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Bristol Cathedral was originally a church of the Regular Canons of the Augustinian Order, who settled at Bristol in 1142. In 1542, like the Augustinian churches of Carlisle and Oxford, it became a cathedral. In 1836 the see was united to that of Gloucester: it has recently resumed its independent status.

I. Late Norman.—The choir and transepts of the cathedral were almost wholly rebuilt in the fourteenth century; but here and there the original work of the founder, Robert Fitzhardinge, survives. This includes (1) the end wall of the south transept, which contains a doorway, afterwards blocked up, when the south aisle of the Norman nave was constructed with a doorway into it from the north-east corner of the cloister. Inside the transept is a Norman cushion-corbel, supporting a later Perpendicular capital. (2) Outside the south transept are flat pilaster buttresses at the angles; the set-off of the ancient parapet; and a plain gable window, set in a rough wall, on which may be seen the weathering of the original steep roof. (3) The coursed masonry below the big window of the north transept. (4) The lower part of the tower-piers; for their Perpendicular mouldings, as in the earlier remodelling of Winchester nave, are such as could be developed out of a Norman compound pier. (5) The corbels in the staircase on the north side of the choir. (6) The gatehouse to the Abbot’s lodgings.

THE CHAPTER-HOUSE.

II. Transitional.—About 1145 innovations began to be made in Anglo-Norman Romanesque. Among other things the pointed arch was introduced; at first chiefly in arches supporting central towers or vaults. In 1155 the founder received a grant of the forfeited estates of Roger de Berkeley; and, owing to this vast accession of wealth, was able to finish his Norman and Transitional work with exceptional richness. (1) In the Vestibule to the Chapter-house, the bays being oblong, pointed arches were used on the short sides of each bay, so that their crowns might rise to the same height as those of the semicircular arches on the longer sides, as the builders thought was demanded by the requirements of vaulting. In the same way, beneath the central towers of Oxford Cathedral and Bolton Priory, pointed arches were built over the narrow transepts; while over the broader nave and choir the semicircular arch was employed. (2) The Chapter-house, as in most monastic establishments, e.g., Gloucester, Canterbury, Oxford, Chester, was oblong; the more beautiful polygonal form being more in favour in cathedrals served by Secular Canons. It was originally 71 by 25 feet. The vast scale of these conventual arrangements, here and elsewhere, is exceedingly striking. The monks of St. Albans thought that their church required a nave 300 feet long; the six canons of Bristol must have been lost in a Chapter-house 71 feet long. The recessed arcades round the walls here and at Worcester are interesting; simple as they are, they are the germs of the beautiful arcades of canopied niches round the Chapter-houses of York and Wells and the Lady Chapel of Ely. Here is preserved a fine piece of archaic sculpture (see Chichester). (3) Exceedingly rich, too, is the lower part of the Great Gateway in College Green; “its courses, however, are nearly double the height of Norman masonry; the hood-moulds of all the arches are perpendicular, and at the crown of each arch are mitred into a perpendicular string-course; which, with the high finish of the ornament, points to the gateway having been wholly rebuilt in Perpendicular times”; in which case, like the eastern bay of the triforium of Rochester, it is an early example of “architectural forgery.” Fitzhardinge’s nave and aisles seem to have been pulled down in the sixteenth century with a view to rebuilding; which, however, was not carried out till 1877.

ELDER LADY CHAPEL.

III. Lancet.—Early in the thirteenth century a beautiful Lady chapel was built, projecting eastward from the north transept, and separated by a few feet from the north wall of the choir. The same position was adopted later for the Lady chapels of Peterborough and Ely. This chapel is the artistic gem of the cathedral; it is surrounded by arcades of the greatest beauty, with sculptured grotesques interspersed among the foliage that remind one of the rich sculptured work in the retro-choir of Worcester, which is possibly a few years earlier. Later on it received the name of the elder Lady chapel; another Lady chapel having been built in the more normal position at the extreme east of the choir.

IV. Fitzhardinge’s cathedral, supplemented by the Lady chapel, seems to have satisfied the Canons very well for the first half of the thirteenth century. But in the Early Geometrical period (1245-1280), preparations were made to improve the lighting of the north transept by the insertion of a big window in its north wall. The tracery of the present window is later; but its inner jambs, mouldings and shafts, and the external sill and string, as well as a great part of the buttresses, seem to have been executed c. 1250. About this date is the fine doorway, with a cleverly-contrived lintel, at the south end of the east walk of the Cloister.

V. In the Middle of the Geometrical period, c. 1280, the east end of the Lady chapel was rebuilt, and a window with Geometrical tracery inserted; the tracery is of early character, containing nothing but foliated circles. At the same time it received a simple quadripartite vault; and to resist the thrust of this vault, the northern buttresses were reconstructed and weighted with pinnacles. Of these pinnacles only one, at the north-east corner, remains; the others seem to have been reconstructed at the time when the pinnacles of the choir were built.

CHOIR.

