Wherever the Comacines established themselves they founded lodges; to each lodge a schola and a laborerium were attached, where the members received instruction and training in the several branches of their craft. The Comacines who settled with Augustine in the royal city of Canterbury, must have established according to their custom a lodge and a schola in that city, for there Wilfrid some seventy years later sent for architects and builders (cœmentarii) to renew the Cathedral Church of York which had been built by Paulinus, but possibly through increase of population was now inadequate. The plan of the ancient church has been traced; it was Basilican in form, with aisles and an apse.[114]
Wilfrid, Bishop of York for forty-three years, was, while still a young man, sent to Rome as a companion to Biscop, a Saxon thane who was afterwards Abbot of Wearmouth and Jarrow. There, says Bede, he spent some months in the study of ecclesiastical matters. On his way home he remained in Gaul for three years. When he returned to Britain at the expiration of that time, King Alfred gave him land and the monastery of Ripon where he built a spacious church, which excited universal astonishment and admiration; though not so large as the church he afterwards built at Hexham, it was a noble building. The apse with its altar was at the west end, and underneath the apse was a confessio, which with its passages still exists. The round-headed arches within the church were supported by lofty columns of polished stone.
But beautiful as this church was, that at Hexham exceeded it. Eddius Stephanus, precentor of York, the biographer of Wilfrid, and Richard of Hexham, give enthusiastic descriptions of it which accord exactly with what we know the Comacine church of the period to have been.[115]
From them we learn that St. Andrews, Hexham, built by Wilfrid, was a Basilican church, and in one respect at least it was similar to Ripon; the apse was at the west end, and beneath it was a crypt with passages around it; the crypt with its passages is still to be seen. The proportions of the church were however nobler and the details richer. The walls were covered with square stones of divers colours and polished; the columns were also of polished stone; the capitals of the columns, arches, and vault of apse, and space over the apse-arch were decorated with sculptures and histories (i.e. with paintings representing sacred scenes) all very splendid and very beautiful, according to Eddius.
As regards the sculptures, the examples we have of Saxon sculptures show them to have been generally vigorous, and often grotesque. A writer in Archæologia, vol. viii. p. 174, states that in the vaults of Hexham there were at the time he wrote many Roman inscriptions and grotesque carvings. The capitals of columns in Saxon as well as in later times not infrequently bore grotesque ornament for decoration, and it was commonly used for other purposes; not even coffins were exempt from decorations of this nature. Reginaldus de Coldingham (de virtutibus S. Cuthberti) describes the double coffin of St. Cuthbert, the inner one being of black oak elaborately carved, the subject of one of the carvings being a monk turned into a fox for stealing new cheese.
As regards their paintings, the Comacines were rather given to colour—it was in one of their churches, that of S. Maria del Tiglio, built by Theodolinda, wife of King Autharis, that the Emperor Lothaire beheld a brilliantly painted picture which adorned the vault of the apse and represented "The three kings presenting gifts to the Child Jesus." The picture moved the king to undertake the restoration of the church.
The Comacines also used frescoes in Theodolinda's palace at Monza in the fifth and sixth centuries.
From the foregoing description of Hexham church by Eddius Stephanus, it would appear that there were galleries over the aisles to which access was gained by spiral stairways in the wall. Similar galleries and spiral stairway still exist in the church of S. Agnese in Rome. In this church between the nave and the aisles there is a double arcade of open arches one above the other; the higher arcade on each side forms the front of the galleries—above these is a clerestory. The church of S. Lorenzo at Verona, also a Comacine church, contains a spiral stairway in the wall which led to the different divisions in the women's gallery for the widows, matrons, and girls. So far I have not heard of any ancient spiral stairways as still existing in any other than in these Comacine churches.[116]
