Logo
Prev
Bookmark
Rotate
Print
Next
Contents
All Pages
Related Articles
Browse Issues
Help
Search
Home
'
National Geographic : 1974 Jun
Contents
eering over the heads of the crowd, Trials. A rival contestant in the bone-twisting, Britain's Princess Anne (below) awaits 21/ 2-mile cross-country event leans back in the results of the Cirencester Park Horse stirrups as her horse plunges down the graded 15th century, the wool merchants embellished their little Saxon and Norman parish churches into cathedral-like showpieces. Perhaps it was their way of buying parole from pur gatory, for they had heartlessly dispossessed many a poor farm family to make pasture for their sheep. In the small village of Northleach there stands a massive church with a tower 100 feet high and a battlemented and pinnacled nave roof. So that no one will forget who paid for it, Northleach church also possesses six wool-merchant brasses, the greatest number to be found in any church in England. A brass is a memorial portrait, exquisitely engraved. The rubbing of brasses-taking off the images with colored waxes onto spe cial papers that can be framed-is a continu ing fad, particularly rife among visiting Amer icans, who pay for the privilege. And so it has become a business (page 860). Long-dead Merchants Still Pay Their Way "These brasses are a bargain," pretty Mrs. Mark Smith told me as she rubbed black wax into gold paper. "Chipping Campden charges up to three pounds per figure. Here it's a third." Those mercenary wool merchants, if they could know, would enjoy the fact that they are still making money. At Cirencester church, rubbers rub facsim iles because the originals were being worn by visitors' shoes. Perhaps that is why, when a group of rubbers asked for a "student's dis count," Vicar Canon Rowland E. Hill quickly granted it-"Fifty pence." In any case, silver is the more cherished metal at Cirencester: 858
Links
Archive
1974 Jul
1974 May
Navigation
Previous Page
Next Page