[88] Bloxam.
[89] Id.
[90] Gent. Mag., Sept. 1862. “It was said to be for the purpose of the monks conferring with each other; but he had seen such openings in places where no such construction could be put upon them.”
[91] Willis, p. 90.
[92] An account of this synod, drawn up by Wulfstan himself, is printed in the Anglia Sacra. The Dean of Chichester thus translates the commencement:—“I, Wulfstan, by the grace of God Bishop of Worcester, determined to hold a synod in the Minster of St. Mary’s, in the crypt of the church, which I built from the foundations, and by the mercy of God afterwards consecrated. This synod was held in the year of our Lord 1092, the fifteenth indiction. There were assembled all the wisest men invited from the three shires in our diocese, Worcester, Gloucester, and Warwick; because that I, being full of days, sensible of my bodily weakness, and perceiving the end of my life approaching, was desirous of disposing canonically the ecclesiastical affairs committed to our charge, and by their wise concert, of correcting and amending whatever required amendment.”
[93] See Mr. Albert Way’s paper on “The Tradition of Flaying Inflicted in Punishment of Sacrilege,” Archæological Journal, vol. v. The Worcester doors are said to have been fixed originally in the west entrance, and to have been removed thence by Bishop Wakefield. The Dean of Chichester (Life of Wulfstan, p. 7,) remarks that the west side of the cathedral, fronting the Severn, was that from which a Danish attack might naturally be expected; and suggests that the doors are as old as the eleventh century, when the citizens of Worcester, like other Englishmen, resisted the imposition of the Danegelt, and killed (May, 1041) Feadu and Thurstan, the huscarls of Hardicanute, who had been sent to Worcester to collect it. Their skins may have been stretched on the church doors. In the following November a Danish army plundered the town and ruined the cathedral, from which the monks had fled. The sight of the skins, it is suggested, may have been the especial cause of this latter act of vengeance.
[94] Report of Professor Willis’s Lecture in Gent. Mag., Sept. 1862.
[95] J. H. Parker, Gent. Mag., Oct. 1862. Professor Willis considered the hall to be “in so ruinous a state that the expense of restoring it would have been greater than justifiable on such an object (especially as there would have been no use for it when done), and the Dean and Chapter had to keep up and maintain the cathedral in a state worthy of its original purpose.”—Gent. Mag., Sept. 1862.
[96] Rev. C. H. Hartshorne.
[97] See Kemble, Sax. in England, i. p. 300; and Exeter Cathedral, Pt. II.