Most curiously that bower was built
Of stone and timber strong
An hundered and fifty doors[969]
Did to this bower belong,
And they so cunninglye contrived
With turnings round about,
That none but with a clue of thread
Could enter in or out.
According to Drayton, Rosamond’s Bower consisted of vaults underground arched and walled with brick and stone: Stow in his Annals quotes an obituary stone reading, Hic jacet in tumba Rosa Mundi; non Rosa Munda, non redolet sed olet, which may be Anglicised into, Here lies entombed a mundane Rosa not the Rose of the World; she is not redolent, but “foully doth she stinke”. I am inclined, however, to believe that the traditional Rosamond was really and indeed the “cleane flower” and that the ignorant monks added calumny to their other perversions. History frigidly but very fortunately relates that “the tombstone of Rosamond Clifford was taken up at Godstone and broken in pieces, and that upon it were interchangeable weavings drawn out and decked with roses red and green and the picture of the cup, out of which she drank the poison given her by the Queen, carved in stone”.[970] At the Cornish village of Sancreed, i.e., San Kerid or St. Ked, engraved upon the famous nine foot cross is a similar cup or chalice, out of which rises a tapering fleur de lys: with the word creed may be connoted the fact that the artist of Kirid or Crete, “with a true instinct for beauty, chose as his favourite flowers the lovely lily and iris, the wild gladiolus and crocus, all natives of the Mediterranean basin, and the last three, if not the lily, of his own soil”.[971] Opinions differ as to whether the Sancreed lily is a spear head or a fleur de lys: they also differ as to the precise meaning of the cup: in the opinion of Mr. J. Harris Stone, “the vessel or chalice is roughly heart-shaped—that is the main body of it—and the head of the so-called spear is distinctly divided and has cross-pieces which, being recurved, doubtless gave rise to the lily theory of the origin. Now there was an ancient Egyptian cross of the Latin variety rising out of a heart like the mediæval emblem of Cor in Cruce, Crux in Corde, and this is irresistibly brought to my mind when looking at this Sancreed cross. The emblem I am alluding to is that of Goodness.”[972]
