The Cathedral Church of the Holy and Indivisible Trinity at Winchester.
FROM NORTH WEST.
The present legal designation of Winchester cathedral dates only from the time of Henry VIII. It was originally the church of the abbey of St. Swithun; and, next to St. Swithun, its greatest patron was St. Birinus. Later on, an alternative dedication was to St. Peter and St. Paul.
It is the longest mediæval cathedral in Europe. Once it was surpassed by old St. Paul’s, London; now its only rival is St. Alban’s. But Winchester has an internal length of 526 feet 6 inches; exceeding that of St. Alban’s by 5 feet 4 inches. Vast as it is, no cathedral shows up so little. It has but one tower, and that barely overtops the roof; in outline it is depressed and monotonous; there are none of the double transepts, and lofty side-porches, which so picturesquely break up the lines of Salisbury, Lincoln, and Hereford. It has no conspicuous façade to give it grandeur to the west; it lacks the wide reach of open square and verdant close that delights at Salisbury and Wells. So far from dominating the city, like Lincoln or York, it hides out of sight. You walk all the length of the High Street and never get a glimpse of it. Never was such a retiring cathedral. Generally, it is approached from the High Street through a hole in the wall; up a narrow passage, and down an avenue of obscuring elms. Slowly its huge mass uprears itself, sprawling over the ground like some stranded prehistoric monster. And, externally, it is as plain as it is huge: mainly an enormous bulk of blank wall. Once it presented a better appearance; for though the Lady chapel to the east was rather shorter, to the west the nave was 40 feet longer, and was flanked, like Southwell, by two Norman towers, forming a western transept, after the manner of Ely and of Peterborough. The present west front does anything but prepare us for an interior so vast; it seems rather the approach to some parish church of the second rank. All the more, perhaps, is one struck with the glorious interior.
The arrangement of the cathedral should be compared with that of St. Alban’s. It consists of (1) nave, (2) choir, (3) presbytery or sanctuary, (4) feretory or saints’ chapel, (5) retro-choir, (6) Lady chapel.
In the North Transept we are in presence of the earliest work in the cathedral. Much of it is the work of Bishop Walkelin (1070 to 1097); and, with the exception of some traceried windows inserted early in the fourteenth century to give more light to the eastern altars, it remains much as he left it. As his work is in the transepts, so once was the whole cathedral. As finished before the close of the eleventh century, Winchester, in vastness of scale and stern power, must have been one of the most impressive cathedrals of England: more overwhelming than Ely or Peterborough; not inferior even to Durham. I am not sure that every change and transformation that took place at Winchester between the eleventh and the sixteenth century was not a change for the worse. For of the earliest temples of our race, torn as it were out of the solid rock, Walkelin’s cathedral was the most awful and the most religious. As it is one of the earliest, so it was, artistically, the grandest of our Romanesque cathedrals. The south transept of Hereford and the north transept of Chester are, in comparison, humble indeed. In colossal scale it finds one rival only—the mighty church of St. Alban. Artistically, they are miles apart: as far apart as two designs can be, one conditioned by the use of stone, the other of brick.
NORTH TRANSEPT.
But not all the work of the Winchester transepts is by Walkelin; it is Norman, but part of it is a rebuilding rendered necessary by the fall of the central tower in 1107. The original work is readily distinguished. Those parts of the transept which are the nearest to the central tower have fine-jointed masonry; the vaulting of the aisles has ribs; the piers are larger. The further and earlier part of the masonry is much ruder, and the joints wider; the vaulting is without ribs, and the piers are smaller. In both parts the arches are square-edged, greatly adding to the peculiar severity of the aspect of this part of the church. The pier-arches are raised on stilts in order to get their crowns on a level with the intersection of the diagonal groins or ribs; for the earlier vault-builders imagined that all the arches of a vault must rise to the same level. The cushion or cubical capitals are of a simple type, little subdivided. Both transepts have double aisles. Lanfranc, in his metropolitan cathedral at Canterbury, was content with an aisleless transept; but Winchester cathedral was built on a scale befitting the capital of the Norman realms. At either end, too, of the transepts is an aisle—i.e. to the north and south; this unusual feature enabled processions to pass uninterruptedly round the triforium. We hear that in 1111, the bishop having sorely taxed the monastery to provide funds for the rebuilding of the central tower, “the monks reversed their crosses, head down, feet up, and made procession barefoot against the sun, contrary to ecclesiastical use,” round the broad triforium. Ely once had similar end-aisles, and still has both eastern and western aisles to the transepts.
