Kitabı oku: «The Building of England: How the History of England Has Shaped Our Buildings»
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Introduction
1— Beginnings: The Collapse of Rome: 410–700
2— The Foundations of England: 700–1000
3— England and Europe: 1000–1130
4— The Invention of English Architecture: 1130–1250
5— Extravaganza: 1250–1350
6— From the Black Death to the Reformation: 1350–1530
7— From the Reformation to the Civil War: A Century of Growth: 1530–1630
8— Protestantism, Power and Prosperity: 1630–1720
9— Property, Commerce and Consensus: 1720–1760
10— War, Inventions and Introspection: 1760–1830
11— World Dominance: 1830–1870
12— 1870s to the Second World War: 1870–1939
Endnotes
Picture credits
Index
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Publisher
Building in England 410–1930
This book is a history of English buildings, although it is intended to be more than that. It is also about the beliefs, ideas and aspirations of the people who commissioned them, built them, lived in them and saw them while going about their daily business. It is about how people discovered new ways of building, both for improved structural performance and for enhanced aesthetic effect. It is about how buildings reflected changing economic circumstances, shifting tastes and fashions. It is about the architectural expression of power, of hierarchy, of influence. It is the history of a nation through what it built.
So this book aims to put building back into the history of England. For some this will be a questionable enterprise because much recent British history is written as the history of the British Isles.1 Yet we should remember Britain was only created by an Act of Parliament in 1707, although the Crowns of England and Scotland had been united in 1603 and Wales had been incorporated in 1536. Thus, for 1,300 of the 1,520 years that this book spans, England and Scotland, at least, were separate political entities. Although now one country, before 1603 England and Scotland generally looked in different directions – and influences on building in each were markedly distinct. Even after the Act of Union, to take a single example, urban housing in Scotland was based on the tenement and in England on the terrace.2
Moreover, through the whole period covered by this book it was rarely if ever only England that was governed from London. If we are to take a wider perspective on the political and cultural context of English history it would be desirable not only to include Scotland, Wales and Ireland but also to include much of France, the Netherlands, Hanover and, latterly, a huge, worldwide empire. All these places brought influences to bear on English building but it is what happened in England that is the focus of this book.
Writing only about England, the danger is of claiming English exceptionalism. Exceptionalism – the assertion that England was and is fundamentally different from other countries – is a strong streak in English historical writing but will not find much of a place in these pages. Whilst I will argue, repeatedly, that English buildings looked different from those in other countries, this makes no stronger claim than suggesting that buildings in Spain, for instance, looked different, too. Perhaps England was, at certain times, more insular than some other countries, but it was always open to external ideas and influences. There is one period, however, in which I will argue for exceptionalism. After 1815 England moved into a position of world dominance that has had no parallel in history. The achievement was unquestionably a British one, but it was one directed from London. For a period that lasted from perhaps the 1830s to the 1920s England was home to building types and categories of places that were to have worldwide influence. This was exceptional and this book will make no apology for that.
St Pancras Station, London. The engine shed of 1866–8 by W. H. Barlow and R. M. Ordish. With a clear span of 240ft and a length of 690ft this was an unprecedented enterprise.
The Problem of English Architecture
Writing a history of English building is fraught with problems, many of which have been inadvertently caused by architectural historians. Architectural history is still too often divorced from mainstream historical research and, with some notable exceptions, has concentrated either on general popular accounts or on a series of questions interesting only to a small circle of people concerned with stylistic analysis.
This latter approach ultimately derives from the work of the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, who became Professor of Art History at Berlin University and then at Munich in the first decades of the 20th century. His achievement was to establish a more empirical way of judging art and architecture, and his Principles of Art History set out how each artist’s personal style existed both within a national style and a period style. The job of the art historian, he suggested, was to disentangle and explain these stylistic strata. From this time onwards the identification of personal, national and period styles in architecture – and naming them – has been among the primary activities of architectural historians. With most types of buildings thus categorised, architectural history turned in on itself, spending half a century arguing whether the stylistic categories were correct and whether various architects had been allotted to the most appropriate category.3
My late friend Giles Worsley, writing in his excellent book Classical Architecture in Britain, opens a chapter with two questions: ‘Was Sir William Chambers a neo-Classical architect? Was Robert Adam a neo-Palladian architect? Convention,’ he writes, ‘would give a positive answer to the first question and a negative one to the second.’4 This present book does not set out to address such questions. The problem, as I see it, is that almost every art-historical term has ended up being more of a subject for debate than what it attempts to describe. So, for instance, there is much disagreement about whether ‘Norman architecture’ or ‘Palladian architecture’ can really be said to exist.5
A closely related problem concerns the assumptions that flow from the identification of a particular style. After deciding when a style begins – an art-historical industry in itself – historians see it growing, maturing and then waning. This view of style has both Darwinian and moralistic overtones. But styles do not have a life cycle and so there is nothing particularly degenerate, late or waning about late Gothic architecture, any more than there is anything immature about early Gothic. Nor is there any reason to assume that things evolve from the simple to the complex or from the small to the large.
These ideas about stylistic development lead to a series of assumptions that have distorted much writing on English architecture. At its root is the problem of determinism; in other words, the temptation to tell the story of English building as if everything that happened was inevitably going to bring about the outcome we see. There are many examples that illustrate this, but here I present just two. The first concerns the search for the origins of the more faithful rendition of classical buildings seen increasingly in England after 1720 and commonly called Palladianism. Knowing how the story ends, historians have given huge weight to a small number of classically correct buildings built by Inigo Jones nearly a hundred years earlier. As a result, everything that was built between 1630 and 1720 is seen in the light of Jones’s work. Compared with Jones’s buildings, nearly a century of English architecture has been regarded as somehow backward or at least not living up to a standard set by him. The reality is different. Jones’s buildings, at the time, were regarded as oddities outside the mainstream and had little impact on building in his lifetime. He did have his day as an influential architect, but only a century after he was dead.6
The search for the origins of English buildings designed in a style known as Modern has been even more distorting. Knowing that, after the Second World War, the Modern movement had a significant impact on English building, elements in buildings as early as the 1870s are seized upon as precursors. Although a very small number of mainly foreign architects built Modern buildings in England from the 1920s, these buildings have come to form part of the main narrative of English architecture, and the overwhelming mass of other fine and important buildings from the inter-war period is either ignored or deprecated.7
Somerset House, London. Neo-palladian or neo-Classical? A nicety or a fundamental question?
The sensible solution is therefore to put to one side stylistic labels, most of which are relatively recent inventions and few of which would have been recognised by those contemporary to what is being labelled, and start again. But as historians need to label things, because that is how they communicate and make sense of the past, an alternative strategy is needed. An answer may lie in a different approach: periodisation.
This is, however, another minefield. Historical periods are, of course, an alternative way of characterising what happened in order to make sense of the past. At one level they are self-explanatory, so people will have an idea about the Iron Age, the Romans, the Saxons and the Normans simply on account of the name (although not everyone can remember in which order they came). British scholars, uniquely in Europe, use royal dynasties to describe periods in their history. Plantagenet, Tudor, Stuart, Georgian and Victorian reflect changes in dynasty but they tell us very little else in historical terms. The fact is that dynastic changes rarely represented moments of meaningful architectural change. Even the most famous and apparently absolute dynastic division in English history, the Norman Conquest of 1066, did not represent an architectural break. It would also be hard to argue that anything architecturally decisive took place in either 1485 or in 1603, two of the most frequently used dynastic-break dates in English history. This, of course, is not to say that changes of monarch might not run parallel to architectural changes. The death of the military-minded Conqueror and the accession of William Rufus; the Restoration of Charles II after the Commonwealth; the accession of Edward VII after the long late Victorian years – all of these led, to a lesser or greater extent, to an outbreak of architectural exuberance.
For the same reason that we have to reject dynastic change as a basis for periodising English building we must also reject a rigid calendrical method. Although the unit of a numbered century is easily comprehended, it makes even less sense as a basis for explaining things than the period of rule of a family of kings or queens. Nothing particularly significant happened in 1500, 1600 or 1700 – there is no reason why it should have. The challenge is to try and divide up the story of building in England in such a way that each chunk makes better sense of what was happening. Readers will decide whether my divisions have made understanding English building easier or whether they only confuse it. Obviously, I hope that my divisions help to shed light on why things happened.
Castle Howard, the breathtaking Yorkshire country house chosen as both the television and film setting of Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited. Nostalgia, fiction and aesthetics combine to give undue architectural influence to such buildings.
But, alas, there is another pitfall. Architectural change does not take place evenly across time, geography or building type, so chronological divisions will only ever be a rough guide to what took place. This is particularly problematic in this book, which considers a much broader spectrum of building types than is usual. The study of buildings has long been divided up into the separate analysis of churches, castles, industrial archaeology, engineering, country houses, urban studies and vernacular architecture. Archaeology, of fundamental importance for understanding the built world, exists in an even more discrete enclave. Studying individual building types – or even sub-sets of them – as separate disciplines necessarily limits a discussion on the cross-currents between them; more seriously, it fragments the visual and spatial world in which our ancestors actually lived. Distinct disciplines are certainly important – we need people who have a deep understanding of lap joints in 12th-century timber buildings as much as we need those who can spot the derivation of a particular type of Corinthian capital. But we also need synthesis; someone who tries to link up James Wyatt and James Watt.
Much architectural history of the last thirty years has been preoccupied with the study of the country house, to the exclusion of other building types. The country house has sometimes been portrayed as a national driver of innovation, and more pages of English architectural history have been devoted to the development of this single building type than to any other – indeed, it has sometimes been claimed as Britain’s unique cultural contribution to European art. There are reasons for this, of course, not least the enormous success of the National Trust with, at the time of writing, its four million members. But it must be doubted whether the country house really deserves such lopsided attention. Most of the key developments, in fact, took place in an urban context, as this book will argue.
Another area to gain disproportionate attention is the careers of famous architects. Architectural history has too often been about the study of architects, while the role of patrons has consistently been underestimated. This is, in part, perhaps because architectural history was at first written by architects. Indeed, it was not until very recently – and only in specific cases – that the design and construction of a building were handed over to a design supremo who would relieve the patron of almost all input into the structure. Patrons from Benedict Biscop in the 7th century, through Archbishop Lanfranc in the 11th, Lord Burghley in the 16th to William Beckford in the 18th all exercised decisive design influence over their buildings. Innovation might be laid at the feet of a designer but it is just as likely to have originated from a patron who was better read, more widely travelled, and who had seen and experienced many more different types and styles of building.
