Salisbury Cathedral: The Chapter House and the Cloisters

     I hadn't planned to devote a separate post to the cloisters and chapter house at Salisbury, but they are of such quality and the cathedral so large and complex, I don't think it possible to do them justice any other way.

      Strictly speaking, the cloisters and chapter house at Salisbury are superfluous; the cathedral has never been monastic.  It was, and still is, governed by a body - the Chapter - of secular priests.  And it's not as though they connect the cathedral to any other structure apart from the chapter house, so their utility is limited, providing perhaps merely shelter from the British climate for processions.  Salisbury was not however unique among Medieval 'secular' cathedrals in England in possessing cloisters; they exist at Lincoln, Hereford (two), Exeter, Chichester, and Old St Pauls had two, one on either side of the nave.  Of  these the cloister at Salisbury is the largest. 
     Of the Post-reformation cathedrals two were planned, at Bury St Edmunds and Truro, but neither have been completed.  Truro, long ago, threw in the towel.

     The Salisbury cloisters are spacious and serene, a beautiful and almost frivolous gesture.  (Frivolous is almost certainly the wrong word here as it suggests a lack of seriousness, when the design is actually very serious.) They stand to the south of the cathedral nave.  Square in plan, and almost completely inward looking - there are, for instance, no exterior windows.  And it is this exclusion, along with that seriousness of design and intent, that makes for such serenity.  Two porches tether the cloisters to the cathedral; one in the nw corner to the w end of the nave and one in the ne corner to the south transept. Cloister and chapter house were built, of the same Chilmark stone as the cathedral, in the 1270s in the Geometric Decorated style, the English response to the development of the Rayonnant style in Northern France in the first half of the 13th century.  On the exterior is a conscious attempt to tie-in the new work to the cathedral with the adoption the same parapet design; while the interior shares some of the serene austerity of the cathedral interior eg. no foliate capitals.  
     In the late Middle Ages a library was constructed over the length of the e walk, but that fell victim of that ol' bruiser Wyatt who curtailed it to a mere four bays.

     In the w walk poignant relics of WWI in form of the original grave markers for men, connected with the cathedral, lost in that terrible conflict.  Too poignant for words, really.
     There is something almost Zen about the position of two cedars add greatly to the atmosphere of this serene almost transcendental space, but the contemporary sculpture does not.

     The plan of the cloisters and their relationship to the chapter house suggest an ultimately Late Antique origin, but I think that must coincidental.  Salisbury chapter house, is based on that at Westminster Abbey, though, I think, smaller.  Like its prototype, it is a centralised structure, octagonal in plan with a tall central pier of Purbeck marble (a sort of axis mundi) to support the vault, but unlike Westminster all of the eight sides contains a window. The effect is dazzling.  Both buildings represent some of the best examples of the Rayonnant style in Britain, with the windows filling all the available space between the structural elements. Below the windows is a tall dado decorated with arcading.  In all very refined and sophisticated, and a uniquely English/British architectural form.

     The spandrels above the arcading contain a sculptural cycle of events from the first two books of the Old Testament: Genesis and Exodus i.e. from the Creation to the Patriarch Moses receiving the Law on Mt Sinai. For some reason, which we couldn't work out, a disproportional number of the sculptures relate the story of Joseph, Son of Jacob.  I realise that Joseph is the type of Christ, but this emphasis seems to throw things out of balance somehow.
     Sir George Gilbert Scott Snr restored the chapter house in the 19th century, introducing painted decoration, stained glass, and encaustic tiling, and restoring the sculptures.  And he has come in for criticism ever since.  The restoration of the sculptures below the windows has come in for particular criticism. I suppose it matters to some, but it seemed fine to me.  The painted decoration has been erased at some point in the late 19th/early 20th century, probably for the best.

     Between the cathedral and the cloisters is a space known as the Plumbery.  I think wisely the cathedral authorities have used this space for the café and gift shop.  Fine views of the cathedral.

 

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'The Enchanted April' by Elizabeth von Arnim

      Just before we went away to Bath, I finished reading Elizabeth von Arnim's 1922 novel 'The Enchanted April'.  This really is a delightful book, full of poise and elegance.  Lotty Watkins, a sort of Holy Fool, despairing of grey and wet London and her equally grey and wet marriage, is suddenly enraptured by a 'small ad' in 'The Times' - castle to rent on the Italian coast.  (In those days such advertisements, and announcements - births, marriages & deaths, etc, were on the front page of the paper.)  She dreams of a month away by the Mediterranean, but money being scarce, she enlists an acquaintance, Rose Arbuthnot in sharing the cost of the rent, but even combined their meagre resources are not enough.  They take the expedient of sub-renting to two other women: the haughty Mrs. Fisher, and the unhappy socialite Lady Caroline Dester.  A comedy of manners ensues as the genius loci begins to weave its enchantments. A sly, clever novel, well worth reading.

     Currently reading a novel of a rather different strip, 'The Garrick Year', by Margaret Drabble.  Sharp, witty, acerbic if not downright bitter.

