Part 14

But the towers were not built. The Ely monks over the way were building a nave with no less than twelve bays, and with a western transept as well. The Peterborough monks would not like to be outdone by Ely; so they determined also to have a long nave and a western transept as well. They built only ten bays to the twelve of Ely; on the other hand, their nave, excluding western transept, was 211 feet long, while that of Ely was only 208 feet. About the same time, or probably a little earlier, the clerestory of the nave—in which pointed arches occur—was built. All this work may be assigned to Abbot Benedict (1175-1193), who is said by Swapham and John to have built the whole nave as far as—but not including—the present west front. The statements of Swapham, however, must be wrong here. He was still living _c._ 1240; so that he was only a boy when the nave was finished. He may possibly in his boyhood have seen the clerestory of the nave built, and, in writing half a century after, have thought that Benedict who built the clerestory, had built the triforium and ground-story also. But the documentary evidence at Peterborough must be received with the utmost scepticism. All that we know for certain is that the choir and the eastern portions of the central transepts were built between 1118 and 1140; and that the central transept, central tower, nave and western transept were built between 1140 and 1190.

III. LANCET (1190-1245).—The east end of the church consisted of three parallel apses. The apses of the aisles were now replaced by narrow oblong bays: those next to the New Building.

In the middle of the Lancet period was erected the grand façade in front of the Transitional western transept. It is not so much a façade, however, as an open portico or piazza. Several interesting engineering problems were involved. One was, how to keep up the three gigantic arches. If they had spread to north or south, the whole façade would have collapsed. To prevent their spreading, therefore, flanking towers were built to north and south; which in later days were weighted with spires. But there was a more serious danger. The two great isolated piers might be pushed outwards by the western thrust of the arches of the nave. These thrusts the builders stopped by building two towers; one over the westernmost bay of each aisle of the nave. The northern of these towers was soon after heightened; the other—the Bell Tower—remains low. The central gable had to be narrow, because it is the termination of the nave roof. The side-arches and side-gables had to be wide, to span the space from the nave to the sides of the Transitional façade behind. Though much narrower, however, the central gable rises as high as the lateral gables, being made to spring at a higher level; and it is made to look as important as the broad side-gables by being given the company of two powerful pinnacles. Thus the main features of this magnificent design are due to difficulties of planning and construction. The design is said to be drawn from Lincoln; it is more likely that it is an amplification of John de Cella’s lovely design for the west front of St. Albans. Abbot Acharius, who may well have commenced the work (1200-1210) had been Prior of St. Albans under John de Cella. Judging from the billet and nebula ornament on the gables, and from the arcading, in which semicircular arches and round-headed trefoils occur, the façade was designed in the very beginning of the thirteenth century.

The west front of Peterborough has been severely criticised, especially by Mr. Pugin. To many it will ever seem the highest effort of English art, and to be at once the most original and most successful façade either in English or in Continental Gothic. Yet, magnificent and poetic as it is, we have not the full effect contemplated by the mediæval builders. They meant to have four towers, not three. The north-west tower was once crowned by a wooden spire; we may be sure that there would have been a spire also on the south-west tower. Add, too, in the background, the tall spire which was to be added to the central tower, and you have a group before which even Lichfield and Lincoln would pale into insignificance. But, even curtailed as it is, the design attains the sublime. When first its Titanic arches rose into the blue sky, its builders may well have repeated the psalmist’s words: “Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of Glory shall come in.” They had built a worthy portal to the House of the Almighty.

IV. GEOMETRICAL (1245-1315).—In this period the bell tower was carried up; and a magnificent Lady chapel was built (_c._ 1290), like that at Bristol, to the north of the choir, but detached from it. It could not be built east of the choir, as a high road passed close to the apse. This Lady chapel was pulled down in the seventeenth century for the sake of its materials.

