English Architecture: Reaching for Heaven, 1130-1300 - Simon Thurley

well ladies and gentlemen I've taken an average from three watches on the front row we about six o'clock thank you very much for coming on a incredibly cold night treacherous night most of the trains are down you'll probably have to spend the rest of the night here because if it's snowed in I can give you the next three lectures if you want blower waiting but perhaps that might be a bit too much anyway and this is the second of four lectures in which I'm talking about building in England in the Middle Ages and in my first lecture for those of you who weren't here I argued that from the disappearance of the Roman administration in this country in 410 up to about the 1130 s people who were building masonry buildings of brick and stone were striving to imitate the architecture of ancient Rome and I showed you this picture the transept of Winchester Cathedral which I think sums up beautifully the effect that they were trying to achieve and I said that I thought that while the Norman Conquest might have accelerated some changes in the way people built in England it did not alter the course of building in England and actually the strength of anglo-saxon aesthetics their great love of richness of surface ornament of decoration very very quickly infected the sort of very plain militaristic architecture of the immediate post conquest period and I ended my lecture by saying that by the early 1100 s those aristocrats and churchmen who had come to England in 1066 now saw themselves as Englishmen and this is a very important point for the development of building in England for the century or so after 1130 the growing wealth the growing self-confidence and identity of the English ruling class led to an incredibly energetic patronage of architecture the great magnets reorganized their estates they built themselves castles they endowed churches bishops reconstructed their cathedrals and Abbot's built new monasteries and the style in which all these buildings were constructed was really ambitious it was original and with hindsight we can say it was very English now the sheer volume of building that these people undertook exceeded even the achievements of the Norman invaders and this is a graph put together by Professor Richard Morris which shows the period that we're talking about this evening and you can see the huge bulge of building with projects in progress and during the 13th century this is partly because many of the patrons wanted to participate in a stylistic revolution that was going on that I will talk about in a moment but there were also functional issues there was a very rapid change in society the most important of those was huge population growth and you can see the very rapid rising rising population this is what happens in my next lecture but this is what we're talking about this time a period of very very rapid and population expansion and at the same time there was a very very good economic conditions the economy was swollen with silver agricultural profits were rapidly rising due to a whole series of entrepreneurial moves both by landlords and by the peasants the most successful cathedrals like Salisbury for instance had huge increases in income Salisbury's income increased by a hundred and sixty eight percent during the period of the century towns grew markets prospered communications improved but the building boom that I want to talk about was a different sort of building boom to the one that was stimulated by the Norman Conquest there were now better quarrys there were better skilled Masons and there was a huge improvement in the quality of building this slide I hope you can see it because sometimes the light is a bit difficult here but this is a detail of that transept of Winchester Cathedral and you can see how the workmanship was actually really quite shoddy the weren't are not really skilled Masons only a hundred years later you go to Gloucester Cathedral and you can see things like that being built there were very few new buildings started most buildings were extensions or rebuilding of existing ones there was only one really major new building which was of course Salisbury Cathedral most churches and castles were reconstructions and extensions of existing buildings but most of all the thing that really characterizes this period is that architectural leadership innovation lay firmly with the cathedrals the 13th century was the age of the English Cathedral collectively I think one of the greatest architectural achievements of the whole Middle Ages the whole of European civilization this is certainly partially due to the inventiveness of English Mason's and designers but it's also due to the extraordinary wealth of the English bishops now I showed you this map in my last lecture which shows how the Normans moved the locations of the Saxon cathedrals to be the centre of the diocese but these diocese in England were much larger than diocese on the continent I mean look at the Diocese of Lincoln absolutely huge the Diocese of Winchester the biggest diocese in the richest diocese in England a Winchester had an income of three thousand pounds a year this was equivalent to the very very richest heiress des Kratz in fact this is a very interesting and important fact by the end of the thirteenth century twelve out of Europe's forty richest diocese were in England and it was this extraordinary wealth that funded the extraordinary sumptuousness of cathedrals like Lincoln and Salisbury we're going to be looking at Lincoln in a few minutes and if you take a single Bay of Lincoln Cathedral due to the perfusion of carving and the lavishness of the use of stones it probably cost twenty times more than a single Bay in a French equivalent Cathedral so that is the background what was happening during the eleven 50s the eleven sixties and the eleven 70s was a big period of stylistic experimentation for the men of the 12th century style was important that it was important because it expressed hierarchy in the Middle