the church of Wells holding a far higher position among its fellows.
The east ends of English churches are of various kinds; the apsidal
form, that most usual on the Continent, being the rarest. We do indeed
find the German apse without aisles repeated at Lichfield, and the
French apse with its divergent chapels is found on a vast scale at
Westminster, and on a smaller at Tewkesbury. And there are a few other
examples of apses of less merit and importance at Pershore, Coventry,
Wrexham, and a few other places.[22] But the apsidal arrangement never
was thoroughly English. Of the three great examples Tewkesbury is the
only one where the apse fills its proper function of a canopy over the
high altar. At Westminster the high altar is displaced by the shrine
of Eadward the Confessor, and at Lichfield it is not the choir, but
a Lady chapel of the full height, of which the apse is the ending.
English east ends fall for the most part under two classes. Sometimes,
as at York, Lincoln, Ely, Beverley, and Southwell, the Lady chapel
and whatever else stands east of the high altar is carried on at the
full height of the church. In other cases, as at Winchester, Hereford,
Exeter, and Salisbury, the Lady chapel and other chapels east of the
choir are much lower than the main body of the church. Now of these
arrangements I confess that I myself prefer the apse to all others.
No other plan gives such dignity to the high altar, or makes it so
evidently the central and crowning point of the whole church. There
is undoubtedly great stateliness in such an arrangement as that of
York and Lincoln; but its good effect is almost wholly confined to the
outside. The high altar seems to have come where it is by accident;
its position is marked by a mere screen, not by anything in the
arrangement of the building itself. In the third arrangement, where
all that is east of the choir is much lower than the choir, some share
of its proper dignity is or may be restored to the high altar. But,
on the other hand, it is not easy to add on a lower building which
shall be in full harmony with the loftier parts of the church. There
is something insignificant about the Lady chapel at Salisbury, and it
is hard to admire, externally at least, the long masses of low chapels
at Winchester and Saint Alban's. A happy accident, as I have already
explained, gave the opportunity at Wells of producing a form of east
end which I think certainly surpasses all others of its class. The
general outline and proportion of the church are no less excellent,
and it is fortunate in having had everything finished, and in having
nothing destroyed. At Hereford, as I have already said, the western
tower has vanished, and it has carried part of the nave away with it.
But, even while it stood, the single western tower could never have
grouped so well with the central lantern as the two western towers at
Wells. Wimborne, the chief surviving example of this arrangement, I
have heard irreverently compared to driving tandem, and I cannot deny
the aptness of the saying.[23] At Southwell, where the grouping of the
three towers is as perfect as it well may be, the general effect has
greatly suffered by the lowering of the roofs throughout. We shall
hardly venture to compare the four limbs of Wells with the four limbs
of Beverley, but of the Beverley west front I have already spoken,
and the general effect of the church is altogether ruined through the
central tower never having been carried up. Even at Lichfield, the
faultless grace of the three spires, even the loveliness of the apse,
cannot reconcile us to the long low body and to the extravagant length
of the eastern limb. The eastern view of Lichfield, graceful as it is,
cannot compare with the real stateliness of the east end of Wells. I
have seen many fine churches both in our own country and abroad, many
of them of course on a scale which might seem to put Wells out of all
comparison. But I can honestly say that I know of no architectural
group which surpasses the harmony and variety of our own cathedral, as
seen by the traveller as he first enters the city from Shepton Mallet.
From the outside we turn to that of which the outside is after all the
mere shell. When we enter the church, we find ourselves in a building
which can fairly hold its own against competitors of its own class.
