Throughout the history of the Christian Church in England, since St Augustine’s mission from Rome to reconvert the country, in 597, Canterbury Cathedral has stood at its heart, the seat of the Archbishop, Primate of All England. The Saxon Cathedral remains only in the words of Edmer, who wrote in the late C11 a detailed but puzzling description. In 1070-7 Lanfranc, the first Norman archbishop, rebuilt the cathedral church much larger. That too has virtually disappeared, though the present nave and transepts stand on Lanfranc’s foundations. Today the shell of the choir and E transepts is the work of Lanfranc’s successor, Anselm, consecrated in 1130: a shell only, because the choir was gutted by fire in 1174. The interior of the choir was rebuilt in 1175-8 under a French master mason, William of Sens, and extended eastwards under his successor William the Englishman, in 1179-84, to house the shrine of St Thomas Becket. The successors of Lanfranc’s nave and transepts are Perp. The decision to rebuild was taken in 1378, the new nave erected in 1391-1405, the S transept completed after 1414, the N transept as late as 1468, but all to a consistent design. Finally, the towers. The SW tower was built in 1424-34, the central tower, ‘Bell Harry’, by John Wastell c.1494-1503. Lanfranc’s NW tower lasted until the C19, when, sadly, it gave way to a replica of the SW tower, built in 1832-41 by George Austin. Austin, the Cathedral Surveyor, carried out the first major restoration c.1820-48; Caroe the second, renewing pinnacles and tracery, in the 192Os.
So there is no irregular, Frenchily picturesque W front. The silvery grey mass of the cathedral as it appears in the distance say from Harbledown Hill or St Thomas’s Hill to the W, or rising above the jumbled red roofs of the city, seems almost conventionally perfect, with a lofty central tower and a pair of W towers, vigorously pinnacled but quite low; indeed only in the view dead E from, say, Rheims Way is the shortness of the W towers, here seen as a broad plinth for Bell Harry, really overcome. But in the close view it is Wastell’s tower that draws everything together, slender but strong, and tall enough to stand against the long extended body of the building, from the W towers to the turrets and battlements of the strangely castle-like E end. Inside, the classic grandeur and poise of the C14 nave, and the leggy, experimental C12 choir stay visually separate. The total internal length is 515 ft, of the E transepts 155 ft 8 in., of the W transept 125 ft. The choir vault is 69 ft high, the nave vault 80 ft high. The W towers are almost 157 ft in height, the central tower, including the pinnacles, a few inches short of 250 ft. The cathedral is built of Caen stone.
The last introductory paragraph must be given to the documentation of the building, far fuller than for any other English medieval cathedral. Bede recounts the foundation of the cathedral by Augustine; Edmer, a monk of Canterbury, early in the C12 describes what it looked like before fire destroyed it in 1067, and tells us much about the re-buildings under Lanfranc and Anselm. Most precious of all is Gervase’s eyewitness account of the progress made year by year in rebuilding the choir in the 1170s and 80s. Finally, in 1845, Professor Robert Willis published his architectural history of the cathedral, in most respects the last word on the subject.
THE SAXON CATHEDRAL
Bede says that Augustine in 602 re-hallowed a church that had been built for Roman Christians, and consecrated it as Christ Church. In the mid C8 Cuthbert built a second church, dedicated to St John, E of Christ Church and almost touching it, i.e. in an axial layout familiar from St Augustine’s Abbey (qv). The second church was for baptisms, certain judicial trials, and for burials. What the first church was like we do not know. Archbishop Odo c.950 heightened the walls, but it was completely pulled down by Lanfranc. Edmer, a schoolboy at the time, made a detailed description of it in his De Reliquiis S. Audoeni, etc. It was arranged, he says, in some respects like St Peter’s at Rome; i.e. there was an E apse, raised above a crypt. The church also had a W altar, probably in an apse, so that the plan was like the abbey church at Abingdon of 675, to give an English parallel, and like the Early Christian plan of e.g. Orléansville in North Africa, and the early C9 plan of Fulda. Edmer speaks also of aisles, and two towers, about the middle of the church, outside or above the aisles. If by ‘super’ Edmer meant outside, then he will have been describing towers of the sort familiar from Ottonian examples. The tower had an altar in it.
LANFRANC’S CATHEDRAL
Lanfranc, abbot of Bec, was in 1066 nominated by Duke William as first abbot of St Etiemie at Caen. When William captured the throne of England, Lanfranc did not have long to wait for further promotion; in 1070 he was called over to become the first Norman Archbishop of Canterbury. At once he set about rebuilding the cathedral, and, says Edmer, practically completed it in seven years. That was extraordinarily fast work. The E end, where building began, has gone, leaving no trace. The ends of the transepts however are marked; the S transept by a chunk of the S wall, and by c. 20 ft of the SE quoin, with pilaster buttresses set back from the angle, and a string-course of almost square profile taken round them; the N transept by much masonry of the W wall, and the NW quoin, with two nicks in the angle, not one. (Part too of the NE quoin remains, masked by the chapter house.) So the transepts were one bay deep, two bays E-W. Gervase tells us that each had an E apse. There was a crossing tower. The nave, with aisles, coincided in dimensions with the present nave, eight bays plus a ninth over which stood the two W towers. The NW tower, recorded by Buckler’s measured drawings, was extremely severe, with a pronounced taper, clasping buttresses, cut back several times at the angles, and eight stages in all, marked by string-courses. Simple arcading on the top three stages. Even these scanty remains are enough to show that Lanfranc’s cathedral was nothing but a transplantation from Normandy; indeed, to be more precise, own brother to the abbeys at Caen, St Etienne and Ste Trinité, begun in the 1060s. As Willis was the first to note, not only the plans but the dimensions of transepts and nave are the same at Canterbury and St Etienne to within a foot: the nave 187 ft long and 72 ft wide, the transept 127 ft across. The W front was, in the massing, close to Ste Trinité, the towers more firmly expressed than at St Etienne.
ANSELM’S CHOIR
Lanfranc’s choir was short-lived. Under his successor, Anselm, a new choir took its place, stupendously increased in size, with a second pair of transepts and three E chapels, all raised upon a crypt. The new choir exceeded even Lanfranc’s nave in length and width; the total area of the cathedral was practically doubled. No reason is given to explain this vast enlargement; but the result was to provide seven new altars, and we know that many of the early, beatified archbishops were re-buried with great solemnity in the Norman cathedral. Perhaps then, as Willis says, ‘shrine-room’ was needed. At any rate, the new building was not only large, it was sumptuously decorated. William of Malmesbury laid great emphasis on the splendour of the decoration - stained glass, marble pavement, wall paintings (‘adeo splendide erexit, ut nihil tale possit in Anglia videri, in vitrearum fenestrarum luce, in marmorei pavimenti nitore, in diversicoloribus picturis . . .’). Prior Ernulf (1096-1107) began the work. Anselm financed it for the first seven years, from I096. The choir was completed under Ernulf’s successor, Conrad, and consecrated in 1130.
EXTERIOR. The fire of 1174 gutted the choir but left the outer walls standing. Externally they were heightened by William of Sens, but very little modified. Only the Trinity Chapel at the E end was demolished, to make way for William the Englishman’s very much larger Trinity Chapel. The plan of Ernulf’s choir is strangely complicated. The choir aisles run from the crossing for three bays, before a second pair of transepts opens out, deeper than the W transepts, so that each has two E apses, not one. Projecting W stair-towers. The third church at Cluny was being built at this very moment, c.1095-1100, with two pairs of transepts. The choir aisles continue E of the transepts for one more bay, and then the curvature of the apse begins. As it does so, a square chapel with an E apse and a W stair-turret projects, masking the curve. The N chapel is dedicated to St Andrew, the S to St Anselm. The turrets, aligned with the aisle walls, stand askew to the chapels, which hug the curve. The chapels are apsed. This plan, which looks so odd outside, enables the chapels within, in spite of their position, to have altars facing due E. In France radiating chapels were not obliged to be aligned to the E, but in England for some reason that obligation was felt. Hence the contorted chapel plans at Canterbury, and also at Norwich, Lincoln (St Hugh’s Choir), Leominster, and Muchelney. All these excrescences tend to mask the great length of the choir, but we could deduce that it was nine bays long, with an apse and ambulatory, even if Gervase had not told us that. The E chapel, as has already been said, was removed in 1180.
Examination of the exterior may as well begin with St Anselm’s, the SOUTH-EAST CHAPEL. The elevation has two storeys, the lower being the crypt. Above each comes a deep band of blind arcading, except that the apse is stopped below the upper band. Broad pilaster buttresses, with cut-back angles, clasp the corners of the chapel, and a slimmer one marks the S wall off into two bays. String-courses are continued round the buttresses at all levels, the lower two plain, the top three with billet moulding. The windows are large, those that light the crypt plain, the main windows, best seen in the apse, lofty, shafted, with a double roll round the head. The two S windows were replaced in 1336 by a grand Dec five-lighter, with in the head a circle full of ogee-lobed trefoils, and big sub-cusped trefoils l. and r., the main cusps split back like swallow-tails. Such an idiom had been developed at Canterbury more than thirty years before, e.g. on Prior Eastry’s screen, and before that in the chancel at Chartham.
The SOUTH-EAST TRANSEPT gives a fuller idea of Ernulf’s architecture. The system is exactly the same as before, except that the upper band of arcading is eliminated and all the string-courses are plain. The third level of windows represents Ernulf’s clerestory.1 The clerestory over the aisles was of course replaced by the work of the 1170s; so it is in the transepts alone that we have the full Ernulfian elevation. William of Sens heightened the transept with a second, pointed, set of clerestory windows and, a memorable feature, a rose window in the S wall at this level. The gable was renewed by Austin early in the C19. The staircase tower, projecting to the W, free for two whole stages above eaves level. It must, as we shall see in a moment, have been heightened in the mid CI2. So the transept rises prodigiously lofty, and to appreciate early C12 building properly, one has to reduce it in the mind’s eye to its original, stockier proportions. The impression then is of spacious orderliness, with large areas of plain walling, organized by the buttresses and string-courses. Above the main window heads, and at the same level on the windowless tower, spring shallow relieving arches, spanning the space from buttress to buttress. The windows do not all sit centrally under the arches, which seem not merely functional, strengthening the wall, but a further attempt to articulate the dumb wall surface. The low band of arcading gains maximum emphasis, by contrast, a prestissimo rhythm of colonnettes, spanned by tiny arches, and a second sequence of intersecting, billet-moulded arches. The colonnettes, almost all renewed, alternate round and octagonal, some with zigzag or a scale pattern on them; the block capitals are, some of them, richly carved with interlace, leaves, or even figure scenes. Crumbled as the carving is, one can appreciate the style well enough. It is a style to be met again in the crypt. The staircase-tower is obviously alien to the rest, with its crust of surface carving that leaves hardly a square inch of smooth wall. Yet the lowest of the four rows of arcading has the intersecting, billet-moulded arches just as has been described. That then is the top of Anselm’s work, meant as a lacy fringe, like the arcading on St Anselm’s Chapel. The top three stages of the tower on the other hand break out into a riot of zigzag, the shafts are composite, set against tiny diapered piers, and there are no intersecting arches. Scallop, not block, capitals.
The AISLE windows fill the full width of tl1ree bays, in a narrow-wide-narrow rhythm. Here in particular one realizes how exceptionally large these windows are for the early C12. Willis supposed that they were heightened in 1175 and the old arches, with chip-carved patterns on the voussoirs, reset; but the voussoirs will fit only at their present height. William of Malmesbury mentions the ‘light from the glass windows’ as the first of the memorable features of Anselm’s choir. In 1130 it must indeed have seemed astonishing.
On to what these great windows threw light we hardly know now. The only internal features of Ernulf’s work to survive the fire and the subsequent remodelling are wall-shafts and part of the wall-arcading along the aisle walls. In position and size the arcading corresponds with the external arcading, but it is left plain. Probably then it was painted, and maybe one should imagine the interior blazing with colour, illuminated by an ample flow of light. Certainly there was no high vault, but a wooden ceiling, which Gervase says was well painted.
Externally the N side of Ernulf’s choir matches the S side.
The NE transept stair-tower was heightened just like its fellow on the S side. The Treasury, added to the NE chapel under Prior Wibert (1151-67), is described as part of the Precincts. High up in the wall of the NE transept a recess with four squints, belonging to the C15 Prior’s Chapel, linked to the Prior’s lodging, and giving a view of four altars in the cathedral.
CRYPT. The new Norman choir was in its entirety raised upon a crypt, a crypt more lofty and spacious than any previously built in England, standing so far above ground that it is full of light; the type, that is to say, of the crypts of St Maria in Capitol, Cologne, and Speyer, both mid C11. The choir is thus many steps higher than Lanfranc’s nave. Steps lead down to N and S of the crossing, the walls of the N flight diapered with an incised pattern, each grooved, formed of two strands, as it were, one passing over, one under at every intersection. Stones set lozenge-wise in the S flight. The fire of 1174 did not touch the crypt; nor did William of Sens, except for putting in two stout piers to support new choir piers that did not sit squarely on pre-existing ones in the crypt. So the crypt is remarkably perfectly preserved. Nave and aisles, divided by piers; the nave subdivided into a further nave and aisles by two rows of columns, twenty-two in all. They support groin-vaults with broad, unmoulded transverse ribs, resting on semicircular responds against the piers. The system continues into the transepts, with one free-standing column and two E apses, equipped with PISCINAS and AUMBRIES, and into the chapels, St Gabriel’s (S) and Holy Innocents’ (N), which each have an apse, with plain PISCINA and AUMBRY, and two free-standing columns to take the vault.
