48 ABBOTSBURY ABBEY. 



looking all are in absolute concord, and combine into as perfect 

 a mediaeval building of its kind and for its purpose as can easily 

 be found anywhere.* I have only to add firstly that, while every- 

 thing else inside and outside stamps St. Catharine's as of the i5th 

 century, the piscina rather looks as if of the i4th ; and, secondly, 

 that the projection of some of the upper courses of the turret is 

 to me a puzzle. It does not appear to show inside. It obviously 

 is not an accident, and yet there seems no reason or use for it. 



I am ashamed of this tame sketch of St. Catharine's. Every 

 Dorset man with the least glow of admiration for our old world 

 betters in design and in work every such Dorset man must 

 have a real affection for this our old county's triumph of head 

 craft and handicraft. But I am here to read a paper, not to make 

 an oration, if I could even. And while expressing shame, let me 

 apologize for my string of conjectures throughout this paper. I 

 might be a very Yankee for guessing. But let me end at least 

 with a certainty. There certainly was an amazing plenty of 

 of art, energy, and money in Abbotsbury Abbey in the i4th 

 and 1 5th centuries. All we see dates from that epoch. Nay, St. 

 Catharine's, the Barn, the Pynion end, and the dairy house gable 

 are all identical in style and must have been built within a very 

 few years of each other. What a vast cost ! But we know that 

 the Benedictines did, as the ages went on, heap up riches. Some 

 contrast between Benedict unseen, lost to the knowledge of men, 

 hidden in a drear cave in the wild waste of Subiaco, that he might 

 be alone with God, on one side ; and, on the other side, his 

 Benedictines 800 years after, pulling down their barns here to 

 build greater with their redundant money for their unmeasured 

 corn. Well for the Benedictines, though, if the annals of Bene- 

 dictine St. Albans, for instance, told of the order no worse things 

 than that here, in this fair Dorset Vale, the Abbotsbury fathers 

 reared up stately seemly building after building, of the mellow ochry 

 ashlar, to glow in the evening suns of half a millennium. 



* The three wishing holes, one for the knee, two for the hands, should 

 be noted. They are in the east jamb of the south doorway. 



