Memorials of Old Lincolnshire

by Unknown

We are at once impelled to ask what this source is. And this question brings us to the consideration of two final questions, which are complementary to one another. What influences from the Christian architecture of other countries were felt by Lincolnshire masons? Is there any element of progress to be traced in the Saxon buildings of the county? In short, to combine the two questions into one, can any chronological sequence be traced in these buildings, by comparing them with the work of Romanesque builders in other countries?

We already have allowed the term “Saxon” to them, on the understanding that a pre-Conquest date is not implied thereby, but merely the fact that their style is different from that of buildings to which we give the term “Norman.” It may also be premised that, in considering their relative date, we have to deal cautiously and tentatively with a series of probabilities. We must also put legend aside. A hardy tradition, resting on no authentic basis, but engraved on a brass tablet within the church, points to certain traces of fire in the church of Stow as evidence of its burning by the Danes in 870. If this were true, and if the lower walls of the tower, as they exist to-day, were the tower walls of the Saxon cathedral of Sidnaceaster, we should be able to point to a church of the ninth century, if not earlier, which would probably have supplied an architectural standard to the diocese. However, we have nothing but the size of the church and an unfounded, if time-honoured, assumption to give it claim to cathedral rank. The very name of Sidnaceaster was probably invented in post-Conquest times, by some one who misread the signature of one of the bishops of Lindsey to the decrees of a Saxon council.[40] And, finally, the authentic history of the church of Stow does not begin till about the year 1040, when Eadnoth, Bishop of Dorchester, with the powerful assistance of Earl Leofric and his wife Godiva, set a band of religious men on the site hallowed by memories of the miraculous sojourn of St. Etheldreda on her flight from York to Ely. All that lies behind 1040 in connection with this church is pure romance. When Bishop Rémi later in the century restored St. Mary’s Minster at Stow, what he probably did was to complete Eadnoth’s ambitious beginnings, on a worthy scale, out of reverence for St. Etheldreda, and not out of sentimental feeling for an old cathedral church which he had superseded for all time by his new church at Lincoln. If a small archdeaconry in the Norman diocese of Lincoln, corresponding to the original district of Lindsey, took its name from Stow, we must not consider this as admitting the old cathedral dignity of Stow. The size of Eadnoth’s and Rémi’s church made it the most prominent building in the archdeaconry: no more convenient or suitable name could be supplied to the district.[41]

1040, then, is a recognised date to which we can refer the earliest work at Stow. We know, too, that a church was founded at Alkborough in 1052, and the work in the western tower there, with its triangular-headed belfry windows, may be claimed for that date or not long after. These are practically the only two pieces of dated evidence on which we can rely, for we have already seen that the evidence as to Coleswegen’s churches at Lincoln does not apply to existing buildings.[42] Stow, as we have seen, retains strip-framing to the tower jambs on a large scale: “long-and-short” work occurs in the north transept doorway and in the jambs of a window opening in the south transept: through-stone masonry is used in the north transept doorway, but abandoned in the tower arch jambs. Alkborough has none of these characteristics. We are thus at liberty to assume a gradual cessation of purely Saxon technique between 1040 and 1052.

Further, at Barton-on-Humber, although we have no documentary evidence to guide us, it is obvious that the tower is of two styles. The uppermost stage forms an addition to the original design in a somewhat more simple style. An interval of date between the stages is certain: the length of that interval would be hard to ascertain. But the fantastic strip-panelling and “long-and-short” work of the lower stages of the tower belong to the height of a fashion in architecture which is seen gradually disappearing at Stow. The strip-framing and “long-and-short” work at Stow are of a different and less purely decorative type: we are not surprised when in the upper stage of the tower at Barton, or in the tower at Alkborough, they disappear altogether. So far, then, this statement of progress is justifiable. The lower stages of the tower at Barton are obviously earlier than the upper stage. The upper stage has affinities of detail with the tower at Alkborough, and clearly belongs to much the same or a slightly later period. The tower at Alkborough is at least twelve years later than the only trustworthy date for the early work at Stow. And, as we have just seen, the work at Stow, in its selection and treatment of elements which had been used at Barton in careless profusion, is probably later in date than the earlier portion of Barton. With Barton may be grouped, from the character of its “long-and-short” quoining and the window-openings of its stair turret, the interesting tower at Hough-on-the-Hill. With Stow we may group, at any rate provisionally, those fabrics which have “long-and-short” quoining of a substantial type, flush with the surface of the wall, instead of projecting in rather thin strips beyond it—this will include, as we have noticed, some naves of churches. With Alkborough and the upper stage at Barton can be combined church towers generally, Hough alone excepted, and work of a partly Saxon character, like that at Stragglethorpe, not far from Hough. The “long-and-short” work in Rothwell tower is so small in quantity that it can hardly be treated as an exception to the third group.

