Читать книгу The Building of England: How the History of England Has Shaped Our Buildings - Simon Thurley - Страница 38

By 1220 a traveller moving across England would have seen the hand of man everywhere. The whole landscape was managed to a greater or lesser degree and few places remained untamed. The most apparent unit of economic and social management was the estate. Estates, whether owned by the monarch, the Church, the great barons or the monasteries, organised the countryside for economic advantage. But the medieval landscape was not merely a money-making machine; the buildings and structures within it had meaning to the people who owned and looked at them.

Castles had a special meaning. In theory only the king could license the construction of a defendable fortress, as in the reign of King John a system had developed whereby magnates wishing to build a fortified residence applied for a royal licence to do so. The possession of a licence, whether it resulted in a building or not, was a sign of wealth and royal favour. It was also a sign of the times. All great houses in the 13th century were, to a greater or lesser extent, defendable. They had to be. It was not only residences on the south coast or the Welsh or Scottish borders that were vulnerable to raiders. Theft, vendetta and social unrest were all potential threats to the comfort and security of the well-off. High walls and towers were thus a sign of a man who could afford them, as well as an indication that he had something worth protecting.⁶

For those who could not afford to build a castle or obtain a licence there was the option of digging a moat. Moats had been dug from at least the 1150s, but during the period covered by this chapter as many as 3,500 moats were dug. Some of these were dug around manor houses, some around the houses of richer peasants. Not all parts of England were suitable for moats; they tended to be concentrated in Suffolk, Essex, Hertfordshire and in the central midlands, where there was a clay subsoil. Some moated houses were in the centre of villages, others were more isolated farmsteads.

The now deserted medieval hamlet of Winteringham, Cambridgeshire, had three moated houses, one of which was excavated between 1971 and 1972. The site of the excavated house had been occupied by two earlier houses before the moat was dug in around 1250. The former houses were simpler and humbler, and the increasing wealth of the family who owned them is apparent by their desire to build a larger, more modern house and surround it with a moat. The house itself consisted of a hall and residential cross-wing, with a detached kitchen, a bower, a storeroom and a circular dovecot (fig. 90). The buildings were connected by cobbled paths. This was not the house of the lord of the manor, but of a substantial and prosperous farmer who wanted to protect his possessions from ill-doers and demonstrate his wealth by sporting a moat.7

There was, of course, a huge gap between the aspirations of the owners of Winteringham and those of the great magnates. The magnates saw themselves as soldiers and their interests were in the governance of state and Church. Culturally their priorities were, loosely speaking, chivalric, expressed in mighty residences set in extensive and beautiful hunting parks. Hunting was fundamental to the life of the aristocracy. It was the activity, above all others, that defined aristocratic rank. It took great skill, it was dangerous, and it was run through with chivalric, religious and sexual symbolism.

All medieval residences of any pretensions were surrounded by hunting parks, 1,900 of which were created between 1200 and 1350. Most parks were between 100 and 200 acres in extent, the size of the park reflecting the wealth of its owner.8 The largest park in 13th-century England was the royal park of Clarendon, Wiltshire, covering 4,292 acres. It was surrounded by an impressive earthwork 10 miles long and more than 10ft high, topped with oak paling. The park was divided into three areas: pasture to the north, woodland in a band across the middle and wood pasture to the south. In addition to the palace there were eight lodges – some guarded the gates, others provided special services, such as accommodating the royal kennels. Every part of the land was productive. The woods were bounded by banks, ditches and hedges to keep the deer out and allow coppicing. Slow-growing oaks were also cultivated as a crop, and oxen and cows would graze on the wooded pasture in the south. The northern pasture supported deer and included man-made ponds for drinking and wallowing, troughs for feeding and deer houses for winter shelter. Rabbits and hares were bred here on an industrial scale and provided continuous supplies of meat. Even the wild birds were hunted with hawks.

Fig. 90 Winteringham, Cambridgeshire, moated house at c.1250–1300, excavated in 1971–2. This is the house of a prosperous farmer and his family, comfortable, convenient but in the tradition of residences built for at least two centuries.

