ly lost sight {130} of. The gruesome relics on the south transept
door were traditionally supposed to be the skins of the Danes, but the
one here was said to be that of a man flayed alive for robbing the royal
treasury in the time of Edward I., which was fixed upon the treasury
entrance as a warning to the monks, who were implicated in the crime.
Sir Gilbert Scott, however, believed the skins to have been those of men
who were executed for sacrilege. Beneath the Chapter House itself is a
crypt, which was also used as a depository for treasure, and formed part
of the King's wardrobe in Edward the First's reign. It is still a
moot-point as to which strong room was broken into by the robbers, but
this need not detain us now. The door leads nowhere at present; but in
the Confessor's day, when the chamber was built, and for long afterwards,
it admitted at once into the treasury chamber. Behind it now there is
only an empty space beneath the library stairs, within which, late in the
eighteenth and early in the nineteenth century, one of the Chapter
officials seems to have kept his wine, for the names of different wines
and the dates are written upon the stones. Beyond the fourteenth-century
staircase, which led up to the monks' dormitory, a wall, probably of the
same period, divides this part of {131} the treasury from the rest, and
one of the Norman columns has been built into the middle of it. In
Scott's day a modern door led to the Chapter library from the vestibule,
but he restored the original staircase with the entrance into the east
cloister, which is on our left when we emerge. The spacious chamber
above was originally the dormitory, whence the monks passed to and fro
into the church over this vestibule by a covered passage-way, which
crossed the end of St. Faith's Chapel and descended by stone steps, some
of which remain, into the chapel of St. Blaise in the south transept.
After having been occasionally used as a library under different Deans,
part of this dormitory (the rest is incorporated in the schoolroom) was
restored and fitted up by Dean Vincent in the seventeenth century, and is
now the Chapter library. In the cloister beyond the library entrance a
heavy oak door, clamped with iron bars, leads into the chamber or chapel
of the Pyx. Behind this is another equally formidable-looking door, and
upon each are three complicated locks, only two of which are used at the
present time. There is little doubt th