work—that very peculiar form, with its tendency to panel decoration
with strip-framing, which produces its highest decorative effect at
Earl’s Barton, side by side with a more staid, less fantastic manner
of building, which is without architectural ambition, uses decoration
very sparingly, but can achieve very pleasant effects of proportion
within its modest limits. This second style, as it may be called, is
emphatically the style favoured by Lincolnshire builders. Of the first
style, Barton-on-Humber is the only really conspicuous example in the
county.[38] Strip-work decorations, not uncommon in the Saxon work of
the South Midlands and South of England, of Mercia and Wessex, is quite
the exception within the belt of Danish influence. It appears here and
there as a kind of frame to arches and their jambs, or to the heads of
window-openings. The best examples of its use in this connection anywhere
in England are to be found in the jambs of the noble tower arches at
Stow, where a semicircular shaft is carried down the face of the wall
close to the angle of the jambs, and is accompanied by a flat strip
of stone at a few inches distance. Both shaft and strip are finished
off by rough corbels a little above the floor level.[39] But Stow is an
exceptional church. As a rule, we find the strip-frame retained purely
as a flat hood-mould to doorways and windows, without a trace of that
individuality of style which distinguishes it at Stow, and preserving a
still more distant kinship to the work at Barton.
“Long-and-short” work pursues a more hardy existence. Quoining was
necessary, and the “long-and-short” method was at once serviceable and
fairly ornamental. So, while strip-work, a merely decorative arrangement
of pilasters without constructive use, went its way, “long-and-short”
quoining remained. We come across it chiefly at the angles of naves,
which in several cases have been left almost untouched, when aisles of a
later date have been added. St. Mary-le-Wigford and St. Peter-at-Gowts
at Lincoln are cases in point. Bracebridge is an excellent example,
for here all four angles of the nave can be traced. Cranwell, near
Sleaford, and Ropsley, near Grantham, are other unmistakable instances.
But here we must beware. The critic is too common who, assuming that
a piece of wall is Saxon in character, immediately jumps to the
conclusion that its quoining must be “long-and-short.” If the quoins
are not arranged in a regular series of pieces alternately vertical and
horizontal, then the work is not “long-and-short” work. If one or two
stones thus arranged occur in the middle of irregular or of the common
“small-stone” quoining, we are not justified in speaking of the fabric
as showing “long-and-short” work. If the quoining shows a merely rough
general resemblance to the “long-and-short” arrangement, it is not
“long-and-short” work, but work of a quite haphazard type.
This brings us to one of the leading features which distinguish the
towers so characteristic of Saxon work in Lincolnshire. We may study
their angles to our heart’s content, and discover “long-and-short” work
with the eye of faith, but we shall actually see it in only one instance,
and there in the jambs of a western doorway of the tower, rather than
in the quoining of the tower itself. In this instance, at Rothwell,
near Caistor, the south-west quoining of the adjacent church has been
left standing, like a small rectangular buttress, against the junction
of the twelfth century nave and south aisle. It is formed of irregular
stones, but such “long-and-short” work as there is, is confined to the
tower. This is an exception. At the Lincoln churches and Bracebridge,
where we have noticed “long-and-short” quoining at the nave angles, the
quoining of the tower is of small stones; and this is universally the
case. If we go northwards, by Marton, Heapham, Springthorpe, Corringham,
Harpswell, and Glentworth, to Winterton and Alkborough; if we cross the
Ancholme to Worlaby, and then go by Barton-on-Humber to Clee, Scartho,
Holton-le-Clay, Waith, and Laceby; if we traverse the Wolds by Swallow,
Cuxwold, Rothwell, and Cabourn to Caistor and Nettleton, and, descending
by way of Hainton to Lincoln, make our way along the South Cliff to
Branston, Harmston, and Coleby; if we go as far south as Boothby Pagnell,
Little Bytham, and Thurlby-by-Bourn, and finish our journey in the
midst of the parts of Holland at Great Hale, the only genuine piece of
“long-and-short” work we shall have found in a western tower is that at
Rothwell. It is true that this journey will have included more than one
doubtful member of the family, and some of its genuine members which
have lost, under the hand of the restorer, most of their appearance of
age; but its result will be the establishment of the general rule that
the Saxon tower-builder in Lincolnshire did not avail himself of the
“long-and-short” method of quoining.
