The Building of England: How the History of England Has Shaped Our Buildings. Simon Thurley

The Building of England: How the History of England Has Shaped Our Buildings

Lincoln of around 1190. The plans show that, unusually, the fireplace was placed over the ground floor passageway, a way of emphasising on the street front that the house had such a luxurious facility.

Fig. 85 58 French Street Southampton, though dating from the 1290s, was heavily restored after 1972. It is a rare survivor of a building type that was once very common in towns, the merchant’s house-cum-emporium. From the 13th century there were shops and houses built of stone; a remarkable surviving group can be found in the lower city at Lincoln, which, in the mid 13th century, was one of the largest and richest towns in England. Here two stone houses still stand and the remains of 30 more have been excavated. The Jews House, The Strait, of c.1190, was a prestigious structure probably containing three shops – two on one side of a central door and one on the other (fig. 84). The door led to a secure back range (now lost) for the storage of valuables, with a staircase to the first floor. The first floor contained two residential rooms, one with a fireplace. The external elevation was magnificent, with a fine zigzag-moulded door and heavily moulded two-light windows above. The chimney stack was incorporated into the front elevation as a badge of wealth and sophistication. In contrast to Lincoln, stone houses in most other towns had undercrofts rather than rear strong-rooms. A complete, though restored, example is 58 French Street, Southampton, built for a merchant called John Fortin in the 1290s (fig. 85). It was one of about 60 stone and timber merchants’ houses in one of England’s most important ports. As at Lincoln there was a shop at the front, but behind was a hall and private chamber for the owner, and upstairs were two bedrooms. The whole was set upon an undercroft built for the secure storage of merchandise. This was typical of its type: a building that was a home, a showroom, a warehouse and an office all in one.²⁸ Towns were also home to the houses of the aristocracy, prelates and the Crown. Again, in Lincoln, one such high-status house survives, probably built for a visit of King Henry II in 1157. Like 1 The Strait, it presented its prestigious front to the street with not one but two large chimney stacks. The principal archway, which survives, was clearly the entrance to a very special house. On the first floor was a huge hall raised up above ground-floor vaults, and at right angles to it a withdrawing chamber for the king. This was a compact, but grandiloquent town house of the first order.²⁹

Fig. 86 St Mary’s Hospital Chichester of 1290–1300 looks like a church: its ‘nave’ was a ward for the patients who would lie on beds at right angles to the outer walls; they had a clear view of the ‘chancel’, a chapel at the east end separated from the ward by a fine screen.

As well as shops, many other trades were practised, particularly those concerned with food and drink, especially butchery and baking. Many of the larger towns such as Lincoln, York and Oxford specialised in the manufacture of woollen cloth and served an international clientele. Merchants were cosmopolitan; the best houses would have been comfortable, luxurious even, with goods from all over the world. The contents of a rubbish pit at one of the stone houses in Southampton not only contained pottery from France and Spain, but fig and grape seeds, and the skeleton of a pet monkey.

The picture painted above is of towns as engines of trade and prosperity, with robust, well-made houses, shops and churches. They were also chaotic. Everyone in a medieval town wanted to live in the centre, and rich and poor lived hugger-mugger in crowded, narrow streets, cohabiting with horses and scavenging pigs. Crafts and trades were practised in the centre of town, sometimes in the back of shops or in separate buildings in back yards. Many were noxious: tanning, brewing and smithing were all unpleasant to live close to. On the positive side, piped water supplies began to be developed, the removal of rubbish to out-of-town pits was encouraged, and early forms of building control enforced rules about the location and construction of privies. After 1200 towns started to acquire communal institutions such as hospitals, schools and colleges. Of all the institutions that were later to populate English towns, hospitals were, at first, most numerous. A single Latinised word ‘xenodochium’ embraced institutions that today we would separate out into hospital, almshouse and guest house, but in the early Middle Ages a single foundation was often a mixture of all three. Just as Norman kings and churchmen built castles and cathedrals, so they founded hospitals, most intensely between 1100 and 1220. Archbishop Lanfranc, for instance, founded three hospitals at Canterbury for ten paupers, 60 lepers and many elderly priests. St Mary’s Hospital, Chichester, Sussex, although built between 1290 and 1300, is typical of these early foundations (fig. 86). The essential principle was that every inmate should have a clear view of Mass being celebrated in the hospital chapel. So the whole building was like a church, with the nave being a ward containing low wooden beds with straw mattresses, and the chancel being a complete chapel, separated from the rest by a screen. In such a hospital the sick would be cared for but passing travellers, especially pilgrims, would also be given beds.³⁰

The Economics of Building

The sheer volume of building described in this chapter perhaps exceeded even the achievements of the first generation after the Conquest. Much was bankrolled by good economic conditions: the economy was swollen with silver and agricultural profits rose rapidly as a result of entrepreneurialism. The most successful cathedrals, such as Salisbury, enjoyed an increase in income of 168 per cent in a century. Towns grew, markets prospered, communications improved, and education produced a class of able and ambitious clerks and administrators.

But it was a different sort of building boom to the one stimulated by the Conquest. There were now proper quarries, better-skilled masons (and more of them), and few buildings were started anew. New monasteries were rare and, after the 1130s, no new dioceses were created until 1547 – only Salisbury Cathedral stands out as an entirely new structure. Most churches and castles were reconstructions, adaptations and extensions of existing buildings. Architectural leadership lay firmly with the cathedrals, whose golden age it was. These institutions were in cities, meaning that their influence in terms of architecture – as well as learning, ideas and education – was more profound than even the greatest of the rural monasteries. While most cathedrals were progressively rebuilt in new styles, many rural monastic churches remained Anglo-Norman.³¹

England’s cathedrals are collectively one of the supreme architectural achievements of the whole Middle Ages. This is partly a result of the inventiveness of English masons and designers, but equally of the wealth of English sees. English dioceses were larger than those on the continent and correspondingly richer. The richest, such as Winchester (£3,000 a year), Durham (£2,700), Canterbury (£2,140) or Ely (£2,000), had incomes equivalent to the most prosperous earls. Indeed, by the end of the 13th century 12 out of Europe’s 40 richest dioceses were in England. It was this wealth, carefully exploited by bishops and deans, that funded the extraordinary sumptuousness of cathedrals such as Lincoln and Salisbury. Salisbury, without its spire, cost around £28,000 over 50 years. A single bay at Lincoln (p. 96), because of the profusion of carving, probably cost twice as much as its French equivalent.³²

Yet financing the construction of a cathedral was hugely expensive and it was unlikely that the normal revenues of a diocese, however rich, would suffice. At Lincoln, for instance, a fabric fund was created in around 1200, endowed by dividing the cathedral’s income in two. This was supplemented by gifts from all over the diocese responding to the disastrous collapse of 1185. To encourage more giving, continual Masses were said for those who contributed to the work. Landowners might contribute half an acre of land and symbolically place a sod from it on the altar. A tax was also levied on every household in the diocese at the Whitsun procession.³³ While all these sources of income

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