Chapter 9
Art and Architecture
We have very little evidence of British art or artists during the Roman period. What we see are mosaics done in the Roman style, a little wall-painting carried out in the same mode and some mediocre silver ware. Presuably these were British craftsmen satisfying the demands of their customers for fashionable goods and disregarding their own artistic heritage. By the time this fashion had waned, the pendulum was ready to swing back towards abstraction employing motifs drawn from both classical, geometric, and animal styles in an inventive and innovating fashion that was one of the greatest contributions of the age to the history of art. As far as the architectural styles are concerned they were were always derivative and we have to wait until the latter part of the period for anything that can be described as innovation.
The realistic art of the Mediterranean world had been re-introduced into England in the late sixth century after the missionaries despatched by Pope Gregory arrived at the court of the king of Kent and, more importantly after the arrival of Bishop Biscop in Northumberland with books that he had brought from Italy. In the scriptoria of the monasteries of Monkwearmouth and Jarrow, both of which he founded, artists learnt their trade by their extraordinarily faithful copying of Italian works like the Codex Amiatinus, a great bible, which they produced round about 700. But they soon branched out and brought to their work the abstraction that had been characteristic of British Celtic art with spectacular coloured representations of the apostles who, in some books, are shown in their symbolic guises of man, lion, bull-calf and eagle as in the Durrow Gospels, c680 and the Echternach Gospels c700. British artists introduced the carpet pages, pages filled with ribbon interlace and twined and twisting animal bodies, reminiscent of Celtic metalwork. This fruitful interaction between the two traditions can be seen in the work of the Canterbury scriptoria with its Vespasian Psalter 730-740 and ‘Golden Gospels’ of 750. Some of these books reached Europe and their influence shows up in the work of Frankish scribes who adopted the British idea of stressing the importance of the initial letter of a page and the more disciplined drawing of the British artists. A magnificent production which was influenced in this way is the famous Psalter of 800 made in the monastery of Corbie.
Charlemagne’s Frankish Empire stimulated an artistic renaissance, blending the artistic traditions of its northern past with those of northern Italy. Two stylistic schools were active – the Court school with a series of rich Gospel Books in bright colours – and the Ada School with figures dressed in classical white garments and the use of gold. Perhaps the Reims scriptoria was the most inventive during the period 815 to 835 with drawings that almost seem to burst off the page with excitement. One of the achievements of the scriptoria was the development of the Carolingian miniscule script, one of the most satisfying of medieval scripts (and the most legible!). The Harley Psalter (see below) is written in this hand.
In Britain in the later tenth century a magnificent style of book illumination was produced by the Winchester scriptorium. Their lavish books were intended for liturgical use like the Benedictional of St Aethelwold and they were matched by the products of the Canterbury scriptorium with animated figures in flying ruffled drapery as in the Harley Psalter of the early eleventh century. This drawing in outline was a new technique. About sixty manuscripts include such illustrations which had the advantage of being produced more quickly than coloured pictures. Other monasteries followed Canterbury’s lead. Peter Hunter Blair says of them ‘Anyone who wishes to understand something of the emotional force that inspired the new monasticism would do well to study these drawings. He will be impressed at once by their strength and vitality and, if he has previously studied the movement only through its written materials, he may well be astonished by their gaiety’
In architectural terms Augustine’s arrival in Canterbury signalled the renaissance of masonry construction for building the first post-Roman churches. Two regions in England were involved. The south-east, almost as a matter of course, and, later, Northumbria, at this time the premier kingdom in England where strenuous attempts were made by the Roman missionaries to outface the Celtic church that was already well dug in there.
It was from their base on the island of Iona in the Inner Hebrides, granted to St Columba by a Scottish king in AD563, that Irish missionaries had converted northern Britain. As a first step they founded the site of Lindisfarne in Northumbria in AD635 that served as the springboard for the establishment of further Northumbrian Celtic religious houses at Jarrow, Hexham and York. Even after the Celtic church was subsumed into the Roman, Lindisfarne continued as an outstanding centre of Christian activity until AD793 when it was extinguished by the first Viking raid on England.
An example of a Celtic foundation has been excavated in south-western Scotland at Whithorn, a monastery that contained Scotland's earliest church building and was the base for the conversion of southern Scotland. The settlement was first established c450 together with a cemetery that was used almost continuously from that time until the late-medieval period. In the fifth and sixth centuries, Mediterranean and Gaulish pottery on the site emphasize the links with southern Europe. During the eighth and ninth centuries the church became a fine timber building. Later, the economic links seem to have been with the English kingdom of Northumbria but these declined by the eleventh century and that part of south-western Scotland returned to being a segment of the Irish Sea trade network.
