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of a travelling entertainer. I suggest rather that they are enjoying food.
The animal on the right may have a hive in his paw.
(18) A Blemya seated with his features upon his chest.
Mr. Druce has dealt with this monstrosity in " Some Abnormal and
Composite Human Forms in English Church Architecture," reprinted from
Archaeological Journal, 1915. The earliest MS. that is given by him
as containing the Blemya dates from 1180. Examples are found also on
misericords at Norwich, Ripon and King’s Lynn. Mr. Druce is inclined to
think that we have here an ordinary man with his head bent forward, so as
to fit it into rather a small medallion.
Plate VIII
(19) A large bird such as a stork or crane, and a goat with a
pail which he is offering to the bird. A variant of Aesop’s fable of the
Crane and the Fox.
(20) Two figures collar-wrestling.
I have found similar figures on the South doorway at Foston, Yorkshire,
and also on a Norman corbel on the
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North wall of Kitham in the East Riding. The Barfreston figures are
clothed and each has his head on the other’s shoulder. The left man
seems to have a fold of the clothes of his antagonist in his teeth. The
same subject is treated and illustrated in A. Kingsley Porter’s The
Crosses and Culture of Ireland.1
In this book examples are given from the Durrow and Kells
Market Crosses. In the latter example the figures are naked. The subject
occurs also at Castle Dermot with the additional detail that one is
kicking the other. Continental examples are also given: viz, from the
window of a thirteenth century house at Chartres, the West Front of Notre
Dame, Poitiers, c. 1130, and from a later century at Lyons.
In all his instances the interpretation given by Kingsley
Porter is Jacob wrestling with the Angel. This view is
1 Romilly Allen’s Christian
Symbolism, p. 256, illustrates this subject from Hutton Cranswick
font, Yorkshire, without explanation. Cowlam font in the same county has
similar figures.
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