The glory of the crypt is the carved capitals of the columns. The plain block shape is left untouched on the responds2 but the columns not only have shafts fluted spirally or in zigzags, or carved with a scale pattern, but carving on the undersides and the faces, the four semicircular fields that the block capital offers. This is the most ambitious, most finely conceived, and, equally important, the best preserved Early Romanesque sculpture in the country. Some capitals have bold interlacing beaded strands, others, e.g. the two in Holy Innocents Chapel, splendidly luxuriant leaves. But the most ambitious are carved with figure subjects, almost all of creatures fighting, their antagonism giving the linear patterns into which the designs naturally fall a lithe vigour that is tremendously exciting. The N column of the central pair in the nave has perhaps the most brilliant design of all, a wyvern fighting a dog. Another face of this capital is carved with jugglers. A similar comical subject, animals playing musical instruments, is in St Gabriel’s Chapel. The S capital in the bay furthest W seems different in feeling from the rest, more tender and truer to nature. The subjects are a man on horseback, a doe, and a man struggling with a beast. The evidence that the carving was done after the capitals were in place is one other of the S capitals, which has only one face finished; on yet another the design (of interlacing strands) is merely blocked out. The octagonal column in the N transept, with crockets on the capital snapped off, is evidently a substitution of 1175.
The three E bays of the nave are swallowed up in the deliciously filigree stone screens of the CHAPEL OF OUR LADY or THE UNDERCROFT. Lady Mohun, who died in 1404, had in 1396 founded a chantry in the crypt. Masses were however said for her in the 1370s, and in early 1371-2 Lady de Maun is recorded as donor of £66 13s. 4d. Whatever their exact date, the screens are thoroughly Perp in feeling, with slender vertical members, and sharp gables, not at all a hackneyed design.
The s transept was relined in 1363 as the BLACK PRINCE’S CHANTRY (now used as the Huguenots’ church), founded in return for a dispensation that allowed the Prince to marry a kinswoman, Joan, Countess of Kent. Piers were formed round the Norman ones, with slender clustered shafts. Lierne-vaults with some fine carved bosses, low enough to be well seen: the pelican in her piety, on a nest in an oak tree; Samson and the lion. Two carved faces of immured Norman capitals have been exposed.
THE LATE C12 REBUILDING AND EXTENSION OF THE CHOIR
In 1170 Archbishop Thomas Becket was murdered in the NW transept of the cathedral. The political consequences of the murder were serious enough for Henry II, but it was also an act the most sacrilegious imaginable; so it is hardly surprising that miracles soon began to be worked at the tomb of the martyred archbishop. A second calamity came hard on the heels of the first. In 1174 fire gutted the choir, destroying the glass and the wall paintings, and left the arcades a tottering wreck. Gervase tells us that the monks at first wanted to patch them up. They summoned a number of masons, from France as well as from England, and asked their opinions. The one who impressed them, by ‘his lively genius and good reputation’, was William of Sens, so the rest were dismissed, and William was left to come to the conclusion that the Norman arcades and clerestory must be demolished. That meant that the width, but not the height, of the new work was fixed; William of Sens was able to design an interior elevation virtually unrestricted by what already stood. Before we embark on a description, Gervase’s chronicle of the building must be briefly repeated. It allows us to follow the construction year by year, a unique experience as far as English medieval architecture is concerned. Work began at the W end of the choir, and during 1175 two piers each side were erected. In 1176 came a third pier each side and the arches of these first three bays, together with the aisle vaults to support them. In 1177 two further bays were completed, and the triforium, clerestory, and high vault for all five bays. During 1178 William of Sens supervised the construction of the sixth bay of the choir, and the transepts, and at the beginning of 1179 was preparing to turn the high vault over the high altar when he fell from the scaffolding so severely that, recovering only slowly, he had to return to France, leaving the work to a successor, William the Englishman. Thus it was English William’s task to build the Trinity Chapel and Corona. He had completed the new crypt by 1181, and set up the outer walls of the Trinity Chapel. In 1182 the piers went up, and the walls of the Corona. By the end of 1184 all was vaulted and structurally complete. They must have worked at a prodigious speed - no wonder, as donations must have poured in. So for the second time the cathedral grew a great eastward extension. The new Trinity Chapel was to be a chapel in honour of St Thomas, because, says Gervase, it was in the old one that Thomas had said his first mass, and under which he had been buried. After the rebuilding Thomas’s tomb was replaced in the crypt, but the shrine was not set up until 1220. The original purpose of the Corona is not altogether clear. Gervase calls it ‘turris’. The Archbishop’s chair stands there now.
Lanfranc had introduced a new kind of cathedral architecture to England, and now, a century later, William of Sens initiated a second revolution, by importing the Early Gothic style of the lle de France. Gervase puts his finger on the essential differences between the new choir and the old: the piers were increased in height but not in girth, i.e. made of slenderer proportions, so that the new choir is higher by the height of the whole clerestory; there is a vault not a flat roof, plenty of marble shafting is used, and the capitals are carved, not plain. That is to say, there is a dramatic increase in height, but none in the other dimensions, and the supporting shafts are stressed rather than the supporting wall. The arcade arches are pointed, but by no means all the subsidiary ones, and of course the vaults are all rib-vaults. All these features can be found elsewhere in England, combined to form truly Gothic structures, even a little before 1175, at Ripon and at Roche Abbey, Yorkshire, c.1170, the culmination of a Cistercian tradition. By c.1180 Wells was begun, and Gothic was firmly established in the North and West. Canterbury, to say it again, is not an indigenous growth like these; but it was the overwhelming prestige of Canterbury that ensured the swift spread of the new style throughout the country.
Detailed description naturally starts inside, with the W half of the choir. The piers alternate round and octagonal, the bases boldly moulded, with undercurling3 spurs. The foliage capitals, of noble acanthus fronds, are so close to contemporary French capitals that they must have been carved by a Frenchman. No two are alike, but all are designed with a classic restraint that equals any on the continent. A development in style is discernible. The fronds on the 1175-6 capitals are carved as units. The fronds of the next year’s capitals on the other hand, the W piers to the transepts and the pier W of each, tend to break up into separate indented lobes, like oak leaves. This busier handling is exploited further in the pier capitals of the next year, in the E half of the choir. The fronds clothe a circular or octagonal funnel, and develop into crockets at the diagonals to support a square abacus, chamfered at the corners. Pointed arches with two moulded orders, and an inconspicuous row of nailhead. At the next level come the gallery openings, two pairs per bay, with pointed arches and semicircular superarches over each pair. Shafts for each member of the arches, with crocket, not acanthus, capitals and square abaci. Clerestory, with a passage, and a single, shafted light, pointed. The vaults are sexpartite, pointed in section, the ribs with a billet between the three rounded mouldings, intersecting at big bosses of foliage. The carved foliage and the sexpartite vaults are part of the common stock of French church architecture in the 1170s. But the elevation, considered more closely, is derived specifically from Sens. There too the columns are inordinately lofty, the arches that span them relatively narrow, and in particular the gallery is pushed high up out of the way, and has the same paired openings. In two vital respects William departed from his model. First, his sexpartite vaults were not given alternately major and minor supports, for the variation round-octagonal does not affect the spatial rhythm. So whereas the space strides majestically down the nave of Sens, double-bay by double-bay, the flow at Canterbury is smooth and uninterrupted, in spite of the fact that the sexpartite vaults draw the bays into pairs. The second departure is more serious. At Sens the piers are coupled, here they are single. This stresses their height, and the disparity between the high arcades and the low gallery and clerestory above is undeniably disturbing. But so far nothing has been said of the most striking decorative element introduced by William of Sens, the use of black polished Purbeck marble. It is used for all the minor verticals, i.e. the gallery and clerestory shafts, and the wall-shafts that stand on the abaci of the arcade capitals to take the vault ribs, set in trios or singly according to the number of ribs there are to carry. The horizontals that are picked out in black marble are the upper member of all abaci, and a thin billet-moulded string-course, at gallery sill-level, carried round the shafts as a shaft-ring. This play of dark on light is worked out with admirable logic and consistency. Dark shafts were to become all the rage in England. In France however they were barely known. Professor Jean Bony points only to Notre Dame la Grande, Valenciennes, of 1171, and remarks that detached marble shafts had occurred in England even earlier at Iflley, and in the crypt of York Minster to which he might have added the chapter-house doorway at Rochester.
To complete our survey of the first three years’ work, we must look at the CHOIR AISLES . The outer walls retain much that is early C12 undamaged. Below the windows, as has been noted above, runs blank shafted arcading, with plain block capitals. Several shafts and capitals were replaced in the 1170s, so that one can compare the axe-cut mouldings of c.1100 with the chisel-carved ones of 1175. Ernulf’s wall-shafts were also retained, and adapted by making them higher (see the change from several blocks per course to one block) and by removing the subsidiary shafts, which were not needed when Ernulf’s groin-vault, as one supposes it to have been,4 was replaced by a rib-vault. The ribs are trimmed with tiny rows of dogtooth except the transverse ribs, which are not only semicircular, not pointed, but have powerful zigzag overlapping the roll mouldings. This is an extremely early appearance of dogtooth; and such undercut zigzag would also be hard to parallel at a date as early as this.
So the EAST TRANSEPTS. They are identical, except as noted below; so the description describes both. William of Sens emphasized the entrance arches by clothing these four piers in detached marble shafts, one against each of the eight faces, with their own small capitals, masking the main capital, as e.g. at Laon. There is a second tier of shafts to take the many vault ribs that converge here. Shaft-rings. The transepts, unlike the aisles, were carefully remodelled to obscure the fact that the walls are Ernulf’s up to the sill of the second clerestory. This makes a four-storey elevation. The main windows and the blank arcading below keep to the Norman proportions, but the mouldings and shafting are brought up to date, the former chiselled into a slim roll or a double roll sown with dogtooth, the latter given Purbeck shafts and crocket capitals. One or two early C12 bases remain, and the chip-carved voussoirs of the blank W window. The SE transept keeps the round-headed arches of the arcading, but in the NE transept the arches are just pointed. At gallery level comes a second band of blank arcading, the arches acutely pointed; at clerestory level, the wall passage is screened with arches on shafts, five per bay, a wide, round-headed one flanked by pairs of pinched pointed ones. In the second clerestory the windows are pointed and distinctly taller; in front of the wall passage trios of pointed arches are set, on skinny Purbeck shafts and crazily elongated. The centrepiece of the end wall is a big rose window, quite plain, without the spoke-like radiating colonnettes one would expect. Moulded string-courses, two with billet, mark the stages. Sexpartite vault, on slender wall-shafts taken down to the ground. The E apses have rib-vaults too, their entrance arches made pointed and given especially complex, undercut mouldings, on crocket capitals and Purbeck shafts. Note the felicitous design of the bases here. More significant is the fact that the abaci of these shafts are round, not square, an important inflection of the French vocabulary.
E of the transepts there are four more bays of the CHOIR. William of Sens completed these, according to Gervase, except for the high vaults. A change is at once apparent. The simple alternation of round and octagonal piers is given up in favour of a series of greater variety: first a round pier each side; then an octagonal one with four attached shafts of Purbeck marble and bases for four more shafts, i.e. like the piers flanking the transept openings; then a pair formed of a couple of round shafts with two marble shafts in the angles; and finally an octagonal pier, turning to round a third of the way up. The choir aisles pursue the same system as before, but this is made difficult by the curve that Ernulf’s walls take in these three bays, preparing for the apsidal ambulatory. All the wall-shafts here are William’s, but Ernulf’s wall-arcading survives, and so do the interiors of ST ANDREW’S and ST ANSELM’S CHAPELS. Both have rib-vaults. That would be a notable fact if the vaults really belonged to the building of c.1100. But the fact that there is an incomplete series of angle shafts, and the way the vault cuts slightly into the window voussoirs (e.g. in the W wall of St Andrew’s Chapel), make it more likely that they are a later adaptation, done before the fire. In St Anselm’s Chapel, the shaft capitals are, some of them, carved with stylized flowers and beaded interlace; e.g. one in the apse with more uncompleted carving. In 1178 the entrance arch was reinforced with two more mouldings and shafts with crocket capitals, to mask the thickened wall where the new, wider Trinity Chapel starts away.
With that we have reached the point where William the Englishman took over. The fact that William of Sens had narrowed the three E bays of the choir, carrying them past the chapels, shows that the decision had already been taken to enlarge the Trinity Chapel to take arcades, or rather to give room for the shrine of the martyred archbishop, and an ambulatory round it. It is at once clear however that English William departed from his predecessor’s design from the start. The last piers erected in 1178 begin octagonal and turn to round a third of the way up. Apparently then the last bay was left incomplete by William of Sens. More important than this is the change in floor level. The Trinity Chapel stands sixteen steps higher than the choir, but the steps were not prepared for, since they cut across the base and shaft of the last choir piers.
The conclusion is that it was William the Englishman’s idea to build the new crypt (for the new Trinity Chapel needed a wholly new crypt to stand on) decisively higher than Ernulf’s crypt. To follow the building year by year one must descend now into the TRINITY CHAPEL CRYPT. Height is achieved by the vault, which is sharply pointed, yet spans wider distances than Ernulf’s bays; for William divides his central space by a single arcade, not two. The vault has ribs, those in the main part of the crypt with a fillet on the central, raised moulding, a form that was to recur constantly in England all through the C13. Bosses at the intersections, carved as stylized flowers. The main supports are thick, short round piers in couples, with round bases and round, simply moulded capitals, all of Caen stone, except the abaci, which are of Purbeck marble. No square forms, one notes. Semicircular transverse arches, with a slight chamfer, except in the apse, where the piers come closer together and the arches have to be pointed and stilted to reach the same height. The central arcade stands on piers that are of Purbeck marble, very slender round shafts, with round bases and capitals, the latter deep and with many mouldings. At the E end the crypt under the Corona also has a rib-vault, with a splendid boss of acanthus leaves. The boss emphasizes by contrast the most forcible impression of the crypt as a whole: its lack of carved decoration. Smooth, moulded forms prevail. Admittedly, in the crypt a simpler treatment is understandable; though Ernulf’s crypt is proof enough that not all crypts were treated simply. One dwells on the point because in England, but not on the Continent, by the early C13, these moulded, unenriched forms, enlivened by the contrast of colour and texture that Purbeck marble gave, were favoured even in the main parts of cathedrals, above ground. Salisbury, begun in 1220, is of course the locus classicus of this.