Designers of buildings before the 1750s had either risen up through the building and craft trades or had come to design through gentlemanly curiosity. But into the 19th century the size and complexity of building construction demanded a spectrum of skills that these traditional routes did not permit. Three branches emerged – architect, engineer and contractor – and, of these, architects have dominated the history books.8 Yet builders, engineers and, indeed, manufacturers can all claim credit for having formed the built environment of England after 1800. In fact, architects have rarely been the sole force in the design of a building; perhaps their only period of absolute ascendency was between the mid 1950s and the late 1970s, a period outside the scope of this book.9
Excessive interest in famous architects and their oeuvres prevents us from acquiring a rounded picture of what was built and what was important. A good instance of this is the way in which Sir Christopher Wren has come completely to eclipse his contemporaries by having designed palaces, public buildings, churches and cathedrals – the traditional diet of the art historian. Most people have never heard of Wren’s brilliant and distinguished contemporaries Edmund Dummer and Michael Richards, both of whom were very considerable designers responsible for works of equal skill and novelty; unfortunately for their posthumous reputations, they built in naval dockyards and military enclaves, and most of their buildings do not survive.10
Essentially, no matter how hard we try, architectural history is determined by the accidents of survival; extant buildings will always have a primary claim over the historian’s understanding. Archaeology can fill in the gaps and topographical sources can show what things once looked like, but there is no substitute for a surviving structure. In this book I have deliberately chosen as examples buildings that survive. This is to encourage people to go out and see places they perhaps would never otherwise have thought of visiting. But I have not shirked from mentioning, sometimes in depth, important buildings that are now lost. This is because, without them, we cannot understand what happened.
So the task I have set myself is a difficult one and I suspect I have not entirely succeeded. The fact is that writing architectural history, avoiding the pitfalls I have just set out, is complex and raises issues that do not arise in the evaluation of music, painting or literature.11 The most important and obvious of these is the utility of architecture. A building cannot be understood in isolation from its function and it is not possible to separate its aesthetic effect – or its historical significance – from the function that it fulfils. Similarly, the location of a building cannot be separated from its effect and significance. Most art forms are mobile. Architecture is not, and it can only be comprehended in the context of its surroundings. Third, although new inventions are made in other art forms, such as acrylic paint in fine art or the electric guitar in music, architecture is fundamentally fashioned by developing technology. The invention of the sash window, of plate glass, structural cast iron or reinforced concrete all opened new chapters in architectural aesthetics, performance and functionality. For these reasons, function, locality and technology play a very large role in this book.
Some Big Ideas
Leaving behind some of the problems of this enterprise, I now want to turn to some overarching ideas that affect the whole story I have to tell. They will be covered in more detail in the following chapters, but a few moments’ consideration here will, I think, help set the scene.
Let us start with England. It is small. France covers 212,209 square miles; England covers only 50,333. It is on an island but is not itself an island, accounting for 57 per cent of a landmass also occupied by Wales and Scotland. As an offshore island, on the edge of a continent, Britain has an extraordinarily rich geology. Pumped, pummelled and folded by tectonic activity for three billion years, it has a variety of underlying strata not found on a great landmass. A traveller across the United States might go for hundreds of miles before noting a change in scenery; in most parts of England changes come thick and fast, influenced by over seven hundred types of soil and their underlying geology. England is the most fertile and easily cultivated part of Britain: only 13 per cent of its land is upland (i.e. over 600ft); in Wales and in Scotland the figures are 42 per cent and 48 per cent respectively. Yet England itself is divided into lowlands and uplands by a line that runs between Teesmouth and Torquay. This is a fundamental determining factor in both agriculture and building. In general terms, in the lowlands farming is arable and in the uplands livelihoods are maintained by grazing livestock. Upland or lowland, England is an extremely fertile country with a temperate climate, and the successful and innovative practice of agriculture, in a variety of guises, was a crucial factor in its early economic development.
The Customs House, King’s Lynn, Norfolk – a building for merchants, built by merchants to advance sea trade.
What lay beneath the fertile meadows and ploughed soils later came, perhaps, to be even more important. From the early Middle Ages the presence of flint, slate, limestone, brickearth and millstone grit, to name a few, influenced the form and appearance of man-made structures; but, decisive in England’s history, was the exploitation of clay, salt, metal ores and, particularly, huge amounts of coal. It was coal, extracted at first for the domestic needs of Londoners but later to power industrial production, that was first to transform Britain and then the world.
The geographic and geological distinctiveness of England, the individuality of its regional building traditions and the diversity of its economy make it hard to write a history of English building. Some recent books have acknowledged this, taking a regional approach and declining to paint a national picture.12 This is welcome, as generalisations about change in any one period in any one place are almost certain to be compromised by examples taken from other parts of the country. Yet it is possible to paint a national picture and desirable to do so. This book relies on the fact that the diversity of building in England means that although national generalisations might not be quite right, they are equally likely not to be completely wrong.
The Roman historian Tacitus wrote of Britain that ‘nowhere does the sea hold wider sway … in its ebb and flow, [it] is not held by the coast, but passes deep inland and winds about, pushing in among highlands and mountains, as if in its own domain.’ It was up Britain’s rivers that attackers came, from the Vikings to the Dutch, and down those same rivers developed the trade that gradually placed them at the centre of a worldwide network of waterways. The seas around Britain were, of course, a major deterrent to potential invaders; although there were waterborne assaults on England after 1066, none was successful in taking England in battle. This fact is fundamental to England’s history as, unlike all of its European rivals, it was not continually overrun by adjacent states. Its boundaries, even those with Scotland, were fixed from an early date, giving it territorial stability and helping to establish itself as a nation state before 1066.
During the Middle Ages the sense of national identity grew strongly, but the Reformation significantly intensified nationalism, characterising Catholic Europe not only as hostile but as oppressed and poverty-stricken. Protestant England was increasingly seen by its inhabitants as a sort of chosen nation, blessed by God. The Civil War strengthened this underlying culture, and over the following century the idea of individual liberty safeguarded by parliament was added to it. Indeed, from the Viking raids to the First World War, national identity has been shaped by war. In particular, war with France: the Hundred Years’ War, the wars after the Reformation, intermittent war through the 18th century, and then the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars of 1793 to 1815. As well as building and bolstering national self-image, these wars also accelerated social, economic and architectural change. This is a theme that runs throughout this book, which sees 1815 as a decisive moment in the national story. A final victory over France, with the help of its allies, put Britain into an unassailable position of world power, hurtling it into a century of rapid and fundamental transformation.13
Rievaulx Abbey, Yorkshire was suppressed in 1538 and sold to the Earl of Rutland. A series of detailed accounts chronicle its partial demolition by the Earl over the following two years.
Trade was central to this. Being on an island, England had to use the seas in order to trade. It was not unique in being a seafaring nation, but, it was unique in that trade with countries other than Scotland had to be seaborne. If exports were bound for Calais, they might as well be bound for Bordeaux, too – or for that matter Bombay or Buenos Aires. In this way, once Britain had secured the freedom of the seas after its European wars it was in a position to build up a dominating global trading network.
So in terms of fundamentals, England, on a temperate and fertile island, with rich mineral resources, a powerful sense of national destiny and a strong maritime culture, was blessed with a number of advantages. These contributed in some measure to England being a populous country. Changes in its population have also had a fundamental impact on its history and architecture. In particular, relatively rapid population growth in the century before 1300, between the early 1500s and 1650, and then exponential growth after 1760 have had a wide range of important impacts, many of which have determined the narrative in this book.
A central feature of English social structure is the rights and privileges of the individual over the group or over the state. This leads to a particular view of property rights. Nowhere else in Western Europe could an owner dispose of his property with such freedom as in England; everywhere else the proportion that could be freely sold was limited by law and children had some claim over their parents’ property. In England, even with primogeniture, which became the rule from the 16th century, it was possible to sell at any time, effectively disinheriting the following generation. So English land and buildings were commodities that could be easily transferred, and all property was purchasable. Individualistic property ownership lies at the heart of the history of English building.
On four occasions in English history property transfer took place on a national scale. The first was the plunder of Anglo-Saxon estates by the Normans, in which the majority of English land changed hands; soon after there was another, less traumatic, transfer – the granting of substantial estates to the Church from the Crown and the aristocracy. By 1200 this had created the skeleton of the medieval landscape, comprising a series of great estates owned by Crown, aristocracy, bishops and abbots, a situation that remained until the 1530s, when Henry VIII triggered a third great shift. The Dissolution of the Monasteries saw a reversal of the process started during the early Middle Ages, secularising the ownership of both rural and urban estates. Despite the disruption of the Civil War and Commonwealth, which saw an assault on the lands of the Crown and bishops, the Dissolution set the scene for the whole of the period up to the First World War. After 1918 came a fourth transfer. The great estates of the aristocracy, now no longer economically beneficial for their owners, were largely, but not completely, dispersed, with ownership transferring to smaller operators and being sold for urban expansion.
In tandem with these major changes in land ownership were cyclical management decisions by landlords. From the Conquest to the First World War, landlords chose either to manage their lands themselves or to rent them out to tenants, depending on which was more profitable. So, for instance, between about 1184 and 1215 landlords took their lands in hand, but after the Black Death – between around 1380 and 1410 – lands were rented out to tenant farmers.
The ordinary English people who were involved on a micro level in these changes in land tenure were, from at least the 13th century, individualists. They were socially and geographically mobile, market-oriented and acquisitive.14 They exploited the opportunities presented by the redrawing of property ownership and in due course transformed the practice of agriculture, making England the most productive country in Europe per head.
How English Buildings Looked
Explaining how the look of English buildings changed lies at the heart of this book. But it opens up some big questions. Is changing architectural fashion down to individual whim or an expression of something deeper, a physical representation of contemporary society? Do, for instance, Georgian terraced houses, 15th-century parish churches and Victorian town halls in some way express the society in which they were produced? Is architectural innovation generated by craftsmen and designers or requested by kings, bishops, aristocrats or industrialists? Is the appearance of a building driven by its function or does a desire for it to look a certain way come first? Do engineering advances create new styles or do engineers devise ways of facilitating aesthetic effects? These questions will be addressed in the chapters that follow, but there are some general points that need to be made about how English buildings look.
Roman Catholicism was a globalising force, bringing remarkable stability across the whole of Europe from the 5th until the 16th century. There was a unity of ideas that engendered cultural conformity – and this applies to building, as to much else. English medieval building was in the mainstream of European Christian architecture, if distinctive and recognisable. The English monarchy played an important part in this, on a European scale. Starting, perhaps, with Alfred the Great’s building of Winchester Cathedral, through Edward the Confessor’s and Henry III’s Westminster Abbey, and culminating in Henry VII’s works of piety, the English monarchy was consistently among the greatest architectural patrons in medieval Christendom.
After the death of Henry VIII, who channelled much Church wealth into his own buildings, English royal building became overshadowed by the architectural efforts of courtiers and eclipsed by the buildings of foreign monarchs. It was only under George IV that the Crown started to build ambitiously again; and then it was the Crown, and not the monarch, for George’s work at Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace was paid for by parliament. Thus, after the Reformation, although architects who worked for the Crown are important in the story of English building, royal buildings themselves seldom are.
