The modern Roman Church has made yet another innovation which, although it has its disadvantages, certainly reduces the inconvenience of the vestment to a minimum. Two fairly large semicircular pieces are cut from each side of the front of the vestment, thereby permitting the hands to be brought together when necessary without crushing the vestment between the forearms, which was inevitable in the old form. But the wasp-waisted appearance of this chasuble is ugly, and attempts are being made to abolish it and to return to the mediaeval pattern.
Fig. 10.—Sir Peter Legh, Knight and Priest. (From his brass at Winwick. Vested in chasuble only.)
Yet another small distinction is to be found in the shape of individual examples of the mediaeval period. We find many of these vestments to be made circular or elliptical, so that the lower border is rounded off; while many others are found to be made in the shape known as the vesica piscis, so that the lower extremities terminate in a point more or less sharp. Writers who cannot be content with simple or commonplace explanations of such phenomena as this have laboured in vain to invent some esoteric signification which will account for it. Perhaps the most common-sense guess is that made by Dr Rock, who thinks that the rounded chasuble was used during the period of rounded architecture—the Saxon and Norman—and the pointed chasuble during the pointed periods of architecture: a suggestion which we should have no difficulty in accepting at once, were it not for the fact that scores of brasses and other monuments of the Curvilinear and Rectilinear periods in architecture exist showing rounded chasubles; while (among others) the effigy of Bishop John de Tour, at Bathampton near Bath, A.D. 1123, shows a pointed vestment. We have no space to enter into particulars of the other suggestions—the symbolism of the vesica piscis, the perfection of the circle, etc.
The simple explanation seems to be that the difference depended merely on the taste and fancy of the seamstress or of the engraver of the monument. It would be perfectly possible to draw up a list of monuments in which the point of the chasuble shows every stage from extreme sharpness to extreme bluntness, and so, by one step further, into a continuous curve. This demonstrates that no rule was necessarily followed in choosing the shape of the chasuble, beyond that of making a fairly symmetrical vestment which should hang down in front and behind, and should have a hole in the middle through which the priest's head should be passed. Nor can we even say that fashion affected the shape of the vestment; for were such a list as I have mentioned to be printed here, it would be seen to consist of the most haphazard and random series of dates and names of places thrown together without the slightest regard to chronological sequence or geographical position.
The dimensions of a pointed chasuble (circa fourteenth century) at Aix-la-Chapelle, which has been accepted as a standard for modern imitation, are given as follows:
| ft. | in. | |
| Depth of shoulder, measuring from neck | 2 | 9 |
| Length of side, from shoulder to point | 4 | 11 |
| Depth from neck to point in front | 4 | 6 |
| Depth from neck to point behind | 4 | 10 |
The chasuble of St Thomas of Canterbury, at Sens Cathedral, which is of the old extinguisher shape, is three feet ten inches in depth. In the oldest chasubles the length of the vestment behind was greater—often much greater—than in front. There is a more even balance between back and front in later mediaeval times.
Passing now from the manner of making the chasuble to the manner of ornamenting it, we find just the same divergence, with apparently just as little rule. It is probable that, as the decoration was the most costly part of the manufacture of a chasuble, the amount of it was regulated by the resources available to pay for it.
We propose to consider at the end of the next chapter the classes of patterns with which vestments generally were decorated in the middle ages; at present, therefore, we shall confine ourselves to noticing briefly the positions in which these decorations were placed on the chasuble.