Salisbury Cathedral: Exterior and Close

      On Monday, we left Bath for the day, taking the train south to Salisbury.  It was our first visit to the city and to the cathedral. We were in no way disappointed.  It was in fact a revelation; critics, I think, tend to credit Salisbury Cathedral with an icy perfection. Yet entering those vast and lucid cloisters for that first time was very much an emotional experience.

     History at Salisbury, for once, is straight forward.  Makes a change.  In the early 13th century Bishop Richard Poore relocated both city and cathedral from the ancient hillfort of Old Sarum down to the floodplain of the river Avon some two miles south, where the tributaries Nadder and Bourne join the river.  The foundation stone was laid on 1220 and the work continued until the 1250s - the cathedral was consecrated in 1258.  It is in Early English Gothic; the influences appear to be the cathedrals of Lincoln and Wells.  In 1270s major building work resumed with the construction of the Chapter House and cloisters to the s of the cathedral church.  In 1334 work commenced on the tower and spire, a massive undertaking - the stone spire is the tallest in England at 404ft.  It is a supremely elegant design; the tower appears, to me at least, to belong to the same family as the towers of Worcester Cathedral and Pershore Abbey.  According to The Bells Cathedral Series there was a belief locally that 'the number of the pillars, wwindows, and doorways is said to equal the hours, days and months of the year; hence the local rhyme, attributed, on the authority of Godwin, to a certain Daniel Rogers:

'As many days as in one year there be'
So many windows in this church we see,
As many marble pillars here appear
As there are hours throughout the fleeting year,
As many gates as moons one year does view -
Strange tale to tell! yet no more strange than true.'

     Apart from the tower and spire, very little was added to the cathedral in the subsequent centuries, or for that matter altered.  A small porch and two chantry chapels were added to the structure in the Late Middle Ages, but these three Perpendicular Gothic additions were removed by James Wyatt (1746-1813) as part of his ruthless restoration and re-ordering of the building.  The result is an almost uniquely homogenous structure among British cathedrals.  At the Reformation the usual amounts of destruction.  Wren worked on the cathedral in the 17th century, Wyatt in the 18th, Sir George Gilbert Scott in the 19th, and Randoll Blacking in the 20th.

     The cathedral is surrounded by a large close - all lawns and large old houses - all very attractive and tranquil.  Quite villagey.  One of Wyatt's more egregious acts at Salisbury was the destruction of the detached bell tower in the midst of the close, just to the north of the cathedral.  An act of vandalism.  The bells, as a result, are now hung in the tower of the cathedral.  He also demolished the houses that stood around it, in an endeavour, I suppose, to tidy everything up. He really shouldn't have bothered.  

Apologies for the dim quality of the photographs; the weather was against us.

     Finally, on our walk around the close we came across 'Arundells', the home in retirement of the British Prime Minister Edward Heath (1916-2005).  It is now a museum.  Arundells is a palimpsest of a building, the history of England told in stone.  Ted Heath moved there in 1985.  It was altered at the time, and redecorated by the interior designer Derek Frost (1952-).  The result is very satisfying; Frost responds well to historic properties.  The dining room is particularly rich. The influence of David Hicks and Mary Fox Linton is evident.  The house contains a small but fine collection of art.  The garden, which leads down to the river, has a particularly fine view of the cathedral.  In all very English.  Fittingly.

     The house is very much as it was left at Ted Heath's death. What results is not only a singular memento of an individual's taste but, interior design being an ephemeral phenomena, of a work of a particular designer at a particular time, a snap-shot, as it were, of one strand of interior design at the end of the 1980s.  And valuable for that.

Own work: Rusticated Façade from Colmann's 'Vollstandige Answeisung ze der Civil Baukunst'

      Finished on Friday, 06.11.25, mixed media, on 300 mgsm watercolour paper.  Based on a design in Nicholaus Goldmann's  'Vollstandige Anweisung zu der Civil Baukunst' of 1699, showing a rusticated façade of the Tuscan order.

Bath in November I

       To celebrate a significant birthday we have been to Bath for a few days, and it has been a lovely treat.  I feel revived.  Those few days I felt re-integrated.  We arrived Saturday lunchtime and stayed in the same hotel - The Kennard in Bathwick - as we did on our previous visit.  That evening with the fireworks thundering over our heads we ate at Cote Brasserie.  It was a pleasant surprise. Boeuf Bourguignon, Crème Brûlée, and a decent glass of Malbec.

     Sunday morning, our first full day, and, for what must have been a good two hours, the city air was filled with the joyous sound of church bells - Bath Abbey, St Mary Bathwick and St John the Divine, I believe.  How I have missed that sound in these past few years.  For the first time in far too long I went to church, to St Mary Bathwick - my sort of place, and I took Holy Communion.  I think it maybe the first church I have worshipped in with galleries.  Sunday lunch at The Architect, part of the Imperial Hotel.  In the afternoon a walk up to the Georgian Garden behind the Circus, and then back to the hotel via Walcot.

     Photos from my walk around the city before church.