Further illustration of this fact can be adduced from the large number
of similar examples found in the succeeding periods. In whatever
age the almshouse was built the idea was recognised as perennially
“old-fashioned,” and the style of its architecture is therefore
inevitably of a somewhat earlier character than seems warranted by its
actual date. Each builder in turn raised his building intentionally
in a somewhat antique manner, and as the seventeenth century advanced
the Jacobean detail gave way very slowly before the new fashions of the
later Renaissance. The gatehouse disappeared, but the gateway remained;
the street front and its two wings assumed the Queen Anne treatment
of heavy cornice and hipped roofs. The cloistered arcade, which in
Christ’s Hospital, Abingdon (1553), and Penrose Almshouses, Barnstaple
(1627), had been placed in front of the buildings, reverted to the
manner of Ewelme (1434) and surrounded the inner court as at Bromley
College (1666) and Morden College, Blackheath (1695). The chapel was
placed generally in the centre of the farther side of the square, and
projected from it, or stood alone at the end of the perspective of two
lines of cottages as at Trinity Ground, Mile End (1695). The simple row
of almshouses, too, which existed at all periods for smaller buildings,
was developed and often cleverly grouped on either side of the central
feature of the chapel, as at Colfe’s Almshouses, Lewisham (1664). The
variations in the style of the architecture are unending, and numerous
features such as heraldic shields, sundials, cupolas, stone terraces,
stained glass, statuary, furniture, are scattered about them, here in
profusion, there in fewer number, but none the less tasteful and in
keeping. A few examples occur to one at random in addition to those
just mentioned:—Ingram’s Hospital, York (1640); Smyth’s Almshouses,
Maidenhead (1659); Lucas’s Hospital, Wokingham (1663); Corsham
Almshouses (1668); Kirkleatham Hospital, Yorks (1676); Jesus Hospital,
Newcastle (1681); Collegium Matrarum, Salisbury (1682); Winwood’s
Almshouses, Quainton (1687); Hall’s Almshouses, Bradford-on-Avon
(1700); Fishmongers’ Almshouses, Yarmouth (1702); Trinity Almshouses,
Salisbury (1702); Collins’s Almshouses, Nottingham (1709); Christ’s
Hospital (second building, 1718) and Tompkin’s Almshouses, Abingdon
(1733); Somerset Hospital, Petworth (1746); and Millington’s Hospital,
Shrewsbury (1748). Several of these names are well-known, and will
recall to the reader’s mind the character of the almshouse that
obtained until the middle of the eighteenth century. There has been
no lack of similar buildings since, but they have suffered from the
general decline in the art of building. They have also revived with
the renewed interest of the present day in the old methods, and they
compete, and will still compete, successfully with the scattered
cottage homes which are for the moment in vogue. The virtue in the old
ideas, whether in the economy and beauty afforded to the buildings or
in the charm and usefulness of the little close community, has not
gone away. An institution that has stood the test of 800 years, and
has weathered the storms of such varied social changes, is bound to
live and flourish for many years to come, and it is to be hoped that
the original examples, weatherworn, but with the beauty of age and of
their time-honoured usefulness upon them, will be preserved to show the
future the triumphs of their modest excellence.
The foregoing is but an imperfect little sketch of a subject which
is of wide interest and endless fascination. Sir Christopher Wren
well understood the significance of the idea, and with his customary
skill he has given us a fine interpretation of its beauty in his Royal
Hospital at Chelsea. Here is a good starting point for the Londoner,
from which he may trace the story backwards.
—W. H. G.
THE FRIARS AS
BUILDERS
[Illustration: FIG. 101.—BLACKFRIARS, NORWICH.]
XV.
THE FRIARS AS BUILDERS.
THE LONDON HOUSES OF BLACKFRIARS AND WHITEFRIARS.
