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ST. MARTIN’S CHURCH.

The metropolitan cathedral of Canterbury owes its enthralling interest to its vastness of scale, its wealth of monuments, its treasures of early glass, the great historical scenes that have been enacted within its walls—above all, to that greatest of all historical tragedies to the mind of the mediæval Englishman, the murder of Becket. It does not owe its distinction to its architecture. Whole building periods are almost wholly unrepresented; for the century and a half when English design was at its best, the Canterbury authorities slumbered and slept. What we have is the result of two periods only, with some scraps incorporated from earlier Norman work. What is there is not of the best: the Perpendicular work can be bettered at Gloucester, Winchester, and York; the work in the choir, a foreign importation, is not equal to that of its prototype, the French cathedral of Sens. We have many heterogeneous cathedrals in England. In the rest there is ever an attempt, usually a successful attempt, as at Hereford, and Gloucester, and Wells, to weld the conflicting elements of the design into symmetry and harmony. Canterbury scornfully declines any attempt at composition. Transepts and turrets and pinnacles are plumped down anyhow and anywhere; to the east it finishes abruptly in the ruined crags of a vast round tower; to the west the towers of its façade were, till lately, as incongruous in character as in date. Externally, the lofty central tower alone gives some unity to the scattered masses; internally it is an assemblage of distinct and discordant buildings.

I. Norman.—Of the pre-Conquest cathedrals of Canterbury nothing remains, unless it be fragments of rude masonry in crypt and cloister. Of Lanfranc’s cathedral, built, together with the Benedictine monastery, between 1070 and 1077, there remains the plinth of the walls of nave and transept. In the north transept some of his small square blocks of Caen stone are well seen just above the site of the martyrdom, as well as his turret in the north-west corner. His nave was allowed to stand till the fifteenth century. The present nave and central transept are built on Lanfranc’s foundations. The Norman work has had a most deleterious effect on the later design. To preserve the Norman north-west tower of the façade, the fifteenth century nave was built too short; to preserve the lines of his transept, it was rebuilt with a projection of only one bay to north and south, and without aisles, and appears woefully shrunken when compared with the vast transept of York, or even with the twelfth century transepts of Winchester and Ely. Lanfranc’s cathedral was an unambitious building, built in a hurry; closely copied, to save time probably, both in plan and dimensions, from William the Conqueror’s abbey-church at Caen, from which Lanfranc came to rule at Canterbury.

SOUTH CHOIR AISLE.

His choir consisted of but two bays and an apse. This was altogether inadequate for the church of a big monastery, and the seat of the Primate of all England. In 1096 it was pulled down and replaced by an enormous apsidal choir, some ten bays long, with a square Saint’s chapel to the east as at Rochester, with northern and southern towers flanking the main eastern apse, and crossed midway by a big eastern transept, from each arm of which two apsidal chapels projected to the east. What was the object of this vast eastward extension? It was probably due to the increasing tendency towards sacerdotalism, to the increase of veneration for the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, and to the increase of Saint-worship. (1) In the monastic churches the monks were accustomed to sit in the crossing and in the western bays of the nave, where their stalls still remain at Norwich, Gloucester, and St. Albans. They wanted to be segregated and screened off from the laity, the sheep from the goats; the very stones of the church must preach the dignity of the priestly function. So they removed to the east, and shut themselves up in a choir of their own. (2) Secondly, they wanted a clear space for the high altar, a sanctuary for it. (3) They wanted space for many chapels and altars; not only those of the greater saints of the church, St. Mary, St. Peter, and the rest, but those saints—and they were very numerous at Canterbury—whose bodies or relics of whom were among the treasures of the cathedral—such as St. Dunstan, the destroyer of Secular Canons, and the martyred Archbishop Alphege. Crowds of pilgrims flocked to Canterbury to these shrines; room had to be found for them to pass round, to gaze for a moment at the holy relics, to say one prayer. Whatever the object of the extension, it set a precedent which was followed in the great majority of the cathedrals of England. In the latter days of the twelfth century Hereford and Chichester extended their choirs; in the thirteenth century the choirs of Lincoln, Lichfield, Worcester, Ely, and Exeter were rebuilt, and those of Winchester, Durham, and Lincoln were enlarged. In the fourteenth century those of Lichfield and Wells were enlarged, and that of York was rebuilt on a magnificent scale. Old St. Paul’s had a choir twelve bays long. Thus, till the end of the fourteenth century, the history of the English cathedrals was largely a history of the rebuilding or enlarging, or, as at Gloucester and Norwich, of the remodelling of choirs.

CAPITAL IN CRYPT.

