Part 13

The finest remaining examples of the English preaching nave are the Austin Friars, London (153 ft. by 83 ft.), and the Dominican Church, Norwich, now St. Andrew’s Hall (124 ft. by 64 ft.). Both are distinguished by great space and openness, the former being amongst the broadest churches in the country.

In the centre of the typical English friars’ church stood the belfry, which formed its most original and distinctive feature. The friars’ tower was apparently a spontaneous innovation amongst the English mendicants, for there is no evidence that it was either borrowed from Continental sources or copied from other orders at home.

It appears to have been customary for each house of friars to have but one great bell, for though there are instances of two being hung in the steeple, yet the friaries of London, according to Stow, had only one each, and it is evident that this peculiarity was largely instrumental in deciding the unusual form which the steeple assumed.

Situated between the choir and the nave, the steeple rested on two parallel walls which ran north and south across the church, and were pierced by two main arches opposite one another opening respectively into the nave and choir; these walls were placed close together, generally some ten feet apart, thus forming an oblong space under the crossing. Between them and high above the arches before mentioned two lesser arches were thrown across the open space (sometimes dying away into the walls and sometimes resting upon corbels projecting from them) to carry the north and south walls of the tower above.

The building in most cases was so arranged that the outside faces of the north and south tower walls were in a line with the inside faces of the piers of the two arches opening into the nave and choir, the lower voussoirs of which thus supported the whole weight of the cross walls above them. The oblong thus became a square, and by this arrangement it was possible to raise a small stone tower in the centre of the church, while at the same time retaining the two arched openings between the nave and the choir.

Upon this base a light stone or brick lantern was raised, which in England was generally octagonal in form, but in Ireland invariably square, the additional number of worked quoin stones required for the former plan being probably the reason for its rejection in the poorer country. Occasionally the tower was finished with a stone spire, but as a rule any addition in that direction was of timber only. A good example, however, occurs at Coventry in the central tower of the Franciscan Church (the sole remnant of that house), and as now incorporated in the modern Christ Church, it forms one of the trio of spires for which the City of Coventry is famous. The Grey Friars’ tower at Lynn Regis, Norfolk, is again the sole remnant of the convent of which it formed a part, and is a brick and stone building of Perpendicular date, octagonal, and finished with a battlemented parapet. This town is also singular in having formerly possessed two parish churches, with octagonal central towers. Now, though octagonal upper stages are comparatively common, especially in the eastern counties, instances of the whole tower of this shape are very rare; and since the Lynn examples were probably copied from one or other of the four friaries of the town, it is not extravagant to surmise that it was the mendicants who first introduced the octagonal form into England. At Richmond, Yorkshire, stands the only other friars’ tower which has survived; this, however, is of a more ordinary type. It is a beautifully proportioned square structure, with belfry windows, and a pierced parapet of Perpendicular work, and was evidently only just completed at the Reformation, when the whole church was in course of reconstruction.

Dunbar contains the only example of a typical friars’ steeple in Scotland, the Carmelite tower of South Street, Queensferry, being of the more ordinary type; but in Ireland a remarkable series is still standing, including among its numbers the celebrated ruins of Quinn, Ennis, Clare, Galway, Rosserk, Drogheda, and Athenry.

The space beneath the tower was commonly continued in the form of a passage right across the church, and served as the chief means of communication between the cloister and the outside world.

Turning now to the choir of the friars’ churches: they were usually aisleless parallelograms, and almost always square ended. Their chief feature will be found to be the magnificent proportions of the windows. The choir of the Dominicans at Norwich has a magnificent Decorated east window of seven lights; the Franciscans of Chichester another, with five graduated lancets under one hood; and even a small house like the Austin Friars at Rye had an east window (now built up) of imposing dimensions.

The apsidal termination usual on the Continent has one example in this country in the Grey Friars at Winchelsea, a fourteenth-century structure, and a very graceful example of Decorated work. A wide chancel arch, with banded sideshafts, opened from the nave (which has now gone), into the choir of four bays, with a three-sided apse, each face of which is pierced with a tall Decorated window. A Scotch example of very similar type exists in the Dominicans at St. Andrews, but in this instance the apse belonged to a side chapel and is much smaller in all its dimensions. The stone vault remains in part, and, like its Sussex counterpart, it is the sole remaining fragment of the church. In both these instances the use of the apsidal end may be ascribed to French influence, which was particularly strong in the Cinque Ports at this time, owing to the French wars of Edward III.