The mendicant orders as a factor in the history and development of
English Gothic have not only never received the recognition they
deserve, but their building activity has been left in the almost
complete oblivion to which the iconoclasts of the Reformation did their
best to consign it. The general interest in the friars has been centred
entirely in their history, in the eventful lives of their founders,
and in the vast influence which they exercised upon the main currents
of mediæval life. Consequently, while the general reader is well
acquainted with the figures of St. Francis or St. Dominic, he is often
entirely unaware of any connection between them and their followers on
the one hand, and the course of English architecture upon the other.
The nature and aims of the mendicant orders rendered it almost
essential for their convents to be placed either in or near the great
towns, and the presence of so many quarries of worked stone was a
circumstance unlikely to be long neglected by the townsmen of Tudor and
Stuart times, whose utilitarianism was no whit less developed than that
of the present day. Consequently the continued existence (with one or
two exceptions) of any fragment of friars’ architecture is as purely
fortuitous as the survival of any fragment of domestic architecture of
the same date.
As a whole the mendicants present so marked a divergence from the older
orders of monks and canons that their buildings are stamped with a very
definite and striking individuality. These divergences were, indeed,
so intimate as to make the study of them essential to the proper
understanding of the architecture they produced.
In sharp distinction to the Benedictines or Cistercians, who were
continually adding “house to house and field to field,” the friars were
forbidden by their rule to own any property. As their name “mendicants”
implies, they were to be beggars, receiving alms only in the form
of food, shelter, or clothing, the rule of St. Francis expressly
prohibiting the acceptance of money or land, and thus in its original
simplicity reducing their architectural opportunities to a minimum,
or, rather, rendering them non-existent. The severities of the rule
were, however, early evaded, the later practice being for the convent
and precinct to be vested in some outside authority, such as the
Corporation of the town or the Bishop of the diocese, to hold in trust
for the friars in perpetuity, thus keeping the letter while breaking
the spirit of the rule. How slight a check it was eventually to prove
upon their building activities was early evinced by the magnificent
convent of San Francesco at Assisi, which rose around the tomb of the
founder under the supervision of his immediate successor. Nevertheless,
the general system of non-endowment remained largely in force until the
end, and in Henry VIII.’s Visitation the majority of friaries returned
the estimated annual value of their convent site and buildings as their
sole possession.
Considering the fact that at the Dissolution of the Monasteries
the friars numbered over two hundred houses in England and Wales,
their architectural remains are neither important nor impressive,
and in most cases require searching for; but while they in no case
display the massive and imposing memorials of the earlier orders,
they are nevertheless of no mean interest to the student of mediæval
architecture.
Preaching, while pre-eminently the characteristic of the Dominicans,
nevertheless figured largely amongst the duties of the other three
orders, and was undoubtedly responsible for the imposing dimensions to
which many of their churches ultimately attained.
The mendicant orders being primarily preachers, the first building to
be erected (especially in England, where the climatic conditions were
inimical to regular open-air preaching) was the church built in the
main for that object, and consequently as near as possible to the main
street. Proximity to the chief thoroughfare bordering their site will
be found almost invariably to determine the position of the friars’
church. This is well exemplified in the convents of the London friars:
thus the Franciscan church adjoined Newgate Street with the cloister
on the north, the Carmelite was approached from Fleet Street with the
domestic buildings on the south, and the Austin Friars fronted Broad
Street with the cloister again upon the north. It will be seen that the
time-honoured custom of placing the cloister and domestic buildings on
the south of the nave for protection from the wind is no longer the
governing feature of the plan.
In the churches of the English friars a marked peculiarity is at once
apparent in the general absence of the transept—a large aisled nave,
an aisleless choir with a belfry between, is the usual and typical
form. In a few cases, such as the Austin Friars, Warrington, and the
Franciscans at Richmond (Yorkshire), a transept is added on the side
opposite the domestic buildings, but the presence of both arms of the
cross is very rare. In the Irish friaries the one-armed transept is
more the rule than the exception, but here again the complete cross is
almost unknown.