The WATCHING CHAMBER, built above the ambulatory of Emulf’s crypt, where the steps rising to the Trinity Chapel create a pocket of space, was for watching over the safety of Becket’s tomb. It is only about 10 ft high, but an exceedingly depressed quadripartite vault is managed, two bays with moulded ribs, the ribs of the N bay given dogtooth. Bosses never carved.5
Reascending to the TRINITY CHAPEL, up the sixteen steps, one is aware of a change from the choir, in proportions rather than in idiom. Although the floor level is so much higher, the roof ridge runs on from the choir at exactly the previous level: that is to say, the total height of the elevation is reduced. Yet gallery and clerestory continue at the same level. Only the arcades are reduced in height, or to be more precise, the pier shafts are shortened. William the Englishman’s purpose was to unify choir and Trinity Chapel in the distant vista from the W. Seen thus, the apse of the Trinity Chapel was the back drop to the shrine, and the canted E bays of the choir focused attention on it, like the wings of a stage set. If the two were to be read as part of the same set, they had necessarily to share unbroken horizontals. But the proportions of the Trinity Chapel elevation are decisively altered, and, one must say, improved. No longer is the arcade so lofty that the gallery shrinks to an inconspicuous band. Here arcade, gallery, and clerestory are balanced evenly against one another. But what crucially strengthens the elevation is the coupling of the arcade piers in depth. Did William the Englishman know from personal experience that that was how the piers in Sens Cathedral were coupled, or had his predecessor left designs in the lodge? The circular shafts and bases of the piers are completely made of Purbeck marble (of a pinkish hue), which makes them visually yet stronger. Otherwise Purbeck marble is employed as before. The W pier each side has a crocket capital, of Purbeck marble; the rest revert to being of freestone, carved with acanthus fronds, with a bunch of leaves projecting to take the soffit moulding. Here the dissolution of the fronds, already noted, into individual lobed leaves springing from a thick central vein is even more noticeable. Arch mouldings however exactly as in the choir. Billet and small dogtooth among the crisp angle mouldings. Altogether the vocabulary of the two Williams is almost identical; it is what they are saying that is different. English William still does not exclude the round-headed arch, e.g. from the widest bays of the main arcade. The gallery openings, four per bay, and two in the apse (a real triforium here), are as before, except that the fours are no longer subdivided, two and two. Finally, at the highest level, the clerestory windows are coupled, and screened inside by arches on a slender central shaft. Wall passage. Rib-vaults, a quadripartite bay plus the apse, with splendid leaf bosses, bigger than those in the choir vault.
Spacious aisles, vaulted as the choir aisles, with saw-toothed zigzag round the transverse arches. The aisles are full of light from the generous windows. The vaults spring from marble wall-shafts set against projecting piers. The skeleton structure of the Trinity Chapel is here most forcibly felt.
The CORONA, only 27 ft in diameter, re-echoes the elevation of the Trinity Chapel. No arcades of course, but windows that occupy the full width of each bay, repeating the proportions of the apse arcades. Zigzag round the arches. No piers, but Purbeck wall-shafts brought down to the ground. Shaft-rings. Triforium, with single, not grouped, shafts. Nine-sided vault, the tenth rib omitted over the entrance arch. Doorway l. and r. of the entrance arch, to staircases, up to the triforium wall passage and on to the roof.
CHOIR AND TRINITY CHAPEL EXTERIOR. As we have seen, William of Sens needed to do little to the exterior of the choir, except heighten the aisle walls and raise a new clerestory. Shafted, pointed clerestory windows, and similar ones, on the S side only, to light the gallery. The heightened aisles got additional light from broad trefoil-headed windows, with a scale pattern overlapping the outer moulding, a peculiar motif not used elsewhere in the post-fire work. Structurally the most important feature outside is the flying buttresses that slip inconspicuously down over the aisle roofs. They transmit some of the thrust of the choir vault to the outer walls, and need to, for, as we have seen, the clerestory walls are hollowed out with a wall passage. They are the earliest exposed flying buttresses in England, although it had of course long been normal to buttress high vaults secretly by transverse arches within the galleries.
The heightening of the transepts has already been dealt with, so it only remains to consider the Trinity Chapel and Corona. Here, as has been pointed out, William the Englishman new built from the ground up. The contrast with the Norman building is decisive. That, for all its large windows, and its bands of arcading, is a structure of load-bearing walls punctured here and there by openings, and reinforced at the angles by shallow buttresses. The Trinity Chapel on the other hand is a frame, of deeply projecting buttresses, and walls which are reduced to little more than vertical and horizontal members by the great windows that occupy space from buttress to buttress. Even by French standards of c.1180, Canterbury is notably thoroughgoing in the extent that supporting walls are done away with. The great projection of the buttresses is structurally needed, not chosen for visual effect; that one can be sure of by looking at the Corona staircase towers, which, since the walls are solid, keep shallow, clasping buttresses. The flying buttresses fall into place as part of this bracing system, though they start so low down, at the level of the sills of the clerestory windows, and are so puny, that they are of relatively little use. Wall buttresses carried up above eaves level as counterweights. In France, e.g. at Saint-Remi, Reims, c.1170-5, far vaster and more adventurous flying buttresses were already in use. In the external decoration there is no such break with the Norman past. Mouldings may have changed, become bolder, less elaborate, and undercut; but they are used in the same ways as before. Horizontal string-courses mask the levels of sill, window head, and the spring-ing of the window arches. As for verticals, there are window shafts, with shaft-rings and crocket capitals, and similar shafts in the cut-back angles of the buttresses. Arcading only at clerestory level on the Corona staircase towers. The Corona battlements and buttress tops date from 1748-9, largely renewed in artificial stone. Until the mid C18 the Corona walls were unfinished.
WEST TRANSEPTS, NAVE, AND TOWERS
The rebuilding of Lanfranc’s nave and transepts was first proposed before 1370, by Prior Hathbrand, who opened a subscription list. Work began in 1378, under Archbishop Sudbury (d. 1381), who paid for the demolition of the old nave, and ‘duas alas in parte postenori ecclesie . . . erexit’. Mr Oswald has interpreted ‘alas’ as aisle walls. Certainly, the nave was the first part to be built up again. But then there was a second pause, until 1391, when Prior Chillenden was elected. Leland called him ‘the greatest Builder of a Prior that ever was in Christes Church’. Under him the nave was carried on, vaulted c.1400, and finished by 1405. Henry Yevele seems to have been master mason.6 The S transept was vaulted after 1414, the N transept built from 1448 to after 1468, both following the nave design in practically all respects. The latter, the place where Becket had been murdered, was deeply hallowed. So it seems that hesitation was felt about touching the Norman fabric of it. Eventually, when such scruples were overcome, the original floor level was left unraised. Contemporaneously the Lady Chapel was thrown out E of it. St Michael’s Chapel that answers it, E of the S transept, was built c.1420-8. Meanwhile at the W end, the SW tower was rebuilt in 1424-34, Thomas Mapilton being master mason. Its fellow had to wait until 1832 before George Austin made it match. The crossing tower had been prepared for under Prior Chillenden, but the tower itself rose only a century later, designed by John Waszell and built from 1496. The vault bears the arms of Archbishop Warham, who was installed in 1503.
With this outline of events before us, an approach can be made to the W half of the cathedral. The exterior can be taken first, then the interior.
EXTERIOR. It has been pointed out before that in the Perp rebuilding nave and transepts were not increased in extent; the nave of eight bays and transepts projecting by a single bay repeat the C11 plan. The NAVE elevation is straight forwardly Perp, sober and dignified, with the minimum of unnecessary elaboration. The usual deep buttresses rise from a moulded plinth with a blank frieze. The second of their three set-offs admittedly supports a pedestal for a statue under a canopied niche, but the top pinnacles are quite standard, with crockets and panelling. Flying buttresses and clerestory pinnacles. The aisle windows, four-lighters, lofty for their breadth, yet occupy practically all the space between buttresses. Two transoms, and cinque cusped lights below them; at the top the lights group two and two, but above that is the most elementary panel tracery. Two-centred heads. Above that plain ashlar, with a quatrefoil gallery light in a neat square frame. Moulded parapet, above a string-course with inconspicuous square flowers. The clerestory windows, four-centred and of three lights, have slightly livelier tracery, with daggers standing on their heads. Plain moulded parapet here too.
The parapet carries round unbroken on to the N and S TRANSEPTS. Clerestory and aisle windows also correspond. String-courses do not, but range with the set-offs on the end buttresses. S transept S window of vast size, of eight lights grouped three, two, three, with two transoms. Panel tracery. N transept N window to match. The W buttresses of each transept hide a newel stair. That is why the SW pinnacle is extra large, with subsidiary pinnacles where it springs, and eight gabled faces higher up, and why the NW pinnacle echoes it. The Norman walling of the N transept rises almost to parapet level here, so the pinnacle stands above clasping buttresses. The Perp buttress takes a second, smaller pinnacle. The other external difference between the two transepts is not governed by Norman survivals, but a reminder that a third of a century separates their building. The S transept gable is all panelled; the N transept gable has three niches over a row of blank panelling.
ST MICHAEL’S CHAPEL, added to the E side of the S transept, breaks with the nave transept design. Two bays by one. Two-storeyed elevation, for there is a second chapel above the main one. The lower windows have four lights not grouped; the upper, of three cinque foiled lights, have straight-sided heads.
The break that the SOUTH WEST TOWER makes with Yevele’s design is much more important. The tower is not especially tall,7 and only in the view from the SW does it stand up to the central tower; but Thomas Mapilton’s preference for pretty little details like concave-sided gablets, panelled buttresses, and ogee window labels ensures that the sobriety of the nave has a foil that stops it from falling into dullness.8 The angle buttresses project so far that those on the S side almost enclose the porch. On the way up the depth is gradually consumed by four gableted and pinnacled set-offs, panelled below, with a string-course above, that sets up a syncopated rhythm of stages. Four-light main windows, two-light belfry windows in pairs in the top three stages. Elaborate skyline of panelled battlements and complex pinnacles, set lozenge-wise to the corners of the tower, their outlines fretted by two tiers of gablets. The most sumptuous display is however reserved for the lowly SOUTH WEST PORCH, which has two tiers of niches, carried on round the SW buttress, the lower square-headed, the upper gabled to the W, canopied towards the S. All renewed in 1862, and filled with statues by Phfyffers. Internally the porch was not touched - its lierne-vault, its carved bosses and shafted inner doorway. Larger niches, with Phfyffers statuary, continue across the W front of the nave, which otherwise calls for little comment. Characteristically the shallow, lierne-vaulted W porch and doorway are inconspicuous, the W window huge. Seven lights, two transoms, panel tracery in three tiers. The gable is marked off by an enriched band, and is pierced by a large square window, with slightly convex sides, filled by tracery of quatrefoils in spherical triangles.
BELL HARRY. John Wastell’s majestic crossing tower perfectly sets the seal on the cathedral, lofty enough to weigh against the enormous length of the building, magisterially forceful of outline, yet profusely decorated. The angles are buttressed by sheer octagonal turrets,9 the angles of which are further buttressed. The turrets culminate in openwork lanterns, gableted and ringed by pinnacles. Those are the major vertical accents, for the shallow buttress in the centre of each face goes for little. Pairs of tall, slender two-light windows, with two-centred heads, at two levels. The lower windows light the crossing, so the belfry windows are very high up indeed. The wall surface that is left is all broken up with enriched bands and panels. A deep band below the belfry windows, of lozenges, embattled above, bordered by square flowers below, makes the strongest horizontal tie, much more important than the three inconspicuous string-courses. Pierced top battlements. The ogee-crocketed hood-moulds to the lower windows, with luxuriant finials, are telling, and so are the quatrefoil- and trefoil-headed panels on the faces of the angle turrets.
So at last it is time to enter the SW porch and contemplate the INTERIOR of the nave. Yevele’s design has, in its exterior, been criticized for a certain coolness; but inside one does not feel that any more. The nave is as nobly impressive as any Perp interior in the country, worked out with such thorough, final logic that one forgets that the length and width of nave and aisles and the bay-spacing were fixed by the Norman fabric. Only in height was there no restriction, so Yevele raised the ridge as high as the chancel roof-ridge; but as the nave does not stand on a crypt, the proportions of the nave are quite different from those of the chancel. Lanfranc’s massive piers are cased and adorned with continuous double-wave mouldings and half-shafts in the cardinal directions, so that their bulk cuts off all but the briefest diagonal vistas. Yet the nave is brilliant with light. Yevele arrived at this result by the relationship of arcade arches to aisle windows. The windows are as tall and wide as the aisle walls and buttresses will allow; the arcade rises exactly as high. Above the arcades no gallery openings, but a panelled area of wall, the panels formed by the prolonged mullions of the clerestory windows. Nothing here to counterbalance the dominant verticals of the piers, for the double-wave is carried up from ground to vault up and over the clerestory windows. The pier shafts are interrupted by two sets of shaft-rings, but it is a mere whispered interruption. The fact that shaft-rings are used at all needs comment. Favourites in the C13, by the mid C14 they were not used at all. But when Yevele in 1375 continued the unfinished nave of Westminster Abbey, he copied the C13 design closely, shaft-rings and all. Here he presses them into service a second time, for their own sakes, not for reasons of conformity. The high vault springs from the capitals of the main shafts, a cluster of ribs fanning out, major and minor, to join the ridge rib along the length of the nave. A network of lierne ribs, forming crosses bay by bay, with insignificant carved bosses, ceil the crown of the vault. Lierne-vaults in the aisles too. The strainer across the W crossing arch, a deep embattled stone band, pierced with rows of quatrefoils three deep, the middle row encircled, the upper row and lower row enclosed in blunt daggers, carried on a four-centred arch, was put in by Wastell to help the crossing piers carry the weight of his tower. Identical strainer across the arch to the S transept. The choir screen does the same service for the E crossing arch. Nothing however on the N side, a risk taken, it has been suggested, lest the view to the place of Becket’s martyrdom be obscured. The tower itself has a fan-vault incredibly high up.
