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Vetusta Monumenta: Ancient Monuments, a Digital Edition

Plate 1.64 DZI View: Engraving of Chichester Cross

Plate 1.64 of Vetusta Monumenta presents a varorium view of Chichester Cross, one of the so-called “market-” or “butter crosses,” as it appeared (or might have appeared) at several times in the previous half-century, including the west front of the Cross, a plan view of the Cross, and an elevation view of the “highest part” of the Cross. The print also includes a human figure in the lower left, selling produce; a spaniel stands expectantly nearby. Inside the cross, a boy plays. In the background and to the east of the monument are some houses. Engraving by George Vertue after Augustin Ménageot. Published by the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1743. Current location: The Chichester Cross can still be seen today on South St in Chichester, West Sussex, UK.

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Plate 1.64: Chichester Cross Plate: Engraved by George Vertue (1684-1756) after Augustin Ménageot (c. 1700-1784); published as a loose sheet in 1743 (a copy of which is held by the British Library, K.Top.42.19.h). Plate 1.64 displays the Chichester Cross, one of England's so-called “market-” or “butter crosses” (see also Plate 1.61). Most of the plate is occupied with a variorum view of the Cross as it appeared, or might have appeared, at several times in the previous half-century. The engraving displays the west front of the Cross. The print also includes: a plan view of the Cross (labeled Crucis ichnographia, a gesture to the Vitruvian “ichnos” or ground-plan), details regarding the footprint of the Cross on its raised dais, and an elevation view of the “highest part of the cross,” as it appeared before its renovation in 1724. The elevation view shows a small clock topped by an ornamental kiosk. A figure sits at a temporary stall in the lower left corner, selling produce; a spaniel stands expectantly nearby. Within the Cross, a boy occupies himself at a game, possibly spinning a top. Some of the houses to the east of the monument are in the background.

Object: An open, gazebo-like structure of Caen limestone, constructed in the style of the perpendicular Gothic. Eight buttressed piers, arranged octagonally around a massy central column, together frame eight open doorways enclosing a shadowed, much-worn central portico; a stone bench rings the central column. Springing from each pier is a flying buttress, which in turn supports the central pillar, now itself become octagonal; the central pillar, rising above the buttresses, affords further niches for statuary. This pillar is topped by a conical spire.

The Chichester Cross was built in 1501 at the sole expense of Edward Story, within view of Chichester Cathedral where he was Bishop. Story further supplied an endowment for its maintenance, stipulating that it provide free shelter for the sale of agricultural goods. The Cross remains in situ, marking the formal center of Chichester; the four streets which emerge from the Cross bear the names of the cardinal compass points.

The present-day structure displays the marks of numerous reconfigurations. Though much of the original statuary is no longer present, the current building is encumbered with armorial shields, escutcheons, banners, and other significant markers, most of which memorialize the monument’s many remodelings. The four of its faces addressing each of the four streets which meet at the cross have been fitted each with one large clock.

Transcription:

Top, Left: Crucis ichnographia. / ped…..28 / scala pedum.

Top, Right: Summa pars crucis, prout anno 1724 instaurata fuit, in muliebrium figurarum locum horologio suffecto.

Bottom: CRUX CICESTRIӔ, / Extructa ab Edwardo Story, qui ad Episcopatum Cicestriensem anno 1475, regnante EDWARDO IV, evectus est; cujus insignia regiis immixta, cruciq[ue] insculpta esse dicuntur. Collapso temporis injuriâ fastigio, post CAROLI II. reditum reparata est, aeneo CAROLI I. capite in arculo, ubi olim fuerat Statua, posito. Prima hujusce Crucis delineatio anno 1715 facta est; secunda anno 1724, formam ejus horologio et campana nundinali ornatae, prout hodie manet, exprimens; postrema anno 1743. Sumptibus Soc. Antiq. Lond. ӕri incisa hic exhibetur prima.

Translation:

Top Left: Plan of the cross / 28 feet / scale of feet.

Top Right: The uppermost part of the cross as it was redone in the year 1724, after the statues of women were replaced by clocks.

