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The Building of England: How the History of England Has Shaped Our Buildings
The Building of England: How the History of England Has Shaped Our Buildings
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The Building of England: How the History of England Has Shaped Our Buildings

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

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

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.

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

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
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
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.