Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 20, 2025
Augustine's Chair must be regarded as a figure of speech. By the most marvellous good fortune the wonderful series of windows in Trinity Chapel, illustrating the many cures wrought at the Shrine of St. Thomas, have come down to the present time almost unharmed, and this magnificent range of thirteenth-century glass is finer than anything else of its period in England.
It had, or was meant to have, a pretty thirteenth-century tower. But the church is a mere fragment, mutilated, desecrated, shut up. A decently kept ruin is far less offensive than a church in such a state as this. But the thought again comes, as at Saint-Evroul, how short a time has passed since the parish church of Les Vieilles and the abbey church of Beaumont were both living things.
As a rule French peasants are exceedingly courteous to strangers, but these good people of the plain seldom come in contact with the tourist world, their country not being sufficiently picturesque even to attract the cyclist. The curious thirteenth-century church of Recloses had long been an art pilgrimage.
In revenge for their lawless greed the defrauded beneficiaries choose to burlesque the affair by looking like the four-and-twenty blackbirds when the pie was opened. She consented to go for a moment to the Gothic Marienkapelle with her husband in the revival of his mediaeval taste, and she was rewarded amidst its thirteenth-century sincerity by his recantation. "You are right!
Hidden behind the lovely beech-arched gateway rests the old parochial church. In spite of restoration the age of six centuries is written unmistakably on the massive square bell-tower, the thirteenth-century traceries, and the rich old glass.
Rutebeuf, one of the trouvères, thirteenth-century French poets, has a description of the scene in which one of the old herbalist doctors who used to go round and collect a crowd by means of songs and music, and then talk medicine to them just as is done even yet in many of the smaller towns of this country is represented as saying to the crowd when he wants to make them realize that he is no ordinary quacksalver, that he is one of the disciples of the great Madame Trot of Salerno.
The church was probably built by one of the early successors of St Thomas in the See of Canterbury; for Pagham belonged to the Archbishops until the Reformation, and certain ruins of their palace remain in a field to the south-east of the church. At Nyetimber, on the Chichester road, a mile out of Pagham, are the ruins of a thirteenth-century chapel.
This, of course, is the weak point in the Feudal System, and was probably not confined to the peoples of Asia. The chroniclers of Mediæval Europe tell only of Princes and Nobles, and Knights and Dames and merry tales they are but we are left to guess what was the condition of the bulk of the lower classes in Thirteenth-Century England.
Her every resource is taxed. And the need is still great. The story of the town of D , in Brittany, is very typical of what the war has brought into many isolated communities. D is a little town of two thousand inhabitants, with a thirteenth-century church, with mediaeval houses with quaint stone porticoes and outside staircases.
"What a divine place!" exclaimed Nell, as we came once more to the little gate whence we had the double picture of the house and its reflection in the lake. "I don't see how there could be any lovelier one, even in England. How I should like to live in that wonderful old house! I'd have my own room and a boudoir in the thirteenth-century tower." "Would you care to go in?"
Word Of The Day
Others Looking