Ages the most high status architecture was about the ritualized display of power it was about Sarah me it was about ritual it was about liturgy these were the driving forces behind the stylistic appearance of buildings their structure and their decoration expressed the social economic and religious hierarchies that went on inside them so the architectural setting of any particular activity whether it be eating a meal or praying to God had to be suitable to its importance and the importance of the people who were doing it so just to give you a couple of examples the most important of all medieval secular spaces were great halls the holes were therefore singled out for special treatment this is the doorway of the hall to the Bishop of Durham's Great Hall at a Durham durham castle it still led very difficult to photograph all my photographs are really useless so I've used this print instead and what this incredible decoration indicates as you go into it is you are going into the most important room in the in the castle in the same way in sacred spaces the that the presbytery is the Chancellor's and shrines were obviously the most important areas and even in the most humble parish church these places were given significance by their decoration this is an Easter Sepulchre in a church called hacking t'en in Lincolnshire we'll come back to this church later and this is where you would place the consecrated host in the middle of this in this little an armory here are on Good Friday and that the decoration of this is of the most elaborate nature because it's expressing the hierarchy of the activity that's going on inside it antiquity conferred status to at the East End of Canterbury Cathedral and we're coming back to this in a few minutes when it was rebuilt these great marble piers were given Roman proportions they were given Roman bases and capitals deliberately to echo the early Christian basilica's of Rome so when we come to consider the big stylistic changes that swept across England from the eleven 50s onwards we've got to bear in mind the importance of hierarchy and function and the fact that new was not necessarily seen as being better so the term given to describe the new style that came to dominate the form of masonry buildings is gothic which I think in the minds of many people is associated with the point art but of course it is important to remember that pointed arches were actually reasonably common in anglo-norman buildings if you go to Durham Cathedral do you think it was a Norman building in the Norman structure there are pointed arches this whole a style developed in France his Reims Cathedral in the eleven 30s and of course it was a lot more it was about a lot more than pointed arches it was really a manner of building that enabled you to create stone vaults over very very thin walls that's what you're seeing there on the screen the skeletal nature of the construction allowed the walls to be pierced by huge windows and the vaults to be supported on very thin piers which were actually supported by buttresses outside the building this was an engineering revolution and as a structural system it was much more rational and economical than anglo-norman architecture because it concentrated supports at the points of real stress so here is Ely Cathedral with the Norman arcades this is basically a huge thick wall into which holes have been cut here and you have Lincoln you see how this isn't a wall at all this is a very thin strong column huge amounts here been able to be cut away because all the weight has been concentrated down here onto these columns it's a structural and system that's what gothic is all about and the spatial effect that you could create in a place like Lincoln was remarkable because it apparently dissolved away the supporting walls into this sort of filigree of artists shaft and spaces and these new fashions began to have an impact in England after 1130 just at the time when a new order of monks was making its present felt these were the Cistercians who set out to avoid wealth and ostentation to avoid over elaborate liturgy and complex intellectual pursuits they wanted to be economically independent and their brethren were put to hard labor on their own estates and they were building their new monasteries at exactly the time when this new fashion in architecture was becoming popular and by 1170 they had started work on Pyland abbey now I'm showing you a reconstruction of Island here rather than a picture of the ruins that are still there in the carrying the charity or all members who be able to go at any point and look at it and this was the most ambitious Cistercian a church of its age now whatever Cistercian ideals may have said originally this building as you can see was no Stier blopps its walls as you can see had three bands of gothic arches supporting a a barrel vault actually made of timber the west end as you can see there was illuminated by a great circular Rose window but you know the architects of Island were not using gothic as an alternative structural system like the French they were using it as an alternative form of decoration and this is the first manifestation of Gothic architecture in England this great wall you see here was a thick wall like a Norman wall and all they were doing really was putting pointed arches in it rather than round headed ones this was exactly this is Castle Lake a Priory in Norfolk this is exactly what the Normans did a great big thick wall with holes in it and that's what the first Gothic architecture in England was actually about so unlike France in England gothic was a style and not a constructional system well II Island and a whole series of other very important buildings in the north of England including York Minster was very very influential but what had a much much bigger impact on English building was the rebuilding of Canterbury Cathedral now this happened after two very important events the first one of which was the murder of Thomas Becket in 1170 and then 18 months later there was a really serious