Part 9

The first question the monks had to decide was that of lighting. Their answer was a momentous one. They decided to get additional light by raising the walls of transept and presbytery, and inserting immense clerestory windows. The nave was internally 67½ feet high. To get a big clerestory, they raised the south transept and presbytery to the height of 86 feet. Similar tall clerestory windows were being built, but in the Curvilinear style, in the choirs of Lichfield and Wells. But as yet clerestory windows were, as a rule, rather small; and some big churches of the Curvilinear period, such as Grantham and Patrington, had no clerestory at all. For what was to be the glory of the closing days of English Gothic architecture—the Lantern type of church—we must give the credit to the masons of Gloucester. And also for the new type of window. The new big window, occupying the whole breadth and nearly the whole height of the end wall of the south transept, had to be strengthened by cross-bars or transoms; and the tracery of the head had to be strengthened by the substitution of vertical straight lines, as far as possible, for curves. Here, then, we have the genesis of the Perpendicular or Rectilinear window.

Then there was the question of the vault. If we can believe Abbot Froucester, so early as 1337 the monks put over the south transept not only one of the earliest lierne vaults in the kingdom, but one so accurately worked that the junctions of the ribs did not require to be masked by bosses: they mortised the ribs together with as much precision as if they were dealing with joints in cabinet work. And over the choir and under the tower they put up the most amazingly complicated lierne vault that was ever constructed: this, too, not later than 1351.

Thirdly, they appear to have intended to separate the presbytery from its aisles by the usual stone screens—designed to correspond with the tracery of the clerestory windows. This would have left an ugly cavernous arch—that of the eleventh-century triforium—in each bay, between the screen below and the clerestory above. The pattern of the tracery of the clerestory window had been repeated once in the screen below: what more natural than to repeat it a second time in the shape of a screen set in front of the open arch of the triforium? It remained merely to join up the mullions of all three—lower screen, triforium screen, and clerestory window—and the three members were welded together into one composition; harmony and unity reigned from pavement to vault. Here again we have at Gloucester not only the commencement, but the full development of what became the leading principle in later English Gothic—the desire to impose unity on the elevations of their churches by repeats of window tracery. It is but a short step from Gloucester choir to St. George’s, Windsor. The only improvement that was made on the design of the Gloucester choir was that in the next century, when fan-vaulting came into vogue, this also was covered all over with the patterns of the window tracery.

One question still remained unsolved: how to treat the east end of the church. At Norwich, where the Gloucester precedent was largely followed a century later, the apse and ambulatory and chevet of chapels were all retained—with most beautiful effect. At Gloucester—unfortunately, as it seems to me—they pulled down the apse; and on the wall of the three eastern bays of the ambulatory they erected three gigantic windows, so welded together as to compose one window. And, to bring the whole into view, they made the new easternmost bays of the presbytery, which had now to be built, wider to the east than the west. Thus they got one of the biggest windows in the world, and one of the ugliest. However, no one looks at the tracery of the window, but at the painted glass which it still retains. This glass is decidedly Perpendicular in character, but the armorial bearings in it show that it was completed before 1350. All the characteristics of late Gothic glass are there. Thus the canopies and the figures alike are silvery white, and yellow stain is introduced here and there. The drawing, however, is shockingly bad; and the colour is got in a very artless way by inserting backgrounds of vertical stripes of red and blue.

At the same time—between 1337 and 1377—the monks were provided with new choir-stalls. But while stone-work and glass alike are Perpendicular in character, the stalls have bowing ogee canopies, and are quite Curvilinear.

Next the north transept was remodelled (1368-1373). It is very much like its brother, but is eight feet higher, and the vault has bosses.

The next work was the rebuilding of the cloister. This was built between 1351 and 1412. It is covered with a fan-vault, supposed to be the earliest example of the kind. But the supports look as if designed for a lierne vault. It is possible, therefore, that the earliest fan-vaults are those of two monuments in the neighbouring Abbey-Church of Tewkesbury. In the south walk are twenty “carols” or “studies” for the monks; in the north walk a lavatory and a recess for towels.

Between 1421 and 1437 Abbot Morment was guilty of the west front and the two western bays of the nave. He intended to rebuild the whole nave, but could not make up his mind how to do it. The two bays he did build are quite different in height and span and general design. With his big west window, and with the insertion of Perpendicular windows in the north aisle and in the clerestories of the nave, the improvement of the lighting of the church may be said to have been effectually completed.

