Ireland, and canon of Windsor. He also acted as chaplain to Lord Wentworth, afterwards the celebrated earl of Strafford. For some time he travelled abroad as tutor to Lord Falmouth, and in 1646, during a visit to Rome, joined the Roman Catholic Church. In the following year he published his Exomologesis (Paris, 1647), or account of his conversion, which was highly valued by Roman Catholics as an answer to William Chillingworth’s attacks. Cressy entered the Benedictine Order in 1649, and for four years resided at Somerset House as chaplain to Catherine of Braganza, wife of Charles II. He died at West Grinstead on the 10th of August 1674. Cressy’s chief work, The Church History of Brittanny or England, from the beginning of Christianity to the Norman Conquest (1st vol. only published, Rouen, 1668), gives an exhaustive account of the foundation of monasteries during the Saxon heptarchy, and asserts that they followed the Benedictine rule, differing in this respect from many historians. The work was much criticized by Lord Clarendon, but defended by Antony à Wood in his Athenae Oxoniensis, who supports Cressy’s statement that it was compiled from original MSS. and from the Annales Ecclesiae Britannicae of Michael Alford, Dugdale’s Monasticon, and the Decem Scriptores Historiae Anglicanae. The second part of the history, which has never been printed, was discovered at Douai in 1856. To Roman Catholics Cressy’s name is familiar as the editor of Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection (London, 1659); of Father A. Baker’s Sancta Sophia (2 vols., Douai, 1657); and of Juliana of Norwich’s Sixteen Revelations on the Love of God (1670). These books, which would have been lost but for Cressy’s zeal, have been frequently reprinted, and have been favourably regarded by a section of the Anglican Church.
For a complete list of Cressy’s works see J. Gillow’s Bibl. Dict. of Eng. Catholics, vol. i.
CREST, a town of south-eastern France, in the department of
Drôme, on the right bank of the Drôme, 20 m. S.S.E. of Valence
by rail. Pop. (1906) town, 3971; commune, 5660. It carries
on silk-worm breeding, silk-spinning, and the manufacture of
woollens, paper, leather and cement. There is trade in truffles.
On the rock which commands the town stands a huge keep, the
sole survival of a castle (12th century) to which Crest was indebted
for its importance in the middle ages and the Religious
Wars. The rest of the castle was destroyed in the first half of
the 17th century, after which the keep was used as a state prison.
Crest ranked for a time as the capital of the duchy of Valentinois,
and in that capacity belonged before the Revolution to the
prince of Monaco. The communal charter, graven on stone and
dating from the 12th century, is preserved in the public archives.
Ten miles south-east of Crest lies the picturesque Forest of
Saon.
CREST (Lat. crista, a plume or tuft), the “comb” on an
animal’s head, and so any feathery tuft or excrescence, the
“cone” of a helmet (by transference, the helmet itself), and the
top or summit of anything. In heraldry (q.v.) a crest is a device,
originally borne as a cognizance on a knight’s helmet, placed on
a wreath above helmet and shield in armorial bearings, and used
separately on a seal or on articles of property.
Cresting, in architecture, is an ornamental finish in the wall or ridge of a building, which is common on the continent of Europe. An example occurs at Exeter cathedral, the ridge of which is ornamented with a range of small fleurs-de-lis in lead.
CRESTON, a city and the county-seat of Union county, Iowa,
U.S.A., about 60 m. S.W. of Des Moines, at the crossing of the
main line and two branches of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy
railway. Pop. (1890) 7200; (1900) 7752; (1905, state census)
8382 (753 foreign-born); (1910) 6924. The city is on the crest
of the divide between the Mississippi and the Missouri basins
at an altitude of about 1310 ft.—whence its name. It is situated
in a fine farming and stock-raising region, for which it is a
shipping point. The site was chosen in 1869 by the Burlington
& Missouri River Railroad Company (subsequently merged in
the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad Company) for the
location of its shops. Creston was incorporated as a town in
1869, and was chartered as a city in 1871.
