church is commonly the chief object of interest, alike as its present
ornament and as the chief centre of its past history. But in Wells
the cathedral church and its appurtenances are yet more. Their
interest is not only primary, but absorbing. They are not only the
chief ornament of the place; they are the place itself. They are not
only the centre of the past history of the city; their history is the
history of the city. Of our other cities some can trace up a long
history as cities independent of their ecclesiastical foundations. Some
were the dwelling-places of Kings in days before England became one
kingdom. Some have been for ages seats of commerce or manufactures;
their history is the history of burghers striving for and obtaining
their freedom, a history which repeats in small that same tale of
early struggles and later abuses which forms the history of so many
greater commonwealths. Others have a long military history; their
name at once suggests the memory of battles and sieges, and they can
still show walls and castles as the living memorials of the stirring
scenes of bygone times. In others even the ecclesiastical pre-eminence
of the cathedral church may be disputed by some other ecclesiastical
building. The bishoprick and its church may be comparatively modern
institutions, and they may be altogether eclipsed by some other
institution more ancient in date of foundation, perhaps more ancient
in its actual fabric. Thus at Oxford the cathedral church is well-nigh
lost among the buildings of the University and its greatest college.
At Chester its rank may be disputed by the majestic fragments of the
older minster of Saint John. At Bristol the cathedral church, even when
restored to its old proportions, will still have at least an equal
rival in the stateliest parish church in England. In these cities the
bishoprick, its church and its chapter, are institutions of yesterday;
the cities themselves were great and famous for ages before they were
founded. So at Exeter, though the bishoprick is of far earlier date,
yet Exeter was a famous city, which had played its part in history,
long before Bishops of Exeter were heard of. Even at Winchester the
overwhelming greatness of the old minster has to compete with the
earlier and later interests of the royal palace, of the fallen Abbey,
of the unique home of noble poverty and of the oldest of the great
and still living schools of England. Salisbury alone in our own part
of England, and Durham in the far north, have a history which in some
measure resembles that of Wells. Like Wells, Salisbury and Durham are
cities which have grown up around the cathedral church. Wells stands
alone among the cities of England proper as a city which exists only in
and through its cathedral church, whose whole history is that of its
cathedral church. The bishoprick has been to us what the Abbey has been
to our neighbours at Glastonbury, which the church first of Abbots
and then of Bishops has been elsewhere to Ely and Peterborough. The
whole history of Wells is, I say, the history of the bishoprick and of
its church. Of the origin and foundation of the city, as distinguished
from that of the church, nothing is known. The name of Wells is first
heard of as the place where the church of St. Andrew was standing and
its name seldom appears in later history except in connection with
the affairs of its church. It was never a royal dwelling-place; it
was never a place of commercial importance; it was never a place of
military strength. Like other cities, it has its municipal history,
but its municipal history is simply an appendage to its ecclesiastical
history; the franchises of the borough were simply held as grants from
the Bishop. It has its parochial church, a church standing as high
among the buildings of its own class as the cathedral church itself.
This parochial church has a parochial constitution which is in some
points unique. But the parochial church is simply an appendage to
the cathedral church; it is the church of the burghers who had come
to dwell under the shadow of the minster and the protection of its
spiritual lord. And it has ever retained a close, sometimes perhaps
a too close, connexion with the cathedral and its Chapter. Thus the
history of the church is the history of the city; no battles, no
sieges, no parliaments, break the quiet tenor of its way; the name of
the city has hardly found its way into our civil and military history.
Its name does appear among the troubles of the Seventeenth Century,
in the pages of Clarendon and Macaulay, but it appears in connexion
with events whose importance was mainly local. And even here the
ecclesiastical interest comes in; the most striking event connected
with Wells in the story of Monmouth’s rebellion is the mischief done
to the cathedral, and the way in which further damage and desecration
was hindered by Lord Grey. And in our own times, when the parliamentary
existence of this city became the subject of an animated parliamentary
discussion, even then the ecclesiastical interest was still uppermost.
The old battle of the regulars and seculars was fought again over the
bodies of two small parliamentary boroughs. I need not remind you that
the claims of the old secular foundation were stoutly pressed by one of
our own members. But the monastic influence was too strong for us; the
mantle of Dunstan and Æthelwald had fallen on the shoulders of Sir John
Pakington, and the claims of the fallen Abbey of Evesham were preferred
to those of the existing Cathedral of Wells.
[Illustration: CATHEDRAL OF WELLS, ENGLAND.]
