For indepth, fascinating tours of two mind-blowing buildings and their history, why not join my dayschools being organised by a group of former students at Exeter Cathedral on 28 April and Wells cathedral on 7 July. Each includes a fascinating half-day tour of the cathedral itself. Contact me — jon_cannonAThotmail.com — if you’d like to know more!

… and don’t forget my other upcoming events… http://joncannon.wordpress.com/talks-and-tours/calendar/.

Roger Bacon (d. 1294), Opus Majus

I’ve even been there — http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n15/jon-cannon/diary – and it was the only country I’ve ever been to (and they included such feared and stereotyped nations as Iran, and indeed China itself) that didn’t prove to be quite different from its reputation when actually visited. But then, one doesn’t actually visit it: every moment is packaged, and moments of genuine human interaction are rare. One experiences a Stalinist/Cold War theme park, rather than a real country.

It’s hard to overstate this: I seriously wonder if any population in human history has been controlled and cut off to such an extent and for so long. The challenge, if it comes, will surely not come from any western (or even South Korean) idea of ‘democracy’ but from the portion of the North Korean ruling class who have visited (or who see from their bedroom windows) China. One can ignore or doublethink many things, but the living proof that one’s only ally in a post-Communist world is growing and one is not will be obvious to all. Whether NK can make this change is another question entirely.

The Medieval Art, Architecture and History of Bristol Cathedral

An Enigma Explored

Edited by Jon Cannon
Edited by Beth Williamson

http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewitem.asp?idproduct=13759

Winterbourne - spire

A desire to understand one extraordinary, indeed flabberghasting, medieval building – - the east end of St Augustine’s abbey, Bristol, now Bristol Cathedral — has been the fuel of not a little obsessive activity chez this author’s brain over the last decade or three. And among St Augustine’s many remarkable features is the way in which its design is infused with the interests of one particular medieval family — the Lords Berkeley — as they stood in the early fourteenth century.

One line of enquiry, then, has spun out from it into an investigation of the lives and interests of the individual members of the Berkeley family who held the lordship at this time. Some of the fruits of this will be published next week — http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewitem.asp?idproduct=13759 – but the investigation has spun on, for the research in itself has brought to life the complex network of friends, relations and rivals these individuals inhabited — and amazingly, several of these people (most of whom were local knights and gentry rather further down the pecking order than the Berkeleys themselves) — have also left physical and documentary tastes of their lives and interests (especially pious) behind.

These traces are battered and fragmentary, but they still suggest the potential to piece together something of a small group of human beings, men and women of fourteenth-century Gloucestershire, and some of the artworks they funded. And that’s the reason for a visit to Winterbourne, a village in choppy pre-Cotswold hills, swollen and cut off from its church by proximity to Bristol, and its very helpful and active parishioners who afford me access to St Michael’s church in spite of it being one of the least convenient days in the entire year so to do.

My quarry? A series of fourteenth-century effigies, one of whom is almost certainly Thomas (de) Bradestone (or Bradston or Breadstone, depending on the source). He’s a key link historically for his closeness to Thomas III Lord Berkeley, by far the most interesting of the men who was lord while St Augustine’s east end was being built. Thomas acquired the lordship after his father died imprisoned at the hands of Edward II; within a year, the benighted king was in turn dead, in Thomas’s own castle.. He seems to have spent much of the next decade succesfully rebuilding his and his family’s reputation, including a remarkable series of commemorative foundations, some to his wife and others to other members of his inner circle, around his estates in the 1330s and 40s.

The buildings I’m interested in all date from this period too: and Thomas Bradeston is relevant to them. His arms are visible in the east window of Gloucester cathedral, funded in the wake of the cult of the murdered king, as well as Thomas III Lord Berkeley’s east window at St Augustine’s.

St Michael’s church is alone in a field, almost on top of the M4, with nothing around but the lowering medival barn and a manor house that seems to have been half converted into a Wimpy home in the 1970s. Its safe to see the occupiers of the manor as dominant figures in the life of the church that is virtually in its back garden.

