Part 12

The building of a new church seems to have been taken in hand in 1242, a year memorable in the annals of Durham Cathedral as the one which saw the beginning of the great eastern transept of the "Nine Altars," under the auspices of Prior Thomas of Melsamby, of whom Canon Greenwell says: "He was one of the greatest men who have sat in the prior’s chair at Durham." The subservient position which Finchale held to the Durham convent necessitated the assent of its Prior to so important an undertaking; and it is not improbable that he may have pointed out the necessity of the work and that his architect, Richard de Farnham, was responsible for the design. Although of but modest dimensions for a priory church, and but little longer and wider than the chapel which the Brus family had recently built near by at Hartlepool, it was still on too ambitious a scale for the limited resources of the convent; and the work dragged on for a number of years, and was never completed in its entirety. Its chief internal dimensions were--total length of nave and choir 194 feet and of the transepts 99 feet; the widths of the nave and choir were 23 feet and of the transepts 21 feet, while the width across the unbuilt aisles would have been 52 feet. But the aisles would seem never to have been finished, and though Mackensie Walcot pathetically says that "it was the hand of the monk which pulled down the chapel of the transept and the aisles of the choir and nave" it seems more than likely that they were never begun, and that the idea was abandoned for lack of funds soon after the nave and choir arcades had been completed. It is probable that the choir only was roofed in in a temporary manner, and that the nave and perhaps the transepts as well were not enclosed until the works were seriously resumed in the next century. The wars with Scotland caused much trouble within the county of Durham, and doubtless affected the revenues of the priory, although there is nothing to show that the monks were disturbed in any way by the invaders; but twice the Scotch armies appeared upon the Wear, first under the Douglas just before the treaty of Northampton made in 1328, and again in 1346 when they were defeated at the Battle of Neville’s Cross within sight of the cathedral.

All works were suspended at Durham as well as at Finchale for the same reasons, but with the return of peace and under the energetic sway of Prior John Fossor they were resumed; and no doubt under his direct

influence and perhaps with his assistance the completion of the church at Finchale was undertaken. The account rolls of the priory from 1348 begin to mention large quantities of material bought for the works and money expended upon labour until 1372 when we may consider the fabric of the church was finished. Instead of building the aisles as originally intended, they filled up the moulded arches of the arcades with walling in which they inserted traceried windows; and they seemed to have roofed in the buildings at a level but little above the top of the arches without any clerestory but sufficiently high to clear the great arches of the crossing. Whether the crossing was vaulted is not quite certain, but some stones found among the ruins seem to indicate remains of groin ribs, and it was raised as a low tower, and covered in all probability with a squat, leaded spire such as those which once stood on the western towers of the cathedral. The windows which had their heads filled in with reticulated tracery were, with those of Easington Church and those inserted in the cathedral by Prior Fossor, among the most important Decorated work in the county. The east end of the choir had originally three lancet windows, but either at this time or later a large traceried window was inserted in their place, the cost of reglazing which appears in the accounts for 1488. A reredos to the high-altar was erected about 1376 during the period when the great Neville screen was in course of construction in the cathedral. The exact position it occupied in the choir is not now evident, as the position of the original double piscina (see p. 135) and the sedilia left but little room for such an erection, and it seems to have involved some alteration in the arrangements of the east end. It is clear from existing remains that it was originally intended to build a chapel on the east side of the north transept and possibly a corresponding one to the south transept, the former with an altar dedicated to St. Godric and the latter to the Blessed Virgin, but these chapels were abandoned at the completion; the whole south transept became the Lady Chapel, and it has been suggested that the shrine of St. Godric was removed to the extreme east end of the choir, from which it was cut off by the new reredos, in which case another piscina which has disappeared must have been made for the service of the high-altar. The ancient sedilia of which there were three were cut into and reduced to two when the large traceried window was inserted in the south wall of the choir, and our illustration (see p. 137) shows not only this alteration but what is supposed to have been the base of the reredos.

The arches, which had been left open on the eastern face of the transepts, were filled in in the same manner as the nave arcades but with two-light windows in the walling except in the case of the south transept where there is a five-light window, with the heads uncusped, beneath which was the altar of the Blessed Virgin. In 1469 sixty shillings was paid for glazing this window. The west walls of the transepts contain the only original windows left complete, the south transept having a short lancet which looked over the cloister roof, and the north transept has two narrow and lofty lancets. The lancets at the north end of the transept were doubtless removed for a traceried window as in the choir; but the triplets of the west front were left undisturbed, and their remains and the beautifully simple west front, together with the lancets of the transepts, are shown in our illustration (see p. 139).

