George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted Papers

by George Edmund Street

3. A half-destroyed carved capital of a large shaft clustered of three: it looks like the capital of a groining-shaft, but agrees with nothing in the church.

4. One moulded marble capital, and two fragments of a marble monial, with engaged shaft inside and out. There is no existing marble monial in the church, and the only suggestion I can make is, that possibly the same increase of enrichment that I have noticed was carried on to the east end, and the east window executed with monials entirely of marble; but on the other hand, this monial, though of marble, is not so rich in detail and moulding as the stone monial, with its detached marble shaft in the north window of the chancel.

5. A portion of the lower part of a sitting figure of our Lord. This figure is that of a man about four feet six inches in height. The feet are naked and pierced with the wounds. There is no sign of any place from which such a figure could have been moved. Its date is about that of the church.

6. A spandrel of an arcade, sculptured with a portion of the resurrection of the dead. It very nearly fits the spandrel of the arcade discovered in the south wall of the south aisle, and, in order that it may be preserved, I have had it placed there. The treatment of the bodies coming out of the coffins is good, and the work is about the date of the church.

7. A large number of fragments of the groining-ribs of the chancel, of the windows, etc. etc., were also found. The bulk of all these were built into the upper part of the chancel walls, and into the gable wall above the chancel arch, and were no doubt placed there at the time of the alterations of the building, after the fire in the seventeenth century.

Of the works recently executed in the church, it will be sufficient to say, that the nave has been re-seated with open seats, and paved with the best red, black and buff tiles. The eastern part of the chancel floor has been repaved with marble and encaustic tiles, and want of the necessary funds alone has prevented the re-laying of the remainder of the chancel floor and the completion of the seats. The lectern for the Bible is of oak. The whole of the chancel has been groined in stone and chalk: the groining-ribs being of Caen stone, and the filling in of the vault of chalk. I have been unable, on account of the cost, to introduce any bosses at the intersection of the groining-ribs; we found no remains of any, but as they were used in the groining at Westminster Abbey, I should have preferred their introduction. On the same account the wall-ribs are chamfered, not moulded. The other ribs are exactly copied from the old fragments found in the chancel wall, and I was also able to obtain the exact height of the vault, and as nearly as possible the mouldings of the bold arch on the eastern face of the waggon-vault at the entrance of the chancel. The east and north windows of the chancel are both new, and copied from the old fragments found by me in the north wall. A pulpit of stone, alabaster and marble, carved by Mr. Earp, and the gift of the family of the late Archdeacon King, is placed in the north-east angle of the nave. The window in the east bay of the north aisle is filled with stained glass, and is to form one of a series, those in the north aisle illustrating the miracles of our Lord, and those in the south aisle the parables. This window is the gift of Mrs. Cooper, and is executed (as are the others) by Mr. Wailes, of Newcastle. The east window of the north aisle is a memorial window to the late Archdeacon King, erected by his parishioners: and the subject is, our Lord in Majesty, with angels on either side. The east window of the chancel is also a memorial to the Archdeacon, and erected by his family; it contains a long series of subjects from the life of our Lord, in medallions, and is richly treated in Mr. Wailes’s usual style; and it is only to be regretted that in brilliancy of colour and nervousness of drawing he does not yet by any means equal the old school of painters on glass. The altar-cloth is of red velvet, embroidered in the old manner by Mrs. G. Murray.

I referred, in the earlier part of this paper, to the similarity between the detail of the work at Stone and that of the earlier portions of Westminster Abbey; and before I conclude I will, as well as I can, explain the extent of this similarity. Few subjects are of more interest to me, and I suppose to all students of our ancient architecture, than this of the extent to which the work of the same artist may be traced in different buildings. I have been able, in a considerable number of cases, to prove pretty clearly what I now wish to prove about Stone and Westminster;[75] but I need hardly say that the evidence is always of a kind which it is extremely difficult to give in writing; though it is difficult to resist its force if the two works are examined one after the other, and their special peculiarities carefully noted. I will endeavour however to show the existence of something more than the ordinary likeness of all works of the same date and style, between Westminster Abbey and some portions of Stone church.

I. The Arcades round the Chapels of the choir at Westminster are almost identical in shape and design with that round the chancel at Stone. The proportions of their trefoil cusps are very peculiar, and as nearly as possible the same. The spandrels are filled with foliage carved exactly in the same spirit. The labels are terminated upon small corbels level with the capitals: a very unusual arrangement. The arcades rest upon a stone chamfered seat; and the arch-moulds, though not the same, are of the same character, and both of them undercut at the back.

II. Window Tracery.—The original window tracery at Westminster is the same as at Stone. The windows in the south triforium of the nave (four eastern bays) are of precisely the same character as the window discovered in the chancel at Stone. The latter are remarkable for the great width of the light (3 ft. 1 in. and 3 ft. 10 in. in the clear), and this is very characteristic of the Westminster windows. The Stone windows are remarkable also for very broad chamfered tracery-bars on the outside, corresponding with very rich mouldings on the inside. The triforium openings at Westminster are treated just in the same way on the side next the triforium, and a comparison of the triforium of the choir and north transept there with the east window of the north aisle at Stone would well illustrate the identity of character. The stone cusping in both is let into grooves in the way common in early tracery.

III. The Sculpture of Foliage is very similar in both churches. The spandrels of arcades are treated just in the same way: at Westminster sculptures of subjects are introduced here and there in place of foliage; at Stone all the spandrels are filled with sculpture of foliage; but we found in the thickness of the wall one spandrel sculptured with figures, which appears never to have been used.[76] The foliage of capitals is generally similar, and the very remarkable bosses of foliage in the chancel arch at Stone, arranged in something of the outline of an enormous dogtooth, are all but repetitions of the similar archivolt enrichments in the triforium of the north transept at Westminster. The roses round the archivolt of the south door at Stone are of the same kind as those round the inside arches of the north transept doorways at Westminster.