In the 16th century, better surviving documentation means that we can begin to understand what people actually thought about architecture. This has led many to see a fundamental change in people’s attitudes to building during the Tudor period. However, as this book will argue, John of Gaunt was probably no less interested, or informed, about building in the 1370s than was Henry, Prince of Wales, in the 1610s. Only we know more about Prince Henry’s interests as they have been written down. It is thus a fundamental premise of this book that people like to build and the rich, in particular, like to know about building, as it gives them pleasure and status. After all, only really rich people can build really big buildings.15 Some of the wealthy people significant in the story of English architecture are known as individuals; many are not. One of the important characteristics of English building is the consistently growing class of wealthy urban merchants, shopkeepers and professionals who demanded new types of building. Their rural counterparts were important, too, in certain periods driving innovation more urgently than the big landowners.
Burghley House, not some misunderstood attempt to imitate foreign buildings or styles but a native way of building.
Some patrons travelled and wanted to imitate what they saw abroad; some even sent their architects to learn new foreign techniques. This does not mean that English architecture is just a poor imitation of designs developed elsewhere, neither properly understood nor executed. The old view of Gothic architecture was that it was copied from France, but imperfectly, and that as classical architecture came to be admired the Elizabethans muddled it up and ‘got it wrong’. These views underestimate the insular traditions, as well as the inventiveness of English craftsmen and designers. New architectural languages were not simply copied – that was seldom, if ever, the intention. In reality, ideas, motifs and elements were absorbed and recast as new ways of building were being created.16
On a number of occasions new architectural languages were imported in a measured form that was then embellished and decorated. This reflects an underlying preference for ornamentation. The severity of Norman Winchester Cathedral (fig. 44), for instance, soon gives way to the exuberance of the nave at Durham Cathedral (fig. 51), something, perhaps, more florid and native, while the introduction of austere classical forms at Longleat House, Wiltshire (p. 212), turns into the encrustations of a house like Wollaton Hall, Nottinghamshire (fig. 195).
So there is a pendulum of taste swinging from austerity, simplicity and minimalism to ornament, colour and exuberance, and then back again. The Norman Conquest swept away the decorated buildings of the late Saxons, generating an architecture of military sobriety; but this gave way, in reaction, to the exuberant buildings of the 12th century. The way the English used Gothic from the 1170s was very austere, but this led to its elaboration and decoration from the 1250s. Simplicity of line and cleanness of form began to return in the 1340s, remaining the accepted language until the 1450s, when it became decorated and exuberant again. Towards the end of the reign of Henry VII and lasting until around 1530, simplicity and austerity returned before being overwhelmed by the theatre of Henry VIII’s court architecture. Then there was a short period of austere classical rigour from the 1550s to the 60s before a riot of Elizabethan and Jacobean decoration commenced. By the 1630s the mood swung back to minimalism, which remained to the Restoration until the richness and inventiveness of Wren, Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh become fashionable. Under the influence of Lord Burlington and his approved architects a more tempered and austere classical architecture then took over until the 1760s, when there was an explosion of decorative styles. The simplicity of the Grecian revival in the 1820s was transformed into the richness and colour of revived Renaissance styles in the 1830s. The purity of Gothic Revivalism in the 1840s then led to a riot of expressiveness of High Victorian Gothic in the 1860s, before a return to the simplification of forms of so-called ‘Queen Anne’ from the 1870s. This, in turn, gave way to a revival of interest in baroque forms, which itself stimulated a new breed of minimalist modern classicism.
Sudbury Hall, Derbyshire, built by George Vernon 1660–80. The staircase with remarkable carving and breathtaking plaster-work is at the exuberant end of English architectural taste.
Of course, moderation and excess are not opposites – they can coexist both within architecture and within the human spirit. They are different states of the same mind, not different states of mind. Yet their presence is certainly discernible to a greater or lesser extent through the building history of England. This observation is not a causal analysis nor an explanation of what happened. It is a description of a chain of events. The impulses that caused the pendulum to swing each time are complex and multi-causal – and different for each swing. The reasons that the geometric clarity of early Norman architecture was lost to Decoration are quite different from those that explain the transition from the minimalist classicism of the Restoration to the exuberance of Vanbrugh. Fashion, for that is what these changes are, can change quickly or slowly, but change it does.
‘The history of architecture is the history of the world.’17 It would be tempting to take this remark by the architect A. W. N. Pugin as a conclusion to this book. But what buildings of the past tell us is less important than the way they affect us now. We have today more of the physicality of the past around us than at any previous time. Depending on your point of view, our lives are either imprisoned by the buildings erected by our ancestors or ornamented by them. Thus, for me, it is a remark made by Sir Winston Churchill, in connection with the Houses of Parliament, that captures the significance of the story of English building: ‘We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.’18
The fact that the constructions of our ancestors are inescapable is a profoundly levelling fact. More than anything else, the story told in this book gives the lie to the notion of progress. No mason alive today could create the high vaults over the Henry VII chapel at Westminster Abbey or the spire of Salisbury Cathedral, and no brick maker could fashion the terracotta of the Natural History Museum, London. The computer-driven precision of the contemporary glass-and-steel tower cannot be said to be an absolute advance over the brilliant eye–hand–mind coordination of the pre-modern age.
Indeed, the very notion of progress was alien to the people of England for the first 1,400 years covered by this book. Progress, as an accepted phenomenon, dates from the 18th century. For most of English history people thought in terms of trying to return to a previous, more virtuous, age. Architecture thus also gazed to the past rather than being on some forward trajectory that represented, at each step, an improvement on the previous one. The belief that progress is taking place, that it is inevitable and that it makes people happier and therefore should be pursued is not, I think, borne out by the evidence. There have been good times and bad; some of the bad times were terrible, and some of the good inspiring. Buildings, likewise, have waxed and waned. This book attempts to tell that story.
Splendid is this masonry – the fates destroyed it; the strong buildings crashed, the work of giants moulders away. The roofs have fallen, the towers are in ruins, the barred gate is broken.
The End of Rome
In 410, when the Roman army finally left Britain, neither England nor the English existed. The geographical area that is now England was part of the Roman province of Britannia and was occupied by British and Romano-British peoples. It took a long time for England to emerge from the ruins of Britannia. The first real king of England was Athelstan (924–39), who struck his coins with Rex totius Britanniae (King of all Britain). Athelstan inherited a rich, successful, populous kingdom ornamented with churches, cathedrals, monasteries and palaces. So, technically, the history of England’s architecture begins in around 900, but to understand how England looked then, and why, we need to start in 410.
This is easier said than done. The evidence is wafer thin – few buildings, a few more manuscripts and a volume of archaeological excavation carried out, not systematically, but where opportunities arose. The result is that the period 410 to 1000 is an incredibly controversial one, with heated debate among archaeologists and historians not only about why things happened, but what happened, and when.
One of the difficulties is that England was at least two and sometimes three different places before 1000. Indeed, Roman Britain itself had culturally been two places: the south and east, which were more Romanised, and the north-west and west, which were less heavily Romanised. Similar distinctions remained in Saxon England, with the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings making a bigger impact in the south and east than, for example, in Cornwall. The southern parts, particularly Kent, had closer ties with the continent, while Northumbria was more influenced by Ireland. As a result, it is very hard to generalise about England as a whole, but it will be necessary to make some generalisations if any sense is to be made of this complex period.
The Romans were in Britain for an extremely long time – if they had left in the year 2000 they would have arrived in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. During the centuries of their occupation they built a very great deal: there were over 60 towns, places of administration, justice, manufacture, trade and latterly church administration. Some were large, with populations of 15,000 or more, at least as large as medieval towns such as Norwich. In some areas the countryside was littered with villas and the coast with a messy series of forts. Hadrian’s Wall, with its forts and towns, protected the Empire’s northern border. Internal fortifications, too, were mighty. Many towns were walled, and the largest of these, like York, was built almost impregnably in stone (fig. 1).
Fig. 1 The Multangular Tower, York. The lower part of this fourteen-sided tower dates from the late 3rd or early 4th century and formed part of the Roman fortress of York. The upper stages were rebuilt and reused in the 13th century. Throughout the early Middle Ages large Roman structures such as this dominated many English towns.
In 410, in the face of complex problems across the empire and a decline in the importance of Britannia, the Emperor Honorius ordered the remaining units of the Roman army to leave Britain and told the Romano-British to fend for themselves. With the exit of the army came the collapse of Roman state control and its economy. The legions had been responsible for maintaining centralised government with coinage and taxation, laws and the physical infrastructure of roads and fortifications. Their removal exposed what was to become England to the destructive forces of the barbarian world.1
The first wave of settlers that came to East Anglia in the first half of the 5th century was from northern Germany. They were farmers attracted by the agricultural potential of England who had little direct experience of the Roman way of life – and even less interest in it. These peoples kept contact with their homelands, moving backwards and forwards, bringing and transferring fashions in everything from weapons to jewellery and, of course, buildings. The newcomers were not especially numerous but were highly successful at establishing themselves, by force, as the landlords of the native British population. So much so that by 600, although the genetic make-up of what is now England was still heavily British, people spoke Anglo-Saxon, worshipped Germanic gods and shared Germanic fashions. A hundred years later there was a sense of emerging Englishness, but not politically, for the land that became England was still divided into a number of small kingdoms, each with its own kings, customs and ambitions (fig. 2).
