English Architecture: Making England in the Shadow of Rome, 410-1130 - Simon Thurley

well ladies and gentlemen I think we'll start it is six o'clock thank you for coming on an evening where transport is obviously a little bit difficult and I'm very pleased to give the first of four lectures the series I've entitled God's Caesar and Robin Hood how the Middle Ages were were built you know I think that building in England in the Middle Ages is often misunderstood the term Middle Ages itself actually in my view speaks of prejudice it was invented by the 16th century Italian historian Giorgio Vasari to describe the bit between the glories of Rome and the triumphs of the Renaissance part barbaric part heroic and for many holy confusing these eleven hundred years are too many a jumble of castles and cathedrals hovels and pigsties inhabited by brutish hairy peasants and the odd knight in shining armor for academics very often what was built in England is considered to be a pale imitation of what was being built elsewhere in Europe somehow for them everything that was new and good architectural II about the Middle Ages seems to have come from abroad until eventually thank goodness it all swept away by the Renaissance so in my four lectures I want to present her completely different and I think personal view of building in England during the Middle Ages I'm not going to concentrate on the very many and very deep arguments which take place between scholars about England's early architectural history I want to tell a narrative as I see it and one of my objectives is to encourage you to go and see some of the extraordinary amazing beautiful buildings that I'm going to be talking about and tonight I'm going to start with the end of the Roman Empire those of you who stay the course and come to all my lectures will reach the Reformation and the end of the Middle Ages eventually I've called as I said this series God Caesar and Robin Hood you'll find out why but tonight I want to talk about Caesar the Romans were in Britain for a very long time to put it in perspective if they had if they had left Britain in the year 2000 they would have arrived in the reign of Queen Elizabeth the first and during those centuries the Romans built a great deal there were over 60 towns parts of the countryside were littered with villas sections of the coasts with massive fortresses and hadrian's wall with its forts and towns protected the UM the Empire's northern border internal fortifications - were mighty many towns were walled and the largest of these like York almost impregnably in stone and here is the multi angular tower at York the lower courses of which are still Roman the simple and crucial fact was for a thousand years after the Roman legions left Britannia in 410 England was littered with Roman buildings these are the remains of the Roman town of Rock Sita in Shropshire the Romans had built in brick and stone and had bonded their buildings with hydraulic lime mortar which as you probably know sets like the hardest rock and what this meant is that well into the 14th century there were Roman buildings standing many of which were still roof with vaults you could walk into them the Roman Road network survived and so did many Roman bridges and what you see here is a artist's reconstruction of 6th century Canterbury showing how the Saxons were but were living amongst the remains of the Roman city so as the first waves of Saxons arrived in East Anglia from northern Germany they came to a country where the physical legacy of Rome was ever-present this is not one of the East Anglian Saxon Shore forts this is poor Chester and those walls that you see there are Roman and are the sort of Roman walls that the Saxons arriving is Anglia would have seen these people were farmers they were attracted by the agricultural potential of England and had very little direct experience of the Roman Way of life and even less interest in it they weren't especially numerous but they were highly successful at establishing themselves by force as the landlords of the native British population so much so that by the year 600 although the genetic makeup of what is now England was still heavily romano-british people spoke Anglo Saxon worshipped Germanic gods and shared Germanic fashions but by the year 600 something was happening that was going to put Rome center stage again in five nine six Pope Gregory had sense and Augustine and his missionaries to the Kentish Kingdom and after several faltering starts England had become Christian again by the six 80s after the Synod of Whitby had resolved that the Roman form of Christianity rather than the Celtic form would be followed the influence of Rome was assured so what did this mean to building in England well Britain between 410 and around 950 was essentially an island of timber buildings the Saxons were masters of timber construction building their own houses churches and their palaces of wood even the verb to build in saxon is tim Brehon and buildings were get in bro so we shouldn't imagine that these structures were either primitive or even provincial because we know from excavations at roman villa sites like the one that's currently being undertaken by the barry Cunliffe at braiding on the isle of wight that many Roman villas were furnished with great timber halls for transacting state business and for feasting and we know also from excavation that many of these timber halls survived well into the Saxon period and the timber halls built by Saxon Kings such as those constructed at neighboring in Northumberland in the six 20s for King Edwin were monumental buildings built in a romano-british chapter tradition and this is a reconstruction of one of King Edwin's halls built of timber plastered over the outside rendered and painted a very substantial sophisticated highly decorated at buildings stone building you see implied infrastructure and organization and this disappeared after 410 and by 600 that can have been very fused stonemasons left