Instead of going on with Abbot Morment’s rebuilding of the nave, the monks now turned their attention to the central tower. The tower was of no use as a lantern, for the lierne vault of the choir had been carried beneath it. So it long remained unaltered. But in the days of Abbot Seabrooke (1460-1482) it was rebuilt under the superintendence of a monk named Sully, to be in character with the new exterior of choir and transepts. A very imposing tower it is; fully able, from its massiveness as well as from its height, to gather together the masses of the building—all the more so because the transepts are so short. It succeeds where the central towers of Worcester and Hereford fail; in fact, it is as effective in its way as Salisbury spire. The pinnacles, again, bear witness to the love of these later artists for harmony and unity: each pinnacle, with its two ranges of windows, is a repeat of the two stages of the tower below.

Then—after the tower had been erected—it was decided to rebuild the Lady chapel. So an immense detached building was constructed to the east of the great window of the presbytery; without aisles, but with little transepts; almost one continuous sheet of glass, and with a superb vault. This Lady chapel had to be joined up to the presbytery, but the great east window was in the way. However, the difficulty was got over by a series of ingenious shifts and dodges, which must be seen to be appreciated (1457-1499).

And so ended this great building-period at Gloucester (1330-1499), which turned the course of English architecture; so that the Curvilinear style of 1315 to 1360 did not find its natural development in Flamboyant, as on the Continent, but was switched off to Perpendicular and Tudor design.

The Cathedral Church of St. Mary and St. Ethelbert, Hereford.

Hereford boasts a cathedral which, though one of the smallest, is, both externally and internally, one of the most picturesque in the country. To the archæologist and the architectural student, its _mélange_ of styles makes it a perfect treasure-house of mediæval design: early and late Norman, Transitional, Lancet, early, middle, and late Geometrical, Curvilinear, Perpendicular and Tudor work are all well represented in the structure, to say nothing of the Gothic of Wyatt, Cottingham and Scott.

Hereford is one of the oldest of all the sees, going back, at any rate, to the year 601, when St. Augustine had a conference with the Welsh bishops. It owed its riches and reputation mainly to two saints, King Ethelbert and Bishop Thomas Cantilupe. In the year 792 the great King of Mercia, Offa, inveigled Ethelbert, King of East Anglia, to the west of England, where he was treacherously murdered. “On the night of his burial, a column of light, brighter than the sun, rose to heaven;” three days later his ghost appeared and gave directions for the removal of his body. He was interred at Hereford; and in 825 “a noble church of stone” was erected over his remains. Of this or any subsequent Anglo-Saxon cathedral nothing survives.

I. EARLY NORMAN.—In 1079 the present cathedral was commenced by Robert de Losinga. Like the founder of Norwich cathedral, he was probably from Lorraine. He held the see till 1091. It is asserted by Sir Gilbert Scott that none of his work remains. It seems certain that the east wall of the south transept, the pier-arcade of the choir, and perhaps the triforium also, are eleventh-century work. The design of the transept is curiously artless and archaic. The tall arches of its wall arcade are reminiscences of many a church in Lombardy; the squat little balustraded triforium is just what one finds in the eleventh-century transepts of St. Albans and Chester and Pershore. Proceeding into the choir aisles, probability rises into certainty. The masonry is of the roughest, and coursed in the most casual way; the strings and the bases have the rudest caricatures of mouldings. The piers, too, are just the heavy masses of wall which one finds at St. Albans and Chichester: it is impossible that these piers and the light cylinders of the nave can both have been erected in the twelfth century. What has deceived archæologists is that, though the skeleton of the choir is of the eleventh century, it was smartened up immensely in the following century. In fact, it has gone through a similar process to that which took place in Romsey choir, where the early Norman caps have been recarved by a late Norman sculptor; only at Hereford the renovation has been much more drastic. Looking at the east wall of the south transept, it is impossible to believe that the noble bay of the triforium above the arch of the aisle is of the same date as the balustraded triforium to the right. The Norman choir and its aisles originally ended in three parallel eastern apses, after the fashion of the ninth-century choir of St. Ambrogio, Milan, with probably a rectangular chapel east of the central apse, such as is found at Aix-la-Chapelle. From the south transept projected eastward a rectangular sacristy, with crude, unribbed vault, which still remains, but was enlarged to the east in the fifteenth century.

II. LATE NORMAN, 1100-1145.—To this period belong the nave and the renovation of the choir. The capitals of the nave, near which the stalls of the canons stood, are richly carved, and, like all pre-Gothic carving, are full of classical survivals, acanthus, honeysuckle, etc. The Norman work is far richer than that of Ely, Peterborough, Durham, Gloucester or Tewkesbury; these capitals and those of Southwell nave and Romsey lead up to the rich transitional capitals of Oxford Cathedral. The design of the nave, and still more the choir, was probably the most solid and satisfactory in the country, not even excepting Durham. The triforium is especially magnificent; a copy of it was executed in the transept of Romsey. The bays of the choir are separated by broad pilasters, apparently to carry broad transverse arches. But whether these arches were intended to carry some form of wooden roof (their spandrils being built up), or a vault, cannot be determined.

