FROM NORTH-WEST.
Southwell Minster, as it is usually but incorrectly styled, was originally what is called a collegiate church. It is as if, in any parish church of unusual importance or with an exceptionally large population, there should be not one rector, as nowadays, but a dozen or so, this dozen being formed into a corporation, with a dean, precentor, chancellor and treasurer (the two first officials did not exist at Southwell). All the cathedrals of the old foundation had from the earliest time such a collegiate constitution as the above: viz., Chichester, Exeter, Hereford, Lichfield, Lincoln, London, Salisbury, Wells, and the four Welsh cathedrals. But all these were also cathedrals: i.e., they possessed a bishop’s chair (cathedra); Southwell did not become a cathedral—there was no bishop of Southwell—till the present reign.
Like the other ecclesiastical colleges—those of cathedrals excepted—that of Southwell was suppressed by Edward VI.; but under Queen Mary it had the good fortune to be reconstituted and re-endowed. Its sister church, Beverley minster, also a college of secular canons—i.e., priests not living under a monastic rule—became and has remained a parish church. The only collegiate churches remaining with their original constitution are Windsor, Westminster, Heytesbury, Middleham, and St. Katherine’s Hospital, London—omitting, of course, the cathedrals of the old foundation.
Though, however, there was till recently no bishop of Southwell, yet the church up to the Reformation was practically a cathedral. Just as the Bishop of Wells had at different times other cathedrals besides that of Wells—at one time at Bath, at another time at Glastonbury; and as the bishop of the Mercian diocese had at one time three chairs—viz., at Lichfield, Chester and Coventry—so the Archbishop of the immense northern kingdom of Northumbria required and possessed four cathedrals: viz., at York, Ripon, Beverley and Southwell. The latter was especially the cathedral of Nottinghamshire, as it has become once more. The archbishops had a palace at Southwell, of which the fine hall remains; Archbishop Sandys is buried in the minster.
I. In the seventh century St. Paulinus is said to have founded a church at Southwell. But long before his time—in the third century, or thereabouts—the Romans were at Southwell. There actually survives a tesselated pavement in the south transept which may well have belonged to a Romano-British basilica.
II. Two fragments have been carefully preserved and re-used from an early Norman church—it may even have been of Pre-Conquest date. One is a fragment of a lintel over a doorway in the north transept, depicting St. Michael and the Dragon and David throttling the lion. The other is a set of capitals on the eastern piers of the tower, now unfortunately covered up to make room for more organ pipes. (A mania for big organs is raging in our cathedrals: nothing short of the roar and rumble of an earthquake will bring people nowadays into a devotional frame of mind.)
NAVE.
III. Between 1109 and 1114 a new Norman church was begun. Of this the choir has disappeared. As the choir would be built first, 1120 is given as an approximate date for the transept and 1130 for the nave. The cable-mouldings, however, of the crossing and transepts, and the carving of the nave-capitals, are so rich and effective that the work is probably somewhat later. Indeed, the whole of the ornamentation is far ahead of that at Ely, Norwich and Peterborough, Tewkesbury or Gloucester. The carved capitals may be compared with those of the nave of Hereford. The interior of the nave is low and squat, but has been vastly improved by Mr. Christian’s semicircular ceiling. The piers are stumpy cylinders; the elevation is that of Malvern, or St. Bartholomew’s, Smithfield. Here there are none of the tall compound piers of Peterborough or Ely, still less the Brobdingnagian cylinders of Tewkesbury or Gloucester. Each bay of the triforium was to have been filled with the same kind of arcade as that of Romsey choir: viz., two small arches, with a small shaft rising from their point of intersection. (Projecting stones, intended for the arches and the shaft, may be seen in each bay.) The Romsey design was not a success even in the eyes of the Romsey people, for they tried five other designs in the triforium of their transept; and the Southwell canons very sensibly omitted this inner arcade. The clerestory, with its circular windows, is remarkable; the same design was worked out very beautifully, later on, in the north transept of Hereford.
