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On its steps the Duke of Monmouth was proclaimed king, and from the window of the Old Angel Inn Judge Jeffreys watched with pleasure the hanging of the deluded followers of the duke from the tie-beams of the Market Arcade. Dunster market cross is known as the Yarn Market, and was erected in 1600 by George Luttrell, sheriff of the county of Somerset.
Two monolith jambs support a huge lintel, cambered in the middle like the tie-beams of our sixteenth-century roofs. The heraldic pose of the lions and the technique of their sculpture, so suggestive of Assyrian reliefs with their splendid sense of muscular form and energy, are far ahead of an architecture that is still barbaric, scarcely architecture at all.
So it was that some ancient carpenters, engaged in building somewhere or other, after laying the tie-beams so that they projected from the inside to the outside of the walls, closed up the space between the beams, and above them ornamented the coronae and gables with carpentry work of beauty greater than usual; then they cut off the projecting ends of the beams, bringing them into line and flush with the face of the walls; next, as this had an ugly look to them, they fastened boards, shaped as triglyphs are now made, on the ends of the beams, where they had been cut off in front, and painted them with blue wax so that the cutting off of the ends of the beams, being concealed, would not offend the eye.
But he thinks that he could show better coved roofs at home, and he wonders why, if the coved shaped was chosen, a system of South-Saxon tie-beams and king-posts was thrust in as well. We turn to the other famous border-fortress of Verneuil.
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