Many towns had already been in decline before the legions left, but after their departure the collapse was sudden and fundamental. We know that people continued to live in some of them after the Roman administration ended – in Colchester, Cirencester, Wroxeter, Carlisle, St Albans. But this was not a continuation of urban life, with civic, social and economic structures. It was life in towns, not town life. This is fundamentally different to what happened in Gaul; there, Roman cities formed the building blocks of Frankish rule. From these places taxes were levied, in them administration was centred, and to them secular and ecclesiastical rulers were attracted. So why were the British Roman towns abandoned?2
 |
| Fig. 2 Early Anglo-Saxon England showing the Roman road network and, overlaid in a thicker line, the roads that remained in regular use in the Anglo-Saxon period. |
| The walled towns of Roman Britain were generally much larger than those in Gaul, where, in the late Roman period, only the central part was protected. The walls of Winchester or Canterbury, for instance, enclosed the entirety of the settlement and were thus much longer than their continental counterparts (most enclosed around forty hectares). Such places were difficult to defend and expensive to repair. A Roman legion could do both jobs, but after the collapse of Roman authority, mechanisms were simply not in place for this to happen. Towns in Gaul, smaller, and easier to maintain and defend, had a strong afterlife in a way that the English towns did not. |
| As a result, what happened in Britain after the Romans left was more radical and fundamental than what happened to its nearest Romanised neighbours. In the years after 410 new social and economic structures emerged in which towns played no part – England was now agrarian, localised and small-scale, elites were mobile and there was no market economy. |
| Yet importantly, the physicality of Rome had not been forgotten. The Northumbrian monk, Bede, England’s first historian, writing in 731, tells us that Roman ‘cities, forts, bridges and roads’ were still visible, while an anonymous contemporary of his wrote a poem about the ruins of Aquae Sulis, modern-day Bath: ‘Splendid is this masonry – the fates destroyed it; the strong buildings crashed, the work of giants moulders away. The roofs have fallen, the towers are in ruins, the barred gate is broken.’3 |
| As we shall see, in many places the ruins of Roman towns and fortifications dominated the landscape well into the Middle Ages. Roman buildings were, after all, built with iron-hard hydraulic lime mortar; they did not fall down, they needed to be demolished. Parts of the Roman road network survived, too. The Anglo-Saxons appropriated the most important of these as ‘royal roads’: the former Roman Watling Street, Ermine Street and Foss Way, together with the prehistoric Icknield Way (fig. 2). In addition to these it is known that other roads, such as Dere Street north of Hadrian’s Wall, remained in serviceable use. |
| Bridges were an essential component of the Roman network, too, and it seems some of the most important of these remained intact. Roman bridges at Rochester, Chester, London and Cambridge are likely to have been maintained by the Saxons, and several others were rebuilt in timber.4 Roads and bridges were not only important factors in the growth of settlements; they helped the movement of building materials. The Roman stone from which the church at Brixworth, Northamptonshire, was built (p. 42), was brought down the Fosse Way and then Watling Street from Leicester 28 miles away. |
| Even more important than the physical remains of Rome was its intellectual and cultural legacy. With the fall of the political and military empire, Rome entered a new phase as the headquarters of world Christianity and, for educated Anglo-Saxons such as Bede, became the headquarters of the world. For the whole Anglo-Saxon period there was a real sense that the cultural and intellectual capital of England was Rome. The East Anglian king, Raedwald, who was buried in a great ship at Sutton Hoo, Suffolk, in around 624, was surrounded by objects identifying him as much as a Roman ruler as an Anglo-Saxon feast-giver. Julius Caesar was claimed by 8th-century Saxon kings as among their ancestors, and some East Anglian coins even included an image of Romulus and Remus.5 |
This fascination with Rome is a thread that runs through this book. There is a sense in which the history of English architecture until the late 18th century can be explained as a quest to re-create Roman buildings. King Alfred the Great at Winchester (p. 46), William the Conqueror at the White Tower (p. 69), Edward Seymour at Somerset House (p. 280) and Lord Burlington at Chiswick (p. 318) were all trying to achieve the same thing. And it was not just the 18th-century Grand Tourists who went to Rome in person; in Anglo-Saxon England kings, bishops, parish clergy and ordinary people all made the long and dangerous pilgrimage to Rome. In the Leonine City on the edge of Rome was the Schola Saxonum, a lodging house for English pilgrims supported by a tax raised by English kings. England was no provincial outpost; those who had the wealth to commission buildings were not ignorant of the great buildings of the ancients in Rome.6
How the Saxons Built
The early Anglo-Saxon world, unlike ours, was not primarily a built one. Special places were normally natural ones: rivers, hills, woods. Indeed, their language had words for circles and curves, but expressing straight lines and right angles was difficult. The natural world therefore played a large role in building. Most churches, for instance, were not aligned by compass point to the east, but were laid out by sighting the sun at sunrise and sunset either on saints’ feast days, Easter, or on the spring or autumn equinoxes.7
Almost all secular buildings were built of timber; indeed, the Anglo-Saxon verb ‘to build’ is timbrian, and buildings were getimbro. Timber was not seen as a lower-status material than stone, nor was the skill to use it effectively lesser than that of the mason. Indeed, even in the early Saxon period, the achievements of leading English carpenters were considerable. That English building between the Romans and the Vikings was almost entirely of timber demonstrates that efficient woodland management must have continued after 410, albeit at a local level. This involved cyclically harvesting the underwood (coppicing) but allowing the oaks to grow in longer rotations (between twenty and seventy years). Coppicing provided fuel as well as all the non-structural building timber, including poles for scaffolding. Oaks were selected by carpenters, felled, their branches and bark removed, and then squared up and used for the structure of buildings. Oak was worked green (without being seasoned), the structure tightening up as the timber dried out. The most important woodworking tool was the axe used for cutting and smoothing, but hammers, adzes, boring-bits, chisels, gouges, planes and saws have been excavated from Anglo-Saxon sites. Nails were not used and fastening was by simple joints with timber pegs. The highest-status buildings might also include iron straps, hinges and catches, as ironworking and smithing continued after the Romans left.
Fig. 3 St Peter’s, Wearmouth, County Durham. The lowest stage of the tower was built in around 680 and was originally a single-storeyed porch; it was heightened c.700 and then again in the later Middle Ages. The remarkable porch, which never had doors, is flanked by cylindrical stone drums probably turned on a lathe like timber balusters. The Saxon nave lies behind the tower; the aisle to the left is 13th century.
Coppicing produced the wattles necessary for certain types of wall construction. Wattling involves a row of upright stakes, the spaces between which are filled by interweaving flexible branches, often rods of hazel, which are then covered with daub, either mud, clay or, in more sophisticated buildings, lime plaster. Roofs were not covered with slate, tile or stone, as was often the case in Roman times, but only with thatch or shingles. The best thatch was made of reed, but most often it was straw or even hay attached with string or hazel rods. Shingles were small, geometric slithers of oak pegged or nailed to the roof structure, more durable than thatch and less prone to catch fire.8
Stone building implied infrastructure and organisation. Quarrying, transport and construction require the mobilisation of significant expertise and labour. All this disappeared after 410, and by 600 there can have been few masons left in England. Masonry was re-introduced by Christian missionaries and relied entirely on robbing Roman buildings for a supply of cut stone. It was not only the expertise that was lacking to restart quarrying, but the motivation; the ruins of Rome were a plentiful quarry and most Saxon stone buildings were built close to or among the ruins of Roman sites.9 Where stone was used in a decorative fashion by the Saxons it was often carved as wood. The right-hand jamb of the archway at the base of the tower at St Peter’s, Wearmouth, County Durham, of c.680 is a perfect example of the woodcarvers’ art translated into stone (fig. 3).
Fundamental to the reintroduction of masonry building was the rediscovery of mortar; without this, stones could only be laid dry on top of each other at a very low height. Excavations at Wearmouth have revealed the earliest example of a post-Roman mortar mixer, a pit for mixing lime mortar with large, rotating paddles. The expertise for constructing this came from Gaul and required limestone to be burnt in a kiln before being mixed with water to form lime mortar.10
Where People Lived
In the years after the collapse of Roman rule power did not reside in fixed places – capitals, if you like; it resided with individuals moving from place to place. Leaders principally expressed their status through portable wealth, through personal adornment, through individual prowess and the ability to provide their entourage with great feasts. Places were occupied for short periods so that rulers could receive food-rents from surrounding farmers, feast with their households and move on. Yet the rulers who emerged in England wanted, as much as their Roman predecessors, to create monumental expressions of their power. In the Saxon poem Beowulf the heroic struggle between Beowulf and the monster Grendel is set in a spectacular timber banqueting hall, with doors bound with ironwork, and a carved and gilded roof strengthened by iron braces. Quite a number of these halls have now been identified, either by aerial archaeology or by excavation.11
Fig. 4 A reconstruction of the royal hall at Yeavering, Northumberland, based on excavations in the 1950s and 60s. Started by King Edwin in the 620s, this great hall and accompanying structures, including a grandstand looking like a Roman theatre, would have been used by the king when he visited the region to feast on food rents owed to him by his subjects.
The only one that can certainly be identified as being royal was the complex of the Northumbrian King Edwin at Yeavering, Northumberland, started in the 620s.12 There the excavators found a number of halls built in succession after a series of fires. The important point is the size and sophistication of these structures. The hall christened A2, for instance, was 82ft long and 36ft wide, had an entrance in the centre of each long wall, and two internal cross-walls making separate rooms at either end. The main hall was aisled and so was interrupted by supporting posts. The walls were made of planks sunk into a trench, then plastered inside and out. It is very likely that these were painted, and that beams and posts were elaborately carved (fig. 4). This was a building that required craftsmanship, engineering and organised labour, and it is likely that it was built in a tradition that was uninterrupted since the Romans. Roman villas had great halls or barns that are archaeologically almost indistinguishable from Saxon halls such as the one at Yeavering. In fact it is possible that some large Roman timber halls might have remained in use well into the period covered by this chapter. However, although the techniques necessary for their construction were probably essentially Romano-British, their decoration might have owed more to the traditions of their Anglo-Saxon owners.13
It was not only kings who built great halls. With royal grants of land, leading nobles also built places as estate centres and for feasting. It is likely that the remains found at Cowdery’s Down, Hampshire, are just such an aristocratic settlement dating from the 6th century. Fine timber halls, palisaded enclosures and more humble timber houses were found in a tight-knit plan, demonstrating that the building technology available to kings was also used by the richest landlords. Here, again, the halls and houses owed much to Romano-British building traditions, suggesting continuity of structural techniques.
The places that these individuals chose to make their base, whether as living kings or as corpses, were often ones that had been significant in the Iron Age or earlier. This is the start of a phenomenon that is very strong in England’s architectural history, the desire of the powerful to emphasise their legitimacy through references to the past. The locations of both the royal palace at Yeavering and the royal mausoleum at Sutton Hoo were influenced by pre-existing prehistoric settlements and barrows.14
This continuity of place seems to have affected lower-status settlements, too. Through the extraordinary upheavals and changes of the period Britain’s population had remained fairly static. From the late Roman period to about 700 most people continued to farm the same landscapes that they had farmed from the late Iron Age, in a similar manner, and living in similar buildings.
Fig. 5 A reconstructed 6th-century house at West Stow, Suffolk, based on archaeological excavation. The village contained five such halls strung out along the ridge of the hill, forming the spine of the settlement. A fire would be lit in a hearth in the middle of the single internal room.