The nave has a distinct character of its own: there may be differences
of taste as to its merit, but it has a character, and that character
is clearly the result of design. The main lines of the interior are
horizontal rather than vertical. We can hardly say that there is any
division into bays; no vaulting-shafts run up from the ground, nor does
the triforium take, as usual, the form of a distinct composition over
each arch. In short we cannot, as we can in most churches, take each
arch with the triforium and clerestory over it as a thing existing
by itself. One would rather say that three horizontal ranges, one
over the other, all converged to the centre, without thinking of what
was above or below them. Now tastes may differ as to whether this is
a good arrangement or not, but there is no doubt that it is in its
way an effective arrangement; there is no nave in which the eye is so
irresistibly carried eastward as in that of Wells. And it is worth
notice that this arrangement, in its fulness, is confined to the nave;
in the transepts the bays are much more clearly marked. The idea of
producing this marked horizontal effect was clearly one which came into
the heads of the designers as they were working westwards.
It might have been expected that the marked prominence which is thus
given to the horizontal line might have gone far to destroy all effect
of height in the interior; but it is not so. There is no special
feeling of height in Wells Cathedral--not so much, for instance, as
there is in the church of Saint Mary Redcliff; but there is no such
crushing feeling of lowness as there is at Lincoln. This I imagine
to be mainly owing to the form of the arch chosen for the vaulting,
one boldly but not acutely pointed, and to the way in which the
lantern-arches fit into the vault. Contrast this with the far larger
and loftier nave of York. In that nave the positive height is second
only to Westminster among English churches, and the design of the
separate bays can hardly be surpassed in its soaring effect. But in
the direct eastern or western view the nave of York loses almost its
whole effect, partly, no doubt, from the excessive breadth, but partly
also from the flat and crushing shape of the vaulting-arch. Another
point which I think helps to redress the balance between horizontal
and vertical effect is the great height of the clerestory. In a church
where the vertical bays are strongly marked I do not think that great
comparative height in the clerestory helps to increase the effect of
height. But in such cases the question rather lies between the arcade
as one thing, and the triforium and clerestory together as another.
Here the question lay between the triforium and the clerestory, and I
cannot help thinking that, if the triforium had been on the same scale
as that in the choir of Ely, the effect of height would have been less.
At any rate, the nave of Wells makes the most of its small actual
height: so do the choir and presbytery also; for, though I cannot at
all admire the kind of vault which is there used, the shape of the arch
is as judiciously chosen as it is in the nave. In the presbytery we
also get the vaulting-shafts rising from the ground, so as to give the
vertical division, and the consequent effect of height, in its highest
perfection. Of the exquisite beauty of the Lady chapel, looked on, as
it should be, not as a part of the whole, but as a distinct and almost
detached building, I have already spoken. In short, the internal effect
of the church, whether looked at as a whole or taken in its several
parts, if not of the highest order, which its comparatively small scale
forbids, may claim a high place among churches of its own class.
I think then on the whole that, even looking at the church by itself,
we have every reason to be thankful for what we have got. We have
not a church of the first order; but we have a church whose several
parts fit very well together, all whose parts have been finished, and
of which no part has been destroyed. And I may add that we may be
thankful for another thing, for the goodness of the stone of which the
greater part of the church is built. The sculpture of the west front
indeed has crumbled away; but elsewhere at Wells, as at Glastonbury,
wherever the work has not been wantonly knocked away, it is as good
as when it was first cut. Now we might have had a church like Chester
or Coventry, where the whole surface of the stone has crumbled away,
and where the whole ornamental design has become unintelligible. I
have said that the church of Wells forms a harmonious whole, that it
was perfectly finished, and that no part has been destroyed; and this
is a great thing to say. Let me compare the good fortune of Wells in
this respect with the cathedral church of a much more famous city at
the other end of England. At Carlisle there is a noble choir, ending
in what is probably the grandest window in England. If that choir only
had transepts, nave, and towers to match it, the church of Carlisle
would be a splendid church indeed. But the choir is built up against a
little paltry transept and central tower, and nothing remains by way
of nave but two bays of the original small Norman church, the rest
having utterly vanished. Here then is a church which does not form a
harmonious whole, a church which remains utterly unfinished, and of
which one essential part has been destroyed. Or, without taking such an
extreme case as this, we may compare our church with some of those of
which I have already spoken, with Hereford, Southwell, Beverley, and
Tewkesbury. In all of these some important feature has either never
been finished or has been destroyed at a later time. The church of
Wells then, simply taken by itself, claims a high place among buildings
of its own class, that is, among minsters of the second order. But,
as I began these lectures by saying, the real charm of Wells does
not lie in the church taken by itself, but in the church surrounded
by its accompanying buildings. Of some of these I must now speak a
word. I do not intend to go minutely into either their architecture or
their history; but some of them are inseparably connected both with
the fabric and with the foundation of the cathedral. And it is the
preservation of them which gives Wells its peculiar character. Each
part may easily be equalled or surpassed, but the whole has no rival in
England, and I cannot think that it has many in Christendom.