in England but masonry building was reintroduced by Christian miss and missionaries and it relied not on querying new stone but on robbing Roman buildings for a supply of cut stone remarkably acent Martin's Church in Canterbury the very first Church founded by central g'sten and his fellows survives incorporating the brick remains of a Roman tomb here is a reconstruction of what that church would have looked like here is a plan of it today here you see the saxon walls and at the heart of this church is in red here an actual roman tomb and if you look at the fabric of the church you can see the roman bricks here making it up so this ancient church although it's been mauled and altered by time is an amazing place to visit actually i really recommend it and it's very typical of the first places of christian worship in saxon england they were all built in very close proximity to prominent Roman sites and all constructed entirely out of reused Roman materials an early monastery remains of which survived at Bradwell on see this was built in the 650s and this makes the point again the the remains of this church it's lost its apps but you can see perhaps on the ground there where the apse was this would have been that as it were the chanson arch this church was actually built on the gate of the great Roman Shoreline fort of auth owner but the church that you really have to go and see to get an understanding of this first phase of stone building in England after the Romans is the Church of st. John in Eskom in County Durham probably built in about 1700 and this is the best preserved early Saxon building in England and what you can see here and I hope that the lights aren't blasting this out I can't see whether you can see it or not but are the huge blocks of Roman masonry which is very very typical of these early sacks and churches making up at the coins but you know when you go into the church and this is an old photograph of it before it's now got pews and things in the walls which are of naked chiseled Roman stone just don't do justice of what we know the original interiors were like these were plastered and painted white the carving was picked out in bright primary colors the walls were hung with icons and the narrow windows filled with incredibly valuable and rare stained glass but of course a church like Eskom was not the norm before about 950 the vast majority of churches were built of timber and of course can only be recovered by archaeological excavation however remarkably at green stood in Essex there is a remarkable timber built church that's been scientifically dated to the last days of Saxon England and this small church gives an impression perhaps of what hundreds of other much earlier examples might have looked like the walls which I hope you can see here are built of split logs here is a close-up the round side of the logs is built on the outside the bottom of these logs has been taken away rotted away and has been replaced by a Victorian sill at the top the logs are jointed into a beam at the top and when you go inside the church the smooth inside face of the logs shaped by the Saxon adzes still exist so this is a much more typical view of what these churches actually look like but the stone churches the new churches were literally imported from Rome their fabric their design and even their craftsmanship but you know it wasn't only the physicality of Rome that was really important in early Saxon Christian England equally important was its intellectual and cultural legacy you see with the fall of the political and military Roman Empire Rome as a city entered a new phase as the headquarters of world Christianity and as such for an educated Anglo Saxon like the venerable bead England's first historian Rome became the headquarters of the world and for the whole of the anglo-saxon period in England there is a real sense that the cultural and intellectual capital of England was actually Rome so look at someone like the East Anglian King red walled who was buried in the great ship at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk in around 624 he was surrounded by objects identifying him as much as a Roman Emperor as as an anglo-saxon feast giver and here is his helmet which is based on a Roman military helmet now before the 10th century England was divided into numbers of small kingdoms which fluctuated in their size and influence very crudely speaking in the years around 600 the Kentish kingdom was the most powerful of these and I've already mentioned Sint Maartens church built in Canterbury in the Kentish Christian Kingdom in the following century at Northumbria was in the lead and Eskom which I've showed you and gathering which I've also showed you were both built in this at Northern Kingdom but from around 700 it was Murcia that was in the ascendant and in the 8th century the kingdom of Mercia was ruled by two very powerful and very successful Kings who controlled most of England south of the river Humber Ethel bald who wrote rules from 716 to 57 and King offer who ruled between 757 and 796 now they're both interesting but offer is of particular importance because he was an international figure who corresponded with Charlemagne and was a friend of the Pope Hadrian and of course he is also significant as the builder of Britain's largest monument the 150 mile long offers Dyck now much to the chagrin of Canterbury offer used his influence with the Pope to propose and successfully found a new arch Episcopal see at Litchfield now nothing of his great Cathedral there now remains but just a couple of years ago a fragment of a contemporary shrine chest associated with the cult of Saint Chad was excavated under the nave and this carving which I'm showing you here on the screen in my view one of the most beautiful and moving sculptures to survive from Saxon England which is on showing the cathedral was heavily influenced by a revival of the sculptural style of the early Christian church now this revival was political it was