The Building of England: How the History of England Has Shaped Our Buildings. Simon Thurley
here on an industrial scale and provided continuous supplies of meat. Even the wild birds were hunted with hawks.
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| Fig. 91 Rievaulx Abbey, Yorkshire, the precinct. A series of land deals enabled the monks of Rievaulx to acquire the land either side of the river Rye which allowed them to divert it for abbey use. The 92-acre precinct was exceptionally large; most Cistercian abbeys had precincts averaging 60 acres while Benedictines or Augustinian Canons tended to have much smaller precincts averaging around 30 acres. |
| It was not only kings who moulded and sculpted the landscape around their homes; almost every major residence had a wide-ranging impact on the landscape. The De Roos family owned Helmsley Castle, Yorkshire, and in the 1180s and 90s rebuilt and expanded the castle while purchasing more land for the creation of parks. There were three of these: the West and the East, each paled, and an inner park known as La Haye. The main residential parts of the castle looked out over La Haye and had a balcony from which the culling of deer could be watched.10 |
| It was not only castles and great houses that remodelled their landscapes. Monasteries never stood alone but were linked to varying numbers of support buildings, normally in a walled precinct. At Rievaulx, for instance, within the precincts covering 92 acres there were 27 buildings (fig. 91). Some of these were for polite purposes, such as accommodating guests and abbey pensioners; others were for food preparation, such as baking and brewing. In the outer parts there were buildings that housed industrial processes including a fulling mill (for finishing woollen cloth), a corn mill, a water-powered forge and a tannery. Amidst these buildings were meadows, gardens and orchards.11 |
| New Decorative Vocabulary |
| In the 1250s England’s distinctive brand of Gothic architecture reigned supreme, but in 1245 Henry III’s project to rebuild Westminster Abbey challenged the architectural consensus. The rebuilding of the royal abbey as a coronation church and shrine to the Confessor was the most lavish act of religious architectural patronage by any one individual in the entire Middle Ages. It was pursued with great energy until the latter parts of his reign and then more slowly till his death in 1272, by which time £45,000 had been laid out on the building. |
Fig. 92 Old St Paul’s Cathedral; London: the chapter house, drawn by Wenceslaus Hollar in 1657. The chapter house and cloister were the masterpiece of the royal mason, William Ramsey. Note how the tracery of the windows continued over the walling below.
Westminster Abbey (fig. 93) was heavily influenced by French buildings and broke away from the style of recent work at Lincoln, for instance (p. 96). Its very proportions were French; at 102ft its nave is England’s highest, supported by tiers of French-looking flying buttresses. Many other elements, from its polygonal east end to its northern triple portal, are direct quotes from French buildings. Henry III, who had travelled in France in the 1240s and 50s, was doubtless looking to the French coronation church of Reims and the jewel-like royal Sainte-Chapelle as models. Yet Westminster was no straightforward copy, and the general richness of carving and surface decoration of its interior was in long-established English taste. The influence of the abbey, rather like that of early Gothic Canterbury (pp 93–4), lay not in its composition but in its details: the richness of surface decoration, the use of tracery, the carved and painted heraldic shields, the large-scale sculpted figures and smaller-scale foliage sculpture.12
Fig. 93 The construction of the nave of Westminster Abbey is one of the most remarkable stories in English building. Building began in the east in 1259–72, and subsequent abbots and masons continued the design from the 14th to the 16th century in exactly the same style. Though the inspiration was at first French, the details used over the long construction period are progressively more anglicised.
Nor was it alone, for England’s largest and most important cathedral was independently following a similar path. From the 1250s the monks of Old St Paul’s began to rebuild their east end with a massive extension that would make it the longest cathedral in England, whose exterior shared the richness and decoration of Westminster Abbey (fig. 92). A third London building encapsulated many of the new features displayed in the great churches. This was St Stephen’s Chapel, the main royal chapel at Westminster Palace, which Edward I started to rebuild in 1292. Its building history is long and complicated, covering 56 years, only being finally completed by Edward III after 1348 (pp 157–8). Yet the chapel was the most prominent and architecturally magnificent royal commission of its age, and no self-respecting mason or patron was ignorant of its style.
To understand the appearance of buildings in the period from 1250 to 1350 it is best to look at the individual elements since the focus of architectural innovation was on decoration, not on the underlying architectural skeleton. It is hard to convey the importance of decoration in medieval architecture to the modern spectator, as so little survives. The Reformation and the Civil War dealt horrible blows to the greatest English medieval buildings, stripping most of them down to their bare bones. This has led to a loss of meaning, for the architectural bones were the skeleton for a programme of communication through sculpture and paint. Church buildings were designed to represent the kingdom of heaven, and were intended as a signpost and the gateway to paradise for mortals.13
The most important new decorative element was undoubtedly window tracery. It was possible, using lancets grouped together, to let in more light, but it was still obvious that these were individual windows with sections of wall between them. The invention of tracery allowed really big windows to be built without bits of wall in the middle. The adoption of bar tracery at Binham Priory, Norfolk, at Netley Abbey, Hampshire, and at Westminster Abbey and Palace immediately made anything built before the 1250s look old-fashioned (compare figs 58, 94). Windows were now not only a gap in the wall; they were transformed into one of the primary vehicles for decoration and elaboration. Part of this was the extraordinary variety of the tracery, but a great deal of the effect was achieved by advances in glazing technology.
From 1300 a much paler and more translucent type of yellow stain was introduced, thinner glass was being manufactured and the designs were being painted with better, finer brushes. All of these advances let more light into churches. The west window at York Minster, which was glazed in 1339 by Master Robert with the extensive use of yellow stain, can be contrasted with the much heavier, darker windows in the lancets of Canterbury Cathedral (figs 60 and