Читать книгу English Cathedrals Illustrated - Francis Bond - Страница 11

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WEST FRONT.

The bishopric of Durham has a long history, though the cathedral was not at Durham till 1018. The conversion of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, north of the Thames, had been brought about by the missionaries of the Irish and Scottish church. Augustine’s mission in Kent, and that of Paulinus in the north—both sent from Rome—had for their object, not so much the conversion of England, as to induce the English Christians to transfer their allegiance from the Celtic to the Roman Church. The success of Augustine’s mission had been but short-lived. He landed in England A.D. 597; his death occurred in 605; and in 616 the Kentish kingdom relapsed into paganism. Paulinus landed in 601; proceeded to Northumbria in 625, but left it in 633, when, like Kent, most of Northumbria relapsed into paganism. The real “apostle of the north” was not Paulinus, but Aidan, who was sent at the request of King Oswald from Iona, and in the year 635 became the first bishop of the north of England.

(1) For thirty years the see was at Lindisfarne (Holy Island), but the jurisdiction of the bishop extended over all England north of the Humber, and over the south of Scotland (635-665). (2) In 678, Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury split up the vast Northumbrian diocese into the four bishoprics of York, Lindisfarne, Hexham, and Whitherne in Galloway. Twelve bishops ruled the now curtailed see from 678 to 900, the cathedral still remaining at Lindisfarne. The second of these was the famous St. Cuthbert (685-688). (3) In fear of the Danes, the body of St. Cuthbert was removed to Chester-le-Street, seven miles north of Durham, and eight bishops had their cathedral at Chester-le-Street (900-995). (4) Once more, in fear of the Northmen, the see was removed—this for the last time—to Durham. Including Aldhun, the last bishop of Chester-le-Street and the first bishop of Durham, there have been, up to 1898, sixty-one bishops of Durham.

In the earliest days, we always read of monks as carrying about the relics of St. Cuthbert and serving the cathedral. Later on, but still in Anglo-Saxon days, the monks gave way to Secular Canons. These in turn were replaced by Benedictine monks by the Norman bishop, William of St. Carilef (1081-1096). In 1540 the monastic establishment was suppressed, and the cathedral was placed on the New Foundation, like the Benedictine cathedrals of Canterbury, Winchester, Ely, Norwich, Rochester, and Worcester, with an establishment once more of Secular Canons.

NAVE.

In Anglo-Saxon days England was divided into provinces, whose earls exercised quite as much power as the Viceroy of the Empress exercises nowadays in India. These powerful and dangerous viceroyalties the Norman sovereigns abolished, with two exceptions. To guard the Marches against the Welsh, they left the old Earldom or Viceroyalty of Chester, putting it in the hands of a layman. To guard the Scottish border, they united with the Bishopric of Durham the Earldom of Northumberland. Between Tees and Tyne, and in some external districts, the Bishop of Durham had palatine jurisdiction. Here the King’s writ did not run; but the writs were drawn in the name of the bishop. As feudal lord, his seat was Durham Castle; as bishop, Durham Cathedral. Hence that wonderful group, castle and cathedral, which one sees from the Wear bridge towering overhead; unique in England, but not rare in the cities of the Prince-Bishops of the Holy Roman Empire: Lausanne, Chur, or Sitten. With the Bishop of Durham rested the power of life and death in case of murder, or even of treason itself. The most magnificent of all these powerful prelates was Anthony Bek (1283-1310). His own personal followers, when he marched with Edward I. against the Scots, included 26 standard-bearers, 140 knights, 1000 foot, and 500 horse. “Surrounded by his officers of state, or marching at the head of his troops, in peace or in war, he appeared as the military chief of a powerful and independent franchise. The court of Durham exhibited all the appendages of royalty; nobles addressed the palatine sovereign kneeling; and instead of menial servants, knights waited in his presence-chamber and at his table, bareheaded and standing.” But in 1536, Henry VIII. swept away the most important of the powers of the Counts Palatine. The ancient form of indictment “contra pacem Episcopi” was altered to “against the King’s peace,” and the King’s writ ran in Durham see. Still, the palatinate county of Durham was not fully an integral part of the realm, and up to 1675 did not send members to Parliament. It was not till 1836 that the privileges of the County Palatine were fully and finally vested in the Crown. Even now, the towers of Durham have a stern military air, such as no other English cathedral possesses; for a parallel to which we must go to the fortress-cathedrals of Albi and the south-west of France. Durham cathedral is “half House of God, half castle ’gainst the Scot.”