The TRANSEPTS, in spite of certain irregularities caused by retaining parts of the Norman walls, follow the forms of the nave in all but trifling details. The gigantic end windows dominate.
Finally, the chapels added to the transepts. The LADY CHAPEL (or Deans’ Chapel), built in the third quarter of the C15, has a fan-vault, the first on a large scale in eastern England. The chapel is only two bays long, but lofty. The vaulting has no special features, but the handling of the walls, as buttressing masses, projecting into the chapel, between the spacious windows, is a satisfying notion. To them many dainty shafts are applied, and on the canted splays shields and rows of quatrefoils. A double row of leaves on the E window splays, and canopied niches low down - part of a reredos? Ornate stone W screen built with the chapel.
ST MICHAEL’S CHAPEL, built E of the S transept, is a little earlier, c.1420-8. So the vault is a lierne-vault. Mouldings somewhat coarser than in Yevele’s designs. Above the chapel, reached up a flight of steps within the thickness of the wall from the S choir aisle, is ALL SAINTS CHAPEL. Plain tierceron-vault. Bosses at the ridge, three carved with cowled heads, identified by inscriptions as portraits of Prior Chillenden, Prior Wodinsbergh, and ‘Willms Molasch discipulus’. Molash succeeded as Prior in 1428, which gives the terminus ante quem for the chapels.
FURNISHINGS
The cathedral is well endowed with furnishings and a fine series of monuments, but it is the STAINED GLASS that is unforgettable. A substantial part of the glass inserted in the newly built choir and Trinity Chapel has survived, and can be justly compared in quality with the finest C12 and C13 French glass. Any history of glass painting in Europe must take account of them. Where the glass has gone, most of the iron armatures have not, and their strong geometrical patterns are an important element in the architectural effect of the Trinity Chapel aisles and the Corona in particular. As the glass is almost all not now where it was placed at first, and windows intended to form a series have been scattered up and down the cathedral, a brief résumé of the original layout of the glass must be made here. The glass in the clerestory of choir and Trinity Chapel formed a genealogy of Christ, as recorded in Luke, Chapter 3, beginning in the W bay on the N side, and continuing, with two figures per window, making eighty-four in all, clockwise to finish with Mary and Christ in the W window on the S. The sequence was broken in the apse by five windows, the centre three filled with scenes from the Life of Christ. The rose windows in the E transepts have panels illustrating the Old Dispensation (N) and the New Dispensation (S). In the choir aisles and E transepts were twelve ‘Theological’ windows, datable c.1200.10 The medallions were arranged in threes, an Old Testament scene, coupled with the New Testament event it foreshadows. The scheme was a favourite one in English medieval art. The E window of the Corona is the culmination of this series, the ‘types’ and ‘antitypes’ here being confined to the Death, Resurrection, and Glorification of Christ. It is a little later than the rest, as the border of stiff-leaf tufts shows. Of the twelve aisle windows of the Trinity Chapel, seven are partly or wholly intact. The medallions here depict miracles recorded to have happened in the years following Becket’s murder, as set down by two monks of Christ Church, Benedict and William. The glass was made after 1220; for the shrine of St Thomas Becket, set up in that year, is twice depicted.
The dating of the rest of the glass is controversial. Bernard Rackham, in his monumental book The Ancient Stained Glass of Canterbury Cathedral (1949), argued that the genealogical windows would have gone in at once, i.e. into the choir c.1178 and into the Trinity Chapel c.1184, while the scaffolding was still up. His argument has force in so far as there does seem to be a difference both in style and in quality between the panels that came from the two halves of the clerestory. But Professor Grodecki has pointed out that the C12 clerestories at Poitiers and Angers were both glazed after a lapse of years. He would date none of the glass before c.1200. But, as we shall see, the foliage patterns in some of the borders are decidedly Romanesque in style, which would make a date in the 1180s easier to accept. Until the style of the windows has been more thoroughly analysed, the question must be left open.
The glass will be described in its present positions, among the rest of the furnishings. What is in the crypt comes first, then the rest of the cathedral, from E to W, taking N (aisle, transept, etc.) before S where necessary.
CRYPT. Preserved in the crypt are the moveable remains of Reculver church. They are of national importance, speaking eloquently of the culture and refinement of Early Saxon art. The abbey of Reculver was founded in 669. In terms of ecclesiastical history that was a date when Canterbury was tied most closely to the rest of the civilized world. In 668 the great Theodore of Tarsus was consecrated Archbishop. He came to England with two assistants, Hadrian, an African monk who had been ruling a monastery near Naples, and Benedict Biscop, Northumbrian by birth but a monk of Lérins.
First the COLUMNS, two of them, that formed the chancel screen. They are monoliths, c. 20 ft high, their capitals a simplification of a Byzantine block capital, their bases, like the St Pancras shaft-base, a form of classical Ionic, with an enriched moulding. In front of the columns there stood until at least the C16 a lofty cross. Six sizeable fragments of the CROSS SHAFT are preserved in the crypt, together with two smaller pieces without figure sculpture. Leland’s description helps to make sense of them: ‘Yn the enteryng of the quyer [of Reculver church] ys one of the fayrest, and the most auncyent crosse that ever I saw, a ix footes, as I ges, yn highte. It standeth lyke a fayr colunme. The base great stone is not wrought. The second stone being rownd hath curiusly wrought and paynted the images of Christ, Peter, Paule, John and James, as I remember. Christ sayeth Ego sum Alpha et Ὠ. Peter sayith Tu es Christus filius Deo vivi. The saing of the other iii wher painted majusculis lireris Ro. but now obliterated. The second stone is of the Passion. The iii conteineth the xii Apostles. The iii hath the image of Christ hanging and fastened with iii nayles, and sub pedibus sustentaculum. The hiest part of the pyller hath the figure of a crosse.’ In excavating Reculver church Sir Charles Peers discovered that the original plaster floor of the nave stopped against a masonry foundation just where the cross according to Leland11 stood. If the base was contemporary with the church, so probably but not necessarily was the cross shaft. In spite of recent attempts to date the shaft to the C10, a date in the C7 is, however one looks at it, the more probable. C7 sculptured crosses are familiar from Ireland and Northumbria. But in the South, apart from two shafts with sculptured figures at Glastonbury, one of them at least set up late in the C7, we know of nothing like the Reculver Cross. The position of the Reculver Cross in front of the chancel screen has no parallel in Britain or on the Continent.
There are eight fragments of cross shaft altogether, two without any decipherable carving, and six containing figure sculpture. These six fragments are part of two round shafts, one about 18 in. in diameter, the other about 15 in. The other early British crosses (e.g. Bewcastle and Ruthwell) have square shafts. An Early Christian forerunner, comparable with Reculver in more than the roundness of its shaft, as we shall see, is the ciborium of St Mark’s at Venice. The biggest fragment, which is also the best preserved and artistically the highest in quality, has the lower half of two standing frontal figures, and part of a third, in quite high relief. This must have come from the lowest tier. There are two other pieces of large diameter carved with figures only, one with a side-view figure, and the hand of someone else stretching out towards his feet; the other with a figure striding nimbly on two knolls, and apparently reaching upwards. The latter must depict the Ascension. Christ strides uphill in just this pose, his hand grasped by the hand of God extended from a cloud, in the Ascension on the famous ivory diptych at Munich. The heads of both these are, alas, gone too. The fourth big piece does include faces, of busts set in a foliage scroll; and also a broad border of interlace. The two small fragments have figures between colonnettes, and seem to fit together. So here we have four of the twelve Apostles, or rather their ghosts, so damaged is the surface of the stone.
Figure sculpture, foliage scrolls, interlace: where else are all three found together in C7 Europe? The answer is nowhere, except in the two great Northumbrian crosses, the Ruthwell Cross in Dumfriesshire and the Bewcastle Cross in Cumberland, the latter datable after 670. Yet monasticism in Northumbria was Irish monasticism. Ecclesiastically Reculver depended on Canterbury, and Canterbury had been colonized from Italy. It is to the Mediterranean too that we must look for the sources of the Reculver sculpture. The figures of course imply Antique sources ultimately. Of that more in a moment. The interlacing strands, which look so un-Antique, are at least Early Christian. They can be found on the low choir screens, the cancelli, of S. Clemente and S. Sabina in Rome, both of the C6; though one should not forget that contemporary Kentish pagan jewellery is carved in such knotty strands. Now for the scrolls. Vine-scroll ornament can be found in the C6 too, on the Throne of Maximian at Ravenna for example. The scrolls there are inhabited by birds and beasts. So are the vine-scrolls on the Bewcastle Cross. But the Reculver scrolls are not recognizably vine branches, and the inhabitants are not animals, but half-length young men like the busts in wreaths familiar from Late Roman ivory consular diptychs. As for the standing figures, it must be confessed that to find anything as good in quality as these, one must go back at least to the C5. Where else in C6 or C7 art are there drapery folds as delicately carved as these are, or folds that tell as much of the limbs beneath them as these do? Where can one find poses so lively and convincing? It is tempting to suggest that the Reculver Cross was carved by workmen who had portable objects beside them as models; as we have seen already, ivories yield the best comparisons. The technique of carving too, the hair-breadth incisions that indicate hems or a rolled parchment, is a miniaturist’s technique, quite unlike the bold simplifications of the northern crosses. But that is not a full explanation. A C7 craftsman could not emulate the style of a 5 ivory merely by looking at it; he needed training. And that implies that there were other C7 works of art as expert as the Reculver Cross. What they were and where they were made, whether in Britain, in Italy, or in the Eastern Mediterranean, we do not know. Time has destroyed them all. But the Reculver Cross testifies that they existed. - SCULPTURE. C17 ivory figure, Portuguese, of the Virgin, in the reredos of the Chapel of Our Lady of the Undercroft. – WALL PAINTINGS. The apse of St Gabriel’s Chapel has its complete set of wall paintings of c.1130, an outstanding series in quality, extent, and state of preservation (having been walled up from the late C12 to the C19). In the apse vault, Christ in Majesty flanked by four angels. On the walls to either side, scenes of the annunciations of the archangel and their results; on the N the annunciation to Zachariah, his dumbness, and the naming of John; on the S the annunciation to Mary and the Nativity. On the soffit of the outer arch is depicted the vision of St John the Evangelist of the angels of the seven churches of Asia, and at the bottom at the N end, the Evangelist writing. The hieratic presentation and strict symmetry, as well as the convention for modelling faces, suggest a Byzantine source for the style that probably reached England via Norman Sicily. - STAINED GLASS. E window: original border, and top panel, of the Virgin enthroned, c.1200. The early C13 figures lower down, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Jacob, and Isaac, came from Petham church, where they belonged. The Crucifixion is made up, some of it with old glass; the lowest panel started life perhaps in one of the Trinity Chapel aisles. - NE transept: in the N apse, a C13 French panel recently inserted; four further panels, with scenes from the life of St Nicholas, in the S apse. - St Gabriel’s Chapel: C13 French medallion, set in French C14 grisaille glass. Also a C13 figure of St Dunstan, much restored. - MONUMENTS. Indent of a large brass of an archbishop. - Lady Mohun, before 1375. Alabaster effigy, badly damaged, of a lady fashionably dressed. - Countess of Atholl. This damaged effigy in St Gabriel’s Chapel was identified by St John Hope as being not of the Countess but of Lady Tryvet d. 1431. - Archbishop Morton d. 1500. Recumbent effigy, with little canons kneeling, three on this side, three on that. Splayed faces to the arch above, and attached to the faces small figures of saints, well carved but almost all now headless.
CORONA. ST AUGUSTINE’S CHAIR, for the enthronement of Archbishops. Of Purbeck marble, the chair is one of only two surviving in England from the C13. The other is St Frideswide’s Chair at Oxford. - STAINED GLASS. The E window illustrates the main events from Good Friday to Pentecost, with the Old Testament episodes that foreshadow them grouped in fours, of semicircles round the square panels, of circular medallions around the lozenge-shaped ones. The sequence goes from bottom to top, as follows:
Moses striking the Rock
Crucifixion12 Sacrifice of Isaac
Preparing the Passover Lamb
The Grapes of Eshcol
Joseph in the Pit
Entombment, Samson and Delilah in bed
Jonah cast overboard
Daniel in the Lions’ Den
Noah in the Ark13
Resurrection13 Jonah disgorged by the Whale
Michal and David13
Moses and the Burning Bush
The High Priest enters the Holy of Holies
Ascension Elijah carried up to Heaven
The Sundial of Ahaz
Enoch translated to Heaven
Consecration of Aaron and his sons
Pentecost Christ in Glory (to be read with the Pentecost panel)
Moses and Jethro judging the people
Moses receiving the Tables of the Law
In the N window part of a late C12 Jesse Tree, just the figures of Josiah and the Virgin, majestically conceived though small in size. The leaves of the tree are entirely Romanesque in form. The next window, a whole Jesse Tree, was made by George Austin in 1861. More C19 glass, very muddy, in the SE window. C13 panel of Christ in Majesty in the S window. - MONUMENT. Archbishop Temple d. 1902. Kneeling figure under a busy Gothic canopy, by W.D.Caroe.
HENRY IV’s CHANTRY (Chapel of St Edward the Confessor). STAINED GLASS . Three delightful C15 figures, St Christopher, St Edward, St Catherine.
