tower-turret here must remain uncertain; but its purpose is plain
enough. The light of it was intended to guide travellers benighted
in the once dense and far-spreading Enfield Chase. The elevated site
of the church itself was known as “Beacon Hill” in the time of Queen
Elizabeth, and even then had long borne that name. There is evidence
that the beacon was lighted in the troubled times of 1745, when the
Scottish rebels were hourly expected to descend upon London and
replace King George with a Stuart sovereign. Blown down in the great
gale of January 1st, 1779, the existing one is, of course, merely a
restoration. It was lighted on the night of the rejoicings over the
Diamond Jubilee in 1897, and again at the Coronation of Edward the
Seventh.
The Battle of Barnet, in which Monken Hadley and all the surrounding
district were involved, is an oft-told tale, and romantic novelists
have long had their way with it. Lord Lytton was probably the last, as
he was certainly the greatest, to make that great contest of 1471 the
vehicle for a story; and he wrote of it so convincingly that an ancient
and weatherbeaten fragment of a huge oak tree marking the border of
Enfield Chase is pointed out as a legitimate historic landmark of
that great contest. It is the “gaunt and leafless tree” whereon Friar
Bungay hangs his hated rival, Adam Warner, whilst at its foot lay the
lifeless form of his daughter Sibyll and “the shattered fragments of
the mechanical ‘eureka’ on which he had spent the labours of his life.”
The old trunk, long ago divested of its bark, was upset some years ago
by some drunken volunteers, but it has been replaced in its original
position and enclosed within a railing.
Taking by preference the old road, across Hadley Green, by the obelisk,
called “Hadley Highstone,” marking the site of the battle, instead
of following the “new” road out of Barnet constructed by Telford in
1823, we pass Dyrham Park. The imposing stone-built entrance to this
beautiful domain is sufficient to attract attention by itself, without
the aid of historic association; but it has, according to oft-repeated
story, the added interest of having originally been a triumphal arch
erected in London to welcome Charles the Second, at his Restoration in
1660.
[Illustration: THE GATEWAY, DYRHAM PARK.]
The old road comes to a junction again with the new at South Mimms, and
old and new proceed together from this point to St. Albans, up Ridge
Hill, and so by London Colney. Here and there stretches of the old
way may be found, to right or left; hollow, overshaded by trees, and
solitary, save for those expertest of expert wayfarers, the gipsies and
the tramps, who may often be found there, under the greenwood tree,
secure from the dust and the hustling of this new century which has
discovered the roads again, but has not the time nor the inclination to
know them intimately, or as anything else than a race-track.
[Sidenote: _ST. ALBANS_]
In 1826, seventy-two coaches passed through St. Albans every
twenty-four hours, and it was calculated that the travellers passing
through in the same time numbered no fewer than 1,000, of whom the
coaches conveyed 600. The rest were those at the extremes of poverty
and wealth, who rode in the waggons or walked; or sped by swiftly and
luxuriously, in post-chaises or in their own private chariots. How
many, one wonders, are the motor-cars that now daily speed, in clouds
of dust, up Ridge Hill and so through London Colney and St. Albans
to North Wales, or to Manchester and then, across the Border, into
Scotland?
The streets of St. Albans are by no means adapted for the hurrying
methods of to-day; and although the town or the city, as we must now
style it—is but twenty-one miles from the centre of London, it is even
yet a place of narrow and winding ways. There is, indeed, to this day
a certain savour of monasticism about St. Albans, largely though the
place has grown of late years. The Abbey, on its crowning ridge, of
course dominates everything; but, apart from that chief feature, you
have old churches, old houses of every degree of antiquity down to
the time of George the Third (after which period houses cease to be
antique), and old inns. And with all these evidences of a venerable
age there is yet a lively air, a bustling cheeriness, about St. Albans
that render it really lovable. Much might be said of St. Albans: of
the ruins of Sopwell nunnery, down in the quelchy water-meadows as you
come in from London; of St. Stephen’s, the tiny village on its height,
looking down upon the city; of the ancient Abbey Gatehouse, proudly
known as “the oldest school in England.” Indeed, something must needs
be said of this last. It stands immediately by the West Front of the
Abbey, and is the last relic of the vanished monastery.
