History of the Cathedral Church of Wells / As Illustrating the History of the Cathedral Churches of the Old Foundation

by Edward A. Freeman

Nothing more remains to be spoken of in the fabric of the church itself, beyond a few insertions in the Perpendicular style—such, for instance, as the window tracery inserted in the nave and transept. I do not know the exact date of this not very important change, but it must have been late in the fourteenth or early in the fifteenth century. For it is plain that it was made before the reconstruction of the cloister and the addition of the rooms over it, as these last block one of the windows inserted in the transept. Now these rooms were built by Bishop Bubwith,[157] so that the insertion of the tracery was made before his time, not improbably when the southern tower was carried up. A more important change, and one which must have happened later, was the insertion of a fan-tracery vault in the central tower, hiding the original arcades which remain above it. One hardly sees the reason of this insertion, as there could be no reason for hanging bells in the central tower of a church which had two towers at the west end.

Thus, after about two hundred years from the beginning of the present building in the days of Jocelin, we may look on the cathedral church of Saint Andrew as at last finished. It was finished, in a sense, before the end of the thirteenth century, when everything had been built which was needed for its ecclesiastical completeness. But it was in the course of the fifteenth century that it finally assumed the shape with which we are all familiar, and which has from that time remained almost unchanged. Now then we have reached the point at which we can estimate the place which fairly belongs to the church of Wells among the other churches of England and of Christendom. As it seems to me, that position, as I began by saying, is a special and remarkable one. I need not say that, in point of size and splendour, the church of Wells has no claim to a place in the first rank of European, or even of English, churches. Setting aside the Welsh churches, and the churches which have become cathedral without being originally meant for that rank, Wells is one of the very smallest of English episcopal churches. It is hardly fair to compare it with Carlisle, which is a mere fragment, or with Hereford, which has lost its western tower, and with it a part of its nave. But it is, in point of scale, with Carlisle, Hereford, Lichfield, and Rochester, or again with non-cathedral churches like Southwell, Beverley, and Tewkesbury, that Wells must fairly be compared, not with churches like Canterbury and York, or even like Salisbury and Gloucester. And among churches of its own class it certainly ranks very high. It has one accidental advantage in having been much less damaged by mere destroyers than any of them, except perhaps Beverley. But this is not all. I think that those under whose hands the church of Wells gradually grew up showed a wiser discretion, and a greater skill in adapting their changes and additions to what they found existing, than was shown in most of the other cases. Let us take the two ends of the church, the two parts to which a church owes so much of its external character, the east end and the west front. Now the west front of Wells is a thing which it is the fashion to rave about. It is the finest part of the church; the finest thing in Somersetshire; the finest thing in England; for aught I know, the finest thing in the world. I am perverse enough to think differently, and to look on the west front as the one part of the church of Wells which is thoroughly bad in principle. It is doubtless the finest display of sculpture in England; but it is thoroughly bad as a piece of architecture. I am always glad when I get round the corner, and can rest my eye on the massive and simple majesty of the nave and transepts. The west front is bad, because it is a sham—because it is not the real ending of the nave and aisles, but a mere mask, devised in order to gain greater room for the display of statues. The architecture, in short, is sacrificed to the sculpture. A real honest west front, if it have two towers, will be made by the real gable of the nave flanked by a tower at the end of each aisle. So it is at York; so it is at Abbeville; so it is at Llandaff. Or a front may, like those of Winchester, Gloucester, and Bath, have no towers at all, but may simply consist of the endings of the nave and aisles, set off with turrets and pinnacles. Or a front may be, like that one glorious and unequalled front at Peterborough, built up in front of and across the endings of the nave and aisles, but without at all professing to be itself their finish. All these forms are honest; but I deny the honesty of such fronts as those at Wells, Salisbury, and Lincoln.[158] In all these cases the front is not the natural finish of the nave and aisles; it is a blank wall built up in a shape which is not the shape which their endings would naturally assume. It is therefore a sham; it is a sin against the first law of architectural design, the law that enrichment should be sought in ornamenting the construction, in giving a pleasing form, and such enrichment as may be thought good, to those features which the construction makes absolutely necessary, not in building up anything simply for the sake of effect. The main features in a front should be the windows and doorways. There must be some windows and some doorways; it is the business of the architect to make these necessary features the main sources of ornament. Now in the Wells front the windows and doorways are made nothing of; they could not be altogether got rid of, but they seem to have been felt as mere