TRINITY CHAPEL. PAVEMENT. St Thomas Becket’s shrine has gone, but not the pavement laid down in front of it c.1220. It is a most handsome affair, a complicated geometrical pattern, a lozenge in a quatrefoil, in a square, in a much bigger lozenge overlapping four circles; executed in marble tesserae, the technique called opus alexandrinum. N and S of it are thirty-six roundels, in rows of six, of yellow oolite, on which designs are cut, and filled with red mastic. Now muddled up, they include the Signs of the Zodiac, Labours of the Months, and Virtues trampling Vices. Four more roundels, very worn, further E. - MONUMENTS. Prince Edward, the Black Prince, d. 1376. Formal and withdrawn. Stiff recumbent effigy, of copper gilt, of the Prince in full armour, on a high tomb-chest, with shields in multifoils against its sides. Above, a flat wooden canopy painted with a large figure of God the Father holding his crucified Son, this too treated hieratically. Above that hang replicas of the Prince’s funeral achievement, a set of armour, tabard, etc.14 - Archbishop Courtenay d. 1396. Alabaster tomb-chest, with niches for weepers, and an alabaster recumbent effigy, already a drop in quality from the early alabaster effigy of Archbishop Stratford. Podgy, self-indulgent face, perhaps not a portrait, for the effigy of William of Wykeham (d. 1404) at Winchester is almost a duplicate. Crisp, shallow drapery folds. Small angels hold the cushions under his head. - King Henry IV d. 1413, and Queen Joan of Navarre d. 1437. One of the most ambitious alabaster monuments ever executed. Tomb-chest with canopied niches. Crowned recumbent effigies set under elaborate vaulted tabernacles. His features are clearly a portrait. Much expertise in rendering their jewelled robes, but no joy. This is not art of a high order. Oak canopy, flat, originally painted on the underside, with demi-angels along the sides. Coronation of the Virgin painted on a panel at the foot, and the Murder of Becket painted at the head. - Dean Nicholas Wotton d. 1567. He kneels in prayer on a bulgy tomb-chest, before a ‘reredos’. Corinthian side columns, notably pure in form for the date. Obelisk at the other end. The total effect is already of Late Elizabethan showiness.
TRINITY CHAPEL AMBULATORY. STAINED GLASS. Of the twelve windows all keep their original armatures, eight their stained glass. The subjects are all of miracles worked by the blood or intervention of St Thomas. As the windows are at eye level, there is a chance, all too rare, to study the glass close up, to see the delicacy with which designs are drawn, and how the lead glazing bars clarify them; to appreciate the colours, ruby, blue, green, amber, and brown, and the intensity of each; to observe how stock designs are re-used or modified, even used in reverse, to depict the innumerable incidents. The description of the windows starts at the W end on the N side and proceeds clockwise. - Window I. Only the border is in its original place. All the panels, mostly made up of old glass, have been put in during the C20. Four medallions down the middle belong to the miracle series. - Window II. By Clayton & Bell. - Window III. Ten scenes, in lozenges and paired part-circles. The top three scenes show a riding accident; No. 4, Stephen of Hoyland delivered from nightmares; 5, 6, 7, Pilgrimage scenes; 8, a young man’s vision; 9, William the Priest cured by a drop of St Thomas’s blood; 10, curing the blind and sick. - Window IV. Eight cures in eight pairs of medallions. The backgrounds here are picked out with delicious scrollwork. No. 1 (top 1.), Pilgrims with healing water; 2, St Thomas visits a sick man; 3, 4, Petronilla of Polesworth cured of epilepsy; 5, 6, 7, modern; 8, The dream of Louis VII of France; 9, 10, the healing of Robert of Cricklade, who suffered from swollen feet; 11, 12, the cure of a woman; 13, 14, a maniac cured; 15, 16, Audrey of Canterbury cured of quartan fever. - Window V. The iron armature, forming quatrefoils in large circles, is especially monumental here. This makes four scenes per circle, and two further scenes in the interspaces below before the next circle begins. No. 1, St Thomas appears from his shrine to a sleeping monk – as the shrine was set up only in 1220, the window must be later than that; 2, 3, Miracles at the saint’s tomb; 4, Godwin of Boxgrove (?) gives his shirt to a poor man; 5, 6, a woman with dropsy visits the tomb; 7, 8, 9, modern; 10, 11, 12, the lame daughters of Godbold of Boxley; 13-18, i.e the third circle and the two panels below, illustrate the punishment and healing of Eilward of Westoning. 13 does not belong to the story. For stealing gloves and a Whetstone Eilward is sentenced (14), blinded and mutilated (15). St Thomas cures him (17) and he walks and points to his restored eyes (16). In the last panel Eilward gives thanks at the tomb of the saint. 19, 20, 21, Hugh of Jervaulx cured, after drinking holy water, of a generous flow of blood from his nose; 22, modern. – Window VI. The design, providing thirty three panels in three and a half stylized flowers, is the most complicated of all. The stories run from l. to r., filling for the most part trios of panels. Only the lowest ‘flower’ is filled with a single nine-scene story. As usual, description starts top l. Nos. 1-3, Healing the blind Juliana of Rochester; 4-9, Richard Sunieve cured of leprosy; 10-12, modern; 13-15, Rodbertulus, a boy of eight, drowned in the Medway while stoning frogs. In 14 two boys tell his parents, and in 15 his body is rescued. His resuscitation is missing, and 16-18 are modern. 19-21, a mad woman healed; 22-24, modern; 25-33, Plague in the house of Sir Jordan Fitz-eisulf. The story sequence begins in the bottom row, continues in the top row, and ends in the centre. So - 31, the funeral of the first victim, the nurse ; 32, funeral of Sir Jordan’s son; 33, Water of St Thomas used to revive him; 25, Sir Jordan given coins to place in his son’s hands; 26, the son sits up and eats, and his parents give thanks - but, says the inscription, they do not thank the martyr Thomas; 27, Gimp, a blind and lame leper, being bidden in a dream to warn Sir Jordan of his omission; 28, Gimp giving his warning; 29, as the warning is ignored, another of Sir Jordan’s sons dies; 30, at last Sir Jordan accomplishes his vow, pouring gold and silver pieces on the tomb. - Window VII (the E window on the S side). The top eight medallions made up of old glass in 1893. Nos 9-12, the story of William of Kellett, the carpenter. 9, he cuts his shin at the bench; 10, St Thomas appears to him in a dream; 11, unbandaged, his leg is miraculously healed; 12, William leaves Canterbury, rejoicing. 13, Adam the Forester shot by a poacher; 14, a man in bed drinks the water of St Thomas; 15, a man in bed; 16, Adam’s thank-offering at the tomb. - Window IX. Borders and two panels, one of pilgrims on the road, the other showing them at the tomb. – Window XI. No. 1, John, the Groom of Roxburgh, thrown from his horse into the Tweed; 2, St Thomas rescues him; 3, two men in a boat search for his body; 4, John is revived by lying beside a fire; 5, Pilgrims; 6, a young man kneeling; 7, a dying man healed; 8, two men lowering a coffin into a tomb; 9, Pilgrims; 10, an offering at the tomb; 11, a man lying on the ground, with a priest and a woman; 12, an offering at the tomb; 13, a girl restored to life; 14, 15, a boy restored to life; 16, Funeral; 17, 18, Scenes at St Thomas’s tomb. – Window XII. A pretty design, a tier of fan-shaped compartments, making twenty-two panels in all. At the bottom the shrine, set up in 1220, is depicted again. Nos 1-6, the miraculous preservation of the child Geoffrey of Winchester, first from a fever, then when the wall of the house falls down; 7, 8, James, son of the Earl of Clare, cured of a hernia, by a rag of St Thomas’s hair shirt; 9, IO, a lame youth (Eilwin of Berkhamsted?) healed; 11, a leprous monk and two pilgrims; 12, Tending a leprous priest. 13-20, the story of William of Gloucester, a workman of Archbishop Pont L’Evéque of York. 13, William buried by a fall of earth; 14, eye-witnesses tell a priest; 15, a woman telling of her vision that William is still alive; 16, the bailiff, ear to the ground, hears William’s groans; 17, mostly modern; 18, the bailiff reports to the priest; 19, a party with shovels sets off; 20, and digs William out; 21, 22, Offerings at the shrine.
MONUMENT. Archbishop Walter d. 1205.. Gabled Purbeck marble tomb-chest. The shrine of St Thomas must have looked something like this, though a great deal more gorgeous. In style too a date c.1220 would suit this monument very happily. The gable decoration, of heads in quatrefoils within lozenges that overlap circles, plays with geometrical forms just like the pavement and the Trinity Chapel window armatures. Filleted mouldings, undercut where they overlap. The heads too are in notably high relief, with vivaciously incised wrinkles and curls. Shafted arcading, trefoiled, on the sides of the tomb-chest, with tufts of stiff-leaf in the spandrels.
ST ANDREW’S CHAPEL. STAINED GLASS. Cosam, one of the genealogical figures from the Trinity Chapel clerestory.
ST ANSELM’s CHAPEL. CRUCIFIX and CANDLESTICKS, c.1951 by Andor Mészdros. - CHANDELIER. C18. Brass. Shell-shaped sconces. - WALL PAINTING. High up in the NW corner of the apse, the majestic mid-C12 figure of St Paul shaking off the viper at Melita, on a brilliant blue background (preserved by walling up in the C12). It must be contemporary with the most splendid illuminated manuscripts of the Canterbury scriptoria, such as the Edwine Psalter and the Dover Bible; but in style, especially in the clinging draperies articulated by sparing S-curved folds, which give the figure its mass and rhythm, the closest parallel is with the Bury Bible. Such a comparison emphasizes the monumentality of this figure of St Paul. Naturally one looks for some large-scale source for the style. Dr Saxl has found it in the mosaics of Norman Sicily, specifically in those of the Cappella Palatina in Palermo. What wouldn’t one have given to have some more of the painted decoration of Conrad’s choir? - STAINED GLASS. Disastrously glaring glass inserted in the Dec S window in 1959, by H.J. Stammers of York. - MONUMENT. Archbishop Meopham d. 1333. A mighty structure, making a screen across the chapel entrance, with original wrought-iron gates. The S window, inserted in I 336, was put in to light it, no doubt. All of black Purbeck marble except the vaulting that grows from the gable of the tomb-chest. Lofty vaulted canopy, on lofty clustered shafts, that obscure the sculptured panels on the tomb-chest. Was the canopy an afterthought, or was the perverse arrangement intended? Altogether, the monument is a peculiar design, of a wilful, very Dec, oddness. Its joy is the sculpture, confined to reliefs in the spandrels, and all in little, but delightfully freshly carved. In the trefoils and half-trefoils on the canopy, monks seated at their desks. In the trefoils on the tomb-chest vault, ogeed and split-cusped these, smiling angels holding scrolls and symbols of the Evangelists.
CHOIR SCREENS. Erected under Prior Eastry in 1304-5. Of stone, enclosing the choir on three sides. The idiom is Dec, the handling remarkable for its orderliness. So there are ogees all over the tracery, i.e. in the paired trefoiled lights and the cinquefoil in a circle over them, and split cusps in the spandrel trefoils; but the even row of windows is topped with a straight parapet, decorated just with a row of big square leaves, a row of pierced trefoils, and a crest of minuscule battlements. Ball-flower on the S doorway. The W side, treated a little more richly, is hidden now. Scott uncovered it temporarily and found much original colouring, red, blue, green, and gold. Contemporary iron GATE. - PULPITUM. This second screen, far more bulky and impenetrable than Prior Eastry’s,15 was set up in Prior Chillenden’s time (1390-1411). Its W face is treated as a setting for figures in elaborately vaulted niches. Fussy when seen close to, the main lines, typically, read at a distance as a grid, with the doorway in the centre enlarged visually because of its sloping reveals. The pulpitum still retains its original iron GATES. But the important thing about the pulpitum is the sculpture that survives. Six figures, of kings, in the main register are left. The kings l. and r. of the doorway are Ethelbert and Edward the Confessor,16 the others are usually identified as Richard II and Henry IV, V, and VI, but they are certainly not portraits. All six seem to have been set up together; there is no difference in style. These then are the major surviving examples of early C15 sculpture in England, apart from monuments; so thoroughly have other screens and reredoses been despoiled. What about the style? They stand impassively, holding their insignia in constrained poses, dignified but not noble. On their small, neat heads they wear rich crowns; their robes, falling in long unbroken folds to crumple at their feet, are clearly made of some heavy material. C14 figures, say the kings on the W front at Lincoln, or at Exeter, are more animated, their robes not so all-enveloping. The change in style is both a change in ideals, from Dec to Perp, and also a change brought about by knowledge of the most advanced sculptural style in Europe c.1400, that of Claus Sluter, and his followers, in Burgundy. That knowledge affects only the draperies; it does not animate the cool-blooded figures. - ARCHBISHIOP’S THRONE. 1843-4 by George Austin. Convincingly Gothic. - CHOIR STALLS. The return stalls at the W are by Roger Davis, 1682. Just like the woodwork in a Wren church. – The rest are by Sir G. G. Scott, 1879. - LECTERN. Brass. The usual eagle. Made in 1663 by William Burroughs. - CHANDELIERS. - STAINED GLASS. In the clerestory, C19 copies of the genealogical windows. Original borders in three windows on the N side. - MONUMENTS. Described under N and S choir aisles.
NORTH EAST TRANSEPT. STAINED GLASS. Rose window, late C12. The Old Dispensation, represented by Moses and the Synagogue in the centre square. Four triangular panels surround this, with figures of the Cardinal Virtues, and then four semicircles with prophets. All this is set within a circle, which is the full extent of the old glass. - In the clerestory windows nearest the aisle three of the genealogical figures from the earlier series. Heber, on the W side, and opposite, to the E, Shem above and Isaac below. - The main windows are all modern,17 imitating the C13 glass. That in the W wall is by Clayton & Bell, that in the SE apse by John Baker, 1956. - MONUMENT. Archbishop Tait d. 1882. Recumbent figure carved by Sir J.E.Boehm.
