§ IV. OF LEADED SPIRES AND TURRETS.
Our own old St. Paul’s, the once highest steeple in the world, which rose 500 feet and more into the clouds, from whence it at last drew the lightning to its destruction, was the proudest example of these lead spires which for beauty at least equalled the finest examples in stone. When the second church, begun at the end of the eleventh century, was but just completed; “the quire was not thought beautiful enough, though in uniformity of building it suited with the church: so that resolving to make it better they began with the steeple, which was finished in A.D. 1221.” This was the lead-covered steeple, the only spire of the church which stood centrally over the crossing. It was 1312 before the modification of the old church was done, and thenceforth that part was known as the “new work.” Within three years afterwards a great part of the spire of timber covered with lead being weak and in danger of falling was taken down and a new cross, with pommel large enough to contain ten bushels of corn, well gilt was set on the top thereof by Gilbert de Segrave the Bishop of London with great and solemn procession, and relics of saints were placed in it.[4] The relics of saints were thus put at the apex as a safeguard from lightning.
This lead spire, repaired in 1315, must have been the work spoken of as finished in 1221, and it was thus the earliest lead spire of considerable dimensions of which we have any knowledge: it was an extraordinary development from the square lead pyramids that covered the Norman towers at Canterbury and other places.
Stow says the height was 520 feet “whereof the stone-work is 260 feet, and the spire was likewise 260 feet. The cross was 15 feet high by 6 feet over the arms, the inner body was of oak, the next cover was of lead, and the uttermost was of copper red varnished. The bowl and the eagle or cock were of copper and gilt also.” The ball at the apex was three feet across and the weathercock four feet from bill to tail and three feet six inches across the wings. “Certes,” says Harrison, “the toppe of this spire where the weathercocke stode was 520 foote from the ground of which the spire was one half.” The measurements of Wren confirm the height of the stone tower (which alone was standing in his day) as being 260 feet, the spire, he says, had been 40 feet diameter at the base and rose 200 feet or more. It must have been altogether worthy of this vast church of twenty-five compartments in the interior vista of arch and vault, 600 feet in greatest length and 100 feet high. In 1444 the spire narrowly escaped destruction by lightning, but the fire was put out. “In the year 1561, the 4th of June, between the hours of three and four of the clock in the afternoon, the great spire of the steeple of St. Paul’s Church was fired by lightning, which brake forth as it seemed two or three yards beneath the foot of the cross: and from thence it went downwards the spire to the battlements, stonework, and bells, so furiously that within the space of four hours the same steeple with all the roofs of the church were consumed to the great sorrow and perpetual remembrance of the beholders.”[5] It was thus destroyed a hundred years before the great fire when the cathedral perished.
London was a city of lead spires. Stow tells us that at St. Paul’s School close by the Cathedral was “of old time a great and high clochiard or bell-house, four square built of stone and in the same a most strong frame of timber with four bells the greatest that I have ever heard. The same has a great spire covered with lead with the image of St. Paul on the top.” It was said that Sir Thomas Partridge won it by a throw of dice from Henry VIII., and pulled it down. Stow, who would have thought the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings, to which we owe so much good work, much too cautious in its methods, reports with much pleasure, “This man was afterwards hanged on Tower Hill.” At St. Bartholomew’s Priory, Smithfield, was another of these timber spires.
A spire said to have been even higher than this of St. Paul’s was erected in the fourteenth century over the central tower at Lincoln. The two western towers also had spires which were taken down to save the cost of repair within this century. This group of three great leaded spires crowning the Hill-city must have been one of the most wonderful the whole world over. The central tower as it now stands is 270 feet high 54 feet on the face; it was finished in 1311. “The spire of timber covered with lead reaching a height of 524 feet which once surmounted it was destroyed by a tempest in 1548.”[6]
The plates in Dugdale’s Monasticon engraved by Hollar and others surprise us by the number of leaded spires to the cathedrals not one of which has survived storm and flames or the crueller hatred of beauty which the modern mind has developed. There are those of the two west towers of Durham, western spires at Canterbury, Peterborough, and Ely, all three at Lincoln, and four smaller pinnacles at Norwich. Two square pyramids shown to the west tower of Southwell, were probably the original covering of the twelfth century. These are now “restored” and they look as false as the word.
