The buildings now remaining consist of a church with an enormous cloister on its western side, and a lofty steeple at the south-west angle of the cloister. On the north side of the cloister is a large stone-roofed hall, and north of this again, and detached from the cathedral, are considerable fragments of what is called a castle, and these include another noble groined hall.
My ground-plan of the cathedral and its dependences will show at a glance how unusual and remarkable the whole scheme is. The south side of the church is built on the very edge of the precipitous cliff above the town and river, and the lofty tower is daringly balanced as it were on the most dangerous point of the whole ground. The mass of the whole group seen from below, and the vast height of the tower, are therefore singularly imposing, whilst the view obtained from the summit is one of rare magnificence. It is true that here the immediate neighbourhood is not lovely, but still the river does much towards converting to fruitfulness the usually arid-looking Aragonese soil of the district by clothing it with trees and verdure, and when last I saw it not only was the Segre a torrent of rushing waters, but on all sides the hills were covered with a wide expanse of vineyards and corn-fields; and beyond these were to be seen towering up in the far distance the grand range of the Pyrenees, touched here and there—on the Maladetta and some of the other high peaks—with lines of snow; whilst on the other side the lower mountain ranges of Aragon completed one of the most beautiful panoramas I have ever seen from church tower.
The site of the cathedral has long been occupied. It was an important stronghold in the time of the Romans, and the first cathedral was erected as early as in the sixth century. The Moors in course of time gained possession of the city, and it was not until A.D. 1149 that the Christians, under Ramon Berenguer, finally drove them out and regained possession.
The documentary evidence as to the age of the existing buildings is fairly clear, and may as well be given at once. I derive all my facts from the papers printed in ‘España Sagrada;’[354] and besides those which more particularly interest me as an architect, there are in the volume which relates to Lérida some most interesting extracts from the proceedings of councils held there from A.D. 1175 to 1418, and of diocesan synods from the year 1240. These are full of information as to the customs of the church, and the rules affecting the clergy.[355]
The first stone of the new cathedral was laid in the time of the third bishop after the restoration, and in the presence of the king Don Pedro II. An inscription on a stone on the Gospel side of the choir, which I did not see, gives the date[356] as the 22nd July, 1203; and in A.D. 1215 the cloister was, in part at any rate, built, one Raymundo de Segarra having desired that he might be buried within its walls.[357] From this time to the consecration we have no notice of the building, if I except the following inscription still remaining on the eastern jamb of the south transept doorway, which proves the existence of that part of the church at the time mentioned:—“Anno Domini M: CCº: XV xi: Kal: Madii: obiit Gulielmus de Rocas: cuj: aīe: sit:” and there is a mention in ‘España Sagrada’ of the burial of Bishop Berenguer, in A.D. 1256, by one of the doors, called thenceforward after him. On the last day of October, A.D. 1278, the church was consecrated by Bishop Guillen de Moncada, and the record of this on the west wall is now concealed, but I give a copy of it.[358]
In 1286 Pedro de Peñafreyta, who had been master of the works, died;[359] he had probably been employed on the central lantern and the cloister, for which latter work, on the 21st of August, 1310, the king Don Jayme II. gave the stone;[360] circa A.D. 1320 Bishop Guillen founded a chapel; in 1323 the work of the “cloister and tower” was still going on;[361] and in 1327 alms were asked for the completion of the same work;[362] and again in 1335 the vicar-general, in the absence of the bishop, appealed for alms, “pro maximo et sumptuoso opere claustri ecclesiæ catedralis.”
In A.D. 1391 Guillermo Çolivella contracted to execute the statues for the doorway at the price of 240 sueldos each; and in A.D. 1490 Francisco Gomar contracted for the erection of a grand porch for 1600 sueldos. The steeple at the angle of the cloister seems to have been commenced about the end of the fourteenth century. The fabric-rolls for 1397 contain an item of 350 feet of stone from the river Daspe “for the work of the tower.” Other similar notices occur, and among them the names of two masters of the works, Guillelmo Çolivella and Cárlos Galtes de Ruan. It was probably completed before 1416; for in this year Juan Adam, “de burgo Sanctæ Mariæ, Turlensis diocesis, regni Franciæ,” contracted for the making of the great bell, which was finished in 1418, and commended by the chapter in these words—“Cujus sonitu et mentis vulnera sanari, et divinitatis singularis gratia possit conquiri.”[363] There are no other notices of the main portion of the fabric; but we know that, in A.D. 1414, Pedro Balaguer was sent from Valencia to examine the tower at Lérida before he built the tower called the Micalete in his own city; and we may conclude therefore that before this date the work at Lérida had been completely finished.
