English Architecture: Exuberance to Crisis, 1300-1408 - Professor Simon Thurley

well as I think you are aware the the title of my serious lectures this year has been God Caesar and Robin Hood and we saw my first lecture that and to understand Saxon and Norman building we needed to understand the obsession I talked about style specific design to bring man into proximity with a earthly representation of heaven now in the second two lectures this year that's tonight at on April 13 we want to Robin Hood now practices are more exciting they're surprising emblem or English building in depth but I think it's one which I hope when we have finished you will agree it captures the extraordinary richness and individuality of English building in the period between about 1300 and Reformation but tonight I want to deal with the first part this period an extraordinary century recently started in now 13th century England was rich and populous and the century that followed brought a lot of bad news and underlying many of the province was a very modern concern and that was climate change because between 1290 in about 30% by the British client came in stable and unpredictable there were a series of very very wet summers which prevented the crops ripening rotten seeing the ground and merchant pests and disease there was crystal flooding thousands of acres were inundated while torrential rain made thousands more useful between 30 and 50 unit 13:22 it was a cyst and crop failure and widespread famine perhaps killing half a million people so starting in the 1330s the countryside began to contract villages were abandoned claiming in sandy soils were left for more fertile areas this is an area of energy dark mist effects they're called pound tall and this is a passive thing that's where in the populace in which 13th century Hamlet's and Punk states were built on marginal agricultural land in 1300 this little hand that you see on the screen for non houses as long as four of those and seven ancillary they the buildings and we know from the archaeological record that the farmers who occupied these fought to keep the Mormons from eating up their fields by building a series of stone walls initially they had success but in the 1330s they built corn dryers to try and come back to the effect of the wet summers and we know that the qualifiers saw the problem because less than twenty years later the whole segment was handled using a better developed agricultural economy might have resisted the effects of climate change the climatic factors are all pretty immature system to its means particularly the marketplaces but there was a second factor that undermined the 13th century stability this is a danger of money supply this was partially caused by a genuine shortage of silver the silver mines just couldn't produce enough silver both to mint coins and serve the luxury market in this booming economy of the 13th century but part of the problems also to you to taxation and this was because the English crown that made heavy demands for war performative of the sixty years between 1290 in 1315 England and these weren't skirmishes these involved armies of up to 20,000 men ships horses and massive castles extended supply lines and the only way to pay for it was the imposition heavy taxes and the manipulation and the exploit of the wool trade upon which England's welcome was best and both the taxation and the manipulation were bad for the economy and meant that the self-confidence and the prosperity that knitted society together in the thirteenth century beginning in 1348 that knitting completely the pranic plane reached the South of England in that summer and gradually spread northwards continuing to spread death in Scotland in 1315 half of the English population was careful to recurring bouts in 1361 to to legend a legend said I probably killed another ten to fifteen percent so all in all as this graph shows in the middle of the century possibly up to 60% of the energy population was completely wiped out now of course many architects big Mason's were killed by the back deck many building projects were halted many rich patrons died with their checks on the spine and in a few places you can restock the illustrates the effect of the Black Death this is quite well known example in a very perishable very ambitious building again and about 1300 and were suddenly soft 1349 the town's fires you can see together with a mile of concepts place as was the south side name normil was never built were stopped in 1350 and was never here now if we were to assume the death toll amongst architects masons and sculptors was similar to the population and what this meant is very important point you suddenly have after 1350 new men of a younger generation their shoes in the patrons you know there was an emotion and a movement in the architecture of the 13th century that I described in my last lecture if you were here you will remember that me showing you this slide the East End of some Dennis and sleepers and see this amazing learning and tracery the exuberance of these niches the opportunity was missed to to lavish decorations on building this is another example I show you I can show you some actual sign this is one of the largest parish churches in England Holy Trinity ha just know that the wonderful learning lines need zubrin's of the East window is a jerk from the outside this exactly a Finnish church but you can see how every single element of this building is emotional decoration if it's affected in science the church as well as reading the slide but as we enter the 14th century English architecture gets much less emotional much more static it's less exuberant and it's less modded it's more controlled and it's less individualistic these changes began in the 1330s completely unconnected with the back deck but after the greatest tragedy of the mid century they seem to have completely captured the mood and stylistic change in English architecture really assemblies are 38 now in understanding these changes that took place it's crucially important to realize the importance of regional variations of style very easy living the 21st century to imagine everything look the same and everywhere in the country with regional variations a