Part 7

The traditional removal of fittings and furniture from the dissolved monastic houses to neighbouring parish churches is generally found on examination to be devoid of any foundation, the unusual richness or lavish decoration of a screen, a roof, or a piece of tabernacle work having alone given rise to the popular belief. There are, however, a few instances of the genuine transfer of monastic “loot” to parish churches, which are all the more surprising when one considers the low repute into which the Gothic craftsmanship was rapidly falling at that period. The choir stalls at Richmond, Yorks (brought from Easby Abbey), and the still finer series at Whalley, Lancashire, are well authenticated instances of this practice, while at Lancaster there is every probability that the magnificent fourteenth-century stalls in the parish church originally adorned the choir of Cockersand Abbey. It is true that an alien priory was long attached to the church at Lancaster, but the fact that the existing fabric is almost entirely of later date than the confiscation of the alien houses makes it more than improbable that the stalls were transferred from the earlier church. On the other hand there is the persistent tradition of their Cockersand origin and the neighbouring instance of a similar transfer at Whalley.

As at present arranged they stand on either side of the sacrarium, the returned stalls (two on each side) being placed against the east wall. The seats, fourteen in all and 2 ft. 5 in. from centre to centre, are provided with misericordes more or less mutilated and carved with grotesque figures. The canopies are supported on buttressed shafts at the back and front, carried up in the form of crocketed pinnacles and finished with carved finials of unusual form. Above each seat is an ogee arch richly crocketed and filled in beneath with a pierced panel of flamboyant tracery, each bay being of different design. Rising slightly behind these arches are lofty gables filled with similar panels, the crockets forming a nearly continuous edging of carving and presenting an almost infinite richness and variety. The comparative scarcity of “Decorated” woodwork adds largely to the value of the present example, which is undoubtedly the richest specimen of fourteenth-century wood-carving now remaining in this country.

The church of Cockerham is said to possess the Cockersand bells, and at Mytton near Clitheroe is a rood-screen said to have been derived from the same source. In the latter instance, however, the screen was undoubtedly intended for its present position, and was erected at the cost of the abbey, which then held the advowson of the church. Be this as it may, the forgotten and inconspicuous Lancashire convent has transmitted to the present day, in its octagonal chapter-house and its splendid stalls, some indication of the beauty and originality of monastic work even in the remoter parts of England, and has preserved for itself two monuments of its days of prosperity, while the very existence of so many of its greater fellows is rescued from oblivion only by lingering tradition and their written records.

The foregoing notes, with the accompanying photographs, should therefore be of value to all who take an interest in mediæval architecture, more especially in those examples which are not rendered familiar by constant illustration.

—A. W. C.

THE REBUILDING OF CROSBY HALL AT CHELSEA

VIII.

THE REBUILDING OF CROSBY HALL AT CHELSEA.

The removal of Crosby Hall from Bishopsgate to Chelsea, regretful as was the necessity, provides us with an excuse for investigating its claim to our admiration. The vicissitudes of this noble fragment of fifteenth-century domestic architecture have been told many times since it was threatened with demolition, and since the day on which, after escaping the Great Fire of 1666, and also a second outbreak a few years later (when most of the mansion of Crosby Place was destroyed), it fell finally, in 1908, to the business demands of our modern city.

Although known for many years, and still known, as Crosby Hall, it must be remembered that the building was merely a fragment of the City-merchant’s palace which was called Crosby Place from the name of Sir John Crosby who built it. Shakespeare calls it Crosbies’ Place in _King Richard III._, and we know that it was a house of great size and magnificence—so much so, that it shared with other important palaces of London the distinction of providing lodging for the noblest ambassadors. This was the great Hall or principal apartment of Crosby Place—the sole survivor of all the spacious rooms and galleries that surrounded its many courtyards and overlooked its gardens.

Sir John Crosby rebuilt a large portion of an existing house in Bishopsgate, which was formerly in the occupation of a wealthy Genoese merchant named Cataneo Pinelli. This rebuilding was begun in the year 1466, the sixth year of the reign of Edward IV., some twelve or thirteen years before the king constructed his great Hall at Eltham Palace, which offers many interesting points of comparison with Crosby Hall. (_Vide ante_ pp. 58, 59.)