religious and it was ultimately also architectural and most important politically was the emergence under Charlemagne who came into power in 768 and died in 814 of a new empire a new empire that rivaled in wealth in organization and instability the fallen Empire of Rome Charlemagne's territories stretched from central Germany to northern Spain and into northern Italy and on Christmas Day 800 at the hands of Pope Leo the 3rd Charlemagne took the title of Roman Emperor and this political revival was accompanied by a renewal of the authority and the traditions of the Roman Church an absolutely self-conscious attempt to recreate the Emperor Constantine's Golden Age of Christianity now under Charlemagne's influence his territories enjoyed one of the most important and creative periods of architectural development in European history in his reign alone 16 cathedrals 232 monasteries were either founded or rebuilt and what you see on the screen here is Charlemagne's own palace Chapel M at Aachen and the style in which these features were developed was that of early Christian Rome epitomized by the basilica's of Saint Peter and Saint Paul it's a way of building that art historians have described as Romanesque now Romanesque is in fact not really a style it is what I would describe an aesthetic program it's the name that is given to a variety of effects that were used by architects to try and create more closely and effectively the architecture of ancient Rome and Charlemagne's a chapel here actually incorporated and large quantities of Roman material including the polished marble pillars and capitals that you see under the arches and it became possible to to develop this this plethora of techniques which built up the Romanesque style through advances in building technology in materials and engineering all stimulated in their turn by the peace and prosperity that Charlemagne's rule bought now these developments in the empire of Charlemagne were really important for England because offers achievements were heavily influenced not only by the remains of the row of Rome that were around him in his own kingdom but crucially by Carolingian Christianity and the best example of this is the most spectacular saxon a church to survive in england today All Saints bricks worth in Northamptonshire now of course this spire just to make it clear is not part of the saxon church and indeed as i'll go into explain in a moment the saxon church and had a series of little rooms these were open arcades little rooms called Porticus of here and which were roofed over in a single roof so the form of the saxon church would have had a cholesteric rest area up here and a roof down here and a series of little rooms giving it a basilican appearance now this building when you go inside has an extraordinary a monumental quality to it and what you see when you go in is these extraordinary arcades this is an archive photograph this is a photograph that I took which I think shows perhaps even better these extraordinary arcades which have been open and led into these little rooms there was originally an apse there was originally a crypt and the Crypt would have been full of relics what is important about this building is that it is entirely built in Roman brick and stone brought from the ruins of Leicester 40 miles away down a Roman Road this church was deliberately and successfully recreating the sense of Roman monumentality that that an offer would have seen around him in the ruins of the great baths in in Leicester which still survived to a degree and were visible in contemporary Carolingian buildings now um the mercian dominance of England came to an end and between about eight six five and nine five four everything was dominated by the Vikings who first pillaged and then settled in the east of the country the problems caused by Viking aggression were only resolved by the Royal dynasty of Wessex most famously of course by kill King Alfred the Great who ruled between 871 and 899 and in the eight 80s Alfred populated his kingdom with a network of strategically located fortified palaces containing craftsmen tradesmen markets Minster churches and sometimes royal palaces these are known as the burrs a burr meaning defended place and they were essentially the first English towns since the Romans Alfred chose Oxford to be one of these and he surrounded the existing Minster there and the settlement first with earth ramparts initially supported by great timber posts but after the Year 1000 these earth ramparts were faced with stone and at the West Gate of Oxford was built this massive Tower which amazingly still stands today so Oxford was in the 10th century a stone walled Citadel with massive and entrance towers built in stone and here you see a plan of it it has only recently been realized that the tower is actually Saxon it was always thought to be normal we now know it's Saxon it was located here at the the north desert of the West Gate of the of the city and inside the city inside the defences there was a grid of metal streets laid out round a cross of main roads so the formation of towns in the sense that we would understand the word town followed hard on the heel of the formation of something else that was in very important that is the formation of villages in the countryside you see before the 10th century almost everybody lived in scattered settlements of no more than perhaps a score of people but between the 10th and the 12th centuries in the central terrible areas of England peasant farmers abandoned their farmsteads and Hamlet Hamlet's and moved together to create villages these places normally had Church and a main street and between perhaps 12 and 60 houses this is a plan of the deserted medieval village of Warren Percy in Yorkshire you can still visit it it's under the care of English heritage extremely atmospheric place and you can still make out the pattern of the Saxon tops and Crofts so each of these little areas here this is the house this is the Toft which is a