Ely Cathedral: The Exterior

"....Ely Minster is a curious pile of building all of stone the outside full of carvings and great arches and fine pillars in the front...."

     So said Celia Fiennes.  Daniel Defoe seemed almost completely immune to it as a piece of architecture, merely musing upon the building's supposed fragility.  But then both of them were of the Puritan persuasion.  Ely Cathedral is one of the largest Medieval churches in England, at 537ft the fifth longest.  English cathedrals (and their progeny in the other parts of Great Britain) tend to emphasise length over breadth and height.  In terms of area it ranks as the 4th largest.  I would be tempted to call Ely a leviathan of a building, except the epithet has a bad connotation in the Old Testament being the name of a monstrous sea-serpent, a symbol of chaos.  As I wrote in my previous post on the cathedral it is a complex building with an involved construction history; it is really two buildings: one a massive cruciform church (w additional western transept and tower) and an almost separate Lady Chapel to the north of the chancel that is one of the most exquisite pieces of architecture to survive from the Middle Ages.  In addition it possesses, in the central octagon of the cathedral, one of the most unique and thrilling spaces of Medieval Europe.

     To quote R H C Davies the Norman invasion of England brought to all parts of the British Isles 'a new aristocracy, a new church, a new monasticism and a new culture'.  Even those parts of the Britain that were not militarily conquered by the Normans, such as Scotland, were not immune from this new vigorous culture.  Across the British Isles this new culture was made manifest in new buildings, though few could match the colossal scale of the projects undertaken in England, or their number.  It was an architecture that, here at least, was massive, confident and austere.  Assertive, even.  In the revised Cambridgeshire volume of the 'Buildings of England' it is remarked that these projects came close to emulating the gargantuan scale of the Late Antique basilicas to the of the city of Rome. At Ely the rebuilding began in the 1080s when Simeon, who had been prior of Winchester, was appointed abbot. Unsurprisingly his work shows the influence of the that cathedral.

    By the time the rebuilding had reached the western transept and its great solitary tower, Gothic architecture was emerging.  It makes for a striking composition, made more so by the loss of the northern transept towards the end of the Middle Ages.  It has a sculptural quality that is often lacking in the w fronts of Medieval English cathedrals which tend to flatness.  Not only that but the western tower and the remaining transept are altogether different from the austerity of the main transept and nave.  There has been a major aesthetic change.  Both are embroidered - can one say tattooed? - with lavish architectural ornament - row upon row of little arches - so that little inert wall surface is left. While not unique in the British Isles, there is only one other cathedral in England with a single west tower and it, or was, Hereford.  In East Anglia there are two contemporaries Bury St Edmunds and Waltham (does that quite count?) and only one in Scotland, Kelso Abbey.  With the exception of Hereford these examples also possess a western transept, an architectural feature more associated with Romanesque Germany.  The final stage of the tower - echoing the shape of the Octagon dates from the 14th century, it was until the early 19th topped with a lead spire.
      Back to ground level and the final part of the w front here to be constructed was the porch or Galilee.  Built at the foot of the west tower - perhaps to act as a buttress - it is the first mature piece of Gothic architecture at Ely and it is almost as ornate as the existing sw transept.  It is credited to Bishop Eustace.

     Focus then shifts to the east end of the cathedral with the construction of what is referred to as the Presbytery. It was built 1234-52 during the episcopate of Bishop Northwold to house the shrine of St Etheldreda. Luxurious Early English influenced by the nave at Lincoln cathedral.  Like a game of tennis, it in turn influenced the building of the Angel Choir at Lincoln built to house the shrine of St Hugh.

   And so we reach the Decorated period and a flowering of artistic endeavour at Ely under the subprior and sacrist Alan of Walsingham. Work began on the Lady Chapel in 1321 but was suddenly halted when on the night of 22nd February 1322 the old Norman central tower collapsed into the chancel.  Between that year and 1340, not only a new chancel was built in the most fluid and luxurious of styles but a new top-lit space was created at the heart of the cathedral; one was that was without real precedent both technically and conceptually.  That finished, work then recommenced on the Lady chapel, which was complete by c. 1352/3 when the chapel was consecrated.

