A. Hamilton Thompson

“ Trinity College is the most distinguished fruit of that revived learning which paved the way for and accompanied the Reformation: from the very beginning its tendencies were liberal and progressive; every genius which it nourished was eminently constructive. The names of its three greatest alumni, Newton, Bacon, and Barrow, form, so to speak, the three fountain-heads of organized philosophical thought in England; and there are a hundred less monumental names which are sufficient guarantee of the intellectual supremacy of Trinity over her sisters. ”

“ They realise [132] that when an eighteenth century church is swept away, and a handsome building, in an eclectic Gothic style, decked with the best products of modern arts and crafts, rises in its place, the advantage is questionable. Not merely does much good furniture inevitably perish, but a link with the past is destroyed. Eighteenth century pews may not be altogether suited to a fifteenth century church; but they remind us at any rate that the fabric in which they stand has a continuous history. ”

“ At Tonbridge we see the mount-and-bailey fortress of early Norman times, built to meet needs which were purely military, and strengthened with a stone keep and walls and towers of stone as those needs became more pressing. At Carlisle we have the fortress with its compact inner ward and great tower, approached through the spacious base-court which served the needs of the garrison and might shelter flocks and herds in time of war. No castle of the most perfect type, planned in the golden age of military architecture, is represented. ”

“ CAMBRIDGE Dr Caius’ ingenious contention that Cambridge was founded in 3538 B.C. by Cantaber, a Spanish prince, has never received the support which its audacity deserves. The town cannot pretend to so great an antiquity, nor is its Roman origin even certain. It stood in the middle of a country intersected by Roman lines of road; in no part of England are Roman and British remains more plentiful and more interesting. ”

“ Nothing could be more beautiful, from their very simplicity of design, than the chancels of Mitford in Northumberland, or Burgh-next-Aylsham in Norfolk, with their row of lancet windows in the side walls, and the marked projection of their string-courses and buttresses. Later in the thirteenth century, the chancel of Houghton-le-Spring church, near Durham, gives us another example from the north of England of spacious planning, with light admitted through a row of splayed lancets. ”

“ The castle to which it was added was surrounded by a curtain, largely of twelfth-century date,354 and contained a tower-keep and domestic buildings which appear to have been in the main of the thirteenth century. Situated at the head of a very steep hill, and flanked by two huge octagonal towers, this gatehouse is the perfection of the type which is seen, with more slender flanking towers, at Bothal and in the keep of Alnwick. The window openings towards the field are few and small: the battlements are boldly corbelled out, and machicolations of large size are left between them and the wall. ”

“ When one hears of the destruction of the beautiful courts at Emmanuel and Sidney, one is tempted to wonder what good genius of building spared the second court of St John’s and Nevile’s Court at Trinity. ”

“ The wall is solid, and, looking at its fluted outer surface, we may well admire Philip’s military skill, which found it a not too formidable obstacle. A gateway in the east face gave access to the inner ward from the narrowest portion of the middle ward, and the ditch at this point was originally crossed by a stone causeway. The projecting spur of the great tower faced the gateway. The whole formidable design was perfect from the point of view of flanking, while the plan was a step towards the concentric arrangement of one ward within another. ”

“ As a matter of fact, fifteenth century builders were gifted with a power of design, and an ability to plan a parish church as a whole, unequalled in the previous history of medieval art. They lost their interest in sculptured detail, because their main concern was with the broad contrasts of light, shade, and colour, which their large windows and high walls afforded—contrasts in which there was no use for minute detail, and the deep under-cutting and delicate carving of the earlier styles became mere waste of time. ”

“ It is not at all surprising that their influence, combined with the constant importation of Genevan teachers, rendered Cambridge very susceptible for a time to reformed doctrine of a foreign type. But the final result of the Reformation in the University is shown by the intellectual freedom of her greatest sons. Bacon and Sir Isaac Newton are the obvious examples of this, but their illustrious personalities should not allow us to forget the brilliant ingenuity of the Cambridge Platonists; while, side by side with the greatest of all we may place the name of John Milton. ”

“ A minute symbolism, which often was the fruit of pious imagination, or was derived from the fancies of post-medieval writers on ritual, was read into every detail of the medieval church fabric. It is true that, as has been said, some builders worked imaginatively, imitating in the round naves of a few churches the rotunda of the Holy Sepulchre. Other instances of devout imitation might be found, if we looked for them. But the imitation of a concrete model is a different thing from translating abstract mysteries into the plan and elevation of a building. ”

