Space and the End of the Middle Ages in Britain

  Now I am not a person who likes to indulge in debates about periodisation in history. As far as I am concerned, the middle ages came between the early ages and the recent ages. There is no one set of events, or values, or levels of knowledge, or types of government, or religion which draws a line between different eras. It is all a complicated jigsaw. Scholars of Italian history like to put the end of the middle ages earlier than those of British history for the paradoxical reason that Italian intellectuals suddenly took an interest in the writings of the ancient past. The French seem to like to keep the medieval era going until they all became Enlightened.

Ruins of Lanercost Priory, Cumbria

  In Britain the changes of the Reformation are taken to be a watershed issue that could be considered epoch changing. The family medievalist firmly asserts that the medieval period ended in England in 1540. So there. Much ink has been expended on how much, how comprehensively and how quickly those religious changes got into the mindsets of ordinary people. Not going there. Enough said already and some of it based on modern personal belief rather than much else. What did happen in England was that the use of space in daily life changed. The configuration of town and country was changed forever.

Oxford

  I have always found Oxford a rather unwelcoming place. Nothing to do with the people, although I guess they have their little exclusivities at times, but the ancient layout of the town is a trifle forbidding. Everywhere there are exclusion zones, defined by elegant quadrangles which are not public space. The streets are oppressively walled off and you feel that all the action is going on inside those secluded enclaves from which you are barred. Like many first time visitors, I was lost and confused about where the university actually was, gradually realising that the university is not a bounded entity but a whole bunch of entities dotted around the town, each claiming its bit of space and history.

The vast complex of Blackfriars, Norwich, middle distance behind another large church.

  Late medieval towns were a bit like that. In the larger and more prosperous towns, various types of religious institutions had acquired space within the town walls, built increasingly grand constructions and enclosed them within their own walls. These were communities within the larger community, and those not members of them just walked past and wondered, I guess.

Anglo-Saxon tower of St Mary-le-Wigford, Lincoln, one of three surviving medieval churches.

  This is the pattern for the end of the middle ages, but it doesn't define the whole epoch. Towns which were prosperous before the Norman Conquest had many small parish churches founded by lay patrons, many of which did not survive to the end of the middle ages as parishes consolidated. The constant process of church rebuilding meant that the surviving churches became larger and more elaborate as others disappeared. The monasteries became larger, more elaborate and more powerful forces in the land.

Southwell Minster, collegiate church.

  More recently founded collegiate churches, with colleges of canons rather then monks, rivalled the cathedrals for grandeur.

St Cross Hospital, Winchester

  Hospitals were built, not as places of medical healing but where the poor, elderly and sick could be cared for. In the case of the leper hospitals they were also for protecting the rest of the community against disease and were often located outside the town walls. Within the towns they ranged from little houses of charity, pilgrimage hostels, to some quite grand institutions, often run by Augustinian canons and resembling other large, enclosed church institutions.

Blackfriars complex, Norwich, largest surviving in the land.

  The arrival of the friars in the 13th century added more to the ecclesiastical mix of the towns. The concept of mendicants living like the apostles on charity in the streets gave way to the building of large complexes, each in their own enclave. The massive churches were available for the laity to be preached to, but the borders of the enclaves expanded as town populations took a hit after the bubonic plague of the 14th century.

Ruins of the bishop's palace at Lincoln.

  Bishops and archbishops claimed pieces of towns all over the country, constructing large palaces for when they went rambling around their dioceses. They did it in style, even when they were away from home.

Fountains Abbey

  Even in the countryside large areas were controlled by the church. The Cistercian abbeys set in remote locations for the monks to live the ascetic and contemplative life became large estates with increasingly huge and elaborate buildings. The various abbeys had rural manors all over the place. Some of these places must have seemed like small towns in their own right.
  Essentially the church had space, the church had walls. Then within a very short period of time, those walls came down. The friaries and some collegiate churches seem to have disappeared quite rapidly, their walls pillaged for building materials, their buildings sometimes used for other civic purposes, but steadily running down. Leland, in his travels around England immediately after the Dissolution of the Monasteries, refers to the friaries and urban abbeys in the past tense, which they certainly were in terms of being institutions but probably rapidly became so in terms of fabric. Daniel Defoe, describing Lincoln in the early 18th century, claims that barns, stables, out-houses and "hog-styes" were built "church fashion" using carved stones from old ecclesiastical buildings.

A bit of old stone wall, all that exists of the Austin friary in York.

  York had substantial houses of the four major orders of friars, but barely a stone remains and those not very recognisable. This is not an uncommon fate for these institutions.

Rievaulx Abbey as garden ornament.

  These changes to the use of space were probably less obvious in rural areas. Large rural monasteries were taken over by large rural landholders who nicked stonework to build their new mansions but left ruins for their aesthetic value and swank. You can see how a medieval monastery was laid out and worked in the wild hills of Yorkshire better than in the crowded towns.