It was during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, alongside of
the works in the church itself of which I have already spoken, that
those subordinate buildings were also rising, which have given Wells
this its peculiar character as the most complete and most uninjured
example of the buildings of a great secular foundation. The greatest
name in this way in the course of the fourteenth century is one which
we all know, that of Bishop Ralph of Shrewsbury; I have already spoken
of him as having probably had a chief hand in the reconstruction of
the choir and presbytery. He also gave the palace its present form.
The house had been originally built by Jocelin. The great hall had
been added by Robert Burnell. It was Ralph who fenced himself in with
a moat and a wall as we now see.[24] But his greatest work is to be
looked for on the other side of the church, and it is closely connected
with the constitutional change which may be looked on as putting the
finishing stroke to the existing constitution of the cathedral, I
mean the foundation of the College of Vicars. The great offices of
the church were now all in being, and the relations between the two
classes of Canons had been pretty well fixed. It now remained to fix
the exact position of that subordinate body of clergy which had grown
up through the prevalent practice of non-residence among the Canons.
The Vicar, we have seen, was at first simply the personal deputy of
some particular Canon, appointed by him to discharge his duties in his
absence. But it could hardly fail that the Vicars as a body should
gradually enter into some sort of relation with the Chapter as a body.
This would especially be the case, when residence became the fixed
duty of one class of Canons and no part of the duty of another. The
Vicars would gradually change from deputies of absent Canons into
assistants of Canons who at least professed to be present. As such,
it was natural that they should receive a fixed status in the church,
and, with the ideas of those times, it was equally natural that they
should receive somewhat of corporate independence. The Vicars of Wells
then, like the Vicars of most or all of the Old Foundation churches,
became a distinct corporation. They were subordinate to the Chapter
as regards their duties in the church, but they were independent of
it as regards the estates with which they were endowed, and they were
governed by statutes given them by their founder. That founder was,
as we all know, Ralph of Shrewsbury. Most of you, no doubt, have seen
the picture with the Latin verses in which the Vicars set forth their
hard case to the Bishop, how they are driven to live where they can
about the town, and how he promises to give them a house where they may
live together.[25] Then arose the Vicars' Close of Wells, and, though
the present buildings mainly belong to a later time, yet portions of
Ralph's work may still be seen, especially in the hall, where several
of his windows still remain. But the complaint of the Vicars, that they
were scattered through the streets of the town, deserves notice. In the
first state of things, as is plain from the stories told by Richard
of the Devizes, the Vicar lived in the house of the Canon whom he
represented.[26] But it is equally plain that as the number of prebends
increased, even the institution of ribs did not provide a house for
every Canon, and, as the institution of special Residentiaries became
fixed, the available houses would be mainly occupied by them. We can
thus understand how there might now be many Vicars unprovided with any
place to dwell in. The buildings of the Close were recast and almost
rebuilt by the three executors of Bishop Beckington, Richard Swan the
Provost, Hugh Sugar the Treasurer, and John Pope, Prebendary of Saint
Decumans.[27] They were commissioned to dispose of the unbequeathed
portion of the Bishop's goods to pious uses at their discretion, and,
besides other works in other parts of the diocese, the Vicars' Close
