English Cathedrals Illustrated / Second and Revised Edition

by Francis Bond

NAVE.

IV. Lancet.—About 1220 the upper and eastern parts of the Lady chapel were completed. It is a work of great beauty, especially in the rich clustering of shafts in the window-jambs and in the fine composition of the east end, with its quintet of lancets. The chapel is curiously low internally. The builder was an exceptionally cautious person. He not only provided for the thrusts of the vault by heavy buttresses and pinnacles, but, to get the thrusts as low down as possible, he made the vault spring below the window-heads. Moreover, down below he constructed a lofty crypt, thus raising considerably the floor of the Lady chapel. Thus encroached on from below and from above, the interior of the Lady chapel contrasts remarkably with its lofty and imposing exterior. Externally, moreover, as the window-heads could not rise high, owing to the low spring of the vault, a large amount of wall-surface was left, and had to be decorated. This was done in a remarkable way; the arcade which runs round it being the old-fashioned Norman arcade of intersecting semicircular arches—probably the last appearance of this design on the stage. Another puzzle is that the external doorway leading to this crypt contains Transitional details. Probably the whole of the lower part of the Lady chapel was built in the Transitional period. The crypt-worship of the eleventh century had gone out of fashion; and the Hereford crypt, like that at Norwich, was probably built as a golgotha or charnel-house.

LADY CHAPEL.

V. Early Geometrical.—The history of the cathedral now resolved itself for the next hundred years into a series of attempts to get rid of the “dim, religious light,” so dear to the modern, so abhorrent to the mediæval ecclesiastic. Hereford choir was even worse lighted than Norman churches generally, being blocked to east and west by transepts, and having enormously bulky piers. So the Norman clerestory was taken down, and a Gothic clerestory with an inner arcade—an early and interesting example of plate-tracery—was substituted. Moreover, the choir was made fireproof by being vaulted in stone, c. 1250.

VI. Middle Geometrical.—About 1260 more drastic measures were taken with the Norman north transept. It was pulled down bodily, and rebuilt on a design which is perhaps the most original, as it certainly is one of the most beautiful, in the history of English Gothic architecture. To the north and west were built enormous windows, with tracery of cusped circles, quite exceptional in their elongation, more like late German than English work. On the east side was built an aisle of exquisite beauty. Its arches, almost straight-sided—its triforium windows, a ring of cusped circles set under a semicircular arch—its clerestory windows, spherical triangles enclosing a cusped circular window—the composition of the triforium—the north and west windows—are quite unique, except so far as they were copied in later work in the city and neighbourhood. At the south end of the aisle is the exquisite tomb of Bishop Peter Aquablanca (d. 1268); no doubt built in his lifetime. The tomb is as unique as the transept, and closely resembles it in design. The inference is that Bishop Aquablanca built the transept. The credit of it, however, is constantly given to his successors, apparently on account of his private vices. But sinners as well as saints have liked to leave memorials behind them in stone; and, moreover, Aquablanca had his good points. To this day four thousand loaves are distributed every year out of funds which he bequeathed. It is recorded, too, that, of a fine which was imposed on the citizens for encroachments on his episcopal rights, he remitted one half, and handed over the other for works on the cathedral. Moreover, he was a foreigner, from Chambery; and has probably received no more favourable judgment from the English chroniclers than they were wont to give to foreign favourites of the king who swallowed up the best things in the English Church.

NORTH TRANSEPT

VII. Late Geometrical.—Then came a turning-point in the history of Hereford. The reputation of King Ethelbert as a miracle-worker may well by this time have worn a little thin. In 1287 Hereford found that it had obtained a new saint. This was Bishop Thomas Cantilupe, a man of saintly life, and one of the greatest churchmen of the day. “He was a pluralist of the first dimension—Chancellor of England and of the University of Oxford, Provincial Grand Master of the Knights Templars in England, Canon of York, Archdeacon and Canon of Lichfield and Coventry, Archdeacon of Stafford, Canon and Bishop of Hereford.” In 1282, with his chaplain, Swinfield, he visited Rome, and died on the journey home. Swinfield, following a not uncommon mediæval practice, had the flesh of the body separated from the bones by boiling. The flesh was buried in the church of St. Severus, near Orvieto; the heart and bones he conveyed to England. The heart was interred at Ashridge, the bones in Hereford cathedral. Five years afterwards miracles commenced: “There were raised from death to life threescore several persons, one-and-twenty lepers healed, and three-and-twenty blind and dumb men received their sight and speech. Twice King Edward I. sent sick falcons to be cured at his tomb.” In 1320, by the expenditure of vast sums of money, Swinfield procured his canonisation. Ever since, the see of Hereford has borne the arms of Cantilupe. He was the last English saint; and, being the newest, was for a considerable time the most fashionable. The fame of St. Wulfstan of Worcester and St. Swithin of Winchester paled before that of St. Thomas of Hereford. Till Gloucester secured in 1327 still fresher relics in the murdered body of King Edward II., Hereford held the greatest attraction for pilgrims in all the West-country. For forty years—from 1287 to 1327—the pilgrims resorted to the new shrine in vast numbers. Swinfield’s foresight was justified by the huge sums which poured into the cathedral treasury.

Swinfield succeeded Cantilupe as bishop in 1283, and occupied the see till 1316. With the vast resources now at his disposal he set about a series of great works. His first pious act was to construct for his benefactor and predecessor a noble shrine, the pedestal of which now stands once more, after many vicissitudes, in the aisle of the north transept. It is a work of the rarest beauty, executed just at the time when, tired of conventional foliage, the mediæval carver, with ever fresh delight, was making the most exquisite transcripts in stone of the leaves of the trees and the flowers of the field.