The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (18 page)

Four years after the consecration of the choir, Abbot Serlo passed away and was succeeded by Abbot Peter and then by Abbot William. Under the abbacy of William, the nave—the foot of the cross—was completed, so that the congregation might have somewhere to stand as they listened to the chanting of the monks in the choir. Stretching away toward the west, it was as dark as the sanctuary of Abbot Serlo, and its massive arcades were ornamented with chevrons of a savage simplicity.

And then Abbot William passed away and was succeeded by Abbot de Lacy and Abbot Hameline. In the year of Our Lord 1179, Abbot Hameline passed on and was succeeded by Abbot Carbonel, and then Abbot Blunt; and then Abbot Blunt died and was succeeded by Abbot Foliot.

In the time of Abbot Foliot, a tower was raised above the crossing, where the nave and the choir, the foot and head of the cross, met the transepts—the cross’s arms. It was also at this time that the nave was given a new vault, whose pointed arches, slender ribs, and high clerestories relieved some of the heaviness of the ancient architecture.

And when the new vaulting of the nave was complete (but before work could begin on the rest of the abbey), Abbot Foliot died and was succeeded by Abbot John de Felda and then Abbot de Gamages; and when Abbot de Gamages died in 1306, he was succeeded by Abbot Thokey, who received the body of the murdered King Edward II and
laid him to rest in the abbey. Soon afterward, Abbot Thokey resigned the abbacy and was succeeded by Abbot Wigmore, who, it is said in the
Historia
of the abbey, “took much delight in working with his own hands, both in mechanical arts as well as in embroidery.”

It was not long before the wonderful tomb of Edward II erected in the time of Abbot Thokey began to perform wonders, and it was not long before people came to see it in hope of cure and aid. The Purbeck marble of the sarcophagus and even the alabaster face of the king himself are still marked with crosses the pilgrims carved there. Soon, the monks recorded, “the offerings of the faithful and the devotion which the people showed for King Edward who had been buried in the church were such that the city of Gloucester could scarcely hold the multitude of people flowing together there from the cities, towns, and villages and hamlets of England.” The shrine of Edward II glowed and hummed with prayer, a tiny seed germinating in the dark choir of the abbey.

And in the time of Abbot Wigmore, who loved embroidery, the delicate tomb of Edward II spawned the first of its offspring. Soon, the pilgrims who came to gaze upon the tiny shrine of Edward II found themselves inside its progeny: a gigantic reproduction of the original. The new structure was so large, in fact, that it necessitated the partial demolition of the southern transept of the church. The masons broke down the end wall of the transept and replaced it with a huge tapestry of stone and colored glass, through which light flooded into an interior that had hitherto been dark. They replaced the original vault that had covered the transept with a complex triangular mesh of ribs; and then they added new clerestory windows, whose four-centered arches and stiff grid of traceries were ornamented with delicate trefoils. Finally, they embroidered the blank walls of the transept with the same grid of tracery as the windows, so that from some angles it was impossible to tell where the windows ended and the walls began.

It was a complex and delicate task, and the signs of the struggle may still be seen. All that lightening of the ancient structure had reduced its ability to support what was above it. At some stage during the work, the masons realized that the abbey tower was now in danger of collapsing into the transept, and they devised a huge buttress to
support it. It was an emergency measure; but rather than hide it away, the masons allowed this diagonal shaft of stone to slice right through the delicate cage of traceries they had made, so that everyone would see and remember that their ingenuity had averted a disaster. Medieval building was always, to some extent, experimental, relying as it did on margins of safety and rules of thumb derived from experience rather than engineering calculation. The flying buttress that slashes through the south transept at Gloucester shows just how experimental it was.

Experimental, and dangerous: another story is told in the south transept on a tiny scale. Affixed to one of the walls is a small stone bracket made in the form of a mason’s T square. It is thought that it once supported an image of Saint Barbara, whom the masons often invoked to protect them from wind and fire. The top of the bracket is crowned with minute castellations, as if it were the roof of a great building, and its underside is carved with a miniature reproduction of a ribbed vault. A tiny figure of a beardless apprentice clings in desperation to this vault, while his master looks on in horror: it appears that the apprentice is about to fall to a certain death on the abbey floor. It happened to masons all the time, but no one thought to record the names of their dead in the
Historia
of the abbey they had built.

W
HEN THE TOMB
of Edward II and the southern transept of Gloucester Abbey were finished, Abbot Wigmore was laid to rest, and he was succeeded by Abbot Staunton. In the time of Abbot Staunton, Edward III came to pay his respects at the tomb of his father, and he brought his whole court with him. It was a profitable visit for the abbey. Edward donated a model ship made of gold, in thanks for a safe passage across the sea; his queen, Philippa, gave a golden heart and an ear, in thanks for the cure of some malady or other; and their son, Prince Edward, gave the shrine a cross made of the same material. It is thought that King Edward III saw the offspring of his father’s tomb in the southern transept of the abbey church and desired that the monks and the masons transform the choir where his father was laid in a similar manner.

