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Carvings from the tomb of Guillaume de Ros, third abbot of Fécamp

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2012

Extract

The slabs on which are carved the bas-reliefs with which this paper is concerned are fastened by iron clamps or holdfasts to the south wall of the chapel of Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours, which is the easternmost of the lateral chapels of the choir of the Benedictine abbey church of Fécamp, on its southern side, immediately next to the chord of the apse and the chapels of its chevet. This chapel, and indeed all those on the south of the choir, date from the early years of the fourteenth century, when a daring scheme of rebuilding on a very lofty scale was begun during the abbacy of Thomas de St. Benoist (1297–1307).

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Society of Antiquaries of London 1927

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References

page 486 note 1 L'Art religieux de la Fin du Moyen Âge: ‘Le Tombeau,’ p. 408.

page 487 note 1 This font, in a hard white stone—not native to Sussex, and not Caen stone—suggests a French source for the carving as well as the material. It might well have been made at Fecamp and shipped across. It is circular and is carved with the Last Supper and the legend of St. Nicholas, bishop of Myra. The date is about the middle of the twelfth century.

page 487 note 2 I am assuming that at the translation of the remains of Abbot Guillaume de Ros—some fifty years after his burial-the skeleton would be lifted from its original stone coffin, and chested within the new tomb, the original coffin being buried beneath.

page 490 note 1 The woman who is handing something to the shipmaster in the legend of St. Nicholas on the Brighton font has these same long pendent sleeves.

page 491 note 1 The instances of the occurrence in French twelfth-century carvings are too numerous to quote here, but the following examples may be noted: Notre-Dame, Paris, a figure in the archivolt of the S. or St. Anne's Portal of the west front, where the tympanum and other carvings are relics of an old church; Chartres, in the Portail-Royal—several times over; Le Mans Cathedral; Bourges ; St. Loupde-Naud, and formerly in one of the statues representing ‘The Ancient Law’, attached to the jambs of the central, or Judgement, portal in the west front at St. Denis.

page 492 note 1 The accidental discovery, through a fire in 1912, of a wall-painting in Hardham Priory, Susséx, disclosed a trefoiled canopy with miniature buildings over, in which an oculus occurs between the lancets. Its date was about 1 200 (see Sussex Arch. Coll., vol. lviii).

page 493 note 1 Our Fellow Miss Graham has brought to my notice some finely carved capitals of the same type as those at Chartres, discovered in the Church of the Nativity, Jerusalem, of about the same date. Two English examples, both betraying foreign influence, may be cited: the canopy above a bas-relief of St. Michael and the dragon in an external niche on the south wall of the chancel at Barfreston, Kent; and a tomb-slab of Liege marble, or ‘touch’, in Ely Cathedral, probably imported from Tournai—also a canopy over a figure of the archangel, who holds a nude figure of the human soul in a napkin. Both carvings may be dated about 1160 to 1170.

page 494 note 1 MS. Harl. 5102. I owe this reference to the kindness of our Fellow Miss Rose Graham. It is reproduced in Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, by W. H. Hutton.

page 494 note 2 Book IV, chap, ix (in the translation, vol. ii, p. 66). Translated by Thomas Forester (Bohn's Translations), 1854. I have to thank Miss Rose Graham for the reference.

page 495 note 1 I presume that he was a brother of the famous Maurice de Sully, bishop of Paris, 1160–96, the great rebuilder of Notre-Dame.

page 496 note 1 M. Malandain does not use the word ‘ossuary’, but that is evidently what he means—a chest or ark, not of wood, like those preserved on the choir screens of Winchester Cathedral, also erected early in the sixteenth century, to contain the bones of Saxon kings and bishops, but of marble with wooden box or boxes inside.