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Updated: July 24, 2025
In the north aisle the Tudor monument to Sir T. Hales showing his burial at sea is curious and picturesque, and other memorials are to Charles I.'s organist, Orlando Gibbons, and to the Archbishops Boyes and Sumner. The north-west transept, on the left as the steps to the choir are ascended, is the scene of Becket's martyrdom, and the vergers show the traditional spot where he fell.
"These cloisters in which we are," he said; "do you believe that they were built to serve as a refuge to the humble secular people who now live in them? No, señor, although the Church was generous, she would not have built these 'habitaciones, with their inner courtyards and their colonnades for Wooden Staffs and vergers, etc.
After a time, one of the vergers blew out the three wax lights on a side altar, and all three retired, each scurrying away in different directions with very little show of reverence. How different from the crowded churches in Brittany, where, whether at mass or vespers, hardly standing-room is to be found!
Indeed I do not think I am much unlike that respectable character. I have seen your dim-eyed vergers, and bed-makers in spectacles, drop a bow or curtsy, as I pass, wisely mistaking me for something of the sort. I go about in black, which favours the notion. Only in Christ Church reverend quadrangle, I can be content to pass for nothing short of a Seraphic Doctor.
Vergers in yellow and buff, with knee-breeches, silk stockings, and powdered wigs, were receiving the congregation at the doors. "Let us go in by the west door I should like you to see the screen to advantage," said Mr. Golightly. The inside of the church was gorgeous. As far up as the clerestory every wall was frescoed, and every timber of the roof was gilded.
None of them vergers here, though I'm sure they're a splendid body of men, any one who has seen them walking before his Lordship, the Bishop, the Canons and what not, as I did last Sunday morning, would say the same, but none of the vergers here can say as much. I've made inquiry, but of course with all discretion. As to the duties, sir, I think I can fulfil them.
It was, of course, a very unorthodox thing for the verger to go away and leave the Abbey unattended, even for half an hour, but vergers, after all, are only human, and enjoy a cup of tea as much as other people who do not wear black cassocks. He was safely seated by the fireside in his ivy-colored cottage at the other side of the churchyard, so the girls seized their golden opportunity.
If you pause beside any one of the verger-led groups, and analyse the murmur emitted whenever the verger has said his say, you will find the constituent parts of the sound to be such phrases as 'Lor! 'Ach so! 'Deary me! 'Tiens! and 'My! 'My! preponderates; for antiquities appeal with greatest force to the one race that has none of them; and it is ever the Americans who hang the most tenaciously, in the greatest numbers, on the vergers' tired lips.
He ceased speaking and seemed to expect her to say something, but she had not understood a word of his long explanation. He sat patiently waiting. She could hardly distinguish his face in the gloom. The sound of irregular, shuffling footsteps and low voices moved the stillness. The vergers were making their last round in a hurried, perfunctory way.
Dear sir, take care you do not fall, and do but consider what a figure you will make in the streets with six vergers attending you; otherwise every pitiful citizen of Paris that meets you will be apt to jostle you, in order to make his court to the Cardinal d'Est. You ought not to have come to Rome if you had not had resolution and the means to support your dignity.
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