Chapter VII: TUDOR.—The grandest chantry of all is that of Abbot Ramryge, c

1520.

VIII. In recent times vast sums have been spent in underpinning and securing the walls and tower: and we have had the amazing west front and transept-ends designed by Lord Grimthorpe.

The “Annals of an Abbey,” in Froude’s “Short Studies,” should be read.

The Cathedral Church of St. Mary, Salisbury.

Two English cathedrals surpass all others in external effect: Lincoln and Salisbury; each of them being at its best as seen from the north-east. But Lincoln lacks “the quiet tranquillity of the close of Salisbury, the half-hidden houses, covered with vines and creepers, that nestle among the trees, the sense of being shut off from the work-a-day world. If Durham seems the petrified interpretation of the Church militant, Salisbury is the very type and picture of the Church of the Prince of Peace. Unworldliness and peace brood over church and close.”

The ancient Norman cathedral stood within the fortifications of Old Sarum. The site was cramped, and extension was impossible; there was far too much wind and far too little water; moreover the soldiers who garrisoned the castle were most objectionable neighbours. So, by permission of the Pope, Bishop Richard Poore in 1220 commenced a new cathedral on the present site.

It was a virgin site; and from this fact resulted a cathedral different from any other that we possess, and as a study in design more important than any other we possess. In other cathedrals we study the mediæval architect designing under difficulties; what we see in such a composite cathedral as Hereford or Chichester or Rochester is not one design, but a dozen designs trying to blend into one design; sometimes, as at Canterbury and Rochester, rather ineffectually, sometimes, as at Hereford, with remarkable success. At Salisbury it is not so: the design is one design, all sprang from a single brain, except the west front and possibly the upper part of tower and spire. We have no such homogeneous design in our mediæval cathedrals. The French were less conservative, perhaps less penurious; their Gothic architects were iconoclasts; no French architect could have allowed such frightful solecisms to remain as disfigure our cathedrals to the purist eye, and endear them to the artist.

Bishop Poore’s architect, Elias de Dereham, one of the canons of the cathedral, who a little later designed the eastern transept of Durham, had—what no other of our Gothic architects had—a free hand. Salisbury, then, tells us what no other cathedral does—what an English architect thought a cathedral ought to be like, when not hampered by having to preserve or assimilate pre-existing work or to build on pre-existing foundations. Canterbury nave is not the best the architect could do: it is the best he could do subject to the restriction that his nave must be neither longer nor broader than Lanfranc’s ancient nave. Elias de Dereham had no such restrictions; the cathedral was to be built in the green pastures, he could take as much space as he liked.

Begun in 1220, the whole cathedral, except west front, tower and spire, was complete in 1266, having cost, it is said, what is equivalent to half a million of our money. It has, therefore, the distinction among our cathedrals of having a design which is practically uniform. It is said, indeed, and with perfect truth, that the homogeneity and uniformity of the design of Salisbury makes it less interesting than the usual composite cathedral of England, with its design changing, as in Selby nave, almost in every bay. When we have seen one bay of Salisbury nave, we have seen the other nine, and we know that we shall find practically the same design in the choir. Yet we can afford very well, in England, to have one great design, the product not of a dozen minds, but of one mind; a work completed in less than half a century, and not spread out, like Canterbury, over four centuries, or like Hereford, over seven.

Again, building on a virgin site, Elias de Dereham did what all great builders have always wished to do—he made his building symmetrical. It is the fashion to contrast the symmetry of Greek with the picturesqueness of Gothic architecture. The comparison may be carried too far. The Erechtheium is as unsymmetrical and picturesque as any Gothic building. The great cathedrals of northern France, and Salisbury and Exeter, are quite classical in their symmetry. But they are not pedantic in their symmetry. Because nave balances choir, the north transept the south transept, and the north-east transept the south-east transept, the builder was not so foolish as to construct on the south a big porch to balance that on the north side of the nave. Instead of that, he built to the south an octagonal chapter-house, and this he placed unsymmetrically—_i.e._, picturesquely—because, so placed, it was more to the convenience of those who would have to use it. In other words, he did not purposefully aim at the picturesque and the irregular. Gothic cathedrals are picturesque, either of accident, as at Canterbury, owing to the casual collocation of work of different design in the course of several centuries, or because the different parts of the cathedral, being intended for different functions, have been designed different in plan, in dimensions, and in details. The latter is the case with Salisbury.

