The Building of England: How the History of England Has Shaped Our Buildings. Simon Thurley
Читать онлайн книгу.Lincoln of around 1190. The plans show that, unusually, the fireplace was placed over the ground floor passageway, a way of emphasising on the street front that the house had such a luxurious facility.
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Fig. 86 St Mary’s Hospital Chichester of 1290–1300 looks like a church: its ‘nave’ was a ward for the patients who would lie on beds at right angles to the outer walls; they had a clear view of the ‘chancel’, a chapel at the east end separated from the ward by a fine screen. |
As well as shops, many other trades were practised, particularly those concerned with food and drink, especially butchery and baking. Many of the larger towns such as Lincoln, York and Oxford specialised in the manufacture of woollen cloth and served an international clientele. Merchants were cosmopolitan; the best houses would have been comfortable, luxurious even, with goods from all over the world. The contents of a rubbish pit at one of the stone houses in Southampton not only contained pottery from France and Spain, but fig and grape seeds, and the skeleton of a pet monkey. |
The picture painted above is of towns as engines of trade and prosperity, with robust, well-made houses, shops and churches. They were also chaotic. Everyone in a medieval town wanted to live in the centre, and rich and poor lived hugger-mugger in crowded, narrow streets, cohabiting with horses and scavenging pigs. Crafts and trades were practised in the centre of town, sometimes in the back of shops or in separate buildings in back yards. Many were noxious: tanning, brewing and smithing were all unpleasant to live close to. On the positive side, piped water supplies began to be developed, the removal of rubbish to out-of-town pits was encouraged, and early forms of building control enforced rules about the location and construction of privies. After 1200 towns started to acquire communal institutions such as hospitals, schools and colleges. Of all the institutions that were later to populate English towns, hospitals were, at first, most numerous. A single Latinised word ‘xenodochium’ embraced institutions that today we would separate out into hospital, almshouse and guest house, but in the early Middle Ages a single foundation was often a mixture of all three. Just as Norman kings and churchmen built castles and cathedrals, so they founded hospitals, most intensely between 1100 and 1220. Archbishop Lanfranc, for instance, founded three hospitals at Canterbury for ten paupers, 60 lepers and many elderly priests. St Mary’s Hospital, Chichester, Sussex, although built between 1290 and 1300, is typical of these early foundations (fig. 86). The essential principle was that every inmate should have a clear view of Mass being celebrated in the hospital chapel. So the whole building was like a church, with the nave being a ward containing low wooden beds with straw mattresses, and the chancel being a complete chapel, separated from the rest by a screen. In such a hospital the sick would be cared for but passing travellers, especially pilgrims, would also be given beds.30 |
The Economics of Building |
The sheer volume of building described in this chapter perhaps exceeded even the achievements of the first generation after the Conquest. Much was bankrolled by good economic conditions: the economy was swollen with silver and agricultural profits rose rapidly as a result of entrepreneurialism. The most successful cathedrals, such as Salisbury, enjoyed an increase in income of 168 per cent in a century. Towns grew, markets prospered, communications improved, and education produced a class of able and ambitious clerks and administrators. |
But it was a different sort of building boom to the one stimulated by the Conquest. There were now proper quarries, better-skilled masons (and more of them), and few buildings were started anew. New monasteries were rare and, after the 1130s, no new dioceses were created until 1547 – only Salisbury Cathedral stands out as an entirely new structure. Most churches and castles were reconstructions, adaptations and extensions of existing buildings. Architectural leadership lay firmly with the cathedrals, whose golden age it was. These institutions were in cities, meaning that their influence in terms of architecture – as well as learning, ideas and education – was more profound than even the greatest of the rural monasteries. While most cathedrals were progressively rebuilt in new styles, many rural monastic churches remained Anglo-Norman.31
England’s cathedrals are collectively one of the supreme architectural achievements of the whole Middle Ages. This is partly a result of the inventiveness of English masons and designers, but equally of the wealth of English sees. English dioceses were larger than those on the continent and correspondingly richer. The richest, such as Winchester (£3,000 a year), Durham (£2,700), Canterbury (£2,140) or Ely (£2,000), had incomes equivalent to the most prosperous earls. Indeed, by the end of the 13th century 12 out of Europe’s 40 richest dioceses were in England. It was this wealth, carefully exploited by bishops and deans, that funded the extraordinary sumptuousness of cathedrals such as Lincoln and Salisbury. Salisbury, without its spire, cost around £28,000 over 50 years. A single bay at Lincoln (p. 96), because of the profusion of carving, probably cost twice as much as its French equivalent.32
Yet financing the construction of a cathedral was hugely expensive and it was unlikely that the normal revenues of a diocese, however rich, would suffice. At Lincoln, for instance, a fabric fund was created in around 1200, endowed by dividing the cathedral’s income in two. This was supplemented by gifts from all over the diocese responding to the disastrous collapse of 1185. To encourage more giving, continual Masses were said for those who contributed to the work. Landowners might contribute half an acre of land and symbolically place a sod from it on the altar. A tax was also levied on every household in the diocese at the Whitsun procession.33 While all these sources of income