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

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      Fig. 55 Norwich Castle Keep, though extensively repaired and restored by Anthony Salvin in 1835–9 its external elevations still exude the flamboyance and excess of the years around 1100.

      Norwich, as we have seen, was England’s second town (p. 77), and the construction of a palatial tower there by William Rufus is a parallel to the White Tower in London. But the Norwich tower was more audacious. It was sited on a high artificial mound or motte, linked to an outer bailey by a giant arched bridge. The same masons worked on the tower and on the cathedral, and the architectural exuberance of Rufus’s reign is apparent in both. Although the tower has been refaced, a series of watercolours of 1796 shows a building without corner turrets, but with massive buttresses framing an intricately composed decorative façade. Inside, the plan centred on a great ceremonial hall lit by high windows.²⁶

      These towers were very much a feature of the first generation of Norman overlords. There is scant evidence that the White Tower was ever used as a regular residence, and many, such as Norwich, had long interruptions in their construction. Others, such as Colchester, remained unfinished. The vastness of these structures, conceived in a militarised society for feasting, security and image, was becoming unnecessary as quickly as they were built. But the image of power they were able to convey remained a desirable and fashionable accessory for more than a century to come (p. 102). Two of Henry I’s courtiers demonstrate the allure of the great tower. In the 1120s Geoffrey de Clinton, chamberlain and treasurer to Henry I, was granted lands in Warwickshire, where he founded a castle and priory. The castle at Kenilworth was hugely ambitious and was bankrolled by the king, who wanted to establish it as a royal centre of power against the nearby Earl of Warwick, who was of doubtful loyalty. A great tower was erected and an inner courtyard enclosed around it by a wall. At Portchester, Hampshire, another Norman magnate, Hugh Pont de l’Arche, replaced the Saxon residential buildings inside the Roman walls in the 1130s with a square-plan great tower with a hall at first-floor level.²⁷

      Building Materials and Technology

      The 11th century saw a revolution in English building. The reconstruction of thousands of local churches in stone and, after 1066, the rebuilding of the cathedrals meant a huge expansion in all branches of stone production. The quantity of stone required to sustain this boom was colossal, perhaps even greater than that quarried by the Egyptians for the building of the pyramids. We have already seen that Saxon quarries generally only produced rubble and small quantities of cut stone, but the effects that architects were trying to achieve from the 1050s onwards demanded much more cut ashlar (i.e. rectilinear blocks). These ashlar blocks formed the internal and external structural walls, with an internal core of rubble mixed with mortar. Much of the expense of stone building was the cost of bringing it to site, so great efforts were made to secure stone locally. At Battle, Sussex, William the Conqueror first contemplated importing stone from Normandy for the construction of his abbey but found that stone could, in fact, be quarried nearby. This was ideal; in many instances, however, the solution was not so straightforward. In Kent, where the local building stone is less suitable for ashlar, Archbishop Lanfranc turned to other sources of stone for Canterbury Cathedral. Whilst the rubble core work could be extracted locally, ashlar came by sea from Caen in Normandy, Quarr on the Isle of Wight and from Marquise near Boulogne.²⁸

      If stone had to be moved more than about 12 miles by land the cost of carriage exceeded the value of the stone and so it was better to bring it in by water, a slower but cheaper solution. Before the Conquest canals were cut to bring stone from the Peterborough area to Fenland abbeys. A sunken barge excavated at Whittlesey contained large blocks of Barnack stone perhaps destined for Ramsey. After 1066 many more waterways were dug and diverted to make the movement of stone easier. Much of the stone for Norwich Cathedral was brought by sea to Great Yarmouth and then put into barges that came right up to the cathedral by means of a new canal.²⁹ Whilst new sources of stone were found and old ones continued to be exploited, the plunder of Roman buildings continued. Lanfranc’s Canterbury also made use of Roman brick and tile, and in 1077 the abbot at St Albans found stockpiles of already salvaged Roman materials. Meanwhile, a cathedral such as Winchester, which was largely built of relatively local Quarr stone, made use of the masonry of its Anglo-Saxon predecessor.

      Quarries were key to the building industry. Stone was not only extracted there, it was cut and carved. Blocks of ashlar, columns, bases and capitals were mass produced and shipped directly to the site, thereby avoiding the transport of stone that would end up as chippings at their destination. Working at a distance was, in principle, familiar, as the components of timber buildings were often cut remotely, transported and erected on site; but the precision needed for stonework was much greater. The dimension of each course of stone, for instance, had to accord with any decorative or structural elements in it. So ashlars had to be cut to different dimensions in the correct quantity. These details had to be carefully calculated and communicated to the quarry by means of written instructions and templates. The quarries therefore also became training schools, producing masons and carvers who could move to the great building sites, where they could learn to set stone and undertake some of the more exacting work that was done on the bench in masons’ lodges on site.³⁰

      In Normandy as much as in England the quality of masonry improved markedly in the hundred years after the Conquest; larger blocks, tighter joints, finer carving suggest more skilled design, increasing proficiency СКАЧАТЬ