III. TRANSITIONAL.—Then, _c._ 1186, following the precedent of Romsey, the three Norman apses were pulled down in order to provide (1) a processional aisle, of four bays, connecting together the side-aisles of the Norman choir; (2) a double chapel, a prolongation of the Norman eastern chapel. The new processional aisle had probably two eastern chapels, two to the north, two to the south. The processional aisle with the double chapel was altogether six bays in length, and therefore formed an eastern transept—one of the earliest eastern transepts in England. The side walls of the old Norman eastern chapel were pierced with windows, unglazed, to improve the lighting of the new aisle-chapel on either side. In the jambs of these windows are shafts with conventional stalky foliage; while the arch of the window-head is enriched with the Norman diamond ornament. The vaulting-ribs are enriched with zigzag. The central piers have, one conventional foliage, the other a scalloped capital. In the south-east transept there are remains of the doorway, and a plinth which seems to have supported a pier between the two eastern chapels. Some five or six years later a similar processional aisle with five eastern chapels was built at Abbey Dore, where, however, it does not form an eastern transept. The piers of the processional aisle are so arranged that two of them are in a line with the centre of the semicircular arch which led from the choir into the former Norman central apse. The intention of the builder evidently was to reconstruct the east end of the choir, or perhaps to rebuild the whole choir, substituting for the single semicircular arch a pair of pointed arches, as at Exeter. This was never done, however; and so, quite fortuitously, Hereford gets the most charming vistas from the choir across to the eastern transept and the Lady chapel.

IV. LANCET.—About 1220 the upper and eastern parts of the Lady chapel were completed. It is a work of great beauty, especially in the rich clustering of shafts in the window-jambs and in the fine composition of the east end, with its quintet of lancets. The chapel is curiously low internally. The builder was an exceptionally cautious person. He not only provided for the thrusts of the vault by heavy buttresses and pinnacles, but, to get the thrusts as low down as possible, he made the vault spring below the window-heads. Moreover, down below he constructed a lofty crypt, thus raising considerably the floor of the Lady chapel. Thus encroached on from below and from above, the interior of the Lady chapel contrasts remarkably with its lofty and imposing exterior. Externally, moreover, as the window-heads could not rise high, owing to the low spring of the vault, a large amount of wall-surface was left, and had to be decorated. This was done in a remarkable way; the arcade which runs round it being the old-fashioned Norman arcade of intersecting semicircular arches—probably the last appearance of this design on the stage. Another puzzle is that the external doorway leading to this crypt contains Transitional details. Probably the whole of the lower part of the Lady chapel was built in the Transitional period. The crypt-worship of the eleventh century had gone out of fashion; and the Hereford crypt, like that at Norwich, was probably built as a golgotha or charnel-house.

V. EARLY GEOMETRICAL.—The history of the cathedral now resolved itself for the next hundred years into a series of attempts to get rid of the “dim, religious light,” so dear to the modern, so abhorrent to the mediæval ecclesiastic. Hereford choir was even worse lighted than Norman churches generally, being blocked to east and west by transepts, and having enormously bulky piers. So the Norman clerestory was taken down, and a Gothic clerestory with an inner arcade—an early and interesting example of plate-tracery—was substituted. Moreover, the choir was made fireproof by being vaulted in stone, _c._ 1250.

VI. MIDDLE GEOMETRICAL.—About 1260 more drastic measures were taken with the Norman north transept. It was pulled down bodily, and rebuilt on a design which is perhaps the most original, as it certainly is one of the most beautiful, in the history of English Gothic architecture. To the north and west were built enormous windows, with tracery of cusped circles, quite exceptional in their elongation, more like late German than English work. On the east side was built an aisle of exquisite beauty. Its arches, almost straight-sided—its triforium windows, a ring of cusped circles set under a semicircular arch—its clerestory windows, spherical triangles enclosing a cusped circular window—the composition of the triforium—the north and west windows—are quite unique, except so far as they were copied in later work in the city and neighbourhood. At the south end of the aisle is the exquisite tomb of Bishop Peter Aquablanca (_d._ 1268); no doubt built in his lifetime. The tomb is as unique as the transept, and closely resembles it in design. The inference is that Bishop Aquablanca built the transept. The credit of it, however, is constantly given to his successors, apparently on account of his private vices. But sinners as well as saints have liked to leave memorials behind them in stone; and, moreover, Aquablanca had his good points. To this day four thousand loaves are distributed every year out of funds which he bequeathed. It is recorded, too, that, of a fine which was imposed on the citizens for encroachments on his episcopal rights, he remitted one half, and handed over the other for works on the cathedral. Moreover, he was a foreigner, from Chambery; and has probably received no more favourable judgment from the English chroniclers than they were wont to give to foreign favourites of the king who swallowed up the best things in the English Church.