The conventual buildings were all placed on the south side of the church and their arrangement, so far as they exist at the present time, is shown on the general plan (see p. 140). They were to a great extent erected at the same time as the church, that is during the thirteenth century, but were far from completed, and the account rolls show that they were not finished before the latter half

of the fifteenth century; but it is quite possible that some of the buildings erected by Henry de Pudsey continued in use until the new ones were ready for occupation. The chapter-house adjoins the south transept and still retains its front over which one of the dormitory windows can yet be seen (see p. 141). To the south of the cloister are considerable remains of the refectory, raised, as at Durham, above a vaulted basement (see p. 142); it was lighted by a fine range of lancet windows on either side, and had a fireplace at the west end, and over it was another chamber the use of which is not apparent. By the west front of the church a guest-house for the poorer travellers was erected about 1464 in two storeys, the lower one containing an oven; but the superior guests were entertained in the Prior’s lodging. Although surrounded by earlier buildings, the cloister was not completed until the second building epoch, the north walk occupying the site of the proposed south aisle of the nave, and the original doorway which had been built to be the south door of the church now crosses the east walk at the north end.

The Prior’s lodgings (see p. 143) form an important and picturesque group of buildings standing by themselves to the south-east of the church, much in the same position as those of Durham. The vaulted basement under the Prior’s hall and most of the substructure may be the earliest part of the conventual buildings remaining, and earlier in date than the church, though much of the upper storey which contains the hall, camera and chapel belong to the subsequent periods. The low building at the west end containing a fireplace, which has been described as the Prior’s kitchen, seems to be the building which, according to the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ for 1836, was the "spacious entertainment room" which Mr. Prebendary Spence erected for the use of the picnic parties which have in modern times pervaded the ruins. To the north of the Prior’s lodging, separated from it only in the basement story, is the building mentioned in the account rolls for 1460 under the name of the "Douglestour." How it came by this name is uncertain, but as the lower part of the building was standing in 1328 when Douglas and his Scots made their raid across Northumberland to the banks of the Wear, it may have gained it through some association with him. The upper storey of the tower formed the Prior’s camera and had at the north end an embayed window which commanded a charming prospect of the river and the Cocken woods beyond. St. Godric was reputed to be the special patron of women, and this encorbelled window-base was known by them as the "wishing-chair"; but whatever was its charm, the spell was broken when the monks left the convent at the Reformation.

At the Dissolution, as its income was less than £200 per annum, the Priory was treated as one of the lesser monasteries and suppressed in 1536, when the site was granted to the Bishop of Durham, and the buildings were left neglected; but their ruin was hastened by being treated as a stone-quarry. It does not appear that the Priory was ever purposely damaged otherwise, and it remains, after three centuries of neglect, a more perfect and picturesque ruin than many of higher importance and more beautiful architecture.

MONKWEARMOUTH AND JARROW

BY THE REV. D. S. BOUTFLOWER, M.A.

It is almost impossible for the student of history to dissociate the two names. In their earliest origin, in the ups and downs of their long existence, and almost, if not quite, in their present conditions, the sister churches have met with one and the same experience. Their foundations were laid within the short period of ten years; they have arisen and decayed and revived (and that more than once) almost simultaneously. They have shared together honour and neglect, wealth and poverty. In all things and at all times the supreme desire of their great founder has been fulfilled, and Monkwearmouth and Jarrow have been one. Planted long ago as outposts of religious culture brought oversea to the mouths of the Wear and the Tyne, the Churches of St. Peter and St. Paul are now the centres of populous districts. Like other churches around them, they have their own busy church life; but, unlike to and above the rest, these two stand as witnesses of the antiquity and continuity of the Christian faith in England. The churches where Bede worshipped are still, at least in part, the churches of the twentieth century. The Gospels which he expounded are heard at their Communion services to-day.

Much of their history must be sought for and read in the buildings themselves. The first thing they will tell us is that they belong to a very early period of Saxon art. We have other evidence to assure us that these were

among the first stone churches in England, and to tell how masons were brought from the Continent to erect them. The singular height of the church at Monkwearmouth would lead us to the same conclusion. They were thus churches of quite a peculiar type, a type destined to undergo many modifications in later times. In Monkwearmouth and Jarrow you are face to face with the earliest form of English ecclesiastical architecture.