Of the Anglo-Saxon cathedrals in wood or stone nothing remains. The architectural history of the present cathedral commences with the accession of the second Norman prelate, William of St. Carilef, or St. Calais on the southern border of Maine, who was bishop from 1081 to 1095, and is said to have laid the foundations of the Norman cathedral in 1093 on August 11th. The building operations of the Norman cathedral admit of a threefold division: (1) The choir and choir aisles; the arcade and triforium of the eastern aisles of both transepts; the crossing; the first bay of the nave and the first arch of the nave-triforium; and the whole of the outer walls of the nave up to the top of the aisle-arcade of intersecting arches. All this is supposed to have been built by William of St. Carilef between August 11th, 1093, and January 6th, 1096; i.e., in two and a half years; which seems impossible. (2) In the interval of three years between Carilef’s death and the appointment of Ralph Flambard, the monks are said to have finished the transepts. (3) Between 1099 and his death in 1128, Ralph Flambard finished the nave. These three divisions are architecturally correct; they are borne out by differences of detail; and they follow the same order of building which was observed elsewhere. But it does not follow that the exact dates given above, on mediæval authority, are correct.

The most important matter is the date of the high vaults. From architectural evidence it is pretty clear that the vaulting was executed in the following order: (1) the vaults of the aisles of the choir and transepts, said to be not later than 1099; (2) the high vault of the choir, now destroyed, said to be not later than 1104; (3) the vaults of the aisles of the nave, said to be not later than 1128; (4) the high vaults of the transepts and nave, said to be not later than 1133. The chronology of the high vaults is a very important question in the history of mediæval architecture, especially as affecting the reputation of English architects. If the above dates are correct, it was the Durham architect, and not a Frenchman, who was the first to solve the great problem of mediæval architecture: how to construct and keep up a ribbed vault, oblong in plan, over a central aisle. With it goes the question of priority in the use of flying-buttresses to take the thrust of a high vault. If the dates given above are correct, Durham was a generation ahead of the whole world in the construction of a high vault and in the use of flying-buttresses.

WEST TOWERS.

But the transverse arches of the vault of the nave are pointed; a feature which occurs nowhere else in England at so early a date. Besides, it seems impossible that if the Durham people had solved the problem of problems of mediæval architecture—the construction of a high oblong vault—nobody else should have copied it in England for more than fifty years.

Another theory is that the high vaults were constructed by Bishop Farnham in 1242, making them contemporary with the Chapel of the Nine Altars—which is impossible. It seems to me that they belong to the episcopate of Hugh Pudsey, c. 1160.

The bays of Durham are coupled, Lombard-fashion—i.e., large and small piers alternate: with what object, is uncertain. There were three parallel eastern apses. The central apse had no ambulatory. The lateral apses were square externally, as at Romsey and Cerisy-la-Forêt, and S. Maria in Cosmedin, Rome (c. 780). The central was separated from the lateral apses by solid walls, as at Cerisy-la-Forêt, whose clerestory also seems to have been copied in the original western clerestory of the south transept.

Durham anticipates Gothic not only in vaulting its central aisles in oblongs—for the high oblong vaults of Durham, if not so early as 1133, are still the earliest in England—but in the employment of flying-buttresses. These, I think, were built long before the vaults, their object originally not being to withstand the thrust of vaults. In the triforium of the choir they appear in the form of semicircular arches, with a wall on them, which provided a support for the longitudinal timbers of the aisle-roof. In the choir these flying-buttresses are semicircular arches, and therefore, strictly speaking, are not flying-buttresses at all. But in the triforium of the nave they consist of segments of circles tilted up on end. Here they are genuine flying-buttresses, which oppose resistance to any outward inclination of the clerestory wall. The only constructional difference between those of the nave and Gothic flying-buttresses is that the former are placed underneath the roof of the triforium, sheltered from the weather, while the latter are placed outside and above the aisle-roof, and are thus liable to disintegration by wind, rain and frost. But even in Gothic, flying-buttresses are not always displayed; they still remained concealed under the triforium in the early work at Salisbury; and even in the fourteenth-century work of Winchester nave.

At the west end the towers project beyond the line of the nave, but only slightly. Still we may well see in this the germ of the grand western transepts of Ely, Wells and Peterborough.

CHOIR.

Internally, the one fault of Durham is its shortness in proportion to its great breadth. The nave ought to be two or three bays longer. Ely nave has twelve bays, Peterborough ten, Norwich fourteen, Durham only eight. But the architect could not build much further to the west, for close at hand is the precipice rising above the river; nor did he like to build further to the east, for the ground there is bad.

