The Medieval English Landscape, 1000-1540 (33 page)

As for the cathedral churches themselves, many have already been mentioned in their monastic context. For the ‘secular’ cathedrals, the story is broadly the same, with vigorous building campaigns in the century following the Norman Conquest creating structures which were subsequently modified as fashion and funding permitted. York Minster, for example, was rebuilt on a new site between 1080 and 1100, but its progress to become the largest medieval church building in the country is attributable to a series of projects of the first half of the thirteenth century, the first half of the fourteenth century, and the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, which collectively obliterated all trace above ground of the earlier Norman work. As buildings, what especially set both secular and monastic cathedrals apart from all but the greatest abbey and parish churches was, on the one hand, their sheer size and, on the other, their significance as places where new construction techniques and new architectural styles could be introduced or developed as models to be copied elsewhere. Every medieval church was intended to be an earthly representation of the heavenly Jerusalem, destination of those souls which would be saved after the Last Judgement as described in the Revelation of St John, but the grandeur of cathedrals, and especially their great height, equipped them particularly well for this role: ‘beholde, the tabernacle off God is with men, and he wyll dwell with them’, as Tyndale’s illegal translation of 1526 put it.
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The pointed rib vault – a device which allowed extra height to the roof while containing the lateral thrust – possibly originated at Cluny Abbey but the earliest surviving example anywhere in Europe is that over the nave at Durham Cathedral, built between 1120 and 1133; this was the precursor of the pointed arches, as well as pointed roof vaults, which came to dominate the various styles of ‘Gothic’ ecclesiastical architecture throughout the middle ages. The late-twelfth and early thirteenth-century rebuilding of much of Lincoln cathedral, badly damaged in a collapse of 1185, was in a distinctively English (as opposed to French) Gothic style, conventionally known as ‘Early English’; with its emphasis on verticality (notably
in sequences of lancet windows) this would also be the style adopted at Salisbury, where a completely new cathedral was erected between 1220 and 1284 following papal permission to abandon its Norman predecessor at Old Sarum.
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When Exeter Cathedral was almost entirely rebuilt in the century after 1275 – retaining only its Romanesque transept towers but respecting the original Norman dimensions of nave and crossing – it became the country’s supreme example of the Decorated style, characterized by the use of the ogee arch and by elaborate decorative carving especially in canopies over portals and in the flowing tracery of windows. The octagon designs used in the first half of the fourteenth century for both the lantern over the central tower of Ely Cathedral and for the Lady Chapel at the east end of Wells Cathedral, although not adopted elsewhere in English churches, are also testimony to a readiness to experiment and to innovate on an elaborate scale. Much the same could be said of the distinctive ‘scissor-arches’ inside Wells, a brilliant solution to the problem of supporting an overweight central tower, built in the decade before the Black Death. There is an exception to the story of cathedrals as innovators in the case of the Perpendicular style which prevailed from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth century: a style which may owe its longevity partly to the fact that the skilled craftsmen needed for the best Decorated work were by now in short supply. This was introduced in the 1330s not at a cathedral but at an abbey – as it then was – for the remodelling of the south transept at Gloucester in the 1330s. However, the naves of Canterbury and Winchester Cathedrals, rebuilt either side of the year 1400, were to be among the finest examples of this style in the country.
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There were, of course, mixed motives behind these developments. Several rebuilding schemes were prompted by urgent necessity, such as the collapse of Lincoln’s Romanesque central tower in the 1230s, but by the close of the thirteenth century England hosted 12 of the 40 richest dioceses in Europe – partly because of their unusually large size – and there was undoubtedly a strong element of competition, as well as imitation, in projects undertaken ostensibly to the glory of God. And possession of the relics of a saint offered the prospect of a lucrative income from pilgrims, while also providing both an opportunity and an obligation to house them appropriately. Thus, the lavish reconstruction of the east end of Canterbury Cathedral followed both the canonization of Becket in 1173 and a major fire in 1174. Lincoln Cathedral’s reconstruction after 1185 was supposed partly to honour its first Norman bishop Remigius and thereafter, with greater conviction, the late-twelfth-century Bishop Hugh, canonized in 1220. As for the master masons, the architects of the buildings, they had to solve structural problems while delivering an aesthetically pleasing result; there is good evidence both that they were left a fairly free hand to interpret their patrons’ briefs and that they borrowed freely from comparable buildings they had seen, and in
some cases had worked upon. The late-twelfth-century historian Gervase of Canterbury has left us an account of the rebuilding of the choir area of Canterbury Cathedral after 1174 which shows that the master mason William of Sens knew only too well how to secure a building contract and then get his own way. The story could have been spun very differently by a less sympathetic narrator, but the outcome was the first ‘Early English’ structure in the country.