fire which gutted the Norman Cathedral and this gave the Canterbury monks the opportunity to create a spectacular new cathedral as a setting for their new saint st. Thomas Becket so what was new about Canterbury well the most obvious and visible thing that's new about Canterbury are the huge windows and you can see that very very clearly and here at the East End these are fundamentally different from those in anglo-norman cathedrals the glass in them was held together by these massive pieces of iron called Pharaoh mentor these are pieces of iron here they're pieces of iron like that that holds the glass in place in these vast and windows but of course also the arcades the bottom arcades there are a much taller the columns are thinner and you can see that most of the most important masonry here is polished limestone it is a very very lavish effect that's achieved at the East End here as though the experience and many of you will have had it canned Canterbury Cathedral is the most wonderful building going eastwards through the Cathedral up towards the shrine of son Thomas which was originally before the Reformation here on the site where this candle is is a breathtaking experience you go up over the Norman crypt built by Archbishop LAN Frank you go up and over another crypt and then you enter this extraordinary world a polished stone deliberately designed to replicate the heavenly Jerusalem as described in the book of Revelation a pilgrim would have felt as if he had been shrunk and placed inside and enameled reliquary like the Beckett casket in the VNA so canterbury was going to be extremely influential for english architecture but interestingly not so much through the detail of its style construction lilies were very important but for its lavishness it was the Mother Church of England and it set the standard for everything that came after particularly in this use of polished limestone which becomes extremely popular in the 13th century now I haven't got time this evening to follow through exactly what happened blow-by-blow cathedral by cathedral going mentioning wells and then going on through lincoln to exeter etc but i do want to do is I just briefly want to talk about Lincoln Cathedral because in a sense this is the most important of the English cathedrals Lincoln which you see in this on the eccentric picture here which I think I rather liked actually was rebuilt between 1186 and about 1250 this was a Cathedral that was striving to demonstrate that it was at the top of the English Episcopal hierarchy obviously together with Canterbury in York and as a result nobody stinted on money on scale or on decorative effect Lincoln set out to dazzle and I'm sure many if not most of you who've been to Lincoln and you will agree with me that it does dazzle we saw last week how English tastes in architecture tends towards the decorative tends towards the busy and the elaborate we looked at Durham and saw how the sort of noble simplicity of the early anglo-norman buildings became enmeshed in circuit surface decoration which you can see some of here and in a sense this is what happens to the English Gothic style at Lincoln the polished stone of canterbury predominates but look at the vaults these are the vaults in the choir the shafts come up from the ground and divide the elevation into Bay's but the vaults which you see here don't reinforce the structure of the bay because for the first time you see here there is a central rib that goes down the center of the vault and onto this at seemingly random points come the rest of the ribs this was not a structural necessity this was pure decoration and at lincoln ribs are used for the first time in the english way a surface ornament and not a structure this is what we were talking about last week the invention of vaulting that happens at Durham Cathedral what happens here is that the english take adapt a say we don't want one interested structure we're interested in decoration and when you go to the nave of Lincoln Cathedral they're slightly less crazy but look how rich they are look how dense look how complex symmetrical they succeed in making the vault as interesting and as lively as the walls dragging the whole thing together in a sort of restless sea of ornament and if you look at the the nave elevations look at those big big arcades and look how much depth they have to them these spans 27 feet wide and they're wide deliberately so that when you're standing looking at a down the cathedral you can see through at the walls of the nave here which have even greater depth in them they have another sort of mini arcade and built into there and each of these knave peers is actually slightly different so you have a incredible intensity and depth of decoration well the design of Lincoln extraordinarily experimental extraordinary hungry for novelty had a huge impact on the next two generations of English builders in 1817 the Victorian architect Thomas Rickman christened the style that was born at Lincoln early English a term that I think nicely expresses the essential insularity of what was being built the great churches I just described and many many others that followed them were individualistic and original taking French ideas and taking turning them into a decorative vocabulary that was absolutely unique to England and there is a real sense in which by 1220 a national style had been invented in England by the twelve fifties this distinctive style reigned supreme but in 1245 Henry the third started a project to rebuild Westminster Abbey which introduced something completely different into the mix the rebuilding of Westminster Abbey is a coronation Church and a shrine to Edward the Confessor was the single most lavish act of architectural patronage by any one individual in the entire Middle Ages by the death Henry the third in 1272 he'd spent forty five thousand pounds on rebuilding the Abbey which you see here it was heavily influenced by French buildings and broke away from the style of Lincoln now what was important about Westminster