capitals of these were richly carved and brightly painted, and below, on the great blank wall, would have been paintings or hangings to give the hall a feeling of vitality and colour. The roof was probably carried by a series of vast timber trusses, themselves presumably painted and decorated, and the floor was probably of rammed earth, allowing for the entry of mounted knights. This was never a space for regular use. It was rather a ceremonial hall conceived as the setting for the great feasts that accompanied major religious festivals. In here William wore his crown in splendour and presided over his magnificent household as God’s elected ruler.24
| These changes can be seen as they take place at Durham Cathedral. The historic core of Durham, sitting high on a U-shaped bend in the river Wear, has the most dramatic site of any town in England. The scarp on which the cathedral and castle now stand was from ancient times a fortress, and here the Normans built the supreme English monuments of the Norman age. The castle, in timber, came first, but in 1093 the foundation stone for a new cathedral was laid – it took 40 years to build. In that period the austerity of the first generation of post-Conquest buildings was swept aside in an encrustation of decoration, indeed a resurgence of Anglo-Saxon aesthetics. Whilst the bones of the cathedral’s design are familiar – the alternating compound and cylindrical piers are as in the Confessor’s abbey – the first-floor gallery, at Westminster almost of equal height to the main arcade, has been reduced. The arcades at Durham are huge, and squeeze the gallery and clerestory up to the roof (fig. 51). This is an aesthetic change, in that the piers dominate the nave; but it is also a liturgical one, as the gallery was no longer considered to be a major liturgical space. Equally important was the invention, at Durham, of the rib vault. The naves of early cathedrals had been roofed in timber, with flat, painted-timber ceilings – the effect can now be seen at Peterborough (fig. 50) or Ely. At Durham a way was found of vaulting over a much wider space, with masonry highlighting the intersections of the vault with stone ribs (fig. 51). The vault was a crucial architectural development because a flat, timber roof broke up the unity of the space while a vault drew together all the elements into a coherent whole. Durham’s novelty is not only in its structure; it also lies in its decoration. The eastern parts of the cathedral, which were built first, have little surface decoration, but the nave, built after 1104, gets progressively more showy towards the west. The piers are cut with lozenges and zigzags, the arches with chevrons, and the aisle walls are decorated with blank, intersecting arcading that looks as if it has fallen straight out of an Anglo-Saxon manuscript. This change from austerity to exuberance can be seen elsewhere: at Ely, for instance, where the decoration is external too, and at Norwich, where the tower is highly original, almost wacky, with bold roundels, lozenges and blind arcading (fig. 52). |
Fig. 50 Peterborough Cathedral nave; the flat wooden ceiling dates from c.1230 and is painted with images designed to be read from the nave far below. Colourful, expressive and a precious survival, it never succeeded in architecturally drawing together the great arcades of 1160–90.
Fig. 51 Durham Cathedral nave, unlike Peterborough, is visually united by its vault. We don’t know who the designer was, but here force and splendour are coherently combined as nowhere else in medieval England. Rib vaults were first erected in the Durham choir in 1095 and were a ground-breaking advance of European importance. The ribs have their own structural integrity and the cells between are made of lighter material 12–18 inches thick.
The Anglo-Saxons had a rich tradition of carving in stone, but their sculptures were either freestanding or used as applied ornament, rather like a bejewelled clasp on a cloak. The new architectural forms developing in Normandy and England in the years around 1066 integrated sculptural decoration into architecture, and blended the roles of sculptor and mason. Architecture after 1066 introduced new opportunities for sculptural embellishment. Whilst Anglo-Saxon doorways were plain rectangular openings in plan, after the Conquest they were routinely recessed, with small columns and capitals supporting moulded arches. These often enclose a stone slab called a tympanum, which provided an opportunity for a virtuoso display of carving (fig. 53). Likewise the capital, a ubiquitous and essential element of the new style, was a vehicle for carving. The vault of Archbishop Anselm’s crypt at Canterbury rests on a forest of carved and decorated columns, each crowned with a sculpted capital; the best, such as the one showing a wyvern fighting a dog, are bursting with energy and motion (fig. 54). The style of these capitals is so close to the initial letters in manuscripts painted in the priory that they must have been designed by the same hands. These were exceptional; most capitals were of a type known as ‘cushion’, a squashed cube of stone that could be painted, carved or more usually left plain. These were rare in Normandy and, as used in England, were probably copied from Germany. They were easy to reproduce quickly in places where the skill, time or money was not available for anything more elaborate.
Fig. 52 Norwich Cathedral; the spectacular crossing tower was the last part of the cathedral to be completed in around 1140; it was erected only after the foundations of the crossing had been allowed to settle, thus avoiding the sort of collapse that had been experienced at Winchester or Ely. The turrets at the corners are part of the original conception – the spire was added in the 1480s.
Sculptural traditions after the Conquest, as with architectural ones, were cosmopolitan, and masons working on the great cathedrals blended influences from Normandy, Burgundy, the Loire, Germany and Scandinavia to produce a rich variety of forms. The most expressive example of this is a group of churches in Herefordshire. One of these, St Mary and St David’s, Kilpeck, displays 85 carved corbels, as well as carved door and window surrounds (fig. 53). Here a Scandinavian great beast with a snake-like body and a dragon’s head winds its way through the stems of a plant of Anglo-Saxon decorative origin.25
Fig.