Two chief types of cathedral plan were at the architect’s disposal: what we may call the York type, and the Wells type. In the latter, the cathedral continues at its fullest height from the western doors to the far east of the sanctuary, then the retro-choir or ante-chapel (sometimes divided into Saint’s chapel and processional path or ambulatory) is roofed at a far lower height, and east of them is a Lady chapel, similarly on a low level. And, of course, as the upper wall of the east end of the sanctuary requires to be supported, arches have to be built beneath it opening from the sanctuary into the retro-choir. The plan is a beautiful one—it is our English equivalent for the French ‘chevet.’ Externally, the different portions of the eastern limb tell distinctly the purposes for which they are built: standing to the east of Winchester, or Wells, or Hereford, you say at once, “This building is the Lady chapel; there is the processional path and probably the shrine of the local saint, there is the east end of the sanctuary, and the light from that east window at the early morning services streams down on the high altar below.” Internally, too, the effect is delightful; the upper story of the cathedral is of course really greatly curtailed in length, but the cathedral is not shortened to the eye: the mysterious vistas through the east arches of the cathedral more than restore the height lost above; the glimpses of Lady chapel behind ambulatory, and ambulatory behind Saints’ chapel, as seen from far west in the nave, make the termination of the Lady chapel, invisible from many points of view, seem infinitely distant. Of these mysterious distances, shadowy recesses and changing vistas, there is nothing in Lincoln and York; the whole eastern limb is seen at a single glance, and, unfortunately, is foreshortened by the eye. Wells and Salisbury internally look longer than they are, Lincoln and York much shorter. In mediæval days, however, the ritualistic divisions of the church were marked off by a series of screens, each adding apparent length to the interior. So many of these screens, however, have been swept away by Wyatt, Scott and the like, or replaced by paltry open-work, as at Lichfield and Durham, that many of the cathedrals of this type are now mere open barns; all sense of mystery, all sense of magnitude gone. Externally, York and Lincoln and Beverley have the best of it. The sweep of a sky-line, five hundred feet in length, at a height so vast, is sublimely impressive. The cost of an exterior kept at an unbroken height for such a distance is very great, but it is worth the cost.

Cathedrals of the latter type, such as Ely, York, and Southwell, are quite presentable with a central tower of moderate height, provided that it is reinforced by more important towers to the west. An exterior of the former type, that of Wells and Salisbury, demands a very important central tower. Accordingly, every cathedral of this type has a big central tower—viz., St. Alban’s, Hereford, Wells; or a spire as well as a tower—viz., Chichester. (Winchester alone is an exception, an exception which proves how very much a central tower is needed in such elevations.) In such exteriors, looked at from the east, hills rise beyond hills, alps beyond alps, and the eye instinctively looks up to see the highest ranges aspire into the pyramidal outline of a Matterhorn. And this is what is given us at Salisbury.

It is not, however, what Elias de Dereham, the original architect, meant. No spire, or even upper tower, says Sir Christopher Wren, was originally contemplated. The unique slenderness of the piers of the crossing is certain evidence of that. The diameter of the piers on which the central tower of Canterbury rests is twelve feet; those at York and Winchester have a diameter of ten feet; those at Worcester nine feet; those of Peterborough tower (which collapsed) and of Salisbury, seven feet only. It is almost terrible to stand between these four thin piers of Salisbury and think how many hundred tons of stone in tower and spire above they have been made to bear. They were never meant to bear any such weight, especially planted as they are, like the whole cathedral, on the insecure foundation of a spongy bog. Indeed, not merely the tower and spire, but the whole cathedral, ought never to have been built where they are. Recklessness is by no means a strong enough word to use of the mediæval builders’ wanton carelessness about foundations. Peterborough cathedral was built practically without foundations on waterlogged peat; beneath the central tower of Carlisle cathedral were two running springs; Wells is reared on the boggy shores of a ring of pools. At Salisbury continuous bases had to be built from pier to pier.