Adjoining the church, in some instances, lay an open yard provided with an outside pulpit either for overflow meetings or for more general use in the heat of the summer. The space outside the Dominican Church at Norwich was long known as the “Preaching Yard,” and the beautiful octagonal stone pulpit cross formerly outside the west front of the church of the same order at Hereford remains intact. It is, now, perhaps, the only remaining example of such a structure in England—an existing counterpart to the rich cross “y-tight with tabernacles” of Pierce Ploughman’s Creed.

Two unusual features distinguish the planning of the domestic buildings of a friary—the first an emphasis upon the secular nature of most of the church, the second the result of a necessity for economy.

The cloister of a friary was placed without any general rule, but most generally it partly adjoined the nave with a portion overlapping the choir, and when the whole or any part adjoined the nave it was not unusual to introduce a narrow open court between the church wall and the cloister walk. The Cistercians had a somewhat similar arrangement in the “lane” which, in many of their houses, separated the buildings of the monks from those of the “conversi,” and, in the case of the mendicant orders the court served to separate the domestic portion of the house from their public preaching-place. In England this feature, which occurs in the Black Friars at Norwich, the Franciscan houses at London and Cardiff and elsewhere, is almost confined to the mendicant orders, the only other existing example outside their ranks being the secular cathedral of Salisbury, and here, as in the friars’ houses, a short corridor communicates between the cloister and the church.

The second noticeable feature in the planning of the domestic buildings is found in the general practice of building the first-floor apartments over one, two, or more walks of the cloister, effecting by this means an economy both in wall masonry and in the flat lead roofing of the cloister alleys. Examples of this treatment are very numerous, and occur in all parts of the country. Thus, at Hulne, Northumberland, two alleys were built over—the east and west. At Norwich Black Friars and Dunwich Grey Friars one or more walks are similarly treated, while the Walsingham Franciscans apparently built their frater half over the south walk of the great cloister and half over the north walk of the little cloister. That lack of funds was the chief cause of this somewhat niggardly arrangement is rendered more certain by the fact that the only other order in which it occurs—the Gilbertine—was the most poorly endowed of all the older communities.

Turning now from the subject of the actual structure and arrangement of the friars’ houses the larger question arises: What influence, if any, had all this mass of building upon the outside world, and upon the architecture practised among the people at large? It may be safely postulated at the outset that the influence exercised by the friars will be found, firstly and most definitely, in the structure of the parish church and, in its earliest manifestations, in the parish church of _the towns_, for not only were they the nearest ecclesiastical neighbours, but the objects served by each class of buildings were, within certain limits, identical.

The great towns of England during the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries were split up into a very large number of parishes, each with its church, and as the town enlarged its borders or multiplied its population, additional churches were built to supply its increased needs. London, even in the time of Fitzstephen (_temp._ Henry II.), had 120 parish churches; Norwich, at a little later date, had over forty; Lincoln twenty or more; Winchester a dozen; and a small town like St. Albans five. The practice was evidently at this period to meet the demand for increased accommodation, _not_ by enlarging existing churches but by building new ones. The average town church of the Norman period was, comparatively speaking, of small dimensions and limited accommodation, and in London, with hardly an exception, they remained to the end architecturally insignificant, solely because their numbers were such as to meet all possible demands that could be made upon them.

The period of the greatest architectural activity of the friars may be dated to the last quarter of the thirteenth and the first quarter of the fourteenth centuries, or, roughly, to the reigns of the first two Edwards, and by about the middle of this period they had evolved a type of church which for its purpose was as nearly perfect as experience and experiment could make it. The comfort of the largest congregation was secured by an ample floor-space, while the heavy piers of the older buildings had given way to the lofty and slender columns of the Austin Friars at London, only just large enough for structural stability and leaving an almost uninterrupted view of the preacher from all parts of the church.

The culmination and final expression of their views of what a congregational church should be took form in the great Franciscan church begun in Newgate Street, London, in 1306, and probably the largest friars’ church in England. This building, with its 300 ft. of length, its slender piers, its long range of clerestory, aisle, and end windows, is a type which is without a parallel of its own date and outside its own order as the expression of a new and original idea in church building, departing equally from the insignificant dimensions of the contemporary parish church and the massive and cavernous construction of the monastic nave.

