Lichfield Cathedral III: The Furnishings

     In his book, 'English Cathedrals: The Forgotten Centuries' (1980, Thames & Hudson) Gerald Cobb sees the cathedral at Lichfield as having undergone two great disasters since the Reformation; the destruction during the English Civil War and the restoration undertaken by James Wyatt in 1788, when most of Bishop Hacket's work was undone. Some architectural historians, perhaps not so many now, would contend the mid nineteenth century restoration under Sir George Gilbert Scott, which was to sweep away the work of Wyatt and the last remains of Hacket's work, was a third disaster. I don't agree.

     Sadly the result of these repeated dislocations that the cathedral has undergone from the Reformation onwards is that there is now very little left in the way of furnishings from the Middle Ages or for that matter from either either the Hacket or Wyatt restorations. I can't help regret the loss of the Artisan Mannerist choir stalls installed by Bishop Hacket, and the great Corinthian reredos that may have been by Sir Christopher Wren, and stood behind the High Altar. 
     The overwhelming number of monuments and other furnishings date therefore from the early nineteenth century onwards; and the cathedral, (the transepts in particular), has a particularly rich collection of funerary monuments of that period (more than most English cathedrals, I think).  Wyatt's restoration, however much detested(!), may be a manifestation of a change in attitude to the cathedral that occurred at the end of the Long Eighteenth Century, for while there are a small number of memorials from the 17th & 18th century the number of memorials suddenly increased and continued through the 19th century filling the cathedral with good things. Perhaps Scott's work at the cathedral should also be viewed as part of that process. 

 

Lichfield Cathedral II: The Interior

      And so, to the interior. This is church as cave; the place of the Nativity or the Resurrection. It is filled with furnishings, mainly nineteenth century. A treasure hoard. There is some quite extraordinary work on display. So with all this richness where to begin? Perhaps with a little chronology. It always helps. (Images in the order in which they were taken.)

    There's barely a trace of either the Anglo-Saxon or Norman churches so the complicated construction history of the present cathedral essential begins c1200 with the rebuilding of the old Romanesque choir in the Early English style. Three bays of the arcade survive. The piers are complex, showing the influence of the school of West Country masons to be found, for instance at Wells and Glastonbury, (and much further afield in S Wales and in Dublin).  Short and very sturdy, these piers, far more than one would think structurally necessary. The aisles are correspondingly low, cave like. The two storey Chapel of St Chad's Head, attached to the s choir aisle was constructed at the same time.

     Then followed the s and n transepts in that order, both given a comprehensive working over in the late Middle Ages, and the chapterhouse & its long, dark richly decorated vestibule.  More cave.  The chapter house is a two storey structure, polygonal - octagonal or decagonal you decide!  It's been described as both. Either way it is rather domestic in scale with little of the monumentality one associates with the great polygonal chapterhouse of such places as York and Lincoln, and none the worse for that.  It currently functions as a sort of cathedral museum containing, amongst other things, two valuable Anglo-Saxon pieces of art: a fragment of sculpture - one of the scant remains of the Anglo-Saxon cathedral - and the manuscript folio The Lichfield Gospels aka The Llandeilo Gospel Book. Look for the Late Medieval painting over the entrance. Upstairs (not open to the public) currently holds the cathedral library and has done since the 18th century and the demolition of the old medieval library which stood to the north of the nave.

      In the later half of the 13th century the nave was rebuilt in the Geometric Decorated style reaching the w front c1270. Some writers have associated this work with the masons Thomas, and his son William Fitzthomas who are known to have worked at the cathedral at that time.

     The nave is the most architecturally significant part of the cathedral, certainly its most sophisticated work. The bays are on the narrow side, well portioned, richly detailed and perhaps a little solid. The arcade takes up half the elevation. The triforium and clerestory a quarter each. That makes the triforium larger than normal, larger certainly that at Lincoln which is the ultimate source for the design via Westminster Abbey.* The clerestory - those 'spherical triangles' - on the other hand, is under the direct influence of Westminster Abbey, where a similar design is used to light the rear of the triforium.  There is some influence of the Rayonnant Sainte Chapelle in Paris, but there the windows which are in the Lower Chapel there have horizontal sills, not curved as at Westminster and here. Those 'triangular' windows were already in the repertoire of French architects at the time and must be closed linked to the invention of bar tracery, for example they had been used as clerestory windows in the High Gothic Leibfraukirche in Trier built by French masons from Champagne. The form also occurs in the glazed tympanums of the w front of Rheims Cathedral and in the aisle clerestories of Le Mans and Beauvais cathedrals.

