ventured to propose would set out to the world an authoritative
presentment of the actual condition of each church visited, drawn
up by duly qualified and certificated professional men according to
instructions laid down for them. The reports should include accurate
ground-plans made according to one uniform scale, elaborate copies of
mouldings, window-tracery, doorways, capitals, roofs--not merely pretty
little sketches suitable for the readers of the _Graphic_, but working
drawings, the results of careful measurement; and to this should be
added lists of monumental brasses, fonts, remains of mural paintings
or ancient glass, a complete register, in fact, of whatever remains
the churches contained of ancient work in wood or stone or metal at
the time the building was examined and reported on. Of course I shall
be met by the objection that the expense of such a survey would be
enormous, and that any such scheme is therefore for that one reason
impracticable. I am not prepared to go into the estimates. But of this
I feel very certain, that, so far from the cost of such a survey and
such a publication of reports as those contemplated deserving to be
called enormous, it would be much more truly described as insignificant.
The great bulk of the ancient churches which have not been violently
tampered with during the last thirty years or so belong to two classes:
the very small ones, which have seemed not worth meddling with, and
the very large ones which have frightened even the restorers. The cost
of drawing up reports upon the small churches would be very trifling
and would bring down the average expense considerably, and as to the
time required for carrying out such a survey, it need not, I believe,
occupy more than three years, though I dare say it might profitably be
spread over five. As to any other difficulty standing in the way, it
is ridiculous to suggest it. A preliminary survey of all the churches
in England was actually begun under the sanction of the Archæological
Institute thirty years ago, and a brief report upon the condition of
every church in seven counties was published, and may be purchased
now for a song. Each church was personally visited by some competent
antiquary or architect, and a slight but instructive notice of every
edifice was supplied. The survey of the county of Suffolk alone dealt
with no less than 541 ecclesiastical buildings of one sort or another.
Will it be said that what was so effectively carried out on a small
scale by private enterprise thirty years ago could not be done on a
large scale now, or that there is less need to do it now than there was
in the past generation?
And consider the collateral advantages that would ensue. Consider
the immense gain of keeping a band of young architects out of
mischief for five years; of inducing them during that time to confine
themselves to the severe study of an important branch of their art; of
compelling them to become acquainted with the history of its growth and
development, and familiarizing them with the minutest detail of Gothic
architecture, not in books but _in situ_; and above all of giving them
a direct interest in keeping up and preserving some hundreds of ancient
buildings which, as things are now, they have actually a pecuniary
interest in tempting people to pull down.
But, desirable as it would be--nay, necessary though it be--that some
such undertaking as this should be carried through, the other question
must come first. Again and again we find ourselves driven back upon
that when we attempt to stem the current of vandalism that may happen
to be setting in this direction or in that. The ownership of our
ecclesiastical edifices must be placed upon a different footing from
that which we have acquiesced in too long. Sooner or later this must
come; the sooner it comes the better for the interests we have at heart.
* * * * *
At this point prudence suggests that I should pause. The time has not
come for putting forward more than an outline of a proposal which
is sure to be denounced as revolutionary. It will be a great point
gained if we can find acceptance for the principle advocated. We all
do dearly love our own old ways of looking at things; we all do cling
tenaciously to the prejudices which we inherited or which were stamped
upon our minds in the nursery; we all do honestly detest being worried
into changes which interfere with our habits of thought and action and
compel us to enter upon some new course. Yet if it be once brought
home to us that a great national heritage is being rapidly sacrificed,
allowed to perish, or, worse, being wantonly destroyed for lack of
that small measure of protection which life and property have a right
to expect in every civilized community, I believe that the sense of
a common danger will unite men in a generous forgetfulness of their
favourite maxims and a shame at their own supineness, and awaken them
to see the necessity for concerted action; and then the thing that
needs doing will be done.
