Old England: A Pictorial Museum (page 25/52)

Decorative Cap “T” With Flowers

A floriated initial letter capital “T” used as a 14-line drop cap at the start of a chapter. Drop capitals should normally align exactly with the the baseline of the nth line of text, but this design does not need exact alignment. It features flowers such as bluebells and pansies. [more...]

381.—St. Mary’s Chapel, Hastings Cliff Castle.

Hastings Castle was built by William the Conqueror in 1070 or so, together with the chapel of St. Mary. Coastal erosion, and, later, French attacks, meant there wasn’t much left by 1400. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries the land became used for farming. It was excavated in the 1820s, and further damaged by bomb in the Second World War. It [...] [more...]

382.—Alnwick Castle.

A dramatic view of Alnwick Castle in a storm, with its towers, castle walls and battlements standing high on the hillside. The wood engraving is signed J. W. Whimper; this is the same person as J. W. Whymper. Josiah Wood Whymper was a painter, wood engraver and etcher, and used both [...]Edward Whymper, is also represented on this site, but not in this book, which was printed when Edward was four years old. [more...]

383.—Rock of Bamborough with Castle.

There has been a settlement here for at Bamborough for hundreds of years; a castle was mentioned here in the year 547, but was probably over 100 years old even then. That castle was destroyed by Vikings in the 10th century but it was [...] [more...]

389.—Ruins of reading Abbey in 1721.

Reading Abbey was founded in 1121 by King Henry I; it became very wealthy, no doubt in part because of the corruption that was endemic to the Roman Catholic Church. At the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539 the Abbot refused to accept the authority of the King, and was executed; the property thus passed to the Crown and was used as a royal [...] [more...]

Plate 3.—Rochester Castle.—Interior.

Two men stand on a ruined wall and peer into the Keep; the men are brightly dressed. The castle here today was built in A.D. 1080 and the keep is also called Gundolph’s Tower after its builder. [more...]

390.—Cardiff Castle

as it appeared in 1775.

First built around 1090, Cardiff castle was extensively rebuilt in the 19th Century.

Cardiff Castle Web site

“Fortunate was it for the country when a prince arose of such decided character as Henry I.; for he crushed the lesser oppressors, whose evil doings were more constant and universal. It mattered little to the welfare of the country that his unhappy brother Robert was shut up for years in Cardiff Castle, if the king visited his own purveyors with terrible punishments when they ground the people by unjust exactions. In Cardiff Castle (Fig. 390) a dark vaulted room beneath the level of the ground is shown as the place where Robert of Normandy was confined by his brother for twenty-six years. The tradition rests upon no historical foundation whatever, nor, indeed, upon any probability. The gallant but heedless prince, according to William of Malmesbury and other chroniclers, was indeed a prisoner in Cardiff Castle, but surrounded with luxury and magnificence, and provided with minstrels and jesters to make his life pass away as a gay dream.

“Matthew Paris tells a curious story, which appears very characteristic of the proud and trifling mind of him whom Beauclerk had jostled out of a throne. “It happened on a feast day, that king Henry trying on a scarlet robe, the hood of which being too strait, in essaying to put it on he tore one of the stitches, whereupon he desired one of his attendants to carry it to his brother, whose head was smaller; it always having been his custom whenever he had a new robe to send one cut off from the same cloth to his brother with a polite message. This garment being delivered to Robert, in putting it on he felt the fraction where the stitch had been broken, and through the negligence of the tailor not mended. On asking how that place came torn, he was told that it was done by his brother, and the whole story was related to him; whereupon, falling into a violent passion, he thus exclaimed: ‘Alas! alas! I have lived too long! Behold my younger brother, a lazy clerk, who has supplanted me in my kingdom, imprisoned and blinded me! I who have been famous in arms! And now, not content with these injuries, he insults me as if I were a beggar, sending me his cast off clothes as for an alms!’ From that time he refused to take any nourishment, and, miserably weeping and lamenting, starved himself to death.

He was buried in Gloucester Cathedral, where his image, as big as the life, was carved in Irish oak and painted, is yet shown.” Death leveled these distinctions in the same year. If Robert died of mortification about a cast off robe, Henry perished more ignobly of a full meal of lampreys. Robert’s effigy of heart of oak was carefully repared by a stranger two centuries ago [i.e. circa 1650]. The monument [more...] [$]

395.—Rougemont Castle

Rougemont Castle is on a natural volcanic hill in Exeter. See also Northernhay Gardens, Exeter [more...]