Norwich Cathedral with beat up remains of monastic cloisters.

  Even the urban monasteries that were cathedrals, or were turned into cathedrals, lost much of the structure outside the church and their sense of enclosure.

Partially ruined collegiate church at Howden.

  Collegiate churches disappeared or declined. Even the beautiful Beverley Minster was barely rescued from destruction by some engineering genius in the 18th century, as the townsfolk continued to use the town church of St Mary's, as they had always done. There was just too much church around. In Leicester and Norwich collegiate churches disappeared, releasing their enclosed spaces for other urban purposes.

Holy Trinity Hospital, Leicester.

  Hospitals became run down and less able to provide for those they served without the charity of the church, and the obligations the church put on others, to support them. In Leicester Holy Trinity Hospital became steadily more decrepit until it was rebuilt in the late 18th century.

Where a bishop's palace once was, Northallerton.

  The bishops and archbishops had to curb their profligate living arrangements and the palaces dotted around the place  were appropriated, pillaged or disappeared.
  New urban amenities were built, such as grammar schools to replace the teaching functions of the church schools. It does seem that some areas of the towns were ransacked for their materials and became a bit derelict until the renewal of urban amenities in the 19th centuries. Post offices, railway stations, theatres, museums and art galleries so often occupy the sites of medieval religious institutions. Changes to trade, transport and commerce over time caused towns as a whole to open up as walls and gates were demolished. This process has gone to extremes with modern road transport in some places. (I'm looking at you, Leicester and Nottingham.)
  So perhaps we can define the end of the middle ages in English towns not so much by religious change as such, whatever that implies in terms of belief or private conviction, but in terms of use of urban space. This just leaves the question of whether bringing down those old walls reclaimed the space for the town dwellers, or handed them over to a new class of owners.

Where Did the Stones Go?

  In the course of pottering through photographs and antiquarians' accounts to see and reassemble some changing patterns of how our ancestral societies have used and changed the built environment in the middle ages and beyond, I have become intrigued by the scale with which building materials, particularly stones, have been shifted around. It is possible to see where they have been, and where they have disappeared from, but seeing where they have gone to can be tricky.

  This is the site of Leicester Abbey, a substantial Augustinian house with significant historic connections. It has an ancient wall around it. Some of the pillar bases look like the real thing, but much of the rest of it looks not even like proper foundations, rather lines of stones laid out to show where walls were, or were likely to have been. It's bare, empty and extraordinarily vacant in spirit as well as substance.

From Mrs T. Fielding Johnson 1906 Glimpses of Ancient Leicester: Leicester

  After the dissolution of the monasteries, the fabric was pillaged to build a grand mansion, which explains the wreckage, but the mansion itself eventually became derelict. Either the owners were not of the school that retained a romantic ruin in the grounds, or the remains of the abbey and most of the mansion were later removed lock, stock and barrel to build roads, or rebuild the Civil War damage in the town, or build the stocking factories of Leicester, or the railway stations or some other purpose.

  Stone shifting and re-use has been going on since people first thought of putting one stone on top of another. Hadrian's Wall, here shown near Birdoswald, is nowhere its former self. Drystone walls and stone farm buildings are abundant in the rugged north and those neat little squared Roman building stones are just so handy. And there was road building. It's easy to imagine plenty of uses for them without having to take them very far. Roman stones and tiles found their way into later buildings in various places.

  The church of St Nicholas in Leicester has Roman stones and tiles embedded in its fabric. As it is right beside the Roman Jewry wall and public baths, they didn't have to be brought very far.

  Monastic ruins in locations that are difficult of access, such as Fountains Abbey above, have retained substantial ruins, probably because it wasn't worth anybody's trouble and expense to cart the raw materials away. Then they became part of the high class garden furniture of the aristocracy and were preserved because they could be, but not entirely.

  The houses of the wealthy landowners became bigger and more elaborate, explaining some of the existing holes in the monastic ruins. Fountains Hall is not part of the medieval Fountains Abbey, or is it? These stones have had another life.
  Town churches became redundant in the middle ages as parishes were consolidated, and no doubt there was cannibalism as the materials were recycled to enlarge and adorn the ones that survived. Churches did keep getting bigger on the whole. Ecclesiastical Darwinism.

From Mrs T. Fielding Johnson 1906 Glimpses of Ancient Leicester: Leicester

  In Leicester in the 16th century a large town mansion and a free grammar school were built using materials from the redundant church of St Peter. The mansion was rebuilt and altered many times only to succumb to demolition in 1902 to build the railway station, which is itself no longer in that location. The grammar school still exists as a structure, having undergone changes of purpose. (The VCH on British History Online gives it as a carpet warehouse. Google maps shows a restaurant on the site.) This all seems like recycling and churning as a town's needs change over the centuries, but there is a bit of an anomaly.

