What does a medieval church mean to me?
What does a medieval church mean to me? I’ve had cause to think more intensively about it this Easter week, after the tragic events in Paris on Monday. I went to Lichfield on Wednesday — partly because it’s always nice to visit a new cathedral, but also because Monday made me feel it was more imperative that I try and see more of them in the near future, in case any more of them were suddenly and violently wounded before all of us again.
My interest is not narrowed to just cathedrals — it is all shapes and sizes of medieval church, and this was best represented by my adventures in East Yorkshire when I lived in Hull. There I visited and adored churches of all shapes and sizes — the tiny little edifice of Kirby Underdale, planted on a hillside, all the way up through Patrington, Hedon, Skirlaugh, Ottringham, up to the soaring, rapturous beauty of Beverley Minster. East Yorkshire was a fantastic place to develop such a hobby, and it has stuck with me since.
Of course, there was an immediate practical benefit for me of taking this up as a hobby — it took me away from my day job, and enabled me to focus on something else for an afternoon, or a whole day. The whole thing could be a day trip — mastering bus timetables, spotting things on the journey, and of course discovering the eccentricities of a tiny village or small town. But the centrepiece was the church itself — no matter how nice the local pub or café, or how unpleasant a ride on the bus, or how changeable the weather, there was always a church worth seeing.
Because every church always became worth seeing. Even somewhere like Skirlaugh — a simple Perpendicular church, no extra chapels or chancels or aisles or anything of the sort — has all sorts of little details and mysteries (in that case, some half-visible remnants of medieval wall paintings), that rewarded exploration. There isn’t necessarily a direct correlation between size and interest — Hull’s Holy Trinity, described by Simon Jenkins as a “Gothic supertanker at anchor” never held my interest quite as powerfully as St Patricks in Patrington, which rewarded 3 visits each time with a fresh burst of fascination.
What makes a church, or cathedral, or abbey, or minster, rewarding to look at then? What makes St Patrick’s worth seeing thrice? Was it a spiritual thing? Was it architectural? Historical? Just simply a desire to get out of the house and look at something different? What, in short, is the meaning to me of these buildings? These are questions that I faced each time I went off, loaded myself onto an EYMS bus, and set off for a tiny village and its church. Indeed, they stay with me now as I wander down to Lichfield, or contemplate wider journeys from Manchester to Durham, Carlisle, and Hereford.
The first thing I would attest to is the beauty of these buildings — and the variety of the English Gothic in presenting different forms of beauty. Prior to the Gothic, you have the Romanesque — heavy round arches, small windows, thick walls. Winchester’s North transept is this, a survivor of the colossal building programme that followed the events of 1066. My favourite flavour of this is the tiny church at Adel — the doorway and chancel arches are riots of decorative carving; all people and beasts and plants, tangled up in each other, a seething riot of artistic energy erupting from the melding together of Norman and Anglo-Saxon culture, the final eruption of the art of the pre-medieval, post-Roman world into stone.
Then you move from that to the Gothic, and the unimaginatively named phases of Early English, Decorated, and Perpendicular. For Early English, you have slender lance-shaped windows — the lancet — the pointed arch, the contrast of black Purbeck marble on cool, golden limestone. For this, I would turn to Beverley Minster — the choir in particular — a stunningly beautiful, remarkably intimate space of countless columns and arches, nested within each other, rising up and carrying the eye with it — a testament to the newly found ability of masons to raise their churches higher than before, with even more light admitted than before. As that form develop, the carving becomes richer, more detailed — and more Decorated. In this, perhaps my personal favourite of the phases, every surface than can yield a detail does. There are tangled foliage capitals, figurative bosses depicting all manner of scenes, niches frosted with detailing — and faces, so many faces, of all shapes and sizes, from every arch and corbel and spandrel. Again, I would turn back to St Patrick’s in Patrington, carved in beautifully crisp, almost white stone and as dense with decoration as is possible in the space available — but also to Lincoln’s soaring Angel Choir, with its orchestra of angels serenading the shrine of St Hugh below. Then comes the trauma of the 14th century — famine, plague, war — and the Gothic moves into a new form of even greater windows, with thin, straight lines — far less carved decoration of capitals or arches, but even then some beautiful intricate delicacy in the particular form of the fan vault. York Minster’s colossal nave is a song to this form — open, vast, some of its windows still bearing the original medieval glass, the crisp limestone making it feel almost modern in its luminosity.
These phases make a building dateable, roughly, but more importantly they present different forms of beauty. You want dark and serious, brooding and powerful? The solid Norman church will turn your head. Do you prefer a busy rush of decoration, of intricate and tangled stonework? Find yourself a Decorated church. Or do you like a more contemporary touch — vast acres of glass, structure narrowed down as much as possible, the space flooded with light? The Perpendicular is for you. Across all these churches, then, you can explore the evolution and different forms of an artistic and architectural style that developed over a period of some 500 years — from Conquest to Reformation — and whose progeny can be found in town halls, porcelain factories, and office buildings across all our major cities.
But that story can also be told in other ways, through these buildings. This is about more than an aesthetic argument — there’s always going to be disagreement about which buildings are beautiful, it will always be both personal and contextual — this is also, for me, about the people who lived around and with these buildings.
