Читать книгу The Building of England: How the History of England Has Shaped Our Buildings - Simon Thurley - Страница 34

Between 1100 and 1300 the percentage of the English population that lived in towns doubled to 20 per cent. In 1086 there were about 100 boroughs, almost all founded by royal will. By 1300 there were more than 500, many founded by the Church and the aristocracy. Towns were profitable business; rents from the burgesses were good, but landlords could also profit from market tolls and the borough court. The example of King’s (originally Bishop’s) Lynn, Norfolk, demonstrates this nicely. In 1090 Herbert de Losinga, Bishop of Thetford, established a priory and market in the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Lynn. His intention was to capture a slice of the trade that would flow through the Wash and down the Great Ouse. The settlement was a success, and in about 1150 Bishop Turbe built an extension to the town, with a colossal new marketplace and a huge church. This was under the direct lordship of the bishop and was highly lucrative, so much so that the bishop bought back his rights over the original town and obtained a royal charter for the unified settlement in 1204 (fig. 80). A charter meant that the bishop could govern the town and collect taxes in exchange for a fixed fee paid to the Crown.²⁴ The excavation of early medieval timber houses in Lynn, London and several other towns corroborates what the great barns at Cressing Temple tell us, which is that in the late 12th century timbers became squarer, cut by saw, mortise-and-tenon joints start to become common, frames were more stoutly constructed, with regularly spaced studding, and earth-fast posts were replaced by timber sole plates, often on foundations. This was all part of a process that led to fully self-supporting frames for domestic dwellings. The impetus for structural and technical advances, and the reasons for them, were not simple. On the one hand, they were driven by the need to solve intensely practical problems. For instance, the making of timber revetments that formed the London riverfront led to innovations in timber framing, their constructors having to battle against the intense forces of the tidal Thames. On the other hand, high-level patronage from bishops (as at Hereford), deans (as at Salisbury) or by the king himself (at Westminster) made stylistic and engineering demands that constantly pushed carpenters to the limit of their confidence. Technical improvement in the construction of timber town buildings was important as it changed the appearance of English towns. Earth-fast timber houses needed to be replaced or completely refurbished every 15 or 20 years as their foundations rotted. Timber-framed structures built on stone foundations lasted much longer – indeed, when well maintained, for centuries. Thus, owning a townhouse was now not merely the simple possession of a plot of land, it was a long-term investment. This meant that greater efforts were made in the building’s appearance and decoration, its maintenance, and its visual and spatial relationship with other buildings. Houses got taller, too. Timber framing meant that they could be built three storeys high; the first medieval domestic skyscrapers were constructed by the 1190s, and soon after their upper floors began to be jettied out (fig. 81).²⁵

Fig. 80 King’s Lynn, Norfolk; maps showing the expansion of the town after 1150. As a consequence the town today, unusually, has two market places (Tuesday and Saturday)and two very large churches, the original parish church St Margaret’s and a chapel of ease St Nicholas serving the town extension.

Fig. 81 28 Cornmarket St, Oxford is a three-storied 15th century house with cellars. All floors were originally jettied but the ground floor has been under-built. There is a handsome corner post.

Fig. 82 Lady Row, York was a commercial development built in around 1316 in Holy Trinity Churchyard as an endowment for the chantry of the Blessed Virgin in the church. They are the earliest timber buildings in York and are a very early example of jettying.

Many townhouses were also shops. Trade was, of course, central to the purpose of towns; by 1234 Canterbury had 200 shops and by 1300 Chester had 270. But, as today, London was England’s shopping Mecca. Its principal shopping street, Cheapside, was 450 yards long and 20 yards wide. The shops, 400 of them lined on either side, were occupied by goldsmiths, mercers, drapers, spicers, saddlers, girdlers, chandlers, wiredrawers, bucklemakers, pursemakers, buttonmakers and more. The shops themselves were very narrow, typically only 6ft to 7ft wide, and about 10ft to 12ft deep. Elsewhere in the city, where land was less valuable, shops were wider, their frontages measuring between 15ft and 20ft. The shops had a window opening and a narrow door, and window shutters were lifted during the day to reveal large, round-headed openings. Most shoppers would have been served standing in the street, rather like in an Arab souk today. Jetties overhead would have kept off the rain. Like a souk, too, the interiors were crammed with goods, and merchants’ houses elsewhere in the city would have acted as warehouses to supply them. Most shops were of timber, but some party walls and some larger shops were of stone.²⁶

No early medieval shops survive today unaltered and so we have to study later examples to get an understanding of how retail premises originally looked. Lady Row, Goodramgate, York, is a row of shops dating from 1316 that have lost their original windows (fig. 82). Lady Row is not untypical of what we know of commercial developments of shops built by single landlords and then rented to shopkeepers. The upper rooms may have been separately let as housing, or traders may have lived above their showrooms. A rare survival from c.1350 is 169 Spon Street, Coventry, a different type of shop, probably built by a merchant with a showroom on the street and a substantial house with a hall for the family behind (fig. 83).²⁷

Fig. 83 169 Spon Street, Coventry. Although restored in 1970, this shop is a rare survivor from the 1350s in a district of Coventry devoted to the cloth and leather trades. No medieval shop in England survives with its original ground floor openings intact.

