20 CROSS-LEGGED EFFIGIES IN DORSET. 



The number of cross-legged and other effigies which vanished 

 with the suppression of the priory churches, or at the so-called 

 restoration of others, will probably never be known, so completely 

 wiped out of existence were the former that in many cases not 

 even the sites on which they stood are definitely known. I have 

 only succeeded in tracing records of two cross-legged effigies 

 which have vanished, both being mentioned by Hutchins, but no 

 fragment of either can be discovered. The account by Hutchins 

 of one of these vanished effigies, which was in Milton Abbey, is 

 very interesting : 



*"In the south-west corner (of the south aisle), under this 

 window, is the greatest piece of antiquity in the church (Milton 

 Abbey). It is the figure of a man in complete armour, cross- 

 legged, and a shield on his left arm, on which is an obscure 

 cross. He may have been a Crusader, and buried here before 

 the church was burnt ; and, indeed, the figure is much decayed. 

 Statues cross-legged were not always of knight templars, but 

 persons who had made a crusade to the Holy Land or vowed to 

 do so. The first crusade began 1096, and in 1291 the Sultan of 

 Egypt put an end to them by the conquest of Palestine. 



" Whom it represents is very hard to determine. We may be 

 a little assisted in our conjecture by a MS. account of Milton 

 Abbas in the Cotton Library, Julius, F. VI., 115, in a few leaves 

 entitled " Collections about Several Towns in Dorsetshire," by an 

 anonymous author, 1579, who says ' William the Conqueror took 

 away part of the lands of the Abbey and gave them to Glaston- 

 bury, and by the medyation of a barren of great honour 

 replenished it again with monks, thirteen to the dozen, for as 

 they wanted of their lands, even so of their number. . . . 

 The name of the barren was called . . . and beryth Sa, a 

 cross humette botony flowrte O, in which are five escallops of 

 the first ; and lyeth cross-legged in the south aisle and wall.' 

 These arms," continues Hutchins, " are those of the Latimers, 

 though the escallops are a difference of a younger branch. One 



* Hutchins, 2nd Ed., Vol. II., p. 446. 



