St Albans Cathedral II: The Nave

     And now for the interior, and the nave. 

     Firstly, and I think this is quite a rare thing these days, the visitor is left quite alone - there is minimum signage, there is no eager 'greeter' resplendent in coloured sash and there is no entrance charge. The building is left to speak for itself. Commendable. 

     Secondly, I feel that I have to point out a Medieval pilgrim would have experienced this building in a way quite differently to us, apart from the changes to the building, liturgy etc. The pilgrim would have had only limited access to this church, entering and leaving by a door in the N presbytery aisle, not through the great west door as today. One can't help but think they were a bit short changed. The rest of the church was, I believe, out of bounds to them. We are used, these days, to the nave being used as a great congregational space, but 'back in the day' the original purpose was simply to provide for a space for processions safe from the vagaries of the English weather. That, and bit of ostentation. Later, as it became common for monks to be ordained (originally they had be simply laity under vows) and for them to say mass everyday the nave was used to house additional altars it being the Medieval custom that an altar could only be used once a day to celebrate the Eucharist. We shouldn't imagine that these additional masses were in anyway congregational. They were solitary affairs. There could have been any number of these Low Masses going on at any time throughout the building. After the Reformation the nave became used, I believe, as a sort of covered cemetery, oddly echoing the original use of the nave of St Peter's in Rome.

      So what did I notice stand there with the extremely long nave stretching out before me into the religious gloomth? The austerity of the space and its asymmetry. The south arcade has three periods of building and the north two. The Early English and the Decorated work both are very good, the Norman crude, massive and vigorous. And that neatly sums up the architectural history of the building for there are no major Perpendicular additions or alterations to the church, and as I mentioned in my previous post milord Grimthorpe did his utmost to remove all those Perpendicular intrusions he did find. Over this architectural mash-up is a flat Late Medieval ceiling - dark and a bit dull, except at its e end where it is painted. I think if had been a nineteenth century restorer I would have been inclined to remove the whole thing and replace it with a wooden tunnel vault, such as you might find in York Minster or Glasgow Cathedral. The intention of the Early English builders had been to vault in stone, but idea was quickly abandoned.  In fact the majority of roofs in the cathedral are of wood, the only original stone vaults being in the presbytery aisles; Hertfordshire being rich in timber and poor in good quality building stone. I wonder what the effect would have been if they had kept to their original scheme.

     Anyway these elements of asymmetry and austerity add to the sense of the parochial that permeates not only the nave but the whole church and which I mentioned when talking about the exterior. Not that that is a bad thing. This is also partly due to the lack those elements that we associate with the cathedral; for instance, there are no grand post-reformation monuments and very few from before. As for the furnishings in the nave; there is an excellent west window by Sir J N Comper, and a lovely font cover by Randoll Blacking. However of more importance are a number of precious medieval survivals. Firstly there is the medieval Rood Screen, built of stone like the one at Crowland in Lincolnshire. Apparently they were more likely constructed of wood like the surviving one at Peterborough, which alas is no longer in situ, but is currently in use as a parclose screen in the north transept there. It did however survive in situ into the nineteenth century, when Blore, I think, was let loose on the interior. I digress. Originally the Rood screen would have been surmounted by a depiction of the Crucifixion. In addition this sculptural group could be flanked by two seraphim standing on wheels, combining Old Testament imagery from the Books of Isaiah and Ezekiel. The second survival, and is really is a fluke of history, are the paintings on the Norman piers of the n arcade. They really are something special, and some display Byzantine influence. Originally they served as reredoses for those additional altars I mentioned above.