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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ the shift from the austerity of Winchester to the exuberance of Durham. Yet architecture after 1066 was as experimental as the Saxon work that preceded it. From 1000, people increasingly became used to seeing and experiencing stone buildings, but this should not obscure the fact that even after 1066 timber remained the most important and common building material. Although most churches were now built in stone, the first generation of castles – and almost all domestic, agricultural and industrial buildings – remained of timber. Stone buildings, too, contained huge quantities of timber; the earliest timber roof to survive intact is at St Mary’s, Kempley, Gloucestershire. It dates from soon after 1120 and comprises fifteen trusses, with sole-plates projecting into the church that were probably carved with animal heads.³¹ Other fragments of early timberwork survive, including the unusual and handsome nine-bay balustrade of c.1180 at St Nicholas’s, Compton, Surrey, and a door of c.1050 in Westminster Abbey.³²

      The construction of the great Norman cathedrals was overseen by masons who we would today call architects. After 1066 their names are increasingly known: Blithere at Canterbury, Robert at St Albans and Hugh at Winchester. These men understood the principles of engineering, not through the written word, but through observation and trial and error. They drew plans, sections and templates either on parchment, wood or on large plaster panels. The earliest English architectural drawing to survive (of c.1200) is at Byland Abbey, Yorkshire, where incised drawings on a floor slab and a wall are full-size sections of the west front rose window.³³ In addition to drawings, designers commissioned models and templates, either at reduced scale or sometimes full-size.

      It has been said that by looking at buildings alone it would be impossible for a historian to guess that the Norman Conquest had taken place. In 1000 England’s architecture had already reached a turning point and the changes that came rapidly after 1066 had been in embryo since the 1050s at the latest. Yet without doubt the Conquest hugely accelerated architectural change. The building and craft industries quickly developed and diversified, and by 1130 almost everyone could experience stone architecture in their own locality. The great Saxon estates had been broken up and, as well as the great magnates, there was now a large class of middling landowners who aspired to build themselves homes and churches.

      The severe unsullied monumentality of early Norman buildings as seen in the transepts of Winchester or the elevations of the White Tower lasted merely a generation; they soon gave way to something more florid and playful. Likewise the reforming aspirations of the Norman churchmen were diluted and what remained was an English compromise. As the first generation of Normans died out, England’s architecture was already looking very different to anything in their former homelands. Indeed, the men and their families were feeling different, too. They might not have been able to express it in 1130, but the Normans and their architecture were becoming English.

      As the second generation of Normans felt more English, so the great cathedrals, abbeys, castles and houses then under construction became increasingly distinct from their counterparts in France.

      The Normans and the English

      Many thought the death of Henry I in 1135 a calamity. He was the Conqueror’s last surviving son and was outlived by only one legitimate child, Matilda. Matilda was his agreed successor but his nephew Stephen darted across the Channel and was crowned before he could be stopped. This led to a period of disorder and uncertainty, often called the Anarchy, which was only resolved by Stephen’s death and the accession of Matilda’s son, Henry II, in 1153.

      Henry II had huge strength of character, boundless energy, and a determination to re-establish order and the rule of law. His court was cosmopolitan and, through his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, he presided over territories from Scotland to the Pyrenees. Henry was not a Norman king; he had Anglo-Saxon ancestry through his mother, and of his eight great-grandparents only William the Conqueror was Norman. But it was not only the monarchy that was no longer Norman. Families whose ancestors had arrived with the Conqueror had begun to see themselves as English; while the first generation of newcomers had usually been buried in Normandy, by the 1150s their children and grandchildren were buried in England.¹

      A sense of Englishness also becomes increasingly apparent in the work of a generation of historians writing between about 1120 and 1150. Henry of Huntingdon, for instance, set out to write the history of ‘this, the most celebrated of islands, formerly called Albion, later Britain, and now England’. His History of the English continued up to his own time and explained that the past victories of the Normans, including the Conquest of 1066, were now English history. This was in many respects true. The Norman ruling elite had married English women, adopted English laws and customs, assimilated native administrative structures, appropriated English history as their own and made pilgrimages to the shrines of Anglo-Saxon saints. In fact, although they didn’t speak English as their first language, the third generation of Normans were now Englishmen.²

      Despite Henry II’s strength and success, he, no more than William the Conqueror, could control events after his death, and his sons Richard and John frittered away the territories and powers amassed by their father. Yet in many senses the reigns of Henry’s sons saw a further reinforcement of English identity: King Richard’s absence in 1191; the loss of Normandy in 1204; the interdict of 1208 (when the pope banned the administration of the sacraments in England) and the failed invasion of England by Prince Louis of France in 1216 – all these led to increasing insularity and even xenophobia.

      This reinforcement was of great importance for the development of English architecture in the century or so after 1130. The growing wealth, self-confidence and identity of the English ruling class led to an energetic patronage of architecture. Magnates reorganised their estates, built themselves castles, and endowed churches and monasteries; bishops reconstructed their cathedrals and abbots built new abbeys. The style in which these buildings were constructed was ambitious, original and, with hindsight, English.³

      Old Principles, New Fashions

      The 1150s, 60s and 70s were a period of stylistic experimentation. New currents of design from France, mixed with native decorative and structural traditions, produced some of the most inventive and lively buildings ever constructed in England. Contemporaries recognised this but might have described what was happening in different terms to us. For them, architectural language was important as it expressed hierarchy. In the Middle Ages most high-status architecture was about the ritualised display of power: ceremony, ritual and liturgy were the driving forces behind the appearance of buildings. Their structure and decoration expressed social, economic and religious hierarchies, and so the architectural setting of an activity, whether it be dining or praying, had to match its importance – and the importance of the people who were doing it.⁴ This could be achieved through progressive intensity of decoration, the least important places being plain and the most important richly decorated, or through association, either with past activities or people, or with Christian Rome. Various parts of buildings – and whole buildings themselves – were thus always accorded a status through their architecture. So, for instance, as the most important of all medieval secular spaces was the great hall, this was singled out for special treatment. The magnificence of the carving around the doorway to Bishop Puiset’s Hall at Durham Castle, and the arcading in the room above (fig. 56), proclaim them to be of the highest importance. English great halls, unlike some of their continental contemporaries, were always roofed in timber rather than vaulted in stone, a sign of status and reflecting a tradition going back to Roman Britain.

      In religious buildings presbyteries and shrines were the most important areas, and, even in the most humble СКАЧАТЬ