Elias de Dereham’s design, no doubt, was to give us an exterior something like that of Beverley Minster or Westminster Abbey. The whole elevation of the cathedral, however, clamoured for a tall tower and spire. The original design was abandoned, and the foolhardy enterprise was taken in hand (_c._ 1330) of adding to the existing tower, which only just rose above the roofs, two more stages, and on these a spire, and that not of wood, but of stone. To abut this perilous steeple as much as possible, great flying-buttresses were added, both externally and running through the clerestory and triforium of the interior of the church. Moreover, to lessen the weight, the tower-walls were built in thin shells, while the spire is but nine inches thick. That the builders left their timber scaffolding in the spire, where it still is, to give its sides a little additional support, shows that they were alive themselves to the fragility and insecurity of their work. Later on, in the fifteenth century, stone girders were put across the piers of the central and eastern transepts, as at Canterbury and Wells, by way of struts, to keep the piers from bulging inwardly, though, as a matter of fact, what was wanted was rather ties to keep them from bulging outwardly.

Externally, however, the madness of this engineering feat does not trouble one. The addition of the tower and spire gives to the whole composition that pyramidal outline which always presents such a satisfactory appearance of stability to the eye—and in architectural design it is the eye that has to be reckoned with. In Wren’s masterpiece, St. Paul’s, one has the same central pyramidal outline of all the masses, but in a still higher degree.

In both cases, in St. Paul’s and in Salisbury, unity is secured. Salisbury spire is tall enough, St. Paul’s dome is tall and broad enough, to impose unity on all the diverging masses of the building. The low towers of Worcester and Hereford have no such supreme dominance.

Next to the abiding presence of the spire, unity is secured by scoring strong, horizontal lines round the building, welding its masses into one composition. Most cathedrals are contented, like Wells, with one strong horizontal line—a broad parapet. But at Salisbury there is not only a horizontal parapet, but a horizontal corbel-table as well; and there are no less than three horizontal strings—one running round the base of the walls, a second running along beneath the windows, and a third running round the buttresses; moreover, each of these horizontal lines is scored far more heavily than anywhere else. Especially remarkable is it to find the upper flow of the buttresses stopped by a heavy string. Usually, in Gothic, if a horizontal meets a vertical line, the former gives way; here, as in Greek architecture, the vertical gives way to the horizontal line. This architect saw, what few others of his day saw, that you may make too much of the “aspiring principle” of Gothic; that if you suppress the horizontal lines, you weaken the unity of the building, by failing to tie all its parts together.

As we have seen, the appearance of stability was enhanced by the pyramidal outline which the whole building ultimately assumed. But the eye instinctively looks downwards also to see that the pyramidal outline is continued there, it instinctively demands an emphatic spreading base. It likes to see a rock-like foundation. At Salisbury all below is but greensward. All the more carefully, therefore, has the builder spread out and broadened and emphasised his base-courses, till art gives the appearance of stability which nature has denied.

Stable, therefore, below and above, the exterior of Salisbury has much of that “monumental appearance”—of what Dr. Johnson called “stability and indeterminate duration”—which is the noble attribute of a great architecture, which one desiderates in a building “built not for time, but for eternity, whose walls will long be washed by the passing waves of humanity.” Such a building gravity and simplicity befit; its design should be solid and monumental, sober and restrained; it is not a field for the frippery of ornament, its best decoration is the stain of time. Built for eternity, it should suggest infinity—an infinite length which the eye cannot measure, an infinite height which the eye cannot estimate, a vastness of area that overpowers the imagination. Bigness counts for much in the painter’s work and the sculptor’s; it counts for yet more in architecture. A building in the grand style has to be big, and if it is a Gothic building it has to look bigger still. Salisbury is really big: it is 473 feet long, its spire is 404 feet high, its vaulted roof, 81 feet high, is the highest of any English cathedral. But the eye does not measure in feet. Salisbury spire and Louth spire, acute and slender, look hundreds of feet above their real height; Oxford and Chichester spires look lower than they really are. As for length, follow the wall of Salisbury from east to west. As you pass round cape and headland and promontory, you forget the point from which you started, or the goal for which you are bound. How foreshortened in comparison is the long façade of a Pitti Palace! As for area, in all honesty Mr. Whittington gravely declared that Salisbury was “a much larger church altogether than Amiens.” The error was natural. Amiens has fewer parts than Salisbury, and necessarily seems less. Going round Salisbury we pass no less than seven façades, at Amiens only three. There are thirty-nine bays in Amiens; in Salisbury there are sixty. As usual, multiplicity of parts has produced apparent increase of magnitude.

