The year after the Lady chapel was commenced, the central tower fell; and falling eastward, ruined the three western bays of the Norman choir which still remained. Nevertheless, though the monks had suddenly cast on them the vast task of rebuilding both tower and choir, they did not abandon or intermit their work in the Lady chapel. Side by side the different sets of works went on: the Lady chapel, the central tower, and the choir. The tower was finished in 1342, the Lady chapel c. 1349, the choir probably not much later. How vast the resources of Ely must have been!
In 1322 Alan of Walsingham, then sacrist at Ely and afterwards Prior, set to work to clear away the débris of the piers of the tower. We may believe that when he saw the great open space in the centre of the cathedral, it may well have occurred to him what a pity it would be ever to close it up again to construct the usual circumscribed square central tower, the width only of the nave, under which one feels as if looking up from the bottom of a well. What was left, when he had cleared away the four tower-piers, was an area three times as large as that of the original crossing. This area was an octagon, with four long and four short sides: four long sides opening into nave, choir, and transepts; four short sides opening diagonally into the aisles. Why not throw four wide and four narrow arches over the piers of the octagon, and on these arches erect, not a small square tower, but a vast octagonal tower? Octagonal central towers were unknown in the English cathedrals; but there are plenty abroad—e.g., magnificent examples at Coutances and Siena. The difficulty was how to roof a tower so vast. The noblest course would have been to cover it with a vault of stone. But no English architect ever dared a vault 77 ft. wide. In Spain they might have done it: the vault of the nave of Gerona is 73 ft. in span. In England not so; the York people did not even venture to vault a nave 45 ft. broad.
LADY CHAPEL.
Some sort of wooden roof, therefore, had to be adopted. That roof could not be a flat wooden ceiling; no beams of the length of 77 ft. could be had; and if put up they would have been unsafe. Instead, then, of a flat ceiling, Alan determined on a conical vault of wood like that of York Chapter-house. But what he wanted was not merely a roof, but a lantern. A roof like the York one would have darkened the whole central area, besides being ugly in appearance and difficult to construct. Instead, therefore, of taking the whole of the York cone, he cut the top off, replacing its sharp spike with an octagonal lantern. In this, or in some such way, Alan got at his design: one of the most original and poetic conceptions of the middle ages; but arising, like all the best things in Gothic architecture, out of nothing but the exigencies of building construction.
The problem was solved on paper, but it proved immensely difficult in execution. Alan finished the stone piers and arches in six years, but the timber-work occupied twelve years more. He had to search all over England before he could find oaks big and straight and sound enough for the eight vertical angle-posts of his lantern. They are 63 feet long, with a sapless scantling of 3 ft. 4 in. by 2 ft. 8 in. Oaks like those do not grow now in England. The eight angle-posts are tied together at top and bottom by collars of horizontal beams, and the whole skeleton lantern rests on the tips of inclined beams, whose lower ends rest on corbels behind the capitals of the great piers below.
And as the inclined beams spread to right and left from the great piers below, it follows that the eight sides of the lantern are not placed above the eight arches below. This engineering necessity, also, is wrought into a new source of beauty. For advantage is taken of it to pierce the wall-space above the narrow low arches with four tall windows, so that the central area, so gloomy at Winchester, Lincoln, and Wells, is irradiated with a flood of light from twelve vast windows; four below, eight above. There is not such a lantern church in the world, and certainly there is no such interior as Ely in England. To the west, dark nave; to the east, darker choir; the centre all light and atmosphere. The views from the aisles across the octagon into the choir are veritable glimpses into fairyland. Externally, too, the octagonal lantern groups marvellously with the great western tower; in height, in bulk, in shape they are in perfect ratio.
Side by side with the octagon went up the choir, as was necessary, that the octagon might have abutment to the east. The choir is “a little over-developed and attenuated in detail”; the windows are squat and ungraceful in proportion, and their flowing tracery wiry and unlovely. Window tracery is the one weak point in the Curvilinear work at Ely. Nevertheless, this choir is one of those works whose delicate loveliness disarms criticism. It even disarmed Mr. Fergusson, who says that the proportions of the presbytery are reproduced in the choir, “with such exquisite taste that there is perhaps no single portion of any Gothic building in the world which can vie with it in poetry of design or beauty of detail.”
ALCOCK’S CHAPEL.