Part 17

The success of the exterior of Salisbury depends, not on the littlenesses of architectural design, but on the great leading factors of any really great style—vastness of scale, yet further enhanced to the eye by multiplicity of parts; bold handling of the masses, combined nevertheless into a symmetrical whole: unity, harmony, proportion, shadow-effects. Beside these elemental factors, sculptured ornament is but “mint and cummin.”

Straighten out Salisbury cathedral, in imagination, till Lady chapel and retro-choir and eastern transept and choir and central transept and nave are all in one long straight line. Then let it resume its shape, and you will see what is meant by “bold handling of the masses,” and the difference it makes. Nevertheless, don’t go away with the idea that the lines of Salisbury cathedral were pulled about in this way for picturesqueness’ sake—for the sake of effect. The Gothic architects—_pace_ Peterborough west front—did not design for effect. All the parts of the building are there either for some constructional or for some ritualistic reason. A big central tower will not stand without abutment to the north and south; therefore there has to be a central transept. The long stretch of clerestory wall—at Salisbury unbuttressed externally—will be all the better for the support of two transepts and a lofty porch: they are added. Transepts, moreover, are useful in providing chapel-room for various great saints of Christendom, as well as for the local saints of the cathedral. The porch is useful as providing neutral ground for various functions—half religious, half secular; the porch is added. And so with the chapter-house. Every one of the appanages which make a Gothic exterior so picturesque was built, not because it would be picturesque, but because it would be useful.

And see what pits and abysses of shadow lurk behind each projecting buttress, and still more in each deep sound that runs inland, like some Norwegian fiord, between towering precipices on either side. But these grand shadow-effects—varying from minute to minute as the sun moves round—varying from day to day as summer treads on spring, autumn on summer—were not in the designer’s first intent. The projecting masses had to be there; the play of light and shadow which ensued, he did not plan; he only welcomed it. He had little control over it; in the windows, indeed, which were within his control, he made the jambs so shallow that the windows are externally almost shadowless; almost the whole depth of the window he gave to the interior, preferring to enrich the interior of each window with an inner arcade—feeling, doubtless, that he need do nothing externally to add to the shadow-effects of the projecting buttresses.

But the life-blood of an architectural design is proportion. Unfortunately one never notices its presence. Only when a building is out of proportion does one recognise that such a thing as proportion exists. And as it is the most subtle, so it is the most important factor in design—design small or large—Salisbury cathedral, the Pandolphini Palace, a Chippendale chair, or a Wedgewood vase. Alter the shape of the vase, and see the difference. In the same way, see if you can lengthen or shorten Salisbury nave for the better, or the transepts, or the porch, or the Lady chapel; or if you could heighten the Lady chapel or retro-choir to advantage; or if you could make the roofs an inch more acute or more flat. The proportions of this, as of every really great building, are subtle in the extreme; they interlock in all directions. Each part—_e.g._, the Lady chapel—is in proportion to the cathedral taken as a whole; each part is in proportion to contiguous parts; and each individual bit of each part is in proportion to the rest of it: _e.g._, in the Lady chapel the length, breadth and height of the walls, the slope of the roof, the dimensions of the windows, etc., are all in proportion to the Lady chapel taken as a whole. More than that—the proportions of the nave, choir, transepts, etc., are those which are suitable to a church 473 feet long and 404 feet high. If you built a church with a nave, choir and transepts exactly twice as large as those of Salisbury, it would not be in proportion, but out of proportion. The same lack of proportion would ensue if you copied the design of Salisbury in a parish church of exactly half its dimensions. Salisbury cathedral, like the Parthenon, cannot be copied with impunity, unless you preserve every dimension unaltered. Modern designers, not recognising this, have too often wrought themselves disappointment by unintelligent imitations of ancient work.

To the north and south another charming effect is seen in the gradual growth of the ornament upward. This, again, is to the credit of Time, and not of Elias de Dereham. From 1220 to 1330 window-tracery was ever growing richer day by day, and Salisbury cathedral was ever growing upward. And so the ornament culminates most rightly, yet most accidentally, in the higher stories of the transepts, in the tower and spire.

Only one criticism suggests itself before we leave Salisbury cathedral as seen from the north-east. Are not the voids in excess—two windows in the aisles and three in the clerestory, where one would produce a much more monumental and solid effect? Such single windows, filled with the opaque grisaille glass of the period, would have subdued the glare of the interior. But I have not the slightest doubt that the critics of the day infinitely preferred the uniform good lighting of Salisbury to the “dim, religious light” of Lincoln and its darksome corners and recesses. In Salisbury there is not a quiet spot anywhere where you can pray in peace; the blinding light pursues you everywhere. But good people in those days liked a cheerful church—full of light, sparkling with stained glass, brilliant with gilding and paint: religious gloom had not yet become fashionable; it did not come in till the time of the Puritans. In every respect except the fenestration, in Salisbury, as in Lincoln Minster, internal seems to have been subordinated to external effect.

