Early English architecture

“ It is a costly building, a refined and thought-out design; and yet one cannot say that there is anything of the past in it more than this—that it is based upon the spirit and taste of the Renaissance rather than upon that of the classic epoch, or of the mediæval epoch, early or late, or of the Post-Renaissance epoch, beginning in the North about 1650. This relative independence{206} is what the foreigner sees most strongly in modern English architectural practice. ”

“ The English cottages have an importance in the story of the development of architecture far greater than that which concerns their mere beauty and picturesqueness. As we follow the history of Gothic art we find that for the most part the instinctive art in relation to church architecture came to an end in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, but the right impulse did not cease. House-building went on, though there was no church-building, and we admire greatly some of those grand mansions which were reared in the time of Elizabeth and the early Stuarts ”

“ Transition from Norman to Gothic Architecture—The Period of Change—The Early English Style—Examples and Characteristics of the Style—Towers—Windows—Doorways—Porches—Buttresses—Pillars—Arches—Mouldings and Ornaments—Fronts.
The history of architecture is the history of change, sometimes gradual, sometimes sudden, but always change. People and nations change; new ideas spring up among them; new wants are created, and Architecture has to minister to these wants. A necessity arises and has to be met ”

“ It can hardly, however, be called an architectural style; it would have no right to figure in any work illustrating the great architectural styles of the world. It was, in fact, the last dying phase of the English Renaissance; the architecture of the classic order reduced to a threadbare condition, treated very simply and in plain materials, in many cases shorn of its columnar features, and reflecting faithfully enough the prim rationalistic taste in literature and art of the England of the 18th century. ”

“ In our towns almost every tower and spire which we see is a modern building, though the styles may vary from Norman to Perpendicular and seventeenth century. Modern buildings, churches, halls, public offices, and private houses are mostly imitations of the work of past ages. There is no nineteenth-century style of English architecture. Some day, perhaps, England may develop a new style of architecture, such as the world has never yet seen, but at the present time we seem to be only able to copy and adapt the work of those who have gone before us. ”

“ When the need for feudal strongholds had passed, and the conditions of life in the open country had become peaceful, a type of domestic architecture arose in England which assumed its most characteristic form in the early Elizabethan Age. The best features of this architecture were of native growth out of the humbler forms of mediæval domestic building, the feudal castle, and the latest phase of Perpendicular Gothic. ”

“ When the grouped lancets of the east end were replaced by one great mullioned and traceried opening, some truly magnificent designs were indeed produced, of which that of the Presbytery of Lincoln is perhaps the grandest; yet still are these great windows generally mere openings in walls. Rarely, if ever, in England do the rib of the vault and the archivolt of the aperture come one and the same member, as they do in Amiens Cathedral.
Such are the structural characteristics of early pointed architecture in England in so far as concerns the longitudinal bays. ”

“ In establishing that outpost in the New World, which was to become the first permanent English settlement on this side of the Atlantic, as well as the beginning of the British Empire—now the Commonwealth,—they brought with them a knowledge of, and skill in, English architecture. At that time, the beginning of the seventeenth century, architecture in Britain had reached a very high level of culture—witness the great minsters, like Lincoln and York, or the great castles, like Windsor and Hampton Court. ”

“ I think the very reverse of this; for the one thing to which it trusts for effect is that which scarcely exists in Anglo-Saxon buildings, while it is the leading principle in Norman ones. This error is the natural result of looking to rudeness of{76} workmanship and homeliness of material, instead of the principles of design, as the evidences of early style.
The next principle is merely the resultant of those already named. It is the decoration by mouldings of the salient divisions of the arch and the substitution of decorative shafts for those of the pier. ”

“ And the civilized countries have almost with one consent returned, in the main, to the adoption of a school of architecture based on classic types. The taste for medievalism is dying out even in Great Britain, which has been its chief stronghold. ”

“ In general, the foreign influence governs the construction, while the Anglo-Norman influence appears in the decorative details. Structurally, there is no other building in England that exhibits so much of Gothic character except Westminster Abbey, which is rather a French than an English design. ”

“ But while in England the new style was winning its way, in Italy it was passing the zenith of its vigour. The continued study of ancient monuments enabled architects to reduce the old methods of design to a system which could be acquired with ease, and architectural design became less a matter of invention than a capacity for adapting new buildings to old rules. ”

“ Our architecture, for example, took five hundred years to develop out of the splendid Norman through the various transitions of Gothic down to the perfection of the English country house in Elizabethan and Jacobean times. If church architecture was decaying, domestic architecture was improving. Architecture is, of course, the first and most important of all the arts, and when the human intellect is being used up for some other purpose there is a temporary cessation; there is never any decay of architecture. ”

“ But, unhappily, English life among the upper classes in the sixteenth century was not without sophistication. Many of the great houses were built, not for convenience and propriety, but to gratify a spirit of ostentation and pedantry. False notions of symmetry were allowed to control design at the expense of fitness, and classic details, even more grotesquely disfigured than in Italy and France, and combined with elements of nameless character, began to overlay the walls, and break the sky-lines. ”