Much of the impressiveness of this exterior is due, not only to its grandeur of scale, both real and apparent, but to the lovely hue of the stone of which it is built, and the astonishing perfection of the masonry. At first sight, indeed, the appearance of the masonry of Salisbury is almost uncanny. Salisbury is not mouldered or corroded with age. “Time prints no wrinkles on its brow.” Its antiquity is that of a goddess ever young. The masonry, too, is that of a Greek temple; the precision that of the builders of the Parthenon; the joints fine, almost invisible; the blocks squared with mathematical precision; pass round the building from south transept eastward to north transept, and you will find that the stones in each course preserve their height with utmost exactness all these hundreds of feet. And so the building has the feeling of Greece in it. Gothic is a “small-stone” style, with joints openly displayed. Here, as in a Parthenon, the joints are invisible; the whole building seems one solid block—a monumental effect indeed. The crumbling masonry of Ely might belong to the ancient days of Saturn; Salisbury seems the work of a younger race of gods. Only when we scan its colour—the lovely colour of the Salisbury stone, that is seen nowhere else—“a pale, ashy grey, stained below with broad patches of red and yellow lichens,”—do we realise that this is no temple of yesterday, but one that has faced the stress of storm for more than six centuries. Her perpetual juvenility is at once the charm and the disappointment of Salisbury.

Very noteworthy, also, are the sobriety and restraint and repose of the whole design: very ungothic, too. At first it passes unnoticed; after a time it is noticed—and noticed with astonishment—that the beauty of a design of consummate loveliness is gained in some mysterious way without the use of ornament. One realises at Salisbury—perhaps for the first time—that ornament is non-essential even in Gothic design. What ornament there is is of the slightest—a floriated finial to a buttress, a trefoiled corbel-table; the design would be little the worse if even this trifling amount of decoration were omitted.

The success of the exterior of Salisbury depends, not on the littlenesses of architectural design, but on the great leading factors of any really great style—vastness of scale, yet further enhanced to the eye by multiplicity of parts; bold handling of the masses, combined nevertheless into a symmetrical whole: unity, harmony, proportion, shadow-effects. Beside these elemental factors, sculptured ornament is but “mint and cummin.”

Straighten out Salisbury cathedral, in imagination, till Lady chapel and retro-choir and eastern transept and choir and central transept and nave are all in one long straight line. Then let it resume its shape, and you will see what is meant by “bold handling of the masses,” and the difference it makes. Nevertheless, don’t go away with the idea that the lines of Salisbury cathedral were pulled about in this way for picturesqueness’ sake—for the sake of effect. The Gothic architects—_pace_ Peterborough west front—did not design for effect. All the parts of the building are there either for some constructional or for some ritualistic reason. A big central tower will not stand without abutment to the north and south; therefore there has to be a central transept. The long stretch of clerestory wall—at Salisbury unbuttressed externally—will be all the better for the support of two transepts and a lofty porch: they are added. Transepts, moreover, are useful in providing chapel-room for various great saints of Christendom, as well as for the local saints of the cathedral. The porch is useful as providing neutral ground for various functions—half religious, half secular; the porch is added. And so with the chapter-house. Every one of the appanages which make a Gothic exterior so picturesque was built, not because it would be picturesque, but because it would be useful.

