Chichester Cathedral

“ But Chichester is a pleasant old city, though it does not realise impossible dreams; its grey-toned cathedral makes a fine background for its beautiful arched market-cross. I am afraid I admire the market-cross more than the cathedral, for the cathedral is rather interesting than beautiful, whilst the market-cross is wholly beautiful and interesting besides. Never had an architect of lesser structures a more happy inspiration than when designing that graceful cross. ”

“ It lies in a plain at the foot of a spur of the South Downs, a mile from the head of Chichester Harbour, an inlet of the English Channel. The cathedral church of the Holy Trinity was founded towards the close of the 11th century, after the see had been removed to Chichester from Selsey in 1075. The first church was consecrated in 1108, but fires in 1114 and 1187 caused building to continue steadily until the close of the 13th century. ”

“ More attractive, because more human, than the cathedral itself are its precincts: the long resounding cloisters, the still, discreet lanes populous with clerics, and most of all that little terrace of ecclesiastical residences parallel with South Street, in the shadow of the mighty fane, covered with creeping greenness, from wistaria to ampelopsis, with minute windows,
Chichester Cross
inviolable front doors and trim front gardens, which (like all similar settlements) remind one of alms-houses carried out to the highest power. ”

“ One feels nervous for its future, but the good taste of the inhabitants, combined with the formidable barrier of the hills, will, it is hoped, prevent it ever becoming a mere congeries of tea gardens and like amenities. The fine cruciform church has a central tower and is Early Perpendicular; built by Baron de Poynings in the late fourteenth century it has many interesting details. Note the old thurible used as an alms box. The great south window was brought here from Chichester Cathedral. There is some good carved wood in the pulpit and rails. ”

“ His real genius appears far better in the memorial reliefs in honour of the private dead, which are to be found in so many churches throughout England—in Chichester Cathedral no less than eight, in the cathedrals of Winchester and Gloucester, in the churches of Leeds, Manchester, Campsall, Tewkesbury, Ledbury, Michaldever, Heston, Chertney, Cookham, Lewisham, Beckenham, Leyton, Milton, and many more. ”

“ But the very desire to deal well with the fabrics of our churches that were to be repaired taught men to study closely the facts of archaeology. The studies had a practical end, and at Chichester they found their opportunity in the cathedral.
But first a new church of S. Peter was built in West Street in 1853, so that the north arm of the transept should no longer be used as it had been for about four hundred years. Then not long afterwards Dean Chandler, at his death, left a large sum to be used for the purpose of decorating the cathedral. ”

“ It does not exhibit the massive force and strength of Durham; but the rigid power in the square piers of the arcades is stern compared with the more subtle variations of light and shade produced by the curved surfaces of the circular piers either at Ely or Peterborough.
During the Reformation period the divisions between the several chapels to the north and south of the nave were removed; and so since that date Chichester has been the only cathedral in England which has what may be called five aisles, and it is wider than any other, excepting York, being ninety-one feet across. ”

“ The spire of Chichester at a little distance greatly resembles that of Salisbury. It is on a smaller scale, but it tapers upward with a delicate slimness which, like that of its famous rival, makes a picture of the level landscape in which it stands. Unlike the spire of Salisbury, however, it has not at present the charm of antiquity. A few years ago the old steeple collapsed and tumbled into the church, and the present structure is but a modern facsimile. The cathedral is not of the highest interest ”

“ The best thing left to us in Chichester, apart from the Cathedral and its subject buildings, is, I think, St Mary's Hospital, a foundation dating from the time of Henry II., which possesses a noble great hall, and a pretty Decorated chapel, with old stalls, which is still used as an almshouse. It stands upon the site of the first Franciscan house established in Chichester. In 1269 the Friars Minor left this place and moved to the site of the old Castle. There they built the church of which the choir still remains, a lovely work ruined at the dissolution and used as the Guildhall. ”

“ Whatever noise may be in the air you know in your heart that quietude is its true characteristic. One might say that above the loudest street cries you are continually conscious of the silence of the close.
Chichester's cathedral is not among the most beautiful or the most interesting, but there is none cooler. ”

“ Foreign influence is also noticeable in the somewhat later Ripon and Chichester Cathedrals, but by the beginning of the 13th century English Gothic had freed itself almost entirely from the trammels of French traditions, and started forward on the path from which it never deviated, combining a consummate mastery of structural principles and an unwearying attention to detail with a unity of expression that makes an English Gothic church or cathedral an ideal reflection of the spirit of the age which witnessed its erection. ”

“ In an arched recess in the wall nearer to the library is the tomb and effigy of Bishop Storey (25) . Close to this are two memorials of the sixteenth century. On the west side of the north transept are the monuments of Bishops Henry King, Carleton, and Grove.
The Stained Glass in the cathedral is all modern, and most of it is of the worst possible kind. It is bad in design and crude in colour, and much of it is not really stained glass at all, but a painted substitute. The only really good window in the building is that at the east end of the south choir aisle in S. Mary Magdalen's chapel. ”

“ On the evening of the wedding-day I went to Chichester, where the Bishop’s palace, venerable and grey, but buried in myrtles and coronillas, and radiant with brilliant flowers, lies close under the shadow of the beautiful cathedral spire. The Bishop (Durnford) , at eighty-seven, is the very type of a christian scholar, perfectly charming in conversation, equally at home in classical and in French, English, and Italian reminiscence and quotation, and touchingly filled with a generous and kindly spirit to all he meets with. ”

“ This gives the work a resemblance to the triforia of Chichester cathedral, to some work in the west front of Lincoln cathedral, and other Romanesque buildings, and shows that the diagonal form was used as ornament as well as in construction. Unfortunately the artist has given no representation of an interior. ”