“ And while this remark may seem to ignore architecture as such, i.e. the fine art of beautiful building, it expresses a fundamental principle; for to build a house to live in, shaped for the needs of civilized human life, is to secure the primary condition of good architectural effect. And no domestic architecture in Europe has had more genuine charm for the eye than that of England of the Elizabethan time in its integrity, as it may be seen, for instance, in the greater parts of Haddon Hall; St. Johns, Warwick; Hambleton Old Hall, Rutland; North Mymms, Hertfordshire, and others. [2] ”

“ English houses have so long established themselves in the forefront of domestic architecture that the distinctive qualities which they exhibit need not be enlarged upon; no houses excel them for quiet dignity, appropriate treatment, and charm of effect. ”

“ The latter carried the day, and, after an heroic struggle and many failures, England awoke from her long lethargy, to find herself the possessor of a noble architecture, a true exponent of ecclesiastical art and tradition, although confessedly far from perfect when applied to domestic buildings. For these latter edifices the old manor-houses, with their many mullioned windows and Tudor arcuation, formed the basis for design, and machicoli, turrets, and open timber roofs became the fashion for country-houses ”

“ But a national style of architecture was never reproduced by such means. It must grow up like the oak, unforced and in its native soil; and, when thus originating, its living forms become the embodiment of the polity, social history, and religious faith of the nation. Yet architecture is on this very account essentially a practical art, and even in the most gorgeous medieval cathedral a sense of fitness, and ideas of direct utility, may be traced as controlling powers influencing the whole design. ”

“ Thus we see that the adoption of the arched system of construction, unbiassed by any pre-existing laws of art, but aided only by the very rational desire to utilise the materials most abundantly provided by nature, led to two of the most important characteristics common to Romanesque and Gothic architecture, viz., the sub-ordinated arch and the clustered column, with the whole system of decoration derived from them; than which no two features can be pointed out which have been more richly fruitful of architectural forms the most original and beautiful. ”

“ Elizabethan architecture, which was in its flower during the latter half of the 16th century—more than a hundred years after the revival of classical architecture in Italy—shows the first symptoms of the adoption of the new style in England. The Elizabethan style—the name reaches back over the century—is characterised by much-pierced stonework, rectangular ornamentation, and a rough imitation of antique detail applied to masses of building, in which many Gothic features were still retained as regards general form, but altered as to ornament. ”

“ I hold the study of the contemporary buildings of neighbouring countries, especially those of France, to be essential to the due understanding of our own, and of the style as a whole; but this affords no excuse for the neglect of English architecture, to which, beyond all question, we are bound, as English architects, to direct our primary attention, and which will repay our study by a series of special beauties of its own, which have of late years been almost wholly overlooked. ”

“ The effect must not only have been striking, but in the refraction of light in the latitude of Athens, conditions would exist that differ essentially from any we could reproduce here.
The architecture of England is essentially its own, it is capable of adaptation to every known requirement, and many more.
Leaving fortifications and cathedrals on one side as exceptional, there is often a great wealth of{340} beauty in the most unpretending domestic buildings, that would lighten up a street or landscape, and if imitated would prove attractive to a tenant. ”

“ One thing cannot fail to strike every one who closely studies our old architecture. In early Norman buildings we often find rude and clumsy workmanship; in works from the middle of the fourteenth century, on to the extinction of Gothic architecture, we frequently meet with the same—the work of rude, untutored hands, evidently unable to do justice to their style ”

“ No, the change to Italian architecture was not for the better. It is true that picturesqueness was not stamped out of the genius of England, and so a number of the buildings that were put up until the reign of George the Second were shapely and often noble; indeed the classic style has a breadth about it, no doubt, that makes it safe for modern architects to deal with, especially in country houses. Of course the formal rows of windows, if the house is a very large one, are a serious matter to deal with, as far as the plan is concerned. ”

“ When a change or revolution in the order of things sets in, we find generally the style of architecture changing also to adapt itself to the new laws and new thought. This illustrates, to a certain degree, the reason why the so-called Victorian Gothic has not developed to any great extent in England, although some of our best architects sought to revive the earlier Gothic some years ago. ”

“ Columns and pilasters, answering to nothing in the real structural scheme of a building, are disposed with no thought save for agreeable lines and rhythmical spacings. Thus they soon came to be used in many novel ways. They were set in pairs, stretched through several stories, embraced by pediments, and varied in countless fanciful ways. In this way the architecture of the Renaissance even more than that of imperial Rome, became a mere surface architecture differing fundamentally from all of the great architectural systems of ancient times, and of the Middle Ages. ”

“ Some sketch of the state of recent architectural thought or endeavour in England seemed essential to the subject, since it is there that what may be called the philosophy of architecture has been most debated, and that thought English progress. has had the most obvious and most direct effect on architectural style and movement. ”

“ The true developments we have to look for are such as will be continually forced upon us by the necessities of new materials, new modes of construction, new requirements, and the altered habits and feelings of the age in which we are living; by the different modes of decoration which will from time to time offer themselves to our notice, and the importing into English architecture arts which had previously been peculiar to that of other countries and perhaps to wholly different styles. ”

“ In architecture the English favour the development of that kind of special Gothic of which they are the inventors, the Perpendicular, a rich and well-ordered style, terrestrial, practical, pleasant to look upon. No one did more to secure it a lasting fame than the Chancellor of Edward III. and of Richard II., William of Wykeham, bishop of Winchester, the restorer of Windsor, founder of New College at Oxford, the greatest builder of the century. ”