     There is very little Perpendicular work at Ely.  The sole exceptions are the fantastical chantry chapels of Bishops Alcock, and West.  More about in a further post.

    With Reformation comes the usual destruction and retrenchment.  The cathedral came through the Civil war relatively unscathed.  The nw corner of the n transept collapsed in 1699 and is restored in the classical style by the mason Robert Grumbold with advice of Sir Christopher Wren.  The door is particularly fine and rather French.  It replaced the old Pilgrim's Door.  In 1770 James Essex re-ordered the interior of the cathedral and worked on the Octagon.

     Pugin visited the cathedral in 1834 exclaiming with his usual vigour: Here is a church, magnificent in every respect; falling into decay through gross neglect.  there is no person appointed to attend to the repair of the building, and the only erson who has been employed in the last sixty years is a bricklayer. Not even common precautions are taken to keep the building dry.
     Salvation came in the form of Sir George Gilbert Scott, who under took a thorough restoration and re-ordering of the building.  He essentially re-designed the Octagon as left by Essex in the 18th century, restoring the flying buttresses, and adding pinnacles to the lower stage.  Whether accurate or not those pinnacles are aesthetically just right.

     In this last century Sir John Ninian Comper, Stephen Dykes Bower and George Pace have worked on the cathedral.

'Oh, to be in England'

 Oh, to be in England, by Robert Browning 1812-1889

Oh, to be in England
Now that April's there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England - now!

And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops - at the bent
spray's edge -
That's the wise thrush; he sings each song
twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children's dower
- Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

Ely Cathedral: City and Precinct

Ely the stately
Shining a land mark
O'er the broad water
Gold-bright in the sunrise
Gold-red in the sunset
Grey in the waning
Kissed by the moonbeams
Glimmering through mist-cloud
Magic and matchless.

     Magic and Matchless.  Ely cathedral is unique and quite remarkable.  It stands, vast and complex, in the midst one of England's smallest cities, on an 'island' in the East Anglian fenland. Not a landscape of immediate satisfaction, those level unending acres where the straight line predominates and 'where everything is three quarters sky' - a place that is easy to dislike.  As I write this I am put in mind of these lines of Philip Larkin, though here he is writing about the level land of Holderness, and here in these flat Fens the land meets the North Sea not with a bang but a whimper.

And out beyond its mortgaged half-build edges
Fast-shadowed wheat-fields, running high as hedges,
Isolate villages where removed lives

Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands
Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,
Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,
Luminously-peopled air ascends;
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shapes and shingles. Here is unfettered existence:
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.

     Ely,  it has to be said, like the other Fenland towns tends like the landscape itself, to the utilitarian, being work-a-day sor of place.  But beauty exists: Ely has it, as do King's Lynn, Boston, Wisbech and Spalding. Surprisingly perhaps.  Still, the little streets climb the hill from the river, from the forgotten hithes, past the grey warehouse and the cottage or from the station, to the cathedral.  And there it stands.  Heroic in scale and intent.  Built from oolitic limestone brought all the way from Barnack in the Soke of Peterborough some forty odd miles to the west.  Almost like an act of foolishness.  A place of holiness and ancient.  The contrast could not be more marked.

     I suppose I must now talk history.  I won't bore you with too much of it.  Just enough to give you an idea why the cathedral was constructed. As with the life of St Chad the life of St Etheldreda of Ely is all rather eventful, reading somewhat like a soap-opera or 19th century Sensation Novel. I seem to be waxing in my cynicism where this sort of thing is concerned.
    All you need to know here is that c. AD 673, in her early 30s, Etheldreda, daughter of King Anna of East Anglia, founded a monastery (a double house for men and women) believed to be on the site of the present cathedral.  She was (of course) abbess, and she remained so until her death some six or seven years later, c 679.  She would have been about 45 years old.  It could be that she was actually re-founding an earlier monastic foundation on the Isle, at a place called Cratendune, and was sacked (c650?) by the Mercian army under King Penda.  Much of this detail comes from the much later 'Liber Eliensis'.  Bede writing closer to the events is that bit more circumspect.  Whatever happened, Etheldreda gained a reputation for holiness and Ely became a place of pilgrimage.