The great central spires at Rochester and at Hereford and the central and two western spires at Ripon are shown of lead, as is also that of the beautiful isolated belfry at Salisbury, which was destroyed “to improve the view of the cathedral.” Of three of these large central spires shown in Dugdale, Rochester and Hereford rise from square towers with “broaches”: the first is of a curious and yet happy form, with recessed faces, and the other is an octagon of which the cardinal faces are wider than the alternate sides. The great spire of Ripon rose within the stone parapet of the tower, apparently at first twelve-sided with gables, and the spire itself twenty-four, each pair making a slight reentering angle—a beautiful composition it must have been of light and delicate shadow on the silver white of the old lead. This fair colour is of great importance; several of the old spires which remain to us are as white as if whitewashed. Modern ones, like the grimy thing at Lynn, would be improved by being whitewashed. The old, that at Minster in Kent for instance, tell as bright high lights in a general view of the landscape such as that you obtain from Richborough.
The finest of the English spires now existing constructed of timber and sheeted with lead is that of Long Sutton in Lincolnshire, the highest, oldest, and most perfect. The stone tower with octagon projections at the angles, is 25 feet square and 65 high, standing free from the church to which it is attached by one angle only. The flèche itself is 85 feet from the eaves to the top of an enormous relic “pommel” some four feet in diameter, which is thus 150 feet in the air. The four octagonal projections carry large pinnacles 25 feet high, which at a little height disengage themselves wholly from the great flèche, but with consummate art all lean their axes inwards towards it as much as two feet. The wooden framing, carefully measured by Mr. Austin,[7] shows that this grouping of the lines was as much done from set purpose as the inclination of the lines in the Parthenon of which we hear so much. Each face of the leading has the rolls arranged in a double row of herringbone, and the faces of the pinnacles have the leading slanting in one direction only. Altogether it is a most interesting and most beautiful work of the thirteenth century.
Fig. 11.—Spire, Barnstaple.
The [drawing] here given is of the fine old steeple at Barnstaple, which was saved from destruction by the good advice of Sir Gilbert Scott—and lack of funds! It is a delightfully careless and cheerful looking object, like that at Chesterfield, warped and nodding, which outrages the precise sensibilities of the townspeople; it was erected in 1389, as appears from the accounts and was repaired and altered in the seventeenth century (as shown by a date and initials, “1636 W. T.”), at which time the spire lights were opened out. The external bells are unusual in England. There are two other spires of village churches in the neighbourhood at Braunton and Swymbridge. The spires at Chesterfield, Godalming, Almondsbury in Gloucestershire, Wrighton in Northumberland, and Harrow (1481), are among the finest that remain. Of the destroyed church at Reculver the west towers, which are retained as landmarks, had lead spires. In some spires in Norfolk, about Cromer, two or three feet of the leading is omitted, thus forming an open band through which the timbering and a bell hung here may be seen. In some of the spires the lead is laid in vertical strips, as at Minster in Thanet, and a [sketch] given from a church in Hertfordshire shows the lower part in a way arcaded by an ingenious arrangement of the rolls. At great Baddow Church, Essex, vertical rolls run up about two-thirds of the spire, and the rest is plain. Generally, however, the lead work is arranged in herring-bone with careful irregularity and change so as to get a texture in the surface so different to the dead and dreary accuracy we should attain to. Low square spires at Ottery St. Mary are good examples of lead texture for those who see some beauty in the jointing of the armour of a tortoise.
Fig. 12.
