The Cross in Ritual, Architecture and Art

CHAPTER VII.

Wayside and Boundary Crosses.

We have seen how the cross was erected in the busy market and beneath the shadow of the great Cathedral, where crowds hurried to and fro, day by day, for business or devotion. It was not alone in such populous places, however, that the sign of salvation reared itself to cheer the weary traveller through life’s ways by a message of faith, of hope, of divine love. In the village street, the lonely trackless moor, the meadow pathway and the king’s high-road, at every turn and in every place in mediÆval England one met the same sacred memorial. Nay, even the hillside itself has been scored with it, as in the case of Whiteleaf in Buckinghamshire, where a cross, nearly one hundred feet long by fifty feet broad, was cut at some unknown but remote period in the chalk hill, by means of a huge trench over two feet in depth, after the fashion of the more familiar White Horse in Berkshire.

These numerous examples are not easily classified. If only the full history of their raising could be known, many doubtless would fall into classes that have already been considered. Some would prove to be memorials which have failed to preserve the memory of their founders; others may have marked spots, round which the villagers gathered to hear sermons from the travelling friars, to listen to some proclamation issued by the lord of the manor, or by the king, or to discuss those topics of local politics or of public interest which might from time to time come uppermost; others again marked the boundaries of estates, and especially of Church lands. They were in fact public crosses for no one special purpose, but for every public requirement of rural life.

In the west of England, in Devon and Cornwall, roadside crosses were, and even now are, remarkably common. Those of the former county seem to have generally served one of two purposes, either to mark the boundaries of lands, or to act as guide posts on the other wise almost trackless moorlands of Dartmoor and the neighbourhood.

For example, not far from Princetown stands one of the largest of the Dartmoor Crosses, known as Siward’s or Nun’s Cross, over seven feet in height. On the western face of this is carved, in two lines, the word ‘Boc-lond,’ marking it as a boundary stone of the lands of Buckland Abbey, although in this case it was adapted to that purpose, not erected expressly for it, the foundation of the abbey being not so ancient as the cross. The abbey dates from 1278. Bennet’s Cross, again, is one of the boundaries of Headland Warren, and of the parish of Bovey Tracey; it bears on its face the letters W. B., standing for “Warren Bounds;” the letters, but not the boundary line, are modern.

An ancient track across the moor, called the Abbot’s Way, which formed the most direct method of communication between the abbeys of Buckland and Tavistock on the one side, and that of Buckfast on the other, was marked out with a series of crosses, many of which yet remain. The fords of the Avon, on this pathway, were indicated by this means; Huntingdon Cross still stands at one ford as of old, but Buckland Ford Cross has gone. Some of these weather-beaten stones have carved on their several faces the initial letters of the towns towards which those faces turn, as a guide to the traveller. Sandowl Cross, now a rough stone rising scarcely a yard from the earth, has cut upon it the letters B., T., R., and M., pointing to Brent, Totnes, Kingsbridge, and Modbury respectively. Similarly Hookmoor Cross indicates the direction to be taken to reach Modbury, Brent, Totnes, and Plymouth.

These Dartmoor Crosses are interesting as ancient landmarks and boundaries, and as indications of the almost instinctive way in which our forefathers employed the Cross for every purpose of more than usual importance; they are moreover not devoid of a certain picturesque effect from the harmony of their rugged forms with their moorland surroundings. They are not, however, in the ordinary sense of the word, beautiful. They are mostly plain Latin crosses, occasionally mounted on one or two steps, with no attempt at carving or decoration. Nor are they specially impressive in height or size; Merchant’s Cross, near Lynch Hill, is the largest and stands but eight feet two inches high, and some are much less than this. Some few of them have an incised cross cut within the head, or even running the whole length, but those on the Moor proper are of the simplest kind. On the borders we find a few cut by some slightly more ambitious hand. At Hele is a Maltese Cross, the section of each of its limbs being an octagon, and a Latin one of the same section is at Holne.

REMAINS OF RUNIC CROSS, WEST KIRBY, CHESHIRE.

