Читать книгу The Building of England: How the History of England Has Shaped Our Buildings - Simon Thurley - Страница 13

Although, when Pope Gregory sent St Augustine and his missionaries to England in 596, he was sending them to a place he regarded as at ‘the end of the world’, it was to one that had a Roman heritage. He instructed that bishops be seated in the Roman towns of Canterbury and London; perhaps he thought England was still the urbanised, centralised Roman society that it had once been. It was not. But despite this, Augustine did in fact found a see based on Canterbury, where he built England’s first cathedral, possibly on the site of an earlier Roman church. Outside the Roman town he also built a monastery, later to be given his name.

Further cathedrals were to be founded at Rochester and London and, in the 620s, at York. A cathedral is a church that contains the cathedra, or throne, of a bishop; this is, in fact, the only difference between a cathedral and any other sort of large church. In their dioceses bishops were responsible for ordaining priests, consecrating new churches, dealing with clergy discipline, and administering land and finances. As such they were crucial in the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons.

After several faltering starts England had become Christian again by the 680s, and in 664 the Synod of Whitby had settled that the English Church should be modelled on that of Rome rather than the Irish Church. Within a century England was populated by several hundred minsters, that is to say churches with a residential religious establishment, and was divided into seventeen dioceses. Not enough survives of any early Saxon cathedral to say much about it, but several minsters do, and from these we can paint a picture of the first Saxon churches.

Remarkably St Martin’s, the very first church of St Augustine and his fellows, survives in Canterbury, incorporating the brick remains of a Roman tomb (fig. 6). This ancient church, possibly first used as a mortuary chapel, though mauled and altered by time, is a powerful and evocative place to visit and is typical of the first places of Christian worship in Saxon England, built in close proximity to prominent Roman sites and constructed out of re-used Roman materials.¹⁶

Fig. 6 St Martin’s, Canterbury, Kent. A reconstruction of the church of Bertha, Christian queen of King Ethelbert; St Augustine first worshipped here in the 590s. The walls of the present nave are partly Roman and may have originally been part of a tomb chamber. Though significantly altered, St Martin’s remains the oldest standing church in England.

Fig. 7 St Mary’s, Reculver, Kent, of 669 from an excavation in 1927. The church was built in the middle of the Roman fort out of reclaimed materials. a) apse with bench and throne; b) altar framed by central arch; c) porticus; d) nave.

St Mary’s, Reculver, Kent, now precariously perched on the edge of a cliff, is a more complete example (fig. 7). In 669 King Egbert of Kent founded this minster in the centre of the old Roman fort. Most of the fort has now fallen into the sea and the church is abandoned, but it has been excavated. In plan it has a stubby, rectangular nave with an apsidal (semicircular) chancel lying behind a screen of two columns. On the north and south there are subsidiary rooms, known as porticuses. The apse, which contained a semicircular bench with a separate seat or throne in the middle, was an area set aside for the clergy, who celebrated communion facing their congregation in the nave. It is doubtful that St Mary’s could have been erected by Saxon craftsmen, whose architectural tradition, as we have seen, was entirely in timber. The strong likelihood is that St Augustine brought masons with him from Italy who designed and constructed these early Christian churches; a likelihood that is strengthened by their stylistic similarity to the churches of Ravenna in northern Italy and the Alps.¹⁷

Roman missionaries from Kent took the gospel to Northumbria, where, after the Synod of Whitby, more minsters were founded. The twin foundation of Wearmouth (today Monkwearmouth, 674) and Jarrow (681) is by far the most important of these. Like St Mary’s, Reculver, these churches were not designed by native hands. Their founder, Benedict Biscop, who had travelled Europe for sixteen years absorbing the latest ideas for the organisation and construction of monasteries, enlisted Frankish stonemasons and glaziers to construct his monastery in Roman fashion. They took their carts and their measuring rods to the Roman forts on Hadrian’s Wall and returned with both building materials and construction techniques for the new minsters. Both were thus, in terms of fabric and technique, built in the Roman manner, and their dedications – to St Peter and St Paul, the patron saints of the Roman Church – confirmed that life there was to be based on Rome, too.

Fig. 8 The Monastery of St Peter’s, Wearmouth. Plan based on excavations showing the layout of the latest phase of the Saxon monastery. The church, with its skirting of porticuses, was linked by a corridor crossing the cemetery to the living quarters.