NORTH CHOIR AISLE. PAINTINGS. Restored C15 fresco of the Vision of St Eustace. Also a curiosity, the Vision of King Charles the Martyr, c.1660. - STAINED GLASS. Here is what is left of the series of twelve ‘Theological’ windows, with scenes from the New Testament (anti-types) flanked by pairs of Old Testament types, i.e. events that foreshadowed them. The surviving glass fills only two windows, but the complete arrangement is known from a C14 key in the Chapter Library. The glass must have been made c.1200, for the leafage is no longer the majestic Romanesque fronds of the earliest style, nor the springy scrolls with stiff-leaf of the Miracle windows, but something in between. For pure pictorial charm these are perhaps the pick, covering a much wider range of subject than the Miracle windows; so e.g. the Sower, or the miraculous Draught of Fishes, shows to perfection the graceful but ruthless schematization of early medieval art, so easy to comprehend. Some of the triplets are intact, as follows. Centre window (Window II), reading from top to bottom: The Magi riding, with, in the l. panel, Balaam on his ass, and to the r., Isaiah at the gate of Jerusalem ; Herod and the Magi, between Pharaoh dismissing Moses, and The Conversion of the Heathens from Idolatry; Adoration of the Magi, between Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and Joseph and his brothers in Egypt; the Magi warned in a dream not to return to Herod, between Lot’s escape from Sodom, and Jeroboam sacrificing; Presentation in the Temple and Samuel received in the Temple by Eli (the other Old Testament panel of this triplet is missing. In its place is the Parable of the Sower). The two lowest rows are also mixed up: Ecclesia, with the three sons of Noah; the Pharisees leaving Jesus; the three blameless states of life, Virginity, Continence, and Marriage; the Rich Men of this world; the Parable of the Sower (second scene); Daniel, Job, and Noah, the three righteous men (Ezekiel XIV).
NE window (Window III). Only the top triplet, the medallion with the half-medallions below, is in the place made for it. The subjects are: Jesus among the doctors; and the types, to the l., Moses advised by Jethro, and to the r., Daniel among the Elders. The panels continue downwards as follows: the Miracle of Cana (six waterpots turned to wine); the Six Ages of the World; the Six Ages of Man. These form a triplet. The rest are out of context: the Miraculous Draught of Fishes; Noah in the Ark receiving the Dove; St Peter and the Jews; The Calling of Nathanael; Gentiles hearing the Word; Pharisees despising the Word.
The clerestory windows of the aisle each enclose three medallions. In the NW and centre windows, scenes from the life of St Dunstan; in the NE, the story of St Alphege. - MONUMENTS. Archbishop Chichele d. 1443. Very sumptuous, the polygonal piers for the canopy covered in tiers of canopied niches. Recumbent effigy on a tomb-chest, and a gisant below. Straight-topped canopy fringed with angels. All the colour and the niche statues are modern. - Archbishop Bourchier d. 1486. As sumptuous as the last, but more imaginative and carved as crisply as can be in Bethersden marble. Small-scale tabernacles on the side of the tomb-chest. Lofty vaulted canopy carrying a loft with pierced panelling and niches. - .Archbishop Howley d. 1848. The monument lives up to its companions in splendour, though inevitably the style of the tall open canopy is Dec, not Perp. R. Westmacott jun. Carved the recumbent figure. Who designed the rest?
SOUTH EAST TRANSEPT. STAINED GLASS. Genealogical figures in the E clerestory windows which are nearest the aisle: Neri and Rhesa, Juda and Phares, and, in the next window to the S, an unidentified figure. - Apse windows by G.Austin jun., 1852. - S windows 1956 by Erwin Bossanyi. Symbolic of Peace and Salvation (below), Faith and Action (above). Scalding colours, jagged shapes, but sugary faces. Deeply felt by the artist, no doubt, but Expressionism of this sort does not fit in here.
SOUTH CHOIR AISLE. STAINED GLASS. In the three main windows panels, seventeen in all, of C13 French glass, inserted, in modern borders, in 1958 and 1962. It is good to be able to compare them with the English glass, e.g. with the medallions in the clerestory windows immediately above, although these are worn and restored. SE window, Dormition, Assumption, and Coronation of the Virgin; centre and SW window, Scenes from the Life of Christ, from the Nativity to the Resurrection. MONUMENTS . Prior Eastry d. 1322. Fine realistic recumbent figure. Notice e.g. his sunken cheek and neck, and even a detail like the shape of his toes within the shoes. Battlements to the tomb-chest, and, effective this, the ends canted forward to make room for niches, with panels of reticulated tracery above. Vaulted canopy on shafts with leaf capitals, pure Dec, like everything else. - Archbishop Reynolds d. 1328. This must have been similar, but the canopy has gone, and the effigy, of Purbeck marble, is battered. - Archbishop Stratford d. 1348. The effigy is as fine as Prior Eastry’s, boldly and realistically carved, but it is of alabaster, one of the earliest alabaster effigies known. On the tomb-chest, alabaster mixes charmingly with Purbeck marble. Vaulted canopy of stone on Purbeck shafts. The whole thing is a work of great sensibility with dainty forms much broken up; but what makes it historically so interesting is that the vocabulary is Perp. So the tomb-chest is panelled, the verticality of the canopy shafts stressed. - Archbishop Sudbury d. 1381. A very long tomb-chest, of Purbeck marble, oddly shaped with its end pieces and deep niches on the S side. Vaulted stone canopy. The monument seems coarse and plain after Archbishop Stratford’s. - Archbishop Kempe d. 1454. The standard panelled marble tomb-chest, under a wooden canopy that is anything but standard. So the mid C15 was capable of flights of fancy as delectable as anything in the early C14. Four pairs of exceedingly slim shafts rise to carry, far above the tomb-chest, a flat-topped canopy, vaulted with three two-centred arches, and a half-arch each end, so that it seems about to fly away. - Dean Neville d. 1615. Mutilated Jacobean monument of the standard kind, with kneeling figures. - Anna Milles d. 1714. Tablet with seated putti and a bad, flat, half-length figure.
NORTH WEST TRANSEPT. STAINED GLASS. The N window in its entirety was filled with glass, as the gift of Edward IV, who with his wife and children appear as donors. The window was finished in 1482. William Nave was royal glazier at the time. Prophets, Apostles, and Saints in the tracery; the main lights all destroyed except for the donor portraits, and angels bearing shields of arms. Clearly the two parts are by different hands, the tracery figures by some not specially distinguished artist, typical mid-C15 hack-work. In the main lights the colours are much stronger, applied with subtle shadowing, the leads enclosing daringly large areas. This almost water-colourist technique is hard to appreciate except in reproductions. So, standing in the transept, one tends to underestimate its quality and condemn the figures as limp and inexpressive. Of the royal faces, only the King’s and Queen’s are genuine. The panel between the King and the Queen is Rhenish, early C16. - In the W window, the Annunciation in the tracery and the main lights by Comper, 1954.
MONUMENTS. Indents of several great brasses. - Archbishop Peckham d. 1292. One of the earliest pieces anywhere that can be called pure Dec. The recumbent effigy is of wood, idealized, not realistic, his hand raised in blessing, his robes falling in heavy, placid folds. Tomb-chest with niches and a row of stocky little weepers. The canopy, with a sub-cusped arch, a crocketed gable, and side pinnacles, was to be a favourite form. At the sides niches with ogees, one of the very first appearances of the form (Hardingstone Cross, Crouchback monument in Westminster Abbey). Pretty borders of leaves stylized into Dec bumpiness. - Archbishop Warham d. 1532. Reclining effigy on a tomb-chest, under a colossal vaulted triple canopy, drastically retooled in the C19. No hint of a Renaissance taint to the Gothic forms. It would be very interesting to know how Warham, whose death came so opportunely for Henry VIII, came to get such an expensive and confident monument on the brink of the Reformation of the Established Church. - Alexander Chapman d. 1629. Big, restrained architectural wall monument, of black marble and alabaster. Frontal half-length scholar figure, under looped-up curtains. Side niches.
LADY CHAPEL. EMBROIDERY. Turkish, brought from Nicaea. - STAINED GLASS. In the E window, armorial glass and the badge of Archbishop Bourchier, c.1455. - MONUMENTS . Dean Fotherby d. 1619. Tomb-chest, its sides covered with a charnel-house array of skulls and bones. - Dean Boys d. 1625. Alabaster standing wall-monument transformed into the Dean’s study. Seated at a table, the figure of the Dean half turns to look towards the altar. A book is open on a sphinx-ended rest, and books line the ‘walls’ on three sides. The motifs of a standard Jacobean monument are re-used with a new sense of realism.
SOUTH WEST TRANSEPT. STAINED GLASS. The great S window contains a good deal of C15 glass, figures and shields of arms, some C13 foliage, and, far more important, three rows of the late C12 ancestors of Christ from the choir and Trinity Chapel clerestory. Where they are now, they are easily within eye-shot. All figures are seated, the earlier ones under arches, the later in shaped surrounds - quatrefoils, almonds, or stretched hexagons. The earlier figures are undoubtedly finer, the poses more animated and secure, the heads turned or cocked alertly, the hands in expressive gestures. Perhaps the noblest of all is Methuselah, in the centre of the bottom row. The complicated draperies, drawn, sometimes twisted in a multitude of folds, this way and that across the bodies, but in the best figures not obscuring the poses, have their closest parallels in sculpture in the reliefs at Chichester. - W window, 1903 by Whall.
ST MICHAEL’S CHAPEL. The chapel is full up with MONUMENTS, a riot of colour after their recent touching up. - Margaret Holland d. 1437, between the two husbands who predeceased her. Three excellently preserved alabaster effigies on a single, low, broad tomb-chest. They all wear coronets,18 the men heavy plate armour. - Lady Thornhurst d.1609. Typical Jacobean standing wall-monument, with columns, obelisks, and loud heraldry at the top among strapwork, the frame for two figures, she reclining on her side in a ‘toothache’ attitude, her husband kneeling behind. Small kneeling daughters below. - Dorothy Thornhurst d. 1620. Hanging monument, with a large kneeling woman in prayer, and the usual trappings. – Thomas Thornhurst d. 1627. A more lavish affair in the same coarse idiom. He half reclines, gazing up; his wife lies prone. At the side stand soldiers in contemporary armour, holding curtains back. Kneeling children below. - William Prude d. 1632. Again the same sort of thing, a kneeling knight this time, hand on breast, with Ionic columns each side and standing soldiers, one drawing his sword. Allegorical females higher up. - Sir George Rooke d. 1708. Standing wall-monument, with a long bust on a pedestal, possibly by Edward Stanton. Ships in relief below, and an inscription recounting his naval exploits (one of them the capture of Gibraltar) in Ciceronian phrases. - Francis Godfrey d. 1712. Architectural wall-monument with trophies of arms.
NAVE. FONT and FONT COVER. An outstanding piece of Laudian display given in 1639 by Bishop Warner of Rochester, torn down by Puritans, and reassembled with new sculpture in 1662. The font itself, of black and white marble, is memorably pure and unmannered in its classicism. Shallow, octagonal, gadrooned and fluted bowl on a stem with figures of the four Evangelists standing between Tuscan colonnettes. Cover of wood, in two stages, with small figures of the twelve Apostles; Christ blessing as the finial at the top. Metal pulley bracket, with the Royal Arms of Charles II. - ARCHBISHP’S THRONE. Only the canopy remains of the throne presented by Archbishop Tenison in 1704. Grinling Gibbons carved it, but the designer of this monumental columned structure may well have been Hawksmoor. This play with curved forms in three dimensions is just what he enjoyed. Trios of fluted Corinthian columns carry pieces of entablature with concave sides. These are linked by an arch with pierced scroll brackets carrying urns and a cloth of honour. - PULPIT. 1898; designed by Bodley. Of wood, coloured; in a Perp style, with a tester. Prim, tight outline, conventional handling. - WOODWORK of the SW porch, made up by Seely & Pager, incorporating fragments of Roger Davis’s choir stalls of 1676. - PAINTING. Early C16 transferred fresco of St Christopher, by the Ferrarese painter Garofalo. Very Venetian in style. – STAINED GLASS. The W window has the rest of the late C12 genealogical figures reset in the lowest two tiers of lights. Thirteen in all, they include the splendid figure of Adam delving. The upper parts of the window keep much of the glass inserted here in the C15. The tracery lights however are datable 1396-9. Armorial glass, and figures of prophets, saints, and apostles here. In the main lights Kings of England and Archbishops, and a good deal of armorial glass. The subdued colours, browns, greens, and mauves, and plenty of plain glass, are quite different from the strong, glowing C12 colours, and different too from the later C15 glass in the NW transept. - MONUMENTS. N AISLE. Hales family, after 1596. A bizarre narrative wall-monument. At the bottom a man kneels at a prayer-desk. Above him a kneeling woman, between obelisks, with, behind her, a painting of Sir James Hales’s suicide in the river Stour. At the top, a second family tragedy, the committal at sea of the body of the younger Sir James, who led the disastrous expedition to Spain in 1589, meant to be a reprisal for the Armada, in which the crews were decimated by disease. - Sir John Boys d. 1612. Big standing wall-monument, much too big for the effigy, a figure in scholar’s robe reclining on one elbow and frowning hard. Two little children kneel below. – Orlando Gibbons d. 1625. The famous organist and composer, who died while at Canterbury composing music for Charles I’s reception of his bride Henrietta Maria. Nicholas Stone made the monument, in 1626, for £32. Black and white marble tablet, with an outstandingly fine bust, white against the plain black niche. The bust, cut short at the shoulders and set on a pedestal, is an elegant Continental form, new to England. Top-heavy segmental pediment on an eared surround, robustly Jacobean in feeling, but this too a form picked up by Stone in the Low Countries. Charming little swags at the bottom. - Dr Thomas Lawrence. 1806 by Flaxman. Just a tablet with a medallion portrait in profile. - Officers and Men of the 50th Regiment, 1848. ‘Geo.Nelson sculp. from a sketch by the late M .L. Watson.’ Large classical female in very high relief. She holds a flag and reclines on a cannon. Well designed; carved in a dead sort of way. - Dean Lyall d. 1857. Medievalizing wall-monument, with a recumbent effigy, tomb-chest, and canopy. One notes that stone is used, not marble. - Archbishop Sumner, 1866 by H. Weekes. Similar, minus the canopy. - Bishop Parry d. 1890. Recumbent effigy, 1881 by James Forsyth, of marble, on an alabaster tomb-chest, with E.E. arcading and allegorical figures. This too is completely conventional. - Archbishop Benson d. 1896. Designed by Sir T. G. Jackson. Alabaster recumbent effigy under a heavy Gothic canopy. It is rather surprising that at a time when in architecture novelty of effect, admittedly within the styles of the past, was so highly prized, monumental design should have remained quite uninspired by any feeling for experiment.
