Viewing page 221 of 285

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

132                 ANNUAL REGISTER
[[two columns]]
[[left column]]

These few particulars in the Saxon and Norman stile of building, however minute they may be in appearance, yet will be found to have their sue, as they contribute to ascertain the age of an edifice at first sight.

It cannot be expected we should be able to enumerate all the decorations they made use of; for they designed variety in the choice of them: but a judicious antiquarian, who has made the prevailing modes of architecture in distant times his study, will be able to form very probable conjectures concerning the age of most foo these ancient structures; the alterations that have been made in them since their first erection will often discover themselves to his eye. Perhaps, the most useful change he will find in them, is in the form of the windows; for in many of our oldest churches, I mean such as were built within the first age after the conquest, the windows which were originally round-headed, have since been altered for others of a more modern date, with pointed arches. Instances of this kind are numerous, and may often be discovered, by examining the courses of the stone-work about them; unless the outward face of the building was new cased at he time of their insertion, as it sometimes happened. Without attending to this, we shall be at a loss to account for that mixture of round and pointed arches we often meet with in the same building.

There is, perhaps, hardly any one of our cathedral churches of this early Norman style (I mean with round arches and large pillars) remaining entire, though they were

[[right column]]
all originally so build; but specimens of it may still be seen in most of them. The greatest part of the cahedrals of Durham, Carlisle, Chester, Peterborough, Norwich, Rochester, Chichester, Oxford, Worcester, Wells and Hereford; the tower and transept of Winchester, the nave of Gloucester, the nave and transepct of Ely, the two towers of Exeter, some remains in the middle of the west front at Lincoln, with the lower parts of the two towers there; in Canterbury, great part of the choir formerly called Conrade's choir (more ornamented than usual,) the two towers called St. Gregory's and St. Anselm's and the north-west tower of the same church; the collegiate church of Southwell, and part of St. Bartholomew's in Smithfield; --are all of that style; and so was the nave and transept of old St. Paul's, London, before the fire in 1666. York and Litchfield and had all their parts so entirely rebuilt at separate times, since the disuse of round arches, that little or nothing of the old Norman work appears in them at this day. The present cathedral church of Salisbury is the only one that never had any mixture of this early Norman stile in its composition. The old cathedral, begun soon after the conquest, and finished by Roger, that great and powerful Bishop of Salisbury under Henry I. was at old Sarum, and of the fame kind: it stood in the north-west part of the city, and the foundations are still visible. If one may form a judgment of the whole by the ruins that remain, it does not appear indeed to have been so large as some others of those above-mentioned;


                      For the YEAR 1772;          133
[[two columns]]
[[left column]]

tioned; but it had a nave and two porticos or side-isles, and at the east end it was semicircular. Its situation on a barren chalky hill, exposed to the violence of the winds, and subject to great scarcity of water and that within the precincts of the castle, (whereby frequent disputes and quarrels arose between the members of the church and officers of the castle) gave occasion to the bishop and clergy in the reign of Henry III. to desert it, and remove to a more convenient situation, about a mile distant towards the south-east; where Richard Poore, at that time bishop, began the foundation of the calends of May, 1220. It consists entirely of that style which is now called (though I think improperly) Gothic; a light, neat and elegant form of building; in which all the arches are (not round but) pointed, the pillars small and slender, and the outward walls commonly supported with buttresses.

_____________________________________________________

 Some Extracts from an enquiry into the value of the ancient Greek and Roman money: by Mathew Raper, Esq; F. R. S.   From the Philosophical Transactions, for the year 1771.

Of the Attic Drachm. 

The Greek coins were not only money, but weights. Thus their drachm was both a piece of money, and a weight; their mina was 100 drachms as a sum, and the same number as a weight; and their talent contained 60 minas,

[[right column]]

or 6000 drachms, both by weight and tale.

This way of reckoning 100 drachms to the mina, and 60 minas to the talent, was common to all Greece; and where the drachm of one city differed from that of another, their respective talents differed in the same proportion.

Of all the Greek cities and free states, both in Europe and the lesser Asia, that of Athens was the most famous for the fineness of their silver, and the justness of its weight: Xenophon tells us, that whithersoever a man carried Attic silver, he would sell it to advantage. And their money deserves our more particular attention, both because we have the most unexceptionable evidence of its standard weight; and what little we know of the money of other Greek cities, is chiefly by comparison with this.

The current coin of Athens, was the silver drachm, which they divided into 6 oboles, and struck silver pieces of 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, oboles, of half an obole, and a quarter of an obole. Their larger coins above the drachm were, the didrachm, the tridrachm, and the tetradrachm; which last they called slater, or the standard.

 Of the Eginean and Euboic talents. 

The attic was not the only money-talent used in Greece. Historians and others mention the Eginean and the Euboic talents. The former weighed 10000 Attic drachms, but, like other talents, contained only 6000 of its own; which being so much heavier than the Attic, the Athenians called it K3 [Greek script]

Transcription Notes:
Unsure how to transcribe the Greek letters on the bottom-right of 133