There was a time in our history when the cry of “the Church in danger”
provoked a strange frenzy among the people. The panic did not last very
long, and not much came of it. But if another cry should be raised by
gentle and simple and men of all creeds and parties, the cry of “the
churches in danger!” I do not think little or nothing would come of
_that_. That would be not the mere expression of a passing sentiment,
but it would be a call to action; and when that cry does come to be
raised, the public at large will not be satisfied with anything less
than drastic measures, because the nation will have been roused to a
consciousness of the value of their heritage; and when a great people
begins to assert itself, it is not often that it is content with
demanding only what it is morally justified in claiming.
* * * * *
NOTE.
The following appeared in _The Pall Mall Gazette_ of August 15, 1889.
If a more dreadful comment upon the above essay can be produced, I have
not yet met with it:--
DISESTABLISHMENT BY DEMOLITION.
Mr. Thackeray Turner, the secretary of the Society for the
Protection of Ancient Buildings, requests us to publish the
following appeal for an ancient church which is in imminent danger
of destruction:--
The parish of Sotterley, in the county of Suffolk, lies about
five miles from the town of Beccles, and is one of those _close_
parishes which they who live in the _opens_ are wont to look upon
with a suspicion of envy. It is the property of a single owner;
not a field or meadow, not a yard of ground by the roadside, not
a stake in the hedgerow, not a brick or a gate is to be seen in
Sotterley that is not part and parcel of the possessions of the
squire and lord of the manor. The estate was for some 400 years
held by a family named Playters, which was counted among the great
Suffolk houses, and which came to grief at last, partly by taking
the wrong side in the troublesome times, and partly by the profuse
hospitality which the overgrown size of Sotterley Hall tempted its
owners to indulge in. But for four centuries they lived here, and
here generation after generation they died and were laid in their
graves. In the little church which in life they loved, their bones
rest now, and there are their monuments in brass and marble. The
walls are studded with their effigies.
Moreover, these Playters--and indeed their predecessors the
Sotterleys--spent money and pains upon the sacred building. There
to this day stands the fourteenth-century screen in wonderfully
good preservation, four at least of the figures in its panels still
retaining a great deal of the old brilliancy of colour, though at
least 500 years have passed since they were first set up in the
position they now occupy. There, too, _in situ_ may be seen many of
the old oak benches with their handsome “poppy-heads,” doubtless
carved by Sotterley craftsmen, and carved out of the oaks that were
growing in Sotterley wood before the Wars of the Roses had begun.
The same roof, which might be easily repaired at an insignificant
cost, covers the chancel which covered it before people had dreamed
of a Tudor king, the panels but little injured, and of the bosses
not one missing.
A man may visit fifty churches in East Anglia, and not meet with
one so entirely adapted to the needs of the small population who
delude themselves with the preposterous belief that they have a
right to worship there.
Moreover, Sotterley Church stands in a churchyard of unusually
large dimensions. It must cover at least an acre of ground, and
not half of this space shows the smallest sign of interments
having been made in it during the present century. But, unhappily,
Sotterley Church and churchyard lie in the middle of Sotterley
Park--not that it was always so, for the park has come to the
church, not the church to the park--and people will insist in going
to church, even farmers and farm labourers will, and worshipping
the Most High where their forefathers worshipped before them. The
Hall of the Playters was pulled down during the last century, and
the new hall--an ugly white-brick mansion of no pretension--was set
up much nearer to the ancient church; and when Sotterley people
died nothing could prevent their relatives from carrying their dead
to the old graveyard and laying them where they themselves hoped to
lie some day. But was not this a little too bad, to have a funeral
procession of tearful clodhoppers passing through your park gates
and under your very windows, asking no leave, but taking it in
quite a brutal fashion?