Abbey what was it that it introduced that was different well the single met there was still a number of things were a number decorative motifs that were were introduced but the single most important element was undoubtedly window tracery now this is this is Revo Abbey at the East End and you can see that the Cistercians at Revo by using individual lancets grouped together could let more light in to their building but it's still obvious that these were succession of individual windows with sections of wall between them the invention of tracery that was popularized at Westminster Abbey and you see here one of the elevations the North elevation substituted much thinner stone which could never be confused as wall thereby creating these big windows and the popularization of Barr tracery which is what really Westminster Abbey did made everything that was built before 1250 look old-fashioned overnight windows were now just not just a gap in the wall they were actually transformed into one of the primary vehicles for decoration and elaboration let's go to sleep it in Lincolnshire and look at em since Dennis look at the wonderful flowing tracery and in the aisle window there this is Holy Trinity how begun around 1300 now look at the amazing East window there Holy Trinity which you see again here is is one of England's largest parish churches the first to be built largely of brick but its chart chancel which you can see there and it's transept have some of the most inventive and beautiful tracery and of their age now what's very important about this is that of course this is a stylistic development but it's not only a stylistic development because it supported an important theological shift too and this shift came out of the council held at the Lateran Church in Rome by Pope Innocent the third in 12 12 15 this the fourth reforming lateral council a Lateran council saw the propagation of the doctrine of transubstantiation the magical transformation of bread and wine into Christ's body and blood during the Eucharist transubstantiation which of course could only be affected by an ordained priest further elevated the status of priests above the congregation and put even greater weight on the importance of the chancel in churches the part of the church where obviously Communion is celebrated and so in the 13th century thousands of new Chancellor's were built up and down England and almost all of these had these big new windows with thin tracery pouring lots of light into the presbytery so that you could see the priests elevating and the hosts the crucial moment of communion these new Chancellor's as you see in this slide were longer with larger windows and here is hacking Tyndall big tall and windows now the Chancellor's of course remained separated from the nave by a wooden screen now very few of these screens survived but there's an incredibly rare one that survives from about 1260 it's Michael Stanton Harcourt and we just shouldn't imagine that these screens were there for blocking up people's view because as you see from this screen there was not only quite a good view at this level but very often in the lower part of the screen the dado holes would be cut so that people could see the priest and elevating that the host at the crucial moment from 13th century there were Chantry priests assistants and deacons who were increasingly present during the communion and this again partially explains the increase in size of chansons during the 13th century but it also explains the building on the south wall of special seats for the clergy these City Lea and from the latin seat were usually built in threes you see them all in all churches all over the place they're first seen in anglo-norman churches but became incredibly popular in these 13th century Charles of course they were often accompanied by pasina's washbasins and often little hombres little cupboards for storing the consecrated hosts and they were often very highly elaborated this is the famous one at hecan't enriched I've shown you a couple of times already so just as in the cathedrals the chances of parish churches flooded with light windows filled with stained glass with rich carvings meant that every village in England could have its own visualization of heaven and as the chancel became more actively defined as the sphere of the clergy so during the 13th century the nave became more defined as the sphere of the parishioners there is pieces of legislation meant that it became their financial responsibility to maintain the nave and the moment that happened the desire to put some furniture in started of course there was no permanent furniture in the nave to begin with and but in the 13th century particularly with the increased emphasis on sermons the began to have pews these are the earliest surviving pews in England at a church called Sant Marian All Saints and Dunsfold and Surrey they dated to about 1272 1290 and this emphasis on preaching was another one of the things that had come out of the fourth Lateran council so I talked about hierarchy and I've spent some time talking about the attempts of masons bishops and Abbot's priests to create on earth a heavenly Jerusalem these were astonishing buildings of power light richness and color but what about secular buildings what was going on in the high status secular buildings well it's worth dwelling for a moment on possibly the most spectacular royal residence to be built during the whole of the 12th century this was the great tower at Dover built by Henry the second between 1180 and 1185 and here is a cutaway illustration of the building this was no ordinary castle it was built in a deliberately old-fashioned style to emphasize royal gravitas and dynastic durability it was also of course being in Dover the gateway to England a place where the king could receive important visitors many of whom were on their way to the new shrine of Saint Thomas at Canterbury Cathedral and central to this building was the Great Hall which you see here in the in the body of the building the Great Hall