VII. LATE GEOMETRICAL.—Then came a turning-point in the history of Hereford. The reputation of King Ethelbert as a miracle-worker may well by this time have worn a little thin. In 1287 Hereford found that it had obtained a new saint. This was Bishop Thomas Cantilupe, a man of saintly life, and one of the greatest churchmen of the day. “He was a pluralist of the first dimension—Chancellor of England and of the University of Oxford, Provincial Grand Master of the Knights Templars in England, Canon of York, Archdeacon and Canon of Lichfield and Coventry, Archdeacon of Stafford, Canon and Bishop of Hereford.” In 1282, with his chaplain, Swinfield, he visited Rome, and died on the journey home. Swinfield, following a not uncommon mediæval practice, had the flesh of the body separated from the bones by boiling. The flesh was buried in the church of St. Severus, near Orvieto; the heart and bones he conveyed to England. The heart was interred at Ashridge, the bones in Hereford cathedral. Five years afterwards miracles commenced: “There were raised from death to life threescore several persons, one-and-twenty lepers healed, and three-and-twenty blind and dumb men received their sight and speech. Twice King Edward I. sent sick falcons to be cured at his tomb.” In 1320, by the expenditure of vast sums of money, Swinfield procured his canonisation. Ever since, the see of Hereford has borne the arms of Cantilupe. He was the last English saint; and, being the newest, was for a considerable time the most fashionable. The fame of St. Wulfstan of Worcester and St. Swithin of Winchester paled before that of St. Thomas of Hereford. Till Gloucester secured in 1327 still fresher relics in the murdered body of King Edward II., Hereford held the greatest attraction for pilgrims in all the West-country. For forty years—from 1287 to 1327—the pilgrims resorted to the new shrine in vast numbers. Swinfield’s foresight was justified by the huge sums which poured into the cathedral treasury.

Swinfield succeeded Cantilupe as bishop in 1283, and occupied the see till 1316. With the vast resources now at his disposal he set about a series of great works. His first pious act was to construct for his benefactor and predecessor a noble shrine, the pedestal of which now stands once more, after many vicissitudes, in the aisle of the north transept. It is a work of the rarest beauty, executed just at the time when, tired of conventional foliage, the mediæval carver, with ever fresh delight, was making the most exquisite transcripts in stone of the leaves of the trees and the flowers of the field.

Secondly, he constructed a north porch—the present inner porch—the design of which is plainly taken from the shrine.

Thirdly, he rebuilt the central tower on the Norman piers and arches. To lessen the weight as much as possible it was built in two skins, the inner skin consisting of a framework of upright stone girders, as in the towers of Wells and Lincoln. Externally it is smothered in ball-flower. Originally it carried a tall timber spire; the loss of which greatly injures the external elevation of the cathedral.

Fourthly, he went on with the improvement of the lighting of the cathedral. Beginning probably at the north-east transept, which was rebuilt, together with its eastern aisle, and working along the choir and nave to the west end, and then _vice versa_ on the south side of the cathedral, he took down all but the lower part of the walls of the Norman aisles, rebuilt the upper part higher, and inserted very large windows. This lighted the nave, at any rate, very satisfactorily. The design of these windows is unusual and effective, owing to the largeness of the trefoils employed in the tracery.

VIII. CURVILINEAR (1315-1360).—By the time of Swinfield’s death it may be conjectured that the pilgrim-revenue had begun to fall off; for the rebuilding of the south-east transept, together with its eastern aisle, in completion of the reconstructions commenced by Swinfield, was executed in a cheap and inferior way, even the clumsy Transitional plinth being retained for the new central column of the transept. The windows have flowing tracery.

To the same period belong the stalls and the beautiful chapter-house, now in ruins. The lead of its roof was cast into bullets in the Civil War; sacrilegious bishops used its stones as a quarry for their palace.

There are monuments of Bishop Swinfield (_d._ 1316) and Bishop Charleton (_d._ 1343).

It is probable that all this work was done before 1349, when the Black Death made its appearance at Hereford, and again in 1360.

IX. PERPENDICULAR (1360-1485).—The lighting improvements were now completed by the insertion of two huge windows in the south transept, the southern of which has recently been filled with magnificent glass by Mr. Kempe. On the north side of the choir Bishop Stanbury (1455-1474) built for himself a pretty little chantry-chapel, like those at Lincoln. It has fan-vaulting.

X. TUDOR.—Bishop Audley (1492-1502) built himself a pentagonal chantry-chapel, two stories high, projecting from the south side of the Lady chapel. But, as he was translated to Salisbury, he had the trouble of building another chantry-chapel there. To this period belong the Bishop’s cloister—three-sided, as at Chichester—and probably the Vicars’ cloister, with picturesque timber roof, and a fan-vault over the entrance to the Vicars’ college. Bishop Booth (1516-1535) built the outer north porch—an admirable specimen of late Gothic design.