In the Gesta regum Anglorum (1126) William of Malmesbury characterized the Anglo-Saxons as having lived sumptuously in small and meagre buildings whereas the Normans created ample and spacious buildings which they inhabited frugally.11 His comment gives us a perceptive characterization of one of the major transitions in taste in the arts during the century after the Norman Conquest, away from lavish adornment with gold and jewels and towards large arcaded spaces. The question as to what extent the Normans brought wholesale new development, especially in architecture, has often been raised and never fully answered. Richard Gem and Eric Fernie have both tended to favour the idea of slow incremental change, highlighting the extent to which late Anglo-Saxon church buildings in the century before the Conquest had already been developing on ever more ambitious scales and were very up to date in relation to contemporary buildings on the continent. Around the middle of the eleventh century, Edward the Confessor’s new abbey church of St Peter at Westminster (consecrated in 1065 and some thirty metres in length) or Abbot Wulfric’s rebuilding of St Augustine’s Canterbury, with its central rotunda (completed C.1059), were arcaded ecclesiastical buildings clearly of a European character, the former comparable to Jumieges in Normandy (consecrated 1067) and the latter to William of Volpiano’s church at St-Benigne at Dijon (1001-18) or to St-Sauveur at Charroux, western France (consecrated 1047).12
Whatever developments in the provision of church buildings were already in train, it is nevertheless clear that the Conquest marked a dramatic increase in both the scale and numbers of new monastic and cathedral churches. The fact that these were built under the aegis of a church leadership comprising mainly newly recruited Norman bishops and abbots implies that new patronage inspired new standards.13 Some ten of the greater churches, including St Albans, Lincoln, Old Sarum and Bury St Edmunds, were extended or built anew in the 1070s, while the 1080s and 1090s saw the building afresh of cathedrals and abbey churches at St Paul’s, London, Ely, York, Gloucester, Tewkesbury, Norwich, Durham and Chester (plate 24.1). There never seems to have been any prescribed form for the appearance of Anglo-Norman churches, but there was remarkable consensus about their scale and spatial arrangements. All the English buildings are constructed on a system of bays made of rounded arches resting on heavy piers, linked normally by groin vaults and lit by small arched or circular windows. Pier forms often alternate between circular and composite, the latter made up of a core surrounded by smaller attached shafts which link to upper elements of the elevation. Elevations are built up with tiered vaulted arcading to form upper galleries facing into a taller central vessel which forms the nave to the west and choir to the east. There have been attempts to link the development of upper arcades
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Plate 24.1 Nave of Norwich cathedral looking east, showing decorated piers at the crossing, c.1100. (Photo: School of World Art Studies and Museology, University of East Anglia) with functional needs of the liturgy, for example, to supply a need for new processional routes and chapels, and while evidence is compelling that they were used liturgically, it is just as likely that they represented a particular taste for openness and light.14 As reflected in the collective name ‘Romanesque’ given to this phase of architecture, both form and detail were descended from late Roman sources. This applied equally to the various derivations of geometric and volute capitals down to such specialized features as the Giant Order (see Glossary below) found at Gloucester (consecrated 1100), Tewkesbury (consecrated 1123) and Oxford (1180s).15
Around new churches came wider developments in the urban landscape, and architecture became one of the outward ‘signs of a new Norman order’.16 Recent work on Norman stone castle keeps of the early 1100s has emphasized their purpose as status symbols establishing ‘an architectural language of power’.17 The character of some of the most significant examples, the White Tower at the Tower of London, Colchester, Norwich and Orford, shows that royalty and the aristocracy were as much concerned with creating commodious accommodation for the establishment of a comfortable lifestyle as they were in protecting themselves from attack.18 Norwich castle keep was a royal building, begun under William Rufus and finished by Henry I. By 1136 it had been taken over by Hugh Bigod, earl of Norfolk. Inside, the rooms were large and well lit with huge windows, consistent with what is known about William Rufus’s love of luxury. The exterior was from the start extensively decorated with blind arcading, the main entrance-archway carved with beakhead voussoirs and little hunting and legendary scenes. This marks an unusual appropriation of ornament normally associated with ecclesiastical buildings and the closest parallel for this lavish treatment is Norwich cathedral. Norwich castle keep was ‘architecturally the most ambitious secular building in western Europe’ and, as such, overtly expensive and ostentatious, with the probable intention to inspire awe.19
World History