Therefore, about ten years ago, a vestry meeting, or something
of the sort, was held in Sotterley. The landlord’s pleasure was
signified, certain formalities were gone through, the tenantry,
small and great, were told that it was desirable that Sotterley
churchyard should be closed, and, the legal document being duly
drawn up, an order was obtained from the Privy Council, and the
churchyard was closed accordingly. Outside the park gates, in a
place where four ways meet, a square patch of ground, scrubby
and soppy, has been fenced off by a mean and ill-kept hedge,
and in the middle of it stares rather than stands, a forbidding
protuberance, an octagonal construction of cheap Sotterley bricks,
covered with cheap Sotterley tiles, looking like a ginger beer
stall in a cricket ground where there is no play going on. This
thing is called a chapel, I believe, and here the Sotterley people
must needs bring their dead. Will they all be brought here? High
and low--rich and poor one with another? Well, to get rid of the
funerals passing through the park was one point scored; but it was
but a beginning. On Easter Monday last a meeting of the parish in
vestry assembled was held as usual in Sotterley church. I am told
that the parishioners, knowing what was coming, very discreetly
kept away, all except the unhappy parson, who was bound to be
there, the landlord and one, two, or three others, who, it is
suspected, were told to be there. Forthwith a resolution drawn up
beforehand was proposed, seconded, and carried unanimously--for the
parson had nothing to do but to “put it to the meeting”--to the
effect that it was desirable to pull down or shut up the church of
Sotterley, and build another somewhere else. I am told that this
resolution has been actually forwarded to the Bishop of Norwich and
that a faculty has been actually applied for to close or destroy
a church which has been standing in its present site for the best
part of a thousand years, and that it only remains for the Bishop
to give his assent to this iniquitous proposition, and one more
of those monstrous outrages will have become an accomplished fact
which we English submit to with just a little snarling after they
have been committed, and which we allow to be perpetrated under our
eyes without ever lifting a finger to prevent. Whether the Bishop
of Norwich is the man to connive at so shameful a job as this, and
to give his episcopal sanction to the proposed desecration, is a
question that is a humiliating one to ask, for is it less than
infamous that such things are so possible that we begin to inquire
about their probability?
V.
_CATHEDRAL SPACE FOR NEGLECTED RECORDS._
The most delightful place of resort on the face of the globe is to be
found within a bow-shot of Temple Bar. Not on the south side of Fleet
Street, whatever enthusiastic gentlemen of the law may say, nor on
the west, nor on the east, for there too there is little to attract
us except in the shop windows, and there is noise and turmoil and the
roar of a restless multitude bewildering and disturbing us whether
we move or halt on our way. No! my happy valley lies to the north
of the great thoroughfare; its courts and halls and corridors, its
restful solitudes, its mines of gold that are waiting to be worked, its
storehouses of precious things that are practically inexhaustible, all
are to be found in a favoured region that lies between Chancery and
Fetter Lanes.
“Record Office, Fetter Lane!” I said to the driver of a Hansom some
months ago. “Do you mean _Chancery_ Lane, sir?” asked the voice
through the hole over my head. “No, I mean Fetter Lane.” The man
actually did not know the situation of the earthly Paradise.
Pone me pigris ubi nulla vicis
Arbor æstiva recreatur aura,
I murmured to myself--I could not waste my Horace upon Cabby.
I am in the habit of assuring my lowly congregation upon Sundays that
for all their talk about heaven they would find themselves very much
out of place there without some previous preparation for that desirable
abode. The same warning is equally true when applied to other blissful
resting-places besides the celestial mansions. You must have a taste
for them; you must have qualified yourself to enjoy them and to mix
with the company you find there. Surely Valhalla could only have
suited the few. But this place of resort of which I am thinking is a
pleasure-house whose resources are actually limitless, however well
you may have learnt to use your opportunities. “Life piled on life
were all too little” to get even so much knowledge of this prodigious
and enormous accumulation of treasures as to be able to answer with
certainty what may be found there and what not. For eight-and-forty
years there has appeared annually a _Report of the Deputy Keeper of
the Public Records_, presenting us with an elaborate summary of work
carried on by the functionaries employed in examining our national
archives; and so far are we from getting to the end of the work of
men cataloguing and calendaring that it may reasonably be estimated
another fifty years will be required to complete this vast preliminary
labour; and when that time comes it will be necessary to begin again at
summarizing and supplying indices to the reports issued. What next will
follow it is difficult to conjecture or imagine.