And see what pits and abysses of shadow lurk behind each projecting buttress, and still more in each deep sound that runs inland, like some Norwegian fiord, between towering precipices on either side. But these grand shadow-effects—varying from minute to minute as the sun moves round—varying from day to day as summer treads on spring, autumn on summer—were not in the designer’s first intent. The projecting masses had to be there; the play of light and shadow which ensued, he did not plan; he only welcomed it. He had little control over it; in the windows, indeed, which were within his control, he made the jambs so shallow that the windows are externally almost shadowless; almost the whole depth of the window he gave to the interior, preferring to enrich the interior of each window with an inner arcade—feeling, doubtless, that he need do nothing externally to add to the shadow-effects of the projecting buttresses.

But the life-blood of an architectural design is proportion. Unfortunately one never notices its presence. Only when a building is out of proportion does one recognise that such a thing as proportion exists. And as it is the most subtle, so it is the most important factor in design—design small or large—Salisbury cathedral, the Pandolphini Palace, a Chippendale chair, or a Wedgewood vase. Alter the shape of the vase, and see the difference. In the same way, see if you can lengthen or shorten Salisbury nave for the better, or the transepts, or the porch, or the Lady chapel; or if you could heighten the Lady chapel or retro-choir to advantage; or if you could make the roofs an inch more acute or more flat. The proportions of this, as of every really great building, are subtle in the extreme; they interlock in all directions. Each part—_e.g._, the Lady chapel—is in proportion to the cathedral taken as a whole; each part is in proportion to contiguous parts; and each individual bit of each part is in proportion to the rest of it: _e.g._, in the Lady chapel the length, breadth and height of the walls, the slope of the roof, the dimensions of the windows, etc., are all in proportion to the Lady chapel taken as a whole. More than that—the proportions of the nave, choir, transepts, etc., are those which are suitable to a church 473 feet long and 404 feet high. If you built a church with a nave, choir and transepts exactly twice as large as those of Salisbury, it would not be in proportion, but out of proportion. The same lack of proportion would ensue if you copied the design of Salisbury in a parish church of exactly half its dimensions. Salisbury cathedral, like the Parthenon, cannot be copied with impunity, unless you preserve every dimension unaltered. Modern designers, not recognising this, have too often wrought themselves disappointment by unintelligent imitations of ancient work.

To the north and south another charming effect is seen in the gradual growth of the ornament upward. This, again, is to the credit of Time, and not of Elias de Dereham. From 1220 to 1330 window-tracery was ever growing richer day by day, and Salisbury cathedral was ever growing upward. And so the ornament culminates most rightly, yet most accidentally, in the higher stories of the transepts, in the tower and spire.

Only one criticism suggests itself before we leave Salisbury cathedral as seen from the north-east. Are not the voids in excess—two windows in the aisles and three in the clerestory, where one would produce a much more monumental and solid effect? Such single windows, filled with the opaque grisaille glass of the period, would have subdued the glare of the interior. But I have not the slightest doubt that the critics of the day infinitely preferred the uniform good lighting of Salisbury to the “dim, religious light” of Lincoln and its darksome corners and recesses. In Salisbury there is not a quiet spot anywhere where you can pray in peace; the blinding light pursues you everywhere. But good people in those days liked a cheerful church—full of light, sparkling with stained glass, brilliant with gilding and paint: religious gloom had not yet become fashionable; it did not come in till the time of the Puritans. In every respect except the fenestration, in Salisbury, as in Lincoln Minster, internal seems to have been subordinated to external effect.

The interior is, indeed, very fine. It could hardly help being fine; a nave so spacious and so proportioned could under no circumstances be a failure. It is immensely high, and is long in proportion. The proportion of height to span (2½ to 1) is better than in most English churches. The harmony of the design—practically the same from east to west, and from north to south—is unique in England, and is most impressive. The charming way, too, in which the architect has contrived that we should have a vista of another miniature church in the Lady chapel—a cathedral within a cathedral—is worthy of all commendation. But, as in Lincoln nave, to the eye every support is alarmingly insufficient for the work it has to do; the piers are too tall and slender, the walls too thin, and pierced with too many openings. The triforium is a most unfortunate design: in harmony neither with the arcade below, nor with the clerestory above; its outer arches ugly in themselves and discordant with every other arch in the church; nor could it be expected that its dark marble shafts would tell against a dark background—black on black. Add to this the dreadfully new look of everything—partly due to the very perfection of the masonry, partly because Scott has been here—and the overpowering glare: one almost feels as if one were in the Crystal Palace. Of the west front it is as well to say nothing; it would take pages to contain the unkind things that have been said about it.

