Great St Mary, Cambridge II

Great St. Mary's Church, Cambridge: interior towards the west end. Line engraving by J. Le Keux, 1824, after J.P. Neale. Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark. Source: Wellcome Collection. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/pkfjy8nn

As I walked in Petty Cury on Trinity Day,
While the cuckoos in the fields did shout,
Right through the city stole the breath of the may,
And the scarlet doctors all about

Lifted up their heads to snuff at the breeze,
And forgot they were bound for Great St-Mary’s
To listen to a sermon from the Master of Caius,
And ” How balmy,” they said, ” the air is !”

And balmy it was ; and the sweet bells rocking
Shook it till it rent in two
And fell, a torn veil ; and like maniacs mocking
The wild things from without peered through.

Wild wet things that swam in King’s Parade

The days it was a marshy fen,
Through the rent veil they did sprawl and wade
Blind bog-beasts and Ugrian men.

And the city was not. (For cities are wrought
Of the stuff of the world’s live brain.
Cities are thin veils, woven of thought,
And thought, breaking, rends them in twain.)

And the fens were not. (For fens are dreams
Dreamt by a race long dead ;
And the earth is naught, and the sun but seems :
And so those who know have said.)

So veil beyond veil inimitably lifted :
And I saw the world’s naked face,
Before, reeling and baffled and blind, I drifted
Back within the bounds of space.

I have forgot the unforgettable.
All of honey and milk the air is.
God send I do forget. . . . The merry winds swell
In the scarlet gowns bound for St. Mary’s.

Dame Rose Macaulay 1881-1958

     And so to the interior.  And, as I have said in a previous post from years ago, it is a worldly place, where the civic and University, and the near constant flow of tourists combine to suppress the numinous.  It must be a hard task for the clergy to maintain even a modicum of the spiritual in such an environment.

     Entering through the s porch one immediately feels the weight of the galleries that fill the aisles; massive constructions encompassing the whole nave, the remains of an 18th liturgical 'refit', designed to accommodate the University for ceremonies and specifically the Sermons that then punctuated the academic year.  That original scheme centred on a 'three decker' pulpit of extraordinary design; the two lower desks for the clerk and the rector faced e while behind them pulpit itself, tall and proud in the form of an octagonal tower.  See above There were additional galleries at the w end and filling the chancel arch.  Local tradition has it that the galleries were designed by James Gibbs.  Whether that is true, they do give a good sense of what a Medieval church looked on the eve of the Oxford Movement.  Apart from the side galleries everything else was ripped out during Sir George Gilbert Scott's thoroughgoing mid 19th century restoration.  I don't think there were any other architectural interventions until the Post war period when the then Vicar Mervyn Stockwood brought in George Pace (an Anglican establishment architect if ever there was).  Pace was responsible for a re-ordering of th chancel and, I think, a new vestry at the W end.  (Could be wrong about the latter.) 

     As for the architecture, the nave is all, everything else an afterthought.  And it is pretty spectacular 'all singing, all dancing' Late Gothic.  The architect, it is pretty certain, was John Wastell, who we have encountered at two other buildings in E Anglia: Peterborough Cathedral and King's College Chapel, just the other side of Senate House Hill.  The interior façade is rich and restless.  There is scarcely any inert wall surface.  The arcade is very tall and slim and the clearstory double.  Construction commenced in 1478 and was completed just at the start of the Reformation.

     For all that magnificence the interior feels ill at ease.  There is an awful lot of contemporary semi-religious clutter, everything feels temporary, and nothing quite comes up to quality of Wastell's work.  It is also for an Late medieval East Anglian church surprisingly dark., and over-pewed.  It is a building I feel I would find it very difficult to pray in.

     Like St Edward's, Great St Mary was the stage for the radical middle stage of the Reformation in England and Wales.  The Reformer Martin Bucer was buried in the church in 1551.  With the Marian reaction his remains were exhumed and publicly burned on Market Hill.  A vindictive act.

Peterborough Cathedral III: The Interior

      Finally, a few days in London, a respite from the Infernal City, and a trip north to Peterborough and Stamford.  An opportunity to complete by series of posts on the cathedral at Peterborough with a look at the interior.  It was, as you can see, a bit of a drab day.  Hardly June weather at all.