It is at this precise point that a radical alteration is observable in the planning of the parish church, an alteration which, in view of its ultimate results, was almost revolutionary.

The old idea of the multiplication of the small town churches is suddenly and for no apparent reason abandoned, and the single church of huge dimensions takes its place. It is not asserted that, previous to this date, there were no large buildings of this class, but such as already existed were almost entirely in country districts, and with their cruciform shape and central tower they were evidently inspired by the monastic churches of the older orders.

An examination of the plan of one of the towns which rose into prominence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries will reveal a remarkable and striking contrast when compared with that of one of the older towns. In the former case one or two parishes embrace the whole city, while in the latter it is subdivided into ten, twenty, thirty, or more, and while _the one_ has perhaps a single parish fane which dominates the town, _the other_ has towers and spires rising on every hand.

The outset of the new regime may perhaps be definitely dated to the foundation by Edward I. of several new towns, of which Hull in the north, and Winchelsea in the south, are the best-known examples, and in each of these places a single great church is deemed sufficient for the needs of the whole town.

It would be easy to multiply examples. The great port of Boston or the trading centre of Newark, whose prosperity dates from the fourteenth century, each built for themselves a single church on an almost cathedral scale, and in the same sequence are ranged most of the great churches of East Anglia.

The new type of church is one having the great open nave, the long ranges of windows, and the slender piers which became so general in the Perpendicular period. They are, in fact, copies of the great friars’ churches which immediately preceded them. The friars originated and perfected the type which in the fulness of time was accepted and adopted by the parish church builder as the best and most suitable structure for his purpose which had yet been evolved.

The church of the Holy Trinity, Hull, the forerunner of the new movement, provides an additional element of probability to the theory. Founded by Edward I., and built under the auspices of his son, it had in both its royal parents a close relationship to the great Franciscan church of London, erected through the bounty of the wife of the one and the step-mother of the other, and it is not improbable that the personal element was brought to bear on the design of the later building with far-reaching results.

Once the new idea had taken root under royal patronage it rapidly spread over England, and in the next century some even of the old town churches were rebuilt in the then prevailing style, and it is perhaps not too much to say that the great Perpendicular parish church, of which there are so many noble examples, is the direct outcome and lineal descendant of the friars’ buildings, which have unfortunately so nearly disappeared.

BLACKFRIARS, LONDON.

Blackfriars to the modern Londoner is as familiar a title as that of any part in the City, and to all frequenters of Fleet Street the district of Whitefriars must be little less familiar. Yet the homes of the Dominicans and the Carmelites, their churches and the numerous buildings within their precincts, have disappeared so completely that it is doubtful if the majority of people who daily use their names have any intelligent idea of the origin of the terms. And even for those who have given thought to the subject there has been no definite description of the buildings such as would enable them to reconstruct in their minds the great monastic establishments of the two orders. It is possible, however, from various sources to draw out with tolerable accuracy the plans of the houses of the Blackfriars and the Whitefriars and to ascertain the accurate position of all their principal apartments. The arrangements of the Blackfriars has an additional interest in that the Guest House is still exactly defined by the Hall of the Apothecaries’ Company, and the Upper Frater which lay across the entrance to Printing House Square served not only as the Parliament House in the reign of Henry VIII. but was later converted into the celebrated Blackfriars Theatre.

The priory of the Dominican or Black Friars in London was founded in 1221 on a site to the south of Holborn and east of Chancery Lane. In 1274, however, a new site was given them on the north bank of the Thames, just east of the Fleet ditch. This necessitated the pulling down of that part of the city wall south of Ludgate, and a new wall was built running eastwards from the gate and turning south to the river within the Fleet. It appears that the church was not begun until 1279.

Although there is little documentary information regarding the buildings before the Dissolution, it is some evidence of their importance that the meetings of Privy Councils were held here during the first part of Henry VI.’s reign, and that three Parliaments met here in 1450, 1523–4, and 1529. The Emperor Charles V. lodged in the Guest House in 1522, and a gallery was built by Henry VIII. to connect his apartments with Bridewell Palace, where his train was accommodated. In 1529 the King’s divorce from Catherine of Arragon was tried in the “Parliament Chamber,” Henry VIII. and his queen being in residence in Bridewell.