interruptions to the lines of sculpture. They are therefore stowed away as they best may be, and they do not form, as they should, the main features of the front. Look, for instance, at Llandaff; the front suffers much from the incongruity of the two towers built at different times: but look at the ending of the nave itself; that perfect composition of lancets, inside and out, is, as it should be, the main feature; at Wells the west window is made nothing of; it is simply cut through the sculpture. The small size of doorways is a common fault of English as opposed to foreign churches; but at Wells they reach the extreme point of insignificance in those narrow mouse-holes at the end of the aisles, through one of which we are commonly driven to creep, while the west doorway remains shut. But even the west doorway itself is a very small mouthful, I will not say after Laon or Rheims, but after York; nay even at Lichfield and Salisbury the doorways have a little more of dignity than they have at Wells. In a really good design the architectural features ought to be the first thing; sculpture or any other source of ornament should be secondary. At Wells the rule is reversed; a sham wall is built up and loaded with statues, and the windows and doorways are left to shift for themselves.

You may perhaps be surprised, perhaps even a little indignant, at the freedom of my criticism on a work which you have doubtless all learned to look on with traditional admiration. But there is nothing like truth, and I think that, if you go and fairly examine for yourselves, you will see that the censures which I have made on our west front rest on good grounds. Those censures are pretty well summed up in the one charge of unreality. But, if we can get over that charge, there is much to be said for the design on the score of boldness and originality. You know that the towers, instead of standing, as usual, at the ends of the aisles, stand beyond them, an arrangement which I have seen nowhere else except in the metropolitan church of Rouen.[159] Now in a church of the comparatively small size of Wells the effect of this arrangement is undoubtedly to sacrifice height to width, and thereby to take away from the truest dignity of the front. Still it is not to be denied that even the width has a dignity of its own, and the arrangement was well planned with regard to the special object in view, that of gaining the greatest possible space for the display of sculpture. And after all, though the west front of Wells is a sham, it is by no means so contemptible a sham as the west fronts of either Salisbury or Lincoln. The form given to the front, if unreal, is at least stately. At Salisbury the form given to the front is equally unreal, and it is indescribably mean; as no western towers were intended, one cannot conceive why the natural endings of the nave and aisles were not left, as at Winchester, Gloucester, and Bath, and in our great parish churches of Yatton and Crewkerne. The Wells front again is at least a whole; the Lincoln front is a mass of incongruous pieces. Large parts of two earlier fronts are left to disturb the harmony of the design, and a blank wall is actually carried in front of two of the noblest towers in the world, as if of set purpose to destroy their effect. The Wells front, after all, unreal as it is, has more connexion with the main building than that of Beverley, where a front, poorly imitated from that of York, is built up against the church, with a gable which has no reference whatever to the real gable of the nave.[160] At Wells, again the later builders seem to have had more feeling than usual for the harmony of the front. Wells has not suffered like Southwell, where a huge Perpendicular window was cut through the noble Romanesque front, and a sham wall with a flat battlement carried up above it. The towers were carried up in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in a way which harmonizes very well with the general design of the front, though there is no kind of adaptation to its details. And here comes the question which I believe everybody asks at a first sight of Wells Cathedral. As I once heard it clearly and tersely put, "Well, that is a fine piece of work, but what are those pieces without their tops?" Every one, I suppose, feels the unfinished look of the towers; the eye craves for something or other more than there is, be it pinnacles, spires, or anything else. Now I once very carefully examined the tops of the towers in company with Mr. Parker, and we could see no signs that there ever had been, or had been designed to be, any stone-work more than there is now. But any sort of finish that any one chooses to imagine may have been added, or designed to be added, in wood. I suspect that people seldom take in how many of our great churches had their towers finished with spires of wood covered with lead or shingle. Spires of this sort were either destroyed by accident or taken away in wantonness at Old Saint Paul's, Lincoln, Ely, Hereford, Exeter, Southwell, and a crowd of other churches. A single one of two still remains at Ottery Saint Mary. On the Continent they are far more common, and they sometimes furnish beautiful examples of work in lead. Among the English examples, the towers of Lincoln supply the example which is most instructive for our own case. The spires are gone, but the angle turrets are still finished with pinnacles of wood covered with lead. Whether such an arrangement as this ever actually existed at Wells I do not know, but there can be no doubt that a finish of this kind, spires of wood sheeted with lead, with pinnacles of the same materials at the angles, would be the true means of getting rid of the flat and imperfect look of which every one complains.