     Researching these early saints can be confusing business and not even the cathedral authorities are immune from this: the cathedral website site suggests that Penda and his Mercian army were responsible for destroying Etheldreda's foundation, which would be quite the accomplishment for a man dead by at least some 18 years at the time of her own passing.  It was the Viking raids that did for monastery.  It was re-founded as a Benedictine house for men by King Edgar in 970 as part of a wider reform movement in the English church.  In the 1109 it was raised to the rank of cathedral with the creation of the Diocese of Ely.  In 1539 the priory was suppressed and after a wait of some 2 years (rather like at Peterborough) a new charter was granted in 1549.  There followed the usual iconoclasm that accompanied the English Reformation.  Up until the early 19th century the Isle and areas north, such as Wisbech, were a 'liberty' (at some point even a 'Palatinate'), with the Bishop of Ely exercising not only spiritual but temporal power.  It was a practical solution to the often inaccessibility of the Isle due to flooding.  There are however a couple of names that will reappear in these posts on the cathedral: Alan of Walsingham and James Bentham.  Alan of Walsingham was a member of the monastic community, and he was a goldsmith. However, it is as architect or at least as patron that he is remembered.  James Bentham (1709-1794) was a prebendary of the cathedral and an antiquarian and historian.  He was the author of 'The History and antiquities of the Conventual & Cathedral Church of Ely : from the foundation of the monastery, A.D. 673, to the year 1771'.

    So to the precincts.  The County History for Cambridgeshire considers them to be the largest in the country, amongst the Medieval cathedrals.  I wonder if that is true?  The precinct is bounded by (s) Back Hill, (w) The Gallery, (n) High St & Fore Hill and (e) Broad St.   I'm not sure how many gates there were originally, but six are usually mentioned:  the Ely Porta on the w, and four on the n along the High St:  Steeple Gate medieval, timber-framed and Georgianised, which gave access to the now demolished parish church of The Holy Cross and the Lay Cemetery (now Holy Cross Green) on the N side of the cathedral.  Beside the gate stood the demolished Chapel of St Peter, whose crypt served as a charnel house.  Goldsmith's Tower, Sextry Gate (both associated with Alan of Walsingham) form along with Sextry and the Almonry a range on the s side of the High St.; then followed the lost Porta Monachorum.  It was the largest of all the cathedral gates and opened out onto the Market Place.  Finally there was a gate on Broad St.

     The cathedral and its ancillary buildings stand clustered together in the northwest corner of the precinct at the highest point of the site, a mere 68 ft above sea level.  Most of the conventual buildings - cloisters, chapterhouse and dorter have gone, but to the s of the remains of cloister and the refectory is a complex of interrelated buildings: the King's Hall, the Queen's Hall, The West Range, and the Priors House.  They have all been altered over time, but the collage of styles and materials, and elements of ruination is very satisfying.  The Prior's House does retain the Priors Chapel, aka Prior Crauden's Chapel, one of the buildings associated with the time Alan of Walsingham.  It is not usually open to the public, so I only have an image of the exterior to share with you. I searched on line for a suitable image of the sumptuous Decorated gothic interior but to no avail. (As of 04.04.25 I have found a 19th century book illustration that will suffice) There are no early paintings or prints available simply because sometime post-Reformation the interior was subdivided for domestic use.  These intrusions were not removed until the middle of the 19th century, when the chapel was restored to sacred use under the supervision of Canon Stewart and Prof Willis.  It is a building that really deserves a post all of its own. 