was the bill that the structure around which royal life celebrated it was a ceremonial Hall from early anglo-saxon times was central to domestic life and we talked about it at my engine my last lecture and what Dover emphasize is is its continuing importance in fact the hall continued to dominate all high status English buildings into the 17th century so whilst this was a military building it was also a palace and a guest house but Dover was exceptional for many hundreds of other castles rebuilding in stone took place piecemeal over a long period in many instances till timber walls were replaced with stone walls while the residential buildings inside remained of wood here is restoral castle in Cornwall where you can see the typical process of replacing a timber castle on the top of that March there was a timber palisade that was taken down and replaced with a stone wall and here amazingly you can see how this incredibly compact little castle worked you can see at the kitchen the owner's Hall his private chamber his Chapel his lady's chamber and his guest chamber all within this compact and she'll keep but these were fortified residences and not everywhere had a moat and not everywhere had a battlemented curtain wall the largest and most important royal house in the West of England was a house called Clarendon you see a reconstruction of parenting here this house amazingly the Mane's of what remains of which which still stand and can be visited was a complex of one and two-story buildings with pitched and tiled roofs and along a single spine and here of course in the middle is the all-important Great Hall really there was nothing very different between Clarendon and a building like neighbouring which we saw last time an anglo-saxon building these were great halls put in the line made of timber suggesting I think a continuity of a function the Royal households of the 13th century were living in almost exactly the same way as the anglo-saxon and kings so what were these halls actually like well only one early hall survives this is in oakum in Rutland it was built in around 1190 and is the earliest Great Hall to survive and I think when you go into this building today which you can do you can imagine a fire in the middle of the halls the smoke curling up to the roof and long tables with heavy drinking the scene on a feast day can hardly have been much different from the time of Burwell but during the 13th century there were some big big changes to all this as I've already said during the century incomes rose and landlords had increasing disposable wealth and this contributed to some quite big social changes communal feasting and hospitality remained at the heart of medieval life and Lords found ways of making their halls even larger and even more spectacular but at the same time they increasingly wanted to spend time in more intimate spaces and get out of these halls to their chambers where they could fete spend time with their families and their peers and this led to some fundamental changes in the design of high status houses that become apparent from the 1180s houses began to adopt a new arrangement this arrangement was to become the standard layout for all houses of pretension for the following four hundred years essentially what happened was that the Great Hall which used to be a building standing on its own and the kitchen which was another building standing on its own and the Lord's chambers which was a third building stand standing on its own all became joined up and the kitchen became fixed at one end of the hall and the Lord's private rooms became fixed at the other end of the hall the entrance of the hall ceased to be in the middle and shifted down to the lower end near the kitchen and a battery in the pantry one for bread and for beer were placed at the low end of the hall so you have an upper end for the Lord where he would eat and the lower end where the kitchen and service activities took place this more integrated arrangement allowed lords to spend more time in the comfort of their chambers whilst coming and going through their halls having private space was a badge of rank part of the charisma of greatness and wealth to be inaccessible was to be important and so to withdraw to your chamber was to emphasize your and superiority over the rest of your household and your guests now these innovations that I'm describing were almost all led by the bishops this is where innovation took place bishops were single they were rich and because quite often they'd come from quite humble backgrounds they were less conservative in Outlook than the monarchy or the magnets and the shadow of Lincoln Cathedral now lies the ruined Bishop's Palace one of the most lavish palaces in the kingdom and here visitors today it's a nother site in the care of English heritage can see one of the very very earliest instance instances of a kitchen links to the lower end of the hall which dates from the 1220 s you can see the kitchen at the bottom linked by a bridge through the but Rhian pantry to the Great Hall and you can see the the three blocked up doors there at the end of the Great Hall and ruins there which have led to the buttery the pantry and the kitchen now this formalization of this plan was accompanied also by a formalization household organization it was exactly at this period in fact it was a bishop of Lincoln who first did it where household regulations were written down fixed etiquette was adopted for service in the hall new officers appeared in these great households and by 1100 most aristocrats were accompanied by men holding posts such as steward Butler constable Marshall Clarke Huntsman these people became the human backdrop to aristocratic power a Bishop's household would have had as many as 80 attendants that of a Duke or an earl perhaps twice that so these structured and hierarchical households with their integrated kitchens halls and chambers started to present new architectural opportunities this is the Great Hall at Stokes a castle in Shropshire a miraculously unaltered