The roadside crosses which dot the neighbouring county of Cornwall are similar in this respect, that there are few of them of any great size, but otherwise the type is quite different. They are mostly shafts terminating in circular or oval heads, on which is either incised, or cut in relief a cross or crucifix; in very few instances is the stone itself cruciform. A great number of the Cornish crosses stood near an ancient cell or chapel, serving much the same purpose as a churchyard cross, others marked the pathways which led to these rude and now forgotten shrines. Formed of the hard granite of the district, the simple, and sometimes almost grotesque, carvings of these monuments, have been generally well preserved; and seeing that in recent years an increasing amount of interest is shewn towards them, there is every reason to hope that the days of careless neglect or wanton destruction are over. Many crosses have recently been reclaimed from degrading uses, as field gate-posts and the like, and placed in more seemly situations. A singular cross unearthed at West Kirby, near the Dee in Cheshire, bears a closer resemblance to the characteristic crosses of Cornwall, than to those found elsewhere in England. The fragments of the shaft, for it is in several pieces, are covered with ingenious interlacing scrolls, and the head has a bold Latin cross within a circle cut upon it.

Many other examples of wayside crosses are scattered up and down the country, in a greater or less condition of preservation, some of them being still tall and graceful structures. At Aylburton in Gloucestershire, is the lower portion of a very substantial column, said by competent authorities to form part of a fourteenth century cross probably designed by some foreign artist. At Bromboro, in Cheshire, are the remains of a cross, well illustrating the meaningless fashion in which some of our ancient buildings are restored. It was at one time a tall cross of simple design, standing at the top of a flight of nine steps; but the upper member, the actual cruciform head, having been destroyed, a senseless stone ball has been put in its place, and sundials affixed to the shaft. At Burythorpe, in East Yorkshire, the head of what must once have been a beautiful cross is preserved in the garden of a private house. It is foliated, and of a singularly graceful pattern, but whether originally a wayside, or a churchyard cross, it is impossible to say with any degree of certainty. The East Riding has been specially unfortunate in the matter of wayside crosses, of the many examples which it once could boast little has been left but a number of stone sockets, so mutilated for the most part that local tradition has forgotten their origin and purpose, describing them as stone chairs, stone coffin heads, old fonts, and so forth.

BURYTHORPE CROSS.

Several villages are happy in having preserved intact very beautiful examples of the wayside cross, or scarcely less so in having found careful and reverent restorers of them when in ruins. Gloucestershire has some good specimens, as at Hempsted and at Clearwell. The former is a very slender shaft surmounted by a cross of four equal arms within a circle; the whole, save that the cross is of the Latin and not the Maltese type, looking very like the cross-headed staff which formed the badge of a Grand Master of the Templars. The Clearwell Cross, of the fourteenth century, has the usual features of steps, square base or pedestal, and slender shaft, but the elegant cross at the head is of bolder proportions than is found in the majority of cases. A very similar erection is the White Friars’ Cross at Hereford, which can perhaps claim to be considered a memorial cross, in that it was built by Bishop Charlton, or Cherleton (1361-1370) at the time of an outbreak of the plague in the city. It is an excellent example, with a base heraldically decorated and finished at the top with battlements. The head has been restored. Another fine cross of about the same date is at Headington in Oxfordshire; it is crowned with a tabernacle, which is modern and not a good imitation of ancient work of the kind. But one of the most imposing of our wayside crosses stands at Stallbridge, Dorsetshire. It consists of three octagonal steps on which a broad low pedestal is placed, from the centre of which rises a shaft with narrow buttresses, surmounted by tabernacle work. The column is adorned with niches containing statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary, St. John, and other saints, and the tabernacle is completed with a tapering spire ending in a small cross. The whole structure is thirty feet high.

A special class of wayside crosses has been provided by the ancient custom of placing this holy sign beside wells and springs. From ancient times an idea of special sanctity attached itself to springs of bright clear water. It was so in the days of classic Rome, and the Derbyshire custom of well-dressing proves its existence in the past amongst ourselves. All over the country we find such springs with a tradition of being “holy wells,” and their frequent dedication in the names of saints illustrates the same fact. Canons of the church enacted in 960, ordered that no well should be venerated except with the permission of the bishop of the diocese; but so strong was the popular superstition, that similar enactments were called for in 1018, and again in 1102. It was no doubt out of regard for this popular estimation of wells, that in 950 they were declared to be sanctuaries, whither the hunted fugitive from justice might flee and be safe. The special fame of the wells of S. Keyne and of S. Winifred is widely known.

Such being the case it was a natural thing to erect upon this holy ground the sign of our salvation, a practice which the reader will no doubt remember is referred to by Sir Walter Scott in his Marmion:—

“Where shall she turn? behold her mark
A little fountain cell,
Where water, clear as diamond-spark,
In a stone basin fell,
Above some half-worn letters say,
‘Drink, weary pilgrim drink, and pray
for the kind soul of Sybil Grey,
Who built this cross and well.’”