So the short periods during which kings hunted were interludes in a complex and lucrative agricultural industry. Henry I, Henry II, John, Edward I and Edward III all hunted at Clarendon in what was not only an economic and recreational landscape, but one designed and sculpted with aesthetics clearly in mind. The principal entrance to the park through Slaygate afforded a spectacular view of the whitewashed royal palace high up on the ridge, and views from the palace to the park were carefully contrived.9

Fig. 91 Rievaulx Abbey, Yorkshire, the precinct. A series of land deals enabled the monks of Rievaulx to acquire the land either side of the river Rye which allowed them to divert it for abbey use. The 92-acre precinct was exceptionally large; most Cistercian abbeys had precincts averaging 60 acres while Benedictines or Augustinian Canons tended to have much smaller precincts averaging around 30 acres.

It was not only kings who moulded and sculpted the landscape around their homes; almost every major residence had a wide-ranging impact on the landscape. The De Roos family owned Helmsley Castle, Yorkshire, and in the 1180s and 90s rebuilt and expanded the castle while purchasing more land for the creation of parks. There were three of these: the West and the East, each paled, and an inner park known as La Haye. The main residential parts of the castle looked out over La Haye and had a balcony from which the culling of deer could be watched.10

It was not only castles and great houses that remodelled their landscapes. Monasteries never stood alone but were linked to varying numbers of support buildings, normally in a walled precinct. At Rievaulx, for instance, within the precincts covering 92 acres there were 27 buildings (fig. 91). Some of these were for polite purposes, such as accommodating guests and abbey pensioners; others were for food preparation, such as baking and brewing. In the outer parts there were buildings that housed industrial processes including a fulling mill (for finishing woollen cloth), a corn mill, a water-powered forge and a tannery. Amidst these buildings were meadows, gardens and orchards.11

New Decorative Vocabulary

In the 1250s England’s distinctive brand of Gothic architecture reigned supreme, but in 1245 Henry III’s project to rebuild Westminster Abbey challenged the architectural consensus. The rebuilding of the royal abbey as a coronation church and shrine to the Confessor was the most lavish act of religious architectural patronage by any one individual in the entire Middle Ages. It was pursued with great energy until the latter parts of his reign and then more slowly till his death in 1272, by which time £45,000 had been laid out on the building.

Fig. 92 Old St Paul’s Cathedral; London: the chapter house, drawn by Wenceslaus Hollar in 1657. The chapter house and cloister were the masterpiece of the royal mason, William Ramsey. Note how the tracery of the windows continued over the walling below.

Westminster Abbey (fig. 93) was heavily influenced by French buildings and broke away from the style of recent work at Lincoln, for instance (p. 96). Its very proportions were French; at 102ft its nave is England’s highest, supported by tiers of French-looking flying buttresses. Many other elements, from its polygonal east end to its northern triple portal, are direct quotes from French buildings. Henry III, who had travelled in France in the 1240s and 50s, was doubtless looking to the French coronation church of Reims and the jewel-like royal Sainte-Chapelle as models. Yet Westminster was no straightforward copy, and the general richness of carving and surface decoration of its interior was in long-established English taste. The influence of the abbey, rather like that of early Gothic Canterbury (pp 93–4), lay not in its composition but in its details: the richness of surface decoration, the use of tracery, the carved and painted heraldic shields, the large-scale sculpted figures and smaller-scale foliage sculpture.¹²

Fig. 93 The construction of the nave of Westminster Abbey is one of the most remarkable stories in English building. Building began in the east in 1259–72, and subsequent abbots and masons continued the design from the 14th to the 16th century in exactly the same style. Though the inspiration was at first French, the details used over the long construction period are progressively more anglicised.

Nor was it alone, for England’s largest and most important cathedral was independently following a similar path. From the 1250s the monks of Old St Paul’s began to rebuild their east end with a massive extension that would make it the longest cathedral in England, whose exterior shared the richness and decoration of Westminster Abbey (fig. 92). A third London building encapsulated many of the new features displayed in the great churches. This was St Stephen’s Chapel, the main royal chapel at Westminster Palace, which Edward I started to rebuild in 1292. Its building history is long and complicated, covering 56 years, only being finally completed by Edward III after 1348 (pp 157–8). Yet the chapel was the most prominent and architecturally magnificent royal commission of its age, and no self-respecting mason or patron was ignorant of its style.