Unlike the timber church at Whithorn, the early English Roman stone churches were not impressive and were either built by great people on their estates or formed part of monasteries like Jarrow and Monkwearmouth in Northumbria or St Augustine's at Canterbury. Also at Canterbury, on the site of the present cathedral, another early church was recently unearthed with the characteristic features of nave and narthex (entrance hall/porch) to the west and porticus (extension to the nave) to the north.
On the Continent little remains of Merovingian (the name given to the earliest French kingdom and architectural style) architecture apart from the baptistery of St Jean at Poitiers (Poitou-Charentes) that was begun during the fifth century. But perhaps the best sequence of early churches in Europe is the Visigothic one in Spain which began in the mid-seventh century and features fine pre-Romanesque churches like San Juan de Baňos, Cerrato, Palencia and San Pedro de la Nave in the Zamora region, both of the seventh century.
Augustine and his followers, who must have included some masons, began the Merovingian-style Benedictine monastery at Canterbury dedicated to St Peter and St Paul, the church of St Pancras in the same city and perhaps St Andrew in Rochester in c604. After that the church of St Mary appeared in Canterbury in c620, St Mary in Lyminge in 633 and St Mary in Reculver in 669, a much more elaborate minster church built on a basilican plan. This plan was developed in Italy as far back as the fifth century but does not appear in England until Reculver. In plan the basilica consisted of a hall divided by two rows of columns into a central space (the nave) with an aisle on each side. At the eastern end was the apse against the eastern wall of which was placed the seat of the officiating priest or bishop’s throne. On the chord of the apse stood the altar and in front of it was a low screen stretching across the nave. This arrangement can still be seen today in Italy in churches like Sta Maria Delle Grazie at Grado which is rather earlier than Reculver. All that remains of Reculver are the two western towers that have been left as a sea-mark after the demolition of the rest and the stone columns of the triple chancel arches preserved in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral.
By this time churches started to spring up elsewhere in the south-east in places like St Peter-ad-Murum at Bradwell in Essex built around 660 which has since lost its apse and porch. Missionary activity in Northumbria by the Roman ecclesiastics Benedict Biscop and Wilfred resulted in the construction of monastic churches at Monkwearmouth in 675, Hexham and Ripon in the same year and Jarrow and the local church at Escomb in County Durham around 685.
In some places in Britain the construction of local churches was preceded by the erection of a standing cross, either in timber or stone. Presumably it marked the site of the ‘preaching place’ that was almost invariably the graveyard. In fact the graveyard would have been the earliest ‘Christian place’ in most localities. An excavation on the island of Ardwall in Dumfries and Galloway demonstrated what could have been a common sequence in many places where a Christian burial place developed around an important primary burial or tomb-shrine of a local Christian luminary which was later superseded by a minute rectangular timber building which later gave place to a dry-stone chapel.
Some of the standing crosses were works of art, carved with instructional scenes from the Bible and with intricate decoration. The Bewcastle Cross and the Ruthwell Cross are examples of the best workmanship. Located near a northern outlying fort of Hadrian’s Wall, the Bewcastle Cross stands beside a late church building. On two faces are vine-scrolls rising the full height of the shaft to where the cross-piece has broken off. These vine-scrolls shelter birds and small animals that provide the term ‘inhabited vine-scrolls’. On the west side is a Christ in Majesty and above a panel of John the Baptist. No doubt these sculptures were used as ‘visual aids’ by the priest to instruct his flock but they are very fine pieces of work and must have been commissioned by a wealthy local landowner. There is an inscription on the lowest panel Alcfrith…pray for my soil and the carving of a nobleman holding a hawk and another name - Cynebhurh, wife of Alhfrith (Alcfrith?) who was the son of Oswiu, king of Northumbria, who ruled from 641-670. This conflicts with the accepted dating which is the same (eighth century) as the Ruthwell Cross.
At Ruthwell, a small town just south of Dumfries, the famous cross now stands awkwardly in a four-foot deep well in the parish church. It is seventeen feet, four inches tall, and reconstructed. Both east and west faces have inhabited vine scrolls The north face bears a scene of Christ upon the Beasts, John the Evangelist and the Agnus Dei, St Paul and St Anthony and the return of the Holy Family from Egypt. The south face bears a Crucifixion, the Annunciation, healing of the blind, Mary Magdalene and the two sisters of Lazarus. One of the striking aspects of the cross is its blend of text and image suggesting that those who were originally going to view it were semi-literate. Two scripts are employed to describe or annotate the carvings, Latin and the runic. 750 has been suggested for its date.