The forty-eighth Report, issued in 1887, happens to be lying at my
elbow as I write, and there, ready for consultation, I find a brief
calendar of the Patent Rolls of the seventh year of Edward the First,
drawn up by one of the many accomplished archivists of the Office.
It fills 216 closely printed pages. It summarizes at least 3,000
documents, some of them of considerable length; they all belong to
a single class, and they are all concerned with the life of our
forefathers--yours and mine, my estimable reader--during the single
year ending the 20th of November, 1279. Six centuries ago. Think of
that! Yet this collection is but one among thousands. The third Report,
issued in 1842, first drew attention to the existence of a huge mass
of ancient letters of the reigns of King John, Henry the Third, and
Edward the First, the most modern of them, observe, coming down no
nearer to our own time than the year 1307 A.D. “This important mass,”
we are told, “appears to contain 1,942 bundles, each containing on
the average about 200 documents, or about 388,400 on the whole.”
Scared by such figures as these, the imagination, a trifle jaded,
refuses to dwell upon 913 Papal Bulls of various dates, or to take the
trouble to speculate upon the probable bulk of seven or eight thousand
documents which reveal unknown secrets about the ancient forests and
their boundaries. But we are fairly aghast at the news that there
are hundreds of rolls averaging 200 feet in length, and at least one
extending to the enormous dimensions of 800 feet, written within and
without with lamentation and mourning and woe. There could be no eating
such a roll as that!
The documents deposited in the Record Office, and which, as we have
seen, are likely to have taken a hundred years to catalogue before they
become readily accessible to students and explorers, count by millions.
They are of all sorts, conditions, and classes, but they may be roughly
described as concerned with the civil and political history of the
nation; that is, they deal with the development of our institutions,
with the government of our sovereigns through their ministers, with
the changes in our laws and their administration, with the complex
questions of the tenure of land and the changes in its ownership, with
the rise and growth of our commerce, with our wars by land and by sea,
with a hundred other matters which never can cease to have a profound
and undying interest for the citizens of a great empire. Let us, for
convenience’ sake, call the Record Office the storehouse of authorities
on England’s _constitutional_ history.
This vast _tabularium_, as the Romans called their Public Record
Office, is situated, as I have said, within a bow-shot of Temple Bar,
and to the northeast of that vanished structure. About double the
same distance on the south-west there exists another huge depository
of records, which may be said to be a great storehouse of authorities
concerned with our _family_ history. The wills which are stored in
Somerset House, though beginning at a date centuries later than the
early records in Fetter Lane, go back quite far enough to make the
reading of the great mass of them not always easy for the uninitiated.
They, too, probably count by millions, and I have known one gentleman
who estimated the number which he himself had looked at and examined
with more or less attention at not less than a hundred thousand. This
collection is more easily accessible to students than the other,
inasmuch as here we are dealing with a single class of documents,
which present no difficulties of arrangement, and which have been
carefully preserved and habitually consulted for generations, and
are as a rule bound up in big volumes of transcripts, or offices
copies, made for the most part within a short time of the original
wills having been proved before the accredited officials. So far as
they go the wills in Somerset House contain to a very great extent
the _genealogical_ history of England. It is necessary to guard this
statement by qualifying words, for the wills in Somerset House are the
wills of men and women who died in the southern province only.
