An essay on the history of English church architecture prior to the separation of England from the Roman obedience

Front matter

\ AN ESS AY |

[ ON THE HISTORY OF I

| ENGLISH : ' 1

Chap. I. — Review of the general history of Ecclesiastical architecture previous to the

conversion of the English . . i

Discursus on the Orientation of the Early Christian Churches 14

Discursus on the ^Esthetic and Artistic element in Primitive Christianity ... 24 Chap. II. — From the Mission of St. Augustine to the Norman Conquest 35 Discursus on Early Churches in Eastern and Western Christendom . . . . 52 Description of the Basilica of St. Felix at Nola. (From the xiith Epistle of St. Paulinus

to Severus.) Translated, with a few brief notes and observations, by R. C. J. 78 M. Vitruvius Pollio upon the Secular Roman Basilica ..... 88

Chap. III. — The Norman period 92

Discuisus on the history of the Casula . . . . . . . . .113

Discursus on the painted ceilings of St. Alban's Abbey Church . . . . .119

Chap. IV. — From the first appearance of the Pointed style to the commencement of the

fourteenth century 124

Discursus on certain medieval innovations in the distribution of churches . . . 152 Chap. V. — From the fourteenth century to the close of the Medieval period . . 172 Notes and remarks upon the illustrations . . . , 187

Preface

This is but an essay upon a subject to do justice to which a treatise of many volumes would be required. It has, however, a distinct and definite aim, which should give a unity to what would otherwise appear heterogeneous in its composition. By the greater or less success with which this aim is attained this little work must be judged.

My object throughout has been to exhibit the history with which it attempts to deal as one continuous fact, having an origin, which can be quite accurately ascertained, and an orderly evolution determined by the conditions, internal and external.

It is no matter of accident that churches were built in a certain form and in a certain style at a certain date. It is possible to give a reason for this, in every case, and to trace back the cause of any particular fashion of church building, step by step, to the origin of christian art, which is one with the origin of the christian Church.

It has been my aim to exhibit the architectural art of Christendom as a part of the great fact of Christianity; to deal with the church architecture of our own country as but a portion of a great whole, and to display the essential solidarity of the history of christian art in England with that of christian art in general, and of Christianity itself. This being understood, the reader will not be surprised to find that a good deal of space is here devoted to the consideration of the progress made by church architecture before english churches, or english christians, were. Ecclesiology in England did not start into being — an Athene sprung adult from the brain of Zeus — at the bidding of St. Augustine. Our ancestors, upon their conversion, but took up the threads of — but fell with the stream of — a tradition already venerable from its years. Or rather — and this is of the essence of the matter — they came, by that event, under the influence of two traditions, so distinct in their history, that as we follow back their parted streams we find no common channel, till we reach the common fountainhead.

It should, however, be clearly understood, at the outset, that this distinction in the ecclesiological and ritual tradition, existed side by side with identity of faith, complete inter-communion, hierarchical subordination, and organic unity. Men are parted at the present day into religious sects and churches by differences of opinion, almost microscopic, by an incompatibility of mere sentiment, or by the inequalities of social standing, and they are, therefore, prone to assume that there can have been no unity where there was no uniformity. Wide as was the distinction between the ecclesiological traditions of Britain, Gaul, Italy, and Asia Minor, there existed between these, and other countries still more remote, a complete unity of ecclesiastical organisation under an acknowledged head. British bishops were summoned in common with all other catholic prelates, to the early councils, and the mission of St. Germanus, for the correction of british Pelagianism, offers as conspicuous an example of the action of the central authority, as the mission of St. Augustine, to correct the culpable negligence of the native ii

PREFACE.

hierarchy in the matter of the conversion of the saxon invaders of Britain. That the church architecture of England owes a great deal of its peculiar character to the traditions of the british church, which it was the task of St. Augustine, not so much to reform as to revivify, is sufficiently insisted on in the following pages.

Nevertheless, of an investigation into the antecedents of english church architecture, the larger portion will necessarily relate to the history of that tradition which was imported into these isles by the roman missionaries of the sixth century. This results, partly from the circumstance that at present so much more is known upon this head than upon the subject of british ecclesiology, but principally from the fact itself, that the Christianity of the English is the result of the work of these roman missioners. Of the main stream from which is derived our english ecclesiological traditions, the head-waters are in Rome, but its springs are not to be sought exclusively in Italy, nor even in western Christendom. Hence our preliminary survey will cover of necessity a very wide area. Moreover the roman tradition did not make its first appearance in our island, as a consequence of the mission of St. Augustine. It had, upon the establishment of the peace of the Church (if not before the time of Constantine), been followed by the christianized roman colonists, and the officials of the empire, side by side with the very different tradition of the native british christians. The divergence of the two serves, indeed, to bring out the more clearly the essential unity to which they both witness.

It is very usual to commence the history of the church architecture of our country at the period of the norman conquest. It any retrospect of the preceding history is attempted, it is, too frequently, done in a somewhat perfunctory manner, and is disposed of as briefly as may be.