Bakewell in Derbyshire probably has the largest numbers of cross fragments in England, a collection in the church and two crosses in the churchyard. Fragments like these are frequently found in churches all over the country and prove how common these high crosses were in the eighth and ninth centuries. When the Vikings were converted, they erected crosses of which the best surviving example is at Gosforth in Cumberland dating from c940.
At Colerne church in Wiltshire are two large pieces of a carved cross which are rather better than the usual run of such fragments and demonstrate that quality carving in stone survived in the south as well as in the north and was carried out in a blend of Mediterranean style and native animal-art repertory. Less prestigious crosses were made of timber and one in Stafford was consigned to a burial under the floor of the medieval church of St Bertolin. No doubt timber crosses were relatively common but, of course, they have not survived at all well.
Some time before 680 an aisled basilica after the Italian type was built at Brixworth in Northants. Although, the aisles have since disappeared, the wide nave is still impressive with nave arcades springing from massive, oblong piers. An arcade of three arches divides this nave from the chancel with an apsed sanctuary beyond. At the other end of the nave was a narthex of which only the central portion remains today, being used as the basis of the west tower.
It may be that English builders were not skilled enough to construct nave arcades as at Brixworth as a matter of course for it is a fact that there is no surviving basilican church between the construction of Brixworth and the building of the church at Wing in Buckinghamshire put up during the tenth century. Wing remains as the most complete example of a basilican church of the Saxon period in England. Simple oblong piers support the nave arcades. Below the polygonal apsidal chancel is an octagonal crypt and the church has the largest chancel arch of any Saxon church.
In the middle of the eighth century, the larger basilican churches at Brixworth and Deerhurst and elsewhere were established as 'minsters' where communities of priests could be based to serve the Christians in the surrounding countryside. This was part of a policy of taking Christianity to the ordinary country folk whose relationship to the faith varied from unknowing through ambiguous to the unheeding. The mission of Augustine in its later days had gone to some trouble to absorb paganism into its own ceremonies, setting up altars in pagan shrines and celebrating pagan feasts in Christian guise. Later, Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury, had to proscribe practices like sacrificing to devils, augury and burning grain for the wellbeing of the dead, a ceremony that there is evidence for in graves of the time. But such prohibitions had little effect and in the eighth century the canons of the Synod of Clovesho had to recommended that bishops should make a regular annual tour of their dioceses forbidding pagan practices such as soothsaying, divination and the practices of augury, omens, amulets and spells. Later, in the ninth and tenth centuries laws proscribing pagan practices still had to be passed. But they never entirely died out. We still think of Halloween as a day of ill omen and a rabbit’s foot is a good luck charm.
Several fine post-Roman churches have since disappeared like those at Wareham in Dorset and Cirencester in Gloucestershire but excavations at the latter place show that the building had a ring-crypt at its eastern end which suggests that the inspiration for some of the later large churches came from Carolingian Germany. Still standing and the best preserved of these minsters is Deerhurst in Gloucestershire described above
Because of their small size, few post-Roman chancels have survived. Later, particularly during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, they proved to be too small for parochial worship and were taken down and rebuilt. However, where there was a crypt below the chancel as at Repton in Derbyshire, the chancel has survived unscathed.
From the beginning of the eighth century, stone churches were becoming more common; most simple affairs, two-celled churches – chancel and nave – sometimes with portico but many rebuilt since so they are not easy to recognise except where it is possible to discern the verticality and narrowness of the original nave as at Avebury in Wiltshire where, in addition, there are a couple of early windows.
When church-building revived after the Viking scourge had passed, there was a flush of stone construction during the tenth century by local lords - one definition of a thegn at the time was one who could afford to have a church by his gate. King Alfred led the way with a now-destroyed, centrally-planned, old-fashioned building at Athelney in Somerset, the inspiration for which came from St Germigny-des-Prés built in 808, some eighty years before. But most were much less ambitious although still influenced to some extent by continental tradition.
Not all these local churches are mentioned in the Domesday Book. In Kent, for example, there are references to 186 churches and chapels but a list drawn up earlier gives over 400, which was something like 90% of the actual total. (Morris) This situation was common in other parts of the country. Churches were sometimes built in wood, some later replaced in stone during the period between 1075 and 1125 when masons must have been especially busy, a change usually attributed to Norman piety. St Andrew’s at Greensted-juxta-Ongar in Essex is the sole extant representative of a timber church with a nave still standing, but examples have been excavated at Rivenhall in Essex, later replaced in stone, St Michael’s Thetford, Norwich in the castle bailey, two at Nazingbury in Essex, under the medieval church at Cressing in Essex, at West Bergholt in Essex, and a possible example at Waltham Abbey in Essex. These are all two-celled churches with just a nave and a square chancel but there was a three-celled example at Brandon in Suffolk. It is noteworthy that they all occur in East Anglia where stone for a local church would be too expensive to procure. In Yorkshire, however, where stone could be more readily found, at the site of the medieval village excavation of Wharram Percy, a pre-Conquest two-celled stone church was detected while at Raunds in Northamptonshire a similar archaeological discovery was made.