If we lengthen our radius, keeping to Temple Bar as our centre and
sweeping a circle say of five miles in diameter, we shall include
within this circumference a vast collection of records of a very
miscellaneous character. There are the muniments of the City of London;
there is an unknown mass of curious “evidences” in the secret chambers
of the London companies; there are the mysterious and probably very
large stores of recondite lore hidden away somewhere in the great
Inns of Court, and perhaps in forgotten garrets of some of the minor
dependencies of those august institutions. There are the sessional
records of the county of Middlesex, which a very moderate estimate
has assured us contain more than half a million documents; and,
in addition to all these, there are probably many other important
collections subsidiary to these larger ones, the very existence of
which is unknown and unsuspected except by some few reticent creatures,
who with the grip of the miser cling secretively to the hoarded
treasures that they cannot spend and will not let any one else look
at. It must be evident to any one who reflects upon the measureless
bulk--the mere bulk--of these various assemblages of ancient documents
to be found within the metropolitan area alone, that any heroic policy
which should contemplate gathering them all under a single roof, and
unifying them in a centralized national _tabularium_, is inpracticable.
A Public Record Office which should not only be a monster warehouse
for the safe custody of our ancient muniments, but should be a
library of reference open to all duly qualified persons desirous of
pursuing historical research among our unprinted sources, would be
a building that would more than fill Trafalgar Square. Obviously
such a collection, to be practically accessible, would require to be
methodized, arranged, catalogued, and to some extent indexed. An army
of trained officials would be needed to deal with the materials under
their hands. It would take a lifetime to set the house in order. The
very geography of such a world would require a guide-book as perplexing
as a Bradshaw.
The magnificent collection now at the Record Office is, as has been
seen, only in course of being examined and calendared. Even after
fifty years of unremitting labour bestowed upon it we have a very
imperfect knowledge of what it contains; and this, be it remembered,
though no department of the public service can compare with this in
the ability, industry, enthusiasm, and profound learning which have
been for generations the characteristic of the officials, one and
all, high and low. From the days of that cross-grained, combative,
and overwhelmingly learned miracle of erudition William Prynne down
to our own day there has been a kind of apostolical succession among
the keepers of the national archives and their coadjutors. The Record
Office almost deserves to have a dictionary of biography of its own.
To widen the field of labour here would be to destroy all hope of its
ever being brought into order. Centralization of our muniments has
well-nigh reached its utmost limits in the unwieldy proportions of
the collection now under the charge of the Deputy Keeper. To extend
those limits and to bring together additional millions of MSS. from
distant depositories would be to convert the great _tabulariumn_ into a
colossal _cæmeterium_, in which they would be not so much preserved as
buried for all time.
Let it be conceded, then, that, as far as the Record Office is
concerned, it will be best to leave well alone. The custodians of our
archives in Fetter Lane have quite enough to occupy their time for
many a long day. They are not the men to need urging or to embarrass
by loading them with new accessions of work which they can never hope
to get through. On the other hand, the muniments of such bodies as the
great Inns, the chartered companies, or the Corporation of London can
hardly--at any rate hardly _yet_--be looked upon and dealt with as
public property. These corporations very naturally cling to their own
possessions; they are jealous of throwing open their muniments to be
scrutinized and peeped into by prying eyes by no means always looking
with a kindly or benevolent gaze. Why should the benchers of the Middle
Temple, for instance, lay out their early charters to be copied by
every chance grievance-monger, to be printed with appropriate comments
in the columns of the _Wapping Watchman_, and enriched by learned notes
and illustrations full of love and sweetness? Why should the ancient
Guild of the Girdlers court publicity when there is a host of Grub
Street ragamuffins only too glad to make merchandise of their “Curious
Revelations” and to ferret out inconvenient scraps of information to be
used for the destruction of the things that are? “Confound that shabby
old Dryasdust!” we might hear the warden growl out to his brethren of
the craft. “If the fellow goes on like that we shall have to ask him to
dinner, give him a bad one, and protest we could not afford a better in
the lamentable condition of our finances.” No! Diligent explorers and
omnivorous antiquaries like my friend Mr. Cadaverous must be patient
and submissive. “The rights of property, sir--the rights of property
must be respected. Make your approaches in a spirit of courtesy and
with becoming respect for the august body to which we belong, and you
may find us gracious and condescending; but come to us as a footpad
grabbing at our fobs, and you may find the consequences disastrous.
We have been known to give pence to beggars, but to submit to be
plundered--never!”