Its an impressive building because of its spire, which, excitingly (for me at least) reveals up-to-the-minute late Dec/early Perp detailing of the 1330s or 40s or early 50s: much as I’ve come to expect in buildings associated with these people at this time. The spire was a striking addition into what, in spite of the Victorianisation of the east end, the west end and most of the windows (!), appears at that point to have been a handsome structure of around 1170-90, with the very tasteful early gothic detailing of many Bristol-area churches: most obvious now in the chancel arch, cut back for what must have been a low and early chancel screen, as well as the the priest’s door, fragmentary corbel table and redone windows of the chancel itself, and the delightful south door, with shafts of polished stone and a semiricular arch made up of enormous and again very early great loping cusps.

Winterbourne - effigies

And here inside are the tombs, giant figures making a stone dormitory of an entire corner of the north aise. battered remnants of my past lives. Firstly, as is always the case with such objects, we have to drop any idea that they are portraits. These are ideal images of knightliness and ladiness-ness, imagined chivalrous and whole, as they hoped to be (prayers encouraged) at the moment of future and imminent resurrection. Secondly, we have to assume violent, context-demolishing, memory-and-intention eradicating change between their creation and their current state. Their patrons would be shocked to see them forced in this way, bare of colour and battered of detail.

Which doesn’t make them unimpressive. Indeed lying here in a row, fixed on their great stone platform, they seem to be waiting for Something, Anything, even a horseman or four, bursting off the Hard Shoulder and across the fields. Two knights, two ladies – two couples, seperated (judging by their armour) by a couple of decades. The later one looks 1360s; the earlier, and more interesting, 1340s. He is enormous, far more than lifesize, unless this was a race of giants; most effigies are slightly smaller than they would really have been in life. And he lies with a distended, almost painful courtly stiffness which must be cramp-agonising after 600 years in that position. Indeed his legs are stick-then, far too pin-like to be any good for fighting on, and as well as being crossed they skew off at one angle as if caught in the middle of a dance. His (I presume) wife) lies next to him, wearing a long smooth dress that falls smoothly and then clumps in elegant folds at her feet. He is standing on a rumbunctious lion (they usually are), she on two toy dogs (more unusual). Indeed both the toy dogs and the handling of the drapery are very close in idea to the tomb of Margaret Mortimer (d.1327) commissioned by Thomas III for St Augustine’s. But they’re not by the same hand: this slightly giantesque, distended, very stylised detailing is closer to the workshop that produced the extraordinary Ashbury Giants in Berkshire and other works in Oxfordshire (and perhaps more tombs of the Berkeley familia at Leckhampton and Cobberley?). But it is good stuff, in with the latest ideas; yet if current indications are anything to go on — and they are not much — the tomb chests on which both pairs of effigies lay were very plain indeed.

The other pair are similar in scale but less unusual: effigies, like architecture and art, sobered up and straightened out generally between the Black Death and the Peasant’s Revolt. They call it Perpendicular. And I realise I need to get my Bradeston’s straightened out, as it’s this latter pair that are the monuments to the Thomas commemorated in glass in Gloucester and Bristol (indeed he’s even been fingered as the patron as the latter work). But that’s ok: we can just as easily see him as patron of his father’s effigy, albeit in line with his wishes, just as the second tomb is equally likely either to be posthumouss or created some years before his actual death.

Which is why the rest of the church is so interesting. Firstly, there are two more effigies: at the feet of the four giants is a smaller lordly female of around the same period, presumably a wife (or perhaps a daughter) who pre-deceased those shown here: just the same thing happened to Thomas III, leading to some replanning of his own burial arrangements, I have argued. And at the east end of the north aisle is the only tomb with a surviving architectural setting, another very good 1320-1340 effigy in a shining smooth stone, a bizarrely stretched and smoothly detailed figure whose lion has a magnificent, spreading tail. Effigy trainspotters must enjoy the spur on his left leg, sketched out but apparently left uncarved. He lies beneath a big cusped, low (and early) four-centered arch which shoulders outwards at the base out in a jokey fashion typical of the era, as if the effigy that arrived didn’t fit; it retains significant amounts of colour. Recent work has attibuted this to a member of the holders of another local manor, the de la Riviers, another family (now less significant to the Berkeleys’ inner circle) are remembered in stained glass at Bristol. So six monumental effigies, all created within a 20-40 years in each other, and between them meaning this small church had as many or more monumentalised burials as some cathedrals. Remarkable.

