Ely Cathedral: The Lady Chapel

      To the north of the cathedral, like a boat tethered to a mothership stands the Lady Chapel.  It belongs to the period of Alan of Walsingham and Prior Crauden, and it is one of the greatest pieces of Medieval architecture in the kingdom.  The prolonged period of construction (1321-1349) due to the collapse of the crossing tower in 1322.  It is the largest Lady Chapel to come down to us from the Middle Ages, not only in England but in the entire British Isles.  It could be likened to a vast reliquary though it did not hold any relic of the Blessed Virgin Mary, or any one else, as far as I know.  It stands in the tradition of the demolished Lady Chapel of Peterborough cathedral, and the Wykeham chapel in Lincolnshire.  The exterior is ooltic limestone; the interior, however, is of clunch i.e. chalk, and in places Purbeck marble.

     In many ways chapel is a straightforward building; a simple rectangular plan, the long sides divided into five even bays, like that earlier Lady Chapel at Peterborough, each one clearly defined by large buttresses and prominent pinnacles.  It is easy to read.  There is a logic to it. These side elevations are not so different from that other fenland building of this type, the little known (and very hard to access) Wykeham Chapel, aka Chapel of St Nicholas, at Weston in Lincolnshire, which was constructed in 1311 by Prior Hatfield, and formed part of the grange of the Priory of St Nicholas, in Spalding.  The west façade - the one seen by pilgrims as entered and left the cathedral - is the most ornate, with rows of niches surrounding the great w window.

    Inside, however, that clarity is clouded.  Something more complex and sophisticated, and unique, than the exterior would lead us to expect, and which has elements of both the rational and the irrational. It is the irrational that strikes us first, but the best way to explain what is going on is to examine the rational first.  Mirroring the exterior each bay is defined by an engaged shaft that rises from the low bench that runs along base of the chapel walls to a wide, shallow lierne vault.  So far so good.  Except there is an extra layer, or 'lining' of architecture - an encrustation - that forms the major decorative element, a lavish 'cage' of carved clunch that is very plastic and sculptural and ignores, if not actively contradicts, the logic of the underlying architecture.  This 'cage' consists of two sections; a dado running under the windows and two tiers of tracery encasing the wall surface between the windows. The dado is the most sculptural and dynamic, with nodding ogee arches rippling in an out.  The design of the dado is consistently applied around the chapel; not even the doors in the s wall are to interrupt. The exception is the ruinous original reredos in the e wall.  In all it creates a very self-contained space.

     There is a profusion of sculpted elements to the 'cage' - rather Baroque in the blurring of categories.  Standing there amid such overwhelming and sensuous architecture it is easy to understand why Thomas Rickman (1776-1841) named this period of English architecture was named 'Decorated'.  There is scarcely any inert wall surface.  All is movement.

     Oddly, or brilliantly, each wall of the 'cage' is treated as a separate architectural element - they do not meet in the corners of the chapel. The upper sections are merely tethered to each other by diagonal ogee arches like they were the sides of a tent.  (Something vaguely similar occurs in Prior Crauden's Chapel.) The corners of the chapel are thus de-emphasized, becoming shadowy voids, perhaps of infinite depth. Something similar occurs to the vault shafts along the face of walls, where they are enmeshed in tracery, hidden by ogee canopies, and (originally) by two tiers sculptural figures supported on brackets.  The result of this is that the engaged shafts lose significance, so that vault appears to a separate, discreet element.

    In addition to the capitals, and corbels, crockets and finials the chapel originally contained a dizzying amount of figure sculpture, perhaps uniquely so.  All of this wealth of sculpture was coloured & gilded; the high vault was reportedly painted blue and speckled with stars, some of which remain.  In addition there was stained glass in the windows.  There must have been moments, at least, when the chapel came close to the state of Gesamtkunstwerk.* 

     Today the visitor stands in the wreck.  The iconoclasts have done their malignant work - the brackets are empty, the glass is clear, the stonework stripped of paint.  It is the bare ruin'd choir where late the sweet birds sang.  It is autumn.  And yet it is still sublimely beautiful.   Though of a new and different beauty.

     At the Reformation the chapel, as I have outlined in a previous post on the cathedral, became the parish church of the Holy Trinity.  An extra storey was added to Goldsmith's Tower to convert it to a bell tower to serve the parish.  And so it continued in its quiet parochial manner until, I think ,the Interwar period, when chapel was returned to cathedral use.  The monuments and memorials that had been placed on the walls were removed and the building restored.  I wonder what happened to them?  However the Georgian panelling on the e wall was later used by Stephen Dykes Bower in St Etheldreda's chapel at the e end of the Presbytery.  In 1945 Dykes Bower was called upon to design a new High Altar for the chapel.  At first it was hoped to restore the Medieval reredos, but the cost proved to be prohibitive, and instead he designed a new 'English Altar'.  And very fine it was.  Alas, it was replaced in 2011 with something a lot less sympathetic.  Of the statute of the BVM above the altar the least said the better.

