(Fig. 1): A Saxon monarch represented as seated on a throne, wearing a square crown, and holding a sceptre in his right hand. He is attired in a richly embroidered tunica and a mantle of ample proportions, gathered up with a brooch on the left shoulder. His stockings are cross-gartered and ornamented at the knees and in the lozenges formed by the gartering. (Cott. MS., Tiberius Cvi.) (Fig. 2): A fiddler, wearing the tunica, long stockings and shoes. (MS., Tib. Cvi.) (Fig. 3): A gleeman or juggler, attired similarly to the fiddler. (From the same MS.) (Fig. 4): A husbandman, engaged in digging. (From MS., after Strutt.) (Fig. 5): A blacksmith, working at the anvil. (From MS., after Strutt.) (Fig. 6): A Saxon king, with a bifid beard, on the seat of judgment, crowned and attired in a tunica, covered with a short mantle, which is fastened in the centre of the chest by a brooch of rectangular form. (Fig. 7): A Saxon noble, with long hair and a bifid beard, holding a sword of characteristic Saxon form. He is wearing an ornamented tunica reaching to the ankles, and over it a voluminous mantle. His head is covered with a conical helmet. The rucking of the sleeve on the fore-arm is plainly shown. (Figs. 6 and 7 from a MS., after Strutt.) (Fig. 8): A Saxon horn-blower, attired similarly to the fiddler and gleeman (Figs. 2 and 3), from the same MS. (Fig. 9): A carpenter at work with an axe. (From a MS., after Strutt.) (Note.—In Figs. 2, 3, 4, 5, 8 and 9, all the heads are bare.) (Figs. 10 to 14): Saxon personal ornaments, buckle, rings, etc., found in tumuli.
[ANGLO-SAXON ARCHITECTURE.]
Buildings erected from about 500 A.D. to 1050 A.D. are called Anglo-Saxon, or simply Saxon, in their style.
The Romans built in stone and brick, but the English, when they conquered Britain, razed the Roman buildings to the ground, and built their own structures of wood.
It is interesting to note that the Saxon word for “build” was “getimbrian,” to construct of wood.
From the middle of the 5th century, for nearly 700 years, until the time when the Norman Castle arose, well-nigh every building of architectural merit was in some way or other connected with the Church.
The English were essentially workers in wood, and profoundly ignorant of masonry. The churches that sprang up all over England after the conversion of the country to Christianity were, no doubt, of wood, and even in the 9th and 10th centuries we hear of “the worm-eaten walls of cathedrals.”
They were decorated internally with paintings in various bright colours, and the ornamentation was of metal work, bronze or the precious metals.