     The interior is vast, cavernous, without the usual subdivision one would expect in a large Medieval church.  Of the two medieval screens in the nave, the pulpitum has altogether disappeared but the wooden rood screen survives however, ex situ in the north transept. The architecture is pretty much homogeneous, being Anglo-Norman with little addition.  The most important of these additions are the dramatic, vertiginous west transepts (E.E.), the crossing tower (Dec), and the New Building (Perp). Very sophisticated, the latter.  The work, most likely, of John Wastell.  The painted wooden nave ceiling (early 12th century) is a very rare survival indeed.  The painted wooden ceiling of the chancel is late Medieval.  Both ceilings have been extensively restored by Blore and Gilbert Scott respectively.  They give some welcome colour to an otherwise grey, austere interior, which I think is partly at least due to the aesthetic preferences of John Loughborough Pearson in the late 19th century.  As I said in my post about the exterior of the building the cathedral suffered greatly during the Civil War, and as a result is pretty low on furnishings. The choir stalls are, I believe, by Pearson.  He also repaved the chancel with cosmati work and designed the imposing ciborium over the High Altar. His was the second major restoration of the 19th century.  The first was by Edward Blore.  George Pace worked here during the second half of the 20th but thankfully did little damage - the seating in St Sprite's Chapel is actually rather good.

      The cathedral does, however, contain two interesting pieces of early sculpture.  Firstly, is the enigmatic Hedda Stone - Anglo-Saxon of disputed date. It is now thought, for instance, that the stone was originally quarried during the Roman period.  It stood outside, s of the cathedral, until the early 18th century when it was moved into the cathedral library.  Traditionally believed to have been used to mark the mass grave of Abbot Hedda and the monks martyred by the Vikings.  It is currently in the apse behind the High Altar.  There is also a stone relief in the south transept long thought to be Anglo-Saxon in origin but is more likely to be Roman.  It depicts two deities, rather than, as previously thought, two abbots, dancing. Both pieces contain figures standing under an arcade.

Peterborough Cathedral I: The Exterior

      On the Friday I left London for a few hours and took a trip north by train to Peterborough, to continue a project to visit all the Anglican cathedrals within easy reach of London - one visit per stay in London.  Oddly, considering I lived near Peterborough for many years, the cathedral has never yet been a subject for a blogpost, but by the time I started this blog I had grown to dislike the city.  It had by then become merely a place to change buses or catch a train.  There were other places, pleasanter places, to do shopping.  Like far too many cities in the UK Peterborough has suffered greatly in the 20th century from rapacious Modernity.  I'd go so far to say that by & large our market towns are very good, but our cities are poor.

     Peterborough stands on the Fen edge, at the place where the river Nene enters the Fens; was this then the last bridging point of the river before the sea, or perhaps the tidal limit of the river? And does that explain the siting of the abbey at what was then called Medeshamstede?  Importantly for the construction of the cathedral the site is also just E of the Limestone Belt - it stands at the eastern tip of the 'Nassaburgh Limestone Plateau'.  And it is of stone from the belt, oolitic limestone, specifically from the quarries at Barnack on the n side of the plateau (which the then abbey owned), that the church is constructed.  Work commenced c1118 after a fire destroyed the previous church, but the site itself is much older; the second foundation dates to c965, the first to c655/6 when under the patronage of the Mercian king Peada and King Oswiu of Northumbria a monastery was founded 'in regione Gyruiorum'*.  That is the line taken by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.  Some historians have seen that first foundation as an assertion of Mercian power in a newly conquered territory.  Seaxwulf was apparently the first abbot, though Bede calls him constructor i.e. founder, and a number of scholars support this e.g. Peter S Baker and Jennifer Paxton.  Baker pushes forward Seaxwulf's abbacy to the 660s. To give a little context to all these confusing events: the Staffordshire hoard was deposited sometime between 650 and 675 AD. and the first Bishop of the Mercians, the Irish Diuma, was consecrated in c655. It may be presumed that the monastery used a 'Celtic' rite.