banked area in which the house lay and this is their own little area of a land they could farm the Croft in the background outside this central bow belt of England in the east and the south west and then the north and thus far southwest people lived in a variety of other types of Hamlet's or single farmsteads but this big block in the centre of England the villages and formed peasant houses in these villages tended to be robust but simple timber structures clearly none survived today many have been excavated this what I'm showing you here is a reconstructed saxon house at West Stowe in Suffolk this is a much earlier house than the sort of house that would have been at Warren Percy but I think it does give an idea of the sophistication these weren't Hut's they were houses and I think in the 10th century we can take that there they probably were quite similar and in many ways to this now of course there is a lot of argument as to why villages like Warren Percy formed suddenly in this period and of course with any big historical phenomenon there is no single causal factor for many visit villages the causes were different even unique but there were some strong common forces that caused these villages to coalesce from the 10th century onwards as the density of rural settlement increased Lang land holdings were shared by more family members and the countryside became crowded and complicated to work and it must have seen a good option to move into a village but I think crucially at the same time as these agricultural changes were taking place landlords were building themselves large houses and forming churches which created a kernel around which villages formed and this is indeed what happened Warren Percy there were two landlords in Warren Percy there are two manor houses one here and one here and they between them built their own private church for their use and the use of their tenants now this is a very important development the first Christian churches which I've been describing to you were generally minsters now minsters were essentially small monasteries there were not very many of them they were very dispersed and if you wanted to go to a church in early Saxon England you had to travel quite a long way to to worship but from the 940s these landlords such as a landlord's at Warren Percy began to found and build their own private churches near to their houses and this was the origin of the parish system and by the end of the period I'm covering this evening by about 11:30 there were between six and seven thousand local churches and what this meant was for the first time almost everybody now had a church within a short walk of where they lived this is st. Peter's Church Barton upon Humber this is the Saxon bit this is the later bit the Saxon bit was built by a landlord as his own private Church his house was next Barton and nearby and that the town of Barton grew up around it so a church built in about 970 now unfortunately and perhaps obviously none of these sacs and manor houses which always accompany these churches and survive but some have been excavated and some of these particularly the ones in the East of England seem to have been defended this is a reconstruction of the saxon manor house of golfo in Lincolnshire the 10th century manor house can see that large large building this was set inside a circular compound of ramparts with a wooden palisade on top and a large wooden gate house which allowed you in this was a sort of fortified manor house so what I'm saying is that during the 10th century the English countryside acquired all the components that we are familiar with today the manor house the church with its churchyard close together with the village houses clustered around now Oxford which I was talking about just a moment ago was not the capital of King Alfred's England as much as he had one Winchester was the capital and it was in Winchester that the greatest of King Alfred's buildings were constructed the Cathedral thanks to painstaking excavation more is known about Saxon Winchester Cathedral than any other Saxon Cathedral and you see here Martin Biddle's excavations here is the plan of the Saxon Cathedral right next door to the Norman Cathedral adjacent to it now by the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066 Winchester had already had a Cathedral for 418 years this was the old Minster the plan which you see here it had a cruciform plan basically like this and it had a square end eventually over the ensuing centuries this was enlarged and adapted and so if you were to go and visit the Saxon Cathedral in the Year 1000 as well as the nave and the high altar there were four towers three crypts three apses at least twenty four smaller chapels and a Baptistery and despite some strong purely English characteristics the old Minster was by the Year 1000 with a recognizably Carolingian plan and most prominent of the camp Carolingian features was a feature known as the West work now in fact in Winchester there were two churches the Cathedral the old work here and another one next door not going to talk about this I want to talk about the Cathedral and this massive sort of bulbous extension at the West End of the Cathedral is what I'm talking about as the West work now whist works were developed in Carolingian churches in the ninth century and went on to form a component of many great churches in France and Germany built during the 10th to 12th 10th centuries I'm showing you corvy Cathedral in Westphalia built in the 8th 70s and this is the only Carolingian west work actually to survive so what were these things well at Winchester here what this was about was the fact that these Saxon churches had multiple focuses for liturgy the liturgical focus was not just as the East End there was another focus at the West End and the West End there were shrines there were chapels there were altars and here at Winchester there was also a royal pew which would have loud King Alfred to looked out into the body of the church