Now, the fifteenth century saw the third and last period of that unique style of architecture which we call Gothic—a period which lasted from the latter end of the fourteenth century to the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII., and which is generally known by the useful and significant title of Perpendicular.

Although it is the third period only of Gothic architecture which is known by the name of Perpendicular—and this merely from a detail of its window tracery—yet the term might be applied with great truth to the whole style in contrast to the strong preference which the classical builders showed for the horizontal line. The Greek architects confined all their buildings within the uncompromisingly horizontal limits of their cornice or entablature, and even the Romans who had learned to construct the most elaborate edifices with their semi-circular arches were not content until they had imprisoned each row of arches beneath the long cornice of the Greeks. It was not until the Byzantine builders began to design great churches for the Christian faith, and when the Western Church took up the work, that an attempt was made to free the design from its horizontal limits and to encourage its growth upwards, as a symbol of its religious aspiration. The consummation of these efforts, continued for many hundreds of years, was the sudden birth of Gothic art at the end of the twelfth century, and the wonderful forests of vertical lines leading up to a thousand pointed or—as the French say—broken arches, which we see in our great cathedrals. For a time the classical idea was banished—architecture had broken away from the human scale imposed upon it by the Greek artists, and it was striving to express something superhuman, mysterious, and divine. This spirit could not, however, last for long—it was of too ideal a nature—and just as the finest period of Greek architecture is confined to at most a couple of centuries, so in the case of Gothic the same number of years saw the shadow of approaching change. The Renaissance, the great reversion to classical conceptions, did not obtain a firm footing in England until the sixteenth century, but in the fifteenth we can already see signs of its coming if we look for them, and in no detail is it plainer than in the enclosing of the fifteenth-century pointed arch within a square frame. It can be seen most clearly in Crosby Hall in the case of the fireplace, the north-west door, and the main arch to the great oriel window. It appears also in the arches to the ordinary windows which are confined by a square frame of woodwork, in those of the oriel window in its lower lights and its panels, and in every little pierced arch of the oak roof and cornice. The top lights of the oriel window alone cling to the original idea of the Gothic arch, and point upwards amid the curving ribs of the stone vaults, without any check. At the same time that the arch was imprisoned within a square moulded frame, the arch itself became flatter or more depressed, and assumed the familiar shape which architects call four-centred from its being a composite arch of four distinct curves. The arch over the oriel window and that to the fireplace are two good instances of this in Crosby Hall.

This altered character of the arch is the chief architectural point to notice, and the second is the introduction of panelling. Practically all the design in the earlier and purer Gothic work was confined to definite structural forms and to their adornment and enrichment. In the fifteenth century, however, there began the custom of dividing wall and other surfaces up into panels, again by the introduction of horizontal lines among the vertical ones—and thus was started the type of decoration which remained the most popular method from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. First the long lights of the windows were divided by transomes or horizontal bars as in the oriel window, which is separated into three tiers. Then the vaults themselves were no longer divided only by the structural ribs which carried the weight of the stone roof, but were subdivided again by cross-ribs into the delightful network of panels which is shown in the vault of the oriel, where each intersection has a beautiful carved boss. From this it was an easy matter to repeat the outlines of the windows in stone upon the walls as is here done on those sides of the oriel that did not admit of being pierced for light. The square frames round the arches provided little triangular panels or spandrils, such as those above the oriel and fireplace, and in other similar places. Above all, the timber framing of the roof was specially suited to the panel treatment, and whether we look at the long rectangular divisions into which the great arched ceiling is divided, or at the succession of little squares with pierced quatrefoils in the cornice and round the stone corbels, we cannot fail to appreciate how completely this method of design had gained favour with the fifteenth-century builders.

Let us now consider briefly what light Crosby Hall has to throw upon the arrangements and planning of a mediæval house.