[Sidenote: _ARISTOCRATIC CHURCHMEN_]
The Gatehouse is only by chance the Grammar School, for the school,
itself founded about the year 1095 by the monks, was only removed
hither in 1869. After the suppression of the Abbey and the demolition
of most of its domestic buildings, the Gatehouse became the Sessions
House and prison for St. Albans until 1651. Thenceforward, until 1869,
it served the not dissimilar purpose of a House of Correction. Indeed,
throughout its history, from the building of it in 1380, the great
Gatehouse has served like purposes: the stewards of my lords abbots
having held assize in the upper rooms and consigned offenders to the
dungeons below. Offenders were many, for those ancient Churchmen,
who lorded it autocratically over St. Albans, in temporalities as
well as in spiritual matters, obtruded into all things. They were, as
already shown, for education, and at an extraordinarily early period
established the Grammar School: but they took care to excommunicate
every other school in the neighbourhood, and none might buy nor sell,
nor hold any privileges of market without the Church took toll of them.
That there were those who, even in early days, kicked against the
pricks of this combined jurisdiction over body and soul duly appears
in the records of St. Albans; and they suffered in the Gatehouse the
penalties awarded to all fire-brands, malcontents, and agitators, and
all such pestiferous fellows. Wherefore the grey old building is a very
interesting old relic indeed of those times which certain parties in
the State (who ought properly to be flogged at the cart-tail) are eager
to bring back.
[Illustration: THE “FLEUR DE LIS.”]
Of the inns of St. Albans I shall say little in this place, for much
has been said of them in the pages of the HOLYHEAD ROAD and the GREAT
NORTH ROAD. But a word or two, and a sketch, must be reserved for
the “Fleur de Lis” inn, close by the Market Place. Like Canning’s
“Needy Knife-Grinder” it has no story to tell, but its courtyard,
with the odd little external staircase shown here, sufficiently
justifies notice, even though in history, national or local, the house
has no place. An effective item in the view—the object resembling a
church-tower—is entirely extrinsic. It has nothing to do with the inn,
except serving the purpose of composing a picture; nor is it even
strictly ecclesiastical, being a fourteenth-century curfew-tower, once
of remarkable interest, but shorn of much of that quality after Sir
Gilbert Scott laid his heavy restoring hand on it, some forty years
ago.
XIII
[Sidenote: _ST. ALBAN THE MARTYR_]
The Cathedral of St. Albans, as it must now be called, for the ancient
Abbey became the Cathedral Church of a new diocese in 1875, was said
by Freeman to be “the vastest of English ministers.” He was not quite
correct, for the huge Cathedral of Winchester is ten feet longer; but
the bold and elevated site on which St. Albans stands advertises its
bulk in the supremest degree, while the site of Winchester Cathedral,
being flat, and its precincts enclosed, the dimensions of that most
interesting of all English Cathedrals are not fully displayed.
The reasons that impelled the first architects of St. Albans Abbey to
so greatly distinguish their church, for size, above all others, are
found in the fact that it was here that St. Alban, the first British
martyr, suffered, in the dim era of the Diocletian persecution, in the
Roman domination of Britain. “This year,” says the Saxon Chronicle,
referring to A.D. 283, “suffered St. Alban the Martyr,” but Bede, in
his “Ecclesiastical History,” places the date at A.D. 305, and as the
death of St. Alban was a direct result of the savageries instituted by
Diocletian, decreed two years earlier by that tyrant, the historian is
probably correct.
Bede died in A.D. 735, four hundred and thirty years after the event
he recorded. He and the even earlier chronicler, Gildas, who wrote in
A.D. 564, mention a church of sorts being very early built upon the
site of the martyrdom; but all earlier buildings were swept away on the
coming of the Normans, and already in 1077, only eleven years after
the Conquest, Abbot Paul de Caen had cleared the ground and began the
immense building of which the existing Cathedral is the representative,
still retaining large portions of his work; including the tower,
transepts and choir, nine bays on the north side of the nave and three
on the south.
There was at that time no spot even distantly approaching the especial
holiness of this, and none could have foreseen the tragedy at
Canterbury in 1170, that was, in little less than one hundred years, to
completely overshadow St. Alban and set the Blessed St. Thomas à Becket
above him.