There was presumably an altar by the ‘da la Riviere’ tomb; certainly beyond it there is a small chapel. This, sadly, retains little detail – except for two C15 statue brackets bearing Bradeston arms, and a C14 window with simple but reasonably modish fishtail tracery.  It’s a big chapel and apparently at one point all four double images were posiitioned in it. Family chantry? Possibly, but there’s another contender.

The tower, on the north side facing the manor, is by far the building’s most elaborate structure. Ogee-headed statue niches, curvilinear parapets, a tall spire at the base of which are stylish ogee openings without mouldings. And its base, which is thus a kind of dimuntive north ‘transept’, was also a chapel: a piscina, a squint, a rare early Perp/late Dec window (1350s?). This is unusual, and even more so is the decorative scheme which, remarkably, survives, battered and fragmentary though such things are. This space, by the way, must be a rebuild, forentrance is afforded by an arch carried on big, early C13 bell capitals.

Winterbourne - wall paintings

The painting is very striking indeed. The splays of the Dec/Perp transition window are filled with enormous, swashbuckling ogee arches and finials, painted (if current appearance is a guide) very freely and boldly. The arches themselves have a 3D zigzag on them, the kind of thing one expects more in the C12: at Kempley at that date the zigzag is visible both carved and painted. One thinks of the reuse of C12 carved zigzag at the revolutionary Gloucester south transept of 1331/2.

And almost all the iconography is, and almost was, aggressively secular, knightly: colossal heraldic achivements and banners rise behind the splay-ogees; roses fill the collossal corbels for the ringing-chamber, a knight, presumably Thomas himself, sits praying towards what was the east window before the C19 created an aisle to the east. Religious imagery, of course, originally in the window itself and all over the altar; but on the walls, its squeezed only into smallish figures high up: a St Michael has been identified (it says here) and a Three Living and the Three Dead, both knightly-commemorative themes. All in all, the extent to which this sacred space in a church is a dashing and noisy celebration of knightly lineage is really quite remarkable — and there are thus many overtones of St Augustine’s, albeit with less high-artistry.

In Bristol for example the knightly interests have been able to inform the structure itself: an even bolder and far more expensive thing to do. And there’s the Berkeley chapel, also opening off one side of the church, also incorporating-while-demolishing a preceding structure of some kind, and once very richly decorated. One specific parallel: SS Dismas and Gestas were depicted in the splays of one east-facing window at the Berkeley chapel, suggesting interesting and innovative co-ordination between iconographies in glass and paint. Could something similiar have taken place here with the kneeling figure of Thomas?

The Winterbourne effigies are lucky enough to have benefited from detailed recent study by Sally Badham, one of the main experts on medieval effigies in England, and I’m writing this without have read her article — but it seems to me there are two spaces in the church associated with Bradestones, and the tower chapel must rank alongside the chancel chapel in significance. Could one pair of effigies have been in one building, and the other in the other? The date of the chancel chapel is unclear, but the tower chapel lines up firmly in the 1330s-50s, and in 1351-2 Thomas founded a chantry ‘at the altar of St Michael in the church of St Mary, Winterbourne’, reversing the current polarity of dedications at the church. Now altars to St Michael in towers played a significant role in funerary rites in the eleventh century: could something like this have been the case when this church was built, a hundred years earlier, and retained, if privatised on the interests of one family, when the space was being rebuilt in the decades under discussion, topped off by a statement tower which would have been very visible to people making their way from Bristol into Gloucestershire? 1351-2 is an excellent completed-bydate for the tower.

 There cannot be any doubt, given its lavish decoration, that this was an important chapel and a major, perhaps *the* major, focus of the church interior. Could one of our double Thomas’s have dominated this space, leaving barely room for a priest and a deacon or two? More fuel for my patronal-artistic fire.