SOUTH AISLE. John Sympson. By Rysbrack, 1752. Standing wall-monument with two putti by a broken column. Grey pyramid at the back. Not carved with much gusto. – Officers and Privates of the 16th Queen’s Lancers. Big relief, with a wounded soldier, carved by Edward Richardson, 1848. Very impersonal. - Sir George Gipps. Bushy-browed bust in classical drapery, by H. Weekes, 1849. - Lieut.-Colonel John Stuart. With a relief of Minerva attending to a soldier with a headache. - Bishop Broughton. 1855 by J.G. Lough. Recumbent marble effigy in drapery that seems part shroud, part episcopal lawn. — Lt. Col. Frederick Mackeson. 1856, also by Lough (Gunnis). Relief still in the Flaxman tradition, but mixing allegory and realism with its classical female and Indian and English soldier by an urn. But the surround is Gothic. Lough seems to have been pretty muddle-headed. - Hon. James Beaney. Fussy Gothic wall monument with a relief and a portrait medallion, carved by J. Forsyth, 1893.
PLATE. Chalice and Paten, silver gilt, C12, found in the tomb of Archbishop Walter, the only known pieces of this period in England. Intersecting arches and Romanesque leaves engraved on the chalice. The paten has the following inscription:
ARA CRUCIS TUMULIQUE CALIX LAPIDISQUE PATENA SINDONIS OFFICIUM CANDIDA BISSUS HABET
i.e. an explanation of the symbolic meaning of the altar furnishings: altar = cross, chalice = tomb, paten = stone, linen = winding sheet. - Crucifix, c.1350. Hallmark of Sulmona, Italy. – Two Elizabethan Almsdishes. - Cup, 1636. Gilt. Animals embossed on stern and foot. This remarkable piece was the gift of the Earl of Arundel. - Candlesticks, a pair of c.1663 by James Beacham. - Flagons, a pair, gilt, of 1664. - Two Cups and two Paten Covers, gilt, c.1665. - Patens, a pair, gilt, made by William Grundy.
GREAT CLOISTER. The cloister walks were rebuilt under Prior Chillenden (1390-1411) to a consistent design. The S wall of the s walk, i.e. the vaulting shafts and springers of the vault, was built at the same time as the nave of the cathedral. The W walk was started in a397. Lierne-vaults, the ribs made the framework of cusped panels. Heraldic bosses, 825 of them altogether. A few in the S walk have grotesque heads, woman and fox etc. Four-light windows towards the garth, under crocketed ogee gables that rose above the roof-line with finials, now crumbled away. During the last ten years the stonework of the E and N walks has been entirely renewed and copies of the gables rise again. The tracery is of hexagons enclosing sub-cusped quatrefoils, surprisingly retardataire and not like the nave windows. The S walk was glazed in the late C15; for this was where the novices were taught. See the rebated mullions and tracery. In the W walk a stone bench for the monks to rest on, ending at the N with a stone seat with arms. By it, a contemporary doorway to the cellarer’s lodging, with an octagonal opening beside it, identified as a ‘turn’, i.e. a hatch for handing food and beer unseen to exhausted monks. Similar doorways at the S end.
The N cloister walls are E.E., rebuilt when the refectory N of it was reconstructed in 1226-36. Above a continuous bench, arcading, shafted, with moulded trefoiled arches, runs all along, with a band above of sunk circles and quatrefoils. Mutilated stiff-leaf here and there. The doorways to the refectory, one in the centre, the other at the E end, have luxuriant leaf capitals, the former of stiff-leaf, the latter crockets, upright leaves, and grapes. Multiple shafts in the deep reveals of both. Keeled mouldings. Perp doorway set under the latter. The shafts of the Perp vaulting have so cut into the arcading that it is not easy to see that the E.E. decoration is organized into a pattern, of four bays and one bay of arcading alternately, the stiff-leaf coming at the ends of a group, moulded capitals in the middle. Opposite the main doorway to the refectory was the LAVATORIUM, where the monks washed before meals. See the panelled base and the truncated canopy that was set into the tracery at this point.
The doorways from the E walk are a more varied bunch. Continuing
from the N end, the C12 doorway to the dormitory undercroft (and nowadays to
the library) comes first. It has renewed scallop capitals, zigzag round the
arch, an outer moulding with pellet, and an embattled hood-mould. Inter-locked
circles on a side shaft. After this the following: the Perp doorway to the Dark
Entry; the chapter house doorway with a window each side, erected in 1304-5; a second
Perp doorway, to the slype; and finally the great monks’ doorway into the N transept.
The doorway is now Perp, but with its square surround is set, with callous
indifference, into the centre of three sumptuous E.E. arches, which the
vaulting further interferes with. They have many shafts with bunchy stiff-leaf.
The rich, undercut foliage frieze of the centre arch remains, the winged
demi-angel in the r. spandrel, and a good deal of colouring, red, blue, and
gold. Pointed cinque foiled side arches, with dogtooth made of leaves around them.
A date c.1270 would fit this ripe production. The sumptuousness is explained by
the fact that the Archbishop, coming from his palace, regularly used it. The
monks reached the choir from their dormitory by way of the NE transept.19
The CHAPTER HOUSE was rebuilt, probably re-using Lanfranc’s walling, and made longer, by Prior Eastry in 1304. It was given end gables, a new roof, and new windows by Prior Chillenden a century later. The doorway is easy to recognize as Eastry’s, by its row of square flowers, with bumpy petals, round the arch, and by the four glazed arches l. and r. These are trefoil-headed, on shafts quatrefoil in plan, and over the capitals crawl knobbly, no longer naturalistic, leaves. All this leads one to expect a room more fanciful and florid, i.e. more Dec in spirit, than the one that appears. In fact the vastly lofty, oblong interior, 90 ft by 35 ft, impresses just because its majestic proportions are left to speak for themselves. There is no vestibule, so the wall-shafts divide the room into four equal bays. A double stone seat runs round all four walls, and closely spaced arcading above it, the spandrels filled with four-petalled flowers below a band of quatrefoils and embattling. One recognizes the sober vocabulary of Prior Eastry’s choir screens. Clearly the same mason designed them both. Leaf-capitals to the shafts along the E wall - and the Prior’s seat, in the centre, does, it must be admitted, shelter beneath a canted canopy gabled in three directions, with crockets and pinnacles, and the frieze has to climb up to clear it. But all that is undemonstrative enough too. The wall-shafts go with the arcading, but what the early C14 fenestration was like we do not know, for Prior Chillenden changed it all. His four-light windows, blank in the N wall, have one transom, the end windows, seven-lighters, two transoms, and tracery which starts like the cloister tracery, and continues with simple panelling. They flood the room with light. Finally the boarded ceiling, in seven cants (which produces a strange, mansard effect outside). This is covered with ribs that make patterns of cusped stars, as discreet as the Dec arcading. In the chapter house Dec and Perp combine in complete harmony.
If the chapter house impresses by its size, so does what is left of the DORMITORY. J.L. Denman’s egregious LIBRARY,20 of 1953, neo-Norman-cum-Tudoresque, occupies the S end of its site; so one has to pass down the Dark Entry and turn l. round the end of the library to appreciate the extent of the dormitory. Lanfranc built the dormitory before 1093, to sleep up to one hundred and fifty monks. Not surprisingly, it never needed to be replaced. What stands now is part of the W wall, rising above the cloister E walk, with windows in shafted arcading; and, more important, most of the shafts which supported the undercroft vault. Already in the Dark Entry the first shafts appear, round, and semicircular responds; with pre-block capitals making the transition from round to square by means of keels. But the really striking thing is that the shafts are carved with big patterns, zigzag, spirals, or lozenges lozenges. Such patterning soon reappeared in Ernulf’s crypt, and, on a vastly more monumental scale, at Durham. The arch half-way down the Dark Entry is of course later, mid C12 or so, with its triple shafts, beaded scallop caps, and bobble ornament round the arch. In the open air, N of the library, the task of plotting the dimensions of the building can be tackled. The dormitory measured 148 ft by 78 ft overall, divided lengthwise by a central wall, making three bays W and three bays E of it. In the other direction it ran for twelve-bays. In the NE corner the groin-vault of three bays is intact, with unmoulded transverse arches. Similar arches in the cross wall. The vault shafts are mostly left plain. The NE angle of the dormitory itself survives, with one big window each way, .a roll round the rere-arch, and shafts with block capitals.
From this point, at r. angles, two narrow buildings ran E. The S one was a second dormitory: it is an almost total loss. The other was the REREDORTER or lavatory, and at this, the W end, half a dozen of the arches survive that supported the lavatory seats. A chunk of masonry in mid-lawn belonged to it, and the E end, c.150 ft away, has left its mark against the porch entrance of the prior’s lodging. These buildings enclosed the second cloister on the N, but before investigation is carried further eastwards, the buildings N and W of the Great Cloister must be dealt with.
The grand doorway in the N walk of the cloisters now opens into the garden of the Archdeacon of Canterbury’s house. Originally it was the entrance to the REFECTORY. Of this nothing but the E wall remains, with E.E. trefoil-headed arcading, as in the cloister walk, a continuation of the Norman wall of the dormitory. The arcading marks out the dais end of the refectory, which was thus raised above a passage, into which led the NE doorway in the cloister walk.
The W end of the refectory, gone but for the NW angle, was of course the service end. So this is where one must look to find the kitchen and the quarters of the man in charge of the nourishment of the monks, the cellarer. In fact there is very little. The arcaded wall that bounds the garden on its W side has been identified as the E wall of the long, narrow CELLARER’S HALL, which lay N-S. In this position the Waterworks Drawing shows a building labelled Domus Hospitum, and that is what the Cellarer’s Hall was. These remains however are of a building later in the C12 than the Waterworks Drawing. The doorway, its big, round responds with acanthus leaf capitals, is the work of one of William of Sens’s masons. Depressed arch, with dogtooth, and a tympanum, within which stands a battered figure in relief. The arcading, eight bays of it, facing the ground storey, has big round-headed arches, with an angle roll and a hood, springing from buttress to buttress. Within, traceable on the W side, the ground storey was vaulted. The NE angle of the hall, with a newel stair, stands nearly to full height, in the Archbishop’s Palace garden. The buttresses are short, treated as pilasters, with nook-shafts. Some waterleaf among the foliage on the capitals. The two N bays which are under cover show it best. In the early C13 they were used to make a porch of two groin-vaulted bays S of the plain round-headed archway, the PENTISE GATE, which linked the Kitchen Court with the Green Court beyond the monastic enclosure. Prior Chillenden’s timber PENTISE runs N from here all the way to the outer Court Gate. Open to the E, the pentise is roofed with tie-beams on braces, and scissor braces above. A Norman doorway with outward-pointing zigzag and a sort of be-pelleted Greek key pattern opened to the E from the vaulted gateway. Immediately S of it, the angle of the KITCHEN, which is better appreciated, with its capacious hearth in the angle, from the garden. The kitchen was rebuilt in the mid C14, and Willis’s natural assumption is that it was square outside, octagonal within. The piece that survives is built against the long, rambling, patched, and partly roughcast ARCHDEACON’S HOUSE, which incorporates at its W end the upper parts of the Pentise Gatehouse, with its superimposed rooms called Paradise and Heaven, half-timbered, with a crown-post roof. This house was built by Prior Chillenden, c.1400, as further guest lodgings, flint, two-storeyed, with a crown-post roof. Two-light windows on the N side. (Over mantel with caryatids, c. 1600, in one room.) The E end was bomb-damaged and the Larder Gate, adjoining, demolished. The LARDER GATE MEMORIAL BUILDING replaces it. This, flint and ashlar, with mullioned windows and sash windows, and an oriel over the gateway arch, is by John L. Denman, in the same historicist vein as his library. It can best be seen from the N.
But it is time now to return to the Dark Entry, to complete the tour of the monastic enclosure. It leads into a second court, the INFIRMARY CLOISTER, bounded by cloister walks only on the S and E sides. The S walk runs for four bays open on both sides to the octagonal Lavatory Tower, then turns through a r. angle to join the NE transept of the cathedral. The structure is Norman. Groin-vault with transverse arches. Arches cut back without a moulding twice, suggest an early date; the scalloped caps to the round responds date it later than the dormitory. The arches perform the task of carrying an upper storey, ashlar-faced, divided into bays by pilaster buttresses, lit by one plain window per bay. This upper storey made a covered passage. from dormitory to NE transept. Heightened by Prior Chillenden and better lit from the N by two two-light windows with a transom. The LAVATORY rowan, placed at the bend in the corridor, was a later Norman addition, before c. 1160, as it figures in the Waterworks Drawing. From without, buttressed, and lit by two-light, transomed windows, it looks C15 rather than anything else; but the complete C12 substructure is visible inside. The central stem, through which the water drained from the cistern above, supports the ribs of the quadripartite vaults on four piers, shaped like teardrops in plan. The outer wall, octagonal, stands on composite piers with capitals richly scalloped and decorated with leaves, and arches with zigzag twice, the inner row undercut. On the inner side, the outer row becomes a roll with, as it were, triglyphs, bent over it. Upstairs, nothing of the original washing arrangements is preserved. Perp doorway into the lavatory from the upper passage. Also here, a C13 doorway, inserted in the E wall as the entrance into the Prior’s Chapel.
The PRIOR’S CHAPEL was built by Prior de St Elphege c. 1260 on the site of the E half of the S walk, leading directly to the infirmary. The chapel itself has gone, replaced soon after 1660 by a brick library (now Howley Harrison Library), rewindowed in the C19. But the open undercroft remains, minus its vault, and the central row of piers. It must have been a highly finished edifice. Sadly, the only evidence for that statement is the W respond, of three slim shafts, one forward and two back, with stiff-leaf capitals. Side windows, with a central shaft, and two lights each with a single cusp, under a pointed super-arch. Very deep, sloping external sill.