The Cathedral Church of St. Mary, Southwell.

Southwell Minster, as it is usually but incorrectly styled, was originally what is called a collegiate church. It is as if, in any parish church of unusual importance or with an exceptionally large population, there should be not one rector, as nowadays, but a dozen or so, this dozen being formed into a corporation, with a dean, precentor, chancellor and treasurer (the two first officials did not exist at Southwell). All the cathedrals of the old foundation had from the earliest time such a collegiate constitution as the above: viz., Chichester, Exeter, Hereford, Lichfield, Lincoln, London, Salisbury, Wells, and the four Welsh cathedrals. But all these were also cathedrals: _i.e._, they possessed a bishop’s chair (_cathedra_); Southwell did not become a cathedral—there was no bishop of Southwell—till the present reign.

Like the other ecclesiastical colleges—those of cathedrals excepted—that of Southwell was suppressed by Edward VI.; but under Queen Mary it had the good fortune to be reconstituted and re-endowed. Its sister church, Beverley minster, also a college of secular canons—_i.e._, priests not living under a monastic rule—became and has remained a parish church. The only collegiate churches remaining with their original constitution are Windsor, Westminster, Heytesbury, Middleham, and St. Katherine’s Hospital, London—omitting, of course, the cathedrals of the old foundation.

Though, however, there was till recently no bishop of Southwell, yet the church up to the Reformation was practically a cathedral. Just as the Bishop of Wells had at different times other cathedrals besides that of Wells—at one time at Bath, at another time at Glastonbury; and as the bishop of the Mercian diocese had at one time three chairs—viz., at Lichfield, Chester and Coventry—so the Archbishop of the immense northern kingdom of Northumbria required and possessed four cathedrals: viz., at York, Ripon, Beverley and Southwell. The latter was especially the cathedral of Nottinghamshire, as it has become once more. The archbishops had a palace at Southwell, of which the fine hall remains; Archbishop Sandys is buried in the minster.

I. In the seventh century St. Paulinus is said to have founded a church at Southwell. But long before his time—in the third century, or thereabouts—the Romans were at Southwell. There actually survives a tesselated pavement in the south transept which may well have belonged to a Romano-British basilica.

II. Two fragments have been carefully preserved and re-used from an early Norman church—it may even have been of Pre-Conquest date. One is a fragment of a lintel over a doorway in the north transept, depicting St. Michael and the Dragon and David throttling the lion. The other is a set of capitals on the eastern piers of the tower, now unfortunately covered up to make room for more organ pipes. (A mania for big organs is raging in our cathedrals: nothing short of the roar and rumble of an earthquake will bring people nowadays into a devotional frame of mind.)

III. Between 1109 and 1114 a new Norman church was begun. Of this the choir has disappeared. As the choir would be built first, 1120 is given as an approximate date for the transept and 1130 for the nave. The cable-mouldings, however, of the crossing and transepts, and the carving of the nave-capitals, are so rich and effective that the work is probably somewhat later. Indeed, the whole of the ornamentation is far ahead of that at Ely, Norwich and Peterborough, Tewkesbury or Gloucester. The carved capitals may be compared with those of the nave of Hereford. The interior of the nave is low and squat, but has been vastly improved by Mr. Christian’s semicircular ceiling. The piers are stumpy cylinders; the elevation is that of Malvern, or St. Bartholomew’s, Smithfield. Here there are none of the tall compound piers of Peterborough or Ely, still less the Brobdingnagian cylinders of Tewkesbury or Gloucester. Each bay of the triforium was to have been filled with the same kind of arcade as that of Romsey choir: viz., two small arches, with a small shaft rising from their point of intersection. (Projecting stones, intended for the arches and the shaft, may be seen in each bay.) The Romsey design was not a success even in the eyes of the Romsey people, for they tried five other designs in the triforium of their transept; and the Southwell canons very sensibly omitted this inner arcade. The clerestory, with its circular windows, is remarkable; the same design was worked out very beautifully, later on, in the north transept of Hereford.

