PULPIT, EDINGTON CHURCH, WILTSHIRE.
There is a simpler form from Blythborough, in Suffolk (Fig. [207]), which consists of panelling framed together, all the framework and the panels themselves being covered with carving in low relief. The widely-projecting bookboard is also ornamented on the underside, and is supported by large carved brackets. The pulpit stands on four short posts let into a wood sill and supported by brackets. Another type is to be seen in Edington Church, Wiltshire (Plate [LXXXIII].), of simple and elegant design. The octagonal body of the pulpit consists of plain moulded panelling without ornament; the bookboard forms a cornice, which is slightly enriched with dentils and carving. The whole stands on a single turned stout post, from the upper part of which spring brackets of simple form. There is a panelled sounding-board with a carved frieze and an acorn drop at each angle. The whole work exhibits unusual restraints and refinement both of design and detail. Of somewhat similar type, but rather more florid in detail, and probably later in date, is the pulpit at Chesterfield Church (Fig. [208]).
208.—Pulpit, Chesterfield Church, Derbyshire.
Font-covers of the seventeenth century are also fairly numerous, and a few of them still retain the elaborate bracket from which they were suspended in order to be raised or lowered with little trouble. There is a good specimen of such a bracket at Pilton Church, in North Devon (Fig. [209]), of which, however, the upper part, above the tilted hood, is of later date and coarser design: and there is a still finer example at Astbury Church, near Congleton, in Cheshire.
209.—Font-Cover and Canopy, Pilton Church, Devonshire.
Of the very few churches which were built during the century that succeeded the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the most important was St. John's Church at Leeds. There is nothing particularly striking in the treatment if we except the beautiful wood fittings. The plan consists of a double nave, divided by an arcade, and the stonework details are plain in character and of no great interest. It might have been expected that window tracery would afford opportunities to the ingenious masons of the time; but either they clung to the old traditions, as did the masons employed by Nicholas Wadham on the chapel of his college at Oxford, where in the years 1610-13, they produced windows of excellent Perpendicular character: or else they tried in a half-hearted kind of way to give to the tracery forms in keeping with those used elsewhere. Such an attempt was made in the church of Kelmarsh, in Northamptonshire (Fig. [210]), but it had not much to recommend it, nor were other efforts—in the hall at Wadham and a few other places—of such singular success as to lead further in this direction; and the call for church windows being very limited, no development worth mentioning occurred. The most noteworthy attempt to give a new character to window tracery was made in later years (subsequent to 1634) at the chapel at Burford Priory, Oxfordshire, where tracery founded on ancient precedents, but following lines of its own, was surrounded by a fully-developed classic architrave. Elizabethan and Jacobean detail lingered on in out-of-the-way places long into the seventeenth century, and at Compton Winyates, in Warwickshire, the church, which was rebuilt in 1663, has some quaint little bits of stone detail (Fig. [211]), in which the old forms have not yet been replaced by the more strictly classic features which were being more and more generally employed.