The internal elevation, however, is unsurpassed by that of any Romanesque church in Europe. At Winchester, Norwich, Peterborough, Ely, Malvern, Leominster, Chepstow, the three stories—pier-arcade, triforium, and clerestory—are about equal in height: a very unsatisfactory proportion. The architects of Gloucester and Tewkesbury saw this: unfortunately they rushed into the opposite extreme, and carried up their piers to such a vast height that the triforium and clerestory were dwarfed out of all proportion. But at Durham the proportions are absolutely right. The vault, too, is not so much later in date as to interrupt the solid monumental effect of the interior. It is as much preferable to the florid vaults of Gloucester, Tewkesbury, and Oxford as it is to the unworthy wooden ceilings of Peterborough, Selby, Waltham, and Ely. Durham gives one still the impression which it gave Dr. Johnson—one of “rocky solidity and indeterminate duration”: the very reverse of the unsubstantial tenuity of Salisbury and Beauvais.

The doorway of the Chapter-house is recorded to have been built by Bishop Galfrid Rufus (1133-1140). The north and south doorways of the nave (facing one another) are so similar to that of the Chapter-house that they must also be his work.

To Bishop Pudsey, to whom we have attributed the high vaults, belongs also the Galilee, c. 1175. He commenced to erect a Lady chapel in the usual position to the east of the choir. But St. Cuthbert, who had an ultra-monastic hatred of womankind, and would not brook to have the chapel even of Our Lady in the neighbourhood of his shrine, showed his displeasure openly by the fissures and cracks and settlements which kept constantly occurring. In despair the bishop had to build in the cramped space between the west end and the precipice, thus blocking up the west end of the church. From the first this Lady chapel seems to have been called the Galilee; nobody knows why. In details it is not unlike the chapel in the keep of Newcastle. Built in the last years of the Transitional period (1145-1190), it is remarkable for the paucity of Gothic detail: the arches are all semicircular; they are not moulded, but ornamented with bands of the old-fashioned zigzag. The bases, indeed, are Transitional in character; and so is the flat voluted leaf of the capitals. But, spite of semicircular arch and Norman ornament, the spirit of the whole—its lightness, grace, and elegance—is Gothic. A building may have every arch pointed and moulded, and yet in its heaviness be Romanesque at heart: e.g., the Cistercian churches of Fountains and Kirkstall, the Augustinian church of Llanthony. In Durham Galilee, on the other hand, one feels that one is in a Gothic building, as truly as one does in presence of the semicircular arcades of Pisa or Lucca. Still more Gothic must have been the effect of the coupled shafts of Purbeck marble before Cardinal Langley added two more shafts of stone. The cardinal is buried in front of the west door of the nave. Here also was the shrine of the remains of the Venerable Bede, stolen from the monks of Jarrow by the sacrist Elfred, one of the most successful of mediæval “body-snatchers.” Pudsey’s work is to be seen also in the external part of the Prior’s doorway opening from the cloister into the east end of the south aisle of the nave.

FROM NORTH.

To the Lancet period (1190-1245) belong the western towers, carried up in the early years of the thirteenth century. At one time they had tall wooden spires. The present battlements were added about 1780.

To the early part of the Geometrical period belongs the noble eastern transept. Its position repeats that of Fountains Abbey, which was finished in 1247, and which also is known as the “Chapel of the Nine Altars.” The object of the eastern extension at Durham was partly to provide nine more chapels, partly to provide a clear space all round the shrine of St. Cuthbert, which, like those of St. Swithun and St. Birinus at Winchester, and that of St. Alban at St. Albans, stood to the east of the high altar, and contained the body of St. Cuthbert and the head of St. Oswald. The idea of the eastern transept seems to come from Hereford and Abbey Dore. It is curious that the floor of the Durham transept is lower than that of the choir. It has been suggested that the height of the vault being fixed by that of the vault of the choir, sufficient height could be gained only by lowering the floor. But I doubt if mediæval architects were in the habit of designing merely for effect in this way: probably some humble practical reason is at the bottom of it. The fact that the ground falls away to the east, or that it is bad ground, and that much of it had to be excavated and carted away, would be quite sufficient for this objectionable drop in level (cf. “Worcester”). The vaulting is, perhaps unavoidably, awkward and clumsy.