The construction of the wood framing of the greater of these spires is a forest of intricate interlacing timbers, the best authority for which is the article Flèche in Viollet-le-Duc, or Burges’ drawing of Amiens in his volume of careful studies of the Gothic art of France.
The most decorated of these lead spires in England—although not very large—is at East Harling in Norfolk. It rises within the stone battlement and has an open stage with wood pinnacles and crocketed “flying buttresses” all covered with lead. The sides of the spire proper, very narrow and acute, have the rolls arranged in lozenges instead of the usual herring-bone or vertical lines, the lozenges are on one side as wide as the face, breaking into a zig-zag above, on another side are smaller lozenges three or four in the width changing into one again above: at the apex is a large finial knob.[8]
Wren’s knowledge of the spire of old St. Paul’s possibly led him to try his hand at leaded spires, and the result in some of the City churches, particularly that one on Ludgate Hill that is such a perfect foil for the great dome of St. Paul’s, shows his usual assured mastery. The spire of St. Olave, Hart Street, is said to have a crystal ball at the apex.
Fig. 13.—Barnard’s Inn Hall.
The smaller turrets on college halls are generally covered with lead in an ogee form. Those at Oxford have often a lozenge raised on each face, that on [Barnard’s Inn] in the City is wholly enveloped in lead. A turret on the alms-houses at Abingdon has large letters and crowns, which are gilt, standing up free on the slanting faces. At Hampton Court there are turret roofs, ogee with crockets and finials and little pinnacles set round at the springing. At Nonsuch leaded turrets surmounted the great octagons at the angles, they were probably much decorated and certainly of considerable size, making very picturesque compositions, as we may see in the rude views of the palace which exist.
In France and Germany there are many remarkable leaded spires, but we can only stay to mention the steeple at Chalons-sur-Marne, the central flèche at Amiens, and the belfry at Calais. The steeple at Chalons is a most interesting work, large and well-designed, with faint and fascinating remains of a gorgeous scheme of colour decoration patterning the whole surface of the lead with figures and canopies resembling the drawing on stained glass, the lead rolls passing across the design like the iron glazing bars. This was carefully drawn by Burges and illustrated in the Builder for 1856, and the whole spire is represented to scale in the Sketch Book of the Architectural Association for 1883. This is a work of the end of the thirteenth century, and the decoration was done in the following century. It will be well to mention it more particularly later, but as Viollet-le-Duc says that nearly all the lead work of the middle ages was so decorated we may conclude that such a magnificent spire as St. Paul’s was not entirely bare of gold and colour.
The flèche at Amiens, which rises from the roof some 100 feet of “transparent fretwork which seems to bend to the west wind,” is well illustrated in Viollet-le-Duc’s Dictionary as well as by Burges. Every resource of the art was lavished on it, pinnacles and niches, lead statues, tracery, great circular coronets of pierced cast work. The sheet lead was diapered with fleurs-de-lis, and all was decorated with designs in colour and gold. Although perfectly Gothic in form it is a work of the sixteenth century, and the painting is in the manner of the Renaissance.
At Calais the fine belfry represented in [Fig. 14], which was completed about 1600, is in some respects very English in character, while on the other hand it is a northern representative of a class of bulbous spires which are as much cupolas as spires, and were probably often intended as fantastic domes. These, although later found all across Europe, from Russia to Belgium, were never naturalised in England on a large scale, our nearest approach to them being in the ogee cupolas of small turrets and lanterns and some of Wren’s spires. In Holland they were very much affected in the most extravagant forms, and they are now the constant form of church spire seen in eastern Europe. They seem much at home in such a city as Buda-Pesth, and have doubtless characteristics which endear them to those of Mongolian blood and speech. It is an interesting point to decide whether these forms are in origin actually Eastern—“travelled topes” as a friend says—or whether they are the natural outcome of a combination of spire and dome in a period of extravagant and declining taste.
Fig. 14.—Calais Belfry.