Early Anglo-Saxon settlements were not villages in the sense that we would understand today. They were places occupied over a long period by perhaps ten families at most; built structures, all of which were of timber, would be replaced many times. These settlements were very loose, unfenced and unstructured, without streets or apparent geometry. At West Stow, in Suffolk, just such a settlement of the 5th and 6th centuries was excavated in the 1960s. Its inhabitants lived and worked in houses of a type prosaically described by archaeologists as Sunken-Featured Buildings. These were made by digging a rectangular pit over which a timber floor was suspended. Walls were made of planks sunk into the ground, and uprights at each end supported a ridge pole (or poles) that supported a thatch roof. These buildings were ubiquitous in English settlements from the 5th to the 8th centuries and were an Anglo-Saxon import, direct copies of a type of structure found all over northern Europe. In addition to the Sunken-Featured Buildings at West Stow there were larger, sturdier halls, probably for communal use (fig. 5). These bore less resemblance to their continental equivalents and are much more similar to Romano-British houses dating back to the later 1st or 2nd centuries.15
The Church before the Vikings
Although, when Pope Gregory sent St Augustine and his missionaries to England in 596, he was sending them to a place he regarded as at ‘the end of the world’, it was to one that had a Roman heritage. He instructed that bishops be seated in the Roman towns of Canterbury and London; perhaps he thought England was still the urbanised, centralised Roman society that it had once been. It was not. But despite this, Augustine did in fact found a see based on Canterbury, where he built England’s first cathedral, possibly on the site of an earlier Roman church. Outside the Roman town he also built a monastery, later to be given his name.
Further cathedrals were to be founded at Rochester and London and, in the 620s, at York. A cathedral is a church that contains the cathedra, or throne, of a bishop; this is, in fact, the only difference between a cathedral and any other sort of large church. In their dioceses bishops were responsible for ordaining priests, consecrating new churches, dealing with clergy discipline, and administering land and finances. As such they were crucial in the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons.
After several faltering starts England had become Christian again by the 680s, and in 664 the Synod of Whitby had settled that the English Church should be modelled on that of Rome rather than the Irish Church. Within a century England was populated by several hundred minsters, that is to say churches with a residential religious establishment, and was divided into seventeen dioceses. Not enough survives of any early Saxon cathedral to say much about it, but several minsters do, and from these we can paint a picture of the first Saxon churches.
Remarkably St Martin’s, the very first church of St Augustine and his fellows, survives in Canterbury, incorporating the brick remains of a Roman tomb (fig. 6). This ancient church, possibly first used as a mortuary chapel, though mauled and altered by time, is a powerful and evocative place to visit and is typical of the first places of Christian worship in Saxon England, built in close proximity to prominent Roman sites and constructed out of re-used Roman materials.16
Fig. 6 St Martin’s, Canterbury, Kent. A reconstruction of the church of Bertha, Christian queen of King Ethelbert; St Augustine first worshipped here in the 590s. The walls of the present nave are partly Roman and may have originally been part of a tomb chamber. Though significantly altered, St Martin’s remains the oldest standing church in England.
Fig. 7 St Mary’s, Reculver, Kent, of 669 from an excavation in 1927. The church was built in the middle of the Roman fort out of reclaimed materials. a) apse with bench and throne; b) altar framed by central arch; c) porticus; d) nave.
St Mary’s, Reculver, Kent, now precariously perched on the edge of a cliff, is a more complete example (fig. 7). In 669 King Egbert of Kent founded this minster in the centre of the old Roman fort. Most of the fort has now fallen into the sea and the church is abandoned, but it has been excavated. In plan it has a stubby, rectangular nave with an apsidal (semicircular) chancel lying behind a screen of two columns. On the north and south there are subsidiary rooms, known as porticuses. The apse, which contained a semicircular bench with a separate seat or throne in the middle, was an area set aside for the clergy, who celebrated communion facing their congregation in the nave. It is doubtful that St Mary’s could have been erected by Saxon craftsmen, whose architectural tradition, as we have seen, was entirely in timber. The strong likelihood is that St Augustine brought masons with him from Italy who designed and constructed these early Christian churches; a likelihood that is strengthened by their stylistic similarity to the churches of Ravenna in northern Italy and the Alps.17
Roman missionaries from Kent took the gospel to Northumbria, where, after the Synod of Whitby, more minsters were founded. The twin foundation of Wearmouth (today Monkwearmouth, 674) and Jarrow (681) is by far the most important of these. Like St Mary’s, Reculver, these churches were not designed by native hands. Their founder, Benedict Biscop, who had travelled Europe for sixteen years absorbing the latest ideas for the organisation and construction of monasteries, enlisted Frankish stonemasons and glaziers to construct his monastery in Roman fashion. They took their carts and their measuring rods to the Roman forts on Hadrian’s Wall and returned with both building materials and construction techniques for the new minsters. Both were thus, in terms of fabric and technique, built in the Roman manner, and their dedications – to St Peter and St Paul, the patron saints of the Roman Church – confirmed that life there was to be based on Rome, too.
Fig. 8 The Monastery of St Peter’s, Wearmouth. Plan based on excavations showing the layout of the latest phase of the Saxon monastery. The church, with its skirting of porticuses, was linked by a corridor crossing the cemetery to the living quarters.
Figs 9 and 10 St John the Evangelist, Escomb, County Durham; the most perfect Anglo-Saxon church in England. Massive Roman stones were used in its construction, including what is probably a re-set Roman arch in the chancel. Fragments of stained glass have been found and the windows have grooves for shutters. A patch of cobbled flooring in the nave is probably Saxon. The plan shows its original layout as revealed in excavation in 1968. The walled circular churchyard was a very early addition. a) chancel; b) nave.
Wearmouth and Jarrow have been extensively investigated, and enough remains to demonstrate that the layout of Benedict’s buildings was influenced by what he had seen in Gaul and elsewhere. In plan both sites were based on continental monastic models. The churches were long, narrow (their length three times their width) buildings with a western porch. Either side of the nave were lower porticuses or galleries, giving the buildings a basilican appearance (that is to say, a taller nave with lower aisles).
The church at Wearmouth had a narrow, 100ft-long, roofed gallery with glazed windows linking it with the domestic structures (fig. 8).
This feature, a precursor of the monastic cloister, presumably used for reading, writing and exercise, is a feature Benedict could have seen on his travels. Yet despite all this novelty the church, and particularly the domestic buildings, refectory and dormitory, were very similar to large, secular, timber structures elsewhere in Saxon England. At the royal site of Yeavering, for instance, a timber church was excavated that was virtually identical in plan and size to the Wearmouth and Jarrow churches.18
Fig. 11 St Andrew’s, Greensted-juxta-Ongar, Essex. In Norway numbers of timber churches survive, but this is the sole early medieval survivor from thousands of such churches in England. While the walls are of the late 11th century, the brick sill on which they sit is of 1848 and the dormers and brick chancel are Tudor. The tower is later too.
Although conceived in a timber-built tradition, these Northumbrian churches were among the first to be built in stone since the disappearance of the Roman legions two hundred years earlier. This is important, as stone building was associated by early Saxon Christians with Roman Christianity. When King Nechtan of the Picts accepted the Roman Easter he asked the Northumbrians for advice, not only on liturgical issues, but in building churches in masonry ‘after the Roman fashion’.19
A visit to the church of St John at Escomb, County Durham, still conveys a sense of what the churches at Wearmouth and Jarrow must have been like inside (figs 9–10). This is the best-preserved stone church of the early Saxon period in England, but its chiselled stone walls cannot do justice to what we know of the original interiors. Walls were plastered and painted white, carving was picked out in bright primary colours, the walls were hung with icons and the windows filled with stained glass.
Wearmouth and Jarrow are the only early Saxon monasteries about which anything is known architecturally. We do know, however, that as well as the monasteries of Northumberland and Kent there were many others in the Midlands, the Thames valley and the west. But before about 950 only the largest were of stone; most were still built of timber by people working in local building traditions.
At Greensted-juxta-Ongar, Essex, there is a remarkable survival: St Andrew’s is the single surviving Anglo-Saxon timber church in England (fig. 11). Thanks to dendrochronology it is now known that most of its surviving timbers date between 1063 and 1100. Yet this building was constructed in the same way as hundreds of other much earlier examples, somenow revealed through archaeology. The walls were built of split oak logs with their rounded face on the outside and fixed together with concealed timber tongues. These are jointed into timber roof and base (sole) plates, making a rigid wall.20
As the Roman legions left the shores of Britain they took with them the know-how and infrastructure necessary to build in stone. For the next two hundred years rich and poor, strong and weak, pagan and Christian lived, worked and worshipped in timber buildings. Some of these were in a long tradition of native building stretching back to the Iron Age; others were introduced by Anglo-Saxon settlers; most were an eclectic blend of Romano-British and Germanic engineering and aesthetics. At the high end these were buildings of considerable sophistication and magnificence; at the lower end buildings of extreme functionality. It was the coming of Christianity that reconnected England with the stone-building traditions of Rome. As a result, English architecture acquired a distinct and vibrant character – a blend of native, timber-based building and stone-built Roman styles. This is what the Viking raiders of the 790s found when they started their systematic plunder of the kingdom of Northumbria. These attacks, and their political and economic effects, set English architecture in important new directions.
| By 1000 it was not only England that existed but also a sense of Englishness among its inhabitants. |
| Introduction |
| Before the 10th century England was divided into numbers of small kingdoms that fluctuated in size and influence (fig. 12). Crudely speaking, in the years around 600, the kingdom of Kent was the most powerful of these; in the following century Northumbria was in the lead, and from about 700 Mercia was in the ascendant. Then from 865 until 954 everything was dominated by Scandinavian raiders – the Vikings who at first pillaged and then settled in the north and east. The problems caused by Viking aggression were only resolved by the royal dynasty of Wessex: King Alfred the Great (871–99), his son Edward the Elder (899–924) and his grandson Athelstan (924–39). In 927 Athelstan became the first true king of England, a position he secured with a series of decisive military victories and carefully planned treaties and alliances (fig. 12). |
| The success of the line of Alfred in uniting England owed much to the struggle against the Vikings. The imperative for defence and buying off the Vikings with cash payments stimulated the mobilisation of manpower on a large scale and the amassing of portable wealth by kings, both vital factors in the development of England and its architecture. Yet the Vikings themselves made little or no lasting contribution to England’s architecture.1 What foreign influences there were came from a much more powerful cultural source – the revival of the Roman Empire in Western Europe. |
| This revival was political, religious and, ultimately, architectural. Most important politically was the emergence, under Charlemagne (768–814), of a new empire that rivalled, in wealth, organisation and stability, the fallen empire of Rome. Its territories stretched from central Germany to northern Spain and into northern Italy. On Christmas Day 800, at the hands of Pope Leo III, Charlemagne took the title of Emperor of the Romans. This political revival was accompanied by a renewal of the authority and traditions of the Roman Church. In the 750s the Franks adopted the Roman liturgy to replace their Gallic forms; in 779 the payment of tithes to the church was enforced; in 789 all monastic orders were required to conform to the rules of St Benedict; and in 801 it was ordered that altars not containing relics should be demolished, stimulating a huge market in relics primarily from Rome. This represented not some generalised revival, but rather a self-conscious attempt to re-create the Emperor Constantine’s heroic age of Christianity. |
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| Fig. 12 Anglo-Saxon England, showing the approximate location of the kingdoms, towns, coastal trading settlements (wics), places mentioned in the text and places that were attacked by the Vikings before 865. |
| The political and religious revival of late Rome was accompanied by an architectural one. 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 and 232 monasteries were either founded or rebuilt, establishing most of the key components of medieval ecclesiastical design. The style in which these features developed was that of early Christian Rome, epitomised by the basilicas of St Peter and St Paul; a way of building known as the Romanesque. Romanesque is, in fact, not so much a style as an aesthetic programme, the name given to a variety of effects used by architects to re-create more closely and effectively the architecture of ancient Rome. It became possible to do this through advances in building technology, materials and engineering that were stimulated, in their turn, by the peace and prosperity of Carolingian rule. All these developments were important for England.2 |
Fig. 13 Offa’s Dyke, Clun, Shropshire, a massive piece of military engineering begun soon after 757. It stretched from sea to sea, and for 200 years kept the marauding Welsh out of Mercian England.
