English Cathedrals Illustrated / Second and Revised Edition

by Francis Bond

To Bishop Pudsey, to whom we have attributed the high vaults, belongs also the Galilee, c. 1175. He commenced to erect a Lady chapel in the usual position to the east of the choir. But St. Cuthbert, who had an ultra-monastic hatred of womankind, and would not brook to have the chapel even of Our Lady in the neighbourhood of his shrine, showed his displeasure openly by the fissures and cracks and settlements which kept constantly occurring. In despair the bishop had to build in the cramped space between the west end and the precipice, thus blocking up the west end of the church. From the first this Lady chapel seems to have been called the Galilee; nobody knows why. In details it is not unlike the chapel in the keep of Newcastle. Built in the last years of the Transitional period (1145-1190), it is remarkable for the paucity of Gothic detail: the arches are all semicircular; they are not moulded, but ornamented with bands of the old-fashioned zigzag. The bases, indeed, are Transitional in character; and so is the flat voluted leaf of the capitals. But, spite of semicircular arch and Norman ornament, the spirit of the whole—its lightness, grace, and elegance—is Gothic. A building may have every arch pointed and moulded, and yet in its heaviness be Romanesque at heart: e.g., the Cistercian churches of Fountains and Kirkstall, the Augustinian church of Llanthony. In Durham Galilee, on the other hand, one feels that one is in a Gothic building, as truly as one does in presence of the semicircular arcades of Pisa or Lucca. Still more Gothic must have been the effect of the coupled shafts of Purbeck marble before Cardinal Langley added two more shafts of stone. The cardinal is buried in front of the west door of the nave. Here also was the shrine of the remains of the Venerable Bede, stolen from the monks of Jarrow by the sacrist Elfred, one of the most successful of mediæval “body-snatchers.” Pudsey’s work is to be seen also in the external part of the Prior’s doorway opening from the cloister into the east end of the south aisle of the nave.

FROM NORTH.

To the Lancet period (1190-1245) belong the western towers, carried up in the early years of the thirteenth century. At one time they had tall wooden spires. The present battlements were added about 1780.

To the early part of the Geometrical period belongs the noble eastern transept. Its position repeats that of Fountains Abbey, which was finished in 1247, and which also is known as the “Chapel of the Nine Altars.” The object of the eastern extension at Durham was partly to provide nine more chapels, partly to provide a clear space all round the shrine of St. Cuthbert, which, like those of St. Swithun and St. Birinus at Winchester, and that of St. Alban at St. Albans, stood to the east of the high altar, and contained the body of St. Cuthbert and the head of St. Oswald. The idea of the eastern transept seems to come from Hereford and Abbey Dore. It is curious that the floor of the Durham transept is lower than that of the choir. It has been suggested that the height of the vault being fixed by that of the vault of the choir, sufficient height could be gained only by lowering the floor. But I doubt if mediæval architects were in the habit of designing merely for effect in this way: probably some humble practical reason is at the bottom of it. The fact that the ground falls away to the east, or that it is bad ground, and that much of it had to be excavated and carted away, would be quite sufficient for this objectionable drop in level (cf. “Worcester”). The vaulting is, perhaps unavoidably, awkward and clumsy.

The work was not commenced till 1242 (Bishop Farnham), and not completed till about 1280. When it was begun, Lancet windows were still in fashion; when it was completed, they had given way to traceried windows with cusped circles in their heads. Later on, Perpendicular tracery was inserted in the lancets: it is surprising that it has not been hacked out, as in Ripon façade, by architectural “purists.” The circular window, 90 feet across, was rebuilt by Wyatt. The architect was a layman, Richard Farnham, “architector novæ fabricæ Dunelm”; the master-mason “Thomas Moises posuit hanc petram.” The foliated capitals, both here and in the eastern bay of the choir, are of unrivalled beauty. No less remarkable is the perfection of the masonry. The walls are nearly eight feet thick, with huge piers at the angles forming buttresses and weighted by pinnacles; they rise straight from the ground unaided by aisles or flying-buttresses, “yet they have borne the lofty vault (80 feet high) for more than three centuries without the slightest sign of settlement or flaw.” Such was the reverence for St. Cuthbert that not a single person was buried in the cathedral till 1311, when that magnificent prelate Anthony Bek was brought into the Chapel of Nine Altars for interment, through a door on the north of the chapel (now blocked up), not through the cathedral; and even he was not allowed a monument. One sees why there is such a paucity of monuments in this cathedral.

CHAPEL OF NINE ALTARS.

The next thing was to pull down the old Norman apse; to join the transept on to the choir; and to break the transition from Romanesque choir to Gothic transept by remodelling the eastern bays of the choir in the fashion of the day. Also a new Gothic vault was put over the choir; its eastern bay is sexpartite. Here also the details are of exceptional beauty.

For a long time little was done at Durham; the cathedral was structurally complete. In the Curvilinear period (1315-1360) several large windows with flowing tracery were inserted: e.g., the west window of the nave and the north window of the north transept; and four windows (restored) in the south aisle of the choir. The three westernmost windows in the north aisle of the choir were copied in 1848 from the fourteenth-century windows at Sleaford, Holbeach and Boughton Aluph. To this period belongs the tomb of Bishop Hatfield, built in his lifetime (1345-1381), one of the best bits of design in England. The episcopal throne above it looks a little later, and seems to have been designed for some other position, as it does not fit the space between the piers.