  Prosperous medieval towns supported large religious institutions with large buildings, expansive cloisters, rambling outbuildings. The above is the former Dominican Priory in Norwich. The friaries and some collegiate churches acquired ever increasing amounts of land within the towns and built big things all over them. The complex in Norwich is a rare survival as by some incidents or accidents of history the buildings were re-used over the centuries for a variety of purposes without totally destroying their integrity. There is a lot of building material in this structure. In this case, because it is Norwich, it includes a lot of flint which may not have seemed so worthy of pillage as other stone. Not sure about that. Most complexes of this type gradually vanished from the town landscape.

  What is far more likely to be found in a modern town is some fragment which has survived the destruction, like this scrap of the Franciscan friary in Lincoln. Last heard, the future of this building was in doubt but the latest proposed incarnation was as a community centre run by the local diocese, having previously served as a museum. This is an interesting evocation of changing community needs, but it doesn't explain where the rest of the materials of the fabric of the entire religious complex went to. The friars didn't remain propertyless mendicants for long, or at least, they had substantial homes to go to.

  An even more enigmatic fragment from Lincoln is this old water conduit, made from a miscellany of carved stones taken from the Carmelite Friary site.That site also eventually disappeared under a railway station, which subsequently vanished to be eventually replaced by buildings of the University of Lincoln. I guess there is some parallel between educational institutions and religious ones in the psyche of a town, but the new institutions are not built from old friary stones.
  Lincoln became very down at heel in the later middle ages and beyond. Daniel Defoe writes of it in the late 17th, early 18th century:

  "Lincoln is an antient, ragged, decay'd, and still decaying city; it is so full of the ruins of monasteries and religious houses, that, in short, the very barns, stables, out-houses, and, as they shew'd me, some of the very hog-styes, were built church-fashion; that is to say, with stone walls and arch'd windows and doors." Daniel Defoe 1928 A Tour Through England and Wales, Vol. 2: London and New York

  You could make quite a few stables and hog-styes out of a bunch of friaries. The description also doesn't suggest much urban renewal in these religious sites, more rural encroachment on the town. It makes you wonder how much of this stone material made its way into the railway stations, art galleries, theatres, post offices, schools and other vital ingredients of the modern urban revival.
  In areas where good quality building stone was rare, it was probably worthwhile to shift it considerable distances. There seems to have been a good bit of shunting stone around along the Ouse, Derwent and Humber river system in Yorkshire, where the white limestone from Tadcaster was favoured for fancy buildings.

  Not a stone remains visible above ground of the East Yorkshire Cistercian Abbey of Meaux, near Beverley. The Google satellite image shows some suggestive marks on the ground. Click here. The whole shebang was shipped down the Hull river to build Henry VIII's  harbour defences at Hull. These are now completely vanished.

  The former abbey church of Selby is built of Tadcaster limestone. Now a handsome parish church, its cloister and all the conventual buildings have completely disappeared.

  Beverley Minster, a formerly collegiate church, got into a drastic state in the 18th century due to the fact that St Mary's was in use as the main parish church of the town, so that it stood largely unused and neglected. The north transept nearly collapsed, only rescued by a man of great ingenuity and confidence with a nifty grasp of engineering physics. It is claimed that stone was shipped from the ruins of St Mary's Abbey in York to assist in its repairs.

  There certainly isn't a great deal left of the stone work of St Mary's. York Minster itself, meanwhile, has required periodic major surgery over many years to keep it glorious and functioning. 

  Meanwhile, most ancient English towns have demolished, partially or wholly, their medieval walls and gates for purposes of modern convenience, but York has not only retained but maintained and renovated its defences of Tadcaster limestone. You can hardly tell where they breached the walls to let the railway in when that was the ultimate in urban modernity, although not a trace remains of the friary that lay underneath the station. The station has, of course, been banished again to the outer regions. The walls of York have undoubtedly gathered in some stones from other sources.
  It is hard to get your head around how these massive stony urban complexes could vanish so completely. There is reason to believe it took a long time in many cases and that ruins lay around in the heart of the cities for years, even centuries. The stones of many buildings, ancient or more modern, may have led many lives and travelled considerable distances. Some may have gone from noble buildings to perform more humble purposes, as roads, docks, walls. Some may have been incorporated into new buildings engendering civic pride. Some of humble origin may have been elevated to more elegant uses. They are effectively alive and part of evolving organisms.
  There is a tendency for folks to discuss the authenticity of ancient buildings. They are all palimpsests; repaired, renovated, beautified, reconceptualised. The idea of a building can live, as with the great cathedrals, or die, as  with the vanished friaries. The stones have many tales to tell. I still find it hard to imagine where that tonnage of stone from the medieval institutions of the towns has gone, but it's out there somewhere.