 * Enough of the sculpture survived in the dado for M R James to reconstruct the original iconic scheme. It was based upon the late 'infancy gospel' known as 'The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew'.  It deals with the life of the Virgin Mary prior to the Annunciation and the infancy of Christ.

Ely Cathedral: The Furnishings

      Finally to the furnishings.  And it must be said that Ely is particularly rich in them.  Their distribution is however not only uneven 'geographically' throughout the building (the majority of them are in the eastern limb), but chronologically (the majority are post-Reformation).  The latter is to be expected in a country where the Reformation was not Lutheran, but was, at times, decidedly 'Reformed'.  Time and neglect have done the rest.  Perhaps it might be valuable to see the cathedral subject to a series of tides that have both scoured the building of furnishings and left a flotsam of new ones in their place.  It also illustrates that we assume erroneously that buildings like cathedrals exist is some sort of stasis, when by their very nature the opposite is true.

      The most important survivals from the Middle Ages are the Choir Stalls (1338-48), and the funerary monuments.  In particular are there is the Tournai marble tomb of an unknown bishop; the Purbeck marble tombs of Bishop Kilkenny and Bishop Northwold; and the tomb of Bishop Redman which is credited to John Wastell - we've seen his work so far at Peterborough Cathedral, and King's College Chapel, Cambridge.  Very little Medieval stained glass survived the onslaught of the iconoclasts - the overwhelming number of such windows in the cathedral today are Victorian.  In a similar manner nearly all the liturgical furnishings are Victorian or later.

     Little survives of the period between the Reformation and the arrival in 1770 of James Essex except a series of fine Baroque monuments.  Sadly, the rather fine marble font was exiled from the cathedral at some point during the 19th century; the bowl is in Prickwillow church but the canopy has been lost. For shame. Late 17th century, it was the sort of thing you might in a Wren church in the City of London.  Of Essex's work at Ely next to nothing survives with the exception of two paintings in the s transept that served, in turn, as altarpieces for his High Altar.  Some it, surely, must have been ok?  And that takes us neatly to the work of Sir George Gilbert Scott - where to begin? Perhaps with the fine Italianate iron screens in the chancel aisles.  Scott also designed the new High Altar and its sumptuous reredos, the accompanying gasoliers, the marble and encaustic flooring of the choir and sanctuary, the organ case, the pulpit, and the choir screen.  It is perhaps no surprise to find that his time at Ely lasted some 30 years, no surprise either that his work has come in for some heavy criticism since.  Whatever the its merits stylistically the craftsmanship is top notch.  

     In the nave are two sumptuous tombs in the N aisle.  Both Victorian. The tomb of Canon Hodge Mill by Sir George Gilbert Scott, and tomb of Bishop Woodford by Thomas Garner.  In the north transept the furnishing of the Cambridgeshire War Memorial chapel is by the Arts and Crafts architect Sir Guy Dawber - more remembered for his domestic architecture.  To be honest I'm not sure if I quite like it.  In the 1920s Sir J N Comper furnished Bishop West's Chantry, but more of that in a further post.

    In recent years a number of contemporary art works have been installed in the cathedral with mixed results.  The best is, perhaps, by John Maddison in Bishop Alcock's Chantry.

St George

 Happy St George's Day

Ely Cathedral: The Interior

"....the inside has the greatest variety and neatness in the works; there are two Chappels most exactly carved in stone all sorts of figures cherubims and gilt and painted in some parts; the roof of one Chappel most delicately carved and hung down in great points all about the church; the pillars are carv'd and painted with the history of the Bible and description of Christ's miracles, the lanthorn in the quire is vastly high and delicately painted, and fine carv'd work all of wood...."

     The interior, as you can imagine, is vast and like any Medieval cathedral not immediately or easily comprehended. It is akin to a mystery.  A place to be experienced, in the which the visitor participates in the unfolding of that mystery.   It is, also, not easily written about.  I have found this post a struggle - how does one write about something so big and so complex?

     I will start as any paying visitor does with interior of the w porch.  As big as some parish churches, Early English influenced by the choir of Lincoln cathedral. Quadripartite vaulting. Arcading very elegant in contrast to the general heft of the structure.  The doors into the cathedral are by George Gilbert Scott - lots of scrolling ironwork.

     Through the wicket door the visitor steps into a sublimely vertiginous space - the lantern of the w tower.  It is almost overwhelming, but one feels, however, the absence of that missing nw transept.  The space is out of kilter.  That great blank wall filling the north tower arch somehow oppressive. The w wall of remaining transept is as highly decorated as the exterior.  There is no room for mural painting.  Architecture, even at this stage, has become its own decoration.  In the 1840s, before Sir George Gilbert Scott undertook his mammoth restoration of the cathedral, Professor Robert Willis (1800-1875) restored the transept - the ceilings of both it and the tower are his and he restored St Catherine's chapel from near ruin.  Since the mid 19th century the transept has been used as a baptistry, though the font looks bereft without a substantial cover.  Wondering since what, if any, was the original liturgical purpose of the w transept?  And another question while we're at it: has it ever been proposed to rebuild the nw transept?

