Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire

by W. F. Rawnsley

The wide joints of the masonry, and the square shape of the stones, and the rude capitals of the pilasters are distinctive of Remigius’ work. Bloet succeeded Remigius, and during his thirty years he did much for the cathedral staff, but not very much to the fabric. His successor, Bishop Alexander, 1123, was a famous builder, and besides the castles of Sleaford, Newark and Banbury, the first two of which Stephen forced him to give to the Crown, he built the later Norman part of the west front, raising its gables and putting in three doors and the interlaced arcading above the arches of Remigius. He also vaulted the whole nave with stone, after a disastrous fire in 1141. There had been a previous fire just before Alexander was consecrated Bishop in 1123, of which Giraldus Cambrensis, writing about 1200, says that the roof falling on it “broke the stone with which the body of Remigius was covered into two equal parts.” This richly carved and thus fractured stone you may see to-day, where it is placed close to the north-west arch of the nave and north aisle. Bishop Alexander’s work is richer than that of Remigius, and the shafts and capitals of his west doors are beautifully carved. In these, according to Norman custom, hunters are aiming at the birds and beasts in the foliage. This is best seen in the north-west doorway. King Stephen came to Lincoln in 1141, the year of the fire, and it was there that, after a fierce fight which raged round the castle and cathedral, he was taken prisoner and sent to Bristol, but in the following year terms were arranged between him and the Empress Maud, and he was crowned at Christmas in Lincoln cathedral. After that date Bishop Alexander carried forward his work on the cathedral without intermission till his death in 1047, putting in the central western gable and the two gables over the arcading, vaulting the whole west front with stone, and adding the little north and south gables against the towers and the Norman stages of the towers, of which the northern tower was a little the highest, but looked less high because the south tower had its angles carried up higher than the walls of the square.

Bishop Alexander, like St. Hugh, died of a fever, which he caught at Auxerre in France, where he had been to meet the Pope. Those French towns seem to have been pretty pestilential at all times. Bishop Chesney succeeded him, and either he or Bishop Bloet began the episcopal palace. He assisted at the Coronation of Henry II. in Lincoln, and founded St. Catharine’s Priory. He died in 1166, and, after the lapse of six years, Geoffrey Plantagenet, son of Henry II. by Fair Rosamund, held the See for nine years, but was never consecrated. In 1182 he resigned, and was afterwards made Archbishop of York. He gave many gifts to the cathedral, and notably two “great and sonorous bells,” the putative parents of “Great Tom.” Walter de Constantiis followed him, but was in the very next year translated to Rouen, 1184, and again the See was vacant for the space of two years.

ST. HUGH

In 1185 an earthquake did great damage, and in the following year Hugh of Avalon, the famous St. Hugh of Lincoln, was appointed Bishop by Henry II. He widened the west end by putting a wing to each side of the work of Remigius, and put a gable over the central arch, and began his great work of making a new and larger cathedral with double transepts and a choir 100 feet longer and a nave ten feet wider than that of Remigius, starting at the east and building the present ritual choir and both the eastern and western transepts. In this his work was of a totally new character, with pointed arches, and “is famous as being the earliest existing work of pure English Gothic.” But Early English work, so says Murray, was already being done at Wells in 1174, twelve years earlier, and it was there that the Gothic vaulting and pointed arch was first seen in England. From the great transept to the angel choir is all his design, and it bears no trace of Norman French influence in any particular. The name of Hugh’s architect is Geoffrey de Noiers, his work is more remarkable for lightness than for strength, and in about fifty years Hugh’s tower fell, setting thereby a bad example which has been followed so frequently that Bishop Creighton’s first question on visiting a new church used generally to be, “When did your tower fall?”