The EAST WALK of the Infirmary Cloister starts Norman. It is open and arcaded, with unmoulded arches on piers alternating, not quite strictly, single and in pairs. The singletons are round and have scalloped caps. The pairs must be a replacement; contrast their much more deeply undercut base mouldings. How late was the replacement made? Their spirally grooved shafts recall those in Ernulf’s crypt. But that must be misleading; for the deep leaf capitals have waterleaf in places, and their abaci are square, not round, both forms introduced to Canterbury by William of Sens. No acanthus leaves, on the other hand. Above the cloister walk, in place of the Cheker, i.e. monastic accounts department, for which the buttresses and segmental super-arches visible outside formed a support, there now stands the WOLFSON LIBRARY, 1964-6 by H. Anderson, red brick, Tudoresque. So a C20 style is still debarred from the sanctum of Canterbury precincts. Two Perp doorways in the E wall of this walk, one, with panel tracery in the spandrels, to the prior’s lodging, the other to the Cheker and an octagonal staircase turret going higher (placed within the W bay of the N aisle of the infirmary hall; see below). The PRIOR’s LODGING, what is left of it, is of flint, showing Perp features, but at its N end built upon the Norman walling of the E extremity of the Necessarium (seethe string-course and one blocked early window in the N wall). The three blocked and fragmentary windows visible from the E, however, seem to be of the early C14. The PRIOR’S GATEWAY, a porch built on to the N end, is an addition of Prior Selling’s (1472-94). Vaulted in two bays on wall-shafts. With that the Green Court is reached again, and it is time to turn back to study the infirmary buildings themselves.
The INFIRMARY, hall and chapel in line to the E, makes the most powerfully expressive ruin in the whole precinct, close beneath the N side of the Trinity Chapel. It belongs stylistically to the period of Ernulf’s priorate, i.e. to the very beginning of the C12. The total length, aisled hall of seven bays plus the nave and chancel of the chapel, comes to 250 ft. In area the infirmary hall is a little bigger even than the main dormitory itself. Such a scale is astonishing, and one asks why the sick bay needed to be so big. What proportion of the monks were sick at any one time; what provision was there for isolating one sick monk from another by means of screens, and so on? To such questions surviving medieval hospitals give no answer. Presumably beds were placed in the aisles, head to the wall: then the sick monks could catch a glimpse into the chapel and see the elevation of the host. That is how the beds are arranged in Chancellor Rolin’s C15 hospital at Beaune, except that there are no aisles. In England there are no parallels. St Mary’s Hospital, Chichester, was refitted in the C17. Nor is late medieval practice necessarily any guide to what was done in the C12. At Canterbury the S aisle was blocked up and turned into a house for the Sub Prior before the C15. The same thing happened to the aisles of the Ely infirmary, in the C14. With that the nave space would have become a single open ward, just like the one at Beaune.
It was this re-use of the S aisle of the HALL that saved its arcade, or rather the five W bays of it, their big, strong, round piers, with scalloped capitals, and the grandly wide round arches, with two plain square orders. Evidence of the clerestory. On the N side just the W bay. The W wall stands high enough for the entire W window to survive, above the cloister walk on the W side of the wall. The internal walls faced with Caen stone ashlar.
The chapel is contemporary with the hall, but far more sumptuous. Here too it is the S arcade that has survived, together with the clerestory, ashlar-faced externally. Five bays. Arches with a roll in the crook of the two unmoulded orders. Compound piers cruciform in plan, round shafts occupying the re-entrant angles and semicircular responds E and W. The capitals are carved with stylized leaves, interlacing bands, and wild beasts by the masons responsible for the capitals in Ernulf’s crypt. Of the N arcade nothing but a bit of the E respond. Part of the chancel S wall is Norman, with the SE quoin and the jamb and springing of a window. Zigzag here, a very early occurrence, if the window goes with the nave arcades, and is not later. The chancel was lengthened, with a square E end, c.1330. New, very wide, chancel arch, and big traceried windows. The E window’s tracery is lost. The complete N window, of three lights, however, establishes the date. The ogees in combination with a split-cusped and sub-cusped trefoil repeat the design of the window inserted in 1336 into St Anselm’s Chapel.
Adjoining the E end of the N aisle of the infirmary hall Prior Hathbrand, in 1342-3, built the TABLE HALL (now Cathedral Choir School), a rectangular flint building with two-light side windows, their pointed heads filled with concave-sided hexagons. ‘Mensa Magistri Infirmatorii’ was the phrase used to describe the Table Hall in the C14; i.e. it was a refectory, for those who, to quote Willis, ‘were able to quit their chambers or were relieved for a time from the austerities of the cloister ’. The building is heavily restored.
At the W end of the infirmary hall, sharing a wall with the S aisle but otherwise no part of it, was built the TREASURY. This square building, put up c. 11 50 on an open arcaded ground storey and heightened in the late C13, fills the whole space between the infirmary and the NE chapel of the cathedral. That it is an addition to the cathedral is apparent, not only because it cuts across the external arcading of St Andrew’s Chapel, but also because the arcading on the Treasury is of the more advanced kind, found on the tops of the staircase towers, with compound shafts to support the intersecting arches. The Treasury is ashlar-faced, divided by pilaster buttresses into two bays each way. Entrance arches with outward-pointing zigzag and interlocking noughts and crosses. The ground-storey vault corresponds, two bays by two, on a central compound pier, its round responds taking the transverse arches, but making no provision for the ribs of the quadripartite bay vaults. Scalloped respond capitals enlivened in places with beading and foliage across the mouths of the scallops. The interior of the Treasury (now a vestry) can be reached only from the cathedral, but it is for consistency’s sake described here. The memorable thing about it is that the whole area, almost a square (23 ft by 22 ft 9 in.), is covered by an octopartite rib-vault. Nothing like it survives in England. Bilson compared it closely with the vault of the crossing at Montivilliers in Normandy, which does without the Canterbury wall ribs. The experimental nature of the Treasury vaulting comes out in the way the ribs are brought down, some only wall-shafts (one with heads like those on the central boss), while others die into the wall.
W of the Treasury the ruined substructure of the passage which linked it to the choir aisle.
Finally in this direction, E of the infirmary chapel, the sheer flint building called MEISTER OMERS (now a boarding house of King’s School). Built c.1400, as yet one more of Prior Chillenden’s improvements to the comforts provided by the monastery. This was a lodging for the Prior’s guests. Outside, Meister Omers has suffered badly from restoration in the 1860s, and looks gaunt and unappealing, with c19 fenestration and the knapped flint walls too tidied up. It is also hard to believe that such a strange-looking building can be medieval and not Victorian. Tall and narrow, its long sides are broken, the N by a polygonal stair-turret, the s by a chimneybreast, and both, near the E end, by answering polygonal window bays. Doorways N and S also answer one another towards the W end. They open into the screens passage. Originally only the part W of this was two-storeyed, with a kitchen on the ground floor, see the wide stone arch to it. In the C16 a spine wall and two floors were put across the open hall. Before that it must have been a magnificent room, with its two oriel bays shafted internally, the shafts carrying pierced timber spandrels, and tiebeam roof on carved stone corbels. One corbel on the N side still has a fine dragon, and one on the S an eagle in flight. Elizabethan WALL PAINTINGS upstairs, the Royal Arms over a chimneypiece, and, in the W room, faded bits of a frieze with figures.
Meister Omers broke through the Norman convent wall, lengths of which stand N and S of it. A reset Norman doorway21 leads into the WAR MEMORIAL GARDENS, laid out by Sir Herbert Baker between convent wall and city wall, on the site of the convent gardens.
Twice this tour of the precincts has turned back from the GREEN COURT, but at last the time has come to enter it, via the E walk of the Infirmary Cloisters. The DEANERY closes the E side of the court, rambling on for 180 ft or so, built of red brick in places, of flint in others. The Waterworks Drawing shows a building on the site, and Willis identified a tunnel-vaulted passage under the dining room as part of it. The W front was all ingeniously rebuilt after damage in the Second World War. The middle of the E side is also not medieval. The two brick gables and the vast diapered brick chimney-breast belong to 1570, the date when the Deanery was reconstructed after a fire. N of this, a three-storey square flint tower, medieval with Victorian windows. The N end, of flint and stone, is Perp but calls for no comment; the S end, of the same material and date, has a low tower at each corner, the SE one answering on the E side a second rectangular projection. Two-light cinque foiled windows at two levels.
The flint ranges on the N side of the Green Court were also bomb-damaged, but their repair has been most skilfully managed to hide the fact. The Perp gateway, a big four-centred arch, and a postern are known as the FORRENS GATE. They pierce walling which continues as a two-storeyed range, with Perp windows. Then comes a blocked, two-centred arch, with a wave moulding on damaged, but once fine, heads. This is the entrance into the BREWHOUSE, which together with the BAKEHOUSE was built in 1303. They now do duty as King’s School classrooms. The part W of that is the prettiest building in the precinct, chequered in stone, flint, and red brick. Then come more school buildings, post-war, in a C17 style, but incorporating a Perp arch. Away to the W the GREAT HALL of King’s School, 1955-7 by Darcy Braddell, in a solemn Edwardian Tudor.22
So to the farthest NW corner of the Green Court, to the COURT GATE and NORTH HALL. Both are Norman. Prior Wibert built them in one go after c.1153, to be the main entrance to the precincts for lay visitors, and, apparently, a hall to accommodate them. Two-thirds of the North Hall were pulled down in 1730, and of the S end that remained the upper floor was rebuilt in 1843 by George Austin, not in the E.E. style Willis noted, but in Norman. (One genuine respond at the S end; so the hall had a single aisle.) Three complete bays of the Norman arcade to the undercroft survive, but only the southernmost bay of the vault, two bays deep. Groin-vaults, not ribbed. Simple responds. External arches, with a roll and outward-pointing zigzag. Shafted responds sunk deep below ground. In view of all these tamperings, it is doubly delightful that the outside staircase, which can be seen clearly enough in the Waterworks Drawing, has never been swept away. There is nothing else like it, no staircase of the C12 so prominently displayed, starting out at a r. angle as this does to the building it serves. The grandiose preliminary bay is square, arched in all directions, with outward-pointing zigzag, the piers tall and round, the capitals scalloped. Thereafter the stone steps rise sharply, under a gabled roof, screened at the sides by arcades of five narrow arches, which have, with a sharp reduction in scale, tiny shafts with big scallop caps and rich zigzag on the arch heads. Flint substructure.
The COURT GATE is massive in scale, as one has come to expect of Canterbury’s Norman buildings, with a tunnel-vault 36 ft deep and enriched entrance arches E and W so wide and high that two Perp arches, one for carts, the other for foot passengers, fit comfortably under each. The outer (i.e. W) arch has a pinched blank arch l. and r. and another pair and two blank roundels in the spandrels. Capitals and arch rolls all carved (and heavily re-cut), the capitals with dragons cavorting among twining stems, the rolls with the star like Romanesque leaves which so splendidly adorn illuminated manuscripts from the Canterbury scriptorium, and appear still in the borders of the earliest stained glass windows of the cathedral (e.g. crypt E window). The outer roll finds room too for eight roundels of figure subjects. One roll with leaves round the E arch.
1 Only represents, because the undercut string-course and the leaves on the shaft capitals show that this is late C12, not early C12, workmanship.
2 The simplified Corinthian capital at the W end of the S aisle cries out that it is an intruder. But it may be contemporary with the rest. A capital very like it occurs on one pier of the Infirmary Chapel.
3 The W respond each side is Ernulf’s, lengthened I2 ft to the new height; see the shallow base moulding.
4 Surely not a tunnel-vault, as Willis thought.
5 The Watching Chamber for Becket’s Shrine in the Trinity Chapel is at the E end of the S choir aisle.
6 His name appears among the highest class of those receiving Christmas livery of the Prior of Canterbury in 1398, the first relevant year where the lists are preserved. Yevele was at the time King’s Master Mason. The shaft-rings on the nave piers are the strongest internal evidence that Yevele was the designer of the nave, for reasons which will be given in due course.
7 It must have been designed to match the height of the Norman NW tower.
8 Internally it is easy to see that the piers are part of Yevele’s work, and that Mapilton built the S and W (i.e. the outer) walls, with slight changes in the base mouldings, and foliage on the shaft rings. Fan-vault. The crockets in many places on the exterior are, as old photographs show, a modern enrichment.
9 The other major towers erected c.1500, at Magdalen College, Oxford, and Bath Abbey, are also handled in this way. But the drawing for the proposed tower at King’s College, Cambridge, has angle turrets just the same, and that is a design as early as c.1448.
10 The E window of the crypt is similar in style,
and so in date.
11 And a C13 record mentioning ‘magnam crucem lapideam inter ecclesiam et cancellum’.
12 Largely modern.
13 Mostly modern.
14 The originals, now decayed and fragile, are displayed at the E end of the choir aisle.
15 Yet the entrance vault looks early C14, not early C15.
16 A benefaction towards them was made in Prior Woodnesborough’s time (1411-27).
17 Except the restored roundel of St Martin in the NE apse.
18 Her second husband, the Duke of Clarence, was a son of Henry IV.
19 In the cloister garth several MONUMENTS with noteworthy lettering: Archbishop F. Temple, an early work of Eric Gill, 1904. - Hugh Sheppard, also by Gill, 1938. - Dean Hewlett Johnson d. 1966.
20 Several sculptural fragments, among them relief heads in quatrefoils nimble about 1190, are kept in the library.
21 Taken early in the C19 from its position SE of the SE transept, between the monks’ cemetery and the lay cemetery.
22 The account of it in The Builder in 1958 rings with a Victorian tone: ‘After much thought it was decided to use the style of building in vogue during the time of Holbein and adapt it to modern usage.’ No reason for this illogical choice is given, only an assurance that ‘at no time was there the slightest desire evinced on the part of anyone concerned to use a modern idiom’.
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