Figs 9 and 10 St John the Evangelist, Escomb, County Durham; the most perfect Anglo-Saxon church in England. Massive Roman stones were used in its construction, including what is probably a re-set Roman arch in the chancel. Fragments of stained glass have been found and the windows have grooves for shutters. A patch of cobbled flooring in the nave is probably Saxon. The plan shows its original layout as revealed in excavation in 1968. The walled circular churchyard was a very early addition. a) chancel; b) nave.

Wearmouth and Jarrow have been extensively investigated, and enough remains to demonstrate that the layout of Benedict’s buildings was influenced by what he had seen in Gaul and elsewhere. In plan both sites were based on continental monastic models. The churches were long, narrow (their length three times their width) buildings with a western porch. Either side of the nave were lower porticuses or galleries, giving the buildings a basilican appearance (that is to say, a taller nave with lower aisles).

The church at Wearmouth had a narrow, 100ft-long, roofed gallery with glazed windows linking it with the domestic structures (fig. 8).

This feature, a precursor of the monastic cloister, presumably used for reading, writing and exercise, is a feature Benedict could have seen on his travels. Yet despite all this novelty the church, and particularly the domestic buildings, refectory and dormitory, were very similar to large, secular, timber structures elsewhere in Saxon England. At the royal site of Yeavering, for instance, a timber church was excavated that was virtually identical in plan and size to the Wearmouth and Jarrow churches.¹⁸

Fig. 11 St Andrew’s, Greensted-juxta-Ongar, Essex. In Norway numbers of timber churches survive, but this is the sole early medieval survivor from thousands of such churches in England. While the walls are of the late 11th century, the brick sill on which they sit is of 1848 and the dormers and brick chancel are Tudor. The tower is later too.

Although conceived in a timber-built tradition, these Northumbrian churches were among the first to be built in stone since the disappearance of the Roman legions two hundred years earlier. This is important, as stone building was associated by early Saxon Christians with Roman Christianity. When King Nechtan of the Picts accepted the Roman Easter he asked the Northumbrians for advice, not only on liturgical issues, but in building churches in masonry ‘after the Roman fashion’.¹⁹

A visit to the church of St John at Escomb, County Durham, still conveys a sense of what the churches at Wearmouth and Jarrow must have been like inside (figs 9–10). This is the best-preserved stone church of the early Saxon period in England, but its chiselled stone walls cannot do justice to what we know of the original interiors. Walls were plastered and painted white, carving was picked out in bright primary colours, the walls were hung with icons and the windows filled with stained glass.

Wearmouth and Jarrow are the only early Saxon monasteries about which anything is known architecturally. We do know, however, that as well as the monasteries of Northumberland and Kent there were many others in the Midlands, the Thames valley and the west. But before about 950 only the largest were of stone; most were still built of timber by people working in local building traditions.

At Greensted-juxta-Ongar, Essex, there is a remarkable survival: St Andrew’s is the single surviving Anglo-Saxon timber church in England (fig. 11). Thanks to dendrochronology it is now known that most of its surviving timbers date between 1063 and 1100. Yet this building was constructed in the same way as hundreds of other much earlier examples, somenow revealed through archaeology. The walls were built of split oak logs with their rounded face on the outside and fixed together with concealed timber tongues. These are jointed into timber roof and base (sole) plates, making a rigid wall.²⁰

As the Roman legions left the shores of Britain they took with them the know-how and infrastructure necessary to build in stone. For the next two hundred years rich and poor, strong and weak, pagan and Christian lived, worked and worshipped in timber buildings. Some of these were in a long tradition of native building stretching back to the Iron Age; others were introduced by Anglo-Saxon settlers; most were an eclectic blend of Romano-British and Germanic engineering and aesthetics. At the high end these were buildings of considerable sophistication and magnificence; at the lower end buildings of extreme functionality. It was the coming of Christianity that reconnected England with the stone-building traditions of Rome. As a result, English architecture acquired a distinct and vibrant character – a blend of native, timber-based building and stone-built Roman styles. This is what the Viking raiders of the 790s found when they started their systematic plunder of the kingdom of Northumbria. These attacks, and their political and economic effects, set English architecture in important new directions.