Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/605

592 babbling runnels, and the Hostry garden of the hospitable Guest-house, well-filled with vines and fruits, adjoining the Paradise and orchard, and beyond which stretched the meadows of Tothill, Eubery, and Neyte, where the snipe and wild duck fed among the marshes, and fish for fasting-days filled the pools; where the golden corn ricks redden in the sun, and the ruddy cattle and snow-white sheep have their folds. At the foot of College Street was another bridge; and to the eastward lay the king’s palace.

Entering by the southern gateway, on the left are granaries, with their massive tower and double tier of pointed windows, the bakehouses and brewhouses stretching westwards; on the right are monastic offices, with old walls of grey flint and coigns of stone. Two gateways flank the cellarer’s apartments on the east side, and these still remain; the northern tower was, as now, the porter’s lodge; the southernmost opened into the quadrangle, and the present Little Dean’s-yard, but then surrounded with the lodgings of the subordinate great officers of the abbey—the prior, sacrist, chamberlain, and lesser ecclesiastical magnates.

If we now pass under the porter’s lodge, we shall see on the left a small court-yard; on the north is the Jerusalem Chamber, once the abbat’s great chamber, and deriving its name from pictures of the Holy City which adorned its walls; on the west is the Abbot’s Hall, now the dining-room of the Westminster schoolboys; and on the east and south is the deanery, formerly the abbat’s lodge, and the palace of the Bishop of Westminster during the short episcopate of Dr. T. Thurlby. The Jerusalem Chamber, in which King Henry IV. died, and Sir Isaac Newton and Campbell the poet were laid in state, contains some curious glass of the time of Henry III., a quaintly-carved Jacobæan mantlepiece of cedar-wood, and portions of the old tapestry hangings which long formed the ornament of the choir.

We will now enter the South Cloister, in which rests the great canonist Lyndwood, Bishop of St. David’s, whose remains were transferred hither not many years since from the undercroft of St. Stephen’s Chapel. Beautiful indeed is the solemn grey light—beautiful the misty perspective; yet it is not a hundred years ago since the wife of a reverend canon felt herself oppressed by the spleen, the vapours, or some similar complaint—mysteriously restricted to be the torment of the gentler sex—and prayed and besought her reverend spouse to alter what to her appeared a dim funereal hue. The canon consented: the edict went forth for whitewash: and whitewashed these glorious alleys would have been, but that the dean, one of the first of Oxford scholars as well as a man of taste, suddenly appeared—a Deus ex machinâ—when he was supposed to be snugly rusticating in the country, and stayed the profane hands, we trust for ever and a day. In these days we should have a storm of indignation raised at such an act of barbarity, as efficacious as that unearthly tempest which routed Dr. Dee under these grey roofs when he was plying his magic wand to discover the monks’ buried treasures. On the right-hand side of the door, which is marked by a brass plate bearing the name of the sub-dean, is a blank arcade, which served as the lavatory of the monks. Let us pass through another door on the lower side. We enter a little yard surrounded by sheds, and stumble, if we are not forewarned, over planks and garden tools; one moment—just peep behind that woodstore, and on that bit of rugged wall you will, even in the imperfect light, discern traces of a round-headed arcade: that is a fragment of the south wall of the monks’ refectory. Now look up, with your back turned on that relic of one of the oldest parts of the conventual buildings; it is Saxon work, and you will see a range of decorated windows in that South Cloister wall, which lighted once the north side of that same chamber, where, on the annual high day, the salmon was served after having been laid before the high altar of the choir; there the successor of Edric the fisherman sate as the guest of my lord abbat. For the monks could tell a wonderful story of the ferry of Lambeth; how, at stormy midnight, a cry from the reedy shore of the Thames awoke the Saxon fisher to convey across the swollen river a mysterious stranger; how the unconsecrated minster suddenly blazed with tapers, and became vocal with pealing hymns; and when the bishop came at early dawn with holy oil and solemn procession, he found on walls and altar the unction administered by no less holy hands than those of St. Peter himself; and how the saint commended Edric to all good fortune, on condition that he and his sons should offer year by year a salmon in the new church dedicated to his honour.

Once more in the old Cloister. We glance up at the grand pile of the Minster through the bars of the moulding arcade, and down at the rude effigies of abbats laid under the low-arched recesses below the bench table, and tread upon Long Meg, the huge stone that covers the Forty who fell victims in a great year of plague and pestilence, centuries ago; on the right side is the last alley of the Cloister, on the left hand are the Dark Cloisters—alas! they have been whitewashed. Along the walls will be seen a range of doors; the northernmost the superb entrance of the vestibule of the Chapter-house; the next that of the library, whereby hangs a tale; the third that of the Pyx-chamber, and then others which we shall enter in succession; nearly at the extreme end is the passage into the Little Cloisters.

This line of building, raised by the Confessor, forms the substructure of the Dormitory, now the Westminster boys’ schoolroom. It runs in a direct line southward from the south transept, and is divided through the greater part of its length, about 100 feet in extent, by an arcade of massive columns. The range was once continuous and open like the ambulatory of Fountains Abbey, which was in fact a series of store-chambers allotted to the reception of the wheat grown and wool shorn by the homely farmer-like Cistercians, in preparation for their annual fair, and the base of the market-cross still stands among the ruins. The buildings at Westminster are similarly divided. The rude pillars, three feet six inches in diameter and three feet five inches high in the shaft, have only a rude abacus and chamfer, like a Doric capital, with bases as simple. They carry a plain groining with