If we turn to the east end, we shall, as I have already said, find the church of Wells holding a far higher position among its fellows. The east ends of English churches are of various kinds; the apsidal form, that most usual on the Continent, being the rarest. We do indeed find the German apse without aisles repeated at Lichfield, and the French apse with its divergent chapels is found on a vast scale at Westminster, and on a smaller at Tewkesbury. And there are a few other examples of apses of less merit and importance at Pershore, Coventry, Wrexham, and a few other places.[161] But the apsidal arrangement never was thoroughly English. Of the three great examples Tewkesbury is the only one where the apse fills its proper function of a canopy over the high altar. At Westminster the high altar is displaced by the shrine of Eadward the Confessor, and at Lichfield it is not the choir, but a Lady chapel of the full height, of which the apse is the ending. English east ends fall for the most part under two classes. Sometimes, as at York, Lincoln, Ely, Beverley, and Southwell, the Lady chapel and whatever else stands east of the high altar is carried on at the full height of the church. In other cases, as at Winchester, Hereford, Exeter, and Salisbury, the Lady chapel and other chapels east of the choir are much lower than the main body of the church. Now of these arrangements I confess that I myself prefer the apse to all others. No other plan gives such dignity to the high altar, or makes it so evidently the central and crowning point of the whole church. There is undoubtedly great stateliness in such an arrangement as that of York and Lincoln; but its good effect is almost wholly confined to the outside. The high altar seems to have come where it is by accident; its position is marked by a mere screen, not by anything in the arrangement of the building itself. In the third arrangement, where all that is east of the choir is much lower than the choir, some share of its proper dignity is or may be restored to the high altar. But, on the other hand, it is not easy to add on a lower building which shall be in full harmony with the loftier parts of the church. There is something insignificant about the Lady chapel at Salisbury, and it is hard to admire, externally at least, the long masses of low chapels at Winchester and Saint Alban's. A happy accident, as I have already explained, gave the opportunity at Wells of producing a form of east end which I think certainly surpasses all others of its class. The general outline and proportion of the church are no less excellent, and it is fortunate in having had everything finished, and in having nothing destroyed. At Hereford, as I have already said, the western tower has vanished, and it has carried part of the nave away with it. But, even while it stood, the single western tower could never have grouped so well with the central lantern as the two western towers at Wells. Wimborne, the chief surviving example of this arrangement, I have heard irreverently compared to driving tandem, and I cannot deny the aptness of the saying.[162] At Southwell, where the grouping of the three towers is as perfect as it well may be, the general effect has greatly suffered by the lowering of the roofs throughout. We shall hardly venture to compare the four limbs of Wells with the four limbs of Beverley, but of the Beverley west front I have already spoken, and the general effect of the church is altogether ruined through the central tower never having been carried up. Even at Lichfield, the faultless grace of the three spires, even the loveliness of the apse, cannot reconcile us to the long low body and to the extravagant length of the eastern limb. The eastern view of Lichfield, graceful as it is, cannot compare with the real stateliness of the east end of Wells. I have seen many fine churches both in our own country and abroad, many of them of course on a scale which might seem to put Wells out of all comparison. But I can honestly say that I know of no architectural group which surpasses the harmony and variety of our own cathedral, as seen by the traveller as he first enters the city from Shepton Mallet.