V. CURVILINEAR.—In this period the weight of the Norman tower, which had of course very thick walls, and was three or four stories high, was found to be too much for the exceptionally weak piers on which it stood. Warned, perhaps, by the fate of the central towers of Ely and Wells, both of which collapsed about this time, they took down the Norman tower, and built a new one (which has recently been rebuilt), much lighter and much lower. And they strengthened its eastern and western semicircular arches by inserting pointed arches beneath them. The south-west spire was also built—a design of exquisite beauty.

VI. PERPENDICULAR.—The monks wanted to have a Galilee porch, and they inserted one between the piers of the west front, where it was constructionally useful by keeping the piers from bulging in. The wooden screens were now inserted in the central transept.

Peterborough, after 1116, seems to have had a singular immunity from fire; so, very unlike Norwich, the monks did not take the slightest trouble to make their church fireproof. The whole of the high roofs are of wood. That of the nave may possibly be the original twelfth-century ceiling. A twelfth-century wooden roof still covers the Bishop’s Palace at Hereford. The choir has a wooden vault of the fifteenth century.

VIII. In another respect the history of the church is uneventful. The eastern limb must have been exceedingly inconvenient, for there was no processional aisle or ambulatory round the apse. Every other large church pulled down or altered its eastern limb to suit the ritual: the Peterborough monks, always conservative and always behind the times, did not provide a processional aisle till the latter days of Gothic. And even then they took a very long time about it. The works seems to have been suspended in 1471, and not resumed till 1496. Even then, good conservatives that they were, they did not pull down the apse, but erected the New Building round it. It is a rich specimen of TUDOR work, with a fan vault.

IX. In the matter, too, of the roof-drainage the Peterborough monks were slow to move. Instead of dripping eaves they constructed gutters and parapets to the aisles in the early years of the thirteenth century, and to the apse a little later. It was not till _c._ 1330 that they provided the high roofs of nave and choir with gutters and parapets; and, with their wonted conservatism, they retained the Norman corbel-table.

X. What the monks cared most about was the lighting of the church. This they were always trying to improve. In the thirteenth century they inserted large geometrical windows in the western transept, and _c._ 1290 others in the aisles of the central transepts to light the altars placed there. Moreover, the Norman windows in the aisles of the nave were replaced by wide windows of five lights. In the Curvilinear period the triforium windows were transformed, and charming flowing tracery, with rear-arches, was inserted in the windows of the apse, which then looked into the open air, but now look into the New Building. In the Perpendicular period some seventy-five windows were either enlarged or filled with rectilinear tracery. The builders certainly achieved their object. The cathedral is well lighted. We may be thankful that they did not stick a great Perpendicular window in each end of the central transept.

XI. In 1541 the church was made a cathedral on the new foundation. Henry VIII. is said to have preserved it as a mausoleum to his first wife, Catharine of Arragon, who is buried in the choir. It is wretchedly built—the west front and the New Building as badly as the Norman work—and practically without foundations. Much underpinning has been done, and more is required. The west front has been saved for the present by judicious treatment.

The Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Wilfrid, Ripon.

Ripon minster has passed through strange vicissitudes. It was founded _c._ 660 as a monasterium or minster for Scottish monks attached to the Celtic church. Soon afterwards it was taken away from them and granted to the famous St. Wilfrid. In 678 the church became a cathedral, but only during the lifetime of Bishop Eadhed. Ultimately it passed into the hands of regular canons of the Augustinian Order. It was dissolved with the other collegiate churches by Edward VI. It was made collegiate once more by James I., but with dean and prebendaries instead of Augustinian canons. In 1836, for the second time, it became a cathedral.