It will hardly need this journey to be convinced of his preference for
the double window-opening, divided by the mid-wall shaft. This declares
itself patently in the well-known towers at Lincoln; and all the
towers mentioned above still have, or probably have had, such windows.
Sometimes, as at Nettleton or Coleby, the belfry stage has been entirely
renewed in the later Gothic period. Sometimes, as at Winterton or
Alkborough, the tower has simply been heightened, and the Saxon belfry
stage has become an intermediate storey. Sometimes, as at Cuxwold, the
top of the tower has been lopped off altogether, or, as at Swallow,
has been replaced by a modern stage in a rather incongruous style. In
every case the original existence of the “mid-wall shaft” window cannot
be reasonably doubted. The form of such openings as remain is very
much the same. Its main outlines have been seen in the uppermost stage
of the tower at Barton: two adjacent openings, with dressed jambs and
voussoirs flush with the general surface of the wall, with rounded arches
springing from through-stone impost-blocks, and received at their meeting
by another such block, which rests on the mid-wall shaft itself. These
openings pierce the wall without any splay. They have no strip-framing,
and seldom, if ever, any attempt at hood-moulding. Although, as has been
hinted, some beauty of form may be claimed for them, they are as simply
constructed a type of arched opening as could well be devised. Their
proportions are sometimes rather elegant; and, when they are set round
a small upper stage, divided by a projecting string-course or off-set
from the unbuttressed and sometimes slightly tapering length of the lower
stage, their effect is always striking.
The architectural value of these towers, so simple in their principles
of construction, so insignificant in their height, is less than their
historical interest. Saxon builders had little architectural knowledge
or skill; and buildings like Stow impress us more by their height and
mass of wall than by any very striking architectural feature. The work
at Barton-on-Humber is curious and interesting building: it is not
architecture. In the Lincolnshire towers, a step is taken in the right
direction by the avoidance of merely decorative surface-ornament. The
tower asks for judgment on its own merits. Where it is divided by offsets
into two or three stages, the result is satisfactory; although, if the
belfry stage is of much the same area as the stage below, the tower
looks top-heavy. This certainly is the case of St. Mary-le-Wigford. At
St. Peter-at-Gowts, a small upper stage is set firmly and squarely upon
a long and tapering lower one; and there is no finer tower in the whole
series. The third type, where there is no off-set—the much-restored tower
of Springthorpe is now, if it was not always, in this state—is merely
insignificant.
The treatment of openings in these towers, other than the mid-wall
shaft windows, is open to few variations. Western doorways are low and
narrow: large stones are used in the jambs; and, though the heads are
arched, the actual opening is covered by a flat lintel. The roughest
of these openings is in the tower at Winterton, where the head of the
doorway is formed by a huge stone, cut with a segmental curve on its
under side to give the effect of an arch. Flat rectangular hood-mouldings
of small projection sometimes follow the curve of the doorway arch and
meet the extreme edge of the impost-block. At Clee, one of the best
towers of the group, such a hood-moulding bounds a doorway head of two
orders of voussoirs, the lower slightly recessed beneath the upper;
but such refinements are rare. A similar recessing of a lower band of
voussoirs occurs in the tower arches at Clee and Scartho, but in no case
is it accompanied by any attempt at moulding the arch or recessing the
jambs to match. An edge-roll was worked very tentatively at Nettleton
along part of an unmoulded tower-arch, but was abandoned when about
half completed. An ambitious and unique attempt at recessing, in the
chancel arch at Broughton (now the arch from the tower into the nave),
remains as a monument of the failure of the Saxon mason in his search
for means of architectural expression. Both orders of the arch spring
from an undivided impost-block, and the shafts, which should bear, and
are intended to correspond to, the inner order, are stranded on either
side of the back of the opening, with their heads left bare and their
function denied them. As a rule, in doorways and tower arches, the mason
was content with a plain unmoulded arch, springing from projecting
impost-blocks on the top of jambs, the dressings of which are simply the
quoins of a rubble wall. He varied the proportions of his tower arches,
giving them great height, breadth, and dignity at St. Peter-at-Gowts,
building them tall and narrow at Clee, Scartho, and Holton-le-Clay,
or with rather less elevation and rather more breadth at Rothwell and
Cabourn, frequently allowing them, as at Cuxwold or Alkborough, to remain
low and rather broad in proportion. These variations of the tower arch
constitute one of the most interesting features of this type of building:
they introduce an element of individual design, and the loftier form of
arch often produces by its mere size an effect which is not due to any
obvious architectural virtue.
