George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted Papers

by George Edmund Street

In one of Erfurt’s many squares or market-places, is a good pointed house, with a large bay window, and three traceried windows, one on either side, and one above it in its gable end.

In another Platz is a church with two western steeples, one with a spire rising from the gabled sides of the tower. Another church occupies a triangular piece of ground, the tower being at the western angle, between two streets. It is desecrated, and I could not get into it, but its internal arrangement must be most singular.

These hurried notes are all that I could make. I was homeward bound, and obliged to travel all night to Marburg. So I did what a pilgrim to the shrine of S. Elizabeth of Hungary ought, I suppose, not to have done—I slept as the train passed Eisenach, and neglected therefore, even to get a glance through the starlight of the castle on the Wartburg, her residence and the scene of most of the beautiful story of her life.

It was early morning when Marburg was reached. Under high hills, covered with vine and picturesque in their outline, stands the noble church, conspicuous as one first sees it by its two completed and nearly similar towers and spires rising in all the beauty of their deep-coloured stonework against the green hillside which rises so precipitously close behind them. On the summit of the hill are the tall walls of the fine old castle, and to the left of the church and below the castle the town covers the hillside with the ramifications of its old steep and narrow streets. The church is perhaps rather too much outside the town for the use of the townspeople; but then it was not built for them, and in the general view it certainly gains much by being placed where it is.

And now, before I say anything about the church, two or three dates, which seem to be settled beyond dispute, may as well be mentioned.

S. Elizabeth of Hungary was born, then, in the year 1207, was married when but fifteen years old, and ere she was twenty left a widow, her husband having laid down his life in the third Crusade: three years and a half of widowed life were all she saw before an early grave received her; and from thence forward year after year saw fresh fervour excited by the contemplation of her virtues, and fresh enthusiasm awakened about the old city of Marburg, in which the last years of her life had been spent in the practice of austerity and self-denial such as the world has seldom seen. She was canonized in A.D. 1235; and in the same year the church as we now see it was commenced, and completed by about A.D. 1283.

More I need not say; for the life of her whose memory gave rise to this grand architectural effort is foreign to my present purpose, and moreover is too well known to need repetition.

Judging by the evidence of style—which is not however very strong, as the whole work has been completed carefully upon a uniform plan—I should say that the work commenced at the east, and was continued on westward, so that the west front, with its two towers and spires, was the latest portion of the work. I am inclined to think, too, that the sacristy, a large building of two stories in height, filling the angle between the north transept and the northern side of the choir, is an addition to the original fabric, but probably earlier than the steeples.

The plan shows a very regular cruciform church, the choir and transepts all having apsidal ends, a large sacristy, and two western steeples; the whole very regular and similar in character throughout.

The exterior of the church is perhaps, with the exception of its west front, more curious than really beautiful. Throughout its whole extent every bay is similar, and consists of two stages, the upper an exact repetition of the one below, each lighted with a simple two-light window with a circle in the head, and divided by a great projecting cornice, the top of which is on a level with the bottom of the upper windows. The nave and aisles are all groined at one height without triforium or clerestory; and the outer walls are, therefore, the full height of the groining of the nave. Now this endless repetition of the same windows in a manner so apparently unnecessary was at first most perplexing to me, inconsistent as it seemed with the delicate taste exhibited elsewhere by the architect; but I was not long perplexed. The cornice between the windows was, in fact, a passage-way extending all round the church in front of the windows and, by openings, through all the buttresses: whilst in front of the lower windows a similar passage, not corbelled out, but formed by a thinning of the wall from this point upwards, again encircles the church. The sacristy is the only portion of the building not so treated. The church has not and never had cloister, chapter-house, or any of the ordinary domestic buildings of a religious house, attached to it; it stood on a new piece of ground, away from houses, and with an open thoroughfare all round, and all this helps in the solution of its singular arrangements. We have but to recall to mind that the relics of S. Elizabeth were visited by more pilgrims for some two or three centuries than any other shrine almost all Europe could boast of, to see the difficulty accounted for. It was built from the first to be a pilgrimage church, and carefully planned with an especial view to this. No doubt it was a great shrine, round which thousands of pilgrims congregated in the open air, to watch as processions passed with the relics they came from so far to see, passing by these ingeniously contrived passages round the entire church again and again, seen by all, but unencumbered by the pressure of the multitude.