“ Richard's pence’—contributions offered each Easter day or Whitsunday by the parishioners of each church in the diocese. With the same object he induced the archbishop of Canterbury and various bishops to recommend pilgrimages and offerings to Chichester Cathedral, with relaxation of penance as reward. He was a great patron of the mendicant friars, especially the Dominicans, who largely expanded their work in Sussex during his episcopate. ”

“ Chichester is a perfect example of an English rural capital, thronged on market days with tilt carts, each bringing a farmer or farmer's wife, and rich in those well-stored ironmongers' shops that one never sees elsewhere. But it is more than this: it is also a cathedral town, with the ever present sense of domination by the cloth even when the cloth is not visible. Chichester has its roughs and its public houses (Mr. Hudson in his Nature in Downland gives them a caustic chapter) ; it also has its race-week every July, and barracks within hail; yet it is always a cathedral town. ”

“ Professor Willis suggests that a great part of the work done after the fire of 1186-1187 was completed by the time of the dedication ceremony in 1199, and he is no doubt a safe authority to follow. But the nature of many architectural features tends very strongly to confirm the idea that much of the work in the ambulatory eastward of the sanctuary had been delayed. It may have been that the activity which prevailed during the early half of the thirteenth century was caused by the desire to see this portion of the church completed ”

“ April 3 was set apart in the calendar as Richard's day, and very pleasant must have been the observance in the Chichester streets. In 1297 we find Edward I. giving Lovel the harper 6s. 6d. for singing the Saint's praises; but Henry VIII. was to change all this. On December 14th, 1538, it being, I imagine, a fine day, the Defender of the Faith signed a paper ordering Sir William Goring and William Ernely, his Commissioners, to repair to Chichester Cathedral and remove "the bones, shrine, &c., of a certain Bishop —— [Pg 422] which they call S. Richard," to the Tower of London. ”

“ He bequeathed 1,250 marks for purposes of the fabric, a hundred shillings for two boys ‘to cense the body of Christ at the daily high mass,’ and endowed the precentorship for a mass on his anniversary. But his great work at Chichester was the rebuilding, in a singularly beautiful form of ‘decorated’ architecture, the eastern bays and the east end of the lady chapel of the cathedral. ”

“ The third and fourth flying-buttresses have a secondary, and apparently later, arch of fine grained white stone beneath their larger arches.
The copings on the backs of these buttresses are not weathered like those of the nave, and, except the one next the transept, each is covered with lead. There are no pinnacles to them above the aisle wall. The fourteenth-century builders had not touched them, as they did those south of the nave. There are, too, no gutters along their backs. ”

“ Mary's Hospital in North Street; and the remains of the monastery of the Grey Friars in the Priory Park. Young Chichester now plays cricket where of old the monks caught fish and performed their duties. It was probably on the mound that their Calvary stood; the last time I climbed it was to watch Bonnor, the Australian giant, practising in the nets below, too many years ago.
Like all cathedral towns Chichester has beautiful gardens, as one may see from the campanile. There are no lawns like the lawns of Bishops, Deans, and Colleges; and few flower beds more luxuriantly stocked. ”

“ J. B. Deane, the brass matrix of a seal, found, five years since, in a field between the two parishes of Cholderton and Newton Toney, on the borders of Hampshire, forty or fifty miles from Chichester. The adjoining parish of Amport, Hants, is a living belonging to the Chapter of Chichester. The seal, which appears by the legend to have belonged to the sub-dean of Chichester, represents an ecclesiastic praying to St. Peter, the patron saint of Chichester cathedral. The most populous parish in Chichester, in which also the close is situated, is the parish of "St. ”

“ The cathedral churches of the Old Foundation are those which have always had secular canons, which therefore were not suppressed at the dissolution of monasteries, but have gone on uninterruptedly with essentially the same constitution down to our own time. Such, besides our own church, are the neighbouring churches of Salisbury and Exeter. Such, in other parts of England, are York, London, Lincoln, Lichfield, Hereford, Chichester, and the four cathedrals of Wales. ”

“ Thus Chichester got a shrine of its own, which became exceedingly famous and attracted vast crowds of pilgrims, and thus indirectly brought so much money to the church that great works, such as the transformed Lady Chapel, and the many chapels which the Cathedral boasts, were able to be undertaken.
St Richard of Chichester was not a Sussex man; he was born about 1197, at Droitwich in Worcestershire, and thus gets his name Richard de Wyche. His father, a man well-to-do, died, however, when Richard was very young, and he being only a younger son fell into poverty. ”

“ On the other hand in Chichester cathedral (36) , the ogee motive is supreme. There are no more pointed arches; every arch is an ogee; and the cresting consists of wavy tracery surmounted by a battlement. The cusping of the upper ogee arches is compound; the foliage of pronounced bulbous character. It is unlikely that this work can be much earlier than that of the Ely stalls, which were not begun till 1338. On the evidence of costume and armour it would seem that the misericords were in course of execution between c. ”

“ Such are Canterbury, Chichester, Salisbury, Wells, Ely, and Lichfield. Barchester was emphatically a country town, dominated by the landowners in the vicinity; and the clergy around it were a rural priesthood. The society which was centred in any cathedral was and still is unlike anything else in the world. In the middle ages a great cathedral, like Salisbury or Lincoln, was designed for a semi-monastic rather than congregational worship. ”

“ The upper part, below the finishing horizontal string-course, is composed of two full and two half quatrefoils. The work in each arcade is recessed quite seven inches from the face of the general walling above; and the multiplied detail in the mouldings is finely studied. Opposite the entrance is the west doorway into the nave. The deep arch over this is seriously cracked in several places, though it has already been much restored. It has an outer label, which indicates that when it was built in there was then no porch to protect it. ”