and columns.3
Fig. 34 St Mary in Castro, Dover Castle, Kent. Standing next to the Roman lighthouse that dates from the early 2nd century is a Saxon church, itself substantially built of re-used Roman materials. It was once linked to the lighthouse which was probably used as its bell tower. Its location at the centre of an important fortified burgh together with high-level patronage meant that it was one of the most substantial churches of its age.
So the interior of Westminster Abbey was conceived as a spatial whole rather than an agglomeration of small compartments as in Saxon churches (fig. 33). Its walls, which in an earlier Saxon church would have been a solid mass of masonry acting as a vast canvas for painting, now became an organised system of superimposed arches raised in tiers one above the other. The basic principle of the design was that each arch should be visibly supported by a column (or half-column) and a capital. This produced a clustering of vertical shafts round the piers that visually broke up the hard forms of the structure. The arches themselves no longer had simple square sections but displayed a range of shapes created by the addition of extra rolls and mouldings.
Equally, the plan of the church and abbey buildings at Westminster became the model for the layout of a monastery well into the Middle Ages (p. 98, figs 109, 175). The cross-shaped – or cruciform – church had a large eastern apse and smaller subsidiary apses on the short arms. There was a tower at the crossing and smaller towers containing stair turrets. The conventual buildings (the abbey’s domestic structures) were to the south, with the cloister in the corner between the south transept and the nave, and a chapter house with an apsidal end on the east side. There was a dormitory on the east side and a refectory on the south. Who conceived this new building for Edward will never be known, although the identity of the three most important figures is recorded: two had English names; the third appears, perhaps, to be German. In architecture stylistic change is normally more than a whim of the designer. In the case of Westminster Abbey, Church reform was an important factor (pp 73, 76); the new monastery, in common with its sister buildings in mainland Europe, was to be a model for reformed Benedictine monasticism. Edward’s political and dynastic ambitions have already been mentioned, as has his wealth, but we should never discount the sheer fascination and enjoyment of building things in a new way – and late Saxon Westminster was new and shocking to anyone who saw it.4
Fig. 35 Holy Trinity, Great Paxton, Cambridgeshire, the nave arcade; a mid-eleventh century example of compound piers with bulbous cushion capitals.
In the 1050s local churches began to display similar architectural forms to Westminster and a much stronger spatial unity. At St Mary’s, Stow-in-Lindsey, Lincolnshire, the transepts and crossing of a large minster church of c.1055 still dominate the small village. It is one of the first generation of buildings in which the Anglo-Saxon porticus had transformed itself into a fully fledged transept. The crossing tower at Stow would probably have been made of timber, but at St Mary in Castro, Dover, the masonry crossing tower survives (fig. 34), albeit much restored. A third church, Holy Trinity, Great Paxton, Cambridgeshire, not only has transepts and a crossing, but its nave has aisles with an arcade of compound piers (fig. 35). This small group of churches might once have been part of a larger family experimenting with new forms and spatial concepts, but it is likely that these architectural adventures were confined to the highest level of patronage; Great Paxton and Dover might have had been commissioned by the king, while Stow was founded by Earl Leofric and his wife Godgifu (Lady Godiva).
| Patrons lower down the social scale, however, were also very active. After 1000 thousands of local churches, originally constructed in timber, were rebuilt in stone. This fashion was started by the rich landowners of commercially developed East Anglia, but soon spread to the nucleated villages of the Midlands and then eventually to western England. This was an important moment in English architectural history. On the one hand, it shows that there were now builders who could produce a sort of standard, ready-to-order stone church; on the other, it meant that more and more ordinary people started to experience complex and elaborate stone architecture on a daily basis. |
| There was a liturgical change, too. Most of the earlier timber churches were single spaces, but the separate chancels in the new stone churches meant that the priest was separated from his congregation. This created a different relationship between congregation and priest, who now had an elevated status. Meanwhile, the nave became a communal space in which people congregated to celebrate and to mourn. From the late 10th century local churches had their own burial grounds and from around 1050 permanent fonts.5 |
| It will never be possible properly to judge the architecture of late Saxon England, as the vast majority of it was swept away after 1066. Yet what survives suggests that after 1000 a new aesthetic began to gain ground: a greater spatial harmony and a new architectural vocabulary. Much of this was promoted by a tiny super-rich elite, the structure of which was England’s political Achilles heel: Saxon England was systemically weak, unable to settle the key question of succession. That weakness was exploited by Duke William of Normandy in 1066. |
| Conquest |
| The Norman Conquest looms large over English history, casting a shadow that obscures much of what came before and colouring what came after. It sounds obvious to say it, but in the year 1000 no one had heard of the Norman Conquest. In fact no one had heard of the Normans as such; to the English the people of Normandy were French. England and Normandy faced each other across the Channel, sharing a common cultural inheritance, both greatly influenced by Scandinavia. England was richer and bigger, and was experimenting with exactly the same types of architectural novelty as the Normans. |
| I have already suggested that the term ‘Romanesque’ is not very helpful in trying to characterise Anglo-Saxon architecture (p. 39), so this book does not use it. The same applies to what was built after 1066, which is normally categorised as Romanesque and commonly called Norman. Sadly, this too is simplistic and confusing, suggesting as it does that the buildings erected in England after 1066 were somehow in a style that was brought over by the Normans. They were not. What is normally called Norman architecture was developed in England after 1066, drawing on native traditions and absorbing influences and ideas from across Europe, so it can more properly be called Anglo-Norman or Anglo-French. It was an inventive, eclectic, exotic and cosmopolitan style born of a unique coincidence of political, religious, social, cultural and economic events. English architecture for a period of fifty years was among the most original and influential in Europe.6 |
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| Fig. 37 The White Tower, Tower of London; conjectural room uses as originally intended. Cut away reconstruction from the south west: a) basement level for storage; b) entrance level containing a hall, ‘throne room’ and private chamber; c) first floor hall, chamber and chapel. Cut away from the south east: d) first floor hall; e) chapel. |
