, or more solemn part of the Mass. Most frequently hangings were suspended at the back and sides of the altar, and this was a favourite form of gift left to the churches in the wills of ladies in the fifteenth century. In some accounts and inventories mention is made of an “altar beam,” evidently used for the purpose of placing candles upon it, and possibly also images and relics. Whether it was behind the altar, or supported by columns in front, or serving to bear up the canopy, is not certain. Canon Scott Robertson, writing about mediæval Folkestone, suggests that it was at the back of the altar, and that it was somewhat similar to what Gervase described at Canterbury in the twelfth century.
“At the eastern horns of the altar were two wooden columns, highly ornamented with gold and silver, which supported a great beam, the ends of which beam rested upon the capitals of the two pillars. The beam placed across the church and decorated with gold supported the Majesty of the Lord, the images of St. Dunstan and St. Elphege, also seven shrines, decorated with gold and silver and filled with the relics of many saints. Between the columns stood a cross, gilt, in the centre of which were sixty transparent crystals in a circle.”
Two other features very general in the south side of every chancel must be noted—the sedilia, or seats for the ministers at the altar, and the piscina, or place where the vessels or cruets of wine and water were placed for use at Mass, and which was furnished with a basin, from which the water used to wash the priest’s hands, etc., could drain away into the earth of the consecrated cemetery. Originally the word piscina meant, of course, a “fish-pond,” but came to mean, even in classical writers of the silver age, a basin or bath.
SHAFT PISCINA, TREBOROUGH
DOUBLE PISCINA, COWLINGE, SUFFOLK