Excerpt from Inventories of Christchurch Canterbury: With Historical and Topographical Introductions and Illustrative Documents The collection of documents here printed, nearly all of them for the first time, enables us to realize to some extent how the ornaments of a great church were acquired, augmented, and lost, in the course of centuries. Such a collection is of the greater value and interest, not only on account of the range of time covered, but because so few of our great churches have preserved even an isolated record of the same kind. Although the series under notice contains only one general inventory earlier than that taken at the suppression of the Benedictine monastery (a very full one of the ornaments, jewels, and relics of the church in 1316 which were handed over to a new sacrist five years later) it is possible from other documents to show what important additions were made to the list during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, chiefly through the liberality of divers benefactors. Besides these, we have during the opening years of the sixteenth century a series of inventories of certain chapels in the church. They have fortunately been preserved, with other interesting particulars, in a memorandum book of one of the officers of the monastery, and contain much new and valuable in formation not to be found elsewhere. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.