One of the most interesting antiquities of Jarrow Church,
Northumberland, is the chair of the Venerable Bede. It is preserved in
the vestry of the church, whither all brides repair as soon as the
marriage service is over, to seat themselves upon it. This, according to
the popular belief, will make them the joyful mothers of children; and
the expectant mothers (as I have been informed) would not consider the
marriage ceremony complete, until they had been enthroned in the
Venerable Bede's chair. The chair is very rude and substantial; made of
oak; in height, four feet ten inches; having an upright back, and sides
that slope off for the arms. According to the barbarous English fashion,
it is carved over with the nomenclature of all the vulgar obscurities of
the neighbourhood, whose sacrilegious penknives, together with the
wanton depredations of relic-hunters, have so "shorn" the chair of its
"fair proportions," that soon nothing but its attenuated form, "small by
degrees, and beautifully less," will be left for the future Childe
Harold to address with--
"Can it be,
That this is all remains of thee?"
Every foreigner who has visited our churches and cathedrals cannot fail
to remark how the English love of popularity glares forth in its most
sickly form in this barbarous custom of writing and carving names upon
monuments, or other works of art. Every observant person, too, when he
sees John Smith's name and full address, scratched with painful and
elaborate accuracy upon the stern but noseless face of some alabaster
knight, while he wonders at the gratuitous trouble which John Smith has
taken, must deplore the want of education thus so lamentably evinced.
Happily, this vulgar taste (so far as our churches are concerned) is now
under some control; but, nevertheless, it is still sad to see--at
Lichfield, for example--that control obliged to take the visible shape
of railings, to prevent Messrs. Smith, Brown, Jones, and Robinson from
handing their names down to posterity on the life-like marble of
Chantrey's "Sleeping Children." I have heard that this mode of defacing
monuments took its rise in the time of the Protectorate; and I would
wish to put this in the form of a _Query_: Whether it was so, or no?
With the impression that it _was_ the case, I have for many years past
examined the dates that accompanied names scratched upon monuments, and
never found a date earlier than the Protectorate. The subject seems
worth the inquiry.
To return to Bede's chair. It has often been engraved: but the best
representation of it that I know, is that by Mr. W. B. Scott, in his
_Antiquarian Gleanings of the North of England_. Besides his careful
etching of the present state of the chair, he also gives a suggestive
woodcut of its restoration. The ornamental portion he confines to the
front of the seat, and the head of the chair.