Great Malvern Priory

     To Worcestershire Saturday to see family. En route we stopped at Malvern, that most salubrious of Birmingham's suburbs, for breakfast - and a slightly curious affair that was.  Malvern and the Priory were much better.  Malvern itself is a sprawling, hospitable nineteenth century spa town - all ad hoc around the base of the Malvern Hills (from Moelvryn meaning 'bald hill') like a big-boned but friendly dog. Sometimes picturesque, sometimes confusing.  The whole is very much the territory of John Betjeman and John Piper. I went there as a teenager with my folks and the experience was at once interesting - all those villas, etc. - and boring - small shopping area. The residential, as now, dominated. As an adult my experience was more positive, though I can image living on one of those interminable suburban roads a bit dull no matter how good the architecture is. That said the place is a sort of open-air museum of nineteenth century architecture, and a such endlessly fascinating. A place of random and extraordinary buildings. I think we often forget how good the Victorians could be in creating the built environment partly because of their failures in the Industrial Cities, though even in a small industrial town like Pontardawe in the Tawe valley here in Wales you can come across a street as delightful as Thomas St lined with small semi-detached houses of stone and brick, some even retaining their cast iron railings. The only difference being that the Thomas Streets of this world are far more vulnerable to slow evisceration and destruction than the Malverns.
     It was Betjeman who likened Malvern to the tiny Italian republic of San Marino, it being so set apart from the usual run of the West Midlands. And it is strange, being a suburb detached from its city and dropped from a great height into the mist of heath and farmland. Other writers have said that hills form the true border of Wales. There is certainly a difference between east Worcestershire, beyond Severnside, and the western part of the county which can be very remote.
     Breakfast over we headed to the Priory Church. But first a little history, and it is a little confusing it has to be said.  All we really need to know is that there may have been a community of hermits living about the hills pre-Conquest in some sort connection with the martyrdom of St Werstan which is thought to have occurred at Malvern during the Viking Invasion of England (the presence of hermits may though predate St Werstan), and that sometime around the Norman Conquest (or after) this community developed into a regular Benedictine community with connections to Westminster Abbey. At the Dissolution of the Monasteries it was bought by the local community and became parochial.  The church subsequently lost its Lady Chapel and s transept. Apart from the Priory gatehouse all the monastic buildings were also lost. There are larger parish churches it has to be said, but what survives is superlative, for the church was rebuilt in Perpendicular Gothic some time late in the Middle Ages in a beautiful sandstone.  

     The Tower in particular, based on the tower at Gloucester Cathedral, which in turn is based on that at Worcester, is splendid, a powerful design full equally of strength and intricate detail. Poised. In the past some credited Sir Reginald Bray (born nearby at St Johns, the western suburb of Worcester) with the design of the tower. He was also credited with Henry VII's Chapel at Westminster Abbey and St George's Chapel Windsor. However Bray, who had been an officer the household of Lady Margaret Beauchamp (Yes, her again) and later that of her son Henry VII was essentially an administrator and not an architect, and that explains his involvement with the Royal commissions.  The real architect of the priory remains unknown.
     The interior gives a sense of great space and luminosity.  Of the earlier church there survives the powerful Norman nave arcade and the s aisle wall which contains at the e end a blocked Norman processional doorway which led to the cloisters. Everything else Perp. Soaring and lucid. The influence of Gloucester is present in the space beneath the crossing tower and in the base of the great east window where the mullions extend down to the ground forming the screen to the Lady Chapel. (Delightful Gothic Revival internal porch hiding the original doorway.)

     The chancel, rightly, is the culmination of the interior. Light floods in through the vast clerestory windows, and where the again the mullions descend from the windows down this time on to extrados of the arcade arches leaving very little, if any, inert wall surface. And little space, it has to be said for, large scale mural painting as you would find, say, in the Italian peninsular. All is articulated and decorated by architecture. Architecture has, as a result of a long-term trend in the Gothic, become essentially its own decoration.  The chancel aisles are, in contrast, much plainer, more utilitarian, with simple quadrapartite vaults. The scale of these too is 'parochial'  - the difference so marked that I'm tempted to assign them to a different master mason. All of that said there are some slightly strange details in the chancel: the capitals of the arcade are weak as to be almost obsolete (the arcades at near-ish Merevale Priory are similar but cruder in design) and the springers of the unattempted high vault look 'wrong' somehow. But these are minor quibbles.

