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This poor little living Findelkind would look at the miniatures in the priest's missal, in one of which there was the little fourteenth-century boy, with long hanging hair and a wallet and bare feet, and he never doubted that it was the portrait of the blessed Findelkind who was in heaven; and he wondered if he looked like a little boy there, or if he were changed to the likeness of an angel.
The crypt and cellars, and possibly the kitchen and buttery, were portions of the original house owned in 1358 by Robert Herdegrey, Burgess in Parliament and Bailiff of the City, and the present hall, with its groined porch and oriel window, was erected later over the original fourteenth-century cellars.
In recognition of these services the government resolved to maintain the carriers at the public cost; and the flocks of to-day are the descendants of the fourteenth-century pigeons. The more probable tradition, however, is that which connects these pigeons with the antique ceremonies of Palm Sunday.
The parapet to the aisle chapels in the four western bays is plain, with a weathered coping and string-course in which is some carved work of late fourteenth-century date. The gables between the buttresses are gone, as is the case on the south side; but traces of their old copings remain.
Opposite the Belfry, in the middle of the Market-Place, is the monument to Peter De Coninck and John Breidel, on which garlands of flowers are laid every summer, in memory of what they did when the burghers rose against the French in May, 1302; and amongst the modern frescoes which cover the walls of the Grande Salle des Échevins in the Hôtel de Ville, with its roof of fourteenth-century woodwork, is one which represents the return from the Battle of the Golden Spurs, that famous fight in which the hardy peasantry of Flanders overthrew the knights of France whom Philip the Fair had sent to avenge the blood of the Frenchmen who had died on the terrible morning of the 'Bruges Matins.
To turn in from the sunlit, open court-yard; to pass beneath, the vine-hung gallery; to lift the great latch of the low Gothic door and to enter the rich and sumptuous interior, where the light came, as in cathedral aisles, only through the jewels of fourteenth-century glass; to close the door; to sit beneath the prismatic shower, ensconced in a nest of old tapestried cushions, and to let the eye wander over the wealth of carvings, of ceramics, of Spanish and Normandy trousseaux chests, on the collection of antique chairs, Dutch porcelains, and priceless embroideries all the riches of a museum in a living-room such a moment in the Marmousets we had tested again and again with delectable results.
Drink, weary pilgrim, drink and pray For the kind soul of Sybil Grey, Who built this cross and well. "In the corner of a field on the Billington Hall Farm, just outside the parish of Haughton, there lies the base, with a portion of the shaft, of a fourteenth-century wayside cross. It stands within ten feet of an old disused lane leading from Billington to Bradley.
The tower of Weatherbury Church was a square erection of fourteenth-century date, having two stone gurgoyles on each of the four faces of its parapet. Of these eight carved protuberances only two at this time continued to serve the purpose of their erection that of spouting the water from the lead roof within.
Yet judges no less competent than Fanfani in this matter of style, and far more trustworthy as witnesses, Vincenzo Nannucci, Gino Capponi, Isidoro del Lungo, are of opinion that Dino's 'Chronicle' is a masterpiece of Italian fourteenth-century prose; and till Italian experts are agreed, foreign critics must suspend their judgment.
It is, however, in his observations upon the engagement and management of maidservants that the wisdom of the serpent is most apparent. Incidentally he gives an account of how servants were hired in fourteenth-century Paris, which shows that the registry office and the character are by no means modern phenomena. A servant maid's wage at this time was 30s. a year and her shoes.
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