I. Both the minsters built by St. Wilfrid—Ripon and Hexham—retain their crypts. He was a Romaniser in architecture as in ritual, and well acquainted with Italy. So his seventh-century church at Ripon was modelled after the early Christian basilicas which he had seen at Rome. Like them, it had a confessionary or crypt, which still exists, beneath the central tower; like them, it was orientated to the west. He seems even to have brought over Italian masons to direct or to execute the work, for the crypt is vaulted, and the vaulting is of excellent construction; the masonry is smooth, and is covered “with a fine and very hard plaster which takes a polish.” At its west end was the altar, at its east end an aperture through which a glimpse of the interior might be obtained from the Saxon nave. Round the walls are little niches in which lights were placed. “St. Wilfrid’s Needle” is merely a niche with the back knocked through. Similar Saxon crypts remain at Hexham and Wing, and a Norman crypt at St. Peter-in-the-East, Oxford. They usually consisted of a small central chamber, with a passage all round it. There were two staircases descending from either side of the nave; pilgrims went down one flight of steps, proceeded along the passage, getting a glimpse of the relics through openings in the wall of the central chamber, and then returned up the other flight of steps into the nave.

IV. NORMAN.—Early in the twelfth century a Norman cathedral seems to have been built, wholly or in part, by Archbishop Thurstan. Of this there remains only an apsidal building, with crypt beneath, on the south side of the south aisle of the present choir. An eleventh-century chapel formerly existed, with crypt beneath it, in precisely the same situation at Worcester; there is a twelfth-century chapel in the same position in Oxford cathedral. In Oxford this chapel was the Lady chapel. It may be that the Ripon chapel also may have been a Lady chapel. For if the Norman choir was of the same length eastward as at present, it would have been impossible to build a Lady chapel of the type of that, the crypt of which still exists at Winchester, to the east of the choir; the ground falls far too steeply eastward. Moreover, the so-called Lady loft now existing would seem, from its name, to be merely an upper story added to a Lady chapel. This Norman chapel formerly opened into the Norman church; traces of the arches may be seen in the walls. In the buttress is a curious room which may have been a sacristy, a lavatory, a prison, or an anchorite’s cell, like the one in the east end of Ludlow church.

V. TRANSITIONAL.—From 1154 to 1181 there ruled at York a man of the greatest energy and power—Archbishop Roger. He condemned his two Norman churches at York and Ripon; made no attempt, as at Peterborough and Ely, to improve them; simply pulled them down, and started again _de novo_. The two new minsters seem to have been somewhat similar: both had square east ends, both had exceptionally broad naves. But Ripon minster was merely the church of Augustinian canons, therefore it was not planned in cathedral fashion. Our ancient collegiate and parish churches seem to have followed some other model than the early Christian basilicas which furnished the plans of the cathedrals. Most of our parish churches originally were without aisles; and even large churches of the regular canons frequently had no aisles to the nave. This was the case in Roger’s new church at Ripon, and at Bolton Priory (also Augustinian). Later on, indeed, the Ripon canons added north and south aisles to their nave, and the Bolton canons a north aisle to their nave—they could not add a south aisle also, as they had a cloister to the south. But originally both churches had aisleless naves. That of Ripon was 40 feet broad—broader than any nave in England, except York, which is of the breadth of 45 feet. The combination of unaisled nave and aisled choir must have produced a very remarkable interior; quite unlike anything now existing in England, but to be paralleled by the Spanish cathedral at Gerona (illustrated in Street’s “Gothic Architecture of Spain”).

Of this Transitional nave nothing is now left except two fragments, one at the east, and one at the west end on either side. All the rest has been replaced by sixteenth-century piers, arches, and clerestory. But if in imagination the two ends of the Transitional nave are joined together—it is well to do so in an actual drawing—the design of the whole of the original nave can be recovered with exactitude. A very remarkable design it was. It consisted of three stories; the lower story was simply a blank wall. The second, the triforium, was merely a passage in the thickness of the wall, ornamented in front by a tall pointed arcade. The clerestory had three tall slender lancet windows in each bay, all of the same height, separated by two detached piers. The strangest feature of the nave was that neither in the ground-story nor in the triforium were there any windows. Everywhere else people were trying to get all the windows possible into their churches; here alone a “dim, religious light” was preferred. And filtering in, as it did, through small lancet windows at a great height, as in Pugin’s cathedral at Killarney, the effect must have been most dramatic. The destruction of this unique nave is one of the heaviest losses that English architecture has sustained.