The interior is, indeed, very fine. It could hardly help being fine; a nave so spacious and so proportioned could under no circumstances be a failure. It is immensely high, and is long in proportion. The proportion of height to span (2½ to 1) is better than in most English churches. The harmony of the design—practically the same from east to west, and from north to south—is unique in England, and is most impressive. The charming way, too, in which the architect has contrived that we should have a vista of another miniature church in the Lady chapel—a cathedral within a cathedral—is worthy of all commendation. But, as in Lincoln nave, to the eye every support is alarmingly insufficient for the work it has to do; the piers are too tall and slender, the walls too thin, and pierced with too many openings. The triforium is a most unfortunate design: in harmony neither with the arcade below, nor with the clerestory above; its outer arches ugly in themselves and discordant with every other arch in the church; nor could it be expected that its dark marble shafts would tell against a dark background—black on black. Add to this the dreadfully new look of everything—partly due to the very perfection of the masonry, partly because Scott has been here—and the overpowering glare: one almost feels as if one were in the Crystal Palace. Of the west front it is as well to say nothing; it would take pages to contain the unkind things that have been said about it.

The Cathedral Church of St. Mary, Southwell.

Southwell Minster, as it is usually but incorrectly styled, was originally what is called a collegiate church. It is as if, in any parish church of unusual importance or with an exceptionally large population, there should be not one rector, as nowadays, but a dozen or so, this dozen being formed into a corporation, with a dean, precentor, chancellor and treasurer (the two first officials did not exist at Southwell). All the cathedrals of the old foundation had from the earliest time such a collegiate constitution as the above: viz., Chichester, Exeter, Hereford, Lichfield, Lincoln, London, Salisbury, Wells, and the four Welsh cathedrals. But all these were also cathedrals: _i.e._, they possessed a bishop’s chair (_cathedra_); Southwell did not become a cathedral—there was no bishop of Southwell—till the present reign.

Like the other ecclesiastical colleges—those of cathedrals excepted—that of Southwell was suppressed by Edward VI.; but under Queen Mary it had the good fortune to be reconstituted and re-endowed. Its sister church, Beverley minster, also a college of secular canons—_i.e._, priests not living under a monastic rule—became and has remained a parish church. The only collegiate churches remaining with their original constitution are Windsor, Westminster, Heytesbury, Middleham, and St. Katherine’s Hospital, London—omitting, of course, the cathedrals of the old foundation.

Though, however, there was till recently no bishop of Southwell, yet the church up to the Reformation was practically a cathedral. Just as the Bishop of Wells had at different times other cathedrals besides that of Wells—at one time at Bath, at another time at Glastonbury; and as the bishop of the Mercian diocese had at one time three chairs—viz., at Lichfield, Chester and Coventry—so the Archbishop of the immense northern kingdom of Northumbria required and possessed four cathedrals: viz., at York, Ripon, Beverley and Southwell. The latter was especially the cathedral of Nottinghamshire, as it has become once more. The archbishops had a palace at Southwell, of which the fine hall remains; Archbishop Sandys is buried in the minster.

I. In the seventh century St. Paulinus is said to have founded a church at Southwell. But long before his time—in the third century, or thereabouts—the Romans were at Southwell. There actually survives a tesselated pavement in the south transept which may well have belonged to a Romano-British basilica.

II. Two fragments have been carefully preserved and re-used from an early Norman church—it may even have been of Pre-Conquest date. One is a fragment of a lintel over a doorway in the north transept, depicting St. Michael and the Dragon and David throttling the lion. The other is a set of capitals on the eastern piers of the tower, now unfortunately covered up to make room for more organ pipes. (A mania for big organs is raging in our cathedrals: nothing short of the roar and rumble of an earthquake will bring people nowadays into a devotional frame of mind.)

III. Between 1109 and 1114 a new Norman church was begun. Of this the choir has disappeared. As the choir would be built first, 1120 is given as an approximate date for the transept and 1130 for the nave. The cable-mouldings, however, of the crossing and transepts, and the carving of the nave-capitals, are so rich and effective that the work is probably somewhat later. Indeed, the whole of the ornamentation is far ahead of that at Ely, Norwich and Peterborough, Tewkesbury or Gloucester. The carved capitals may be compared with those of the nave of Hereford. The interior of the nave is low and squat, but has been vastly improved by Mr. Christian’s semicircular ceiling. The piers are stumpy cylinders; the elevation is that of Malvern, or St. Bartholomew’s, Smithfield. Here there are none of the tall compound piers of Peterborough or Ely, still less the Brobdingnagian cylinders of Tewkesbury or Gloucester. Each bay of the triforium was to have been filled with the same kind of arcade as that of Romsey choir: viz., two small arches, with a small shaft rising from their point of intersection. (Projecting stones, intended for the arches and the shaft, may be seen in each bay.) The Romsey design was not a success even in the eyes of the Romsey people, for they tried five other designs in the triforium of their transept; and the Southwell canons very sensibly omitted this inner arcade. The clerestory, with its circular windows, is remarkable; the same design was worked out very beautifully, later on, in the north transept of Hereford.