now assumed its present shape. In that shape it is certainly without a
rival. I know nothing to compare to those two quiet ranges of houses,
the hall at one end, the chapel at the other, suggesting the very
perfection of collegiate life; and, as an ingenious device for turning
a piece of practical convenience into a matter of high architectural
ornament, nothing can well surpass the chain-bridge. I need not say
that the original design of the institution was at once broken in upon
as soon as marriage was allowed to its members. The two rooms, with
the separate approach to each, were designed as college rooms for
men who took their meals in the common hall; and, as college rooms,
they give very far from contemptible accommodation. But they were, of
course, utterly unsuited for the reception of wives and families, and
the architectural features of the Close have been sadly damaged by
throwing two or more houses into one. I have always cherished a sort of
dream that, by some means or other, the old institution of the Vicars'
College and the new institution of the Theological College might be
rolled into one, that the office of Vicar in the cathedral might be
held by young clergymen and by men preparing for holy orders, and that
collegiate life might be again restored in the old hall of Ralph and
Beckington. But, however this may be, I would at least call on the
clerical members of the College to stick to their good old title of
Priest Vicar, and not to call themselves, or allow themselves to be
called, by the new-fangled name of Minor Canon. It is historically
incorrect; it was in use at Saint Paul's and at Hereford, but it was
never in use at Wells. That it is better sounding or more honourable
than that of Priest Vicar I cannot believe. To me it seems exactly the
reverse, as the stress is always laid on the word _Minor_, never on the
word _Canon_. And it tends to confound the Priest Vicars of our Old
Foundations with men holding a position very inferior to theirs, namely
the Petty Canons or Minor Canons of the churches founded by Henry the
Eighth. These are simple subordinates of the Chapter, without any
separate endowment or corporate independence of any kind. The supposed
legal necessity for the change arises from a misconstruction of an Act
of Parliament, which really orders nothing of the kind. To hear of a
Minor Canon of Wells is as bad as to hear of an Honorary Canon; that
is to say, to hear a Canon or Prebendary of Wells, whose stall dates
perhaps from the twelfth century, pulled down to the level of those
mysterious personages, not only without revenues but without either
rights or duties, who have sprung up at Bristol or Manchester within
the present reign.
The history of Vicars' Colleges at Wells and elsewhere should be
written in full. No one could do it so well as my friend Mr. Dimock,
once himself a Priest Vicar of the collegiate church of Southwell.[28]
One point to be worked out with special care would be the steps and
causes by which the office came to be held by laymen. The change in
this respect was fully recognized by the charter of Elizabeth, which
confirmed the rights and estates of the Vicars, and regulated, without
absolutely fixing, the numbers of the two classes of Vicars, clerical
and lay. It is a change which has not taken place everywhere. The
Vicars at York are still a purely clerical body, the lay members of the
choir being mere stipendiaries. And, unless some change has been made
very lately, the same is the case at Hereford.[29] And as the Priest
Vicars of our Old Foundations should never be confounded with the Petty
Canons of the New, still less should the lay members of those colleges,
equal in corporate rights to their clerical brethren, ever be degraded
to the level of the mere lay clerks or singing-men of other churches,
who are sometimes simply stipendiaries, and who, even when they are
statutable officers, have no separate endowment or corporate being.