The Mercian Kingdom
In the 8th century the kingdom of Mercia was dominated by two very powerful and successful kings who controlled most of England south of the River Humber. Ethelbald (716–57) and Offa (757–96) were the first kings able to organise huge labour forces to solve surveying, engineering and construction problems on a national scale. Ethelbald was probably responsible for starting a concerted programme of bridge and road building to improve communications. No Anglo-Saxon bridge now survives – most were probably of timber – but before 1000 a network of bridges carried roads on both local and national routes.3
Offa is of particular importance as an international figure who corresponded with Charlemagne and was a friend of Pope Hadrian. He is also significant as the builder of Britain’s largest monument: the 150-mile-long Offa’s Dyke (fig. 13). The dyke was probably constructed to keep Welsh raiders out of Mercia and had 6ft-deep ditches with a 25ft bank behind; the rampart was topped by timber palisading and, in places, stone walls. Offa was able to mobilise labour for this and for the fortification of towns, marking a major change in the way England’s landscape was moulded by the power of the state. Offa’s achievements in church building were no less impressive, if only fragments of his churches now survive. Much to the chagrin of Canterbury, Offa used his influence with the Pope to found a new archiepiscopal see at Lichfield. Nothing of Offa’s cathedral remains except for a fragment of a contemporary shrine chest associated with the cult of St Chad (fig. 14). This carving, one of the most beautiful and moving to survive from Saxon England, reveals Mercian carvers following Carolingian fashions, reviving the sculptural style of the early Christian Church.4
Fig. 14 The corner of a tomb chest of c.800, probably from the shrine of St Chad, who died in 672. This fragment, found in 2003, shows that Mercian sculptors and architects, like their continental counterparts, were reviving late Roman styles.
Fig. 15 St Wystan’s, Repton, Derbyshire. The mausoleum of King Wiglaf of c.830. This compact but richly articulated space contained recesses to take the tombs of the Mercian royal family.
An even more potent expression of Mercian interest in early Roman Christianity is their royal mausoleum at Repton, Derbyshire. The crypt here was first built as a freestanding burial chamber for the kings of Mercia. King Wiglaf, before his death in 839, transformed the chamber from a plain rectangular cellar into a spectacular mausoleum by incorporating it into the chancel of the church and building an internal vault supported by four twisted stone columns based on the most prestigious late Roman Christian monument in Rome: the tomb of St Peter. This daring allusion gave voice to the power of Mercian kings in the language of Carolingian Europe (fig. 15).
More substantial evidence of the Mercian revival of Rome is the church of All Saints’, Brixworth, England’s most exciting and impressive standing Anglo-Saxon building (fig. 16). The church is big, about 160ft in length, but is now shorn of its ‘porticuses’, five on each side, which originally flanked the open hall of the nave, rather like aisles in later churches, but subdivided into individual chambers. East of the nave was a separate space, a choir, enclosed by an apsidal sanctuary beneath which was a crypt encircled by an enclosed passageway.5 The nave arcades are truly massive, their voussoirs made of reused Roman brick; whoever commissioned and designed this church was deliberately and successfully recreating a sense of Roman monumentality, and might have known contemporary Carolingian buildings.6
How many such churches existed in Mercia or elsewhere before the Vikings is quite unclear, but it is unlikely that Brixworth, and the major minster excavated at Cirencester, Gloucestershire, were the only two. These structures put architecture in England in the 8th and 9th centuries in the same bracket as some of the most avant-garde structures in Europe.
Fig. 16 All Saints’, Brixworth, Northamptonshire. This powerful church (the largest surviving Anglo-Saxon church in England) would have been even more massive before the demolition of its porticuses. The blocked-up ground floor arches along the nave would have originally led into these, just as at St Peter’s, Wearmouth (as shown in fig. 8). The tower with its semi-circular staircase projection is probably 10th century.
The Anglo-Saxon Church
The importance of churches to Anglo-Saxon society cannot be overestimated. Whilst kings were mobile, their buildings only occasionally utilised, and their economic effects dispersed, churches were rooted to a single location and thus became centres of economic activity and often, in due course, the kernel of towns. Minster churches also needed land to support them, and Church land, unlike the land owned by aristocrats, was not transferable between generations but held in perpetuity. The amassing of land by the Church contributed to a shift in focus from movable wealth, a feature of Germanic societies, to the idea of permanent land holding, as in Roman times. Land transactions were thus increasingly recorded and legalised, and the landscape divided and packaged.
In addition to landed endowments, often provided by royal or aristocratic patrons, relics, pilgrimages and miracles were the trinity that underpinned the building economy and design of the medieval church. For Saxons, relics had supernatural power. They were placed inside altars, carried into battle, used for solemnising oaths; without them no church was able to function. The more famous the relic, the greater the chance of attracting pilgrims who would make gifts of money at the shrines they visited. But pilgrimage was not only a pious act; it was a visual education for the clergy, builders and the laity. It was the cause of mobility and design exchange, of competition and of rising architectural expectation.7 Even modest numbers of pilgrims set architectural problems for church designers. People needed to be able to come close to relics in an orderly and controlled way that enabled suitable donations to be made, and satisfaction with the experience to spread by word of mouth.
One of the most conspicuous innovations connected with pilgrimage was the crypt, a small underground chamber, normally under the high altar, designed to contain relics. It was the crypt at St Peter’s, Rome, that established this feature as an aspiration for any late Saxon church. Brixworth (fig. 16) originally contained a ring crypt that allowed pilgrims to move round the apse, venerating relics, and the mausoleum at Repton was appropriated as a shrine to St Wystan, a royal prince murdered in 849. For this, a new access was cut, providing a proper circulation for pilgrims (fig. 15). Visitors to Repton and the surviving Anglo-Saxon crypts at St Andrew’s, Hexham, and at Ripon Cathedral can still explore the mysterious and gloomy subterranean circulation designed to lubricate the flow of pilgrims.
If the need to provide access to relics above and below ground was a fundamental factor in the design of the Anglo-Saxon church, so was the Saxon view of the Eucharist. Whilst Christ was obviously the focus for worship, it was the consecrated bread – the host – itself, as a sort of super-relic, that was venerated. Inside chapels the host could be placed on an altar alongside other relics, forming an easily multiplied supernatural focus. Because the moment of consecration was less important than the veneration of the host, Saxon churches were not as focused as later medieval churches on a single altar at the east end. Rather they comprised an assemblage of compartments on several floors, each with its own ritual focus. The most common and flexible of these subdivisions was the porticus, which served as side chapel, tomb chamber, sacristy or viewing chamber. The most important and impressive was the westwork,8 an enlargement of the west end of a church to provide a location for relics or shrines, a western choir, or occasionally a high-status viewing place (p. 46). These secondary spaces became progressively more important with a rise in the doctrine of purgatory and the appropriation of individual chapels by the rich for prayers to be said on their behalf. They also appealed to aristocratic aesthetic sense, which tended to the more ornamental, decorative and intricate than the big and bold.9
Before the 670s Christians did not expect to be buried in or near churches but were buried, like pagans, in cemeteries. By the late 7th century, however, the Church had wrested control of burial rites from friends and neighbours, and started to bury the dead close to Church buildings. Burial within churches themselves remained controversial and was made available only to individuals of the highest status. By 850, however, Christian cemeteries were serving large numbers of ordinary people, taking in land that was increasingly walled or fenced and populated by grave markers.
Monasteries
The Viking raids were devastating for early English monasticism. Whilst some monasteries survived, and some semblance of communal life might have remained, England’s former glittering monastic tradition, with its learning, music and patronage of art, was effectively wiped out by the Vikings. The decisive moment in the re-foundation of English monasticism came in 939 when King Edmund (939–946) set up Dunstan as Abbot of Glastonbury Abbey. This was a decisive move because Dunstan’s monastery, in line with those in the Carolingian empire, was founded according to the rule of St Benedict and Glastonbury went on to influence the foundation of thirty more Benedictine monasteries in southern England in as many years. At first each of these houses interpreted the rule as it wished, and it was not until King Edgar’s monastic reform that a consistent version of the rule of St Benedict was imposed on all the largest and richest minsters by the Regularis Concordia of 973.
Fig. 17 St Mary’s, Deerhurst, Gloucestershire; view of the interior looking west. On the ground floor is the Saxon door leading into the tower. Originally above this was a timber gallery – the blocked door that gave access to it can be seen. The corbels in the corners would have supported the gallery. The two pointed windows above looked into the church from a large room in the tower on the other side.
The Concordia put English monasticism on a level with contemporary continental practice. There were, however, some important specifically English provisions. As a concession to English weather, during the winter monks were allowed to have a fire in a warming room and permitted to work inside rather than in the cloister. More overtly political and nationalistic was the fact that the king and queen were to be recognised as patrons and guardians of monasteries, and that they should be prayed for at each of the daily offices bar one.10
In the hundred years after the Regularis Concordia kings and aristocrats lavished gifts of land on the monasteries, so much so that by 1066 nearly a sixth of the income of England was held by monasteries in lands and rents. This not only made them a hugely significant economic force but created vast wealth for architectural display. So little remains of any of the thirty or so monasteries reformed in the 10th century that it is hard to generalise about them, but it does seem likely that most of the components of later medieval monasteries were already in place, such as the cloister, refectory, dormitory and warming house. The abbey churches, however, were very different from those that remain today.
Fig. 18 St Andrew’s, Nether Wallop, Hampshire. The paintings over the chancel arch are the best preserved Saxon murals in England. They show angels censing a lost figure of Christ. Such paintings would have been commissioned by wealthy patrons, in this case possibly the powerful Godwin family who held land in the area.