Fig. 84 The Jews House, The Strait, Lincoln of around 1190. The plans show that, unusually, the fireplace was placed over the ground floor passageway, a way of emphasising on the street front that the house had such a luxurious facility.

Fig. 85 58 French Street Southampton, though dating from the 1290s, was heavily restored after 1972. It is a rare survivor of a building type that was once very common in towns, the merchant’s house-cum-emporium.

From the 13th century there were shops and houses built of stone; a remarkable surviving group can be found in the lower city at Lincoln, which, in the mid 13th century, was one of the largest and richest towns in England. Here two stone houses still stand and the remains of 30 more have been excavated. The Jews House, The Strait, of c.1190, was a prestigious structure probably containing three shops – two on one side of a central door and one on the other (fig. 84). The door led to a secure back range (now lost) for the storage of valuables, with a staircase to the first floor. The first floor contained two residential rooms, one with a fireplace. The external elevation was magnificent, with a fine zigzag-moulded door and heavily moulded two-light windows above. The chimney stack was incorporated into the front elevation as a badge of wealth and sophistication.

In contrast to Lincoln, stone houses in most other towns had undercrofts rather than rear strong-rooms. A complete, though restored, example is 58 French Street, Southampton, built for a merchant called John Fortin in the 1290s (fig. 85). It was one of about 60 stone and timber merchants’ houses in one of England’s most important ports. As at Lincoln there was a shop at the front, but behind was a hall and private chamber for the owner, and upstairs were two bedrooms. The whole was set upon an undercroft built for the secure storage of merchandise. This was typical of its type: a building that was a home, a showroom, a warehouse and an office all in one.28 Towns were also home to the houses of the aristocracy, prelates and the Crown. Again, in Lincoln, one such high-status house survives, probably built for a visit of King Henry II in 1157. Like 1 The Strait, it presented its prestigious front to the street with not one but two large chimney stacks. The principal archway, which survives, was clearly the entrance to a very special house. On the first floor was a huge hall raised up above ground-floor vaults, and at right angles to it a withdrawing chamber for the king. This was a compact, but grandiloquent town house of the first order.29

Fig. 86 St Mary’s Hospital Chichester of 1290–1300 looks like a church: its ‘nave’ was a ward for the patients who would lie on beds at right angles to the outer walls; they had a clear view of the ‘chancel’, a chapel at the east end separated from the ward by a fine screen.

As well as shops, many other trades were practised, particularly those concerned with food and drink, especially butchery and baking. Many of the larger towns such as Lincoln, York and Oxford specialised in the manufacture of woollen cloth and served an international clientele. Merchants were cosmopolitan; the best houses would have been comfortable, luxurious even, with goods from all over the world. The contents of a rubbish pit at one of the stone houses in Southampton not only contained pottery from France and Spain, but fig and grape seeds, and the skeleton of a pet monkey.

The picture painted above is of towns as engines of trade and prosperity, with robust, well-made houses, shops and churches. They were also chaotic. Everyone in a medieval town wanted to live in the centre, and rich and poor lived hugger-mugger in crowded, narrow streets, cohabiting with horses and scavenging pigs. Crafts and trades were practised in the centre of town, sometimes in the back of shops or in separate buildings in back yards. Many were noxious: tanning, brewing and smithing were all unpleasant to live close to. On the positive side, piped water supplies began to be developed, the removal of rubbish to out-of-town pits was encouraged, and early forms of building control enforced rules about the location and construction of privies. After 1200 towns started to acquire communal institutions such as hospitals, schools and colleges. Of all the institutions that were later to populate English towns, hospitals were, at first, most numerous. A single Latinised word ‘xenodochium’ embraced institutions that today we would separate out into hospital, almshouse and guest house, but in the early Middle Ages a single foundation was often a mixture of all three. Just as Norman kings and churchmen built castles and cathedrals, so they founded hospitals, most intensely between 1100 and 1220. Archbishop Lanfranc, for instance, founded three hospitals at Canterbury for ten paupers, 60 lepers and many elderly priests. St Mary’s Hospital, Chichester, Sussex, although built between 1290 and 1300, is typical of these early foundations (fig. 86). The essential principle was that every inmate should have a clear view of Mass being celebrated in the hospital chapel. So the whole building was like a church, with the nave being a ward containing low wooden beds with straw mattresses, and the chancel being a complete chapel, separated from the rest by a screen. In such a hospital the sick would be cared for but passing travellers, especially pilgrims, would also be given beds.30