If it should be thought that too great a space is here devoted to these necessary prolegomena, my excuse must be, that they are very commonly omitted altogether.

Some apology is needed for the form which this little work has come to assume, which may appear to the reader somewhat unmethodical, and even desultory — a collection of papers, rather than an essay.

It will be observed, however, that the text itself pursues a pretty regular and consecutive course, and gives, so far as the ability of the writer permits, a continuous history of the subject from the point of view taken. The intervening discursus are intended to illustrate points in the history, which could not be dealt with at length in the text itself, without a sacrifice of that effect of unity which it has been my main object to bring out. Some of these may seem to cohere but loosely with the principal theme, but they have, as a matter of fact, been suggested by it. To write, so as to interest others, a man must write what comes to him. Serpit humi tutus nimium. The consideration of various details, bearing all, more or less directly, upon the main thesis, has brought about a result which, if unmethodical, is at least natural and spontaneous. It may, perhaps, be not the less interesting to the reader on that account.

There is one point in connection with our medieval architecture, upon which I should have been glad to have been able to remark, as it is one which has long interested me, but the little study which I have given to the subject has not enabled me to arrive at any conclusions of value. I refer to the systems of proportionment adopted by the architects of the middle ages.

That there were such rules, traditional in the various schools of medieval art, the outcome

PREFACE.

iii of ancient science, and of accumulating experience, I have no doubt. I feel convinced, too, that different schools had different methods, to which is due the very different effect of the buildings erected by each. It is with systems of proportioning as with the keys of the musical scale, one is fitted to the expression of one kind of sentiment, one to another. But what these rules were, it is now, perhaps— the tradition having been broken — impossible to ascertain.

Apart from the antecedent probability of the existence of such rules, which results from what we know of the practice of the architects of antiquity, the conditions of the building craft during the middle ages, would lead us to expect that such traditions, as were undoubtedly in existence from very early times, would be carefully preserved and elaborated. Such a result was indeed insured by the fact, that like all the other crafts, the building trade was organised upon a very systematic principle. This ruling idea of the medieval guilds was the solidarity of each craft, from the highest member of it, down to the humblest artificer.

Human society only too naturally falls into strata. " Les couches sociales " are obvious enough to every observer, in every age. What is demanded by the higher instincts is a force which shall cut athwart this grim mechanical " stratification," which separates man from man, and effect a " cleavage " in a more or less vertical direction.

The only power which has, as a matter of fact, produced such a re -arrangement of the ultimate social particles is the catholic church. What electricity is in the physical order, Christianity is in the social.

As a consequence of the gradual abandonment of christian social principles, which has followed upon the Reformation, the organization of society has reverted to the natural law. In place, therefore, of a guild in which architect, mason, joiner, carpenter, bricklayer, and labourer were banded together in a common work, under the invocation of a common patron-saint (a man like any one of them) and under the eye of an almighty Master, "cuncta stricte discussuri," we have now institutes of architects, contractors' associations, societies of foremen, masons', joiners', and labourers' trade-unions. The divine idea, the electricity of the social order, having been lost, there is no longer any vertical " cleavage," in society. Brute nature asserts itself once again, and the old battle of classes recommences, as if Christianity had not been.a

But in the middle ages the state of the building art was wholly different from that to which it has been reduced by the reaction of the sixteenth century. Up to that time it was possessed of a living tradition, of which the conditions imposed upon the craft by the circumstances of its practice, ensured the systematic inculcation.

The special peculiarity of the building trade is that it is necessarily migratory. Hence the

a Of the result of this unhappy reaction upon the character of the work produced under the modern system , Mr. Thomas Carlyle, in an unpublished letter to Sir Joseph Whitworth, writes thus : — "A sadder object than even that of the coal strike, or any other conceivable strike, is the fact that— loosely speaking — we may say all England has decided that the profitablest way is to do its work ill, slurily, swiftly, and mendaciously. What a contrast between now and say only a hundred years ago ! At the latter date, or still more conspicuously for ages before that, all England awoke to its work — to an invocation to the Eternal Maker to bless them in their day's labour, and help them to do it well. Now all England — shopkeepers, workmen, all manner of competing labourers — awaken, as if with an unspoken but heartfelt prayer to Beelzebub : — ' Oh, help us, thou great Lord of shoddy, adulteration, and malfeasance, to do our work with the maximum of sluriness, swiftness, profit, and mendacity, for the devil's sake. Amen.' " With the state of things thus powerfully described, the modern decay of architecture, as a living popular art, is intimately connected. Good art can only exist where there is good workmanship.

IV

PREFACE.

need of secret signs by which the travelling artificer might be known to his brothers in the guild all over the country, or even beyond it. This feature of the mason's guild, which the conditions of its practice originated, has survived the overthrow of the guild itself. As there is now a cloth-workers' and a drapers' company, having little or nothing to do with the manufacture of clothing stuffs, so there is a freemasonry which is not concerned with the art of working stone. But as the city cloth company was once an organised trade, so was once the company of free and accepted masons. And there can be little doubt that the various branches of the society, when it was a reality, were in possession of certain rules of proportion the outcome at once of theory and of practical experience. Now, however, that the traditions of the building guilds have been lost, it is, of course, impossible to ascertain with certainty the principles of design which were followed in the middle ages. Some hints may, no doubt be obtained from a careful study of measured examples, but the results hitherto obtained appear to me very much a matter of conjecture.