It is easy to distinguish the works referred to in these notices. The church, of which the first stone was laid in A.D. 1203, and which was consecrated in A.D. 1278, still remains almost as it was built; and there can be but little doubt that the greater part of the cloister is of the same date. The works for which stone was given, in A.D. 1310, were probably those in its western half, and possibly the lower part of the steeple; and the chapel, founded in A.D. 1320, must be one of those added on either side of the great south door, or on the east side of the south transept.
It is impossible not to feel greatly more interest in a church whose scheme is unusual, than in one of a common type, even when its detail is not of so high a value, or its scale less imposing. Here, however, we have both extreme novelty in the general scheme,[364] and extreme merit in all the detail. As one climbs the steep street which leads to the cathedral, where the open space around the fortifications is reached, the first general view of the buildings is most puzzling. The low outer wall of the cloister, with an enormous western doorway, the point of whose archway reaches to the top of the wall, the steeple on the extreme right, and the central lantern appearing to rise only just above the cloister wall, make a most unintelligible group. Making my way to the great doorway, I was astonished to find it to be the entrance, not of the church, as I at first assumed it to be, but only of the cloister; and not less disgusted to find that three sides of this cloister had been turned into barracks, a floor having been inserted all round at the level of the springing of the vault, so as to afford ample accommodation for some hundreds of soldiers, who sleep, cook, and live within its walls; whilst the eastern side is now a storehouse for arms and accoutrements, similarly divided by a floor, and without any visible trace of the doors of communication between church and cloister, which are said to be on this side. Yet this cloister is certainly, even in its present desecrated state, the grandest I have ever seen. Its scale is enormous, and much of its detail very fine. I have no doubt that it was a long time in progress, and this would account to some extent for the extreme irregularity of some of its parts. The bays, for instance, vary in width: the buttresses are variously treated; and the sculpture, which on the eastern side seems to be coeval with the earliest portion of the church, is evidently on the other sides of much later date—probably not earlier than A.D. 1300. The buttresses on the eastern side are carried on bold engaged columns with sculptured capitals, whilst most of the others are square in outline, with small engaged shafts in recesses at their angles. The arches are now all built up and plastered; but in two of those on the eastern side it is just possible to detect the commencement of traceries, from which it would seem that each arch had tracery above an arcade of three or four divisions. In its present state it is impossible to say more than this, or whether these traceries were original, though they seem to have been geometrical in style, and therefore probably later in date than the enclosing arches. The eastern half of the cloister has the outer arches richly adorned with complicated chevron and cable ornament, and the remainder of the arches are finely moulded. The interior is more uniform in character, the vault being quadripartite throughout, with very boldly moulded ribs; and the main piers, and the piers at the angles, being very exquisitely planned, with a number of detached shafts with well moulded bases, bands, and capitals, the latter carved with foliage and heads. The capitals and bases are square throughout the cloister. On the south side this cloister has openings in the outer wall corresponding with those opening into the inner court; and these, I think, also had traceries. Owing to the fall of the ground towards the edge of the cliff, these windows are high above the terrace outside, and very bold buttresses are placed between each of them. The effect of the cloister on the south side is that of an enormous ball: and this, in truth, is what it is. Its clear internal width varies from 26 ft. 6 in. to 27 ft. 6 in., and the height is quite in proportion. Occupied as it now is by hundreds of soldiers, one is tempted to ask, whether a building so far larger than could be required for a mere cloister may not have been built in the first instance to serve some double purpose; being, for instance, not only an ambulatory, but a refectory, and dormitory also. The way in which some of our own old buildings were fitted, with a chapel at the end of a series of cubicles on either side under the open roof of a great hall (as, e.g., St. Mary’s Hospital at Chichester, Chichele’s College Higham Ferrers, and a hospital at Leicester), seems to point to the possibility of some such utilizing of the vast space which these cloisters afford; and the more as it seemed to me that there were not the evidences that might have been expected of the existence at any time of the other dependent buildings required by a cathedral body in all cases, and more than usually here where the church was so far above and away from the city. I mentioned the western entrance of the cloister as being very large: it is a double doorway with niches for six statues in either jamb, and the orders of the archivolt are alternately of mouldings and niches for figures. The outer arch is crocketed between two great pinnacles. The carving has mostly been destroyed; but there is a poor sculpture of the Last Judgment in the tympanum. The doorway has evidently been added between two of the earlier buttresses of the cloister at about the end of the fourteenth century; its detail is extremely delicate and rich, and somewhat similar to that of the west doorway of Tarragona cathedral; and both are quite like very good French fourteenth-century work.
Unfortunately the doorways from the cloister to the church are now quite invisible, the wall being completely hidden by military packing-cases and arms.[365] This is the more to be regretted as the grandeur of the other doors leads me to suppose that the western doorway would be very fine.