To understand the appearance of buildings in the period from 1250 to 1350 it is best to look at the individual elements since the focus of architectural innovation was on decoration, not on the underlying architectural skeleton. It is hard to convey the importance of decoration in medieval architecture to the modern spectator, as so little survives. The Reformation and the Civil War dealt horrible blows to the greatest English medieval buildings, stripping most of them down to their bare bones. This has led to a loss of meaning, for the architectural bones were the skeleton for a programme of communication through sculpture and paint. Church buildings were designed to represent the kingdom of heaven, and were intended as a signpost and the gateway to paradise for mortals.¹³

The most important new decorative element was undoubtedly window tracery. It was possible, using lancets grouped together, to let in more light, but it was still obvious that these were individual windows with sections of wall between them. The invention of tracery allowed really big windows to be built without bits of wall in the middle. The adoption of bar tracery at Binham Priory, Norfolk, at Netley Abbey, Hampshire, and at Westminster Abbey and Palace immediately made anything built before the 1250s look old-fashioned (compare figs 58, 94). Windows were now not only a gap in the wall; they were transformed into one of the primary vehicles for decoration and elaboration. Part of this was the extraordinary variety of the tracery, but a great deal of the effect was achieved by advances in glazing technology.

From 1300 a much paler and more translucent type of yellow stain was introduced, thinner glass was being manufactured and the designs were being painted with better, finer brushes. All of these advances let more light into churches. The west window at York Minster, which was glazed in 1339 by Master Robert with the extensive use of yellow stain, can be contrasted with the much heavier, darker windows in the lancets of Canterbury Cathedral (figs 60 and 94). In the York window it is also apparent that stained-glass artists had mastered the use of perspective. Windows depict figures under canopies and vaults similar to, and fully integrated with, those in the architecture around them.¹⁴

The narrow lancet windows in early Gothic churches let in little light, creating a mystical and intimate effect. From the early 14th century larger windows and larger east ends made it easier to see the increasingly elaborate rituals that were being performed. These changes can be seen in churches such as St Denys’s, Sleaford, Lincolnshire, with its wild, flowing tracery and west end covered in carving, or Holy Trinity, Hull, begun in around 1300 (fig. 95). Holy Trinity is one of England’s biggest parish churches and the first to be largely built of brick. Its chancel and transepts have some of the most inventive and beautiful traceried windows of their age, flooding the presbytery with light. Outside, the buttresses have canopied niches and parapets carved with wavy patterns.¹⁵

Fig. 94 York Minster nave, looking west towards the great west window commissioned in 1339 – it is 55ft high and of eight lights. The whole nave makes the most of the possibilities of big windows, suppressing the visual impact of the triforium by linking it to the clerestory using continuous mullions.

Fig. 95 Holy Trinity, Hull: the east end of the church of around 1300–20. The rich flowing tracery lights the retrochoir. The internal fittings of the choir were funded by the city corporation from a wool tax.

Fig. 96 Eleanor Cross, Geddington, Northamptonshire, 1291–4. Edward I erected twelve crosses marking the nightly resting places of the coffin of his wife, Eleanor of Castile, as it travelled to London. The monument contains canopied niches for statues.

The second fundamental decorative element of the period was the niche. These miniature vaults with a triangular gable sheltering an arch can be found, in large scale, on the outside of churches, most prominently on the west front at Wells Cathedral in the 1220s, but from the 1260s they begin to shrink in scale and become a decorative component often coupled with pinnacles. Perhaps the most prominent use of this combination was in the series of monuments Edward I erected to his queen, Eleanor of Castile. Eleanor died in 1290, and within a year or so twelve crosses had been erected near the religious houses at which her body lay on its journey from Nottinghamshire to Westminster (fig. 96).¹⁶ The crosses displayed a sort of micro-architecture of the type that can be found in contemporary metalwork and manuscripts and that was also well suited to tombs. The tomb in Westminster Abbey of Edmund, Earl of Lancaster, who died in 1296, captures the full possibilities of the niche and pinnacle. The astonishing tomb of King Edward II at Gloucester Cathedral of about 1330 is even more exotic, almost Moorish, with niches with S-shaped or ogee tops (fig. 97). The ogee arch had been used in Venice in about 1250, but from the 1290s it was taken up by English architects and designers like nowhere else in Europe. It first started to be used in tombs, then in niches, and then in prominent structures such as the great rose window of St Paul’s Cathedral. The ogee arch gave an exotic, quasi-Eastern form to some of the greatest spaces of the era, such as the Lady Chapel at Ely. The most unforgettable of these is St Mary’s, Redcliffe, Bristol, a parish church that aspires to the grandeur of a cathedral. The hexagonal porch, encrusted with niches with forward-thrusting ogee arches, contains a door that defies architectural description and looks to have escaped from a maharaja’s palace.