Not Just a Big Church

  I have recently become aware that, with all the nattering on Twitter about Camden and blogging about tombs,  I still have about a zillion roughly digitised old photographs to clean up and sort, including numbers that I took of monasteries, cathedrals, hospitals and collegiate churches. What fascinated me about these institutions is how they were entire communities among themselves, connected into the greater society but at least partially self supporting, with their own networks and hierarchies.
  In fact, the western medieval church can be seen as a society in itself, part of the society of the nations where it resided but not entirely of them, partly a transnational social system with its own rules and structures. As is well known, the relations between secular governments and church authority could get seriously bumpy at times.
  The nature of church society and its relationship with secular society changed drastically over the course of the medieval era. There is an image of monks of the Dark Ages living solitary, ascetic lives of literate scholarship, apart from secular society. By the 15th century monasteries were big business enterprises of major economic significance and senior churchmen were influential people wheeling and dealing in the land. In my investigations of important medieval towns (now a defunct multimedia project waiting for a Lazarus revival), it became apparent just what proportion of town real estate had become the property of major church institutions of various kinds. Their impressions on the townscape can still be seen today, even if there is not a stone to show above ground. The big institutions of 19th century urban revival, such as railway stations, libraries, museums or theatres, were often built on land that had formerly belonged to long departed friaries, collegiate churches or the appurtenances to cathedrals. There must have been something there in the meantime, but presumably nothing that couldn't be knocked down.
  It is these accidents of survival and destruction that give us our impression of the medieval church through heritage monuments. I have started tweeting some of these pictures with the hashtag #notjustabigchurch as I go along, to try to build up a picture of the whole pattern.

  The magnificent Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire preserves much of its structure and complexity, giving us a glimpse of all the facets of life that were conducted there. Because Cistercian abbeys were usually tucked away in remote spots, it wasn't worth anyone's trouble to try to cart away the raw materials. So we have a mental image of monasteries as tucked away in the romantic hills as isolated communities. But they are now ruins. After the Reformation, Fountains Abbey served as a large garden ornament.

  Town monasteries that had the good fortune to be converted to cathedrals at the Reformation, like Peterborough above, at least avoided the fate of demolition of their churches, but the survival of all the conventual buildings was dubious, and of course they became crowded around with all the modern appurtenances; living things still, not fossils of an ancient type of society.

  The abbey church of Selby survived by becoming a parish church, but no cloister or conventual buildings remain at all. It is now just a big church, and offers few hints about the community that founded, developed, lived and worshipped in it.

  In the major towns, the four orders of friars steadily commandeered quantities of inner city space and their institutions were large and sprawling. Blackfriars' Hall in Norwich was the nave of a huge Dominican preaching church. It and the other surviving buildings and fragments in the complex give some idea of the scope of these enterprises, but these are rare survivals in the towns.

  Fragments may survive as multiply re-used fragments, as in the remains of the Dominican Friary in Gloucester. This is a rather desolate wreckage.

  Or there might be some poor decontexted abandoned relic, like this isolated tower from the Franciscan church in Richmond, Yorkshire. Or there might be a few sculpted stones in a heap, or a street called Blackfriars Lane, or a car park with a king buried under it, or nothing recognisable at all. It is very hard to conjure up the lives of the friars from the relics of built heritage that are left behind.

  Collegiate churches, occupied by secular canons rather than monks, were also complex communities. Because they didn't serve as parish churches, they became extraneous and many became ruinous, partly ruinous or lost. Beverley Minster got lucky, but was only saved in the nick of time before the north transept fell down. The lumpy green pasture beside it once housed an archbishop's palace, but it and all other buildings of community living are vanished. Some undistinguished buildings by the minster hold the remains of canons' houses in their innards.

  In York in the 1970s there were scruffy little inner city alleyways where you could find mysterious stuff like this, right near the tourist hub of the minster as you can see. This area has all been rejuvenated, consolidated and beautified. It was the Bedern, where the vicars choral who did duty in the Minster lived and ate and carried out their private devotions. The whole community was lost under the jumble of close packed later building. It wasn't just the monasteries that formed communities, the secular clergy had them as well.

  Hospitals were also large religious communities, housing members of religious orders as well as the lay inmates who were being cared for. St Cross Hospital in Winchester has enough surviving structure to give an impression of this communal life, as well as still carrying out something that resembles its original function. Many others fell to decay after the Reformation, during a couple of centuries when charitable provision became a bit dodgy.
  I am continuing to plough through the photographs, hoping to eventually be able to put something together to show how these communities within communities functioned. I am slogging my way through monastic communities right now. The work in progress can be seen on my Flickr site as a monastic collection. Tasters can be found by following the hashtag #notjustabigchurch on Twitter. 
  Meanwhile, I haven't abandoned medieval tombs or my travels with Leland or manuscripts and paleography. Everything in its own good time.