[Illustration: RELICS OF THE SAXON CHURCH IN THE NORTH TRANSEPT, ST.
ALBANS.]
Abbot Paul’s great building was imposing, but it was not beautiful.
What is left of his original work has become venerable through age,
but there can be no doubt that, could we see it in all its freshness,
as it was built, we should consider it very gaunt and ugly indeed. He
antedated the typical American in his desire to “lick creation,” and
he thought in feet and yards, rather than in terms of beauty. There
was much to provoke him to this. He had the relics of the then holiest
indigenous martyr, and those of St. Amphibalus, scarcely less holy, in
his charge, and ready to his hand lay huge piles of building materials,
the bricks, tiles, and stones of the ruined Roman city of _Verulamium_,
that had stood in the valley. The bulk of these materials was formed
of tiles, and with these the abbot reared his walls and piers, and the
central tower, bedding the tiles in mortar as thick as themselves:
so that to modern observers it seems remarkable that, with such a
pudding-like mass as this must have been before it dried out, the walls
ever consented to stand upright. Some few ornamental features were
incorporated from the Saxon church built by Offa, King of the Mercians,
in A.D. 793. These are the celebrated balusters, of undoubted Saxon
character, which, fitted with Norman capitals and bases, serve as
columns in the triforia of the transepts.
Abbot Paul’s building was of the most stark and naked early Norman
character. He willingly forswore ornament, if he could thereby
add another bay to the length of his Abbey Church, and he and the
mid-nineteenth-century builders join hands, in the spirit, across
the tremendous gap of seven centuries and a half. Both delighted in
plaster, and both hated to show the real materials of which they built.
Abbot Paul covered the entire exterior of his Abbey, as well as the
interior, from east to west, and up to the topmost battlements of his
central tower, with plaster, thick and slab, and thought the result
beautiful. And so did his contemporaries. We may take leave to look
with a considerable measure of contempt upon their taste. Traces of
the plaster facing of the tower, indeed, remained until 1870, when, in
course of restoration works, it was removed, revealing the beautiful
dark red hue of the Roman tiles of which it is constructed.
[Sidenote: _A COSTLY ENTERPRISE_]
The proverb that “the old order changeth, giving place to new,” is
most strikingly emphasised in the appearance and history of any great
Cathedral. Each successive abbot seems here, as elsewhere, to have
desired to do something much better than that done by his predecessors;
and so we find Abbot John de Cella, in 1195, with the particularly
inadequate sum of one hundred marks left for the purpose by the last
abbot, beginning to rebuild Abbot Paul’s gigantic church. De Cella
was a supreme artist, but unhappily an idealist who did not count the
cost of what he was doing. He pulled down the West Front, and began to
rebuild it in the Early English style. Before he had done more than get
in the foundations of his new work, bang went the hundred marks, with
much else: a circumstance which led the historian, Matthew de Paris, to
gibe cruelly at him; saying, very caustically, he wondered the abbot
had not recollected the ancient proverb,—“That he who is about to build
should compute the cost, lest all begin to jeer at him, saying, ‘This
man _began_ to build, and was unable to finish it.’”
How de Cella tried in every direction to raise money for his works is a
pitiful story: how he visited, travelled, petitioned, and begged, first
of one person, and then of another; how he was “looked coldly upon”
and snubbed. Finally, after a great number of years, during which the
works were only spasmodically in progress, de Cella died, in 1214, with
the porches of his West Front only half finished.
The Early English architecture of de Cella remained, a lovely specimen
of the artistic feeling of the period, until 1882, when Lord Grimthorpe
destroyed it, on the excuse that it was decayed and could not be made
good by modern workmen: building a West Front of his own, in a style
which has justly been called “Dissenting Gothic.”
William de Trumpington succeeded de Cella as abbot, and in his
one-and-twenty years rebuilt four bays on the north side of the nave
and five on the south, in the Early English style. Five others on the
south side are of the Decorated period, and are the work of Abbot
Eversden, in the fourteenth century. The remainder of the nave is the
original gaunt early Norman.
It would be a lengthy treatise that should duly tell the architectural
and other history of St. Albans Cathedral: and this is not the place
for so prolonged an exercise. Let it be sufficient, then, to tell
something of the things done to the fabric in modern times, in the name
of “restoration.”
