Betjeman’s Best British Churches. Richard Surman
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which are 7th century – were the result of the Italian mission of St Augustine, and were reinforced after the coming of St Theodore in 669. In plan and style they resembled certain early Italian churches. The northern group found in Northumberland and Durham are survivals of the Celtic church, and their architecture is said to have come from Gaul, and is more barbaric looking than that of their southern contemporaries. Their three distinctive features were, according to Sir Arthur Clapham, an unusual length of nave, a small chancel, less wide than the nave, and very high side walls. In the northern group, the most complete is Escombe, Durham (7th and early 8th century?), a stern building, nave and chancel only, with squared rubble walls, small windows high up and square or round headed, and a narrow and tall rounded chancel arch. We have a picture of the interiors of these northern churches from near contemporary accounts. The walls and capitals and arch of the sanctuary were adorned ‘with designs and images and many sculptured figures in relief on the stone and pictures with a pleasing variety of colours and a wonderful charm’. We learn, too, of purple hangings and gold and silver ornaments with precious stones. Elsewhere in England the most considerable remains of pre-Conquest work are those at Monkwearmouth (Durham), Jarrow (Durham), Brixworth (Northants), Deerhurst (Glos), Bradford-on-Avon (Wilts), the tower of Earls Barton (Northants), Barton-on-Humber (Lincs), Sompting (Sussex), the Crypts at Repton (Derby), Wing (Bucks), and Hexham (Northumberland). From the pre-Conquest sculpture, like the crosses at Bewcastle and Ruthwell, and the carvings at Langford (Oxon), Romsey (Hants), Bexhill (Sussex), St Dunstan’s Stepney (London), and the moving relief of the Harrowing of Hell in Bristol Cathedral, and from such enrichment as survives in such objects as St Cuthbert’s stole (Durham), the Alfred Jewel in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, the beautiful drawing in the Winchester Psalter and Lindisfarne Gospels in the British Museum, we know that these Romanesque masons, sculptors and illuminators were very fine artists, as fine as there have ever been in England.
EARLS BARTON: ALL SAINTS – a rare surviving Saxon tower, with characteristic stripwork and crude arched bell openings in the top stage; the parapet above is later
© Michael Ellis
However, it is safer to try to imagine our parish church as it was in Norman times, as far more of our old churches are known to be Norman in origin than pre-Conquest, even though as in the church of Kilpeck (Herefordshire) the pre-Conquest style of decoration may have continued into Norman times. It is narrow and stone built. Let us suppose it divided into three parts. The small, eastward chancel is either square-ended or apsidal. Then comes the tower supported internally on round arches. The nave, west of the low tower, is longer than the chancel. The windows are small and high up. The church is almost like a fortress outside. And it is indeed a fortress of Christianity in a community where pagan memories and practices survive, where barons are like warring kings and monasteries are the centres of faith. These small village churches are like mission churches in a jungle clearing.
ANGLO-SAXON AND NORMAN – Two aisleless plans with central tower. (Top) tower between nave and chancel; (Bottom) tower over crossing of transepts with nave and chancel
There are no porches, and we enter the building by any of the three doors to the nave on the north, south or west. Inside, the walls of the nave are painted with red lines to look like blocks of stone. The raftered roof is hidden by a flat wooden ceiling which is painted with lozenges. The floor of the nave is paved with small blocks of stone or with red tiles. There are no pews. We can only see the chancel through a richly moulded round arch, that very arch which is now the South Door of your parish church. Above this chancel arch is a painted Doom, not quite so terrifying as that of the 15th-century church, for all the painting here is in the manner of the mosaics still seen in basilicas of Italy and eastern Europe.
WALTHAM ABBEY: HOLY CROSS – sturdy Norman arcades sometimes survive in churches that have been much altered in later centuries, though not all are carved with as much grace as these very decorative columns for the abbey church
© Michael Ellis
GOTHIC ADDITIONS TO A NORMAN PLAN – Based on Raunds, Northamptonshire: probably this was a Norman aisleless church consisting of nave and chancel of equal width. A tower and north aisle ot the nave were added in the 13th century. In the 14th century a south aisle was added. The original Norman walls were pierced and turned into arcades.
A TOWN CHURCH ENLARGED IN THE 13TH AND 14TH CENTURIES SO AS TO PROVIDE GUILD CHAPELS – Based on Grantham, Lincolnshire
The splays of the windows in the nave have figures of saints painted on them. But it is through the chancel that we see the greatest riches. Stained glass is rare. If there is any it is in the sanctuary and black with much leading and giving the impression of transparent mosaics. The walls are painted everywhere with figures, also recalling mosaic pictures. There are bands of classic style, patterns dividing them. The altar is of stone, small and box-like, recalling the tombs of Christians in the catacombs of Rome in the very earliest days of Christianity. The altar stands well away from the eastern, semi-circular end of the apse. It is covered with a cloth hanging over its four sides, decorated with vertical bands.
Our Lord is depicted on the cross as a King and Judge, not as a man in anguish as in later crucifixions. The religion of the time was less concerned with Him and Our Lady as human beings, more concerned with the facts of Judgement, Death and Hell. It was more ascetic and severe.
PART TWO: THE NEWER CHURCHES
Of the 16,000 parish churches in England more than half have been built since the 17th century, and the majority of these were erected in the 19th and 20th centuries. Guide books, almost wholly antiquarian in outlook, still dismiss even 18th-century churches as ‘modern’, while Victorian buildings are usually beneath their consideration. Yet some of the noblest churches are post-Reformation, from cathedrals like St Paul’s and Truro and Liverpool, to the great town churches designed by such architects as Hawksmoor, Gibbs, Street, Butterfield, Pearson, Brooks, Nicholson and Comper.
The first post-Reformation churches differed little in plan from those of medieval times. Wren in some of his churches for the City of London seems to have tried to build uncompartmented churches, where Baptism, Morning and Evening Prayer and Holy Communion could all be conducted in an undivided space, without the priest and his assistants moving out of sight and earshot.
Usually the plan was the nave with three-decker pulpit dominating for Matins, Litany and Evensong, a screen through which the congregation passed for Communion, and a Bapistry at the west end. The earliest post-Reformation churches usually had west galleries for organ and choir and also side galleries, because by the 17th century the population had begun to increase, especially in the towns where many new churches were built. The churches of the 17th and 18th centuries were mostly built on the English medieval plan. The only noticeable new feature in the more traditional churches was that the chancels were shallower and broader than those surviving from earlier times.
The style of tracery and decoration and wood-carving certainly changed. Windows were square-headed in the 16th century, and thereafter became round-headed. Grapes and cherubs and a cornucopia of fruit cascaded down the sides of altar-pieces, wreathed round the panelling of pulpits, and flattened themselves into patterns on the ceiling. The Renaissance style of Italy became the fashion. But it was an English version. Wren’s Portland stone steeples and lead spires, so happily clustering round St Paul’s Cathedral, are a recollection of Gothic architecture, though most of them are Renaissance in detail.
The interior of even the most room-like classic church of the 17th and early 18th centuries generally differs from its contemporary Dissenting interior. In the former there is provision for the expounding of the Word, and for the two chief sacraments; in the latter there is provision for the Word, but