BISHOP GROSTESTE

Hugh of Avalon died in London in 1200, and William de Blois (1201) and Hugh of Wells (1209) went on with the building. The latter particularly kept to Hugh of Avalon’s plan of intercalating marble shafts with those of stone. Other characteristics of St. Hugh’s work are the double arcading in the transept and the little pigeon-hole recesses between the arcade arches, a trefoil ornament on the pillar belts and on the buttresses, and the deep-cut base mouldings. He put in the fine Early English round window in the north transept called the “Dean’s eye,” which has plate tracery. The five lancet lights, something after the “Five Sisters” window at York, were a later addition. The end of his work is easily distinguishable in the east wall of the great transept. He also built the Galilee porch, which was both a porch and an ecclesiastical court, and the Chapter house, with its ten pairs of lancet windows, its arcading and clustered pillars and beautiful central pillar to support the roof groining. He was succeeded, in 1235, by the famous Robert Grosteste, a really great man and a fine scholar, who had studied both at Oxford and Paris. He opposed the Pope, who wished to put his nephew into a canonry, declaring him to be unfit for the post, and stoutly championed the right of the English Church to be ruled by English and not Italian prelates. In his time the central tower fell, and he it was who built up in its place the first stage at least of the magnificent tower we have now. He also added the richly arcaded upper portion of the great west front, and its flanking turrets crowned by the figures of the Swineherd of Stow with his horn, on the north, and Bishop Hugh on the south. Henry Lexington, Dean of Lincoln, succeeded him as Bishop in 1254, and during his short episcopate of four years Henry III. issued a royal letter for removing the Roman city wall further east to enable the Dean and Chapter to lengthen the cathedral for the Shrine of St. Hugh after his canonisation. Then began the building of the ‘Angel Choir,’ which “for the excellence of its sculpture, the richness of its mouldings and the beauty of its windows, is not surpassed by anything in the Kingdom” (Sir C. Anderson). Its height was limited by the pitch of the vaulting of Hugh’s Ritual Choir, just as the height of Grosteste’s tower arches had been. The Angel Choir was finished by Lexington’s successor Richard of Gravesend, 1258-1279, and inaugurated in the following year with magnificent ceremony under Bishop Oliver Sutton, Edward I. and Queen Eleanor both being present with their children to see the removal of St. Hugh’s body from its first resting-place before the altar of the Chapel of St. John the Baptist in the north-east transept, where it had been placed in 1200 when King John himself acted as one of the pall bearers, to its new and beautiful gold shrine in the Angel Choir behind the high altar.

JOHN DE WELBOURN

The whole cost of the consecration ceremony was borne by Thomas Bek, son of Baron d’Eresby, who was on the same day himself consecrated Bishop of St. David’s, his brother Antony being Bishop of Durham, and Patriarch of Jerusalem. Bishop Sutton, in 1295, built the cloisters and began the charming little “Vicar’s court.” He died in 1300, his successor was Bishop John of Dalderby, the same who had a miracle-working shrine of pure silver in the south transept, and whom the people chose to call St. John of Dalderby, just as they did in the case of Bishop Grosteste, though the Pope had refused canonisation in each case. He finished the great tower, which, with its beautiful arcaded tower stage, its splendid double lights and canopies above, and its delicate lace-like parapet, seems to me to be quite the most satisfying piece of architecture that this or any other county has to show. It is finished with tall pinnacles of wood covered with lead. The exquisite stone rood-screen and the beautiful arches in the aisles were put in at the same time, the work on the screen being, as Sir C. Anderson remarks, very like the work on the Eleanor’s Cross at Geddington. He died in 1320, and the lovely tracery of the circular window in the south transept, called “The Bishop’s eye,” was inserted about 1350 above his tomb.

John de Welbourn, the munificent treasurer, who died in 1380, gave the eleven statues of kings beneath the window at the west end, which begin with William the Conqueror and end with Edward III., in whose reign they were set up. Among other benefactions Welbourn gave the beautifully carved choir stalls, and he also vaulted the towers. These were all, at one time, finished by leaded spires. Those of the western tower being 100 feet high, and that on the great central or rood tower soaring up to a height of 525 feet. This was blown down in 1547, and the western spires were removed in 1807-08, a mob of excited citizens having prevented their removal in 1727, but eighty years later the matter made no great stir, and though their removal may by some be regretted, I think it is a matter of pure congratulation that the splendid central tower, whose pinnacles attain an altitude of 265 feet, should have remained as it is. The delicate lace-like parapet was added in 1775. It is not very likely that anyone should propose to raise those spires again, but dreadful things do happen; and quite lately one of our most eminent architects prepared a design for putting a spire on the central tower at Peterborough. Think of that! and ask yourself, is there any stability in things human?

Apart from its commanding situation, the whole pile is very magnificent, and, viewed as a whole, outside, it has nothing to touch it, though the west front is not to compare in beauty with that of Peterborough. Inside, York is larger and grander, and Ely surpasses both in effect. But if we take both the situation and the outside view and the inside effect together, Lincoln stands first and Durham second.