French and English articifers were … summoned, but … differed in opinion … Some undertook to repair the [fire-damaged] columns without mischief to the walls above. On the other hand, there were some who asserted that the whole church must be pulled down if the monks wished to live in safety … However, amongst the other workmen there had come a certain William of Sens [whom] they retained, on account of his lively genius and good reputation … He … carefully surveying the burnt walls … did yet for some time conceal what he found necessary to be done … and when he found that the monks began to be somewhat comforted, he ventured to confess that the pillars rent with fire and all that they supported must be destroyed if the monks wished to have a safe and excellent building. At length they agreed, being convinced by reason and wishing to have the work as good as he promised.
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William of Sens is believed to have worked previously on the abbey church of St Denis, near Paris, as well as the new cathedral at Sens in Burgundy, and his achievements at Canterbury were to influence, in turn, the master mason responsible for the rebuilding at Lincoln from the 1180s onwards. Similarly, in the early thirteenth century, Salisbury Cathedral drew heavily on the contemporary reconstructions of both Lincoln and Wells, almost certainly through the use of shared personnel. By the later middle ages, several master masons are known by name, among them William Ramsey (died 1349) who worked on St Stephen’s chapel in Westminster Palace and the cathedrals at Lichfield and London (St Paul’s), and Henry Yevele (died 1400), whose work embraced (besides some bridges, as we saw in the previous chapter) Westminster Abbey, Canterbury Cathedral and St Paul’s. By such means were architectural ideas spread across the country: even the beating-up by local rivals of William Colchester, a southern master mason previously at Westminster Abbey who was appointed to York in 1405, did not prevent his remaining in charge until 1419, overseeing new buttresses to the tower and (internally) new stone screens, all in Perpendicular style.
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Much of the best work left by these men can only be seen inside the buildings and so is outside the scope of a study of the landscape as a whole. However, towers and (less frequently) spires allowed cathedrals
and other great churches to advertise their presence far and wide, while also posing some of the greatest problems to medieval masons and their patrons. Chichester’s south-west tower, adorning its west front, fell down in 1210; Lincoln’s central tower, completed about 1200, had partially collapsed within four decades; Ely’s Norman central tower did so in 1322; Durham’s central tower had to be rebuilt after destruction by fire following a lightning strike on Easter Day, 1459; Salisbury’s slender spire of the early fourteenth century would have long since gone but for ingenious reinforcement by Sir Christopher Wren and others. But such was their symbolic importance in pointing the way to heaven and emphasizing the Church’s authority over those on earth below that enthusiasm for towers and spires was unabated: and since they were not strictly necessary to the performance of the liturgy, they could be added as separate projects whenever funds permitted. So the three towers of Lincoln Cathedral, visible over much of the county, are later additions to a largely twelfth- and thirteenth-century structure: the present central tower was completed between 1306 and 1311, the two western towers followed about 1400. Salisbury’s tower and spire were not finished until two generations or so after the rest of the building. Durham’s present central tower belongs to the 1460s to 1480s, much later than most of the church. Similarly, the three spires at Lichfield, erected over central and twin western towers in the first two decades of the fourteenth century, were late additions to a church predominantly in an earlier style.
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Scarcely less impressive were the façades added to the west ends of cathedrals and other great churches, often adorned with statues of Christ and the saints and invariably intended to overawe approaching pilgrims and worshippers as they headed for the entrance to the nave. Their impact was sometimes enhanced not only vertically through the addition of western towers but also horizontally by extending them well beyond the width of the nave and aisles concealed behind. The west front of Wells Cathedral, built in the 1230s, is packed with statues in niches, and flanked by twin towers – themselves late additions – which stand outside the lines of the outer walls of the church itself. The enlargement of the west front at Lincoln Cathedral, in the following decade, with room for a chapel and courtroom in the spaces behind the screen which outflanked the main structure, created a comparable effect.
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There was ostentation in all this, but even today these buildings have the power to inspire reverence and awe. Buildings of such magnificence, breadth and height, soaring towards the heavens, must have seemed miraculous in their style, in their scale and in the messages they conveyed about the relationship of God to Man and the Church’s role as intermediary between the two.