Celia Fiennes wrote, over two hundred years ago, that the “great Church
wᶜʰ is dedicated to St. Albans is much out of repaire. I see the places
in the pavement hat was worn like holes for kneeling by the devotes of
yᵉ Religion and his votery’s as they tell you, but the whole Church is
so worn away that it mourns for some Charitable person to help repaire
it.” That person was forthcoming in the fulness of time, in that
ferocious controversialist and amateur architect, Lord Grimthorpe, who
“restored” the Cathedral at his own expense. As a result, it mourns,
and others mourn for it, more than ever. Enormous sums of money have
been expended upon the vast building, amounting to over £160,000. Of
this amount £40,000, raised by public subscription, went upon the works
executed between 1870 and 1879. The remaining £120,000 or more was
spent by Lord Grimthorpe in playing at being an architect.
[Sidenote: _NEW WAYS WITH AN OLD ABBEY_]
The Abbey had, indeed, been gradually falling into decay for many
years, and, about the middle of the nineteenth century, had at last
become quite ruinous. In 1833, some reparations had been made to the
tower, but these were slight, and work was only seriously begun in
1856, following a faculty granted to a committee which, calling itself
“national,” was nevertheless impotent to raise more than £30,000.
Some slight accretions were made to this fund as the result of the
added interest upon the Abbey being made the Cathedral Church of a new
diocese, in 1875; but these were soon engulfed in the mere work of
securing the sinking foundations. Sir Gilbert Scott was then called
in to undertake the work, and instantly shored up the great tower,
then on the point of falling. Until 1833, it had been crowned with a
dwarf timber and leaden spire, but this had been removed, and the
ring of eight bells had, three years earlier, been silenced, for fear
of bringing the heavy mass down. Great cracks had appeared in the
walls of the transepts, being slowly ground to powder by the settling
of the tower, and the interior of the building was always filled with
an impalpable dust, from the same cause. Still the tower sank slowly,
and it was seen that the four great piers at the crossing, which had
hitherto supported it, were at last failing. The real marvel was that
they had not failed before, for a singular discovery was made at this
time, at the base of the south-west pier, by which it was proved that
at some distant period—probably about that of the dissolution of the
monasteries under Henry VIII.—an attempt had been made to wreck the
place. A kind of cavern, some six feet wide, had been excavated in the
foundation and strutted with timbering which had evidently been placed
there for the two-fold purpose of protecting the excavators, and of
firing it when the undermining process had been completed. Why this
brutal idea had been abandoned, when so near completion, must be left
to conjecture; but it is plain to see that in all those centuries the
congregations and visitors to the Abbey had been in danger, at any
moment, of being crushed to death by a possible sudden collapse of the
tower.
This injury was repaired, and new foundations were laid, down to the
solid chalk, and the upper parts of the tower were secured. Funds at
that time permitted of little else being done. In 1871, an appeal
for £50,000 was issued, resulting in a subscription of about £21,000;
and in 1875, a further appeal for £30,000. Then the clerestory began
to fall. A new faculty was granted, and more subscriptions came in,
but by 1879 all these funds were again exhausted, and the restoration
committee resigned. Then came the great opportunity which Lord
Grimthorpe had long desired, of getting the restoration entirely into
his own hands. He was an incredibly wealthy man,[2] with a passion for
exercising the part of amateur architect, and an equal passion for
controversy. He procured a new faculty, granting him unlimited power
at his own expense, to “restore, repair, and refit the Church.” Thus,
disastrously for antiquity, was the old building made over to him,
without let or hindrance, to do as he would.
[Sidenote: _LORD GRIMTHORPE_]
The handiwork of Lord Grimthorpe is writ large, all over the building.
He did the most extraordinary things. In restoring the transepts he put
in what purported to be “Early English lancets,” with false heads that
look like genuine heads from without, but from within are seen to be
cut off square; and was so enamoured of the red Roman tiles that give
so noble an appearance to the exterior that, in rebuilding the walls,
he supplied the lack of genuine ones for the new work by especially
manufacturing “Roman” tiles of his own, to form the walls of the south
transept; designed in what has been very fitly styled “Railway-station
Gothic.”
[Illustration: LORD GRIMTHORPE.]
