Not Just a Big Church: The Index

  A series of posts looking at large churches as living communities, with a changing history and perhaps deceptive surviving remains.

Caen. Abbaye aux Dames

1. Not Just a Big Church
2. Not Just a Big Church: a Building Site

Not Just a Big Church: a Building Site

  As we visit the great churches of yore, whether they are still in use or exist as mere ruins, we see a distorted image of how these buildings actually functioned in the middle ages. They are serene, eternal somehow, decorously quiet except for the sounds of worship, largely monochromatic. They display tangled threads of chronology, as the work of various eras is knitted together. They reflect the end point of something that has evolved. The potential for anachronism when looking at them historically is enormous.

  Every time I see an article about St Hilda illustrated with an image of the much later Gothic ruins of Whitby Abbey, which didn't have any nuns in it and was massively more huge than its Anglo-Saxon predecessor, I feel a (possibly unreasonable) urge to scream. Yes, it does engender a sense of place, but not a very accurate sense of time or circumstance.
  I intend to write a series of posts about how various kinds of medieval buildings, while being beautiful things to cherish and admire, can give us a distorted idea of what these buildings were about in their heyday, and how they themselves changed during the course of their use. This first episode is about the myth of timeless serenity as these massive monuments were constantly under reconstruction, using slow and laborious building methods that meant that many of them were building sites for years, They reverberated not just to the gentle chanting of the offices of monks or canons, but the ring of hammers and chisels, the groaning of winches, the crash of occasional accidents and no doubt the cursing of workers.

  Take a very famous example, York Minster, which has an early English south transept with narrow lancets and a wheel window.

  Then there is the famous Decorated heart of Yorkshire west window set in a much more elaborated setting.

  The great Perpendicular east window is a massive expanse of glass on the outside and an amazing stained glass picture gallery on the inside. The building has become bigger, brighter, lighter.

  Underneath, the Norman crypt is the only evidence for a whole earlier building of which nothing survives above ground, apart from a couple of little isolated stained glass panels. This does not simply mean that the building had periods of change over time. It also means it had extended periods, years and decades, when there was noise and dust and scaffolding and horses and bullocks all around and lumps of partially carved stone lying all over the place. Masons and painters and gilders and glaziers would have been climbing over everything. Presumably the canons and priests just hung in there and did their best.
  This is not the image we have as we potter respectfully through the building today. Indeed, there have been periods of major repair even in my lifetime's experience of York Minster.

  In 1973, great metal braces held up the southwest tower and there was scaffolding all over the place because of major fears for the foundations. Later the south transept burnt out and was inaccessible for a number of years while they repaired it. These were regarded as aberrations caused by time and circumstance, and were dealt with using modern machinery and building practices. In fact, during the medieval era such disruptions must have been just part of the regular rhythm of life. They did not occur in order to restore the building to some conception of an older ideal state, but to upsize and improve it. The building was not static. It was in a constant state of change and chaos.

  Most major churches have had something of a similar history; building, enlarging, accidental destruction by fire, earthquake or human miscalculation, more building, rebuilding, deliberate destruction due to political or religious strife, reconstruction. They look like big, solid, static things but they are living organisms. One of the most peculiar histories is that of Cologne Cathedral. Please pardon the qualities of the photos here, but they were taken during the winter solstice in the evening because I was actually there to do something else in the brief hours of daylight.
  There are folks who will tell you that Cologne Cathedral is not a medieval church at all, as it was largely built in the 19th century. That is only sort of true. With its strange history, it is as much a symbol of place as Whitby Abbey is of the history of the English church.
  It was a Christian site from the 4th century, and remains of a 6th century freestanding baptistery survive. The old cathedral was completed in 818. It acquired the relics of the Magi in 1164, taken from Milan by Friedrich Barbarossa and given to them as a nice little earner. That was how big churches funded their improvements, by promoting pilgrimage to sacred relics. Never mind any dubious aspect to the provenance. It burned down in 1248. However, unlike Chartres, they didn't manage to use their relics and resources to rebuild rapidly. It actually took until 1880 to finish the job. The sequence in which it happened perhaps gives us a peep at what these massive buildings were like during their phases of reconstruction.

  The eastern end, with the apse, was built first in the Gothic style, very French in conception unlike the collection of massive Romanesque churches that adorned Cologne at the time (and still do, despite horrendous circumstances). 

  The vault was one of the tallest in Europe. But this segment sat there detached for centuries. Work on the west front began, but was halted in 1473, with the bottom section of one tower completed. The building was effectively in two bits, with not much connecting them except the lower section of one aisle.

