113 



|Jotes on % pcmibuji of Mista^ Ca%kal 



By the Rev. E. E. Dorling. 



[Read at the Salisbury Meeting of the Society, 1896.] 



9gl feN presenting to the notice of your Society a few observations 

 ^kjj §j on the heraldry of Salisbury Cathedral, I must begin by 

 confessing that our cathedral is not a church rich in heraldic 

 ornamentation. In fact, architecturally speaking, and so far as the 

 actual fabric of the church is concerned, it is completely devoid of 

 heraldry. Compare this cathedral with such a church as Sherborne 

 Abbey, and you will understand what I mean when I say that the 

 structure is absolutely unheraldic. And the reason of this absence of 

 heraldry in the architecture of our church is not far to seek. Planch e 

 lays it down as a fundamental fact that heraldry appears as a science 

 at the commencement of the thirteenth century. Now Salisbury 

 Cathedral was begun in 1220, and was substantially finished in 1266, 

 so that even by the time the building was completed heraldry would 

 only just be beginning to assume the position to which it gradually 

 attained as a well ordered and intelligible science. But, in the other 

 case, heraldry had come to be recognised as an essential part of the 

 nation's economy when Sherborne Abbey was left, practically as 

 we know it now, after the great re-building by Abbots Bradford 

 and Bamsam in the fifteenth century. Until the end of Henry 

 III/s reign heraldry was only in process of assuming a definite and 

 systematic character. And if it is objected that the architecture of 

 Westminster Abbey — a church built contemporaneously with 

 Salisbury Cathedral and finished only a few years later — is rich in 

 heraldic adornment, the poverty of the Salisbury builders might be 

 suggested as a further reason for our church's lack of heraldry. 

 The deans of the building period placed on record the difficulty 

 which they experienced in obtaining funds for the prosecution of 

 the work, and it is not altogether unreasonable to suppose that the 