“ The vast palace of St David’s, on the other hand, displays in all its details, and especially in the ogee-headed doorway of the porch of its larger hall, a sumptuousness of decoration which is not often found in the domestic architecture of the time. The great hall on the west side of the courtyard, the smaller hall and private apartments on the south side, the vaulted cellars which occupy the whole of the basement in each range, are planned upon a scale equal to that of a castle of first-rate size. ”

“ Our parish churches, as we have them to-day, are stripped of much that made them beautiful. The cold walls, often scraped of all their plaster and whitewash; the windows, glazed with white glass, or with modern glass of very uncertain merit, reveal merely the structural skeleton of the building. ”

“ In our own day a congregation, driven out by builders or restorers, can resort to a school room or mission room. In the middle ages, these alternatives were unknown; and the church was positively indispensable. With this in view, the builders were obliged to add their aisles without touching more of the main fabric than they could help. Usually, then, they took the length of the existing aisleless building for the length of their aisles. They then set out the aisles upon either side of the church, building the outer walls, and dividing them into bays by external buttresses. ”

“ Before we proceed, however, to the growth of the stone-walled castle, some description is necessary of the improvement in siege-engines and methods of attack by which its development was governed. It must be kept in mind that the siegecraft of the middle ages advanced upon lines that were by no means new. Its engines, its devices for breaking down or scaling walls and towers, were not new inventions, but relics of Roman military science. With the decay of the Roman power in western Europe, these materials of warfare, unknown to the Teutonic conquerors of Britain, had fallen into disuse. ”

“ One of the prettiest spots in the whole University is the tiny medieval court on the north side of Corpus. You have only to turn your back on the ugly Hall, and look at three sides of a venerable, low quadrangle clothed with ivy and stained with age, and you can imagine yourself back in the days of the Edwards, when the pious members of the Cambridge benefit societies founded the college. Times have changed, and the court has been repaired fairly often ”

“ The third source of colour to the church, apart from the stonework and the stained glass, was the woodwork of roofs, screens, and other pieces of furniture. With this must be reckoned also the colour of the stone furniture of the church, the sedilia, canopied tombs, stone reredoses, pulpits, and so on. As a rule, the colouring of the stone, here as upon the walls, has faded away or has been obscured by later coats of plaster or whitewash. Here and there, as at Higham Ferrers, a tomb-canopy keeps not a little of its original brilliance. ”

“ Internally, the charm of the general effect is extraordinary, and every Cambridge man must have felt it at some time or other. Its length is 316 feet, its breadth 451⁄2 feet, its height 78 feet; and this vast area is flooded with the exquisite colours of the stained windows. Even the roof, an unbroken expanse of that development of vaulting known as fan tracery, must give the palm to the windows. Without its stained glass, King’s Chapel would be, like the Lady [98] Chapel at Ely, merely an interesting relic. ”

“ The cylindrical donjon in England and Wales was simply an experiment attempted here and there, as an improvement upon the rectangular tower, but was never carried to the general perfection which it attained in France. Its isolation at Coucy, upon the outer face of the inner ward, protected by its own inner ditch, and covered by a strong curtain of its own, are signs of a perfection of engineering skill to which our builders did not attain. ”

“ No effect of colour can well surpass that which is still to be seen in some of our late medieval churches—the grisaille windows of the chancel at Norbury in Derbyshire, the late fourteenth century figure glass of the north aisle at Lowick in Northamptonshire, the fifteenth century east window of the south aisle at St Winnow in Cornwall, the fourteenth century Jesse tree, once in St Chad’s, and now in St Mary’s at Shrewsbury, or the fifteenth century Jesse tree at Llanrhaiadr-yn-Cynmerch, near Denbigh. Some of the parish churches of York are almost as rich in glass as the cathedral itself. ”

“ The Roman invaders brought to England new methods of military construction and the tradition of an architecture of dressed and cemented stone. Their whole system of warfare was far in advance of that pursued by the British tribes. They had developed the art of siege to a high pitch. Their operations in open field were orderly and scientific. Their walled strongholds were constructed with a view which took into account, not only the mere strength of the ramparts, but also the capacity of the defenders to man them. Men, not fortresses, were the main asset of Roman warfare ”

“ There is a gorgeous coloured frame, probably much restored, for a reredos in the north chapel at Worstead in Norfolk. The panels of the reredos in the south aisle at Northleach contain certain figures of saints, in faded green, red, and blue. The fine reredoses in the side chapels of St Cuthbert’s at Wells have brilliant remains of gilding. But coloured woodwork, which has lost little of its brightness, is fairly common, and, though it has often [106] been subjected to drastic restoration, is sometimes almost untouched by time. ”