Читать книгу The Building of England: How the History of England Has Shaped Our Buildings - Simon Thurley - Страница 29

The 1150s, 60s and 70s were a period of stylistic experimentation. New currents of design from France, mixed with native decorative and structural traditions, produced some of the most inventive and lively buildings ever constructed in England. Contemporaries recognised this but might have described what was happening in different terms to us. For them, architectural language was important as it expressed hierarchy. In the Middle Ages most high-status architecture was about the ritualised display of power: ceremony, ritual and liturgy were the driving forces behind the appearance of buildings. Their structure and decoration expressed social, economic and religious hierarchies, and so the architectural setting of an activity, whether it be dining or praying, had to match its importance – and the importance of the people who were doing it.⁴ This could be achieved through progressive intensity of decoration, the least important places being plain and the most important richly decorated, or through association, either with past activities or people, or with Christian Rome. Various parts of buildings – and whole buildings themselves – were thus always accorded a status through their architecture. So, for instance, as the most important of all medieval secular spaces was the great hall, this was singled out for special treatment. The magnificence of the carving around the doorway to Bishop Puiset’s Hall at Durham Castle, and the arcading in the room above (fig. 56), proclaim them to be of the highest importance. English great halls, unlike some of their continental contemporaries, were always roofed in timber rather than vaulted in stone, a sign of status and reflecting a tradition going back to Roman Britain.

In religious buildings presbyteries and shrines were the most important areas, and, even in the most humble parish churches, were given significance by their decoration. Antiquity conferred status, too. When the Lady Chapel at Glastonbury burnt in 1184 its replacement included Anglo-Norman (or earlier) stylistic elements to emphasise its importance and venerability. We have already seen that references to ancient Rome were a way of emphasising hierarchy (p. 69). When the east end of Canterbury Cathedral was rebuilt the great Purbeck piers were given Roman proportions, bases and capitals, echoing the early Christian basilicas of Rome (pp 94–5).⁵

Fig. 56 Durham Castle; reconstruction of Bishop Le Puiset’s lodgings, centred on his magnificent great hall with its spectacular doorcase originally entered directly from the courtyard. The upper part of the hall has a remarkable arcade with alternating windows and window seats, all encrusted with deep zig-zag friezes and bold scalloped capitals.

So when we come to consider the architectural changes that swept across England from the 1150s onwards we have to bear in mind the importance of hierarchy and function, and the fact that new was not necessarily seen as better. The term later given to describe the new architectural language that came to dominate masonry buildings is ‘Gothic’, which in the minds of many has come to be associated with the pointed arch. But it is important to remember that pointed arches were reasonably common in Anglo-Norman buildings, such as those in the vaults of Durham Cathedral. Gothic architecture, as it developed in France in the 1130s, was about more than pointed arches; it was a manner of building that created stone vaults over tall, thin walls. The skeletal nature of the construction allowed the walls to be pierced by much larger windows and the vaults to be supported by thin piers and external buttresses. This was an engineering revolution. As a structural system it was more rational and economical than the Anglo-Norman one, concentrating supports only at points of real stress. This allowed the non-structural parts of walls to be cut away. The spatial effect was remarkable and apparently dissolved supporting walls into arches, shafts and spaces (fig. 57).

Fig. 57 Part cross sections of a) Reims Cathedral, France, the nave; b) Durham Cathedral, the nave, illustrating the principles of Gothic architecture. At Reims the very tall thin nave walls are supported by two tiers of flying buttresses weighted down by heavy pinnacles. The structure is minimal and full of large openings. Durham is built in the English thick-wall technique, much squatter and heavier with passages cut into the wall thickness. The thrust of the vault is taken by a single buttress and most of the weight is converted into vertical thrusts in the massive wall thickness.

These new fashions started to have an impact in England after 1130. There is no simple political explanation for this, as the parts of modern France that were influential were not the lands in the west ruled over by Henry II and his sons. Inspiration in fact came from the Île-de-France, and from Picardy and north-eastern France, which English travellers crossed on their way to Paris. Innovations in style were transmitted by travellers, masons and, above all, churchmen. In the middle years of the 12th century some of the most important architectural commissions were in northern England, which had been slow to develop because of William the Conqueror’s aggressive harrying of the north. The largest of these were the new houses of the Cistercians.