Of “Conrad’s glorious choir” (it was commenced by Prior Ernulph c. 1096 and finished c. 1115 by Prior Conrad) a considerable amount remains. The round-arched work in the crypt is nearly all of this date, except the carving of many of the capitals, which was executed later; and from the extent of his crypt one can plot out the exact shape and dimensions of the Norman choir. Much of it is seen outside, especially in and near the south-east transept with its intersecting semicircular arcades, and the most charming little Norman tower imaginable. In the interior many Norman stones, “cross-hatched,” may be seen in the aisle-wall immediately after entering the choir-aisle by the flight of steps; the lower part of the vaulting-shaft in this wall, built of several stones and not of solid drums, as it is higher up, is also Norman. In the eastern transept the triforium occurs twice over; the upper of the two was Conrad’s clerestory. Much of Conrad’s semicircular arcade also remains on the aisle-walls.

Conrad’s choir was not only far longer than Lanfranc’s, but it had the curious peculiarity (preserved in the French choir) that it was broader than the nave, and moreover widened out as it proceeded to the east. The double apses of each of his transepts were copied by St. Hugh at Lincoln a century later. A very noble feature of Canterbury choir is its elevation, necessitated by the construction of the crypt below it. The raising of the floor adds great dignity to the choir (one misses it painfully at Bristol); and was still further added to by the French architect, so that now at Canterbury one goes eastward from height to height. We climb from the nave to the choir, from the choir to the sanctuary, from the sanctuary to the eastern chapels. One gets a bathos at Durham and Worcester, where at the east one plunges into a hole.

II. Transitional.—But Conrad’s glorious choir was destroyed by a great fire in the year 1174, amid much mediæval cursing and swearing, and the tears of all the people of Canterbury. Then the monks did an abominable thing. Instead of being satisfied with our home-bred English architecture, of which such a beautiful example was just being completed at Ripon, they sent for a foreigner. The present choir of Canterbury, like that of Westminster, was “made in France.” The only consolation one has is the fact—which is a fact—that with that stolid insularity which from the twelfth century has insisted on working out its own salvation in its own way—English architects ignored them both. The new French choir was to be a rock on which the main current of English art struck and parted asunder only to meet again on the other side. English design passed on, as if Canterbury choir had never existed, from Ripon and Chichester and Abbey Dore and Wells to Lincoln Minster. The coupled columns, the French arch-moulds, the Corinthianesque capitals of Canterbury were un-English; no one would have anything to do with them anywhere.

SOUTH-EAST TRANSEPT.

The choir, as rebuilt, was even longer than Conrad’s long choir. It has an elongated aisled apse beyond, and a curious circular chapel east of that. The former goes by the name of Trinity chapel, the latter of Becket’s corona. Becket’s first mass had been said in an older Trinity chapel; his body lay from 1170 to 1220 in the crypt below it; in 1220 he was translated to a magnificent shrine in the present Trinity chapel. The corona may perhaps have been erected to cover another shrine placed here and containing a fragment of Becket’s scalp. Sens seems to have had a similar corona.

The design of the choir is a close copy of the work at Sens, Noyon, Senlis, and the neighbouring cathedrals. Columns almost classical in proportion replace the heavy English cylinder. The coupled columns and Corinthianesque capitals of Sens are faithfully reproduced in the Trinity chapel. The choir, as at Sens, is arranged in coupled bays with sexpartite vaulting; while principal and intermediate piers, single and compound vaulting-shafts occur alternately in either choir. In unstable French fashion the vaulting-shaft is perched on the abacus. The abacus is square, except in the eastern part of the crypt. The capitals of the choir are foliated; the English moulded capital occurs only in the crypt. Each bay of the triforium in both cathedrals contains a couple of arches, each arch subdivided by a central shaft. Both cathedrals have round transverse arches in the vaulting of the aisles. The windows are not the tall slender lancets of England, but the broad squat lancets of France. The pointed arches of the apse of Trinity chapel on their tall stilts have a thoroughly French look. French, too, is the wish to dispense with a hood-mould round the pier-arches. And, as at Noyon, flying-buttresses emerge from the gloom of the triforium into the open air.