The nave of the average canons’ or monks’ church is divided into two
unequal parts by a solid screen or pulpitum, against which, on the
east, stood the choir stalls, occupying two, three, or more bays of
the structural nave, the rest being used for processions, chapels, and
as a general burial-place for the lesser patrons of the establishment.
In the friars’ churches all the available floor-space was required for
the congregation, and consequently the stalls were removed into the
structural choir, and in place of the solid stone screens of the older
orders a steeple was built pierced by two narrow openings at the base,
practically shutting the stalls off from the nave.
The finest remaining examples of the English preaching nave are
the Austin Friars, London (153 ft. by 83 ft.), and the Dominican
Church, Norwich, now St. Andrew’s Hall (124 ft. by 64 ft.). Both are
distinguished by great space and openness, the former being amongst the
broadest churches in the country.
In the centre of the typical English friars’ church stood the belfry,
which formed its most original and distinctive feature. The friars’
tower was apparently a spontaneous innovation amongst the English
mendicants, for there is no evidence that it was either borrowed from
Continental sources or copied from other orders at home.
It appears to have been customary for each house of friars to have but
one great bell, for though there are instances of two being hung in the
steeple, yet the friaries of London, according to Stow, had only one
each, and it is evident that this peculiarity was largely instrumental
in deciding the unusual form which the steeple assumed.
Situated between the choir and the nave, the steeple rested on two
parallel walls which ran north and south across the church, and were
pierced by two main arches opposite one another opening respectively
into the nave and choir; these walls were placed close together,
generally some ten feet apart, thus forming an oblong space under the
crossing. Between them and high above the arches before mentioned two
lesser arches were thrown across the open space (sometimes dying away
into the walls and sometimes resting upon corbels projecting from them)
to carry the north and south walls of the tower above.
The building in most cases was so arranged that the outside faces of
the north and south tower walls were in a line with the inside faces of
the piers of the two arches opening into the nave and choir, the lower
voussoirs of which thus supported the whole weight of the cross walls
above them. The oblong thus became a square, and by this arrangement
it was possible to raise a small stone tower in the centre of the
church, while at the same time retaining the two arched openings
between the nave and the choir.
Upon this base a light stone or brick lantern was raised, which in
England was generally octagonal in form, but in Ireland invariably
square, the additional number of worked quoin stones required for
the former plan being probably the reason for its rejection in the
poorer country. Occasionally the tower was finished with a stone
spire, but as a rule any addition in that direction was of timber
only. A good example, however, occurs at Coventry in the central
tower of the Franciscan Church (the sole remnant of that house), and
as now incorporated in the modern Christ Church, it forms one of the
trio of spires for which the City of Coventry is famous. The Grey
Friars’ tower at Lynn Regis, Norfolk, is again the sole remnant of the
convent of which it formed a part, and is a brick and stone building
of Perpendicular date, octagonal, and finished with a battlemented
parapet. This town is also singular in having formerly possessed two
parish churches, with octagonal central towers. Now, though octagonal
upper stages are comparatively common, especially in the eastern
counties, instances of the whole tower of this shape are very rare;
and since the Lynn examples were probably copied from one or other of
the four friaries of the town, it is not extravagant to surmise that
it was the mendicants who first introduced the octagonal form into
England. At Richmond, Yorkshire, stands the only other friars’ tower
which has survived; this, however, is of a more ordinary type. It is
a beautifully proportioned square structure, with belfry windows, and
a pierced parapet of Perpendicular work, and was evidently only just
completed at the Reformation, when the whole church was in course of
reconstruction.
Dunbar contains the only example of a typical friars’ steeple in
Scotland, the Carmelite tower of South Street, Queensferry, being of
the more ordinary type; but in Ireland a remarkable series is still
standing, including among its numbers the celebrated ruins of Quinn,
Ennis, Clare, Galway, Rosserk, Drogheda, and Athenry.
