MORTUARY CHAPELS, LICHFIELD. 121 



Ruiton, which he held till 1340. After that date his con- 

 nection with Lichfield ceased. He held the prebendary of 

 Dunnington, York, in 1324; in 1328, and again in 1353, he 

 is mentioned as Archdeacon of Eley. He succeeded to the 

 Deanery of S. Paul's in 1336, and died, holding that office, 

 on November 3rd, 1353. The chapel of S. Catharine, in that 

 cathedral, which he had rebuilt, and wherein he had founded 

 a chantry, received his remains. 



I take it, then, that the very foundation of these chambers 

 we are now considering could not have been begun until after 

 the decision of the Chapter in 1323; and the outer walls, 

 at the slow rate of building then customary, would not be 

 sufficiently high to allow of the completion of the outer 

 tombs for another ten or twenty years. These outer tombs 

 were very probably intended as the resting places of the 

 executors of the munificent Bishop (though not eventually, 

 at all events in the case of Bruere, thus used), and none of 

 them could have been designed, as sometimes conjectured, for 

 the Bishop himself. 



When the corpse of Langton was brought from London, it 

 was in the first instance deposited beneath the high altar of 

 the Lady Chapel. This must not be understood as meaning 

 the present Lady Chapel, but the previous one of Early English 

 workmanship, whose eastern wall would about correspond with 

 the seventh or last piers of the present Presbytery, and whose 

 outer wall would probably not be taken down until the newly- 

 extended Lady Chapel had been nearly or quite completed. 

 Bishop Roger de Norbury removed the bones of his predeces- 

 sors to a magnificent tomb on the south side of the high altar, 

 between the fifth and sixth piers of the Presbytery. Dugdale, 

 in his Visitation of 1662, took a careful drawing of this monu- 

 ment, which is now at the College of Arms, and it has been 

 reproduced in Shaw's Staffordshire. The canopy of the tomb 

 was subsequently destroyed, and only the effigy in Purbeck 

 marble now remains, resting on the pavement of the south 

 choir aisle. 



These three chambers, to which I am trying to confine my 



