Many of the doors of our cathedrals and great abbey churches have knockers, often of very striking designs. These as a rule indicate that the places in question claimed the right of sanctuary; and the knocker was to summon an attendant, or watcher, to admit the fugitive from justice at night, or at other times when the [p 24] entrance was closed. A curious head holding a ring within its teeth forms the knocker at Durham cathedral; a lion’s head was not an uncommon form for this to take, as at Adel, York (All Saints), and Norwich (S. Gregory’s); a singularly ferocious lion’s head knocker may be seen at Mayence.
From a Photo by Albert E. Coe, Norwich.
ERPINGHAM
GATE, NORWICH.
The deep porch which we so frequently see over the principal door of the church was formerly something more than an ornament, or even a protection; it was a recognized portion of the sacred building, and had its appointed place in the services of the Church. Baptism was frequently administered in the church porch, to symbolize that by that Sacrament the infant entered into Holy Church. There are still relics of the existence of fonts in some of our porches, as at East Dereham, Norfolk. When baptism was thus administered in the south porch, it was also customary, so it is alleged, to throw wide open the north door; that the devil, formally renounced in that rite, might by that way flee “to his own place.” The font now usually stands just within the door. In the pre-reformation usage of the Church the thanksgiving of a woman after child-birth was also made in, or [p 25] before, the church porch; and concluded with the priest’s saying, “Enter into the temple of God, that thou mayest have eternal life, and live for ever and ever.” The first prayer-book of Edward VI. ordered the woman to kneel “nigh unto the quire door:” the next revision altered the words “to nigh unto the place where the table standeth;” and from Elizabeth’s days the rubric has simply said indefinitely “a convenient place.”
The rubric at the commencement of the Order of the Solemnization of Holy Matrimony according to the Sarum use began also in this way: “Let the man and woman be placed before the door of the church, or in the face of the church, before the presence of God, the Priest, and the People”; at the end of the actual marriage, and before the benedictory prayers which follow
it, the rubric says, “Here let them go into the church to the step of the altar.” Chaucer alludes to this usage when in his “Canterbury Tales” he says of the wife of Bath—
“She was a worthy woman all her live,
Husbands at the church dore had she five.”