FONT.
The Crypt.—From the north transept one descends to the crypt, which is well worth a visit, when not under water. The level of the river seems to have risen since the eleventh century, causing the crypt to be frequently flooded. It extends to the extreme east end of the present cathedral, and is in three parts. The first part, the western, consists of the substructure of the original choir, showing that it consisted of four aisled bays and an apse with ambulatory. Secondly comes a very remarkable feature, of the same date—viz., a long aisleless chapel of three bays, also apsidal, beneath the present retro-choir. Whether the chapel above it was a Lady chapel is a matter of uncertainty; for Lady chapels do not seem to have come into fashion till the thirteenth century. Thirdly, to the extreme east, comes the substructure of Courtenay’s Lady chapel, built between 1486 and 1492. Most interesting of all is the sacred well, immediately beneath the high altar; far older than Norman crypt or Norman cathedral; the holy central spot of by-gone Saxon and even British minsters.
South Transept.—Crossing the choir, we pass down a flight of steps to the south transept. At the top of these steps are the bolt-holes of the iron gates, which are now placed in the north-west corner of the nave, but which once stood here as a barrier to the pilgrims, who were allowed access to the north transept and choir aisles, but not to the choir itself, or to the south transept. They entered the cathedral by a doorway which may still be seen from the outside at the south-east corner of the north transept. In the south transept the same two periods of Norman work are recognisable which we saw in the north transept; but the three aisles have been shut off by walls and screens, forming chapels on the east side, and a chapter-room and treasury on the west.
LADY-CHAPEL.
The Central Tower fell in 1107. Its fall was regarded as a judgment; William Rufus having been buried under it in 1100. The piers, as strengthened, are “most unwieldy and intrusive from their excessive size and squareness of form; the largest tower-piers in England in proportion to the span of the arches that rest upon them.” The tower-windows could formerly be seen from below, as well as a grand specimen of late Norman arcading: now hidden from view by the wooden fan-vault erected in 1634. The eastern and western arches of the tower are left wide, so as not to interfere with the principal vista of the cathedral; the northern and southern arches are contracted to gain strength. The northern and southern sides of the piers were designed nearly flat, so as not to interfere with the stall-work of the monks. This is one of the cathedrals where the choir occupies, in part, its original position, and has not been moved eastward into the sanctuary. But originally the monastic choir of Winchester extended still farther to the west, occupying not one, but three bays of the nave; and was separated from the western bays of the nave by a great rood-screen. The old arrangement has been preserved at Norwich and Gloucester, and has been restored at Peterborough. Before leaving the south transept, the northern bay of the western triforium should be noticed. It has been only partially transformed into Perpendicular after the style of the nave; for the semicircular upper arch of the triforium can still be seen. This helps us to restore in imagination the original triforium of the whole Norman nave.
STALLS.
Of the Transitional period of our architecture, 1145 to 1190, only two traces seem to remain at Winchester. One is the doorway below the triforium-bay mentioned above. Its zigzag ornament is of Norman character, but the obtusely pointed arch shows that it is subsequent, yet not much subsequent to 1145. This doorway, with its queer fluted pilasters, may have been built by Henry de Blois (1129-1171) when he walled off this western aisle to serve as a treasury. If so, it is the only trace in the structure of this, the greatest of all Winchester’s bishops. The other is the font.
Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre.—Now we return to the north transept, which is cut off from the choir by a massive stone wall, the object being to keep the pilgrims out of the choir, and, perhaps, to support organs. At the end of the twelfth century a curious chapel was built on to this wall: it contains frescoes representing the Passion of our Lord.
Retro-Choir.—Traversing the north choir-aisle, we reach the largest retro-choir in England; it consists of three bays, with an east end originally consisting of three chapels all of the same length. The central chapel was elongated in the fifteenth century. This retro-choir was built by Bishop Godfrey de Lucy, between 1189 and 1204, and therefore, with the Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre, is the earliest Gothic work in the cathedral, and but few years later than St. Hugh’s work at Lincoln. De Lucy’s work is not very ambitious, nor very rich, nor artistically on a plane with the early English work at Lincoln, Beverley, and Ely. The great defect is that, in relation to its area, it is so miserably low. To get it high, the architect would have had to sacrifice the east windows of the clerestory of the choir; and this he was not allowed to do. The retro-choir was serviceable in providing room for processions round the high altar, and space for shrines, and in giving additional chapels and altars. Probably, also, the reversion to the favourite square east-end of English church architecture was popular in itself. Almost every Norman cathedral ended in an apse; and in the apse, high raised behind the high altar, sat the Norman bishop, facing the congregation; the hateful symbol of Norman domination. The destruction of the Norman apse may well, then, have been popular. The best part of the design is seen in the southern wall of the Lady chapel, and in the charming vaulted staircases which lead out of the side chapels to the roofs of the retro-choir and choir, and to the clerestory of the choir, from which a good view of the interior and of the interesting vault and glass of the choir is obtained. At the north-east corner of the retro-choir is an effigy in a vesica: it commemorates Bishop Ethelmar or Aymer, whose heart was buried at Winchester in 1261.
The Stalls.—These are in the Geometrical style (1245-1315), and were executed about the middle of the period. “The beauty and variety of the carvings are wonderful. There is no repetition; and the grace and elegance, as well as the fidelity, with which the foliage is represented, are nowhere to be surpassed. The human heads are full of expression; and the monkeys and other animals sporting among the branches have all the same exquisite finish. Here are also interesting misereres” (Murray).
FERETORY.
The Presbytery.—The space between the central tower and retro-choir was occupied by the Norman choir, less its apse, up to about 1320, when this choir was pulled down and the present pier-arcade was built, with the clerestory; which latter, however, received new window-tracery in the sixteenth century. To the same period, the Curvilinear, but a little later, belongs the exquisite series of nine tabernacles in the retro-choir, on the wall at the back of the feretory; the naturalistic foliage of which is perhaps the best work in the cathedral. Below is an original entrance to the crypt, now called the “Holy Hole.” Above it accordingly is the inscription:
“Corpora sanctorum sunt hic in pace sepulta
Ex meritis quorum fulgent miracula multa.”
The Nave.—We now pass into the south aisle of the nave. The nave is of exceptional interest, for three reasons. In the first place, for its vast length of 12 bays of 250 feet. Norwich has 14 bays of 230 feet. Secondly, because, after the work at Gloucester, it is the earliest work we possess in the Perpendicular style. Thirdly, because its Perpendicular vesture is little more than skin deep, the solid core of every pier and every wall, from pavement to roof, being Norman. It is just this combination of the massive solidity of Romanesque with the grace and elegance of Gothic which makes it what it is, the finest nave in the country. The walls are Norman; built, in Norman fashion, of rather small and square blocks; they are thick, nearly 10 feet thick at the top; outside the south aisle may still be seen the flat Norman buttresses; hidden behind the balustrade of the clerestory are the upper arches of the Norman triforium, one of which we saw in the south transept. The vault rests on the original Norman vaulting-shafts, though they are stopped by Perpendicular capitals. They are not really stopped, however; for when we mount up to the back of the vault we find the vaulting-shaft, piercing through the vault, rising to the very top of the wall, to support, as they once supported, a wooden ceiling like that of Peterborough. Near the eastern end of the south aisle the lower part of a Norman shaft has been left; probably because it was covered up by some later shrine or altar. Crossing the nave, still clearer evidence of the character of the early work is to be seen in the second and third piers from the east of the north arcade. These were covered up by a great rood-screen, now destroyed.
