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of Cleveland (pp. 29-35). By his kind permission, use has been made in many places of his description.

Dugdale's words, nuperrime existens, can only mean that when the drawing he engraves was made, the monument was not in the Priory church. Then where was it? The condition of the two side slabs, as compared with the remaining end slab, shows that the former have never been exposed to the weather to any appreciable extent, while the latter has suffered a good deal of weathering. The only explanation of this, and it is confirmed by Warburton, is that the side slabs have been in the parish church for two centuries or more, and we must therefore conclude that soon after the dissolution the monument was moved out of the Priory church into the parish church, a distance of but a few yards, as the two buildings stand close together side by side, the parish church being on the north side of the nave of the conventual church, the western ends of the two being very nearly in a line with each other. Its position after the removal was, there can be little doubt, the south-west portion of the chancel, in fact where the base slab now lies in the floor. The great size of the monument would render it a great inconvenience in the chancel, and it is easy to understand that when the time came that churchwardens and squires liked to make the parish churches comfortable with pews, panellings and ceilings, such relics as the Brus cenotaph had to give way. We may infer that it was about the earlier part of the last century that Guisbrough Church had its turn for being degraded into a condition of coziness. It was about the year 1754, that John Burdon, Esquire, was spending large sums of money in laying out the park and grounds at Hardwick, near Sedgefield, in the county of Durham. He made a lake of forty acres extent, formed a terrace and erected several ornamental buildings on a most sumptuous scale. In one portion of the park a sham ruin was placed representing, no doubt correctly enough to the uneducated eyes of the period, the gateway of a medieval castle. It is furnished with a turret containing a stone newel stair, by which the roof can be reached. According to the fashion of the time, real ruins were robbed and mutilated to make sham ones, and Guisbrough Priory was laid under contribution to supply Hardwick with Gothic details. The connection between the owners of the two places is sufficient to

account for this.13 The landscape gardening mania of the time reduced the ruins of Guisbrough Priory from the condition in which they appear in the plate in the first edition of the Monasticon to their present state. The notion was to make a neater and more imposing ruin as a feature of the landscape than uneven walls and mounds of fallen rubbish afforded, hence all was cleared away except the largest fragment, in this case the east wall of the church. The cruellest wrong, however, was that even this was mutilated by cutting away all that remained below the great east window, so that the window arch became a great open arch, beneath which we can well imagine the gorgeously dressed owner of the time proudly strutting and ignorantly descanting to some fair lady, with a wave of his gold-headed cane, on the grandeur and beauty of the building which he had so nearly annihilated. We have by this lamentable process lost the beautiful wall arcade under the east window with its sill, and all traces of the altar which stood there While this havoc was being played in the Priory, the parish church was being "beautified,"14 and the Brus monument came down, the side slabs were fixed in the porch, the covering slab made the top of the communion table, and the ends removed. That, with the Prior and Canons, went to Hardwick, along with a great quantity of beautiful details, and was put into the sham ruin, where Hutchinson and Surtees saw it, both supposing the Prior to be the Virgin Mary, being deceived by his costume. It is quite possible that the King end went there as well, and though not now visible, it may be lying buried beneath the sod in the park. The ruin is a slightlybuilt structure, and a square recess in one wall from which a stone has fallen may be the erstwhile home of the lost end of the monument. The other details at Hardwick are well worthy of study. They include a number of beautiful cir

13 "John Burdon, Esq. (son of Nicholas and grandson of Thomas Burdon, who is said to have come from Nottinghamshire), was born at South Shields, the youngest of eighteen children. His eldest sister married Edward Fairless of Monkton. Another sister married James Finney, Esq. of Durham, who had an only child Mary, married to William Chaloner, of Guisbrough Abbey, E-q., to whose daughter, Mary, wife of General Hale, and to her family, Mr. Burdon left

the bulk of his property. Thomas Burdon, Esq., brother of John Burdon, had a daughter Sarah, married first to William Swinburne, Esq., secondly to Sir James Riddell, Bart., and died S. P." (Surtees' History and Antiquities of the County Palatine of Durham, vol. iii., p. 34, note).

14To beautify" in an ecclesiastical sense meant in the last century to disfigure, just as to restore means nowadays in the same sense to destroy.