Of the central tower, the south-east pier has been rebuilt; the north-east and south-west piers have been cased. The north and west arches of the tower survive; the south and east arches have been rebuilt. The nave was considerably wider than the central aisle of the choir; the tower was therefore not built square; the northern arch being set obliquely, and not parallel to the southern one. Outside, however, the north side of the tower is corbelled out till the tower becomes square.

The design of the choir is best seen in the east side of the north transept, which retains the original round-headed windows. In the choir the western windows of the north aisle were converted into lancets in the thirteenth century. The design of transept and choir is almost Greek in its severity. Very effective is the contrast of broad wall-surface and plain splayed window with the light and slender shafted arcades of triforium and clerestory. In proportions, too, it is superior to nearly all later designs. The pier-arches are tall and narrow, and the triforium thoroughly subordinated to the tall clerestory; the proportions approximate closely to those of Westminster Abbey and Beverley Minster. It is remarkable, too, for the studied absence of foliated ornament. Not that the builders could not design a foliated capital; they have left one or two, in unnoticed corners of the north transept, to show their powers. All the capitals of the choir are moulded capitals, as at Roche Abbey—perhaps occurring here for the first time. Being a first attempt, they can hardly be considered a success; they were soon to be improved upon in the French crypt of Canterbury. The designer relied on architectural effects pure and simple, and was followed in his ascetic self-restraint sixty years later in the eastern transept of Fountains and at Salisbury. Even more remarkable is the complete abolition of Norman ornament. The billet, the zigzag, the whole barbaric congeries of Norman ornament is contemptuously cast aside. In this respect, indeed, Ripon is much more advanced than Canterbury choir, which was not commenced till 1174. The clerestory, however, is of a familiar Norman type, being an adaptation of that of Romsey and Waltham Abbey, and Peterborough and Oxford cathedrals; it was reproduced a little later in Hexham choir.

The vaulting-shafts rest on the abaci, French fashion. In the choir there are five vaulting-shafts, which in the clerestory diminish to one. The effect is not satisfactory, and a different treatment is adopted in the transept. It is noteworthy that the vaulting of the north transept aisle contains an exceptionally early example of ridge-ribs, both longitudinal and transverse.

In spite of round-headed windows and round-headed arches here and there, the whole design of the interior is light and graceful, thoroughly Gothic. Externally it is just the reverse; but for a pointed arcade in the clerestory one might imagine one was back again in the early days of the twelfth century. But when one compares the interior with that of Oxford Cathedral, which is precisely contemporary, and in which the spirit of Gothic is wholly absent, suspicion rises to certainty: Ripon Minster must have been designed under French influence. The tall, acute, pointed pier-arches of Notre Dame, Chalons-sur-Marne, and Sens (commenced _c._ 1140) reappear in Ripon choir, and the undoubtedly French choir of Canterbury. The Chalons triforium reappears in the north wall of Ripon transept; the Chalons clerestory in that of Ripon nave. The clerestory of Ripon choir is practically that of the French choir of Canterbury, itself probably suggested by that of Sens. French too, are the vaulting-shafts of the choir, insecurely balancing on the abaci; and the broadness and plain splays of the windows.

IV. LANCET.—To this period belong the vaulting and piers of the present chapter-house; and the west front, which, like York transept and Southwell choir, is attributed to Archbishop Gray (_ob._ 1255). The west front is too flat; deficient in play of light and shade; correct and uninteresting. It is ruined by the loss of its wooden spires, removed in 1664; and by the miserable little pinnacles put up in 1797. Before the aisles were built, these towers projected clear of the nave, their inner walls are Transitional; but the Transitional arch has been taken out and replaced by one of the Lancet period.

