The Building of England: How the History of England Has Shaped Our Buildings
Simon Thurley
Throughout England’s cultural history, its buildings have reflected changing economic circumstances and fashions, and architecture has always been an expression of power and influence. The Building of England takes us on a fascinating journey through the history of English architecture.From the awe-inspiring castles, cathedrals and monasteries built by the Normans, to the steel frame buildings of the Industrial Revolution and the skyscrapers springing up today, Simon Thurley explores how this small island has come to be so distinctly different from its European neighbours, and its huge architectural impact on the globe.The Building of England puts into context the significance of a country’s architectural history and unearths how it is inextricably linked to the cultural past – and present. Saxon, Tudor, Georgian, Regency, even Victorian and Edwardian are all well-recognised architectural styles, displaying the influence of the events that mark each period. Thurley looks at how the architecture of England has evolved over a thousand years, uncovering the beliefs, ideas and aspirations of the people who commissioned them, built them and lived in them. He tells the fascinating story of the development of architecture and the advancements in both structural performance and enhanced aesthetic effect.Richly illustrated with over 500 illustrations, photographs and maps, Simon Thurley uniquely traces the fascinating history and contemplates the future of the buildings that have made the country that is uniquely England.
Contents
Cover (#u495e5390-2c1c-5030-8b6a-6bbf53fc003b)
Title Page (#u33595ef8-514b-5325-894b-1d8e8c3e7dbd)
Introduction (#ulink_ad838a2f-4754-5ff6-bf22-fa716337c486)
1— Beginnings: The Collapse of Rome: 410–700 (#ulink_38028204-14b8-55a4-8125-25fcdbe4ffce)
2— The Foundations of England: 700–1000 (#ulink_e03f15bf-3a85-50f4-a27d-5953ed4895e3)
3— England and Europe: 1000–1130 (#ulink_266e855f-02fb-5f61-9335-0a01ea8bcdd7)
4— The Invention of English Architecture: 1130–1250 (#ulink_1107f0ab-3d39-5fd6-acec-476c85abf9a3)
5— Extravaganza: 1250–1350 (#ulink_9c706b6c-d6f4-5aa0-bfed-212fab482071)
6— From the Black Death to the Reformation: 1350–1530 (#ulink_cbb589ba-952b-5219-ba87-d4abf0f7ec8a)
7— From the Reformation to the Civil War: A Century of Growth: 1530–1630 (#litres_trial_promo)
8— Protestantism, Power and Prosperity: 1630–1720 (#litres_trial_promo)
9— Property, Commerce and Consensus: 1720–1760 (#litres_trial_promo)
10— War, Inventions and Introspection: 1760–1830 (#litres_trial_promo)
11— World Dominance: 1830–1870 (#litres_trial_promo)
12— 1870s to the Second World War: 1870–1939 (#litres_trial_promo)
Endnotes (#litres_trial_promo)
Picture credits (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
(#ulink_1ebd9c31-6456-5c13-ab18-84776f1054ae)
Building in England 410–1930
This book is a history of English buildings, although it is intended to be more than that. It is also about the beliefs, ideas and aspirations of the people who commissioned them, built them, lived in them and saw them while going about their daily business. It is about how people discovered new ways of building, both for improved structural performance and for enhanced aesthetic effect. It is about how buildings reflected changing economic circumstances, shifting tastes and fashions. It is about the architectural expression of power, of hierarchy, of influence. It is the history of a nation through what it built.
So this book aims to put building back into the history of England. For some this will be a questionable enterprise because much recent British history is written as the history of the British Isles.
Yet we should remember Britain was only created by an Act of Parliament in 1707, although the Crowns of England and Scotland had been united in 1603 and Wales had been incorporated in 1536. Thus, for 1,300 of the 1,520 years that this book spans, England and Scotland, at least, were separate political entities. Although now one country, before 1603 England and Scotland generally looked in different directions – and influences on building in each were markedly distinct. Even after the Act of Union, to take a single example, urban housing in Scotland was based on the tenement and in England on the terrace.
Moreover, through the whole period covered by this book it was rarely if ever only England that was governed from London. If we are to take a wider perspective on the political and cultural context of English history it would be desirable not only to include Scotland, Wales and Ireland but also to include much of France, the Netherlands, Hanover and, latterly, a huge, worldwide empire. All these places brought influences to bear on English building but it is what happened in England that is the focus of this book.
Writing only about England, the danger is of claiming English exceptionalism. Exceptionalism – the assertion that England was and is fundamentally different from other countries – is a strong streak in English historical writing but will not find much of a place in these pages. Whilst I will argue, repeatedly, that English buildings looked different from those in other countries, this makes no stronger claim than suggesting that buildings in Spain, for instance, looked different, too. Perhaps England was, at certain times, more insular than some other countries, but it was always open to external ideas and influences. There is one period, however, in which I will argue for exceptionalism. After 1815 England moved into a position of world dominance that has had no parallel in history. The achievement was unquestionably a British one, but it was one directed from London. For a period that lasted from perhaps the 1830s to the 1920s England was home to building types and categories of places that were to have worldwide influence. This was exceptional and this book will make no apology for that.
St Pancras Station, London. The engine shed of 1866–8 by W. H. Barlow and R. M. Ordish. With a clear span of 240ft and a length of 690ft this was an unprecedented enterprise.
The Problem of English Architecture
Writing a history of English building is fraught with problems, many of which have been inadvertently caused by architectural historians. Architectural history is still too often divorced from mainstream historical research and, with some notable exceptions, has concentrated either on general popular accounts or on a series of questions interesting only to a small circle of people concerned with stylistic analysis.
This latter approach ultimately derives from the work of the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, who became Professor of Art History at Berlin University and then at Munich in the first decades of the 20th century. His achievement was to establish a more empirical way of judging art and architecture, and his Principles of Art History set out how each artist’s personal style existed both within a national style and a period style. The job of the art historian, he suggested, was to disentangle and explain these stylistic strata. From this time onwards the identification of personal, national and period styles in architecture – and naming them – has been among the primary activities of architectural historians. With most types of buildings thus categorised, architectural history turned in on itself, spending half a century arguing whether the stylistic categories were correct and whether various architects had been allotted to the most appropriate category.
My late friend Giles Worsley, writing in his excellent book Classical Architecture in Britain, opens a chapter with two questions: ‘Was Sir William Chambers a neo-Classical architect? Was Robert Adam a neo-Palladian architect? Convention,’ he writes, ‘would give a positive answer to the first question and a negative one to the second.’
This present book does not set out to address such questions. The problem, as I see it, is that almost every art-historical term has ended up being more of a subject for debate than what it attempts to describe. So, for instance, there is much disagreement about whether ‘Norman architecture’ or ‘Palladian architecture’ can really be said to exist.
A closely related problem concerns the assumptions that flow from the identification of a particular style. After deciding when a style begins – an art-historical industry in itself – historians see it growing, maturing and then waning. This view of style has both Darwinian and moralistic overtones. But styles do not have a life cycle and so there is nothing particularly degenerate, late or waning about late Gothic architecture, any more than there is anything immature about early Gothic. Nor is there any reason to assume that things evolve from the simple to the complex or from the small to the large.
These ideas about stylistic development lead to a series of assumptions that have distorted much writing on English architecture. At its root is the problem of determinism; in other words, the temptation to tell the story of English building as if everything that happened was inevitably going to bring about the outcome we see. There are many examples that illustrate this, but here I present just two. The first concerns the search for the origins of the more faithful rendition of classical buildings seen increasingly in England after 1720 and commonly called Palladianism. Knowing how the story ends, historians have given huge weight to a small number of classically correct buildings built by Inigo Jones nearly a hundred years earlier. As a result, everything that was built between 1630 and 1720 is seen in the light of Jones’s work. Compared with Jones’s buildings, nearly a century of English architecture has been regarded as somehow backward or at least not living up to a standard set by him. The reality is different. Jones’s buildings, at the time, were regarded as oddities outside the mainstream and had little impact on building in his lifetime. He did have his day as an influential architect, but only a century after he was dead.
The search for the origins of English buildings designed in a style known as Modern has been even more distorting. Knowing that, after the Second World War, the Modern movement had a significant impact on English building, elements in buildings as early as the 1870s are seized upon as precursors. Although a very small number of mainly foreign architects built Modern buildings in England from the 1920s, these buildings have come to form part of the main narrative of English architecture, and the overwhelming mass of other fine and important buildings from the inter-war period is either ignored or deprecated.
Somerset House, London. Neo-palladian or neo-Classical? A nicety or a fundamental question?
The sensible solution is therefore to put to one side stylistic labels, most of which are relatively recent inventions and few of which would have been recognised by those contemporary to what is being labelled, and start again. But as historians need to label things, because that is how they communicate and make sense of the past, an alternative strategy is needed. An answer may lie in a different approach: periodisation.
This is, however, another minefield. Historical periods are, of course, an alternative way of characterising what happened in order to make sense of the past. At one level they are self-explanatory, so people will have an idea about the Iron Age, the Romans, the Saxons and the Normans simply on account of the name (although not everyone can remember in which order they came). British scholars, uniquely in Europe, use royal dynasties to describe periods in their history. Plantagenet, Tudor, Stuart, Georgian and Victorian reflect changes in dynasty but they tell us very little else in historical terms. The fact is that dynastic changes rarely represented moments of meaningful architectural change. Even the most famous and apparently absolute dynastic division in English history, the Norman Conquest of 1066, did not represent an architectural break. It would also be hard to argue that anything architecturally decisive took place in either 1485 or in 1603, two of the most frequently used dynastic-break dates in English history. This, of course, is not to say that changes of monarch might not run parallel to architectural changes. The death of the military-minded Conqueror and the accession of William Rufus; the Restoration of Charles II after the Commonwealth; the accession of Edward VII after the long late Victorian years – all of these led, to a lesser or greater extent, to an outbreak of architectural exuberance.
For the same reason that we have to reject dynastic change as a basis for periodising English building we must also reject a rigid calendrical method. Although the unit of a numbered century is easily comprehended, it makes even less sense as a basis for explaining things than the period of rule of a family of kings or queens. Nothing particularly significant happened in 1500, 1600 or 1700 – there is no reason why it should have. The challenge is to try and divide up the story of building in England in such a way that each chunk makes better sense of what was happening. Readers will decide whether my divisions have made understanding English building easier or whether they only confuse it. Obviously, I hope that my divisions help to shed light on why things happened.
Castle Howard, the breathtaking Yorkshire country house chosen as both the television and film setting of Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited. Nostalgia, fiction and aesthetics combine to give undue architectural influence to such buildings.
But, alas, there is another pitfall. Architectural change does not take place evenly across time, geography or building type, so chronological divisions will only ever be a rough guide to what took place. This is particularly problematic in this book, which considers a much broader spectrum of building types than is usual. The study of buildings has long been divided up into the separate analysis of churches, castles, industrial archaeology, engineering, country houses, urban studies and vernacular architecture. Archaeology, of fundamental importance for understanding the built world, exists in an even more discrete enclave. Studying individual building types – or even sub-sets of them – as separate disciplines necessarily limits a discussion on the cross-currents between them; more seriously, it fragments the visual and spatial world in which our ancestors actually lived. Distinct disciplines are certainly important – we need people who have a deep understanding of lap joints in 12th-century timber buildings as much as we need those who can spot the derivation of a particular type of Corinthian capital. But we also need synthesis; someone who tries to link up James Wyatt and James Watt.
Much architectural history of the last thirty years has been preoccupied with the study of the country house, to the exclusion of other building types. The country house has sometimes been portrayed as a national driver of innovation, and more pages of English architectural history have been devoted to the development of this single building type than to any other – indeed, it has sometimes been claimed as Britain’s unique cultural contribution to European art. There are reasons for this, of course, not least the enormous success of the National Trust with, at the time of writing, its four million members. But it must be doubted whether the country house really deserves such lopsided attention. Most of the key developments, in fact, took place in an urban context, as this book will argue.
Another area to gain disproportionate attention is the careers of famous architects. Architectural history has too often been about the study of architects, while the role of patrons has consistently been underestimated. This is, in part, perhaps because architectural history was at first written by architects. Indeed, it was not until very recently – and only in specific cases – that the design and construction of a building were handed over to a design supremo who would relieve the patron of almost all input into the structure. Patrons from Benedict Biscop in the 7th century, through Archbishop Lanfranc in the 11th, Lord Burghley in the 16th to William Beckford in the 18th all exercised decisive design influence over their buildings. Innovation might be laid at the feet of a designer but it is just as likely to have originated from a patron who was better read, more widely travelled, and who had seen and experienced many more different types and styles of building.
Designers of buildings before the 1750s had either risen up through the building and craft trades or had come to design through gentlemanly curiosity. But into the 19th century the size and complexity of building construction demanded a spectrum of skills that these traditional routes did not permit. Three branches emerged – architect, engineer and contractor – and, of these, architects have dominated the history books.
Yet builders, engineers and, indeed, manufacturers can all claim credit for having formed the built environment of England after 1800. In fact, architects have rarely been the sole force in the design of a building; perhaps their only period of absolute ascendency was between the mid 1950s and the late 1970s, a period outside the scope of this book.
Excessive interest in famous architects and their oeuvres prevents us from acquiring a rounded picture of what was built and what was important. A good instance of this is the way in which Sir Christopher Wren has come completely to eclipse his contemporaries by having designed palaces, public buildings, churches and cathedrals – the traditional diet of the art historian. Most people have never heard of Wren’s brilliant and distinguished contemporaries Edmund Dummer and Michael Richards, both of whom were very considerable designers responsible for works of equal skill and novelty; unfortunately for their posthumous reputations, they built in naval dockyards and military enclaves, and most of their buildings do not survive.
Essentially, no matter how hard we try, architectural history is determined by the accidents of survival; extant buildings will always have a primary claim over the historian’s understanding. Archaeology can fill in the gaps and topographical sources can show what things once looked like, but there is no substitute for a surviving structure. In this book I have deliberately chosen as examples buildings that survive. This is to encourage people to go out and see places they perhaps would never otherwise have thought of visiting. But I have not shirked from mentioning, sometimes in depth, important buildings that are now lost. This is because, without them, we cannot understand what happened.
So the task I have set myself is a difficult one and I suspect I have not entirely succeeded. The fact is that writing architectural history, avoiding the pitfalls I have just set out, is complex and raises issues that do not arise in the evaluation of music, painting or literature.
The most important and obvious of these is the utility of architecture. A building cannot be understood in isolation from its function and it is not possible to separate its aesthetic effect – or its historical significance – from the function that it fulfils. Similarly, the location of a building cannot be separated from its effect and significance. Most art forms are mobile. Architecture is not, and it can only be comprehended in the context of its surroundings. Third, although new inventions are made in other art forms, such as acrylic paint in fine art or the electric guitar in music, architecture is fundamentally fashioned by developing technology. The invention of the sash window, of plate glass, structural cast iron or reinforced concrete all opened new chapters in architectural aesthetics, performance and functionality. For these reasons, function, locality and technology play a very large role in this book.
Some Big Ideas
Leaving behind some of the problems of this enterprise, I now want to turn to some overarching ideas that affect the whole story I have to tell. They will be covered in more detail in the following chapters, but a few moments’ consideration here will, I think, help set the scene.
Let us start with England. It is small. France covers 212,209 square miles; England covers only 50,333. It is on an island but is not itself an island, accounting for 57 per cent of a landmass also occupied by Wales and Scotland. As an offshore island, on the edge of a continent, Britain has an extraordinarily rich geology. Pumped, pummelled and folded by tectonic activity for three billion years, it has a variety of underlying strata not found on a great landmass. A traveller across the United States might go for hundreds of miles before noting a change in scenery; in most parts of England changes come thick and fast, influenced by over seven hundred types of soil and their underlying geology. England is the most fertile and easily cultivated part of Britain: only 13 per cent of its land is upland (i.e. over 600ft); in Wales and in Scotland the figures are 42 per cent and 48 per cent respectively. Yet England itself is divided into lowlands and uplands by a line that runs between Teesmouth and Torquay. This is a fundamental determining factor in both agriculture and building. In general terms, in the lowlands farming is arable and in the uplands livelihoods are maintained by grazing livestock. Upland or lowland, England is an extremely fertile country with a temperate climate, and the successful and innovative practice of agriculture, in a variety of guises, was a crucial factor in its early economic development.
The Customs House, King’s Lynn, Norfolk – a building for merchants, built by merchants to advance sea trade.
What lay beneath the fertile meadows and ploughed soils later came, perhaps, to be even more important. From the early Middle Ages the presence of flint, slate, limestone, brickearth and millstone grit, to name a few, influenced the form and appearance of man-made structures; but, decisive in England’s history, was the exploitation of clay, salt, metal ores and, particularly, huge amounts of coal. It was coal, extracted at first for the domestic needs of Londoners but later to power industrial production, that was first to transform Britain and then the world.
The geographic and geological distinctiveness of England, the individuality of its regional building traditions and the diversity of its economy make it hard to write a history of English building. Some recent books have acknowledged this, taking a regional approach and declining to paint a national picture.
This is welcome, as generalisations about change in any one period in any one place are almost certain to be compromised by examples taken from other parts of the country. Yet it is possible to paint a national picture and desirable to do so. This book relies on the fact that the diversity of building in England means that although national generalisations might not be quite right, they are equally likely not to be completely wrong.
The Roman historian Tacitus wrote of Britain that ‘nowhere does the sea hold wider sway … in its ebb and flow, [it] is not held by the coast, but passes deep inland and winds about, pushing in among highlands and mountains, as if in its own domain.’ It was up Britain’s rivers that attackers came, from the Vikings to the Dutch, and down those same rivers developed the trade that gradually placed them at the centre of a worldwide network of waterways. The seas around Britain were, of course, a major deterrent to potential invaders; although there were waterborne assaults on England after 1066, none was successful in taking England in battle. This fact is fundamental to England’s history as, unlike all of its European rivals, it was not continually overrun by adjacent states. Its boundaries, even those with Scotland, were fixed from an early date, giving it territorial stability and helping to establish itself as a nation state before 1066.
During the Middle Ages the sense of national identity grew strongly, but the Reformation significantly intensified nationalism, characterising Catholic Europe not only as hostile but as oppressed and poverty-stricken. Protestant England was increasingly seen by its inhabitants as a sort of chosen nation, blessed by God. The Civil War strengthened this underlying culture, and over the following century the idea of individual liberty safeguarded by parliament was added to it. Indeed, from the Viking raids to the First World War, national identity has been shaped by war. In particular, war with France: the Hundred Years’ War, the wars after the Reformation, intermittent war through the 18th century, and then the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars of 1793 to 1815. As well as building and bolstering national self-image, these wars also accelerated social, economic and architectural change. This is a theme that runs throughout this book, which sees 1815 as a decisive moment in the national story. A final victory over France, with the help of its allies, put Britain into an unassailable position of world power, hurtling it into a century of rapid and fundamental transformation.
Rievaulx Abbey, Yorkshire was suppressed in 1538 and sold to the Earl of Rutland. A series of detailed accounts chronicle its partial demolition by the Earl over the following two years.
Trade was central to this. Being on an island, England had to use the seas in order to trade. It was not unique in being a seafaring nation, but, it was unique in that trade with countries other than Scotland had to be seaborne. If exports were bound for Calais, they might as well be bound for Bordeaux, too – or for that matter Bombay or Buenos Aires. In this way, once Britain had secured the freedom of the seas after its European wars it was in a position to build up a dominating global trading network.
So in terms of fundamentals, England, on a temperate and fertile island, with rich mineral resources, a powerful sense of national destiny and a strong maritime culture, was blessed with a number of advantages. These contributed in some measure to England being a populous country. Changes in its population have also had a fundamental impact on its history and architecture. In particular, relatively rapid population growth in the century before 1300, between the early 1500s and 1650, and then exponential growth after 1760 have had a wide range of important impacts, many of which have determined the narrative in this book.
A central feature of English social structure is the rights and privileges of the individual over the group or over the state. This leads to a particular view of property rights. Nowhere else in Western Europe could an owner dispose of his property with such freedom as in England; everywhere else the proportion that could be freely sold was limited by law and children had some claim over their parents’ property. In England, even with primogeniture, which became the rule from the 16th century, it was possible to sell at any time, effectively disinheriting the following generation. So English land and buildings were commodities that could be easily transferred, and all property was purchasable. Individualistic property ownership lies at the heart of the history of English building.
On four occasions in English history property transfer took place on a national scale. The first was the plunder of Anglo-Saxon estates by the Normans, in which the majority of English land changed hands; soon after there was another, less traumatic, transfer – the granting of substantial estates to the Church from the Crown and the aristocracy. By 1200 this had created the skeleton of the medieval landscape, comprising a series of great estates owned by Crown, aristocracy, bishops and abbots, a situation that remained until the 1530s, when Henry VIII triggered a third great shift. The Dissolution of the Monasteries saw a reversal of the process started during the early Middle Ages, secularising the ownership of both rural and urban estates. Despite the disruption of the Civil War and Commonwealth, which saw an assault on the lands of the Crown and bishops, the Dissolution set the scene for the whole of the period up to the First World War. After 1918 came a fourth transfer. The great estates of the aristocracy, now no longer economically beneficial for their owners, were largely, but not completely, dispersed, with ownership transferring to smaller operators and being sold for urban expansion.
In tandem with these major changes in land ownership were cyclical management decisions by landlords. From the Conquest to the First World War, landlords chose either to manage their lands themselves or to rent them out to tenants, depending on which was more profitable. So, for instance, between about 1184 and 1215 landlords took their lands in hand, but after the Black Death – between around 1380 and 1410 – lands were rented out to tenant farmers.
The ordinary English people who were involved on a micro level in these changes in land tenure were, from at least the 13th century, individualists. They were socially and geographically mobile, market-oriented and acquisitive.
They exploited the opportunities presented by the redrawing of property ownership and in due course transformed the practice of agriculture, making England the most productive country in Europe per head.
How English Buildings Looked
Explaining how the look of English buildings changed lies at the heart of this book. But it opens up some big questions. Is changing architectural fashion down to individual whim or an expression of something deeper, a physical representation of contemporary society? Do, for instance, Georgian terraced houses, 15th-century parish churches and Victorian town halls in some way express the society in which they were produced? Is architectural innovation generated by craftsmen and designers or requested by kings, bishops, aristocrats or industrialists? Is the appearance of a building driven by its function or does a desire for it to look a certain way come first? Do engineering advances create new styles or do engineers devise ways of facilitating aesthetic effects? These questions will be addressed in the chapters that follow, but there are some general points that need to be made about how English buildings look.
Roman Catholicism was a globalising force, bringing remarkable stability across the whole of Europe from the 5th until the 16th century. There was a unity of ideas that engendered cultural conformity – and this applies to building, as to much else. English medieval building was in the mainstream of European Christian architecture, if distinctive and recognisable. The English monarchy played an important part in this, on a European scale. Starting, perhaps, with Alfred the Great’s building of Winchester Cathedral, through Edward the Confessor’s and Henry III’s Westminster Abbey, and culminating in Henry VII’s works of piety, the English monarchy was consistently among the greatest architectural patrons in medieval Christendom.
After the death of Henry VIII, who channelled much Church wealth into his own buildings, English royal building became overshadowed by the architectural efforts of courtiers and eclipsed by the buildings of foreign monarchs. It was only under George IV that the Crown started to build ambitiously again; and then it was the Crown, and not the monarch, for George’s work at Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace was paid for by parliament. Thus, after the Reformation, although architects who worked for the Crown are important in the story of English building, royal buildings themselves seldom are.
In the 16th century, better surviving documentation means that we can begin to understand what people actually thought about architecture. This has led many to see a fundamental change in people’s attitudes to building during the Tudor period. However, as this book will argue, John of Gaunt was probably no less interested, or informed, about building in the 1370s than was Henry, Prince of Wales, in the 1610s. Only we know more about Prince Henry’s interests as they have been written down. It is thus a fundamental premise of this book that people like to build and the rich, in particular, like to know about building, as it gives them pleasure and status. After all, only really rich people can build really big buildings.
Some of the wealthy people significant in the story of English architecture are known as individuals; many are not. One of the important characteristics of English building is the consistently growing class of wealthy urban merchants, shopkeepers and professionals who demanded new types of building. Their rural counterparts were important, too, in certain periods driving innovation more urgently than the big landowners.
Burghley House, not some misunderstood attempt to imitate foreign buildings or styles but a native way of building.
Some patrons travelled and wanted to imitate what they saw abroad; some even sent their architects to learn new foreign techniques. This does not mean that English architecture is just a poor imitation of designs developed elsewhere, neither properly understood nor executed. The old view of Gothic architecture was that it was copied from France, but imperfectly, and that as classical architecture came to be admired the Elizabethans muddled it up and ‘got it wrong’. These views underestimate the insular traditions, as well as the inventiveness of English craftsmen and designers. New architectural languages were not simply copied – that was seldom, if ever, the intention. In reality, ideas, motifs and elements were absorbed and recast as new ways of building were being created.
On a number of occasions new architectural languages were imported in a measured form that was then embellished and decorated. This reflects an underlying preference for ornamentation. The severity of Norman Winchester Cathedral (fig. 44 (#ulink_9c117243-2e85-551d-b1cb-1dc0ca37f937)), for instance, soon gives way to the exuberance of the nave at Durham Cathedral (fig. 51 (#ulink_695a26cf-2a9e-579d-ba2e-2a8037fb04b8)), something, perhaps, more florid and native, while the introduction of austere classical forms at Longleat House, Wiltshire (p. 212), turns into the encrustations of a house like Wollaton Hall, Nottinghamshire (fig. 195 (#litres_trial_promo)).
So there is a pendulum of taste swinging from austerity, simplicity and minimalism to ornament, colour and exuberance, and then back again. The Norman Conquest swept away the decorated buildings of the late Saxons, generating an architecture of military sobriety; but this gave way, in reaction, to the exuberant buildings of the 12th century. The way the English used Gothic from the 1170s was very austere, but this led to its elaboration and decoration from the 1250s. Simplicity of line and cleanness of form began to return in the 1340s, remaining the accepted language until the 1450s, when it became decorated and exuberant again. Towards the end of the reign of Henry VII and lasting until around 1530, simplicity and austerity returned before being overwhelmed by the theatre of Henry VIII’s court architecture. Then there was a short period of austere classical rigour from the 1550s to the 60s before a riot of Elizabethan and Jacobean decoration commenced. By the 1630s the mood swung back to minimalism, which remained to the Restoration until the richness and inventiveness of Wren, Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh become fashionable. Under the influence of Lord Burlington and his approved architects a more tempered and austere classical architecture then took over until the 1760s, when there was an explosion of decorative styles. The simplicity of the Grecian revival in the 1820s was transformed into the richness and colour of revived Renaissance styles in the 1830s. The purity of Gothic Revivalism in the 1840s then led to a riot of expressiveness of High Victorian Gothic in the 1860s, before a return to the simplification of forms of so-called ‘Queen Anne’ from the 1870s. This, in turn, gave way to a revival of interest in baroque forms, which itself stimulated a new breed of minimalist modern classicism.
Sudbury Hall, Derbyshire, built by George Vernon 1660–80. The staircase with remarkable carving and breathtaking plaster-work is at the exuberant end of English architectural taste.
Of course, moderation and excess are not opposites – they can coexist both within architecture and within the human spirit. They are different states of the same mind, not different states of mind. Yet their presence is certainly discernible to a greater or lesser extent through the building history of England. This observation is not a causal analysis nor an explanation of what happened. It is a description of a chain of events. The impulses that caused the pendulum to swing each time are complex and multi-causal – and different for each swing. The reasons that the geometric clarity of early Norman architecture was lost to Decoration are quite different from those that explain the transition from the minimalist classicism of the Restoration to the exuberance of Vanbrugh. Fashion, for that is what these changes are, can change quickly or slowly, but change it does.
‘The history of architecture is the history of the world.’
It would be tempting to take this remark by the architect A. W. N. Pugin as a conclusion to this book. But what buildings of the past tell us is less important than the way they affect us now. We have today more of the physicality of the past around us than at any previous time. Depending on your point of view, our lives are either imprisoned by the buildings erected by our ancestors or ornamented by them. Thus, for me, it is a remark made by Sir Winston Churchill, in connection with the Houses of Parliament, that captures the significance of the story of English building: ‘We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.’
The fact that the constructions of our ancestors are inescapable is a profoundly levelling fact. More than anything else, the story told in this book gives the lie to the notion of progress. No mason alive today could create the high vaults over the Henry VII chapel at Westminster Abbey or the spire of Salisbury Cathedral, and no brick maker could fashion the terracotta of the Natural History Museum, London. The computer-driven precision of the contemporary glass-and-steel tower cannot be said to be an absolute advance over the brilliant eye–hand–mind coordination of the pre-modern age.
Indeed, the very notion of progress was alien to the people of England for the first 1,400 years covered by this book. Progress, as an accepted phenomenon, dates from the 18th century. For most of English history people thought in terms of trying to return to a previous, more virtuous, age. Architecture thus also gazed to the past rather than being on some forward trajectory that represented, at each step, an improvement on the previous one. The belief that progress is taking place, that it is inevitable and that it makes people happier and therefore should be pursued is not, I think, borne out by the evidence. There have been good times and bad; some of the bad times were terrible, and some of the good inspiring. Buildings, likewise, have waxed and waned. This book attempts to tell that story.
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Splendid is this masonry – the fates destroyed it; the strong buildings crashed, the work of giants moulders away. The roofs have fallen, the towers are in ruins, the barred gate is broken.
The End of Rome
In 410, when the Roman army finally left Britain, neither England nor the English existed. The geographical area that is now England was part of the Roman province of Britannia and was occupied by British and Romano-British peoples. It took a long time for England to emerge from the ruins of Britannia. The first real king of England was Athelstan (924–39), who struck his coins with Rex totius Britanniae (King of all Britain). Athelstan inherited a rich, successful, populous kingdom ornamented with churches, cathedrals, monasteries and palaces. So, technically, the history of England’s architecture begins in around 900, but to understand how England looked then, and why, we need to start in 410.
This is easier said than done. The evidence is wafer thin – few buildings, a few more manuscripts and a volume of archaeological excavation carried out, not systematically, but where opportunities arose. The result is that the period 410 to 1000 is an incredibly controversial one, with heated debate among archaeologists and historians not only about why things happened, but what happened, and when.
One of the difficulties is that England was at least two and sometimes three different places before 1000. Indeed, Roman Britain itself had culturally been two places: the south and east, which were more Romanised, and the north-west and west, which were less heavily Romanised. Similar distinctions remained in Saxon England, with the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings making a bigger impact in the south and east than, for example, in Cornwall. The southern parts, particularly Kent, had closer ties with the continent, while Northumbria was more influenced by Ireland. As a result, it is very hard to generalise about England as a whole, but it will be necessary to make some generalisations if any sense is to be made of this complex period.
The Romans were in Britain for an extremely long time – if they had left in the year 2000 they would have arrived in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. During the centuries of their occupation they built a very great deal: there were over 60 towns, places of administration, justice, manufacture, trade and latterly church administration. Some were large, with populations of 15,000 or more, at least as large as medieval towns such as Norwich. In some areas the countryside was littered with villas and the coast with a messy series of forts. Hadrian’s Wall, with its forts and towns, protected the Empire’s northern border. Internal fortifications, too, were mighty. Many towns were walled, and the largest of these, like York, was built almost impregnably in stone (fig. 1 (#ulink_60a049e3-e774-565d-a36d-66939a1b68a8)).
Fig. 1 The Multangular Tower, York. The lower part of this fourteen-sided tower dates from the late 3rd or early 4th century and formed part of the Roman fortress of York. The upper stages were rebuilt and reused in the 13th century. Throughout the early Middle Ages large Roman structures such as this dominated many English towns.
In 410, in the face of complex problems across the empire and a decline in the importance of Britannia, the Emperor Honorius ordered the remaining units of the Roman army to leave Britain and told the Romano-British to fend for themselves. With the exit of the army came the collapse of Roman state control and its economy. The legions had been responsible for maintaining centralised government with coinage and taxation, laws and the physical infrastructure of roads and fortifications. Their removal exposed what was to become England to the destructive forces of the barbarian world.
The first wave of settlers that came to East Anglia in the first half of the 5th century was from northern Germany. They were farmers attracted by the agricultural potential of England who had little direct experience of the Roman way of life – and even less interest in it. These peoples kept contact with their homelands, moving backwards and forwards, bringing and transferring fashions in everything from weapons to jewellery and, of course, buildings. The newcomers were not especially numerous but were highly successful at establishing themselves, by force, as the landlords of the native British population. So much so that by 600, although the genetic make-up of what is now England was still heavily British, people spoke Anglo-Saxon, worshipped Germanic gods and shared Germanic fashions. A hundred years later there was a sense of emerging Englishness, but not politically, for the land that became England was still divided into a number of small kingdoms, each with its own kings, customs and ambitions (fig. 2 (#litres_trial_promo)).
Many towns had already been in decline before the legions left, but after their departure the collapse was sudden and fundamental. We know that people continued to live in some of them after the Roman administration ended – in Colchester, Cirencester, Wroxeter, Carlisle, St Albans. But this was not a continuation of urban life, with civic, social and economic structures. It was life in towns, not town life. This is fundamentally different to what happened in Gaul; there, Roman cities formed the building blocks of Frankish rule. From these places taxes were levied, in them administration was centred, and to them secular and ecclesiastical rulers were attracted. So why were the British Roman towns abandoned?
This fascination with Rome is a thread that runs through this book. There is a sense in which the history of English architecture until the late 18th century can be explained as a quest to re-create Roman buildings. King Alfred the Great at Winchester (p. 46), William the Conqueror at the White Tower (p. 69), Edward Seymour at Somerset House (p. 280) and Lord Burlington at Chiswick (p. 318) were all trying to achieve the same thing. And it was not just the 18th-century Grand Tourists who went to Rome in person; in Anglo-Saxon England kings, bishops, parish clergy and ordinary people all made the long and dangerous pilgrimage to Rome. In the Leonine City on the edge of Rome was the Schola Saxonum, a lodging house for English pilgrims supported by a tax raised by English kings. England was no provincial outpost; those who had the wealth to commission buildings were not ignorant of the great buildings of the ancients in Rome.
How the Saxons Built
The early Anglo-Saxon world, unlike ours, was not primarily a built one. Special places were normally natural ones: rivers, hills, woods. Indeed, their language had words for circles and curves, but expressing straight lines and right angles was difficult. The natural world therefore played a large role in building. Most churches, for instance, were not aligned by compass point to the east, but were laid out by sighting the sun at sunrise and sunset either on saints’ feast days, Easter, or on the spring or autumn equinoxes.
Almost all secular buildings were built of timber; indeed, the Anglo-Saxon verb ‘to build’ is timbrian, and buildings were getimbro. Timber was not seen as a lower-status material than stone, nor was the skill to use it effectively lesser than that of the mason. Indeed, even in the early Saxon period, the achievements of leading English carpenters were considerable. That English building between the Romans and the Vikings was almost entirely of timber demonstrates that efficient woodland management must have continued after 410, albeit at a local level. This involved cyclically harvesting the underwood (coppicing) but allowing the oaks to grow in longer rotations (between twenty and seventy years). Coppicing provided fuel as well as all the non-structural building timber, including poles for scaffolding. Oaks were selected by carpenters, felled, their branches and bark removed, and then squared up and used for the structure of buildings. Oak was worked green (without being seasoned), the structure tightening up as the timber dried out. The most important woodworking tool was the axe used for cutting and smoothing, but hammers, adzes, boring-bits, chisels, gouges, planes and saws have been excavated from Anglo-Saxon sites. Nails were not used and fastening was by simple joints with timber pegs. The highest-status buildings might also include iron straps, hinges and catches, as ironworking and smithing continued after the Romans left.
Fig. 3 St Peter’s, Wearmouth, County Durham. The lowest stage of the tower was built in around 680 and was originally a single-storeyed porch; it was heightened c.700 and then again in the later Middle Ages. The remarkable porch, which never had doors, is flanked by cylindrical stone drums probably turned on a lathe like timber balusters. The Saxon nave lies behind the tower; the aisle to the left is 13th century.
Coppicing produced the wattles necessary for certain types of wall construction. Wattling involves a row of upright stakes, the spaces between which are filled by interweaving flexible branches, often rods of hazel, which are then covered with daub, either mud, clay or, in more sophisticated buildings, lime plaster. Roofs were not covered with slate, tile or stone, as was often the case in Roman times, but only with thatch or shingles. The best thatch was made of reed, but most often it was straw or even hay attached with string or hazel rods. Shingles were small, geometric slithers of oak pegged or nailed to the roof structure, more durable than thatch and less prone to catch fire.
Stone building implied infrastructure and organisation. Quarrying, transport and construction require the mobilisation of significant expertise and labour. All this disappeared after 410, and by 600 there can have been few masons left in England. Masonry was re-introduced by Christian missionaries and relied entirely on robbing Roman buildings for a supply of cut stone. It was not only the expertise that was lacking to restart quarrying, but the motivation; the ruins of Rome were a plentiful quarry and most Saxon stone buildings were built close to or among the ruins of Roman sites.
Where stone was used in a decorative fashion by the Saxons it was often carved as wood. The right-hand jamb of the archway at the base of the tower at St Peter’s, Wearmouth, County Durham, of c.680 is a perfect example of the woodcarvers’ art translated into stone (fig. 3 (#ulink_44caa304-17ec-5fe2-a67b-e455113d4a2b)).
Fundamental to the reintroduction of masonry building was the rediscovery of mortar; without this, stones could only be laid dry on top of each other at a very low height. Excavations at Wearmouth have revealed the earliest example of a post-Roman mortar mixer, a pit for mixing lime mortar with large, rotating paddles. The expertise for constructing this came from Gaul and required limestone to be burnt in a kiln before being mixed with water to form lime mortar.
Where People Lived
In the years after the collapse of Roman rule power did not reside in fixed places – capitals, if you like; it resided with individuals moving from place to place. Leaders principally expressed their status through portable wealth, through personal adornment, through individual prowess and the ability to provide their entourage with great feasts. Places were occupied for short periods so that rulers could receive food-rents from surrounding farmers, feast with their households and move on. Yet the rulers who emerged in England wanted, as much as their Roman predecessors, to create monumental expressions of their power. In the Saxon poem Beowulf the heroic struggle between Beowulf and the monster Grendel is set in a spectacular timber banqueting hall, with doors bound with ironwork, and a carved and gilded roof strengthened by iron braces. Quite a number of these halls have now been identified, either by aerial archaeology or by excavation.
Fig. 4 A reconstruction of the royal hall at Yeavering, Northumberland, based on excavations in the 1950s and 60s. Started by King Edwin in the 620s, this great hall and accompanying structures, including a grandstand looking like a Roman theatre, would have been used by the king when he visited the region to feast on food rents owed to him by his subjects.
The only one that can certainly be identified as being royal was the complex of the Northumbrian King Edwin at Yeavering, Northumberland, started in the 620s.
There the excavators found a number of halls built in succession after a series of fires. The important point is the size and sophistication of these structures. The hall christened A2, for instance, was 82ft long and 36ft wide, had an entrance in the centre of each long wall, and two internal cross-walls making separate rooms at either end. The main hall was aisled and so was interrupted by supporting posts. The walls were made of planks sunk into a trench, then plastered inside and out. It is very likely that these were painted, and that beams and posts were elaborately carved (fig. 4 (#ulink_0c209f81-3f31-565e-9930-8a5516b6aaaf)). This was a building that required craftsmanship, engineering and organised labour, and it is likely that it was built in a tradition that was uninterrupted since the Romans. Roman villas had great halls or barns that are archaeologically almost indistinguishable from Saxon halls such as the one at Yeavering. In fact it is possible that some large Roman timber halls might have remained in use well into the period covered by this chapter. However, although the techniques necessary for their construction were probably essentially Romano-British, their decoration might have owed more to the traditions of their Anglo-Saxon owners.
It was not only kings who built great halls. With royal grants of land, leading nobles also built places as estate centres and for feasting. It is likely that the remains found at Cowdery’s Down, Hampshire, are just such an aristocratic settlement dating from the 6th century. Fine timber halls, palisaded enclosures and more humble timber houses were found in a tight-knit plan, demonstrating that the building technology available to kings was also used by the richest landlords. Here, again, the halls and houses owed much to Romano-British building traditions, suggesting continuity of structural techniques.
The places that these individuals chose to make their base, whether as living kings or as corpses, were often ones that had been significant in the Iron Age or earlier. This is the start of a phenomenon that is very strong in England’s architectural history, the desire of the powerful to emphasise their legitimacy through references to the past. The locations of both the royal palace at Yeavering and the royal mausoleum at Sutton Hoo were influenced by pre-existing prehistoric settlements and barrows.
This continuity of place seems to have affected lower-status settlements, too. Through the extraordinary upheavals and changes of the period Britain’s population had remained fairly static. From the late Roman period to about 700 most people continued to farm the same landscapes that they had farmed from the late Iron Age, in a similar manner, and living in similar buildings.
Fig. 5 A reconstructed 6th-century house at West Stow, Suffolk, based on archaeological excavation. The village contained five such halls strung out along the ridge of the hill, forming the spine of the settlement. A fire would be lit in a hearth in the middle of the single internal room.
Early Anglo-Saxon settlements were not villages in the sense that we would understand today. They were places occupied over a long period by perhaps ten families at most; built structures, all of which were of timber, would be replaced many times. These settlements were very loose, unfenced and unstructured, without streets or apparent geometry. At West Stow, in Suffolk, just such a settlement of the 5th and 6th centuries was excavated in the 1960s. Its inhabitants lived and worked in houses of a type prosaically described by archaeologists as Sunken-Featured Buildings. These were made by digging a rectangular pit over which a timber floor was suspended. Walls were made of planks sunk into the ground, and uprights at each end supported a ridge pole (or poles) that supported a thatch roof. These buildings were ubiquitous in English settlements from the 5th to the 8th centuries and were an Anglo-Saxon import, direct copies of a type of structure found all over northern Europe. In addition to the Sunken-Featured Buildings at West Stow there were larger, sturdier halls, probably for communal use (fig. 5 (#ulink_6225209b-5e3f-529b-a827-e15bfc03cf2f)). These bore less resemblance to their continental equivalents and are much more similar to Romano-British houses dating back to the later 1st or 2nd centuries.
The Church before the Vikings
Although, when Pope Gregory sent St Augustine and his missionaries to England in 596, he was sending them to a place he regarded as at ‘the end of the world’, it was to one that had a Roman heritage. He instructed that bishops be seated in the Roman towns of Canterbury and London; perhaps he thought England was still the urbanised, centralised Roman society that it had once been. It was not. But despite this, Augustine did in fact found a see based on Canterbury, where he built England’s first cathedral, possibly on the site of an earlier Roman church. Outside the Roman town he also built a monastery, later to be given his name.
Further cathedrals were to be founded at Rochester and London and, in the 620s, at York. A cathedral is a church that contains the cathedra, or throne, of a bishop; this is, in fact, the only difference between a cathedral and any other sort of large church. In their dioceses bishops were responsible for ordaining priests, consecrating new churches, dealing with clergy discipline, and administering land and finances. As such they were crucial in the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons.
After several faltering starts England had become Christian again by the 680s, and in 664 the Synod of Whitby had settled that the English Church should be modelled on that of Rome rather than the Irish Church. Within a century England was populated by several hundred minsters, that is to say churches with a residential religious establishment, and was divided into seventeen dioceses. Not enough survives of any early Saxon cathedral to say much about it, but several minsters do, and from these we can paint a picture of the first Saxon churches.
Remarkably St Martin’s, the very first church of St Augustine and his fellows, survives in Canterbury, incorporating the brick remains of a Roman tomb (fig. 6 (#ulink_10f299c7-c911-5c5b-9a7b-69c93e03610d)). This ancient church, possibly first used as a mortuary chapel, though mauled and altered by time, is a powerful and evocative place to visit and is typical of the first places of Christian worship in Saxon England, built in close proximity to prominent Roman sites and constructed out of re-used Roman materials.
Fig. 6 St Martin’s, Canterbury, Kent. A reconstruction of the church of Bertha, Christian queen of King Ethelbert; St Augustine first worshipped here in the 590s. The walls of the present nave are partly Roman and may have originally been part of a tomb chamber. Though significantly altered, St Martin’s remains the oldest standing church in England.
Fig. 7 St Mary’s, Reculver, Kent, of 669 from an excavation in 1927. The church was built in the middle of the Roman fort out of reclaimed materials. a) apse with bench and throne; b) altar framed by central arch; c) porticus; d) nave.
St Mary’s, Reculver, Kent, now precariously perched on the edge of a cliff, is a more complete example (fig. 7 (#ulink_e54a2cbf-aa17-5ecf-96f2-8f6d702737c0)). In 669 King Egbert of Kent founded this minster in the centre of the old Roman fort. Most of the fort has now fallen into the sea and the church is abandoned, but it has been excavated. In plan it has a stubby, rectangular nave with an apsidal (semicircular) chancel lying behind a screen of two columns. On the north and south there are subsidiary rooms, known as porticuses. The apse, which contained a semicircular bench with a separate seat or throne in the middle, was an area set aside for the clergy, who celebrated communion facing their congregation in the nave. It is doubtful that St Mary’s could have been erected by Saxon craftsmen, whose architectural tradition, as we have seen, was entirely in timber. The strong likelihood is that St Augustine brought masons with him from Italy who designed and constructed these early Christian churches; a likelihood that is strengthened by their stylistic similarity to the churches of Ravenna in northern Italy and the Alps.
Roman missionaries from Kent took the gospel to Northumbria, where, after the Synod of Whitby, more minsters were founded. The twin foundation of Wearmouth (today Monkwearmouth, 674) and Jarrow (681) is by far the most important of these. Like St Mary’s, Reculver, these churches were not designed by native hands. Their founder, Benedict Biscop, who had travelled Europe for sixteen years absorbing the latest ideas for the organisation and construction of monasteries, enlisted Frankish stonemasons and glaziers to construct his monastery in Roman fashion. They took their carts and their measuring rods to the Roman forts on Hadrian’s Wall and returned with both building materials and construction techniques for the new minsters. Both were thus, in terms of fabric and technique, built in the Roman manner, and their dedications – to St Peter and St Paul, the patron saints of the Roman Church – confirmed that life there was to be based on Rome, too.
Fig. 8 The Monastery of St Peter’s, Wearmouth. Plan based on excavations showing the layout of the latest phase of the Saxon monastery. The church, with its skirting of porticuses, was linked by a corridor crossing the cemetery to the living quarters.
Figs 9 and 10 St John the Evangelist, Escomb, County Durham; the most perfect Anglo-Saxon church in England. Massive Roman stones were used in its construction, including what is probably a re-set Roman arch in the chancel. Fragments of stained glass have been found and the windows have grooves for shutters. A patch of cobbled flooring in the nave is probably Saxon. The plan shows its original layout as revealed in excavation in 1968. The walled circular churchyard was a very early addition. a) chancel; b) nave.
Wearmouth and Jarrow have been extensively investigated, and enough remains to demonstrate that the layout of Benedict’s buildings was influenced by what he had seen in Gaul and elsewhere. In plan both sites were based on continental monastic models. The churches were long, narrow (their length three times their width) buildings with a western porch. Either side of the nave were lower porticuses or galleries, giving the buildings a basilican appearance (that is to say, a taller nave with lower aisles).
The church at Wearmouth had a narrow, 100ft-long, roofed gallery with glazed windows linking it with the domestic structures (fig. 8 (#ulink_009bd539-56ec-5e64-8e61-923711f6cbf6)).
This feature, a precursor of the monastic cloister, presumably used for reading, writing and exercise, is a feature Benedict could have seen on his travels. Yet despite all this novelty the church, and particularly the domestic buildings, refectory and dormitory, were very similar to large, secular, timber structures elsewhere in Saxon England. At the royal site of Yeavering, for instance, a timber church was excavated that was virtually identical in plan and size to the Wearmouth and Jarrow churches.
Fig. 11 St Andrew’s, Greensted-juxta-Ongar, Essex. In Norway numbers of timber churches survive, but this is the sole early medieval survivor from thousands of such churches in England. While the walls are of the late 11th century, the brick sill on which they sit is of 1848 and the dormers and brick chancel are Tudor. The tower is later too.
Although conceived in a timber-built tradition, these Northumbrian churches were among the first to be built in stone since the disappearance of the Roman legions two hundred years earlier. This is important, as stone building was associated by early Saxon Christians with Roman Christianity. When King Nechtan of the Picts accepted the Roman Easter he asked the Northumbrians for advice, not only on liturgical issues, but in building churches in masonry ‘after the Roman fashion’.