Gothic architecture

By the reign of King Stephen the Benedictine monasteries of England, with their elaborate liturgical life, were comfortable, secure, prosperous bodies integral to the economic and social infrastructure of the country. Yet across Europe in the late 11th century and early years of the 12th century reformers increasingly regarded their way of life as a betrayal of the Rule of St Benedict, and groups of monks started to establish their own simpler reformed communities. One of these, later known as the Cistercians, was to create a new type of monasticism. Their success was largely due to their charismatic leader, St Bernard of Clairvaux. By his death in 1153 there were 340 Cistercian houses in Europe, 86 of which were in Britain.6 The Cistercians set out to avoid wealth and ostentation, over-elaborate liturgy and complex intellectual pursuits; they wanted to be economically independent and their brethren were put to hard labour on their own estates. These convictions were at first expressed in architectural simplicity; the first Cistercian monasteries had plain, aisle-less churches. But as time went by they became less austere and more susceptible to international architectural influences. The exact chronology of the introduction of Gothic forms into their English monasteries is unclear but at least one church was built in a recognisably Gothic manner by the late 1150s.7

Fig. 58 Byland Abbey, Yorkshire; reconstruction of the nave as first built. The stalls for the lay brothers were integrated into the lower part of the nave arcade. The prominent rose window, 26ft across, was an architectural elaboration that the earliest Cistercians would have disapproved of.

By 1170 work had started on Byland Abbey, the most ambitious Cistercian church of its age. This was no austere box. The walls were enlivened by three levels of pointed arches supporting a timber barrel vault; the west end was illuminated by a great rose or circular window. (fig. 58). But the architects of Byland were not using Gothic features as an alternative structural system like the French; they used them as an alternative form of decoration. This was the first manifestation of English Gothic, retaining the structural tradition of Anglo-Norman buildings but adopting the decorative vocabulary of Gothic architecture.

Fig. 59 Canterbury Cathedral, Kent, looking east; the choir of 1175–84. Its principal architectural characteristic is the height of the main arcade, more than half the height of the whole elevation; above are clusters of polished black Purbeck marble shafts used for the first time in England. These lead the eye up to the high vaults, in six parts, with decorated ribs that complement the beautifully carved capitals of the arcade far below. Beyond is the presbytery (fig. 60).

The adoption of Gothic detailing at Byland and then at York Minster was very influential in the north, but the repercussions of events at Canterbury between 1170 and 1175 were of much greater national impact. The most famous murder in English history took place on 29 December 1170 in Canterbury Cathedral; its victim was Archbishop Thomas Becket. Within days miracles were reported. The dead archbishop rapidly became a martyr and, within three years, a saint. This was a turning point in the history of Canterbury. Another took place eighteen months after Becket was canonised: the gutting of Archbishop Anselm’s early 12th-century choir by fire. This gave the Canterbury monks the opportunity to create a spectacular new setting for their saint and his relics. After consulting a number of architects, the monks chose a Frenchman, William, who came from the French city of Sens, the location of a new cathedral built in the Gothic style. As the monks wanted to ensure continuity with their much-loved building, he decided to retain the crypt and the lower, undamaged, parts of the choir and construct inside it a new east end.

So what was new about William of Sens’s choir (fig. 59)? Compared with the Anglo-Norman work of the nave the arcades were much taller, with gently pointed arches squeezing those of the gallery above. The vault springs from a low point and its ribs are decorated with dog-tooth motifs. The piers themselves were more slender and furnished with carved capitals. Polished limestone was used to enliven the elevations. William of Sens fell from his own scaffolding while supervising the construction of the highest vaults over the eastern crossing. He tried to carry on the work from his sick bed but had to return to France. His replacement was another William, known as ‘the Englishman’. He not only completed the repair of the fire damage but was commissioned to build an enlarged chapel to the east of it to replace the Trinity Chapel, the crypt of which contained the relics of St Thomas. This was to have two parts: the Trinity Chapel itself and beyond that a circular shrine called the Corona, where the severed crown of the martyr’s head was housed. The Englishman continued the main features of the choir through to the new chapel, which, being raised above a higher crypt, had shorter piers and much more satisfying proportions (fig. 60). The big windows were made possible by some of the earliest visible flying buttresses anywhere. The stained-glass scenes of the life of Christ and the miracles of St Thomas Becket are still largely intact, held in place by geometric iron frameworks (ferramenta). Their colours intensify the effect of the polished limestone columns, the use of which becomes progressively denser as the visitor moves eastwards. In the chapel the arcade piers are doubled-up and entirely made of Purbeck marble, while those nearest the shrine are of a hard pink-and-cream marble imported from abroad.

Fig. 60 Canterbury Cathedral, Kent. The presbytery was the culmination of the cathedral and the location of St Thomas’s shrine from 1220 until its destruction in 1538. The use of polished limestone made a huge impact on both pilgrims and masons from elsewhere. The survival of the original glass is nothing short of miraculous.