     And in addition to all that architectural richness there are fittings to match: the original choir stalls, the very rare Medieval wall tiles and the Medieval stained glass, which includes two Royal commissions - the E window paid for by Richard III and the N transept window by Henry VII.  All lucky survivals. Perhaps it was the connection with Royal monastery of Westminster that inspired such Royal patronage. In addition there are several good monuments both Jacobean and Neo-classical. The priory was restored in by Sir George Gilbert Scott in 1860 and a relatively sensitive job he did of it; I particularly liked the nave ceiling which is beautifully decorated to his design. Alas the place is awash with well-meaning clutter, and muzak - well, classy muzak to be fair - was playing.

'This is Merlin's Town': Carmarthen and Pembroke

     Friday, the final full day of my holiday and we went into the west.  I exaggerate a little, as we only went as far as Pembroke, but there is something distinctive, almost other worldly, about west Wales.  Perhaps it is the quality of the light.
Our first point of call was Carmarthen, an ancient town, the oldest in Wales, high on a bluff above the river Towy at the point where it becomes tidal.  The Romans were there building a fortress and later a town - Moridunum, the civitas of the Demetae.  Remains of the amphitheatre are east of the town centre. 

     Carmarthen is at the southern end of the longest branch of the 'Sarn Helen', the network of Roman roads in Wales, the construction of which is traditionally credited to 'Elen Luyddog' - 'Helen of the Hosts', daughter of Eudaf Hen and wife of  Macsen Wledig, the late Western Roman Emperor Magnus Maximus. That ancient legend, the 'Breuddwyd Macsen Wledig' or 'Dream of Macsen Wledig', forms part of the Mabinogion and appears too in different form in Geoffrey of Monomouth's 'Historia Regnum Britanniae'. But I digress. Carmarthen is however associated with another mythic cycle that of Arthur, for Carmarthen, Caerfyrddin, is Merlin's town.  (There is some scholarly discussion as to whether Caerfyrddin actually refers to Merlin or not; either way there are number of local monuments that are connected to him.)  Be that as it may Carmarthen was an important centre in the Kingdoms of Dyfed and Deheubarth - the location of a 'bishop house', three monasteries within the walls, that sort of thing. The centre of the town now presents a mainly Georgian and Victorian face, the public spaces intimate, streets narrow, something that all old Welsh towns have in common I wonder? Coloured plaster predominates. The view from the south is dominated by the muscular County Hall building designed by Sir Percy Thomas architect of the Guildhall in Swansea.  It is, like the Guildhall, a building of impressive heft, with a nod in the direction of Richard Norman Shaw with its great chimneys and impressive graded slate roof. There is however, like the Guildhall, some of that twentieth century froideur about it.  It is an austere, somewhat aloof, building that sits squarely within the remains of the castle on the site of the gaol that John Nash built during his Welsh sojourn.  Its not helped by the fact it is now encircled by a puddle of parked cars.  I left wondering what the wonderful Josef Plechnik would have made of the commission like that.  

     We had time also to pop into St Peter's church.  Full of civic pomp, and a dash over restored, but worth a visit.  It contains the lavish tomb of Sir Rhys ap Thomas supporter of Henry Tudor in his rebellion against Richard III and reputed slayer of the king at Bosworth Field.