House of the twelve ATS built by a super-rich wool merchant called Lawrence of Ludlow an early example of a merchant who's setting himself up as a country squire Lawrence built himself this fine Hall but if you look at it from the outside you can see how he began to integrate all this into an architectural whole here is his Great Hall at this end is his private rooms in the tower and at the other end over the kitchens are rooms for his guests making an elegant architectural composition now all medieval residences of any pretension and of any size were surrounded by hunting parks 1900 hunting parks were created but were created between 1200 and 1350 most of them were between one or two hundred acres in size and of course the size of the park reflected the wealth of the person who owned it the largest one in the 13th century was the park at Clarendon which I've already mentioned and the palace that I showed you a few moments ago was located right in the middle of the park just here and you can see that this very very big estate covering over 4,000 acres it was surrounded by a high earthwork topped with a fence and this fence all paling was to keep the deer inside the park but at intervals and you can still see these in this part around the edge there was what was called a deer leap which allowed deer outside the park which these two deer are to leap over the fence and come in and because the land was scooped away on the inside they couldn't get out again and that was the way that you encourage deer into your park so that you maintained and the stock so every part of Clarendon Park was productive in the woods they'd grow Oaks as a crop cows would graze on the pasture and the South in the north the deer would be supported and there were man-made ponds for them to drink and wallow troughs for feeding deer houses for winter shelter there with in rabbits and hares which were bred on an industrial skits that scale and even the wild birds in the park were hunted by hawks and so this was a landscape of production but it was also a landscape of power you can't see it on this diagram but there's a ridge that goes across the park here and the palace is sitted on the ridge seated on the ridge and the entrance here to the park is up here and so as you came through the park you could see the whitewashed walls of the palace looking down over the grasslands and dotted with deer this was carefully contrived the buildings were sited with a view to them having the greatest impact on the viewers and so when we think about these houses and the castles they were never isolated structures they were all always closely integrated into their economic and their visual setting and of course a crucial part of their economic set a setting was their estates and the estates comprised the villages which they owned and the villages were lived in by what we today call peasants now this term peasant I think is a very unfortunate one because it gives the impression of a poverty-stricken downtrodden illiterate eking out a living from the soil villagers who made up 80% of the population were in fact small holders and they owned anything between five and 40 acres and they engaged in market activities growing buying selling making money and buy the 1180s the economic stability of the richer peasant started having quite a big impact on the houses in which they live now this impact varies hugely across the country and so what I'm going to say now is a really sort of big generalization but I explained last time showing you this picture of Warren Percy in Yorkshire that their dwellings were normally cited in a banked or hedged Toft about quarter of an acre and they'd have had a single house in here which in some parts of the country they have shared with their animals so they've had this little area this they'd have cultivated themselves and this was a top where they lived but during the 13th century this was becoming less common and increasingly these tofs had a principal cottage where the family lived but also a barn or a granary and sometimes a buyer and the richer peasants might have even had a separate kitchen a free-standing bake house maybe even a dovecote or a cart house so there were more buildings the peasants had more buildings but these buildings were also built differently and the crucial development in the period between about 1180 and about 1320 was the introduction of various types of foundation now before this happened essentially the way these houses were built was a holes dug you stuck your posts into the ground and you built your your thing your your house around that so what obviously would happen is the ends of your posts would rot and event eventually your building would fall down what happened between 1180 and 1320 is that foundations came in so your post was either on a stone foundation or it might actually be on a low stone wall and this allowed new types of superstructure you could have a Krupp superstructure which had this sort of arch brace like this the arches resting on stone pads or you could create a fully framed building with cell plates base plates resting on walls of which you built a frame just framed up and you filled in the gas with wattle and daub now chimney stacks were not very common in fact they were very rare fires would have been made in the centre of the room as you can see and this diagram here but what I think is very interesting is that most of the systems whether they were cracks or whether they were frames resulted in a construction unit of about 15 foot and so what that meant was that most houses were either 30 or 45 feet by 15 feet wide so although these houses probably were quite dark because was no glass in them and they were quite smoky because they had no chimneys they were probably about the same size as workers housing in Victorian cities and they were also I think more private than we imagined although the whole basis of life in a village was communal we know that these houses had quite stout locked doors they would be surrounded by their hedges and banks