Cathedrals had to be managed as landed corporations and – like the religious houses discussed in the earlier part of this chapter – as the profitability of their estates declined in the later middle ages, so did the scale of their building ambitions. With the exception of Bath, every medieval cathedral in England retains a fair proportion of work from before the fourteenth century: it was far too costly to be replaced. The point is worth stressing, because this could not be said of local churches, any number of which survive with little trace of their pre-1300 structures surviving. The contrast takes us to the heart of the difference between cathedrals on the one hand, with their regional (diocesan) role, and local churches on the other. Some of these had the status of ‘parish churches’, with obligations to their surrounding localities – their designated parishes – and entitlements to draw income from them. Others were administratively dependent upon parish churches and so are conventionally called ‘chapels’. But all were the servants, and the products, of their local communities and wherever a local community had the will and the means to rebuild – at any stage in the middle ages – its church or chapel would reflect that commitment.

Although the conversion of Anglo-Saxon England to Christianity during and after the seventh century was accomplished from regional ‘minster churches’, staffed by teams of clergy who went out to engage in missionary activity, the parish system was developing by the tenth century as a means of organising and sustaining local church provision. The story of how an ecclesiastical network which in 900 had been dominated by minsters came by 1100 to be largely replaced by one of local churches is a complex one which has been expertly told elsewhere.
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Suffice it to say here that there was an interplay of factors such as lords’ wishes to exercise greater control over assets on their manors, a growing wish to identify with local church buildings as communities began to settle at fixed locations, and – after the Norman Conquest – enhanced efforts by bishops to exercise control over their clergy through a closely defined administrative system. All this worked in favour of the subdivision of large ‘mother-parishes’ – focused on churches which could seem distant, run by priests not readily called to account – into several small ones each with an identifiable ‘parish priest’ serving his own local flock. This process did not happen everywhere – the huge parishes which survived until the Industrial Revolution in much of north-west England show the tenacity of the older system – but where it took place it involved, at one level, the diversion of revenues from the central minster to the parish church, and, at another, the increasing devolution to the localities of rights to baptize and bury the laity. Of most relevance to this book is the major impact of all this
on ecclesiastical building, since while old minster churches continued in being, usually serving parishes much reduced in extent, many new places of worship were required.

By the late eleventh century, it seems clear that most villages, and all towns, had at least one church. Domesday Book is inconsistent in its coverage and omitted many places of worship known from other sources, but still mentions more than 2,000 ‘churches’, ‘priests’ or ‘priests with churches’. It has been estimated that over half of all parish churches in England on the eve of the Industrial Revolution were already in existence (albeit as earlier structures) by 1080. There was clearly a concern that ecclesiastical provision should keep pace with demand: in Worcestershire, where the phenomenon has been studied, a correlation has been found between the recorded populations in Domesday Book and the size of the naves of local churches at that time. According to the chronicler William of Malmesbury, the incoming French lords were largely responsible for this building endeavour: ‘the standard of religion everywhere in England has been raised by their arrival: you may see everywhere churches … rising on a new style of architecture; and with new devotion our country flourishes.’ William’s contemporary, Orderic Vitalis, wrote in similar vein. But while the Norman Conquest undoubtedly gave impetus both to the endowment of monasteries and to the building or rebuilding of parish churches in towns and countryside alike, these comments unfairly neglect the efforts made in the two generations prior to the Conquest.
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