  The building has the French Gothic arrangement of grand portals with narrative sculpture on the tympana, large column figures and smaller figures around the arches, but this one is the only one that was completed in the 15th century. The whole rest of the west end waited for around 400 years to be finished.

From P. Clemen and W. Ewald 1911 Die Kunstdenkmäler der Stadt Köln. Im Auftrage des Provinzialverbandes der Rheinprovinz und mit Unterstützung der Stadt Köln: Düsseldorf, Vol. 3.

  This is an impression of it in the 16th century, almost like two separate skyscrapers overlooking the houses and walls of the town. The diagonal structure on the western tower is a crane that was part of the scenes for centuries.

P. Clemen and W. Ewald 1911 Die Kunstdenkmäler der Stadt Köln. Im Auftrage des Provinzialverbandes der Rheinprovinz und mit Unterstützung der Stadt Köln: Düsseldorf, Vol. 3.

 P. Clemen and W. Ewald 1911 Die Kunstdenkmäler der Stadt Köln. Im Auftrage des Provinzialverbandes der Rheinprovinz und mit Unterstützung der Stadt Köln: Düsseldorf, Vol. 3.

  Before it could be completed, the building was occupied by French Revolutionary troops in 1794, sustaining internal damage. These two early 19th century paintings show the oddness of the building before reconstruction started again in 1842, using a medieval plan of the facade but some modern materials and different stone. I don't know how detailed this medieval plan was, or quite how closely they stuck to it. But the building process lurched into life again.

From F.T. Helmken 1901 The cathedral of Cologne, its history, architecture...legends. A guide for visitors, compiled from historical and descriptive records.. : Cologne.

  This wasn't the end of its troubles, as the use of poor quality stone necessitated repairs and replacements, and then there was the ferocious destruction of the monuments of Cologne in the Second World War. The cathedral was damaged, but it stood. There is a tale that it was deliberately spared, sort of, because Allied bomber pilots used the towers for navigation. If that isn't true, then it makes a good legend. Many stained glass windows and treasures, such as the reliquary of the Magi, had been stashed away for safekeeping and survived.
  See the reliquary here. It's an amazing survival. It is, in fact, the little golden square blob in the picture of the apse above, but I couldn't get any closer because of the Christmas services going on at the time.
  What happened in Cologne Cathedral in the 19th century must have been something of a recapitulation of what went on in other great churches during the multiple rebuildings of the middle ages. We look at those buildings as things complete and try to preserve them. They saw them as aspirational. Many people would not have seen their local great church in any kind of completed state in their lifetime.
  Our concept of how one should behave in a church is also based around its completeness. Lowered voices and respectful behaviour are a response to the enclosure and wholeness of the building as a retreat from everyday life. For great lengths of time, the great churches were busy workplaces, no doubt with their quiet and respectful corners but in other areas buzzing with their connection to the world of work and daily life outside.
  In this sense Cologne Cathedral is very much a medieval church, just displaced by a few centuries. All the great churches have suffered periods of neglect or damage, and times of restoration. None of them is a time capsule.

The historic pictures of Cologne Cathedral here are brought to you courtesy of the wonderful and fabulous Internet Archive.

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.

Leland in Hidden East Yorkshire

  I have, in previous postings, described my attempts to resuscitate some ideas, and the photographs that go with them, that I used in various multimedia projects in the days when digital images had 256 colours and nobody believed in vertical scrolling. One of the projects involved looking at certain medieval towns, and how the history of the towns shaped their modern forms, as well as finding the material clues to their past. Another project involved looking at towns, villages and landscape through the eyes of John Leland, traveller of the early 16th century.
  Medievalists and early modernists will fight to the death defining the end of the middle ages, but in Britain one event (no, not the battle of Bosworth) changed the face of towns and the landscape forever. That was the dissolution of the monasteries at the Reformation. Whatever you might think of horrible Henry, by the 16th century the buildings of the church dominated the layout and organisation of towns and the views of the villages and countryside and a great deal of wealth in town and country. The owners of the handsome secular buildings also put their mark in the churches with their endowed chapels and elaborate funerary monuments. Then the whole infrastructure was kicked down. 
  Populations shifted, towns shrank and grew. The renewal of urban infrastructure and new organisations and technologies in the 19th century often appeared in the spaces left partly deserted and tatty on old church lands. If you are looking for the site of a town friary, pretty good chance it might be under the railway station.
  I have tried a couple of little experiments in meshing these two projects together with teensy weensy little examples done using Flickr. There is a historic tour of Beverley.