And so the southern transept of the abbey, which had been generated
from the tomb of Edward II, generated its own descendant. The masons started work under the central tower, where all the arms of the cross met one another. Again they took away the ancient ceiling, and again they replaced it with a new vault; but they had learned some lessons from their work in the southern transept. This new vault was even more complex than the one they had made before, and its many ribs sprouted from elaborate bosses carved with angels and saints and wild men of the woods. The new ceiling appeared to be less a structure of stone, resting on heavy walls, than a canopy of creepers hanging in a luminous forest.

When the crossing was complete, Abbot Staunton was taken to God, and Abbot Horton took office in his stead. In the time of Abbot Horton, the new vault was extended toward the semicircular apse of the original choir, where the high altar stood. The masons demolished the apse, replacing it with a great window, the largest in the world at the time; it was so enormous that it had to be reinforced with two tall buttresses lest the wind blast it in. At the heart of this window the glaziers put an image of the Virgin Mary receiving the crown of heaven from her Son. Angels fluttered in the sunny panels above her, and below her the saints, the prelates of the church, and the kings of England stood in multitudinous array. Below these notables were ranked the coats of arms of the nobles and the knights who had fought for King Edward III at the Battle of Crécy.

And just as they had done in the transept, the masons now draped and embroidered the walls of the choir with the same paneling that divided the great window. A screen of narrow shafts and tiny trefoils of stone made it impossible to tell what was window, what was arcade, and what was wall. It was as if the vault above had spread its tendrils down over the heavy walls of the choir, dissolving it into a cage of thin stone ribs webbed with colored glass and sparkling with light. The grandchild of the tomb of Edward II had learned from its predecessors and had evolved into forms and languages of even greater elegance and elaboration.

The refurbished choir of Gloucester Abbey was descended from the heavenly mansion that floated over the body of Edward II; but its habitat was an earthly building of thick walls and heavy arcades, and the difficulties of adapting heaven to earth are apparent everywhere.
While the body of the choir is a model of celestial order, the aisles that run on either side of it are a jumble of mismatched architectures: blocked openings, seemingly random demolitions, and improvised junctions.

Medieval building was rarely, if ever, the simple implementation of a preconceived design. Buildings were not drawn or modeled in their totality before work began on site, and much was therefore left to chance and ingenuity. At the same time, large structures took so long to build that no one generation could ever hope to see them completed in their own lifetime. As a consequence, medieval architecture is almost always the result of a slow collective process of adaptation, rather than the invention of an individual genius.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the crossing at Gloucester, where the walls of the choir, with their narrowly spaced supporting columns, met the wider transepts. This was a structural problem, born out of the misfit between the existing shell of the building and the new design evolving inside it, and it left the vaults of the crossing—and the tower above them—with nothing to rest upon but thin air. It was, perhaps, a miscalculation; but just as they had done before, the masons decided not to conceal their problem but to celebrate it. They decided to make it seem as if their vault was indeed floating on almost nothing at all. They spanned an arch of almost impossible thinness and lightness over the opening of the transept, and then they balanced a tiny pedestal at the apex of this arch. The massive load of the tower came down the ribs of the vault, through the tiny pedestal and the delicate arch, and safely to the ground; but the ribs showed no strain whatsoever, fanning out from the pedestal as if they were dancing around the head of a pin. The masons had taken an intractable problem of engineering and construction and had conjured an illusory moment of angelic grace.

W
HEN THE CHOIR
of Gloucester Abbey was complete, King Edward III died, and Abbot Horton took to his bed, and he was succeeded by Abbot Boyfield. It was in the time of Abbot Boyfield that King Richard II came to stay at the abbey. He prayed at the shrine of Edward II and embellished it with his ensign of the white hart—in
memory, perhaps, of the creatures that had drawn the king’s hearse from Berkeley Castle to Gloucester. He even wrote to the pope proposing that Edward II be canonized.

When Abbot Boyfield was taken to God, he was succeeded by Abbot Froucester. And in the time of Abbot Froucester, the choir of Gloucester Abbey, which was the child of the southern transept, which was the child of the tomb of Edward II, spawned a further descendant: a cloister of four walks surrounding a central garden.

On one side of these walks, a luminous grid of windows looked into the garth; on the other, a solid stone wall hid the secular functions of the abbey. The masons covered every surface of the new cloister with the same traceries they had employed in the transformation of the choir, so that it was impossible to tell what was wall and what was window. Indeed, so elaborate was this masking that it was possible to imagine even the heavy vault above the cloister walks as a skeleton of stone ribs, webbed with a skin of glowing glass.

But there was an additional elaboration here in the cloister, a further step in the evolution of the tomb’s descendants. The vaults above the tomb of Edward II, and the vaults in the new southern transept and in the refurbished choir, were all essentially just barrel-shaped tunnels intersected at right angles by other tunnels; but the masons vaulted the walks of the cloister in a completely different manner. In between each cloister window they placed a thin shaft of stone, and from this shaft emerged a conical fan of ribs, which unfolded above each window. Each of these fans met its neighbor tangentially, so that the cloister walks read as an avenue of palm trees with spreading fronds rather than a crossing of tunnels. Indeed, it was almost impossible to imagine that this was the work of the same masons who had made the transepts and the choir.