Bottom: The Chichester Cross, / Built by Edward Story, who, during the reign of King Edward IV, was elevated to the bishopric of Chichester in the year 1475; his insignia are said to have been mixed with the King’s and to have been engraved on the cross. After the roof collapsed, weakened by the passage of time, it [the cross] was repaired after the restoration of Charles II, and a bronze bust of Charles I was placed in a niche where there once had been a statue. The first drawing of this Cross (i.e. the top, left image) was made in the year 1715; the second (i.e. the top, right image) [was made] in the year 1724 and shows how it looks adorned with a clock and a market bell tower, as it still looks today; the last (i.e. the main image) [was made] in the year 1743. This drawing, engraved in copper at the expense of the Society of Antiquaries, is shown here for the first time.

Preparatory Drawings: Click here to see the Preparatory Drawings for Plate 1.64.

Commentary by Sean Silver: The minutes of the Society of Antiquaries of London (SAL) note that on 12 November 1741, “[i]t was Balloted to give Mr Menagoest four Guineas for his Curious Draught of Chichester Cross” (quoted in Alexander 2008, 368). Ménageot was a Paris-trained painter who had arrived in England early in that same year, responding to an offer of patronage from William Draper (1709-1759). He would remain in London, living the life of an impoverished piece-work artist, for another fifteen years. It seems likely that Draper introduced Ménageot to the Society, which would be one source of his income, but it is certain that he caused Ménageot to collect drawings of views and principal monuments from London and its environs to the South (Ménageot 1741). Following Draper’s advice, Ménageot completed a journey from London to the Isle of Wight during the travelling season of 1741, where he completed sketches of Portsmouth and of Carisbrooke Castle, and the drawing of Chichester Cross which Ménageot sold to the SAL (Willk-Brocard 1998, 43). The resulting copperplate, engraved by George Vertue at the SAL's request, was published as a loose sheet in 1743 and republished in Vetusta Monumenta as Plate 1.64.

It is easy to see what attracted members of the SAL to the Chichester Cross. Early English antiquaries were largely concerned with the interpretation of Gothic artifacts, positioning them as part of a native English history (Sweet 2004). William Draper was grandson from his mother’s side to the diarist John Evelyn (1620-1706), and a charter member of the SAL; it was he who dispatched Augustin Ménageot to Sussex for the purpose of gathering representations of local monuments. Draper’s desires were therefore explicitly aligned with the SAL's mission of collecting, and then publishing, representations of Gothic antiquities, which were to be used as components and evidence in that general historiographic and nationalist project (Draper 1744; Ménageot 1741).

Early antiquarian historiography lent itself particularly well to objects which made their history palpable, and the Chichester Cross was one of these. The Chichester Cross was built at the turn of the sixteenth century by Bishop Edward Story (d. 1504), who left a further legacy for its maintenance. It was defaced in a burst of iconoclastic fury during the first English Civil War, but was repaired after the Restoration; a bust of Charles I by Herbert Le Sueur, installed by the Charles II to commemorate the Monarchist leanings of the city where it stood, appears on its East front. In 1724, Lady Farington, the widow Sir Richard Farington (bart.), placed three clocks on the Cross, and so on. This can all be known because the Cross is its own monument, or, at least, a monument of its own coming-into-being. A series of prominent engravings, armorial bearings, and icons commemorate the people who caused the Cross to be built and maintained. In what might be called the graffiti of the wealthy, it bears a record of its patrons prominently upon itself; that self-testimony is repeated in the explanatory script at the bottom of the engraving (see also Falzman 1935 and Foster 2001).

