A HISTORY OF CUMBERLAND 
Irish-Scandinavians were so fond. Mr. Calverley with much reason 
compared the descriptions in the Edda of Hel, the abode of the dead, 
and its walls wattled, not with withes like the houses of the living, but 
with snakes. This heathen idea, grafted upon the Christian faith, 
flowered into the pretty and favourite device which we shall see often 
repeated, and find here in the little figure standing on the head of the 
great serpent—the seed of the woman bruising the serpent’s head, 
triumphing over death and proclaiming the hope of life to come. 
A fragment of similar workmanship built into the church of 
Hutton-in-the-Forest shows that there must have 
been other crosses of this type in the neighbour- 
hood ; and the sundial and base in the churchyard 
may possibly be the original lower part of the same 
monument, as appears to be the case elsewhere. At 
Penrith is the Plague stone, evidently the socket of 
an ancient cross, though known only as the basin 
which during times of plague people filled with vine- 
gar and put their money in to disinfect it, at the same 
time taking up the goods which country folk from 
outside had laid by the stone, themselves retiring to a 
safe distance. 
We must now traverse the county to Gosforth 
and view the most famous and beautiful examples of 
the round-shafted cross and its associated monuments. 
We must treat them briefly, but they have been de- 
scribed at length by Mr. Calverley in Early Sculptured 
Crosses of the Diocese of Carlisle and by Dr. C. A. 
Parker in his book on The Ancient Crosses at Gosforth, 
Cumberland. 
There are at Gosforth the remains of three crosses 
and two hogbacks; one little cross-head built into 
the porch is probably not pre-Norman. ‘The style 
and execution and the ‘literary subject’ of this famous 
group are very similar ; if the three crosses and two 
hogbacks were not carved by the same hand, they 
represent the work of the same age and race. They 
cannot be twelfth century, because the hogbacks were 
built into the foundations of the twelfth century 
church ; nor can they be Anglian, because they are 
quite unlike the work we know to be Anglian, and 
because two of the crosses illustrate verses from 
the Edda, which is a series of poems made by 
Scandinavian skalds under Irish and English 
influence in the tenth century. The sculp- 
tures do not merely reflect general ideas com- 
mon to all Teutonic heathendom, but they show, carved in stone, 
pictures obviously intended to embody the very words of the Norse songs. 
266 
CEES 
ASS 
eS 
iw, 
ee 
AI 
oR 
PIR 
jae 
—— 
= 
FE 
CE 
GosrortH Cross. 