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the English country house—apart from the castles and other fortified places—was a very simple but most dignified building. Its main apartment was the Great Hall, where the whole household lived, dined, and sometimes slept—a room designed on such a scale as to give the necessary shelter to all the servants as well as to the members of the family. To this hall was generally attached, at the upper end, a small withdrawing room or sleeping chamber for the master and mistress of the house, and to the lower end a kitchen for the preparation of food. The system of the family and its dependents, as assembled in their hall, constituted a little hierarchy like that of the feudal State or that of the Church. Privacy was discouraged; every man lived his life in the presence of his fellows, and beneath the fine timber roofs of the great Gothic halls the plan worked out well and produced good men and noble women. Community of living was understood by the people of the Middle Ages in a way that is hard for us to understand now; it was a familiar thing to them, and it is illustrated over and over again in their social customs. So much was this so, that when at the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth centuries we find people adding private apartments to their houses, we also meet with protests from men like William Langland, who saw in this new practice a loss of interest in the household and a consequent shirking of duty towards its members. In his _Vision of Piers Plowman_ we read concerning the Great Hall:—

“Each day in the week There the lord nor the lady liketh not to sit, Now hath each rich man a rule, to eat by himself In a privy parlour—for poor men’s sake. Or in a chamber with a chimney, and leave the chief hall, That was made for meals, for men to eat in, And all to spare to spill that spend shall another.”

Now, by the time that Sir John Crosby came to build his mansion, the privy parlour had become a settled institution, and with it a multitude of other private rooms had found their way into the necessary domestic equipment. But these new rooms had not yet completely ousted the Great Hall, nor was this time-honoured and central feature of the house superseded until well on into the seventeenth century. The Hall was still used on many important family occasions it was still the place for general meeting and the exchange of courtesies, and it happily retained its mediæval plan and arrangement with scarcely any modification of importance.

We have, therefore, in Crosby Hall the Great Hall of a fifteenth-century mansion, which resembles those of two centuries before and two centuries after its time, all of which followed the same pattern, if with certain slight modifications in design.

Let us imagine that we have entered the front courtyard of Crosby Place through the gatehouse in Bishopsgate Street. We approach the Hall which lies directly in front of us, passing the Chapel on our right and the private apartments on our left. We enter at the chief door, and find ourselves at the lower end of the Hall behind a beautiful oak screen and beneath a projecting gallery. Every Hall was provided with a screen to divide the entrance passage from the room. Here unfortunately we have lost all trace of this end of Crosby Hall. Quite probably it suffered in the fire that destroyed the southern part of the mansion in the seventeenth century. We have not even the old doorway left to us, for a large archway had been driven through the walls and under the gallery to Crosby Square, and horses and carts passed to and fro. Only when we came to pull down the building did we find some traces of the original beams of the gallery still left in the ceiling over this roadway. It can be seen that the gallery formed part of the hall, and its windows were designed to harmonise with the long range on the west side. The high roof of the hall, however, was not carried over the gallery, and so its two windows were drawn together, there being no need for a stone corbel between them. Some doubts have been cast on the genuineness of this double window since it had been much restored, probably when the archway was made. I have little doubt, however, that it shows the original arrangement, and it may be noted in its support that all the windows in Eltham Palace are grouped together in this way in twos, the stone corbels and roof beams being divided by each coupled window. The corresponding wall on the east side of the gallery had long been destroyed, but from the presumptive evidence of the rest of the hall and of its careful balance of features, we have ventured to place a new counterpart of the double window here also. The oak roof over the gallery is again a conjectural restoration, and it is hoped before the rest of the buildings are completed that we shall be able to replace the missing screen as well with one which will properly fulfil its function and reflect in part at least the beauty of the hall roof.

Having passed through the screen into the hall, the visitor would be at leisure to examine its various features. The windows on either side are placed high in the wall, but towards the upper end a beautiful bay-window or oriel is thrown out in order that the principal members of the family might have the use of its space for comparative privacy and from its lowered windows might look out upon the courtyard. Beyond the oriel on the same side is the door to the great parlour or private dining-room, above which was the great chamber—a reception room in much favour in this and the succeeding century. Mr. Gotch reminds us that Slender in _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ boasts of his Great Chamber. The blank windows between the oriel and the end wall show the position of this room which was misnamed the Throne Room while Crosby Hall was still a restaurant, and it was felt advisable to keep up the legend of Richard III. and his crown. These and the two windows on the east wall, corresponding to the blank ones, are a smaller size than the others, perhaps to allow loftier hangings to be placed round the dais. Opposite to the oriel was the beautiful fireplace of a size and proportion befitting this fine apartment. By it the upper end was well warmed, but it was not sufficient to heat the lower hall where the servants were gathered, and it is more than probable that the _louvre_, or opening in the fifth bay of the roof, represents the position below of the central hearth which would be used in addition to the fireplace.

