English Cathedrals Illustrated / Second and Revised Edition

by Francis Bond

Perhaps the first thing to do would be to add the top storey to the presbytery; for a church seems not unfrequently to have been consecrated before its clerestory was built, a temporary roof being erected at the level of the triforium. The presbytery being at last really completed, the monks would then proceed to complete the transepts and the crossing, to build the lower stage of the tower, and the nave and west front. When they did reach the nave, they altered the design altogether; as did the Tewkesbury monks also. They put up naves of the worst possible proportions; with piers so lofty that triforium and clerestory were almost squeezed out of existence.

Both have, of course, been credited with some artistic motive. To me it seems that they had found the choir, with its squat pier-arches, intolerably dark; and when they reached the nave, they saw that if they adhered to the early design, the nave would be even darker than the choir. For on the north side the cloister abutted on the aisle-wall, whose windows therefore had to be placed very high up in the wall: giving hardly any light to aisle and nave. To remedy this, therefore, regardless of appearances—for mediæval architects were practical builders first, artists only afterwards—they put up these colossal columns 30 feet high, raising the arches nearly 40 feet above the pavement. In that way the light from the high windows of the north aisle was enabled to penetrate into the church.

Another very remarkable feature in the design of the eastern limb is the utilisation of the triforium. In many churches—e.g., in Beverley and Lincoln minsters—the triforium seems not to have been intended to be used. At Beverley it is walled off from the nave; at Lincoln it has no floor. But in the earlier churches some ritualistic use must have been made of it. At Winchester, Ely, and the Abbaye-aux-hommes at Caen, return-aisles were constructed at the ends of the transepts to provide a broad path by which processions might pass along the triforium from the choir, round the transept, to the nave.

NAVE.

At Gloucester one step further is taken. All the five apses are built two stories high, the upper story of each opening into the triforium: so that five additional chapels are gained for the church. Moreover, since the crypt passes beneath all five apses, another set of five apsidal chapels is obtained underground; so that, without taking into account chapels otherwise arranged for, Gloucester possesses in the minor apses alone no less than fifteen chapels. In fact, leaving out of account the central aisle, Gloucester presbytery is really three churches—an upper, middle, and lower church. The amount of accommodation gained by this ingenious planning is immense.

One wonders that the plan of radiating chapels and practicable triforium was not adopted more frequently. It occurred at Tewkesbury and at Leominster; but in the end it was superseded by the eastern transept thrown across the choir centrally, as at Lincoln, or at its eastern termination, as at Fountains. In Lincoln choir, St. Hugh’s architect, hesitating between two opinions, built eastern transepts as well as return-aisles and apsidal chapels.

For nearly a century the architectural history is a blank. Early in the thirteenth century the wooden ceiling of the nave was replaced by the present quadripartite vault. This involved the demolition of the Norman clerestory, except the jambs of its outer arches, which may still be seen, enriched with zigzag. The north chapel of the crypt also was vaulted, and two windows were inserted in the eastern chapel of the crypt. About the middle of the century were built the north doorways of the cloister, and the vaulted passage in its north-east corner; also part of the west front of the nave was reconstructed. A little later was built, now moved to the north transept, the reliquary (or perhaps it is a gateway), one of the most lovely designs of the thirteenth century, worthy to be put in comparison with the Beverley staircase and the western porches of Ely and St. Albans. Of the time of Henry III. is the oak effigy of Robert Courthose, Duke of Normandy, eldest son of the Conqueror (d. 1135), which lies on a wheeled chest of the fifteenth century, and was formerly placed in the centre of the choir. On the whole, there was not much to show at Gloucester, with the exception of the nave-vault, for the long period 1150 to 1318.

But about the latter year the Norman south aisle of the nave had got into a very dangerous condition. The north aisle was safe, its wall being propped up by the cloister roof. But the vault of the south aisle had thrust the wall eleven inches out of the perpendicular. To save the vault, Abbot Thokey built on to the Norman pilasters the present beautiful buttresses. But the new buttresses also swung over four inches, and the Norman vaulting had to be taken out; the aisle received a new vault, and its eastern bays were enriched with ball-flower. The beautiful windows are of late Geometrical character, and are smothered in ball-flower. The profuse employment of ball-flower is quite a characteristic of the fourteenth-century Gothic of the West country; it is equally remarkable in the grand windows of Leominster, and at Ledbury and Hereford. “A horizontal line drawn just below the spring of the arch of each window at Gloucester cuts through thirty-two bands of ball-flower.” There are no less than 1400 ball-flowers in each window.