The most decorated of these lead spires in England—although not very large—is at East Harling in Norfolk. It rises within the stone battlement and has an open stage with wood pinnacles and crocketed “flying buttresses” all covered with lead. The sides of the spire proper, very narrow and acute, have the rolls arranged in lozenges instead of the usual herring-bone or vertical lines, the lozenges are on one side as wide as the face, breaking into a zig-zag above, on another side are smaller lozenges three or four in the width changing into one again above: at the apex is a large finial knob.[8]
Wren’s knowledge of the spire of old St. Paul’s possibly led him to try his hand at leaded spires, and the result in some of the City churches, particularly that one on Ludgate Hill that is such a perfect foil for the great dome of St. Paul’s, shows his usual assured mastery. The spire of St. Olave, Hart Street, is said to have a crystal ball at the apex.
Fig. 13.—Barnard’s Inn Hall.
The smaller turrets on college halls are generally covered with lead in an ogee form. Those at Oxford have often a lozenge raised on each face, that on [Barnard’s Inn] in the City is wholly enveloped in lead. A turret on the alms-houses at Abingdon has large letters and crowns, which are gilt, standing up free on the slanting faces. At Hampton Court there are turret roofs, ogee with crockets and finials and little pinnacles set round at the springing. At Nonsuch leaded turrets surmounted the great octagons at the angles, they were probably much decorated and certainly of considerable size, making very picturesque compositions, as we may see in the rude views of the palace which exist.
In France and Germany there are many remarkable leaded spires, but we can only stay to mention the steeple at Chalons-sur-Marne, the central flèche at Amiens, and the belfry at Calais. The steeple at Chalons is a most interesting work, large and well-designed, with faint and fascinating remains of a gorgeous scheme of colour decoration patterning the whole surface of the lead with figures and canopies resembling the drawing on stained glass, the lead rolls passing across the design like the iron glazing bars. This was carefully drawn by Burges and illustrated in the Builder for 1856, and the whole spire is represented to scale in the Sketch Book of the Architectural Association for 1883. This is a work of the end of the thirteenth century, and the decoration was done in the following century. It will be well to mention it more particularly later, but as Viollet-le-Duc says that nearly all the lead work of the middle ages was so decorated we may conclude that such a magnificent spire as St. Paul’s was not entirely bare of gold and colour.
The flèche at Amiens, which rises from the roof some 100 feet of “transparent fretwork which seems to bend to the west wind,” is well illustrated in Viollet-le-Duc’s Dictionary as well as by Burges. Every resource of the art was lavished on it, pinnacles and niches, lead statues, tracery, great circular coronets of pierced cast work. The sheet lead was diapered with fleurs-de-lis, and all was decorated with designs in colour and gold. Although perfectly Gothic in form it is a work of the sixteenth century, and the painting is in the manner of the Renaissance.
At Calais the fine belfry represented in [Fig. 14], which was completed about 1600, is in some respects very English in character, while on the other hand it is a northern representative of a class of bulbous spires which are as much cupolas as spires, and were probably often intended as fantastic domes. These, although later found all across Europe, from Russia to Belgium, were never naturalised in England on a large scale, our nearest approach to them being in the ogee cupolas of small turrets and lanterns and some of Wren’s spires. In Holland they were very much affected in the most extravagant forms, and they are now the constant form of church spire seen in eastern Europe. They seem much at home in such a city as Buda-Pesth, and have doubtless characteristics which endear them to those of Mongolian blood and speech. It is an interesting point to decide whether these forms are in origin actually Eastern—“travelled topes” as a friend says—or whether they are the natural outcome of a combination of spire and dome in a period of extravagant and declining taste.
Fig. 14.—Calais Belfry.