Professor Baldwin Brown, in his valuable monograph on Saxon ecclesiastical architecture, has provided strong arguments for the influence of Teutonic Romanesque architecture on our Saxon builders.[43] It has long been the fashion to suppose that the decorative detail at Barton-on-Humber and other kindred churches is an imitation of timber construction in stone; the rudeness of treatment makes the supposition excusable. But we can hardly grant that Saxon builders could have imitated a system of construction which was not at any rate general till a much later date; and it is much more likely that the work at Barton is copied roughly and clumsily from a type of decorative work which, in the tenth and early eleventh centuries, was common in the Rhenish provinces and in the districts of Northern Italy architecturally related to them. It is unquestionable that the double opening with mid-wall shaft found its origin in the same provinces. Northern Italy doubtless exercised its influence on Germany; Germany, in turn, influenced the Saxon masons. In three other cases at least German influence is more than probable. It is certainly responsible for the double-splayed window-opening; it probably affected the simple type of capital which was developed into the cushion capital of later days; the unfaced rubble masonry and thin walling of Saxon churches are found commonly in early Romanesque German churches, and are the antithesis of the faced rubble and thick walling of Normandy and the Romanesque buildings of France; while the position of the western tower in the Saxon plan is a further German feature.

On the details of English intercourse with Germany it is unnecessary to dwell. There is plenty of evidence to show that a close connection existed between the two countries, which cannot but have had influence on the progress of art in England. That progress must have been practically at a standstill during the long epoch of Danish invasion. The date at which we may most reasonably expect an architectural revival to be general is that period, the last thirty to forty years of the tenth century, when so many monasteries were rebuilt or newly founded, and the monastic life re-established. This revival was strongly influenced by the monasteries of the Netherlands, which lay in the direct current of architectural progress between Germany proper and England. To this date at earliest, then, may be assigned the earliest parts of the church at Barton-on-Humber, and possibly the tower at Hough. We cannot go further back without deserting probability. At the same time, if we limit this work to the latter half of the tenth century on the one hand, we are not precluded from allowing that it may be later. Barton-on-Humber lay in the very path of the Danish invaders who established their power in England between 1002 and 1014. The base of operations of the heathen Swegen was at Gainsborough; there he died, and there he was said, though wrongly, to have been buried. The older parts of the church at Barton show no sign of the ruin which we might expect to have thus befallen them. Perhaps the church was left roofless by Swegen, but restored and completed, with the upper stage added to the tower, towards the middle or after the middle of the eleventh century. But it is also equally probable that the whole lower structure may be a rebuilding under the Christian Canute of a church ruined by his father; and that, after an intermediate stage in which the church may have taken the form shown by Professor Baldwin Brown, the tower was heightened by a storey.

The oldest Saxon fabrics in Lincolnshire need not, therefore, be earlier than the eleventh century. It will be noticed that of these Barton gives us a centralised plan, while Hough presents a plan which certainly is not in keeping with that of the usual western tower. The head of the second group, Stow, is another experiment in “central” planning. The remaining anomalies of plan, Broughton and Waith, belong, in the matter of technique, to the third group, in which the western tower predominates overwhelmingly. The German features of the third group already have been described. But they are less marked than those of earlier groups, and the buildings are open to influences, especially decorative influences, of quite another kind.

Towers like those of St. Mary-le-Wigford and St. Peter-at-Gowts, or of Bracebridge, may be regarded, on the strength of their different quoining and their lack of any bond with the fabric behind, as final additions to churches which, in point of date, we have provisionally classified with Stow. Not infrequently, the tower and church were built together without afterthought, as at Winterton, where the ends of the nave walls still remain in bond with the tower, enclosed within the spacious church of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries. If we attempt to classify these towers chronologically, however, we may try several standards. The relative height and width of the tower arch affords no criterion; this seems to be varied at the fancy of local masons. Again, rude attempts at moulding, like that at Nettleton, tell us nothing; the moulded tower arch at Corringham is so out of keeping with the tower itself that it can hardly be part of the original design; the wide arch at Harmston is clearly a reconstruction achieved comparatively late in the twelfth century. But the absence of through-stone masonry, the approach to the system of rubble core and dressed facing, indicate a growing assimilation to “Norman” methods. The tower at Waith has a facing of rough ashlar, which is found in no other Lincolnshire tower of the type. Another tell-tale sign is the appearance of herring-bone work, which Norman builders used freely in the walling of their earlier castles, and builders of the pre-Conquest period certainly used little, if at all. The “herring-bone” masonry of the tower at Marton is identical in style with that in the curtain-wall of Tamworth Castle.