Fig. 97 Gloucester Cathedral; the tomb of Edward II, c.1330–5. The effigy is of alabaster on a tomb chest clad in Purbeck marble, but it is the canopy that is a work of genius. It is a bewildering array of crockets, niches, pinnacles and buttresses, all originally painted as befitted a king.

One of the innovations introduced at Westminster Abbey was the idea of interior large-scale sculpted human figures integrated with the structure and the wider decorative programme. Big figures had been used to great effect externally, particularly at Wells on the west front, but their internal use was another idea taken from the Sainte-Chapelle. At Westminster these figures either told stories from the lives of saints or emphasised some important part of the building (fig. 98). Such large-scale sculptures were to be taken up with huge enthusiasm, bringing colour and ornament to interiors.

Fig. 98 Westminster Abbey, south transept, south wall; an angel, elegantly accommodated in a spandrel, wings spread and swinging a censer – a perfect marriage of sculpture and architecture.

Fig. 99 Naturalistic foliage in the arches of the chapter house at Southwell Minster, Nottinghamshire, 1290s.

Medieval sculptors were not interested in accurately representing the human form, and figures – including those of people of great importance – were idealised. The statues of the queen on the Eleanor crosses do not capture the features of a real person; they represent an idealised Christian queen (fig. 96). Saints were instantly identifiable by how they stood or what they held; St Catherine had her wheel and St Peter always held the keys of heaven, while secular figures were identified by their badges or coats of arms. So Queen Eleanor’s crosses were encrusted with the badges of León, England, Castile and Ponthieu.

Yet startling naturalism can also be found, such as the heads carved for the corbels at Salisbury Cathedral, some tomb effigies, but most of all the brilliantly naturalistic foliage in the arches of the chapter house at Southwell Minster, Nottinghamshire (fig. 99). Capitals were now less often carved with narrative schemes (fig. 54), but corbels became a sort of portrait gallery, with hugely expressive images of what were probably real people. Carving – and painting – reflected life, rather than commenting on it as today.

Fig. 100 Exeter Cathedral was the last to be rebuilt almost in its entirety, over a period of 60 years from 1275; the building work was funded by a voluntary tax on the bishop and the chapter’s own income. A result of this is the perfect harmony of its interior, especially the nave, shown here, with its extraordinary high vaults 300ft above the floor.

All these streams of embellishment are represented at Exeter. The Anglo-Norman cathedral there was rebuilt over a 60-year period beginning in 1275. Its new form was constrained by the decision to retain its 12th-century twin towers. Thus Exeter is characteristic of most Gothic cathedrals where bishops and deans grafted their new buildings onto older work. This meant that the Gothic parts normally followed the thick-wall technique of the Anglo-Normans, keeping cathedrals long and low with a stronghorizontal emphasis.

But that is where the conservatism ends, for a succession of bishops determinedly funded a rebuilding of the cathedral in the best modern style (fig. 100). Exeter is an extravaganza. Everything is multiplied: the piers are made up of 16 bunched shafts, and the spectacular vault is a forest of 22 ribs in each bay, creating the longest single continuous Gothic vault in the world. Everything was patterned, from bosses, through corbels to tracery. The west front was started by Bishop Grandison in around 1346, and while it might not have the balance or harmony of the west front of Wells, here every decorative element in the designer’s vocabulary is brought to bear as tiers of figures reside in canopied niches below, perhaps, the most fanciful window of its age (fig. 101). This frontage, like that at Wells, and elsewhere, was intended as a backdrop for the most important services of the year, particularly the processions of Palm Sunday. On this day a choir, hidden behind the façade, seemed to make the very statues, originally painted and gilded, sing.

Fig. 101 Exeter Cathedral; the west front. Originally (1320s–40s) the front had three great doorways, and the west window still remains from this period, but the image screen was added from the mid-1340s and figures were still being completed in the 15th century.