VI. Curvilinear.—But the great building period at Bristol was between 1315 and 1349—that short but brilliant period when English mediæval design was at its best—which culminated in the Octagon and Lady chapel of Ely, the choir-screens of Southwell and Lincoln, and the Percy monument at Beverley. Everything east of the nave was pulled down and rebuilt de novo. And a very remarkable design it is; in fact, quite unique among our cathedrals. All other cathedral authorities had agreed long ago that the cardinal fault in all Romanesque design was its bad system of lighting, but that the remedy was to be found mainly in improving the top-lighting—i.e., in increasing the dimensions of the clerestory. Beverley clerestory had taller windows than Durham; Salisbury clerestory had three windows for every one of Beverley; Exeter spread out its windows in increasing breadth till they touched the buttresses on either side; the clerestories of the choir of Gloucester, now in course of erection, were a vast, lofty, continuous sheet of glass. But there was an alternative system of improving the lighting, which in many large churches, such as Grantham, Ledbury, and Leominster, was the result of fortuitous growth, but which in the choir of the Temple Church, London, and in Patrington Church now in course of erection, was the result of deliberate design. It was to magnify the aisles at the expense of the nave, to lift them up so high that windows of vast height could be placed in their walls, to dispense with a clerestory altogether, and to give to the pier-arcade of the nave the additional height gained by the suppression of the clerestory. It was to substitute side-lighting for top-lighting; to rely exclusively on the flood of light passing from vast, lofty aisle windows into the nave through its elevated arches. Hence the big windows of Bristol choir, each representing a pair of windows; the lower half the usual small window of an aisle, the upper half the larger window stolen from the clerestory.

BERKELEY CHAPEL.

But the new design had another merit, which probably weighed still more with the Bristol builders. The cardinal difficulty of the mediæval builders was how to keep up on the top of lofty clerestory walls a heavy stone vault which was always striving to push them asunder. They succeeded at length in keeping the clerestory walls from being thrust out by propping them up with flying-buttresses, perilously exposed, however, to all the vicissitudes of English weather. But there was another solution of the problem, which had been worked out in the thirteenth century in the Temple Church, and in the twelfth century in many a church in central and southern France, such as the old cathedral of Carcassonne. It was to stop the outward thrusts of the nave vault not by the inert resistance of buttress, pinnacle, and flying-buttress, but by bringing into play opposing thrusts—i.e., the inward thrusts of vaults built over the aisles. But to make these outward and inward thrusts balance and neutralise one another, the aisle vaults must be of pretty much the same height and span as those of the nave. The nave must be lowered or the aisles must be raised, or both. At Bristol the architect has preferred to raise the aisles. Then, the stability of the nave vault being secured, all the builder has to do is to stop the outward thrusts of the vaults of the aisles. This it is easy enough to do by a row of buttresses weighted with pinnacles. So Bristol Cathedral, to eyes accustomed to contemporary cathedrals, presents the strange solecism of having neither clerestory nor flying-buttresses. The whole design may well have been based on that of the English cathedral at Poitiers.

VAULT OF AISLE.

The Bristol architect was an architectural Radical. When it came, however, to the question of vaulting the aisles he had not the courage of his convictions. Having constructed aisles unusually lofty and impressive, he immediately sets to work to make them look low and ordinary by a complicated, costly and unnecessary system of skeleton vaulting. He seems to have thought that without some method of reducing the apparent height of the aisles, the church would look like no other church; it would look not as if it had the ordinary aisled nave, but as if it had three naves side by side. He ought to have been thankful to have the means of making it look unlike other churches; and, as a matter of fact, a design of parallel naves has a most noble effect, as may well be seen in the nave of Warwick Church, built in the most debased Gothic of the seventeenth century, but one of the most impressive designs in the country, full of light and atmosphere.

A little later, but still in the Curvilinear period, the Berkeley chapel was built, projecting southward from the easternmost bay of the south aisle of the choir, and a sacristy by which it is approached. Here is more skeleton-vault and much elaborate carving. The Newton chapel was also built, projecting eastward from the south transept; and perhaps at the same time the simple vault of the adjacent bay of the choir aisle was put up. A curious and by no means pleasing characteristic of the Bristol fourteenth-century architecture is the series of sepulchral recesses in the walls; they remind one of the cloister doorway at Norwich.

VII. Perpendicular.—Early in the fifteenth century a central tower was added. Here again one is struck by the originality of the Bristol people; it is as beautiful as it is original. Fifteenth-century tower design rather runs in grooves. Gloucester, Evesham, Wrexham, Taunton, and the Somerset towers are cast very much in a mould. It is not so with the Bristol tower. The designer had noticed how beautiful is the effect of a close-packed range of tall clerestory windows, such as those of Leighton Buzzard Church. So, instead of restricting himself on each side of the tower to one or two windows, he inserts no less than three. The range of clerestory windows which the fourteenth-century builder refused to the choir becomes the special ornament and glory of the tower.

VIII. In 1888 the new nave and western towers were completed by Mr. Street. He can hardly be said to have made the most of his opportunities. The new work is copied closely from the old, and so is somewhat uninteresting. He had but to remedy some of the faults of the original design: to omit the ugly skeleton vaulting of the aisles, to simplify the vaulting of the choir, to discard the sepulchral recesses, to improve on the design of the windows of the choir—in which, as at Ely, flowing tracery is not seen at its best; and we should have had something original and interesting. The new nave might have been a criticism of the choir.