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Updated: June 11, 2025
Passing through this noble gateway, which, somehow or other, does not look as old as we know it to be, we enter the great quadrangle, around which the various buildings are grouped. On the eastern side is the Infirmary, with the Ambulatory beneath it, a long, low cloister of sixteenth-century date, which extends along the whole side to the church.
It was a rough and even a dangerous journey, but not at all impossible for a patient traveller. Dr. Hulin, who has made wonderful discoveries about the early Flemish painters, found a mention, in an old sixteenth-century list, of a 'Portrait of a Moorish King or Prince' by Van Eyck, painted in 1414 or perhaps 1418.
Having gone past the fine Swiss Guard, in their sixteenth-century dress, and their officer in helmet and cuirass, and then past the Guardia Nobile, and a huge staff of ecclesiastics in violet robes, I bent low before the sovereign pontiff, and kissed his ring with deep emotion.
It may be objected that the sixteenth-century public, and even, in the next century, the great Duke of Marlborough, got their knowledge of English history from Shakespeare, and the other writers of chronicle-plays. Well, I leave it to historians to determine whether this very defective and, in great measure, false vision of the past was better or worse than none.
She is a striking example of the effect of sixteenth-century sympathy, admiration, and enthusiasm; she was protected by some of the greatest literary men of the age—Balzac, Grotius, Heinsius; the French Academy is said to have met with her on several occasions, and she is said to have participated in its work of purifying and fixing the French language.
Over this porch is one of those grand old sixteenth-century halls such as were built in former times in front of the churches. It is called the "Parvise," a word derived from the same source as Paradise, which in the language of architecture means a cloistered court adjoining a church.
The road to Furnes took us through what had been, a few years before, quaint Flemish villages, but German Kultur, aided by the products of Frau Bertha Krupp, had transformed the beautiful sixteenth-century architecture into heaps of brick and stone. And nowhere did I see a church left standing.
Of course not: so it befell in the course of time that Frederick R. Woods and the Colonel who had quickly become a great favourite, by virtue of his implicit faith in the Eagle and in Woden and Sir Percival de Wode of Hastings, and such-like flights of heraldic fancy, and had augmented his popularity by his really brilliant suggestion of Wynkyn de Worde, the famous sixteenth-century printer, as a probable collateral relation of the family it came to pass, I say, that the two gentlemen nodded over their port and chuckled, and winked at one another and agreed that the thing would do.
The church stands above the village in a picturesque situation, but is of little interest. With the exception of the tower, it was rebuilt in 1866. Here is a sixteenth-century tomb of John Byne from the old building, and in the churchyard may be seen the grave of Charles Goring. Hillaire Belloc has immortalized the village inn thus:
The study of men's characters and motives as we understand it, formed no part of the policy of sixteenth-century statecraft, or Wolsey would not have been disgraced, or Thomas Cromwell's head have fallen on the block.
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