"....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.
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. The western tower and 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.
Almost as richly decorated is the first mature piece of Gothic architecture at Ely. This the Galilee porch, built at the foot of the west tower. It is credited to Bishop Eustace. Then that the focus 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 in turn influenced the building of the Angel Quire 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.