In connection with this subject of the mode of organisation of the building trade, there is another, upon which it would have been interesting to have touched had the materials available been sufficient for the construction of a fairly complete theory.

While the unity of the craft was so complete that a new idea, no matter where it originated, became known, and was adopted at once all over western Europe, it is also clear that this great body of artists and artizans was sub-divided into separate schools. Of these some were purely local, while others, though exhibiting the influences of local tradition, were connected with the varied families of the great religious orders.

In regard to the first it is curious to observe the mannerisms, so to speak, of different districts. No one could mistake a Somerset church for an East Anglian, or a Yorkshire building for one in the Midlands. Each county has its own peculiar architectural character, known to every student of our ancient architecture,11 while of certain buildings one says, almost instinctively, this and that were designed by the same men.

The same is the case with the monastic churches. Each order appears to have originated a school of building of its own. There is, for example, about the works of the cistercian family a peculiar and undefinable tenderness, which cannot be mistaken.0 So, too, with the oth,er religious societies, the buildings which they erected differ not more in the distribution of their plan than in the impression, more easily felt than described, which their architecture is calculated to produce.

How the unity of each school was preserved, how the traditions peculiar to each originated and were developed, and how, at the same time, an inter-communication was maintained between all these separate bodies, extending more or less over the whole of Europe, it is difficult now to conjecture. The loss of so powerful an instrument for the furtherance of art and of civilization, due to religious dis-union and the consequent enfeeblement of the social principles of Christianity, must ever be a matter of profound regret.

b Thus in Northamptonshire almost every steeple has a stone spire ; in the adjacent county of Buckingham there are, I believe, but three ancient spires, and of these two are on the border of Northants. It is quite striking in driving from the one county into the other to observe the abrupt change in the general design of the village churches, which is determined by the crossing of some nameless brooklet.

c Rievaulx, Netley, and Tintern exhibit this, the especial character of the work of the most austere of all the monastic orders, in its noblest form, and it is important thus to observe the instinctive sympathy which unites what is most tender in the expression of human nature with the most severe asceticism.

PLATE II.

TINTERN ABBEY.

EXTERIOR VIEW OF THE EAST END.

J' KEF ACE. v

I have referred to this matter here, because, while it is a subject upon which I confess myself unable to throw much light, I should be unwilling to appear to ignore its importance to a proper understanding of medieval architecture.

There only remains the pleasant task of acknowledging the assistance which I have received from so many quarters. My thanks are particularly due to M. le Comte de Vogue, the author of the work entitled "Syrie Centrale: Architecture Civile et Religieuse du Premier au Septieme Siccle," and to M. Baudry, its publisher, for permission to reproduce from it several plans and illustrations. This is a work of great accuracy, which deserves to be more widely known. I have to thank Mr. R. Popplewcll Pullan for a similar permission, very courteously given, in regard to the work upon '■' Byzantine Architecture, illustrated by Examples of Edifices erected in the East during the Earliest Ages of Christianity," which was published by him, in conjunction with M. Texier, in 1864.

To the Misses O'Brien my best thanks are due for the loan of the sketches of their brother, Edward O'Brien, which have been fac-simileed for this work by Messrs. Akerman.

To the Rev. Canon Jenkins, rector of Lyminge, I am indebted not only for an entire chapter, upon the basilica of Nola, contributed by him to this work, but also for many communications upon the subject of the basilical church of Lyminge, and upon other matters connected with the ecclesiology of early times, and for a kindly readiness to impart information which is never wearied.

For accurate observations upon the orientation of the roman basilicas I have to thank Mr. Henry Lainson, of Collcy Manor, Reigate, and my old friend, the Rev. J. Wilson Fickance, whose friendship led them to spare no pains in pursuing an investigation for which their frequent residence in Rome afforded special opportunity. I owe not a little gratitude to the Rev. W. E. Addis, of the London Oratory, for valuable criticisms and suggestions in regard to subjects upon which his special knowledge constitutes him an authority.

I have mentioned but a few among the many to whom my acknowledgements are due. I must not, however, omit to express the obligation I am under to Mr. C. B. King, and to Mr. John Medland, whose painstaking researches at the British Museum and elsewhere have been of the greatest service to me in obtaining and correcting the many references, which are indispensable to a work of this character.

'' This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings, Feared by their breed and famous by their birth, Renowned for their deeds as far from home, For christian service and true chivalry, As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry Of the world's ransom, blessed Mary's Son, This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land.

Dear for her reputation through the world- Hath made a shameful conquest of itself : O, would the scandal vanish with my life, How happy then were my ensuing death ! "

AN ESSAY ON

ENGLISH CHURCH ARCHITECTURE,