The Chapels
Chapels were places of worship
and
could be as large as a country church or as small as a niche in a wall. In some places, chapels were small
church-like rooms or buildings built into castles and gates, or on
estate
properties, and owned by the church, a secular family, or an
institution. Guilds might build chapels
into their meeting
halls or a city into its entry-gate, or gentry might build chapels into
their castles
or manor houses. These chapels might be
owned outright by the family, but were always sanctioned and supervised
under
the local bishopric and subordinate to the local churches and
cathedrals. In monasteries, small
niche chapels lined the church walls along the nave, the transepts, and
even in
the presbytery.
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[Castle Ruins, the chapel, Goodrich, England]
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Chapels
were dedicated to particular saints and sometimes important persons, as
with
memorial chapels where the visitor was encouraged to pray for the
benefactor’s
soul. Niche chapels in monastic churches
might contain a relic of the saint (such as a thread from an apostle’s
cloak or
a martyr's finger bone), or might have painted depictions of the saint
or the
symbols associated with that saint, such as the pig and St.
Anthony. These paintings or relics,
then, were displayed in canopied niche chapels in the church, perhaps
illuminated by a candle, oil lamp, or
colored-glass lantern.
Larger
chapels might include space for many pilgrims at
once, and a large shrine, with more important relics, to the saint to
whom the
chapel was dedicated. They might also
include the admonition that penitents must remove their shoes before
entering or
maintain silence. The pilgrim or visitor
was encouraged pray at these chapels, and to make offerings and
requests to the
saints to whom the chapels were dedicated.
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Saints,
chapels, and shrines could
all be associated with the workings of miracles. The
monks, in fact, would encourage this by
enthusiastically copying and distributing the stories of saints and the
miracles associated with the relics owned by the monastery. Relics, and
the
miracles associated with them, were an extraordinarily important
component of
the monastic church. Relics attracted
pilgrims (and their coins), and the patronage of the wealthy. A monastery with valuable relics would be
esteemed by association, and it was not uncommon for there to be
squabbles over
ownership of reliquaries, or even outright theft between institutions. |
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[Zara, sarcophagus of San Simeone, Dalmatia,
Austro-Hungary]
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Chapels
were similar to chantries
in appearance, and both might be built into a church niche, on the
church
grounds, or into the church itself. But
chapels and chantries had very different functions.
Chapels were associated with particular saints
and were a place the general population could go (or, if it were a
private
chapel, a particular group or family) to offer prayers and make
requests of that
saint for health, safety, and happiness. Chantries
were associated with particular people or
families, and built
with the particular intent to provide a place for a priest to say
memorial
masses for that person or family. Chantries
included altar tables, and the basic idea was
that with each
Mass sung, the soul of the chantry builder would be brought closer to
heaven.
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Fairhurst and historyfish.net, 2007 All rights reserved. No
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