It would be wearisome to follow Lord Grimthorpe in detail, in his new
way with an old Abbey. With extraordinary passion and virulent contempt
for public opinion, he swept away genuine Norman work, and in many
places gave a brand-new appearance where had before been the bloom of
antiquity. Controversy followed upon controversy, during the progress
of these works, and Lord Grimthorpe went grimly on his way, replying to
arguments with the personal abuse of which he was a better master than
he was of architecture. His critics were “the usual howlers”; Street
to him was “the immortal author of the worst great Gothic building in
the world,” by which, of course, he meant the Law Courts; the foremost
architects and antiquaries talked “ignorant nonsense,” and were
persons who would “call everything destruction on which they have not
got a percentage.” Here, indeed, be “words that sting, and thoughts
that burn.” They are vehement, and they hurt, which was the object of
them. Like Alan Breck, he was a “bonnie fighter,” even though, as an
architect, he did not begin to exist. One of his worst atrocities was
the hateful wash-tub done in stone, which serves for pulpit in the nave.
His work is, indeed, only too evident all over the building, and he
himself is represented in sculptured stone in a spandrel over one of
the western porches; and is shown in the likeness of a recording angel,
with a pen and a scroll upon which he is probably entering the sins of
architects, or writing some new Evangel on matters architectural. But
the sculptor, although the portrait is excellent, has made a mistake
in representing him apparently at a loss for a word. Whether pleading
a case in court, or abusing fellow-controversialists, his eloquence
suffered from no such impediment.
[Sidenote: _ST. ALBAN’s SHRINE_]
But enough of Lord Grimthorpe and his doings. Let us see the “holy of
holies” of this Cathedral: the Shrine of St. Alban, in its beautiful
chapel, directly east of the great altar-screen. After the Shrine
was destroyed, in the troubles attendant upon the Reformation, none
expected it to be ever seen again. It disappeared utterly, and only the
worn pavement, where the pilgrims had knelt, showed where it had stood.
All around were signs that this had been no lightly regarded Shrine;
and to this day the mid-fifteenth-century Watching Loft remains, in
which the Feretrarius, or Relic Keeper, and his monastic brethren kept
guard night and day.
It was in 1866 that, during some alterations to the Lady Chapel, many
pieces of carved Purbeck marble were found, built up with bricks and
rubble into some sixteenth-century work. It was readily guessed that
they were portions of the vanished Shrine, and in 1872, when Sir
Gilbert Scott was at work in the south choir-aisle, an immense quantity
of carved fragments were discovered. A further quest led to the
recovery of nearly the whole of the marble Shrine; and it now stands,
pieced together, in its ancient place.
The carved work of this strangely found relic is particularly
beautiful, and includes groups representing the beheading of St. Alban
and the scourging of St. Amphibalus. The cresting of the structure is
of the most ornate character.
All this elaborate work was, however, but the support for the actual
reliquary, the casket containing the relics of the Saint, which was
gorgeous in silver and gold, and blazing with jewels. This was too
precious a sight to be on view every day, and was covered at most
times with an “operculum,” which could be raised or lowered at will
by means of cords or pulleys. On special high days and holy days it
was displayed to view. The twisted shaft seen outside the Shrine is a
fragment of the six that formerly supported the six wax lights kept
burning on those special days.
[Illustration: SHRINE OF ST. ALBAN, AND TOMB OF DUKE HUMPHREY.]
[Sidenote: _ST. AMPHIBALUS_]
The Shrine of St. Amphibalus was discovered in a similar manner, and
was also pieced together in the same way. It stands now in a darkling
corner of the North Choir Aisle. There have been sceptical antiquaries
daring enough to suggest that Amphibalus, the persecuted Christian who
was secreted by Alban, with the result that both were martyred, is a
myth. No such person, they contend, ever existed. “Amphibalus,” it
seems, was really the name of a kind of long cloak worn at that period;
and such a cloak was worn by Alban when he was taken to execution.
Monkish legends personified it, and it was, thus marvellously changed
from an article of clothing into a human being, at length canonized. It
is a little shocking to find old clothes admitted into the hierarchy of
saints, and considerably lessens the very slight modicum of respect one
might entertain for monastic lore.
XIV
If the following story, told by John Wesley in his Diary of 1769, is
correct, some people must have queer tastes, and strange stomachs: