Betjeman’s Best British Churches
Richard Surman
Sir John Betjeman
A beautiful and practical up-to-date guide to over two thousand of Britain’s best parish churches.Although now most famous for his poetry, Sir John Betjeman’s great passion was churches. For over fifty years his guide, regularly updated, has been the eminent authority and the most distinguished guide to the best churches to visit.This edition, in full colour throughout and illustrated with over 350 specially commissioned photographs, covers over 2,500 of the very best churches in England, Scotland and Wales. Fully updated by bestselling author Richard Surman, this is the most complete and up to date guide to Britain’s church heritage.
BETJEMAN’S BEST BRITISH CHURCHES
UPDATED BY RICHARD SURMAN
With photographs by Michael Ellis and Richard Surman
Contents
Cover (#ud76f2760-4e04-5e88-9eaa-96c1c99248f4)
Title Page (#u54ae687b-ca04-5fcf-8b49-be5505d443bf)
How to find a Church
County Locator
PREFACE by Richard Surman (#ulink_2d0516a4-a64a-5042-911a-ac2b45aa52ac)
INTRODUCTION by Sir John Betjeman (#ulink_6415b04e-9226-511b-8f57-e9a732551bfe)
ENGLAND BY COUNTY
BEDFORDSHIRE (#ulink_b06e14df-eade-50c0-94c8-c16bd01a1b1e)
BERKSHIRE
BUCKINGHAMSHIRE
CAMBRIDGESHIRE
CHESHIRE
CORNWALL
CUMBRIA
DERBYSHIRE
DEVON
DORSET
DURHAM
ESSEX
GLOUCESTERSHIRE
HAMPSHIRE & THE ISLE OF WIGHT
HEREFORDSHIRE
HERTFORDSHIRE
KENT
LANCASHIRE, MERSEYSIDE & GREATER MANCHESTER
LEICESTERSHIRE
LINCOLNSHIRE
LONDON
GREATER LONDON
NORFOLK
NORTHAMPTONSHIRE
NORTHUMBERLAND AND TYNE & WEAR
NOTTINGHAMSHIRE
OXFORDSHIRE
RUTLAND
SHROPSHIRE
SOMERSET & BRISTOL
STAFFORDSHIRE
SUFFOLK
SURREY
SUSSEX – EAST
SUSSEX – WEST
WARWICKSHIRE & WEST MIDLANDS
WILTSHIRE
WORCESTERSHIRE
YORKSHIRE – EAST RIDING
YORKSHIRE – NORTH
YORKSHIRE – SOUTH
YORKSHIRE – WEST
WALES
SCOTLAND
THE ISLE OF MAN
THE CHANNEL ISLANDS
Glossary
Index of Architects and Artists
Index of Places
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Publisher
How to find a Church (#ulink_16317d92-4a25-5d97-81ef-1325ef029697)
This book includes Ordnance Survey (OS) and Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates to help readers locate the churches with precision.
USING THE OS COORDINATES
The OS grid references work on all the paper Ordnance Survey maps and the Ordnance Survey’s OpenData service on its website (www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk). If using the website, simply type the full grid reference into the OpenData search bar – e.g. SE966710 – which will take you directly to a map page showing the church, usually identifiable as ‘PW’ for ‘place of worship’.
If you are using an Ordnance Survey paper map, the same six-digit grid reference will work as follows:
• THE FIRST TWO LETTERS – e.g. the SE of SE966710 – refer to the Ordnance Survey’s division of Great Britain into 100 x 100 km major grid squares, each identified by two letters. On the paper maps, the letters can be seen in large lettering in the corner 1km grid squares and also where the major squares butt up to each other.
• THE FIRST TWO DIGITS – e.g. 96 – refer to the horizontal grid lines, called the ‘eastings’, which are numbered left to right on the paper maps.
• THE THIRD DIGIT – e.g. 6 – refers to the eastings grid in tenths. Thus the 6 in this example is six-tenths east of grid line 96.
• THE FOURTH AND FIFTH DIGITS – e.g. 71 – refer to the vertical grid lines, called the ‘northings’, which are numbered bottom to top on the paper maps.
• THE SIXTH DIGIT – e.g. 0 – refers to the northings grid in tenths. Thus the 0 in this example is within one-tenth north of grid line 71.
The division of tenths on the six-digit OS references in this book should be accurate to within 100 metres of the church.
USING THE GPS COORDINATES
These references give the latitude and longitude of locations in a digital format used by many car SatNav systems, mobile devices with GPS, and major online mapping applications such as Google and Bing.
Car SatNavs
First check if your SatNav allows the input of latitude and longitude / GPS coordinates. There are several reference systems in operation, so select ‘digital’ if given the option. In some SatNavs you will need to key in the full GPS coordinates with letters – e.g. 54.12669N, 0.52226W – while in others the letters may have to be selected separately.
Note that the GPS coordinates given in this book are centred on the church building itself, rather than an access point into the grounds or the nearest car park. Churches sited in remote fields, woods or parks may be some distance from the nearest public highway, and in such cases SatNavs won’t necessarily guide you to the best access point or parking place, although they should indicate where the church stands.
If your car SatNav does not offer the option to input the coordinates, we would suggest that you search for the village name and then the church name as a point of interest within the village, or, failing that, searching for ‘Church Street’ in a village often yields results!
Google Maps and Bing
Google Maps, Bing and some other online maps directly read the digital coordinates given in this book. Simply type the coordinates – e.g. 54.12669N, 0.52226W – into the map’s search bar.
Mobile phones and Other GPS Devices
Handheld devices that support GPS can read the GPS coordinates. On an iPhone, BlackBerry or Android device, for example, open the Google Maps application and type the coordinates into the search bar. Devices that use Full GPS (linking directly to satellites) are more accurate than those using Assisted GPS (via mobile phone masts).
If your device does not recognize the letters in the references, try leaving out the letters and substituting a minus sign before the longitude reference – e.g. 54.12669, -0.52226. (The minus sign is not necessary for longitude references ending in E.)
County Locator (#ulink_4164a646-ea33-555d-9d2a-729363f702e0)
COLN ST DENYS: ST JAMES THE GREAT – sunk into the picturesque Gloucestershire landscape, the church retains its Norman ground plan and tower
© Richard Surman
PREFACE by Richard Surman (#ulink_bdc53f75-e918-5dbe-8047-3df94a41ce5c)
Since John Betjeman compiled the first 1958 edition of the Collins Guide to English Parish Churches, it has become a classic of its kind, and has been reprinted several times, most notably in the two-volume Collins Pocket Guide to English Parish Churches, published in 1968, and the 1980 edition, in which the scope of the book was extended to take in churches in Wales. The background to the book is a story all of its own. To many, Sir John Betjeman was latterly the Poet Laureate, whose work was reviled and adored in equal measure. But Betjeman was many things apart from being a poet: as a young boy holidaying in Trebetherick he went church-hunting, and in adolescence, churches became a passion for him. He would always talk about his childhood impressions of buildings as being crucial in determining his later responses to architecture.
Friendships with James Lees-Milne, the noted architectural advisor to the National Trust, Betjeman’s work on the Architectural Review, where he met and formed a life-long friendship with the artist John Piper, a spell as the film critic for the Evening Standard – all these fed Betjeman’s limitless and sometimes mischievous imagination, which was equally exercised by his colourful private life.
His working life would take a different emphasis however, when he proposed the idea of a series of county guides to Jack Beddington, publicity manager of Shell-Mex BP. Beddington was known for his patronage of artists and writers, and Betjeman found himself working alongside Paul Nash and a coterie of friends to whom he handed out work on the Shell Guide series. What always characterised Betjeman’s reactions to architecture and countryside was a sense of place – the setting – as well as architectural and topographical detail. However mannered Betjeman might sometimes appear, one of his great gifts was to let landscape, architecture and art speak for themselves. After the war, Betjeman worked on many magazines, as well as writing poetry, and appearances on television became more and more regular. His presenting of the ABC of Churches programmes was a great success, not least to the crew, with whom he got on famously (although he did disconcert at least one member of the crew by taking his teddy bear Archibald Ormsby Gore wherever he went).
This new version – Betjeman’s Best British Churches – takes Betjeman’s original idea and moves it in a slightly different direction, but with great respect for his fundamental love of parish churches. The volume has much of a 21st-century feel about it – the age of satellite navigation and precision mapping have allowed us to create very precise locations for each of the churches featured herein. Betjeman would have found this odd, I’m sure, but it is our hope that in ‘modernising’ the format of the book, we might appeal to a new audience more familiar with the digital age, as well as re-invigorating those familiar with earlier versions.
There are three radical departures from previous editions. The first is that we have introduced a much stronger pictorial element: full colour photographs are used throughout the book, as are accurate and clear maps of each county. The second radical difference arises from the first: with a large number of colour illustrations, the extent of the book has had to be considerably reduced. Betjeman’s original book contained some 4,500 entries, and in some respects was a gazetteer. We decided to considerably modify this present edition, cutting down to some 2,500 entries. The criterion for retaining entries has been, wherever possible, to refer to the very simple star system that Betjeman employed in the 1968 edition, as the basis for first selection. Although the most recent 1993 edition discarded this form of rating, we have re-introduced it here, refining it so that throughout the book there is now a one- and two-star rating. Naturally there are many other churches included that were not starred in Betjeman’s 1968 edition – some of those have been revised too. There are also new churches included, and to these we have applied rating criteria that reflect those of which Betjeman would have approved.
The third radical departure from previous versions is the creation of an entirely new section for Scotland. Though Scottish religious history differs quite significantly from that of England and Wales, we believe that there is a sufficient number of fine churches in Scotland to merit a place alongside their English and Welsh counterparts.
Another distinct feature of this present book is the inclusion of several notable Roman Catholic churches: these have been selected as being of outstanding historical, architectural or artistic merit. The medieval abbey of Pluscarden in Scotland qualifies on both counts, first as the only medieval monastery in the British Isles in continuous use – barring a hiatus after the Reformation – by a Roman Catholic monastic community, and second as a centre of design and production of outstanding contemporary glass. The Church of the Immaculate Conception, Farm Street, London has an entry, based on the excellent work of A. W. N. Pugin to the altar and reredos and the chancel chapels by H. Clutton and J. F. Bentley. London’s Brompton Oratory gets an entry too; it would be remiss to ignore this extraordinary piece of Rome in London. In common with earlier editions we have also included churches in the care of the excellent Churches Conservation Trust, the Friends of Friendless Churches – especially in Wales – and English Heritage.
As regards the structure of counties, we have followed all the modern ceremonial boundaries: this has necessitated a considerable re-ordering of Yorkshire, the merging of Westmorland and Cumberland into Cumbria, changes to Berkshire and Oxfordshire and several other counties. Rutland, the country’s smallest and fiercely independent county, has been retained, whilst Huntingdonshire and the Soke of Peterborough have been brought together within Cambridgeshire. Bristol is with Somerset, and London is in two parts, Central and Greater London (the latter containing Middlesex and the inner parts of Essex, Kent and Surrey). Greater Manchester and Merseyside are together with Lancashire.
Considerable effort has gone into checking the facts about each entry, and wherever possible we have corrected errors. For errors that we have inadvertently introduced or have failed to correct, we both apologise and welcome comments.
To those people who may be disconcerted by the disappearance from this edition of their familiar churches, we ask for their forbearance, and hope that we have explained with sufficient persuasion the reasons why. Above all what we have striven to achieve is a book that captures the spirit of the earlier editions, in a 21st-century context.
A book such as this is not possible without the work of many people, not least those who have contributed to the various counties over the years. In particular I would like to thank Sam Richardson and Helena Nicholls at Collins Reference for their enthusiastic support for a long and complex project. I would also like to express my gratitude to Mike and Ros Ellis at Thameside Media: their hard and painstaking work on the planning, design, mapping, checking and photography have been essential. Their enthusiasm and expertise has taken them, I suspect, way beyond their brief. I am also very grateful to Michael Lynch, former Sir William Fraser Professor of Scottish History and Palaeography, for his eagle-eyed and helpful observations on my attempts to disentangle Scottish religious history.
Many others have contributed more indirectly – those hard-working souls that keep (some) of our fine churches open, that write the individual church guides, many of which are of a very high standard, and the various organisations, particularly the Churches Conservation Trust, the Friends of Friendless Churches, the National Churches Trust and the many county historic church trusts, all of whom work tirelessly to preserve a priceless heritage – the parish church.
Richard Surman 2011
WALPOLE ST PETER: ST PETER – the porch to the church is vaulted in a beautiful sandstone, the bosses sculpted into the sleeping forms of foals, sheep and suchlike
© Michael Ellis
INTRODUCTION by Sir John Betjeman (#ulink_d05847c5-eac0-566c-be6d-64aa9b03a30f)
PART ONE: THE OLD CHURCHES
To atheists inadequately developed building sites; and often, alas, to Anglicans but visible symbols of disagreement with the incumbent: ‘the man there is “too high”, “too low”, “too lazy”, “too interfering”’ – still they stand, the churches of England, their towers grey above billowy globes of elm trees, the red cross of St George flying over their battlements, the Duplex Envelope System employed for collections, schoolmistress at the organ, incumbent in the chancel, scattered worshippers in the nave, Tortoise stove slowly consuming its ration as the familiar 17th-century phrases come echoing down arcades of ancient stone.
Odi et amo. This sums up the general opinion of the Church of England among the few who are not apathetic. One bright autumn morning I visited the church of the little silver limestone town of Somerton in Somerset. Hanging midway from a rich-timbered roof, on chains from which were suspended branched and brassy-gleaming chandeliers, were oval boards painted black. In gold letters on each these words were inscribed:
TO GOD’S
GLORY
&
THE HONOR OF
THE
CHURCH OF
ENGLAND
1782
They served me as an inspiration towards compiling this book.
The Parish Churches of England are even more varied than the landscape. The tall town church, smelling of furniture polish and hot-water pipes, a shadow of the medieval marvel it once was, so assiduously have Victorian and even later restorers renewed everything old; the little weather-beaten hamlet church standing in a farmyard down a narrow lane, bat-droppings over the pews and one service a month; the church of a once prosperous village, a relic of the 15th-century wool trade, whose soaring splendour of stone and glass subsequent generations have had neither the energy nor the money to destroy; the suburban church with Northamptonshire-style steeple rising unexpectedly above slate roofs of London and calling with mid-Victorian bells to the ghosts on the edge of the industrial estate; the High, the Low, the Central churches, the alive and the dead ones, the churches that are easy to pray in and those that are not, the churches whose architecture brings you to your knees, the churches whose decorations affront the sight – all these come within the wide embrace of our Anglican Church, whose arms extend beyond the seas to many fabrics more.
From the first wooden church put up in a forest clearing or stone cell on windy moor to the newest social hall, with sanctuary and altar partitioned off, built on the latest industrial estate, our churches have existed chiefly for the celebration of what some call the Mass, or the Eucharist and others call Holy Communion or the Lord’s Supper.
Between the early paganism of Britain and the present paganism there are nearly twenty thousand churches and well over a thousand years of Christianity. More than half the buildings are medieval. Many of those have been so severely restored in the last century that they could almost be called Victorian – new stone, new walls, new roofs, new pews. If there is anything old about them it is what one can discern through the detective work of the visual imagination.
It may be possible to generalize enough about the parish church of ancient origin to give an impression of how it is the history of its district in stone and wood and glass. Such generalization can give only a superficial impression. Churches vary with their building materials and with the religious, social and economic history of their districts.
The Outside of the Church – Gravestones
See on some village mount, in the mind’s eye, the parish church of today. It is in the old part of the place. Near the church will be the few old houses of the parish, and almost for certain there will be an inn very near the church. A lych-gate built as a memorial at the beginning of this century indicates the entrance to the churchyard. Away on the outskirts of the town or village, if it is a place of any size, will be the arid new cemetery consecrated in 1910 when there was no more room in the churchyard.
Nearer to the church and almost always on the south side are to be found the older tombs, the examples of fine craftsmanship in local stone of the Queen Anne and Georgian periods. Wool merchants and big farmers, all those not entitled to an armorial monument on the walls inside the church, generally occupy the grandest graves. Their obelisks, urns and table tombs are surrounded with Georgian ironwork. Parish clerks, smaller farmers and tradesmen lie below plainer stones. All their families are recorded in deep-cut lettering. Here is a flourish of 18th-century calligraphy; there is reproduced the typeface of Baskerville. It is extraordinary how long the tradition of fine lettering continued, especially when it is in a stone easily carved or engraved, whether limestone, ironstone or slate. The tradition lasted until the middle of the 19th century in those country places where stone was used as easily as wood. Some old craftsman was carving away while the young go-aheads in the nearest town were busy inserting machine-made letters into white Italian marble.
ST JUST-IN-ROSELAND: ST JUST – coastal lichen and moss on one of the headstones
© Michael Ellis
The elegance of the local stone carver’s craft is not to be seen only in the lettering. In the 18th century it was the convention to carve symbols round the top of the headstone and down the sides. The earlier examples are in bold relief, cherubs with plough-boy faces and thick wings, and scythes, hour glasses and skulls and cross-bones diversify their tops. You will find in one or another country churchyard that there has been a local sculptor of unusual vigour and perhaps genius who has even carved a rural scene above some well-graven name. Towards the end of the 18th century the lettering becomes finer and more prominent, the decoration flatter and more conventional, usually in the Adam manner, as though a son had taken on his father’s business and depended on architectural pattern-books. But the tops of all headstones varied in shape. At this time too it became the custom in some districts to paint the stones and to add a little gold leaf to the lettering. Paint and stone by now have acquired a varied pattern produced by weather and fungus, so that the stones are probably more beautiful than they were when they were new, splodged as they are with gold and silver and slightly overgrown with moss. On a sharp frosty day when the sun is in the south and throwing up the carving, or in the west and bringing out all the colour of the lichens, a country churchyard may bring back the lost ages of craftsmanship more effectively than the church which stands behind it. Those unknown carvers are the same race as produced the vigorous inn signs which were such a feature of England before the brewers ruined them with artiness and standardization. They belong to the world of wheelwrights and wagon-makers, and they had their local styles. In Kent the chief effect of variety was created by different-sized stones with elaborately-scalloped heads to them, and by shroud-like mummies of stone on top of the grave itself; in the Cotswolds by carving in strong relief; in slate districts by engraved lettering. In counties like Surrey and Sussex, where stone was rare, there were many wooden graveyard monuments, two posts with a board between them running down the length of the grave and painted in the way an old wagon is painted. But most of these wooden monuments have perished or decayed out of recognition.
‘At rest’, ‘Fell asleep’, ‘Not dead but gone before’ and other equally non-committal legends are on the newer tombs. In Georgian days it was the custom either to put only the name or to apply to the schoolmaster or parson for a rhyme. Many a graveyard contains beautiful stanzas which have not found their way to print and are disappearing under wind and weather. Two of these inscriptions have particularly struck my fancy. One is in Bideford and commemorates a retired sea-captain Henry Clark, 1836. It summarizes for me a type of friendly and pathetic Englishman to be found hanging about, particularly at little seaports.
For twenty years he scarce slept in a bed;
Linhays and limekilns lull’d his weary head
Because he would not to the poor house go,
For his proud spirit would not let him to.
The black bird’s whistling notes at break of day
Used to wake him from his bed of hay.
Unto the bridge and quay he then repaired
To see what shipping up the river stirr’d.
Oft in the week he used to view the bay,
To see what ships were coming in from sea,
To captains’ wives he brought the welcome news,
And to the relatives of all the crews.
At last poor Harry Clark was taken ill,
And carried to the work house ’gainst his will:
And being of this mortal life quite tired,
He lived about a month and then expired.
The other is on an outside monument on the north wall of the church at Harefield, near Uxbridge, one of the last three country villages left in Middlesex. It is to Robert Mossendew, servant of the Ashby family, who died in 1744. Had he been a gentleman his monument would at this time have been inside the church. He was a gamekeeper and is carved in relief with his gun above this inscription.
In frost and snow, thro’ hail and rain
He scour’d the woods, and trudg’d the plain;
The steady pointer leads the way,
Stands at the scent, then springs the prey;
The timorous birds from stubble rise,
With pinions stretch’d divide the skies;
The scatter’d lead pursues the sight
And death in thunder stops their flight;
His spaniel, of true English kind,
With gratitude inflames his mind;
This servant in an honest way,
In all his actions copies Tray.
The churchyard indeed often contains cruder but more lively and loving verses than the polished tributes inscribed in marble tablets within the church to squires and peers and divines of the county hierarchy. The Dartmoor parish of Buckland Monachorum displays this popular epitaph to a blacksmith which may be found in other parishes:
My sledge and hammer both declin’d,
My bellows too have lost their wind.
My fire’s extinct, my forge decay’d,
And in the dust my vice is laid,
My coal is spent, my iron’s gone,
My nails are drove, my work is done.
Though such an epitaph can scarcely be called Christian, it is at least not an attempt to cover up in mawkish sentiment or in crematorial good taste the inevitability of death.
The Outside
The church whose southern side we are approaching is probably little like the building which stood there even two centuries before, although it has not been rebuilt. The outside walls were probably plastered, unless the church is in a district where workable stone has long been used and it is faced with cut stone known as ashlar. Churches which are ashlar-faced all over are rare, but many have an ashlar-faced western tower, or aisle to the north-east or south-east, or a porch or transept built of cut stone in the 15th century by a rich family. Some have a guild chapel or private chantry where Mass was said for the souls of deceased members of the guild or family. This is usually ashlar-faced and has a carved parapet as well, and is in marked contrast with the humble masonry of the rest of the church.
Rubble or uneven flints were not considered beautiful to look at until the 19th century. People were ashamed of them and wished to see their churches smooth on the outside and inside walls, and weather-proof. At Barnack and Earl’s Barton the Saxons have even gone so far as to imitate in stone the decorative effects of wooden construction. Plaster made of a mixture of hair or straw and sand and lime was from Saxon times applied as a covering to the walls. Only the cut stone round the windows and doors was left, and even this was lime-washed. The plaster was thin and uneven. It was beautifully coloured a pale yellow or pink or white according to the tradition of the district. And if it has now been stripped off the church, it may still be seen on old cottages of the village if any survive. The earlier the walls of a church are, the less likely they are to be ashlar-faced, for there was no widespread use of cut stone in villages until the late 14th century when transport was better, and attention which had formerly been expended on abbeys was paid to building and enlarging parish churches.
EAST SHEFFORD: ST THOMAS – plaster on exterior walls would once have been common but is now a rarity; here too is a use of many materials: brick, stone, tile and timber
© Michael Ellis
And this is the place to say that most of the old parish churches in England are building rather than architecture. They are gradual growths, as their outside walls will shew; in their construction they partake of the character of cottages and barns and the early manor house, and not of the great abbey churches built for monks or secular canons. Their humble builders were inspired to copy what was to be seen in the nearest great church. The styles of Gothic came from these large buildings, but the village execution of them was later and could rarely rise to more than window tracery and roof timbering. Even these effects have a local flavour, they are a village voluntary compared with the music played on a great instrument by the cathedral organist. Of course here and there, when the abbeys declined, a famous mason from an abbey or cathedral might rebuild the church of his native place, and masons were employed in rich wool districts of East Anglia, the Midlands and parts of Yorkshire and Devon to build large churches which really are architecture and the product of a single brain, not the humble expression of a village community’s worship. Much has been discovered about the names and work of medieval architects by Mr John Harvey in his book Gothic England and in the researches of Messrs. Salzman, and Knoop and Jones.
These outside walls on which the sun shews up the mottled plaster, the sudden warm red of an 18th-century patching of brick, the gentle contrast with the ashlar, the lime-washed tracery of the windows, the heating chimney-stack in local brick climbing up the chancel wall or the stove pipe projecting from a window, these are more often seen today in old watercolours in the local museum, or in some affectionate and ill-executed painting hanging in the vestry shewing the church ‘before restoration in 1883’. Most of our old churches have been stripped of their plaster, some in living memory. The rubble has been exposed and then too often been repointed with grey cement, which is unyielding and instead of protecting the old stones causes them to crack and flake in frosty weather, for cement and stone have different rates of expansion. To make matters worse the cement itself has been snail pointed, that is to say pointed in hard, flat lines, so that the church wall looks like a crazy pavement.
Old paintings sometimes shew the external roofs as they used to be. The church roof and chancel are scarcely distinguishable from the cottage roofs. If the original steep pitch survives, it is seen to be covered with the local tiles, stones or thatch of the old houses of the district. 15th-century and Georgian raisings or lowerings of the roof and alterations to a flatter pitch generally meant a re-covering with lead, and the original pitch may be traced on the eastern face of the tower. Victorian restorers much enjoyed raising roofs to what they considered the original pitch, or putting on an altogether new roof in the cathedral manner. The effect of those re-roofings is generally the most obviously new feature on the outside of an old church. Red tiles and patterned slates from Wales or stone tiles which continually come down because they are set at a pitch too steep for their weight, are the usual materials. Instead of being graded in size, large at the eaves and getting smaller as they reach the ridge, the stone tiles are all of the same size so that the roof is not proportioned to the walls. The ridges are usually crowned with ridge tiles of an ornamental pattern which contrast in colour and texture with the rest. The gable ends are adorned with crosses. The drainage system is prominent and there will be pipes running down the wall to a gutter. On the rain-water heads at the top of these pipes there will probably be the date of the restoration. The old way of draining a roof was generally by leaden or wooden spouts rushing out of the fearsome mouths of gargoyles and carrying the water well beyond the walls of the church into the churchyard. If the water did drip on to the walls the plaster served as a protection from damp. Butterfield, a comparatively conservative and severely practical Victorian restorer, in his report on the restoration of Shottesbrooke church (1845) remarks of the flint walls of that elegant building, ‘There are no parapets to any part of the Church, and the water has continued to drip from the eaves for five centuries without any injury to the walls.’ On the other hand the water has continued to drip from the eaves of Sir Edwin Lutyens’ fine church of St Jude-on-the-Hill, Hampstead Garden Suburb, London, and over its Portland stone cornice with considerable injury to the brick walls in less than half a century. The nature of the wall surface, the pointing, and the means devised for draining the water clear from the wall foundation once it has reached the ground, have much to do with keeping out the damp.
Sometimes we may find on the outside walls a variety of scratches, marks and carvings. The only ones of any beauty will probably be the consecration crosses, where the Bishop anointed the walls with oil when the church was newly built. They are high up so that people would not brush them in going past. Similar crosses may be seen on stone altars inside the church. The small crosses which are cut roughly in the jambs of doorways were, according to the late E. A. Greening Lamborn, an angry antiquarian with a good prose style, probably put there not for consecration but ‘to scare away evil spirits and prevent them crossing the threshold’. There is a whole literature devoted to masons’ marks on the walls of churches, outside and in, and to the ‘scratch dials’ or ‘mass clocks’ which look like sundials lacking a gnomon, to be found on the outside south walls of many churches. The masons’ marks are triangles, diamonds, bent arrows, circles, squares and other shapes looking rather like boy scout signs, cut into ashlar in some churches, notably the large ones, and surviving where stone has not been re-tooled by the Victorians. Often they may be only scribbles. But they seem to help some antiquaries to give an exact date to buildings or portions of a building. Scratch dials or mass clocks were used generally to show the time when Mass was to be said (usually 9 a.m. in medieval England). Others are primitive clocks. But they, like the parish registers, belong to the non-visual side of church history and it is with the look of a church that this book is primarily concerned.
Finally there are on the outside of churches the gargoyles spouting water off the roof and the carved heads to be found either side of some windows and the figures in niches on tower or porch. Gargoyles can be fearsome, particularly on the north side of the church, and heads and statues, where they have survived Puritan outrage and Victorian zeal, are sometimes extremely beautiful or fantastic.
The church porch flapping with electoral rolls, notices of local acts, missionary appeals and church services (which will occupy us later) gives us a welcome. Though the powers of the parish vestry have been taken over by parish councils and local government, church doors or the porches which shelter them are often plastered with public announcements. Regularly will the village policeman nail to the church door some notice about Foot-and-Mouth Disease when the British Legion Notice Board has been denied him or the Post Office is shut. Most church porches in England are built on the south side, first as a protection for the door from prevailing south-west gales. Then they were used as places for baptism, bargains were made there, oaths sworn, and burial and marriage services conducted. Above some of them, from the 14th century onward, a room was built, usually for keeping parish chests and records. In these places many a village school was started. At first they may have been inhabited by a watchman, who could look down into the church from an internal window. In counties where stone is rare there are often elaborate wooden porches, notably in Sussex, Surrey and Essex.
ASHTON: ST JOHN THE BAPTIST – the 15th-century screens at the church have some of Devon’s best figurative panel painting
© Michael Ellis
Professor E. A. Freeman, the great Victorian ecclesiologist, thought little of a man who went up the churchyard path to the main door, which is more or less what we have done, and did not go round the whole building first. But he was an antiquary who took his churches slowly, speculated on them and did detective work about dates of extensions. On a day when the wind is not too cold and the grass not too long and wet, a walk round the outside of the church is always worth while. On the farther side, which is generally the north, there may well be extensions, a family mausoleum for instance, of which there is no sign inside the church beyond a blocked archway. Mr John Piper and I had a peculiar experience through not going round the outside of the derelict church of Wolfhamcote near Daventry in Warwickshire. The lovely building was locked, the windows smashed, and the sun was setting on its lichened stone. There was only one cottage near and we could make no one hear. So we climbed through a window in the south aisle. Bat-droppings were over rotting floors and damp stains on the ochre-plastered walls, and in the fading light we saw that the altar cloth had been raised and revealed a black tunnel with light at the end, a most peculiar thing to see beyond an altar. We approached and saw there were stairs going down under the table leading to a passage in which brass-studded coffins lay on shelves. When we went round the outside of the church we saw that beyond the east end was a Strawberry Hill Gothick extension, the mausoleum of the Tibbits family. Vestries are more usual on the north side of churches than mausolea, and very ugly most of them are, hard little stone sheds leant against the old walls. There will be almost for certain a north door blocked or bricked-up long ago, with the trace of its arch mouldings still there. There may even be a north porch. But unless the village and manor house are to the north of the church this side of the churchyard will be gloomy and its tombs will be, at the earliest, 19th century, except for a very few near the east end. And so round by the sexton’s tool-shed and the anthracite dump and the west door of the tower, we return to the south porch.
ROCK: ST PETER AND ST PAUL – like many churches, it has retained its Norman doorway while the church around it has been fully Gothicised
© Michael Ellis
Notice the stonework round the outside doors. Often it is round-headed and of Norman date, an elaborate affair of several concentric semi-circles of carved stone. It may even be the only Norman work left in the church and may originally have been the chancel arch before the chancel was enlarged and a screen put across its western end. The later medieval rebuilders respected the Norman craftsmanship and often kept a Norman door inside their elaborate porches.
There is often difficulty in opening the door. This gives the less impatient of us a chance of looking at the door itself. Either because the business of transferring the huge church lock was too difficult, or because here was a good piece of wood older than any of the trees in the parish, church doors have survived from the middle ages while the interiors on to which they open have been repaired out of recognition. The wood of the door may be carved or be decorated with old local ironwork. If it is an old door it will invariably open inwards. So first turn the iron handle and push hard. Then if the door seems to be locked, turn the handle the other way and push hard. Then feel on the wall-plate of the porch for the key. Church keys are usually six or eight inches long and easy to find. If there is no sign of the key and all vestry doors are locked, call at a house. If the path leading through the churchyard to a door in the vicarage wall is overgrown and looks unused, you may be sure the vicarage has been sold to wealthy unbelievers and there is no chance of getting the key from there. The houses to choose are those with pots of flowers in the window. Here will be living traditional villagers who even if they are chapel will probably know who it is who keeps the church key. Men are less likely to know than women, since men in villages are more rarely church-goers. Villagers are all out on Saturday afternoons shopping in the local town. Only an idiot and the dog remain behind.
The Porch and Bells
Down one step – for the churchyard will have risen round an old building – and we are in the church itself.
The practised eye can tell at a glance how severe the restoration has been, and often indeed who has done the damage. For instance almost every other church in Cornwall, beside many farther east, was restored by Mr J. P. St Aubyn late in the 19th century, and he has left his mark at the church porch in the form of a scraper of his own design, as practical and unattractive as his work. We must remember, however much we deplore it, that the most cumbersome bit of panelling bought from a Birmingham firm without regard for the old church into which it is to go, the sentimental picture for the Art Shop, the banner with the dislocated saint, the Benares ware altar vases, the brass commemorative tablet, the greenish stained-glass window with its sentimental Good Shepherd – often have been saved up for by some devout and penurious communicant. It must be admitted that spirituality and aesthetics rarely go together. ‘Carnal delight even in the holiest things,’ says Father R. M. Benson, founder of the Cowley Father ‘(habits of thought and philosophy, acquisition of knowledge, schemes of philanthropy, aesthetic propriety, influence in society) hinders the development of the Christ-life by strengthening the natural will.’ So when one is inclined to lament lack of taste and seemingly wilful destruction of beauty in a church, it is wise to remember that the incumbent, even if he be that rarity a man of aesthetic appreciation, is probably not to blame for modern blemishes to the fabric. He is primarily a missioner and he cannot offend his parishioners on so unspiritual a matter. The reader who casts his mind back to his early worship as a child will remember that a hymn board, or a brass cross or a garish window were, from his customary gazing on them Sunday after Sunday, part of his religious life. If as an older and more informed person his taste and knowledge tell him these things are cheap and hideous, he will still regret their passing with a part of him which is neither his intellect nor his learning. How much more will an uninformed villager, whose feeling always runs higher where the church is concerned than a townsman’s, cling to these objects he has known as a boy, however cheap they are. When the vicar or rector felt himself entitled to be a dictator, he could with more impunity and less offence than now, ‘restore’ the old church out of recognition. He could hack down the box-pews, re-erect a screen across the chancel, put the choir into surplices and move it from the west gallery to the chancel, and substitute a pipe organ for the old instruments. Even in those days many a disgruntled villager left the church to try his voice in chapel or to play his instrument in the old village band. It is a tribute to the hold of our church that congregations continued to use their churches after restorations in Victorian times. Perhaps the reason for the continued hold is that the more ritualistic performance of the Church Services made church more interesting. There is no doubt that Evangelicals were worried at the success of Tractarian methods. But picture your own childhood’s church whitewashed on the advice of the Diocesan Advisory Committee, your pew gone and a row of chairs in its place, the altar different, and the chancel cleared of choir-stalls and the choir non-existent as a consequence. Were it not your childhood’s church, you would consider this an improvement. One part of you may consider it an improvement despite associations, but not the other. Conservatism is innate in ecclesiastical arrangement. It is what saves for us the history of the village or town in wood and glass and metal and stone.
Let us enter the church by the tower door and climb to the ringing chamber where the ropes hang through holes in the roof. Nowhere outside England except for a very few towers in the rest of the British Isles, America and the Dominions, are bells rung so well. The carillons of the Netherlands and of Bourneville and Atkinson’s scent shop in London are not bell ringing as understood in England. Carillon ringing is done either by means of a cylinder worked on the barrel-organ and musical box principle, or by keyed notes played by a musician. Carillon bells are sounded by pulling the clapper to the rim of the bell. This is called chiming, and it is not ringing.
Bell ringing in England is known among ringers as ‘the exercise’, rather as the rearing and training of pigeons is known among the pigeon fraternity as ‘the fancy’. It is a class-less folk art which has survived in the church despite all arguments about doctrine and the diminution of congregations. In many a church when the parson opens with the words ‘Dearly beloved brethren, the Scripture moveth us in sundry places...’ one may hear the tramp of the ringers descending the newel stair into the refreshing silence of the graveyard. Though in some churches they may come in later by the main door and sit in the pew marked ‘Ringers Only’, in others they will not be seen again, the sweet melancholy notes of ‘the exercise’ floating out over the Sunday chimney-pots having been their contribution to the glory of God. So full of interest and technicality is the exercise that there is a weekly paper devoted to it called The Ringing World.
A belfry where ringers are keen has the used and admired look of a social club. There, above the little bit of looking-glass in which the ringers slick their hair and straighten their ties before stepping down into the outside world, you will find blackboards with gilded lettering proclaiming past peals rung for hours at a stretch. In another place will be the rules of the tower written in a clerkly hand. A charming Georgian ringers’ rhyme survives at St Endellion, Cornwall, on a board headed with a picture of ringers in knee-breeches:
We ring the Quick to Church and dead to Grave,
Good is our use, such usage let us have
Who here therefore doth Damn, or Curse or Swear,
Or strike in Quarrel thogh no Blood appear,
Who wears a Hatt or Spurr or turns a Bell
Or by unskilful handling spoils a Peal,
Shall Sixpense pay for every single Crime
’Twill make him careful ’gainst another time.
Let all in Love and Friendship hither come,
Whilst the shrill Treble calls to Thundering Tom,
And since bells are our modest Recreation
Let’s Rise and Ring and Fall to Admiration.
Many country towers have six bells. Not all these bells are medieval. Most were cast in the 17th, 18th or 19th centuries when change-ringing was becoming a country exercise. And the older bells will have been re-cast during that time, to bring them into tune with the new ones. They are likely to have been again re-cast in modern times, and the most ancient inscription preserved and welded on to the re-cast bell. Most counties have elaborately produced monographs about their church bells. The older bells have beautiful lettering sometimes, as at Somerby, and South Somercotes in Lincolnshire, where they are inscribed with initial letters decorated with figures so that they look like illuminated initials from old manuscripts interpreted in relief on metal. The English love for Our Lady survived in inscriptions on church bells long after the Reformation, as did the use of Latin. Many 18th- and even early 19th-century bells have Latin inscriptions. A rich collection of varied dates may be seen by struggling about on the wooden cage in which the bells hang among the bat-droppings in the tower.
Many local customs survive in the use of bells. In some places a curfew is rung every evening; in others a bell is rung at five in the morning during Lent. Fanciful legends have grown up about why they are rung, but their origins can generally be traced to the divine offices. The passing bell is rung differently from district to district. Sometimes the years of the deceased are tolled, sometimes the ringing is three strokes in succession followed by a pause. There are instances of the survival of prayers for the departed where the bell is tolled as soon as the news of the death of a parishioner reaches the incumbent.
Who has heard a muffled peal and remained unmoved? Leather bags are tied to one side of the clapper and the bells ring alternately loud and soft, the soft being an echo, as though in the next world, of the music we hear on earth.
I make no apology for writing so much about church bells. They ring through our literature, as they do over our meadows and roofs and few remaining elms. Some may hate them for their melancholy, but they dislike them chiefly, I think, because they are reminders of Eternity. In an age of faith they were messengers of consolation.
The bells are rung down, the ting-tang will ring for five minutes, and now is the time to go into Church.
The Interior Today
As we sit in a back pew of the nave with the rest of the congregation – the front pews are reserved for those who never come to church – most objects which catch the eye are Victorian. What we see of the present age is cheap and sparse. The thick wires clamped on to the old outside wall, which make the church look as though the vicar had put it on the telephone, are an indication without that electric light has lately been introduced. The position of the lights destroys the effect of the old mouldings on arches and columns. It is a light too harsh and bright for an old building, and the few remaining delicate textures on stone and walls are destroyed by the dazzling floodlights fixed in reflectors from the roof, and a couple of spotlights behind the chancel arch which throw their full radiance on the brass altar vases and on the vicar when he marches up to give the blessing. At sermon time, in a winter evensong, the lights are switched off, and the strip reading-lamp on the pulpit throws up the vicar’s chin and eyebrows so that he looks like Grock. A further disfigurement introduced by electrical engineers is a collection of meters, pipes and fuses on one of the walls.
If a church must be lit with electricity – which is in any case preferable to gas, which streaks the walls – the advice of Sir Ninian Comper might well be taken. This is to have as many bulbs as possible of as low power as possible, so that they do not dazzle the eye when they hang from the roof and walls. Candles are the perfect lighting for an old church, and oil light is also effective. The mystery of an old church, however small the building, is preserved by irregularly placed clusters of low-powered bulbs which light service books but leave the roof in comparative darkness. The chancel should not be strongly lit, for this makes the church look small, and all too rarely are chancel and altar worthy of a brilliant light. I have hardly ever seen an electrically lit church where this method has been employed, and we may assume that the one in which we are sitting is either floodlit or strung with blinding pendants whose bulbs are covered by ‘temporary’ shades reminiscent of a Government office.
(#ulink_b3da99e3-c66a-519f-a110-9e7af3450018) I have even seen electric heaters hung at intervals along the gallery of an 18th-century church and half-way up the columns of a medieval nave.
Other modern adornments are best seen in daylight, and it is in daylight that we will imagine the rest of the church. The ‘children’s corner’ in front of the side altar, with its pale reproductions of water-colours by Margaret W. Tarrant, the powder-blue hangings and unstained oak kneelers, the side altar itself, too small in relation to the aisle window above it, the pale stained-glass figure of St George with plenty of clear glass round it (Diocesan Advisory Committees do not like exclusion of daylight) or the anaemic stained-glass soldier in khaki – these are likely to be the only recent additions to the church, excepting a few mural tablets in oak or Hopton Wood stone, much too small in comparison with the 18th-century ones, dotted about on the walls and giving them the appearance of a stamp album; these, thank goodness, are the only damage our age will have felt empowered to do.
The Interior in 1860
In those richer days when a British passport was respected throughout the world, when ‘carriage folk’ existed and there was a smell of straw and stable in town streets and bobbing tenants at lodge gates in the country, when it was unusual to boast of disbelief in God and when ‘Chapel’ was connected with ‘trade’ and ‘Church’ with ‘gentry’, when there were many people in villages who had never seen a train nor left their parish, when old farm-workers still wore smocks, when town slums were newer and even more horrible, when people had orchids in their conservatories and geraniums and lobelias in the trim beds beside their gravel walks, when stained glass was brownish-green and when things that shone were considered beautiful, whether they were pink granite, brass, pitchpine, mahogany or encaustic tiles, when the rector was second only to the squire, when doctors were ‘apothecaries’ and lawyers ‘attorneys’, when Parliament was a club, when shops competed for custom, when the servants went to church in the evening, when there were family prayers and basement kitchens – in those days God seemed to have created the universe and to have sent His Son to redeem the world, and there was a church parade to worship Him on those shining Sunday mornings we read of in Charlotte M. Yonge’s novels and feel in Trollope and see in the drawings in Punch. Then it was that the money pouring in from our empire was spent in restoring old churches and in building bold and handsome new ones in crowded areas and exclusive suburbs, in seaside towns and dockland settlements. They were built by the rich and given to the poor: ‘All Seats in this Church are Free.’ Let us now see this church we have been describing as it was in the late 1860s, shining after its restoration.
Changed indeed it is, for even the aisles are crowded and the prevailing colours of clothes are black, dark blue and purple. The gentlemen are in frock coats and lean forward into their top hats for a moment’s prayer, while the lesser men are in black broad-cloth and sit with folded arms awaiting the rector. He comes in after his curate and they sit at desks facing each other on either side of the chancel steps. Both wear surplices: the Rector’s is long and flowing and he has a black scarf round his shoulders: so has the curate, but his surplice is shorter and he wears a cassock underneath, for, if the truth be told, the curate is ‘higher’ than the rector and would have no objection to wearing a coloured stole and seeing a couple of candles lit on the altar for Holy Communion. But this would cause grave scandal to the parishioners, who fear idolatry. Those who sit in the pews in the aisles where the seats face inward, never think of turning eastwards for the Creed. Hymns Ancient and Modern has been introduced. The book is ritualistic, but several excellent men have composed and written for it, like Sir Frederick Ouseley and Sir Henry Baker, and Bishops and Deans. The surpliced choir precede the clergy and march out of the new vestry built on the north-east corner of the church. Some of the older men, feeling a little ridiculous in surplices, look wistfully towards the west end where the gallery used to be and where they sang as youths to serpent, fiddle and bass recorder in the old-fashioned choir, before the pipe organ was introduced up there in the chancel. The altar has been raised on a series of steps, the shining new tiles becoming more elaborate and brilliant the nearer they approach the altar. The altar frontal has been embroidered by ladies in the parish, a pattern of lilies on a red background. There is still an alms dish on the altar, and behind it a cross has been set in stone on the east wall. In ten years’ time brass vases of flowers, a cross and candlesticks will be on a ‘gradine’ or shelf above the altar. The east window is new, tracery and all. The glass is green and red, shewing the Ascension – the Crucifixion is a little ritualistic – and has been done by a London firm. And a smart London architect designed all these choir stalls in oak and these pews of pitch-pine in the nave and aisles. At his orders the new chancel roof was constructed, the plaster was taken off the walls of the church, and the stone floors were taken up and transformed into a shining stretch of red and black tiles. He also had that pale pink and yellow glass put in all the unstained windows so that a religious light was cast. The brass gas brackets arc by Skidmore of Coventry. Some antiquarian remains are carefully preserved. A Norman capital from the old aisle which was pulled down, a pillar piscina, a half of a cusped arch which might have been – no one knows quite what it might have been, but it is obviously ancient. Unfortunately it was not possible to remove the pagan classical memorials of the last century owing to trouble about faculties and fear of offending the descendants of the families commemorated. The church is as good as new, and all the medieval style of the middle-pointed period – the best period because it is in the middle and not ‘crude’ like Norman and Early English, or ‘debased’ like Perpendicular and Tudor. Nearly everyone can see the altar. The Jacobean pulpit has survived, lowered and re-erected on a stone base. Marble pulpits are rather expensive, and Jacobean is not wholly unfashionable so far as woodwork is concerned. The prevailing colours of the church are brown and green, with faint tinges of pink and yellow.
Not everyone approved of these ‘alterations’ in which the old churches of England were almost entirely rebuilt. I quote from Alfred Rimmer’s Pleasant Spots Around Oxford (c. 1865), on the taking down of the body of Woodstock’s classical church.
‘Well, during the month of July I saw this church at Woodstock, but unhappily, left making sketches of it till a future visit. An ominous begging-box, with a lock, stood out in the street asking for funds for the “restoration”. One would have thought it almost a burlesque, for it wanted no restoration at all, and would have lasted for ever so many centuries; but the box was put up by those “who said in their hearts, Let us make havoc of it altogether”. Within a few weeks of the time this interesting monument was perfect, no one beam was left; and now, as I write, it is a “heap of stones”. Through the debris I could just distinguish a fine old Norman doorway that had survived ever so many scenes notable in history, but it was nearly covered up with ruins; and supposing it does escape the general melee, and has the luck to be inserted in a new church, with open benches and modern adornments, it will have lost every claim to interest and be scraped down by unloving hands to appear like a new doorway. Happily, though rather late in the day, an end is approaching to these vandalisms.’
The Church in Georgian Times
See now the outside of our church about eighty years before, in, let us say, 1805, when the two-folio volumes on the county were produced by a learned antiquarian, with aquatint engravings of the churches, careful copper-plates of fonts and supposedly Roman pieces of stone, and laborious copyings of entries in parish rolls. How different from the polished, furbished fane we have just left is this humble, almost cottage-like place of worship. Oak posts and rails enclose the churchyard in which a horse, maybe the Reverend Dr Syntax’s mare Grizzel, is grazing. The stones are humble and few, and lean this way and that on the south side. They are painted black and grey and the lettering on some is picked out in gold. Two altar tombs, one with a sculptured urn above it, are enclosed in sturdy iron rails such as one sees above the basements of Georgian terrace houses. Beyond the church below a thunderous sky we see the elm and oak landscape of an England comparatively unenclosed. Thatched cottages and stone-tiled farms are collected round the church, and beyond them on the boundaries of the parish the land is still open and park-like, while an unfenced road winds on with its freight of huge bonnetted wagons. Later in the 19th century this land was parcelled into distant farms with significant names like ‘Egypt’, ‘California’, ‘Starveall’, which stud the ordnance maps. Windmills mark the hill-tops and water-mills the stream. Our church to which this agricultural world would come, save those who in spite of Test Acts and suspicion of treachery meet in their Dissenting conventicles, is a patched, uneven-looking place.
Sympathetic descriptive accounts of unrestored churches are rarely found in late Georgian or early Victorian prose or verse. Most of the writers on churches are antiquarians who see nothing but ancient stones, or whose zeal for ‘restoration’ colours their writing. Thus for instance Mr John Noake describes White Ladies’ Aston in Worcestershire in 1851 (The Rambler in Worcestershire, London, Longman and Co., 1851). ‘The church is Norman, with a wooden broach spire; the windows, with two or three square-headed exceptions, are Norman, including that at the east end, which is somewhat rare. The west end is disgraced by the insertion of small square windows and wooden frames, which, containing a great quantity of broken glass, and a stove-pipe issuing therefrom impart to the sacred building the idea of a low-class lodging house.’ And writing at about the same time, though not publishing until 1888, the entertaining Church-Goer of Bristol thus describes the Somerset church of Brean:
‘On the other side of the way stood the church – little and old, and unpicturesquely freshened up with whitewash and yellow ochre; the former on the walls and the latter on the worn stone mullions of the small Gothic windows. The stunted slate-topped tower was white-limed, too – all but a little slate slab on the western side, which bore the inscription:
JOHN GHENKIN
Churchwarden
1729
Anything owing less to taste and trouble than the little structure you would not imagine. Though rude, however, and old, and kept together as it was by repeated whitewashings, which mercifully filled up flaws and cracks, it was not disproportioned or unmemorable in aspect, and might with a trifling outlay be made to look as though someone cared for it.’
Such a church with tracery ochred on the outside may be seen in the background of Millais’ painting The Blind Girl. It is, I believe, Winchelsea before restoration. Many writers, beside Rimmer, regret the restoration of old churches by London architects in the last century. The despised Reverend J. L. Petit, writing in 1841 in those two volumes called Remarks on Church Architecture, illustrated with curious anastatic sketches, was upbraided by critics for writing too much by aesthetic and not enough by antiquarian standards.
He naturally devoted a whole chapter to regretting restoration. But neither he nor many poets who preceded him bothered to describe the outside appearance of unrestored village churches, and seldom did they relate the buildings to their settings. ‘Venerable’, ‘ivy-mantled’, ‘picturesque’ are considered precise enough words for the old village church of Georgian times, with ‘neat’, ‘elegant’ or ‘decent’ for any recent additions. It is left for the Reverend George Crabbe, that accurate and beautiful observer, to recall the texture of weathered stone in The Borough, Letter II (1810):
But ’ere you enter, yon bold tower survey
Tall and entire, and venerably grey,
For time has soften’d what was harsh when new,
And now the stains are all of sober hue;
and to admonish the painters:
And would’st thou, artist! with thy tints and brush
Form shades like these? Pretender, where thy brush?
In three short hours shall thy presuming hand
Th’ effect of three slow centuries command?
Thou may’st thy various greens and greys contrive
They are not lichens nor light aught alive.
But yet proceed and when thy tints are lost,
Fled in the shower, or crumbled in the frost
When all thy work is done away as clean
As if thou never spread’st thy grey and green,
Then may’st thou see how Nature’s work is done,
How slowly true she lays her colours on . . .
With the precision of the botanist, Crabbe describes the process of decay which is part of the beauty of the outside of an unrestored church:
Seeds, to our eye invisible, will find
On the rude rock the bed that fits their kind:
There, in the rugged soil, they safely dwell,
Till showers and snows the subtle atoms swell,
And spread th’ enduring foliage; then, we trace
The freckled flower upon the flinty base;
These all increase, till in unnoticed years
The stony tower as grey with age appears;
With coats of vegetation thinly spread,
Coat above coat, the living on the dead:
These then dissolve to dust, and make a way
For bolder foliage, nurs’d by their decay:
The long-enduring ferns in time will all
Die and despose their dust upon the wall
Where the wing’d seed may rest, till many a flower
Show Flora’s triumph o’er the falling tower.
WILLEN: ST MARY – a Classical church of the 1670s by Robert Hooke, it points the way to the Georgian interiors of the following century
© Michael Ellis
Yet the artists whom Crabbe admonishes have left us better records than there are in literature of our churches before the Victorians restored them. The engravings of Hogarth, the water-colours and etchings of John Sell Cotman and of Thomas Rowlandson, the careful and less inspired records of John Buckler, re-create these places for us. They were drawn with affection for the building as it was and not ‘as it ought to be’; they bring out the beauty of what Mr Piper has called ‘pleasing decay’; they also shew the many churches which were considered ‘neat and elegant’.
It is still possible to find an unrestored church. Almost every county has one or two.
The Georgian Church Inside
There is a whole amusing literature of satire on church interiors. As early as 1825, an unknown wit and champion of Gothic published a book of coloured aquatints with accompanying satirical text to each plate, entitled Hints to Some Churchwardens. And as we are about to enter the church, let me quote this writer’s description of a Georgian pulpit: ‘How to substitute a new, grand, and commodious pulpit in place of an ancient, mean, and inconvenient one. Raze the old Pulpit and build one on small wooden Corinthian pillars, with a handsome balustrade or flight of steps like a staircase, supported also by wooden pillars of the Corinthian order; let the dimensions of the Pulpit be at least double that of the old one, and covered with crimson velvet, and a deep gold fringe, with a good-sized cushion, with large gold tassels, gilt branches on each side, over which imposing structure let a large sounding-board be suspended by a sky-blue chain with a gilt rose at the top, and small gilt lamps on the side, with a flame painted, issuing from them, such Pulpits as these must please all parties; and as the energy and eloquence of the preacher must be the chief attraction from the ancient Pulpit, in the modern one, such labour is not required, as a moderate congregation will be satisfied with a few short sentences pronounced on each side of the gilt branches, and sometimes from the front of the cushion, when the sense of vision is so amply cared for in the construction of so splendid and appropriate a place from which to teach the duties of Christianity.’
And certainly the pulpit and the high pews crowd the church. The nave is a forest of woodwork. The pews have doors to them. The panelling inside the pews is lined with baize, blue in one pew, red in another, green in another, and the baize is attached to the wood by brass studs such as one may see on the velvet-covered coffins in family vaults. Some very big pews will have fire-places. When one sits down, only the pulpit is visible from the pew, and the tops of the arches of the nave whose stonework will be washed with ochre, while the walls will be white or pale pink, green or blue. A satire on this sort of seating was published by John Noake in 1851 in his book already quoted:
O my own darling pue, which might serve for a bed,
With its cushions so soft and its curtains of red;
Of my half waking visions that pue is the theme,
And when sleep seals my eyes, of my pue still I dream.
Foul fall the despoiler, whose ruthless award
Has condemned me to squat, like the poor, on a board,
To be crowded and shov’d, as I sit at my prayers,
As though my devotions could mingle with theirs.
I have no vulgar pride, oh dear me, not I,
But still I must say I could never see why
We give them room to sit, to stand or to kneel,
As if they, like ourselves, were expected to feel;
’Tis a part, I’m afraid, of a deeply laid plan
To bring back the abuses of Rome if they can.
And when SHE is triumphant, you’ll bitterly rue
That you gave up that Protestant bulwark – your pew.
The clear glass windows, of uneven crown glass with bottle-glass here and there in the upper lights, will shew the churchyard yews and elms and the flying clouds outside. Shafts of sunlight will fall on hatchments, those triangular-framed canvases hung on the aisle walls and bearing the Arms of noble families of the place. Over the chancel arch hang the Royal Arms, painted by some talented inn-sign artist, with a lively lion and unicorn supporting the shield in which we may see quartered the white horse of Hanover. The roofs of the church will be ceiled within for warmth, and our boxed-in pew will save us from draught. Look behind you; blocking the tower arch you will see a wooden gallery in which the choir is tuning its instruments, fiddle, base viol, serpent. And on your left in the north aisle there is a gallery crowded under the roof. On the tiers of wooden benches here sit the charity children in their blue uniforms, within reach of the parish beadle who, in the corner of the west gallery, can admonish them with his painted stave.
The altar is out of sight. This is because the old screen survives across the chancel arch and its doors are locked. If you can look through its carved woodwork, you will see that the chancel is bare except for the memorial floor slabs and brasses of previous incumbents, and the elaborate marble monument upon the wall, by a noted London sculptor, in memory of some lay-rector of the 18th century. Probably this is the only real ‘work of art’ judged by European standards in the church. The work of 18th-century sculptors has turned many of our old churches into sculpture galleries of great interest, though too often the Victorians huddled the sculptures away in the tower or blocked them up with organs. No choir stalls are in the chancel, no extra rich flooring. The Lord’s Table or altar is against the east wall and enclosed on three sides by finely-turned rails such as one sees as stair balusters in a country house. The Table itself is completely covered with a carpet of plum-covered velvet, embroidered on its western face with IHS in golden rays. Only on those rare occasions, once a quarter and at Easter and Christmas and Whit Sunday when there is to be a Communion service, is the Table decked. Then indeed there will be a fair linen cloth over the velvet, and upon the cloth a chalice, paten and two flagons all of silver, and perhaps two lights in silver candlesticks. On Sacrament Sundays those who are to partake of Communion will leave their box-pews either at the Offertory Sentence (when in modern Holy Communion services the collection is taken), or at the words ‘Ye that do truly and earnestly repent you of your sins, and are in love and charity with your neighbours’, and they will be admitted through the screen doors to the chancel. They will have been preceded by the incumbent. Thereafter the communicants will remain kneeling until the end of the service, as many as can around the Communion rails, the rest in the western side of the chancel.
ALTARNUN: ST NONNA – painted panels with biblical texts and images became popular from the 17th century; these from Cornwall hang either side of the high altar
© Michael Ellis
The only object which will be familiar from the Victorian church is the font, still near the entrance to the church and symbolical of the entrance of the Christian to Christ’s army. Beside the font is a large pew whose door opens facing it. This is the christening pew and here the baby, its parents and the god-parents wait until after the second lesson, when the incumbent will come forward to baptize the child in the presence of the congregation. Some churches had Churching pews where mothers sat.
Our churches were, as Canon Addleshaw and Frederick Etchells have pointed out in The Architectural Setting of Anglican Worship, compartmented buildings. So they remained from 1559 (Act of Uniformity) until 1841 onwards when Tractarian ideas about the prominence of the altar, the frequent celebration of Holy Communion and adequate seating for the poor – for the population had suddenly increased – caused a vital replanning of churches. What we see in 1805 is a medieval church adapted to Prayer Book worship. The object of having the Prayer Book in our own language was not so doctrinal and Protestant, in the Continental sense, as is often supposed, but was to ensure audible and intelligible services. The compartments of the building were roughly three. There is the font and christening pew which form a Baptistry. There is the nave of the church with the pews facing the pulpit which is generally half-way down the church against one of the pillars, and the nave is used for Matins, Litany and Ante-Communion. Some of the larger churches have one end of an aisle or a transept divided off with the old screens which used to surround a Chantry chapel in this part. This the parson might use for weekday offices of Matins and Evensong when the congregation was small and there was no sermon.
The lime-washed walls form a happy contrast with the coloured baize inside the box-pews, the brown well-turned Stuart and Georgian wood-work and the old screens, the hatchments which hang lozenge-shaped on the wall above family pews, and the great Royal Arms in the filled-in tympanum of the chancel arch. Behind the Royal Arms we may see faintly the remains of a medieval painting of the Doom, the Archangel Michael holding the balance, and some souls going to Heaven on one side of him, others to Hell on the other side. In other parts of the church, too, the pale brick-red lines of the painting which once covered the church may be faintly discernible in sunlight. Mostly the walls will be whitewashed, and in bold black and red, with cherubs as decorative devices, will be painted admonitory texts against idolatry. The Elizabethan texts will be in black letters; the later and less admonitory Georgian ones will be in the spacious Roman style which we see on the gravestones in the churchyard. In the Sanctuary on either side of the altar are the Lord’s Prayer and the Commandments painted in gold letters on black boards, and perhaps Moses and Aaron flank these, also painted on boards by a local inn-sign painter. An oil painting of the Crucifixion or The Deposition of our Lord or some other scriptural subject may adorn the space above the altar table. Far more people could read than is generally supposed; literacy was nearly as rife as it is today. There was not the need to teach by pictures in the parish church that there had been in the middle ages.
The lighting of the church is wholly by candles. In the centre of the nave a branched brass candelabrum is suspended by two interlocking rods painted blue, the two serpent heads which curl round and interlock them being gilded. In other parts of the church, in distant box-pews or up the choir gallery, light is from single candles in brass sconces fixed to the woodwork. If the chancel is dark, there may be two fine silver candlesticks on the altar for the purpose of illumination. But candles are not often needed, for services are generally in the hours of daylight, and the usual time for a country evensong is three o’clock in the afternoon, not six or half-past six as is now the custom.
Outside the church on a sunny Sunday morning the congregation gathers. The poorer sort are lolling against the tombstones, while the richer families, also in their best clothes, move towards the porch where the churchwardens stand with staves ready to conduct them to their private pews. The farmworkers do not wear smocks for church, but knee breeches and a long coat and shoes. Women wear wooden shoes, called pattens, when it is wet, and take them off in the porch. All the men wear hats, and they hang them on pegs on the walls when they enter the church.
How still the morning of the hallowed day!
Mute is the voice of rural labour, hushed
The ploughboy’s whistle, and the milkmaid’s song.
The scythe lies glittering in the dewy wreath
Of tedded grass, mingled with fading flowers,
That yester morn bloomed waving in the breeze.
Sounds the most faint attract the ear, – the hum
Of early bee, the trickling of the dew,
The distant bleating, midway up the hill.
With dove-like wings, Peace o’er yon village broods:
The dizzying mill-wheel rests; the anvil’s din
Hath ceased; all, all around is quietness.
Less fearful on this day, the limping hare
Stops, and looks back, and stops, and looks on man
Her deadliest foe. The toilworn horse, set free,
Unheedful of the pasture, roams at large;
And as his stiff unwieldly bulk rolls on,
His iron-armed hoofs gleam in the morning ray.
So the Scottish poet James Graham begins his poem The Sabbath (1804). All this island over, there was a hush of feudal quiet in the country on a Sunday. We must sink into this quiet to understand and tolerate, with our democratic minds, the graded village hierarchy, graded by birth and occupation, by clothes and by seating in the church. It is an agricultural world as yet little touched by the machines which were starting in the mills of the midlands and the north. The Sabbath as a day of rest and worship touched all classes. Our feeblest poets rose from bathos to sing its praises. I doubt if Felicia Hemens ever wrote better than this, in her last poem (1835), composed less than a week before she died.
How many blessed groups this hour are bending,
Through England’s primrose meadow paths, their way
Towards spire and tower, midst shadowy elms ascending,
Whence the sweet chimes proclaim the hallowed day:
The halls from old heroic ages grey
Pour their fair children forth; and hamlets low,
With whose thick orchard blooms the soft winds play,
Send out their inmates in a happy flow,
Like a freed rural stream.
I may not tread
With them those pathways, – to the feverish bed
Of sickness bound, – yet, O my God, I bless
Thy mercy, that with Sabbath peace hath filled
My chastened heart, and all its throbbings stilled
To one deep calm of lowliest thankfulness.
One is inclined, seeing the pale whites and ochres and greys, relieved here and there with the warm brown red of local bricks, which we associate today with Georgian England, to forget how highly coloured were the clothes of the people. Thomas Hood’s early poem The Two Peacocks at Bedfont (1827) describes with the colours of an aquatint the worshippers entering that then countrified Middlesex church:
So speaking, they pursue the pebbly walk
That leads to the white porch the Sunday throng,
Hand-coupled urchins in restrained talk,
And anxious pedagogue that chasten wrong,
And posied churchwarden with solemn stalk,
And gold-bedizened beadle flames along,
And gentle peasant clad in buff and green,
Like a meek cowslip in the spring serene;
And blushing maiden – modestly array’d
In spotless white – still conscious of the glass;
And she, the lonely widow that hath made
A sable covenant with grief, – alas!
She veils her tears under the deep, deep shade,
While the poor kindly-hearted, as they pass,
Bend to unclouded childhood, and caress
Her boy, – so rosy! – and so fatherless!
Thus as good Christians ought, they all draw near
The fair white temple, to the timely call
Of pleasant bells that tremble in the ear, –
Now the last frock, and scarlet hood and shawl
Fade into dusk, in the dim atmosphere
Of the low porch, and heav’n has won them all . . .
The Lord of the manor and his family have entered their private pew, hidden in a transept and with a separate entrance. Their liveried servants sit on a bench behind them. All round the church is an array of hats hanging on pegs on the walls above the pews. The parson, who has entered the church in his long white surplice and red silk hood of an Oxford Master of Arts, takes his place in the second desk of the three-decker. The parish clerk is below him to say ‘Amen’. He begins Morning Prayer, facing the congregation. He then mounts to the pulpit and preaches a sermon, which is usually read. Extempore preaching was a sign of ‘enthusiasm’. The Devon poet N. T. Carrington well describes a morning service in My Native Village (1830):
Ah, let me enter, once again, the pew
Where the child nodded as the sermon grew;
Scene of soft slumbers! I remember now
The chiding finger, and the frowning brow
Of stern reprovers, when the ardent June
Flung through the glowing aisles the drowsy noon;
Ah admonitions vain! a power was there
Which conquer’d e’en the sage, the brave, the fair, –
A sweet oppressive power – a languor deep,
Resistless shedding round delicious sleep!
Till closed the learned harangue, with solemn look
Arose the chauntcr of the sacred book, –
The parish clerk (death-silenced) far-famed then
And justly, for his long and loud – Amen!
Rich was his tone, and his exulting eye
Glanced to the reedy choir, enthroned on high,
Nor glanced in vain; the simple-hearted throng
Lifted their voices, and dissolved in song;
Till in one tide, deep welling, full and free
Rung through the echoing pile, old England’s psalmody.
The singing is from metrical psalms which are bound with every prayer book. The versions used were generally those awkward quatrains by Tate and Brady. They are easily committed to memory. The minister or clerk reads out the stanzas and then the congregation sings, stanza by stanza, those few who cannot read committing the lines to memory. The custom, still prevailing in some Evangelical churches and many chapels, of the minister’s proclaiming the first verse of the hymn, is doubtless a survival of these days. Two of Tate and Brady’s metrical psalms, ‘Thro’ all the changing scenes of life’ and ‘As pants the hart for cooling streams’, survive, cut down, in modern hymn books. An appendix to the Psalms was also printed, consisting of rhyming doxologies and a few hymns for special occasions such as ‘While Shepherds watched’. From this appendix grew the separate hymn book, of which the most famous and successful was Hymns Ancient and Modern (1861), which consisted first of 273 hymns.
The parson’s sermon is the end of the service unless it is ‘Sacrament Sunday’. For the sermon has come after the Nicene Creed and not at the end of the office of Morning Prayer. It was the custom to have Morning Prayer, Litany and Ante-Communion. The whole service lasted about two hours. As the time of eating was at three o’clock, this was no great inconvenience. But one can understand where the deep-rooted English idea that church worship is boring had its origin. The layman was asked to take part in the monkish offices of Morning and Evening Prayer (an anglicized and potted version of the daily offices of monks and nuns) as well as in the celebration of Communion, always the central act of worship of the Church. The English habit of attending but not receiving Communion was the origin of the Ante-Communion service alone being read, and ‘Sacrament Sundays’ being special and rare occasions; for it was ordered in the Prayer Book that two or three people must be willing to partake of the Sacrament before it could be celebrated. This order was made with the intention of encouraging people to communicate. But the habit of abstaining was too strong, hence the diminution of the service to Ante-Communion.
The Church in the Fifteenth Century
There will be no end to books on the Reformation. It is not my intention to add to them. Rather I would go back to the middle of the 15th century, when the church we have been describing was bright with its new additions of tower, porch, aisles and clerestory windows, and to a medieval England not quite so roseate as that of Cardinal Gasquet, nor yet so crime-ridden as that of Dr Coulton.
The village looks different. The church is by far the most prominent building unless there is a manor-house, and even this is probably a smaller building than the church and more like what we now think of as an old farm. The church is so prominent because the equivalents of cottages in the village are at the grandest ‘cruck houses’ (that is to say tent-like buildings with roofs coming down to the ground), and most are mere hovels. They are grouped round the church and manor-house and look rather like a camp. There is far more forest everywhere, and in all but the Celtic fringes of the island agriculture is strip cultivation, that is to say the tilled land is laid out in long strips with no hedges between and is common to the whole community, as are the grazing rights in various hedged and well-watered fields. There are more sheep than any other animals in these enclosures. The approaches to the village are grassy tracks very muddy in winter. Each village is almost a country to itself. Near the entrance to the churchyard is the church house where the churchwardens store beer or ‘church ales’ for feasts. This is the origin of so many old inns being beside the churchyard in England. The graveyard has no tombstones in it. The dead are buried there but they are remembered not in stone but in the prayers of the priest at the altar at mass. Everyone goes to mass, people from outlying farms stabling their horses outside the churchyard. The church itself looks much the same. The stone tower gleams with new cut ashlar; the walls of the church when they are not ashlar are plastered.
Not only does everyone go to church on Sunday and in his best clothes; the church is used on weekdays too, for it is impossible to say daily prayers in the little hovels in which most of the villagers live. School is taught in the porch, business is carried out by the cross in the market where the booths are (for there are no shops in the village, only open stalls as in market squares today). In the nave of the church on a weekday there are probably people gossiping in some places, while in others there are people praying. There was no privacy in the middle ages, when even princes dined in public and their subjects watched them eat. The nave of the church belonged to the people, and they used it as today we use a village hall or social club. Our new suburban churches which are used as dance halls during the week with sanctuary partitioned off until Sunday, have something in common with the medieval church. But there is this difference: in the middle ages all sport and pleasure, all plays and dancing were ‘under God’. God was near, hanging on his Cross above the chancel arch, and mystically present in the sacrament in the pyx hanging over the altar beyond. His crucifixion was carved on the preaching cross in the churchyard. People were aware of God. They were not priest-ridden in the sense that they bowed meekly to whatever the priest said. They had decided opinions and argued about religion and the clergy, and no doubt some went to church reluctantly. But no one thought of not going to church. They believed men had souls and that their souls must be exercised in worship and customed by sacraments.
THE GROWTH OF A MEDIEVAL CHURCH – ’At Harringworth in Northamptonshire there had been an aisleless church, to which a tower had been added at the end of the 12th and aisles early in the 13th century. In about 1300 a new north aisle had been built with a new altar at the east end. Soon after the whole of the south aisle and arcade were built. The work was done in a very conservative spirit. During the next few years, the north arcade was entirely rebuilt so as nearly to match that on the south. Thus the work, beginning with the north aisle, and extending over some 30 or 40 years, finished on the side on which it began.’ (From The Ground Plan of the English Parish Church, by A. Hamilton Thompson, 1911)
Let us go in by its new south porch to our parish church of five-hundred years ago. Many of the features which were there when we last saw it are still present, the screen and the font for instance, but the walls are now painted all over. Medieval builders were not concerned with ‘taste’. But they were moved by fashion. If the next village had a new tower, they must have one like it. If the latest style at the nearest big abbey or bishop’s seat made their own building seem out of date, then it must be rebuilt. At the time of which we are writing, the style would be Perpendicular. Only the most shewy features of earlier building – a Norman chancel arch removed in a few instances to the south door, a ‘decorated’ window with rich tracery, and perhaps a column with sculptured foliage capital of Early English times – might be spared if they could be made to look well. The builders were chiefly concerned with making the interior of the church as rich and splendid as possible, something to bring you to your knees. Most parish churches, even the smallest, had three altars, one in the chancel and one on either side of the chancel arch.
WEST HORSLEY: ST MARY – St Christopher carrying an infant Christ on his shoulder was a common theme for medieval wall-paintings; this one could be as early as 13th-century
© Michael Ellis
Where we go in, there is a stoup made of stone or metal, containing Holy Water. And somewhere near, very prominent, is the font. Over it is a painted wooden cover, rising like a church steeple and securely clasped down to the basin of the font and locked. This is because the font contains Baptismal Water, which is changed only twice a year at Easter and Whitsun when it is solemnly blessed. The cover is raised by means of a weight and pulley. The plaster walls are covered with paintings, mostly of a dull brick-red with occasional blues and greens and blacks. The older painting round any surviving Norman windows is picked out in squares to resemble masonry. Chiefly the paintings are pictures. There will be scenes in the life of Our Lady on the north wall, and opposite us probably a huge painting of St Christopher carrying Our Lord as a child on his shoulders and walking through a stream in which fishes are swimming about and fishermen hooking a few out around St Christopher’s feet. It was a pious belief that whoever looked at St Christopher would be safe that day from sudden death. The belief is kept alive today on the dashboards of motor-cars. All the windows will be filled with stained glass, depicting local saints and their legends. Our Lord as a baby and receiving homage as the Saviour will be painted somewhere on the walls. But chiefly there will be pictures and images of Our Lady, who will probably be portrayed more often in the church than her Son. Our Lady was the favourite saint of England, and more old churches are dedicated to her than to anyone else. The Christianity of late medieval England was much concerned with Our Lord as Saviour and Man, and with Our Lady as His mother.
The wooden chancel roofs will all have painted beams, red, green, white and gold and blue. The nave rood may not be painted but over the rood-beam just above the chancel arch it will be more richly carved and painted than elsewhere. The stone floor of the church is often covered with yew boughs or sweet-smelling herbs whose aroma is stronger when crushed underfoot. Strong smells were a feature of medieval life. People did not wash much or change their clothes often, and the stink of middens must have made villages unpleasant places in hot weather. Crushed yew and rosemary must have been a welcome contrast in the cool brightness of the church. Five-hundred years ago, most churches had a few wooden benches in the nave. In some districts, notably Devon, Cornwall and parts of East Anglia, these were elaborately carved. In most places they were plain seats of thick pieces of oak. People often sat along the stone ledges on the wall or on the bases of the pillars. And the pillars of the nave had stone or wooden brackets with statues of saints standing on them. Everywhere in the church there would be images of saints. Though some worshipped these and thought of them as miraculous, such was not the teaching of educated priests of the Church. John Mirk, prior of Lilleshall, who flourished c .1403, wrote thus:
‘Men should learn by images whom they should worship and follow. To do God’s worship to images is forbidden. Therefore, when thou comest to church, first, behold God’s Body under the form of bread upon the altar; and thank Him that He vouchsafe every day to come from the holy heaven above for the health of thy soul. Look upon the Cross, and thereby have mind of the passion he suffered for thee. Then on the images of the holy saints; not believing on them, but that by the sight of them thou mayest have mind on them that be in heaven: and so to follow their life as much as thou mayest.’
And here in the nave, the people’s part of the church, we have not yet looked eastward to Our Lord upon the Cross. His figure hanging on a wooden cross over the chancel arch, with St Mary and St John weeping on either side of Him at the foot of the cross, looks down from above the screen. This dominates the nave, and behind it or above it, painted on the east wall, is the depiction of the Doom. There, above His Body on the Rood, is a painting of the Resurrected Christ, the severe judge. His wounds are shewn, His hands are raised with the nail prints in them, and His eyes fix you as you stare up. Angels blow trumpets around Him, and there rising from their graves are naked souls, painted as naked bodies but wearing head-dresses, tiaras, crowns and mitres to shew their rank in life. On one side they enter rather joylessly the gates of heaven. On the other, with terrible imagery, are shewn devils with sharks’ teeth and rolling eyes, hauling off the helpless souls to the gaping mouth of hell, a yawning cauldron in the bottom corner of the picture. The artists had a far more enjoyable time drawing devils and hell than angels and heaven. For one sweet-faced saint or tender portrait of Our Lady surviving in the wall-painting in our islands, there must be two or three alarming devils.
It is appropriate that here in the nave, with Our Lord looking down sadly from the Cross and sternly from His glory, people should be reminded of how to live while on earth if they wish to escape Hell. And while we look at the judgement on the wall, let us listen to John Bromyard, a Dominican Friar of c. 1390, preaching against the rich:
‘Their souls shall have, instead of palace and hall and chamber, the deep lake of hell, with those that go down into the depth thereof. In the place of scented baths, their body shall have a narrow pit of earth; and there they shall have bath more black and foul than any bath of pitch and sulphur. In place of a soft couch, they shall have a bed more grievous and hard than all the nails and spikes in the world; in place of inordinate embraces, they will be able to have there the embraces of the fiery brands of hell . . . Instead of wives, they shall have toads; instead of a great retinue and throng of followers, their body shall have a throng of worms and their soul a throng of demons. Instead of large domain, it shall be an eternal prison house cramped for both.’
Heaven is represented in the chancel beyond the richly-painted screen, where the priest murmurs scarcely audible Latin and where the Body of Our Lord under the form of bread, hangs above the altar in a shrouded pyx. Much chatting goes on in the church during sermon and Mass, and we may now approach the screen to examine it and the jewel-like blazing richness beyond, in the holiest part of the church.
Through the screen which runs across the whole width of the church, you may glimpse the richest part of all this teaching imagery. The altars at the end of the aisles are either guild chapels, or family chapels, each with their paid priests. The Shoemakers may have an altar dedicated to Crispin, and will subscribe for its upkeep and to keep its lights burning. Another chapel may be kept up by a guild which pays a priest to say Mass for the Souls of its departed members. The secular descendants of these guilds are the trade unions and burial societies of today. The big town churches such as those at Coventry, Stamford and Bristol had many guild chapels with priests maintained to serve them. And many altars contained a relic of a saint. The walls round the altars were painted, the roofs above them were richer and more elaborately painted than those in the people’s part of the church, the altar hangings were of the richest silks and threaded with jewels, the fair linen-cloth laid upon the altar itself a white, plain contrast with the elaborate hangings. The floors of the chancel are of marble or tiles. Brasses of dead priests shone bright among them. You may see what they looked like in illuminated missals. The ornaments on the altar were few, candles perhaps, and if a cross, then a small one to help the priest in his devotions – for here in the chancel we meet the risen Lord. Only in the nave is He dead on the cross, as large as life.
Few people will make their communion at Mass. Indeed it is rare for anyone to make his communion except at Easter. People think of the Mass as something offered for them rather than something of which they partake the sacred elements.
On a hot summer Sunday morning in the country, when I have been reading Chaucer to the sound of bells pouring through the trees, I have been able dimly to imagine this late medieval religion. Life is short for everybody. It is matter of fact. The pictures on the church walls are not thought of as ‘art’, but are there to tell a story. Small parish churches were not consciously made beautiful. They were built and decorated for effect, to be better than the church in the next village, to be the best building in the village itself, for it is the House of God, and God become Man – that was the great discovery – offered here upon the altar. All sorts of miraculous stories were invented about Him, and even more about His mother. Because He was Man born of woman, he becomes within the grasp of everyone. Few of the extravagances of German and Spanish late medieval art are found in English representations of the scourging, the crucifixion and the deposition. Jesus is thought of as the baby of poor people who received the tributes of a king. His mother is the most beautiful woman in the world – and how many lovely, loving faces of Our Lady we may see in the old glass, wall-paintings and statues which survive in England. And she bore a Spotless Son who was God and Judge of all. No wonder she was loved by the pious English.
COVENTRY: HOLY TRINITY – only rediscovered in 1999 and now restored, this extraordinarily intact Doom painting is dated to the early 15th century
© Michael Ellis
The miracles of Our Lord were not so interesting to these people as the miracles they ascribed to His saints. Here extravagancy knew no bounds. St Petroc sailed in a silver bowl from Cornwall to an isle in the Indian Ocean. St Winifred was beheaded by an angry lover, but her head was reunited to her body and she became an abbess. There were saints like St Quintin who cured dropsy, saints for toothache, and for colds and fever, and for finding things. There were patron saints for every craft and trade. There were miraculous images which winked, or flew to bedsides; there were statues of saints that had never been, like the Maid Uncumber in old St Paul’s Cathedral.
Though for the everyday things of life there were friendly saints who helped, life itself must have been terrifying, a continual rush to escape hell. Our Lord and His Mother were the loving and human part of it; hell was the terrifying part. The Devil was seen. His fellow devils yawned as gargoyles with bats’ wings on the north walls of the church, black against the evening sky. The white teeth of devils and their red eyes gleamed out of the darkness. Evil spirits lurked behind stones on lonely moors and ranged the deep woods. Good and evil fought together in the roar of the storm. All thought, all sight, every breath of the body, was under God. The leaping sciapod, the man-eating mantichora, the unicorn, might easily be met in the forest by men with imaginations, which as easily would expect to see Our Lady flying through the air, or the local saint, for centuries enshrined in his altar, walking down the street. The witch cast her evil spells, blood and death lay around everywhere, the entrails of a man hung, drawn and quartered, shone black with flies in the sun, silvery lepers tinkled their bells, creating loneliness around them. The fear that men felt is expressed in the grotesque carvings over the north walls of churches, and in the corbels and bosses of roofs, and in bench-ends, screens and miserere stalls. Their humour is shewn there too. Chiefly in the figure of Our Lady do we see the tenderness and sweetness of this late religion.
WINCHCOMBE: ST PETER – the church has a fascinating array of grotesques and gargoyles that seem to mix anguish, fear and broad comedy
© Michael Ellis
So when we walk down a green lane like an ancient cart track towards the ringing church-bells, we can see the power of God in the blossom and trees, remember legends of the saints about birds and stones, and recall miracles that happened in the parish at this or that spot. And on a feast day we can see the churchyard set out with tables for the church ale when Mass is over, and as we enter the nave we can see it thronged below the painted roof and walls with people in the village, young and old, and the rest of the parish crowding in with us. Human nature may not have been better. Life was as full, no doubt, of wrong and terror as it is today. How different it was is expressed in the words of Froude:
‘For, indeed, a change was coming upon the world, the meaning and direction of which even still is hidden from us, a change from era to era. The paths trodden by the footsteps of ages were broken up; old things were passing away and the faith and the life of ten centuries were dissolving like a dream. Chivalry was dying; the abbey and the castle were soon together to crumble into ruins; and all the forms, desires, beliefs, convictions of the old world were passing away never to return. A new continent had risen up beyond the western sea. The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the firm earth itself, unfixed from its foundations, was seen to be but a small atom in the awful vastness of the universe. In the fabric of habit which they had so laboriously built for themselves, mankind were to remain no longer.
And now it is all gone – like an unsubstantial pageant faded; and between us and the old English there lies a gulf of mystery which the prose of the historian will never adequately bridge. They cannot come to us, and our imagination can but feebly penetrate to them. Only among the sleeping on their tombs, some faint conceptions float before us of what these men were when they were alive; and perhaps in the sound of church bells, that peculiar creation of medieval age, which falls upon the ear like the echo of a vanished world.’
The Churches Before The Fifteenth Century
To imagine our church in earliest times of Christian England is, alas, to enter the controversial world of archaeology. There was a Christian Church in the Roman settlement at Silchester, Berkshire, and its remains have been excavated. It had an apse at the west end instead of the east where one would expect it to be, and the altar which is supposed to have been wooden and square, was also in the west. The east end was square. The church is said to be 4th century. Only the foundations remain. The form of worship was probably more like that of the Orthodox church today than the western rite.
But there are enough later pre-Conquest churches remaining to give us an idea of the architecture of those times. They are called Saxon. There are two types. The southern, of which the earliest churches are found in Kent – three in Canterbury, St Mary Lyminge, Reculver, and, most complete, Bradwell, Essex, all of which are 7th century – were the result of the Italian mission of St Augustine, and were reinforced after the coming of St Theodore in 669. In plan and style they resembled certain early Italian churches. The northern group found in Northumberland and Durham are survivals of the Celtic church, and their architecture is said to have come from Gaul, and is more barbaric looking than that of their southern contemporaries. Their three distinctive features were, according to Sir Arthur Clapham, an unusual length of nave, a small chancel, less wide than the nave, and very high side walls. In the northern group, the most complete is Escombe, Durham (7th and early 8th century?), a stern building, nave and chancel only, with squared rubble walls, small windows high up and square or round headed, and a narrow and tall rounded chancel arch. We have a picture of the interiors of these northern churches from near contemporary accounts. The walls and capitals and arch of the sanctuary were adorned ‘with designs and images and many sculptured figures in relief on the stone and pictures with a pleasing variety of colours and a wonderful charm’. We learn, too, of purple hangings and gold and silver ornaments with precious stones. Elsewhere in England the most considerable remains of pre-Conquest work are those at Monkwearmouth (Durham), Jarrow (Durham), Brixworth (Northants), Deerhurst (Glos), Bradford-on-Avon (Wilts), the tower of Earls Barton (Northants), Barton-on-Humber (Lincs), Sompting (Sussex), the Crypts at Repton (Derby), Wing (Bucks), and Hexham (Northumberland). From the pre-Conquest sculpture, like the crosses at Bewcastle and Ruthwell, and the carvings at Langford (Oxon), Romsey (Hants), Bexhill (Sussex), St Dunstan’s Stepney (London), and the moving relief of the Harrowing of Hell in Bristol Cathedral, and from such enrichment as survives in such objects as St Cuthbert’s stole (Durham), the Alfred Jewel in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, the beautiful drawing in the Winchester Psalter and Lindisfarne Gospels in the British Museum, we know that these Romanesque masons, sculptors and illuminators were very fine artists, as fine as there have ever been in England.
EARLS BARTON: ALL SAINTS – a rare surviving Saxon tower, with characteristic stripwork and crude arched bell openings in the top stage; the parapet above is later
© Michael Ellis
However, it is safer to try to imagine our parish church as it was in Norman times, as far more of our old churches are known to be Norman in origin than pre-Conquest, even though as in the church of Kilpeck (Herefordshire) the pre-Conquest style of decoration may have continued into Norman times. It is narrow and stone built. Let us suppose it divided into three parts. The small, eastward chancel is either square-ended or apsidal. Then comes the tower supported internally on round arches. The nave, west of the low tower, is longer than the chancel. The windows are small and high up. The church is almost like a fortress outside. And it is indeed a fortress of Christianity in a community where pagan memories and practices survive, where barons are like warring kings and monasteries are the centres of faith. These small village churches are like mission churches in a jungle clearing.
ANGLO-SAXON AND NORMAN – Two aisleless plans with central tower. (Top) tower between nave and chancel; (Bottom) tower over crossing of transepts with nave and chancel
There are no porches, and we enter the building by any of the three doors to the nave on the north, south or west. Inside, the walls of the nave are painted with red lines to look like blocks of stone. The raftered roof is hidden by a flat wooden ceiling which is painted with lozenges. The floor of the nave is paved with small blocks of stone or with red tiles. There are no pews. We can only see the chancel through a richly moulded round arch, that very arch which is now the South Door of your parish church. Above this chancel arch is a painted Doom, not quite so terrifying as that of the 15th-century church, for all the painting here is in the manner of the mosaics still seen in basilicas of Italy and eastern Europe.
WALTHAM ABBEY: HOLY CROSS – sturdy Norman arcades sometimes survive in churches that have been much altered in later centuries, though not all are carved with as much grace as these very decorative columns for the abbey church
© Michael Ellis
GOTHIC ADDITIONS TO A NORMAN PLAN – Based on Raunds, Northamptonshire: probably this was a Norman aisleless church consisting of nave and chancel of equal width. A tower and north aisle ot the nave were added in the 13th century. In the 14th century a south aisle was added. The original Norman walls were pierced and turned into arcades.
A TOWN CHURCH ENLARGED IN THE 13TH AND 14TH CENTURIES SO AS TO PROVIDE GUILD CHAPELS – Based on Grantham, Lincolnshire
The splays of the windows in the nave have figures of saints painted on them. But it is through the chancel that we see the greatest riches. Stained glass is rare. If there is any it is in the sanctuary and black with much leading and giving the impression of transparent mosaics. The walls are painted everywhere with figures, also recalling mosaic pictures. There are bands of classic style, patterns dividing them. The altar is of stone, small and box-like, recalling the tombs of Christians in the catacombs of Rome in the very earliest days of Christianity. The altar stands well away from the eastern, semi-circular end of the apse. It is covered with a cloth hanging over its four sides, decorated with vertical bands.
Our Lord is depicted on the cross as a King and Judge, not as a man in anguish as in later crucifixions. The religion of the time was less concerned with Him and Our Lady as human beings, more concerned with the facts of Judgement, Death and Hell. It was more ascetic and severe.
PART TWO: THE NEWER CHURCHES
Of the 16,000 parish churches in England more than half have been built since the 17th century, and the majority of these were erected in the 19th and 20th centuries. Guide books, almost wholly antiquarian in outlook, still dismiss even 18th-century churches as ‘modern’, while Victorian buildings are usually beneath their consideration. Yet some of the noblest churches are post-Reformation, from cathedrals like St Paul’s and Truro and Liverpool, to the great town churches designed by such architects as Hawksmoor, Gibbs, Street, Butterfield, Pearson, Brooks, Nicholson and Comper.
The first post-Reformation churches differed little in plan from those of medieval times. Wren in some of his churches for the City of London seems to have tried to build uncompartmented churches, where Baptism, Morning and Evening Prayer and Holy Communion could all be conducted in an undivided space, without the priest and his assistants moving out of sight and earshot.
Usually the plan was the nave with three-decker pulpit dominating for Matins, Litany and Evensong, a screen through which the congregation passed for Communion, and a Bapistry at the west end. The earliest post-Reformation churches usually had west galleries for organ and choir and also side galleries, because by the 17th century the population had begun to increase, especially in the towns where many new churches were built. The churches of the 17th and 18th centuries were mostly built on the English medieval plan. The only noticeable new feature in the more traditional churches was that the chancels were shallower and broader than those surviving from earlier times.
The style of tracery and decoration and wood-carving certainly changed. Windows were square-headed in the 16th century, and thereafter became round-headed. Grapes and cherubs and a cornucopia of fruit cascaded down the sides of altar-pieces, wreathed round the panelling of pulpits, and flattened themselves into patterns on the ceiling. The Renaissance style of Italy became the fashion. But it was an English version. Wren’s Portland stone steeples and lead spires, so happily clustering round St Paul’s Cathedral, are a recollection of Gothic architecture, though most of them are Renaissance in detail.
The interior of even the most room-like classic church of the 17th and early 18th centuries generally differs from its contemporary Dissenting interior. In the former there is provision for the expounding of the Word, and for the two chief sacraments; in the latter there is provision for the Word, but there is no suggestion of an altar about the table that is set for Communion. There may be some significance in the hour-glasses so often found beside the Anglican pulpits. They were intended as a check on the length of the sermon, and perhaps as a reminder to parson and people that there were other offices of the Church to be performed than preaching. Only for the short period when the Commonwealth ejected ordained priests of the Church, who returned with the Restoration, can these interiors have resembled Dissenting meeting houses.
Some of our finest scuplture is to be found in the monuments erected in all parish churches new or old during the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries. A whole illustrated literature of this has been developed by the late Mrs Esdaile and Mr Rupert Gunnis. The work of great sculptors ignored or despised by the Victorians, such as Roubiliac, Rysbrack, Stone, Wilton, the Bacons, Hickey and Paty, has received recognition owing to their writings.
From the middle of the 18th century until its end, new churches were Classic, usually in the manner of the Brothers Adam, with chaste decorations in low relief in interior plaster and woodwork, and comparatively plain exteriors. The individuality of architects was beginning to assert itself over traditional plan and local styles. Cross-shaped churches were built with altar at the eastern axis and there were square and octagonal churches as well as proprietary chapels with the pews all arranged for a view of the occupier of the pulpit. These last buildings came as near to a Dissenting chapel as Anglicanism permitted.
Gothic never died. The style was driven by the Renaissance out of churches and houses into barns, farms and cottages. It was revived in a romantic form, suggesting Strawberry Hill (1733), even in the 17th century. And a slender case might be made for its never having died even in ecclesiastical building. There are Stuart churches which are Tudor Gothic, such as Low Ham in Somerset (1624), and Staunton Harold in Leicestershire (1653), which are like late Perpendicular medieval churches, and not a conscious revival but a continuance of the old style. St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, until its rebuilding by Gibbs in 1721, had been continuously rebuilt in the Gothic style since the time of Henry VIII. There are churches like St John’s, Leeds (1632), and Compton Wynyates (1663), which are a mixture of Classic and Tudor Gothic. Then there are the first conscious imitations of old forms by architects, such as Sir William Wilson’s tower of St Mary’s, Warwick (1694), and Wren’s tower and steeple to St Dunstan-in-the-East (1698), and his towers of St Mary Aldermary (1711) and St Michael’s Cornhill (1721). There is an interesting and well-illustrated chapter on this subject of the earlier revival of Gothic in M. Whiffen’s Stuart and Georgian Churches. The plan of these buildings was almost always traditional with an emphasized chancel. Now and then a Lutheran element crept in. In the Gothic church of Teigh in Rutland (1783), the small font is fixed by a brass bracket to the Communion rails. But the seats face north and south and the pulpit is at the west end.
In the reign of Queen Anne Parliament passed an act to remedy the insufficiency of accommodation for worship in London and the vicinity. Leading architects of the time like James Gibbs, Archer and Hawksmoor were employed, and several fine churches which challenge those of Wren were the result. Other large towns, for this was a time when the population of the midlands was rapidly expanding, followed London’s example.
Throughout the 18th century there was great interest in theology. Anyone looking through the library of a country house can verify this, for he will find rows of superbly bound volumes of sermons and controversial pamphlets and histories of religion. In the spas and the richer parts of London, private chapels were built for favourite clergy. They are well described by T. Francis Bumpus in London Churches, Ancient and Modern:
‘Well pewed, well warmed, undedicated, unendowed, unconsecrated, here captivating preachers of the Morphine Velvet, lavender-kid-glove school of theology dispensed the most comfortable doctrines. The pews were filled, and the good promoters were amply repaid by the pious tenantry, but accommodation for the poor was never thought of.’
Not all proprietary chapels were like this. Some were undoubtedly missions for teaching the Faith to the rich and indifferent or for bringing the Gospel to the poor. When town parishes grew very large in the 18th century, it was sometimes the custom for a chapel to be rented or built, and, if it did not succeed, to be sold again, or in some instances taken over by dissenters. St Martin-in-the-Fields had two such chapels which have now disappeared, and there were three in the parish of St Margaret Westminster and seven in the parish of St Pancras.
Few of these proprietary chapels survive as such today. Sometimes there is, in a large provincial town, one very Evangelical church, in classic style, whose patronage is in the hands of private trustees. This may well once have been an 18th-century proprietary foundation. In 1746 there were nineteen in London, excluding chapels belonging to Royal and Episcopal Palaces, Almshouses, Prisons, Livery Companies and Inns of Court. Those which have not been pulled down or become Dissenting places of worship, have been consecrated and turned into parish churches. I remember one in Bath called Kensington Chapel, which was Calvinistic yet Anglican, but which is now a furniture store. At another in Homerton, London, known as Ram’s Episcopal Chapel, I attended worship, and the clergyman wore a black gown and bands for preaching. This charming 18th-century chapel is now, alas, demolished. At Christ Church, North Brixton, London, is an extremely original and impressive episcopal chapel re-erected in 1904 in the Byzantine style from designs by Professor Beresford Pite. It was built privately and in it the black gown was still used in 1952.
WING: ALL SAINTS – this monument was sculpted by Roubiliac, a French artist of the 18th century who worked mostly in England; his work fell out of fashion by the 19th century
© Michael Ellis
Another reason for the erection of new churches in the 18th century was the inadequacy of medieval buildings. They could sometimes hold galleries erected in the aisles and at the west end, but no more. Old prints shew us town churches which have almost the appearance of an opera house, galleries projecting beyond galleries, with the charity children away up in the top lighted by dormers in the roof, pews all over the aisles and in the chancel, and only here and there a pointed arch or a bit of window tracery to shew that this was once a gothic medieval church. Walls began to bulge, stone decayed, structures were unsound and ill-behaved children could not be seen by the beadle and clerk. The only thing to do was to pull down the building. A surviving interior of this sort is the parish church of Whitby. To go into it is like entering the hold of a ship. There are box-pews shoulder high in all directions, galleries, private pews, and even a pew over the chancel screen. Picturesque and beautiful as it is, with the different colours of baize lining the pews, and the splendid joinery of varying dates, such an uneven effect cannot have pleased the 18th-century man of taste. Therefore when they became overloaded with pews, these old churches were taken down and new ones in Classic or Strawberry Hill Gothick style were erected on the sites.
In the country there can have been little need to rebuild the old church on the grounds of lack of accommodation. Here rebuilding was done at the dictates of taste. A landlord might find the church too near his house, or sited wrongly for a landscape improvement he was contemplating in the park, or he might simply dislike the old church on aesthetic grounds as a higgledy-piggledy, barbarous building. Most counties in England have more than one 18th-century church, now a sad relic in a park devastated by timber merchants, still crowning some rise or looking like a bit of Italy or ancient Greece in the pastoral English landscape.
Eighteenth-century churches are beautiful primarily because of their proportions. But they were not without colour. Painted hatchments adorned the walls, gilded tables of the Commandments were over the altar, with Moses and Aaron on either side, the Royal Arms on painted wood or coloured plaster was above the chancel opening, coloured baize lines in the pews, rich velvets of all colours were hanging from the high pulpit and the desks below it, an embroidered velvet covering decked the altar in wide folds, gilded candles and alms dish stood on the altar. The art of stained glass was not dead in the 18th century as is often supposed. East windows were frequently coloured, with pieces of golden-yellow 16th-century foreign glass brought back from a Grand Tour, and gold, blue and dark green glass, partly pot-metal and partly coloured transparency, such as went on being made in York until late in the century. Another popular kind of window was the coloured transparency – a transparent drawing enamelled on to glass, like the Reynolds’ window in New College, Oxford, by such artists as Eginton of Birmingham, Peckitt of York, James Pearson and Jervais.
After 1760 country churches were often rebuilt in the Gothick taste. Pointed windows, pinnacled towers and battlemented walls were considered ecclesiastical and picturesque. They went with sham ruins and amateur antiquarianism, then coming into fashion. The details of these Gothick churches were not correct according to ancient examples. Nor do I think they were intended to be. Their designers strove after a picturesque effect, not antiquarian copying. The interiors were embellished with Chippendale Gothick woodwork and plaster-work. Again nothing was ‘correct’. Who had ever heard of a medieval box-pew or an ancient ceiling that was plaster moulded? The Gothick taste was but plaster deep, concerned with a decorative effect and not with structure. The supreme example of this sort of church is Shobdon, Herefordshire (1753).
Amid all this concern with taste, industrialism comes upon us. It was all very well for the squire to fritter away his time with matters of taste in his country park, all very well for Boulton and Watt to try to harness taste to their iron-works at Soho, as Darby before them had tried at Ironbridge; the mills of the midlands and the north were rising. Pale mechanics, slave-driven children and pregnant women were working in the new factories. The more intelligent villagers were leaving for the towns where there was more money to be made. From that time until the present day, the country has been steadily drained of its best people. Living in hovels, working in a rattling twilight of machines, the people multiplied. Ebenezer Elliott the Corn Law Rhymer (1781–1849) was their poet:
The day was fair, the cannon roar’d,
Cold blew the bracing north,
And Preston’s mills, by thousands, pour’d
Their little captives forth . . .
But from their lips the rose had fled,
Like ‘death-in-life’ they smiled;
And still, as each pass’d by, I said,
Alas! is that a child? . . .
Thousands and thousands – all so white! –
With eyes so glazed and dull!
O God! it was indeed a sight
Too sadly beautiful!
A Christian himself, Ebenezer called out above
the roar of the young industrial age:
When wilt thou save the People?
O God of mercy, when?
The people, Lord, the people,
Not thrones and crowns, but men!
Flowers of thy heart, O God, are they;
Let them not pass, like weeks, away, –
Their heritage a sunless day.
God save the people!
The composition of this poem was a little later than the Million Act of 1818, by which Parliament voted one million pounds towards the building of churches in new districts. The sentiments of the promoters of the Bill cannot have been so unlike those of Elliott. Less charitable hearts, no doubt, terrified by the atheism consequent on the French Revolution and apprehensive of losses to landed proprietors, regarded the Million Act as a thank-offering to God for defending them from French free-thinking and continental economics. Others saw in these churches bulwarks against the rising tide of Dissent. Nearly three hundred new churches were built in industrial areas between 1819 and 1830. The Lords Commissioner of the Treasury who administered the fund required them to be built in the most economical mode, ‘with a view to accommodating the greatest number of persons at the smallest expense within the compass of an ordinary voice, one half of the number to be free seats for the poor’. A limit of £20,000 was fixed for 2,000 persons. Many of these ‘Commissioners’ or ‘Waterloo’ churches, as they are now called, were built for £10,000. The most famous church of this date is St Pancras in London, which cost over £70,000. But the money was found by private subscription and a levy on the rates. For other and cheaper churches in what were then poorer districts the Commissioners contributed towards the cost.
The Commissioners themselves approved all designs. When one reads some of the conditions they laid down, it is surprising to think that almost every famous architect in the country designed churches for them – Soane, Nash, Barry, Smirke, the Inwoods, the Hardwicks, Rickman (a Quaker and the inventor of those useful terms for Gothic architecture, ‘Early English’, ‘Decorated’ and ‘Perpendicular’), Cockerell & Basevi and Dobson, to name a few. ‘The site must be central, dry and sufficiently distant from factories and noisy thoroughfares; a paved area is to be made round the church. If vaulted underneath, the crypt is to be made available for the reception of coals or the parish fire engine. Every care must be taken to render chimneys safe from fire; they might be concealed in pinnacles. The windows ought not to resemble modern sashes; but whether Grecian or Gothic, should be in small panes and not costly. The most favourable position for the minister is near an end wall or in a semicircular recess under a half dome. The pulpit should not intercept a view of the altar, but all seats should be placed so as to face the preacher. We should recommend pillars of cast iron for supporting the gallery of a chapel, but in large churches they might want grandeur. Ornament should be neat and simple, yet variable in character.’
In short, what was wanted was a cheap auditorium, and, whether Grecian or Gothic, the solution seems always to have been the same. The architects provided a large rectangle with an altar at the end in a very shallow chancel, a high pulpit on one side of the altar and a reading desk on the other, galleries round the north, west and south walls, an organ in the west gallery, and lighting from two rows of windows on the north and south walls, the lower row to light the aisles and nave, the upper to light the galleries. The font was usually under the west gallery. The only scope for invention which the architect had was in the design of portico and steeple, tower or spire.
Most large towns have at least one example of Commissioners’ Churches, particularly in the north of England, where they were usually Gothic. None to my knowledge except Christ Church, Acton Square, Salford (1831) survived exactly as it was when its architect designed it. This is not because they were badly built. But they were extremely unpopular with the Victorians, who regarded them as cheap and full of shams and unworthy of the new-found dignity of the Anglican liturgy. The usual thing to do was to turn Grecian buildings into ‘Byzantine’ or ‘Lombardic’ fanes, by filling the windows with stained glass, piercing the gallery fronts with fretwork, introducing iron screens at the east end, adding a deeper chancel and putting mosaics in it, and of course cutting down the box-pews, thus ruining the planned proportions of the building and the relation of woodwork to columns supporting the galleries. The architect, Sir Arthur Blomfield, was a specialist in spoiling Commissioners’ Churches in this way. Gothic or Classic churches were ‘corrected’. In later days side chapels were tucked away in aisles originally designed for pews. Organs were invariably moved from the west galleries made for them, and were fitted awkwardly alongside the east end.
One can visualize a Commissioners’ Church as it was first built, by piecing together the various undisturbed parts of these churches in different towns. The Gothic was a matter of decoration, except in St Luke’s new church, Chelsea, London, and not of construction. A Commissioners’ Church will be found in that part of a town where streets have names like Nelson Crescent, Adelaide Place, Regent Square, Brunswick Terrace and Hanover Villas. The streets round it will have the spaciousness of Georgian speculative building, low-terraced houses in brick or stucco with fanlights over the doors, and, until the pernicious campaign against Georgian railings during the Nazi war, there were pleasant cast-iron verandahs on the first floor and simple railings round the planted square. Out of a wide paved space, railed in with Greek or Gothic cast iron according to the style of the building, will rise the Commissioners’ Church, a brick structure with Bath stone dressings, two rows of windows and a noble entrance portico at the west end. Such churches are generally locked today, for the neighbourhood has often ‘gone down’; the genteel late Georgian families who lived there moved into arboured suburbs at the beginning of this century, and their houses have been sub-let in furnished rooms.
But Commissioners’ Churches, which provided worship for nearly five million people, had a dignity and coherence which we can appreciate today now that the merits of Georgian Architecture are recognized. They were the last auditory buildings of the Establishment to be erected for about a century. Through the rest of the 19th century, most new churches might be considered inauditory buildings, places where the ritual of the service could best be appreciated, where sight came first and sound second.
By 1850 began a great period of English church building, which is comparable with the 15th century. Much as we regret the Victorian architect’s usual ‘restoration’ of an old building, when he came to design a new one, he could produce work which was often original and awe-inspiring. To name only a few London churches, All Saints, Margaret Street; St Augustine’s, Kilburn; St James the Less, Victoria; St Columba’s, Haggerston; Holy Trinity, Sloane Street; Holy Redeemer, Clerkenwell; St Michael’s, Camden Town; and St Cyprian’s, Clarence Gate, are some large examples of the period which have survived Prussian bombing. To understand the inspiration behind these churches, we must leave architecture for a while and turn to the architects and the men who influenced them; architects such as Pugin, Street, Butterfield, Pearson, Gilbert Scott, Bodley and the Seddings, and priests such as Newman, Keble, Pusey, Neale, Wilberforce, and later Lowder, Mackonochie and Wainwright.
CHEADLE: ST GILES – one of A. W. N. Pugin’s most complete schemes, a meticulous recreation of medieval Gothic
© Michael Ellis
The Commissioners’ Churches were built to provide more space for the worship of God. But in what way was God to be worshipped? And even, who was God? Those 19th-century liberals who survived the shock of the French Revolution took up a line which we can still find today in the absurd Act inaugurated by R. A. Butler (1944) about the teaching of religion in State Schools. The liberal view was, as Newman described it, ‘the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another.’ This view commended itself to Dissenters in the beginning of the last century, since they saw in it the liberty to expound their doctrines, and perhaps to win the world to believe them. It commended itself to those whom scientific discovery was driving to unwilling agnosticism. And, of course, it commended itself to materialists who had not yet made a dogma of materialism.
In the late Georgian Church there was little of such liberalism. People were divided into Low Church Evangelicals and old-fashioned ‘High and Dry’. By the 1830s the great Evangelical movement was, as W. S. Lilly says, ‘perishing of intellectual inanition’. Beginning, in Apostolic wise, with ‘the foolishness of preaching, it had ended unapostolically in the preaching of foolishness.’ The evangelical tea-parties, revelations, prophecies, jumping, shaking and speaking in strange tongues which went on in England in those days within and without the Church make fascinating reading. But they have left no enduring architectural monument, except for some of the buildings belonging to the Catholic Apostolic Church. The other party in the Church of England, the ‘high and dry’, was orthodox and uninspiring. Once a quarter, after preparing themselves by means of those Queen Anne and Georgian manuals of devotion which we sometimes find bound up in old prayer books, its members moved through the chancel screen on Sacrament Sunday to partake of the outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace. Their parsons wore the surplice and the wig, and abhorred change. They were not quite so negative as they are made out to be. There are several instances in the late 18th and early 19th centuries of screens being erected across chancels to shut off from the nave the place where the Sacrament was partaken.
The Church of England at this time drew its ministers from men who were scholars or gentlemen, usually both. Harriet Martineau’s acid biography of Bishop Blomfield (1786–1857) in her Biographical Sketches, rather cattily says: ‘In those days, a divine rose in the Church in one or two ways, – by his classical reputation, or by aristocratic connection. Mr Blomfield was a fine scholar;...’
Let us try to put ourselves into the frame of mind of somebody living in the reign of King William IV. Let us suppose him just come down from Oxford and still in touch with his University. The grand tour was no longer so fashionable. A squire’s son usually went abroad for sport. Few came back with works of art for the adornment of their parks or saloons. Most country house libraries stop at the end of George IV’s reign, except for the addition of sporting books and works of reference on husbandry, law and pedigrees of family and livestock. A studious man, such as we have in mind, would have turned his attention to antiquity and history. The novels of Scott would have given him a taste for England’s past. The antiquarian publications of Britton would have reinforced it. In Gothic England he would have found much to admire. And the people of his village were still the product of agricultural feudalism. Tenantry bobbed, and even artisans touched their hats. Blasphemy shocked people, for many believed that Christ was the Incarnate Son of God.
Our young man would undoubtedly read The Christian Year by the Reverend John Keble (1827). It is hard to see today how this simple and unexciting, oft-reprinted book could have fired so many minds. Perhaps the saintly life of the author, who had thrown up academic honours and comfort to live among simple villagers as their minister, had something to do with it. At any rate, Newman regarded that book as the foundation of the Tractarian movement. The verses of The Christian Year were a series composed to fit in with the feasts, fasts and offices of the Book of Common Prayer. They drew people back to the nature of the Established Church. And the Tracts for the Times which followed, from Keble’s Assize Sermon of 1833 up to Tract XC by Newman on the Thirty-nine Articles in 1841, would certainly influence him greatly. In these he would learn how the Church was finding herself part of the Catholic Church. Although many great men, greatest of all Newman, have left her for the Church of Rome, others remained faithful. Their witness in England in the last century is apparent in the hundreds of churches which were built on Tractarian principles in new suburbs and towns, in the church schools, public and elementary, in the Sisterhood buildings, in the houses of rest erected by good people of the kind one reads about in the novels of Charlotte M. Yonge, who was herself a parishioner and friend of Keble.
English architecture was also beginning a new phase of professionalism in the reign of William IV. Architects had in the past been regarded either as builders or as semi-amateurs who left the details of their designs to masons and plasterers. There had been great architects since the time of Wren. There was also a host of lesser men who in domestic work were pursuing their local styles and imitating the splendid designs of the metropolis, rather as village builders in monastic times had tried to reproduce in village churches the latest styles at the abbeys. But for years now architecture had been becoming a profession. Architects designed buildings and produced their own beautiful, detailed drawings. Less was left to the builder and the gifted amateur. In 1837 the Institute of British Architects was incorporated by Royal Charter. Architects were by now rather more like doctors and lawyers than artists.
The most influential was Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812–52), who was said by his doctor to have crammed into his forty years of existence the work of a hundred years. Pugin’s life has been entertainingly described by his contemporary Benjamin Ferrey in Recollections of Augustus Welby Pugin, 1861, and lately his life has been written by Michael Trappes-Lomax, who stresses his Roman Catholicism. Sir Kenneth Clark in The Gothic Revival, the Revd. B. F. L. Clarke in Nineteenth Century Churchbuilders, and John Summerson in an essay in The Architectural Review (April 1948), have all written most illuminatingly about him.
In 1841 Pugin published his Contrasts and his True Principles of Christian Architecture. Herein he caricatured in skilful drawings the false Gothick of the Strawberry Hill type, and lampooned everything that was classical. To contrast with these he had made beautiful shaded drawings of medieval buildings, particularly those of the late 14th century. He did not confine his caricatures to architecture, and peopled the foregrounds with figures. In front of pagan or classical buildings he drew indolent policemen, vulgar tradesmen and miserable beggars; before the medieval buildings he drew vested priests and pious pilgrims. He idealized the middle ages. His drawings were sincere but unfair. The prose accompaniment to them is glowing and witty.
Pugin’s own churches, which were almost all Roman Catholic, are attempts to realize his dreams. But for all the sincerity of their architect, the brass coronals, the jewelled glass by Hardman of Birmingham, the correctly moulded arches and the carefully caned woodwork have a spindly effect. St Chad’s Roman Catholic Cathedral at Birmingham, St Augustine’s Church, Ramsgate, and St Giles’s, Cheadle, are exceptions. It is not in his buildings but in his writing that Pugin had so great an influence on the men of his time.
Pugin is sometimes supposed to have joined the Church of Rome for aesthetic reasons only. It is true that he saw in it the survival of the Middle Ages to which he desired the world to return. But the Roman Catholics of his time were not whole-heartedly in favour of the Gothic style he advocated, and to his annoyance continued to build in the classic style of the continent or else in the plaster-thin Gothick he despised. The Church of England, newly awakened to its Catholicism, took more kindly to his doctrines, so that although he came in for some mild criticism from The Ecclesiologist (the organ first of the Cambridge Camden Society, and from 1845 of Catholic-minded Anglicans in general), Pugin contemplated writing an essay called: ‘An Apology for the separated Church of England since the reign of the Eight Henry. Written with every feeling of Christian charity for her Children, and honour of the glorious men she continued to produce in evil times. By A. Welby Pugin, many years a Catholic-minded son of the Anglican Church, and still an affectionate and loving brother of the true sons of England’s church.’
I do not think it was solely for aesthetic reasons, or even for doctrinal reasons, that Pugin joined the Church of Rome. He possessed what we now call, ‘social conscience’. He deplored the slums he saw building round him. He abhorred the soullessness of machinery, and revered hand craftsmanship. His drawings of industrial towns contrasted with a dream-like Middle Ages, his satire on the wealthy ostentation of a merchant’s house – ‘On one side of the house machicolated parapets, embrasures, bastions, and all the show of strong defence, and round the corner of the building a conservatory leading to the principal rooms, through which a whole company of horsemen might penetrate at one smash into the heart of the mansion! – for who would hammer against nailed portals when he could kick his way through the greenhouse?’ – are summed up in the two principles of Gothic or Christian architecture which he delivered to the world. These are they. ‘First, that there should be no features about a building which are not necessary for convenience, construction, or propriety; second, that all ornament should consist of enrichment of the essential construction of the building.’ Pugin’s principles, and his conviction that the only style that was Christian was Gothic, are fathered by popular opinion on Ruskin. But Ruskin was not fond of Pugin. He disliked his Popery, and he thought little of his buildings. If one must find a successor to Pugin, it is the atheist William Morris. Both men liked simplicity and good craftsmanship. Both had a ‘social conscience’. Pugin dreamed of a Christian world, Morris of a Socialist world, but both their worlds were dreams.
Let us imagine our young man again, now become a Tractarian clergyman. His convictions about how best to honour the God he loves, and how to spread that love among the artisans in the poorer part of his parish, are likely to take form in a new church. And, since he is a Tractarian, it must be a beautiful church. His reading of Pugin, the publications of the Cambridge Camden Society and The Ecclesiologist, will have inspired him. He will have no truck with the cheap Gothic or Norman Revival of the Evangelical school. A pamphlet such as that of Revd. W. Carus Wilson’s Helps to the Building of Churches, Parsonage Houses and Schools (2nd Edition, Kirby Lonsdale, 1842) will have digusted him. Here we find just the sort of thing Pugin satirized: ‘A very neat portable font has been given to the new church at Stonyhurst, which answers every purpose; not requiring even the expense of a stand; as it might be placed, when wanted, on the Communion Table from which the ceremony might be performed. The price is fourteen shillings; and it is to be had at Sharper’s, Pall Mall East, London.’ Such cheese-paring our clergyman would leave to the extreme Protestants who thought ostentation, stained glass, frontals, lecterns and banners smacked of Popery, and who thought with Dean Close of Cheltenham that ‘the Restoration of Churches is the Restoration of Popery’. This explains why, to this day, unrestored churches with box-pews are generally Evangelical and locked. But the Evangelical did not wholly reject Gothic. Ullenhall (Warwicks) and Itchen Stoke (Hants) are Victorian Gothic churches designed to have the Table well away from the East wall and the lectern and pulpit dominant. Ullenhall retains its Protestant arrangement, and this arrangement was originally, we must remember, the ‘High Church’ of the 17th and 18th centuries. The Early English style was regarded as plain and primitive. Very few churches were built in a classic style between 1840 and 1900. The choice before young vicar is no longer Gothic or Classic, but what sort of Gothic?
Architects were turning their attention to churches. And the younger men were all for Gothic. Most architects were God-fearing folk of the new middle class. They felt privileged to build churches to the glory of God. Many of them were instructed in theology; they subscribed to The Ecclesiologist and to various learned antiquarian publications. They delighted to discuss the merits of Norman, and Decorated, Early English and Perpendicular, or Early, Middle and Late Pointed, according to which terminology they favoured. In the early ’forties they were still following Pugin. Pugin’s chief Anglican equivalents were Benjamin Ferrey, Carpenter and Gilbert Scott. These men, and many others, were capable of making very good imitations of a medieval fabric. With the aid of the numerous books of measured drawings that were appearing, it was possible to erect almost exact copies of such famous monuments of the Middle Ages as the spire at Louth, the tracery of the Angel Choir at Lincoln, and the roof of Westminster Hall. The scale was different it is true, and architects had no compunction about mixing copies of what they considered the ‘best’ features of old churches in their new ones. They thought that a blend of the best everywhere would make something better still.
LONDON: ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET – Butterfield’s masterpiece is an industrialised version of Gothic Revival, a medieval sensibility allied to modern materials and methods
© Michael Ellis
The earlier Gothic revival churches, that is to say those of late Georgian times, were in the late 14th-century style. One may see in some prim and spacious Georgian square, brick imitations of King’s College Chapel and Bathstone dressings. But in the late 1840s architects were attaching moral properties to Gothic styles. Pugin had started the idea and his successors surpassed him. Since Gothic was the perfect style, what was the perfect style of Gothic? I do not know who it was who started the theory that early Gothic is crude, middle is perfection, and late is debased . But – certainly from the middle of the 1840s – this theory was held by most of the rising young church architects. Promoters of new churches who could afford it were advised to have something in the Middle Pointed or Decorated style. This is the reason why in mid-Victorian suburbs, while speculative builders were still erecting Italianate stucco mansions, in the last stuccoed gasp of the Georgian classic tradition – South Kensington and Pimlico in London are examples – the spire of Ketton or Louth soars above the chimney-pots, and a sudden break in the Palladian plaster terraces shews the irregular stone front, gabled porch and curvilinear tracery of a church in the Decorated style. Church architecture was setting the fashion which the builders followed, and decades later, even employing church architects (such as Ferrey at Bournemouth), they erected Gothic residences in the new winding avenues of housing estates for the upper middle classes. Most of the work of the late ‘forties and early ‘fifties was in this copying style. When an architect had a sense of proportion, there were often impressive results. Carpenter and his son and their partner Slater were always good. Their Lancing School Chapel must be regarded as one of the finest Gothic buildings of any period in England, and their London church of St Mary Magdalen, Munster Square, so modest outside, is spacious and awe-inspiring within.
The most famous copyist was Gilbert Scott. He and his family have had a great influence on English architecture over the past century. Gilbert Scott was the son of a Buckinghamshire parson, the grandson of the Calvinist clergyman Thomas Scott, whose Commentary on the Bible greatly influenced Newman as a youth. There is no doubt of Scott’s passionate affection for Gothic architecture. He pays a handsome tribute to Pugin’s influence on his mind: ‘Pugin’s articles excited me almost to fury, and I suddenly found myself like a person awakened from a long, feverish dream, which had rendered him unconscious of what was going on about him.’
Our young clergyman would almost certainly have applied to Gilbert Scott for his new church. He would have received designs from Scott’s office. They would have been a safe, correct essay in the middle pointed style, with tower and spire or with bellcot only, according to the price. Scott himself, except when he first started in private practice, may not have had much to do with the design. He collected an enormous staff, and from his office emerged, it is said, over seven hundred and forty buildings between 1847 and 1878 when he died. When one considers that an architect in private practice today thinks himself busy if he has seven new buildings to do in a decade, it seems probable that Scott eventually became little more than an overseer of all but his most important work. His ‘restorations’ were numerous and usually disastrous.
Yet Scott, who was eventually knighted for his vast output, had a style of his own – a square abacus to his columns, Plate tracery in the windows, much stone foliage mixed up with heads, and for east or west windows, three equal lancets with a round window above them. In five churches of his, St Giles, Camberwell; St George’s, Doncaster; Leafield, Oxon; Bradfield, Berks, and St Anne, Alderney, I can trace it clearly. He liked to build something big. He dispensed with a chancel screen. Instead of this, he often interposed between the congregation in the nave and the rich chancel, a tower or transept crossing which was either darker or lighter than the parts it separated. Add to this a sure sense of proportion and a workmanlike use of stone, and the dull mechanical details of his work are forgotten in the mystery and splendour of the interior effect. Scott realized some of Pugin’s dreams for him. But he never did more. He was at heart a copyist and not a thinker in Gothic.
Church architecture by the ’fifties was very much an affair of personalities. The big London men and a few in the provinces had their individual styles. As Sir Charles Nicholson remarked in his comments on Henry Woodyer’s beautiful building St Michael’s College, Tenbury (1856), which was designed as a church choir school: ‘It was never, of course, intended that the College should be mistaken for anything other than a 19th-century building: for Gothic revival architects did not attempt such follies, though their enemies accused them of doing so.’ What is true of St Michael’s College, Tenbury, is true also of most of the churches built in England after 1850. The chief of those architects who ‘thought in Gothic’ are listed below.
William Butterfield (1814–1900) was the most severe and interesting of them. He first startled the world in 1849 with his design for All Saints, Margaret Street, London, built on the cramped site of an 18th-century proprietary chapel where lights had been used on the altar since 1839, and a sung celebration of the Holy Communion introduced. All Saints embodies architectural theories which Butterfield employed in most of his other churches throughout his long life. It is constructed of the material which builders in the district were accustomed to use, which in London at that time was brick. Since bricks do not lend themselves to the carving which is expected of a Gothic building, Butterfield varied his flat brick surfaces with bands of colour, both within and without. In those days the erroneous impression prevailed that Gothic decoration grew more elaborate the higher it was on a building. The patterns of bricks in Butterfield’s buildings grew, therefore, more diversified and frequent towards the tops of walls, towers and steeples. But their arrangement is not usually capricious as it is in the work of some of the rather comic church architects who copied him, like Bassett Keeling. Where walls supported a great weight, they were striped horizontally, where they were mere screen walls, diaper patterns of bricks were introduced. Inside his churches Butterfield delighted to use every coloured stone, marble and other material he could find for the money at his disposal. He was a severely practical man, and a planner and constructor first. His decoration was meant to emphasize his construction.
The plan of All Saints is in the latest Tractarian manner of its time. The high altar is visible from every part of the church. Indeed to this day not even the delicate and marked style of Sir Ninian Comper’s side altar in the north aisle takes one’s eye from the chancel. Butterfield disapproved of side altars and never made provision for them in his churches. The chancel is the richest part of the building, and the chancel arch, higher than the arcades of the nave, gives it an effect of greater loftiness than it possesses. There is, of course, no screen. The other prominent feature of any Butterfield church is the font. That sentence in the Catechism on the number of Sacraments, ‘Two only, as generally necessary to salvation, that is to say Baptism, and the Supper of the Lord’, is almost spoken aloud by a Butterfield church; altar and font are the chief things we see. But when we look up at arches and roofs, we see Butterfield the builder with his delight in construction. His roofs are described by that fine writer Sir John Summerson as ‘like huge, ingenious toys’. The phrase is as memorable as all Butterfield’s roofs, of which the ingenuity and variety seem to have been the only sportiveness he permitted himself.
In person Butterfield was a silent, forbidding man who looked like Mr Gladstone. He was an earnest Tractarian with a horror of everything outside the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer. Except for one Noncomformist chapel in Bristol, designed when he was a youth, and unlike the rest of his work, he built only for Tractarians. He supplied no attractive drawings to tempt clients. He was a strong disciplinarian in his office, and on the building site, scaffolding and ladders had to be dusted before he ascended to see the work in progress. He was averse to all publicity and show, and had little to do with any other architects. People had to take Butterfield or leave him. And so must we. Yet no one who has an eye for plan, construction and that sense of proportion which is the essential of all good architecture, can see a Butterfield church without being compelled to admire it, even if he cannot like it.
George Edmund Street, R.A. (1824–81), is chiefly remembered now for the Law Courts in London. He was in Gilbert Scott’s office before setting up on his own. Early in his career he received the patronage of such distinguished High Churchmen as Prynne, Butler of Wantage, and Bishop Wilberforce of Oxford. Street himself was a Tractarian, singing in the choir at Wantage and disapproving of ritual without doctrine. The churches he built in the late ‘fifties and throughout the ’sixties, often with schools and parsonages alongside them, are like his character straightforward and convinced. They are shorn of those ‘picturesque’ details beloved of the usual run of architects of the time. The plan of Street’s buildings is immediately apparent from the exterior. Some of his village schools of local stone built early in his career in the Oxford Diocese are so simple and well-proportioned, and fit so naturally into the landscape, that they might be the sophisticated Cotswold work of such 1900 architects as Ernest Gimson and F. L. Griggs. Street’s churches are built on the same principles as those of Butterfield, one altar only, and that visible from all parts of the church, a rich east end, and much westward light into the nave. Street had a sure sense of proportion, very much his own; his work, whether it is a lectern or a pulpit or a spire, is massive, and there is nothing mean about it nor over-decorated. This massive quality of his work made Street a bad restorer of old buildings, for he would boldly pull down a chancel and rebuild it in his own style. He was a great enthusiast for the arts and crafts. With his own hands he is said to have made the wooden staircase for West Challow Vicarage in Berkshire. His ironwork was drawn out in section as well as outline, and there were some caustic comments written by him in the margin of his copy of Gilbert Scott’s Personal and Professional Recollections (in the RIBA Library) where Scott confesses to leaving the detail of his ironwork to Skidmore of Coventry, the manufacturer. Street was an able sketcher of architecture, and clearly a man who could fire his pupils with his own enthusiasm, even though he never allowed those pupils a free hand in design, doing everything down to the smallest details himself. Street’s influence on English architecture is properly appreciated in H. S. Goodhart Rendel’s English Architecture Since the Regency. It comes down to us through his pupils, among whom were Philip Webb and Norman Shaw, whose domestic architecture brought about the small house of today, William Morris, to whom the Arts and Crafts Movement owes so much, and J. D. Sedding, the church architect and craftsman.
WATERFORD: ST MICHAEL AND ALL ANGELS – Morris & Co. produced much of the glass in this church, some designed by William Morris and some, such as this example, by Burne-Jones
© Michael Ellis
The third of the great mid-Victorian church builders was John Loughborough Pearson (1817–97). His later buildings are of all Victorian churches those we like best today. He was, like Street and Butterfield, a Tractarian. Before designing a building he gave himself to prayer and receiving the Sacrament. He seems to have been a more ‘advanced’ clergyman than his two comparable contemporaries, for in his later churches he made ample provision for side altars, and even for a tabernacle for the reservation of the Blessed Sacrament. Pearson was articled in Durham to Ignatius Bonomi, the son of an elegant 18th-century architect. His early work in Yorkshire is competent copying of the medieval, and just distinguishable from the work of Gilbert Scott. But somewhere about 1860 he paid a visit to France, and early French Gothic vaulting seems to have transformed him. He built St Peter’s, Vauxhall, London, in 1862. Like most of his later work it is a cruciform building with brick vaulting throughout and with a clerestory. St Peter’s seems to have been the pattern of which all his subsequent churches were slight variants. Sometimes he threw out side chapels, sometimes he made aisles under buttresses. The Pearson style was an Early English Gothic with deep mouldings and sharply-pointed arches; brick was usually employed for walls and vaulting, stone for ribs, columns, arches and window tracery. Pearson also took great trouble with skyline, and his spires, fleches and roofs form beautiful groups from any angle.
One more individualistic Gothic revivalist was William Burges (1827–81), who was as much a domestic architect and a furniture designer as an ecclesiastical man. He delighted in colour and quaintness, but being the son of an engineer, his work had a solidity of structure which saved it from ostentation. His east end of Waltham Abbey and his cathedral of St Finbar, Cork, are his most beautiful church work, though Skelton and Studley Royal, both in Yorkshire, are overpowering in their rich colour and decoration, and very original in an early French Gothic manner.
Neither Butterfield, Street, Pearson nor Burges would have thought of copying old precedents. They had styles of their own which they had devised for themselves, continuing from the medieval Gothic but not copying it.
These big men had their imitators: Bassett Keeling who reproduced the wildest excesses of the polychromatic brick style and mixed it with cast-iron construction; S. S. Teulon who, in his youth, did the same thing; E. Buckton Lamb who invented a style of his own; Henry Woodyer who had a fanciful, spindly Gothic style which is original and marked; William White and Henry Clutton, both of whom produced churches, strong and modern for their times; Ewan Christian, the Evangelical architect, who could imitate the style of Pearson; or that best of the lesser men, James Brooks who built several ‘big-boned’ churches in East London in a plainer Pearson-esque manner. There was also the scholarly work in Italian Gothic of E. W. Godwin, and Sir Arthur Blomfield could turn out an impressive church in almost any style.
There is no doubt that until about 1870 the impetus of vigorous Victorian architecture went into church building. Churches took the lead in construction and in use of materials. They employed the artists, and many of the best pictures of the time had sacred subjects. The difficulties in which artists found themselves, torn between Anglo-Catholicism, Romanism and Ruskin’s Protestantism, is described well in John Steegman’s Consort of Taste.
After the ‘seventies, Norman Shaw, himself a High Churchman, became the leading domestic architect. The younger architects turned their invention to house design and building small houses for people of moderate income. Bedford Park was laid out by Norman Shaw in 1878. It was a revolution – a cluster of picturesque houses for artistic suburbanites. And from this time onwards we have a series of artistic churches, less vulgar and vigorous than the work of the now ageing great men, but in their way distinguished: slender, tapering work, palely enriched within in Burne-Jonesian greens and browns. The Middle Pointed or Decorated style and variants of it were no longer thought the only correct styles. People began to admire what was ‘late’ and what was ‘English’, and the neglected glory of Perpendicular, long called ‘debased’, was revived, and even the Renaissance style was used. For as the Reverend B. F. L. Clarke says in his Church Builders of the Nineteenth Century, ‘the question of Style was coming to be regarded as being of small importance’.
The last quarter of the 19th century was a time when the Tractarian movement firmly established itself. Of the eight Religious Communities for men of the Anglican Church, six were of the 1890s, and one, the ‘Cowley Fathers’ (Society of St John the Evangelist), was founded in 1865. Of the forty-five Communities for women, the first two, the Society of the Holy and Undivided Trinity and the Society of the Most Holy Trinity, Ascot, were founded in 1845, and well over half the rest are of Victorian origin. There are now in the Church of England more religious Communities than there were in medieval England, and this does not include Communities in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, America, Asia, Africa and Australia.
This was a time when the church was concerning herself with social problems, and building many new churches in England as well as establishing dioceses abroad. Many, and often ugly, little churches were built of brick in brand new suburbs. Cathedral-like buildings, subscribed for by the pious from wealthy parishes, were built in the slums. At the back of Crockford’s Clerical Directory there is an index of English parishes with the dates of their formation. If you look up an average industrial town with, say, ten churches, you will find that the majority will have been built during the last half of the 19th century. Oldest will be the parish church, probably medieval. Next there will be a late Georgian church built by the Commissioners. Then there will be three built between 1850 and 1870, three built between 1870 and 1900, and two since then, probably after the 1914 war and in new suburbs.
It is entertaining, and not completely safe, to generalize on the inner story of the Church and its building in Victorian and later times. In, let us say, 1850, the vicar of the parish church had become a little old for active work, and left much to his curates. His churchmanship took the form mainly of support for the Establishment and hostility to Dissent. The word ‘Dissenters’ applied to Nonconformists always had a faint note of contempt. Methodists and Baptists were building chapels all over the rapidly growing town. Their religion of personal experience of salvation, of hymn-singing, ejaculations of praise; the promise of a golden heaven after death as a reward for a sad life down here in the crowded misery of back streets, disease and gnawing poverty; their weekday socials and clubs which welded the membership of the chapels in a Puritan bond of teetotalism, and non-gambling, non-smoking and welldoing: these had an appeal which today is largely dispersed into the manufactured day-dreams of the cinema and the less useful social life of the dance hall and sports club. Chapels were crowded, gas-lights flamed on popular preachers, and steamy windows resounded to the cries of ‘Alleluia, Jesus saves!’ A simple ceremony like total immersion or Breaking of Bread was something all the tired and poor could easily understand, after their long hours of misery in gloomy mills. Above all, the Nonconformists turned people’s minds and hearts to Jesus as a personal Friend of all, especially the poor. Many a pale mechanic and many a drunkard’s wife could remember the very hour of the very day on which, in that street or at that meeting, or by that building, conviction came of the truth of the Gospel, that Jesus was Christ. Then with what flaming heart he or she came to the chapel, and how fervently testified to the message of salvation and cast off the old life of sin.
CARSHALTON: ALL SAINTS – Ninian Comper produced some of his finest work in this surburban London church, including this gilded and painted triptych for the high altar
© Michael Ellis
Beside these simple and genuine experiences of the love of Christ, the old-established Church with its system of pew rents, and set prayers and carefully-guarded sacraments, must have seemed wicked mumbo-jumbo. No wonder the old Vicar was worried about the Dissenters. His parish was increasing by thousands as the factories boomed and the ships took our merchandise across the seas, but his parishioners were not coming to church in proportion. He had no objection therefore when the new Bishop, filled with the zeal for building which seems to have filled all Victorian bishops, decided to form two new parishes out of his own, the original parish of the little village which had become a town in less than a century. The usual method was adopted. Two clergymen were licensed to start the church life of the two new districts. These men were young; one was no doubt a Tractarian; the other was perhaps fired with the Christian Socialism of Charles Kingsley and F. D. Maurice. Neither was much concerned with the establishment of churches as bulwarks against Dissenters, but rather as houses of God among ignorant Pagans, where the Gospel might be heard, the Sacraments administered, want relieved, injustice righted and ignorance dispelled. First came the mission-room, a room licensed for services in the clergyman’s lodging, then there was the school, at first a room for Sunday school only, and then came the mission church made of corrugated iron. Then there was an appeal for a church school and for a permanent church. For this church the once young clergyman, now worn after ten years’ work, would apply to the Incorporated Church Building Society, and to the Church Building Fund of his own diocese; he would raise money among his poor parishioners, he would give his own money (this was a time when priests were frequently men of means), and pay his own stipend as well. The site for the church would be given by a local landowner, and who knows but that some rich manufacturer whose works were in the parish would subscribe. Whatever their Churchmanship, the new parishes formed in the ‘fifties generally had their own church within twenty years.
All this while the Commissioners’ Church in the town, that Greek Revival building among the genteel squares where still lived the doctors, attorneys and merchants, had an Evangelical congregation and disapproved of the old ‘high and dry’ vicar of the parish church. The congregation and incumbent disapproved still more of the goings on of the Tractarian priest in charge of one of the two new districts. He lit two candles on the Table which he called an ‘altar’, at the service of the Lord’s Supper he stood with his back to the congregation instead of at the north end of the Table, he wore a coloured stole over his gown. He was worse than the Pope of Rome or almost as bad. The ignorant artisans were being turned into Roman Catholics. The pure Gospel of the Reformation must be brought to them. So a rival church was built in the Tractarian parish, financed by the Evangelical church people of the town, and from outside by many loyal Britons who throughout England, like Queen Victoria herself, were deploring the Romish tendency in the Established Church.
Many years have passed since this controversy, and the rival Evangelical fane probably has now a clergyman who always wears a surplice and sometimes a coloured stole, who has lights on the altar and faces east to celebrate Holy Communion, while the priest and congregation of the neighbouring Tractarian church, who now have incense, reservation of the Blessed Sacrament, daily mass, confessions and a High Mass on Sundays, still regard him as ‘low church’.
If one may generalize about the ecclesiastical works of the last half of the century, when so many new churches were built, so many new dioceses established at home and abroad, one can say this. From the ’forties to the middle ’sixties, the majority of the new churches were built as missions to the poor in towns; from the middle ’sixties until the end of the century, and increasingly since then, most new churches have been built in the suburbs. This is not to say that the poor became neglected. Rich manufacturers, settled down as squires in country near Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, London, the Potteries and the East Riding, also often rebuilt their country parish church as did those established landowners who were pious and still wealthy. Hence the many rebuilt churches in the Home Counties, Cheshire, Shropshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire. The ‘Lux Mundi’ group of the ’nineties, the Christian Socialism of such men as Father Adderley, Canon Scott Holland and Bishop Gore whose theology emphasized the Incarnation, laid great stress on the idea that the Catholic faith must play a part in the everyday life of factory and shop and not be a matter of Sunday worship only. Thus we find many slum Tractarian parishes building new mission churches on their smoky, overcrowded outskirts, churches with the names of black letter saints in the Calendar who always seem to be ‘high’: St Anselm, St Cyprian, St Erkenwald, St Mary Magdalen.
We like to think that the reason for the missions to the suburbs from the middle ’sixties onwards was that there were fewer poor. There may be some truth in this, but the reason lies more in the great growth of the middle classes – clerks, rich wholesalers and retailers, the Pooters, those dear, solid bits of English backbone. Few of them were more than one generation from a country village, and the churchgoing habit was ingrained in them from youth. They are the reason for the tall Perpendicular walls of St Philip’s Church, in red brick with stone dressings, rising above the oak paling and evergreens where Victoria Drive intersects Tollemache Avenue. The Tollemaches, deriving an unexpected income in house rents from what had been a sandy warren, gave the site; the merchants in the detached houses at the richer end of Victoria Drive gave the woodwork; the rich brewer whose family have by now been absorbed into the country squirearchy gave the stained glass; and either George Gilbert Scott Junior, John Olrid Scott, G. F. Bodley, J. D. Sedding, Norman Shaw, or, if it is in the North Country, Paley & Austin, designed the church. These architects were the young men who emerged from the enormous office of Sir Gilbert Scott, or the gay craftsman’s studio of Street. They carried the faith of their masters with them. They were generally Tractarians, of a more advanced sort than their masters. They were musical and artistic. They knew such men as Burne-Jones and Rossetti, and, much as they abhorred his atheism, they admired the decorative work of Street’s pupil William Morris.
I think that the well-spring of this later church architecture is the work of George Gilbert Scott Junior, who was a close friend of G. F. Bodley. This talented man was a scholar who wrote that learned and interesting History of English Church Architecture until the Reformation. He was not only a medievalist. He was one of the first Victorians to appreciate again the work of the Renaissance. The few churches he built are a foretaste of the work of Bodley and his followers. In 1877 he dared to build St Agnes, Kennington, London, in the despised Perpendicular style. What is more, he used brick walls, put a screen and rood across the chancel arch, and had a chancel under the same roof as the nave. He designed side chapels for daily services, he had no capitals to the piers in the nave arcades, and he filled the windows with glass by an unknown young artist called Kempe.
(#ulink_ff4ec180-b9a8-51e4-9f28-833d6bb93c44) This church was destroyed by the Southwark Diocese after war damage.
But we can see other churches influenced by the Neo-Perpendicular movement, and many of these are very fine buildings, no more imitations of medieval than were the works of the older Victorians. They are, however, less Victorian than the daring experiments of the ’fifties and ’sixties, and they seem, like the small houses designed by Norman Shaw, to come into our time or at any rate into the 1920s. Because they are near us, we do not appreciate their originality. In our desire to see a new style emerge from new materials, we notice only that the mouldings and fittings are copies of medieval Gothic. We do not realize that the proportions, plan and liturgical arrangement are nothing like our old churches.
See in your mind’s eye a church built in the neo-Perpendicular style by G. G. Scott Junior, Bodley, W. H. Bidlake of Birmingham, Edgar Wood, Sir Ninian Comper, W. D. Caroe, Sir Charles Nicholson, Temple Moore, J. D. Sedding, Edmund Sedding, Charles Spooner, E. P. Warren, Walter Tapper, Niven and Wigglesworth, Paley & Austin, to name a few of these later Victorian architects. If you cannot see it, I will try to re-create such a church, and you will remember it in some newish suburb of a provincial town where you stayed with an aunt, or on a holiday in the outskirts of a south-coast watering place, and you can read of it in Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street. ‘Ting-ting’ the single bell calls to Sung Eucharist, because the tower, designed for a full peal of bells, was never completed. Rather gaunt without it, the church rises above the privet and forsythia and prunus of its little garden, for there is no churchyard to these churches; we have reached the era of municipal cemeteries, and it is in their marble acres that the dead of this new parish are to be found. Inside the church, the tall nave is filled with chairs, and the narrow aisles are not used on a Sunday, as they give a view only of side altars where the weekday Celebrations and the very early Sunday masses are said. The floor is of oak blocks, the walls are cream and clean, the woodwork of the thick Devonshire style chancel screen, carved by Harry Hems of Exeter, is unstained. In more recent times a coloured statue of Our Lady under a gilded canopy is seen against one of the eastern-most pillars of the nave. Through the screen we glimpse a huge reredos painted green and red and gold, with folding doors. The high altar has a purple frontal, because just now it is Lent. The floor of the sanctuary is paved with black-and-white marble. Riddel posts with gilt angels on them – the famous ‘English altar’ introduced by Sir Ninian Comper in the ’eighties – hold curtains round the north, south and east of the side altars. The windows are filled with greenish glass in which are patches of dark blue, red and gold. These are the work of Kempe, and they allow more light into the church than earlier Victorian windows. The chief beauty of the church is its proportion. These architects favoured two kinds of proportion when they were building in the Gothic style – almost all of them designed Byzantine and classic churches as well – and they were either height and narrowness, or breadth and length. Their churches either soar or spread.
The Sung Eucharist is probably from the Prayer Book and with a crowd of acolytes at the altar. Blue incense rises to the golden reredos and the green Kempe window. The English Hymnal is used, and plain-song or more probably, Eyre in E [flat] or Tours in C. Candlelights twinkle in the mist. The purple Lenten chasuble of the priest is worn over amice, alb, stole and maniple, and there is discussion of these things after the service and before among servers and the initiated. We are in a world which feels itself in touch with the middle ages and with today. This is English Catholicism. There is much talk of Percy Dearmer, correct furnishings and vestments, the Prayer Book and how far one is justified in departing from it. After church the acolytes in their Sunday suits hang round the porch, and the young curates too, and there is a good deal of backslapping and chaff. For months the Mothers’ Union and women’s guilds of the church have been working on banners and a frontal to be ready for Easter. From these suburban parishes much of the Church life of modern England has sprung. They have trained their people in faith and the liturgy, they have produced many of the overseas missionaries and parish priests of today.
We are in modern times, out of the older and rich suburbs with their garden city atmosphere of guild craftsman and Sarum Use, and into the big building estates. The large areas of semi-detached houses, built by private speculators or councils, have been eating up our agricultural land since 1920. They have been brought about by the change in transport from steam to motor-bus and electric train. People are moving out of the crowded early Victorian industrial lanes and terraces, into little houses of their own, each with its little patch of garden at the back and front, each isolated from its neighbour by social convention, in districts where miles of pavement enlivened by the squeak of perambulators lead to a far-off bus route and parade of chain stores, and a distant vita-glass school, used as a Community Centre in the evenings. To these places, often lonely for all the people in them, is the new mission Church.
Just as there is today no definite modern style in England, except in what is impermanent – exhibition buildings, prefabs, holiday camps and the like, so there is no definite modern church style. In the period between the two wars church architects were too often concerned with style, and they built places of worship which vied with the local Odeon or with by-pass modern factories in trying to be ‘contemporary’. They now look dated, and will, I fear, never look beautiful. But the purpose of the church remains the same as it was at the beginning of this book, to be a place where the Faith is taught and the Sacraments are administered.
TUDELY: ALL SAINTS – one of the windows created by Marc Chagall to commemorate Sarah Venetia d’Avidgor Goldsmid, who drowned in the 1960s
© Richard Surman
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