A visit to the church of St John at Escomb, County Durham, still conveys a sense of what the churches at Wearmouth and Jarrow must have been like inside (figs 9–10 (#ulink_71fdcef6-f785-5ab2-875d-079489416295)). This is the best-preserved stone church of the early Saxon period in England, but its chiselled stone walls cannot do justice to what we know of the original interiors. Walls were plastered and painted white, carving was picked out in bright primary colours, the walls were hung with icons and the windows filled with stained glass.
Wearmouth and Jarrow are the only early Saxon monasteries about which anything is known architecturally. We do know, however, that as well as the monasteries of Northumberland and Kent there were many others in the Midlands, the Thames valley and the west. But before about 950 only the largest were of stone; most were still built of timber by people working in local building traditions.
At Greensted-juxta-Ongar, Essex, there is a remarkable survival: St Andrew’s is the single surviving Anglo-Saxon timber church in England (fig. 11 (#ulink_80def849-40ad-52e9-899c-25355374d411)). Thanks to dendrochronology it is now known that most of its surviving timbers date between 1063 and 1100. Yet this building was constructed in the same way as hundreds of other much earlier examples, somenow revealed through archaeology. The walls were built of split oak logs with their rounded face on the outside and fixed together with concealed timber tongues. These are jointed into timber roof and base (sole) plates, making a rigid wall.
As the Roman legions left the shores of Britain they took with them the know-how and infrastructure necessary to build in stone. For the next two hundred years rich and poor, strong and weak, pagan and Christian lived, worked and worshipped in timber buildings. Some of these were in a long tradition of native building stretching back to the Iron Age; others were introduced by Anglo-Saxon settlers; most were an eclectic blend of Romano-British and Germanic engineering and aesthetics. At the high end these were buildings of considerable sophistication and magnificence; at the lower end buildings of extreme functionality. It was the coming of Christianity that reconnected England with the stone-building traditions of Rome. As a result, English architecture acquired a distinct and vibrant character – a blend of native, timber-based building and stone-built Roman styles. This is what the Viking raiders of the 790s found when they started their systematic plunder of the kingdom of Northumbria. These attacks, and their political and economic effects, set English architecture in important new directions.
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Fig. 13 Offa’s Dyke, Clun, Shropshire, a massive piece of military engineering begun soon after 757. It stretched from sea to sea, and for 200 years kept the marauding Welsh out of Mercian England.
The Mercian Kingdom
In the 8th century the kingdom of Mercia was dominated by two very powerful and successful kings who controlled most of England south of the River Humber. Ethelbald (716–57) and Offa (757–96) were the first kings able to organise huge labour forces to solve surveying, engineering and construction problems on a national scale. Ethelbald was probably responsible for starting a concerted programme of bridge and road building to improve communications. No Anglo-Saxon bridge now survives – most were probably of timber – but before 1000 a network of bridges carried roads on both local and national routes.
Offa is of particular importance as an international figure who corresponded with Charlemagne and was a friend of Pope Hadrian. He is also significant as the builder of Britain’s largest monument: the 150-mile-long Offa’s Dyke (fig. 13 (#ulink_94473454-eddf-5615-9ba1-d6fb600b9e8a)). The dyke was probably constructed to keep Welsh raiders out of Mercia and had 6ft-deep ditches with a 25ft bank behind; the rampart was topped by timber palisading and, in places, stone walls. Offa was able to mobilise labour for this and for the fortification of towns, marking a major change in the way England’s landscape was moulded by the power of the state. Offa’s achievements in church building were no less impressive, if only fragments of his churches now survive. Much to the chagrin of Canterbury, Offa used his influence with the Pope to found a new archiepiscopal see at Lichfield. Nothing of Offa’s cathedral remains except for a fragment of a contemporary shrine chest associated with the cult of St Chad (fig. 14 (#ulink_6c65d7d8-555e-58c1-9bc6-303e239533be)). This carving, one of the most beautiful and moving to survive from Saxon England, reveals Mercian carvers following Carolingian fashions, reviving the sculptural style of the early Christian Church.
Fig. 14 The corner of a tomb chest of c.800, probably from the shrine of St Chad, who died in 672. This fragment, found in 2003, shows that Mercian sculptors and architects, like their continental counterparts, were reviving late Roman styles.
Fig. 15 St Wystan’s, Repton, Derbyshire. The mausoleum of King Wiglaf of c.830. This compact but richly articulated space contained recesses to take the tombs of the Mercian royal family.
An even more potent expression of Mercian interest in early Roman Christianity is their royal mausoleum at Repton, Derbyshire. The crypt here was first built as a freestanding burial chamber for the kings of Mercia. King Wiglaf, before his death in 839, transformed the chamber from a plain rectangular cellar into a spectacular mausoleum by incorporating it into the chancel of the church and building an internal vault supported by four twisted stone columns based on the most prestigious late Roman Christian monument in Rome: the tomb of St Peter. This daring allusion gave voice to the power of Mercian kings in the language of Carolingian Europe (fig. 15 (#ulink_cb906384-3b03-5a34-9616-82b2abbbb707)).
More substantial evidence of the Mercian revival of Rome is the church of All Saints’, Brixworth, England’s most exciting and impressive standing Anglo-Saxon building (fig. 16 (#ulink_7607623c-1814-5d0e-9a5e-9ea0dc716aea)). The church is big, about 160ft in length, but is now shorn of its ‘porticuses’, five on each side, which originally flanked the open hall of the nave, rather like aisles in later churches, but subdivided into individual chambers. East of the nave was a separate space, a choir, enclosed by an apsidal sanctuary beneath which was a crypt encircled by an enclosed passageway.
The nave arcades are truly massive, their voussoirs made of reused Roman brick; whoever commissioned and designed this church was deliberately and successfully recreating a sense of Roman monumentality, and might have known contemporary Carolingian buildings.
How many such churches existed in Mercia or elsewhere before the Vikings is quite unclear, but it is unlikely that Brixworth, and the major minster excavated at Cirencester, Gloucestershire, were the only two. These structures put architecture in England in the 8th and 9th centuries in the same bracket as some of the most avant-garde structures in Europe.
Fig. 16 All Saints’, Brixworth, Northamptonshire. This powerful church (the largest surviving Anglo-Saxon church in England) would have been even more massive before the demolition of its porticuses. The blocked-up ground floor arches along the nave would have originally led into these, just as at St Peter’s, Wearmouth (as shown in fig. 8 (#ulink_009bd539-56ec-5e64-8e61-923711f6cbf6)). The tower with its semi-circular staircase projection is probably 10th century.
The Anglo-Saxon Church
The importance of churches to Anglo-Saxon society cannot be overestimated. Whilst kings were mobile, their buildings only occasionally utilised, and their economic effects dispersed, churches were rooted to a single location and thus became centres of economic activity and often, in due course, the kernel of towns. Minster churches also needed land to support them, and Church land, unlike the land owned by aristocrats, was not transferable between generations but held in perpetuity. The amassing of land by the Church contributed to a shift in focus from movable wealth, a feature of Germanic societies, to the idea of permanent land holding, as in Roman times. Land transactions were thus increasingly recorded and legalised, and the landscape divided and packaged.
In addition to landed endowments, often provided by royal or aristocratic patrons, relics, pilgrimages and miracles were the trinity that underpinned the building economy and design of the medieval church. For Saxons, relics had supernatural power. They were placed inside altars, carried into battle, used for solemnising oaths; without them no church was able to function. The more famous the relic, the greater the chance of attracting pilgrims who would make gifts of money at the shrines they visited. But pilgrimage was not only a pious act; it was a visual education for the clergy, builders and the laity. It was the cause of mobility and design exchange, of competition and of rising architectural expectation.
Even modest numbers of pilgrims set architectural problems for church designers. People needed to be able to come close to relics in an orderly and controlled way that enabled suitable donations to be made, and satisfaction with the experience to spread by word of mouth.
One of the most conspicuous innovations connected with pilgrimage was the crypt, a small underground chamber, normally under the high altar, designed to contain relics. It was the crypt at St Peter’s, Rome, that established this feature as an aspiration for any late Saxon church. Brixworth (fig. 16 (#ulink_7607623c-1814-5d0e-9a5e-9ea0dc716aea)) originally contained a ring crypt that allowed pilgrims to move round the apse, venerating relics, and the mausoleum at Repton was appropriated as a shrine to St Wystan, a royal prince murdered in 849. For this, a new access was cut, providing a proper circulation for pilgrims (fig. 15 (#ulink_cb906384-3b03-5a34-9616-82b2abbbb707)). Visitors to Repton and the surviving Anglo-Saxon crypts at St Andrew’s, Hexham, and at Ripon Cathedral can still explore the mysterious and gloomy subterranean circulation designed to lubricate the flow of pilgrims.
If the need to provide access to relics above and below ground was a fundamental factor in the design of the Anglo-Saxon church, so was the Saxon view of the Eucharist. Whilst Christ was obviously the focus for worship, it was the consecrated bread – the host – itself, as a sort of super-relic, that was venerated. Inside chapels the host could be placed on an altar alongside other relics, forming an easily multiplied supernatural focus. Because the moment of consecration was less important than the veneration of the host, Saxon churches were not as focused as later medieval churches on a single altar at the east end. Rather they comprised an assemblage of compartments on several floors, each with its own ritual focus. The most common and flexible of these subdivisions was the porticus, which served as side chapel, tomb chamber, sacristy or viewing chamber. The most important and impressive was the westwork,
an enlargement of the west end of a church to provide a location for relics or shrines, a western choir, or occasionally a high-status viewing place (p. 46). These secondary spaces became progressively more important with a rise in the doctrine of purgatory and the appropriation of individual chapels by the rich for prayers to be said on their behalf. They also appealed to aristocratic aesthetic sense, which tended to the more ornamental, decorative and intricate than the big and bold.
Before the 670s Christians did not expect to be buried in or near churches but were buried, like pagans, in cemeteries. By the late 7th century, however, the Church had wrested control of burial rites from friends and neighbours, and started to bury the dead close to Church buildings. Burial within churches themselves remained controversial and was made available only to individuals of the highest status. By 850, however, Christian cemeteries were serving large numbers of ordinary people, taking in land that was increasingly walled or fenced and populated by grave markers.
Monasteries
The Viking raids were devastating for early English monasticism. Whilst some monasteries survived, and some semblance of communal life might have remained, England’s former glittering monastic tradition, with its learning, music and patronage of art, was effectively wiped out by the Vikings. The decisive moment in the re-foundation of English monasticism came in 939 when King Edmund (939–946) set up Dunstan as Abbot of Glastonbury Abbey. This was a decisive move because Dunstan’s monastery, in line with those in the Carolingian empire, was founded according to the rule of St Benedict and Glastonbury went on to influence the foundation of thirty more Benedictine monasteries in southern England in as many years. At first each of these houses interpreted the rule as it wished, and it was not until King Edgar’s monastic reform that a consistent version of the rule of St Benedict was imposed on all the largest and richest minsters by the Regularis Concordia of 973.
Fig. 17 St Mary’s, Deerhurst, Gloucestershire; view of the interior looking west. On the ground floor is the Saxon door leading into the tower. Originally above this was a timber gallery – the blocked door that gave access to it can be seen. The corbels in the corners would have supported the gallery. The two pointed windows above looked into the church from a large room in the tower on the other side.
The Concordia put English monasticism on a level with contemporary continental practice. There were, however, some important specifically English provisions. As a concession to English weather, during the winter monks were allowed to have a fire in a warming room and permitted to work inside rather than in the cloister. More overtly political and nationalistic was the fact that the king and queen were to be recognised as patrons and guardians of monasteries, and that they should be prayed for at each of the daily offices bar one.
In the hundred years after the Regularis Concordia kings and aristocrats lavished gifts of land on the monasteries, so much so that by 1066 nearly a sixth of the income of England was held by monasteries in lands and rents. This not only made them a hugely significant economic force but created vast wealth for architectural display. So little remains of any of the thirty or so monasteries reformed in the 10th century that it is hard to generalise about them, but it does seem likely that most of the components of later medieval monasteries were already in place, such as the cloister, refectory, dormitory and warming house. The abbey churches, however, were very different from those that remain today.
Fig. 18 St Andrew’s, Nether Wallop, Hampshire. The paintings over the chancel arch are the best preserved Saxon murals in England. They show angels censing a lost figure of Christ. Such paintings would have been commissioned by wealthy patrons, in this case possibly the powerful Godwin family who held land in the area.
Fig. 19 Winchester Cathedral, the layout of the Old Minster as recovered by excavation lies next to the later cathedral. Right, isometric diagram and cross section of the Old Minster at Winchester c.993–4, as reconstructed by the Winchester research unit based on excavations. The massive western towers – the westwork – probably contained the royal chapel or pew from which a view of the high altar was possible.
A single example of a Mercian minster church, begun in around 804 and re-ordered in around 970, survives at St Mary’s, Deerhurst, Gloucestershire (fig. 17 (#ulink_e9cb1524-aa10-5caf-99d8-00cde775c99a)). This precious survival, before it was converted to a parish church, was a complex, multi-focused monastic church on a series of levels. At the west end was a four-storied porch containing three upper rooms, the room on the first floor housing a chapel with a deep gallery overlooking the nave. The taller and more impressive room above had two elegant windows giving clear views of the church interior; there was another balcony here, but this one was on the exterior of the west porch, allowing, perhaps, the display of relics to people outside the church. The porticuses to the north and south of the choir were two-storied, their first-floor rooms containing doors leading to an eastern gallery over the choir; the chancel was a polygonal apse also with a room above, with a balcony looking into the church.
St Mary’s not only provides the best place to understand the complexity and ingenuity of Anglo-Saxon liturgical space, it also allows us to come closer to an appreciation of the way church interiors originally appeared. The interior of a church like St Mary’s was richly painted, not only with figurative murals, but with carving and mouldings painted and decorated with organic patterns.
Whilst the surviving figure-work at Deerhurst is very faded, at St Andrew’s, Nether Wallop, Hampshire, the lower part of an impressive mural of Christ in majesty survives from about 1000 (fig. 18 (#ulink_0e0d439b-0c64-5246-bea3-35d296822a1a)). This decoration is painted in styles familiar to us from Anglo-Saxon manuscript illumination and decorative art. Whilst painting occasionally survives, very few Anglo-Saxon textiles do, but it is clear that prestigious monasteries and cathedrals, as well as richly endowed minsters and smaller foundations, were hung with textiles, often on the walls. These would have been a backdrop for rich metalwork in gold, silver and wrought iron. Aethelwig, Abbot of Evesham, adorned his church with ‘a great many embellishments – chasubles, copes, precious textiles, a large cross and an altar most beautifully worked in gold and silver’. The overall effect of a great Saxon church interior would have been overwhelming. Anglo-Saxon taste was for richness, intricacy, detail and ornament, all of which added to the complexity and disorienting effect of liturgical space: balconies, side chapels, crypts, winding staircases, all painted and hung with textiles, dimly lit by lamps or windows filled with coloured glass, created a sense of mystery that it is impossible to gain from the whitewashed shells that remain.
The residential parts of minsters have all vanished, but, from what we know, they were, like royal buildings, centred on great halls. It is likely that the stone hall, 120ft long, excavated in Northampton and dating from around 860, was part of a minster complex. This is where an abbot would have administered his estates, dispensed justice and entertained.
Bishops and Kings
Early English dioceses were based on Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and, as power and territory ebbed and flowed between them, they were reorganised many times. The Viking incursions provided an opportunity to redraw the diocesan map, and after the 10th century dioceses more or less coincided with the new administrative shires of England (fig. 12 (#litres_trial_promo)). But there was no particular conformity of diocesan organisation; cathedrals were organised in different ways and many, uniquely for England, were also monasteries where the bishop lived his life in a monastic order.
Thanks to painstaking excavation, more is known about Winchester than any other Saxon cathedral. It was arguably the finest building standing in England at the Conquest. By 1066, however, Winchester had already had a cathedral for 418 years; this was the Old Minster, with a cruciform (cross-shaped) plan and a square end. Over the ensuing centuries the cathedral was enlarged and adapted so that by 1000, as well as the nave and high altar, it comprised four towers, three crypts, three apses, at least 24 smaller chapels and a baptistery (fig. 19 (#ulink_41874746-6ec8-52cb-92c1-833ba2264b80)). Despite strong English characteristics, the Old Minster was, by the time of the Normans, a church with a recognisably Carolingian plan. Most prominent was the westwork – the enormous, tower-like structure erected at the west end of the cathedral in the 970s. Westworks developed in Carolingian churches in the 9th century and went on to form a component of many great churches in France and Germany built from the 10th to the 12th centuries. At Winchester the huge west towers performed a dual purpose, providing a focus for liturgy and an occasional grandstand for the kings of Wessex to view events in the main church below. Winchester, built next to the royal palace of Wessex and functioning as a dynastic church, might have been exceptional. More typical, perhaps, was the westwork of which fragments, surprisingly, survive at Sherborne Abbey in Dorset. The see of Sherborne was founded in 705 but came to prominence in the 9th century, when two of Alfred the Great’s brothers were buried there. Bishop Aelfwold rebuilt and extended the cathedral between 1045 and 1058 in a form heavily influenced by developments in the Carolingian empire (fig. 20 (#litres_trial_promo)). The upper chamber in the west tower contained an apse in which the bishop’s throne was positioned, opposite him; at the east end was a three-light window looking down into the main body of the church and before this stood the altar. This arrangement allowed Mass to be celebrated in public view in the upper chamber and distinguished members of the congregation to watch from chambers on either side.
The Rise of Local Churches
For many Saxon landowners who were planning a village, building a manor house and founding a church would be inextricably entwined as these were all part of an economic, social and religious enterprise. Before the 10th century minsters had dominated the religious landscape, but by the 940s secular lords, with their coffers swelled by profits from their lands, increasingly began to commission their own churches. Many parish churches today have their origins as estate churches of an Anglo-Saxon landlord, which is why many parishes have boundaries that are the same as those of Saxon estates. The remarkably well-preserved church of St Peter, Barton-upon-Humber, Lincolnshire, is one such building. Built originally as an estate church next to a lordly fortified enclosure, it comprised a central tower flanked by a chancel in the east and a baptistery to the west (fig. 31 (#ulink_42a6eade-986b-54a5-aa91-93b98b3d91cc)). The chancel and baptistery were two-storeyed, and the tower had three storeys. This was not just a place of worship; it was a symbol of the lord’s status, a place for his heir to be baptised.
Fig. 29 All Saints’, Earls Barton, Northamptonshire. Like St Peter’s, Barton-upon-Humber, the tower of All Saints’ is set with a pattern of long thin stones used by the masons both structurally and decoratively as if they were timber beams. As at St Peter’s, the rest of the church is of a later date.
All Saints’, Earls Barton, Northamptonshire (fig. 29 (#ulink_da7cab52-27c6-583f-85b6-9353f3102ea9)), is another example of a magnificent church conceived and built by a Saxon noble. What is now a parish church originally had its nave on the ground floor of the tower and a small chancel to its east. The floors above the nave are referred to as a belfry; the term today is solely associated with bells but in Middle English it meant something like ‘place of security’. This was perhaps where relics, vestments and plate presented to the church by its patron were stored.
Late Saxon stone-built church towers were not only status symbols and strong rooms for their patrons but were also linked to the evolving church liturgy. In the development of parish funeral rites the use of bells became increasingly important. Bells were rung as the body left the church as well as when it reached the graveside, drawing God’s attention to the prayers of the faithful and sending the deceased’s soul forth to heaven.
Some belfries, such as the one at St Peter’s, Barton, were topped with timber spires. None of these survives today, but at St Mary’s, Sompting, Sussex, the late Saxon spire was rebuilt in the 14th century to the same pattern (fig. 30 (#ulink_6d5adad2-9aae-5c3b-a7c3-3c9d96ea9648)). Typically, such spires were supported by a central mast resting on a horizontal beam on the tower top; they were almost all shingled and had a characteristic shape known as a Rhenish helm. This type of pinnacle, and the central mast construction, link the design of these spires to those of Carolingian Europe.
Fig. 30 St Mary’s, Sompting, Sussex. Although this church has a 14th-century spire, it captures the appearance of late Saxon examples. Like both St Peter’s, Barton (which would have had such a spire) and All Saints’, Earls Barton, stone is used on rubble walls like timber.
It is not known how many local churches were built by Saxon lords before the Conquest, but the majority of churches around which the parish system formed were in existence by around 1120. In total they numbered about 6,000 to 7,000 buildings. This was a major change to people’s way of life and to the appearance of the countryside. Previously, people had travelled perhaps as far as ten miles to one of approximately 800 minster churches to worship. Now, for most, there was a church in their village or town.
Building Techniques and Materials
As this chapter has demonstrated, building in England begins to diversify and become more complex from the reign of Alfred the Great. This was a process that was driven by richer, better-informed and more powerful patrons. According to King Alfred’s contemporary biographer, the king ‘did not cease … to instruct … all his craftsmen’, and King Eadred (946–955) specially went to Abingdon Abbey ‘to plan the structure of the buildings for himself. With his own hand he measured all the foundations of the monastery exactly where he decided to raise the walls.’ A manuscript from about the 1030s shows Anglo-Saxon craftsmen at work on a complex building (fig. 32 (#ulink_43488b09-b854-5a03-992e-fd1d630c39db)), with a spectrum of craftsmen and skills.
Fig. 31 St Peter’s, Barton-upon-Humber. The tower and baptistery to its left date from just before 1000. The nave and porch to the right are late 13th-century. The Saxon tower was heightened in the later 11th century; before this date the tower was probably crowned by a timber spire very similar to that at Sompting (fig. 30 (#ulink_6d5adad2-9aae-5c3b-a7c3-3c9d96ea9648)).
The most important phenomenon must have been the rise of the anonymous (to us) master builder or architect. The Anglo-Saxons used the Latin term architectus, not to describe an architect in the modern sense but to describe people with creative responsibility for a structure. Early buildings such as Wearmouth and Jarrow (pp 34–5) could be erected with minimum skill and engineering, but as buildings became more sophisticated masons, carvers and quarry owners became crucial and the designers had a much more onerous task. It would have been impossible to build great churches such as Winchester Cathedral, or even smaller ones such as St Mary’s, Sompting, without drawings and small-scale timber models. Drawings might have been on parchment, but equally they might have been etched into large areas of plaster floor expressly laid for the purpose. In the 9th century masonry components began to be cut at the quarry, and so templates must have been made and passed to and fro. Late Saxon builders were still heavily reliant on salvaged Roman stone. St Peter’s, Barton-upon-Humber (fig. 31 (#ulink_42a6eade-986b-54a5-aa91-93b98b3d91cc)), is typical in that its stone dressings were constructed using blocks of millstone grit possibly taken from the nearby Roman site at Winteringham or from further afield in York. The crypt at Hexham Abbey, Northumberland, contains carved Roman ashlars with inscriptions, and the nearby tower at St Andrew’s, Corbridge, contains a reset Roman arch. In towns the ruins of Rome were upstanding and visible, and at Winchester, for instance, provided most of the materials necessary to construct the cathedral. In the late Saxon period it is likely that there were well-organised salvage contractors, perhaps acting under royal licence, deconstructing Roman ruins and selling on the materials for reuse.
Whilst masons were not numerous in early Saxon England, by 900 there must have been hundreds of craftsmen working in stone. The most skilled were re-cutting large Roman ashlars into window heads, balusters and quoins. Most, however, were little more than labourers. Given the relatively small number of stone buildings in Saxon England and the proximity of most to Roman ruins, the quarrying industry remained underdeveloped. Most Saxon quarries were merely shallow diggings producing huge quantities of rough rubble – the most common stone-walling material. Rubble walls could be built with a small number of technicians and a large number of unskilled labourers; such walls also relied on the skills of joiners rather than masons. Rubble was mixed with mortar and shovelled into timber shuttering; a third of the mix was mortar and this had to dry before another layer of rubble mix could be added on top. Sometimes levelling courses were put between layers of rubble, and these were often of Roman brick or tile, or perhaps herringbone masonry. Corners were now and then strengthened and straightened by stone quoins, this being known as long-and-short work. A church tower such as St Katherine’s, Little Bardfield, Essex, was entirely built of rubble in diminishing stages. Here not even the window openings had stone dressings.
Most rubble walls were originally plastered inside and out, concealing the original construction method. This provided a canvas for surface decoration as seen at towers such as All Saints’, Earls Barton, or St Peter’s, Barton-upon-Humber (figs 29 (#ulink_da7cab52-27c6-583f-85b6-9353f3102ea9) and 31 (#ulink_42a6eade-986b-54a5-aa91-93b98b3d91cc)). This decoration, whilst imitating Roman arcades and pilasters, was easily applied and constructed using the principles of joinery. Even the baluster window openings at All Saints’ were conceived in the language of wood turning rather than masons’ work.
Thus the role of carpenters in construction was crucial. They built the shuttering for wall construction and scaffolding as the building rose, in addition to the roofs (many of which were covered in timber shingles), doors, windows, balconies, staircases and other internal fittings. Moreover, the decoration of these structures was imagined in the mind of a carpenter not a mason. Finally, it is vital to acknowledge the increasingly important role of the smith in construction. Smiths were highly valued, largely through their role of arming men in a military society. Yet buildings increasingly demanded both decorative ironwork and more functional bars, cramps and hinges.
Fig. 32 God witnessing the building of the tower of Babel; a manuscript from St Augustine’s Monastery, Canterbury, Kent from the second quarter of the 11th century. This is a rare glimpse of Saxon workmen with their tools erecting a complex building (from The Old English Illustrated Hexateuch, c.1125–50, British Library. Shelfmark: Cotton Claudius B. IV, f. 19).
The Viking raids shook English society and stimulated the growth of the state. First the Mercians, then the West Saxons, mobilised labour and materials to reshape society and the very landscape of England. The country was divided into 32 shires, at least 20 of which took their names from burghs, which became centres of royal power and administration. Beneath these were smaller administrative units: hundreds in the south and west, and wapentakes in the north and east, the focus for justice and tax collection. The only exception was the north, which was only brought into the system after the Norman Conquest.
As the administrative matrix of England was created from above, so parishes formed from below. Instead of holding all the land themselves, kings granted it to their followers, who became the first generation of estate-owning English squires. These men built themselves fortified houses and founded churches and, across much of lowland England, this stimulated the move from dispersed settlements to villages. People’s religious focus and loyalty also moved from the minsters to new parishes in both town and country. The sense of identity these changes created is of huge importance; by 1000 it was not only England that existed but also a sense of Englishness among its inhabitants. These were big changes and they were accompanied by important architectural developments. Alongside a timber-building tradition that was part Roman and part Saxon, a vigorous stone tradition developed. In this, before the 1040s, English buildings were eclectic combinations of strong insular traditions, themselves established through a mix of Romano-British and Saxon forms – with influences from Carolingian Europe – producing an architecture that was wholly English.
There was, however, a strong underlying continuity. Although life had become more complex both economically and socially, rich and poor still lived in single-cell dwellings. Peasants, either in villages or in isolated houses or hamlets, lived in a single room in which they would cook, eat and sleep. Although their social and economic superiors had separate structures for communal entertainment, worship and cooking, they also lived in a single room, albeit constructed more robustly and decorated in the current fashion. This fact continued to be the foundation of everyday life for some centuries to come.
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Fig. 34 St Mary in Castro, Dover Castle, Kent. Standing next to the Roman lighthouse that dates from the early 2nd century is a Saxon church, itself substantially built of re-used Roman materials. It was once linked to the lighthouse which was probably used as its bell tower. Its location at the centre of an important fortified burgh together with high-level patronage meant that it was one of the most substantial churches of its age.
So the interior of Westminster Abbey was conceived as a spatial whole rather than an agglomeration of small compartments as in Saxon churches (fig. 33 (#litres_trial_promo)). Its walls, which in an earlier Saxon church would have been a solid mass of masonry acting as a vast canvas for painting, now became an organised system of superimposed arches raised in tiers one above the other. The basic principle of the design was that each arch should be visibly supported by a column (or half-column) and a capital. This produced a clustering of vertical shafts round the piers that visually broke up the hard forms of the structure. The arches themselves no longer had simple square sections but displayed a range of shapes created by the addition of extra rolls and mouldings.
Equally, the plan of the church and abbey buildings at Westminster became the model for the layout of a monastery well into the Middle Ages (p. 98, figs 109 (#litres_trial_promo), 175 (#litres_trial_promo)). The cross-shaped – or cruciform – church had a large eastern apse and smaller subsidiary apses on the short arms. There was a tower at the crossing and smaller towers containing stair turrets. The conventual buildings (the abbey’s domestic structures) were to the south, with the cloister in the corner between the south transept and the nave, and a chapter house with an apsidal end on the east side. There was a dormitory on the east side and a refectory on the south. Who conceived this new building for Edward will never be known, although the identity of the three most important figures is recorded: two had English names; the third appears, perhaps, to be German. In architecture stylistic change is normally more than a whim of the designer. In the case of Westminster Abbey, Church reform was an important factor (pp 73, 76); the new monastery, in common with its sister buildings in mainland Europe, was to be a model for reformed Benedictine monasticism. Edward’s political and dynastic ambitions have already been mentioned, as has his wealth, but we should never discount the sheer fascination and enjoyment of building things in a new way – and late Saxon Westminster was new and shocking to anyone who saw it.
Fig. 35 Holy Trinity, Great Paxton, Cambridgeshire, the nave arcade; a mid-eleventh century example of compound piers with bulbous cushion capitals.
In the 1050s local churches began to display similar architectural forms to Westminster and a much stronger spatial unity. At St Mary’s, Stow-in-Lindsey, Lincolnshire, the transepts and crossing of a large minster church of c.1055 still dominate the small village. It is one of the first generation of buildings in which the Anglo-Saxon porticus had transformed itself into a fully fledged transept. The crossing tower at Stow would probably have been made of timber, but at St Mary in Castro, Dover, the masonry crossing tower survives (fig. 34 (#ulink_29e5d1e4-4b43-52e9-886e-860e7929a792)), albeit much restored. A third church, Holy Trinity, Great Paxton, Cambridgeshire, not only has transepts and a crossing, but its nave has aisles with an arcade of compound piers (fig. 35 (#ulink_f7ec4e63-c44f-5701-8c88-140322135491)). This small group of churches might once have been part of a larger family experimenting with new forms and spatial concepts, but it is likely that these architectural adventures were confined to the highest level of patronage; Great Paxton and Dover might have had been commissioned by the king, while Stow was founded by Earl Leofric and his wife Godgifu (Lady Godiva).
Fig. 40 Freestanding bell tower at St Mary’s, Pembridge, Herefordshire. This late 14th-century tower is supported internally by eight mighty oak posts forming a square. They are braced diagonally and horizontally up to the pyramidal roof. Though this is a much later example, the footprints of such massive timber constructions have been excavated and dated to the 11th and 12th centuries.
Two buildings started by William, however, were – the White Tower, London, and its sister in Colchester. These colossal structures were palaces for the duke-made-king. They contained a suite of reception rooms and a large chapel in an overwhelming stone-built tower. Such towers had been built for rulers before in the Loire valley and, indeed, in Normandy itself, but not quite on this scale or to this level of sophistication. In fact, scale was integral to their purpose; the parapets of the White Tower were raised far above its roof line to create a more domineering silhouette (fig. 37 (#litres_trial_promo)). The population of London, as the largest and most important city, and that of Colchester, guarding the east flank of England from troublesome Scandinavia, would be in no doubt that their new king was a mighty and determined master. Yet these were sophisticated residences, too. They had fireplaces with chimneys, garderobes (latrines) and simple, bold architectural settings for thrones, tables and chairs. Furnished with rich textiles, brightly painted wooden furniture and sparkling with candlelit gold plate, these palatial towers were intended to be a pleasure to live in as well as a mighty image of royal power. The White Tower ranks as one of the most important buildings in English architectural history. Its direct influence was to be felt in the design of castles for more than a century and its effects on London continued for more than half a millennium.
Great Churches: The First Phase
In England and Normandy of the 11th century there was no hard distinction between Church and state. While the pope kept an eye on doctrine, lay rulers effectively governed their national Churches. Both William and Edward the Confessor were interested in Church welfare and reform, and welcomed a series of reforming decrees starting in 1049 that slowly transformed canon law and liturgy in Western Europe. William had promoted reform in Normandy from about 1050 through his chief religious advisor, the Italian abbot Lanfranc, one of the greatest intellectuals of his day, and when William sailed from Normandy in 1066 he did so under the banner of the pope. Once in England, William used his power of appointment and patronage ruthlessly. He appointed Lanfranc as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1070 and, in a series of councils between 1072 and 1076, the structure, governance and morals of the English Church were reformed.
This was as much a political as a moral crusade; with William’s support Lanfranc reorganised the boundaries of Saxon dioceses, moving cathedrals from the countryside to towns and ensuring that the diocese became, like the county, a unit of government control. So the Saxon cathedral at Dorchester-on-Thames moved to Lincoln, Selsey to Chichester and Elmham to Norwich, via Thetford. By the reign of Henry I there were 17 dioceses, with boundaries that remained nearly unchanged until the Reformation (fig. 41 (#litres_trial_promo)).
Fig. 41 English dioceses in 1100; several, such as Lincoln and York, were huge compared to their modern size.
Within a period of less than 50 years each of these dioceses was to have an entirely new cathedral, perhaps the largest and most ambitious programme in English architectural history. It is easy to imagine that this meant the invention of a new type and shape of church, but there was no simple change from ‘Saxon’ cathedrals to ‘Norman’ ones. The sixteen cathedrals built between around 1070 and 1130 were not identikit structures; each mixed stylistic and liturgical influences in its own way according to the preferences of its bishop, the resources available and local traditions. This had probably not been Lanfranc’s intention. He had hoped to abolish Anglo-Saxon forms and traditions, and bring the liturgical and architectural life of English cathedrals into line with the most advanced thinking on the continent. In this, Canterbury was to be the model. Lanfranc’s Canterbury Cathedral was the most derivative of all the great churches built after the Conquest. Lanfranc had been the abbot of St Etienne at Caen and had overseen the reconstruction of the abbey church there; his cathedral at Canterbury was closely modelled on his old church, right down to the precise dimensions of the transepts and nave. But this was not just an architectural importation. The archbishop set down the liturgical practices he wanted performed in his new country: the Decreta Lanfranci was to replace the Saxon Regularis Concordia (pp 44–5) as the liturgical rule book for the English Church. In composing this, Lanfranc, who had trained as a lawyer and taught logical disputation (dialectic), turned away from the showy, flowery customs of the Saxons and set out a more austere, simpler and more disciplined liturgy. Lanfranc did not have the authority to impose this on everyone, but soon at least 15 monastic houses followed his rules.
Other than a few fragments, Lanfranc’s cathedral at Canterbury has been completely rebuilt, but remarkably the liturgical arrangements implemented by him can still be appreciated by visiting the abbey church at St Albans, Hertfordshire, which was started in 1077 (fig. 42 (#litres_trial_promo)). Here there are three liturgical foci: the high altar at the east end; a choir altar for lay people facing the nave; and a huge crucifix (or rood) over the pulpitum (the screen that divided the choir from the nave). At St Albans, as at Lanfranc’s Canterbury, relics remained hugely important and, just as in Saxon churches, the organisation of large numbers of pilgrims had a major impact on the design. The most important relics were either in a crypt below the east end where pilgrims would not interfere with the daily round of monastic services, or, as at St Albans, east of the high altar in a screened enclosure. This definitively divided the church into the part for the monks (the screened-off choir) and the parts for the laity (the nave for services, the shrine at the east end for pilgrims).
Whilst a minority of churches followed the liturgical arrangements of Canterbury, most had a more sympathetic attitude to Saxon customs. Several new cathedrals preserved the idea of the westwork, providing a secondary focus at the west end. The most spectacular of these was at Lincoln, where the west end was a massy, semi-fortified bishop’s hall, echoing a Roman triumphal arch (fig. 38 (#litres_trial_promo)). At Ely, too, a great central tower and part of a western transept survives. We know that at Winchester there was a western structure, now lost. These same cathedrals, like Saxon ones, had extensive areas of first-floor liturgical space for processions and altars. It was possible to do an entire circuit in the broad first-floor galleries at Winchester, and its upper altars were approached by spiral stairs just as in Saxon churches (fig. 43 (#litres_trial_promo)).
Fig. 42 Abbey Church of St Alban, St Albans, Hertfordshire, reconstructed plan showing liturgical arrangements in around 1100: a) side altar; b) relic repository; A) high altar; B) matutinal altar; C) rood altar; S) shrine.
At Winchester one can still gain a good impression of what the interior of the first generation of post-Conquest cathedrals looked like. In the 11th century there was no such thing as a capital city; Norman kings governed as they moved around the country. Yet Winchester, as the seat of the kings of Wessex, had a claim to be the traditional seat of the English monarchy (p. 48). William seems to have acknowledged Winchester’s special status; he rebuilt the royal palace and constructed a castle. He was crowned at Winchester, too, for a second time, by two cardinals and a papal legate, and later his son Rufus was buried there. William also had a permanent treasury at Winchester, and at Easter time the cathedral was the location for one of the thrice-yearly royal crown wearings.
So it is not surprising that in 1070, when the Saxon Bishop of Winchester, Stigand, was deposed, the new bishop, Walkelin, resolved to rebuild the cathedral, emphasising the importance of the city and its royal associations.
Foundations were laid in 1079, and by the time it was finished it was the largest cathedral in Europe, its dimensions almost identical to those of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome (fig. 43 (#litres_trial_promo)). The church was cruciform, with transepts as wide as the nave. There were towers at the west end, on the corners of the transepts and over the crossing. Today only the transepts survive from Walkelin’s time (fig. 44 (#litres_trial_promo)), but here the essentials of the style of the new cathedral can be appreciated. Like the Confessor’s Westminster Abbey, the elevations are three storeys high: a main ground-floor arcade, a gallery above and, crowning that, a clerestory. These levels are tied together by mast-like shafts that rise to the roof. Within this the individual parts of the elevation are subordinated to the whole. The arches at gallery level, for instance, are contained within a larger arch and the whole bay is bounded by piers running from floor to ceiling. The conglomeration of shafts, which visually fragment the piers, disguises the fact that they are, in fact, huge, thick sections of wall supporting the galleries and clerestory above.
The Parishes
The period after the Conquest saw a huge shift in wealth from secular hands to the Church, a shift in landownership not equalled again until the reverse took place under King Henry VIII. Thus Norman landowners such as Robert and Beatrice, the landlords of Asheldham, Essex, endowed their church of St Lawrence by transferring its patronage to a local priory at Horkesley with sixty acres of land. Many such gifts were stimulated by the penitential ordinance of Easter 1067, which set out the penances owed by William’s men who had killed and maimed on English battlefields. Those who were unclear how many English they had slain had a choice: they could either do penance one day a week for life or endow a church. If you were rich the choice was easy.
This lent additional momentum to the rebuilding of timber churches in stone that had started around 1000 (p. 68). At Asheldham the timber church was replaced, the main street diverted and a burial ground formed. Asheldham church has now been rebuilt, but a small number of churches rebuilt soon after the Conquest have been preserved largely unaltered because of later depopulation. Such churches vividly capture the everyday experience of worship in the years immediately after the Conquest.
Fig. 43 Winchester Cathedral, plan at tribune (first floor) level. The cathedral, begun in 1079, had many affinities with its Saxon forebears: there were altars in the galleries and a tribune or royal pew at the west end. Spiral stairs led up to the gallery at several points. + indicates a side altar.
Fig. 44 Winchester Cathedral; the north transept. This precious surviving unaltered part of the cathedral shows the raw simplicity and power, almost crudeness, of the early Norman cathedral.
Fig. 45 St Margaret’s, Hales, Norfolk. This lovely church has a Saxon round tower that was heightened in the 15th century, but its nave and apsidal chancel date from the early 12th century.
Fig. 46 St Botolph’s, Hardham, West Sussex. The wall paintings here, done in 1120–30, were covered up in the 13th century and only re-discovered in 1866.
Most of these are two-roomed (or, more correctly, two-celled), with rectangular naves separated from the chancel by an arch. Most chancels originally had an apse but almost all were later rebuilt square-ended. In east Norfolk a couple of remote churches still retain their original apse, and perhaps the best among these is St Margaret’s, Hales. The round tower is later, but the apsidal chancel dates from before 1130 and retains some of its blank arcading (fig. 45 (#litres_trial_promo)).
Another group of well-preserved churches is in West Sussex. St James’s, Selham, could be Anglo-Saxon; its masonry and carving are clearly by Anglo-Saxon hands, although the likelihood is that it was built just before 1100. St Botolph’s, Hardham, miraculously retains its wall paintings of about 1120 that were whitewashed over and only rediscovered in 1866. The murals, painted in ochre and yellow, a typical Anglo-Norman bacon-and-egg palette, show St George slaying the dragon (the earliest such image in Britain), and wonderful figures of Adam and Eve (fig. 46 (#litres_trial_promo)). The halos are painted in green paint made by coating copper plates in urine and sealing them in a container for two weeks.
Although these small Norman churches are sometimes almost indistinguishable from their Saxon predecessors, the difference was the discipline that the Normans sought to bring to parish life. Lanfranc’s reforms subdivided dioceses into archdeaconries and deaneries to give greater supervision to individual parish priests. This was important, as most priests before 1000 were in minsters under close supervision; with the proliferation of local churches there were now hundreds of remote priests, poor, ill-educated (often illiterate), undisciplined and isolated. Some were drunkards, some said Mass armed, others had secular employment and many had wives. Almost all were English. Under the new regime more was demanded of them and greater discipline enforced. The life of the average clergyman was transformed in the century after 1066.
The Towns
The impact of the Norman Conquest on English towns was enormous, physically, economically and socially. Saxon lords who had lost their country estates lost their urban lands (burgages) too. In the place of English burgesses Norman landlords settled, and in the place of English town houses new castles, cathedrals and priories rose. Many of these, such as those at York and Winchester, were instigated by royal command; others were the random and illegal acts of new landlords. Norwich was already one of the largest towns in England in 1066 and was to become even more important when the see was transferred there from Thetford. By the time of the Domesday Book in 1086 almost half of the Anglo-Saxon town had been cannibalised for the Norman castle, cathedral and new housing. One hundred and thirteen houses were demolished for the site of the castle alone, and 32 English burgesses – bankrupted by the seizure of property and royal tax – fled the town.
As castles and cathedrals rose, existing towns were re-planned. At Richmond, Yorkshire, a vast castle covering 2 ½ acres was grafted on to a small, pre-existing settlement. Against the castle gate was laid out the market place, and on to this, in a D shape, the burgage plots of the townsmen (fig. 47 (#litres_trial_promo)). There is no doubt that Richmond was founded on the top of a cliff for military reasons, but the town was designed as an economic engine for Alan Rufus, who began the castle in 1070. Richmond was at the centre of a huge network of arable estates and soon became not only the principal market but also an industrial centre.
Fig. 47 Richmond, Yorkshire: plan of the town based on a map of 1773. There are two centres to this town, the original village core round St Mary’s Church on the east side and the semicircular castle borough to its west. Though the castle is perched on a dramatic cliff falling to the river Swale, the reasons for its location were as much economic as military.
Fig. 50 Peterborough Cathedral nave; the flat wooden ceiling dates from c.1230 and is painted with images designed to be read from the nave far below. Colourful, expressive and a precious survival, it never succeeded in architecturally drawing together the great arcades of 1160–90.
Fig. 51 Durham Cathedral nave, unlike Peterborough, is visually united by its vault. We don’t know who the designer was, but here force and splendour are coherently combined as nowhere else in medieval England. Rib vaults were first erected in the Durham choir in 1095 and were a ground-breaking advance of European importance. The ribs have their own structural integrity and the cells between are made of lighter material 12–18 inches thick.
The Anglo-Saxons had a rich tradition of carving in stone, but their sculptures were either freestanding or used as applied ornament, rather like a bejewelled clasp on a cloak. The new architectural forms developing in Normandy and England in the years around 1066 integrated sculptural decoration into architecture, and blended the roles of sculptor and mason. Architecture after 1066 introduced new opportunities for sculptural embellishment. Whilst Anglo-Saxon doorways were plain rectangular openings in plan, after the Conquest they were routinely recessed, with small columns and capitals supporting moulded arches. These often enclose a stone slab called a tympanum, which provided an opportunity for a virtuoso display of carving (fig. 53 (#litres_trial_promo)). Likewise the capital, a ubiquitous and essential element of the new style, was a vehicle for carving. The vault of Archbishop Anselm’s crypt at Canterbury rests on a forest of carved and decorated columns, each crowned with a sculpted capital; the best, such as the one showing a wyvern fighting a dog, are bursting with energy and motion (fig. 54 (#litres_trial_promo)). The style of these capitals is so close to the initial letters in manuscripts painted in the priory that they must have been designed by the same hands. These were exceptional; most capitals were of a type known as ‘cushion’, a squashed cube of stone that could be painted, carved or more usually left plain. These were rare in Normandy and, as used in England, were probably copied from Germany. They were easy to reproduce quickly in places where the skill, time or money was not available for anything more elaborate.
Fig. 52 Norwich Cathedral; the spectacular crossing tower was the last part of the cathedral to be completed in around 1140; it was erected only after the foundations of the crossing had been allowed to settle, thus avoiding the sort of collapse that had been experienced at Winchester or Ely. The turrets at the corners are part of the original conception – the spire was added in the 1480s.
Sculptural traditions after the Conquest, as with architectural ones, were cosmopolitan, and masons working on the great cathedrals blended influences from Normandy, Burgundy, the Loire, Germany and Scandinavia to produce a rich variety of forms. The most expressive example of this is a group of churches in Herefordshire. One of these, St Mary and St David’s, Kilpeck, displays 85 carved corbels, as well as carved door and window surrounds (fig. 53 (#litres_trial_promo)). Here a Scandinavian great beast with a snake-like body and a dragon’s head winds its way through the stems of a plant of Anglo-Saxon decorative origin.
Fig. 53 St Mary and St David, Kilpeck, Herefordshire, one of the most perfect 12th-century churches in England. The richness of its decoration, done in the 1130s, is due to the patronage of Hugh of Kilpeck, the Lord of the Manor who also built a castle next door and founded a nearby priory. The south door has a tree of life in its tympanum and otherwise is a writhing mass of dragons, birds, lions, serpents, with the addition of angels and a phoenix.
Fig. 54 Canterbury Cathedral, Kent. St Anselm’s Crypt was unaffected by the fire of 1174 and perfectly preserves the exuberance of the Canterbury masons in around 1100. The subject of most capitals is fighting beasts which give them a restless, writhing quality.
Despite our ability to visit many of these buildings, none gives the modern spectator anything other than a ghost of what was intended. Like Saxon churches, Anglo-Norman cathedrals were filled with colour and texture. Most important were wall paintings. At Canterbury Cathedral the apse of St Gabriel’s chapel was walled up in the late 12th century, preserving – untouched – a complete set of wall paintings only rediscovered in the 19th century. Here it is possible to gain some sense of the brilliance of the painters working in c.1130. The scenes, set out in bands and with strict symmetry, show the annunciations to Zachariah and the Virgin presided over by Christ in Majesty. Vast areas of cathedrals familiar to us as plain stone halls would have glowed with colour, walls would have been whitewashed and imitation masonry blocks outlined in red. Windows would have thrown a coloured glow onto all this splendour, as most were glazed in coloured glass. Along with the glass, almost every scrap of painted woodwork, embroidered textile and gilded metalwork that gave sparkle to early Anglo-Norman cathedrals has gone. Contemporary illuminated manuscripts are now our guide, in miniature, to the sensory delight of these great interiors.
The Establishment of Castles
William the Conqueror died knowing that the military conquest of England was complete and that a matrix of royal castles secured his power in its county towns. There were remarkably few new castles built during the following century; royal architectural attention had turned to Normandy, where the military imperative now lay. In England many castles, such as Canterbury, remained nominally in royal hands but in practice were under the control of constables or sheriffs. One still in royal hands was Norwich, newly elevated to the capital of a diocese.
Fig. 55 Norwich Castle Keep, though extensively repaired and restored by Anthony Salvin in 1835–9 its external elevations still exude the flamboyance and excess of the years around 1100.
Norwich, as we have seen, was England’s second town (p. 77), and the construction of a palatial tower there by William Rufus is a parallel to the White Tower in London. But the Norwich tower was more audacious. It was sited on a high artificial mound or motte, linked to an outer bailey by a giant arched bridge. The same masons worked on the tower and on the cathedral, and the architectural exuberance of Rufus’s reign is apparent in both. Although the tower has been refaced, a series of watercolours of 1796 shows a building without corner turrets, but with massive buttresses framing an intricately composed decorative façade. Inside, the plan centred on a great ceremonial hall lit by high windows.
These towers were very much a feature of the first generation of Norman overlords. There is scant evidence that the White Tower was ever used as a regular residence, and many, such as Norwich, had long interruptions in their construction. Others, such as Colchester, remained unfinished. The vastness of these structures, conceived in a militarised society for feasting, security and image, was becoming unnecessary as quickly as they were built. But the image of power they were able to convey remained a desirable and fashionable accessory for more than a century to come (p. 102). Two of Henry I’s courtiers demonstrate the allure of the great tower. In the 1120s Geoffrey de Clinton, chamberlain and treasurer to Henry I, was granted lands in Warwickshire, where he founded a castle and priory. The castle at Kenilworth was hugely ambitious and was bankrolled by the king, who wanted to establish it as a royal centre of power against the nearby Earl of Warwick, who was of doubtful loyalty. A great tower was erected and an inner courtyard enclosed around it by a wall. At Portchester, Hampshire, another Norman magnate, Hugh Pont de l’Arche, replaced the Saxon residential buildings inside the Roman walls in the 1130s with a square-plan great tower with a hall at first-floor level.
Building Materials and Technology
The 11th century saw a revolution in English building. The reconstruction of thousands of local churches in stone and, after 1066, the rebuilding of the cathedrals meant a huge expansion in all branches of stone production. The quantity of stone required to sustain this boom was colossal, perhaps even greater than that quarried by the Egyptians for the building of the pyramids. We have already seen that Saxon quarries generally only produced rubble and small quantities of cut stone, but the effects that architects were trying to achieve from the 1050s onwards demanded much more cut ashlar (i.e. rectilinear blocks). These ashlar blocks formed the internal and external structural walls, with an internal core of rubble mixed with mortar. Much of the expense of stone building was the cost of bringing it to site, so great efforts were made to secure stone locally. At Battle, Sussex, William the Conqueror first contemplated importing stone from Normandy for the construction of his abbey but found that stone could, in fact, be quarried nearby. This was ideal; in many instances, however, the solution was not so straightforward. In Kent, where the local building stone is less suitable for ashlar, Archbishop Lanfranc turned to other sources of stone for Canterbury Cathedral. Whilst the rubble core work could be extracted locally, ashlar came by sea from Caen in Normandy, Quarr on the Isle of Wight and from Marquise near Boulogne.
If stone had to be moved more than about 12 miles by land the cost of carriage exceeded the value of the stone and so it was better to bring it in by water, a slower but cheaper solution. Before the Conquest canals were cut to bring stone from the Peterborough area to Fenland abbeys. A sunken barge excavated at Whittlesey contained large blocks of Barnack stone perhaps destined for Ramsey. After 1066 many more waterways were dug and diverted to make the movement of stone easier. Much of the stone for Norwich Cathedral was brought by sea to Great Yarmouth and then put into barges that came right up to the cathedral by means of a new canal.
Whilst new sources of stone were found and old ones continued to be exploited, the plunder of Roman buildings continued. Lanfranc’s Canterbury also made use of Roman brick and tile, and in 1077 the abbot at St Albans found stockpiles of already salvaged Roman materials. Meanwhile, a cathedral such as Winchester, which was largely built of relatively local Quarr stone, made use of the masonry of its Anglo-Saxon predecessor.
Quarries were key to the building industry. Stone was not only extracted there, it was cut and carved. Blocks of ashlar, columns, bases and capitals were mass produced and shipped directly to the site, thereby avoiding the transport of stone that would end up as chippings at their destination. Working at a distance was, in principle, familiar, as the components of timber buildings were often cut remotely, transported and erected on site; but the precision needed for stonework was much greater. The dimension of each course of stone, for instance, had to accord with any decorative or structural elements in it. So ashlars had to be cut to different dimensions in the correct quantity. These details had to be carefully calculated and communicated to the quarry by means of written instructions and templates. The quarries therefore also became training schools, producing masons and carvers who could move to the great building sites, where they could learn to set stone and undertake some of the more exacting work that was done on the bench in masons’ lodges on site.
In Normandy as much as in England the quality of masonry improved markedly in the hundred years after the Conquest; larger blocks, tighter joints, finer carving suggest more skilled design, increasing proficiency among masons and better tools. It enabled the shift from the austerity of Winchester to the exuberance of Durham. Yet architecture after 1066 was as experimental as the Saxon work that preceded it. From 1000, people increasingly became used to seeing and experiencing stone buildings, but this should not obscure the fact that even after 1066 timber remained the most important and common building material. Although most churches were now built in stone, the first generation of castles – and almost all domestic, agricultural and industrial buildings – remained of timber. Stone buildings, too, contained huge quantities of timber; the earliest timber roof to survive intact is at St Mary’s, Kempley, Gloucestershire. It dates from soon after 1120 and comprises fifteen trusses, with sole-plates projecting into the church that were probably carved with animal heads.
Other fragments of early timberwork survive, including the unusual and handsome nine-bay balustrade of c.1180 at St Nicholas’s, Compton, Surrey, and a door of c.1050 in Westminster Abbey.
The construction of the great Norman cathedrals was overseen by masons who we would today call architects. After 1066 their names are increasingly known: Blithere at Canterbury, Robert at St Albans and Hugh at Winchester. These men understood the principles of engineering, not through the written word, but through observation and trial and error. They drew plans, sections and templates either on parchment, wood or on large plaster panels. The earliest English architectural drawing to survive (of c.1200) is at Byland Abbey, Yorkshire, where incised drawings on a floor slab and a wall are full-size sections of the west front rose window.
In addition to drawings, designers commissioned models and templates, either at reduced scale or sometimes full-size.
It has been said that by looking at buildings alone it would be impossible for a historian to guess that the Norman Conquest had taken place. In 1000 England’s architecture had already reached a turning point and the changes that came rapidly after 1066 had been in embryo since the 1050s at the latest. Yet without doubt the Conquest hugely accelerated architectural change. The building and craft industries quickly developed and diversified, and by 1130 almost everyone could experience stone architecture in their own locality. The great Saxon estates had been broken up and, as well as the great magnates, there was now a large class of middling landowners who aspired to build themselves homes and churches.
The severe unsullied monumentality of early Norman buildings as seen in the transepts of Winchester or the elevations of the White Tower lasted merely a generation; they soon gave way to something more florid and playful. Likewise the reforming aspirations of the Norman churchmen were diluted and what remained was an English compromise. As the first generation of Normans died out, England’s architecture was already looking very different to anything in their former homelands. Indeed, the men and their families were feeling different, too. They might not have been able to express it in 1130, but the Normans and their architecture were becoming English.
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As the second generation of Normans felt more English, so the great cathedrals, abbeys, castles and houses then under construction became increasingly distinct from their counterparts in France.
The Normans and the English
Many thought the death of Henry I in 1135 a calamity. He was the Conqueror’s last surviving son and was outlived by only one legitimate child, Matilda. Matilda was his agreed successor but his nephew Stephen darted across the Channel and was crowned before he could be stopped. This led to a period of disorder and uncertainty, often called the Anarchy, which was only resolved by Stephen’s death and the accession of Matilda’s son, Henry II, in 1153.
Henry II had huge strength of character, boundless energy, and a determination to re-establish order and the rule of law. His court was cosmopolitan and, through his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, he presided over territories from Scotland to the Pyrenees. Henry was not a Norman king; he had Anglo-Saxon ancestry through his mother, and of his eight great-grandparents only William the Conqueror was Norman. But it was not only the monarchy that was no longer Norman. Families whose ancestors had arrived with the Conqueror had begun to see themselves as English; while the first generation of newcomers had usually been buried in Normandy, by the 1150s their children and grandchildren were buried in England.
A sense of Englishness also becomes increasingly apparent in the work of a generation of historians writing between about 1120 and 1150. Henry of Huntingdon, for instance, set out to write the history of ‘this, the most celebrated of islands, formerly called Albion, later Britain, and now England’. His History of the English continued up to his own time and explained that the past victories of the Normans, including the Conquest of 1066, were now English history. This was in many respects true. The Norman ruling elite had married English women, adopted English laws and customs, assimilated native administrative structures, appropriated English history as their own and made pilgrimages to the shrines of Anglo-Saxon saints. In fact, although they didn’t speak English as their first language, the third generation of Normans were now Englishmen.
Despite Henry II’s strength and success, he, no more than William the Conqueror, could control events after his death, and his sons Richard and John frittered away the territories and powers amassed by their father. Yet in many senses the reigns of Henry’s sons saw a further reinforcement of English identity: King Richard’s absence in 1191; the loss of Normandy in 1204; the interdict of 1208 (when the pope banned the administration of the sacraments in England) and the failed invasion of England by Prince Louis of France in 1216 – all these led to increasing insularity and even xenophobia.
This reinforcement was of great importance for the development of English architecture in the century or so after 1130. The growing wealth, self-confidence and identity of the English ruling class led to an energetic patronage of architecture. Magnates reorganised their estates, built themselves castles, and endowed churches and monasteries; bishops reconstructed their cathedrals and abbots built new abbeys. The style in which these buildings were constructed was ambitious, original and, with hindsight, English.
Old Principles, New Fashions
The 1150s, 60s and 70s were a period of stylistic experimentation. New currents of design from France, mixed with native decorative and structural traditions, produced some of the most inventive and lively buildings ever constructed in England. Contemporaries recognised this but might have described what was happening in different terms to us. For them, architectural language was important as it expressed hierarchy. In the Middle Ages most high-status architecture was about the ritualised display of power: ceremony, ritual and liturgy were the driving forces behind the appearance of buildings. Their structure and decoration expressed social, economic and religious hierarchies, and so the architectural setting of an activity, whether it be dining or praying, had to match its importance – and the importance of the people who were doing it.
This could be achieved through progressive intensity of decoration, the least important places being plain and the most important richly decorated, or through association, either with past activities or people, or with Christian Rome. Various parts of buildings – and whole buildings themselves – were thus always accorded a status through their architecture. So, for instance, as the most important of all medieval secular spaces was the great hall, this was singled out for special treatment. The magnificence of the carving around the doorway to Bishop Puiset’s Hall at Durham Castle, and the arcading in the room above (fig. 56 (#litres_trial_promo)), proclaim them to be of the highest importance. English great halls, unlike some of their continental contemporaries, were always roofed in timber rather than vaulted in stone, a sign of status and reflecting a tradition going back to Roman Britain.
In religious buildings presbyteries and shrines were the most important areas, and, even in the most humble parish churches, were given significance by their decoration. Antiquity conferred status, too. When the Lady Chapel at Glastonbury burnt in 1184 its replacement included Anglo-Norman (or earlier) stylistic elements to emphasise its importance and venerability. We have already seen that references to ancient Rome were a way of emphasising hierarchy (p. 69). When the east end of Canterbury Cathedral was rebuilt the great Purbeck piers were given Roman proportions, bases and capitals, echoing the early Christian basilicas of Rome (pp 94–5).
Fig. 58 Byland Abbey, Yorkshire; reconstruction of the nave as first built. The stalls for the lay brothers were integrated into the lower part of the nave arcade. The prominent rose window, 26ft across, was an architectural elaboration that the earliest Cistercians would have disapproved of.
By 1170 work had started on Byland Abbey, the most ambitious Cistercian church of its age. This was no austere box. The walls were enlivened by three levels of pointed arches supporting a timber barrel vault; the west end was illuminated by a great rose or circular window. (fig. 58 (#ulink_b7ea88f3-1aa1-5483-a856-11fa1c18558f)). But the architects of Byland were not using Gothic features as an alternative structural system like the French; they used them as an alternative form of decoration. This was the first manifestation of English Gothic, retaining the structural tradition of Anglo-Norman buildings but adopting the decorative vocabulary of Gothic architecture.
Fig. 59 Canterbury Cathedral, Kent, looking east; the choir of 1175–84. Its principal architectural characteristic is the height of the main arcade, more than half the height of the whole elevation; above are clusters of polished black Purbeck marble shafts used for the first time in England. These lead the eye up to the high vaults, in six parts, with decorated ribs that complement the beautifully carved capitals of the arcade far below. Beyond is the presbytery (fig. 60 (#ulink_b4f83b24-dd19-5398-b773-5cb4bc510923)).
The adoption of Gothic detailing at Byland and then at York Minster was very influential in the north, but the repercussions of events at Canterbury between 1170 and 1175 were of much greater national impact. The most famous murder in English history took place on 29 December 1170 in Canterbury Cathedral; its victim was Archbishop Thomas Becket. Within days miracles were reported. The dead archbishop rapidly became a martyr and, within three years, a saint. This was a turning point in the history of Canterbury. Another took place eighteen months after Becket was canonised: the gutting of Archbishop Anselm’s early 12th-century choir by fire. This gave the Canterbury monks the opportunity to create a spectacular new setting for their saint and his relics. After consulting a number of architects, the monks chose a Frenchman, William, who came from the French city of Sens, the location of a new cathedral built in the Gothic style. As the monks wanted to ensure continuity with their much-loved building, he decided to retain the crypt and the lower, undamaged, parts of the choir and construct inside it a new east end.
So what was new about William of Sens’s choir (fig. 59 (#ulink_648ae505-f1ef-5301-8798-aab3fb8cd3c8))? Compared with the Anglo-Norman work of the nave the arcades were much taller, with gently pointed arches squeezing those of the gallery above. The vault springs from a low point and its ribs are decorated with dog-tooth motifs. The piers themselves were more slender and furnished with carved capitals. Polished limestone was used to enliven the elevations. William of Sens fell from his own scaffolding while supervising the construction of the highest vaults over the eastern crossing. He tried to carry on the work from his sick bed but had to return to France. His replacement was another William, known as ‘the Englishman’. He not only completed the repair of the fire damage but was commissioned to build an enlarged chapel to the east of it to replace the Trinity Chapel, the crypt of which contained the relics of St Thomas. This was to have two parts: the Trinity Chapel itself and beyond that a circular shrine called the Corona, where the severed crown of the martyr’s head was housed. The Englishman continued the main features of the choir through to the new chapel, which, being raised above a higher crypt, had shorter piers and much more satisfying proportions (fig. 60 (#ulink_b4f83b24-dd19-5398-b773-5cb4bc510923)). The big windows were made possible by some of the earliest visible flying buttresses anywhere. The stained-glass scenes of the life of Christ and the miracles of St Thomas Becket are still largely intact, held in place by geometric iron frameworks (ferramenta). Their colours intensify the effect of the polished limestone columns, the use of which becomes progressively denser as the visitor moves eastwards. In the chapel the arcade piers are doubled-up and entirely made of Purbeck marble, while those nearest the shrine are of a hard pink-and-cream marble imported from abroad.
Fig. 60 Canterbury Cathedral, Kent. The presbytery was the culmination of the cathedral and the location of St Thomas’s shrine from 1220 until its destruction in 1538. The use of polished limestone made a huge impact on both pilgrims and masons from elsewhere. The survival of the original glass is nothing short of miraculous.
Fig. 61 Wells Cathedral, Somerset; the nave is now dominated by the scissor braces at the crossing added in the 14th century. Here the arcade and the clerestory are practically the same height and the triforium becomes a decorative band containing a denser rhythm of arches between the two. The effect of this was to abolish the rhythm of the bay structure and emphasise the great length of the cathedral, now, of course, interrupted by the scissor brace.
The experience of moving eastwards through Canterbury Cathedral towards the Corona is breathtaking. It is necessary to ascend steps over both Lanfranc’s and William the Englishman’s crypts to enter the extraordinary world of polished stone designed to evoke the heavenly Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation. A pilgrim would have felt as if he had been shrunk and placed inside an enamelled reliquary like the Becket casket in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Canterbury was to be influential, not so much through the details of its style or construction (although these were important), but for its lavishness. It was the mother church of England and set the standard for all that came after, particularly in its extravagant use of polished stones. Although Canterbury has more directly French features than any other English building of its age, its successors created a very different look, much more English and, in a sense, much more original. The rebuilding of Wells Cathedral was started soon after 1175 as a deliberate bid to replace Bath as the centre of the diocese of Somerset. It was sufficiently complete to be dedicated in 1239. Over a 60-year period it had at least three architects, all of whose genius must be recognised; for the building that they created was of huge originality and skill. It was the first building in England, if not in the whole of Europe, to be built with pointed arches throughout. But more important was the way the arches were handled. The overwhelming sensation gained by a visit to Wells is the horizontal effect of the nave created by three self-contained strata of arches (fig. 61 (#ulink_6797df39-269d-572e-8441-24e47b659f08)). The lowest, the nave arcade, is supported by massive cross-shaped piers faced with 24 shafts bunched in groups of three. In Anglo-Norman cathedrals there was a substantial gallery above the nave arcades but at Wells there is the semblance of a triforium, which in French buildings is a much narrower passage in the thickness of the wall, fronted by an arcade. This arcade runs the entire length of the nave as a consistent band of decoration without vertical interruptions. Above is the clerestory, with the ribs of the vault supported on stubby shafts.
Fig. 62 Lincoln Cathedral; the vault of St Hugh’s Choir of about 1200, the first instance anywhere of a rib that ran along the ridge of the vault. To this rib join ribs that have little structural necessity and do not define the bay structure – in other words, they are pure decoration.
Ideas from Canterbury and Wells fed into the greatest of early English Gothic churches: the cathedral at Lincoln. In 1185 a vault in the east end of the cathedral collapsed and the following year Henry II appointed Hugh of Avalon as the new bishop. These two events led to a rebuilding of the eastern parts, largely completed by the time of Hugh’s death in 1200. This probably finished the original plan; but work continued and by about 1250 the whole cathedral, save the Norman west front, had been rebuilt. Lincoln was rebuilt in its own image. This was a cathedral that proclaimed its place at the top of the hierarchy, together with Canterbury and York. As a result nobody stinted on money, scale or decorative effect. Lincoln set out to dazzle – and dazzle it does.
The earliest part to be rebuilt was itself replaced in 1255 by the Angel Choir, but St Hugh’s choir and eastern transepts remain. The first thing that strikes the visitor is the use of polished limestone in direct imitation of the work at Canterbury. The second thing is the form of the choir vault. The choir is still built with the thick walls, but the piers appear less massive than at Wells and the shafts from the vaults divide the elevation into bays. But the vaults do not reinforce the bay structure. For the first time there is a central rib running the length of the vault. Onto this, at seemingly random points, the transverse ribs join, creating a pattern that at first defies comprehension (fig. 62 (#ulink_69c6f377-8437-58ee-a44c-02d0c6f6d832)). This was not structural necessity, it was pure decoration. So at Lincoln ribs are used for the first time in an English way – as surface ornament. The nave vaults are slightly later and less idiosyncratic, but richer, denser, more complex and symmetrical. They succeed in making the vault as interesting and lively as the walls, bringing the whole together in a restless sea of ornament. The nave elevations below have extraordinary depth. This is not only achieved by passages in the clerestory and triforium but by the 27ft span of the arches, allowing a panorama of the aisle walls, which are deeply moulded with blind arcading. The effect is accentuated by the nave piers, each pair of which is subtly different.
The design of Lincoln, extraordinarily experimental and hungry for novelty, had a huge impact on the next two generations of English builders. In 1817 the Regency architect, Thomas Rickman, christened the style of Lincoln ‘Early English’, a term that nicely expresses the essential insularity of what was being built. The great churches described above, and the many others that followed them, were individualistic and original, taking French ideas and turning them into a decorative vocabulary unique to England. This concentration on elaboration and surface ornament was a development from the Anglo-Saxons through the late Anglo-Norman monuments into the first Gothic structures. There is a real sense in which, by 1220, a national style had been formed.
Fig. 63 Castle Acre Priory, Norfolk the west front started in c.1130. Richly decorated with blind arcading; there were originally four tall windows in the middle, replaced by a single window in the 15th century.
Monasteries
The Norman Conquest did not lead to an immediate surge in the building of new monasteries. Patrons were too uncertain of their hold on England to invest in expensive new projects, preferring instead to donate English land to Norman monasteries. A small number of new monasteries were founded by the king and his richest followers. Of these perhaps the best preserved and most important is at Castle Acre, Norfolk. The small village of Castle Acre still retains the layout of an early Norman town. The house of its owners, the Warenne family, partly survives within the huge earthworks of the largely later castle, fragments of the town walls still stand, and just outside them within its own walled precinct lie the impressive remains of the priory. Land for the priory was given by William II de Warenne in 1090 but the church was only consecrated between 1146 and 1148, and the west front, the most famous and beautiful of all late Anglo-Norman façades, was not finished until the 1160s (fig. 63 (#ulink_4cda550d-c94c-5f8f-9f45-fdddb37ab826)).
At its heart was the cloister, the great communal space of the priory. Here, between services, the monks could read, drawing books from a large cupboard on the east side. Regulated periods of Latin conversation were also permitted here, as were more mundane tasks such as hair cutting and washing clothes. Abutting the south transept was the chapter house, where the monks gathered each day to listen to the Rule of St Benedict being read and to attend to community business. This was the boardroom of a monastery and it was decorated to match its status. The walls at Castle Acre had interlaced blind arcading painted in bright colours.
The remainder of the east side of the cloister was occupied by a vast dormitory. This was raised up on a vaulted undercroft and at its south end had a remarkable two-storey latrine (or reredorter) with 24 seats. The monks slept fully clothed and descended by a stair to the church for the night-time offices. Below, in the day room, amidst the piers of the vaults, monks in winter could work and read. Detached from the dormitory, to the east was the infirmary, set aside for old or ill monks who received special care and rations.
The south side of the cloister contained the refectory, large enough to seat the whole community. This was a ground-floor room, which in secular buildings might be called a great hall. It had a dais for the prior and a pulpit from which lessons were read during meals. To its east was the warming house where, in deepest winter, a fire was lit on an open hearth in the middle of the room. To the west of the refectory was the kitchen; in the 12th century, monks cooked here in rotation. The vaulted ground floor west of the range next to the kitchen was used for storage of food and wine. Above was the priory guest house and a separate room for the prior. Next to this was the prior’s chapel.
Castle Acre was a Cluniac priory following the rites and rituals of the Benedictine Abbey of Cluny in Burgundy. Other orders varied the layout of their buildings and the structure of their governance, but, broadly speaking, from the early 12th century most full-size monastic houses of whichever order were governed and laid out much as at Castle Acre.
From the 1130s large numbers of new monastic houses were founded in England, 120 in the reign of Stephen and, by the end of Henry II’s reign, a further 30 to 40. By Henry II’s death in 1154 there were around 500. Most of these were new orders and numerically the largest group within them were the canons.
Unlike most monks, canons were ordained priests who spent some of their time outside the monastery working among local people. There were various groups of canons but the largest were the Augustinian (or Austin) Canons, who eventually had about 200 houses in England. Their buildings were usually modest – although they could be large – and often would share a parish church. Lilleshall Abbey, Shropshire, is still a parish church, but is fairly typical of one of the larger Augustinian priories, built in the 1190s and occupied by ten or eleven canons.
Fig. 64 Rievaulx Abbey, Yorkshire: the east end of the abbey church as rebuilt in 1220–50. The early commitment of the Cistercians to simplicity in life, liturgy and architecture had given way to an intense commitment to the beauty of holiness. The original altar stone can be seen in the centre of the presbytery; behind this was Airled’s shrine and behind this additional altars for the community.
Fig. 65 The Abbey church at Rievaulx, Yorkshire as built 1147–67 showing the liturgical divisions. The monk’s choir was effectively a church within a church.
The most architecturally ambitious order was, however, the Cistercians. Their abbey at Rievaulx is now the most important, interesting and evocative ruined monastery in England. It was founded by Walter Espec, a rich and powerful baron at the court of Henry I who gave 1,000 acres to the new Cistercian order to build a house two miles from his castle at Helmsley, Yorkshire. The first abbot, William, enlarged the community from 30 to 300 in a little over a decade, but its fame and success came through its third abbot, Aelred, probably England’s greatest medieval churchman, who doubled the size of the community to 650 (most of whom were lay brothers and servants).
The abbey church lay at the heart of monastic life, the focus of the Opus Dei (the work of God), the eight daily services and the celebration of Mass. Early Cistercian churches were divided into three (fig. 64 (#ulink_c0df127a-9533-53e0-8ce0-f48e6bf38119)). The western part was reserved for the lay brothers, who were responsible for the heavy manual work of the abbey. They took simpler vows and attended fewer services. Then there was the retro-choir, divided from the lay brothers by a screen topped with a rood (crucifix); this was reserved for old and infirm monks unable to withstand punishing attendance in the choir day and night. At the east end and under the crossing was the monks’ choir, the hub of the church. The presbytery was in a stubby east end flanked by altars. This arrangement served Rievaulx well for a century, but between 1220 and 1250 a huge new east end was built in the Gothic style. Cistercian churches began extending their east ends from the 1180s and, as we have seen, this was happening in many cathedrals too (p. 96). The work was done with great richness and expense, and reflected the incredibly successful exploitation of the abbey’s estates by successive abbots. As at many cathedrals, Rievaulx’s new east end was built to contain a shrine for their very own saint, Aered (fig. 65 (#ulink_76fd28fa-c786-5443-bad6-9700b22a107b)). This shrine, which was covered in silver and gold, explains the magnificence of the new architectural work that otherwise might have seemed too lavish for an order devoted to simplicity. The new east end cannot only be explained as an expression of architectural hierarchy, for by the 1220s other factors were involved. There were now few, if any, lay brothers, and so the nave was sealed from the choir by a huge stone pulpitum (screen) and used mainly for processions. Second, despite resisting it at first, the Cistercians were now prepared to offer Masses for the souls of donors (votive Masses), and this meant that more private chapels were required. As about one in three monks was ordained, there were probably 35 priests able to celebrate Mass, for whom five chapels against the east wall would have been a welcome addition.
Where the Rich and Powerful Lived
Up to the 17th century kings and their households were constantly on the move. Organising the royal itinerary was a precise task as monarchs spent particular times of the year in specific places, above all during the great religious feasts of Christmas, Easter and Whitsun. They would also want to appear at provincial residences to reinforce their judicial, administrative and military policies and, crucially, to hunt in the royal forests. Royal houses and castles formed the points around which the court gyrated (fig. 66 (#litres_trial_promo)). The king’s preference dictated where they went, what was repaired, built or extended, and when. In each county the sheriff was responsible for organising royal construction work. However, just as bishops and deans employed architects to oversee big projects, so the king had ingeniatores (engineers or designers) in his household. The first of these about whom we know anything was an Englishman called Ailnoth in the 1150s; under him were the master craftsmen, the masons, carpenters and others – all highly paid technical experts, not just workmen. Ailnoth was responsible for Westminster, the most important royal house in England up until 1512, although the precise layout of the palace is unclear before the reign of Henry III (p. 144). The provincial civil residences of the Crown fell into two groups: those large manors that we can legitimately call palaces, such as Clarendon, Wiltshire, and Woodstock, Oxfordshire; and smaller houses situated in royal forests that were used as hunting lodges, such as Writtle, Essex, and Kinver, Staffordshire. Clarendon was the largest and most important royal house in the west. It was excavated in the 1930s, and it is possible to walk through the fields and see substantial chunks of masonry still standing in front of spectacular views of Salisbury.
Fig. 68 Oakham Castle, Rutland; a very rare survival of a great hall of around 1190. It is built like a church with a central ‘nave’ and aisles, though without clerestory windows. The door was originally in the far right bay and the dormer windows are later additions.
Fig. 69 Dover Castle, Kent. Henry II’s Great Tower dominates the castle and is surrounded by a mighty curtain wall with 14 towers and two gates, one of which can be seen in this view. In the foreground are the 13th-century Norfolk Towers and the circular St John’s Tower, while in the background can be seen St Mary in Castro (fig. 34 (#ulink_29e5d1e4-4b43-52e9-886e-860e7929a792)).
While the disrupted reign of King Stephen saw less permanent castle construction, in the reigns of Henry II, Richard I and John this was the largest single item of royal expenditure, consuming ten per cent of royal income. There was serious purpose behind this. First, it was necessary to modernise the forts of the south coast as a protection against invasion, but also as a springboard for continental expeditions and to protect communication routes to the continent. Then it was necessary to protect England’s internal borders against the Scots and the Welsh. Perhaps most important of all was the lavishing of money on strategic royal castles inland. These had been established as the administrative, judicial and financial nodes of the kingdom, and many had become favoured royal residences too. All performed another crucial task, of emphasising royal lordship over both great and humble.
Few new castles were founded after 1130. As both prestige and warfare demanded buildings of stone, it was a period of rebuilding and reconstruction. For Henry II and his successors, the cultural and military value of a great tower was still unsurpassed and so, while many timber castles had their walls replaced in stone, the towers were in many cases a new addition. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Orford, Peveril and Scarborough castles all acquired great towers, but the last, largest and most expensive was at Dover, where Henry II spent £7,000 between 1180 and 1190. To put this in some sort of context, the total receipts of the royal exchequer in 1130 were £24,500. Dover has a continuous history of fortification back into the Iron Age and perhaps beyond, but no securely dated remains exist before the reign of Henry II. Henry erected his great tower on the highest point of the site surrounded by an inner defensive wall, with 14 projecting rectangular towers and two gates protected by a defensive outwork or barbican. This inner wall was itself guarded by the Iron Age earthworks around it and a short section of wall to the north-east (fig. 69 (#ulink_40af6032-0fa8-5e83-95dc-a953431d5864)). The great tower was a colossus: nearly square, 83ft tall, with walls between 17ft and 21ft thick. Its silhouette was designed to be seen from France. Inside it does not disappoint. The great tower, like most post-Conquest castle towers, was approached by a fore-building with steps ascending to a second-floor entrance (fig. 70 (#ulink_e58793c1-0226-512d-982b-628ff0f0513e)). Refinements in the Dover fore-building include a chapel on the stair, perhaps for giving thanks for a safe journey, a drawbridge, and a guard room by the entrance door. The main building was three storeys high. The ground floor was designed for kitchens and the two floors above contained two magnificent suites of rooms, one for the king on the second floor and another for guests below. Each had a hall and a chamber, and in the massive thickness of the walls were other subsidiary rooms, including garderobes. The king’s floor also had a lavish chapel for his private use. The rooms were architecturally unadorned. Colour and decoration were provided by murals and portable furnishings: hangings, furniture and plate.
It is worth dwelling on the great tower at Dover as it was the last in the line of great towers built after the Conquest. Henry II constructed it at a time when military engineering had moved away from square and rectangular towers to cylindrical ones. But this was no ordinary castle; it was built in a deliberately retrospective style to emphasise royal gravitas and dynastic durability. It was also a gateway to England, a place where the king could receive important visitors, many of whom were on their way to the new shrine of St Thomas at Canterbury Cathedral. So while this was a military building, it was also a palace and guest house cast in the traditional language of dynastic triumphalism.
Fig. 70 Dover Castle, Kent; the Great Tower: a) king’s hall; b) king’s chamber; c) guest chamber; d) guest hall; e) forebuilding, including chapel; f) chapel.
Dover was, of course, exceptional in both its scale and the thoroughness in which it was rebuilt. For many hundreds of other castles, rebuilding in stone took place piecemeal over a long period. In many instances timber palisades were replaced by stone walls, while the residential buildings inside remained of wood. This can be seen at Totnes, Devon, an example of a motte and bailey castle dominating an important trading settlement (fig. 71 (#ulink_10dad178-c71f-5591-87a2-349784b2d623)). It was founded, together with a priory, by Judhael of Brittany, a commander in the Conqueror’s south-west campaign. The timber palisades on top of the exceptionally large motte were rebuilt by his successors in around 1200. The arrangement of the domestic buildings inside cannot now be discerned, but at Restormel in Cornwall the whole plan can be read in a single visit. It is most impressive (fig. 72 (#ulink_76a539ef-537f-56a8-abb9-b4eef485ca72)). The kitchen, hall, lord’s chambers and guest rooms are all arranged inside the perfectly circular outer walls, with only the gatehouse and the chapel projecting outside the circuit. In the 12th century castles were never ordinary residences. Holding a castle proved that the owner was in royal favour with delegated authority to govern and dispense justice. The crown’s ability to take and hold castles, to raise them and demolish them, to grant them out and to take them back was central to the exercise of power. Constructing a new castle required royal permission, and if the king were ever to need it he had the right to requisition it at will. From the 1150s to the 1210s the balance of castle power shifted markedly towards the Crown. At the end of the chaotic reign of Stephen there had been 225 baronial and 49 royal castles. By 1214 there were only 179 baronial castles and the number of royal castles had risen to 93; a shift in ratio from 5:1 to 2:1.
Fig. 71 Totnes Castle, Devon. The motte is what we see today, although there was a bailey with a great hall and other buildings in it. The circular curtain wall was topped with crenellations with arrow slits. Within the wall was at least one domestic building.
Fig. 72 Restormel Castle, Cornwall was topped by a ring of buildings 130ft across: a) gate tower; b) kitchen; c) hall above; d) chambers above; e) chapel above; f) store; g) courtyard.
Getting About
From the 12th century oxen began to replace horses for pulling ploughs and, soon, for pulling carts. Horses could be much faster than oxen but required better roads. By 1066 the Saxon kings had done much to improve the road system and build bridges (pp 25 and 40), but during the 13th century many hundreds of new bridges were built; indeed, of the rivers that were bridged before 1750 almost all had been crossed by 1250. This was certainly a transport revolution but also an engineering one. The technology to build stone bridges was developed by the architects of the great cathedrals, abbeys and castles. Before 1100 most bridges were of timber, such as the impressive bridge excavated over the river Trent in 1993, but during the following century techniques were developed for building foundations underwater, resulting in some impressive feats of engineering. An early surviving bridge, although now tragically marooned in a roundabout, is in Exeter (fig. 73 (#ulink_7d08c0a1-3dbd-550f-9484-b419be4e5e3e)). It was completed by about 1200 and originally had 17 spans of round-headed and pointed arches. The arches were built on wooden piles driven into the bed of the River Exe and protected by triangular cutwaters jutting into the stream. Exeter is typical of a lowland bridge; upland bridges had to withstand flash floods and fast-running waters, and thus had much higher and wider spans. The main arches of Elvet Bridge in Durham, which span over 30ft, were erected in 1228. The bridge, which originally had 14 arches, was commissioned by the bishop and built by his masons. It incorporated chapels at either end (fig. 74 (#ulink_22651556-2841-5480-8587-98e2955d01f1)).
It was the location of bridges that determined the course of roads and stimulated their growth. During the 13th century there was a change from the idea of a road that simply went to the local market to the idea of a network serving the whole kingdom. This was stimulated by increasing trade, new ports and the economic activities of castles, cathedrals and monasteries. However, most importantly, towns could not grow without bridges and roads. Horse transport and a road and bridge network supported the rapid growth of towns such as London and Norwich that needed vast quantities of food, drink and firewood to survive. As a rough guide, a town of 3,000 people would need the produce of ten villages or over three square miles to support it, and all this had to be brought to town every day.
Finally, the growth of an effective road network made it easier to transport building materials. The reliance on cheap but slow water transport decreased as faster horse-drawn wagons took over as the principal means of moving material round the countryside.
Fig. 73 The medieval Exe Bridge, Exeter, Cornwall, built in 1200 through the efforts of Nicholas Gervaise, a wealthy merchant who was four times mayor of the city. Like many medieval bridges, it was endowed with property to provide an income for its upkeep.
Fig. 74 Thomas Hearne, view of Durham from the northeast c.1783. Elvet Bridge was rebuilt and extended in 1228 and incorporated St James’s and St Andrew’s Chapels, one at each end. In the background is the tower of the cathedral and, on a mound, the Castle Keep.
The Countryside
The Norman invaders came to exploit the English countryside. While they did not introduce a new system of social obligation on the population (Saxon lords had received all sorts of service from their dependants), the Conquest did result in the tightening and redefinition of the bonds of lordship. Norman landlords of the first generation were interested in labour obligations from their tenants, but later generations were more interested in cash from rents and fees, made possible by the fact that many tenants were generating a healthy cash surplus from agriculture by 1100. Villages were occupied by what we call peasants. The term is unfortunate as it gives the impression of poverty-stricken and down-trodden illiterates eking out a living from the soil. Villagers, who made up 80 per cent of the population, were in fact smallholders farming anything between 5 and 40 acres. Half held their land in villeinage; that is to say they owed their landlord payment, labour services and required permission to marry. The rest were freemen, who often had smaller landholdings. Villeins and freemen alike cooperated in the common-field system, where it existed (p. 54), but were also engaged in market activities: buying, selling and making money. By the 1180s the economic stability of the richer peasants started having an impact on the places in which they lived. This impact varied hugely across the country and even between adjacent villages. Dwellings were normally set in a banked or hedged toft of about a quarter acre within this (fig. 26 (#litres_trial_promo)). In some parts of the country – particularly the south-west – a single building or long house contained space at one end for people and at the other for animals. This arrangement was becoming less common by the 13th century; by then most tofts in the midlands and the south-east had a principal cottage grouped with a barn or granary and sometimes a byre. Richer peasants might also have a separate kitchen, a freestanding bake-house and even a dovecot or cart-house.
The crucial development in the period between about 1180 and 1320 was the introduction of various types of foundation, either for the full length of a building or just for its principal posts. The abandonment of earth-fast building (posts sunk in the ground) over most of England opened up the possibility for a variety of superstructures that in some parts of the country saw stone walls up to the eaves but more commonly saw a variety of timber structures resting on low or buried stone foundations. In the midlands, the west and north, most of these were crucks. A cruck is essentially an A-shaped truss made of large, slightly curving, timbers. A number of these could be erected on a timber base (or sole) plate and then be joined together at the top (ridge) and along their sloping side with beams called purlins (fig. 75a (#ulink_512a3674-4801-5c77-9e18-c56207ca79d6)).
Fig. 75 As with all issues to do with medieval construction, techniques were highly regionalised and are resistant to easy categorisation. Yet a) cruck; b) box frame and c) post and truss construction are the most common categories found in the Middle Ages in England.
Alternatively, walls could be constructed with a box frame. Simple upright beams were jointed into a sole plate and capped by a top plate on which the roof trusses rested – this method was more common in the east and south (fig. 75c (#ulink_512a3674-4801-5c77-9e18-c56207ca79d6)). A more sophisticated variation of this was the post-and-truss construction, essentially a timber-framed grid upon which the roof trusses rested, found in the west and south (fig. 75b (#ulink_512a3674-4801-5c77-9e18-c56207ca79d6)). In all these cases the gaps were filled with wattle and daub – to make walls impervious to the elements – and the roof covered with thatch. Windows were small, glassless and furnished with shutters. Chimney stacks were rare, and fires would be lit in grates or boxes on the beaten-earth floors.
Most of these constructional systems resulted in framed units of about 15ft, making most houses either 30ft or 45ft by 15ft wide. So although peasant houses were dark and smoky, they were not smaller than workers’ housing in Victorian cities.
They were also more private than might be imagined. Although the whole basis of village life was communal, especially where common-field systems predominated, the tofts – with their hedges and banks, which often rose to head height – and cottages with stout, locked doors, gave peasant families individuality and privacy. At Steventon, Berkshire, there are a number of cruck-built cottages of about 1270 to 1280 associated with a medieval causeway, but surviving peasant houses of this date are rare and most of our knowledge comes from archaeology.
These cottages could not have been built by unskilled labour. It was necessary to employ a carpenter and have access to properly cut timber showing that by the 13th century there were thousands of carpenters working in villages as well as for the aristocracy, Crown and the Church. Nor did a house come cheap. It is likely that a straightforward cottage would have cost a peasant a year’s income, a sum that was probably borrowed and paid off like a modern mortgage.
Fig. 76 The Psalter of which this is a page was commissioned by Geoffrey Luttrell, lord of the manor at Irnham in Lincolnshire in 1320–40. Uniquely, it shows scenes of everyday rural life, including this image of a typical 14th-century water mill. (from The Luttrell Psalter, c.1325–35, British Library. Shelfmark: Add. 42130, f.181)
Fig. 77 An early 14th century stone frieze from the infirmary hall at Rievaulx Abbey, Yorkshire. A contemporary windmill is shown with steps up to the door and a pivot for the whole building to move to catch the wind.
Fig. 78 Temple Cressing, Essex: a longitudinal section of the wheat barn of the 1290s. The barn is remarkably unaltered, and would have originally had wooden boarded walls.
The aristocracy gained about 60 per cent of their income from rents and fees but they were much more interested in agriculture than their continental counterparts; between 1184 and 1214 almost all took their demesne land into direct management. This they did with some success, refining crop rotation and exploiting existing sources of income more efficiently. One of the most important of these was milling, which, as we have seen, was very profitable. After 1100 landlords were busy building new mills and refurbishing old ones, doubling their number to perhaps 12,000 by 1300. In this there was one really important invention: the windmill. It is likely that the first one was built in East Anglia not long before 1185, but they took some time to perfect and construction only boomed in the east in the 1240s, followed by other parts of the country where fast-running water was scarce. A new windmill cost about £10 but they tended to have greater repair costs than watermills, which were cheaper to run though expensive to build. The water engineering alone could cost £15 or more. Watermills were of the type shown in the Luttrell Psalter (fig. 76 (#ulink_b7671d97-4d28-584f-8218-906c38827875)); the mill building was like any normal timber-framed building and had a thatched roof. The windmill was much more specialised as it had to turn and face the wind. This meant that it had to pivot on a central mast, which had to be sturdy enough to resist the huge stresses of wind drag (fig. 77 (#ulink_e585d6c7-f123-5f4c-bf27-092f1734c46c)).
Technological advances in milling were matched by advances in the quality and construction of other agricultural buildings. Barns were pre-eminent in the farmyard, crucial for the safe and dry storage of crops. At Temple Cressing, Essex, are two barns that were once part of the large estate of the Knights Templar. The earlier is the barley barn, erected in the 1230s; the wheat barn is later, built in the 1290s (figs 78 (#ulink_023a5a05-49b0-5d04-94bb-858c1451a21a) and 79 (#ulink_f3f9b50c-2571-562a-96a9-12bbb95f3e87)). The wheat barn shows some significant technical improvements even though it was built only 60 years later than the barley barn. In timber building, structural capabilities are determined by the carpenter’s ability to make strong joints. In early timber structures these were simple lap joints (one timber resting on another), but the Cressing barns show that during the late 13th century these simple joints were largely superseded by mortise-and-tenons and stronger types of lap joint. Moreover, the timbers were squared and more regular, and the structure was much better integrated, with all the elements soundly jointed together. These advances made possible the construction of very large barns for 1,000-acre estates such as Temple Cressing.
Fig. 79 Temple Cressing, Essex, The Wheat Barn, interior. Squared timbers made more regular and integrated structures by the end of the thirteenth century.
Towns
Between 1100 and 1300 the percentage of the English population that lived in towns doubled to 20 per cent. In 1086 there were about 100 boroughs, almost all founded by royal will. By 1300 there were more than 500, many founded by the Church and the aristocracy. Towns were profitable business; rents from the burgesses were good, but landlords could also profit from market tolls and the borough court. The example of King’s (originally Bishop’s) Lynn, Norfolk, demonstrates this nicely. In 1090 Herbert de Losinga, Bishop of Thetford, established a priory and market in the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Lynn. His intention was to capture a slice of the trade that would flow through the Wash and down the Great Ouse. The settlement was a success, and in about 1150 Bishop Turbe built an extension to the town, with a colossal new marketplace and a huge church. This was under the direct lordship of the bishop and was highly lucrative, so much so that the bishop bought back his rights over the original town and obtained a royal charter for the unified settlement in 1204 (fig. 80 (#ulink_613562a3-8180-5314-968c-2639ad989b5d)). A charter meant that the bishop could govern the town and collect taxes in exchange for a fixed fee paid to the Crown.
The excavation of early medieval timber houses in Lynn, London and several other towns corroborates what the great barns at Cressing Temple tell us, which is that in the late 12th century timbers became squarer, cut by saw, mortise-and-tenon joints start to become common, frames were more stoutly constructed, with regularly spaced studding, and earth-fast posts were replaced by timber sole plates, often on foundations. This was all part of a process that led to fully self-supporting frames for domestic dwellings. The impetus for structural and technical advances, and the reasons for them, were not simple. On the one hand, they were driven by the need to solve intensely practical problems. For instance, the making of timber revetments that formed the London riverfront led to innovations in timber framing, their constructors having to battle against the intense forces of the tidal Thames. On the other hand, high-level patronage from bishops (as at Hereford), deans (as at Salisbury) or by the king himself (at Westminster) made stylistic and engineering demands that constantly pushed carpenters to the limit of their confidence. Technical improvement in the construction of timber town buildings was important as it changed the appearance of English towns. Earth-fast timber houses needed to be replaced or completely refurbished every 15 or 20 years as their foundations rotted. Timber-framed structures built on stone foundations lasted much longer – indeed, when well maintained, for centuries. Thus, owning a townhouse was now not merely the simple possession of a plot of land, it was a long-term investment. This meant that greater efforts were made in the building’s appearance and decoration, its maintenance, and its visual and spatial relationship with other buildings. Houses got taller, too. Timber framing meant that they could be built three storeys high; the first medieval domestic skyscrapers were constructed by the 1190s, and soon after their upper floors began to be jettied out (fig. 81 (#ulink_9f4a9244-f0ef-5c43-81b8-91a772469fbe)).
Fig. 80 King’s Lynn, Norfolk; maps showing the expansion of the town after 1150. As a consequence the town today, unusually, has two market places (Tuesday and Saturday)and two very large churches, the original parish church St Margaret’s and a chapel of ease St Nicholas serving the town extension.
Fig. 81 28 Cornmarket St, Oxford is a three-storied 15th century house with cellars. All floors were originally jettied but the ground floor has been under-built. There is a handsome corner post.
Fig. 82 Lady Row, York was a commercial development built in around 1316 in Holy Trinity Churchyard as an endowment for the chantry of the Blessed Virgin in the church. They are the earliest timber buildings in York and are a very early example of jettying.
Many townhouses were also shops. Trade was, of course, central to the purpose of towns; by 1234 Canterbury had 200 shops and by 1300 Chester had 270. But, as today, London was England’s shopping Mecca. Its principal shopping street, Cheapside, was 450 yards long and 20 yards wide. The shops, 400 of them lined on either side, were occupied by goldsmiths, mercers, drapers, spicers, saddlers, girdlers, chandlers, wiredrawers, bucklemakers, pursemakers, buttonmakers and more. The shops themselves were very narrow, typically only 6ft to 7ft wide, and about 10ft to 12ft deep. Elsewhere in the city, where land was less valuable, shops were wider, their frontages measuring between 15ft and 20ft. The shops had a window opening and a narrow door, and window shutters were lifted during the day to reveal large, round-headed openings. Most shoppers would have been served standing in the street, rather like in an Arab souk today. Jetties overhead would have kept off the rain. Like a souk, too, the interiors were crammed with goods, and merchants’ houses elsewhere in the city would have acted as warehouses to supply them. Most shops were of timber, but some party walls and some larger shops were of stone.
No early medieval shops survive today unaltered and so we have to study later examples to get an understanding of how retail premises originally looked. Lady Row, Goodramgate, York, is a row of shops dating from 1316 that have lost their original windows (fig. 82 (#ulink_11f8912e-f8ed-5f2a-9e09-3803c84b7c7b)). Lady Row is not untypical of what we know of commercial developments of shops built by single landlords and then rented to shopkeepers. The upper rooms may have been separately let as housing, or traders may have lived above their showrooms. A rare survival from c.1350 is 169 Spon Street, Coventry, a different type of shop, probably built by a merchant with a showroom on the street and a substantial house with a hall for the family behind (fig. 83 (#ulink_5777b18d-f43b-5a09-8777-1f24c235f733)).
Fig. 83 169 Spon Street, Coventry. Although restored in 1970, this shop is a rare survivor from the 1350s in a district of Coventry devoted to the cloth and leather trades. No medieval shop in England survives with its original ground floor openings intact.
But it was a different sort of building boom to the one stimulated by the Conquest. There were now proper quarries, better-skilled masons (and more of them), and few buildings were started anew. New monasteries were rare and, after the 1130s, no new dioceses were created until 1547 – only Salisbury Cathedral stands out as an entirely new structure. Most churches and castles were reconstructions, adaptations and extensions of existing buildings. Architectural leadership lay firmly with the cathedrals, whose golden age it was. These institutions were in cities, meaning that their influence in terms of architecture – as well as learning, ideas and education – was more profound than even the greatest of the rural monasteries. While most cathedrals were progressively rebuilt in new styles, many rural monastic churches remained Anglo-Norman.
England’s cathedrals are collectively one of the supreme architectural achievements of the whole Middle Ages. This is partly a result of the inventiveness of English masons and designers, but equally of the wealth of English sees. English dioceses were larger than those on the continent and correspondingly richer. The richest, such as Winchester (£3,000 a year), Durham (£2,700), Canterbury (£2,140) or Ely (£2,000), had incomes equivalent to the most prosperous earls. Indeed, by the end of the 13th century 12 out of Europe’s 40 richest dioceses were in England. It was this wealth, carefully exploited by bishops and deans, that funded the extraordinary sumptuousness of cathedrals such as Lincoln and Salisbury. Salisbury, without its spire, cost around £28,000 over 50 years. A single bay at Lincoln (p. 96), because of the profusion of carving, probably cost twice as much as its French equivalent.