Fireplaces had been known and used since Norman times, but they were never so popular in the great halls as the open brazier, and we find that even in the King’s Palace at Eltham there was an open hearth provided to the exclusion of the fireplace, though, as we have seen, it was built several years afterwards. This I think disposes to a large extent of the popular assumption that the open hearth was primitive and inconvenient.

All these features above described constitute together the normal arrangement in practically every mediæval domestic building of any size. Whether one visits the halls of Hampton Court, Eltham, or Croydon Palace, or the later halls at the Charterhouse, the Middle Temple, Gray’s Inn, or Lambeth, one recognises the same scheme with such slight variations as the two oriels at Eltham and the Temple, and the occasional absence of the fireplace already noticed. But the greatest glory of these mediæval halls was the timber roof which crowned the whole building and which, here in Crosby Hall, constitutes the most valuable part of the original work. This roof is of particular interest, as it represents a transition from the open timber roof to the later ceiling. The roof of Westminster Hall and those of Hampton Court and Eltham belong to the former class and are among the finest examples of the famous hammer-beam construction. The tradition of the open timber roof remained, indeed, so strong that even in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the hammer-beam was still employed, and the Halls of the Temple and Lambeth Palace show it in its later treatment. But in the case of most of the buildings of the latter half of the fifteenth century the curved and panelled ceiling had come into vogue, and it became the most fashionable method of roofing our parish churches. At Crosby Hall we have, as far as I know, a unique example of this type, for its little forest of pendants—from each of which spring four arches in different directions—make a most original design of great charm. It has been likened to an attempt to gain the effect of fan-vaulting in wood, and no doubt its elaborate detail prevented its repetition in other places. It would have been a great loss to students of architecture if this roof had perished. Happily it was in beautiful preservation, and no single feature of any importance was lacking when put together.

It should be noticed most especially how the roof governs the design of the whole room, bringing each part into harmony with the rest. It is divided into eight bays or compartments by seven arched principals. In each of these compartments on the wall below is a window of two lights brought beneath one deeply moulded arch. The oriel itself occupies two bays. Each roof-principal is carried down to a fine stone corbel which exactly fills the space between the windows and is an integral part of the massive wall stones. Unfortunately one or two of these corbels were replaced at the restoration of the building in the last century. Between the windows and the roof runs the simple cornice of battlements and quatrefoils, the spandrels, or triangular panels on either side of the windows being filled with pierced tracery.

It remains now to state how much of this building is old and how much new, for the visitor will notice a great difference between its appearance here in Chelsea and its old aspect in its restaurant days. It must be remembered that although the fine roof, windows, and other features had remained intact, yet the old hall had suffered grievously from various alterations and additions. Several architects of the Gothic revival period had given it such features as a modern gallery to the south, an organ loft, arch and screen at the north end, and doorways which were not of its original plan. Besides these additions in questionable taste, the west wall which fronted Bishopsgate had been robbed of its original Reigate stone facing and covered with perishable Bath stone, and the eastern wall had been disfigured to a terrible extent by the modern buildings which adjoined it. The chief aim in rebuilding the Hall was to set each original piece which had form or beauty left to it in its proper relative position to the main building. It was necessary, therefore, to use all that was left and to discard the faulty modern reparation, supplying their place with durable work to ensure the safety of what was genuinely old. The walls were built of brick in place of the old rubble which was of little use. The Bath facing stones were replaced with Portland, and each window and door stone was carefully set in its place. Only on the east wall had the external masonry to be entirely replaced, and the stones of the windows severed to preserve the old work on the inside. The two end walls were formerly internal walls of Crosby Place, but they had completely perished. Their position is taken by what will be similarly the internal walls of the College. The original walls were plastered within, and the same treatment was followed here; in fact, the old example was followed minutely in every particular, with the one exception of the floor. There is evidence that the old floor was of Purbeck marble unpolished—but it was decided that it would be unwise to attempt to replace this, and an oak door has been made instead. The Hall, therefore, is older on the inside than the outside, and this is perhaps as it should be, for it may be claimed that wherever a building be planted its interior can never lose its old associations, but its removal destroys much of the historical significance of the external appearance which rightly belongs to its old site in Bishopsgate.