In the vestry of Lambeth Palace is a curiously painted chest; several of an early date are preserved in the triforium of Westminster Abbey; there is one at Salisbury Cathedral, and another in the Record Office, having been removed from the Pix Chapel.
One of the original uses of these coffers, as we have seen, was to preserve the vestments of the church. The copes, however, being larger than the other vestments, and in the cathedrals and other important churches, being very numerous, frequently had a special receptacle provided. [p 180] At York, Salisbury, Westminster, and Gloucester, ancient cope-chests are still preserved. These are triangular in shape, the cope being most easily folded into that form.
In not a few instances these large coffers, or sections of them, were used as alms boxes, for which a very ancient precedent can be found. At the restoration of the Jewish Temple under King Joash, we are told (2 Kings xii., 9, 10) that “Jehoiada the priest took a chest, and bored a hole in the lid of it, and set it beside the altar, on the right side as one cometh into the house of the Lord: and the priests that kept the door put therein all the money that was brought into the house of the Lord: and it was so, when they saw that there was much money in the chest, that the King’s scribe and the high priest came up, and they put up in bags, and told the money that was found in the house of the Lord.”
At Llanaber, near Barmouth in North Wales, is a chest hewn from a single block of wood, and pierced to receive coins. At Hatfield, Yorkshire, is an ancient example of a similar kind; and others may be seen at S. Peter’s-in-the-East, Oxford, at Drayton in Berkshire, at Meare [p 181] Church, Somersetshire, at Irchester and Mears Ashby, in Northamptonshire, at Hartland, in Devonshire, and in the Isle of Wight at Carisbrooke. An interesting chest, with provision for the reception of alms, is preserved at Combs Church, Suffolk, where there is also another plain hutch, iron-bound and treble-locked. The chest in question is strongly, but simply, made, the front being divided into four plain panels, with some very slight attempt at decoration in the form of small disks and diamonds along the top; and the lid being quite flat and plain, and secured by two locks. At one end, however, a long slit has been cut in this lid, and beneath it is a till, or trough, to receive the money, very similar to the little locker often inserted at one end of an old oak chest intended for domestic use, save that in this case the compartment has, of course, no second lid of its own. This chest has the date 1599 carved upon it, but is supposed to be some half a century older, the date perhaps marking the time of some repairs or alterations made in it.
Hutches of the kind that we have been considering are not peculiar to England, some fine and well-preserved examples being found in [p 182] several of the ancient churches in France. Among ourselves it is obvious that great numbers must have disappeared; many doubtless were rough and scarcely worthy of long preservation; others by the very beauty of their workmanship probably roused the cupidity, or the iconoclastic prejudice, of the spoiler. Near Brinkburn Priory a handsome fourteenth century chest was found, used for domestic purposes, in a neighbouring farm-house; a Tudor chest, belonging to S. Mary’s, Newington, lay for years in the old rectory house, and subsequently disappeared; and these are doubtless typical of many another case. When the strictness at first enforced as to the care of the parish registers became culpably relaxed, and parish clerks and sextons were left in practically sole charge of them, it is but too probable that these men, often illiterate and otherwise unsuited to such a trust, were in many instances as careless, or as criminal, in regard to the coffers, as we unfortunately know they frequently were with respect to their contents.
Few church chests of any interest date from the Jacobean, or any subsequent period. Plain deal boxes were then held good enough for the purpose of a “church hutch.”
[p 183]
An Antiquarian Problem: The Leper Window.
By William White, F.S.A.
These windows were called by Parker and other writers of the Gothic Revival, “Lychnoscopes;” and then by the ecclesiologists, “Low-side Windows.” But the name given by the late G. E. Street has now become so generally accepted that it seems necessary to look a little further into the evidence of the fitness or unfitness of this designation for them.
Behind some stalls in the Royal Chapel were discovered some remains of a mural painting, apparently to represent the communicating of a leper through some such window, and he at once concluded that it was for this very purpose so many of them were introduced into the chancels of our mediæval churches. There seemed, however, nothing to indicate that it was at one of these special windows at all that this function was performed. And the very fact of the representation itself would seem to indicate rather an exceptional instance, or special circumstance, such as the communicating of some knight or [p 184] person of note who might, for instance, have brought leprosy in his own person from the Holy Land, from whence probably in the first instance it came; and who would not be admitted within the church. But the records of the existence of lepers would seem to show their numbers to have been very limited, and confined to few localities. And in any case this would be no sufficient cause for the introduction of these windows as of universal occurrence throughout the land, for these windows are found almost everywhere, and in very many instances on both sides of the chancel. Moreover, in many cases the act of administration through these windows would be exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, on account of the position, or the arrangement, of the window itself.