The lesser windows of the towers are usually small and narrow, with an
inner splay. Their outer openings are often flanked by very large dressed
stones: their rounded heads are seldom arched—there is a good arched
window head in the south wall of the tower at Coleby—but are more often
cut in the under side of a lintel; and sometimes this cut, exceeding a
semicircle, produces the “key-hole” form of opening. At Rothwell there
is in each wall of the tower, below the “mid-wall” windows, a small
rectangular opening with a wide inner splay: a somewhat similar opening
pierces the wall above the west door at Nettleton.
In the masonry of these towers two striking features are apparent.
One is the disappearance of that “through-stone” treatment of dressed
masonry, which is an undoubted characteristic of early Saxon work.
A little doorway in the west wall of the north transept at Stow has
voussoirs and jamb-stones, each of which faces the whole thickness of
the wall. But the jambs below the tower arches are faced with double or
triple, not single stones. And while it is rare to find a tower arch
or doorway of this style formed of a core of rubble between facings of
dressed stone, yet there are few in which the facing stones do not become
less closely set together, and wide rubble fillings do not take the
place of neat and close jointing. The other feature is the appearance of
“herring-bone” masonry. This may be seen in some profusion at Broughton,
and in a striking and unusual form at Marton; and, although it is not
general, it occurs in other places.
Modifications in the tower plan are almost confined to an increase of
dimensions which, in some members of the group—notably Caistor—is rather
remarkable. One tower alone—Great Hale—introduces a newel staircase
into an angle of the fabric; and this is almost absurdly unsuited to
the probable size of those who had to climb it. We have seen that, at
Hough and Broughton, nearly circular excrescences were formed to hold
stairs on the west side of the towers. As a rule, we may believe that
the upper floors of the towers were approached by ladders. It may be
noted that in Lincolnshire there are very few of those openings above
the tower arch, which are often quoted to prove the use of the tower as
a place of habitation, and probably led to a landing and wooden stair
communicating with the interior of the church. There are such, as at
St. Peter-at-Gowts, Winterton, and Broughton; but they are exceptional,
and the probable plan of Broughton makes it possible that, as at
Barton-on-Humber, the opening was merely a piercing in the wall between
nave and chancel.
But if there is little variation in plan, there is, as has been noted,
even in the simplest towers, some degree of variation in detail.
There are cases, moreover, in which the tendency to variation takes
the direction of increased ornamental treatment. Instances are quite
common in which the heads of the mid-wall shafts, bulging to support
their impost-blocks, have been carved into the form of capitals—plain
cubical or cushion-blocks, as at Winterton or Clee; rough suggestions of
classical volutes and foliage, as at Glentworth or Scartho; varied forms
of fruit and leafage, as at Bracebridge; or delicate and cleverly cut
relief work, as at St. Peter-at-Gowts. And these capitals are not the
only features which show the tendency. At Alkborough ornamental material
has been transferred from some deserted Roman villa in the neighbourhood:
a cornice from an entablature has been cut up, used as imposts, and
turned upside down to form plinths for the jambs of the tower arch. But
at Branston, south of Lincoln, the builders have not borrowed ornament.
Like the masons at Broughton with their abortive recessed arch, they have
tried to copy what they have heard of, what some of them at any rate have
seen, and have covered the lower part of the west wall of their tower
with arcaded panelling, with rounded arches and cushion capitals. This,
and the central doorway with shafting and rudely foliated capitals, have
been inspired from a source quite distinct from that which brought into
being the strip-work panelling of Barton-on-Humber.