     Ahead lies the immense Romanesque nave.  Its height (over 90ft) makes it feel a little narrow.  (It's at this moment that the critics suddenly invoke a French influence.  They do the same at Beverley.)  All is light, however, and there is a sense of expansion, of release to walk into this vast space.  A serene space.  The architecture mightily impressive and austere with little in the way of carved detail.  The high wooden ceiling was decorated in the 19th century by Henry Styleman Le Strange and completed, after his death, by Thomas Gambier Parry.  It is based on the early 12th century nave ceiling in the former monastic church of St Michael, Hildersheim, Germany.  The shape is just perfect, a flat ceiling, like, say, the one spanning the nave at St Albans would be inappropriate, deadening.  The aisles, I should add here, are groin vaulted, rather cave-like.  In the s aisle of nave are two outstanding Norman doorways that gave access the cloisters.  From the west, they are 'The Prior's Door' and 'The Monk's Door'.  In sharp contrast to the implacable architecture around them they are richly and intricately sculpted; the tympanum of the former, for instance, contains a Pantocrator.  How did it ever survive the rigors of the Reformation?  Little in the way of furnishings now but in the Middle Ages two screens would have stretched across the far end bays of the nave; firstly a rood screen, and behind that, guarding the monks quire, a stone pulpitum.  The altar before the Rood also served as a parochial altar until a separate parish church, likewise dedicated to the Holy Cross, was built on Holy Cross Green adjoining the cathedral.  At the Reformation this church was demolished and the congregation moved into the Lady Chapel which was re-dedicated as the Church of the Holy Trinity.  The floors are, I think, Victorian.

     As Celia Fiennes wrote the 'Lanthorn of the quire is vastly high'.  It is indeed, floating over us mere mortals like an immense canopy or umbrella.  Beautiful, serene and remote.   Until James Essex re-ordered the interior in 1770 the choir ran e-w through this space within a high-walled stone enclosure.  In many ways such an arrangement seems odd to us.  We see the octagon as a centralising space, so much so that it now contains a central altar as thought it was some ideal church from the Renaissance, and there are architectural historians and critics who see it as 'classical' in concept.  Under the influence of Bishop Mawson and James Bentham, Essex essentially moved the choir and sanctuary eastward, to the Presbytery of Bishop Northwold, the High Altar coming to rest against the e wall of the cathedral, though the idea for such a radical liturgical re-ordering came a hundred years before from Bishop Gunning. Writing in 1848, just as Scott was beginning his work on the cathedral, John William Hewett did not spare anyone's blushes: 'Never was there a more ill-judged step than the removal of the choir to the east end [] to give it such stinted proportions, and for this purpose to displace some of the fine old monuments,a nd to hide others, to obscure the pillars and above all, to erect the miserable organ gallery which we now behold, must surely be pronounced most tasteless performances...' Indeed a lot of damage was done in the process: the old Norman pulpitum was demolished and much damage done to the monuments.  However it must be acknowledge that his work on the fabric ensured the building's survival.  Hewett wished to restore the choir to original position in the octagon, but his was not to be.  Scott, in his own far reaching restoration of the mid-nineteenth century, and who undid just about all of Essex's work, merely moved the choir and sanctuary back 3 bays west to its current position.

     To the north and south, the transepts.  The oldest parts of the cathedral.  It was through the door in the nw corner of the n transept that pilgrims entered the church.  Their spatial experience of the interior must have been so profoundly different from ours - much of the church was simply out of bounds to them.  As at St Albans they seem to have been almost an afterthought, though they provided income enough. Flooring in the s transept, at least, yellow gaunt brick.  Aisles vaulted, late Medieval Hammerbeam roofs painted by Stephen Dykes Bower (?).  Rather good.

     At this point I entered n quire aisle and the eastern limb of the church - the quire and the presbytery.  The latter is the older - EE, based on the nave at Lincoln e.g. the tierceron vault and lavish use of Purbeck marble.  It was designed to hold the shrine of St Etheldreda.  The quire - which originally held the choir altar and the High Altar - is even more lavish, with lierne vaults to both aisles and 'nave'. It dates from the time of Alan of Walsingham.  At some point during the Reformation the choir altar became the High Altar.  From the north aisle a covered passage leads to the Lady Chapel, but more of that remarkable building in a later post. In contrast to the nave the whole eastern limb is heavily silted up with furnishings. Elaborate Victorian marble and encaustic tile floors in around the High Altar and choir, the aisles however retain old 'rustic' flooring. 

     Finally at the far east end of both presbytery aisles are the fantastical chantry chapels of Bishops Alcock and West.  Extraordinary confections of stone. Intimate and intense.  Almost overwhelming with the profusion of architectural detailing that in a Late Gothic manner more typical of Europe obscures the logic of the architecture.  The n possesses a fine fan vault with pendant, the s a net vault, profuse with Renaissance motifs.