As well as building outwards parishes were also building upwards. Although there had previously been periods of tower building, there was a rash of new towers from the 1270s, many capped with spires either of lead-covered timber or stone. Stone spires were concentrated in the wealthy, stone-rich midlands from south Lincolnshire across Leicestershire, Huntingdon and Northamptonshire, down through Warwickshire to Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
A spire was a luxury. It had no practical or liturgical function; it simply proclaimed the technical skills of its architect and the wealth of its patrons. It is for this reason that spires were often products of competition. Competitive imitation was one of the ways in which new styles and specific, sometimes quirky, features spread. The concentration of elaborate Easter sepulchres in Lincolnshire or the stone chancel screens of the West Country are examples of features popularised locally. But towers and spires were often not simply the product of imitation; they were built to exceed their neighbours in size and beauty. In neighbouring parishes in Huntingdonshire are the churches of All Saints’, Buckworth, and St Peter and St Paul’s, Alconbury (fig. 107). Their handsome, solid spires with windows (lucarnes) are both broach spires; in other words they rise directly from the tower without a parapet. Built around 1300, they were the result of two villages in fierce competition.22
Fig. 105 St Mary and All Saints, Dunsfold, Surrey; remarkably early pews dating from 1270–90. Simple, robust, and just more comfortable than standing.
Fig. 106 St Mary’s Aldworth, Berkshire; one of the tombs to a member of the de la Beche family. The effigy lies under a canopy, defaced during the commonwealth, but still discernible as an extravagantly carved and cusped recess.
The experience of worship in a cathedral was very different from that in a parish church. Although liturgical practices varied between cathedrals, a good idea of what they were like can be gained by considering Salisbury. Salisbury was the only cathedral during the Middle Ages to be built from scratch. This was down to Richard Poore, first as dean and then as bishop. Poore was also responsible for codifying its liturgical practices, introducing an orderly and regular framework for the feasts of the Christian year that set out how each ought to be celebrated. These liturgical instructions, which became known as the Use of Sarum, were applied to all churches in his diocese and by the 15th century were almost universally used as a sort of standard form of church worship.
Fig. 107 St Peter and St Paul’s, Alconbury, Cambridgeshire. The church has a fine broach spire of c.1300 built, competitively, at the same time as neighbouring All Saints Buckworth.
Although it is not quite comparing like with like, it is useful to compare the plan of St Albans (pp 73–4 and fig. 42) with Salisbury (fig. 108) to show how things had changed since the 1080s.23 The most important principle was that the clergy had their own enclosed area. This was located in the cathedral’s east arm, which was itself of cruciform shape and thus a church within a church. The area was enclosed by screens and was six bays long, three for the choir and three for the presbytery (or chancel). The whole east arm was divided from the rest by a massive stone screen, the pulpitum, which had a central processional entrance.
Each bay of the main and eastern transepts held its own altars, and these, together with those at the east end, ensured that there were 17 altars available for the 50 cathedral canons to say Mass. The clergy had their own entrance to the cathedral through the north end of the eastern transept, while the laity entered through an elaborate north porch in the nave. The Use of Sarum specified that on major feast days the clergy and choir would process out of their part of the church, round the cloisters and, on the most important feasts, to the front of the cathedral and back in through the west doors. The west doors in cathedrals were generally reserved for ceremonial use only.24
At the east end of the cathedral was a large chapel dedicated to the Trinity. In practice this was used for the daily Mass dedicated to the Virgin Mary. As noted above, a daily Lady Mass was an innovation of the 12th century, the Feast of the Conception of the Virgin having been introduced in the 1120s. The cult of the Virgin had a major architectural impact, with Lady chapels being added to greater churches and cathedrals all over England. In cathedrals in which the east end was rebuilt, such as at Lincoln, the Lady chapel tended to be the easternmost part of the church, but other places were appropriated as Lady chapels, too, most famously at Ely, where the monks built a new chapel on the north side between 1335 and 1353. Here, although brutally mutilated during the Reformation, is a symphony in stone to the Virgin. Scenes from her life inspired by a sacred text encrust the lower walls and previously filled the vast windows.
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| Fig. 108 Salisbury Cathedral, Wiltshire; plan of the cathedral showing liturgical arrangements. Liturgical features: 1) high altar; 2) Shrine of St Osmund; 3) pulpitum with rood above; 4) choir stalls; 5) presbytery. Doors: a) original entrance; b) entrance for laity; c) west entrance reserved for processional use; d) exit to cloisters for processional use; e) exit to Bishop’s palace; f) exit to cemetery g) exit for funerals. |
| These spaces were available to the laity, when not in use by the canons and monks, and strategically placed boxes would elicit donations from the curious and the pious. The cathedral’s shrines would be regularly visited and at some times of the year mobbed. Pilgrims would leave objects at the shrine as either offerings of thanks or as requests; in 1307 papal commissioners listed 2,204 items next to St Thomas’s shrine at Canterbury, including nightgowns, ships made of wax, wood and even of silver. On ordinary days people would congregate in the seat-less naves and genuflect at the Elevation of the Host. But many would come for the spectacle of the processions and for the music, both of which would have been infinitely more impressive than any parish church could achieve.25 |
| New Urban Religious Institutions |
| Growing towns, filled with increasingly well-off and literate populations, began to present a challenge to the Church in the late 12th century. Its structures were organised to minister to populations in rural areas, where congregations were illiterate and priests barely above the intellectual level of their rustic parishioners. The rectors of churches in towns had either been appropriated by monasteries or were too poor to attract educated clergy. The church thus perceived a crisis in which educated townspeople would fall into heresy uninformed by the teachings and guidance of the Church. The solution was a radical new type of monasticism, that of the mendicant friars. The friars broke with the established principles of monasticism by refusing to own property and relying on charity for support, while at the same time abandoning the seclusion of the cloister to work among ordinary citizens. In 1221 the first of these orders, the Dominicans (Black Friars), came to England, followed in 1224 by the Franciscans (Grey Friars).26 |
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By 1250 the two orders had established 70 convents in England, and 100 by 1300. Friaries of both sorts were found in 30 towns and, as other orders such as the Carmelites (White Friars) and Austin Friars joined them, many towns might have as many as four friaries. These were often built on the peripheries, as most of the central plots were already occupied by the mid
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