     To the se of the cathedral are the remains of the Infirmary.  It reminds me of the similar infirmary at Peterborough (though much bigger) which was partly unroofed since the Reformation and houses built into the remaining fabric. I always thought that a similar process occurred here, but the story here may be more complicated as some unroofing occurred before the Reformation when at least two buildings were built onto the fabric; these included living accommodation for Alan of Walsingham and the 'Black Hostry' for Benedictine Monks to stay when travelling.  Bentham, following William Stukeley, erroneously believed that the infirmary was the original conventual church.  'A Guide to the Cathedral Church and Conventual Buildings at Ely' 0f 1824 concurred stating: 'there is all certainty which the nature of the case admits, that the arches and columns we now behold, are the very same which were erected by the Virgin Queen our foundress in the year 673'.  The Infirmary is actually Norman.

     The rest of the precincts are given over to fields and a park which was laid out, I think, at the end of the 18th century.  The Park contains the remains of a castle - a 4o ft high motte called Cherry Hill.

     To the west of the cathedral is the triangular Palace Green.  It is one the most attractive parts of the city with the former Bishop's Palace on the s and some attractive Georgian Houses on the n.  'The Cambridge Landscape', published in 1973, says that the Green represents the original settlement.  the modern town centre is later Medieval development under the auspices of the Bishop of Ely.  it was famous in the for the annual St Audrey fair, lasting 7 days around the feast day of St Etheldreda.  It was the most important of the three fairs held in the city annually.  It is the origin of the word 'tawdry'.

     

King's College Chapel

Tax not the royal saint with vain expense,
With ill-matched aims the Architect who planned -

Albeit labouring for a scanty band

Of white-robed Scholars only - this immense

And glorious Work of fine intelligence!

Give all thou canst; high Heaven rejects the lore

Of nicely-calculated less or more;

So deemed the man who fashioned for the sense

These lofty pillars, spread that branching roof

Sel-poised, and scooped into ten thousand cells,

Where light and shade repose, where music dwells

Lingering - and wandering on as loathe to die;

Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof

That they were born for immortality.

     So said William Wordsworth about this most remarkable of buildings, King's College Chapel.  My last visit here was decades ago and after yesterday afternoon's visit, in the sharp spring sunshine, I cannot understand why I deprived myself of this incredible building for so long.  I suspect I just thought it all just too 'touristy', but, at least on a week day afternoon in mid-March, it was almost empty.  It is a place of immense beauty, of luminous transcendence.  There is something of the Gesamtkunstwerk, of the sublime, about it.  I was, as you be able tell, profoundly moved by the experience.

     And so to a bit of history.  King's College - The King's College of Our Lady and St Nicholas at Cambridge - was founded by the ill-stared English King Henry VI in 1441.  Inspired by Bishop Wykeham of Winchester the King also founded a school, Eton College.  The work here at Cambridge alone was a colossal undertaking, consuming streets and wharfs and a church, St John Zachary, of the Medieval city.  Work on the chapel, which is bigger than many cathedrals in the British Isles, began in 1446 and was finished (in the reign of King Henry VIII) in c1515, with the furnishing continuing into the 1530s.  Roughly speaking it belongs to two periods of work: firstly under Reginald of Ely, to whom we owe the plan and general form of the chapel and whose work we have encountered before at St Mary, Burwell; and secondly under John Wastell, who is believed to have constructed the 'New Building' at Peterborough Cathedral.  It is under Wastell that the antechapel or nave was built along with the great corner pinnacles, and the spectacular fan vault constructed.  The college buildings however were not completed until the early 19th century.  The chapel at Eton was not finished according to the original plan.

      The plan of King's College Chapel is simple enough; a long rectangular chapel (divided into chapel and ante-chapel by a hefty wooden screen) with a series of subsidiary chapels etc (18 in all, 9 on each side) nestling between the immense buttresses.  The design must owe something to the Lady Chapel at Ely Cathedral just to the n of Cambridge and I visited that morning, and perhaps also to the lost St Stephen's chapel at Westminster.

