LITMIR.BIZ

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imported from England, and were not usually first-class designers. The western tower, which was added in 1532, is as poor and insipid as may be, the work not even of a second-class architect. All that remains of the pre-Norman cathedral is a stone with plait-work, now lying on the floor at the west end of the north aisle, which has been used as a sharpener for weapons, and most of the sculptured work has been by this means worn away.

      Of the Norman cathedral also little remains. It was a cross church with an apse to the choir, but the foundations are buried beneath the floor of the later chancel. A Norman buttress and rude round-headed windows in the south wall of the chancel are all above ground that recall the church destroyed in 1071.

      At the instigation of King John the city was burnt in 1212, and Bishop Robert was taken prisoner before the high altar, but ransomed for two hundred marks.

      The structure underwent extensive alterations in the latter half of the thirteenth century under Bishop Anian, who christened the infant son of Edward I. When Sir Gilbert Scott undertook the restoration of the cathedral, he preserved and used up in the work much of the earlier sculptured stone that he found. He says: “This exhuming and restoring to their places the fragments of the beautiful work of the thirteenth century, reduced to ruin by Owen Glyndwr, used as mere rough material by Henry VII., and rediscovered by us four and a half centuries after their reduction to ruins, is one of the most interesting facts I have met with in the course of my experience.”

      In the south wall of the south transept is a tomb with a niche beside it that is supposed to be that of Owen Gwynedd, who died in 1169, but from the style it might be later by a century. Owen had died excommunicated for marrying his cousin Christiana. Thomas à Becket, from Canterbury, had fulminated a sentence of excommunication against him, but Owen refused to put away his wife, and preferred dying under the ban. He was, however, buried before the high altar.

      In 1188 Baldwin, Archbishop of Canterbury, made a tour through Wales, preaching the crusade, and used this as an excuse for gaining access to the churches of Wales and asserting therein his ecclesiastical supremacy. When he arrived at Bangor he was in a very bad temper. He had found everywhere that the Welsh princes and ecclesiastics were unmoved by his appeals, and the few who took the cross had the intention of slipping out of their obligation as soon as his back was turned. Having crossed the Menai Straits he was met by Rhodri, son of Owen Gwynedd and the fair Christiana, and the archbishop harangued the prince and people on the shore. Some of the congregation accepted the cross, but the youths of Rhodri’s family sat through the discourse on a rock, swinging their legs, wholly unmoved by his eloquence; and although Rhodri, out of courtesy to the archbishop, advised them to take the pledge, they shrugged their shoulders and refused.

      On entering Bangor, Archbishop Baldwin was a disappointed and offended man, and seeing the tomb of Owen, Rhodri’s father, before the altar, immediately gave orders that the body of the late king should be removed from its resting-place and put in unconsecrated ground. Bishop Guy of Bangor was forced to promise compliance. Perhaps he did as bidden, perhaps not; but certain it is that the tomb, if it be that of the excommunicated king, was not erected till later.

      Another opinion is that this is the tomb of Bishop Anian, as there is no sword cut beside the incised cross upon it. But if it had been that of the prelate, we might have expected his pastoral staff to be figured along with the cross.

      In the cathedral is preserved a pair of “lazy-tongs,” used for catching intrusive dogs by the neck and marching them forth without danger to the sexton. At Clynnog there are also dog-tongs, with the date 1815 on them. Indeed, dogs seem to have been a nuisance in churches for a long time. One main reason for Archbishop Laud’s ordering the erection of communion rails was to keep these animals away from the altar and from defiling it.

      The churchwardens’ accounts of Llanfair Talhaiarn, in Denbighshire, show that the dog annoyance had grown to such a pass that in 1747 the parishioners, in vestry assembled, passed a resolution to inflict a fine of one shilling on the person who brought his dog to church during divine service. It does not seem that this order remedied the nuisance, for other resolutions were passed in 1749 on the same matter, and the sexton was granted a quarterly payment “for keeping the Church clear of ’em”; and the vestry provided a stool for the convenience of the sexton by the church door, that he might be ready to pounce on any dog that put its nose in, and drive it out.

      The plague of dogs in church was not confined to Wales. It would seem that in 1644 they found their way into Canterbury Cathedral, for Richard Culmer, in his Cathedral Newes from Canterbury, relates how “one of the great canons or prebends there, in the very act of his low congying (congé-ing) towards the Altar, as he went up to it in prayer-time, was not long since assaulted by a huge mastiffe dog, which leapt upright on him once and againe, and pawed him in his ducking, saluting progresse and posture to the Altar, so that he was fain to call out aloud, ‘Take away the dog! Take away the dog!’”

      A pleasant excursion may be made from Bangor to Llanidan, in Anglesey, by taking the ferry-boat across at Dinorwic.

      Llanidan old church is for the most part in ruins, a new church having been erected in a more convenient situation. The church consisted of a nave and south aisle separated by an arcade. All but the two western bays and the porches are roofless. In the portion still covered is preserved the sandstone shrine of S. Nidan, who was confessor to the monks of Penmon. It still contains what are believed to be his skull and some of his bones. At the Reformation it was not destroyed, as it was in the possession of a hereditary keeper of the relics, and it was retained at a farmhouse in the parish by the family till recently, when it was surrendered to the church, and now the fleshless bones of the founder are in the dismantled church he founded.

      The Celtic mode of dedicating a church was this, as described at length by Bede. The founder, having selected the spot, remained on it in constant prayer and fast for forty days and nights, eating only a little after set of sun, and on the Sundays, when he consumed a small piece of bread, one egg, and a little milk and water. At the end of that period the place became his, and was called thenceforth after his name. It is a touching thought, looking on the bones of old Nidan, to think that there he rests who fourteen hundred years ago, by prayer and fasting on this very spot, dedicated it to the service of God.

      The south porch is curious. It is overgrown with moss and fern, and contains a stoup that is ever full of water. If sponged out, it rapidly fills again. It has been conjectured that there is a spring underground, and that the stones of the porch suck up the water by capillary attraction, and so supply the stoup. But the church and graveyard are quite dry.

      A similar phenomenon existed at Llangelynin, in the old church, between Barmouth and Towyn, but when the roof fell in the stoup became dry. The explanation is that the drip of the roof fell on the porch, saturated it, and thus the water drained into the stoup. And this may be the true explanation of the phenomenon at Llanidan.

      In the church by the shrine is preserved a bust, not ill carved, of a female wearing a crown. It is possible that this may have been intended as the head of S. Edwen, patroness of the daughter parish. She is said to have been a daughter or niece of Edwin, king of Northumbria, who, as has been already related, spent his youth in Anglesey.

      From Bangor the train may be taken to Llanfair, and thence it is a walk to Penmynydd, where is the Plas, the cradle of the House of Tudor.

      The handsome Owen Tudor caught the fancy of Catherine, widow of Henry V.; but before she would marry this Welsh knight she sent a deputation to his ancestral home to inquire into the respectability of his family, its antiquity, and its dignity.

      The commissioners arrived at the little mansion and found Owen’s mother shelling peas, and surrounded by goats, to which she cast the pods, and pigeons that pounced on the peas that escaped her fingers. As to the pedigree, that was soon disposed of; the old lady could recite the Aps back to Anna, the cousin of the Virgin Mary, an Egyptian princess. The deputation returned with its report, pulling long faces. The Tudors were petty Anglesey squires and nothing more, not largely estated, nor with a great retinue. But Queen Catherine was very much in love and very eager to lay aside her widow’s weeds. “Make the most of the pedigree,” she said, “but cook the rest of the report; write down the goats as serving-men and the pigeons as ladies-in-waiting.”

      They

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