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Updated: May 18, 2025
The carved ends of the cusps are in reality the heads of extraordinary grotesques whose bodies are curled up against the under surface of the arch. Some of these figures, in addition to their proper physiognomy, have faces carved on the crowns of their heads.
If you will look closely at the back ones, you will see that each of them has four corners, or cusps, with a cross-shaped, sunken furrow in the centre, where they come together. After they have been used in grinding food for some years and rubbing against each other, these little corner projections become worn away, and their tops become almost flat.
Over the doors, which are pointed, a square framing is carried up, with tiles of various patterns in the spandrels, and above these frames, as round the whole walls, runs a very beautiful cresting two tiles high. On the lower row are interlacing semicircles in high relief forming foliated cusps and painted blue.
Between the inner and outer round moulding is as usual a hollow filled with branches. The outer moulding, on its upper side, throws out the most fantastic curves and cusps, which with their finials nearly encircle two little round windows, and then in wilder curves push up through the square framing at the top to a finial just below the window.
Beyond this hollow are two tall round shafts ending in large crocketed finials, while tied to them with carved cords is a curious hood-mould, forming three reversed cusps ending in large finials, one in the centre and one over each of the arches, and at the two ends curling across the hollow like a cut-off branch.
In this instance they are happily blended with the earlier Gothic cusps, and the quaint ivy-leaves that spring easily out of the severer lines.
The head of the north door of the chancel is, however, a relic of the original building, and this should be carefully examined. It is beautifully cut with double rows of cusps, and is of fourteenth century workmanship. The latest Gothic additions are the work of Clement Lichfield.
I have spent more than a month, and that in hard work too, in merely trying to get the forms of cusps into perfect order: whereby the reader may guess that I have not space to go into the subject now; but I shall hereafter give a few of the leading and most perfect examples, with their measures and masonry.
But that which gives to the whole design its chief beauty is the deep shadow cast by the large arch thrown across from one main buttress to the other just under the parapet. This arch, moulded and enriched with four-leaved flowers, is fringed with elaborate cusps, irregular in size, which with rounded mouldings are given a trefoil shape by small beautifully carved crockets.
This window is only of one light, and like the dining-room window near it its framing has Gothic bases. The capitals are smaller than in the other windows, and the framing partly covers the outer moulding of the window arch, making it look like a segment of a circle. But the cusps are the most curious part.
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