But there is another factor besides the personality of William of Sens. Having engaged a foreigner to do the work, the next step of the monks probably was to distrust him. The choir, as it appears now, bears unmistakable marks that not only William of Sens was at work, but also a British building committee. Being a Frenchman, William of Sens must have been an iconoclast, and would have liked to clear away the ruins and start de novo. His British employers, here, as in nearly all our cathedrals, parsimonious in the extreme, insisted on retaining every inch of old wall or pillar that could be utilised. The towers of St. Anselm and St. Andrew still stood, more or less stable, to the east. William therefore had to constrict his choir to pass between them. The result is the awkward twisting of the arcade and clerestory of the choir. The choir starts with becoming wider as it advances from the east; then it suddenly contracts to pass between St. Anselm’s and St. Andrew’s chapels; then it expands once more into the Trinity chapel. No Frenchman, if he had had his way, would have permitted his cathedral to be so distorted. Again, the building committee insisted on utilising the piers of Conrad’s crypt as far as possible as supports to the arcade of the choir above. The result is that the piers of the choir are not equally spaced; and the narrow arches are pointed, while the broad ones are semicircular and stilted. William must have been ashamed, too, of all the zigzag and billet ornament. But the building committee had probably a large stock of it collected from the debris after the fire, and wanted to work it off. One beautiful feature, however, is to be placed to English credit—viz., the profuse use of Purbeck marble shafts. On the whole we may take it that what we have is not William’s design as he would have wished it, but his design criticised, fettered, altered and ignored by a clerical building committee.

CHOIR.

BLACK PRINCE’S TOMB.

At the beginning of the fifth year of his work, William of Sens was seriously injured by a fall from the scaffold, and soon after returned to France. An English William was appointed to succeed him. He completed Trinity chapel, Becket’s corona, and the crypt beneath the two. It is usual to attribute to the English William an important part in the design of the eastern chapels and crypt. The facts point the other way. These eastern portions are less English and more French than the western work. There is not a single trace of English influence in the design, except solely the rounding of the abacus and the moulding of the capitals in the crypt. With these two minor exceptions, everything was completed in strict conformity with the French design.

More important even than the architecture is the ancient glass. Canterbury and York are the great treasure-houses of stained-glass: Canterbury for early thirteenth-century glass, York for fourteenth-century glass. The student should take with him to Canterbury Mr. Lewis Day’s work on Stained Glass. Three of the windows in the Trinity chapel illustrate the miracles of St. Thomas. On the north side, in the lower group of the eastern window, is the story of a child (1) who falls into the Medway, (2) the other boys tell his parents, (3) the body is drawn out of the water, cætera desunt. In the next group is the story of a boy who was brought to life by a draught of water mixed with the saint’s blood. But the father omitted to pay the offerings promised to the saint. In the central medallion another son lies dead, struck by the sword of St. Thomas, who is seen through the ceiling. In another group a woman is being flagellated by way of penance. Two other windows describe miracles of healing: in a medallion in the lower part of the western window a madman comes up, “amens accedit,” beaten with sticks and bound; in the next he is cured, “sanus recedit.” In one is the only representation extant of the later shrine; the martyr, in a mauve vestment, appears in a vision to Benedict below. On the shrine is the box, as described by Erasmus, which contained the archbishop’s sudary. In the east window of the corona is portrayed Christ’s Passion; in the two windows of the north aisle are types and antitypes from the Old and New Testaments; among them the three Magi, all asleep in one bed. The circular window in the north-east transept also contains the original glass; and many fragments are seen elsewhere.

SOUTH OF CHOIR

III. Lancet.—For this period (1190-1245) there is nothing to show except the north wall of the Cloister, and a lovely doorway in the south-east corner of the Cloister, cruelly hacked about by the vandals who built the cloister-vault.

IV. To the Geometrical period (1245-1315) belongs the Chapter-house up to the sills of the windows, and the screens north and south of the choir. A fine window with Kentish tracery was inserted in St. Anselm’s chapel.

V. Of Curvilinear work (1315-1360) there is no trace except some diaper-work in the choir, which may have adorned the shrine of St. Dunstan, who was buried at the south end of the high altar.

EAST TRANSEPT.

VI. Perpendicular (1360-1485).—At length Canterbury woke up, and removed Lanfranc’s nave and transept, which must have looked shockingly low and mean for the last two hundred years in juxtaposition with the stately choir. The new nave, built between 1379 and 1400, is very fine, but somehow no one seems to be a very ardent admirer of it. Its proportions are not good: Winchester nave is about the same height, but is 70 feet longer; York choir is loftier, and is 25 feet longer. But the gravest fault is in the internal elevation. The architect has recognised the value of tallness of pier-arch; but to get this exceptional height of pier and arch, he has sacrificed not only triforium, but clerestory as well. It is fatal to a Gothic design to minimise the clerestory. The choirs of Gloucester, Norwich, Cirencester, are the types to be followed; not the naves of Southwell or Lichfield.