CRESWICK, THOMAS (1811–1869), English landscape-painter,
was born at Sheffield, and educated at Hazelwood, near Birmingham.
At Birmingham he first began to paint. His earliest
appearance as an exhibitor was in 1827, at the Society of British
Artists in London; in the ensuing year he sent to the Royal
Academy the two pictures named “Llyn Gwynant, Morning,”
and “Carnarvon Castle.” About the same time he settled in
London; and in 1836 he took a house in Bayswater. He soon
attracted some attention as a landscape-painter, and had a
career of uniform and encouraging, though not signal success.
In 1842 he was elected an associate, and in 1850 a full member
of the Royal Academy, which, for several years before his death,
numbered hardly any other full members representing this branch
of art. In his early practice he set an example, then too much
needed, of diligent study of nature out of doors, painting on the
spot all the substantial part of several of his pictures. English
and Welsh streams may be said to have formed his favourite
subjects, and generally British rural scenery, mostly under its
cheerful, calm and pleasurable aspects, in open daylight. This
he rendered with elegant and equable skill, colour rather grey in
tint, especially in his later years, and more than average technical
accomplishment; his works have little to excite, but would, in
most conditions of public taste, retain their power to attract.
Creswick was industrious and extremely prolific; he produced,
besides a steady outpouring of paintings, numerous illustrations
for books. He was personally genial—a dark, bulky man,
somewhat heavy and graceless in aspect in his later years. He
died at his house in Bayswater, Linden Grove, on the 28th of
December 1869, after a few years of declining health. Among
his principal works may be named “England” (1847); “Home
by the Sands, and a Squally Day” (1848); “Passing
Showers” (1849); “The Wind on Shore, a First Glimpse of the
Sea, and Old Trees” (1850); “A Mountain Lake, Moonrise”
(1852); “Changeable Weather” (1865); also the “London
Road, a Hundred Years ago”; “The Weald of Kent”; the
“Valley Mill” (a Cornish subject); a “Shady Glen”; the
“Windings of a River”; the “Shade of the Beech Trees”;
the “Course of the Greta”; the “Wharfe”; “Glendalough,”
and other Irish subjects, 1836 to 1840; the “Forest Farm.”
Frith for figures, and Ansdell for animals, occasionally worked in
collaboration with Creswick.
In 1873 T. O. Barlow, the engraver, published a catalogue of Creswick’s works.
CRESWICK, a borough of Talbot county, Victoria, Australia.
85½ m. by rail N.W. of Melbourne. Pop. (1901) 3060. It is the
centre of a mining, pastoral and agricultural district. Gold is
found both in alluvial and quartz formations, the quartz being
especially rich. The surrounding country is fertile and well-timbered,
and there is a government plantation and nursery in
connexion with the forests department.
CRETACEOUS SYSTEM, in geology, the group of stratified
rocks which normally occupy a position above the Jurassic
system and below the oldest Tertiary deposits; therefore it is
in this system that the closing records of the great Mesozoic era
are to be found. The name furnishes an excellent illustration of
the inconvenience of employing a local lithological feature in
the descriptive title of a wide-ranging rock-system. The white
chalk (Lat. creta), which gives its name to the system, was first
studied in the Anglo-Parisian basin, where it takes a prominent
place; but even in this limited area there is a considerable
thickness and variety of rocks which are not chalky, and the
Cretaceous system as a whole contains a remarkable diversity
of types of sediment.
Classification.—The earlier subdivisions of the Cretaceous rocks were founded upon the uncertain ground of similarity in lithological characters, assisted by observed stratigraphical sequence. This method yielded poor results even in a circumscribed area like Great Britain, and it breaks down utterly when applied to the correlation of rocks of similar age in Europe and elsewhere. Study of the fossils, however, has elicited the fact that certain forms characterize certain “zones,” which are preceded and succeeded by other zones each bearing a peculiar species or
