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CHICHESTER AND VICINITY 37
to a more ornate fourteenth-century gateway at the western end. This opens into the Bishop's garden, which with its old walls covered with lichens ' and plants, its magnificent flowering Chinese privets, the hugest of their kind, its other rare trees, its lawns stretching to the city walls and delightful views of the Cathedral towers, is one of the loveliest spots on this earth. The Palace is a rambling old house of varying dates with a beautiful vaulted chapel, the work of Seffrid II., an enormous square kitchen with a striking timber roof probably built in the fourteenth century, and a good deal of work by Sherburne, including the dining-room ceiling painted with armorial bearings. The picturesque old brick walls, and a battlemented octagonal tower in the garden, were the work of the same bishop.
The arms of the see (p. 19) are thus described by Thorn. A. Vicars, pastor of the church at Cockfield in Southsex in dedicating a sermon of his to the Bishop in 1626. «The subject of the sermon is your Coate of Armes. The most godly and fairest Armes that ever I or any in the world set his eyes upon. Christ Jesus the great Pastor and Bishop of our soules sits in your azure field in a faire long garment of beaten gold, with a sharpe two-edged sword in his mouth. Is it accounted a great grace, and that for Kings and Princes too, to carrie in their shields, a Lyon, an Eagle, a Lilly, a Harpe or such-like animal or artificial thing? How much more honour is it then 1 pray you to carrie Christ Jesus in your shield, who is Lord of Lords and King of Kings ? "
There were no monks or nuns located in Chichester after the removal thither of the see—the Benedictine House of Boxgrove was a little over |
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