From the outside we turn to that of which the outside is after all the mere shell. When we enter the church, we find ourselves in a building which can fairly hold its own against competitors of its own class. The nave has a distinct character of its own: there may be differences of taste as to its merit, but it has a character, and that character is clearly the result of design. The main lines of the interior are horizontal rather than vertical. We can hardly say that there is any division into bays; no vaulting-shafts run up from the ground, nor does the triforium take, as usual, the form of a distinct composition over each arch. In short we cannot, as we can in most churches, take each arch with the triforium and clerestory over it as a thing existing by itself. One would rather say that three horizontal ranges, one over the other, all converged to the centre, without thinking of what was above or below them. Now tastes may differ as to whether this is a good arrangement or not, but there is no doubt that it is in its way an effective arrangement; there is no nave in which the eye is so irresistibly carried eastward as in that of Wells. And it is worth notice that this arrangement, in its fulness, is confined to the nave; in the transepts the bays are much more clearly marked. The idea of producing this marked horizontal effect was clearly one which came into the heads of the designers as they were working westwards.

It might have been expected that the marked prominence which is thus given to the horizontal line might have gone far to destroy all effect of height in the interior; but it is not so. There is no special feeling of height in Wells Cathedral—not so much, for instance, as there is in the church of Saint Mary Redcliff; but there is no such crushing feeling of lowness as there is at Lincoln. This I imagine to be mainly owing to the form of the arch chosen for the vaulting, one boldly but not acutely pointed, and to the way in which the lantern-arches fit into the vault. Contrast this with the far larger and loftier nave of York. In that nave the positive height is second only to Westminster among English churches, and the design of the separate bays can hardly be surpassed in its soaring effect. But in the direct eastern or western view the nave of York loses almost its whole effect, partly, no doubt, from the excessive breadth, but partly also from the flat and crushing shape of the vaulting-arch. Another point which I think helps to redress the balance between horizontal and vertical effect is the great height of the clerestory. In a church where the vertical bays are strongly marked I do not think that great comparative height in the clerestory helps to increase the effect of height. But in such cases the question rather lies between the arcade as one thing, and the triforium and clerestory together as another. Here the question lay between the triforium and the clerestory, and I cannot help thinking that, if the triforium had been on the same scale as that in the choir of Ely, the effect of height would have been less. At any rate, the nave of Wells makes the most of its small actual height: so do the choir and presbytery also; for, though I cannot at all admire the kind of vault which is there used, the shape of the arch is as judiciously chosen as it is in the nave. In the presbytery we also get the vaulting-shafts rising from the ground, so as to give the vertical division, and the consequent effect of height, in its highest perfection. Of the exquisite beauty of the Lady chapel, looked on, as it should be, not as a part of the whole, but as a distinct and almost detached building, I have already spoken. In short, the internal effect of the church, whether looked at as a whole or taken in its several parts, if not of the highest order, which its comparatively small scale forbids, may claim a high place among churches of its own class.

