MEDIAEVAL FLOOR TILES. 141 



discover it is not known elsewhere, and it may have been 

 specially designed for our Church of St. George. It is No. 2 of 

 a quartet of tiles and I have parts of Nos. i and 4. The eagle 

 bears a scroll inscribed \?3C \>8C, " woe woe," a reference most 

 likely to the iath Chapter of the Apocalypse which reads " Woe 

 to the inhabiters of the earth, for the great dragon is come down 

 unto you." The legend round the quarter of the circular band 

 reads " RESPICE. R. . . " ; but as I can find no sentence in 

 the Vulgate containing this word, followed by one commencing 

 with R, the word Respice may have been repeated. Canon 

 Wordsworth sends me a most interesting surmise regarding the 

 underlying motive of this tile. He writes : " If I merely had 

 your specimen I think I should have conjectured the word 

 Respice thrice repeated, and have imagined perhaps the three 

 souls in Purgatory crying to the three knights their quondam 

 companions ' Woe ; woe ; woe ; look back upon us in our pains 

 and bid sing a mass for us before you ride a hunting ' or words 

 to that effect. This is a subject ' les trois rois vifs et les trois rois 

 morts ' often found in primers and breviaries as an illustration 

 in the office of the Dead." As the sentence commencing Respice 

 " Look Thou upon me and have mercy upon me " occurs in the 

 psalm appointed for the second nocturn of the Vigils of the 

 Dead in the Sarum Use, this may certainly be denominated as a 

 memorial tile alluding to some well-known mediaeval legend or 

 picture of Purgatory. 



The rest of these tiles need only very slight comment. The 

 crowned Lombardic M is a St. Mary tile. The primrose fleur- 

 de-lys is a favourite device on tiles, and I have found many 

 examples elsewhere, though none in which the bloom was so 

 exactly copied from the primrose. Like the rest, it was laid in 

 fours, so that, to realise how beautiful it looked when in si/u, one 

 has to imagine four of them conjoined at the stem corners. The 

 same may be said of the ivy and cable pattern. 



With regard to the fylfot and fret, or key-pattern tiles, a 

 great deal might be said. The design of the swastika or fylfot 

 cross is a heathen symbol of great antiquity adapted to Christian 