The work was not commenced till 1242 (Bishop Farnham), and not completed till about 1280. When it was begun, Lancet windows were still in fashion; when it was completed, they had given way to traceried windows with cusped circles in their heads. Later on, Perpendicular tracery was inserted in the lancets: it is surprising that it has not been hacked out, as in Ripon façade, by architectural “purists.” The circular window, 90 feet across, was rebuilt by Wyatt. The architect was a layman, Richard Farnham, “architector novæ fabricæ Dunelm”; the master-mason “Thomas Moises posuit hanc petram.” The foliated capitals, both here and in the eastern bay of the choir, are of unrivalled beauty. No less remarkable is the perfection of the masonry. The walls are nearly eight feet thick, with huge piers at the angles forming buttresses and weighted by pinnacles; they rise straight from the ground unaided by aisles or flying-buttresses, “yet they have borne the lofty vault (80 feet high) for more than three centuries without the slightest sign of settlement or flaw.” Such was the reverence for St. Cuthbert that not a single person was buried in the cathedral till 1311, when that magnificent prelate Anthony Bek was brought into the Chapel of Nine Altars for interment, through a door on the north of the chapel (now blocked up), not through the cathedral; and even he was not allowed a monument. One sees why there is such a paucity of monuments in this cathedral.

CHAPEL OF NINE ALTARS.

The next thing was to pull down the old Norman apse; to join the transept on to the choir; and to break the transition from Romanesque choir to Gothic transept by remodelling the eastern bays of the choir in the fashion of the day. Also a new Gothic vault was put over the choir; its eastern bay is sexpartite. Here also the details are of exceptional beauty.

For a long time little was done at Durham; the cathedral was structurally complete. In the Curvilinear period (1315-1360) several large windows with flowing tracery were inserted: e.g., the west window of the nave and the north window of the north transept; and four windows (restored) in the south aisle of the choir. The three westernmost windows in the north aisle of the choir were copied in 1848 from the fourteenth-century windows at Sleaford, Holbeach and Boughton Aluph. To this period belongs the tomb of Bishop Hatfield, built in his lifetime (1345-1381), one of the best bits of design in England. The episcopal throne above it looks a little later, and seems to have been designed for some other position, as it does not fit the space between the piers.

In the Perpendicular period the great work was the central tower, which replaced a thirteenth-century tower, c. 1470. It is 218 feet high; in spite of its vast weight, the Norman piers which support it show no signs of strain. There are massive squinches at the angles, showing that it was intended to be finished by a spire, as the western towers actually were finished. What an astounding spectacle Durham would have presented, capped with three spires! Imagine Lichfield cathedral set on a hill 200 feet high! The Neville screen, built, like that at St. Albans, of clunch, is rather thin and spiky. It is continued to right and left, forming sedilia on both sides of the sanctuary (1372-1380). In the nave is a series of Neville monuments. In the third bay from the west is the Women’s Boundary Cross. The great window of the south transept was inserted about 1400.

Between 1660 and 1672 Bishop Cousin did much to repair the damage done by the Scottish prisoners who had been confined in the cathedral after the battle of Dunbar in 1650. His stalls and font cover are of exceptional interest, as specimens of what is rare—seventeenth-century Gothic. It should be compared with the woodwork of St. John’s Church, Leeds. The bishop’s fine oak choir-screen has been destroyed, by way of restoration; the new open screen, and the loss of the organ, give the “unbroken vista” for which so many of our interiors have been ruined.

Exterior.—On the north doorway of the nave is the famous sanctuary knocker. Durham and Beverley, owing to the high reputation of the relics of St. Cuthbert and St. John of Beverley, both had large privileges of sanctuary. Beverley retains the Sanctuary chair, the Frithstool; Durham the knocker. It is thirteenth-century work. “Upon knocking at the ring affixed to the north door of Durham the culprit was admitted without delay; and after full confession, reduced to writing before witnesses, a bell in the Galilee tower ringing all the time to give notice to the town that some one had taken refuge in the church, there was put on him a black gown with a yellow cross on its right shoulder, as the badge of St. Cuthbert, whose peace he had claimed. When thirty-seven days had elapsed, if a pardon could not be obtained, the malefactor, after certain ceremonies before the shrine, solemnly abjured his native land for ever; and was straightway, by the agency of the intervening parish constables, conveyed to the coast, bearing in his hand a white wooden cross, and was sent out of the kingdom by the first ship which sailed after his arrival.” During their stay in the church the culprits lived on the lower floors of the western towers. The atrocious setting of the doorway is modern; as also the pinnacles of the Chapel of the Nine Altars, where the famous Dun Cow is to be seen in a niche in the north-west turret. All the design of this side of the cathedral has been utterly ruined; having been pared away to the depth of three or four inches. Originally each bay of the aisle had a transverse roof ending in a gable, as originally on the south side of Chichester nave.

The monastic buildings are numerous and important; the library contains precious MSS., touching relics of St. Cuthbert, and a wonderful collection of Pre-conquest crosses and “hogbacks.” For all these the visitor should consult Canon Greenwell’s admirable handbook.