From each transept projected eastward a two-storied apse (cf. Gloucester), the arches into which remain, and also the very noble arcade which opened into the upper chapel of the apse. It is noteworthy that the aisles are vaulted, as at Kirkstall, in oblong compartments—another mark of late date. The square broach spires of the west front—which, as well as the conical roof of the chapter-house, were restored by Mr. Christian on the authority of old prints—give the church quite a Rhenish appearance. The two big west windows of the towers are modern shams; originally these stages of the towers were, no doubt, solid. The north-west tower has a pointed arcade, and is therefore a little later than its neighbour, which has an intersecting arcade of semicircular arches. Originally the façade was just such a one as that which remains in St. Stephen’s, Caen.

A magnificent string-course of zigzag ornament runs along the nave and round the transepts. In places it has been taken out, reinserted in a different place or copied, when the Perpendicular windows were inserted in the aisle of the nave. In the south transept it takes the unusual form of a segmental arch over the Archbishop’s doorway. The great emphasis given to the horizontal lines of the Norman building is as remarkable here as at Salisbury. There are good examples of the “nebule” corbel-table with a later parapet, and of Norman pinnacles; one of these, over the porch, is hollow, and served as a chimney for the sacristan or sexton, who, it was enacted, “should lie within the church, to be at hand to ring the bells at the right time.” The gables of the transept have very effective zigzag, with interesting differences of treatment; the pinnacles of the transepts seem to have been removed at some time or other to the central tower, for which they are too small. There is a fine view of the whole exterior from the fields and gardens to the south-east.

IV. This fine Norman church only existed in its entirety for a century. Its eastern limb was less than half the length of the present choir, which was commenced _c._ 1230 by Archbishop Gray, who built the great transept of York and the west front of Ripon. The plan is practically that of Worcester, (the eastern portion of which was finished _c._ 1218), but on a humbler scale: viz., an aisled choir for the canons, a tiny eastern transept (such a one was still in existence in the Transitional choir of York), and a long presbytery, the two eastern bays of which were without aisles. Externally this gives a beautiful composition even now. Before its mutilation, the Southwell choir must have been one of the best mediæval designs in Europe. Unfortunately the roofs have been lowered, and in the flattened battlemented eastern gable a most misshapen window now appears. Originally there were no external flying-buttresses (cf. Salisbury); the clerestory wall began to bulge out; the high roofs of the eastern transepts were taken down, and external flying-buttresses were erected (_c._ 1355). Take these away, in imagination, raise roofs and gables to as sharp a pitch as those of Beverley and Lincoln, and you have a design as noble as it is simple. The alternation of aisled choir and unaisled presbytery with the fine projecting masses of the eastern transepts provides charming contrasts of light and shadow; the base-courses are almost as strong and emphatic as at Salisbury; the sharply chamfered buttresses, with their acute pyramidal caps—a reminiscence of Lincoln nave—are particularly effective. Contrary to Salisbury fashion, the windows are deeply recessed externally. The whole design is vigorous and original.

The interior of the choir is equally original and interesting. The architect seems to have thought that the vaults of the choir must rise no higher than the eastern arch of the tower. If so, he was mistaken; as may be seen at Norwich, where the choir rises much higher than the nave. His problem then was how to get the appearance without the reality of height in the triforium. The same problem had troubled the Norman builders at Dunstable, Jedburgh, and Oxford; they had solved it by constructing a lofty pier-arcade, and then building the triforium _beneath_ it. The Norman builders at Steyning, and the architects of Southwell and Pershore choirs—which were going up together—solved the difficulty in a different and more effective manner: viz., by inserting the triforium inside the clerestory. This saved the elevation. The pier-arcade was tall, the clerestory was tall, and the whole interior looked tall and not squat.