     The piers, though are under the influence of a source much close to home: the choir at Pershore abbey. They are on the sturdy side, and, tend to visually block the aisles from view. The spandrels are nicely decorated with the same cinquefoil motif that appears on the w front, except here it is pierced by the vaulting shafts which run all the way to the ground, unifying the design and accentuating the verticality of what is not, as I have said in the previous post on the cathedral, a particularly tall elevation (under 60ft). 

     The whole interior elevation (rather like the w front) is like some highly patterned screen that keeps the eye firmly within the main volume of the nave. High above there is more patterning with a tierceron vault based on that in the nave of Lincoln Cathedral. There is a general feeling of Lincoln about the whole design, but the nave at Lincoln is more spatially integrated and structurally daring. The design here takes relatively up to date ideas and happily uses them for their decorative value.

     The later nave at Worcester seems to be a variant on this design. The pier forms and the proportions are very similar.

     So far so straightforward, however  in the early 14th century a new apsidal Lady Chapel was constructed at a distance e of the cathedral, and, what is more, slightly out of alignment with existing e end. The difference in alignment between nave and e end can be seen in the first photograph.  It is not a 'weeping chancel'; its meaning is not symbolic but simply utilitarian - the builders were merely following a bed of sandstone on top of which to construct the cathedral foundations. The design of the Lady Chapel has its origins in the Sainte Chapelle in Paris. The interior is quite good, the exterior less so. Though I haven't been able to understand why the mason varied the width of the bays of the chapel 'nave'. 

     Work then commenced to connect this new chapel to the rest of the cathedral. This involved destroying most of the EE choir and its ambulatory (it would have looked something like Southwark or Glasgow) and constructing a new choir and retrochoir. This was done in the Curvilinear Decorated style; the piers keep the proportions of the EE piers in the choir, the details alone being different; the repetition of the cinquefoil from the spandrels of the nave arcade is a nice touch. Above the arcade, the designer - possibly William of Eyton or William Ramsey - dispensed with the triforium altogether, reduced the inner and outer leaves of the 'mur epais'** to what amounts to a second arcade and introduced a new leaf midway between the two, pierced with vast clerestory windows, taller than the arcades below them.  I wonder if the choir at Great Malvern Priory is a descendant of this sort of design. 

     Most of the clerestory tracery apparently dates now from Restoration period and is in the Perpendicular Gothic. I'm not sure it qualifies as 'Survival' or 'Revival'. There are eight windows on each side: the first six from the west on each side have a rather smart tracery design, quite convincingly medieval looking; windows seven have  something much more mundane; windows eight are, on the s. Curvilinear (thought to be the original design), and one the N something completely idiosyncratic, which must date from the Restoration.

   

 

*  Interestingly two engravings of the south elevation of the cathedral, one by Wenceslas Hollar, show the triforium glazed.  If the engravings are accurate they change the whole nature of the design.

** The 'mur epais', the 'thick wall', is a building technique originating in Romanesque period Normandy. It was bought to England after the Norman Conquest and thence diffused to the rest of the British Isles. It can be likened to a sandwich: two leaves of masonry (the bread) with a core of rubble as the filling. It continued to be used right until the end of the Middle Ages, and was one of those factors that helped shape, or define, British architecture of the Medieval Period.

Lichfield Cathedral I: City, Close, Cathedral

   There are also outwardly built three Pyramids, or steeples of a good convenient height, all very well wrought with Free Stone and especially the two Gemmets that stand westwards, very well cut and cureously wrought.  The which West Part is [] exceeding finely and cunningly set forth, with a great number of Tabernacles, and in the same, the Images or Pictures of the Prophets, Apostles Kings of Judah, and divers other Kings of this Land, so well embossed and so lively cut, that it is a great pleasure for any man that takes delight to see such Rarities, to behold them.

