Pope's Chair
At Lincoln is a wooden chair, which appears to be c. 1300; it has recently been placed in the Chapter House and is now used by the bishop at diocesan synods ([114]). It is possible that since several Parliaments met at Lincoln, between 1265 and 1327, that this may be the royal chair: it may well have been used also at the great trial of the Knights Templars, which was held in the Chapter House in 1310. It is only original up to the level of the arms; the lions, the back and the canopy are modern.
| Lincoln | Hereford Cathedral |
In Hereford cathedral is an ancient wooden chair, once coloured in red and gold; it is composed of fifty-three pieces; not counting the seat of two boards and the two circular heads in front; it has been variously ascribed to the twelfth or fourteenth century; but no doubt is Jacobean, belonging to the same class of chairs as those enumerated in the following paragraph ([114]).[[67]] At Stanford Bishop church, Hereford, is a rude chair or settle, of oak without nails. It is said to have been traditionally called "Old Horstin's chair," and therefore has been supposed, very improbably, to be the identical chair seated on which St Augustine received the British bishops in Herefordshire c. 600 A.D., greatly exciting the ire of the irascible Celts by not rising from his seat to receive them. In the Canterbury Museum Dr Cox has recently deposited a mediæval chair believed to be of great antiquity.[[68]]
| Wells | Wells |
A few examples remain of what are supposed to have been abbots' chairs. In the Bishop's Palace at Wells is preserved a chair of remarkable type, said to have been used by the Abbot
of Glastonbury. In the College, Manchester, is or was an ancient chair of the same baluster shape; and a very similar one formerly was to be seen in Agecroft Hall, Manchester. In the cottage at Zaandam, Holland, is a baluster chair, formerly used by Peter the Great. Another chair of this type, but of simpler form, is that once used by John Bunyan, and now preserved, together with his pulpit, in the meeting house of the Independent Congregation at Bedford. In the Victoria and Albert Museum is an arm-chair with balusters of turned ash. All these chairs are of seventeenth century date; no abbot of Glastonbury can have sat in the chair in the Bishop's Palace at Wells ([115], on the left).
| Dunmow | Winchfield |