The Fen is fresh water: a great sump filled by the rivers of Cambridgeshire, Nottinghamshire, Norfolk and Suffolk. That water makes its way slowly to the sea, where it merges with the widemouthed Wash. But that merging is gradual: a flat universe of mudflats, a tidal wetland of salt water and reeds. It’s the salt water, and by implication proximity to the sea, that distinguishes marsh from fen, though the point at which one becomes the other is never clear: this is a landscape of mergings and gradations. But from a distance to the two are suprisingly distinct: here, http://maps.google.co.uk/?ll=52.606384,0.126343&spn=0.610477,1.897888&t=h&z=9&vpsrc=6, the Fenland is black, the Marshland white (though on the ground it is more brown than white), and the Wash sea-coloured. And the simple reason for this clarity is that once, relatively long ago in historical time, but remarkably recent geologically, this part of the country was itself sea, the Wash an even greater, wider mouth.

Suprisingly, it is marshland that is easiest to drain. Fenland’s peaty soil shrinks when dried out, and then everything re-floods. With marshland, one only need build a barrier big enough to hold back  the incoming tides and the land behind it converts to magnificently fertile farming country. The downside of this is that the impact of an exceptional tide or storm can be catastrophic. Not the episodic sinking and resinking of fen, but dramatic and disastrous inpourings of energetic, heavy water; a man made East Anglian tsunami wave. Still, the only technology one needs to create (and re-create) such country is the ability to martial a large workforce ready to do a lot of hard earthmoving. Whoesale Fen drainage, as opposed to the bit by bit approach that has gone on for centuries, really needs pumps.

The presence of an early such barrier, the ‘wall’, very possibly going back to Roman times, is marked by a series of names in the Marshland: the wal-pole; wal-ton. West Wall-ton is one of htem. Such parishes, relatively early, formed part of a reasonably permanent and largely contiguous land bridge running along the coast and linking Lincolnshire with Norfolk, seperating Fen from open sea.  And they were rich: very rich. As early as the late eleventh-century Domesday survey, the Hundred on the Lincolnshire side, very nearby– the Norfolk boundary put’s the ‘west’ in Walton – was the richest in England; the country around it not much poorer. Salt, an essential commodity, was panned on the tidal side of the wall. Salt-preserved fish were traded widely. Agriculture was endlessly productive. Merchants, pilgrims, travellers, made their way across the only (mostly) dry route into East Anglia north of Cambridge. And in the course of the next few centuries, local people built and rebuilt a series of collossal churches.

All this must go some way to explaining the scale of West Walton. It sits like a great yellow-and-grey broken-backed beast among the bungalows of what always feels like a rather benighted settlement. Yet even from a distance, one can sense the watery twists of its history: its whole profile has slumped, as if the landscape beneath it had buckled, drained and sunk; its collossal tower was built some distance away, as if nervous whether it could stand up at all.

Closer-to, all this is even clearer. At a glance, this is a thirteenth-century parish church of the highest imaginable standard — one that has then spent centuries slumping and sinking and being roughly patched by jobbing builders. The result is a curious combination of the magnificent and the primitive, grandiosity and make-do, brazenly cosmpolitan and marshbilly local, all the living result of the underlying mix of fertile wealth and flooded instability which is the essence of this landscape.

In some cases the result is quite bewildering. One can just make out the grandeur of the thirteenth century west front behind the collossal will-she-fall-down buttresses and plain-as-a-pikestaff windows put here in the C15 or C16, ignoring much of the detail of the very structure they strove to preserve. Something very odd has happened to the porch: its gable is a stepped affair in brick, as if patched by a travelling Dutch brick in around 1700; the polished stones that graced the shafting of its door have been replaced with columns of dry, untreated wood; the whole thing is one-and-a-half bays deep, as if it at some point it has been taken down, shortened, then hastily rebuilt.

