The waymark coordinates are for the main door to the Bath Abbey. GPS receivers will not work inside the Abbey.
There are multiple iterations of Bishop James Montagu's personal and family coats of arms in Bath Abbey. This waymark encompasses the two sets of coats of arms reproduced on his tomb.
The two sets of arms, prominently displayed on the side of the tomb, framing a Latin epitaph, represent the joining of his personal family arms with the arms of the dioceses of Bath & Wells and Winchester, which he served in as Bishop.
The article "The Montagus and the great West Doors of Bath Abbey"
by Tony Pratt contains an exhaustive discussion of the various iterations of the Montagu arms throughout Bath Abbey. Our great thanks to Mr Pratt for his scholarship! The article can be found here: (
visit link)
"The West Doors of Bath Abbey are of heraldic and historical significance as well as being wonderful to see. Inside the Abbey a plaque notes that ”Sir Henry Montagu, L(ord) C(hief) J(ustice) 3 erected the great West Doors” in memory of his brother Bishop James Montagu. They are adorned with elaborate carvings of three versions of the Montagu arms – the generic family arms, those of Bishop Montagu and those that appear to be of his brother Walter. There are problems for the herald and the historian with two of these, which this paper will attempt to address.
. . .
There are questions, however, about the Bishop’s arms themselves. There are many examples of them on his tomb and these have been attributed to Bath Priory, “a red shield with a sword
along one diagonal intersecting a pair of keys silver and gold along the other”
However there is considerable doubt that these are the arms of Bath Priory. In 1676 Anthony à Wood noted the arms of the priory and See in one of the windows of a chapel attached to the south side of St James'church in Bath and said that “They are Az two keys indorsed in bend the upper argent the lower or enfiled with a sword in bend sinister" These arms can be dated to at least the end of the fifteenth century.
They appear in Prior Cantalow’s lovely stained glass window in St
Catherine’s church, located in the eponymous hamlet four miles north east of Bath. The arms in the window are given in Colinson’s 18th century survey of Somerset as "the arms of the abbey viz a St Peter's key crossed with a sword" These are not the Priors arms (they appear in the south window) but are those of Bath priory.
So it is almost certain that the arms on Bishop Montagu’s tomb are those of Winchester, which was his seat when he died in 1617.
. . .
Bishop Montagu seems to have used the arms described above, but
instead of impaling them with the saltire of Wells in the ordinary manner he incorporated Bath by placing the keys and sword on the dexter and sinster, respectively, of the saltire of Wells.
It has been said the he evidently “wished to express in heraldic language the pre-eminence of Wells over Bath” but this would have been more evident if he had quartered the arms and placed those of Bath on the sinister side, the arms seen in Fig 13 give equal importance to Bath and Wells, the only pre eminence is that of the keys of St Peter to the sword of St Paul, and St. Peter was seen as the more important saint.
The arms carved onto the West Door do not, of course, have any colour but they do show this arrangement of keys and sword, with them laying along the relevant diagonals but this makes the sword in bend and the keys in bend sinister, the reverse of the Priory and early Abbey arms and of Winchester . . ."