NAVE.
Putting this evidence together, it is plain that we have here a Norman nave transmogrified—Norman in core, but with a Perpendicular casing. This casing, however, is not merely skin-deep, as in Gloucester choir, where the Norman work can be seen at the back of the Perpendicular screens and panelling. The casing at Winchester goes at least one stone deep into the piers. But it was not executed all in the same way. Bishop William of Wykeham’s work, in the seven western piers of the southern arcade, has the new mouldings cut in the original Norman stones. But in the rest of the piers it was found simpler and cheaper to withdraw the Norman stones one by one, and replace them with new stones with Perpendicular mouldings cut on them. The small Norman windows, of course, were destroyed altogether, and replaced by short and broad windows by Bishop Edingdon, probably about 1360, perhaps under the superintendence of William of Wykeham, who was his secretary, in the extreme west of the nave; and by taller and more graceful windows in the later work of William of Wykeham and his successors. The mouldings of all this Perpendicular work are rather large and coarse; but we must remember that the architect was restricted at first to such mouldings as could be developed out of the Norman detail, and in any case they had to be in harmony with the big and heavy Norman vaulting-shafts which were retained unaltered in the Perpendicular design. About the same time forty feet of the western bays was pulled down. Edingdon’s work in the nave may be distinguished by the broad windows, two in the north and one in the south aisle; and by the cusps in the panelling, which in Edingdon’s work are foliated, and in the later work are left plain. In the new design the internal elevation consists of two parts—a tall pier-arcade, and a clerestory with a balustrade in front of the lower part of it.
How low the original Norman pier-arcade was, is shown by the Norman capitals which are left in the eastern piers of the northern arcade. The Norman triforium was exceptionally large. Its floor was on a level with the capitals of the new arches, and it reached up to the sill of the present clerestory windows. A glance round the corner into the transepts will make this clear. Again, the Norman nave had a flat wooden ceiling like that of Peterborough; this was replaced by a magnificent lierne vault of stone, completed by Wykeham’s successors, as is shown by the arms of Cardinal Beaufort and Bishop William of Waynflete on the bosses of the vault and in the string-course under the triforium. Magnificent as this vault is, it was no improvement to break the free flow of the diagonal and ridge-ribs by the insertion of these little liernes or tie-ribs. The earlier vault of Exeter is massive enough and quite sufficiently complicated without them. In the aisles the liernes are grouped into simple hexagonal or “stellar” patterns. The vault of the nave is often said to be unsupported by flying buttresses. They are there, however, between the vault and the outer roof of the aisles, sheltered from the weather, as are the Norman flying-buttresses of Durham and Gloucester.
Such are the chief features of this, the finest cathedral-nave we possess, the work of Edingdon, Wykeham, Beaufort and Waynflete. We shall hardly be wrong in attributing the inception of this great transformation to Wykeham, whether as Edingdon’s secretary or as his successor to the bishopric.
REREDOS.
We must not, however, overrate, as is often done, the novelty of the proceeding. For an even greater transformation had been wrought at Exeter before this, between 1280 and 1307, by Bishops Quivil and Bitton, who transformed the Transitional Norman choir of Bishop Marshall into the style of their day. From Exeter Wykeham borrowed the idea of the transformation, from Gloucester the style in which the transformation was effected.