terrible struggle in ladies Mason's learnt that cars generally speaking in the great regional centers and look to models near vice versa tomorrow's Atlanta and so buildings in Florida Hospital James green looks very different to each other to those bottom one two buildings in London that have a really important role to play and the changes that took place in the middle of the 14th century while it wasn't Stephen's Chapel at Westminster Palace and the other was chapter house at Olsen capito these two buildings were the twin show pieces of London Masons incorporating ideas with which were pinched wrong to French royal buildings the specific innovation that was really important here was the use of tracery as more decoration instead of just as structural glazing bars now if I last lecture I described how the introduction of chastely revolutionised architectural design I showed you these new pictures you've got Revo ABI and on the left and you can show that there see how these are windows here are completely separate openings and here is the introduction tracery these thin pieces of stone which make the engine is being expected highly decorated with it this is the crucial innovation of the century before what happened this perhaps in Paul's Andersen steam is that this hits translated to the wall exists this tracing of the windows is now useless wall decoration this is the place where this verse begins and it's very very likely that the architect of since Stephen's Chapel was a mountain of Canterbury and Michael faced with the problem of modernizing the interior of the south transept of Gloucester and now Gloucester Cathedral covered the walls they're in a veneer of God mega tracer and it sees Venis strongly rented but you can see the way it case it's inside the buildings in the window this is a case we use and in this concept all the components they existed that were christened in 1817 the perpendicular style you see here which is under another architect extended this sort of stylistic experiment of the transect this I think is one of the most exciting places to be the choir is lived by the single largest window to be built anywhere this single graph paper like grids of 30 panels covering the entire eternal service this was a completely really aesthetic because everything in the choir was subjected to this net of tracer no individual elements stood out in complete contrast to previous material smoke which I'll remind you of this evening by statues an individual carving and there's another aesthetic shift to in the way that these panels that you see here emphasize the verticality of the space rather than its horizontality first event horizontality of English architecture this suddenly turns it from being to be that these vertical sharks sprout into a multitude ribs and on the ceiling creating this will during the cement and throw about thirteen sixty the architects of Gloucester take these design principles of the choir to their logical conclusion by applying this grid of paneling to the pools themselves from see here building voices they started handling the bolts to creating what we call here from the vaults previous Paulson relied on the lips of their strength but these bolts which are shaped like sort of up ended half trumpets well they need a brilliantly jointed background decorated with tracery unified the walls the windows the ceilings the whole thing in a modular so the components of this new style that it was a new way of best seen there that prospect soon started to make many many many other buildings look old and the most important of these was Canterbury Cathedral where in 1377 the month started to rebuild the north name to see here the architects they commissioned was Henry Emily the chief right architect and over a period of thirty six years he oversaw the creation of one of those public spaces help your spine to know the name of Canterbury reversed the existing architectural can replacing the massive engineering of the arcades we saw in the last two lectures with thin arches virtually eliminating any terrestrial triforium immunity squeeze squeeze down to emphasize this and voice movement and 80 feet above floor this was imitated all over the country because despite the economic stagnation that was gripping that located and the depopulation for almost every community the period between 13 18 and more or less that the Reformation was one of incredibly active participation in architectural Patridge aspects century and a half so perhaps the rebuilding of half of all the parish churches in England but this process was a totally different process to the one that I had talked about before work why is this the number of leases the first days there were very very few completely new churches new parishes always completely ceased to be formed after 1300 because each church as jealously guarding its rights and jurisdiction and therefore the 15th century saw new Maeve's Palace porches windows and various internal fittings rather than generally speaking new sights that's my semi Church as you see have a perpendicular label tab and whilst the best is the second point this is a really really important come back water again this book was not generally funded by the ecclesiastics or the aristocracy but by the gentry and the merchants this was paid for by the middling and lesser men computing - here is a big church it was acting more as completely rebuilt and sent from Walden Essex largest church in Essex bit outside the 15:30 paid for by the huge wealth of the town merchants it's a ground of the very typical example the big rectangular bottom and regularity at all and inside being are paved with a grid tracery between his ministry this was an expensive endeavor or even a tower as rich as water and we have to UM us why was a perfectly good jerk only built 100 years before replaced and the answer to that question is very simple the answer is dead because death was the Dynamo that drove so much building in the 15th century it was the specter of death over the people of England after the catastrophe of that catastrophe nothing left us on the residual strain of morbidity in society and this is perhaps most starkly symbolized in amongst some Richmond of dead pixels that double tombs