     It was a relief to leave the city centre of Birmingham and head through some interesting and leafy suburbia north to Lichfield, in the unregarded county of Staffordshire.  An all together different city; Defoe described it as "a place of conversation and good company"; it was after all the place of Dr Johnson, David Garrick, Erasmus Darwin and Anna Seward, a place of sensibility. It was my second visit and the bf's first, and the place is a delight - busy and prosperous. The centre is compact, dense and hierarchical. It was market day too, which is always a good thing, though not so good for the photography! Lichfield is a planned medieval town, c1140, built to the south of the cathedral. The site though is of greater antiquity. Close to Repton and Tamworth, it was one of the major centres of power in the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Mercia. And perhaps possessing a still greater antiquity. 

     To the east of the city centre is St Michael, Greenhill. A medieval/Victorian church that stands in the midst of a vast graveyard. I believe it is the largest in the country. Mesolithic items have been found there, and legend links it to the persecution of the Christians under the Emperor Diocletian. Another credits the dedication of the cemetery itself to St Augustine of Canterbury and the Roman Mission. Whatever the basis of these stories, by the 8th century St Michael's had been endowed with vast landholdings. This has led some historians, such as Steven Bassett*, to suggest that St Michael's is the site of an important early Christian centre, possibly the seat of a British bishopric such as those at St Helen Worcester, and St Mary de Lode in Gloucester. It seems that the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons in the this part of the Kingdom of Mercia and the lower Severn valley was the work of the existing British populations, and not the Roman Mission.

      The Kings of Mercia took their bishops from Northumbria and also Ireland. St Chad, the fifth bishop, was no exception. He is thought to have been born in what is now Yorkshire. His name is Brythonic, as are names of his three brothers - Cedd, Caelin and Cynibil. As was also the name of his assistant/servant Ovin, ie. Owain or Owen, who is said to be the same Ovin who was part of St Etheldreda's household.  I wont describe Chad's earlier life in Northumbria except to say it is 'complex'. I don't mean 'problematic', only he was a very busy man, a bit restless maybe. It is enough here to know he, like his predecessors, was trained in the Irish monastic tradition in northern England and in Ireland itself. Chad's time in Mercia is subject to all sorts of legends and variants. It is thought he arrived c.669, but at one time it was believed he had arrived before that date and been living the eremitical life in part of Lichfield that is now known as Stowe, but what for centuries had been known as Chadstowe; attracted, perhaps, by the ancient sanctity of St Michael's church. Be that as it may Chad was appointed Bishop of Mercians c669 and was bishop for three years. It was he who, apparently, moved the cathedra from Repton to Lichfield. By his death there seems to have been two monasteries in Lichfield; St Chad's own skete at the site of St Chad's in Stowe (the church was then apparently dedicated to St Mary), and a second founded by the Mercian King Wulfhere. Chad was buried close to St Mary's church and remained there until c700 when his remains were translated to a new(?) cathedral church dedicated to St Peter on the site of the current structure, and which was situated within Wulfhere's foundation. I hope I've got that right!

     And so finally to the cathedral itself.  I can't do better than quote from the Buildings of England: "Lichfield is one of the smaller English cathedrals (371'), but it has two features which single it out from all others; its three spires and the Minster Pool and Stowe Pool assuring it of a picturesqueness of setting which none can emulate."

     In fact the building (for a cathedral) is so low (for instance, the nave vault is less than 60 ft high) that it scarcely registers in the urban landscape at all. I should add that the central tower, which has some stylistic links to the central towers of Pershore and Worcester, is uncommonly short; I think the great spire that that rests upon it must account for half the total height, if not more.  

      It's only as you approach, and I suggest you approach from the west along Bird St, that the three stones spires - the 'Ladies of the Vale' - appear above the trees. It is only at the moment of turning into the close that the cathedral finally reveals itself to the visitor, all dark and spikey, the flat façade of the w end enmeshed in a dizzying net of tracery and statuary. For all its flaws, (and it does divide critical opinion), it is quite the spectacle. A proper coup du theatre.