There were thus, before the end of the fourteenth century, two distinct
corporations attached to the cathedral church, namely, the Chapter and
the College of Vicars. These two were and are distinct and independent
as regards their property and personal being, though, as regards
the duty and discipline of the church, the members of the younger
foundation were and are subordinate to the members of the elder. These
two bodies still remain, and I trust they may long remain and flourish;
but, in the first years of the fifteenth century, a third body arose,
which has vanished from among us. We read that Ralph Erghum, who was
Bishop from 1388 to 1401, and who was a benefactor to his church in
several ways,[30] founded by his will a College of fourteen priests
in a place which was then called the _Mounterye_, and which from
this foundation took the name of College Lane.[31] That is to say, he
seems to have incorporated the Chantry-priests of the cathedral, the
priests who, besides the public services performed by the Canons and
Vicars, said masses for particular persons at particular altars. All
foundations of this kind were suppressed by the Act of the first year
of Edward the Sixth, and the only memory which Erghum's foundation has
left among us is the name which still belongs to the lane.
The separate houses of Canons and other officers belong mainly to the
fifteenth century, though there are some portions of earlier date. Let
me here especially mention one small and decaying but very beautiful
fragment, namely the round window with wooden tracery at the east end
of the house which formerly belonged to the Archdeacons of Wells. The
house itself, strangely disguised as it is without, contains within a
very fine timber roof; the Deanery too, much as it has suffered from
the insertion of modern windows, still retains much of the dignity of
design which it received from its builder, the learned Dean Gunthorpe,
who held the office from 1473 to 1498.[32] But I will not enlarge more
fully on the particular houses; they are the especial province of
Mr. Parker, and he has dealt with them all from the Bishop's palace
to the house of the organist.[33] I would only again insist on the
necessity, on the duty, of carefully preserving every one of these
ancient buildings to the assemblage of which our city owes its special
position among the cities of England. We have lost too much already.
Every year some ancient building is destroyed or threatened.[34] Let
those whose business it is awake before it is too late; let them see
that not another stone is sacrificed to niggardliness, to caprice, or
to ignorant notions of improvement. Look, for instance, at what was
some time back trumpeted as a vast improvement, the pulling down of a
house to open a view of the west front of the Cathedral to the windows
of the Swan Inn. The doers of that deed most likely knew not what they
were doing. They perhaps did not even remember that, in opening the
view of the west front of the Cathedral to the windows of the Swan Inn,
they were also opening the not very picturesque view of the Swan Inn to
those who came out of the western doors of the Cathedral. They did not
stop to think that the space before the west front was really too open
already, and that at any rate matters were not mended by opening a view
through so ludicrous a gap, which I have heard witty people compare
to the space left in a man's mouth by drawing a single tooth. Still
less did they think that, in a thoughtless moment of destruction, they
were wiping out the whole history of the church and city. The house
indeed was in itself valueless; I should not have wept for the removal
of the house or of the whole row of houses of which it formed a part.
But, along with the house, the destroyers overthrew the wall against
which the house was built up, and that wall was the history of the
city of Wells. At Wells, as I have already set forth, the church was
not founded in the city, but the city grew up under the shadow of the
church.[35] The church and its precincts were not taken into the city
till the days of parliamentary and municipal reform. The wall of the
Close is everywhere a sign of separation, marking off ecclesiastical
and temporal property, and often marking the limits of distinct
jurisdictions. But at Wells the wall has a special significance, as a
memorial of the days when the city arose outside the ecclesiastical
precinct. Thus, by a single thoughtless act, not only is a material
piece of antiquity destroyed, but a page of local, and thereby of
national, history is torn away.
The only remaining work to be mentioned is one to which I have
incidentally referred more than once, namely, the cloister and
the buildings attached to it. I have now to add that the detached
Lady chapel in the east walk of the cloister was rebuilt by Robert
Stillington, who was Bishop from 1464 to 1487, an event which is best
recorded in the words of Bishop Godwin.
"He built that goodly Lady Chappell in the cloysters, that was pulled
down by him that destroyed also the great hall of the palace ... and
was entombed in the said Chappell, but rested not long there: For it is
reported, that divers olde men, who in their youth had not onely seene
the celebration of his funerals, but also the building of his toombe,
Chappell and all; did also see, toombe and Chappell destroyed, and the
bones of the Bishop that built them, turned out of the lead in which
they were interred."[36]