Because these buildings functioned as the markers for the great events of life — birth, marriage, and death — they carry within them a vast slice of human experience. People were willing to endow these buildings with chapels and tombs not just because they wished for resurrection at the end of all things, but also because they surely had a meaningful connection these buildings in particular. More than weekly services or those great waypoints of their lives — they may have watched these buildings grow, or change, or recover. They may have had cause to appear before its courts, or used the nave as a place to do business, or just lived every day in its shadow. Their heads would have turned upwards as it rose, or fell, they would have borne with them a familiarity with these buildings as living, breathing engines at the heart of several overlapping communities.
Of course, we can paint this as a golden hymn to the majesty of all humankind, of the audacious nature of these buildings. It is worth dwelling on the vastness of the ambition that causes people to not merely create something out of all proportion to the other structures they know, but to seek to maintain them, to rebuild and make them even more daring. These buildings represent a grinding process of the expansion of human knowledge in fields such as mathematics, art, and engineering. Of course, many of them housed libraries, or supported schools, or gave employment to great men of learning. But in themselves they represented a process which grew the limits of the possible — slowly, yes, and perhaps not entirely deliberately, but grew them all the same. The ingenuity that, for example, allowed Winchester’s masons in the 15th century to take their already ancient Norman nave and entirely rework the stone to the latest Perpendicular style would be remarkable even today. Canterbury’s ever expanding web of Eastern expansions and chapels, resulting in a church that narrows and swells as each expansion seeks to add yet more, represents as daring an experiment in architecture as the Bauhaus.
Yet this didn’t always work. Notre Dame’s fire reminds us of the endless failures that marred the creation of all these buildings — earthquakes, fires, and the perennial collapse of a tower. The grinding expansion of knowledge that enabled these buildings to go up also partly generated the conditions which often brought parts of them low again — because the full gamut of knowledge needed to adequately sustain such a structure — such a colossal mass of stone in the air — was not available to them yet. So towers toppled and took out choirs, whole roofs burned away and collapsed through the vault, columns twisted and gave way. So they tried again — to learn from what went before, to adapt accordingly.
Ely’s colossal Octagon is my favourite example of how these calamities could create incredible possibility for masons and carpenters — the creation of a unique, vast space capped with a complex and incredible structure to cover the space created in a process that still challenges our understanding to this day. But something else I came to love is how these processes also exposed the wonderful imperfectability of people. Come to Lincoln, walk up the beautiful nave to the crossing — and turn and face West again. When the nave was rebuilt, the masons started from the crossing and worked towards the still standing Norman west front. Unfortunately, at some point, measurements taken were not entirely accurate — and the nave meets the west front at an angle, leaving several feet of exposed stonework on one side as evidence. In a bold effort to minimise the impact of this, the masons have worked some arches into the blank space — to try and prettify the space a little more, and take the edge off their glaring mistake, visible to anyone who turned around in the nave.
Every one of these buildings carries details like that — wonky arches, miscalculated arcades, bowing walls, abandoned towers. Today, with lasers and computers, we might imagine ourselves above some clumsiness. But in countless back gardens in Britain, there are greenhouses and sheds and summer houses that bear the marks of ability outmatched by ambition. The imperfect nature of people and their constructions has never gone away — these churches remind us of how much threads through ourselves back to the past.
And there are other details that do this — graffiti is not just a scourge of the paint can. In churches from Paull to Beverley to Lichfield there are game boards and names and ships and even music, scratched into the stonework over the century. People who were bored, or wanted to be remembered, or just sought to record their passage through a space, have been making their mark on structures other than their own through all time.
Because, in the end, the reason I love these buildings so much is how much of us we have put up there, centuries ago, in stone and glass and timber and lead. Not just a spiritual exercise now distant to so many of us, shrouded in ceremonies and language that we no longer comprehend as meaningful to our lives. But an exercise in human imperfection — in ambition competing with ability, in beauty wrestling with boredom, and in competence in tension with carelessness. Punching through the wall of a church to add a chapel that stylistically, and structurally, mismatches almost ruthlessly with the rest of it tells us as much about humankind as the decision of masons to honour the work of centuries past by continuing in large measure an artistic scheme that was no longer fashionable. We honour our ancestors and their meanings sometimes, others we are relentless in our pursuit of the new and the modern. We are the same people doing this, given to different urges and desires from day to day.
Of course, there are other structures that do this — of their age, the medieval church is joined by the guildhall, the castle, the barn, the townhouse and other structures telling parts of a tale. But, for my money, there is no other structure of that time — perhaps, it might be ventured, of any phase in our history — that captures as large a share of that story in a single space.
So there it is, in the end. Not just an aesthetic or engineering or historical quest — I feel as I visit and explore these places, I am trying to learn about the imperfection of the human condition. Like those masons and carpenters, I am slowly grinding forwards the limits of my own understanding, but I know full well that I will never have a full compass of the thing, never fully complete my understanding, and end just like the creators of these magnificent structures have. But these buildings teach us that we should not create things just for ourselves — that we should express ourselves in ways that carry beyond ourselves, through the ages, to show people all that we feel we know and understand about ourselves and our universe. When we visit them, when I visit them, we should remember that long stretch of history far beyond what our eyes will ever see, and marvel at the sort of people — imperfect, small as we are — who build for beyond what they ever saw or will see, and leave their imperfections for us as well. That, surely, is as good a reason as any to visit a medieval church.
