cate the situation of the western front, and thus sums up the brief memorials that point out to us the actual situation of the abbeychurch. Yes! here "bells tolled to prayers; and men of many humours, various thoughts, chanted vespers, matins, and round the little islet of their life rolled for ever the illimitable ocean, tinting all things with its eternal hues and reflexes. How silent now; all departed, clean gone. The devouring time-demons have made away with it all." 93 tention. Toward the buildings so immediately adjacent to the church as well as so intimately connected with it, as almost to form a portion of that solemn pile, it will be well in the next place to direct atOf the remains of these-and few they are in number— the arch of entrance to the chapter-room has been remarkably preserved amid the protracted, because repeated, devastation which has removed every sculptured relic of the once adjacent church. It stands embedded in a portion of the outer wall of the eastern cloister, whence it conducted through a spacious vestibule to the interior of the chapter-house. The arch is gradually embowed, and includes in its receding architrave a double row of niches, with ornamental canopies, wherein were formerly enshrined the effigies of saints and martyrs, twenty in all; most of which, though now decapitated, yet maintain their seats, exhibiting, even in their present mutilated condition, a pleasing specimen of the sculpture of the time. The figures are said to have been decollated so recently as the middle of the last century, till which period they had been preserved by a Mr. Rogers who held the property upon lease; but he having a wayward son, the youth is said to have thus wilfully mutilated them, to annoy his father on account of a denial which he had received to some request. The back of the archway is disfigured by modern. plaistering, and even the sculptured architrave is made to prop a despicable hovel, which is actually reared against its tabernacled canopies. It is additionally painful to remark that all the projections are fast crumbling away beneath an exposure which the builder could not anticipate, and that no later hand attempts to screen from dissolution this last relic connected with the extirpated church. The new edition of Dugdale's Monasticon has perpetuated 93 Carlyle's Past and Present, book ii. chapter 2. HISTORY OF EVESHAM. 53 an erroneous conclusion of Mr. Tindal's, by terming this arch "the principal entrance to the abbey."9 The bell-tower, happily preserved, remains almost in that perfect state in which it passed from its founder's hand. It was commenced by abbot Lichfield about the year 1533, as a receptacle for the clock and great bell of the monastery, and at the same time as a gatehouse to the conventual cemetery.95 We have named this year, from a 94 Edition by Caley, Ellis, and Bandinel, vol. ii. page 12. 95 "He made a right sumptuous and high square tower of stone in the cemetary of Evesham. This tower had a great bell in it and a goodly clock, and was as a gatehouse to one piece of the abbey."-Leland's Itinerary, vol. iv. page 72. Willis presumption that as the erection of the finely-proportioned tower of Magdalen College, Oxford, occupied six years, 96 the present structure must have required a similar period; and it being apparent as we shall shortly notice that the fabric was scarcely finished at the resignation of its founder in 1539, the year above mentioned would give the period of its commencement. Its situation must have so nearly adjoined the church, that the northern transept abutting almost against it, would thus conceal its lower stories on the south: a reason for the absence of much ornament on that side, as also for that departure from uniformity observable in the window of its upper part. The sacerdotal architect, in his construction of this tower, has with correctest taste, preferred the style of a preceding era, to the already debased manner of his own day: so that, in the absence of direct evidence to the contrary, its distinctive features might appropriate it to the reign of Henry the Sixth. The fabric is square; strengthened from base to parapet by graduated buttresses with panelled fronts. Its east and western faces exactly correspond; each being divided into three compartments. The first includes a spacious archway, under an ogee canopy with crockets and an elaborate finial; in the second is a window of considerable size, canopied in the same manner, and filled with tracery of very graceful form; and the upper story includes a pair of narrower windows, beneath a double ogee with crockets and concluding finials. Both these fronts are entirely covered, save where arches occur, with panelled mullions under foliated transoms and the whole is surmounted by an embattled parapet delicately pierced, and crowned with tapering pinnacles appropriately wrought. : The fabric stands upon a basement twenty-eight feet square, and its height to the summit of the pinnacles is 110 feet. From the Dineley Manuscript, circ. 1684-cited by Mr. E. J. Rudge as then in the possession of Sir T. E. Winnington, bart.—we glean some supposes that the great bell continued till the Dissolution, and was then melted down toward forming the present peal. 96 Dallaway's Observations on English Architecture, page 126. 97 Short Account of the History and Antiquities of Evesham. 12mo. Evesham, 1820, page 56. |