     That initial foundation is traditionally connected to another early monastic site locally; Castor just west of the city in the Nene valley. Like Peterborough Castor was traditionally a royal foundation; in the case of Castor the founders were Peada's sisters Kynesburgha and Kyneswitha.  What I find intriguing here, however, is that although it has long been know that Castor sits within the remains of a (large) Roman structure the same has recently been found to be true of Peterborough.  So, the site is very, very much older than suspected.
     That first foundation was destroyed during the Viking Raids, when Abbot Headda and the community were martyred.  The second foundation*, Benedictine, continued until dissolved in 1539.  In 1541 it was reconstituted as a Cathedral - part of Henry VIII's attempts to re-structure the church. In the intervening two years it apparently functioned a collegiate church. The diocese, which was carved out of the vast diocese of Lincoln, consists of the Soke of Peterborough and the county of Northamptonshire.  In the upheavals of the 17th century the cathedral suffered mightily, though perhaps not as badly as Lichfield. The cathedral underwent two major restorations in the 19th century, firstly, by Blore and then Pearson.  Leslie Moore, son of Temple Moore, and then George Pace worked here mid-century, but latter didn't do too much damage.  Thankfully.
     And so mercifully to the architecture.  Perhaps, because it's so familiar to me, Peterborough always strikes me as a work-a-day sort of building; apart from the w end it has a straightforward masculine quality to it, with none of the complexity of, say, Lincoln.  Perhaps also because it is essentially a Norman building, robust and powerful, even a little remorseless at times in its logic.  And - dare I say it? - monotonous.  The scale is large - 471 ft long and 180 across the transept. You certainly have to admire the ambition and the audacity of the original masons, and the abbot who commissioned them. Apart from the extraordinary Early English w front, which seems to define any logic, there are few further additions to the structure, which furthers the sense of homogeneity.  There are some elegant Geometric Decorated Tracery in the s transept chapels; more importantly there is the 14th central tower (rebuilt by Pearson), and New Building.  This was the last addition to the structure, built as an ambulatory around the e end under the patronage of Abbot Kirkton.  The master mason, it is suggested, is likely to have been John Wastell - the new Building has detailing very similar to King's College Chapel, Cambridge where Wastell was master mason from 1508 onwards.

     Likely Geometric Dec was the Lady Chapel, which, like the Lady Chapel at Ely, stood to the north of the chancel; it was five bays long and aisle-less.  Sadly, it was demolished after the Restoration to provide building materials to repair the great damage done to the cathedral by the Parliamentarians during the Civil War: the church survived largely intact, but the cloister and the monastic buildings were wrecked.  Thankfully the two fine processional doors between the church and the cloister survived. There was also an additional octagonal wooden storey to the central tower, and a lead spire to the nw tower.  Both now gone sometime in the 18th century.

     The west front deserves a paragraph to itself.  At some 156ft wide, it really is quite something like an immense scaenae frons; unique in the British Isles and, I think, in Europe.  I'm not sure architectural historians or critics are that fond of it per se, impressed though they may be by the scale and the concept which verges on the sublime.  The design can be best thought of consisting of two layers, one behind the other.  The outer layer consists of three immense arches, that apart from the central arch have little relationship to what's going on in the building behind.  Pevsner calls them 'niches' which seems an understatement.  These arches, in fact, form a sort of loggia. At each end of the façade are big, square turrets (or are they towers?), each capped with later stone spires; they are probably there to act as buttresses.  Over the arches are three massive gables; the central one being a continuation of the nave roof.  Historians seem quick to look to Lincoln cathedral for inspiration for this design but ignore the remains of the massive w front of the abbey church at Bury St Edmunds (another Benedictine house).  The great width of the façade like that at Bury is explained by the presence of a Western transept (there was also one at Ely), but unlike those transepts, the one at Peterborough  is a narrow, blink-and-you-miss-it affair, which also attempts to combine the western transept with a two towered façade.  Ely has a single central west tower, and Bury, depending on the re-construction, three or five. It is this western transept that forms the inner layer.  Its external projection are the two towers peaking over the two outer gables. Unhappily the s tower has never been attempted, as its absence does detract from the overall composition.  Finally in the middle - a little oddly for some critics - is a Perpendicular Gothic porch.  Ruskin, for one, thought without the porch, the w front would be the finest in Europe.

Apologies for the photography.  It was a more overcast day than I had anticipated. I decided not to pack my camera and, instead, use my phone.  A mistake.

     

* 'in the region of the Gyrwe'.  That is the 'North Gyrwe', an Anglo-Saxon, possibly Brythonic, statelet.  We have encountered them before at Crowland.  The territory is coterminous with the current Soke of Peterborough.  The Nassaburgh Hundred is an old name for the Soke.

** In this case the founder was St Ethelwold, Bishop of Winchester, during the reign of King Edgar. Part of a wider reform movement in the English Church.  Ethelwold, who was a bit of a bruiser all told, was also founder of Ely and Thorney.