I will now lead you on a short excursion out of London, to a glorious old temple which was, in the days of my pupilage, considered to be within walking distance, and can now be reached in less than an hour by railway. I mean the venerable Abbey Church of St. Alban.
You probably know the general history of this church: founded over the tomb of the protomartyr of England, within ten years of his martyrdom, and rebuilt on a larger scale by Offa, King of Mercia, it was again rebuilt of its present enormous dimensions by the earlier of the Norman abbots, using the materials excavated from the ruined city of Verulam.
The Roman brick was not a material very suggestive of ornamental architecture, and we accordingly find the original portions to be plain and massive in the extreme, but, nevertheless, highly impressive and interesting. In the work of a later Norman abbot we find this unshapely material cased with stone-work, and of richly decorative details; but the church in general retained its severe simplicity undisturbed till the accession of Abbot John De Cella, in the reign of King Richard I.
This worthy abbot was more a man of taste than of business, and his temperament more sanguine than calculating. He had no sooner taken possession of the abbacy than he embarked on a magnificent project for rebuilding the western façade of his abbey church; only a prelude, probably, to the reconstruction of the whole in the new style.
The massive brick front, with its flanking towers, would have formed an excellent nucleus for his work; but his ardent spirit would not submit to such an expedient, and he at once took down the vast façade, and that before he had collected money for the new one. The consequence was that he had scarcely got his new work out of the ground before his funds were exhausted. His first builder turned out a rascal, and he had to discharge him; the stone he used was destroyed by the frost; and, mishap after mishap following his undertaking. The worthy man was led, as is so common with bad men of business, to bend his proud spirit to a paltry trick; and, as a means of raising the wind, he sent one of his monks about the country with a man whom he declared to have been raised from the dead by the agency of the relics of St. Amphibalus, and begged money on the strength of the miracle. But all would not do, and after ten years’ labour, during which the old historian tells us that all the funds he procured were merely like rivers flowing into the sea, which was no fuller for receiving them, he could not bring his work above the level of the masons’ shed; and, at length, giving it up in despair, contented himself with more humble undertakings.
He was succeeded by Abbot William De Trumpington, a man who united with the taste for building, inherent in the age, a more moderate ambition and greater aptitude for business. He resumed the suspended works, but moderated their costliness; and making all the details plainer, and giving up or postponing the flanking towers, he was not only enabled to complete the rest of the front, but also to carry on the new work a long way down the nave, and subsequently to make many other alterations.
Now, I beg you to go and examine these works, and, in doing so, to bear in mind their history. You will find—as the chronicler tells us—that just about the height of a mason’s shed, there is a sudden change in the work. Up to that height the details are very superior, and far richer than above. Below, we find traces of the artist; above, of the constructor and man of business, though not to the forgetting of art. Thus, round the piers below are bases for marble shafts; somewhat higher are the marks where their moulded bands have been broken off; but above, their capitals are wanting—
“For William’s shears had cut the bauble off.”
The three portals I alluded to in my last lecture are the work of the unfinancial artist;[51] the range of pillars, etc., down the nave, of the not inartistic man of business. Both are noble works. Trumpington’s works are bold and massive, and his details good, though simple; but for beauty of design we must award the palm to his less thrifty but more spirituel predecessor: indeed, I know few works equal in design to what he commenced; and had he been able to carry it out, this façade might have vied with that of Wells. Unhappily there are, externally, little remains of the work of either of the abbots.
Late in the century the choir, also, was in great measure rebuilt. Its character is less forcible than the earlier works, yet exceedingly beautiful.