  And one of Boston.

A little look at two fascinating medieval edifices in Pickering.

  A slightly alarming tour of Leicester if fossicking for medievalia amid rampaging traffic bothers you.

  An exploration of a church chocablock with medieval alabaster tombs within the deserted landscape of a country estate at Harewood

.
 And a multifacetted little treasure at Higham Ferrers

.
  There is architecture and landscape and bits of  art and archaeology and lots of tombs, but it is all bits and pieces all over the place. Time to try to start to begin to think about developing it into some kind of structure and theme. So back to my favourite forgotten landscape in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Having looked at Beverley, the next segment explores Hull, Hedon and surrounds.

  The picture shows Holy Trinity church, Hull reflected in the windows of the Midland Bank which stands more or less where the Augustinian friary used to be, which kind of encapsulates the whole thing really. Leland provides his 16th century commentary, while Daniel Defoe and Celia Fiennes give us occasional updates from the 17th and early 18th century. Various antiquarians of the 19th century have contributed words and images from their perspective. Of course, the whole enterprise would flounder without the trusty Pevsner, not to mention the old creased and battered Ordnance Survey maps. The Internet Archive provides wondrous old tomes long forgotten and Google Maps satellite images can put some things in a whole new perspective.
  Because Leland is basically an incoherent series of notes in somewhat chaotic order, unfinished in many places, it works quite well to use him for something which is assembled from fragments around the country. He was supposed to have gone crazy and died as a result of his overly ambitious efforts. History may repeat itself.
  Using Flickr as a basic vehicle is providing some challenges. Because it is essentially a database, it is possible to pull out sets and themes on different topics, re-using certain images and captions; truly hypertext. This could be fascinating as a concept, or result in utter chaos. Because it is continually restructurable, I can keep building and elaborating on existing presentations, for better or worse. Because I am working directly on the open web, everybody can see my work in progress and comment on it if they so wish. I have been flagging the material fit to be seen here and on Twitter, but anybody can have a ramble through the as yet unorganised and unfinished sections if they so please. A bit scarey, but strangely liberating.
  All the material utilising Leland is gathered together on Flickr in a Leland collection, so you can access all the tours from there. We will see what becomes of it, but I'm having fun.

Another Medieval Day Trip - Pickering, Yorkshire

  Continuing the theme of trying to integrate some old resources into little explorations of medieval places (See previous blog post for the background.) the latest little adventure is to Pickering in Yorkshire. This fits the baby steps into small and not too complicated sites, as Pickering has just two notable medieval monuments, a church and a castle.
  The down side of following the formula that I started with Beverley is that neither Daniel Defoe nor Celia Fiennes seem to have visited Pickering, or they were asleep in the coach when it rattled through. This rather messes with the concept. Leland had a few words about it though, so all is not lost.
  The church in Pickering is mainly noted for its 15th century wall paintings, one panel of which, the Corporal Acts of Mercy, I illustrated a couple of postings ago. The tour shows all the paintings, although some of the photographs are a bit dodgy as the lighting conditions can be pretty awful. The pictures were taken by myself on two different occasions and by my son Eddy on a third, and as luck would have it the sun was shining through the clerestory windows on different sides of the church, so something is cobbled together. You can see the scheme, and maybe imagine the totally different aesthetic of a medieval church in its heyday, with coloured imagery jumping out in all directions.

  A huge St Christopher greets all wayfaring travellers who enter the south door of the nave.

The story of St Catherine of Alexandria is told in strip cartoon form as narrated by Jacobus de Voragine in the Golden Legend. And there's much more painted along the nave walls.

  There are tombs, including this handsome knight.

  Although we don't have any descriptions from the 17th century travellers, there is a suitably romantic early 19th century steel engraving that shows the motte and bailey castle is a rather more decrepit and decayed state than it is today. Either English Heritage have tidied and reconstructed it something savage, or 19th century artists liked to embellish the romantic decrepitude of historic places, and they always had sheep or cows and rustic yokels in them.

 
  In its preserved state it serves as a pretty picnic spot for those who like a touch of history with their potted meat sandwiches and pork pies, and then there is a chance for an excursion on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, one of the best historical steam railways in England. That isn't medieval but it's damned good fun.
  To do the tour, start here . Read the blurb, look at the map, click on the first picture and off you go. You have to scroll down to get the commentary.
  Now, in this meandering ramble through old resources, where do I go next?