and at the high altar at the East End so winch's is important because it's at Winchester that we understand about the physicality of a saxon cathedral and the multi focused liturgical nature of the building but winchester was soon to be eclipsed by london as the commercial and eventually the political capital of england and Edward the Confessor the last Saxon King of course came to the throne in 1042 decided to build his great royal church at Westminster and this is Westminster Abbey now Edward the confessors commission of new abbey at Westminster ranks amongst the most important in the whole history of English architecture the design of Edwards new abbey had no direct precedent in England or Normandy although across the channel the norman abbey of jimmy edge was being constructed in a similar style almost simultaneously both the English and the Normans were in fact imitating a new way of building which had been evented and developed in burgundy and the Loire Valley in the 10 30s the essential change that was happening in mainland Europe and at the same time in Westminster was from interiors that relied for their effect on large areas of painted wall surface two spaces that were modelled in three dimensions with arches horizontal moldings semicircular shafts stone vaults and other ornamental moldings and these ideas essentially came from Roman buildings especially the large and prominent remains of amphitheaters were there tears of arches and columns it was this that people found so attractive the the arches with columns a stringcourse another arch with columns and then another stringcourse this was what was found attractive and of course what was surviving all over Europe and surviving I would suggest at this point also in an England I'm showing you here the amphitheater at NIEM so the interior of saxon Westminster Abbey was revolutionary conceived as a spacial whole rather than an agglomeration of small compartments remember what I was saying about Saxon a Winchester it was lots of little small compartments this is Richard gems reconstruction of the confessors Westminster Abbey conceived as an architectural hole this is a close-up of it which I think will make the point better because you see in a saxon church these wall spaces here would have been a solid mass of masonry that would have been painted and there would have been little chapels and coming off the side this in the new building became now an organized system of superimposed arches raised in tiers one above the other and the principle of the design was that each arch should be visibly supported by a column or a half column and a Capitol and this produced a clustering of vertical shafts around the piers that visually broke up the hard form of the structure these arches no longer had simple square sections but displayed a range of shapes created by the addition of actual extra rolls and extra moldings so in the ten fifties this revolutionary building started to influence local churches which were being built by members of Edward the confessors caught so we have a building like st. Mary Stowe in Lincolnshire and here we have surviving the sacs and transepts and that the bottom of the Tower of a very big church and if you look at its plan suddenly you see these are not separate separate chapels this is not the Porticus of a Saxon building as I described it bricks Worth and at the Cathedral Winchester this is now a proper and transept as we would recognize it today here is the very big and prominent a possibly royal church in the middle of Dover Castle here is the Roman Pharaoh's still standing today the Roman lighthouse and this is the Saxon church with its sacks Central Crossing tower this was a big change to the way local churches looked in the the most important and the richest places and these new style churches were also used in a different way if you remember I said before when we were looking at Winchester there were multiple focuses for liturgy multiple focuses for worship but in these churches that became a single focus at the East End and these new stone local churches became very different this is a church in Sussex which I'm just putting up as an example because the Saxon churches were often just one space the early Saxon churches the latest accent churches in the 10th century all acquired a chancel a separate space which was the theatre of the priest the priest himself found that his status was increased and this became the area which the the priests became responsible for and the nave became the area that the congregation was responsible for from the late 10th century these types of churches began to get their own burial grounds very often walled and from about 1050 they started to have permanently cited fonts so before William the conquerer sailed from Normandy in 1066 England was already richly populated with walled towns with towers villages with defended manor houses and their own stone parish churches with cathedrals of a great size and beauty this was no architectural backwater indeed Edward the Confessor and his courtiers were commissioning churches in a style that was in the forefront of European fashion now the Norman Conquest lose over English history casting a shadow that obscure obscures much of what became fought before and I think colors much of what came afterward it sounds very obvious to say it but in the year 1000 no one had heard of the Norman Conquest in fact no one had heard of the Normans to the English the people of Normandy were French now I've already suggested that the term Romanesque isn't particularly helpful in trying to describe anglo-saxon architecture and I'm afraid the same applies to what was built in England after 1066 which is normally normally categorized as Romanesque and is usually called Norman architecture sadly this is too simplistic and I think it confuses the picture because it suggests that the buildings erected in England after 1066 were somehow in a style that was brought here by the Normans they weren't what