indicate the form of the feretum, which appears simply to have stood upon the base, and been entirely independent of it. Nor is there any very distinct indication of the means employed for its covering or protection. At each corner of the top slab we find a hole, which seems intended to receive an upright rod three-quarters of an inch in diameter, and there is one like hole in the middle of the south side, and six rather irregularly placed at the west end. The north side and east end are imperfect, so that it is not certain whether they had similar holes. These holes may have held guide rods to keep a suspended cover in its place, but there is nothing to show how such a cover was suspended.[1] Besides the larger holes there are at regular intervals all round the upper slab, and close to its edge, small holes about a quarter of an inch in diameter. These holes are pierced with the same drill which is so much used in the cresting; they pass diagonally quite through the corner of the slab, and appear at its side immediately above each of the smaller leaves. These piercings may have been intended simply to give so many points of shadow in the cresting; but if so, it seems strange that they should be directed upwards and quite through the corner, instead of being drilled horizontally into the marble, which would have been easier to do, and would have better served the purpose. It is just possible that they received the ends of a number of small iron rods forming a kind of cage or herse over the feretum, but such a herse cannot have existed at the same time as a moveable cover sliding on rods in the larger holes. Perhaps the cover of the feretum was in this case a pall of some rich material supported by the herse of iron wires.
The state in which the fragments of the shrine were found seems to indicate that it was not destroyed at the surrender of the Abbey in 1529, but in 1553, when the Lady Chapel was cut off from the rest of the church. And this would account for our having recovered so little of the buttresses
- ↑ In the ridge-rib the wooden vaulting there is a hole exactly over the centre of the shrine, and a short distance to the Bouth there is a second hole in the boarding of the ceiling of the Abbey. These holes are so placed that it would be possible for a cord or chain suspending a cover over the shrine to pass through the first, and after going over a pulley above the ceiling, to return to the floor of the church through the second. But the holes are little more than an inch in diameter, and it in scarcely likely an object so large as the cover must have been, would be raised and lowered by a chain small enough to pass through them. There are many similar holes in different parts of the ceiling.
