In old
conventual churches, now no longer used as such, the stalls have been
often removed from their original position to other parts of the church,
and they appear to have varied in number according to that of the
fraternity.
[Illustration: Misericorde, All Souls' College, Oxford.]
[Illustration: Brass Reading Desk, Merton College Chapel, Oxford.]
In the choirs of cathedral and conventual churches, and in the chancels of
some other churches, a movable desk, at which the epistle and gospel were
read, was placed: this was often called the eagle desk, from its being
frequently sustained on a brazen eagle with expanded wings, elevated on a
stand, emblematic of St. John the evangelist. Eagle desks are generally
found either of the fifteenth or seventeenth century; notices of them
occur, however, much earlier. In the Louterell Psalter, written circa A. D.
1300, an eagle desk supported on a cylindrical shaft, banded midway down
by an annulated moulding in the style of the thirteenth century, is
represented; and in an account of ornaments belonging to Salisbury
Cathedral, A. D. 1214, we find mentioned _Tuellia una ad Lectricum Aquilae_.
Besides the brass eagle desks which still remain in use in several of our
cathedrals, and in the chapels of some of the colleges at Oxford and
Cambridge, fine specimens are preserved in Redcliffe Church, Bristol, of
the date 1638; in Croydon Church, Surrey; and in the church of the Holy
Trinity at Coventry; other instances might also be enumerated.
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