The space beneath the tower was commonly continued in the form of a
passage right across the church, and served as the chief means of
communication between the cloister and the outside world.
Turning now to the choir of the friars’ churches: they were usually
aisleless parallelograms, and almost always square ended. Their chief
feature will be found to be the magnificent proportions of the windows.
The choir of the Dominicans at Norwich has a magnificent Decorated east
window of seven lights; the Franciscans of Chichester another, with
five graduated lancets under one hood; and even a small house like the
Austin Friars at Rye had an east window (now built up) of imposing
dimensions.
The apsidal termination usual on the Continent has one example in
this country in the Grey Friars at Winchelsea, a fourteenth-century
structure, and a very graceful example of Decorated work. A wide
chancel arch, with banded sideshafts, opened from the nave (which has
now gone), into the choir of four bays, with a three-sided apse, each
face of which is pierced with a tall Decorated window. A Scotch example
of very similar type exists in the Dominicans at St. Andrews, but in
this instance the apse belonged to a side chapel and is much smaller
in all its dimensions. The stone vault remains in part, and, like its
Sussex counterpart, it is the sole remaining fragment of the church.
In both these instances the use of the apsidal end may be ascribed to
French influence, which was particularly strong in the Cinque Ports at
this time, owing to the French wars of Edward III.
Adjoining the church, in some instances, lay an open yard provided with
an outside pulpit either for overflow meetings or for more general
use in the heat of the summer. The space outside the Dominican Church
at Norwich was long known as the “Preaching Yard,” and the beautiful
octagonal stone pulpit cross formerly outside the west front of the
church of the same order at Hereford remains intact. It is, now,
perhaps, the only remaining example of such a structure in England—an
existing counterpart to the rich cross “y-tight with tabernacles” of
Pierce Ploughman’s Creed.
Two unusual features distinguish the planning of the domestic buildings
of a friary—the first an emphasis upon the secular nature of most of
the church, the second the result of a necessity for economy.
The cloister of a friary was placed without any general rule, but most
generally it partly adjoined the nave with a portion overlapping the
choir, and when the whole or any part adjoined the nave it was not
unusual to introduce a narrow open court between the church wall and
the cloister walk. The Cistercians had a somewhat similar arrangement
in the “lane” which, in many of their houses, separated the buildings
of the monks from those of the “conversi,” and, in the case of the
mendicant orders the court served to separate the domestic portion of
the house from their public preaching-place. In England this feature,
which occurs in the Black Friars at Norwich, the Franciscan houses at
London and Cardiff and elsewhere, is almost confined to the mendicant
orders, the only other existing example outside their ranks being the
secular cathedral of Salisbury, and here, as in the friars’ houses, a
short corridor communicates between the cloister and the church.
The second noticeable feature in the planning of the domestic buildings
is found in the general practice of building the first-floor apartments
over one, two, or more walks of the cloister, effecting by this means
an economy both in wall masonry and in the flat lead roofing of the
cloister alleys. Examples of this treatment are very numerous, and
occur in all parts of the country. Thus, at Hulne, Northumberland, two
alleys were built over—the east and west. At Norwich Black Friars and
Dunwich Grey Friars one or more walks are similarly treated, while
the Walsingham Franciscans apparently built their frater half over
the south walk of the great cloister and half over the north walk of
the little cloister. That lack of funds was the chief cause of this
somewhat niggardly arrangement is rendered more certain by the fact
that the only other order in which it occurs—the Gilbertine—was the
most poorly endowed of all the older communities.
Turning now from the subject of the actual structure and arrangement
of the friars’ houses the larger question arises: What influence, if
any, had all this mass of building upon the outside world, and upon
the architecture practised among the people at large? It may be safely
postulated at the outset that the influence exercised by the friars
will be found, firstly and most definitely, in the structure of the
parish church and, in its earliest manifestations, in the parish church
of _the towns_, for not only were they the nearest ecclesiastical
neighbours, but the objects served by each class of buildings were,
within certain limits, identical.
