Building after the Restoration: Churches
After the Reformation the churches, as we have said, were much
neglected for a long time. They were used in a different way from
what they had been in the Middle Ages--a great deal more was
thought of preaching and hearing sermons. People grew to be very
particular as to where they sat in church, and to have a seat in
accordance with their dignity and importance. Pews became very
important things. Churches were not heated in those days, though
the services were very long, for sermons often lasted for an hour
or two. No doubt one reason for making pews so high was to keep off
draughts. The great people of the parish seemed to try to outdo
each other in the height of their pews. Some of the grand pews
had canopies to them, like old-fashioned four-post bedsteads, and
they were hung round with curtains. In later times they even had
fireplaces, with "poker, tongs, and shovel" all complete.
Gradually the whole floor-space got filled up with pews with high
wooden walls, some square, some oblong, all shut in with doors, and
with seats running round them. A little girl who was once taken to
a church which was fitted with these "horse-box" pews, when she
came home told her mother: "We went into a cupboard and sat on a
shelf!" The fashion of having pews shut in with doors lasted for
several centuries; indeed you may see them still in some churches,
though they are not nearly as high as they once were.
The churches needed repairs from time to time in the seventeenth
century, and a few, a very few, new ones were built. But money was
not spent upon them as it had been in the Middle Ages. They were
patched up and mended for the most part as cheaply as possible. In
very few cases was any attempt made to make them as beautiful as
the houses which were being built at the time.
[Illustration: _Pews in a Church at Stokesay, Shropshire, rebuilt
1654_]
After the Restoration there arose a great interest in bells and
bell-ringing. At the end of the seventeenth century a great many
rings of bells were hung in the old steeples and belfries, which
had to be altered to receive them.
The monuments set up in the churches in the reign of King Charles
II were somewhat smaller than they had been. They were often
tablets on the walls, ornamented with curious carvings of skulls
and cross-bones, cherubs' heads, curtains, and festoons of flowers
and fruits, often finely carved. You will not find in churchyards
many grave-stones or tombs of an earlier date than 1660. The
head-stones were then very small, and had little on them except
"Here lyeth the body of" so-and-so, and the date.
A great many churches were built in London after the Fire. They
were furnished with high pews, usually all of the same height, and
having doors. The woodwork, especially of the pulpit, reading-desk,
and organ-case, in these churches is mostly very fine. A celebrated
carver of this period was Grinling Gibbons, and he and his pupils
did a great deal of such work, both in churches and houses.
In other parts of the country Wren's work was imitated in some of
the new churches then built, and in some of the old ones which were
altered or rearranged. One of the best specimens of work done at
this time is to be seen in Whitchurch, in Middlesex.
Not very many new churches, however, were built until the beginning
of the nineteenth century, except in some of the towns which had
grown up from country villages. In and round London most of the
villages increased so much in size that the little old parish
church was much too small for the population. Galleries were put up
in them in all sorts of queer places, to provide more seats. More
room still being wanted, many churches were pulled down, and larger
buildings set up.
The new churches of the latter part of the eighteenth and the early
years of the nineteenth centuries were simply big oblong rooms.
The outsides were often copies of parts of Grecian temples. They
were crowned with towers and spires somewhat like those on Wren's
churches, but not nearly so handsome.
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF ST. MARY-LE-BOW, LONDON
Although not considered one of Wren's best interiors, it gives
a good idea of the classical detail and carving employed by the
architect. The position of the pulpit, organ, and seats have been
altered since Wren's time]
Inside, the church was fitted up with a gallery running along
two sides and across one end. In the end gallery a big organ was
placed, and on either side of it, high up, near the ceiling,
were smaller galleries, one for the charity-school boys, the other
for the charity-school girls of the parish. The galleries and floor
of the church were filled with high pews. On the floor opposite the
organ were three huge boxes, rising one above the other. The lowest
box was for the parish clerk, the middle one was the reading-desk,
and the highest was the pulpit, which was often provided with a
sounding-board, not unlike an umbrella. The altar was in a little
niche behind the pulpit. Chapels were fitted up in much the same
way.
Under all these churches and chapels were vaults, in which people
were buried, but not in the earth. The coffins were placed on
shelves, one above the other, round the vault. On the walls of the
church above were often tablets to the memory of people lying in
the vaults below. These, by the nineteenth century, were for the
most part simply slabs of white marble, with black or grey borders.
There was hardly any carving at all on them; only inscriptions or
epitaphs, and texts.
The churchyards were used for burials, and by the middle of the
nineteenth century most of them were crowded with tombstones. In
London nearly all are now laid out in open spaces; many of the
grave-stones have quite disappeared, and those which remain are
rapidly perishing.
When we remember that the churchyards of the old churches had
been used as burial-places in many cases since the early days of
Christianity, and even before that, we can easily grasp the fact
that the earth had been used over and over again for burials.
About the middle of the nineteenth century the nation came to the
conclusion that burials in churches and crowded town churchyards
should no longer be allowed. The practice was dangerous to the
living. So cemeteries were opened in districts away from the towns
and homes of the people. Towns have grown so fast that many of
these cemeteries are now surrounded by houses, and in the midst of
big populations.
About the year 1840 interest began to be taken in the old English
styles of building, and a taste for Gothic architecture arose
again. Since that time places of worship of all descriptions have
for the most part been built in some sort of Gothic. When you read
that such and such a church or building is in the fourteenth-or
fifteenth-century style, you must understand that it is not a
copy of a church built in the fourteenth or fifteenth century,
but that its window-heads, doorways, arches, and fittings are _in
the style_ of the fourteenth or fifteenth century. Most of these
modern buildings are of brick, only faced or dressed with stone. It
is pretty safe to say that there is no old church standing which
was built entirely in the fourteenth century, and has remained
unaltered from that day to this. Nearly all the old churches have
been restored, a good many of them several times during the last
sixty or seventy years. Unfortunately, through ignorance, a good
many interesting features in the old buildings were swept away
during these "restorations". An old building needs very careful
handling when we set about repairing it.
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.
[Illustration: _King Edward VI's School and Alms Houses,
Stratford-on-Avon_]