Just such a rustic roadside erection as that to which Clare thus turned for water to slake the thirst of the dying Marmion, exists at the village of Bumpking Leys, in Shropshire. A plain oblong trough of stone surrounds the well, and beside it is a small Latin Cross, with an inscription, now indecipherable save for the sacred initials I.H.S.

We have already noticed that a well-cross is the only one left of a number of crosses once existing in the city of Lincoln. It stands near the old church of S. Mary-le-Wigford, and consists of a square building, like a wayside chapel, the gable of which once bore the cross. It is said to be the finest well-cross in the country, and dates from the fourteenth century. The heavy base of a cross in Bisley Churchyard, in Gloucestershire, which is now simply a truncated spire, has been supposed to cover a well, which has now, however, dried up or taken some other course. And again in the same county at Hempsted, whose wayside cross was noticed above, another conduit resembling the one at Lincoln is found. This building, known as Our Lady’s Well, has the bases of two crosses on its gables, and niches for statutes beneath them. In the present century the well was closely built up. The neighbourhood of London at one time had several well-crosses. The original Cross at Tottenham, of which the present one is but a modern imitation, was not improbably of such a character; and S. Chad’s Well, S. Bride’s Well, and the Clerk’s Well (Fons Clericorum), which have given their names to the respective districts of Shadwell, Bridewell, and Clerkenwell, doubtless had their crosses likewise. Near Madron, in Cornwall, is a well-chapel covering the Madron Well. This, though only twenty-five feet by sixteen feet, was complete with stone benches, raised sacrarium, and altar, but was almost destroyed by Major Ceely in the Civil War. Helstone also has a holy well, and a third is near Grade Church, all in the same county, where in each case the well-cross has developed into a way-side chapel.

Henley has a cross which deserves mention on account of the subject carved in the tabernacled head. A crucifix fills the niche from side to side, while behind it, and with hands upraised in benediction over it, is a crowned and bearded figure representing the Divine Father. The Dove, the usual emblem of the Holy Spirit, does not seem to have been inserted. This is a type of carving of which few instances have been left to us in England, but one which was common in mediÆval English art, whether the artist wrought in stone or in glass.

Many of these wayside crosses, besides the well crosses, had granted to them, or acquired by popular custom, the rights of sanctuary; and doubtless in early days, when the arm of the law was not long enough or strong enough to reach through all the length and breadth of the land, and when the king himself amongst his barons, was scarcely more than primus inter pares, the foremost of his peers, it must have been a wise and merciful policy, which multiplied these “cities of refuge,” where safety was guaranteed to the accused until his case was fairly investigated.

Others of these crosses appealed to the devotion of certain classes of the people, like one which stood at King’s Weston, on the Severn, which was emphatically the sailor’s cross. Here the mariner, after a successful voyage, or perhaps after an almost unlooked-for escape from the perils of the deep, paid his vows and offered his grateful thanksgiving.

Various civic functions, also, took place around the high crosses of the towns, or those of a similar character in the villages. The good folk of Folkestone were summoned by the blast of a horn to assemble at the churchyard cross before proceeding to elect their mayor; and at Aston Rogers and elsewhere, the court of the lord of the manor met at the cross.

The parish cross was, in a word, in bygone days the centre of the parochial life, and speaks most convincingly of the extent to which religion entered into the lives of the people. In times when the people’s holidays were begun by attendance at the Eucharist, when trade gilds had their special altars in the parish church, when every public function naturally included the offering of the great act of Christian worship, it was simply a part of a consistent national life that the cross should dominate the market, should offer its welcome form at each turn of the high-road, should mark the boundaries of property, and crown the hillside and the cooling spring, as well as stand where the dead lay, sown as seed for the Great Harvest, or gleam from the lighted altar, or tower above the worshippers from the rood-loft.

In the destruction of these holy emblems all England has not suffered equally. The west has been most fortunate; Cornwall, Devon, Somersetshire, and Gloucestershire, being especially rich in the number and excellence of the examples still preserved in a more or less perfect condition. The eastern counties have met with the hardest usage, Lincolnshire and the neighbouring shires having been swept almost bare of them.