The great towns of England during the twelfth and early thirteenth
centuries were split up into a very large number of parishes, each
with its church, and as the town enlarged its borders or multiplied
its population, additional churches were built to supply its increased
needs. London, even in the time of Fitzstephen (_temp._ Henry II.),
had 120 parish churches; Norwich, at a little later date, had over
forty; Lincoln twenty or more; Winchester a dozen; and a small town
like St. Albans five. The practice was evidently at this period to meet
the demand for increased accommodation, _not_ by enlarging existing
churches but by building new ones. The average town church of the
Norman period was, comparatively speaking, of small dimensions and
limited accommodation, and in London, with hardly an exception, they
remained to the end architecturally insignificant, solely because their
numbers were such as to meet all possible demands that could be made
upon them.
[Illustration: FIG. 102.—PLAN OF AUSTIN FRIARS, LONDON.
_Drawn by A. W. Clapham._]
The period of the greatest architectural activity of the friars may be
dated to the last quarter of the thirteenth and the first quarter of
the fourteenth centuries, or, roughly, to the reigns of the first two
Edwards, and by about the middle of this period they had evolved a type
of church which for its purpose was as nearly perfect as experience and
experiment could make it. The comfort of the largest congregation was
secured by an ample floor-space, while the heavy piers of the older
buildings had given way to the lofty and slender columns of the Austin
Friars at London, only just large enough for structural stability and
leaving an almost uninterrupted view of the preacher from all parts of
the church.
The culmination and final expression of their views of what a
congregational church should be took form in the great Franciscan
church begun in Newgate Street, London, in 1306, and probably the
largest friars’ church in England. This building, with its 300 ft. of
length, its slender piers, its long range of clerestory, aisle, and
end windows, is a type which is without a parallel of its own date and
outside its own order as the expression of a new and original idea in
church building, departing equally from the insignificant dimensions
of the contemporary parish church and the massive and cavernous
construction of the monastic nave.
It is at this precise point that a radical alteration is observable in
the planning of the parish church, an alteration which, in view of its
ultimate results, was almost revolutionary.
The old idea of the multiplication of the small town churches is
suddenly and for no apparent reason abandoned, and the single church
of huge dimensions takes its place. It is not asserted that, previous
to this date, there were no large buildings of this class, but such as
already existed were almost entirely in country districts, and with
their cruciform shape and central tower they were evidently inspired by
the monastic churches of the older orders.
An examination of the plan of one of the towns which rose into
prominence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries will reveal a
remarkable and striking contrast when compared with that of one of the
older towns. In the former case one or two parishes embrace the whole
city, while in the latter it is subdivided into ten, twenty, thirty,
or more, and while _the one_ has perhaps a single parish fane which
dominates the town, _the other_ has towers and spires rising on every
hand.
[Illustration: FIG. 103.—PLAN OF GREYFRIARS, LONDON.]
[Illustration: FIG. 104.—PREACHING CROSS, BLACKFRIARS, HEREFORD.]
The outset of the new regime may perhaps be definitely dated to the
foundation by Edward I. of several new towns, of which Hull in the
north, and Winchelsea in the south, are the best-known examples, and in
each of these places a single great church is deemed sufficient for the
needs of the whole town.
It would be easy to multiply examples. The great port of Boston or the
trading centre of Newark, whose prosperity dates from the fourteenth
century, each built for themselves a single church on an almost
cathedral scale, and in the same sequence are ranged most of the great
churches of East Anglia.
The new type of church is one having the great open nave, the long
ranges of windows, and the slender piers which became so general in the
Perpendicular period. They are, in fact, copies of the great friars’
churches which immediately preceded them. The friars originated and
perfected the type which in the fulness of time was accepted and
adopted by the parish church builder as the best and most suitable
structure for his purpose which had yet been evolved.