We have no need to ask about the builders, or to wrangle over the date of their foundation. There are darker and lighter periods in any history; Monkwearmouth and Jarrow have, indeed, known much of both. But the light shines clearly enough upon their early days. For Monkwearmouth saw the birth and Jarrow the death of the patriarch of English historians. Both places claim him as altogether their own. In the united convent of St. Peter and St. Paul he spent practically the whole of his life. Like all great men, he said little about himself; but he has much to tell us about his twofold home. We turn gladly enough to the writings of Bede, and specially to his Lives of the Abbots. We find ourselves at once in the presence of one who knew how to observe and to describe, to admire but never to condemn; one who loved to dwell upon the beautiful in the characters and works of men; a conscientious man withal, who sought out and told the truth. It is he that relates to us how Monkwearmouth and Jarrow grew.

It was not fifty years since the Christian faith had been first taught to the Northumbrians, and less than forty since its permanent establishment by the preaching of the gentle Aidan, when there came back to his native kingdom of Northumbria a man of noble birth and cultured training, Biscop, called Benedict. He had wealth and interest at his command, and, above all things, a fervent zeal concentrated upon a definite purpose. It was an age that had recently witnessed a revival of monasticism; the life of contemplation had led on to study; orthodoxy

was the aim of trained thinkers; emotional minds dwelt on the devotedness of the saintly life. Biscop himself was a traveller and a student; he desired to found his own monastery, and to bring to it treasures from foreign lands. His relative, King Ecgfrid, granted him for this purpose an estate at the mouth of the Wear (A.D. 672). There he built the Church of St. Peter, of which the western wall and porch still remain. He brought with him (as we have seen) masons, and also glaziers, who restored to England a science that had long been lost. The building was quite peculiar in its dimensions--some 60 feet long, 30 high, and 20 broad. The singular proportions of Monkwearmouth Church, which have long puzzled antiquaries, appear to be explained by a sermon in the now printed works of Bede, and possibly preached in the church itself on some anniversary of its dedication. They correspond with those of Solomon’s Temple, the units in this last case being cubits. There was a truly mathematical love of numbers in the mind of Bede, and he is evidently pleased to explain how the three dimensions above mentioned set forth in allegory the three Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity. The windows were small, and set high in the walls of the building. You may see two of them, their splays adorned with baluster shafts, in the western wall of the church. The south wall was adorned with paintings representing scenes from the Gospel of St. John; a series of pictures illustrating the Apocalypse occupied the northern wall. The roof was adorned with portraits of the Virgin and of the Twelve Apostles; the presumption is that it was in the form of a flat ceiling. The whole arrangement of the building thus gave fair scope for light, shelter, and decoration.

There was a second church soon afterwards erected at Monkwearmouth, dedicated to St. Mary. There were also dining-rooms and porches and sleeping apartments, in connection with the last of which there was an oratory dedicated to St. Lawrence. Where these other buildings lay is uncertain. Tradition says that they were to the west of the present church. St. Mary’s Church was probably very much in this direction. In the fourteenth century "the old kirk" was used as a granary.

The house at Monkwearmouth grew and prospered, a home of arts and science and religion. There Bede began to acquire his wonderful knowledge, and John the Chanter founded his great school of music. Seven years after its foundation (A.D. 681) expansion became a necessity, and a new grant of land was obtained, this time at Jarrow, on the south bank of the Tyne. Seventeen persons, clerical and lay, were sent thither, their leader being Ceolfrid, to whose care Bede, already for two years an inmate of the older monastery, was committed. Soon after this event Biscop departed on his last visit to Rome, leaving his stalwart kinsman Eosterwini to rule at Monkwearmouth. He was absent for more than three years, an eventful time, during which both houses suffered grievously from a visitation of the plague. Eosterwini was its most notable victim, whilst at Jarrow nearly the whole convent was stricken down. At that place, as an anonymous writer informs us, only Ceolfrid and one boy, obviously Bede, were left to chant the daily services. The above facts will explain the delay in the consecration of the great church at Jarrow, which, according to a contemporary inscription still preserved, was not dedicated till the fourth year of Ceolfrid’s presidency.

Of this church only some stones now remain. A smaller church had, however, been first built and consecrated, and it is this which forms the chancel of Jarrow Church to-day. Its dimensions do not suggest any special meaning. Twenty-eight feet to the west of it, and lying precisely in the same right line, stood at one time a fabric precisely similar to that of St. Peter’s, Monkwearmouth, the same, apparently, in length and breadth and height, and lighted by windows of the same type and in the same position. Annexed to it on the north and south were a number of apartments, undoubtedly to be identified with the _porches_ in Bede’s account of Monkwearmouth, chambers opening by round-headed arches into the church itself. The arches on the north side, and vestiges of three rooms on the south, remained as late as the year 1769. Probably one such porch as this stood at the eastern end of the building; this we know was the case at Monkwearmouth. These apartments, walled off as they were from each other, would be used for prayer and study, and sometimes as places of sepulture. They were probably constructed in imitation of the chambers round Solomon’s temple.