     The interior is breathtaking, almost incomprehensible.  The main body of the chapel is 40 ft wide and 80 ft high. Again very few cathedrals in Britain attain those sort of dimensions.  Wastell's design of the ante-chapel is a tour de force.  Rather like the choir at Gloucester cathedral all is tracery - it ascends from the floor to apex of the windows unifying everything; it forms the screen work veiling the side chapels, and what little wall surface there is has disappeared behind a mesh of tracery and over-sized heraldic sculpture.  Over all is the fan vault, itself a net of tracery patterns.  Incredible.  I think the decision to partially open up the side chapels to the nave with screen-work is very clever, adding an element of mystery and depth to what overwise be a lucidly simple space.

     Beyond the massive dark wooden screen - a work dating from the early years of both the English Renaissance and (perhaps surprisingly for some) the English Reformation - is the working space of the building, the beating heart, the chapel proper.  This is the design of Reginald of Ely.  And a more austere place it is.  Apparently more in keeping with the wishes of the founder.  Perhaps more like St Stephen's at Westminster in some respects.

     To step into the side chapels, however, is to enter a different world, intimate and womb-like chthonic space.  Spaces that are immediately easier to comprehend because the scale is, well, almost parochial. One gets a sense of the heft of the building, as though they had be excavated from the living rock.  Some are used as vestries, some (on the N side) house a small museum, the westernmost contain the porches, four are used as chapels, and one (the former chantry chapel of Provost Hacumblen) - most evocatively - is used as a tomb chamber.

    And that brings me smartly to the furnishings of the chapel.  Of the monuments in the Tomb Chapel the most important are the marble table-tomb to John Churchill marquess of Blandford,1702-3 and the wall tablet to Samuel Collins,1651, which retains its shadow painting.  Between the wars T H Lyon (we've seen his work before at Little St Mary) fitted up the the se chapel as a war memorial, and he did a very good job.  The ne chapel (St Edward's) contains a Late medieval panel painting 'Madonna in the Rosary' by Gert von Lom.  The Founder's Chapel houses a former altarpiece from the High Altar 'The Deposition of Christ' by Girolamo Siciolente Sermoneta, c 1568, and 'The Adoration of the Magi' c by the Master of the Von Groote Adoration.  The Whichcote Chapel, which I didn't see, functions as a baptistry containing an 18th century marble font, and, serving as a reredos, an 18th century painting by Carlo Maratta.

      Most important however is the stained glass in the 'great windows' of the chapel.  With the exception of the w window(Late Victorian) they date from 1515-1531 and are a rare survival.

    As for wood work I have already mentioned the great choir screen, but connected to that are the choir stalls - work continued on them until 1633.  In addition there a number of original doors.  In the the late 1960s the panelling at the e end was removed to storage as part of the installation of a new reredos for the High Altar - 'The Adoration of the Magi' (1633-4) by Rubens. Critical opinion divided sharply, and I incline to to those were opposed to such an addition to the chapel.

     Photos in the order of my progress through the chapel.

File into the yellow candle light, fair choristers of King's

Lost in the shadowy silence of canopied Renaissance stalls

In blazing glass above the dark glow skies and thrones and wings

Blue, ruby, gold, and green between the whiteness of the walls,

And with what precision the stonework soars and springs

To fountain out a spreading vault - a shower that never falls.

The white of windy Cambridge courts, the cobbles brown and dry

The gold of plaster Gothic with ivy overgrown

The apple-red, the silver fronts, the wide green flats and high,

The yellowing elm trees circled out on islands of their own -

Oh, here behold all colours change that catch the falling sky

To waves of pearly light that heave along the shafted stone.

In far East Anglian churches, the clasped hands lying long,

Recumbent on sepulchral slabs or effigied in brass

Buttress in prayer this vaulted roof so white and light and strong

And countless congregations as the generations pass

Join choir and great crowned organ case, in centuries of song

To praise Eternity contained in Time and coloured glass.