FROM NORTH-EAST.
Hereford boasts a cathedral which, though one of the smallest, is, both externally and internally, one of the most picturesque in the country. To the archæologist and the architectural student, its mélange of styles makes it a perfect treasure-house of mediæval design: early and late Norman, Transitional, Lancet, early, middle, and late Geometrical, Curvilinear, Perpendicular and Tudor work are all well represented in the structure, to say nothing of the Gothic of Wyatt, Cottingham and Scott.
Hereford is one of the oldest of all the sees, going back, at any rate, to the year 601, when St. Augustine had a conference with the Welsh bishops. It owed its riches and reputation mainly to two saints, King Ethelbert and Bishop Thomas Cantilupe. In the year 792 the great King of Mercia, Offa, inveigled Ethelbert, King of East Anglia, to the west of England, where he was treacherously murdered. “On the night of his burial, a column of light, brighter than the sun, rose to heaven;” three days later his ghost appeared and gave directions for the removal of his body. He was interred at Hereford; and in 825 “a noble church of stone” was erected over his remains. Of this or any subsequent Anglo-Saxon cathedral nothing survives.
I. Early Norman.—In 1079 the present cathedral was commenced by Robert de Losinga. Like the founder of Norwich cathedral, he was probably from Lorraine. He held the see till 1091. It is asserted by Sir Gilbert Scott that none of his work remains. It seems certain that the east wall of the south transept, the pier-arcade of the choir, and perhaps the triforium also, are eleventh-century work. The design of the transept is curiously artless and archaic. The tall arches of its wall arcade are reminiscences of many a church in Lombardy; the squat little balustraded triforium is just what one finds in the eleventh-century transepts of St. Albans and Chester and Pershore. Proceeding into the choir aisles, probability rises into certainty. The masonry is of the roughest, and coursed in the most casual way; the strings and the bases have the rudest caricatures of mouldings. The piers, too, are just the heavy masses of wall which one finds at St. Albans and Chichester: it is impossible that these piers and the light cylinders of the nave can both have been erected in the twelfth century. What has deceived archæologists is that, though the skeleton of the choir is of the eleventh century, it was smartened up immensely in the following century. In fact, it has gone through a similar process to that which took place in Romsey choir, where the early Norman caps have been recarved by a late Norman sculptor; only at Hereford the renovation has been much more drastic. Looking at the east wall of the south transept, it is impossible to believe that the noble bay of the triforium above the arch of the aisle is of the same date as the balustraded triforium to the right. The Norman choir and its aisles originally ended in three parallel eastern apses, after the fashion of the ninth-century choir of St. Ambrogio, Milan, with probably a rectangular chapel east of the central apse, such as is found at Aix-la-Chapelle. From the south transept projected eastward a rectangular sacristy, with crude, unribbed vault, which still remains, but was enlarged to the east in the fifteenth century.
SOUTH TRANSEPT.
II. Late Norman, 1100-1145.—To this period belong the nave and the renovation of the choir. The capitals of the nave, near which the stalls of the canons stood, are richly carved, and, like all pre-Gothic carving, are full of classical survivals, acanthus, honeysuckle, etc. The Norman work is far richer than that of Ely, Peterborough, Durham, Gloucester or Tewkesbury; these capitals and those of Southwell nave and Romsey lead up to the rich transitional capitals of Oxford Cathedral. The design of the nave, and still more the choir, was probably the most solid and satisfactory in the country, not even excepting Durham. The triforium is especially magnificent; a copy of it was executed in the transept of Romsey. The bays of the choir are separated by broad pilasters, apparently to carry broad transverse arches. But whether these arches were intended to carry some form of wooden roof (their spandrils being built up), or a vault, cannot be determined.
III. Transitional.—Then, c. 1186, following the precedent of Romsey, the three Norman apses were pulled down in order to provide (1) a processional aisle, of four bays, connecting together the side-aisles of the Norman choir; (2) a double chapel, a prolongation of the Norman eastern chapel. The new processional aisle had probably two eastern chapels, two to the north, two to the south. The processional aisle with the double chapel was altogether six bays in length, and therefore formed an eastern transept—one of the earliest eastern transepts in England. The side walls of the old Norman eastern chapel were pierced with windows, unglazed, to improve the lighting of the new aisle-chapel on either side. In the jambs of these windows are shafts with conventional stalky foliage; while the arch of the window-head is enriched with the Norman diamond ornament. The vaulting-ribs are enriched with zigzag. The central piers have, one conventional foliage, the other a scalloped capital. In the south-east transept there are remains of the doorway, and a plinth which seems to have supported a pier between the two eastern chapels. Some five or six years later a similar processional aisle with five eastern chapels was built at Abbey Dore, where, however, it does not form an eastern transept. The piers of the processional aisle are so arranged that two of them are in a line with the centre of the semicircular arch which led from the choir into the former Norman central apse. The intention of the builder evidently was to reconstruct the east end of the choir, or perhaps to rebuild the whole choir, substituting for the single semicircular arch a pair of pointed arches, as at Exeter. This was never done, however; and so, quite fortuitously, Hereford gets the most charming vistas from the choir across to the eastern transept and the Lady chapel.