We are at once impelled to ask what this source is. And this question
brings us to the consideration of two final questions, which are
complementary to one another. What influences from the Christian
architecture of other countries were felt by Lincolnshire masons? Is
there any element of progress to be traced in the Saxon buildings of
the county? In short, to combine the two questions into one, can any
chronological sequence be traced in these buildings, by comparing them
with the work of Romanesque builders in other countries?
We already have allowed the term “Saxon” to them, on the understanding
that a pre-Conquest date is not implied thereby, but merely the fact that
their style is different from that of buildings to which we give the term
“Norman.” It may also be premised that, in considering their relative
date, we have to deal cautiously and tentatively with a series of
probabilities. We must also put legend aside. A hardy tradition, resting
on no authentic basis, but engraved on a brass tablet within the church,
points to certain traces of fire in the church of Stow as evidence of its
burning by the Danes in 870. If this were true, and if the lower walls
of the tower, as they exist to-day, were the tower walls of the Saxon
cathedral of Sidnaceaster, we should be able to point to a church of the
ninth century, if not earlier, which would probably have supplied an
architectural standard to the diocese. However, we have nothing but the
size of the church and an unfounded, if time-honoured, assumption to give
it claim to cathedral rank. The very name of Sidnaceaster was probably
invented in post-Conquest times, by some one who misread the signature
of one of the bishops of Lindsey to the decrees of a Saxon council.[40]
And, finally, the authentic history of the church of Stow does not begin
till about the year 1040, when Eadnoth, Bishop of Dorchester, with the
powerful assistance of Earl Leofric and his wife Godiva, set a band
of religious men on the site hallowed by memories of the miraculous
sojourn of St. Etheldreda on her flight from York to Ely. All that lies
behind 1040 in connection with this church is pure romance. When Bishop
Rémi later in the century restored St. Mary’s Minster at Stow, what he
probably did was to complete Eadnoth’s ambitious beginnings, on a worthy
scale, out of reverence for St. Etheldreda, and not out of sentimental
feeling for an old cathedral church which he had superseded for all time
by his new church at Lincoln. If a small archdeaconry in the Norman
diocese of Lincoln, corresponding to the original district of Lindsey,
took its name from Stow, we must not consider this as admitting the old
cathedral dignity of Stow. The size of Eadnoth’s and Rémi’s church made
it the most prominent building in the archdeaconry: no more convenient or
suitable name could be supplied to the district.[41]
1040, then, is a recognised date to which we can refer the earliest work
at Stow. We know, too, that a church was founded at Alkborough in 1052,
and the work in the western tower there, with its triangular-headed
belfry windows, may be claimed for that date or not long after. These
are practically the only two pieces of dated evidence on which we can
rely, for we have already seen that the evidence as to Coleswegen’s
churches at Lincoln does not apply to existing buildings.[42] Stow, as
we have seen, retains strip-framing to the tower jambs on a large scale:
“long-and-short” work occurs in the north transept doorway and in the
jambs of a window opening in the south transept: through-stone masonry
is used in the north transept doorway, but abandoned in the tower arch
jambs. Alkborough has none of these characteristics. We are thus at
liberty to assume a gradual cessation of purely Saxon technique between
1040 and 1052.
Further, at Barton-on-Humber, although we have no documentary evidence
to guide us, it is obvious that the tower is of two styles. The uppermost
stage forms an addition to the original design in a somewhat more
simple style. An interval of date between the stages is certain: the
length of that interval would be hard to ascertain. But the fantastic
strip-panelling and “long-and-short” work of the lower stages of the
tower belong to the height of a fashion in architecture which is seen
gradually disappearing at Stow. The strip-framing and “long-and-short”
work at Stow are of a different and less purely decorative type: we are
not surprised when in the upper stage of the tower at Barton, or in
the tower at Alkborough, they disappear altogether. So far, then, this
statement of progress is justifiable. The lower stages of the tower at
Barton are obviously earlier than the upper stage. The upper stage has
affinities of detail with the tower at Alkborough, and clearly belongs
to much the same or a slightly later period. The tower at Alkborough
is at least twelve years later than the only trustworthy date for the
early work at Stow. And, as we have just seen, the work at Stow, in
its selection and treatment of elements which had been used at Barton
in careless profusion, is probably later in date than the earlier
portion of Barton. With Barton may be grouped, from the character of its
“long-and-short” quoining and the window-openings of its stair turret,
the interesting tower at Hough-on-the-Hill. With Stow we may group,
at any rate provisionally, those fabrics which have “long-and-short”
quoining of a substantial type, flush with the surface of the wall,
instead of projecting in rather thin strips beyond it—this will include,
as we have noticed, some naves of churches. With Alkborough and the
upper stage at Barton can be combined church towers generally, Hough
alone excepted, and work of a partly Saxon character, like that at
Stragglethorpe, not far from Hough. The “long-and-short” work in Rothwell
tower is so small in quantity that it can hardly be treated as an
exception to the third group.