From each transept projected eastward a two-storied apse (cf. Gloucester), the arches into which remain, and also the very noble arcade which opened into the upper chapel of the apse. It is noteworthy that the aisles are vaulted, as at Kirkstall, in oblong compartments—another mark of late date. The square broach spires of the west front—which, as well as the conical roof of the chapter-house, were restored by Mr. Christian on the authority of old prints—give the church quite a Rhenish appearance. The two big west windows of the towers are modern shams; originally these stages of the towers were, no doubt, solid. The north-west tower has a pointed arcade, and is therefore a little later than its neighbour, which has an intersecting arcade of semicircular arches. Originally the façade was just such a one as that which remains in St. Stephen’s, Caen.

A magnificent string-course of zigzag ornament runs along the nave and round the transepts. In places it has been taken out, reinserted in a different place or copied, when the Perpendicular windows were inserted in the aisle of the nave. In the south transept it takes the unusual form of a segmental arch over the Archbishop’s doorway. The great emphasis given to the horizontal lines of the Norman building is as remarkable here as at Salisbury. There are good examples of the “nebule” corbel-table with a later parapet, and of Norman pinnacles; one of these, over the porch, is hollow, and served as a chimney for the sacristan or sexton, who, it was enacted, “should lie within the church, to be at hand to ring the bells at the right time.” The gables of the transept have very effective zigzag, with interesting differences of treatment; the pinnacles of the transepts seem to have been removed at some time or other to the central tower, for which they are too small. There is a fine view of the whole exterior from the fields and gardens to the south-east.

IV. This fine Norman church only existed in its entirety for a century. Its eastern limb was less than half the length of the present choir, which was commenced _c._ 1230 by Archbishop Gray, who built the great transept of York and the west front of Ripon. The plan is practically that of Worcester, (the eastern portion of which was finished _c._ 1218), but on a humbler scale: viz., an aisled choir for the canons, a tiny eastern transept (such a one was still in existence in the Transitional choir of York), and a long presbytery, the two eastern bays of which were without aisles. Externally this gives a beautiful composition even now. Before its mutilation, the Southwell choir must have been one of the best mediæval designs in Europe. Unfortunately the roofs have been lowered, and in the flattened battlemented eastern gable a most misshapen window now appears. Originally there were no external flying-buttresses (cf. Salisbury); the clerestory wall began to bulge out; the high roofs of the eastern transepts were taken down, and external flying-buttresses were erected (_c._ 1355). Take these away, in imagination, raise roofs and gables to as sharp a pitch as those of Beverley and Lincoln, and you have a design as noble as it is simple. The alternation of aisled choir and unaisled presbytery with the fine projecting masses of the eastern transepts provides charming contrasts of light and shadow; the base-courses are almost as strong and emphatic as at Salisbury; the sharply chamfered buttresses, with their acute pyramidal caps—a reminiscence of Lincoln nave—are particularly effective. Contrary to Salisbury fashion, the windows are deeply recessed externally. The whole design is vigorous and original.

The interior of the choir is equally original and interesting. The architect seems to have thought that the vaults of the choir must rise no higher than the eastern arch of the tower. If so, he was mistaken; as may be seen at Norwich, where the choir rises much higher than the nave. His problem then was how to get the appearance without the reality of height in the triforium. The same problem had troubled the Norman builders at Dunstable, Jedburgh, and Oxford; they had solved it by constructing a lofty pier-arcade, and then building the triforium _beneath_ it. The Norman builders at Steyning, and the architects of Southwell and Pershore choirs—which were going up together—solved the difficulty in a different and more effective manner: viz., by inserting the triforium inside the clerestory. This saved the elevation. The pier-arcade was tall, the clerestory was tall, and the whole interior looked tall and not squat.

