The monastery garden supplied endless designs for the exquisite plant-forms and scrolls which mingled so gracefully with the written text or the printed page. In the gifted words of the late Lady Eastlake, who said, “Here on these solid and well-nigh indestructible parchment folios, where text and picture alternately take up the sacred tale—the text itself a picture, the picture a homily—the skill of the artist has exhausted itself in setting forth the great scheme of salvation.”[21]
Flowers also supplied an un-ending theme for symbolism which always allied itself to sacred and legendary art, and tradition asserts that the monks reared an appropriate flower for each holy-day, and that certain flowers were dedicated to saints. The ivy a type of immortality, the oak of virtue and majesty, the lily, and the rose, all had their significance on the vellum book.
Mingled with the border designs were satirical allusions in the form of grotesques and other drolleries, evidently aimed at the jealousies of the secular and regular clergy, one against the other, or both against the mendicant friars. What was found on the illuminated page, was echoed in the architectural carvings of the time, and the fantastic wood work in some of our cathedrals and many churches, especially in the stalls of Christ Church, Hants, repeat the teachings of the caustic monk in his cloistered seclusion.
It was reserved for the architect-artist to perpetuate in stone the beauties of the floral world, and nothing speaks a stronger though mute language than the foliage sculptured on the arches, doorways, and nooks of our minsters, churches, and abbey ruins.
“Ivy, and vine, and many a sculptured rose,
The tenderest image of mortality,
Binding the slender columns, whose light shafts
Cluster like stems in corn-sheaves.”
Not only was symbolism embodied in these carvings, but as an exercise and offering of devotion to the Unseen, the best efforts were lavished on it by the skilled master-workmen of the time.
Thus the scribe, the illuminator, the architect were all striving in a kind of companion rivalry, each illustrating by his efforts some phase of artistic labour, or reviving a long-forgotten custom.
However much we may dissociate legend with truth, we cannot always ignore it, mingled though it may be with monkish ignorance and superstition.
The tale of many a noble structure has been veiled under the guise of the chronicle or the monastic ledger book, and the foundation of Waltham Abbey is said to have originated from a 12th century MS., entitled, “De inventione Sancte Crucis.” Around the grand church of Minister in Thanet, gathers a pretty story, in that Dompneva, wife of Penda, King of Mercia, asked Ethelbert to grant her land in Thanet, on which she might build a monastery. In answer to how much she required, “Only as much as my deer can run over at one course.” The King gave her the wide tract of land run over by the deer, and she founded the cloister on the spot where now stands Minister church. Local names have sometimes been associated with the story of the cloister. The Bell-rock with its lighthouse was so called from the bell which the monks tolled, to warn the mariner of his danger.
The smallest item on the parchment page can have an extended meaning; the sign of the cross was found in many old deeds, which often contained an invocation to the Trinity, and the famous story of St. Helena, and the finding of the cross, has its incidents oft repeated in the MS., the printed book, the panel or fresco painting, as well as in the marvellous pieces of the sacred wood, so greatly venerated by the faithful! Of St. Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, there is a drawing, said to be by his own hand, in the illumination of a manuscript in the Bodleian Library, and of dedication of churches to saints, the name is legion. St. Barnabas Day is specially linked with English life and manners, it was the longest day according to the old style, and the old rhyme,