The 1743 engraving captures this history in a surprising way. Despite its gestures towards realistic particularity, that engraving appears to fold both old details and new ornaments into the same image. The engraving captures none of the damage from Parliamentary troops, under the command of William Waller, who on Innocents’ Day 1642 entered Chichester after a siege, stripping Cross and cathedral alike of their icons (“Chichester Cathedral” 1843, 427). This had been repaired by Charles II, as the engraving itself testifies. But it also does not capture what, to later eyes, would be the most valuable single part of the Cross: the highly ornate, gilt bust of Charles I placed there at his son's command, which has been a featured object at the Tate Britain and now resides at the Chichester History Museum. Ménageot's sketch simply omits it. Rather, Ménageot's sketch appears to show a version of the Cross as it was prior to its iconoclastic destruction, with concessions towards more recent refurbishment. That is, Ménageot and Vertue have sketched Lady Farington's clocks into a bit of fanciful drapery, remarking that this "is how it [the Cross] still looks today," while the hyperrealistic perspective view offers what appears to be Ménageot or Vertue's best guesses at its vanished statuary. The finished image therefore relays not a verisimilar image of the Cross as it would have appeared, anachronistically, to a camera's eye, but an idea of the Cross as it might have appeared to an antiquarian viewer, as one local artifact relaying a partial, Whiggish history of Augustan England.

This was, however, only the first engraving of the Chichester Cross, which, as one symbol of the crossings of state power and commodity circulation, wound up as a contested site of local politics. In 1747, the same year that Vetusta Monumenta first appeared as a bound volume, Charles Lennox invited Vertue to visit the Cross in person. Lennox was the second Duke of Richmond (1701-1750) and one-time mayor of Chichester. Sometime around 1746, Richmond commissioned the draughtsman William Ride, who had previously completed a survey of Richmond's own house and grounds, to design and restore the Cross, with a series of new escutcheons, engravings, and ornaments (Vertue 1747). Ride moreover removed the three clocks bespoke by Lady Farington, installing four new ones atop its four cardinal faces, surmounting the whole structure with a new, gazebo-like spire ("Chichester Cross" 1831, 1). Vertue arrived in 1747 and, in partnership with Ride, produced a series of sketches of the Cross in its refurbished state, subsequently gathering these views in a copperplate triptych, with the Cross’s own inscriptions reproduced at larger scale to record the identity of the patron. Those sketches were purchased by Horace Walpole as part of his interest in George Vertue, and are currently held by the Lewis Walpole Library (Folio 49 3581, 47 and 49-52). A copy of Vertue’s second, much embellished engraving is at the Royal Academy (17/1046). This engraving represents the Cross substantially as it appears today.

Although outwardly similar to the engravings of 1743, the 1747 engraving is nevertheless an utterly different document. Unlike the first engraving, which offers an antiquarian monument for antiquarian eyes—only gathering up its patrons as if by accident—this second engraving makes much of the Cross as an icon of local and monarchical power. It gestures explicitly and fulsomely to Richmond in his capacity as agent of the state, once in registering the renewal of the Cross, and again in its dedication. It is one thing to approach the Cross as an antiquarian artifact, which is partly how the Cross appears in Vetusta Monumenta. It is something else altogether to attach the Cross to a particular person, at a particular moment in history—which is precisely the effort Richmond made in 1747, or, we might say, hired Ride and Vertue to make. Richmond was an ardent political loyalist (Colvin 1995, Allen 2019), and, in Vertue's words, "A Member of several Societys," including the Royal Society and the SAL ("Vertue's Note Book" 1937-38, 142). Here, his political leanings and his interest in antiquities appear to have overlapped, such that it was that it was a politically motivated restoration which Richmond, through his connections at the SAL, sought to commemorate.

During the very years that the Cross was redundantly refurbished, re-clocked, and re-engraved, Richmond was caught up in a difficult struggle that pitted state power against the claims of the local population. These years were difficult ones for Sussex—and Richmond’s decision to have the Cross refurbished and engraved, possibly timed to coincide with the 1747 appearance of Vetusta Monumenta as a bound volume, are best read against this historical and economic situation. During the years from 1745-1750, the Jacobites were actively attempting to reinstall the Pretender to the Throne, and Richmond was among the men who took up arms to resist them. But Richmond did more than this. In his home region of Sussex, including his home city of Chichester, he helmed a multi-year program to eliminate the cross-Channel smuggling of goods such as salt, sugar, tea, and tobacco—what he called, “checking that audacious spirit [of smuggling] which now daily gains ground” (1749, 5). Holding a series of irregular criminal trials in Chichester, he ultimately oversaw the deaths of forty-five men, thirty-five of whom were convicted or accused of illegal traffic in commodity goods. The remaining ten died in jail, awaiting trial for related charges.