To interfere with the services as little as possible, the eastern half was built first, as at Rochester and Worcester. When this was finished, the western half was built. If the foliage of the beautiful capitals and corbels and bosses be examined carefully, it will be found to be somewhat stiff and formal in the eastern bays, and to be worked with much more crispness and freedom towards the west (cf. Worcester). The next thing was to pull down the Norman choir, the material of which is found to be largely built up in the western, but not in the eastern bays. In rebuilding the western bays, the first consideration was not to bring down the Norman tower. So the work was not continued from the east, but was started afresh from the tower. The two portions met in the fourth bay; when it was found that, owing to inaccurate setting-out, the arch on the south side of the choir and the string-course on the north side were at a different level to that of the older work to the east. The awkward junction of the arches was masked by a curious medallion. The whole of the work was done late in the Lancet period; as is shown by the frequent use of the triple roll in the bases, and by the fact that the tooth-ornament is worked on a projecting fillet, as in the north transept of Hereford, instead of being set in a hollow. The vault of the aisles and transept is quinquepartite, as in St. Hugh’s aisles and transept at Lincoln; the high vault is quadripartite; and both vaults have the wobbling longitudinal rib of the great transept of Lincoln. At the east end this rib drops down somewhat fortuitously into the middle of a group of lancets. A special local note of this Southwell work is fondness for fillets; they abound everywhere.

V. A little later, the eastern apse of the north transept was replaced by a double chapel (_c._ 1260). The shafts have the “keel-moulding,” both here and in the chapter-house.

VI. Next was built the cloister—_i.e._, the southern part of the Vestibule leading to the chapter-house. Notice the lovely doorway in the north choir-aisle. In this and the arcade is early naturalistic foliage, which fixes the date as _c._ 1280. Before the upper story was built, and when the eastern arcade was open, it must have been singularly beautiful. From the little courtyard between the cloister and the eastern transept the views are most picturesque.

VII. Then was built the vestibule and the chapter-house. If in window tracery and leafage it be compared with the chapter-house of York, it will be plain that the Southwell example is the earlier. Southwell chapter-house may be 1290, York 1300. York chapter-house is then but a copy of that of Southwell—and an inferior copy; both dispense with a central pier; but Southwell has a magnificent vault of stone, whereas York is vaulted in wood. The chapter-house of Southwell, not that of York, is “among chapter-houses, as the rose among flowers.” “What Cologne cathedral is to Germany, Amiens to France,” says Mr. Street, “is Southwell chapter-house to England.” Here English stone-carvers produced their best work; nowhere will you find such capitals or crockets or spandrels, nor such portraits—all, no doubt, here and in the cloister, representing people living at Southwell 1280-1300. Photographs of this wonderful detail have been inserted in the Introduction, pages v-xiii.

VIII. But the wonders of Southwell do not end yet. In the Curvilinear period (1315-1360) was erected quite the loveliest choir screen in England; next comes that of Lincoln, evidently by the same hand. Eastern and western sides are entirely different in design: on the western side the artist parts reluctantly with the beautiful geometrical design of the thirteenth century; on the eastern side he accepts unreservedly the reign of the ogee arch. Magnificent sedilia and stone stalls of similar character were erected, which only survive in part. Very beautiful, too, is the cusping of the reticulated windows inserted in the north transept chapel.

The upper parts of the chapter-house and the north transept chapel also were remodelled in the Curvilinear period.

For two hundred years or more, the highest and best of mediæval art found cultivated and wealthy patrons in the canons of Southwell. Norman, Lancet, Geometrical, Curvilinear work are all seen here at their best. Few of our cathedrals, from the point of view either of architectural design or sculptured detail, can be mentioned in the same breath with Southwell. Nowhere will the architectural student find such a treasure of the best work of the best periods as in the sister churches of the canons of Beverley and Southwell. It is one of the greatest delights of Southwell that this lovely minster is little known and almost unvisited: one feels as if one were “the first that ever burst into this silent sea.”

IX. PERPENDICULAR.—Large windows were inserted in the aisles (_c._ 1390) and the west end (fifteenth century) to light the nave; and a doorway from the choir to the Archbishop’s palace on the south.

X. There is an alabaster monument of Archbishop Sandys (_d._ 1588), of unusually good design. To the same century belongs the fine Renaissance glass (French) in the east of the choir.

XI. There were originally sixteen canons or priests at Southwell in charge of the services. But as they mostly resided in their country parishes, they were allowed to appoint sixteen vicars or deputies, to do their work for them. These vicars, like the canons, formed a college or corporation. The vicars also found the work hard, and were aided by paid lay-clerks and choir-boys. Besides these there was a college of thirteen chantry-priests. In later days there used to be in residence at Southwell only one canon out of the sixteen; he came into residence only once in four years, and only stayed three months. The handsome block of brick houses to the east of the minster was built in 1780: the eastern house for the canon in residence; the two houses on each side for four of the vicars (the number of whom had dwindled to six).

The Cathedral Church of St. Andrew, Wells.