Yet financing the construction of a cathedral was hugely expensive and it was unlikely that the normal revenues of a diocese, however rich, would suffice. At Lincoln, for instance, a fabric fund was created in around 1200, endowed by dividing the cathedral’s income in two. This was supplemented by gifts from all over the diocese responding to the disastrous collapse of 1185. To encourage more giving, continual Masses were said for those who contributed to the work. Landowners might contribute half an acre of land and symbolically place a sod from it on the altar. A tax was also levied on every household in the diocese at the Whitsun procession.
While all these sources of income were important, financing the largest and most spectacular projects was substantially boosted by the financial muscle of a really famous saint. Although in many cathedrals Anglo-Saxon saints had been translated to Anglo-Norman buildings, their setting was now regarded as insufficiently magnificent. So through the 13th and 14th centuries the east ends of dozens of great churches were extended to provide suitably spectacular shrines for Anglo-Saxon and contemporary saints, as well as space for visiting pilgrims. This movement was given a huge boost by the new setting for the relics of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury. Thus between 1190 and 1220, for example, work started on building new eastern arms at Beverly, Ely, Hereford, Lichfield, Lincoln, Southwell, Winchester and Worcester.
As the English economy and infrastructure strengthened and towns grew, secular and ecclesiastical lords rebuilt their castles and cathedrals in new styles. Churches developed in response to changing liturgy, while the great secular residences remained much as they had done for generations, reflecting a more stable way of life for royalty and nobility. For richer ordinary people life also improved, and their houses became more sturdy, commodious and permanent.
As the second generation of Normans felt more English, so the great cathedrals, abbeys, castles and houses then under construction became increasingly distinct from their counterparts in France. Architecture had been through an intense period of experimentation from 1150 to 1170, but by about 1200 there was an increasingly uniform approach to large-scale building. Some of the excesses of late Anglo-Norman decoration were forgotten and the new Gothic style adopted simpler, but bold and deeply cut, pointed arches. Yet it was rooted in what had gone before: English cathedrals clung to the thick wall technique often with masonry 13ft thick. This not only characterised early English Gothic but influenced the proportions and scale of everything that came after. As cathedrals were rebuilt and extended they embodied the Anglo-Norman structural techniques. Thus from a European perspective early English Gothic was rich, insular and distinctive.
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English architecture in the period from 1220 to 1350 displays the confidence that comes with wealth and independence.
Introduction
The hundred years after 1250 are among the most energetic, inventive and extravagant periods of building in English history, a time in which English architecture became as distinctive as its national character. The building boom that started in the 1220s continued strongly up to about 1300 (fig. 87 (#ulink_a222945d-ee95-5682-8a54-5498e6fc4c7f)). This almost precisely mirrored an extraordinary period of economic growth and national prosperity that was underpinned by rapid population growth (fig. 88 (#ulink_9492b0bc-074e-5af7-b0f0-b406cfb83c19)).
Yet the period was not one of political stability. Politically it was characterised by a struggle between the Crown and the aristocracy. In 1215 King John had been forced to sign Magna Carta, a charter that protected barons, freemen and the Church against the arbitrary actions of the king, emphasising that royal power was held under the law. This, and the struggles to enforce it during subsequent reigns, are hugely important for England. Unlike France, where the king answered only to God, in England monarchs were not only below God but also subject to the law of the land.
John’s reign descended into chaos and civil war. He died in 1216, to be succeeded by his son Henry III, who was only nine. Most of the country was in the hands of the nobility, who were in revolt against John, and in London resided their ally, Prince Louis, heir to the French throne, whom they wished to crown king. But after the Battle of Lincoln in 1217 Henry and his party soon regained control, and Henry was to go on to reign for 46 unstable and quarrelsome years. The crisis of 1216–17, Henry’s subsequent favouritism towards foreign advisors, and the heavy-handed exercise of papal jurisdiction were important components in a strengthening sense of English identity during his reign. The process of national definition continued under Edward I, who came to the throne in 1272 at the age of 33. Edward was entirely different to his father; the first 20 years of his rule were characterised by decisiveness and determination, and saw the conquering of North Wales and almost continual war with Scotland. These years also saw persistent and heavy taxation, strengthening the role of parliament. Yet English national identity was also strengthened, partly in counterpoint to resurgent identities in Scotland and Wales.
Fig. 87 Graph showing volume of cathedral and abbey building in England 1100–1500. The upper curve represents the average trend of 40 major building campaigns in each decade; the lower curve the average trend of campaigns started by decade at 85 buildings.
Fig. 88 The estimated population of England 1086–1786. The catastrophic effects of the Black Death in 1348 can be clearly seen.
Edward II, who came to the throne on Edward’s I death in 1307, was completely unsuited to kingship; weak, vindictive and directionless, he squandered the goodwill of the aristocracy, who had supported his father. He was deposed in 1327 and replaced by his son Edward III. On Edward III’s accession the monarchy was ineffectual and unpopular, and the king was only fourteen. Yet Edward went on to forge a reputation as one of England’s greatest warrior kings. John and Henry III had lost all the Crown’s great continental possessions except Gascony, which Henry had agreed to hold from the French king. Tension over this, and Edward’s claim to the French throne, led to the Anglo-French wars of 1337 to 1453, known as the Hundred Years’ War.
Beliefs and Ideas
The way buildings look is governed by the way people think. During the 13th century there were some significant changes in the way people thought about God and about the relationship between the Church and society. These were European streams of thought and doctrine that had varying impacts on the appearance of buildings across Europe. In terms of English architecture, however, there were three particularly important theological developments.
The first came out of the Fourth Lateran Council held at the Lateran Basilica in Rome by Pope Innocent III in 1215 that promulgated the doctrine of transubstantiation – the transformation of bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood during the Eucharist. Transubstantiation, which could only be effected by an ordained priest, further elevated priestly status above the congregation and put even greater weight on the significance of the chancel, the part of the church in which communion was celebrated. The statutes of the council made a direct contribution to a movement in England that saw, from around 1200, pressure to rebuild the chancels of churches to provide a suitable setting for the proper celebration of the Eucharist.
The second – another formal definition of an accepted belief – came out of the Council of Lyon in 1274. The council defined purgatory as the place where the soul rested between death and the Last Judgement while being refined by the prayers of the living. Prayers for the dead were now accepted as being as effective as prayers for the living – if not more so. This had a powerful influence on those rich enough to be able to guarantee prayers for themselves after they had died, and led, after 1300, to a huge upsurge in the foundation of perpetual chantries. At one end of the social and economic scale a chantry could simply be an endowment for a priest to say Mass for an individual’s soul; at the other it could be the foundation of a large college, school or hospital with a dozen or more secular priests.
At the highest levels of society those with sufficient means founded a college of priests in their own residences. Henry III did this at Westminster (St Stephen’s) and at Windsor (St George’s). Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, did the same at his mighty castle at Kenilworth. These chantries and colleges did not replace the monasteries. Monasteries continued to be very important, especially to those who could not afford customised care of their souls in private institutions. Yet, as a result, few new enclosed monastic houses were founded after about 1300.
The third development was an increasing interest in the veneration of the Virgin Mary. Before the Conquest the English had shown a strong devotion to the Virgin, but in the 13th century this developed into a national obsession. The Virgin Mary was the universal saint – she could be worshipped anywhere, free from specific geographical or personal associations and, of course, she appealed to women. Lady chapels were increasingly built to honour Mary, and became major parts of monasteries and cathedrals.
To these theological developments we need to add a fourth, of a different and more amorphous nature – chivalry. From the time of the Norman Conquest the upper classes began developing a code of behaviour – manners, if you like – that centred on physical prowess, generosity, courtesy and loyalty. How these values, which are understandable in the context of the knightly hall or the tournament, applied to the gruesome world of medieval warfare is hard to comprehend. But this exotic aristocratic culture was the way that the Church rationalised the activities of a militaristic society. In this way the brutality of the Crusades, for instance, could be fitted into a Christian world.
Entry to the chivalric world demanded excellent horsemanship, and was therefore restricted to those with the means to equip their steeds and to perfect equestrian techniques. Mounted knights practised their art in peacetime at tournaments, initially to the death but later as a form of chivalric festival. In this the cult of King Arthur and his knights was an important component, with kings and knights modelling themselves on the legendary king and his companions.
Edward I ordered the construction of the ‘Arthurian’ round table that still hangs in Winchester Castle great hall; in 1344 his grandson, Edward III, outdid him when he constructed a building 200ft in diameter at Windsor to contain a great round table as the centrepiece of a festival at which he founded the Order of the Round Table. Arthurian legend and contemporary court life were inextricably connected.
These romantic and militarised ideas were converted into architectural style. In this violent and warlike world castles were designed to defend their occupants from aggressors but their individual elements were often stylised. Turrets, battlements, machicolations, drawbridges and moats were as much elements of a chivalric style as functional components. Just as the 18th-century noble had a Corinthian portico, reflecting his self-image as an ancient Roman senator, so the 13th-century magnate had his machicolations, reflecting his as a heroic knight; thus from the reign of Edward I fortification was often as much a style as a form of defence.
Fig. 89 Butley Priory, Suffolk. The early fourteenth century gatehouse is encrusted in heraldic shields representing the badges of donors and supporters.
The most obvious external sign of the chivalric mind was heraldry. Heraldic badges and devices originated with the need for identification in battle, but a more coherent system began to develop from the 1140s, and English kings adopted the red shield with three gold leopards in 1198. By this stage broad rules for using heraldic devices were being developed and, as the 13th century progressed, people further down the social scale began to use them too. In due course heraldic devices began to identity everything from vast buildings to miniature jewellery.
It was Henry III’s use of his own arms and those of his royal connections at Westminster Abbey that set the fashion for using heraldry in architectural display. Once used as a decorative element in the 1260s, heraldry remained a dominant part of English architectural decoration into the 19th century. Butley Priory, Suffolk, is not the first, but is perhaps the most spectacular use of heraldic decoration in the early 14th century. The gatehouse is the sole surviving part of a priory founded by Ranulph de Glanville, justiciar of Henry II, and was built between 1320 and 1325. On the north front is a panel with 35 shields in five rows, including the arms of the builders and a litany of arms of the great and the good, ending with a list of East Anglian gentry (fig. 89 (#ulink_897f3cc8-e75c-5734-9c1b-e14d29d6d264)).
Landscapes of Power
By 1220 a traveller moving across England would have seen the hand of man everywhere. The whole landscape was managed to a greater or lesser degree and few places remained untamed. The most apparent unit of economic and social management was the estate. Estates, whether owned by the monarch, the Church, the great barons or the monasteries, organised the countryside for economic advantage. But the medieval landscape was not merely a money-making machine; the buildings and structures within it had meaning to the people who owned and looked at them.
Castles had a special meaning. In theory only the king could license the construction of a defendable fortress, as in the reign of King John a system had developed whereby magnates wishing to build a fortified residence applied for a royal licence to do so. The possession of a licence, whether it resulted in a building or not, was a sign of wealth and royal favour. It was also a sign of the times. All great houses in the 13th century were, to a greater or lesser extent, defendable. They had to be. It was not only residences on the south coast or the Welsh or Scottish borders that were vulnerable to raiders. Theft, vendetta and social unrest were all potential threats to the comfort and security of the well-off. High walls and towers were thus a sign of a man who could afford them, as well as an indication that he had something worth protecting.
For those who could not afford to build a castle or obtain a licence there was the option of digging a moat. Moats had been dug from at least the 1150s, but during the period covered by this chapter as many as 3,500 moats were dug. Some of these were dug around manor houses, some around the houses of richer peasants. Not all parts of England were suitable for moats; they tended to be concentrated in Suffolk, Essex, Hertfordshire and in the central midlands, where there was a clay subsoil. Some moated houses were in the centre of villages, others were more isolated farmsteads.
Fig. 92 Old St Paul’s Cathedral; London: the chapter house, drawn by Wenceslaus Hollar in 1657. The chapter house and cloister were the masterpiece of the royal mason, William Ramsey. Note how the tracery of the windows continued over the walling below.
Westminster Abbey (fig. 93 (#ulink_018897f8-16c2-5473-a772-0c2962808fd9)) was heavily influenced by French buildings and broke away from the style of recent work at Lincoln, for instance (p. 96). Its very proportions were French; at 102ft its nave is England’s highest, supported by tiers of French-looking flying buttresses. Many other elements, from its polygonal east end to its northern triple portal, are direct quotes from French buildings. Henry III, who had travelled in France in the 1240s and 50s, was doubtless looking to the French coronation church of Reims and the jewel-like royal Sainte-Chapelle as models. Yet Westminster was no straightforward copy, and the general richness of carving and surface decoration of its interior was in long-established English taste. The influence of the abbey, rather like that of early Gothic Canterbury (pp 93–4), lay not in its composition but in its details: the richness of surface decoration, the use of tracery, the carved and painted heraldic shields, the large-scale sculpted figures and smaller-scale foliage sculpture.
Fig. 93 The construction of the nave of Westminster Abbey is one of the most remarkable stories in English building. Building began in the east in 1259–72, and subsequent abbots and masons continued the design from the 14th to the 16th century in exactly the same style. Though the inspiration was at first French, the details used over the long construction period are progressively more anglicised.
Nor was it alone, for England’s largest and most important cathedral was independently following a similar path. From the 1250s the monks of Old St Paul’s began to rebuild their east end with a massive extension that would make it the longest cathedral in England, whose exterior shared the richness and decoration of Westminster Abbey (fig. 92 (#ulink_0749f7bb-86f5-58fc-a54e-dd5f670cbe2a)). A third London building encapsulated many of the new features displayed in the great churches. This was St Stephen’s Chapel, the main royal chapel at Westminster Palace, which Edward I started to rebuild in 1292. Its building history is long and complicated, covering 56 years, only being finally completed by Edward III after 1348 (pp 157–8). Yet the chapel was the most prominent and architecturally magnificent royal commission of its age, and no self-respecting mason or patron was ignorant of its style.
To understand the appearance of buildings in the period from 1250 to 1350 it is best to look at the individual elements since the focus of architectural innovation was on decoration, not on the underlying architectural skeleton. It is hard to convey the importance of decoration in medieval architecture to the modern spectator, as so little survives. The Reformation and the Civil War dealt horrible blows to the greatest English medieval buildings, stripping most of them down to their bare bones. This has led to a loss of meaning, for the architectural bones were the skeleton for a programme of communication through sculpture and paint. Church buildings were designed to represent the kingdom of heaven, and were intended as a signpost and the gateway to paradise for mortals.
The most important new decorative element was undoubtedly window tracery. It was possible, using lancets grouped together, to let in more light, but it was still obvious that these were individual windows with sections of wall between them. The invention of tracery allowed really big windows to be built without bits of wall in the middle. The adoption of bar tracery at Binham Priory, Norfolk, at Netley Abbey, Hampshire, and at Westminster Abbey and Palace immediately made anything built before the 1250s look old-fashioned (compare figs 58 (#ulink_b7ea88f3-1aa1-5483-a856-11fa1c18558f), 94 (#ulink_ad9edc15-ba3f-517d-8458-8989504f1027)). Windows were now not only a gap in the wall; they were transformed into one of the primary vehicles for decoration and elaboration. Part of this was the extraordinary variety of the tracery, but a great deal of the effect was achieved by advances in glazing technology.
From 1300 a much paler and more translucent type of yellow stain was introduced, thinner glass was being manufactured and the designs were being painted with better, finer brushes. All of these advances let more light into churches. The west window at York Minster, which was glazed in 1339 by Master Robert with the extensive use of yellow stain, can be contrasted with the much heavier, darker windows in the lancets of Canterbury Cathedral (figs 60 (#ulink_b4f83b24-dd19-5398-b773-5cb4bc510923) and 94 (#ulink_ad9edc15-ba3f-517d-8458-8989504f1027)). In the York window it is also apparent that stained-glass artists had mastered the use of perspective. Windows depict figures under canopies and vaults similar to, and fully integrated with, those in the architecture around them.
The narrow lancet windows in early Gothic churches let in little light, creating a mystical and intimate effect. From the early 14th century larger windows and larger east ends made it easier to see the increasingly elaborate rituals that were being performed. These changes can be seen in churches such as St Denys’s, Sleaford, Lincolnshire, with its wild, flowing tracery and west end covered in carving, or Holy Trinity, Hull, begun in around 1300 (fig. 95 (#ulink_4032a8bd-ef5f-5338-8d98-8b5e1830c759)). Holy Trinity is one of England’s biggest parish churches and the first to be largely built of brick. Its chancel and transepts have some of the most inventive and beautiful traceried windows of their age, flooding the presbytery with light. Outside, the buttresses have canopied niches and parapets carved with wavy patterns.
Fig. 94 York Minster nave, looking west towards the great west window commissioned in 1339 – it is 55ft high and of eight lights. The whole nave makes the most of the possibilities of big windows, suppressing the visual impact of the triforium by linking it to the clerestory using continuous mullions.
Fig. 95 Holy Trinity, Hull: the east end of the church of around 1300–20. The rich flowing tracery lights the retrochoir. The internal fittings of the choir were funded by the city corporation from a wool tax.
Fig. 96 Eleanor Cross, Geddington, Northamptonshire, 1291–4. Edward I erected twelve crosses marking the nightly resting places of the coffin of his wife, Eleanor of Castile, as it travelled to London. The monument contains canopied niches for statues.
The second fundamental decorative element of the period was the niche. These miniature vaults with a triangular gable sheltering an arch can be found, in large scale, on the outside of churches, most prominently on the west front at Wells Cathedral in the 1220s, but from the 1260s they begin to shrink in scale and become a decorative component often coupled with pinnacles. Perhaps the most prominent use of this combination was in the series of monuments Edward I erected to his queen, Eleanor of Castile. Eleanor died in 1290, and within a year or so twelve crosses had been erected near the religious houses at which her body lay on its journey from Nottinghamshire to Westminster (fig. 96 (#ulink_6315a5a5-a834-5d14-bff4-deaa8335aad5)).
The crosses displayed a sort of micro-architecture of the type that can be found in contemporary metalwork and manuscripts and that was also well suited to tombs. The tomb in Westminster Abbey of Edmund, Earl of Lancaster, who died in 1296, captures the full possibilities of the niche and pinnacle. The astonishing tomb of King Edward II at Gloucester Cathedral of about 1330 is even more exotic, almost Moorish, with niches with S-shaped or ogee tops (fig. 97 (#ulink_4de2199d-e09d-5a3f-a9e0-c174645c78da)). The ogee arch had been used in Venice in about 1250, but from the 1290s it was taken up by English architects and designers like nowhere else in Europe. It first started to be used in tombs, then in niches, and then in prominent structures such as the great rose window of St Paul’s Cathedral. The ogee arch gave an exotic, quasi-Eastern form to some of the greatest spaces of the era, such as the Lady Chapel at Ely. The most unforgettable of these is St Mary’s, Redcliffe, Bristol, a parish church that aspires to the grandeur of a cathedral. The hexagonal porch, encrusted with niches with forward-thrusting ogee arches, contains a door that defies architectural description and looks to have escaped from a maharaja’s palace.
Fig. 97 Gloucester Cathedral; the tomb of Edward II, c.1330–5. The effigy is of alabaster on a tomb chest clad in Purbeck marble, but it is the canopy that is a work of genius. It is a bewildering array of crockets, niches, pinnacles and buttresses, all originally painted as befitted a king.
One of the innovations introduced at Westminster Abbey was the idea of interior large-scale sculpted human figures integrated with the structure and the wider decorative programme. Big figures had been used to great effect externally, particularly at Wells on the west front, but their internal use was another idea taken from the Sainte-Chapelle. At Westminster these figures either told stories from the lives of saints or emphasised some important part of the building (fig. 98 (#ulink_a4130f3c-e4c6-5513-a132-931e6183f07f)). Such large-scale sculptures were to be taken up with huge enthusiasm, bringing colour and ornament to interiors.
Fig. 98 Westminster Abbey, south transept, south wall; an angel, elegantly accommodated in a spandrel, wings spread and swinging a censer – a perfect marriage of sculpture and architecture.
Fig. 99 Naturalistic foliage in the arches of the chapter house at Southwell Minster, Nottinghamshire, 1290s.
Medieval sculptors were not interested in accurately representing the human form, and figures – including those of people of great importance – were idealised. The statues of the queen on the Eleanor crosses do not capture the features of a real person; they represent an idealised Christian queen (fig. 96 (#ulink_6315a5a5-a834-5d14-bff4-deaa8335aad5)). Saints were instantly identifiable by how they stood or what they held; St Catherine had her wheel and St Peter always held the keys of heaven, while secular figures were identified by their badges or coats of arms. So Queen Eleanor’s crosses were encrusted with the badges of León, England, Castile and Ponthieu.
Yet startling naturalism can also be found, such as the heads carved for the corbels at Salisbury Cathedral, some tomb effigies, but most of all the brilliantly naturalistic foliage in the arches of the chapter house at Southwell Minster, Nottinghamshire (fig. 99 (#ulink_420bcee4-105f-51b5-a315-b83cd58101e1)). Capitals were now less often carved with narrative schemes (fig. 54 (#litres_trial_promo)), but corbels became a sort of portrait gallery, with hugely expressive images of what were probably real people. Carving – and painting – reflected life, rather than commenting on it as today.
Fig. 100 Exeter Cathedral was the last to be rebuilt almost in its entirety, over a period of 60 years from 1275; the building work was funded by a voluntary tax on the bishop and the chapter’s own income. A result of this is the perfect harmony of its interior, especially the nave, shown here, with its extraordinary high vaults 300ft above the floor.
All these streams of embellishment are represented at Exeter. The Anglo-Norman cathedral there was rebuilt over a 60-year period beginning in 1275. Its new form was constrained by the decision to retain its 12th-century twin towers. Thus Exeter is characteristic of most Gothic cathedrals where bishops and deans grafted their new buildings onto older work. This meant that the Gothic parts normally followed the thick-wall technique of the Anglo-Normans, keeping cathedrals long and low with a stronghorizontal emphasis.
But that is where the conservatism ends, for a succession of bishops determinedly funded a rebuilding of the cathedral in the best modern style (fig. 100 (#ulink_307ff26b-4a07-51bb-bc2a-58958a2e491e)). Exeter is an extravaganza. Everything is multiplied: the piers are made up of 16 bunched shafts, and the spectacular vault is a forest of 22 ribs in each bay, creating the longest single continuous Gothic vault in the world. Everything was patterned, from bosses, through corbels to tracery. The west front was started by Bishop Grandison in around 1346, and while it might not have the balance or harmony of the west front of Wells, here every decorative element in the designer’s vocabulary is brought to bear as tiers of figures reside in canopied niches below, perhaps, the most fanciful window of its age (fig. 101 (#ulink_1c49b29d-1fae-504b-8ee7-42eda1e6ecb2)). This frontage, like that at Wells, and elsewhere, was intended as a backdrop for the most important services of the year, particularly the processions of Palm Sunday. On this day a choir, hidden behind the façade, seemed to make the very statues, originally painted and gilded, sing.
Fig. 101 Exeter Cathedral; the west front. Originally (1320s–40s) the front had three great doorways, and the west window still remains from this period, but the image screen was added from the mid-1340s and figures were still being completed in the 15th century.
How People Worshipped
We have seen that from the late Anglo-Saxon period local churches were founded and endowed by landowners as acts of piety (p. 56). These patrons – and their successors – retained the right to appoint the priest to their church or, if they chose, to give away the income to endow a monastery, with the condition that their church be provided for. ‘Rector’ is the term given to the priest or the monastery entitled to the parish church’s income from tithes or other sources.
Many individual rectors took their responsibilities seriously and used the income for its proper purpose. However, when patrons decided to appoint members of their own family as rectors, the income was often simply treated as personal wealth. For instance, Bogo de Clare, the son of the Earl of Gloucester and Hereford, was rector of 24 parishes in 1291 with an income of over £2,000. This enabled him to live a life of considerable luxury while he neglected the parishes from which his income came. De Clare was an exceptional case, but a large minority of rectories were farmed for profit.