The effectiveness of the campaign is doubtful. Horace Walpole (1717-1797) in 1752 for instance remarked that Sussex remained overrun with smugglers and excise-men, in seemingly perpetual conflict over the cross-channel trade (Walpole 1752, 137; McLynn 1989, 187-89). Yet its political cost was clear. Richmond pitched himself as a figure of order, regularity, and security. He justified the violence of his policing program by claiming that smugglers were transmitting cross-channel intelligence to the Jacobites; he also pointed to the violence endemic to the trade. The policing action appears nevertheless to have been manifestly unpopular. Smuggling was an essential part of coastal economies like that of Chichester, a point raised by Michael Kwass in his study of the folk-hero Louis Mandrin (Kwass 2014). Though the illicit trade in regulated goods sometimes erupted in violence, it also constituted a much more ubiquitous, homely part of the fabric of popular rural life (Winslow 1976; Wood 2014). This is not only because unregulated goods were cheaper; more than this, their exchange was central to the livelihoods of surprisingly broad networks of men, women, children, pensioners, the elderly, and so on, all engaging differently in the circulation and distribution of unregulated goods by sale, barter, gift, or other forms of semi-informal exchange.

Details of Richmond’s own reports point to the tight-knit systems that depended upon illicit trade; one account of a break-in to a customs house notes how the thieves freely distributed bags of tea to those they met. Even the trials against the smuggling trade regularly depended upon the open knowledge of smugglers’ identities in local communities. In short, smugglers were often local heroes, even while they were enemies of the state. Walter Gale, a Sussex schoolmaster, notes in his diary that captured smugglers were regularly attended by “a company of foot guards”; this was to “prevent all chances of rescue, so thoroughly were the feelings of great numbers of the people enlisted on the side of the smugglers” ([1749] 1857, 194-95).

Aware of his local unpopularity, Richmond launched a publicity campaign to defend his position, culminating in a pamphlet entitled The Genuine History of the Inhuman and Unparalleled Murders of Mr William Galley, A Custom-House Officer (see also Winslow 1976). Richmond’s narrative ends with descriptions of the irregular trials of seven men at Chichester, who were convicted and hanged in chains in different parts of Sussex. Relying largely on trial testimony, it describes the events in great detail, including seven plates of “barbarous cruelties” that linger on violence and torture done to a customs official and excise man. It is unclear what could have prompted this level of concerted, protracted violence, except as a reaction against the representatives of government regulation; “we have an instance,” Richmond himself remarks, “of two men suffering the most cruel torments… for no other crime but a duty to serve their king and country” (1749, 3). But it is also worth noting the puzzlement of historians over the protracted level of violence instigated by Richmond, both before and after the attack on the Poole Customs House. This can only be explained, writes Frank McLynn, as a defense of the legitimacy of the British state against foreign and domestic threats, for which the customs and excise system served as a crucial icon and institution. By this account, Richmond experienced smuggling as a variety of terrorism—not least because a French Jacobite ultimately claimed responsibility for the Poole attack (McLynn 1989, 187-89).

While Ménageot's sketch, and Vertue's 1743 engraving, are therefore best read as evidence of the antiquarian historiographic project, the 1747 plate should be positioned as a companion piece to the seven lurid plates in Richmond’s Genuine History, which visualize the attack on the Poole Customs House and the networks of smugglers—sometimes called out by name—involved in the uprising. For if the destruction of the customs house and the violence against its representatives captures one episode in the complex of relationships between government agencies and the poor, if, indeed, it figures while vilifying the redistribution of goods like tea from a customs house to a different economy of circulation, so the Market Cross, standing at the central crossroads of the city and the center of the space for trade among small merchants, represents ongoing efforts to legitimate regulated trade at the expense of other forms.