is normally what is normally called Norman architecture was developed in England after 1066 blending what I have already described that had started in the reign of Edward the Confessor and before but also absorbing ideas from across Europe it would be better to be described as anglo-norman or best described as anglo-french this was an inventive eclectic exotic cosmopolitan style born of a unique coincidence of political religious social and economic events now William the Conqueror and his immediate successors built on an imperial scale and expressed their power in the architectural language of ancient Rome the arcades on the white tower in the Tower of London were a series of deliberate quotations from antiquity and the great tower at Colchester that I show you here was actually constructed on the podium of the Roman temple of Claudius these buildings were not the busy accretive structures of the early Saxons they set out to deliberately imitate the monumentality and the spatial clarity of roman buildings the Normans haven't actually built in this style in Normandy it was the conquest of England that created a giddy mixture of excess power and imperial triumphalism that was expressed in an outburst of what can only be called architectural megalomania now anglo-saxon England was no stranger to either invasion or to fortification as I've already explained Saxon landlord's had built themselves fortified residences with earth ramparts with walls with towers with gate houses the situation in Normandy was broadly similar very few Nobles lived in strongly defended residences but in the years around 1,000 the Duke of Normandy and his greatest Lords were developing new types of fortified palaces castles perhaps today we would call them but the military requirements of the Norman Conquest caused a rapid development in military engineering and a proliferation of castles across the English countryside the first ones were simple structures either ring works that is to say a ring of Earth with a palisade on top or what we call mots which is a heap of earth with a tower on top of it a ring works were the most common form of castle both in Normandy and in England but mops were more novel here is a scene from the Bayeux Tapestry and it shows the Motte of William the Conqueror's Castle in Hastings being built under instruction by Saxon slaves very soon these mots had a lower outer enclosure known as the Bailey which provides stable and accommodation for a garrison now the most important first generation of Norman castles were royal a product of the systematic imposition of Norman sovereignty on England they were erected in strategic locations to support field tactics most importantly in the county towns this is one of them spectacular famous building at durham durham castle a custom of the bishops of durham but williams barons bought built castles for themselves and as did their followers and ultimately this meant that in the period up to 11:30 the may have been up to 500 castles in use up to half of which were in private hands this was a huge change a huge change to the situation that had existed in england before 1066 at neither England nor Normandy had had this quantity of fortified houses well William the Conqueror died knowing that the military conquest of England was complete and that his matrix of royal castles had secured his power and that were remarkably few new castles built during the following century but those that were built were dominated by this idea of the great tower the great tower as expressed in the Tower of London and at Colchester and the one built by his son Rufus at Norwich which you see here I'll give you quick two quick examples of of courtiers who built like this Henry the first courtiers one of them in the 1120s builds at Kenilworth Geoffrey to Clinton Chamberlain treasure into the King a very ambitious castle you see a reconstruction of it here you can see that the the the tower still survives there today but I think this reconstruction makes clear extraordinary dominance of the building very very ambitious and here's another example at Porchester here another norman magnate Hugh pont de l'arche replaces a saxon building inside the roman walls with this great tower and here we've seen Porchester a number of times here are the great Roman walls of Porchester here was the Saxon fames residence and here in the corner is the great tower built by the Norman and Lord now 11th century Society in England and Normandy didn't see much of a distinction between the church and the state both William and Edward the Confessor were interested in Church reform and once William came to England he appointed as Archbishop of Canterbury someone who brought over him one of the great intellectuals of Europe Lang Frank who became the Archbishop of Canterbury and what he did was reorganized the boundaries of the saxon diocese moving cathedrals from the countryside to towns ensuring that these norman diocese came became like the counties a unit of government control and by the reign of henry the first there were seventeen diocese a map which remained till the Reformation and you can see this map showing how the seas were moved around and within a period of less than fifty years every single one of these diocese was to have an entirely new cathedral now we shouldn't imagine that there was suddenly magically a new type of cathedral that the Normans invented there wasn't a such a transition there was a slow change and it may well have been land Frank's original intention to build a whole series of completely new types of cathedrals but that is not actually what happened if you look at Winchester we're in one of the transepts you have the early Norman work at surviving you get a very good impression of what the interior or this first generation of post-conquest cathedrals actually look like is very similar to Edward the confessors Westminster Abbey with a ground-floor arcade an upper arcade of similar height and a clear story of a similar height