By 1300 only about half of all parishes had individual rectors; the incomes of the remainder had been transferred to monasteries, a small part of which was reserved for the employment of a vicar (which in Latin means ‘substitute’). So the wealthy church of St Mary’s, Whalley, Lancashire, with an income of over £200, had its income appropriated to the Cistercian monastery there. As parish costs were only £27, the abbey made an annual profit of £173. This system meant that the financial position of a medieval church varied not only with the size of its income but with who controlled it. The impact on churches themselves could be significant because – as we have seen above – responsibility for the fabric of the chancel fell to the priest. Non-resident rectors could ignore their responsibilities, as they did at St John the Baptist’s, Yarkhill, Herefordshire, where water poured through the roof onto the altar when it rained; monastic owners could be equally neglectful of their duties, preferring to keep the income for their own institutions.
Yet there were positive aspects, too. The earliest church-building contract to survive relates to the chancel of All Saints’, Sandon, Hertfordshire, and dates from 1348. The church at Sandon was owned by the Dean and Chapter of St Paul’s Cathedral. The Sandon estate was worth over £30 a year, and the Dean and Chapter decided to demolish the old chancel and replace it with a new one with fashionable windows, a sedilia, piscina and an Easter sepulchre (to receive the Easter effigy of Christ). The priest there was also well equipped; in 1297 he had three sets of vestments, two enamelled processional crosses, a censer and an incense boat.
Fig. 102 Much Wenlock Priory, Shropshire; the triple sedilia of the fine chancel added in the 1380s gives the church a beautiful and well-lit setting for its liturgy.
From the Saxon period individual experience of worship in local churches became progressively less intimate and more ceremonialised. At the same time churches became more complex and segregated. The increased focus on communion, following the doctrine of transubstantiation, led to the rebuilding of many chancels as a suitable setting for the celebration of the Mass. New chancels were longer with larger windows and had square ends, unlike the Anglo-Norman ones. The chancel remained separated from the nave by a wooden screen; few early screens survive, but there is a very rare in situ survival from about 1260 at St Michael’s, Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire (fig. 103 (#ulink_ea3ac4f3-08e2-5ee9-b9e2-f00c7a53ce48)). This not only shows that views of the chancel were actually quite good, but that holes were cut at a lower level to provide a view of the elevated host for those kneeling. Many chancels were provided with a separate door for the clergy so they could come and go independently from the nave. Altars were now universally built against the east wall and the priest would celebrate communion with his back to the congregation. Since the 9th century priests in larger parishes had not celebrated Mass alone, but from the 13th century chantry priests, assistants and deacons were increasingly present. This was a reason for the increased size of chancels but it also explains the building of special seats for the clergy on the south wall. These sedilia (from the Latin for ‘seat’), usually built in threes, were first seen in Anglo-Norman churches but became very popular in new chancels (fig. 102 (#ulink_a6b061f6-e37d-5f1e-9b07-ebf2281cb6fb)).
Fig. 103 St Michael’s, Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire; the mid-13th century chancel screen is a rare and early survival.
Fig. 104 St Mary the Virgin, Stanwell, Surrey. A piscina with a ledge for vessels (a credence) and a cupboard (aumbry).
The emphasis on the proper celebration of Mass meant that a small wash-basin or piscina was now provided for water to be poured into after sacred vessels had been washed. Nearby was often a cupboard or aumbry for the storage of precious items. Sedilia, piscina and aumbries provided opportunities for decoration and often had carved, arched or canopied frames; sometimes two or three were combined in a single decorative unit (fig. 104 (#ulink_7b4793f1-3d6a-5e75-aaeb-c33233f14ecf)).
Just as the chancel became more actively defined as the sphere of the clergy so, during the 13th century, legislation was enacted making the construction and upkeep of the nave the responsibility of parishioners. From early times there had been no permanent furniture in the nave and the congregation might have brought their own wooden stools to sit on. By the late 13th century pews were introduced, associated with a greater emphasis on preaching and sermons stimulated by the Fourth Lateran Council. The earliest surviving pews are probably those at the beautiful St Mary and All Saints’, Dunsfold, Surrey, of 1270 to 1290 (fig. 105 (#ulink_bf730deb-5781-5152-a300-8d0fc085fe28)).
During the 13th century many naves were extended by the addition of an aisle. These first appeared in churches in the hands of rich men or institutions who wanted to bestow greater status on their church by giving it the form of a basilica; aisles also provided them with more space for private side altars and elaborate processions, and for burial inside the church. Less wealthy churches added aisles for more prosaic reasons: a rising population meant that for every churchgoer in 1100 there were three in 1300 and aisles simply fitted more people in.
From the 1270s the practice of knights and lords being buried in their parish church became common. This was in contrast with the practice in France, for instance, where the rich wanted to be buried in cathedrals and abbeys. In England the strong tie between the lord and his land led to a desire for successive generations to be buried in the churches nearest to their homes. One such place is the manor of Aldworth, Buckinghamshire, where the de la Beche family lived. Sir Robert de la Beche was knighted by Edward I and on his death in around 1300 was buried in St. Mary’s church with an effigy carved fully in the round, cross-legged with a hand on his sword. Eight other members of his family subsequently joined him. These figures of knights and their ladies are realistic and expressive but characteristically stiff (fig. 106 (#ulink_48f1ad3d-0979-57c1-917e-0da0fc7265d9)). Although the effigies are now badly mutilated, the impact that such monuments could have on a church interior is obvious.
Less assertive, but no less magnificent or skilled, were the great memorial brasses of the period, in which England led the way.
As well as building outwards parishes were also building upwards. Although there had previously been periods of tower building, there was a rash of new towers from the 1270s, many capped with spires either of lead-covered timber or stone. Stone spires were concentrated in the wealthy, stone-rich midlands from south Lincolnshire across Leicestershire, Huntingdon and Northamptonshire, down through Warwickshire to Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
A spire was a luxury. It had no practical or liturgical function; it simply proclaimed the technical skills of its architect and the wealth of its patrons. It is for this reason that spires were often products of competition. Competitive imitation was one of the ways in which new styles and specific, sometimes quirky, features spread. The concentration of elaborate Easter sepulchres in Lincolnshire or the stone chancel screens of the West Country are examples of features popularised locally. But towers and spires were often not simply the product of imitation; they were built to exceed their neighbours in size and beauty. In neighbouring parishes in Huntingdonshire are the churches of All Saints’, Buckworth, and St Peter and St Paul’s, Alconbury (fig. 107 (#ulink_0553116d-902e-58f9-a1f7-74c8daa109ee)). Their handsome, solid spires with windows (lucarnes) are both broach spires; in other words they rise directly from the tower without a parapet. Built around 1300, they were the result of two villages in fierce competition.
Fig. 105 St Mary and All Saints, Dunsfold, Surrey; remarkably early pews dating from 1270–90. Simple, robust, and just more comfortable than standing.
Fig. 106 St Mary’s Aldworth, Berkshire; one of the tombs to a member of the de la Beche family. The effigy lies under a canopy, defaced during the commonwealth, but still discernible as an extravagantly carved and cusped recess.
The experience of worship in a cathedral was very different from that in a parish church. Although liturgical practices varied between cathedrals, a good idea of what they were like can be gained by considering Salisbury. Salisbury was the only cathedral during the Middle Ages to be built from scratch. This was down to Richard Poore, first as dean and then as bishop. Poore was also responsible for codifying its liturgical practices, introducing an orderly and regular framework for the feasts of the Christian year that set out how each ought to be celebrated. These liturgical instructions, which became known as the Use of Sarum, were applied to all churches in his diocese and by the 15th century were almost universally used as a sort of standard form of church worship.
Fig. 107 St Peter and St Paul’s, Alconbury, Cambridgeshire. The church has a fine broach spire of c.1300 built, competitively, at the same time as neighbouring All Saints Buckworth.
Although it is not quite comparing like with like, it is useful to compare the plan of St Albans (pp 73–4 and fig. 42 (#ulink_68ded25d-05c2-5c6e-ab9c-5697a12757d7)) with Salisbury (fig. 108 (#litres_trial_promo)) to show how things had changed since the 1080s.
The most important principle was that the clergy had their own enclosed area. This was located in the cathedral’s east arm, which was itself of cruciform shape and thus a church within a church. The area was enclosed by screens and was six bays long, three for the choir and three for the presbytery (or chancel). The whole east arm was divided from the rest by a massive stone screen, the pulpitum, which had a central processional entrance.
Each bay of the main and eastern transepts held its own altars, and these, together with those at the east end, ensured that there were 17 altars available for the 50 cathedral canons to say Mass. The clergy had their own entrance to the cathedral through the north end of the eastern transept, while the laity entered through an elaborate north porch in the nave. The Use of Sarum specified that on major feast days the clergy and choir would process out of their part of the church, round the cloisters and, on the most important feasts, to the front of the cathedral and back in through the west doors. The west doors in cathedrals were generally reserved for ceremonial use only.
At the east end of the cathedral was a large chapel dedicated to the Trinity. In practice this was used for the daily Mass dedicated to the Virgin Mary. As noted above, a daily Lady Mass was an innovation of the 12th century, the Feast of the Conception of the Virgin having been introduced in the 1120s. The cult of the Virgin had a major architectural impact, with Lady chapels being added to greater churches and cathedrals all over England. In cathedrals in which the east end was rebuilt, such as at Lincoln, the Lady chapel tended to be the easternmost part of the church, but other places were appropriated as Lady chapels, too, most famously at Ely, where the monks built a new chapel on the north side between 1335 and 1353. Here, although brutally mutilated during the Reformation, is a symphony in stone to the Virgin. Scenes from her life inspired by a sacred text encrust the lower walls and previously filled the vast windows.
Access to the great hall was no longer from a door in the centre of one of its long walls but through a door at the lower end; this door led to a passage that was screened off from the rest of the hall by a timber partition. Doors from the kitchen, from the buttery (for beer) and pantry (for bread) would lead into this enclosure, which became known as the screens passage. This more integrated arrangement allowed lords to spend more time in the comfort of their chambers while coming and going through their halls. This private space was a badge of rank, part of the charisma of greatness and wealth. To be inaccessible was to be important, as it enabled favour to be shown and intimacy to be conferred and withdrawn. More exclusive rooms that often included private chapels (or oratories) were further symbols of exclusivity.
Fig. 111 Lincoln, Bishop’s Palace: reconstructed as it would have been seen from the great courtyard of the palace. To the left is the great hall with its porch and bay window; on the right there is the kitchen linked to the hall by a passage. The palace was built on sloping ground and so the kitchen was raised up on a vault.
Many of these innovations in domestic planning were led by the bishops, who were single, rich and less conservative in outlook than the monarchy or the magnates. In the shadow of Lincoln Cathedral lies the now ruined bishop’s palace, once among the most lavish buildings in the kingdom. Here modern-day visitors can see one of the earliest instances of a kitchen linked to the lower end of a hall, with three doors serving the buttery, pantry and kitchen (fig. 111 (#ulink_439ab4ec-abd4-5c4b-b761-6195b58a6609)). The hall was started in the 1220s and about 20 years later Bishop Grosseteste set out 23 rules for the smooth running of a household. In these he was careful to cover appropriate behaviour in the hall, and rules for the serving, seating and attire of dinner guests.
Such household regulations were increasingly enforced by chamberlains, the guardians of the lord’s dignity and privacy. The chamberlain was not the only officer in a great household as, by 1100, most aristocrats were accompanied by men holding posts such as steward, butler, constable, marshal, clerk and huntsman. These people – and their more humble followers – were the human backdrop to aristocratic power: a household such as that of Bishop Grosseteste would have had as many as eighty attendants, that of a duke or an earl perhaps twice that.
These structured and hierarchical households with their integrated kitchens, halls and chambers presented new architectural opportunities. Stokesay Castle, Shropshire, is a miraculously unaltered house of the 1280s built by the super-rich wool merchant Laurence of Ludlow, an early example of a man, enriched by trade, who set himself up as a country squire. Laurence built himself a fine great hall with tall windows and a central hearth; at its south end was a block containing his own chambers, leading on to a tower with three large, well-lit rooms. At the lower end of the hall were more chambers, possibly for guests or perhaps his family (fig. 113 (#ulink_e3d5fd54-f4a0-5484-b85f-92a0d9f88179)).
Fig. 112 Penshurst Place, Kent; the great hall. A remarkable, perfectly preserved 14th-century great hall now only lacking its central louvre to let out the smoke. Originally there were large-scale murals depicting men-at-arms under gabled canopies.
Fig. 113 Stokesay Castle, Shropshire, the west elevation of the great hall and the north tower built 1285–1305. The hall windows were not glazed but closed with wooden shutters.
One of the most innovative features of Stokesay is the great hall roof. It is one of the first to achieve an impressive span without aisle posts. A post-less hall was the holy grail of early medieval secular architects. Posts cluttered up the hall, reducing flexibility and visibility, and from the 1220s experiments had taken place to create wide spans without the need for posts. After about 1310 no hall had posts – all were clear, unsupported spans.
Stokesay is a modest house; a more spectacular example, almost as well preserved, is Penshurst Place, Kent, begun by Sir John Pulteney between 1338 and 1349. Pulteney emerged as a financier in the 1320s and, thanks to a shrewd financial nose, became one of the richest men in England. At the heart of his house was a magnificent great hall, very much today as Pulteney left it. Entered by a two-storey porch and lit by tall windows with fine tracery, the hall is covered with a vast chestnut roof (fig. 112 (#ulink_172625cc-5487-529d-b027-ebbeeb998668)). The trusses are held together by collar-beams resting on richly moulded purlins. From the collars arched braces come down to another richly carved horizontal member, the wall plate. Each brace terminates in a life-size wooden figure originally standing on a stone corbel.
This was the social centre of Pulteney’s universe. Here he sat at table on his tiled dais facing a wooden screen bearing a gallery for musicians. Between the windows were full-size paintings of men-at-arms. With a fanfare from above, his food would be brought from the kitchens, under the screen past a fire blazing in the centre of the room and to his table. From his dais a spiral stair led up to a large chamber lit on three sides, heated by a fireplace and furnished with a latrine. Penshurst and Pulteney were as grand as it got, unless, that is, you were royalty.
Fig. 114 Map of Westminster in the later Middle Ages.
The English word ‘palace’ comes from the Latin ‘palatium’, referring to the principal residence of the Roman emperors on the Palatine Hill in Rome. Westminster was the palace of the English kings and every medieval monarch contributed something to its adornment. By the time Henry III came to the throne William Rufus’s great hall (p. 78) had already been joined by another hall to its south, smaller and more convenient for everyday use. There was a chamber at right angles to this chamber, its eastern windows overlooking the Thames (fig. 114 (#ulink_0d328249-1135-5595-8991-ff5cfefdf89a)). Henry III remodelled the chamber, giving it new windows, fireplace, roof and a small oratory. This room, soon to be known as the Painted Chamber after its extensive murals, was Henry’s bedchamber, with his bed in a curtained enclosure and a small squint window providing a view of the altar in the oratory. To the south of the Painted Chamber was the queen’s chamber and chapel, newly constructed by Henry III for Queen Eleanor between 1237 and 1238.
Westminster Palace, with its conglomeration of fine chambers, did not stand alone. Part of Henry III’s conception was for his palace and Westminster Abbey to be linked physically and institutionally, with the abbey serving as a private monastery to his principal residence. The chapter house, for instance, was always intended to act as a meeting place in which to discuss state business (and became a meeting place of parliament). This was typical of the intense personal interest that Henry took in the construction of the palace and the abbey that made both so influential.
Defence of the Realm
The crisis of 1216–17 (p. 120) and the continued tension between the Crown and the magnates caused some fundamental questions to be asked about the design of castles. It must be remembered that Dover, the most important and powerful castle in England, had been besieged in 1216 and nearly taken. At the start of Henry III’s reign it was time to review how these powerhouses were built. Henry III spent the following 30 years completing the outer defensive walls at Dover, building outworks and what was probably the most impressive and complex gatehouse to any castle in England (fig. 115 (#ulink_a6229406-8aa6-5eac-b910-d6f49ddad16d)).
Dover was key to the defence of the kingdom, as had been demonstrated in 1216–17. No less so was the Tower of London. Built to overawe Londoners, and by Henry III’s reign the home of the royal treasury and arsenal, it was central to the power of the monarchy. Relations with the city had, however, been strained, and Henry felt it vital to bring this fortress up to standard, too.
Fig. 115 Dover Castle, Kent; the Constable’s Gate, probably the largest gatehouse ever built in England. Begun in 1217 as the new principal entrance to the fortress, but also to contain a residence for the castle’s permanent chief, the Constable.
At the Tower of London, in the 1220s and from the late 1230s, Henry III re-planned the defensive circuit around the Conqueror’s White Tower, building a massive curtain wall protected by a series of circular and D-shaped towers and a 160ft-wide moat. A new gatehouse and barbican faced the City of London, and the White Tower assumed its current name thanks to its first all-over coat of whitewash. Henry’s work, which increased the walled area of the Tower by at least an acre, probably remained unfinished; part of it certainly collapsed, and it was left to Edward I to complete the fortification of the Tower between 1275 and 1285. Edward threw a second wall around the one built by his predecessor, digging a new moat and creating a complex series of outworks and gatehouses as a new entrance. The Tower of London was now the first coherently planned concentric fortress in England (fig. 116 (#ulink_bd549a54-c43c-536d-96ab-1e15b53ba098)).
Fig. 116 The Tower of London today. Although altered in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Tower is still recognisably a concentric fortress with rings of defences and, bottom right, an elaborate system of gatehouses, drawbridges and causeways that secured its entrance.
To enter, it was now necessary to pass from Tower Hill on to the Lion Tower, a semicircular enclosure surrounded by a moat and guarded by two gates and a drawbridge. From here the would-be visitor had to pass through the twin-towered Middle Tower, a gateway defended by a drawbridge, gateway and two portcullises, before passing onto a parapeted causeway across the moat. Here visitors were confronted by a second twin-towered gatehouse, the Byward Tower, also defended by a gate, portcullises and a drawbridge. King Edward I is known, rightly, as one of the great builders in English history. As well as substantial work in England, over a 25-year period – and at the cost of £80,000 – he built a series of castles and fortified towns in North Wales as part of his campaign to conquer and subdue the Welsh. Caernarvon, Conway, Harlech and Beaumaris, for example, still stand witness to this remarkable chapter in royal patronage. As these buildings are in Wales they fall outside the scope of this book, yet it is necessary to ask what influence, if any, did this gargantuan building programme carried out for an English king with English labour and finance have on the development of English architecture?
The first point to make is that the Welsh castles were exceptional, not only because of the incredibly impressive focus of men, materials and money, but because they were all built from scratch. Most English castles were a product of hundreds of years of piecemeal addition; very few new castles were built after 1150. Therefore, unusually, Edward had the opportunity to create a series of brand-new ideal forts, building what were probably the greatest military achievements of their age in Western Europe. The design of the Welsh castles brought together ideas that had been tried and tested at Dover and the Tower. For instance, none of them has a great tower or keep. Their most prominent feature, and where the prime accommodation lay, was the gatehouse. It was the gatehouse that had proved decisive during the siege of Dover, and the new defences at Dover, particularly the Constable Tower, emphasised its importance. But there was perhaps more than military necessity in the prominence given to gatehouses. Since Saxon times the English had favoured the gatehouse as a sign of status (p. 52), and the Welsh castles of Edward I reinforced this as a major feature in English architectural design (p. 146).
Finally, both Conway and Caernarvon castles effectively contained royal palaces.
This is an important point because neither Henry III’s works nor those of Edward I were confined to defence. Henry III transformed his castles into major and comfortable residences for himself; his works at Dover and the Tower included new palaces, as did those at Windsor and Winchester. After his marriage in 1236, yet more building was commissioned to provide suitable accommodation for the queen. These royal works reflect a wider move by magnates who were making their castles more comfortable and spacious. The Cliffords at Brougham Castle, Cumbria, were typical in setting out to extend and modernise their Anglo-Norman great tower in 1300. They added an elaborate gatehouse to its face, raised it by a storey and added fine rooms, including a vaulted oratory (fig. 117 (#ulink_1078dd99-18f3-5969-af91-78a7e7ec21c1)). Brougham was no longer a cold northern fortress; it was a commodious and fashionable residence.
Fig. 117 Brougham Castle, Cumbria, is a lesson in how to transform a severe Norman great tower into a compact but luxurious residence. The bottom three storeys date from around 1200 and contain a store, the castle’s hall and above that the original lord’s chamber. The storey above, with its fancy oratory and big fireplace, date from a century later and was added by Robert Clifford.
A Capital City
It was during the reign of Edward I that London became a capital city in the modern sense of the word, displacing Winchester as the seat of the state and the focal point for English identity, language and law. Its population was perhaps as large as 100,000, much smaller than Paris but four times the size of its nearest rival, Norwich. The years after 1300 saw London consolidate its position as the engine-house of England’s economy. By 1306 it exported more wool than Boston, and by 1334, in terms of taxation, London was five times richer than Bristol, her nearest competitor.
London was still surrounded by a wall with six gates, Roman in origin, and on a number of occasions during the Middle Ages these were manned to defend the City. Yet the population had already burst through the walls, especially in the west, where buildings lined the streets of the Strand and Holborn. Within the city most of the major buildings and structures that dominated its skyline to the Reformation had already been founded. The Tower and St Paul’s Cathedral have already been mentioned, but London also had monasteries and 140 parish churches, as well as London Bridge, 906ft long with 19 arches.
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The years between 1350 and 1530 produced a distinctive architectural language of considerable beauty and sophistication in England that was quite different from its continental counterparts. This individuality was to remain a hallmark of English building during the following century.
Introduction
Between the Black Death and the Reformation building in England entered a long period of architectural consensus. For nearly 200 years designers worked with an architectural language that, with relatively minor modulation and a greater or lesser degree of elaboration, retained its essential stylistic components. Through this long period new building types developed, new materials became fashionable and the way people lived, thought and worshipped changed. Yet, while the differences in buildings built between 1200 and 1300 are readily discernible, the same cannot be said of buildings built between 1400 and 1500. Precisely dating 15th-century buildings on stylistic grounds alone is a hazardous business, but the skills to do the same for 13th-century buildings can be readily developed.
Generations of scholars have made many attempts to explain this, each discrediting the views of the previous generation but each adding to the subtlety and complexity of our understanding.
Yet there are some important points that help. Gothic was an international architectural language, but after 1300 it acquired, if you like, many national dialects. Whilst Henry III’s Westminster Abbey (p. 127) and St Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster (p. 144), were consciously influenced by French models, this cannot be said of buildings after 1350. Architects looked to domestic models rather than to France, and so England, Spain, France, Flanders and elsewhere developed their own indigenous varieties of building. These varieties or dialects sometimes fed from one another; others acquired a particularly distinct tone. In England the dialect was very individualistic – and quite unlike those that developed elsewhere – and formed a national school of design that was strengthened by a close-knit network of masons and architects operating in a geographically defined nation state.
This turning inwards of architectural design took place against a tumultuous background of international warfare, civil war, political instability, and economic and social disaster. It is this mix of apparent instability on the one hand with architectural consensus on the other that this chapter explores.
A Century of Crisis 1300–1408
Although 13th-century England was rich and populous, by 1300 both wealth and population growth had reached a temporary peak, with the century that followed bringing financial setbacks and a decline in population. Underlying many of the problems was a very modern concern – climate change. Between 1290 and 1375 the British climate became unstable and unpredictable; a series of wet summers prevented crops from ripening, rotted seed in the ground, and nurtured pests and disease, while coastal flooding inundated thousands of acres and torrential rain made thousands more unusable. Between 1315 and 1322 there was crop failure and widespread famine, killing perhaps half a million people. Starting in the 1330s the countryside began to contract, villages were abandoned, clay and sandy soils were left for more fertile areas.
During the 13th-century expansion in Dartmoor hamlets and farmsteads had been built on agriculturally marginal land. In 1300 in the southern hamlet at Hound Tor there were four longhouses and seven ancillary buildings. As the climate deteriorated the farmers who occupied these built stone walls to keep the moorland from eating up their fields. Initially they must have had success, but in the 1330s they built corn driers to combat the effect of wet summers. This cannot have been enough, for the whole settlement was abandoned less than twenty years later.
A better-developed agricultural economy might have resisted the effects of climate change but climatic factors brought an immature system to its knees, particularly at the margins. A second global factor undermined 13th-century stability – a failure in the money supply. This was partly caused by a genuine shortage of silver; the mines simply couldn’t produce enough to supply the mints as well as the luxury-goods market. But in part it was a result of taxation demands made by the Crown to pay for war, meaning that in the 1330s and 40s there was often no money available to buy goods.
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