Ely, like Peterborough, Ramsey, Thorney, and Crowland, and like Glastonbury, the greatest of all the English monasteries, goes back to early Anglo-Saxon days, when communities of monks and nuns sought solitude and safety in the recesses of far-spreading marshes and fens. In the beginning the monastery was founded as a nunnery, in 673, by Ethelreda, who became the first abbess and Ely’s patron saint. From the nuns it passed to secular canons, and in Dunstan’s time to Benedictine monks. In 1109 the abbot gave way to a bishop, and the Benedictine church became a Benedictine cathedral.
The Bishop of Ely in his island, like the Bishop of Durham in his hill-fortress, possessed powers which no other English ecclesiastic was allowed to share. His territorial possessions included the whole Isle of Ely: and this, “the Liberty of the Bishops of Ely,” was subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the bishop. It is in these two facts—the possession of a local saint, St. Ethelreda or St. Audrey, of high repute through all England; and in the enormous revenues derived from the Isle of Ely—that the explanation lies of the vast scale on which the abbey-church was planned in the eleventh century, of the unparalleled richness of its thirteenth-century presbytery, and of the enormous works undertaken and rapidly carried out in the fourteenth century.
CHOIR
I. Norman.—The present cathedral was commenced in 1083 by Abbot Simeon, brother of Bishop Walkelin of Winchester, where Simeon himself had been a monk. Earlier still he had been a monk at St. Ouen, Rouen; so that he would be well acquainted with the contemporary architecture of Normandy. As was to be expected from the relationship of the founders of the two cathedrals, Ely and Winchester have many points of resemblance. Both are vast in scale, far surpassing the Abbaye-aux-hommes at Caen, or Lanfranc’s copy of it at Canterbury. Both indulge in the luxury of aisles to the west as well as to the east of their transepts. Both had return aisles in the transepts—a feature borrowed from the Abbaye-aux-hommes. Those of Winchester remain; those of Ely have been pushed back to the walls. The nave of Ely had no less than thirteen bays, its transepts three, its choir five. The choir-aisles had square ends; the choir ended in a semicircular apse. The stalls were placed in the crossing and in the two eastern bays of the nave up to 1770, when Essex removed them to the presbytery; Scott placed them in their present position in 1847. There was a central tower; and, instead of two western towers, there was one tower with four flanking turrets. From the lower stories of these turrets, of which only the southern one is left, apses projected eastward. Externally the western transept gave the church great breadth and dignity; and the plan of Bury and Ely was speedily copied at Peterborough, Lincoln, and Wells. Internally it is the most picturesque bit of Norman work in the country. The two towers “riding tandem” may be paralleled at Wymondham and Wimborne, and formerly at Bury and Hereford. Of Abbot Simeon’s eleventh-century work little is left now except the vaulting-shafts in front of his apse, to the east of the organ; the exterior of the west windows of the south transept, which alone have the nail-head moulding; and the lower part of the eastern walls of the transepts, which have the Ionic capital. “The masonry is rude and tooled with a large cross-stroke: the abaci and the soffits of the arches are square and unmoulded.” The choir and the lower part of the transepts are said to have been completed in 1106.
EAST END.
All the rest of the work as far as the west end was designed towards the end of the Norman period: c. 1130. The lateness of the work is seen in the tall, slender, graceful shafts of the triforium and clerestory, and in the substitution of mouldings for carved ornament in the orders of all the arches. It is much nearer Gothic than the contemporary work at Peterborough and Norwich. The proportions are unusually good, both the pier-arches and clerestory being taller than usual in proportion to such a lofty triforium. Accordingly, the proportions of the Norman choir, then standing, were copied in the presbytery added to the choir in the thirteenth century; and the proportions of the presbytery were reproduced in the fourteenth-century choir. It is this, doubtless, which gives such a feeling of unity in Ely, as at Worcester, in spite of the fact that the present cathedral consists of three blocks built in three different centuries in entirely different styles. At Canterbury, Rochester, Ripon, Chester, nave and choir quarrel; at Winchester and York, nave and transept; Ely has evolved harmony out of discord. The work seems to have been done in four sections: first, the completion of the transepts and the crossing and the eastern bays of the nave; second, the western bays; third, the three lower stories of the west transept; fourth, the monks’ and prior’s doorways.