Fig. 61 Wells Cathedral, Somerset; the nave is now dominated by the scissor braces at the crossing added in the 14th century. Here the arcade and the clerestory are practically the same height and the triforium becomes a decorative band containing a denser rhythm of arches between the two. The effect of this was to abolish the rhythm of the bay structure and emphasise the great length of the cathedral, now, of course, interrupted by the scissor brace.

The experience of moving eastwards through Canterbury Cathedral towards the Corona is breathtaking. It is necessary to ascend steps over both Lanfranc’s and William the Englishman’s crypts to enter the extraordinary world of polished stone designed to evoke the heavenly Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation. A pilgrim would have felt as if he had been shrunk and placed inside an enamelled reliquary like the Becket casket in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Canterbury was to be influential, not so much through the details of its style or construction (although these were important), but for its lavishness. It was the mother church of England and set the standard for all that came after, particularly in its extravagant use of polished stones. Although Canterbury has more directly French features than any other English building of its age, its successors created a very different look, much more English and, in a sense, much more original. The rebuilding of Wells Cathedral was started soon after 1175 as a deliberate bid to replace Bath as the centre of the diocese of Somerset. It was sufficiently complete to be dedicated in 1239. Over a 60-year period it had at least three architects, all of whose genius must be recognised; for the building that they created was of huge originality and skill. It was the first building in England, if not in the whole of Europe, to be built with pointed arches throughout. But more important was the way the arches were handled. The overwhelming sensation gained by a visit to Wells is the horizontal effect of the nave created by three self-contained strata of arches (fig. 61). The lowest, the nave arcade, is supported by massive cross-shaped piers faced with 24 shafts bunched in groups of three. In Anglo-Norman cathedrals there was a substantial gallery above the nave arcades but at Wells there is the semblance of a triforium, which in French buildings is a much narrower passage in the thickness of the wall, fronted by an arcade. This arcade runs the entire length of the nave as a consistent band of decoration without vertical interruptions. Above is the clerestory, with the ribs of the vault supported on stubby shafts.⁸

Fig. 62 Lincoln Cathedral; the vault of St Hugh’s Choir of about 1200, the first instance anywhere of a rib that ran along the ridge of the vault. To this rib join ribs that have little structural necessity and do not define the bay structure – in other words, they are pure decoration.

Ideas from Canterbury and Wells fed into the greatest of early English Gothic churches: the cathedral at Lincoln. In 1185 a vault in the east end of the cathedral collapsed and the following year Henry II appointed Hugh of Avalon as the new bishop. These two events led to a rebuilding of the eastern parts, largely completed by the time of Hugh’s death in 1200. This probably finished the original plan; but work continued and by about 1250 the whole cathedral, save the Norman west front, had been rebuilt. Lincoln was rebuilt in its own image. This was a cathedral that proclaimed its place at the top of the hierarchy, together with Canterbury and York. As a result nobody stinted on money, scale or decorative effect. Lincoln set out to dazzle – and dazzle it does.

The earliest part to be rebuilt was itself replaced in 1255 by the Angel Choir, but St Hugh’s choir and eastern transepts remain. The first thing that strikes the visitor is the use of polished limestone in direct imitation of the work at Canterbury. The second thing is the form of the choir vault. The choir is still built with the thick walls, but the piers appear less massive than at Wells and the shafts from the vaults divide the elevation into bays. But the vaults do not reinforce the bay structure. For the first time there is a central rib running the length of the vault. Onto this, at seemingly random points, the transverse ribs join, creating a pattern that at first defies comprehension (fig. 62). This was not structural necessity, it was pure decoration. So at Lincoln ribs are used for the first time in an English way – as surface ornament. The nave vaults are slightly later and less idiosyncratic, but richer, denser, more complex and symmetrical. They succeed in making the vault as interesting and lively as the walls, bringing the whole together in a restless sea of ornament. The nave elevations below have extraordinary depth. This is not only achieved by passages in the clerestory and triforium but by the 27ft span of the arches, allowing a panorama of the aisle walls, which are deeply moulded with blind arcading. The effect is accentuated by the nave piers, each pair of which is subtly different.

The design of Lincoln, extraordinarily experimental and hungry for novelty, had a huge impact on the next two generations of English builders. In 1817 the Regency architect, Thomas Rickman, christened the style of Lincoln ‘Early English’, a term that nicely expresses the essential insularity of what was being built. The great churches described above, and the many others that followed them, were individualistic and original, taking French ideas and turning them into a decorative vocabulary unique to England. This concentration on elaboration and surface ornament was a development from the Anglo-Saxons through the late Anglo-Norman monuments into the first Gothic structures. There is a real sense in which, by 1220, a national style had been formed.⁹

Fig. 63 Castle Acre Priory, Norfolk the west front started in c.1130. Richly decorated with blind arcading; there were originally four tall windows in the middle, replaced by a single window in the 15th century.