RELICS OF THE SAXON CHURCH IN THE NORTH TRANSEPT, ST. ALBANS.
Abbot Paul’s great building was imposing, but it was not beautiful. What is left of his original work has become venerable through age, but there can be no doubt that, could we see it in all its freshness, as it was built, we should consider it very gaunt and ugly indeed. He antedated the typical American in his desire to “lick creation,” and he thought in feet and yards, rather than in terms of beauty. There was much to provoke him to this. He had the relics of the then holiest indigenous martyr, and those of St. Amphibalus, scarcely less holy, in his charge, and ready to his hand lay huge piles of building materials, the bricks, tiles, and stones of the ruined Roman city of Verulamium, that had stood in the valley. The bulk of these materials was formed of tiles, and with these the abbot reared his walls and piers, and the central tower, bedding the tiles in mortar as thick as themselves: so that to modern observers it seems remarkable that, with such a pudding-like mass as this must have been before it dried out, the walls ever consented to stand upright. Some few ornamental features were incorporated from the Saxon church built by Offa, King of the Mercians, in A.D. 793. These are the celebrated balusters, of undoubted Saxon character, which, fitted with Norman capitals and bases, serve as columns in the triforia of the transepts.
Abbot Paul’s building was of the most stark and naked early Norman character. He willingly forswore ornament, if he could thereby add another bay to the length of his Abbey Church, and he and the mid-nineteenth-century builders join hands, in the spirit, across the tremendous gap of seven centuries and a half. Both delighted in plaster, and both hated to show the real materials of which they built. Abbot Paul covered the entire exterior of his Abbey, as well as the interior, from east to west, and up to the topmost battlements of his central tower, with plaster, thick and slab, and thought the result beautiful. And so did his contemporaries. We may take leave to look with a considerable measure of contempt upon their taste. Traces of the plaster facing of the tower, indeed, remained until 1870, when, in course of restoration works, it was removed, revealing the beautiful dark red hue of the Roman tiles of which it is constructed.
A COSTLY ENTERPRISE
The proverb that “the old order changeth, giving place to new,” is most strikingly emphasised in the appearance and history of any great Cathedral. Each successive abbot seems here, as elsewhere, to have desired to do something much better than that done by his predecessors; and so we find Abbot John de Cella, in 1195, with the particularly inadequate sum of one hundred marks left for the purpose by the last abbot, beginning to rebuild Abbot Paul’s gigantic church. De Cella was a supreme artist, but unhappily an idealist who did not count the cost of what he was doing. He pulled down the West Front, and began to rebuild it in the Early English style. Before he had done more than get in the foundations of his new work, bang went the hundred marks, with much else: a circumstance which led the historian, Matthew de Paris, to gibe cruelly at him; saying, very caustically, he wondered the abbot had not recollected the ancient proverb,—“That he who is about to build should compute the cost, lest all begin to jeer at him, saying, ‘This man began to build, and was unable to finish it.’”
How de Cella tried in every direction to raise money for his works is a pitiful story: how he visited, travelled, petitioned, and begged, first of one person, and then of another; how he was “looked coldly upon” and snubbed. Finally, after a great number of years, during which the works were only spasmodically in progress, de Cella died, in 1214, with the porches of his West Front only half finished.
The Early English architecture of de Cella remained, a lovely specimen of the artistic feeling of the period, until 1882, when Lord Grimthorpe destroyed it, on the excuse that it was decayed and could not be made good by modern workmen: building a West Front of his own, in a style which has justly been called “Dissenting Gothic.”
William de Trumpington succeeded de Cella as abbot, and in his one-and-twenty years rebuilt four bays on the north side of the nave and five on the south, in the Early English style. Five others on the south side are of the Decorated period, and are the work of Abbot Eversden, in the fourteenth century. The remainder of the nave is the original gaunt early Norman.
It would be a lengthy treatise that should duly tell the architectural and other history of St. Albans Cathedral: and this is not the place for so prolonged an exercise. Let it be sufficient, then, to tell something of the things done to the fabric in modern times, in the name of “restoration.”