It is a privilege to revisit places. So I thought recently, while standing by a certain tomb in Chichester Cathedral. Most Cathedrals inspire awe and reverence, but people have their favourite spots within them, and at Chichester mine is the tomb of Richard FitzAlan and his second wife, Eleanor of Lancaster, both of whom died in the 1370s.
You would imagine Richard, the 10th Earl of Arundel, to have been a pretty hard-boiled sort of chap. He was a warrior knight, and one of the three principal commanders at the 1346 Battle of Crecy, a crucial battle of the Hundred Years' War, in which the English annihilated the French forces, and also proved the superiority of the longbow, rather than the crossbow, as a military weapon.
And Richard accumulated such wealth along his martial way that he became King Edward III's chief financier; he is now considered to have been the 15th wealthiest person in history. Well, $118 billion in today's money would do that for you quite easily, I should think.
But Richard was not merely a materialist; he loved his second wife dearly, and proved it by engineering a papal dispensation in order to marry her, a measure necessary because, things being close and cosy in the 14th century, she was related to his first wife. Eleanor was not in her first youth, and was a widow, her first husband having been killed, conventionally enough, in a tournament.
Despite the inexorable march of time, however, Richard and Eleanor went on to have seven children, one of whom became Archbishop of Canterbury. Eleanor predeceased Richard, to his great sorrow: he died four years later, and left orders for a surprisingly modest funeral that matched hers, and for this joint tomb.
So there the marble figures lie, grey and blurred, and with an infinite capacity, I think, to touch the heart. The tomb was radical for its time, in the sense that Richard had decreed that his effigy should not be higher than Eleanor's; her figure also appears to lean towards his, and most moving of all, Richard's has one gauntlet removed, so that his bare hand holds that of his wife. Her feet rest on a little pet dog, his on a small lion.
It could easily escape one's notice, but there is a type-written poem pinned to the pillar nearest this long resting-place. It is by famous English poet, Philip Larkin, who seems to