I think then on the whole that, even looking at the church by itself, we have every reason to be thankful for what we have got. We have not a church of the first order; but we have a church whose several parts fit very well together, all whose parts have been finished, and of which no part has been destroyed. And I may add that we may be thankful for another thing, for the goodness of the stone of which the greater part of the church is built. The sculpture of the west front indeed has crumbled away; but elsewhere at Wells, as at Glastonbury, wherever the work has not been wantonly knocked away, it is as good as when it was first cut. Now we might have had a church like Chester or Coventry, where the whole surface of the stone has crumbled away, and where the whole ornamental design has become unintelligible. I have said that the church of Wells forms a harmonious whole, that it was perfectly finished, and that no part has been destroyed; and this is a great thing to say. Let me compare the good fortune of Wells in this respect with the cathedral church of a much more famous city at the other end of England. At Carlisle there is a noble choir, ending in what is probably the grandest window in England. If that choir only had transepts, nave, and towers to match it, the church of Carlisle would be a splendid church indeed. But the choir is built up against a little paltry transept and central tower, and nothing remains by way of nave but two bays of the original small Norman church, the rest having utterly vanished. Here then is a church which does not form a harmonious whole, a church which remains utterly unfinished, and of which one essential part has been destroyed. Or, without taking such an extreme case as this, we may compare our church with some of those of which I have already spoken, with Hereford, Southwell, Beverley, and Tewkesbury. In all of these some important feature has either never been finished or has been destroyed at a later time. The church of Wells then, simply taken by itself, claims a high place among buildings of its own class, that is, among minsters of the second order. But, as I began these lectures by saying, the real charm of Wells does not lie in the church taken by itself, but in the church surrounded by its accompanying buildings. Of some of these I must now speak a word. I do not intend to go minutely into either their architecture or their history; but some of them are inseparably connected both with the fabric and with the foundation of the cathedral. And it is the preservation of them which gives Wells its peculiar character. Each part may easily be equalled or surpassed, but the whole has no rival in England, and I cannot think that it has many in Christendom.

It was during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, alongside of the works in the church itself of which I have already spoken, that those subordinate buildings were also rising, which have given Wells this its peculiar character as the most complete and most uninjured example of the buildings of a great secular foundation. The greatest name in this way in the course of the fourteenth century is one which we all know, that of Bishop Ralph of Shrewsbury; I have already spoken of him as having probably had a chief hand in the reconstruction of the choir and presbytery. He also gave the palace its present form. The house had been originally built by Jocelin. The great hall had been added by Robert Burnell. It was Ralph who fenced himself in with a moat and a wall as we now see.[163] But his greatest work is to be looked for on the other side of the church, and it is closely connected with the constitutional change which may be looked on as putting the finishing stroke to the existing constitution of the cathedral, I mean the foundation of the College of Vicars. The great offices of the church were now all in being, and the relations between the two classes of Canons had been pretty well fixed. It now remained to fix the exact position of that subordinate body of clergy which had grown up through the prevalent practice of non-residence among the Canons. The Vicar, we have seen, was at first simply the personal deputy of some particular Canon, appointed by him to discharge his duties in his absence. But it could hardly fail that the Vicars as a body should gradually enter into some sort of relation with the Chapter as a body. This would especially be the case, when residence became the fixed duty of one class of Canons and no part of the duty of another. The Vicars would gradually change from deputies of absent Canons into assistants of Canons who at least professed to be present. As such, it was natural that they should receive a fixed status in the church, and, with the ideas of those times, it was equally natural that they should receive somewhat of corporate independence. The Vicars of Wells then, like the Vicars of most or all of the Old Foundation churches, became a distinct corporation. They were subordinate to the Chapter as regards their duties in the church, but they were independent of it as regards the estates with which they were endowed, and they were governed by statutes given them by their founder. That founder was, as we all know, Ralph of Shrewsbury. Most of you, no doubt, have seen the picture with the Latin verses in which the Vicars set forth their hard case to the Bishop, how they are driven to live where they can about the town, and how he promises to give them a house where they may live together.