Fig. 19 Winchester Cathedral, the layout of the Old Minster as recovered by excavation lies next to the later cathedral. Right, isometric diagram and cross section of the Old Minster at Winchester c.993–4, as reconstructed by the Winchester research unit based on excavations. The massive western towers – the westwork – probably contained the royal chapel or pew from which a view of the high altar was possible.
A single example of a Mercian minster church, begun in around 804 and re-ordered in around 970, survives at St Mary’s, Deerhurst, Gloucestershire (fig. 17). This precious survival, before it was converted to a parish church, was a complex, multi-focused monastic church on a series of levels. At the west end was a four-storied porch containing three upper rooms, the room on the first floor housing a chapel with a deep gallery overlooking the nave. The taller and more impressive room above had two elegant windows giving clear views of the church interior; there was another balcony here, but this one was on the exterior of the west porch, allowing, perhaps, the display of relics to people outside the church. The porticuses to the north and south of the choir were two-storied, their first-floor rooms containing doors leading to an eastern gallery over the choir; the chancel was a polygonal apse also with a room above, with a balcony looking into the church.
St Mary’s not only provides the best place to understand the complexity and ingenuity of Anglo-Saxon liturgical space, it also allows us to come closer to an appreciation of the way church interiors originally appeared. The interior of a church like St Mary’s was richly painted, not only with figurative murals, but with carving and mouldings painted and decorated with organic patterns.
Whilst the surviving figure-work at Deerhurst is very faded, at St Andrew’s, Nether Wallop, Hampshire, the lower part of an impressive mural of Christ in majesty survives from about 1000 (fig. 18). This decoration is painted in styles familiar to us from Anglo-Saxon manuscript illumination and decorative art. Whilst painting occasionally survives, very few Anglo-Saxon textiles do, but it is clear that prestigious monasteries and cathedrals, as well as richly endowed minsters and smaller foundations, were hung with textiles, often on the walls. These would have been a backdrop for rich metalwork in gold, silver and wrought iron. Aethelwig, Abbot of Evesham, adorned his church with ‘a great many embellishments – chasubles, copes, precious textiles, a large cross and an altar most beautifully worked in gold and silver’. The overall effect of a great Saxon church interior would have been overwhelming. Anglo-Saxon taste was for richness, intricacy, detail and ornament, all of which added to the complexity and disorienting effect of liturgical space: balconies, side chapels, crypts, winding staircases, all painted and hung with textiles, dimly lit by lamps or windows filled with coloured glass, created a sense of mystery that it is impossible to gain from the whitewashed shells that remain.11
The residential parts of minsters have all vanished, but, from what we know, they were, like royal buildings, centred on great halls. It is likely that the stone hall, 120ft long, excavated in Northampton and dating from around 860, was part of a minster complex. This is where an abbot would have administered his estates, dispensed justice and entertained.12
Bishops and Kings
Early English dioceses were based on Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and, as power and territory ebbed and flowed between them, they were reorganised many times. The Viking incursions provided an opportunity to redraw the diocesan map, and after the 10th century dioceses more or less coincided with the new administrative shires of England (fig. 12). But there was no particular conformity of diocesan organisation; cathedrals were organised in different ways and many, uniquely for England, were also monasteries where the bishop lived his life in a monastic order.
Thanks to painstaking excavation, more is known about Winchester than any other Saxon cathedral. It was arguably the finest building standing in England at the Conquest. By 1066, however, Winchester had already had a cathedral for 418 years; this was the Old Minster, with a cruciform (cross-shaped) plan and a square end. Over the ensuing centuries the cathedral was enlarged and adapted so that by 1000, as well as the nave and high altar, it comprised four towers, three crypts, three apses, at least 24 smaller chapels and a baptistery (fig. 19). Despite strong English characteristics, the Old Minster was, by the time of the Normans, a church with a recognisably Carolingian plan. Most prominent was the westwork – the enormous, tower-like structure erected at the west end of the cathedral in the 970s. Westworks developed in Carolingian churches in the 9th century and went on to form a component of many great churches in France and Germany built from the 10th to the 12th centuries. At Winchester the huge west towers performed a dual purpose, providing a focus for liturgy and an occasional grandstand for the kings of Wessex to view events in the main church below. Winchester, built next to the royal palace of Wessex and functioning as a dynastic church, might have been exceptional. More typical, perhaps, was the westwork of which fragments, surprisingly, survive at Sherborne Abbey in Dorset. The see of Sherborne was founded in 705 but came to prominence in the 9th century, when two of Alfred the Great’s brothers were buried there. Bishop Aelfwold rebuilt and extended the cathedral between 1045 and 1058 in a form heavily influenced by developments in the Carolingian empire (fig. 20). The upper chamber in the west tower contained an apse in which the bishop’s throne was positioned, opposite him; at the east end was a three-light window looking down into the main body of the church and before this stood the altar. This arrangement allowed Mass to be celebrated in public view in the upper chamber and distinguished members of the congregation to watch from chambers on either side.13
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| Fig. 20 Sherborne Cathedral (now Abbey), Dorset. This reconstruction of the cathedral as it was rebuilt under Bishop Aelfwold between 1045 and 1058 shows the massive westwork with its own stubby transepts in which the bishop’s throne was situated. The whole church is over 200ft long with an apsidal east end. |
| What we learn from Winchester and Sherborne, and from lesser investigations at Wells, Exeter and Rochester, is that Anglo-Saxon cathedrals at the turn of the 10th century were large, complex and sophisticated structures of European stature, but with an external form and internal organisation unique to England. |
| Bishops were men of considerable wealth, power and standing, and must have occupied magnificent palaces; of these nothing remains, but we do know about high-status royal residential buildings. Alfred the Great’s biographer, Asser, writes of him having ‘royal halls and chambers marvellously constructed of stone and wood’. Of these, and of other late Saxon royal palaces, the remains of only one have been found. This is at Cheddar in Somerset, where Alfred the Great built a palace next to a large and prosperous minster (fig. 22). The buildings were his personal property and, later, became a favoured royal palace that continued to be used at least up till the time of Henry II.14 |
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| Fig. 21 Timbers from the Thames revetment at Vintner’s Place excavated in 1989–91 came from the arcade of a 10th-century hall. Attempts to reconstruct its appearance by its excavators show: a) a cross section of the hall; b) a hypothetical elevation of the arcade (the lowest tier are the timbers that were found) and c) a perspective view of how the roof may have looked. |
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| Fig. 22 The royal manor of Cheddar in the 9th and 10th centuries showing: a) King Alfred’s hall; b) King Alfred’s bower; c) unidentified buildings of King Alfred’s time; d) 10th-century hall; e) 10th-century chapel; f) 10th-century bower. |
| The buildings were undefended and, like all high-status secular buildings, of timber. The principal structure was a bow-sided hall 76ft long and 18ft wide, with the main room on the first floor; it was entered by doors on its north-east corner and in the middle of its long sides. There were porches immediately inside the doors and at least one staircase leading to the main hall, which was heated by a central hearth towards its south end. Nearby was a separate private building, known at the time as a bower. This was presumably a separate chamber for the king’s personal use. |
| Alfred’s sons further developed the site, replacing the original great hall and building a new one, rectangular, with a more regular timber frame and planked walls. On the site of the first hall a stone chapel was built, which was subsequently rebuilt.15 These were without doubt high-status buildings, so it is particularly unfortunate that their upper parts cannot be recovered; presumably the timberwork would have been of the highest quality, painted and carved. Remarkably, however, the upper parts of a high-status timber arcade, contemporary with the later Saxon buildings at Cheddar, was excavated in London, where it had been reused in a river revetment. These timber components (fig. 21) make up an arcade with ogival arches – not necessary for structural stability but highly decorative. This single find confirms that the upper parts of high-status Saxon buildings were inventively and richly modelled and carved.16 |
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| Fig. 23 King Alfred’s burghs as listed in Burghal Hidage, a document dating from around 911–14 that calculated the number of men required to defend the town based on its size. |
| Towns |
| In the two centuries after 700 towns once more emerged as an economic, social and political force. The first to be re-established were a number of coastal emporia that perhaps began as seasonally occupied trading and craft centres (fig. 12). Hamwic (Southampton), Eoforwic (York), Gippeswic (Ipswich) and Lundenwic (London) were not like Roman towns, walled and adorned with civic structures, but they were functional places with a regular layout and a defined economic purpose. |
| Hamwic was founded, probably by King Ine of Wessex, in about 690. It became the economic engine of his kingdom and covered 111 acres, with a population of about 4,500. Surrounded by a deep ditch, the town was laid out on a regular grid of metalled roads. Buildings lay at right angles to the streets 12ft to 15ft wide and up to 40ft deep, most containing metal, bone and glass workshops. Behind the houses, in yards, were wells and timber-lined pits. The Mercian kings, particularly Aethelbald, similarly developed Saxon London – Lundenwic – after they regained control of it in 733. Sixty Saxon buildings were excavated in Covent Garden, the site of Lundenwic, in the 1990s. They were of timber, with wattle and daub walls, beaten-earth floors and thatch roofs; very few nails were found, showing that these structures were still pegged and jointed. Inside, many had partitions and most had in-built timber benches along their long walls. Most houses had one or more rectangular hearths, some with wattle and daub enclosures.17 |
| The Viking raids, which started in the 840s, brought to an end the age of the undefended coastal wics but led directly to a second type of urban settlement, the burghs – ‘burgh’ meaning ‘defended place’. King Alfred’s defeat and subsequent peace with the Vikings led to the division of England between the West Saxon kingdom and the Danelaw. In the 880s Alfred populated his kingdom with a network of strategically located fortified places containing craftsmen, tradesmen, markets, minster churches and sometimes royal palaces. A minority of these were re-used Roman sites such as Winchester, Bath and Exeter; a few were recycled Iron Age forts such as Hastings or Chisbury; most were fortified settlements set up around existing successful minsters or small trade centres such as Shaftesbury or Oxford (fig. 23). Alfred’s burghs were laid out by highly capable surveyors and engineers expert in road building and the construction of earthwork defences. Some burghs, such as Winchester, had a grid layout, but many developed in a more organic way with winding lanes and alleys. The key feature of these places is that property boundaries were more rigidly defined than in the wics. This was necessary as these towns were owned by landlords in just the same way as the countryside, but with one important difference. In towns it would have been difficult and unnecessary for craftsmen and traders to provide labour services on the landlord’s estate, so there was a special form of land holding known as burgage tenure, which allowed men to pay cash rents to their landlord instead. A ‘burgage plot’ is thus the term for the land owned by a townsman (burgher) for rent and, initially, the term ‘borough’ described a town in which burgage tenure took place. Saxon towns, such as Oxford and Winchester, would be divided into miniature estates, with an aristocratic house belonging to a rural landowner, burgage plots for his tenants and often a church. |
| Later Saxon boroughs had many distinctive buildings, whose construction techniques and building types suggest a melting pot of architectural influences. A slightly better class of dwelling developed on the street frontages, with suspended timber floors over a basement or cellar indicating, perhaps, a shop with storage below. On the land behind these were commercial buildings designed for storage or warehousing. These were windowless and sunk some feet into the ground. Higher still up the social scale were the houses of some landlords with substantial timber halls and, in some towns, the halls of craft guilds.18 |