The whole interest, then, of the city is ecclesiastical; but its
ecclesiastical interest in one point of view surpasses that of every
church in England,--I am strongly tempted to say, every church in
Europe. The traveller who comes down the hill from Shepton Mallet looks
down, as he draws near the city, on a group of buildings which, as far
as I know, has no rival either in our island or beyond the sea. To
most of these objects, taken singly, it would be easy to find rivals
which would equal or surpass them. The church itself, seen even from
that most favourable point of view, cannot, from mere lack of bulk,
hold its ground against the soaring apse of Amiens, or against the
windows ranging, tier above tier, in the mighty eastern gable of Ely.
The cloister cannot measure itself with Gloucester or Salisbury; the
chapter-house lacks the soaring roofs of York and Lincoln; the palace
itself finds its rival in the ruined pile of St. David’s. The peculiar
charm and glory of Wells lies in the union and harmonious grouping
of all. The church does not stand alone; it is neither crowded by
incongruous buildings, nor yet isolated from those buildings which
are its natural and necessary complement. Palace, cloister, lady
chapel, choir, chapter-house, all join to form one indivisible unique
bridge which by a marvel of ingenuity connects the church itself with
the most perfect of buildings of its class, the matchless Vicars’
close. Scattered around we see here and there an ancient house, its
gable, its window, or its turret falling in with the style and group
of greater buildings, and bearing its part in producing the general
harmony of all. The whole history of the place is legibly written on
that matchless group of buildings. If we could fancy an ecclesiastical
historian to have dropped from the clouds, the aspect of the place
would at once tell him that he was looking on an English cathedral
church, on a cathedral church which had always been served by secular
canons, on a church of secular canons which had preserved its ancient
buildings and ancient arrangements more perfectly than any other in the
island.
The whole history of Wells before the time of Edward the Elder is
excessively obscure, and much of it is undoubtedly fabulous. There is a
story about King Ine planting a Bishoprick at Congresbury, which was
presently moved to Wells, and a list of Bishops is given between Ine
and Edward. There is also a document which professes to be a charter of
King Cynewulf in 766, which does not speak of any Bishop at Wells, but
which implies the existence of an ecclesiastical establishment of some
kind. But unluckily the Congresbury story rests on no good authority,
and the charter of Cynewulf is undoubtedly spurious. But because a
charter is spurious in form, it does not always follow that its matter
is unhistorical and I am the more inclined to attach some value to
it, because, while implying the existence of some ecclesiastical
establishment, it does not imply the existence of a bishoprick.
Putting all things together, and remembering the strong and consistent
tradition which connects the name of Ine with the church of Wells, I
am inclined to think that there must have been some body of priests,
probably of Ine’s foundation, existing at Wells before the foundation
of the bishoprick by Edward. If then Ine did, somewhere about the year
705, found a church at Wells with a body of priests attached to it, we
can well understand why Wells should be chosen as the seat of the new
bishoprick in 909.
We have here in Wells the finest collection of domestic buildings
surrounding a cathedral church to be seen anywhere. There is no place
where so many ancient houses are preserved and are mainly applied to
their original uses. The Bishop still lives in the Palace; the Dean
still lives in the Deanery; the Canons, Vicars, and other officers
still live very largely in the houses in which they were meant to
live. But this is because at Wells there always were secular priests,
each man living in his own house. In a monastery I need hardly say it
was quite different. The monks did not live each man in his own house;
they lived in common, with a common refectory to dine in and a common
dormitory to sleep in. Thus when, in Henry the Eighth’s time, the monks
were put out and secular canons put in again, the monastic buildings
were no longer of any use, while there were no houses for the new
canons. They had therefore to make houses how they could out of the
common buildings of the monastery. But of course this could be done
without greatly spoiling them as works of architecture. Thus while at
Ely, Peterborough, and other churches which were served by monks, there
are still very fine fragments of the monastic buildings, there is not
the same series of buildings each still applied to its original use
which we have at Wells. I wish that this wonderful series was better
understood and more valued than it is. I can remember, if nobody else
does, how a fine prebendal hall was wantonly pulled down in the North
Liberty not many years ago. Some of those whose duty it was to keep it
up said that they had never seen it. I had seen it, anybody who went
by could see it, and every man of taste knew and regretted it. Well,
that is gone, and I suppose the organist’s house, so often threatened
will soon be gone too. Thus it is that the historical monuments of
our country perish day by day. We must keep a sharp eye about us or
this city of ours may lose, almost without anybody knowing it, the
distinctive character which makes it unique among the cities of
England.
It is then in this way that Wells became, what it still is, the seat of
the Somersetshire Bishoprick. The Bishop had his throne in the church
of St. Andrew, and the clergy attached to church were his special
companions and advisers, in a word his Chapter. We have thus the church
and its ministers, but the church had not yet assumed its present form,
and its ministers had not yet assumed their present constitution. Of
the fabric, as it stood in the Tenth Century, I can tell you nothing.