Professor Baldwin Brown, in his valuable monograph on Saxon
ecclesiastical architecture, has provided strong arguments for the
influence of Teutonic Romanesque architecture on our Saxon builders.[43]
It has long been the fashion to suppose that the decorative detail at
Barton-on-Humber and other kindred churches is an imitation of timber
construction in stone; the rudeness of treatment makes the supposition
excusable. But we can hardly grant that Saxon builders could have
imitated a system of construction which was not at any rate general till
a much later date; and it is much more likely that the work at Barton is
copied roughly and clumsily from a type of decorative work which, in the
tenth and early eleventh centuries, was common in the Rhenish provinces
and in the districts of Northern Italy architecturally related to them.
It is unquestionable that the double opening with mid-wall shaft found
its origin in the same provinces. Northern Italy doubtless exercised its
influence on Germany; Germany, in turn, influenced the Saxon masons. In
three other cases at least German influence is more than probable. It is
certainly responsible for the double-splayed window-opening; it probably
affected the simple type of capital which was developed into the cushion
capital of later days; the unfaced rubble masonry and thin walling of
Saxon churches are found commonly in early Romanesque German churches,
and are the antithesis of the faced rubble and thick walling of Normandy
and the Romanesque buildings of France; while the position of the western
tower in the Saxon plan is a further German feature.
On the details of English intercourse with Germany it is unnecessary
to dwell. There is plenty of evidence to show that a close connection
existed between the two countries, which cannot but have had influence on
the progress of art in England. That progress must have been practically
at a standstill during the long epoch of Danish invasion. The date
at which we may most reasonably expect an architectural revival to be
general is that period, the last thirty to forty years of the tenth
century, when so many monasteries were rebuilt or newly founded, and the
monastic life re-established. This revival was strongly influenced by
the monasteries of the Netherlands, which lay in the direct current of
architectural progress between Germany proper and England. To this date
at earliest, then, may be assigned the earliest parts of the church at
Barton-on-Humber, and possibly the tower at Hough. We cannot go further
back without deserting probability. At the same time, if we limit this
work to the latter half of the tenth century on the one hand, we are not
precluded from allowing that it may be later. Barton-on-Humber lay in the
very path of the Danish invaders who established their power in England
between 1002 and 1014. The base of operations of the heathen Swegen was
at Gainsborough; there he died, and there he was said, though wrongly, to
have been buried. The older parts of the church at Barton show no sign
of the ruin which we might expect to have thus befallen them. Perhaps
the church was left roofless by Swegen, but restored and completed, with
the upper stage added to the tower, towards the middle or after the
middle of the eleventh century. But it is also equally probable that the
whole lower structure may be a rebuilding under the Christian Canute of
a church ruined by his father; and that, after an intermediate stage
in which the church may have taken the form shown by Professor Baldwin
Brown, the tower was heightened by a storey.
The oldest Saxon fabrics in Lincolnshire need not, therefore, be earlier
than the eleventh century. It will be noticed that of these Barton gives
us a centralised plan, while Hough presents a plan which certainly is not
in keeping with that of the usual western tower. The head of the second
group, Stow, is another experiment in “central” planning. The remaining
anomalies of plan, Broughton and Waith, belong, in the matter of
technique, to the third group, in which the western tower predominates
overwhelmingly. The German features of the third group already have been
described. But they are less marked than those of earlier groups, and the
buildings are open to influences, especially decorative influences, of
quite another kind.