     Then on into Pembrokeshire and the mighty castle at Pembroke - no time really to look at the town.  This incredibly powerful Norman fortress, which stands at the point of a great tine of land, between two branches  (south one silted up) of the Milford Haven ria.  While doing a research for this post I've been struck by the shear political and cultural dynamism of the Normans; R H C Davies in 'The Normans and their Myth' (London 1974) talks about the Dukes of Normandy forging 'a new aristocracy, a new church, a new monasticism and a new culture'. At the same time as the Normans were first conquering England, and then conquering and settling south Wales, Norman knights were conquering first the southern Italian peninsular, defeating the Lombards and the Eastern Roman Empire in the process, and then island of Sicily, before eventually launching the invasion and attempted conquest of North Africa. In the following century they would nearly conquer all of Ireland and settle peacefully, at the behest of the monarch, in Scotland, and wherever they went they brought that new culture with them - there are Norman churches, for instance, all over the British Isles (including areas such as the Shetlands (Kingdom of Norway) and Pre-Conquest Ireland, that politically were beyond  the Norman world). Castles too such as Pembroke.
     Pembroke fell to the Normans in 1093, to put it in context that is twenty-nine years after the Norman Conquest of England and just two years after the Norman conquest of Sicily.  As at Abergavenny, Kidwelly and Brecon in addition to building a castle a monastery was founded. A pattern also followed here in south Lincolnshire at South Kyme, Castle Bytham/Grimsthorpe and more importantly for this post at Bourne under the aegis of Baldwin Fitzgilbert. In 1138, the same year that Baldwin was founding Bourne Abbey, his brother Gilbert was raised to the Earldom of Pembroke with Palatine powers. It was his son Richard de Clare, 'Strongbow', who began the Norman invasion of Ireland.  In 1170 Henry II embarked for Ireland from Pembroke in an attempt to control that invasion, but being virtually impregnable Pembroke castle played little part in British history again until, that is, the Wars of the Roses. By then Pembroke was in the hands of the Lancastrian Tudors, and it became a stage, as it were, for several key events in the rise to power of Henry VII - his birth in 1457, his dramatic escape from a Yorkist siege and flight to France and his return to claim the throne. For this blog the resonate event is his birth, for Henry's mother was the remarkable Lady Margaret Beaufort, (this is her fourth appearance on this blog) wife of Edmund Tudor, descendant of Baldwin FitzGilbert, Lady of the Manor of Bourne, patron of the abbey.
     Back to the architecture.  It is, it has to be said, not only very grand and imposing, but also rather workman-like, utilitarian.  Which is probably what you'd expect with a castle, but it is almost all lacking in detail and being constructed almost wholly of rubble masonry the castle has a very homogenous look making it hard to differentiate sometimes the work of different periods.  Thinking back it seems to be that though there are Early English details and some Geometric detailing in the residential block north of the keep there was nothing later in style.  No Curvilinear Decorated or Perp.  Nothing either of a Great Hall.  All that is left, and there is a lot of it, is the defensive. The most distinctive is the great circular keep - a massive cylinder of stone, 53 feet in diameter at the base and 80 feet high. It is thought to date from the time of William Marshall, 1st Earl of Pembroke of the second creation, who was the husband of Isabel de Clare, daughter of 'Strongbow' and Aiofe McMurrough, daughter of the King of Leinster. The view from the top is exhilarating.

St Guthlac, Market Deeping

   Yesterday, the Feast of the Epiphany, I braved the cold and the damp to visit the small market town of Market Deeping and the parish church of St Guthlac.  It was my first look inside.  It is a small, low slung building; the nave (Early English arcades and Perp clerestory) darkened with late Victorian and early 20th century stained & painted glass.  The chancel in contrast is light filled, where the best glass is to be found in two of the south windows. The walls of both nave and chancel have been scraped down to the bare stone, probably when the church underwent restoration in 1872 under the stern hand of James Fowler of Louth who we have encountered before at Gunby. The Wake chapel on the north of the chancel is now the organ loft.  Perhaps then, a bit of a disappointment. Exterior is however graced by a strong Late Medieval west tower, which with its crisp ashlar stands in immaculate contrast to the humble rubble built walls of the rest of the church.  I suspect that the tower was built under the patronage of that remarkable woman Lady Margaret Beaufort, Lady of the Deepings, mother of Henry VII, grandmother of Henry VIII and descendant of the Wakes. There is, on the s face, a Tudor portcullis.
   The porch contains a really quite beautiful set of nineteenth cast iron gates by Colemans, the local iron founders, and the churchyard gates too are quite fine, though not quite so nice.

St David's II: The Interior

   This was not my first visit to St David's. I had visited once before with my parents, and standing there in the nave the cumulative aesthetic and spiritual strength of this building brought my mother to tears. It is impossible, I think, not to be moved.
The nave possesses an immense spaciousness. That was what struck me first on this my latest visit.  Only then did I notice the architecture: the great slope of the floor as it rises towards the pulpitum at the east end; the ornate Transitional arcades and combined triforium and clerestory and the way it all leans so precariously backwards; and finally the incredible, the immense late Gothic ceiling with its great pendant bosses, the last thing to be added to the cathedral before the Reformation. The cumulative is indeed almost overwhelming.

  This is all much grander architecture than at Brecon, but there is that same sense of the parochial - a feeling amplified by the more intimate scale of architecture at the east end. The cathedral is filled with beautiful things: there are the pale late Gothic choir stalls situated under the central tower, and the wide meadows of encaustic tiles designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott in the choir, aisles and transepts.  They had a layer of richness and apart from the east wall of the chancel, with its three panels of  mosaic by Salviati, are the only evidence that he had been this way.  The sanctuary, however, is stilled paved with its original Medieval tiles, possibly made over in Malvern.  The prominent tomb in the chancel belongs to Edmund Tudor, 2nd husband of the remarkable Lady Margaret Beaufort (we've come across her before at Bourne Abbey) and father and grandfather to Henry VII & Henry VIII respectively.  It originally stood in the choir of Greyfriars in Camarthen and was moved here at the Dissolution of the Monasteries.  The shrine of St David has recently been restored and modern icons added.  I'm not sure I like them as much as an original Greek one that's on display in the south transept. They are far too delicate in execution for the scale of the building.