Apart from the two-celled formula, another characteristic of these local churches is their small size. Settlements were not large and presumably the churches were built to accommodate the local community but it is rather surprising that an average nave was only about ten metres long and about five wide When they were replaced as most were during the Norman period, their successors were a good deal larger which must mean a jump in average community sizes.
Stone was more usually employed for building local churches during the later tenth century but it was still not all that common until the Norman lords started to build their manorial churches. However, some three hundred masonry examples, either in whole or in part survive from before the Conquest, many, perhaps, rebuilds of wooden churches, dating from the tenth and later centuries. Typical of such churches but larger edifices than most are Wing in Buckinghamshire and Breamore in Hampshire.
The introduction of the bell-tower from Italy marked an important advance in Saxon church building and became a fashionable adjunct. This happened during the tenth century. One way to do it was to convert the western porch/narthex into a tower as at Monkwearmouth, St Pancras, Canterbury or Brixworth. At Monkwearmouth the original porch still crouches under the tower. In new-built churches the tower often appeared in the same western position as in the enormously elaborate examples at Earl’s Barton, Northants and Barton-on-Humber or was placed at the crossing in a large cruciform church as at Breamore in Hampshire or Worth in Sussex. In simpler plans it was built between nave and chancel as at the late Saxon church of Newton-by-Castle Acre in Norfolk.
By the later pre-Conquest period, during the tenth and eleventh centuries, stone churches must have been status symbols for landowners who were increasing in prosperity and were ready to advertise their success by the construction of a church in expensive materials on their principal estates. Chickney in Essex and Alton Barnes in Wiltshire are typical examples. We can identify these churches fairly easily by characteristics like pilaster strips that are narrow, flat columns of stone built into the masonry which divide the surface of the wall up into rectangular panels and were used purely as a decorative and not a structural feature. This can be found at Barnack in Northamptonshire where it is augmented by another characteristic, blind arcading, which consists of rows of small arches which have no openings. An example of this decorative treatment in the interior of a church can be seen in the nave of Great Dunham in Norfolk. Exterior corners of churches are often built with quoins set horizontally and vertically in various arrangements: this is referred to as ‘long-and-short work.’ Triangular-headed openings also appear, mainly as windows in towers as at Deerhurst where a pair open through the eastern wall into the present nave or singly in the same position as at Newton-by-Castle Acre but also as doorways as at Great Dunham where one is set into the western end of the nave.
Belfry windows of the tenth and eleventh-century towers are usually doubled although single windows appear at Glentworth in Lincolnshire and at Jarrow. Double windows can be seen at Worth in Sussex with a rounded baluster (central) shaft separating them or with a decorated capital at the head of the shaft as at St Mary-le-Wigford in Lincoln. A square central shaft can be seen at Deerhurst. Both round-heads and triangular heads can appear in these positions.
St Martin’s church at Wareham at Dorset is built on the rampart beside the entrance to the Saxon burh and may in that position have played a defensive role in the town’s protection. Other churches with towers are sometimes claimed to have been built as strong-points but the evidence is not strong and it is probably best to take the suggestions with a pinch of salt.
It is sometimes possible to find remains of the crosses that once stood in churchyards and were often the predecessors of the churches built into the fabric of a church. Apparently the crosses were commonly broken up and re-used when the churches were built and sometimes their bits are visible in the walls. This happened at Avebury in the nave of the present church. When the tower was added it covered up part of the re-used stone but it is still possible to see part of the cross embedded in the western wall of the nave. In some cases bits of the crosses have been rescued and are displayed in the church today as at Bakewell and they allow us to judge the wide range of competence or incompetence of the local stone-carvers and also the persistent survival of the animal ornament of earlier times. Animal ornament is sometimes used to decorate the church interiors as at Deerhurst but there are also specifically Christian motifs like the flying angel at Winterbourne Steepleton near Dorchester on an outside wall but the similar flying figure at Abson in Gloucestershire is presumably not so angelic!