this is one of my favorite double tubes up Arthur to commemorated the patron in World War II and below is his armored effigy on the top know is his emaciated certain more common expressions from obesity were found in the terrifying murals that were painted above and around the chancel arches and behind the rooms many many parish churches worship preserves Thomas's chair Salisbury still stare at a human doom anything today where Christ in majesty judges the world the left-hand side angels so that being good retract instead about help that's animal let's move away from the churches for a moment I will come back to stealing decorative let's move away from churches because the century I'm talking about this evening it's also some of the most remarkable secular buildings of the whole agency now as the Builder King Edward the third and a really good long reign 1327 1777 long before he eclipsed his predecessor I having second thoughts about last time I think always about arguments ed the third became the greatest patron of English architecture of the Middle Ages and his biggest projects most important project was with rebuilding of Windsor Castle over a period of 18 years as the project cost of 51 million pounds this is the bulk of this 4,000 pounds was spent in the years between thirty and fifty seven and thirty and sixty eight on rebuilding also see Papa now this is Hollis this is the and this is the there was this is a reconstructed sketch of what that long animation and I suggest perhaps to us today it looks rather steer and monotonous but I think to the contemporary observer may be the longest secular society by quite a little way it had absolutely no only external sculpture which would have been quite shocking to contenders and we've set it apart from all previous monumental structures I think most of all was the impression that all of the individual elements this facade are less important than the overall effect you see what I mean there's nothing there that stands out is he overall which is really like to be intuitive and this was part of the key art and Gritty of that disadvantage that was born us and Stephen's Chapel is exploited Rostow and they've met aesthetic that we normally call and Windsor you cannot underestimate the importance of one of the most important imitators is Castle watch John of Gaunt Edwards fourth son came to prominence with his elder brothers died and he started on this enormous all over the marble throne set on pink dance behind a huge stone table it was so what happens well in 33 decided to retain massive walls but he knew where the roof was taken out and replaced with the largest and most important piece of country in Western Europe the challenge the humans richard ii sculptor was how to spam the incredible width and to do this he used an emerging structural technique have been successfully employed perhaps only once for as Dartington warden Devon which is known as roof and of course his roof works by essentially shortening the span which you have to bridge by creating the beam which is supported on these all so in terms of engineering this is incredibly ambitious incredibly impressive and incredibly innovative but there's more to it than engineering on the end of each happy was a huge angel holding the arms of England and so the roof was thus a representation of the heavens spread out over the earth deport all witches second alone but this wasn't the only religious connotation of which two-thirds all because the emphasis at which you see here in drawing was also treated exactly like a cathedral and great added with two towers great window and his niches here which originally contained statues 27 of them representing the Kings and Queens of England so he appropriates here the language of the church and the cathedral for his own royal palace this is a unique moment in English medieval architecture with the king seeking equivalents of status with the most important religious buildings this is a big comment on English medieval kingship and particularly which of the seconds conception of his own kingship as defined institution now clearly lesser patrons would never dare copy this audacious building in its entirety but almost every single individual personal badges for the but I think the other thing which i think is in very particular Dean is that these big timber roots have already had a big status in English to keep me on my class where the status material stone of Fulton stones what you wanted to achieve the constant but the halloween' roof thanks to Western straightforward instantly became a special kind of roof the reference back to the principal throne chamber and the fourth used it as ultimately and we can eight used it at home to court and Cortina States the champion period use them in houses such as early as and religious connotations of these rooms were taken up by parish churches many of you will have been to see these amazing angel roots in East Anglia this one is in a neighboring town where I live since with when tweezers quite a rare dedication in March in Cambridgeshire even three tiers on well because 100 years 100 years war and royal and architectural aspiration went hand in hand because fighting in France could bring wealth which in turn supported a feminizing on land in the States for the aristocracy to pass on to their heirs the desperate state of the English economy that collapse of Agriculture thence that's the aristocrats were not getting the revenues from their lands and many of the people who built big in this century built their houses on deep on the profits of all particularly war frogs the courtiers at the third honor and knighthood was in their blood and they wanted to build houses that reflected their Marshall success and they pushed themselves to their limits to do so now until quite a long time after Black Death the north of England North Yorkshire was very thinly populated Great Houses with all the castles force Carlisle Darwin area for instance and there was the castle Palace of the bishops there were very few local houses any size the generator widget second two families became of the lead all system purses and the nethers both were given wide-ranging powers governments by the crown and they were even given