Thus briefly we have reviewed the uses of the sacred symbol of the Cross in Christendom and especially in England. The field is one of well-nigh infinite extent, and there are portions that we have barely touched. The heraldic employment of the sign might fill a book full of interest, and even of romance, and every foreign land has examples worthy of record, and a history diversely woven like our own, of devotion and iconoclasm, which has its word to say both to our art and our religion. A fascinating portion of the story of the cross, which lies somewhat beyond our scope, is the legendary lore that has sprung up about it; how the wood for the true cross was matured for its high purpose, and how there was a mystic meaning in the several kinds of wood employed; how the cross-bill twisted her beak in the vain endeavour to drag the nails from her Creator’s hands, and the robin splashed his fluttering breast with the Redeemer’s blood, in a similar fruitless attempt; how the patient ass was signed with the holy sign in memory of the sacred burden that he bore on the first Palm Sunday; and a score of other legends, often full of pathos and of graceful fancy.

It is pleasant to picture those times, further off from ours even in feeling than in years, in which such fancies were woven. The smoke of factory and mine had not then blasted or blackened the foliage of half the land, nor green pastures nor rustling woods been swallowed up by an ever advancing tide of bricks. The world moved slowly then, and commerce and trade were in their infancy; yet the world was beautiful. The stately minster and the lordly abbey, the rustic church and the humble cell stood in stately grandeur or in simple grace amid the fields and farmsteads of the people. In every market place the tapering cross, then perchance fresh and white from the carver’s hands, saw the folk gather at its feet to chat and chaffer, as beneath the shelter of a friend: and every highway and byeway was marked at intervals, like the great pathway of man’s life, with crosses that are at once emblems of suffering and of salvation. In infinite variety of form, yet always elevating in purity of outline, gracefulness of adornment, and perhaps in richness of colour, these crosses taught, unconsciously to the learners, the love of the beautiful and the good.

The wonderful growth of British commercial enterprise, closely allied as it is, with the building up of our colonial empire and the establishment of our place in the family of nations, is not a fact that any Englishman can regret. But when one marks the sordid spirit, the selfish grasping for wealth, the apotheosis of mere material prosperity, which too often accompany it, he may well feel that the constant presence of a symbol which speaks of other and higher aims, is not less, but more needed now, than it was of old.

From the point of view of the mental elevation of the people, also, the loss of so many treasures of art cannot be too deeply regretted, nor their rebuilding, if rebuilt in the old spirit, too greatly desired. We are but just awakening to the realization of the fact that Art is not an amusement for the rich, but an educating, elevating, spiritualizing power for all. We may rejoice in the wealth of our manufacturing cities, in the vast output of our foundries and our coalpits; but a factory, too hideous in its blank, bald, monotony of bareness for use as a prison amongst men with eyes and hearts, does not compensate for the loss of an abbey, whose every arch, and gable, and “storied window,” raises the soul to thoughts of the pure and the true; nor can a foundry chimney, even though its veil of poisonous smoke represent a fortune working out beneath, be accepted in exchange for the graceful, tapering cross, the very sight of which, in its calm still beauty, would cheer the dweller in our modern towns like the glimpse of an oasis in a desert.

In our schools of all grades some elementary instruction in art forms is now considered a necessity, and something is being done for “children of a larger growth” by opening to them, at times when the masses can use them, the treasures of our museums and picture galleries; how largely would these attempts at popular instruction have been aided if the people had ever before their eyes the graceful forms that ignorance, carelessness, and bigotry have combined to rob us of! And what an influence might not the continued presence of such examples among us have had upon the building of our towns.

It is at least significant that in the days when these types of art were common in the land, even domestic architecture showed a certain harmoniousness of outline; the gabled roof, the timbered front, the quaintly designed chimney, formed a setting not unbecoming the jewel in our mediÆval market-places, and our village streets. It is only since so many different instances of our forefathers’ taste and skill, fair copies each and all for their successors, have been taken from us, that we have learnt to build our towns in a horrid monotony of dullness.

Ruskin, in words of biting force, has defined a town of to-day as “the modern aggregate of bad building, and ill-living held in check by constables, which we call a town, of which the widest streets are devoted by consent to the encouragement of vice, and the narrow ones to the concealment of misery.” May we not hope that the wish now so obvious among us to rebuilt so far as may be, those glorious piles which are instinct with “the beauty of holiness,” is a proof that we are beginning to realize both the squalor and the sin of this condition of things? So far we have seen, it may be, but the little cloud no larger than a man’s hand; may it be indeed the earnest of that refreshing rain for which the land has panted, a reviving influence which shall make English art once more the expression of a sincere and devoted faith.

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