There is not a trace of building of anything like such early date
remaining: while in other places we have grand buildings of the
Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries, at Wells we have little or nothing
earlier than the Thirteenth. But it is quite a mistake to fancy that
our forefathers in the Tenth Century were wholly incapable of building,
or that their buildings were always of wood. We have accounts of
churches of that and of still earlier date which show that we then had
buildings of considerable size and elaboration of plan. And we know
that in the course of the same century Saint Dunstan built a stone
church at Glastonbury to the east of the old wooden church of British
times. The churches both of Wells and Glastonbury must have been built
in the old Romanesque style of England which prevailed before the great
improvements of Norman Romanesque were brought in in the Eleventh
Century. You must conceive this old church of Saint Andrew as very much
smaller, lower, and plainer than the church we now have, with massive
round arches and small round-headed windows, but with one or more tall,
slender, unbuttressed towers, imitating the bell-towers of Italy. I do
not think that we have a single tower of this kind in Somersetshire,
but in other parts of England there are a good many. There is a noble
one at Earls Barton in Northamptonshire, and more than one in the city
of Lincoln.
After about two hundred years from the beginning of the present
building in the days of Jocelin, we may look on the cathedral church
of Saint Andrew as at last finished. It was finished, in a sense,
before the end of the Thirteenth Century, when everything had been
built which was needed for its ecclesiastical completeness. But it was
in the course of the Fifteenth Century that it finally assumed the
shape with which we are all familiar, and which has from that time
remained unchanged. Now then we have reached the point at which we can
estimate the place which fairly belongs to the church of Wells among
the other churches of England and of Christendom. As it seems to me,
that position, as I began by saying, is a special and remarkable one; I
need not say that in point of size and splendour, the church of Wells
has no claim to a place in the first rank of European, or even English
churches. Setting aside the Welsh churches, and the churches which have
become cathedral without being originally meant for this rank, Wells is
one of the very smallest of English episcopal churches. It is hardly
fair to compare it with Carlisle, which is a mere fragment, or with
Hereford, which has lost its western tower, and with it a part of its
nave. But it is, in point of scale, with Carlisle, Hereford, Lincoln,
and Rochester, or again with non-cathedral churches like Southwell,
Beverley, and Tewkesbury, that Wells must fairly be compared, not
with churches like Canterbury and York, or even like Salisbury and
Gloucester. And among churches of its own class it certainly ranks high.
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 fullness, 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 St. Mary Redcliff; but there is no such
crushing feeling of lowness as there is in Lincoln. This I imagine
to be mainly owing to the form of the arch chosen for the vaulting,
one boldly but not actually 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.
The nave of Wells makes the most of its small actual height: so do
the choir and the 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 the
real charm of Wells does not lie in the church taken by itself, but in
the church surrounded by its accompanying buildings. 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.
[Illustration: THE COLISEUM, ITALY.]
THE COLISEUM
EDWARD GIBBON
Whatever is fortified will be attacked: and whatever is attacked may
be destroyed. Could the Romans have wrested from the popes the Castle
of St. Angelo, they had resolved by a public decree to annihilate
that monument of servitude. Every building of defence was exposed to
a siege; and in every siege the arts and engines of destruction were
laboriously employed. After the death of Nicholas the Fourth, Rome,
without a sovereign or a senate, was abandoned six months to the fury
of civil war. “The houses,” says a cardinal and poet of the times,
“were crushed by the weight and velocity of enormous stones; the walls
were perforated by the strokes of the battering-ram; the towers were
involved in fire and smoke; and the assailants were stimulated by
rapine and revenge.” The work was consummated by the tyranny of the
laws; and the factions of Italy alternately exercised a blind and
thoughtless vengeance on their adversaries, whose houses and castles
they razed to the ground. In comparing the _days_ of foreign,
with the _ages_ of domestic, hostility, we must pronounce, that
the latter have been far more ruinous to the city; and our opinion is
confirmed by the evidence of Petrarch. “Behold,” says the laureat, “the
relics of Rome, the image of her pristine greatness! neither time,
nor the barbarian, can boast the merit of this stupendous destruction:
it was perpetrated by her own citizens, by the most illustrious of her
sons, and your ancestors (he writes to a noble Annibaldi) have done
with the battering-ram, what the Punic hero could not accomplish with
the sword.” The influence of the two last principles of decay must in
some degree be multiplied by each other; since the houses and towers,
which were subverted by civil war, required a new and perpetual supply
from the monuments of antiquity.