To interfere with the services as little as possible, the eastern half was built first, as at Rochester and Worcester. When this was finished, the western half was built. If the foliage of the beautiful capitals and corbels and bosses be examined carefully, it will be found to be somewhat stiff and formal in the eastern bays, and to be worked with much more crispness and freedom towards the west (cf. Worcester). The next thing was to pull down the Norman choir, the material of which is found to be largely built up in the western, but not in the eastern bays. In rebuilding the western bays, the first consideration was not to bring down the Norman tower. So the work was not continued from the east, but was started afresh from the tower. The two portions met in the fourth bay; when it was found that, owing to inaccurate setting-out, the arch on the south side of the choir and the string-course on the north side were at a different level to that of the older work to the east. The awkward junction of the arches was masked by a curious medallion. The whole of the work was done late in the Lancet period; as is shown by the frequent use of the triple roll in the bases, and by the fact that the tooth-ornament is worked on a projecting fillet, as in the north transept of Hereford, instead of being set in a hollow. The vault of the aisles and transept is quinquepartite, as in St. Hugh’s aisles and transept at Lincoln; the high vault is quadripartite; and both vaults have the wobbling longitudinal rib of the great transept of Lincoln. At the east end this rib drops down somewhat fortuitously into the middle of a group of lancets. A special local note of this Southwell work is fondness for fillets; they abound everywhere.

V. A little later, the eastern apse of the north transept was replaced by a double chapel (_c._ 1260). The shafts have the “keel-moulding,” both here and in the chapter-house.

VI. Next was built the cloister—_i.e._, the southern part of the Vestibule leading to the chapter-house. Notice the lovely doorway in the north choir-aisle. In this and the arcade is early naturalistic foliage, which fixes the date as _c._ 1280. Before the upper story was built, and when the eastern arcade was open, it must have been singularly beautiful. From the little courtyard between the cloister and the eastern transept the views are most picturesque.

VII. Then was built the vestibule and the chapter-house. If in window tracery and leafage it be compared with the chapter-house of York, it will be plain that the Southwell example is the earlier. Southwell chapter-house may be 1290, York 1300. York chapter-house is then but a copy of that of Southwell—and an inferior copy; both dispense with a central pier; but Southwell has a magnificent vault of stone, whereas York is vaulted in wood. The chapter-house of Southwell, not that of York, is “among chapter-houses, as the rose among flowers.” “What Cologne cathedral is to Germany, Amiens to France,” says Mr. Street, “is Southwell chapter-house to England.” Here English stone-carvers produced their best work; nowhere will you find such capitals or crockets or spandrels, nor such portraits—all, no doubt, here and in the cloister, representing people living at Southwell 1280-1300. Photographs of this wonderful detail have been inserted in the Introduction, pages v-xiii.

VIII. But the wonders of Southwell do not end yet. In the Curvilinear period (1315-1360) was erected quite the loveliest choir screen in England; next comes that of Lincoln, evidently by the same hand. Eastern and western sides are entirely different in design: on the western side the artist parts reluctantly with the beautiful geometrical design of the thirteenth century; on the eastern side he accepts unreservedly the reign of the ogee arch. Magnificent sedilia and stone stalls of similar character were erected, which only survive in part. Very beautiful, too, is the cusping of the reticulated windows inserted in the north transept chapel.

The upper parts of the chapter-house and the north transept chapel also were remodelled in the Curvilinear period.

For two hundred years or more, the highest and best of mediæval art found cultivated and wealthy patrons in the canons of Southwell. Norman, Lancet, Geometrical, Curvilinear work are all seen here at their best. Few of our cathedrals, from the point of view either of architectural design or sculptured detail, can be mentioned in the same breath with Southwell. Nowhere will the architectural student find such a treasure of the best work of the best periods as in the sister churches of the canons of Beverley and Southwell. It is one of the greatest delights of Southwell that this lovely minster is little known and almost unvisited: one feels as if one were “the first that ever burst into this silent sea.”