9<3 ON AN ALABASTER SCULPTURE. 



date, namely, the end of the fourteenth or quite the beginning of 

 the fifteenth century. Antiquaries, judging the matter from very 

 different standpoints, unite in approximating the date to 1400. 

 The date, surely, of a sacred carving of this character, that must 

 once have been so extraordinarily prevalent throughout England, 

 is worth considering. It was the time when the heresies of Wyclif 

 were making some headway in the church. One of the chief tenets 

 of the Wyclifites was a repudiation of the hitherto universally 

 held doctrine of the Presence in the Sacrament. Some of 

 them expressed themselves in terms that would utterly shock 

 English Churchmen of different schools of the present day, 

 and must have been startlingly repulsive to the Catholics of the 

 time. For instance, John Badby, the tailor of Evesham, who 

 was burnt in 1409, when he appeared the last time in court, 

 and was again questioned as to the nature of the elements in the 

 Eucharist, said that, " in the sight of God, the Duke of York," to 

 whom he bowed, "or any child of a Adam, was of higher value 

 than the Sacrament of the Altar." Archbishop Arundel, 1399- 

 141 4, was not only a severe man who readily accepted the aid of 

 the State in the crushing of heresy through the odious statute 

 De herelico comburendo, but was an able and even conciliatory 

 administrator when he thought the times permitted, and it seems 

 to us not at all improbable that he specially revived the tradition 

 of St. Gregory's Pity, and perhaps enjoined its perpetuation in 

 stone, in a readily understood form. That there was some kind 

 of order or powerful recommendation for such sculptures, as a 

 popular way of strengthening the faith, we feel convinced, and 

 possibly evidence of this may yet be forthcoming from Arundel's 

 Register, or some similar source. 



Archbishop Thomas Arundel is said to have taken for his patron 

 saint his predecessor in the see, St. Thomas a Becket, which gives 

 some little support to the theory that this is the saint on the left 

 of these sculptures, though our own opinion coincides with that of 

 Monsieur Fleury, that it is most likely intended for St. Augustine 

 of Canterbury. 



All these sculptures are of about the same dimensions, somewhat 