above that every single element is bounded by another elements who have an arch bounded by another arch and it's all tied together by these great masts that and divide the elevation into Bay's so this style of architecture was prevalent in the first generation of cathedrals and in the first generation of Norman parish churches here is a remarkable survival in East Norfolk and Margaret Hales where you see I think the the early Norman work the apse very very characteristic of these early churches just a closer up view they're taken and in the snow now Archbishop lamb Frank died two years after William the first and he was succeeded in 1093 by Anselm a figure who I think was much more tolerant of anglo-saxon church customs and so the second generation of anglo-norman churchmen lacked the sort of sense of urgency and single-mindedness of life Frank and his contemporaries who were determined to drive through reforms in the anglo-saxon Church and in doing this they the second generation built on improving craftsmanship that was invaded available in England from the from the first generation and the changes which take place in the second generation of Norman churchmen can be seen most clearly at Durham Cathedral now while the bones of Durham's design are familiar the alternating compound and cylindrical piers are exactly the same as in Edward the confessors Abbey something very important has changed here because unlike what we've just seen at Winchester the ground floor arcades a much much taller than the arcades above that have been squeezed up they've been reduced they'd be made much smaller and they squeeze the clerestory up to the roof now the knaves of most of the early cathedrals had been roofed in timber here's Durham and here is Ely one of the early cathedrals you can go to and you can see the equality and height between these arcades and the ground floor the gallery and the clerestory and this wooden roof what happens at Durham is that a way was found of vaulting over the space with masonry and highlighting the intersections of the vault with stone ribs and what this was was a crucial step forward in style because a flat timber roof broke up the unity of the space while a vault as you can see from what's on the screen drew together all the elements into a coherent whole but Durham's novelty is not only in its structure well it is very novel in its novel in European sense in its structure it is novel in its decoration because the eastern parts of the cathedral which were built first are very plain but the nave which was built after 1104 gets progressively more showy as it moves towards the West the piers are cut with lozenges zigzags the arches are cut with Chevron's and the Isle walls are decorated with blank intersecting are Kading that looks to me as if it's fallen straight out of an anglo-saxon manuscript now despite our ability to visit many of these buildings like Durham and elsewhere none of them I think gives the modern spectator anything other than a pale shadow of what these cathedrals were actually like originally like Saxon churches these anglo-norman cathedrals were filled with color and texture and most important of all wall paintings if you go to one of the crypts at Canterbury Cathedral and the apse and Gabriel's Chapel you can see a remarkable survival because here was walled up in the late 12th century some wall painting and here is preserved untouched a complete set of wall paintings only rediscovered in the nineteenth century and this gives us a sense of the brilliance of the interiors of these cathedrals vast areas of these cathedrals which are now very familiar to us as plain stone halls would have glowed with color the walls would have been whitewashed and imitation masonry blocks painted the walls would have thrown a coloured glow onto all this splendor and most of the windows were glazed in coloured glass so what I have set out to demonstrate this evening is that by looking at buildings alone I believe it would be impossible for a historian to guess that the Norman Conquest had ever taken place this may be a surprising thing to be saying as the Norman Conquest is often seen as one of the great turning points in our history but in the year 1000 in Glyn's architecture had already reached a turning point and the changes that came rapidly after 1066 had already been in embryo since the ten fifties at the latest yet without doubt the conquest hugely accelerated architectural change the building and craft industries very quickly developed and diversified and by 11:30 almost everyone living in England could experience stone architecture in their own locality and that architecture was Roman architecture for everyone who saw remains close at hand for those who travelled across Europe or those who associated Rome with Christianity this was the style in which to build but the severe unsullied monumentality of the early Norman buildings as seen in the transepts of Winchester or the elevations of the White Tower lasted merely one generation they soon gave way to something more florid and more cosmopolitan likewise the reforming aspirations of the Norman churchmen were diluted and what remained was an English compromise as the first generations of Normans died out england's architecture was already looking very different from anything in the rest of Europe the Saxon love of ornament and complex and complexity had contaminated the severity of Rome in fact the Normans and their families were feeling different too they might not have been able to express it in 1130 but the Normans and their architecture were becoming English in my next lecture I will explain how a vision of Rome dissolved into a division into a vision of heaven because between 11:30 and 1300 God trumped Caesar thank you

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 68,970

Rating: 4.9086118 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: nsHl48Wnudc

Length: 56min 43sec (3403 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 12 2011