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cular panels, containing trefoils and quatrefoils studded with dog-tooth mouldings and carved bosses, features we are familiar with in such buildings as the transepts at Beverley, the west front at Peterborough, &c., and which must have come from the grand early English west front of Guisbrough Priory church. About thirty years ago, the end of the tomb was brought back from Hardwick by the late Admiral Chaloner, and placed in the Priory ruins at Guisbrough.

In considering the date to which the erection of this cenotaph must be referred, what appeared to be a very ingenious clue must be discarded. In two neighbouring spandrels on the Scotch side are carved what were taken to represent a purse or glove with a nail or some similar sharp-pointed instrument directed against it. These were not unnaturally regarded as a rebus on the name of Pursglove, the last Prior of Guisbrough before the Reformation. A friend has pointed out that the spandrels on this side are filled with devices which relate to the Passion, and that the purse is the purse for containing the thirty pieces of silver, and the so-called glove is really the Sacred Hand with an awl piercing it. This seems proved by the occurrence in the next spandrel of a representation of the Sacred Foot, which has erroneously been described as a boot. Still, though this clue must be given up, there is, I venture to think, another of a like nature, which is more trustworthy. On each side and on the end still preserved is found a representation of a cock, standing on a perch, which very much resembles in form a handreel.15 It must be admitted that in the case where it occurs on the South or Annandale side its primary reference may be to the Passion, but in the two other cases no such allusion can be detected. Is not this device a rebus on the name of Cockerell, i.e., Cock and Reel, Prior Pursglove's immediate predecessor, who was elected in the year 1519, and was still Prior in 1534, though he had retired before 1537.16 If this conjecture is well founded, the period within which this monument must have been erected is confined within the period 1519 to 1534, the time during which James Cockerell was Prior of Guisbrough. This hypothesis is practically converted into a certainty by the occurrence on the English side of an escallop shell in a spandrel immediately adjoining

15 A representation of a handreel is given in Turner's Domestic Architecture,

vol. iii. p. 130.

16 Guisbrough Chart., ii. p. xlv.

the one containing a cock and reel. The shell refers to the Prior's patron saint (St. James), from whose shrine at Compostela it was usual for pilgrims to bring home shells as memorials of their visit there. The figure with a staff opposite the cock on the reel at the original east end of the monument seems to confirm this conjecture." This date at first sight may appear inconsistent with the style of the monument, which is apparently much earlier. A more lengthened inspection will show that while the general characteristics belong to an earlier style, some of the details are very late, almost Renaissance. This is especially true of the end in the Priory ruin, where the grouping of the Monks or Canons is arranged with great felicity, and in a manner suggestive of foreign workmanship. The object of the monument-the glorification of the house of Bruce, and more especially of the Scottish branch, makes it very probable that it is of Scotch design and workmanship.18 Perhaps traces of resemblance to French work may be detected in it; yet, even if so, it is not the less likely to be really Scotch notwithstanding, as a moment's recollection of the intimate connection of Scotland and France at this time would serve to remind one, when the reigning sovereign of Scotland chose both his wives from the princesses of the latter country, and his only child became the wife of Francis II. of France.

The next problem to be considered is the person to whom the erection of this cenotaph may with probability be attributed. As has been shown above, it was almost certainly raised between the years 1519 and 1534, by a person of Scotch nationality, and one to whom the memory of the Bruces was a special subject of pride. The great cost

renders it certain that only a person of considerable wealth could have afforded to pay for such a sumptuous memorial to ancestors, all of whom had been long dead. Flodden,

17 His predecessor, John Whitby, died in Jerusalem on Sept. 5, 1505, when on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land (Ibid., and the Pylgrymage of Sir Richard Guylforde, Camden Soc., p. x.).

18 The Scotch character of the design is indicated by the revival of 12th and 13th century features in a 16th century monument. The trefoil-headed niches and arcade are like Early English work, and the pedestals on which the subordinate figures stand are carved like incipient Early English or Transitional

capitals, while on the other hand the shallow tracery at the backs of the niches is of the very latest Perpendicular character. It is well known to students of architecture that the Perpendicular style is purely English. In Scotland during the same period they were working at the same time an adaptation of the French Flamboyant, and copying the earlier native styles. This renders it very difficult for a novice to date Gothic work in Scotland, and has led to much confusion.

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