In an anonymous fourteenth-century Wickliffite lampoon upon the friars, entitled _Pierce the Ploughman’s Creed_, there is a long passage which refers almost certainly to the London house of the Blackfriars, since, whenever the details can be tested, they are found to be accurate. As the lines are not only of peculiar interest from their remarkably vivid description of a great friary in its architectural prime, but also from their containing the most graphic purely architectural description in the whole range of English mediæval literature, a free rendering of them is quoted below:—

Then thought I to question the first of these four orders, And pressed to the Preachers to make proof of their will; I hied to their house to learn more about them, And when I came to their Court I gazed all about. Such a boldly built pile on earthly heights Certain, I have not seen for a long time. I thought on that house and long thereon looked, How the pillars were painted and finely adorned And quaintly were carven with curious knots, With windows well wrought, lofty and wide. Then entered I in and went all about, And everywhere there were walls around the dwelling With posterns for passing privately whenever they list, Orchards and arbours arranged with neatness, And a curious cross craftily constructed With tabernacles encircled facing all sides— The price of a ploughland in pennies so round To adorn that pillar were little indeed. Then I gat me forth to look at the Church, And found it well and wonderfully built, With arches on each side, embellished and carven With crockets on their angles and knots of gold. The wide windows all wrought with numberless writings Shining with shapely shields to make a display, With merchants’ marks all figured between, To the number of more than twice two and twenty (There is no herald that hath half such a roll), And newly set out as if by a Ragman. Tombs upon tabernacles raised up aloft, Railed in with iron, with many an effigy In armour, of alabaster, seemingly clad; Laid upon marble in divers manners, Were knights now clothed in their martial dress— All, it seemed, saints who were sacred on earth!— And lovely carved ladies lay by their sides In many gay garments that were beaten gold; Though the taxes of ten years were truly gathered It could not make half that church, I trow. Then came I to the Cloister and gazed about How it was pillared and painted and carved so well, All roofed with lead low on the stones And paved with painted tiles, one after another, With conduits of clean tin, closed all about, Washing basins wrought of shining latten; I trow the price of the ground in a great shire Would not apparel that place from beginning to end. Then was the Chapter House wrought like a great church, Carven and roofed and curiously constructed, With a beautiful ceiling set up aloft, Like a Parliament-house all painted about. Then fared I to the Frater and found there again A hall for a great king, to hold his household, With broad tables and benches beautifully furnished, And windows of glass, wrought like a church. Then walked I further and went all about, And saw halls full high and houses full noble, Chambers with chimneys, and chapels gay, And kitchens such as kings may have in castles, And the Dorter furnished with strong doors; Farmery and frater with many more houses, All of strong stone walls raised up on high With garrets, great and gay, and every window glazed; And other houses now in which to lodge the queen, And yet these builders will beg a bag full of wheat Of a poor man that may, for once, pay Half his rent in a year and half be behind.

Apart from the general description contained in these lines, the sources of our information regarding the buildings of the Blackfriars date from after the Dissolution and are contained in certain grants of property, and some surveys of the time of Edward VI., the latter preserved at Loseley, near Guildford. From these it is possible to reconstruct the greater part of the Friary, an outline of which is given below.

The position of the Church is determined by the Cloister, the east walk of which is now marked by the passage called Church Entry, and its western range of buildings by the Apothecaries’ Hall. The name “Church Entry” points fairly conclusively to the usual passage between the nave and chancel—passing north and south beneath the steeple—that has been already referred to as characteristic of the friars’ plans. The nave with its two aisles measured some 114 feet by 60 feet internally, and alongside its northern aisle at the west end was the Lady Chapel, which increased the width of the west front to 90 feet externally. There is a record of this chapel as early as 1437; but from the will of Robert Castell we gather that it had been rebuilt by Lady Ingoldsthorpe, who died in 1494, sister of John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester (“the Butcher”), who was executed in 1470. The occasion of the rebuilding may have been the interment of his body, and beside him was later buried the headless body of James Touchet, Lord Audley, who suffered death at the hands of the executioner in 1497.

The steeple between the nave and choir, called in the grant to Sir Thomas Cawarden (1550) “the Campanile,” is shown in the view of London by Van der Wyngaerde. Polygonal in form, and with pinnacled parapet and spire, it obviously followed the same model as those still to be seen at Coventry and Lynn.