This isn't as good a book as Old London Bridge. It doesn't tie its three subjects together at all well, has few anecdotes that aren't in Home, and doesn't have much storytelling sense of how history was changed by the buildings, or people affected by them. Also, worse illustrations.
Query: what is a Chapter House? the kind attached to a cathedral? I've read the Barchester novels and I still don't know. The Cathedral of Salisbury says:
The Chapter House was the meeting place of the Cathedral clergy or Dean and Chapter who sat on the raised plinth seating, the east end reserved for the Dean, Precentor, Chancellor, Treasurer and Archdeacons and principal officers. The head marking the Dean’s stall has a triple face, sometimes said to represent circumspection - one of the qualities needed in a Bishop. (Some however say it is the Master Mason looking at his completed work). The name 'Chapter' derives from the practice of reading a chapter of the Bible at their meetings.
An entertaining banking precedent, from Hearsey:
A curious legacy left by this Bishop to the cathedral was a thousand marks to be put in a chest kept in the treasury, from which a poor layman might borrow £10 against a suitable pledge. The Dean and principal canons could borrow £20, the Bishop between £40 and £50, and noblemen and citizens £20. The loan was valid for a year, and if the pledge was not redeemed after that, the preacher at Paul's Cross would declare that it would be sold in fourteen days' time. The chest had three keys: one ket by the Dean, the second by the eldest canon resident and the third by the Warden of the Old Fabric.
's The Life of Cardinal Wolsey, which gives descriptions of banquets in York Palace, later Whitehall, sounds like source material for 's Fish Dinner in Memison.
Hearsey, John E. N. Bridge, Church and Palace in Old London. London: John Murray, 1961.
So wrote clew in Cities. , History. | TrackBack