Yet the grand C13 model church that makes this place so significant survives; indeed for those of us who spent our adolescence working out the differences between EE and Perp, lierne vaults and crockets, it is something of a touchstone, as often cited as a ‘perfect model’ of Early English among parish churches as Salisbury is among cathedrals. Great energetic swags of stiff leaf along an arcade of 1230/40 elegance, with en delit shafting and complex moulding and everything that makes this canonic, linear, classical style so refined. Hierarchies of doorways: big south, smaller north, smaller priest’s, liturical trumeau to the west. A palpable increase in quality of carving (never low) in the chancel, once clasped by aisle-end chapels (long demolished) and extending a full bay further east (also lost), an enhanced seperation of high altar from laity that is a mark of the era. Brackets for a lenten veil; blank arcades in the (original two) eastern bays. Indeed much of the very best is lost: the stumps of a triple lancet *nave* east window, fully two hundred years before any other surviving example I can think of, survive, replete with dogtooth and shafting.

My favourite detail is the clerestory, a series of single lancets built into a blank arcade cleverly designed so the rythmn is A-B-A-B blank/open inside, but A-B-B-A on the exterior: subtle, playful, smart, and more to the point proof of a designer doing much more than just going through the parish-church motions. Here, inside and heavily restored, are rich traces of the former colour scheme: fictive ashlar on the walls; patterned painted ‘hangings’ featuring tile-like patterns (addorsed birds, etc) in the blank arches of the clerestory, big roundels (originally containing scenes? which might still be there beneath repaintings?) between the arcades.  

And then there’s the tower: solid, flat-topped, a magnificent composition of its own, with its four open arches imitating the arcade-gallery-clerestory of a great church. Is its location purely about stability? Given that, it must have been very important to someone that this church had a grand tower. And then there is the question of function: all four corners contain newel stairs, giving large-scale access to a central level that opens onto a platform. Is there something liturgical going on here? Commemorative (towers were associated with funerary rites in C11 Lincolnshire) or associated with Palm Sunday or Rogationtide, perhaps?

Also delicious — and here the confusion of change begins – is the south-east window of the south aisle, one of the most elaborate confections of its era, with the latest bar tracery (no tracery elsewhere in the church,, indeed there is plate tracery in the tower so this really must be the latest innovation), and little fluerons and tiny stiff leaf splays running all the way up the richly moulded arch itself. This, weirdly, is the only C13 window to survive. Given the preservation of so much else, this is odd; given its elaboration, it is extraordinary. Are we really to believe that windows of this exhausting expensiveness lined the entire building? If not, this one must have had some special function. Has it, then, been moved, say from an eastern chapel? Yet a priest’s door is built in with it. Perhaps this whole wall comes from a bay further east, and the chapel here was of special significance? In any case, given the door it can’t be an east window, so there must have been openings of yet greater modish grandeur in the church.

Then the changes start. There are windows of hte 1320s/30s, and a series of enormous flat-topped ones of the C15/C16. The whole north aisle is even more barn-like, and much rebuilt in the C17 or C18: great dry rustic beams of oak; simple post-Reformation openings; signs of instability going back to the late C13 or C14. All this gives the church its patched, tragic beauty — but also joyously, fills it with light, echoing the width and brightness of the East Anglian skies. C17 paintings on top of the roundels: a little series of the Tribes of Israel. And a battered and slightly cut-price C15 hammerbeam roof, cracked badly mauled angels staring down in the dusty light.

It is this battered beauty — and the contrast with the sophistication of the original building –  that gives this church its place-rooted poetry. It is the C13 baseline that gives the church its art historical significance. And there comes a question: who is the patron? The architecture, like much around here (Binham, Crowland) looks to Lincoln rather than (say) Ely; at once grand and carefully modulated, it can be viewed at once attempt at a model parish church for the era. Yet the parish stands out in no other way I can find. Except that the manor was in the hands of Cluniac Castle Acre priory. And in one corner, next to a flat-topped tomb that has lost its brass, survives one of the building’s biggest surprises: a top-notch effigy of a C13 abbot, of the era that saw the very first major wave of such images; the kind of thing, then, that one normally only sees to the head of a religious house (or a senior aristocrat) in a major church. Sadly, the names of the priors of Castle Acre (or, conceivably, another related house such as Lewes) at this date lack toponyms: but the most natural conclusion is that a prior of one of these houses was born in Castle Acre and (like the contemporary Bishop Poore, builder of Salisbury) chose to be buried not in the great community to whose headship he rose, but in the parish of his birth, enriching and moderning its church lavishly as he did so. 

