Turrets, towers, and temples

by Unknown

I might have known better; but, somehow, I had expected to see it casting its long shadow on a public street where people came and went all day. It was a surprise to me to find it in a grave, retired place, apart from the general resort, and carpeted with smooth green turf. But, the group of buildings clustered on and about this verdant carpet; comprising the Tower, the Baptistery, the Cathedral, and the Church of the Campo Santo; is perhaps the most remarkable and beautiful in the whole world; and, from being clustered there together away from the ordinary transactions and details of the town, they have a singularly venerable and impressive character. It is the architectural essence of a rich old city, with all its common life and common habitations pressed out, and filtered away.

Simond compares the Tower to the usual pictorial representations in children’s books of the Tower of Babel. It is a happy simile, and conveys a better idea of the building than chapters of laboured description. Nothing can exceed the grace and lightness of the structure; nothing can be more remarkable than its general appearance. In the course of the ascent to the top (which is by an easy staircase), the inclination is not very apparent; but, at the summit, it becomes so, and gives one the sensation of being in a ship that has heeled over, through the action of an ebb tide. The effect upon the low side, so to speak—looking over from the gallery, and seeing the shaft recede to its base—is very startling; and I saw a nervous traveller hold on to the Tower involuntarily, after glancing down, as if he had some idea of propping it up. The view within, from the ground—looking up, as through a slanted tube—is also very curious. It certainly inclines as much as the most sanguine tourist could desire. The natural impulse of ninety-nine people out of a hundred, who were about to recline upon the grass below it to rest, and contemplate the adjacent buildings, would probably be, not to take up their position under the leaning side; it is so very much aslant.

Pictures from Italy (London, 1845).

THE CATHEDRAL OF CANTERBURY.
W. H FREMANTLE.

The foundation of St. Martin’s Church and the lower part of its walls, which are Roman, stood in 598 as they stand to-day; and they were the walls of the little church which had been given to the Christian Queen Bertha and her chaplain Bishop Luithart, by her pagan husband King Ethelbert. When Augustine passed towards the city, as described by the Venerable Bede, with his little procession headed by the monk carrying a board on which was a rough picture of Christ, and a chorister bearing a silver cross, his heart, no doubt, beat high with hope: but his hope would have grown into exultation could he have looked forward through the centuries, and beheld the magnificent Cathedral which was to spring up where his episcopal throne was fixed, and the energetic and varied Christian life which has issued from this first home of Anglo-Saxon Christianity. To us the scene is full of historical recollections. Between the place where we are standing and the Cathedral are the city walls, on the very site which they occupied in the days of Ethelbert, and the postern-gate through which Queen Bertha came every day to her prayers; in the nearer distance, a little to the right of the Cathedral, are the remains of the great abbey which Augustine founded; to our left is the Pilgrims’ Way, by which, after Becket’s canonization, those who landed at Dover made their way to the shrine of St. Thomas.

THE CATHEDRAL OF CANTERBURY.

The eye glances over the valley of the Stour, enclosed between the hill on which we are placed and that of St. Thomas, crowned by the fine buildings of the Clergy Orphan School; and ranges from Harbledown (Chaucer’s “little town under the Blean ycleped Bob-up-and-down”) on the left to the Jesuit College at Hale’s Place farther to the right; and thence down the valley to Fordwich, where formerly the waters of the Stour joined those of the Wantsome, the estuary separating Thanet from the mainland. This town at the Domesday epoch was a port with flourishing mills and fisheries. There the Caen stone was landed to build the Cathedral, and the tuns of wine from the monks’ vineyards in France were lifted out of the ships by the mayor’s crane....

But it is time that we go into the Cathedral precincts. Making use of a canon’s key, we pass, by Queen Bertha’s Postern, through the old city walls, along a piece of the ancient Queningate lane—a reserved space between the walls of the city and the precincts, along which the citizens and troops could pass freely for purposes of defence: through the Bowling Green, where the tower of Prior Chillenden is seen to have been used as a pigeon-house, into the Cathedral Yard. In so doing we pass under a Norman archway of the date of Lanfranc and the Conqueror, which formerly stood in a wall separating the cemetery of the monks from that of the laity; then along the south side of the Cathedral, passing Anselm’s chapel, and the beautiful Norman tower attached to the south-eastern transept, with its elaborate tracery, which shows how delicate Norman work could be; past the south porch, over which is a bas-relief of the altar where the sword of Becket’s murderer was preserved; and round, past the western door, into the cloister.

The cloister occupies the same space as the Norman cloister built by Lanfranc, but of the Norman work only a doorway remains at the north-east corner; there is some Early English arcading on the north side, but the present tracery and fan-worked roof belong to the end of the Fourteenth Century, when Archbishops Sudbury, Arundell, and Courtenay, and Prior Chillenden (1390–1411) rebuilt the nave, the cloister and the chapter-house. The later work cuts across the older in the most unceremonious way, as is seen especially in the square doorway by which we shall presently enter the “Martyrdom,” which cuts into a far more beautiful portal of the decorated period....