V. GEOMETRICAL.—The lower row of lancets in the west front once had charming tracery, inserted early in the Geometrical period. This was destroyed by Scott.

About 1280 the east end of the choir seems to have collapsed—partly, perhaps, in consequence of the steep fall of the ground eastwards. It was rebuilt, with the damaged portions of the choir, with exceptional strength in consequence. The east end is a vigorous, massive design, something like that of Guisborough or Selby. Only the eastern portion of the choir has flying buttresses. The clerestory windows have an inner arcade. Ripon choir alone, of English cathedrals, possesses a glazed triforium, the lean-to roof of the aisles having been replaced by a flat roof (see ELY).

VI. To the CURVILINEAR period (1315-1360) belong the Lady loft and the sedilia. The latter originally stood one bay more to the west. In the Tudor period the arches of the sedilia seem to have received the present clumsy shafts.

VII. PERPENDICULAR (1360-1485).—In 1458 the southern and eastern sides of the central tower collapsed, greatly damaging the adjacent parts of the choir and transept, as well as the stalls. The eastern aisle of the south transept and much of the south side of the choir, as well as part of the tower, had to be rebuilt; and about 1490 the present choir-stalls were put up. In the choir the builders, with a conservatism which does them credit, both in the work of 1280 and in that of 1458, preserved all they could of the twelfth-century work, and both in the Geometrical and the Perpendicular bays of the triforium retained the semicircular arch of the older design. The result is a curious blend of styles. Starting from the east, the first pier on the north side is Geometrical, the rest Transitional. On the south side the first pier is Geometrical, the second Transitional, the third and fourth Perpendicular. To give more support to the tower, the north-east and south-west piers were cased; the south-east pier was rebuilt, and the southern and eastern arches were rebuilt. To strengthen the eastern piers of the tower, the two western bays of the arcade of the choir were blocked up, and a massive choir-screen was inserted _c._ 1480.

VIII. TUDOR.—Early in the sixteenth century the canons unhappily determined to give their unique church more of the look of a cathedral by adding aisles to the nave. It is pleasant to add that they were unsuccessful. The nave is exceedingly low in proportion to its exceptional span, and being, moreover, unprovided with a triforium, does not look in the least like a cathedral, but like a very inferior parish church. Externally, the buttresses are of fine composition, and if the pinnacles were completed, the nave would be very handsome externally.

In 1593 the central spire—of timber and lead—was struck by lightning, and in 1660 it was removed. It was 120 feet high. In 1664, for fear of a similar catastrophe, the western spires also were removed. The result is that, seen from a distance, _minus_ spires and _minus_ pinnacles, Ripon Minster is stunted and squat.

The Cathedral Church of St. Andrew, Rochester.

Rochester and London, next to Canterbury, are the oldest of all the English bishoprics, unless, indeed, we are prepared to accept a pre-Augustine bishopric of Hereford. St. Augustine, soon after his landing in 597, came to preach at Rochester. His reception was not encouraging; the rude people hung fish-tails to his coat. Wherefore in anger the saint prayed “that the Lord would smite them _in posteriora_ to their everlasting ignominy. So that not only on their own but on their successors’ persons similar tails grew ever after.” The worst of it was that the story spread, and not only Rochester people but all English folk were believed on the Continent to be _caudati_ (tailed). So that even in the sixteenth century “an Englishman now cannot travel in another land by way of merchandise or any other honest occupying, but it is most contumeliously thrown in his teeth that all Englishmen have tails.”

Among St. Augustine’s Italian missioners were St. Justus and St. Paulinus. St. Justus became first bishop of Rochester in 604. St. Paulinus, after eight years of mission work in Northumbria, became bishop of Rochester in 633. The first English bishop was St. Ythamar (644-655). These three were the chief local saints of Rochester in early days.