things to maintain an order through their own private bodies these therapists and that followers start building in a period of about a century just overlapping to the same key we're talking about a series of residences of extraordinary scale and extraordinary Magnus's the levels I think were the greatest most important builders they build Brahms Midland Sheraton supporters of the Neville's built an imitation that bulton come on to Bolton in a minute Emily castle and Percy family meanwhile that we developed panic see they're still lived in by the Jews today basically and perhaps the mostly awkward Castle again part of territories National Heritage Collection about nineties now the most important development in the lives of these men Billy's extraordinary houses was any decrease in household mobility because you see the early medieval households were always on the move the whole time in moving about the function but during the 14th century these big households moved about much less some of them stayed put for most of the year and much of this world lots of reasons for this change in lifestyle could go to one of the main reasons was the fact that they had tenant Eve many of their their estates so they didn't need to move around to their various estates because basically they were getting money from the tenants rather than farming themselves and this meant that they were spending much longer periods of time in individual houses so those houses needed to be bigger more complex more richly appointed and as a result costing the earth most laws decided in fact they need to have one or two houses rather than Lots so whilst community the first twenty houses and in the six only twelve baby fish characters at 13 houses in 13 countries by 1356 healing itself because it may be for a few so these mighty residences built in the North England will place all those massive lavish the actual heavily influenced by Windsor and Kenilworth which I've talked about already they tended not to have a strong single visual focus provided by keep see but the silhouette was made up of lots of towers and walls and crucially these houses for the first time were planned around a courtyard and this is a very important development and I'm just one of the thirst has to do it was Berkeley castle this is a photograph from the English Heritage guidebook and you can see the keys there singing classes and middle and this was part of a very important trend which you can see into a cappella sports now I think the best body the most interesting of these is ultimate castles not very well known we're around 1378 Jordan Blouin who was the most important architect in North England started building his brand new castle and a fresh sight from Richard Nordstrom soon I was a soldier but these people who turn into a courtier most of Chancellor of England and like enrich his house by strong towers corners and I think you'll agree his external appearance is this austerity is all shown because if you go to the planets on three levels of the planet by Sonia vertical chain all three it creates a large number of incredibly luxurious lodgings for scrupulous householders guests to service and if you see lots and lots of rooms here all serviced by their bathrooms using the walls to allow people to be deep and so this house represents the first generation of English autocratic houses where the complexity of a lavish civilian lifestyle is architectural integrated with the visual communication of military power so you get something that looks like a castle that feels functions like a very and in this building and others we see the group of the individual logic the individual rooms with the owners for their households and their guests and this is a very very important because it's all about increasing luxury and privacy and specialization we drop my lawsuit is about penshurst place and this is a very good example of how the owners of these great houses wanted to have more private accommodation here is the Great Hall at Penn's Nest place with its drawing room acquainted this was the house that was built by Sir John Watney but was sold to make indicates brother in 1429 and what he does is he builds on this great new chamber and stated brought here with a series of large and comfortable and private rooms with private standards so normally lodging mrs. deeds in which today are often gone to empty were merged with extraordinary experiments this is I can find material in Quito this does give some energy from language these interiors were textiles particular tapestry plate all designed to sparkle in Windows cartridge in 1397 have a bed of those values under negative powers the next pounds was the equivalent of the year's income for very well-off night very very expensive bed one of these tapestries we shouldn't miss jib Charmaine was sent to ignore was bad news nearly 48 pounds so they had about these pieces of furniture covering carpets linen the dazzling display of plate viewers charges candlesticks goblets Lord scroop that both of them had in his bedroom at Bolton Bowl and hue of silver and in his Great Hall at 35 builders buildings let me not leave my last section seedling boy that has to project housing because all the developments these attacks across an interesting they weren't as important in the long run as what was starting to happen in towns now obviously the towers were decimated by the play and many housing Lincoln on your part in science but still about 30% of the population were living in new towns and sometimes I guess was Wooster actually grew even in size and these towns were run by merchants and for some of successful artisans who formed the corporations that round these places and these merchants of octagon after sense were also the leading members of the religious paternity or Hills here we come back to the idea because these guilds were like clubs that you could buy into to ensure what happen to your soul basically paid your pennies in to make sure that somebody after you die pray for your soul and these guilds were the organizations that funded the majority of architectural output in the town spending between this is where I live I'm not in that building this is the town it was originally religious opportunity to build