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110 THE SUSSEX COAST
in length, with clustered pillars to support the galleries and rib-vaulted roof, all in mahogany, dating from a rebuilding in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The rest is mostly the work of the present Duke, who has taken down the greater part of the rebuilding * and raised it again on a colossal scale and in most successful imitation of the Gothic work of the latter part of the period that we must now name the elder Georgian epoch. All is built of a beautiful white stone.
Roger of Montgomery had founded at Arundel an alien priory dependent on the Benedictine Abbey of Seez in Normandy; there had been secular Canons before the Conquest. The present fine cruciform church, the only large one in the county belonging to the Perpendicular period, was built by the excellent Richard Fitzalan, who after a distinguished naval career was executed in 1397 for taking part against Richard II.; for several generations he was popularly regarded as a saint. His possibly is the beautiful altar-tomb with recumbent effigies of Earl and Countess now in the nave of Chichester Cathedral, said to have been moved from Lewes Priory, but St. John Hope thinks it is more likely to be that of his father, who died 1376. The quire of the church he designed as the chapel for his College, whose cloister court was on its south side (there are still remains built into a modern Roman Catholic institution); the nave and transepts formed the parochial part. Such a division was by no means uncommon; it may be seen to-day in the Abbaye aux Dames at Caen. Relations between the two
* Some of the old mahogany is now nsed for doors and other fittings at 8, Hanover Crescent, Brighton. |
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