The Cross marks out a space for the well-regulated trade of a free market; it defines a space dedicated for certain economies of commodity exchange. This is how the Cross had been imagined, and how it probably functioned in day-to-day life. This is perhaps why Ménageot and Vertue (in the first iteration) thought to stage someone selling vegetables there. But it was always also an attempt to exert a beneficent form of control, that the poor might use the space without a toll, provided they stood within its confines, or, in the language of Edward Story’s bequest, “under the cross,” which (the caption reminds us) is mixed with the King’s arms (Foster 2001). In this sense, the gift all along signaled a relationship between power and the marketplace; it concretized a relationship between the micro-economics of exchange and the abstract figures of authority, in which exchange takes place under the sign of icons and representatives of Church and State. It represents a certain kind of exchange, of state-directed marketplaces, rather than familial and gift-based networks. Read this way, the inscriptions which encrust its surface, and the engravings which repeat them, record the transmission of forms of legitimacy, the icons and figures of the political contract, especially where those figures bring the state’s heavy hand to bear on commodity exchange.

Works Cited:

Alexander, David. 2008. “George Vertue as Engraver.” The Volume of the Walpole Society 70: 207-517.

Allen, John. 2019. “Architects and Artists: R.” Sussex Parish Churches. https://sussexparishchurches.org/architectsandartists/.

“Chichester Cathedral.” 1843. Church of England Magazine 24, no. 411: 425-27.

"Chichester Cross." 1831. The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction no. 470: 1-2.

Colvin, Howard. 1995. A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600-1840. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Draper, William. 1744. William Draper to Maurice Johnson, 3 April and 16 July 1744. Archives of the Spalding Gentleman’s Society, 430 and 436. Spalding, England.

Falzman, L.F. 1935. “The City of Chichester: General Introduction.” In A History of the County of Sussex: Volume 3, edited by L.F. Falzman, 71-82. London: Victoria County History.

Foster, Paul G.M. ed. 2001. A Jewel in Stone: Chichester Market Cross (1501-2001). Chichester: Chichester University Press.

Gale, Walter. (1749) 1857. “Diary.” Edited by R. W. Blencowe. Reprinted in Sussex Archeological Collections 9: 194-95.

Kwass, Michael. 2014. Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Richmond, 2nd Duke of (Charles Lennox). 1749. The Genuine History of the Inhuman and Unparalleled Murders of Mr. William Galley…at Chichester, 1748-9. Brighton: W. J. Smith.

McLynn, Frank. 1989. Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England. London: Routledge.

Ménageot, Augustin. 1741. Manuscript letters from Ménageot to William Draper. Liverpool Papers, vol. CCXCI. Shuckburgh Evelyn and Draper Family Papers, fols. 415, 419, 421, 441, 460. British Library, London.

Sweet, Rosemary. 2004. Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain. London: Hambledon and London.

Turner, Joseph Mallord William. 1796. "The Chichester Cross." In Studies Near Brighton Sketchbook. Tate Reference D00755, Turner Bequest XXX 26a-28.

“Vertue’s Note Book D. 1 (part) [British Museum, Add. MS. 23,089. (ff. 1-32.)] (British Museum Add. MS. 23,070).” 1937-38. The Volume of the Walpole Society 26: 141-156.

Walpole, Horace. 1752. “Walpole to Bentley, 5 August.” In The Yale Edition of the Correspondence of Horace Walpole, edited by W.S. Lewis, et al., Vol 35. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Willk-Brocard, Nicole. 1998. “Augustin Ménageot (ca. 1700-1784): Landmarks in the Career of an Art Dealer.” Gazette de Beaux-Arts 131 (April): 141-61.

Winslow, Cal. 1975. “Sussex Smugglers.” In Albion’s Fatal Tree, Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, edited by Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule, E.P. Thompson, and Calvin Winslow, 119-66. New York: Pantheon.

Wood, Andy. 2014. “The Deep Roots of Albion’s Fatal Tree: The Tudor State and the Monopoly of Violence.” History 99: 403-17.