it and turn it into the Town Hall it wasn't roads bridges hospitals which were paid for by these religious class view them spine and elsewhere couple things live this is the merchant adventurers fall in Europe about 1400 huge today and these these buildings really were the buildings that gave medieval towns there and it was actually quite rare in a town for the corporation itself to build and yeah and I want you just to know this for a second because this is extraordinary and I said to you and I think that john roxton who was the mason new designers would have liked to but extraordinary language and built in direct competition direct competition with the court now as the English economy through the machinery of government developed the church prospered there was a huge competition for able administrators and this led to one other area of Baptists development which the last areas have talked about this evening which is building state education and there were three places let's mainly really in a spiritual go to even diversity ends of course or you get awesome now as a true you know maybe pounded University of Oxford it grew out of us concentration of teachers there originally when students went there they stay tuned these things called academic halls with his wife in private houses but from the late 13th century some colleges began pounding the first one was pounding for 1260 all-white waters of Merton who was England College because institutional buildings there's a chapel and then in about 1300 for him the first residential buildings finally the first residential in Oxford this is what incredibly basic quite different from communal life in one Street now they were one-room deep chambers stay either side of the lobby in the staircase each channels has four fellows who set together communally but they had their own little cubicle near the window the new glass the windows was no fireplace and the ground-floor rooms have flaws the walls but like so many other towns was dreadfully hit by the was in those new and this building you can see that was in charge of building into these forms the the north side of triangle the other three sides there there then that contrasts that other side is the other three sides four chambers the seventy scholars and the gatehouse that you see there and west of this was a poster and a belt Winchester College which you see here was built by weakened as a feeder school to send a scholars to this College very very similarly constructed almost the same idea heavily influenced by Queens the great 19th century architect a delusion said the history of architecture the world and I think in the architecture of the period 1300 to around 10 that we talk about evening we can see the reaction of a society to incredible hardship and it was a society in which the economic balance was radically changing and with that change came a change the political battles to the Black Death rather surprisingly many of those who weren't killed were considerably better off not the big landowners but their economic and social messes the poorer in richer and the merchants and gently created a self-conscious and assertive political community that was now representative apartment the peasants revolt in this period and ensured that this community wouldn't as in France for instance make the common people entirely responsible for direct taxation war passes in England shared the burden of taxes and this meant that English society was much less Englishmen now spoke a single language was rapidly becoming the official language of administration and these points are very important because it meant that England had a much more uniform culture than any other state state in Europe and this is a fact this is expressed cleaning in its architecture these buildings that I've been showing you had a much great of commonality of style but commonality of aesthetic purpose than buildings erected on the same area Germany France Italy where the session this were much greater but above all from the 14th century architecture is for more people it's not just for the bishop than the good the Hillsman utilities the factors the emergence of the artists actual building the towns themselves they let me go by the obstacles they a huge disposable income of people though the social scale enable they're not they are approximately habits during the patient's churches cathedrals and as we see in the next lecture we'll meet up at the buildings that they are living in themselves which enabled their own standards of living to gelatinize the passion the throne English architecture is of course God still and so in a smaller way did Rome but out of the misery of the play economic collapse emerged self-confident and into this individualistic nation who didn't want to own everything - Bishop - no water water King and if we were to try and choose an emblem to exemplify the free spirit and their Englishness my money it would be good the more of this on April it was amazing that some of the poverty and the countryside was caused by the increase in the more trade this is us and then you have any comment now if that latter point of view is true this is not remember stock elasticity this is a bit of theater so but again there is debate about that so simply lost you see that the important thing about it is once it was done on this is this is it's very difficult for us today to recreate utter sense of shock and amazement of something when it was people went into it must have been with quite a story and it's only now actually we pay to it and in the way we should settle even more so you can see why they haven't been that great people's imagination and extraordinary when even asked William Cecil decides to build so it is thank you

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 18,209

Rating: 4.8974357 out of 5

Keywords: Medieval History, English Heritage, Heritage, History, English History, Medieval, Architecture, English Architecture, Medieval Architecture, Simon Thurley, Thurley, History lecture, History talk, Gresham College, lecture talk, Gresham Professor, Visiting Gresham Professor, education, free education

Id: 0KaPCPIAMek

Length: 59min 34sec (3574 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 26 2011