and the peasant families who lived in them would have had quite a lot of individuality and quite a lot of privacy so that's what was happening in the countryside but this was not a constructional revolution that only affected the countryside because it also affected the towns in fact it may have started in the towns between 1100 and 1300 the percentage of the population that lived in towns doubles to 20% in 1086 there were about 100 boroughs but by 1300 there were more than 500 and this technical change that took place in the countryside also happened in the towns now what's very important about this is that as I said if you have what we call earth our earth fast foundations in other words you put your sticks into the ground these houses need to be replaced or completely refurbished every 15 or 20 years because your foundations rotted the timber frame structures built on stone foundations could last for generations cluster centuries and so suddenly owning a town house was now not simply the possession of a plot of land it was a long-term investment in building and this suddenly meant that people were making great greater efforts in the appearance of the buildings that they built these are some houses in Oxford and you can see great care was taken with the oriole and bay and windows these timber frames meant that suddenly buildings could be three stories high these are some buildings in York the first medieval domestic skyscrapers are built in the eleven 90s with jet eing and as you can see in these buildings here and of course many of these townhouses were also shops trade was absolutely essential to these towns and by 1234 Canterbury had 200 shops by 1300 Chester had 270 shops a few of them survived this is Lady Rome in Google Gate in York this is a low row of shops built in 13-6 Steen they've lost their original windows but it's not untypical of what we know was built it was a commercial development built by an entrepreneur owned by a single landlord who then rented out the shops to individual shopkeepers really not very different to a modern shopping center today the upper rooms may have been separately letters housing or maybe the traders used them as a showroom or a workshop and unlike in York many other towns the shops had under crafts and a very very good example again in the care of English heritage is in Southampton this is 58 French Street it was built for a merchant called John 14 in the 12 90s it was one of about 60 stone and timber merchant houses in one of England's most important ports this is a little breakdown of what it looked like at the front there was a shop behind it was the merchants own Hall and his private chamber and then upstairs he had a couple of bedrooms and the whole thing was built on an under Croft so that he could secure his merchandise and beneath and this is a very very typical house of its type a building that combined a home a showroom a warehouse and an office all in one now this evening we haven't really had time to discuss half as many buildings as I would really have liked but what I've tried to set out to do is show that the 130 years between 1220 and 1350 stand out as some of the most energetic inventive and extravagant periods of building in English history a period when English architecture becomes as distinctive as its national character became the extraordinary building boom that started in the twelve 20s and continued for more than a century did however the in to decline after 1300 and this precisely mirrored a period of prosperity and population growth you can see the growth in population in prosperity is mirrored in the growth of building and the collapse and building collapse in population the collapse and the economy all happens at once in the mid century which I will be talking about in my next and lecture but this period this big boom period 1222 1350 you see a confidence that comes with wealth a confidence that comes with independence a confidence that comes with a booming economy a growing population influence of the aristocracy increasing architects have mastered both the structural capabilities of Gothic architecture and its decorative possibilities patrons wanted to translate their ambitions into stone into timber into glass and weren't ashamed about being vulgar about it in 1300 England was made up of the estates of the aristocracy of the crown and of the church and they all created landscapes that were in equal measure devoted to power pleasure and production their economic lessers tried to copy them but they also made their distinctive contribution for everyone at this period architecture was about display whether it was Salisbury Cathedral which you see here or a peasant house or a merchants house at striving to make it a mark and this strengthened sense of in Englishness and English architecture was very distinct from what was going on in Wales in Scotland or on the continent and the architecture was equally distinct this type of building doesn't appear anywhere else even in Scotland and Wales this architecture was also and I think this is a very important point accessible to everybody everyone in their own church in their village in their Cathedral or in the towns where they lived for everyone there was an opportunity to find their way to heaven and for everyone they could get a foretaste of the heavenly Jerusalem in their own church but boom leads to bust as we all know because we're living through it and the series of busts that hit English society after 1300 came thick and fast economic stagnation major climate change famine terrible disease and all these things led to big changes in the way that the English built in the new year I shall be looking at the catastrophes of the 14th century and how these changed the way that men thought and the way that men built thank you you

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 44,160

Rating: 4.8541036 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: b8zPMIzw08Y

Length: 56min 17sec (3377 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 24 2011