After having seen the “wheels of fortune,” one is but little impressed by the spectacle of small models of sailing vessels which may be seen suspended in the churches of the smaller seaport towns of Normandy and Brittany. These models symbolize in a pleasing manner the idea of the Church’s protection of mariners. In Belgium, votive offerings of silver horses are met with; they are the gifts of persons whose horses have recovered from some disease, or perhaps from the effects of the “evil eye.” These customs are probably of modern date, and, therefore, not directly traceable to heathen times.
It is doubtful whether we could find preserved, in churches on British soil, pagan vestiges exactly comparable with the solar wheel. In early art it is otherwise, as our architecture and ritual abundantly testify. With respect to actual relics, many a parish church shelters some object, quaint or grotesque, which had its origin in no sentiment of a purely Christian character. When superstition waned, these heirlooms, either from oversight, or, more probably, by tacit consent, were often allowed to remain within the sacred building, for the idea of the church as the house of the people never completely died away. The church continued to be the receptacle for these curious relics, and few folk were found to deny the fitness of the custom.
One by one, tiny fragments of testimony accumulate, attesting such a survival and continuance of folk-memory as few men of to-day have suspected. From the mass of facts there emerges the truth of the twofold purpose of Mediaeval church architecture--the religious and the social. Some writers have attempted to interpret the evidence on the principle that, as the ecclesiastical power diminished, the secular increased, and that the sway of custom was brought about by encroachments from the one side or the other alternately. Certainly, the problem must be surveyed from that point of view, yet it appears to me that such an outlook is only partial. For instance--to mention one objection only--at the period when clerical power was in its heyday, the church fabric appears also to have been most used for social purposes, and this fact seems to stand quite apart from the disorderly tendencies observable in times of irreligion and desecration. Whichever power, clerical or lay, chanced to be uppermost, the parochial customs, as a whole, until within the last few centuries, seem to have been fairly, though not entirely, uniform; and when external causes, whether political or economical, produced a balance of forces, the right to use the church for secondary purposes does not seem to have been seriously challenged. For the strength of the earlier faiths long continued to lie in the recognized union of political, social, and religious interests. There was no gulf fixed between the conceptions of the religious and the secular commonwealth. “Such a distinction,” says Kauffmann, “is foreign to ancient modes of thought[482].” And of the tenacity of thought and the persistency of custom we have had ample proof.