When the tradition of what is usually described as Saxon architecture comes to an end is not easy to determine for it continues to be identified for a time after 1066 in a group of buildings that are sometimes described as Saxo-Norman. The church at Newton-by-Castle Acre is an example but it is probably more sensible to call them Saxon even though they are chronologically challenged. Certainly some Saxon characteristics are absorbed into Norman ‘post-Conquest Romanesque’. In particular one can point to the use of grotesque animal ornament as a prime example and another could be the use of the simple Saxon plan of nave, chancel and tower.
Urban churches proliferated in some areas in Pre-Conquest times. Norwich had twenty-five by the early eleventh century.. Richard Morris has demonstrated that some sixty percent of these urban churches were in towns in the east and south-east of Britain, twenty-two percent were situated in the midlands and central and south-western Britain had eighteen percent, most in the ancient towns of Winchester and Exeter, He also suggests that their founders were overwhelmingly lay people. Ipswich already had seventy-five percent of its later medieval churches before the Conquest and this sort of situation obtained in several other urban centres in eastern England. It is fair to say that some three-quarters of churches in large post-Conquest towns were in existence before the end of the eleventh century. Towns of later foundation of similar size had far fewer.
There is documentary evidence for lay foundations. In some cases it is possible to identify the individuals responsible and they seem to have people of some position and prestige like reeves but in the majority of cases it is only possible to guess that they were men of substance and, as so many of the urban churches are in towns in eastern and south-eastern England where trade was an important activity one might suggest that they were merchants of one sort or another. They certainly treated the churches as personal property that could be bought and sold just like any other goods or passed from father to son as family inheritances. In some cases documents record disputes over ownerships. Evidence for original ownership can be provided by the names they bear, either descriptive of their location on some particular property or by the inclusion of the name of the founder. An example in Norwich is St George Tombland and, in Exeter, All Hallows on the Walls, St Mary Woolnuth, St Nicholas Acon and St Nicholas Aldred.
In some cases the church names refer to the trade or occupation either of the town or the section of the town in which it stands. One can see this in the choice of saints’ names. Nicholas, for example, is associated with fishing or shipping. Another seafaring saint was Clement. Church dedications to him occur in London, at Rochester, Romney and Sandwich in Kent, in Worcester, at York and twice in Norwich. Southern and eastern England, as the most prosperous part of the country, was where there was most spare cash available for such investments for churches were good investments, bringing in a steady income and requiring little upkeep. Perhaps merchants were just as pious in other parts of the country but they lacked the resources. The small size of these urban structures does not suggest that they were used for congregational use but for daily brief visits to light a candle, offer a prayer or make confessions at those times when a priest was in attendance. No doubt a priest would serve several of these little places of retreat, collecting fees from the faithful and rendering a proportion of them to the owner of the church.
In most cases, these small town churches appeared after the later pre-Conquest street plans were set out and they were built in the most active areas of the towns i.e. along the High Streets, on other main streets and in the vicinity of markets. It has been suggested that some were built as adjuncts to the households of important personages who had set up in the towns in much the same way as they had in the country where they had built churches adjacent to their halls on their rural estates. Urban churches did not necessarily face east, their alignment was determined by the shape of the sites on which they stood which could be circumscribed by streets and other buildings so that they were fitted on their site in the most convenient way. Suitable spots were at the junction of a main road and a minor street or at the confluence of two roads or at a cross-roads and they could be at first-floor level, on a city wall or above a gate or market hall or a cellar which was in commercial use. Their churchyards, which few had, were sometimes used as street markets until the prohibition in the Statutes of Winchester in 1285.
Bradford-on-Avon in Wiltshire has a martyrium standing alongside the partly-Norman parish church by the river. It is very small, smaller than the wooden churches described above and stone-built in good-quality coursed masonry, an unusual feature in a pre-Conquest local building unless it was re-used Roman masonry like Escomb in County Durham. King Ǽthelred gave the manor of Bradford in 1001 to the nuns of the Abbey of Shaftesbury that ‘therein might be found a safe refuge (impenetrable confugium) against the insults of the Danes for the relics of the blessed martyr St Edward’, his predecessor on the throne who was murdered at Corfe in 978. As a repository for the bones, the so-called church of St Laurence was put up some time early in the eleventh century. Out of respect for the holy relics the nuns had commissioned a building of the highest quality built out of the best available ashlar. It must have been the work of top-class masons only to be found in England at that time working on great cathedrals. It is not aligned on the usual E/W axis but NE/SW. Externally the original appearance has been spoilt by the loss of the southern porticus or arm of the building, the match for one on the northern side. Arcading runs right round the church together with pilasters that in some cases are reeded. This was an expensive method of decoration but in keeping with the quality of the masonry. The relics would probably have been housed in the eastern arm and pilgrims would enter through the doorway in the disappeared southern porticus, view the relics, and pass out through the northern porticus.
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