This, then, appears to have been the church which it took so long to complete, and in this building was set up the dedication stone above mentioned. It was erected and consecrated under the auspices of King Aldfrid (brother and successor to Ecgfrid), and the Abbot Ceolfrid. Biscop himself was still abroad, but soon afterwards returned to England, bringing with him many books and pictures, one series of which, depicting the events of our Lord’s life, was ranged as a crown round the Church of St. Mary in the greater monastery; another, representing the Gospel story by type and antitype, adorned the monastery and Church of St. Paul. Biscop’s last homecoming had its sorrows. He found Eosterwini dead, and his successor Sigfrid slowly dying of consumption. Then there came to himself a stroke of paralysis. Very touching is the story told us of the last days of the two Abbots. The greater man feels the greater anxiety. His much-prized library is not to be dispersed, but before all things the unity of the double foundation is to be maintained. Before his end comes he appoints Ceolfrid to govern the united monastery of St. Peter and St. Paul.

The narrative continues till the year 716, when the aged Ceolfrid resigned his charge, and departed to die, as he hoped, at Rome. But this was not to be. His last moments were spent at Langres, near Lyons. But one great work of Northumbrian art passed on by other hands to Italy--the splendid manuscript of the Vulgate, now known as the Codex Amiantinus, and preserved in the Medicean Library at Florence.

Bede himself lived on in his old home till the year 735. The story of his end is too well known to need repetition here. Before his death Northumbria had fallen from its former glory. A period of darkness supervenes, broken here and there by the lurid light of Danish invasions. Yet the churches of Monkwearmouth and Jarrow lasted on, sacked, it might be, burned and desolated, but still saved from total destruction.

The period of depression that followed the golden days of the twin monasteries has left us but scanty memorials of their history. We begin to hear of times of insecurity, of attacks made upon the eastern coast of England by Danish pirates. The situations of the two churches would, under these circumstances, be distinctly against them. Jarrow is to this day conspicuous; it is probably less well known that Monkwearmouth Church stood for centuries upon the top of a hill. This is shown quite clearly in the engraving of the year 1785. The sea rovers would take their own survey of the coast and its harbours, and would make for any place that offered promise of pillage. There is much good and rich land between the Wear and the Tyne, and the monks of early days were assiduous cultivators. The country of Wilfrid and Biscop and Bede was no uncivilized or neglected part of the world. To a pagan race there would be no impediment in the form of religious scruples. The wealth of the Church would but invite the spoilers to their prey.

And so the Danes came first to Northern England, to begin with, somewhat tentatively, in the year 793, harrying the island of Lindisfarne, plundering its monastery, and burning the church. The next year their ships put into the Tyne. On the hill overlooking the slake, just where that river receives its tributary the Don, stood the monastery of Jarrow, Egfrid’s Port lying immediately below it. Here they landed, and took such booty as they found. But the people of the neighbourhood rallied, and drove back the invaders to their ships. Few of them made good their escape, for the wind was against them. The storm came up into the river, and the fugitives were driven to the shore, where they and their chieftain, Ragner Lodbrog, met with the vengeance they deserved.

It is quite clear that the lesson thus given was not forgotten. We hear no more of Danish invasions for well on to sixty years. When they recommenced, they were directed elsewhere. In the year 851 the Danes landed in Sheppey, and this time they came to stay. The chroniclers have much to say about _the Army_; but it was not till the year 875 that it marched into Northern England, and then probably not much beyond York; it moved south two years later. But meanwhile there had no doubt been many a raid upon the settlements on the coast. The year 866 was marked by one of the most serious of these. At that date Hingvar and Hubba burned the church of Monkwearmouth. The traces of this conflagration are still distinctly perceptible. Again in the year 875 the fleet of Halfdan was in the Tyne. Contemporaneously with this event took place the flight from Lindisfarne, and the commencement of the journeyings of the body of St. Cuthbert.

How the Danish power was driven back by Alfred, how his wise policy reclaimed the half of his kingdom, is a well-known part of our national history. The final triumph was not so much one of war as of peace. The wisdom of a very great King effected much; the growing strength of recovering Christianity did the rest. Never did any ruler so effectually combine the forces of secular and spiritual power, or hold them more truly in balance and co-operation. The invaders became settlers, and have left this part of their history in the names of their new homes. This is especially true of Lincolnshire; then, hardly less decidedly, of York. But north of the Tees the English population simply retained lands which they had never ceased to occupy. Danish place-names in the county of Durham are few and far between.