MEDIAEVAL FLOOR TILES. 139 



claw. Three more were preserved at Bayeux Cathedral, and on 

 festivals displayed at the high altar, for this mythical animal was 

 not esteemed an evil beast, like the dragon and serpent, but was 

 respected and even venerated as the emblem of the Sun God, 

 the embodiment of vigilance, energy, strength, and zeal. It was, 

 therefore, the custom to represent this creature with an abnormal 

 development of claw. A fellow tile to this one was discovered 

 in the floor of Preston Church in this county in 1855, and is now 

 in the Museum. The letters on the sides of the shield are, I 

 think, a rude representation of the Alpha and Omega. 



The rest of our tiles belong to the fifteenth century, and from 

 the notes I took at the time of their discovery I can with a great 

 degree of certainty relay the pattern as indicated by the remains 

 we found /;/ si/u. One must remember first the rule that where 

 the design of a tile is parallel to the sides, then that tile is a 

 border or penultimate border. The second rule is this : When 

 the pattern runs diagonally across the tile, as is always the case 

 with coats of arms, fleur-de-lys or lettering, &c., then that tile is 

 one of either four, nine, or sixteen combined into a compound 

 design. Our St. George's patterns were laid in sixteens. In the 

 centre a quartet of diagonals covered ten square inches of floor. 

 Separating these from the next quartet were eight borders of the 

 grape pattern with a single fylfot at each outer angle. The 

 borders of the whole were worked out in frets, or key-pattern 

 border tiles, together with several plain black, yellow, and brown 

 singles and triangles. It will be noticed that whenever the 

 quarter patterns on a tile are not identical, then the result of 

 laying a group of them together is the production of two patterns 

 instead of one. This was a very ingenious device of the 

 ancients, and proved to be very effective and beautiful as well 

 as simple. The illustrations I trust will speak for themselves, so 

 I need only say a few words on the most remarkable of our St. 

 George's specimens. The most interesting is No. 19, the only 

 dated example amongst our discoveries. John Gough Nichols 

 discovered a fellow tile to this in Malvern Abbey and called it 

 the " Mendicantc Tile," but it is nothing of the sort. It is one 



