The Building of England: How the History of England Has Shaped Our Buildings. Simon Thurley
a mid-eleventh century example of compound piers with bulbous cushion capitals.
In the 1050s local churches began to display similar architectural forms to Westminster and a much stronger spatial unity. At St Mary’s, Stow-in-Lindsey, Lincolnshire, the transepts and crossing of a large minster church of c.1055 still dominate the small village. It is one of the first generation of buildings in which the Anglo-Saxon porticus had transformed itself into a fully fledged transept. The crossing tower at Stow would probably have been made of timber, but at St Mary in Castro, Dover, the masonry crossing tower survives (fig. 34), albeit much restored. A third church, Holy Trinity, Great Paxton, Cambridgeshire, not only has transepts and a crossing, but its nave has aisles with an arcade of compound piers (fig. 35). This small group of churches might once have been part of a larger family experimenting with new forms and spatial concepts, but it is likely that these architectural adventures were confined to the highest level of patronage; Great Paxton and Dover might have had been commissioned by the king, while Stow was founded by Earl Leofric and his wife Godgifu (Lady Godiva).
| Patrons lower down the social scale, however, were also very active. After 1000 thousands of local churches, originally constructed in timber, were rebuilt in stone. This fashion was started by the rich landowners of commercially developed East Anglia, but soon spread to the nucleated villages of the Midlands and then eventually to western England. This was an important moment in English architectural history. On the one hand, it shows that there were now builders who could produce a sort of standard, ready-to-order stone church; on the other, it meant that more and more ordinary people started to experience complex and elaborate stone architecture on a daily basis. |
| There was a liturgical change, too. Most of the earlier timber churches were single spaces, but the separate chancels in the new stone churches meant that the priest was separated from his congregation. This created a different relationship between congregation and priest, who now had an elevated status. Meanwhile, the nave became a communal space in which people congregated to celebrate and to mourn. From the late 10th century local churches had their own burial grounds and from around 1050 permanent fonts.5 |
| It will never be possible properly to judge the architecture of late Saxon England, as the vast majority of it was swept away after 1066. Yet what survives suggests that after 1000 a new aesthetic began to gain ground: a greater spatial harmony and a new architectural vocabulary. Much of this was promoted by a tiny super-rich elite, the structure of which was England’s political Achilles heel: Saxon England was systemically weak, unable to settle the key question of succession. That weakness was exploited by Duke William of Normandy in 1066. |
| Conquest |
| The Norman Conquest looms large over English history, casting a shadow that obscures much of what came before and colouring what came after. It sounds obvious to say it, but in the year 1000 no one had heard of the Norman Conquest. In fact no one had heard of the Normans as such; to the English the people of Normandy were French. England and Normandy faced each other across the Channel, sharing a common cultural inheritance, both greatly influenced by Scandinavia. England was richer and bigger, and was experimenting with exactly the same types of architectural novelty as the Normans. |
| I have already suggested that the term ‘Romanesque’ is not very helpful in trying to characterise Anglo-Saxon architecture (p. 39), so this book does not use it. The same applies to what was built after 1066, which is normally categorised as Romanesque and commonly called Norman. Sadly, this too is simplistic and confusing, suggesting as it does that the buildings erected in England after 1066 were somehow in a style that was brought over by the Normans. They were not. What is normally called Norman architecture was developed in England after 1066, drawing on native traditions and absorbing influences and ideas from across Europe, so it can more properly be called Anglo-Norman or Anglo-French. It was an inventive, eclectic, exotic and cosmopolitan style born of a unique coincidence of political, religious, social, cultural and economic events. English architecture for a period of fifty years was among the most original and influential in Europe.6 |
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| Fig. 37 The White Tower, Tower of London; conjectural room uses as originally intended. Cut away reconstruction from the south west: a) basement level for storage; b) entrance level containing a hall, ‘throne room’ and private chamber; c) first floor hall, chamber and chapel. Cut away from the south east: d) first floor hall; e) chapel. |
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| Fig. 38 Lincoln Cathedral; a reconstruction of the west front as it may have appeared in the 1090s. Part monumental triumphal arch, part castle, part portal to a great church, it had an affinity to the westworks of Saxon cathedrals (compare figs 19–20) as well as reflecting the highly militarised nature of early Norman society. |
| William and his immediate successors built on an imperial scale. The cathedral at Winchester (p. 47), the great towers at London and Colchester, and their own palace at Westminster (p. 79) were expressions of a parvenu dynasty at the helm of one of Europe’s richest monarchies. William and his contemporaries expressed their power in the architectural language of ancient Rome. The blind arcading on the White Tower was a deliberate quotation from antiquity; the tower at Colchester was constructed on the podium of the Roman temple of Claudius, while the bishop’s residence at Lincoln was framed as a triumphal arch (fig. 38). These buildings were not the busy, accretive structures of the Saxons; they set out to imitate the monumentality and spatial clarity of ancient Rome. The Normans had not built in this style or to this scale in Normandy; it was the Conquest that created a giddy mixture of excess, power and imperial triumphalism that was expressed in an outburst of architectural megalomania. Yet we should be clear, Anglo-French architecture was not a homogeneous style; it was one that varied significantly from region to region. Buildings in the west of England and in Yorkshire, for instance, looked very different. This account cannot describe the subtleties of these variations, nor does it attempt to do so.7 |
| The Norman Military Occupation |
| Anglo-Saxon England was no stranger to invasion or fortification; both Offa and Alfred had commissioned well-engineered and effective defences (pp 40 and 51). These royal enterprises, offering communal security, were matched by the individual fortification of aristocratic residences with ramparts, walls, towers and gatehouses (p. 55). The situation in Normandy was broadly similar. Few nobles lived in strongly defended residences, but in the years after 1000 a large number of fortified residences – or castles – were being developed. In England the word ‘castle’ is used for the first time in the reign of Edward the Confessor to describe fortified places on the Welsh border, but on the eve of the Norman Conquest castles were neither common nor well developed on either side of the Channel.8 |
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This was soon to change. The military requirements of conquest caused a rapid development in military engineering and a proliferation of castles across the English countryside. The first ones were simple structures: either ringworks, that is to say an area enclosed by earth ramparts topped with a palisade, or mottes, which are mounds upon which a fortified structure was built. Ringworks were the most common form of castle in Normandy and similar to Anglo-Saxon fortified sites such as Goltho, Lincolnshire (p. 55). Mottes were less common, though it seems that prehistoric mounds in Wiltshire had been converted into forts from the 1010s (p. 55). The earthworks of both types of fort could be raised with unskilled forced labour, while timber structures could easily be built by expert native carpenters. The Bayeux Tapestry shows the motte |