No other preaching cross attained to the name and fame of that of S. Paul’s, yet they were not uncommon in the country. In the Green Yard at Norwich was one of wood, with leaded roof and a cross of the same metal; Worcester also had one. Remains of a preaching cross may be seen near the church in Iron Acton, in Gloucestershire, a graceful structure originally, now lamentably mutilated; and at Disley, in the same county, is another, also in ruins. A still better example is the Blackfriars’ preaching cross at Hereford, a hexagonal enclosure with open arches, above which is the stump of what was once the sacred emblem.
The Puritans, although such advocates of preaching, evidently had a strong prejudice against these open-air pulpits. That at Iron Acton bears to this day marks of the violence used in the attempt to destroy it, and most of our English preaching crosses have, like our most famous example, wholly disappeared.
In this last half century, the English people have woke up once more in a wonderful way to an appreciation of life in the open air. Never were outdoor sports and games so generally followed; and “garden-parties” and “garden-meetings” are amongst our most modern inventions. Parks and pleasure-grounds are now demanded almost as a public right; and no “exhibition” can look for success that does not provide ample accommodation for its patrons to listen to music under the open skies. In the face of all these signs of the times, is it too much to hope that the Church may be touched with the same feeling—surely a healthy and a desirable one; and that we may yet see on summer’s evenings the congregations choosing to sit or stand about the preaching cross in the churchyard, rather than sit, involuntarily listless, at the best with difficulty attentive, in the heat of a crowded, and often ill-ventilated church?
CHAPTER VI.
Memorial Crosses.
The sign of our salvation having come to fill so large a place in Christian art, it would naturally be expected that in memorials in any way connected with religious feelings it would be employed, and above all in the monuments of the dead laid to rest in hope of a joyous resurrection through the victory of the Cross. As a matter of fact, our earliest Christian cross-forms are the disguised crosses of the catacombs, and in spite of every outbreak of bigotry against other uses of the symbol, it has never been entirely abandoned for such purposes. Preaching crosses and market crosses might fall into ruin, and roods and crucifixes be wantonly destroyed, but the Cross, carved in stone or cut on stone above the grave, is found in all ages, though not so frequently in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as before or since.
The first cross said to have been raised in the Kingdom of Northumbria, was that wooden one which S. Oswald, the King and Martyr, planted with his own hands on the eve of the battle of Hevenfelth in 635. This, originally a sign of the cause for which Oswald sought to reclaim his realm, became a memorial of the Christian victory, and was still preserved as such in the time of the Venerable Bede, who tells us that “the place is shown to this day, and held in great veneration.”
Another memorial of battle was the famous Neville’s Cross, near Durham, erected to mark the spot where Ralph Neville, in October, 1346, defeated the Scottish invaders. This, according to ancient accounts, was a singularly dignified structure, with a crucifixion beneath a stone canopy at the top, and a series of figures at the base, the whole being raised on half-a-dozen steps.