Post by Daniel Silk on May 29, 2010 12:01:35 GMT
www.st-blasius-church.org.uk/history2.htm
St Blasius, Shanklin, Isle of Wight
One of the church's treasures, situated in the former Baptistery now the Parish Room, is a beautiful heavy oak chest, inscribed "Dom Prius Thomas Silksted, Prior from the year of Our Lord 1512".
Thomas Silksted was Prior of St. Swithin's, Winchester, known to be a patron of sculpture in wood, and that part of the chest's provenance is not in doubt. The small mystery is how it comes to be in Shanklin Old Church.
As usual, there are conflicting suggestions. Perhaps it arrived at the time of the English Civil War in the mid-seventeenth century, sent filled with some Winchester Cathedral treasures for safekeeping by the Royalist manorial family. When the treasures were returned, the chest may have remained. Alternatively, it may have been a domestic chest (surely an unusually fine one) which might have passed by gift, bequest or sale to other hands when Prior Thomas died.
St Blasius, Shanklin, Isle of Wight
One of the church's treasures, situated in the former Baptistery now the Parish Room, is a beautiful heavy oak chest, inscribed "Dom Prius Thomas Silksted, Prior from the year of Our Lord 1512".
Thomas Silksted was Prior of St. Swithin's, Winchester, known to be a patron of sculpture in wood, and that part of the chest's provenance is not in doubt. The small mystery is how it comes to be in Shanklin Old Church.
As usual, there are conflicting suggestions. Perhaps it arrived at the time of the English Civil War in the mid-seventeenth century, sent filled with some Winchester Cathedral treasures for safekeeping by the Royalist manorial family. When the treasures were returned, the chest may have remained. Alternatively, it may have been a domestic chest (surely an unusually fine one) which might have passed by gift, bequest or sale to other hands when Prior Thomas died.
