The inns of Rochester receive, as may well be supposed, many pilgrims who for love of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dickens, come hither, not alone from all parts of England, but from America, and even from foreign-speaking countries, and the visitors’ books testify not only to their opinions of the place but also of each other. Thus at one inn I read the signatures of a party of Germans, to which some prejudiced Briton, after sundry offensive remarks about foreigners in general and Germans in particular, adds, “They are everywhere, d——n them!” But I must confess that the following surprised me, even after a long acquaintance with the inanities of visitors’ books. Some one had remarked “How like Rochester Cathedral was to a Catholic Church,” whereupon some other idiot adds, “Of course it is Catholic, but not Roman Catholic.” Really one scarcely knows whom to pity most.
THE “BULL”
The “Bull” inn (how remarkably like its frontage is to that other “Bull” at Dartford) is much the same now as when Dickens wrote of it; only there are portraits of Dickens hanging on the staircase now, and the ball-room, with its “elevated den,” is a place of solitude. They still show you the rooms where Winkle and Mr. Pickwick slept, as though they were real people, and so great an affection do the members of the Pickwick Club command, that, while pointing out where Tracy Tupman and Mr. Snodgrass danced, the rooms occupied by the Princess Victoria are clean forgotten. So literature scores a success for once; but I wish a too earnest loyalty had not altered the sign from the “Bull Inn” to the “Victoria and Bull Hotel”! The hall is still “a very grove of dead game and dangling joints of mutton,” and the “illustrious larder, with glass doors, developing cold fowls and noble joints and tarts, wherein the raspberry jam coyly withdraws itself, as such a precious creature should, behind a lattice-work of pastry,” still whets the appetites of incoming guests, just as though England stood where she did, and as if our trades were not ruined by foreign competition, our industries decayed, the army gone to the dogs, the navy to Davy Jones, the farmer to the workhouse, and the shopkeeper to the Bankruptcy Court, as we are told they have. No doubt all these things have happened, or are in course of fulfilment, and I suppose the hotel-keepers keep up their licences merely for the love of licensed victualling, while the “commercials” still travel the roads for old acquaintance’s sake rather than for any business that may be doing. How disinterested of them!
XXII
I notice that there is a great tendency among those who have to describe Rochester Cathedral to dismiss it with the remarks that it is quite small, and that it was “restored” in 1825 and 1875. These, of course, are the merest ineptitudes of criticism, and if we allowed praise or censure to be awarded according to the bulk, then that hideous elephantine conventicle, Jezreel’s Temple, on the summit of Chatham Hill, would easily bear away the bell.
But size has little to do with a right appreciation of architecture. Chasteness of proportion, the degree of artistry shown alike in details and in the execution of the whole, are the sole considerations that shall weigh with those who take any sort of an intelligent interest in the architecture of cathedrals; and the admiration of a thing that “licks creation” in the matter of measurement is senseless if it is not wedded to a proper perception of the justness of the parts that go to make its bulk.
The Cathedral of Saint Andrew at Rochester is at least equally interesting with that of Canterbury; and that this should be so is only natural, for one is the complement of the other. Canterbury was the earliest Cathedral in England; the See of Rochester was established immediately afterwards, and was for many years not only intimately associated with that great metropolitan church, but was actually dependent upon it. Then, the early Norman Archbishops and Priors of Canterbury and the Bishops and Priors of Rochester were often intimate personal friends who had come over together from Normandy to England; and the close relations thus established lasted for many years. The See of Rochester was founded by Saint Augustine about A.D. 600, and by him the first Bishop was consecrated, four years later.
ROCHESTER CATHEDRAL
But when the Norman Conquest brought a new era of church building into England, Rochester Cathedral was rebuilt. Gundulf, the second Norman Bishop, the friend of Anselm and Lanfranc, the greatest military and ecclesiastical architect of his time, prepared to erect a new and grander edifice on the ruins of the Saxon church. The number and extent of this great architect’s works are simply prodigious. How he could have packed into even his lengthy life the duties of a Churchman, which we are told by those who knew him he never missed for a single day; the cares of statecraft which also fell to his lot; and the building, not only of his Cathedral, but also of the Tower of London, Rochester Keep, Dartford Church, Malling Abbey, and minor works, we are at a loss to conceive. He was consecrated in 1077 and died in 1108, before he had completed his work here. Ernulf, Prior of Canterbury, succeeded him, and finished the building, which was consecrated in 1130, in the same year that witnessed the completion and consecration of Ernulf’s and Conrad’s new Cathedral at Canterbury. Here, then, we see at once the close connection between the architectural history of these two neighbouring churches. Ernulf had a hand in both; a very large share of the crypt, the west front, and a part of the nave of Rochester was his; while at Canterbury the crypt and the choir were built in collaboration with Prior Conrad. These facts partly explain the unusual and beautiful feature of a choir raised many feet above the level of the nave, which is characteristic both of Canterbury and Rochester Cathedrals, and seen nowhere else in England. And not only in these most prominent features of their architectural construction are the two buildings alike; their stories run curiously parallel, both in their building and in their destruction. Less than fifty years after their simultaneous consecration, both churches were partly destroyed by fire, and their ruined portions rebuilt in the Transitional Norman and Early English styles, by those two architects who are supposed to be one and the same person—William de Hoo, Bishop of Rochester, and that “William the Englishman” who succeeded French William of Sens in rebuilding the choir of Canterbury. At that time, allowing for the great difference in their relative sizes, the two Cathedrals must have borne a strong likeness to one another; and when we look upon Ernulf’s nave here, we look upon the likeness of the nave at Canterbury until that period, between 1390 and 1421, when Prior Chillendon replaced Lanfranc’s work with the light and lofty, but exceedingly uninteresting, Perpendicular nave that now forms the western end of the Primate’s Metropolitan Church.