The Economics of Building

The sheer volume of building described in this chapter perhaps exceeded even the achievements of the first generation after the Conquest. Much was bankrolled by good economic conditions: the economy was swollen with silver and agricultural profits rose rapidly as a result of entrepreneurialism. The most successful cathedrals, such as Salisbury, enjoyed an increase in income of 168 per cent in a century. Towns grew, markets prospered, communications improved, and education produced a class of able and ambitious clerks and administrators.

But it was a different sort of building boom to the one stimulated by the Conquest. There were now proper quarries, better-skilled masons (and more of them), and few buildings were started anew. New monasteries were rare and, after the 1130s, no new dioceses were created until 1547 – only Salisbury Cathedral stands out as an entirely new structure. Most churches and castles were reconstructions, adaptations and extensions of existing buildings. Architectural leadership lay firmly with the cathedrals, whose golden age it was. These institutions were in cities, meaning that their influence in terms of architecture – as well as learning, ideas and education – was more profound than even the greatest of the rural monasteries. While most cathedrals were progressively rebuilt in new styles, many rural monastic churches remained Anglo-Norman.³¹

England’s cathedrals are collectively one of the supreme architectural achievements of the whole Middle Ages. This is partly a result of the inventiveness of English masons and designers, but equally of the wealth of English sees. English dioceses were larger than those on the continent and correspondingly richer. The richest, such as Winchester (£3,000 a year), Durham (£2,700), Canterbury (£2,140) or Ely (£2,000), had incomes equivalent to the most prosperous earls. Indeed, by the end of the 13th century 12 out of Europe’s 40 richest dioceses were in England. It was this wealth, carefully exploited by bishops and deans, that funded the extraordinary sumptuousness of cathedrals such as Lincoln and Salisbury. Salisbury, without its spire, cost around £28,000 over 50 years. A single bay at Lincoln (p. 96), because of the profusion of carving, probably cost twice as much as its French equivalent.³²

Yet financing the construction of a cathedral was hugely expensive and it was unlikely that the normal revenues of a diocese, however rich, would suffice. At Lincoln, for instance, a fabric fund was created in around 1200, endowed by dividing the cathedral’s income in two. This was supplemented by gifts from all over the diocese responding to the disastrous collapse of 1185. To encourage more giving, continual Masses were said for those who contributed to the work. Landowners might contribute half an acre of land and symbolically place a sod from it on the altar. A tax was also levied on every household in the diocese at the Whitsun procession.³³ While all these sources of income were important, financing the largest and most spectacular projects was substantially boosted by the financial muscle of a really famous saint. Although in many cathedrals Anglo-Saxon saints had been translated to Anglo-Norman buildings, their setting was now regarded as insufficiently magnificent. So through the 13th and 14th centuries the east ends of dozens of great churches were extended to provide suitably spectacular shrines for Anglo-Saxon and contemporary saints, as well as space for visiting pilgrims. This movement was given a huge boost by the new setting for the relics of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury. Thus between 1190 and 1220, for example, work started on building new eastern arms at Beverly, Ely, Hereford, Lichfield, Lincoln, Southwell, Winchester and Worcester.

As the English economy and infrastructure strengthened and towns grew, secular and ecclesiastical lords rebuilt their castles and cathedrals in new styles. Churches developed in response to changing liturgy, while the great secular residences remained much as they had done for generations, reflecting a more stable way of life for royalty and nobility. For richer ordinary people life also improved, and their houses became more sturdy, commodious and permanent.

As the second generation of Normans felt more English, so the great cathedrals, abbeys, castles and houses then under construction became increasingly distinct from their counterparts in France. Architecture had been through an intense period of experimentation from 1150 to 1170, but by about 1200 there was an increasingly uniform approach to large-scale building. Some of the excesses of late Anglo-Norman decoration were forgotten and the new Gothic style adopted simpler, but bold and deeply cut, pointed arches. Yet it was rooted in what had gone before: English cathedrals clung to the thick wall technique often with masonry 13ft thick. This not only characterised early English Gothic but influenced the proportions and scale of everything that came after. As cathedrals were rebuilt and extended they embodied the Anglo-Norman structural techniques. Thus from a European perspective early English Gothic was rich, insular and distinctive.