This effigy is something of a suprise in itself, but at least it gives West Walton a root, a context, an explanation. A grand gesture of the later 1230s, followed by centuries of root-deepening decline. Indeed this grand figure himself has a sad and Marshish history: somehow, he became detached from his church, and split in two; he was found in the nineteenth century in a nearby drainage ditch. A great work of sculpture, image of a living man of the 1230s and his works, pickled and broken among centuries of peat, flood and eels. West Walton embodied.

First, there’s the ancient nature of this site. The top of Ludgate Hill has almost certainly been the site of the cathedral of London since the earliest decades of English (as opposed to British) Christianity, when it stood in a liminal zone between the lost kingdoms of Kent and East Anglia. And there was a cathedral for London, site unknown but very possibly here, before the Romans left Britain (as opposed to England) to self-government after a few centuries of nation-building occupation. The country promptly reverted to a pre-historic state.

So this hilltop has seen every insurgency and objection to How Things Are from Boudicca’s rebellion onwards; more than that, well before the Norman Conquest it had emerged as Paulsbury: much more than the emerging city’s sacred enclosure – bringing with it the overarching, besworded protection of the apostle most widely assigned, today, with Christianity’s revinvention as a faith of law and authority — it was the city’s premier public space, the embodiment of its community. 

So until the Guildhall emerged as a centre of lay, civic power at some point in the late medieval era, and long before modern conceptions like Trafalgar Square, Speaker’s Corner or Greenham Common where even dreamt of, this is where everything happened. Here, beneath an enormous freestanding belltower, was held the Folkmoot, an informal but politically powerful institution of rough, citizen’s democracy. Here stood Paul’s Cross, where bishops and others vied to grab an open air pulpit for sometimes controversial, often game-changing preaching: Lollards preached here, Reformationists, the opposition to King John. And here where other, just as populist, but more spiritually focused and equally unique, institutions: the outdoor passage to the north transept, with its great ‘people’s cloister’, where burghers vied to be buried before the Dance of Paul’s, a collossal painted reminder that the end is nigh and all finery would imminently be dust, before making their way towards the Black Rood found miraculously washed up on a Thamesside beach, and the gloriously transgender St Uncumber, patron saint of the abused wife. Other cults celebrated here also fused the irrational, the imaginative and the inspired in equally varying ways, from the anti-Edward II Thomas of Lancaster to the putative tomb of rebel-leader London Boy Thomas Becket.

And now here they are again: bedecking the area between the west front, the north transept and the Chapter House with bunting, temporary art, a cluttered photocopy refuge of message from the inspired, the committed, the angry, the artificially intoxicated and the plain barking. As opposed to Barking.  Cramming their way onto the York stone flags until the twin anti-puppies of the apocalypse, Health and Safety, run in terror before them.

 A week ago, there was a buzz to all this: our curious globally overheated Indian Summer shone off the Portland facade and Grinling Gibbons swags of free bounty, the golden orb of Queen Anne and her supplicant native peoples, the half-empty shanty of freely decorated tents. People spoke in open-sided tents, announced spontaneous and creative actions from the steps, slept out on the hard stone. Nows the place is more sombre, and crawling with people from news agencies in search of voxpops. the sky is overcast, a police helicopter poises with metallic-eyed surveillance above Wren’s dome, like a hovering steel raptor; and at some point in the next few days this temporary, threatening, righteous bloomage will be washed away.

Of course all this was meant to happen in Paternoster Square. I don’t know at what point this aonze of offices left Paulsbury and became a privately owned development in the heart of the city, but the city traders based here acted swiftly when Occupy London first descended. All routes of access are sealed with crowd barriers, gaurded by police, security goons and a small army of female staff hoping to entice punters into the various high-end shops and restaurants therein, who must be losing money hand over fist. They stand there with menus, hoping to beckon passing bankers in to the empty concrete fake-Classical wasteland beyond, where a lone police car stands next to a miniature monument to the Great Fire of London.

So just how nigh is this beginning?

Yet they say nothing digital is ever