[164] Then arose the Vicars' Close of Wells, and, though the present buildings mainly belong to a later time, yet portions of Ralph's work may still be seen, especially in the hall, where several of his windows still remain. But the complaint of the Vicars, that they were scattered through the streets of the town, deserves notice. In the first state of things, as is plain from the stories told by Richard of the Devizes, the Vicar lived in the house of the Canon whom he represented.[165] But it is equally plain that as the number of prebends increased, even the institution of ribs did not provide a house for every Canon, and, as the institution of special Residentiaries became fixed, the available houses would be mainly occupied by them. We can thus understand how there might now be many Vicars unprovided with any place to dwell in. The buildings of the Close were recast and almost rebuilt by the three executors of Bishop Beckington, Richard Swan the Provost, Hugh Sugar the Treasurer, and John Pope, Prebendary of Saint Decumans.[166] They were commissioned to dispose of the unbequeathed portion of the Bishop's goods to pious uses at their discretion, and, besides other works in other parts of the diocese, the Vicars' Close now assumed its present shape. In that shape it is certainly without a rival. I know nothing to compare to those two quiet ranges of houses, the hall at one end, the chapel at the other, suggesting the very perfection of collegiate life; and, as an ingenious device for turning a piece of practical convenience into a matter of high architectural ornament, nothing can well surpass the chain-bridge. I need not say that the original design of the institution was at once broken in upon as soon as marriage was allowed to its members. The two rooms, with the separate approach to each, were designed as college rooms for men who took their meals in the common hall; and, as college rooms, they give very far from contemptible accommodation. But they were, of course, utterly unsuited for the reception of wives and families, and the architectural features of the Close have been sadly damaged by throwing two or more houses into one. I have always cherished a sort of dream that, by some means or other, the old institution of the Vicars' College and the new institution of the Theological College might be rolled into one, that the office of Vicar in the cathedral might be held by young clergymen and by men preparing for holy orders, and that collegiate life might be again restored in the old hall of Ralph and Beckington. But, however this may be, I would at least call on the clerical members of the College to stick to their good old title of Priest Vicar, and not to call themselves, or allow themselves to be called, by the new-fangled name of Minor Canon. It is historically incorrect; it was in use at Saint Paul's and at Hereford, but it was never in use at Wells. That it is better sounding or more honourable than that of Priest Vicar I cannot believe. To me it seems exactly the reverse, as the stress is always laid on the word Minor, never on the word Canon. And it tends to confound the Priest Vicars of our Old Foundations with men holding a position very inferior to theirs, namely the Petty Canons or Minor Canons of the churches founded by Henry the Eighth. These are simple subordinates of the Chapter, without any separate endowment or corporate independence of any kind. The supposed legal necessity for the change arises from a misconstruction of an Act of Parliament, which really orders nothing of the kind. To hear of a Minor Canon of Wells is as bad as to hear of an Honorary Canon; that is to say, to hear a Canon or Prebendary of Wells, whose stall dates perhaps from the twelfth century, pulled down to the level of those mysterious personages, not only without revenues but without either rights or duties, who have sprung up at Bristol or Manchester within the present reign.

The history of Vicars' Colleges at Wells and elsewhere should be written in full. No one could do it so well as my friend Mr. Dimock, once himself a Priest Vicar of the collegiate church of Southwell.[167] One point to be worked out with special care would be the steps and causes by which the office came to be held by laymen. The change in this respect was fully recognized by the charter of Elizabeth, which confirmed the rights and estates of the Vicars, and regulated, without absolutely fixing, the numbers of the two classes of Vicars, clerical and lay. It is a change which has not taken place everywhere. The Vicars at York are still a purely clerical body, the lay members of the choir being mere stipendiaries. And, unless some change has been made very lately, the same is the case at Hereford.[168] And as the Priest Vicars of our Old Foundations should never be confounded with the Petty Canons of the New, still less should the lay members of those colleges, equal in corporate rights to their clerical brethren, ever be degraded to the level of the mere lay clerks or singing-men of other churches, who are sometimes simply stipendiaries, and who, even when they are statutable officers, have no separate endowment or corporate being.