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Updated: May 20, 2025
It is thoroughly characteristic of the age that this very human device should have existed, and, secondly, that these ledges were carved and ornamented. These misericords, as they are called, were usually curiously, even grotesquely carved. Some of these carvings were founded on natural objects, some were grotesque heads, others represented subjects with man and animals.
I cannot conceive why a pilgrimage, an adventure so naturally full of great, wonderful, far-off and holy things should breed such fantastic nonsense as all this; but remember at least the little acolyte of Rheims, whose father, in 1512, seeing him apt for religion, put him into a cassock and designed him for the Church, whereupon the youngling began to be as careless and devilish as Mercury, putting beeswax on the misericords, burning feathers in the censer, and even going round himself with the plate without leave and scolding the rich in loud whispers when they did not put in enough.
In a mediaeval town every house was different, in a mediaeval cathedral no two pillars were alike, and in the dress of a mediaeval crowd was captured the colours of the rainbow. With an odd result. Men laughed at the devil in the freedom of their souls. They tweaked his tail on carven misericords, and in the mystery play he was invariably cast for the clown.
The carved enrichments of the under part of the seats, or "misericords," are especially minute, the subjects apparently being taken from old German engravings. This work was done in England before architecture and wood carving had altogether flung aside their Gothic trammels, and shews an admixture of the new Italian style which was afterwards so generally adopted.
The Jacobean pulpit and misericords in the choir call for remark and also the interesting "memoriall" on a pillar of the nave to the "Renowned Martialist " Richard Boles who defended the church during the attack referred to above.
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