Very often to-day, as in Leland’s time, the Chapel of St. Mary is supposed to have been founded later than 1460, partly to commemorate the battle of Sandal Castle Field, now called the battle of Wakefield, and partly as a monument to a boy of eighteen, poor Edmund Earl of Rutland, second son of the Duke of York, who was murdered by the “black Lord Clifford,” called the Butcher. Then a royal chantry seems to have been founded in St. Mary’s Chapel, and endowed; but chantries were founded often in bridge chapels, as we have seen in the case of London Bridge ([p. 217]); and so we must not suppose that “chantry” and “chapel” mean always the same thing. Moreover, in architectural character the chapel belongs to about the time of Edward II, who died in 1327. This was proved by Buckler, and in a charter of about 1358, dated at Wakefield, Edward III settled “£10 per annum on William Kaye and William Bull and their successors for ever to perform Divine Service in a chapel of St. Mary newly built on the bridge at Wakefield.”[94]
Still, the precise date of the foundation is unimportant. Scatcherd ascribes it to a time earlier than 1357, and dwells upon a resemblance between St. Mary’s Chapel at Wakefield and Prior Crawden’s Chapel at Ely, 1321-40; he is “almost persuaded” that they were built by the same great architect, Alan de Walsingham.[95]
I chose the story of this bridge chapel as an instance of the desecration thrust upon old English shrines after the Reformation had let loose the creed of self into sect-making zealotry. In the presence of fine art Puritans were often like starving dogs in the presence of raw meat. Though every mediæval bridge without exception was united to the Church by a Christian symbol, a cross or a crucifix, yet the Puritans were so thorough in their fanaticism that only a bridge here and there was allowed to keep even the stump of a smashed cross. Some broken crosses were handed on to Victoria’s time, but highway boards and their parapet repairs destroyed the stumps one by one, as in the case of Ashford Bridge, Derbyshire. A few years ago the stump of a cross had not yet been stripped from one Derbyshire bridge, the Derwent packhorse bridge, but I dare not say that it still remains. At any moment the vandalism of a “restoration” may remind us that our highway boards ought to be guided and disciplined by independent committees of architects and artists. Their work is far less intelligent than that of the Ponts et Chaussées in France. And so, what with the ravaging hands of our roadway officials, and what with the destructive sanctity of Puritans, our old bridges and their religious adjuncts have suffered long and much and continually. Many bridge chapels have been destroyed, as at Cromford, Doncaster, Ludlow, Bideford, Richmond (Yorks), Leeds, Newcastle, Barnard Castle, Durham (on the Elvet Bridge), Catterick, Bridgenorth, Bristol, Wallingford, Bedford (St. Thomas’s Chapel, Bunyan’s gaol), and Droitwich, where the high road passed through the chapel, and separated the congregation from the reading-desk and from the pulpit! What a relic of old wayfaring life! Yet it was cleared away as hateful to progress.
A small oratory remains on the bridge at Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire. It is not quite on the same lines as the original structure, for in the seventeenth century its roofing was altered into a sort of dome built with stone. It is a “housing,” a tiny place for a passing prayer, not a chapel; and this class of bridge oratory has become so uncommon that I doubt whether another exists. As Mr. Emanuel Green has said, it “is now perhaps unique,” and “should be carefully preserved.”[96] In recent times neither reverence nor care has been bestowed on this oratory. After the Reformation it was profaned, as a matter of course. For a long time it was used as a “lock-up,” and in 1887 it was a powder magazine!
Its pyramidal roof is crowned with a tall finial, which in its turn carries a pretty wind vane; and in the wind vane we find the emblem of St. Nicholas—a gudgeon. The townsfolk used to be known as Bradford gudgeon, and those of them who had been shut up in the little prison on the bridge were said to have been “under the fish and over the water.”[97]
At St. Ives, Huntingdonshire, called Slepe in “Domesday Book,” and Asleep to-day, there is another degraded oratory, a bigger one, with an apsidal termination eastward. Its original parapet has been torn down, and a brick house of two storeys adds greatly to its height. Derby also has a bridge chapel, whose history may be studied in the works of the Rev. Dr. Cox; but I am more interested in the oratory on Rotherham Bridge, Yorkshire. Here, as at Wakefield, the chapel stands on a small island, the upper part is corbelled out on each side, and the end against the bridge is carried by a half-arch. The plan is a rectangle about 30 ft. by 14 ft., while at Wakefield the external width is 20 ft. and the total length about 45 ft. During many years Rotherham Chapel was almost as beautiful as the masterpiece at Wakefield; and even now, after infinite ill-usage, there is charm in the embattled parapet graced with pinnacles.
GOTHIC BRIDGE AT BARNARD CASTLE, YORKSHIRE
We hear of this chapel for the first time in the will of one John Bokyns, who in 1483 left three and fourpence “to the fabric of the chapel to be built on Rotherham Bridge.” There seems to have been no endowment, as this chapel was unnamed by the Commissioners of Henry VIII. In 1681 she was turned into an almshouse, she was a prison in 1778, and also in 1831; but at last she became more reputable as a warehouse. May we hope that her lost window tracery will be renewed, and will she ever be restored to the service of the Church? Her degradation has lasted far too long, certainly, but it is not easy to collect money for church restoration. If our golf fanatics took the matter in hand and made an appeal to the public, their popularity would bring in subscriptions.