The West Front of Gloucester, restored in 1874, is comparatively uninteresting. The buttresses of the great window are pieced, as are also the parapets. Plain transoms cross the lights of the great west window, the tracery of which is very elaborate when looked at from within. The old towers have disappeared.
The South Porch is the principal entrance. It is the work of Morwent (1421-1437). Over the doorway stand St. Peter and St. Paul and the four Evangelists, and below them are King Osric and Abbot Serlo, the founders of the Abbey church. In the niches of the buttress stand St. Jerome, St. Ambrose, St. Augustine and St. Gregory. The windows of this porch have been formed by piercing the tracery of the inside. Over the porch is an unfinished parvis. The doors date from the Fifteenth Century.
We now enter the Nave.
“The first impression of the nave changes all earlier thoughts of the age of the building. It is unmistakably Norman, grand beyond expression, but cold, severe and deathly white. The stained glass (mostly modern) of the Norman and Decorated windows fails to supply the evident lack of colour.
“There was a time when lines of blue and scarlet and gold relieved the white vaulted roof, when altars agleam with colour and pale flickering lights gave light and brightness to the chill whiteness of this vast and mighty colonnade. On Sunday evenings, when the nave is filled with worshippers and the bright searching daylight is replaced by the yellow gleam of the little tongues of fire above the great and massive arches, the want of colour is little felt, and the noble and severe beauty of the matchless Norman work in the great nave strikes the beholder. The nave of Gloucester, to be loved and admired as it deserves, and as it appeared to men in the days of the Plantagenet Kings, must be seen in one of the many crowded evening services.
“Save that the altars with their wealth of colour and light are gone, and the lines of colouring and the glint of gold of the Norman wooden ceiling no longer are visible on the stone-vaulted roof above and the south aisle Norman windows are replaced with exquisite Decorated work of the time of the second Edward, there is no great structural change since the day at the close of the Eleventh Century when Abbot Fulda from Shrewsbury preached his famous sermon to the Gloucester folk, the sermon in which he foretold the death of the imperious and cruel Rufus in words so plain, so unmistakable, that Abbot Serlo of Gloucester, who loved the great wicked King, in spite of his many sins, was alarmed and at once sent to warn his master, but in vain. Rufus disregarded the Gloucester note of alarm, and a few hours later the news of the King of England’s bloody death, in the leafy glades of the New Forest, rang through Normandy and England.
“Yes, it is the same nave, only colder and whiter, on which Anselm, the saintly archbishop, and Rufus gazed; the same avenue of massy pillars—then scarcely finished—through which Maud the Empress often went to her prayers with her chivalrous half-brother, Earl Robert. Beauclerc, her father, too, and some grey-haired survivors of Hastings must have looked on these huge columns crowned with their round arches which excite our wonder to-day. They were a curious fancy of the architect of Serlo; or was it not probably a design of a yet older artist of Edward the Confessor? These enormous round shafts, which are the peculiar feature of the nave of our storied abbey, have only once been repeated, probably by the same architect, in the neighbouring abbey of Tewkesbury, a few years later. There is nothing like them on either side of the silver streak of sea. The Tewkesbury copies are slightly smaller; otherwise they are exact reproductions of Gloucester.”—(S.)
The Nave differs from other Norman naves like those of Peterborough, Ely and Norwich.
“The unique features here are the great height of the massive circular columns, fourteen in number, and the consequently dwarfed triforium or gallery running over the main arches. There are traces to be seen of the original Norman clerestory under the Perpendicular windows, and, judging from this, the height of the clerestory, as originally constructed, must have been but little less than that of the piers in the nave.
“This Norman clerestory was altered at the same time that the roof of the nave was vaulted—viz. in 1242, in the time of Henry Foliot. This work was done by the monks themselves, who thought, as Professor Willis suggests, that they could do it better than common workmen. Their work is made of a light and porous kind of stone, treated with plaster on the under-side, and it was rendered necessary by the previous roof, which was of wood, having been destroyed by fire in 1190. Of this fire the piers certainly show the traces to this day, all having become reddened and slightly calcined. To make the new clerestory the whole of the original Norman work over the arcade of the triforium was removed, with the exception of the jambs of the side-lights (which extended beyond the arches of the triforium) and the wall between them.”—(H. J. L. J. M.)