To this period belong also the Black Prince’s chantry, and the screens and reredos of the Lady chapel, all in the crypt; the upper part of the chapter-house, from which all aspect of antiquity has recently been removed; the cloisters; St. Michael’s, or the Warrior’s chapel, which replaced the eastern apse of Lanfranc’s southern transept, and which has a complicated lierne vault similar in character to that of the north transept of Gloucester cathedral; the tomb and chantry of Henry IV., with fan-vaulting, 1433; the western screen at the entrance of the choir; the south-west tower; Deans’ chapel (Lady chapel), which replaced the eastern apse of Lanfranc’s northern transept (1450), and which has fan-vaulting.

CRYPT.

VII. To the Tudor period belongs the Angel or Bell Harry Tower (1495-1503), and the buttressing and arches inserted between its piers. Also the Christ Church gateway. The great tower is remarkable for the unbroken verticality of its buttresses; it is as exceptional as it is successful in design.

The Chapter-house is rectangular, for a rectangular building fitted more easily into the east walk of a monastic cloister. Nearly all the monastic chapter-houses are therefore rectangular, but sometimes had apses; the exceptions being the Benedictine chapter-houses of Worcester, Westminster, Evesham, and Belvoir (which last was exceptional also in position, being placed in the very centre of the cloister), and the Cistercian chapter-houses of Morgam and Abbey Dore, sister designs. While the Secular Canons, having as a rule no cloister, preferred a polygonal chapter-house, as at Lincoln, Beverley, Lichfield, Salisbury, Wells, Elgin, Southwell, York, Old St. Paul’s, Hereford, Howden, Manchester, Warwick. So did the Regular Canons at Alnwick, Cockersand, Thornton, Carlisle, Bridlington, and Bolton. This beautiful polygonal form seems not to occur in France.

FROM SOUTH-WEST.

At the north-west corner of the cloister is the doorway through which Becket passed to the north-west transept, with his murderers in pursuit of him. Near here is a hole in the wall, the Buttery hatch. In the fifteenth century the south walk of the cloister was divided into “studies” for the monks by wooden partitions (at Gloucester they are of stone), and its windows were glazed.

From the cloister we pass to the West Front, and commence the tour of the exterior. The south-west tower (with the Deans’ chapel) was completed by Prior Goldstone (1449-1468); the copy of it was put up in 1834: “it was an eyesore that the two towers did not match.” Very bad modern statues adorn the niches.

Later still (1517) is Christ Church Gateway, through which one first approaches the cathedral, with doors inserted in 1662. Originally it had two turrets. Outside it is a monument to the dramatist Marlowe.

NAVE.

On the south side is seen the porch; the nave, a beautiful design; and the charming pinnacle of the south-west transept. East of the Warrior’s chapel is the projecting end of Stephen Langton’s tomb. East of this, the two lower rows of windows are those of Conrad’s choir; the upper row that of William of Sens. The middle windows in the S.E. transept were the clerestory windows of Conrad; the windows above them are those of William of Sens. The three upper stages of the tower on the south of this transept are late Norman work; one of the prettiest bits in Canterbury. Farther east we have French design, pure and simple; here, for the first time in English architecture, the flying-buttresses are openly displayed; notice how flat and plain they are; it had not yet occurred to architects to make them decorative. The grand sweep of apse and ambulatory seems to send one straight back to France. Then comes the broken, rocky outline of the corona—the great puzzle of Canterbury. North-east of the corona are two groups of ruined Norman pillars and arches discoloured by fire; once they were continuous, forming one very long building, the Monks’ Infirmary, of which the west end was originally an open dormitory, open to the roof, and the east end, separated off by a screen, the Chapel; which has a late Geometrical window. A mediæval infirmary of this type is still in use at Chichester. The Canterbury infirmary had a north transept, called the Table Hall or Refectory (now part of the house of the Archdeacon of Maidstone), in which the inmates dined. On the north side of Trinity chapel is seen the Chantry of Henry IV.; then St. Andrew’s Tower and the barred Treasury; the lower part of the latter is late Norman work, largely rebuilt. The south alley of the Infirmary Cloister was built about 1236. Along this one passes to the Baptistery, which was originally nothing but a mediæval water-tower; late Norman below, Perpendicular above. Returning towards the Infirmary, we turn to the north up the east alley of the Infirmary Cloister, now called the “Dark Entry,” at the north end of which is the Prior’s Gateway. On the left are some Norman shafts and arches of beautiful design. It was the Dark Entry that was haunted by Nell Cook of the Ingoldsby Legends. West of the Prior’s gateway are the two columns from the Romano-British church at Reculvers. On the north side of the Prior’s or Green Court are the Brewery and Bakehouse; to the N.W. is the famous Norman staircase, which originally led to a great North Hall; perhaps a Casual Ward—for tramps too found accommodation at the monasteries.