140 "Sculptured Stone at Coclford St. Peter, 



of Moses, as in " Bible de Noailles," A.D. 1000. 1 This picture, which 

 puzzled many industrious antiquaries in the nineteenth century, was 

 doubtless, from its conventionality, well understood in the fourteenth, 

 even by the unlearned worshipper and the catechumen. Apart from 

 all questions of originality or skill in the artist, it would be a token 

 and reminder that the doctrine of the resurrection was revealed to 

 Moses, and that the bodies as well as the spirits of the faithful are 

 in Divine keeping. 



The treatment of the Majesty, which prevailed during the middle 

 ages, in manuscripts, in sculpture, and in painted glass, is found in 

 Anglosaxon manuscripts of the tenth century, and on Byzantine 

 coins of the ninth. Mr. Birch has shewn how a good idea in the 

 Utrecht Psalter has been successively re-produced in the Harleian 

 and Eadwine. 2 If I am right in assigning the Codford sculpture 

 to A.D. 1000, the paucity of the remains of Anglosaxon art renders 

 it very precious, and it is possible that the design, which now appears 

 grotesque and unintelligible, may, in its own time, have been well 

 understood as the received and orthodox expression of some point in 

 Scriptural or legendary lore, and may have lived on in later times. 



Although the sculpture has remained a puzzle in its own locality 

 during the eighteen years of its re-appearance, the solution may 

 yet be found in some Church, or manuscript, or in one of the many 

 archaeological publications of the present day. 



Many of the quaint little sculptures round the inside of the 

 Chapter House at Salisbury, forming a sort of memoria tecknica of 

 Scripture History, would be inexplicable, but from their position in 

 the series. One of these represents Noah as a husbandman with a 

 vine, but does not bear any close resemblance to the Codfcrd sculpture. 



The stone with heraldic devices, represented in the autotype plate 

 annexed, was found in the year 1857, in pulling down the London 



1 Compare Guide to Architectural Antiquities, p. 306 ; Oxford, J. H. Parker, 

 1846 ; and Hist, of Our Lord, by Mrs. Jameson and Lady Eastlake, vol. i., p. 

 185, illustration, 74; London, Longman, 1864. 



2 Hist., Ac, of Utrecht Psalter, by W. De Gray Birch, F.R.S.A., plates 1, 2, 3, 

 p. 211, 213, 214 ; London, Bagster & Sons, 1876. 