From the west door there is a superb view eastwards. The grandeur of the interior of the cathedral is much enhanced by the raising of the choir. This raising of the choir is due, however, to no æsthetic preferences on the part of the architects, nor to any wish to emphasise the importance of the clergy, but simply to the fact that there is a substructure below the choir. Here, as at Canterbury and York, it is a crypt. At Wimborne minster, Hythe church, and Hereford cathedral, it seems to be no more than a processional path, or else a charnel-house. Imposing, however, as this vista is, it is not so long as it might be, and it appears shorter than it really is. In the first place, out of the whole internal length of 526 feet, only 338 feet come into the vista. This is because De Lucy kept his retro-choir so low. Far nobler would have been the interior of Winchester, if, as at Ely, York, and Lincoln, retro-choir and eastern chapels had been kept as high as presbytery and nave. Indeed, the Winchester vista of 338 feet is surpassed even by that of the small cathedral of Lichfield, 371 feet. Secondly, owing to the destruction of screens, the apparent length has been greatly diminished. Formerly there were two solid screens: a rood-screen in the nave, three bays east of the tower; and a choir-screen. Thirdly, as at St. Paul’s, the great wall of the reredos is far too lofty, and is placed much too close to the east end of the presbytery, shearing off another 20 feet of the apparent length of the interior. This reredos, indeed, beautiful as its detail must have been, is a vast mediæval blunder—i.e. from an artistic point of view; which point of view, to tell the truth, the mediæval architects cared little about in comparison with the religious purposes which they wished their architecture to subserve. Still here, as at St. Saviour’s, Southwark, one cannot help wishing the reredos away; one would like to see once more behind and above the high altar, on their lofty platform, the shrines of St. Swithun and St. Birinus, and on either side of them such delightful peeps as one has at Wells into retro-choir and eastern chapels. Beaufort’s reredos has much to answer for.
In the south arcade of the nave are the two earliest of the magnificent series of chantries which are the especial glory of Winchester. They should be examined in chronological order. They are those of the following bishops: Edingdon, died 1366; Wykeham, died 1404; Beaufort, died 1447; Waynflete, died 1486; Fox, died 1528; Gardiner, died 1555. Thus they form a continuous record of the growth and development of Perpendicular and Tudor architecture from 1366 to 1555.
IX. Later Perpendicular and Tudor Work.—As we have seen, the great transformation of the nave was not completed till the episcopate of Waynflete (1447-1486), having occupied not less than a century. After a short breathing-space, Bishop Fox (1500-1528) set to work to transform the presbytery; and I have little doubt that every trace of early work would have been swept away from the transepts as well, had not building operations at Winchester been brought to a stop by the Reformation. As we saw above the piers, arches and clerestory of the presbytery had been rebuilt early in the fourteenth century. These Curvilinear windows having probably got out of repair, he replaced the tracery of the clerestory windows on each side of the presbytery, and also the great clerestory window to the east, by Perpendicular tracery. Five of these windows have original glass. A second task was to rebuild the aisles of the presbytery, which, till now, had remained Norman. A third was to ceil the presbytery with a lierne vault. This is a paltry makeshift in wood. The emblems of the Passion, however, carved on the bosses, are of much interest, and should be inspected from the gallery. Fourthly, Fox built his own chantry. Indeed, most of the chantries were built during the bishops’ lifetimes. Fifthly, he erected Tudor screens of stone between the presbytery and his new aisles. These Gothic screens were plainly wrought by English workmen. Just as plainly, the pretty Renaissance frieze which surmounts them was wrought by workmen imported from Italy. Sixthly, he constructed the Renaissance chests which stand on the screen. Bishop Henry de Blois (1129-1171) had collected from the crypt, perhaps now damp, the bones of saints and kings buried there, and had transferred them, cased in lead, to the presbytery. These sacred relics Fox placed in the present six chests. To this period also belongs the Renaissance woodwork now placed in the south transept.
One more structural change had taken place previously. Bishop Courtenay (1486-1492) had lengthened the Lady chapel and the crypt.
To the early years of the sixteenth century belongs the rich work in Bishop Langton’s chapel, and in the chapels of the south transept, and the pulpit in the choir.
FOX’S CHANTRY.