The Cathedral Church of St. Peter, Gloucester.
NAVE.
The foundation of Gloucester, like that of Ely, has gone through many changes. In 681 it was founded as a nunnery, and remained so till 767. About 821 it was refounded for secular priests; who, in the time of Canute, through the influence of Dunstan, were replaced by Benedictine monks. It remained a Benedictine monastery till 1541, when it was placed on the New Foundation, thus reverting to secular priests once more. The abbey-church then became a cathedral, with a diocese carved out of that of Worcester.
The present cathedral is recorded to have been commenced by Abbot Serlo in 1088, and to have been completed and consecrated in 1100. This statement seems to be generally accepted; but the chief evidence for it, as for the architectural history of the cathedral generally, is the chronicle of Abbot Froucester. Froucester, however, lived two hundred years after the foundation of the Norman cathedral, and his authority on this point can hardly be considered decisive. The plain architectural facts tell a very different tale. In the first place, the design of the nave and presbytery is totally different; the presbytery is archaic and rude, the nave highly advanced in design and elaborate and rich in ornament. The former may well belong to the last decade of the eleventh century; the latter is a whole generation later. In the presbytery the piers are low and of enormous bulk—such vast wasteful blocks of masonry as are to be seen in the nave of St. Alban’s, the choirs of Hereford and Chichester and Norwich: all of them commenced in the eleventh century. In the nave of Gloucester the piers rise to the exceptional height of 30 feet; for a parallel one must go to Tewkesbury, which was not consecrated till 1121; and even that consecration does not necessarily include the nave, where alone these towering cylinders are found. Again, in the presbytery of Gloucester the pier-arcade and triforium are about equal in height. So they are also in the eleventh-century work of Winchester, Norwich, and elsewhere. The diminutive triforiums of the naves of Gloucester and Tewkesbury are without a parallel in English work, though the Abbaye-aux-dames at Caen may be quoted on the other side. Again, the pier-arches of the presbytery are in two square orders, and the vault of the aisle is unribbed. In the nave the orders of the pier-arches are enriched with pairs of rolls and zigzag; the vault of the north aisle has diagonal ribs of late Norman character; and the string-course of the clerestory is a twisted cable elaborately enriched. The aisles, too, are very broad and very lofty.
Indeed, everything in the presbytery has an early look, except its plan and the shape of its apses. The plan is exceedingly complicated; with apse, ambulatory, and radiating chapels. But all three features appear in the ancient church of Vignory, which cannot well be later than the middle of the eleventh century. The radiating chapels, indeed, go back to the very earliest days of Christian architecture; for they formed part of the Basilican church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, as built, A.D. 326, by the Emperor Constantine; and have survived all the transformations which that church has undergone. That the apses, indeed, should not be semicircular—as they are even in St. Hugh’s choir of Lincoln—but polygonal, is certainly startling; though here also there are precedents as far back as the sixth century, in such Byzantine churches as that of S. Apollinare in Classe, near Ravenna. In the nave, on the other hand, everything points to a date well advanced—certainly not earlier than 1122. Not only the loftiness of the columns, but the fact that they are columns, is a mark of twelfth-century work. The column does not occur in Normandy, the mother of our Romanesque; but everywhere the compound pier. Capital and abacus, too, are circular on plan; this is usually a sign of late Norman work. The nave of Southwell, which also has circular capitals and abaci, was not built before 1120. But the ornamentation of the nave is decisive: the zigzag and the cables could not have been executed in the days of Prior Conrad of Canterbury, before the chisel had come into use.
TRIFORIUM OF APSE.
Something, however, was consecrated at Gloucester in 1100; and that was probably the eastern arm of the church—not necessarily the chapels—and as much of the rest of the church as was necessary to complete the enclosure of the monastery: viz., part of the north transept and the wall of the north aisle of the nave as high as the sills of the windows. Then the monks probably turned their attention to the domestic buildings of the monastery, which till now may have been temporary buildings of wood, and only some twenty years later resumed work in the church, which they then completely finished.