      At this point we step into the cathedral close - I've written about cathedral closes before now, but never explained them: a close is simple an enclosure, sometimes fortified, containing the cathedral and its ancillary buildings, such as housing for the cathedral clergy and staff. Here the close is neatly rectangular, unlike say Lincoln which is a very awkward shape and is intruded on too much by the modern world such as a main road.  The close at Lichfield dates from the 1200s but I'd like to think that the boundaries are actually Anglo-Saxon. Though without the profound numinosity of the close at St David's, it is still a particularly attractive and peaceful place, and it contains some beautiful houses.  Two buildings stand out for me: the Neo-classical austerity of Newton's College, and the rather French bishop's palace, dating mainly from the Restoration. It is has been credited to Edward Pierce (1630-1695) the mason/sculptor, who worked for Sir Christopher Wren. I should add here a note about what has been lost in the cathedral close: the gates have been demolished at some point, as has the late Medieval cathedral library (a half-timbered structure apparently. It is just visible on Hollar's engraving of the w front). In addition a chantry chapel has been demolished on the north side of the nave, and, intriguingly, depicted on two 19th century plans of the cathedral the location of the tomb chamber of the Mercian kings. Gerald Cobb in his fascinating book 'English Cathedrals: The Forgotten Centuries' mentions a free standing bell tower, but I've never seen that mentioned in any other book.**

      'The Ladies of the Vale' make Lichfield quite unique amongst the medieval cathedrals of, not only England, but the British Isles.  No other possesses, or has ever (as far as we know) possessed, three stone spires. But be not fooled though, for the central spire - the 'Rood Spire' - is not medieval but a 17th century reconstruction of the destroyed original.  Even so Lichfield fared somewhat better in this regard than Ripon and Lincoln, both of which had three spires constructed of timber & lead and lost all over time.  The two three spired cathedrals in Scotland, Elgin and Aberdeen, fared worse of all. All is Ichabod, or almost, for although the former is in complete ruins and the latter only a fragment - loosing choir, transepts and central tower & spire - it does retain the nave with its two w spires, built of intractable granite.

      Lichfield is constructed, like the cathedrals of Worcester and Chester, of Triassic New Red Sandstone of varying intensity of colour from dark brown to pinky-grey.  One imagines it, under certain weather conditions, to be a brooding, sombre presence.  The great problem in using this stone is its susceptibility to weathering, hence the presence of scaffolding on the central tower in the following images. The result of this almost constant repair and replacement of stone is that in places very little of the original medieval stonework is left; this particularly true of the west front where virtually all of the visible masonry dates from the late 19th century, the work of Sir George Gilbert Scott and his son John Oldrid Scott; the figures sculpted by Robert Bridgeman & Son, except those around the Great West Door which are by Mary Grant. The waspish architectural historian Alec Clifton Taylor was rather sniffy about their work, saying the sculpture was  "passable advertisements for the local hairdresser, every little wisp having been carefully 'set' in a fussy little curl."

     In addition, as hinted to above, the cathedral suffered massive amounts of damage during the English Civil War when the close was held as a fortress alternatively by both sides. It was besieged three times. Canon fire brought down the central spire and destroyed the roofs. Puritans smashed anything considered idolatrous. The cathedral remained in a near derelict state until the 1660s when a restoration was undertaken under Bishop Hacket (the church was re-consecrated in 1668). When divine service had been resumed in 1660 services were held in the chapterhouse, the rest of the cathedral being in such a bad state of repair.

   "June 16th, 1660. This morning Mr Rawlins, of Lichfield, told me that the Clerk Vicars of the cathedral had entered the chapter-house, and there said service; and this, with the vestry, was the only place in the church with a roof to shelter them."

Elias Ashmole ?

      Not only was the spire rebuilt, but new window tracery inserted, vaults rebuilt and new furnishings supplied.

      How much then does this lack of original work matter? And how, exactly do you conserve a building such as this?  These are questions that are still 'live' in the worlds of architecture and architectural criticism. These thorough-going Victorian restorations have come in for much criticism since, but it can be argued that the very survival of these buildings depended on the thoroughness of our nineteenth century forebears. Perhaps it matters little for any changes embody the history of the building, and surely it cannot be expected that any building should or can survive intact for so long. A pragmatic approach is required, not a desire for purity.

* cf 'Church and Diocese in the West Midlands: The Transition from British to Anglo-Saxon Control' in 'Pastoral care before the Parish' ed John Blair and Richard Sharpe (Leicester, 1992) pp 13-40

** Doing a quick bit of research I found it mentioned in the original Bells Cathedral series volume on Lichfield. It was demolished in 1315.