The deportation of the original
chancel arch to an obscure nook and the insertion of a wider new
one, to throw open the view of the choir, is a practice by no
means extinct. Next in turn to the re-designing of old buildings
and parts of them comes the devastation caused by letting
restorations by contract, with a clause in the specification
requesting the builder to give a price for 'old materials,' such
as the lead of the roofs, to be replaced by tiles or slates, and
the oak of the pews, pulpit, altar-rails, etc., to be replaced by
deal. Apart from these irregularities it has been a principle that
anything later than Henry VIII is anathema and to be cast out. At
Wimborne Minster fine Jacobean canopies have been removed from
Tudor stalls for the offence only of being Jacobean. At a hotel in
Cornwall a tea-garden was, and probably is still, ornamented with
seats constructed of the carved oak from a neighbouring church--no
doubt the restorer's perquisite.
"Poor places which cannot afford to pay a clerk of the works
suffer much in these ecclesiastical convulsions. In one case I
visited, as a youth, the careful repair of an interesting Early
English window had been specified, but it was gone. The
contractor, who had met me on the spot, replied genially to my
gaze of concern: 'Well, now, I said to myself when I looked at the
old thing, I won't stand upon a pound or two.
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