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| Fig. 24 Anglo-Saxon Oxford showing the principal roads, churches and the area owned by Ealdorman Aethelmaer around the church of St Æbbe. |
| As well as existing minsters or cathedrals, in most towns new churches were founded by lay landlords for themselves and their burghers. Before 1100 it was relatively easy to found what we would now call a parish church, as church law put few restrictions on the rights and incomes that went with it. As a result three-quarters of all medieval urban parishes were in existence before 1100. So a town such as Stamford, Lincolnshire, which was urban before 925, had fourteen churches, whilst nearby Boston, which only came to prominence in around 1100, had only one. Churches were normally located at the junction of important streets, placing them at the heart of neighbourhood life; they were also frequently associated with marketplaces and, indeed, early churchyards were often used as markets, which were even held on Sundays.19 Saxon Oxford illustrates these points nicely (fig. 24). In 727 the minster of St Frideswide was founded in what is now Oxford. A settlement and a market grew up around this foundation, and the Mercian kings seem to have built a fort. Alfred chose this place to be one of his burghs, surrounding the existing minster and settlement with earth ramparts. Initially these were supported by great timber posts and planks, but after 1000 they were faced with stone. At the north gate was an impressive five-storey stone tower, part lookout, part guard house, part church tower. In the 10th century Oxford was therefore a stone-walled citadel like its Roman predecessors. Inside the ring of defences a grid of metalled streets was laid out round a cross of main roads. The land was probably granted out to noblemen and part was reserved for a royal palace. One aristocratic owner was Ealdorman Aethelmaer, who had an estate in the south-west corner of the burgh. He had a residence, thirteen burgage plots and built a church – St Aebbe’s.20 |
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| Fig. 25 Anglo-Saxon Barton-upon-Humber, showing the landlord’s fortified enclosure with the market place and church at its foot and the grid of streets and burgage plots to the left. |
| Oxford had several such landlords, with their halls and churches, whilst a small town in the Danelaw, such as Barton-upon-Humber, had only one. At the heart of Barton was the Saxon lord’s residence, set in an enclosure fortified by an earth bank and presumably topped with timber ramparts. Located on the Humber estuary, he certainly needed a fortified house – this enclosure might have been the focus of a settlement that was fortified by the Vikings. In any event, next to the manor house the 10th-century occupant of the enclosure constructed St Peter’s church. Subsequently, a street, Southgate, separated the church from the town market place; west of this were three blocks of burgage plots probably 35ft to 40ft wide on the street front and 150ft to 170ft deep (fig. 25). Up to a thousand people would have lived in Barton, engaged in agriculture (the town had three large common fields) and craft work. The market would have been at the heart of its economy.21 |
| By 1066 there were about 100 towns in England, of which perhaps 17 had a population of more than 1,000. They were not evenly spread across the country, nor were they confined to the West Saxon kingdom, for the Danelaw also developed successful towns such as Norwich, Lincoln and York. These places represented a significant shift in economic activity. In a period of perhaps only a century many craft workers moved production from the countryside to towns; so weavers and potters, who had previously been based close to raw materials in the countryside, were working in tightly packed timber houses crowded into streets and alleys in order to be near their markets.22 Yet the character of late Saxon towns, even one as important as Oxford, was distinct. Their social make-up and their links with the countryside made them aristocratic rather than mercantile in nature, very different from what they were to become in the following century. |
| The Countryside |
| The economic changes that accompanied the Romans’ departure resulted in much less grain being grown. There were no legions to provision, no towns to feed and no villas to support. Agriculture slipped back to what it had been in the Iron Age, an activity based around livestock, with grain and other crops being grown largely for local consumption. The years either side of 700, however, saw a fundamental reorganisation and intensification of agriculture. A great number of settlements, such as West Stow (p. 31), were located on light, easily cultivated soil on river gravels. Around 700 of these settlements relocated to areas of heavier soil to intensify production and meet the demands of secular landlords, ecclesiastical communities in the monasteries and minsters, and the emerging towns. Settlements that had been occupied in the 5th and 6th centuries were almost all abandoned by this time; new settlements became more permanent and organised, with careful layouts and fenced areas for livestock and, importantly, large halls – the houses of the landlords. |
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| Fig. 26 Wharram Percy, Yorkshire. Layout of the 10th–11th-century settlement showing the main street with peasants’ plots running back to the four big common fields behind. The two manors, church, mill and village green are all shown. |
| Before the 10th century almost everyone lived in scattered settlements of no more than a score of people. But between the 10th and 12th centuries in the central arable areas of England peasant farmers abandoned their farmsteads and hamlets and moved to create villages. These normally had a church, a main street, and between 12 and 60 houses. Outside this central village belt, in the east, the south-east, the north-west and the far south-west, people lived in various types of hamlets or single farmsteads. |
| The now-deserted village at Wharram Percy, Yorkshire, was laid out in the 10th century by its landlords (fig. 26). The peasants lived in houses set on either side of a main street, at one end of which was a timber church and at the other was the village green with a common animal pound. Two manor houses sat hugger-mugger with the houses of their tenants. Each peasant family had a rectangular embanked enclosure or toft. The tofts normally contained a single peasant house. These houses were divided into two: the larger half with a hearth for the family and, on the other side of a cross passage, a byre for their livestock. The buildings were not materially different from earlier Saxon peasant structures.23 |
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| Fig. 27 Goltho, Lincolnshire, known to the Saxons as Bullington, where a substantial fortified lordly residence has been excavated with a hall, kitchen and bower (private retreat) as well as weaving sheds where wool from the lord’s estates would be turned into cloth. Below, reconstructed section and elevation of the hall at Goltho built c.1000–1080. |
| There is no single national factor that led to the formation of villages such as Wharram Percy in this period. For many villages the causes were different, even unique, yet there were strong, common centripetal forces. As the density of rural settlement increased and the intensity of farming became greater, the countryside became crowded and complicated to work in landholdings that were shared by a number of family members. At the same time landlords created a kernel around which to group by building themselves large houses and founding churches. At root these changes express a changed attitude to property and land ownership that saw a delineation on the ground – by banks, fences and hedges – to demonstrate who owned what.24 The village belonged to landlords, and they would divide their land in two: the land worked by peasants, in exchange for cash rents and for labour, and the land farmed by the landlord himself – the demesne. At the centre of this stood the landlord’s manor, which originally meant simply a house but later came to mean all the rights and property owned by the lord. Agricultural production in central England was eventually regulated by rules that seem to have developed concurrently with villages. Every household had its own landholding equally dispersed across the village in one or other of the large ‘common’ fields made up of strips of land (furlongs). Each year one of the two or three common fields would be left fallow and on this would be grazed sheep. The following year the fallow field, enriched by manure from livestock, would be turned over for sowing and one of the others used for grazing the sheep. The principle behind this was twofold: first, when the land was being cropped, it was in sole ownership, but when it lay fallow it was in common use. Second, to achieve common grazing the sheep had to be held communally in a single flock, although they were individually owned. Thus the system relied on close communal cooperation and mutual trust in order to obtain maximum economic benefit. The trust extended to landlords, too, as the demesne lands also benefited from communal flocks.25 |
| This system was very successful and contributed to a doubling of England’s population to 2.3 million between the time of Alfred and the Domesday survey of 1086. Agriculture yielded a surplus to feed the 10 per cent who now lived in towns, and peasants could pay cash rents to their lords. But, crucially, from the 8th century the common fields system was based on the folding of sheep. The development of breeds with fleeces better than those of the French or the Flemish created England’s staple export – wool. Wool was to make England the richest country in Europe, with a strong and stable silver currency.26 Much of this wealth flowed into the hands of the landlords, who invested it in building houses and churches for themselves. At Goltho, Lincolnshire, a Saxon lord’s residence has been excavated between the church and the village. Goltho was occupied from about 900 until the middle of the 12th century. The excavators found, beneath a Norman castle, a whole series of Saxon buildings belonging to the landlords of Goltho, who knew the place as ‘Bullington’. In the late Saxon period there was a great communal hall with a separate residential lodging house next door, a kitchen and several domestic buildings. The whole was surrounded by a deep ditch and a rampart topped with a timber palisade (fig. 27). The use of earthworks and timber palisading was increasingly adopted after 1000. The prehistoric mound at Silbury constructed in the third millennium BC was used in the 1010s and 20s as a fortified residence. Indeed it is possible that many so-called mottes, traditionally dated to the years following 1066, might in fact have been used as fortified residences by Saxon lords.27 |
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| Fig. 28 Portchester, Hampshire. The Roman coastal fort here had probably never been completely abandoned and some parts within the Roman walls had been ploughed and used for crops. During the 10th century a substantial house was built, partly of stone, the residence of a thegn – a man of knightly rank. |
| A few residences were built of stone, as at Portchester Castle, Hampshire. Here, perhaps from the 980s, a lordly residence was constructed within the Roman walls, which stand to this day. A large timber-aisled hall and three smaller timber buildings, a well and a latrine building were arranged around a courtyard with a freestanding stone tower in the corner (fig. 28). Here, as at Goltho, the hall would have been for communal feasting and entertainment, and the smaller halls for the lord and his lady’s more intimate use. In the construction of their great halls these fortified residences both used the same structural techniques that had been common since Roman times.28 But, looking forward, these residences were part of a very important shift from the Saxon concept of communally defended places, such as King Alfred’s burghs, to private fortified dwellings. |
| The great residences did not stand alone. They lay at the centre of agricultural estates and were accompanied by farm buildings, the most important of which was the watermill. This was a significant source of revenue, as tenants were obliged to use their lord’s mill and pay a charge for the privilege. By 1086 there were 6,082 mills in England, many of which dated back to the 7th century. The technology was Roman, and it is likely that after 410 watermilling did not die out. The principle was simple: fast-flowing water powered a waterwheel that turned a mill stone on top of another stone. Corn was poured into a hole in the top stone and came out at the sides as meal. The waterwheel could either lie horizontally in the stream or, much more efficiently, be sited vertically. A large and ambitious mill, probably connected to a late 7th-century royal manor house, was excavated at Old Windsor in the 1950s. It had three enormous waterwheels set in a ditch (or leet) 20ft wide and 12ft deep. The leet was cut from a bend in the Thames three-quarters of a mile away. Many much smaller places, such as Wharram Percy (fig. 26), would have had less ambitious mills erected by landlords and used by the whole community.29 |
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