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

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СКАЧАТЬ complex. This is where an abbot would have administered his estates, dispensed justice and entertained.¹²

      Bishops and Kings

      Early English dioceses were based on Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and, as power and territory ebbed and flowed between them, they were reorganised many times. The Viking incursions provided an opportunity to redraw the diocesan map, and after the 10th century dioceses more or less coincided with the new administrative shires of England (fig. 12). But there was no particular conformity of diocesan organisation; cathedrals were organised in different ways and many, uniquely for England, were also monasteries where the bishop lived his life in a monastic order.

      Thanks to painstaking excavation, more is known about Winchester than any other Saxon cathedral. It was arguably the finest building standing in England at the Conquest. By 1066, however, Winchester had already had a cathedral for 418 years; this was the Old Minster, with a cruciform (cross-shaped) plan and a square end. Over the ensuing centuries the cathedral was enlarged and adapted so that by 1000, as well as the nave and high altar, it comprised four towers, three crypts, three apses, at least 24 smaller chapels and a baptistery (fig. 19). Despite strong English characteristics, the Old Minster was, by the time of the Normans, a church with a recognisably Carolingian plan. Most prominent was the westwork – the enormous, tower-like structure erected at the west end of the cathedral in the 970s. Westworks developed in Carolingian churches in the 9th century and went on to form a component of many great churches in France and Germany built from the 10th to the 12th centuries. At Winchester the huge west towers performed a dual purpose, providing a focus for liturgy and an occasional grandstand for the kings of Wessex to view events in the main church below. Winchester, built next to the royal palace of Wessex and functioning as a dynastic church, might have been exceptional. More typical, perhaps, was the westwork of which fragments, surprisingly, survive at Sherborne Abbey in Dorset. The see of Sherborne was founded in 705 but came to prominence in the 9th century, when two of Alfred the Great’s brothers were buried there. Bishop Aelfwold rebuilt and extended the cathedral between 1045 and 1058 in a form heavily influenced by developments in the Carolingian empire (fig. 20). The upper chamber in the west tower contained an apse in which the bishop’s throne was positioned, opposite him; at the east end was a three-light window looking down into the main body of the church and before this stood the altar. This arrangement allowed Mass to be celebrated in public view in the upper chamber and distinguished members of the congregation to watch from chambers on either side.¹³

Fig. 20 Sherborne Cathedral (now Abbey), Dorset. This reconstruction of the cathedral as it was rebuilt under Bishop Aelfwold between 1045 and 1058 shows the massive westwork with its own stubby transepts in which the bishop’s throne was situated. The whole church is over 200ft long with an apsidal east end.

What we learn from Winchester and Sherborne, and from lesser investigations at Wells, Exeter and Rochester, is that Anglo-Saxon cathedrals at the turn of the 10th century were large, complex and sophisticated structures of European stature, but with an external form and internal organisation unique to England.

Bishops were men of considerable wealth, power and standing, and must have occupied magnificent palaces; of these nothing remains, but we do know about high-status royal residential buildings. Alfred the Great’s biographer, Asser, writes of him having ‘royal halls and chambers marvellously constructed of stone and wood’. Of these, and of other late Saxon royal palaces, the remains of only one have been found. This is at Cheddar in Somerset, where Alfred the Great built a palace next to a large and prosperous minster (fig. 22). The buildings were his personal property and, later, became a favoured royal palace that continued to be used at least up till the time of Henry II.14

Fig. 21 Timbers from the Thames revetment at Vintner’s Place excavated in 1989–91 came from the arcade of a 10th-century hall. Attempts to reconstruct its appearance by its excavators show: a) a cross section of the hall; b) a hypothetical elevation of the arcade (the lowest tier are the timbers that were found) and c) a perspective view of how the roof may have looked.

Fig. 22 The royal manor of Cheddar in the 9th and 10th centuries showing: a) King Alfred’s hall; b) King Alfred’s bower; c) unidentified buildings of King Alfred’s time; d) 10th-century hall; e) 10th-century chapel; f) 10th-century bower.

The buildings were undefended and, like all high-status secular buildings, of timber. The principal structure was a bow-sided hall 76ft long and 18ft wide, with the main room on the first floor; it was entered by doors on its north-east corner and in the middle of its long sides. There were porches immediately inside the doors and at least one staircase leading to the main hall, which was heated by a central hearth towards its south end. Nearby was a separate private building, known at the time as a bower. This was presumably a separate chamber for the king’s personal use.

Alfred’s sons further developed the site, replacing the original great hall and building a new one, rectangular, with a more regular timber frame and planked walls. On the site of the first hall a stone chapel was built, which was subsequently rebuilt.15 These were without doubt high-status buildings, so it is particularly unfortunate that their upper parts cannot be recovered; presumably the timberwork would have been of the highest quality, painted and carved. Remarkably, however, the upper parts of a high-status timber arcade, contemporary with the later Saxon buildings at Cheddar, was excavated in London, where it had been reused in a river revetment. These timber components (fig. 21) make up an arcade with ogival arches – not necessary for structural stability but highly decorative. This single find confirms that the upper parts of high-status Saxon buildings were inventively and richly modelled and carved.16

Fig. 23 King Alfred’s burghs as listed in Burghal Hidage, a document dating from around 911–14 that calculated the number of men required to defend the town based on its size.

Towns

In the two centuries after 700 towns once more emerged as an economic, social and political force. The first to be re-established were a number of coastal emporia that perhaps began as seasonally occupied trading and craft centres (fig. 12). Hamwic (Southampton), Eoforwic (York), Gippeswic (Ipswich) and Lundenwic (London) were not like Roman towns, walled and adorned with civic structures, but they were functional places with a regular layout and a defined economic purpose.

Hamwic was founded, probably by King Ine of Wessex, in about 690. It became the economic engine of his kingdom and covered 111 acres, with a population of about 4,500. Surrounded by a deep ditch, the town was laid out on a regular grid of metalled roads. Buildings lay at right angles to the streets 12ft to 15ft wide and up to 40ft deep, most containing metal, bone and glass workshops. Behind the houses, in yards, were wells and timber-lined pits. The Mercian kings, particularly Aethelbald, similarly developed Saxon London – Lundenwic СКАЧАТЬ В начало < 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 > В конец